by Douglas Lain
“Naming things, naming people, is a tricky business,” I say. “The name and the person never have anything in common.”
“My name is Sally,” she says.
“Sally what?” I ask.
“Sally Barth,” she says without looking down at her tag, and she starts to turn away from me, pretending to have some business at the cash register, but I reach out to stop her. I knock the display of Swatch wristwatches over, they’re red and yellow and green.
I reach out, grab her by her right wrist and spin her back toward me.
“Let go of me,” she says.
“I’ll let go of you, but listen to me. We have to work this out,” I say.
“Let go of me,” she says. And I pause, looking her in the face, trying to gauge what’s there, to figure out what she’s thinking and what she’ll do if I let go. Finally I relax, let go of her, and take one half step back from the register. “Let’s talk this out,” I tell her.
But Sally picks up the phone and presses the button for the operator. “Just a moment,” she says. “Hello, operator? Could you connect me to security? Yes, that’s right. I’ve forgotten the extension.” She puts her left palm over the mouthpiece and whispers to me that I might want to leave now. “Security? Yes, I have a man here who is harassing me. Could you please escort him out of the store?”
I consider just leaving her there, behind the counter. If she thinks she’s somebody else now, if she’s mimicking somebody else, then she’s out of my hair, out of my wife’s hair, but then I think back to the fun we’d had on the kitchen table. Besides, Virginia isn’t finished with her yet, although if Asket has switched over to this new persona for good then Virginia will surely lose interest. Still, if I do leave her then I’ll never figure out just what is happening.
“Excuse me,” a voice behind me asks, a girl’s voice. “What is this? What is going on here?” Sally asks.
The two young women look at each other from across the counter and then Sally lifts the gate and steps into the workspace, stands next to Asket. This Sally who is just arriving reaches out and takes the lanyard from around Asket’s neck, puts it around her own, and then reaches out and touches Asket’s hair.
“You’re nothing like me really, are you?” she asks. “How is it that you’re doing that?” she asks.
“Doing what?” Asket is perturbed. She hangs up the phone and stares at her new twin, maybe considering what the implications are, maybe thinking up excuses, but this young woman doesn’t appear to be wanting any answers.
“Please leave,” Sally says. “I’d like you to leave,” she says. “You don’t belong here. Whoever you are, you don’t belong… here.”
And that’s when the security guard arrives. He’s a portly man in a black security uniform, wearing a baseball cap with the word “security” written in white letters across the front, and I wait for him to look the situation over, wait for the confusion to mount, but instead he simply grabs me by my wrist, twists my arm around my back, and marches me toward the exit.
“I’ve got him,” he says to the two Sallys, and then marches me out into the hall, down the stairs, and around the corner. He’s a big guy, like I said, with red hair that’s turning a bit grey, a silly mustache, and a strong grip.
“Okay, okay,” I say. “Shit, I get it. I’ll leave her alone. You don’t have to manhandle me.”
Asket follows us into the corridor and then follows us as he drags me past the coin-operated rocking horse in front of the Toys“R”Us, past the cart of celebrity memoirs with yellow and red book jackets outside of Barnes and Noble, past Sears. She follows us, keeping a fast clip, until all three of us are at and then through the sliding glass doors of the exit.
“Do not,” the guard says. Then he says it again. “Do not,” he says, “come back inside. If you come back inside I will call the police.”
On the sidewalk outside the Manhattan Mall, sitting on the fire hydrant next to the 34th Street subway entrance, I look up at the balloon-shaped flying saucer hovering between the skyscrapers, and consider Asket’s unconscious. Does she actually have one or is everything about her to be found on the surface? It’s a puzzle because, while her physical appearance doesn’t seem to change much when she switches personalities, she’s utterly convincing as somebody new. Asket is maybe some kind of identity-less creature, possibly human but possibly not, who can capture the mannerisms of a person and replicate them, even before or without meeting the person. Otherwise how is it that Sally recognized herself in Asket? Otherwise how was it that I didn’t recognize Asket as Asket when she turned that corner in the Gap?
