After the Saucers Landed

by Douglas Lain

  “I thought of that,” I say. And I had thought of that, you remember. I’ve explained all that already, right?

  “They don’t talk to me,” Charles says. “Not anymore. I get checks from them but they don’t consult with me.”

  Harold knew that as well as anyone. It was one of his secret joys, and he clearly enjoyed making Charles say it out loud.

  “They don’t mind if you drink?” Harold asks.

  “There is not stricture against alcohol,” Charles says.

  It’s true, but it’s also true that none of the Pleidiens drink. They don’t have a rule against it but they do say that, once you reach enlightenment through their program, the desire for any kind of drug will disappear. That’s one of their big hooks. Their success rate for treating alcoholism and drug addiction is something approaching 100 percent, or so they claim. They get a lot of people to surrender with that one.

  “Yeah, why is it that you drink, Charles? I thought that wasn’t a good vibration activity.”

  Charles doesn’t say anything but just takes a sip of his lager. He gulps it down and then waves to the bartender, asking for another. Harold smiles at this. He’s beginning to lighten up a little as Charles Rain’s mood worsens. Charles turns on his stool, turns his back on me and faces Harold who is quietly laughing. The neon light reflects off of Harold’s glasses and he tips his glass back and forth making the ice clink in his glass. His every move communicates smugness and superiority.

  Rain turns on his bar stool and I’m worried. I don’t want to watch. After everything, all the strangeness, the possibility of a bar fight still makes me want to avert my eyes.

  “You want to know why I believe her, Harold?” Charles asks. “I believe her because I know. I know the truth.”

  Harold is shaking his head, still amused. None of this matters to him anymore. He’s moved away from anger and into mockery, and none of it matters—not Asket, not Virginia, not me, and certainly not Charles Rain.

  “What do you know, Charles?” he asks.

  “I know that she was right. The Pleidiens did go to you first. You were their choice. Back in in 1957, during your sighting, that was them,” Charles says. “That was them. They went to you. You were supposed to prepare the way for them. You were supposed to write Sacred Saucer and Reincarnation in Space.”

  “No,” Harold says. “No I really wasn’t.”

  “Maybe not. Fine, not those books, but others,” Charles says. “You were meant to do it better. I’ll admit it. You were supposed to write books that were better than those books, but you didn’t. You told them no. You turned it all down.”

  “That’s not exactly true,” Harold says. “I did write better books.”

  But Charles has none of this. He accuses Harold of cowardice, of turning his back on his destiny. Harold just sneers.

  “There is nothing so backward as the idea of fate or destiny except, maybe, the idea that these Pleidiens have something to offer humanity that can’t already be found on the Home Shopping Network.”

  “That’s not a denial,” Charles says. “That’s an explanation.”

  “Why haven’t you started painting again, Charles? Now that the cosmic mission is complete, why not take that up again?” Harold asks.

  “Do you deny it?” Charles asks.

  “Oh, that’s right. You can’t return to painting because your paintings are as atrocious as this new religion you started.”

  “Do you…deny it?”

  Harold empties his glass and then holds it up over the bar and soon the bartender is back. Harold swallows this round down in one go, and holds the empty glass up again.

  “Do you?” Charles asks.

  Charles clearly thinks he’s got Harold by the balls with this question. Harold is a coward who couldn’t face those lights from Kubrick’s movie 2001. Rain will admit anything, admit that Harold has the better mind, that Harold has the better understanding of the alien, the absurd, the control system, but Harold has to admit that Rain is the better, braver, man.

  “Do you deny it?”

  Harold is opening his mouth, about to deliver yet another insult, when I realize that I don’t want, really can’t allow, this to continue.

  None of this is helping. My wife is missing and I’m here at the Cedar Tavern watching yet another round of what amounts to a thirty-five-year-long rivalry. Jack Nicholson and I have been silently watching, him from his frozen two dimensions and I from mine, but it’s time to break free of this stasis and intervene.

