The preacher closes his eyes and tilts back on the balls of his feet. His shoes are shiny, hard plastic and little beads of water gather on them in the grass. He presses his hands together like a buddha. I give Tommy a look, like get a load of this guy, like how long is this going to last, like what the fuck did you get us into. Tommy stares at the preacher. Ever since we got here, he’s reverted back to some high school version of himself, quiet and compliant and “I don’t think we should sleep together before the ceremony” and for the first time I wonder if we’re doing the right thing. If I’m doing the right thing.
I put the thought out of my mind. Of course we’re doing the right thing. It’s all planned. It’s happening. What I’m looking forward to is next month, this whole thing behind us, and we’re back to normal. Back to normal, but different.
The preacher pauses, looks up something in his Bible. It is a thing he does and we stand there holding hands like this is normal while he rifles through the pages whispering to himself. I squeeze Tommy’s hand and he squeezes back. “It’s so nice to be back here,” he says. “This is so nice. Right?” He nods at the rolling lawn and the creek. “It’s really nice.”
I squeeze his hands again and pretend to yawn so I can take a break. I wiggle my fingers, stretch my arms up toward the sky. It is deep blue. A beautiful day, and tomorrow is supposed to be the same. I work through the to-do list in my head: seven-thirty rehearsal dinner, pick up the dress tomorrow, Sally is bringing the shoes, my mother is on her way with the flowers. There’s a faint buzzing in the distance and I assume it’s some kind of farm implement doing something farmy.
I reach for my phone, but it’s in the event space with my purse and jacket and a hundred and fifty place settings in tidy boxes waiting to be laid out for tomorrow. It will be fine. It is happening. In a month, we’ll be married and sitting around the back patio having a few beers. Maybe we’ll be looking at real estate listings, or searching yellow labs on Petfinder, or talking about Seattle or Portland or Austin. Us, but different.
“In his name Jesus Christ,” the preacher says, the indicator that he has returned from whatever scripturely errand he sent himself on. He nods and smiles, an indulgent smile, like he has been waiting for us to get back from the bathroom, a smile that says “you’re welcome” and “I forgive you” and I remind myself that after this weekend we will almost certainly never need to see or think about this person again.
He nods at us, the signal that we are to hold hands and stare at each other. Tommy’s hands are clammy. His eyes are strange, troubled. I wonder if he’s having second thoughts but push the idea out of my head. My mother is on her way with a van full of flowers. Our friends are waiting at the Hotel Philipsburg. This is happening.
“Lord,” the preacher says, “we ask that You bless us, that You bless these two young Christians, that You bless these two young Christians as they enter into Christian marriage, that You bless their Christian marriage with a beautiful day tomorrow, that You bless this space.” He opens his eyes and casts his arms toward the big event barn on one side and the creek on the other. “This beautiful space that You have made for us in all Your glory.” I throw Tommy another look, but he is nodding, his eyes closed. The guy who owns the place, Art, is standing outside the barn smoking a cigarette. I give him a look like Dude help me out here, but he flicks his butt and checks his phone.
The sound is getting louder. Definitely a buzzing. I wonder if we’re about to be overcome by a swarm of bees or grasshoppers, if the preacher is summoning something Biblical by referring to me and Tommy as “young Christians.” I wonder about his habit of putting the word “Christian” in front of anything. Christian marriage. Christian ceremony. Christian snacks Christian drinks Christian adult sex life. The decision to get married in Tommy’s hometown with this man who makes him nervous, clammy and closed-mouthed and short and bitchy, is not a decision I would make again, but this ceremony seemed like something best left to Tommy’s quiet judgement. Somehow, we’ve made it through the mandatory five Christian counseling sessions. This rehearsal is all that is standing between us and “I do” and a week in the Outer Banks and the rest of our Good Suburban Agnostic Adult Lives.
The buzzing is getting louder. “Do you hear that?” I say. “Is that some kind of…central Pennsvylania thing? Some bug or something?”
