‘You steal my son,’ said Mother Phan.
‘No,’ Del said, ‘I stole a Honda and later a Ferrari, and then we borrowed the Peterbilt that the demon stole, but I didn’t steal your son. He gave his heart to me of his own free will. Now before you say anything more that might be rash, that you might later come to regret having said, let me tell you about my mother and me.’
‘You bad news.’
Ignoring the insult, Del said, ‘Twenty-nine years ago, when my Mom and Dad were driving from Vegas to a poker tournament in Reno, taking a scenic route, they were abducted by aliens from a lonely stretch of highway near Mud Lake in Nevada.’
Gazing at Del, his head ringing like a gong with remembered lines of conversation that had seemed like sheer lunacy when she had spoken them, Tommy said, ‘South of Tonopah.’
‘That’s right, darling,’ said Del. To Tommy’s mother, she said, ‘They were taken up to the mothership and examined. They were allowed to remember all of this, you see, because the aliens who abducted them were good extraterrestrials. Unfortunately, most of the abductions are perpetrated by evil ET’s whose plans for this planet are nefarious in the extreme, which is why they block abductees’ memories of what happened.’
Mother Phan scowled at Tommy. ‘You rude to Mrs. Dai, won’t even stay for tea, run off and marry crazy woman.’ She discovered Scootie licking her hand, and she shooed him away. ‘You want lose tongue, you filthy dog?’
‘Anyway, in the mothership, hovering above Mud lake,’ Del continued, ‘the aliens took an egg from my mother, sperm from Daddy, added some genetic wizardry of their own, and implanted mother with an embryo – which was me. I am a starchild, Mrs. Phan, and my mission here is to ferret out damage done by certain other extraterrestrials- which often includes teaching people like Mrs. Dai to perform evil mojo – and set things right. Because of this, I lead an eventful life, and often a lonely one. But at last not lonely anymore, because I have Tommy.’
‘World full of lovely Vietnamese girls,’ Tommy’s mother told him, ‘and you run away with crackpot maniac blonde.’
‘When I reached puberty,’ Del said, ‘I began to acquire various extraordinary powers, and I suppose I might continue to acquire even more as the years go by.’
Tommy said, ‘So that’s what you meant when you said you’d have been able to save your father if he hadn’t gotten cancer before you reached puberty.’
Squeezing his hand, Del said, ‘It’s all right. Fate is fate.
Death is just a phase, just a transition between this and a higher existence.
‘The David Letterman show.’
Grinning, Del said, ‘I love you, tofu man.’ Mother Phan sat as stone-faced as an Easter Island monument.
‘And Emmy, the little girl… the daughter of the guard at the gatehouse,’ Tommy said. ‘You have cured her.’
‘And gave you a massage on the carousel that means you’ll never need to sleep again.’
He raised one hand to the back of his neck, and as his heart began to race with exhilaration, he remembered the tingle of her fingers as they had probed his weary muscles.
She winked. ‘Who wants to sleep when we could use all that time to consummate?’
‘Don’t want you here,’ said Mother Phan. Turning to her mother-in-law again, Del said, ‘When the aliens returned Mom and Daddy to that highway south of Tonopah, they sent along one of their own as a guardian, in the form of a dog.’
Tommy would have thought that nothing on earth could have torn his attention away from Del at that moment, but he turned his head to Scootie so fast that he almost gave himself whiplash.
The dog grinned at him.
‘Scootie,’ Del explained, ‘has greater powers than I do-’
‘The flock of birds that distracted the demon,’ Tommy said.
‘-and with your indulgence, Mrs. Phan, I will ask him to give a little demonstration to confirm what I’ve told you.’
‘Insane crazy American maniac blond lunatic’ Mother Phan insisted.
The Labrador sprang onto the coffee table, ears pricked, tail wagging, and gazed so intently at Mother Phan that she pressed back into her armchair in alarm.