by Rick Moody
“Unidentified flying objects! When else do you think you’re going to get the chance!”
“I was reading —”
“Divining is some kind of genetic mutation, and maybe there are UFOs at the beginning and end of the story, and the dowsers are touched by the lights given off by the UFOs, and that’s how they develop the skill, and the mutation is passed down. Should I call Ranjeet? At the end of the story, the last dowser is conscripted into NASA.”
Vanessa explains how she saw the storefront advertising expeditions, and about the tip from Jack the Realtor. Allison Maiser could refuse, of course, because she’s Allison Maiser, but she ultimately gets a coat on, though she’s still wearing her pajama bottoms. It’s back into the Grand Am. Soon they have met up with their guide, Bo Fontaine, a one-time military man who has seemingly spent the last twenty years drinking too much and who has failed in this period of time to perfect the art of shaving without a mirror. For fifty dollars, Bo says, they get to go for a drive and hear his spiel, which is about a woman called Brenda Mae Millerton, who, in these very parts, just north of the town of Alpine, was taken up into a shining disk, probed, and released, during which adventure she learned, above all, that the aliens have been visiting the southwestern United States simply for the reason that the landing surfaces here are amenable to their craft. These aliens also visit the Nunavut Territory, and that’s why the Inuit drew those unusual drawings.
The aliens understand and are attracted to love, Bo continues, in his four-by-four, and therefore, “It’s pretty likely that they have a conception of Jesus. In the beginning was creation, and that means all of creation; it doesn’t just mean creation here, it means creation far and wide, creation scattered about in the night skies, creation amongst the galaxies that you see from that telescope . . . what’s that . . . the Hubble telescope. Creation means the creation of galaxies; it means those are real pictures coming from real galaxies, black holes, and such, which means He was there when the aliens were created, as He was always there. He’ll be there when we travel to the stars. Put it another way: The aliens are aspects of creation. The aliens are in His own image, just like we are.
“No need to fear the unidentified flying object because even if the pilots of that craft have three heads or eyes in the palms of their hands or whatnot, they know love, see what I’m saying?” Bo goes on without self-consciousness. His chatter is transitional: from the lights of Alpine to the blackness of the farm road that leads due east. Again and again, in the days of driving, Vanessa has found herself at night in a landscape that has more nothing in it than anywhere she’s ever been. Here it is again, producing a feeling both soothing and unsettling. The arresting nothingness of the back roads, jackrabbits hopping off the tarmac before their headlights. It could be mountains out in that darkness ahead and behind; it could be a stately sequence of ridges. It could be nothing.
They don’t know anything about Bo. They don’t know, really, that he’s not a rapist in training or a world-class serial killer. There must be more serial killers in the great state of Texas, because they execute so many of them. Vanessa knows how to kick a guy in the balls hard and she knows how to punch at the Adam’s apple of a man with a sharp jab so as to choke and incapacitate. She’d do either of these things before she’d let a sweaty redneck dishonor her or the intern.
In fact, if she needs to, she resolves that she will maneuver herself into a position where she can inflict bodily harm on Bo, after which she will tell Allison that she has been wanting to kiss her. Because ever since the night when they watched The Werewolves of Fairfield County together, the night when Vanessa found herself in bed with Allison the intern, who was definitely a top, there has been no consort between them. It should be, when women love women, that the male tendency toward callousness, toward the recoiling from intimate talk, sharing feelings, never rears its head. Women shouldn’t fuck and run. But once Allison had wrapped her arms around her, and inserted some things in her, and used her tongue on her, and told her that she was now Allison’s possession, until Vanessa was laughing because it was all so funny and so new, laughing until the moment when she started crying, once Allison had done all these things, it was as if she embarked on a campaign of neglecting Vanessa in the office. If not for serving as location scout, which Vanessa offered Allison in hopes that they would then share a hotel room, she would probably be as far away from Vanessa as she could get. It has been a little tense. Nevertheless, Vanessa will tell Allison that something has come over her, some feeling has come over Vanessa out here in the desert, in the limitless night. She will tell Allison that she thinks that this life is made for more than work and pizza and television. She wants Allison to understand that they could address these philosophical issues together. This conversation would involve a fair amount of kissing. And more.
“Is there a reason why we have to be so far out of town?” Allison asks Bo, from the backseat.
“We have to be this far out of town,” Bo shouts, and he seems to like to shout, “because right near here is where Brenda Mae Millerton was when she was abducted by the disk-shaped object I was telling you about. Right along this road is where the visitors, because that’s what we like to call them, visitors, made themselves known to Brenda Mae.”
“How did they make themselves known to her?” Vanessa inquires.
“That’s what I’m getting to,” Bo says. “Brenda was on her way into town from her family’s ranch, she was fixing on going to a restaurant, and she was on this road when she looked up and saw something gleaming in the night sky. What she saw was a disk-shaped object performing a rapid-fire Z-shaped maneuver —”
“What’s a —”
“This is military country. We know what kinds of maneuvers could be performed by the modern aircraft from our arsenal. We know it wasn’t any fighter jet or what have you. No stealth bomber could perform the kind of maneuver I’m speaking about. Brenda Mae saw the rapid-fire Z-shaped maneuver of the flying disk, and she felt cocky about it, prideful, because she knew that we live in a region where unidentified flying objects are part of life. I’m guessing you ladies might not feel the same way about it. I’m guessing that you think this is a big laugh, how this is the region where the visitors come. You think you’ve paid your fifty dollars and that’s a big laugh. And you get to hear a local citizen tell you tall tales of the night. Am I right?”
