by Douglas Lain
I turn on the radio and twist the dial over to WBAI. They usually have saucer reports around this time, letting people know how many saucers we commuters should expect to see in the skies and whether or not to expect delays due to any impromptu landings. The eight o’clock newsreader, a guy named Freund, doesn’t actually complain about these roadside conversion ceremonies, not usually, but unlike the CBS guy, you can tell how he feels about it. When one of these lollipops blocks traffic to the Brooklyn Bridge or causes Houston to back up, Freund’s voice gets deeper. He slows down, almost spitting out his words.
“Today’s spiritual surrenders shouldn’t make many of you late to work,” Freund says. “But, Hoboken Avenue is jammed by a landed saucer at the intersection of Hoboken and Monmouth. It’s easy to avoid, but take note.”
The saucer that’s tailing me isn’t especially big. Must be a scout ship designed for just a few occupants, something built exactly for this, built with the aim of following automobiles. It’s eased off a bit. The craft is about two car lengths back and about ten or a dozen feet up, but even in the September morning light the orange spotlights on the front of the craft are visibly lit, and when the taxi pulls ahead, as the traffic clears, I can hear the UFO as it moves along. It’s making that humming noise that they do, a noise that increases in volume and rises in pitch as we increase in speed. The UFO speeds ahead of us, over the taxis and Chevrolets that are inching along 5th, and then cuts to the left. The craft’s lights are out now and it appears as a grey disc, looking more like the top of the Seattle Space Needle than anything like a craft, but by some miracle it is floating overhead and no strings are visible. It crosses to the left, into Central Park, and then stops and as it crosses the road the traffic stops. A few cars start to turn off the road to follow the alien craft, and many more, maybe a dozen drivers, simply abandon their vehicles and stumble out into the road and to the sidewalk. These believers are taking a chance. A woman in a pea-colored pantsuit, a man in a leather jacket and khakis, a few teens in ripped jeans and plaid, cross the road on foot and I turn on my hazard lights and open the driver side door of my Ford Taurus. I turn off WBAI, unbuckle my seat belt, and mingle with the saved.
The flying saucer’s lights come back on and the craft changes color from black, to green, to red. The reassuring buzz of the craft nearly drowns out the protesting honks from 5th Avenue and by the time we reach the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art the traffic noise and sound of alien machinery have combined into something like music.
The red light spills across the steps of the Met and I pause at the bottom step, refusing to ascend, as the saved start to climb and undress under the red light of the craft. The woman in the green pantsuit’s pale skin is covered in goose bumps and she shivers in the morning air. Half undressed she crosses her arms and tucks her hands in her armpits for a moment before unsnapping her polyester pants. What I’m watching is a light baptism and it is the only part of a mass surrender that I’ve ever witnessed before, or even seen on television. My understanding is that some of the converts have probably been attending reading groups and saucer meetings, while many are coming round to the new religion only now, in this moment. Some require a slow revelation, they need to think it through, while others can simply join through levitation alone.
One by one they are lifted up into the craft where, I imagine, they’ll wait in line for a turn on the Pleidien tech. Each one will reenact Charles Rain’s experience with the Eternity Chamber, each one will have their soul converted and stored in the Akashic record. After this each convert will be fitted with a sequined jumpsuit with green sequins, green being the color of humanity, and then some will be set back down on Earth. These returns work at conventions and in reading rooms, while the rest are kept out of sight on the saucers. Maybe some are taken to the Pleides system and integrated into Pleidien society?
Watching them shedding the ways of this world, their naked bodies turning green and then red and then orange as the lights change, I wonder if, one day soon, there will be nobody left on Earth who will want to visit the Metropolitan Museum. I can’t imagine that those of us who have been saved, the humans deemed worthy to visit the Pleidien homeworld, will have any interest in what the Met has to offer. I expect that Greek statues, Egyptian ruins, and the works of Jasper Johns will seem quaint to the new humans. There can’t be any value in this history, nothing worth keeping from our attempts at being our own salvation. Why bother remembering these failures once victory has been found and no further attempts are necessary?
The old ways of creating permanence that are on display in the Met, these ways of representing supposed truths that have already failed, who will have any time or interest in this history? Certainly not these followers of the saucers. Certainly not these intergalactic groupies of Charles Rain.
In the first week after the landing Ralph Reality campaigned hard for humanity’s vote. He did the Sunday shows, appeared on Letterman and Arsenio Hall, and ended up on the morning news programs as well. He was a guest on the Today show with Bryant Gumbel by Tuesday in that first week. And before the weekend he’d been on Good Morning America.
Ralph Reality repeated the same few examples to explain what joining them, what accepting their message, would mean. He always spoke of Magritte’s painting The Treachery of Images in order to explain just what the Pleidiens were offering to correct and overcome.