The Pleidien saucer isn’t a saucer but a bulb, it’s circular on top and narrowed toward the bottom, and striped red white and blue underneath. It is designed to look like a balloon, but as close as it is I can tell that it’s made out of unyielding metal, and that it’s resonating with some sort of energy. I know that if I wave at it or in any other way indicate interest, I’ll be taken up inside and given another lesson in ecology and spirituality. I know that I can take the tour again if I want. The aliens are watching.
But before I make any sign Asket interrupts.
“We should talk,” she says. “I think I need to talk to you.”
Asket is loitering by the entrance to the mall, she won’t come out onto the street, she refuses to step onto the sidewalk because she’s afraid of being seen by, of being exposed to, the Pleidiens. She doesn’t know what’s happening exactly but she knows that the aliens are a threat, that they’re to be avoided. She whispers at me, stage whispers. She asks me to meet her downstairs in the underground parking lot. I look up at the saucer, still considering another tour.
I imagine that it’s difficult to be so uncertain of yourself, to be confronted by another version of yourself and robbed of your individuality and originality over and over again. To truly not know who you are, that’s gotta be rough. Besides, I’m curious to see if I’d get an apology, or to know if she might think of herself as Asket again. For the moment my connection to this blank person, this mirror girl, is continuing.
We meet on the third floor down, just as she instructed. The Manhattan Mall parking lot has been renovated with text. Barbara Kruger, or somebody a lot like her, has stenciled the walls of the parking lot to make the space both more enigmatic and interesting and more navigable. The idea here is that it’ll be easier to find your way back to your parked Subaru if you’re parked under the words “You are a special person” or “It’s all about me. No You. No Me” than it would be to just write down the number of your space and try to remember the floor.
“‘You destroy what you think is difference,’” Asket reads the wall aloud when I approach her at the Mercedes-Benz.
“Are we on day two together or day three?” I ask. It’s just occurred to me that we must have reached day two of our adventure together, but I suspected another gap in there between the kitchen table and the mall. “Anyhow, you lost it in there. You were somebody new,” I say.
Asket, and I think she is Asket now, again, starts to cry. And it isn’t the kind of manipulative crying that Virginia sometimes tries when she wants something from me, it isn’t a tactic aimed at distracting me, but rather it’s the kind of crying that takes a person over. It’s caught her unaware and come on like a coughing fit or nausea. This is crying that she clearly doesn’t want and can’t control.
“What I want you to believe,” Asket tells me, “is that I’m a human being. I don’t know who I am, don’t know what is going on, but I’d like you to believe that much. I want you to believe it because I believe it.” Her voice is cracking, and there are tears she has to attend to, there are sounds that she’s making that she has to subdue somehow before she can go on. She sounds like she’s at the doctor’s office, she’s saying “ah” only she’s saying it over and over again. Maybe she thinks that if she says “ah” enough times she’ll be able to stop saying it. “Christ!” she exclaims.
I go to her, stand close to
her under the word “difference” and put my arms around her waist. I let her dry her face on my fleece jacket.
“Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah,” she says. She is still crying I think, but she may be repeating a mantra. Listening to her work it out, I realize that an action that is involuntary can still be inauthentic. Listening to her uncontrolled reaction the meaning of tears fades away. This sounds as if she’s groping toward the idea of crying, groping after an emotion that is, in reality, quite far away. These aren’t tears but something else. What I’m witnessing is her involuntary effort to find a feeling. She’s trying to figure out what an emotion is while it’s happening.
“Brian?” she asks. “I want you to forgive me,” she says.
“Forgive you. What for?”
She says she wants me to forgive her for the gap.