Tommy shushes me and Art comes out of the barn running. “Hey!” he shouts. He is holding a phone, coming toward us. “Something’s going on,” he says. “I have to—”
The preacher finally opens his eyes. He looks as though he is going to spank somebody. I picture Tommy over his knee, and then a sinking feeling enters my gut because suddenly a lot of things make sense. I gasp and look at Tommy but he is still looking at the preacher. I squeeze his hands, pull him toward me. He backs up a step, lets go of my hand. It can’t be, but I know it’s true. But then also, why would we be here, why would he subject himself to this, why would any of this be happening?
Art smells like cigarettes and grass and I wonder if he is used to prospective brides bumming smokes off him. I imagine he’s used to just about everything, running a place like this, where people get married and drunk and do whatever else you might do with a whole lot of other people in the middle of Nowhere, Pennsylvania. “I can’t,” he says. “I don’t.” He holds up his phone. In giant text on the CNN website: ALIENS ATTACK.
“Young man we are in the middle of a Christian rehearsal for a Christian wedding tomorrow and I don’t appreciate—” the Preacher says.
“Come on,” Tommy says. The buzzing has turned into a kind of dull whoosh. “Everything is fine. This is really nice. We should…oh my god.” He points toward the barn and we turn and the whooshing gets louder and in the distance we can see a large cigar-shaped thing flying right toward us. It is dark grey, more zeppelin than saucer, glowing around the edges. Things stick out of it. It looks beat up and dirty, but functional, like an old tank or an aircraft carrier.
“What the fuck?” I say, and don’t even think about apologizing to the preacher, who has sunk down to his knees and is rapidly praying, eyes closed, hands clutched into fists stacked on top of the Bible.
Tommy looks down on him. “Come on,” I say, pulling Tommy toward the barn.
“I should…” he says. He puts a hand on the preacher. “Pastor Pat,” he says. “We have to go. We should…” He pushes a little harder. “Come on just stand up and…” he says, but the preacher only shakes his head and continues praying. If it is possible to pray harder, that’s exactly what he is doing, praying as hard as he can, praying his ass off. His hands clutch the Bible like he’s trying to press it into a diamond.
“Tommy, Jesus Christ, now is not the time,” I say. My voice is low and calm and shaky. “We’re going to…” The zeppelin is over the barn now. Searchlights I can’t see are strafing the lawn where we are standing. They move up and down the creek. Something emerges from the craft and I grab Tommy and start running. Art is right behind us. I don’t see the preacher. We get into the barn and hear a zap then something flashes and where the preacher was, there is burning grass, smoldering soil, and a big black Bible smoking next to a preacher-shaped smear in the manicured lawn where we were going to say “I will” and “I do.”
We’re standing just off the entrance, a massive rolling doorway that opens onto the lawn. The whoosh is directly overhead. I flash on that old movie with Tom Cruise and the invading spaceships that came out of the ground like locusts. I take out my phone, but then put it back in my pocket. Tommy stares at the place where the preacher was. Art has turned off the lights and, for some reason, we are all silent. A squirrel runs across the lawn and again, a flash and a zap and there is no squirrel.
Art is reading something on his phone. “Washington, DC; Tokyo; Los Angeles. They’re not…they’re not there anymore,” he says. “I gotta…”
“We can’t just leave him out there,” Tommy says. He is staring at where the preacher was, the preacher-shaped spot in the yard. The whooshing continues but changes in pitch, something getting faster, and I wonder if this means they are leaving or landing or something different. Art is looking for something in the large pantry where our cupcakes and mini-crabcakes and cheese tortellini were to be delivered in twenty hours.
“We can’t just leave him there,” Tommy says again. “His Bible. That’s from—I mean—he’s had that as long as I can remember.”
“We are not going out there,” I say. “We’re staying in here and coming up with a plan.”
