by Douglas Lain
She knew it would happen, that it was happening all the time, but it made her sick to watch it happening to someone else, to see it happen to Harold. Toward the end of his lecture, when Harold was finishing up describing the problem of time (the notion that one moment really does follow the next and how this might not always or ever be true) one of the men in the front row stood up and walked onto the stage. He was about four inches taller than Harold, but they were dressed in nearly identical clothing—khaki pants, blue button-up shirts, tweed jackets—and all this man did, all he had to do, was exchange his tie for Harold’s tie and take Harold’s glasses. The slightly taller man handed over his tie and then he stepped up behind the podium. The taller man, the taller version of Harold, waited while the other Harold exited the stage and found a seat, found the seat the taller man had been occupying. Then he, this new Harold, reshuffled the notes and the lecture started over. The new Harold started from the beginning.
“‘This sentence is in French,’” he said. This Harold looked out, into the audience, and Asket realized that he could see her. He’d found her out there and was watching her. His desire for her had moved into this new version along with the rest of Harold’s personality.
After witnessing Harold’s switch she wasn’t sure if she still wanted to be with him. It was unrealistic to expect that he would be an original, that he wouldn’t be as susceptible to the Pleidien influence as any other human, but she had secretly held this hope. She had assumed it. Harold would different.
She had forty-five minutes until she was to meet Harold in his hotel room, just that much time to decide. Her original hope of regaining her life, of landing on something original, of returning, was, she realized, dashed now. She couldn’t listen to the speech anymore, couldn’t bear to watch this new version of Harold even though, as he spoke, he seemed more and more like himself to her, so she stood up from her folding chair, clasping her metallic mini-purse in front of her like a shield, and made her way to the back of the audience and then into the another section of the convention center.
If Harold had been authentic he would have been the only authentic thing at the Javits Convention Center. Everything else at the MUFON conference was a duplicate, a copy. While MUFON had been vindicated, Ufology as a business had been decimated. The kind of merchandise she associated with the field, the self-published channeled books, the blurry UFO photos, the used copies of abduction research in paperback, and every single trace of the Greys, all of that had been consigned to the dustbin. In place of these there were copies of Rain’s latest book, The Plejaren Prophecies, commentaries on his book, and signed photographs of Ralph and Charles Rain. More than that every kiosk and all the merchandise tables were manned by Pleidiens or by surrendered Earthlings. It had turned out that, after landing, only one alien corporation was ever going to profit from the fact that flying saucers were real.
Asket stopped at a kiosk, pretended to examine the merchandise, the plastic reproductions of hubcap-shaped craft, the glossy covers of Star Insight magazine, while she considered what it would mean to give herself physically to a man who wasn’t himself. It wouldn’t make a difference, would it? She wasn’t herself either.
Asket looked at her hands on the glass counter, tried to stand still against the jostling crowd, and looked down at her arms. She couldn’t remember what color her arms should be.
“You’re white now. Your arms are pale,” I say.
“Are they?” Asket asks, but she doesn’t notice or even look down to check. “What I saw helped me decide. Next to the grey plastic boom box there was a stack of neatly folded white jumpsuits with purple sequins and I asked the clerk, a woman who, as it happened, was wearing an identical jumpsuit, what the purple sequins signified.”
The Pleidiens are a liberal race but they did have rules and one of them was that no human was to wear the Pleidien jumpsuit with the traditional colored sequins. They insisted on this, not for their own sake of course, but in order to protect humanity. For the time being they wanted to maintain a distinction. Mankind was not ready to live without distinctions. They didn’t want to confuse anyone by erasing such an important difference before we were ready.
Asket purchased a green slushy in a Ralph Reality memorabilia cup and admired the blond man. There he was with his broad chest and blown dry hair, and she realized that the cup, for the surrendered, had a religious significance. Sipping through the twisty straw she found the apple slushy to be both too sour and too sweet at the same time, and she stuck her tongue out in disgust and was immediately embarrassed. The woman in the purple sequins frowned at her, disapproving of her disapproval. A green apple slushy was apparently some new sacrament, and even if it was disgusting she had to drink it all. When her tongue turned green and her teeth started to ache she would apparently be redeemed.
Harold greeted her at the door to his hotel room with a question. “Do you believe in fate?” he asked.
She wanted to take him back to the convention center, to get away from the dim light and stale air that smelled of air freshener and dust, but after he asked her this question he turned away and walked back into the room so that she had to follow him in to answer.
Sitting down on one of the twin beds on the far side of the room, facing away from her and toward the venetian blinds, Harold was acting out their fantasy. He was waiting for her to join him there on the polyester comforter, to sit next to him on the bed.
There was a saucer hovering outside the hotel and the red and green and yellow lights were bright enough to light up the overcast sky and to lend the small room in a Best Western the ambiance of a discotheque.
Did she believe in fate? The question went unanswered as she crossed the room and put her hand on him, stroking the small of his back and petting his grey hair and bald scalp.
Right now she is looking down at her meal, at the broiled chicken set in red sauce on a china plate dusted with green pepper, while gripping the stem of her wine glass, averting her eyes as if deciding on where to start, but the sly smile she’s wearing gives her away. The memory of what happened, of what she and Harold did together, is a pleasant embarrassment for her.