  “What does any of this have to do with Virginia?” I ask. “And why aren’t you more interested? So what, it doesn’t make linear sense, but she says she was once your wife. That is, Asket says she was Carole. She was, is, your dead wife,” I say.

  Harold looks at me, puts hands over his face, starts to reply, and then covers his mouth with his palm. I think for a moment that he’s ashamed. I think, for just a moment, that he’s listening to me.

  “Wait a minute,” Harold says. “That’s what this is about. They’re going to switch us, Charles. They sent her, this perky alien, so that they could switch us.”

  Charles looks like he might’ve grown pale but it’s tricky to tell in this light especially with his beard covering so much of his face.

  “Do you deny it?” he asks again, but his voice falters on the question mark.

  They’re ignoring me. For them the question is a game. It’s more of the same pretend stuff that their careers are founded on, but I can’t play along. My wife is gone. Asket has lost sight of who she is. And all of this is happening because of the Pleidiens. And what about Harold’s wife? Did she die, was she killed, by these aliens?

  “They’re trying to take us apart,” I say. “They want to deconstruct us, take the human race down, bit by bit.”

  “Do you deny it?” Charles asks.

  They’re not going to help me. These two are useless and I ask myself, why am I sitting around in a bar, why have I continued on with this routine, when I know that the Pleidiens are set on destroying, on deconstructing, the human race?

  The thing is, I teach this stuff. I’ve shown my students Rosemary’s Baby, both versions of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers movies, The Manchurian Candidate, and so on. I teach classes with names like “American Film Paranoia” and “The Affect of the Invasion,” and in every class, at every screening, I always raise the same point:

  The Paranoid style or aesthetic is a conservative one because the structure of a paranoid film demands naiveté. These movies require their characters to act as if they have faith in society. They have to have a sense of fair play, a compulsion to believe in justice, to believe in following the rules. In fact, the paranoid style makes such strong demands on a story, sets such strict limits on its characters, that there are often scenes that strain at the limits of credulity.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Asket says.

  I’ve got her by her elbow, by the sleeve of the woolen tunic she’s wearing, it was Virginia’s originally. When she tries to wiggle free of my grip I hold on tight to the seam and pull her closer to me.

  We’re standing on the circular concrete lawn of the Federal Building. The structure looks more like a cheese grater than anything, but I do feel a bit like an FBI agent standing here. I’m wearing my only formal suit, a dated cotton and polyester three piece with a pinstriped vest. I imagine I’m Robert Culp or some other middle-aged TV tough guy as I squint against the sun.

  I really have to do this, no matter how naive it seems. Think of the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In that one Donald Sutherland’s character turns to the authorities repeatedly. He turns to the powers that be even after he discovers that most everyone in the city has been replaced by pod people. Sutherland knows that the mayor’s office has been infiltrated. He knows that the police are covering up for the pod people, but when he finds his own duplicate in his backyard, when he discovers a gruesome half-formed monster version of himself, he calls the cops.

/>   “This is a mistake,” Asket says. The Federal Building’s companion, the Court of International Trade, is a smaller glass and steel cube. Looking at them both—the small cube and the taller cheese grater—I feel as though the ’70s never ended. The ugliness of the arrangement, the bare physical fact of these institutions presented without any ornamentation or facades, is absurd. What we’re approaching is only a dingy memory of authority, which is why we’re both of us acting as though we’re in a movie. None of this has any more substance than that. This plaza, it’s called Foley Square, is cut off from the rest of Manhattan by concrete buildings that are mostly parking lots. Standing at the entrance I feel like I’ve already broken some rule, already done something rash. I’ve squeezed in where I don’t belong and now I’m seeing the pipes and electric wires that are meant to be hidden.

  “We can still walk away,” Asket says.

  In a paranoid story even the characters that are cynics or nihilists have to at least occasionally act as if they have faith. At pivotal moments the structure of paranoia demands that the heroes act out of character.

