After the Saucers Landed

by Douglas Lain

  Ralph Reality spoke in clichés and buzzwords. While bubbles floated over his head he spoke of spiritual energy and the coexistence of objects. Asket noticed that he’d grown a mustache since his arrival on Earth six months earlier. It seemed to Asket that he might have even grown a few inches since then too, but his wide eyes and goofy smile were the same as ever. He held his hand aloft, tapped the air with his index finger, and a flash of rainbow-colored light, like sunlight through a prism only more solid seeming, flashed in a halo pattern around his head.

  “There is a mediating field between each one of us,” Ralph Reality said, “and each one of you can learn to touch it, to use it.”

  The Pleidien doctrine was simple if absurd. The universe was imaginary. This didn’t mean that the world was a mere hallucination or that the whole world was all in your head, it was not a solipsistic doctrine, but rather the point was that your head was imaginary too.

  There was a spirit and the goal of this spirit was to realize its own falsehood. The Pleidiens had already done this. They were a people who’d realized that they themselves were imaginary.

  Ralph told the crowd that spirit is the background to their lives and that spirit is changeable, and then he gestured to one of the stewardesses who nodded back to him. This blond assistant in knee-high polyester boots stepped through the bubbles, made her way through the line of security, and mingled in with the crowd.

  “The idea that one day follows the next in a chain of cause and effect is an illusion,” Ralph Reality said. “The truth is that one idea follows another in a chain of associations, not in a chain of cause and effect. The history that you think you know, that history changes all the time. That pattern of cause and effect, that chain of Happenings that occurs so that each thing that is created will have somewhere to be, that changes.”

  And it was at this point that the crowd started to react, or more specifically to respond. For example a man in his forties, maybe six rows ahead of Asket, he started unbuttoning his IZOD shirt. He was sporting grey hair tied in a ponytail and wearing khaki shorts which he unbuttoned as well while another man, maybe a decade younger and Japanese, pulled his Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt off over his head.

  The stewardess stood off to the side smiling and nodding as two young women who looked like they might be identical twins, right next to Asket, started undressing. Seeing as both of them were wearing nearly identical bib overalls and white T-shirts, from the outside this exchange seemed pointless.

  “Anything can happen,” Ralph Reality said. “One day a big burly man might wake up to discover that he is now a woman. The change happened to him, for whatever reason, but when it happens he won’t be surprised. When he discovers his penis is gone the next morning, when he sees that he has a vagina instead, he will be neither annoyed nor delighted. It will make sense to him. He’ll remember the surgery that made his transformation possible, maybe, or he’ll think that he was born a girl. He’ll go about creating, manufacturing, evidence for this new history. His wife, if has one, will remember too. She’ll remember something different, but what she remembers will match this new reality. When he goes to work, goes out into the world, that won’t bother him either. After all most of the world is indifferent to him, and in the pockets of the world where he is noticed, where he has some influence, he’ll find nothing but accommodation to this new reality.

  “Think of the difference between the foreground and the background in a photograph or a painting,” Ralph Reality instructed the audience. “Think of how easily those two categories are reversed with just a few simple marks or a shift in perspective.” He held up a poster-sized line drawing of a cube, a Necker cube. Using both hands he held it up over his head so that everyone could see. “Where is the background and where is the foreground?” he asked. “In this picture, which is which?”

  The open and public way people were switching, the fact that Ralph Reality was speaking of it, made Asket feel very nervous. What she was feeling wasn’t just personal anxiety, but a different kind of fear. In fact the very space and security that she relied upon in order to be personally afraid for herself seemed to be in danger. With every cheery explanation what Ralph Reality was really telling the crowd was that the people they thought they were, the kinds of values which they held dear, these things didn’t exist. They, all the fathers and mothers, businessmen and telecommunications experts, researchers and science fiction fans, they were all of them erased. That is, the identities that they thought were so close to their hearts were utterly transitory. It could easily be switched around.

  “Nobody, not one human being, is really who he thinks he is,” Ralph said. And then, Reality did it. Then he made his big move. He staged his attack.

  Ralph Reality turned to the President of the United States and he reached out toward him. He snapped his fingers. “Mr. President,” he said.

  “What is it, Ralph?”

  “Please undress.”

  Up until this point in the proceedings it might have been possible for the attack, the rearranging, to remain unconscious. That is many people might have been able to convince themselves that they hadn’t seen anything unusual, or if not that, then they might have convinced themselves that they were the only ones who did see it. Asket herself might have chalked it all up to some peculiar delusion on her part, but when the President of the United States unzipped and removed his pants there were gasps. There was a collective intake of breath and even a few screams.

  Then the man who was leaving Ralph Reality unzipped his jumpsuit and stepped into and zipped up the President’s khaki pants, and then the man who had been alien stepped over to the microphone and adjusted his tie. The screams started to spread and transform. This man who should have been Ralph Reality, who still looked like Ralph Reality, started the proceedings over from the top.