6
coney island
Deno’s Wonder Wheel is a nightmare of spokes and springs. A roller coaster/Ferris wheel hybrid, the green latticework and rails creak as the wheel turns. It’s hard to hear over the sound of it. The Wonder Wheel sounds like it’s rusted, like it needs to be greased.
“The women are on the ride?” Harold asks.
“That’s right,” I say. “They just got on.”
“That’s what you remember?” Harold asks. “That’s the last thing that happened?” He’s eating a Coney Island hot dog complete with beanless chili, white onions, and yellow mustard and watching the Ferris wheel cars unlatch from their position along the rim and slide inward, up and down along a snakeshaped rail. He takes a bite of his hot dog, squints at me and then raises his left hand to provide some shade for his eyes. Around us there are families on holiday, some of them wearing brightly colored clothes and smiling in preppy joy as they walk the boardwalk, the blue water reflecting their own goodness back at them, while others shift along in faded fabrics looking for shade. These are locals wearing mostly black and brown.
Harold and I belong to neither group. We’re sweating slightly as we are both overdressed in our tweed jackets, but we’re not looking for shade. “How do you know when it is?” Harold asks.
“There are cues, usually,” I say. “What you do is…”
But I find I don’t really want to complete that thought; what I want to say is that one can pick up on cues and clues. Instead I look up at the Wonder Wheel. It was built in 1920, which means that those Ferris wheel cars have been sliding back and forth along the Wonder Wheel’s spokes for over seventy years now, and as Harold and I both look up to where Asket and Virginia are, to where they’re turning, falling, and looping back, the history of this machine and the fact that it is still here makes me feel better.
“How do you know when we are exactly?” Harold asks again. Harold finishes his hot dog, wipes at his shirt, and now the mustard stain is gone from his jacket, or almost gone. You have to really look in order to notice it. The giant Ferris wheel is creaking ominously as it turns. Standing underneath like this, so close, feels a bit reckless.
“Did we come by car or the subway?” Harold asks.
I don’t know for sure. I don’t recall the subway, can’t remember it, and I’m sure I would remember if that’s how we arrived. The subway is as much of a ride as the Wonder Wheel. Certainly just as amusing and dangerous. The only difference is that the New York subway system is dirtier than this Ferris wheel. The difference between Coney Island and the subway is the graffiti and the muggings.
People on the Thunderbolt roller coaster, the ride next to the Wonder Wheel, are screaming for their life. Looking to my right I can’t tell which faction, the joyful and clean group or the New York heavies, are the ones screaming because they’re all of them speeding along the track and twisting upside down, but I assume they’re the beautiful ones. I assume they’re the tourists.
“The way the present moment gives you cues, tells you what you remember and who you are, is always the same. You wake up, check your watch, try to remember what you did the day before, and piece together whether you’re supposed to be thirty-two or fifty-five based on what you find in the mirror, what your room looks like, and so on…” This is Harold’s spiel. I’ve heard it again and again, in various guises, since our first days working with abductees. The UFO isn’t in the past, it’s in the present. We’re not in the present, we’re in the past. The present and the past are both times that we’re piecing together, figuring out.
“Look,” Harold says. “Here come your wives.”
Virginia and Asket are a bit unstable on their feet. They’re approaching from the other side of the Wonder Wheel, and as they approach the ride starts up again so that it’s hard to speak over the din of its turning, of its Wonder. Virginia is shouting at me but I can’t make out a single word.
“Which one is which?” Harold asks. “Guess it doesn’t matter as long as you’re having fun.”
When Virginia and Asket reach us there is a pause. Whatever was worth shouting to me when I was out of audible range is too sensitive to just come right out with now. “She wants to find herself,” she says.
“What?” “She wants to stop being me, to stop being other people, and find herself.”
“Is that right?” I ask her.
“Yes,” Asket says.
They are dressed alike. Virginia and Asket are both in plaid, both in tight jeans. Asket’s hair looks darker now too, and she’s hunching her back so as to appear shorter.