  In Planet of the Apes, for instance, Charlton Heston’s character claims that humanity itself is a mistake. Heston starts the movie with the premise that interstellar space travel and the consequent time travel involved negates all human meaning and human authority. He says that he’s glad to be disconnected from the values and norms that gave his life a shape before. And yet, even he is shocked to find a society ruled by apes. Even he can’t face the reality of the destruction of human society. By the middle of the movie it turns out that Heston doesn’t believe what he says. He can’t believe it. The movie won’t let him believe it.

  “Time bends and space is boundless. It squashes a man’s ego. He begins to feel like no more than a mote in the eye of eternity,” Heston says at the start, during the scene in the space capsule. And yet…and yet he’s still shocked, terribly shocked, when he discovers a world filled with damned dirty apes.

  Asket tells me that she can’t promise me anything if we go inside. She can’t vouch for what she’ll do or how things will turn out. Once we’re past security she’ll offer me no help at all if things go wrong.

  “They know we’re coming,” she says. “This isn’t what you want to do.”

  “It’ll be okay,” I say.

  But it won’t be. Every step of what’s to come is planned out in advance, and they, the FBI, the Pleidiens, whoever, they won’t be making any mistakes. There is no chance of a success. Not this way, not if I go at them directly.

  “If we walk into the Federal Building we’ll be walking into a trap. They’re prepared for us. What they haven’t prepared for is what happens if we walk away,” Asket says. “We could go to Harold. Isn’t that what you promised me from the start? That’s what I want.”

  “Are they going to shoot me?” I say.

  “No.”

  “Then what will happen? What are you so afraid of?” I ask.

  “We can still leave,” she tells me.

  “No. No. We can’t,” I say. And it’s true. It’s true even though I know better.

  Past the double doors of the cheese grater we find an FBI man waiting for us under the exit sign. He’s a black man with a shaved head and a furrowed brow, and his blue suit and clip-on badge both hang straight on him. He’s perfectly prepared for us, ready to show us around, and bring us up to date.

  “Mr. Johnson,” he begins, “it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’ve read your books.”

  Asket steps past me, stands next to the FBI agent, and opens her eyes wide as if to remind me that she’d warned me off this. She was right, obviously.

  I reach out to the agent, offer my hand to him, and prepare myself for his grip.

  “You’ve read my work?” I ask.

  “Yes, Missing Time,” he says. “Very helpful material. You and Mr. Flint do fine work. A bit creative for the Bureau, of course, but helpful.”

  The agent, his name is Cokely, tells me that they are prepared to take a statement from me, that they’ve been hoping I’d come in. In fact, they’ve been trying to recruit my colleague Flint for quite awhile but have been holding back from contacting me. The job of national security has changed dramatically, obviously, but they still need civilian help, and there has been an effort to bring MUFON, and really the whole field of Ufology, into the fold now that the saucers have landed. Still, they’ve had to go slow.

  Cokely swipes his badge across a plastic rectangle by a steel-framed door and there is a click. Passing from the exterior hallway to the back office the light changes. The bright track lighting of the lobby is gone and then we find ourselves in dim, stale rooms. Fluorescent lights make these back offices seem dingy, pale, and ordinary, and amidst the metal desks, push button phones, and IBM clones, I involuntarily relax.

  “We can talk over here,” Cokely tells me. He shows us to a cubicle on the far side of the vast room and we seat ourselves on metal folding chairs while he parks himself behind his small desk and keys a few commands into his machine. We wait for him to start, listen to the hum of his computer monitor and the keyboard clacking in the otherwise silent space, but nothing happens. He keeps typing, on and on, while we wait.

  “Mr. Cokely,” I say.

  “Just a moment,” he replies.

  The agent is stoic. His brow still furrowed, his typing loud as he hunts and pecks his way across his beige keyboard, but otherwise he’s emotionless. This is all routine. Any sense that I might have had that this agent was in public relations evaporates as he finds one letter and then the next on his keyboard. I try to watch his hands, to see what he’s typing, but his hands are fast.