Vanessa says, “We’re here on a very important mission.”
How long havethey been driving? Forty minutes, and there has been nothing. Less than nothing. No city in the distance. No light pollution from a town twenty miles away. Nothing to separate or divide the immensity of the night from itself. Anything could happen here. Things without explanation, things that make mockery of the United Broadcasting Company and its parent corporation, all the employees thereof.
“Brenda thought she was safely out of the way of the craft that was performing the Z-shaped rapid-fire maneuver, and she thought, Well, it’s probably some kind of border patrol, and she kept driving, singing along with Tejano music on our local station until, at a certain moment, and for no reason other than a little bit of restlessness in her heart, she looked into the rearview. What she saw was that there was a light hovering right behind her, hovering above the road right behind her automobile.”
Of course, Allison looks behind, because she’s sitting in the backseat, and Vanessa looks back at Allison, longingly, and there is nothing out the back window at all.
“How big was it?” Allison asks.
“How big was it? Many have asked, of course,” Bo says. “And the answer is that questions of size are earthbound questions, because, according to Brenda Mae, the scale of the lights of the visitors varies depending on where you are in the story. At this point, when the lights are flying right behind her vehicle, the lights are about what you’d expect on a standard-issue farm tractor. But before you get the idea that these lights are just the headlights of the car following her, you need to know that they were
hovering above ground and they were, as she watched, rising up above the stern of her car, up above the trunk, and, as she looked back, the lights were now above her car, and she was afraid.”
“What kind of sound did the thing make?”
“A very good question, and it’s not a question that most people would think to ask. Most people just want to know about the shape of the unidentified aircraft and the size and stature of the visitors. Most people get right to those kinds of questions, and those questions would indicate that they haven’t thought much about issues of propulsion, fuel, aerodynamics, plasma, things of that nature. The question of what kind of sound the unidentified aircraft made is an interesting question, of course, especially for the reason that the aircraft made no sound at all.”
“Oh, come on,” Vanessa says. “How would she know if it made no sound at all?”
Bo applies the brake as though he’s test-driving the four-by-four for its manufacturer, as though he’s in one of those commercials invariably filmed in landscapes just like this and he wants to highlight his antilock braking system. The four-by-four, recently driven well above the legal limit, lurches to the dirt shoulder with a minor skid. Bo shuts off the engine.
“The answer to the question, ma’am, is that she knew the unidentified aircraft made no sound because she pulled the car over, just like I’ve done, and she shut the car off, and, you know, this was in early September, and so it was the time of year when you might have your windows open because you like a breeze. So Brenda Mae had her windows open, and she pulled her car over because she was afraid, and she turned off her car, and she heard nothing. In the wide open plains of the great state of Texas, here, she heard nothing, not even crickets, like everything had come to a stop, like the night had come to a stop, and she could feel the light shining on her from above because the light had warmth, heat, even, and she knew that there was something up there, all right, but all she could hear was her own breathing, her shortness of breath, and that was when the light, because the aircraft was experienced by her as a kind of light, got in the car with her, into the backseat of the car with her, just like if the light was your friend back there. What’s your name again? What I’m saying to you is that the size of the vehicle, the unidentified flying object, seemed to expand or contract based on a lot of individual factors, and for now it was small enough to waver like a mobile of lights in the backseat of Brenda Mae’s car.”
For dramatic effect, Bo throws open the door on the driver’s side of his four-by-four and climbs out onto the pavement. There are some pinging tones—the engine cooling from its gallop—but otherwise, around them, there’s only the night. Vanessa and Allison get out, too, and they are brought up short in the perception of the night sky. It’s a night sky that they would never see back east, where industrial residue enhances the sunset but forbids the glow of unmediated stars. Here they can see the planets low on the horizon before them and, above, the ceaseless churning of the Milky Way and its constituents.
“The period of her blackout started right at this point —”
“Her —”
“Memory loss,” Bo says. “Could have been traumatic, of course. Because she was seeing things no one has ever seen before, things that you don’t expect to see in this life. Maybe she bumped her head somehow and suffered a concussive injury in her brainpan. The fact is that Brenda Mae was in her car, and she remembers having pulled over the car, and she remembers seeing the blinding light in the back of the car, and she remembers looking out the window and seeing it, seeing something out there, and asking herself What is that thing? And then she remembers nothing. She doesn’t remember walking away from her car, even though she certainly did walk away from her car, since she was found wandering, in an unclothed state, forty miles from here; and did I say that those forty miles were in the middle of the range? Forty miles as the crow flies in the middle of the range. By roads, it would take hours to get there, and you’d still have to hike in. Maybe, you’re thinking, she used some kind of ATV, the kind that leaves no tracks. Maybe she parachuted in. I’m in no position to judge, but that range, that meadow where she was found, is this very field, that’s what I’m saying, this very field right beyond the road here. If you look out in that direction, that’s the field where Brenda Mae was found thirty-six hours later, wandering in an unclothed state, disoriented and measuring extra high on a Geiger counter. With a story about being shoved out of the craft, the unidentified flying object, and no memory of what the visitors looked like.”