Looking out over the rail I see the beach is littered with grubby New Yorkers, some of them in bathing suits and headed for the cold and polluted channel, but most huddled in groups of three or five, here and there on the grey sand. They look cold and lost.
“And she wants to stay,” Virginia says. “She wants to stay for awhile. To live with us.”
Virginia uses the tinfoil her Coneydog came in to catch the bits of onion and beef that fall out of the bun with every bite. She has her orange and brown sundress tucked under her legs as she kneels there on the beach and looks out into the bay. She insists that it’s okay if Asket stay with us a little longer. Asket has admitted to being a duplicate, to not being the real Virginia, and she promises she’ll eventually turn the identity over to Virginia all together.
“She just needs time,” Virginia says. “Something has happened. She’s waiting for something to happen.”
“What did you talk about when you were up there?” I ask. I’m cross-legged across from her, with my back to the ocean, and there is sand in my loafers.
Virginia doesn’t answer me but finishes the dog and scrunches up the tinfoil into a ball. She’s a bit cross I think. Her hair is blowing in the breeze, blowing across her face and into her eyes.
“What did we talk about?” she asked me hollowly, just echoing. “You think I convinced her? You think I want her to stay?”
“Don’t you?”
“Yes,” Virginia says. “I want her to stay, but I don’t think she should. I think this is crazy. It’s making me crazy having her around.”
“What did she tell you?”
Virginia gets up, wipes the sand off her sundress, and then waits for me to stand up too. We start off across the beach, back toward the Wonder Wheel.
“We talked about UFOs,” she says. “We talked about UFO photos.”
Before the landing the evidence for UFOs almost always ended up being put down to being a byproduct of the mechanism that did the reporting. That is, if you had a photograph of a disc-shaped saucer floating next to a tree then the miracle was quickly seen to be a bit of trick photography. It would turn out that the disc was closer to the camera than the tree was, for instance. Or if you had witnesses who’d seen a disc shoot directly up into the sky in an instant it would turn out that what they’d really seen was an airplane or a helicopter that wasn’t flying straight up, but was flying toward them at angle so that it appeared that the craft was shooting straight up.
UFOs were always an illusion created by an error in the observer.
“She thinks the Pleidiens aren’t any different,
” Virginia says. “She thinks that we humans, and she insists that she’s human too, that we’ve misunderstood what these new saucers are in themselves. That we haven’t really seen them yet. It’s all a trick of perception.”
I nod along, thinking how glad Harold would be if this were true.
We’re to meet up with Asket and Harold by the parachute jump at two p.m. and checking my watch I see that we’ve almost reached the hour, but as we near the boardwalk I stop Virginia and look out at the ocean again. Something is still bothering me, something hasn’t been settled yet, or maybe it’s that everything is being settled too easily.
“Harold agrees?” I ask.
“What do you mean?” Virginia asks back.
“I mean, what you’re saying is that the flying saucer phenomena, the abductions, sightings, radiation, cattle mutilation, and Missing Time…” I pause again, looking out at the waves. There are people between me and the water, men and women in bathing suits and swimming caps. The beach seems crowded now, there are pretty people mingling at the water’s edge and dozens more splashing about in the waves, but before, when we’d been walking, the beach had seemed mostly empty. Or was it just that I’d been keeping my head down, watching my step, and hadn’t noticed before?
What I want to know is if Harold has agreed to start working on UFOs again, to investigate the Pleidien contact, to go back to cataloging the anomalies? And if he has, when did this happen? What was said to bring him around and when was it said?
“Virginia,” I start. “Why did we come out here today?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why Coney Island? Why the beach and the boardwalk, what made us decide to come here? Whose idea was it?” I ask.
“Whose idea was it?” she asks back.
“Did we talk to Harold on the phone and did he suggest it? Did we just drive out here on a whim and run into him? When did we decide to make the trip, last night when I’d first brought Asket home or this morning? How long has she been living with us already?” I ask.
