The Amish Spaceman Read online

WITH AS MUCH HASTE as a middle-aged man can muster when he is the one upon whom security has been called, Dean took the steps two at a time. Behind him clattered an Asian woman in sensible heels, cardigan, and denim skirt.

  “Dean, slow down!”

  “No time,” he gasped between breaths, wondering if the tai chi classes he’d taken for five years at the community college had finally shown their value.

  Soaked in sweat, he stopped at the steel door to the lobby, and the Asian woman collided into his lower back like a tiny linebacker. Dean slammed painfully into the steel surface and both crashed to the floor.

  “Lin!”

  “Sorry! I’m sorry.”

  She scrambled to her feet and tugged on Dean’s left arm like the butter-churning queen of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

  “Bad arm! That’s the bad arm,” yelled Dean.

  “Sorry! I forgot.”

  Dean stood up and rubbed his shoulder.

  “Lin Alice Anderson, how could you forget? Your personal assistant star has been hitched to my rising motivational speaker star long enough to remember it was your fault I dislocated the thing.”

  “But––”

  Shouts and a thunder of galloping shoes came from the stairs above.

  “Never mind that!”

  Dean pushed the door into the lobby and narrowly avoided another thundering herd, this one dressed in tuxedos. He flattened against the wall of the lobby as a stream of elegantly dressed men rushed by, words of a strange language on their lips and concerned looks on their pale faces, as if they were missing a really good sale.

  Dean raised his voice to be heard over the slap of dress shoes on marble.

  “See anyone you recognize?”

  “Just because I was born in San Jose doesn’
t mean I know everyone,” said Lin. “This isn’t Ohio.”

  Dean shrugged and surveyed the black-tie marathon. Even in a strange state like California these dapper dandies dressed too well to be security. He suspected something incomprehensible such as a charity 5K for sacrificing young ladies to Mitsubishi the Cat-God or to prevent such horrors, but this chaotic gathering was most likely the funeral for a reality-TV star, or a retirement party for a member of the state senate.

  The herd had thinned to a few cardio-challenged stragglers, when the glass doors of the lobby slammed open and a female Golden Horde burst inside, their high heels tapping a staccato below dresses as tight as garden hoses. The babbling stream of embroidered tubes clicked over the marble, seemingly propelled by 747-sized contrails of Chanel No. 5. The women were of all ages and pale of skin like their male vanguard. Strange, frantic words burbled from their red-lipsticked mouths, while their dark eyes looked Dean up and down and quickly discarded his existence. They were definitely searching for someone, but like most women he’d met between the ages of sixteen and sixty, it was definitely not Dean.

  A burly, gray-uniformed guard erupted from the stairwell with a slam of metal.

  “There he is! Get him!”

  Dean certainly did not want to be “got” and immediately became as panic-stricken as the worst of the finely dressed women. He grabbed Lin and pushed into the protective eye of the female hurricane, shouting words he thought sounded foreign. The crowd exited the building through the west entrance, startling twelve passers-by and one pigeon. With Lin right behind, Dean squeezed free of the packed women like a melon seed and ran to the street. He waved at a green-and-white taxi and it stopped next to the curb.

  “Where to?” asked the cabbie.

  “Foolappa lippa loppa––sorry, I mean Sunnyvale,” said Dean.