by Douglas Lain
The craft had been hovering over McSorley’s, the men’s-only tavern that his friends from Black Mountain thought would be the perfect place to celebrate on the night before his second marriage. Harold could usually hold his liquor, but after an untold number of dark beers he found himself unable to follow the thread of conversation around him. Harold couldn’t figure out how to draw a bunny no matter how many times Ray explained it to him. And when Ben Walton tried to reenact a Steve Reich percussion piece with a fork and a pint glass Harold felt faint. He stared down at the sawdust on the floor of the Irish pub, and tried to ignore the undercurrent that he could hear emerging. He didn’t want to understand how these disconnected conversations were combining into an entirely different message.
“Fleshy bodies…in a world that may or may not…have changed.”
The people around him were unconsciously cooperating in order to speak to him in code. “A common way…to find the answers…alters your living space.” The words he made out were spoken by Ray, Ben, and Joe. He was involuntarily putting them together into a new sequence. He felt sick to his stomach and dizzy, but he was supposed to stand up from the table and go out onto the street. That’s what was expected of him.
“You couldn’t quit doing it,” Asket told him. She was still naked on the bed, sitting Indian style with her hands folded in her lap, and Harold was listening to her. “You saw a saucer that night, again, and the next day, when we were going to be married, your head was pounding. You had too many ideas, couldn’t differentiate your own thoughts from what was going on around you.”
“I was hung over,” Harold said.
“It was all a flow of ideas, of words and concepts, and you were just another idea in with the rest. It was impossible for you to keep up, to keep interpreting. You almost didn’t make it to the church we’d rented.”
Harold had had to drink again, that next day, to get good and drunk, get good and stoned, in order to make the image of the saucer leave him. He couldn’t tell where he was in time, whether he was standing outside of McSorley’s watching the saucer land, back at Black Mountain College putting together a geodesic dome that would never support its own weight, or sitting in his Brooklyn walk-up waiting for a cab.
Eternity, for Harold Flint, wasn’t something to wish for. That space outside of appearance, the disorder that supports the ordered world of our everyday life, was cold, overwhelming, and deadly in its allure and beauty.
“You were so drunk on our wedding day,” she said. “I thought I was making the worst mistake of my life. But then you told me about the saucer, about what they’d done to your head, and I understood. I tied to understand. You hadn’t done it, hadn’t gotten so drunk, in order to hurt me,” she said. “And we got married.”
Harold shook his head. He shook his head and then sat down on a chair with rollers that was set up against the television cabinet. “You and I didn’t get married,” he said. “We’ve only just met, or we’ve only just met again, after a half decade.”
“You’re wrong. I’m Carole. Or, I was, at one time, the woman you know as Carole,” she said. “Does anyone else know that story? Did anyone else see the saucer? Did you tell anyone else?”
“No,” he said. “No.”
The two of them recognized each other when they met at the hotel bar. Carole was drinking stale coffee at the bar when Harold stepped up to the counter on her left side and pointed across to Asket who was standing on her right. He introduced her as the woman from the Well, which was a little disconcerting as Asket had thought that theirs was a clandestine relationship. Carole offered her hand to shake and her grip was firm, but not aggressive. She was a pretty brunette who looked like she might have stepped out of another era. She looked a bit like Doris Day and a bit like Elaine de Kooning, and had an old school aristocratic air about her.
Before they’d even spoken Asket realized that this Carole knew. She might not know everything, but she knew that Asket had been to bed with her husband, but what was equally obvious was that she was not going to say anything directly about it. Carole’s knowledge of her husband’s affair would be the subtext of the encounter, a secret source of power for the wife.
Or that was how Carole saw it, but Asket had none of that.
“Patricia, isn’t it?” Carole asked.
“I prefer the name Carole,” Asket said.
“Are you trying to be clever about something?” Carole asked, but then she gave Asket a second look and it clicked. Carole’s eyes widened as she recognized herself in this other woman.