  “My fellow Americans, and all of you from a-a-around this whole Earth,” the man who was no longer Ralph Reality said. He spoke with the President’s stammering voice in an imperfect but somehow convincing imitation. This new President seemed just as confused as the other one had been as he introduced Ralph Reality, the ambassador from the Pleides. The President of the United States gestured to the figure who had been the President but who was now wearing red sequins.

  The crowd started moving toward the stage as the new President and the line of security between the audience and the stage hardened. Secret Service men in sunglasses and black suits pulled out handguns and blond-haired Pleidiens of both genders unholstered large purple plastic laser rifles, but instead of opening fire, the Pleidien guards reached into their jumpsuits, into pockets that seemed highly improbable, and produced crystal shards that glowed pink and purple. Like a bad television effect these crystals pulsated and as they pulsated there was a high-pitched squeal that filled the convention center. It was so high-pitched, in fact, that it was almost inaudible. But as crystals pulsated and the sound filled the convention center, the crowd settled down.

  Asket wondered if maybe the transformation of Ralph Reality, the transmigration from Bush to Ralph, hadn’t entirely worked. Was an alien-to-human or human-to-alien transfer possible? Had something gone wrong?

  “Of course it is,” Ralph said. “Everything is going as planned. This is what is known as the revelation of method, and now that everybody has seen the truth, now that everybody knows that we’re in control, we can resume the pretense that things are otherwise. We’ve shown everyone here what is impossible to fully imagine. Which means that most everyone will unsee what they’ve seen. Everybody but you, right?” Ralph stepped down from the podium and as he did so one of the blond women took his place.

  “I am so pleased to be able to talk to you all on behalf of Reality,” she said. “He sends his sincere regrets that he can’t be here with you today.”

  Ralph made his way through the crowd. He took a glowing crystal from one of the security guards and created a path for himself with the light, moving people out of his way.

  “Maybe,” Ca
role said. “Maybe we should go?”

  “Yeah,” Harold said. He was backing away, or trying to back away, but the Ufologists and tourists had risen from their seats and crowded around him. He couldn’t go anywhere until Ralph Reality cleared a path for him.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Ralph said as he came closer to them. “I’ve been so hoping that you would be here, Mr. Flint.”

  All three of them, Harold, Carole, and Asket (Patricia?) found themselves unable to move. Maybe it was the crystal, or maybe it was something else, but some kind of paralysis overtook them.

  Ralph Reality smiled at them. He was standing so close to Asket that she could feel his breath on her neck.

  “How would you,” he asked, “like to take a ride in my flying saucer?”

  In your typical Grey alien—style abduction the abductees, usually lumberjacks or subsistence farmers, were subjected to medical exams. That was the story, anyway. That’s the kind of thing that most Ufologists were worried about before the landing. Charles Rain’s abductees, however, never encountered that kind of scenario. The typical Charles Rain—style close encounter was more bizarre, more abstract, than even the worst proctological examination could ever be. The men and women who encountered Rain’s Nordic types, which is what we called them even though Rain claimed to know which star system they were from, wouldn’t take humans aboard their craft at all. Instead they employed some kind of energy ray and would beam information directly into the human’s head. They would basically show home movies on the inside of your skull. Not home movies exactly, but long montages of super eight art house fare. Think of Stan Brakhage or Thorsten Fleisch, lots of juxtapositions, some scratches on the film emulsion, maybe some landscape photography.

  Yet somehow, the people who survived these encounters always came back with rave reviews.

  “I saw into the unknown,” they would say. Or, “We need to change our relationship with the Earth.”

  One way or another the contactees always gained some spiritual insight from what they saw, even if those insights were contradictory. Some would claim to have seen or remembered a past life when the flying hubcaps hit them with their lasers, while others would get good with Jesus.

  What happened to Asket aboard Ralph Reality’s UFO was, to a large extent, just another contact story. It was just like that, full of intimations, chock full of spiritual truths, and impossible to dissect.

  Once they were aboard Harold and Carole held hands, this supposed authentic Carole leaned on her husband, while Asket was left on her own. Reality led them through the craft, past mainframes and lava lamps, and brought them to a movie screen. This time rather than project the pictures into their heads directly they were taken to the source and they, all three of them, made sure to keep their eyes on the moving pictures. Ralph said that everything would be explained and the truth of their identities would be made clear.

  “No more switching around,” he said. “No more play acting.”

  They just had to watch a movie and it would tell them everything they needed to know.

  “I hope you enjoy the picture.”

  But before the picture started Asket took Harold’s hand and it was the current Carole who was left to the side when the stars appeared and disappeared on the screen.

  The three of them were alone in a room with rounded steel walls and a seemingly magnetic movie screen erected in the middle. There was a hum coming from it, a pulsing energy. They were in a room right out of Donald Keyhoe’s book The Flying Saucers Are Real, a large room with rounded walls made with slotted steel vanes protruding out. There was a large eight-by-ten-foot tele-screen in the middle, a screen that was itself made entirely from steel or some other silver metal, and when the pictures appeared it seemed as if the surface of it, that the metal itself, was changing, perhaps because of heat, and that this almost chemical alteration of the screen was what was bringing them pictures. This was a movie made possible due to discoloration.

