She said she needed space, so I drove to Los Angeles and slept in motel parking lots along the coast. I kept having nightmares where she was shouting at me about other men and I’d wake up, ashamed at discovering a caveman in my subconscious. She would tell me that she hadn’t been in love with me for close to two years. I found out from the Gorgonians that they had been depleting the levels of Oxytocin in her brain and that they needed her to be unhappy to get me out of the house. But I didn’t know that yet so I was heartbroken.

You spend hours groaning on your back, pitching fits and feeling sick to your stomach. You wake up crying. They must have been zapping my Oxytocin too and probably had been since I got off of the plane. “You make it difficult to respect you.” ZAP. “What are you doing with your life?” ZAP. “People are right when they say you come off as condescending.” ZAP.

“It’s just like The Flamingo”, everyone kept saying; the movie that I had made three years prior with the actor PJ McCabe about a breakup. PJ had gone through similar dealings with the psychology of rejection in real life, having been thrown to the wind by a girl he really loved, so my first priority, outside of fighting the near-vertical uphill-battle in our couples’ counseling, was to spend time finding out how he coped with the grief. Little did I know, PJ had been working with the Gorgonians for over two years.

He had been receiving a steady communiqué from their scouts via email over the last 18 months and wasn’t able to process the messages without hours of calculations on graph paper; their language was made up of data that described points in 3D space that built letters to form English sentences, floating in PJ’s simulation software. They would be street names or intersections and he would gun it through Los Angeles to the tallest rooftop in the area by midnight or the communication would be lost. We blew through red lights and stop signs with the fake police siren we bought the week I moved down. We would play “If I Ever Feel Better” or “Forever Young” and hang out of the speeding car windows. We’d stay up all night sometimes. The neighbors hated us.

The emails were coming from Chinese addresses that disguised the code inside spam for male sexual endurance and penis enhancement pharmaceuticals. I found this out when I heard PJ crying in his room two weeks earlier and by the time I got there he was scrambling to shut his laptop on an email titled, “The Greatest Pill to Gratify Your Lover.”

“What’s the matter?” I said, and sat down.

“It’s nothing.”

“Doesn’t sound like nothing.”

“Can I be honest with you, Jim?”

“Of course.”

He exhaled, “I’ve been interacting with alien life forms that call themselves the Gorgonians, they have a time machine, and I think they’re gonna destroy the planet…”