“Oh, Christ,” Harold said. “I think I need a drink.”
“My name is Carole,” Asket said.
“I think it is,” Carole said. “It’s nice to meet you, Carole.”
Harold ordered his drink but before it came Asket dragged them back into the merchandise court. The best way to demonstrate what she meant, to convince them both of what had happened, was to give a demonstration.
“Follow me,” she said and led the two of them out of the hotel bar and back to the kiosks and tables by the main stage. They stood back from the activity as Asket searched out a target.
She settled for a representative of the New Church, a pimply adolescent in purple sequins who had recently surrendered. The three of them watched as he wound up a saucer toy with a metal key and then set the saucer down and let it skitter across the glass counter and then stop. The toy couldn’t overcome the strip of aluminum at the counter’s edge. It rotated 180 degrees round and spun away, and the Pleidien convert, the saucer toy salesclerk, picked out another and inserted the key.
“Can we ask you a few questions about the new faith?” Asket asked him when they reached the kiosk. The teenager looked at them, the saucer still in his hands, only half wound, and closed his mouth. The smile he’d had disappeared and his braces and rubber bands disappeared with it.
“This is only a merchandise kiosk. There is a reading room on the second floor and saucers outside the convention center,” he said.
Asket smiled at him and then moved a lock of her straightened black hair behind her ear. She leaned across the table so as to be physically closer to the boy.
“I know that you’re not, what do you call it, a spokesperson?” she asked.
“A communications officer,” he said.
“I know you’re not a communications officer, but you’re a convert? You’ve surrendered?”
The kid put down the toy craft and it spun sluggishly away, just making it halfway down the countertop before stopping.
“I’m a member of the New Church,” he said.
What Asket wanted to know was if the boy understood the Pleidien faith well enough to go along with her. She asked him to explain the Pleidien idea of background reality which, they claimed, was the realm they accessed during interstellar flight. She wondered if he knew that this realm was supposedly both singular and multiple. She wondered if he was as confused by it, by their idea of an accessible but closed background to reality, as she was. And she wondered, suspected, that if he was confused, as confused as she was, that she might be able to exploit that confusion. She wanted to use the background reality, to test it. He would be her guinea pig.
“I’ve heard,” she started, “that there is no difference between thought and reality. The Pleidiens say we are just materialized thought.”
“I…the reading room is on the second-floor pavilion,” the boy answered.
Asket took one of Rain’s books, The Eternity Factor, and opened the dust jacket so as to read aloud from the inside flap.
“‘Our Pleidien Space Brothers are here to deliver the good news,’” she read. “‘You are a spiritual being. You are a materialized thought, an idea in the flesh. Hunger, war, disease and indeed all fear and strife can be eliminated through the proper understanding of this simple fact. You are spirit. Welcome to the Cosmos.’”
The boy’s braces were showing again and his smile seemed genuine.
“You believe that?” Asket asked.
&nb
sp; “It’s the truth.”
“And as spirit you can float free. Your body isn’t a trap,” she said.
“The body is a vehicle for the spirit,” he said.
“Why not get out then?” she asked. “Why do you always stay in the car?”
The boy was winding up the toy saucer again, absentmindedly overwinding it actually. He put the toy down and it made a terrible grinding sound.
“Get out of the car?” he asked.
“Why not try another vehicle?”
“Another vehicle?”
Asket walked around the kiosk and stood next to the boy. She pointed out at the crowd and asked him which one he liked. “You could be any of these. Take your pick.”
“What do you mean?”
“Get out of this car,” she said. She nudged him in his soft belly. “Try a test drive in a different model.”
The salesclerk picked out a teenager who looked a bit like a television star, like a soap opera actor. This other boy had perfect teeth and perfectly combed blond hair, and the four of them approached this kid’s table. This boy was sitting by an Orange Julius kiosk drinking a strawberry slushy through a twisty straw and reading one of Rain’s books. Asket asked him if he knew the doctrine, if he believed in the spirit, or if he thought he was just his body. And then, while Carole and Harry watched, she got the two teens to switch. It was really just a matter of suggestion, of getting them to meet each other’s gaze and make the exchange.