“You weren’t there to seduce him,” I tell her.
She takes a sip of her wine and then pokes at the meat on her plate with her fork, suddenly ambivalent about her order.
“I asked him to call his wife,” she says.
“You did?”
“After a time, I asked him. He didn’t like the idea.”
“What about his question? Do you believe in fate?” I ask.
“Like I told you before, there are moments that can only go one way. Maybe it’s not down to fate but patterns. There are moments that are predictable.”
What was predictable in that hotel room, what anyone could figure out in advance, was where Harold would put his hands and how the transition from separation to unbuttoned intimacy was going to be achieved. These kinds of transitions are actually always worked out in advance, and the moves, his moves and her supple acceptance, while not fated exactly, are definitely worked out in advance and according to an established plan.
Afterward she sat on the bedside table, the phone between her bare legs, her sweaty back pressed against the wall lamp’s cool metal base, and she told him.
She finally told him directly, again and again, that she was Carole. She was the original Carole.
“The Pleidiens have the power to switch people around, to change their identity. They did it to me, to me and the woman you think is your wife, and it needs to be undone,” she said.
“What are you saying?” Harold asked. “Are you trying to blackmail me? You’re my wife?”
She walked him through it slowly, even repeating his own words back to him. She told him that she was speaking French. She told him that she was an untrue truth, and that the Pleidiens weren’t to be trusted. Finally she told him that she was his real wife and that Harold needed to call her. She asked him to call his wife. She lifted the receiver fr
om the hook, held it on her lap, let it dangle on the curled black cord for a time while they argued, and then handed it over.
“When you get her on the line tell her to meet us here. I want to talk to her in person,” she said.
“You’re crazy,” Harold said. “What do you want to tell her?”
“I’ll tell her that she’s going to have an identity crisis.”
When our bill comes I’m glad for the interruption. This news that my wife’s doppelgänger had slept with Harold Flint troubled me even more. Somehow this troubled me more than discovering that she thought she’d once been an artist’s model who thought she was Harold’s dead wife. She’d slept with him not when she was his wife or his wife’s double, but when she was someone like or approximating who she is right now.
She’s at the restaurant with me but she’s thinking about him. That’s what is worse. I’m happy to leave the empty wine bottles and chandelier elegance behind, thrilled to get out of Barbetta’s and onto the sidewalk, and I let Asket hail a cab while I think over what she’s told me. New Yorkers keeping up with the beat and step of the city pass me as I hold my ground in the middle of the sidewalk.
Asket is stretching. She’s on tiptoes at the curb and her litheness and appeal is accentuated by the tight sweater and orange skirt she’s wearing. It occurs to me that she must have changed out of her jumpsuit in the saucer. These civilian clothes she’s in, her Earth uniform, must have been provided by Reality. Watching her stretch and then get her bearings and scan the road for a taxi, the question of her bothers me. Just who is she? Where is she really from? It can’t be that she’s an Oregonian, some community college art teacher with an artist’s model’s body. She’s got to be one of them.
“I don’t believe you,” I say as we climb into the taxi. Music is blaring from the radio. A maudlin pop tune called “Careless Whisper” is loud and she pretends not to have heard me.
“What are you saying exactly anyway? Carole killed herself the weekend of that convention. Are you saying otherwise?” I shout. Asket just keeps nodding along to the beat of the song, and as we turn on 5th I lean back into my seat and cross my arms. If an argument isn’t possible then I’ll settle for brooding.
Carole was buried six months ago, before the election of Bill Clinton. She took too many pills. She was always taking too many pills, but this time the mistake was fatal. It apparently wasn’t a mistake at all. That’s Harold’s story. The reason he gave, that she was depressed by the landing, that the arrival of the aliens had gotten to her in the same way as they got to John Mack and Betty Hill, never made any sense, but it’s even less likely that Carole would’ve overdosed, offed herself, over Harold’s straying. Something else must’ve happened.
When we arrive back at the brownstone Asket immediately excuses herself to the restroom while I head to the kitchen and open our designer refrigerator, this shiny black wonder that’s set into the wall. Inside there is nothing I want, hardly anything in there at all. We just have some leftover rice and a half bottle of wine. Closing the door I spot my own reflection in the black sheen of the door and feel foolish.
Why are we here? More specifically, why is she here? Asket doesn’t live with me, or she ought not to live with me. Not anymore. What reason is there for her to be here, to be staying here?
“You aren’t who you think you are, Brian,” she tells me. She’s changed into Virginia’s clothes. She enters the kitchen wearing a pair of button-up jeans and a Pink Floyd T-shirt from their 1986 Momentary Lapse of Reason world tour. The ironed-on transfer is from Floyd’s album cover. There are empty beds, cots, on the beach and all of them are about to be washed away.
“You’ve got it backward, Asket. It’s you who aren’t who you say you are,” I say. “It’s you who aren’t who you pretend to be.”
