Chapter Ten
Part of me wished that Kevin had seen her. If he had, I'd know at least that I wasn't completely making it all up. But if he'd looked and hadn't been able to see her... I wasn't sure I was willing to admit I'd lost my mind and I was seeing things. I wasn't sure I wanted Gliese-slash-Phantom-CowBelle to be a hallucination. And if she was -- well, I'd rather that remain a secret rather than me being taken away to fly over the cuckoo's nest, if you know what I mean.
"Where do we even start?" I asked her as she climbed out of the bath tub.
"First we need to try to contact Fabritz, see if he still has access to the signal. If he does, he needs to cease and desist immediately." Gliese looked around, "Do you have a means of teleportation?"
"I have a telephone."
"Let's go."
I led her down the stairs to the kitchen and gestured at the wireless phone sitting on its cable, charging. She stared at it. "How does it work?" she reached for the receiver and studied it. "Do you type in coordinates?" Her fingers pressed the buttons.
"You talk into it," I said, taking the phone from her before she accidentally placed a fifty-dollar-a-minute call to Taiwan or something. I put it down on it's cradle again.
"That's not teleporting," she said in disgust.
"It's telephoning," I replied. "Humans don't have teleportation devices installed in suburban homes," I said.
"Where do they have them?" she questioned eagerly.
"On the USS Enterprise with Mr. Spock," I answered.
"And where is this USS Enterprise?" she asked.
"It's not real," I answered. She was really not good with the sarcasm thing. "We don't have teleportation. Nobody's invented it yet."
She shook her head, "Inferior," she muttered.
I picked up an old address book CowBelle kept in the drawer and shook it at her. "We can call him though. His number's probably in here," I said, "All our contacts are in here..." I stared down at the cover of the book and took a deep breath. I didn't even know where to start. "I don't even know Fabritz's last name," I confessed, opening the cover. I took a deep breath and flipped a couple pages through the personal information - all filled out in CowBelle's crisp handwriting.
Gliese reached over and flipped the book's pages purposefully.
Fabritzio Contoso.
"How did you --"
"I've done my research on the topic of the Whitenoise Project," Gliese answered. She stared up at me as I stared down at the little cross bar on CowBelle's Z in Fabritzio, nostalgia or something like it stormed over me. "Telephone him, then, if that's what this device does," she said.
I shook my head, trying to clear away the emotions that were pouring through my veins as I stared down at CowBelle's handwriting. "And say what exactly?"
"That he needs to stop the Whitenoise before my people destroys your planet," she answered in a tone that signified this should've been the obvious message to relay.
"You do know how insane that sounds," I said.
"What's insane about it?" she demanded.
"I dunno now that you mention it it's completely normal for a guy to call up another guy and tell him that his dead fiance is now an alien who wants him to abort the last project she ever did..." I said sarcastically. Even though sarcasm was a complete waste.
"So what's insane about it then?" she asked, staring at me with a persistent air about her.
"I'm gonna go with everything," I answered.
Gliese shook her head, "Just call him. Tell him. Tell him to come and see."
"Come and see what exactly?" I asked, "It's not like you're proving yourself very well. I ain't seen any lasers or nothin' yet."
She raised an eyebrow. "If I'm not an alien, explain my physical form." I looked at her, all CowBelle-y and pretty. I took a deep breath. There was no explanation I could think of otherwise. "Humans have a very narrow scope of understanding and assumptions about extraterrestrial lifeforms," she said. "Lasers. Please. We're just like you. We're not green, we don't have big eyes and suction cups on our fingers. We don't fly around zapping people with lasers." She shook her head.
"So why do you have to impersonate humans if you're just like us and you don't look funny?" I asked. "Why bother altering your DNA?"
"You're famous," she said, "When you go to Hollywood Boulevard, do you wear sunglasses to disguise yourself?"
"Yeah, sometimes I go in cognito."
She waved her arms at herself. "I am in cognito."
I nodded slowly. "Still. If I call Fabritz and just tell him there's an alien here wanting him to turn off the Whitenoise signal, he's going to think I'm fucking mental... I think I'm fucking mental."
"You work together on a project aimed to make contact with aliens. Why would he think you're mental? It should be cause for celebration -- your project was successful." She furrowed her eyebrows.
"Yeah, but I don't think even as we did it that any of us ever believed we'd actually hear back from an alien race," I replied.
"I don't understand. Why try contacting something you don't believe in?" she questioned.
I rubbed the back of my neck. "Because we wanted to believe," I replied. "Maybe we just didn't wanna be alone in the universe anymore." I shrugged.
"Well you got your wish, didn't you?" she asked. "You aren't alone. And neither am I. We have each other." Gliese's eyes flickered with something - some kind of emotion. "You know, we didn't always believe in you, either, back home. Some people still don't. Some people believe you're a hoax created by the government, that Lyra is using the fables and myths to control the Keplars." She took a deep breath. She looked down at her toes, then looked back up at me, her eyes burning. "I have always believed in you."
My heart pounded. Something about the words - the way she said them, the way her eyes looked - it seared me. And for a split moment I felt like I was looking at CowBelle as she'd been. My CowBelle. I felt a lump rise up in my throat.
"I never once questioned if you existed," she said thickly.
"I question a lot of things," I choked.
"Like what?"
"Like my purpose now that you -- she -- Bella -- is gone," I replied.
"Maybe this is your purpose," she said. "Saving us both. Saving everyone. The world. Stopping the Whitenoise."
"Maybe."
She nodded at the phone. "Call him."
I licked my lips and lifted the phone off it's cradle, waited for a dial tone, then thumbed in Fabritz's number and waited as it rang...
"....hello?" he said thickly on the fifth ring.
"Fabritz," I said, "It's me... Nick Carter... Bellatrix Watson's fiance..."
"Yes," he said thickly. He was quiet a long moment. "I was wondering if you'd call today," he said.
Whitenoise by Pengi