  Asket felt that they were being watched as well as watching, there were windows along the top of the room, near the curved ceiling, or she thought there were, but she couldn’t take her eyes away from the screen, from the story, long enough to check.

  The film was about dotted lines. That is, the stars that were flashing by sped up so that soon the dots blurred together into lines. There was a grid onscreen and, while the dots had at first appeared as stars, there was now only a pattern. What had been the cosmos became rectangles, triangles, and squares.

  “Do you hear that?” Harold asked her.

  Asket says that the images, the simple geometric shapes, were making a kind of sound. It was the kind of sound, apparently, that they could hear with their eyes. She could hear a square, for example. What was onscreen, the simple geometric shapes, was also a voice that was explaining how it was that the world was put together into names.

  None of this is the important bit, by the way. The important bit comes after the enlightenment. The important bit comes once the movie does its work and their personalities are swept away. But before we get to that you have to hear about how Asket became sexually excited by a triangle.

  Her body responded to the changes on the screen before her eyes could catch up. The triangles and circles were flashing by, making noise, speaking to her, but more important than what the triangles were telling her was how they were set against a blank, black emptiness, and it was this emptiness that bothered her. After awhile she stopped listening to the voice and concentrated on what wasn’t there.

  Asket looked out at rows and rows of empty seats. Between the lines, where there wasn’t sound, there was a massive theater with three balconies and an oval ceiling. And on the stage there they were, the three of them, only now they were naked and engaged. That is, she imagined that Harold, Carole, and her were making love in an empty theater. She imagined a mouth, a breast, a pair of staring eyes.

  “There were two women on a stage as the stars kept spinning past, there was a man who looked like a small fishing boat without a sail, and the people who weren’t there, the people who would arrive later to fill the seats, were urging us on in our orgy,” Asket says.

  And it becomes obvious why housewives in Des Moines prefer books by Charles Rain over books by guys like Budd Hopkins or John Mack. The contactee experience is more enjoyable all around.

  “What was happening was that they, the Pleidiens, were changing us,” Asket explains.

  “How were they changing you?”

  “They weren’t changing our bodies around, they were changing us. Changing what we meant to ourselves, what we meant to the other.”

  “To the other?”

  “To each other.”

  The three of them were watching themselves on a square movie screen inside the Pleidien flying saucer. They weren’t making love to each other, but were watching themselves watch themselves on a movie screen. What had made her long to be touched a moment earlier made her lose all sense of herself as a body. The movie shifted from something passionate to something cold. What she saw was a regress. They were watching themselves watching themselves. They were the figures on the screen and they were watching themselves on the screen where they could see themselves watching and so on and so on.

  “It was a bit like falling,” she says. “I thought to myself that this flying saucer was not in outer space at all. It was deep underground, or it was in the past.”

  “Uh-huh,” I say. I’m glad that I’ve been drinking wine.

  “The main thing was that the Pleidiens wanted something from us,” she says.

  Watching the loop, falling into the movie screen, it dawned on her. “They wanted something,” she says.

  “What?” I ask.

  “They wanted us to wear polyester.”

  Asket is getting drowsy now, and as she lays back on our overstuffed couch, that is my overstuffed olive green couch, the one I bought with Virginia, her explanations, her story, drifts away and I worry that she’s fallen asleep. Worse, she hasn’t got
ten to anything that matters.

  “Asket,” I say. “What are you telling me? That they let you wear red sequins? Is that what this all leading up to? All the body snatching and mind games, all of the Missing Time, Virginia’s disappearance, it’s all about the New Church?”

  “Carole,” she says. Her eyes aren’t closed. She’s staring up at the ceiling fan, or at the track lighting, and I offer to get her some coffee. I tell her that she needs to wake up. There has to be more and she needs to tell it to me.

  “They aren’t aliens,” she says. “Not from outer space. Harold’s been right about that all along. The saucers are just props, it’s all staged.”

  This isn’t any kind of answer at all. The saucers can’t be fake because there they are, right outside my window there is one of them hovering over the Park Slope condominiums. It’s hovering impossibly over somebody’s sound investment. We might not be who we think we are, she might or might not be my wife, but if anything is certain it’s that the flying saucers are real.

  “They’re not disrupting our identities,” she says. I’ve got her upright again. And I go to fetch some coffee, but once I’m in the kitchen and I get the coffee machine out from under the sink, once I wrench it free from where it’s stuck behind the Cuisinart, I worry that by the time the water boils she’ll be on her back again. Asket is willing herself to sleep out there in the living room. There is something more, but she doesn’t want to tell me.

  I go ahead with the coffee, boiling the water, dumping Maxwell House French roast into the Mr. Coffee coffee filter and wait for the pot to fill, and then I go back to the living room and start to panic when I find she’s not there, but can breathe again when I hear her moving around in the bedroom. She’s by my nightstand. She’s leafing through a copy of Whitley Strieber’s book, not really reading but just turning pages.

  “Carole and Harold left the ship,” she says. “They offered us red sequins, like you said, but Harold didn’t want them. So he left.”