Good thing they paid up front, because one question Vanessa asks herself is whether the story is worth fifty dollars. The whole way back to town, while Bo chatters on about other sightings, she’s thinking about Brenda Mae, who he says works at a hotel in the next town, as a waitress. Is the story worth fifty dollars? Did Brenda Mae Millerton go to the psychiatrist after her experience? Did she go to the church of her choice? Did the evangelical church help her with the feeling that she’d been abducted and probed by the visitors? Would the Seventh-Day Adventists or the Jehovah’s Witnesses welcome such a parishioner?
Bo says, “All of these persons I’m telling you about were administered lie-detector tests by the sheriff of Alpine, who considers himself an expert on alien encounters. Brenda Mae passed the lie-detecting test with flying colors, indicating that she believes without reservation that the events took place as I’m describing them. She was also hypnotized, by a fortune-teller from Midland, and the fortune-teller believes the story, too. In fact, this oracle actually hinted at some of the experiments that might have been performed on Brenda Mae, tests that probed the cellular dimension of human tissue, things of that nature. The last thing I’ll say, before I conclude for tonight, is that Brenda Mae reports that in the weeks after her abduction she was suffused with warm feelings for humanity, feelings of love. She believes that the lesson being imparted by the visitors was the lesson of love. She believes that she was being probed so that the visitors could try to understand why there was so much hatred here on Earth. Brenda Mae wishes she could travel back up into the craft now because of that sweet feeling of union.”
Back at the hotel room, Vanessa’s mother’s voice beckons to her from the complexity of silences, her mother’s unearthly voice, reached by remote, on Vanessa’s machine back in Brooklyn: “Don’t want you to worry . . . in Florida, honey . . . don’t want you to . . . now, I want you to promise that . . . everything . . . got an important . . . taking marching orders from an important . . . nothing to . . . people making the decisions . . . in close contact . . . calling me and . . . front of the courthouse . . . because there’s just . . . hang on, just a, I’ve got to . . . who would have thought . . . old mother . . . weather is . . . only just a couple of weeks . . . young men in suits . . . people have to stand up . . . proud . . . moments like this . . . in case you have forgotten . . . just as soon that I . . . not thinking too clearly . . . really ought to give it some more thought . . . got a swimming pool . . . a long bus ride . . . very nice man came today . . . the justices are . . . the ruling is . . . that woman is . . . my stomach is . . . don’t worry about a . . . back before you . . . on the next bus and . . .”
The part that gives Vanessa the creeps is not the slurred speech on the message, the marginal clarity, but the fact that the call seems as if it’s all part of the same evening’s entertainment. The call should be reassuring, because at least her mother is still her mother, doing the things that her mother seems to do, but of course there is no number where she might return the call, and she can’t shake the feeling that her mother is one of the visitors.
Vanessa wants to go to Allison’s room. She wants to knock on Allison’s door, and she wants to be admitted to Allison’s room, and she wants to wrap herself in Allison’s arms, and she wants to tell Allison what’s going on. She wants to have one of those heart-to-heart conversations that other people seem to get to have, especially after they have slept together.
But next morning Vanessa’s all business. I
f life is love and work, and the love machinery has blown an important fuse, well, at least you still have work. So in the morning, all Vanessa can talk about is the border, how they need to get closer to it. The Chisos Mountains, for example, she has the map to indicate the mountains, the Rio Grande, the thousand species of cacti, the geological layers. Allison has barely finished her coffee and huevos rancheros before they’re driving south, into a landscape so flat that it’s easy to see why Bo Fontaine’s visitors would have landed. Mountains hover in the distance, bisected by clouds and heat mirages. Vanessa gets the rental car up near a hundred miles an hour, since there are no other cars, until the Grand Am rattles as if it’s going to break apart from the g-forces of her fanaticism.
Past the entrance to the national park, of course, because it will be full of college students on Thanksgiving break. Nothing ruins the feeling of adventure like kids sporting hemp products. She turns right just beyond the park entrance. And the next town on the road that shadows the river is:
“Terlingua Ghost Town,” Allison says, reading aloud. “Blah blah blah, mining company once employed thousands of workers, vanished as quickly as it was established. Countercultural types in residence, blah blah.”
“What could be better?”
“On the other side of town is the new state park. Four-wheel drive only.”
They stop for gas in Terlingua, and the first local they observe is in his fifties with a ponytail tickling his lumbar region, riding a bicycle with a Chihuahua in the front basket. The guy looks as if he might be carrying gas back to a jalopy that ran dry somewhere on the roads out of town. Or maybe he needs to restart his tractor, so that he might harvest some righteous bud, completely organic. They disappear into the low mesas, where the road threads through the abandoned mines, the quicksilver mines of Terlingua’s former glory.
