Like many of my stories, this one had its genesis in real life. When I first moved to Washington, D.C., I often took the 42 bus from Dupont Circle to my home in Adams-Morgan. And I knew a man living on Lanier Street who never went anywhere unless he could get there on the 42 bus -- or so all his friends said.

    Morgan Edwards never goes anywhere unless he can get there on the 42 bus. Or at least, that's what all his friends say. 

    "When Morgan goes to Heaven," Howard says, "he'll take the 42 bus."   

    Morgan says you don't really need to go any place that isn't on the 42 bus line. You can buy everything you need to cook Mexican-style in the hole-in-the-wall Hispanic groceries in Mount Pleasant and then head to the other end of the line to find Asian food ingredients in the few old stores that remind you of why that neighborhood is still called Chinatown. And there are a lot of other things going on at the Chinatown stop: the main library and the YWCA (where the health club rates are a lot cheaper than the YMCA), not to mention the flashy new arena -- called the Verizon Center this week -- where you can catch basketball, hockey, and the Ice Capades.

    The whole route teems with restaurants to fit every pocketbook, from fancy places where the chef gets written up in Washingtonian to tiny dives with three tables and an abundance of grease to ubiquitous chains ranging like Micky D's and Hooter's. There are a couple of movie houses playing something other than the latest Hollywood blockbuster and live theatre offering everything from Shakespeare to avant garde Russians to Nude Girls on Stage!

    You used to be able to go a lot farther on the 42 bus -- all the way to Union Station to catch the train for New York City and even all the way out to RFK Stadium to see the Redskins play. But they cut back the 42 line awhile back, so you have to switch to the subway to get to Union Station. And now the Redskins play way out somewhere in the burbs.

    Morgan says he doesn't mind. He doesn't like New York anyway and the Redskins haven't had a good season since they left the city. But the truth is, it hurt him when they cut back the line.

    Still, he holds firm to his principles. He keeps living on Lanier Street where he grew up -- a block off the bus route -- and refuses to get a car or to start taking the subway. Too many tourists on the subway, he says, and he's right about that. The 42 bus, now, it has everything but tourists -- immigrants and yuppies, black and white, old and young, workers and slackers, drunks and teetotalers.

    A few years ago Howard and Katie and Mike and the rest of us were all hanging out in Millie and Al's, drinking cheap beer -- Millie and Al's being the only place in Adams Morgan since all the rich folks moved in and gentrified the place where you can still get cheap beer -- and Mike mentioned he hadn't seen Morgan lately. Katie said the same thing and pretty soon it came out that none of us had seen Morgan in over a week, and that was pretty strange. Because while the rest of us do range farther afield than the 42 bus line -- to places like Takoma Park and Silver Spring and even Rockville and Alexandria  -- we also spend a lot of time in the same places Morgan does. In fact, that's how we all got to be friends.

    Well, speak of the devil, Morgan walked in. Now Morgan's noted for being a very dapper dresser. Even his t-shirts look tailor made. But the Morgan who walked in the door of Millie and Al's looked wild and disheveled, with his shirt half in and half out, everything wrinkled, and his belt missing. Even in the dim light of the bar we could  all see the ashen color of  his face -- it almost glowed in the dark, an amazing feat seeing as how Morgan's natural color is a very dark brown.

    He stumbled up to the booth, grabbed hold of the table like he really needed the support, and looked at us. "Boy, am I glad to see you all."

    "Where have you been?" Katie asked.

    "You'll never believe me. But I swear it's true."

    We looked at him, waiting.

    "I've been on an alien space ship." He sounded dead serious.

    If he hadn't looked so wild, we would probably have just laughed and said tell us another one. But he looked -- well, he looked like you'd expect someone to look if they'd actually seen aliens. Besides, Morgan was never any good at putting people on. He’s the kind of guy who always laughs at his own jokes before he gets to the punch line.

    We sat there in stunned silence until Mike finally managed to croak out, "Tell us what happened."

    "I was snatched up by these, these beings. I don't know what to call them. I mean, it was pretty obvious they were intelligent. They had some kind of thinking process, but it didn't seem to work like ours."

    "What did they look like?"