Asket ignores me, pushes past me, and opens the refrigerator again. She fishes out the wine, pulls the cork free with her teeth, and fetches a pair of mason jars that Virginia bought so we could jar our own jam if we ever wanted to, but of course we don’t. I put them back and take down two delicate tumblers, the ones with the thumb indents that Virginia insisted we had to have. Apparently Asket is not familiar with the kitchen, not anymore. She doesn’t know where anything goes.
“Did Carole kill herself?” I ask.
“No.”
“What happened to her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why should I believe you? Why should I let you stay here?”
“Carole became somebody else,” Asket tells me. “We all switched around, that’s what always happens. That’s what’s been happening.”
I take a sip of the white wine and find it’s too sweet. “This is crap.”
Asket pours more wine into my tumbler and then puts the empty bottle in the sink. She keeps her back to me for a moment, pauses for effect, and then she turns back to me again. “Do you remember what happened at the FBI?”
“I was tested,” I say. “You and your Pleidien friends thought it would be great fun to test me…”
“And after that?”
“After that? There was nothing. After that we went to the restaurant,” I said.
“Brian, he gave you twenty-four hours. Reality said you had twenty-four hours.”
I want to object but decide to drink more wine instead. I swallow down the sickly sweet stuff in one gulp and then leave the kitchen. I make my way to our mock Gustav Stickley chair with oversized leather cushions and sit down heavily. The arts and crafts movement might not have produced a socialist utopia but they knew how to make a chair. Asket sits down across from me, on the leather sofa.
“Listen,” she tells me.
Harold told her he had no intention of calling his wife from the bed he’d just used with another woman, that he had no intention of calling her at all. He rolled over and sat on the side of the bed, lit a filterless cigarette and pulled on his boxer shorts. They were fifteen stories up and from where she was on the bed all Asket could see out the window was the blank dark sky. The light from the hotel room, from the bedside table lamp, reflected off the double pane.
“Harold, do you believe the mind and the body are split?” Asket asked. Harold didn’t answer but he twitched. He was sitting with his back to her and his arm moved, his whole body jerked slightly. “That’s your answer to the mind/body problem. There is a split and that split is a third term.”
Harold didn’t want to discuss it. He didn’t appear to want to talk at all, but just wanted to smoke. He didn’t say anything until the light from outside filled the room. Not sunlight, but a pink and yellow light spilled in. It alternated on and off as the flying saucer spun. The craft was nearer now, not quite level with their floor but closer, lower.
“They look cheap,” Harold said. “They look exactly like saucers should look, so much so that we’ve already forgotten they’re out there. They just blend in.”
Asket sat up in bed, put her hand on his shoulder, and got him to turn back in her direction. She watched his eyes as he looked her up and down and when he met her gaze she asked him again.
“Call Carole,” she said. “Call your wife. I want to meet her.”
Harold stood up from the bed. He moved away from her and nearly stumbled on the carpet, had to catch himself with an outstretched hand or he would have smashed his forehead against the fake wood of the television cabinet. As soon as he regained his balance he crouched on all fours and felt around under the bed for his trousers.
“This was a mistake,” he said. “I don’t know how I could have been so stupid.”
Harold was scared. Whether he was simply scared of being caught out by his wife or if it was something more than that, Asket couldn’t tell, but he was definitely frightened. He was frightened of her.
“I know things that I shouldn’t know,” she told him. And Harold, the tough cynic, the worldly anti-artist, the skeptic, flinched. His face fell.
“Listen, Patricia,” he said. “I like my life. I mean, it’s no
t perfect, but my wife…I don’t…”
“I know things,” she repeated, “that I shouldn’t be able to know.”
The Pleidiens had contacted Harold first.
Before Charles Rain, Harold had been their favorite, the one they wanted. They’d only found an alternate when they’d run out of other options. They’d only turned to the B-movie version of contact, resorted to a security guard at Macy’s and to the idea of a new religion, when Harold had asked them, begged them, to stop. They’d contacted him, they’d been talking to him from Eternity, since he was a little boy, and they made themselves known to him consciously when he was at Black Mountain College. He was a contactee too, even though he wanted to deny it. He’d received the same wisdom message, the same visions, that Charles Rain had received. The only difference was that Harold had rejected it.
“You could see more than Charles,” she said. “It wasn’t just a set of ideas for you, it wasn’t just a fantasy story.”
“What wasn’t?”
“The Third Space.”
Harold’s encounters with the Pleidiens changed him. He couldn’t see straight, he had vertigo for weeks after the first contact and every time after that, when they would land their craft or speak to him telepathically, he would have the same symptoms or worse. The problem was that for Harold the Third Space wasn’t invisible, it wasn’t some distant imaginary dimension, but it was active in the world. It was what gave the world shape, and it was always moving.
“Here’s another thing I know that I shouldn’t. Those symptoms almost stopped us from getting married,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“The vertigo, the confusion you felt when you were in contact with them. It almost stopped everything.”
On December 17, 1979, Harold thought the world might be ending.
He’d seen the saucers the night before, but he’d been drinking heavily and thought, hoped, that they might’ve been a delusion. This time the flying saucers were brought on by the mix of marijuana and alcohol in his system.
