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The doctor wrapped the balloon cuff around my arm, slipped two fingers under it, and pumped it up.  As he did, he asked me, “How are the kids, Jimmy?”
     “Oh, they’re good,” I said.  “Cassandra is at the top of her class and...”  Gort stopped squeezing the blood pressure pump and tilted his big, earless head at me.  “Oh yeah,” I thought.  “I forgot you can’t hear me.”
     “It’s okay,” I heard him respond, though his mouth never opened.
     “I was saying, Cassandra is at the top of her class now, and Peter was just named starting center on the JV basketball team.”
     “Center, huh? He must be pretty tall.  By your standards, anyway.”
     “Yeah, he’s 6 foot 1 already, and I don’t think he’s done growing.”  Though that didn’t seem all that impressive compared to  Gort, who was easily 8 feet tall and still not really any taller than his colleagues.
     He continued the physical, peeling the balloon cuff off my arm.  He bent down and reached toward me with those long skinny fingers of his.  I’ve never gotten used to the feeling of those fingers down there.  He told me to cough.
     He stood up and took a pen light out of the pocket of his white jacket.  He leaned in close and shined the light into my eye.  Even with the light in my eye, looking back at him with his face so close I could see myself reflected in his large beetle-black eyes.  
     Just as he was moving from my right eye to my left, the light in the room went very low, and a spotlight turned on over the table I was lying on and on one a few feet away from me.
     Unable to roll his eyes, Gort sort of rolled his whole head and shrugged, clearly for my benefit.  He looked at me and thought, “New guy.  Can you help us out?”
     “Sure.  What do you need?”
     “Well, you know, when they bring him in, scream really loud, whimper when he’s on the slab, stuff like that.  You’ve been through it.  Oh, and we’ll need to float you out of the room.”
     “Okay, can do.”
     “Thanks.”  He took a cotton swab out of a jar and started to lean toward me, then stopped.  “I almost forgot.” He put the swab down and took off his jacket, along with the rest of his clothes, folding them up and putting them in a drawer under my table.  “Sorry about this.” I almost asked him why he was getting naked when he nodded in the direction of the large door at the end of the room.
     The door slid open and a long stone tablet, floating in the air, glided into the room with a kid of about twenty lying on it.  “Now?” I asked.  Gort just nodded.  I took a huge breath and screamed at the top of my lungs, choking back a couple of fake sobs to make whatever was supposed to be happening to me sound good and painful.  
     Walking alongside the floating table were five more doctors, who were all also naked.  I remember they were naked the first time I was here, and it terrified me then.  What scared me most was that they didn’t seem to have any genitals.  How do they reproduce? I wondered.  Horrible thoughts ran through my head about embryos planted in my chest and a terrifying lunch for my co-workers the next day.  I’ve since learned they just wear gray codpieces to match their skin and scare us more.  Now it’s just funny.  Then it was horrible.  
     This kid didn’t seem to be handling it any better than I had.  The stone slab under him was slick with sweat.  He kept looking back and forth at the naked doctors around him, eyes wide like he was trying to read something in their expressionless faces.  The doctors all just looked at each other and nodded, pretending to be communicating with their minds.  I knew they were pretending because if they actually were I’d have been able to hear them.  Actually, so could the kid on the table, if he hadn’t been too scared to try.  No, it was just an act.  Most of this was, actually.  The weird lighting, the pseudo-nudity, the nodding, it was all sheer performance.  I couldn’t help but wonder why they do it to these new guys.
     “It’s kind of a hazing ritual,” Gort told me.
     “What?”
     “You were thinking about why we do this to the new abductees, right?”
     “Oh, right.  Yeah, I was.”
     “Well, it’s sort of a hazing.  Or more of a test, really.  We do it the first few times to make sure you can handle this.  There are some people who, if they found out without a doubt, in such a simple manner, that we exist, would lose their minds.  Literally.  They’d end up in a mental ward if we just brought them in and said, ‘Hey, how’s it going, buddy?’ and gave them a soda.  We have to make it so extremely frightening that when you wake up you just think it’s a horrible nightmare.  If you can handle it, we’ll bring you back and you’ll understand the truth.  If not, you’ll forget it.
     “Thinking of which...” He lifted up a huge metallic object with a big spinning corkscrew thing, a long blade, and a thin metal tube, all protruding from a single handle.  He started toward me with it and I pulled back.
     “What the hell is that?”
     “Oh, it’s just a thermometer.  See this little tube?  It goes about a centimeter into your ear, while the rest of this contraption moves in a generally horrible manner and scares that guy half to death.”
     “Ah, gotcha.”
     “Ready?”
     “Sure.”
     He flipped a switch and the corkscrew started spinning wildly while the blade stabbed back and forth again and again.  Then, with a fast but careful motion, he put the tube into my ear.  I screamed like I was being ripped apart.  I glanced to my right and saw the kid staring at me and shaking like a leaf.  It was hard for me not to start chuckling.
     Finally Gort pulled the thermometer out of my ear and set it back down on his instrument tray.  I whimpered a little and quivered my lip.  Then, Gort told me I was done for tonight.  I started to sit up, but he shook his head.  “Floating you out, remember?”
     “Ah, right.” I laid back down, and he pushed a few buttons on the table I was laying on.  The top rose up a few inches and floated in the air.  Gort guided it out of the room.  The kid’s eyes looked past the slender gray bodies of the doctors around him and followed me out of the room until the heavy metal door slid down between us.  
     When I was in the hall, my table stopped moving and I stood up.  Gort and I walked down a few hallways to the transporter room so he could send me back to my bedroom. In the room there was a man coming out of the transporter in a pair of flannel pajama pants and a white T-shirt.  “Hey, Steve,” I thought to him.  
     “Heya, Jimmy.  How’s everything?”
     “Oh, you know, can’t complain.  I’m surprised to see you here on a Friday, don’t you normally work tomorrow?”
     “Nah, I told my boss my kid had a football game tomorrow and I needed the day off.”
     “Nice.”
     “Then I told my wife I had a rough day at work and wasn’t feeling well, so she’ll let me sleep in tomorrow.  If I’m lucky, she’ll have breakfast ready for me when I wake up.”
     “Ha! ‘Rough day at work.’  If only she knew.”  I picked up my time card, stuck it into the clock, and pulled the lever.  Steve did the same after me. “Oh, by the way,” I told him. “There’s a new kid in there to break in.  Give him hell.”
     “Will do.  Go get some sleep.”

     
     I woke up around eleven the next morning.  When she asked why I slept so late I just told my wife I couldn’t sleep the night before.  “I shouldn’t eat pizza so late, it always keeps me up.”  Sometimes a lie is easier to believe than the truth.
     As I flipped through the newspaper that morning, I saw an ad that I recognized:


                                              Need Extra Cash?
                                            Participate in a medical study!
                                         Needed: healthy men and women
                                                         Age 18-40
                                        Come in for a physical examination
                                                      once a month.  
                                         Compensation up to $1000 a visit!


     I laughed out loud.  Of course I recognized the ad.  It was the same one I’d responded to almost a year before.  When my wife asked me what was so funny, I just told her, “Family Circus is pretty good today.”