First they took out their wallets and, watching each other, they made the trade. The better-looking boy, the television personality, appeared to be a bit disappointed when he looked at the ID, as if he hadn’t noticed what the other boy looked like, hadn’t noticed how stocky and soft the boy was, until that moment. The boy from the kiosk, on the other hand, was beaming at the other boy’s photo.
“Football?” the boy from the kiosk asked.
“Touchdown,” the better-looking one said, and then he asked the question back. “Football?”
“Star Trek,” the kiosk kid replied.
This exchange drew the attention of a few passing Pleidiens. A man and a woman in jumpsuits with red sequins stopped at the boy’s table and watched as the fatter of the two unbuttoned his shirt. The blond female Pleidien was smiling with a big forced smile, her teeth showing, and she reached out for the more attractive kid and put her hands on his temples. Once contact was made the boy’s eyes closed and yet, as if automatically, he started undressing too. He started with his pants, and as he unzipped the woman put her hand on the boy’s chin and pulled down so that his mouth opened.
“I was thirteen years old,” the boy said.
“Thirteen,” the kiosk clerk echoed.
“I was thirteen years old, too old for a babysitter, but my parents thought I needed one anyway. They were going to the movies, having an evening out together, and it was obvious that they needed to do something to repair all the damage they’d done to each other, but I didn’t need a babysitter. I protested and protested, right up to the moment when Monica arrived. She was sixteen and pretty and we watched television together, some sitcoms, Silver Spoons and a couple of others, and then we played a game of Scrabble, but we didn’t finish the game because…she started talking about her life in school, and what her sister was doing in college, and asking me if I’d ever tried drugs, and by the time my parents got back it was like she wasn’t my babysitter at all. We didn’t make out or anything, although I definitely wanted to, but she’d started to treat me as a peer. And after she left I wished I could drive, I wished that I was the one driving her home instead of my mother, but most of all I felt grown up and, strangely, free. I realized that my relationship with babysitters, with girls, wouldn’t ever be quite the same again. Things were going to be different for me,” he said.
“When I was in third grade I got separated from the rest of my class during a trip to the New York zoo. There were about thirty of us in the class, but when we got to the monkey house and everyone lined up to go through the double-glass doors I didn’t. I didn’t want to see the monkeys because I liked the cats. We’d already seen the cats, but I wanted to see them again. There was a mountain lion in a cage that I particularly wanted to keep looking at, and so I turned around when everyone else went forward,” the salesclerk said. “I didn’t expect to get away with it, but nobody noticed me. Nobody noticed when I left. And I spent the day in the zoo on my own, just went my own way. I spent a lot of time with the cats, and I spent a lot of time in the Penguin House. I had a digital watch and I knew when the buses were leaving. I knew when I had to be back at the exit, and I kept careful track of the time so that when three o’clock came I was there at the gate along with everyone else.
“Nobody realized what had happened or what I’d done. Nobody had noticed that I was missing the whole time and it made me feel invisible but it also made me feel free.”
By the time the salesclerk was finished with his story he wasn’t the same person anymore. That is, he and the other boy had exchanged clothes, exchanged wallets, exchanged watches. The thinner boy, not really more attractive anymore, but just thinner, put on the salesclerk’s glasses and then took them off again, while the bigger boy, not fat but just bigger, seemed surprised to discover that his jean jacket wouldn’t button.
The Pleidiens hummed a little tune to themselves. It sounded like something by Bach or maybe some other baroque German composer, but it was probably alien, and Asket turned to Carole and asked for her purse.