    "They had scales, kind of like lizards. And they came in various colors and patterns, kind of like snakes. They didn't really have heads, but they had a bunch of arms and legs. They walked upright on four of them and they had another four that were kind of like arms with hands, only they seemed to be able to use them for seeing, hearing, and smelling as well as for touching things and picking them up. I didn't hear them say anything or see any kind of mouth, but they could communicate with each other somehow."

    "Telepaths," said Katie, who reads lots of science fiction.

    "Probably. I could feel some kind of messages in my brain but they never made any sense. I guess my brain isn't right for it or something. Boy, I'm hungry." He called to Gladys the waitress to bring him a couple of slices, double pepperoni. Since no one goes to Millie and Al's for the food, this action weighed heavily in favor of Morgan's veracity.

    "How did they eat?"

    "I'm not sure. I never saw them eat. They kept trying to feed us something through tubes in our veins. It didn't hurt us, but it didn't help much either. If one of the others hadn't been grabbed up right after doing some grocery shopping, we'd have starved."

    "Others?" said several of us at once.

    "Oh, yeah. They'd picked up several people, along with a bunch of animals. They must have been some kind of scientists, because they examined us all very thoroughly. It took them a couple of days to figure out that we had more smarts than the dogs and pigs and other animals, but after that they concentrated on us. I'm not sure they were able to figure out much about us, though."

   "How come?"

    "They'd grabbed us all from different parts of the Earth. One woman came from Beijing, another from some small village in Iran, and a third one from someplace in the arctic in Russia, like maybe Siberia.  Then there was a very sophisticated guy from Berne – well someplace in Switzerland anyway – and a guy from a very remote tribal area in Africa, given his clothes and all.

    "The aliens looked at us close enough to see the difference between men and women, but I'm not sure they figured out why we were built that way. I couldn't tell if they had sexes. And we weren't about to demonstrate for them. I mean, it wasn't exactly the kind of atmosphere where you try to strike up a relationship. They must have figured out that we were basically the same species, though, because they kept us together.

    "I suspect they were really puzzled by the fact that we couldn't communicate very well. Here we were, six beings of the same species, from the same planet, and we didn't have one language in common. None of us. The Chinese woman only spoke Chinese and the Iranian only Persian. The one from Siberia spoke something besides Russian, but it made even less sense than Russian."

    "Probably some native language," Mike said. "They've got people up in Siberia who are kin to the Inuits and folks who live in Alaska."

    "Ah," said Morgan. "No wonder it sounded so weird. Anyway the Swiss guy was super-educated. He spoke French and German and Italian, but next to no English. The African guy didn't speak anything outside of his native language, which wasn’t close to anything I ever heard of,  and I, of course, speak only English and enough Spanish to order food at El Tazumal."

    "The Tower of Babel," Howard said.

    "Exactly. We made do with signs and recognizable words from other languages and drawing pictures, but it was still pretty clear that we could barely talk to each other, much less the aliens. It puzzled them a lot, you could tell. They must have some kind of color vision, because they seemed particularly surprised that the African and I couldn't communicate, since we looked so much alike. They kept putting us together. And I couldn't even figure out his home country, because he doesn't know any geography except what's within a few miles of his home. I'm going to try to look up his clothes and tools and appearance and see if I can't get some idea. I want to try to find all these people and get us some translators so we can maybe figure out what happened to us."

    We all sat there in silence, taking it all in. Then Howard asked, "Where were you when all this happened? Your apartment? Out on some deserted road?"

    "No. That was the weirdest part. I felt real restless that night, so I wandered down to Dupont Circle and had a few drinks. After midnight, I ended up at Kramer Books because it stays open late and I didn't want to go home. I sat in the café part in the back, drinking decaf and reading magazines, until it got way past closing and the staff threw me out. I walked out onto Connecticut Avenue and the street was deserted.

    "So I was standing at the bus stop, figuring I'd better just walk home because I'd probably missed the last 42 bus and they don't start up again until five in the morning. And then I looked down toward the traffic circle and the bus was coming. I mean, it looked like the bus and it stopped and everything. So I got on. Next thing I knew I was orbiting the Earth."

    It figures, you know. Morgan Edwards went to outer space on the 42 bus.

copyright 2009 Nancy Jane Moore