I stand in front of Tommy and he tries to look around me. Art has procured a shotgun and a box of shells and is sliding them into place with shaking hands. He is talking to himself. Every now and then he picks up the phone then puts it down. I feel for my own phone in my pocket. It has been vibrating off and on ever since we got here and I’ve been ignoring what I now know were not “I’m so psyched” or “how do I find” messages from my friends and family as they trickle in for tomorrow’s ceremony but certainly I love you’s and goodbyes, our own version of those 9/11 messages.
“Tommy I love you,” I say. I pull his face toward mine. “But this was never going to—”
“Come on.” Art holds a second shotgun toward me. “We can’t just sit here and wait.”
“We can’t just leave him there,” Tommy says. “He can’t—that can’t be the way. That Bible.”
Something changes again in the whooshing and now there are two sounds. “One of you take this,” Art says.
The sky dims and we sneak over to the doorway and look out. The ship is massive, with markings in a language I don’t recognize, lights arranged in an order that I know makes some kind of sense but can’t parse. It smells like sulfur and metal. There are antennae things sticking out of it, moving, searching for something in the land or the air.
Tommy makes a noise in the back of his throat. He turns to me. “We’re not getting married tomorrow, are we?”
I wonder if anybody will get married ever again. Is this the part before the next part, the beginning of the dystopian novel? I remember the book about the traveling Shakespeare company. Will we wind up like that, wandering the countryside, scavenging for food and shoes, or are they going to blast us all into spots on the grass?
Art pushes the shotgun toward me. “Just point that and shoot,” he says. “I think we aim for those ports that are kind of darker than the rest it.”
“Do you think this is Star Wars?” I say, but point the gun up at the zeppelin. “Did you see where it shot from before?” I ask. There are signs, lights, ports, but nothing that looks it might zap a preacher into nothing.
“We’re never going to see our parents again,” Tommy says. “We’re not going to have that dog, the house. I’ve only had two jobs in my entire life. I’ve never even been to Michigan. I thought…”
“I’m going to count to three and we step through before it moves. I fire at the one on the right, you at the one on the left.”
“The porthole looking things?” I say.
“One…”
“And we shoot on three?” I say.
“Two,” he says. “Three.”
We step out of the barn and immediately I can feel…something. It is almost as if gravity is heavier under the ship, pressing me to the ground, pushing from the spaceship through me and deep into the earth. My legs are so tired. I could lie down and sleep. Art is fighting it too, and he looks to me, nods. We struggle to move the weapons up. He pulls his trigger and falls back into the barn. I stand there, fighting the urge to lay down and sleep. Something rotates on the ship, an arm extending impossibly long, coming right for me. I pull the trigger and the next thing I know I am laying on my back in the barn. There is a wheezing sound. Something wet on the back of my head. Wheeze wheeze wheeze. High and distinct.
“Are you okay,” Tommy says. I open my eyes and he is standing over me.
I realize the wheezing sound is me. I breathe in hesitantly and it stops. I sit up, feel the back of my head, and my hand comes away bloody.
“You fell,” Tommy says. “It’s still…it didn’t do anything.”
“It was never going to work, was it?” I say.
“We can get to the car and drive back to my parent’s house,” Tommy says. “We can crawl up in the air conditioning and hide.”
I stand up and move to the doorway. Tommy sits down in a folding chair. He is wearing a suit with no tie and he looks like a hungover groomsman in a movie. What were we doing here? What did he think this was going to accomplish, being back here with Pastor Pat? The zeppelin is still up there, hovering, its lights moving around on the lawn and the creek, the arm extending over to our car, popping the windows and rooting inside.
Art reappears with more guns. “Chicago is gone. Paris. This is all over the world,” he says, holding up his phone. EARTH ATTACKED is the headline. “They came up out of the ground,” he says. “They were here all along.”
“Like that fucking Tom Cruise movie,” I say.
“I don’t know, but yeah, I guess,” Art says. “He’s not going to be any good here, is he?” He nods at Tommy, beautiful Tommy sitting in his folding chair and staring at the place where we were going to dance our first dance to “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” by Cannonball Adderley.
They were here all along. I pick up the gun and nod to the shells laid out on the table. “We’re on our own,” I say.