Imitating the boys Asket told Carole a story. She told her about taking cotillion lessons back in 1967. Cotillion lessons were dance and etiquette lessons for both the young women who aimed at attending a cotillion or debutante ball and the young men who, due to their parents’ station, were likely candidates as these women’s future escorts. Asket had no ambition to attend any ball but she’d been signed up for the lessons regardless. Her parents drove her downtown every Wednesday and dropped her off at the Benson hotel for the two-hour lessons. There she, along with a dozen or more of the other girls in their Sunday dresses, lined up on the right side of the crystal ballroom, under the gold inlaid ceiling and chandeliers, and waited for a boy in an uncomfortable-looking dress jacket and probably a clip-on tie, to cross over from the left side and ask for a dance.
What was surprising was that she’d taken to it despite her initial reluctance. She’d learned to waltz, to foxtrot, and more. And she’d even managed to secure a regular dance partner. His name was Ronnie and while he was not destined to escort anyone to a debutante ball—Ronnie was a nice boy, but not an especially handsome one in his too-thick glasses and powder blue suit—he was a fast study. Despite his limitations Ronnie could dance and they practiced together at every lesson for months. They did this without ever talking to each other, without even looking at each other off the dance floor. The cotiliion and waltz were separate from the rest of the world, from the rest of Asket’s life, somehow bracketed off, and dancing there was a pleasure with no consequence.
“And then Ronnie asked me to dance at homecoming. He took my hand and put his on my waist, assuming that we’d waltz and I was mortified. He would ruin everything. If we tried this we’d be sure to embarrass ourselves permanently. I was going to be socially ruined in a high school gymnasium. But, even though the Rascals’ “Groovin’” was too up-tempo for us, we didn’t embarrass ourselves at all. What happened was that everybody stopped and watched. Instead of going wrong, instead of embarrassing ourselves, we got applause. They were impressed, hippies and jocks both. And I felt free. I felt as though everything was going to be okay,” Asket says.
Carole began to unbutton her blouse, she was ready to switch, ready to tell her own story maybe, but before she could she was interrupted. The Pleidiens who had helped the boys with their transfer stepped in between Asket (or Patricia) and Carole. The Pleidiens stopped the transfer.
“We would like you to attend Ralph Reality’s presentation now,” one of the blond-haired women in sequi
ns said. Asket couldn’t tell the two of them apart. “This thing you’re doing now must stop. It is dangerous for you to do this on your own. You need instruction.”
“What kind of instruction?” Asket asked.
“You are to attend Ralph Reality’s presentation now,” they told her. They spoke in unison.
The presentation was on the main stage. It was a combination of a laser light show and a magic act. It was dark outside and the space was illuminated by lines of high-powered track lights set in rectangular patterns in the grid above them. President George Herbert Walker Bush stood on stage with the crew of Ralph Reality’s mothership. Surrounded by six blond women in uniforms that seemed to be modeled on vintage stewardess uniforms rather than the usual jumpsuits, purple polyester skirts, and collarless jackets, the President looked uncomfortable. At the front of the stage a bubble machine revved up and when the President approached the podium he had to traverse a field of drifting bubbles. Bush stammered a bit as he spoke, stumbling over words like “historic,” and “welcoming.” When he finished he wiped his brow with his shirtsleeve and Ralph Reality, appearing seemingly out of nowhere, took the stage.
Carole and Asket were standing close together in the back, behind row upon row of folding chairs, while Harold stood further ahead of them. None of them had said anything about what had happened at the kiosk, they hadn’t had the time nor the inclination to speak about it. But since then Carole had grown sullen. She clearly felt violated in some way and she seemed inclined toward blaming Harold for her unease. She wasn’t looking toward the stage, wasn’t paying attention to what was happening there, but was staring at Harold. She was watching the back of his head as he pretended not to notice. He was keeping his distance from Carole and Asket both.
What Asket wanted to understand was why the Pleidiens had interrupted. She was worried, wondering what they’d do to her now that they knew she’d caught onto them.
“Hello, Earthlings,” Ralph Reality said. His voice carried easily, smoothly, to the back of the convention center. “I am from another star and I am, of course, happy to be amongst you today.”