  “Mr. Johnson,” the FBI agent addresses me. “Why have you come to visit us today?”

  Why have I come to visit him today? Not him, but them. Why have I come to visit the FBI today, of all days? What did I hope to accomplish?

  “The Pleidiens,” I start, “cannot be trusted.”

  Cokely doesn’t respond, but waits for me to say more. I have his full attention and he cocks his head and waits.

  I tell him about Asket, the Gap, Missing Time, and how my wife has gone missing and he types it all in, or I assume he’s typing in what I say. I tell him that the Space Brothers are undermining us. They’re trying to undo us somehow.

  “They are changing us,” I tell him. “I think they’re changing us. I don’t understand it all, but Asket’s story is that one of them changed who she was. She switched around with another woman. She became an artist’s model, and before that…well, she says she used to be Harold Flint’s wife.”

  Asket shifts in her chair and when I glance over at her I see that her face is reddening. I’m embarrassing her.

  “Well that’s what you said at Rain’s. That’s what you said. I thought you remembered,” I say. Asket doesn’t say anything, but looks away. She turns her head away and glances over at the cubicle. She’s pretending not to have heard?

  “Mr. Johnson,” Mr. Cokely says. “I want to show you something.”

  The FBI agent produces a wave machine from a desk drawer. It’s a clear plastic rectangle filled with blue mercury and positioned on a chrome base. The agent sets it down in front of me and flips a switch. When he turns it on I hear the sound of the ocean.

  “Have you ever read Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes?” the FBI agent asks me. The wave in the rectangle is undulating slowly, irregular but predictable, and I nod slowly.

  “I have,” I tell him.

  “What did you get out of it?” he asks.

  “I think,” I tell him and look up from the wave machine to meet his gaze. “Therefore, I am.”

  “Right,” he says. Only he draws it out. “Riiigghhttt.”

  It turns out that Cokely really wants to tell me about Descartes. He wants to explain it to me, but not the cogito part, but the section about wax:

  “‘Perhaps it was what I now think, viz. that this wax was not that sweetness of honey, nor th
at agreeable scent of flowers, nor that particular whiteness, nor that figure, nor that sound, but simply a body which a little while before appeared to me as perceptible under these forms, and which is now perceptible under others. But what, precisely, is it that I imagine when I form such conceptions? Let us attentively consider this, and, abstracting from all that does not belong to the wax, let us see what remains. Certainly nothing remains excepting a certain extended thing which is flexible and movable,’” he says. Then he reaches out to the wave machine and puts his hand on top, feeling the movement of the plastic rectangle as it slowly seesaws up and down. After a few seconds of this he stands up, walks around the desk, and approaches Asket. He walks around her, and takes hold of the metal backrest, and turns her chair.

  “Who is this?” he asks me.

  Asket smiles at me, then she leans forward and takes my hand. “Who am I, Brian?” she asks.

  “I don’t know who she is,” I tell Cokely. “I can’t keep track.”

  And this is when the bad thing starts to happen, this is when they spring their trap. Another woman, another version of Asket, appears at just this point. She steps from behind the cubicle wall, walks up to where the agent is standing, and puts her arm around his shoulder. This version of Asket is shorter than the one I came in with, but she’s wearing the same stupid sequined jumper that Asket donned at the start. One difference though is that this one has on purple mascara, the kind of mascara that trapeze artists, stage actresses, or call girls might wear in order to emphasize their eyes even at a distance.

  It’s Virginia, of course. Not Asket at all.

  “People are like wax,” she says.

  There is nothing in her stance, in the way she moves, or in her manner of speech, that is the same as it was. I don’t really know who she is.

  “We are constantly changing as we age. We gain or lose weight, our skin loses its elasticity, we might imbibe chemicals or drugs, cut our hair short or grow it long, and yet through it all we think of ourselves and each other as constants. We give each other names, ascribe personality traits, develop all manner of ideas about one another.”