“This is not a pipe,” he said. “That is, on Earth, there is a separation between your concepts and the world as it is. But in the Pleides no such disconnection exists. In the realm of the spirit what is and what can be believed or thought of are the same. On my homeworld Magritte would have to say “Ceci est une pipe.”
“Are you saying that in the Pleides, on the Pleidien homeworld, there is no difference between thinking about something and being or doing something?”
The second example Ralph Reality always used came from an old motion picture, a somewhat popular movie starring Gene Wilder as a chocolatier. “Living there people are free,” Reality said. “That is, if they truly want to be.”
There is nothing erotic about this scene. As the commuters become contactees I just watch them but I don’t feel anything, certainly nothing sexual. They’ve stripped away more than just their clothes on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum. They’ve surrendered on some level that’s hard to articulate.
I don’t want to end up like them, and I take a step back. I’m not, never have been, attracted to this idea of surrender. I want to hold onto my alienation, at least for a little while longer.
When I get to class I find that every inch of the chalkboard is covered over in notes and scribbles: layers of mathematic formulas, doodles, titles of texts, statistics, and more. The physics department shares this ancillary building with literature and they’ve been struggling lately to catch up with the Pleides.
I pick up a piece of orange chalk as well as a dry eraser, but the eraser is full of dust and rather than take anything away it just leaves its own wide mark. There is no space left, no way to write anything legible. I put down the chalk, and turn toward my students. Forget the blackboard.
“Here’s a question that will be on the exam,” I start.
My students in Present Tense: Contemporary Writing are better than most. Sure, everyone is looking for an easy “A.” After all, what could be easier than studying popular novels, movies, and even television programs? But, the course is both a seminar and a workshop which means that many of the students want to be writers themselves. I can usually rely on such students to pay at least a little attention, if only because they’re longing after an affirmation of their supposed talents. They listen closely to every word in hopes that they’ll catch me accidentally praising them. I’m unlikely to do that, but I do attempt, from time to time, to praise their tastes. For example the question that will be on the exam, the question I’m starting with, is: “Why was Kurt Vonnegut’s character Dwayne Hoover wrong to take Kilgore Trout’s novel Now It Can Be Told to
be literal truth?”
I’m not just asking this to flatter them, of course. I’m asking because I’m hoping to figure out an answer, a better answer than the one in my prepared notes.
A kid in the front row raises his hand. “Because novels are fiction?” he asks.
“Okay,” I say and I turn to write this answer down on the chalkboard, which is my usual practice. When a student gives me an answer I don’t want, I write it down on the chalkboard. I note it rather than merely rejecting it. That gives the impression that I at least want to believe that everyone’s opinion is valid and interesting even as it demonstrates the opposite. But, of course, the blackboard is covered in equations and other strange markings, and rather than writing anything down I return the chalk to the ledge again.
“Anyone else? Why was Dwayne wrong?” I ask.
The world has gone wrong. I’ve got two wives instead of one, there is the issue of Missing Time, and there is this pending offer to take me to a Third Space, to Ralph Reality’s space that’s off the map. What I need, though, in order to write about this, is a premise, some unifying idea or, if not a full-on idea, then at least a sound bite. Something cute to catch the reader’s attention.
There is something grubby about the room we’re in, probably due to the fluorescent lights. In the other parts of the campus a clean and airy aesthetic dominates. Beige walls and oval benches work together to provide students and faculty with the impression of being in the moment and relevant, but this building has none of that. In this older wing of the University there’s nothing but dingy tile, wooden desks, and what looks like a layer of pixelated chalk dust.
“The reason Dwayne Hoover ought not have believed Kilgore Trout’s novel was because the message it gave was selfcontradictory. That’s a clue, now can anyone guess at what I’m talking about?” I ask.
“Kilgore Trout’s novel Now It Can Be Told is written in the second person. It’s written as a guidebook and letter from the creator of the universe to the one creature in the entire universe who has a free will. It’s a book that lets the reader in on the secret that he or she alone is the only free and independently thinking thing ever made.
“‘You are the only one who has to figure out what to do next—and why. Everybody else is a robot, a machine. Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines,’” I read the passage from one of my shuffled 3 x 5 index cards. “So what’s the problem with that?”
“The problem is with God,” a girl in the back row says without raising her hand. She’s an awkward-looking girl, a bit gaunt.
“That’s on its way to it. What is it that Vonnegut, or in this case Trout, says about God?” I ask. I look around for another student, for somebody who might have figured it out, but nobody else is raising a hand. “Vonnegut has Trout claim that God is just a machine. He’s like everyone else in the novel, right? God doesn’t have free will either. Only you do. Or, in Vonnegut’s book, only Dwayne does,” I say. “But where does Dwayne get this magic if not from God? If God is just a machine then how is it that a machine, admittedly a very powerful and large machine, could create something that He knows nothing about?
“What Dwayne Hoover should have figured out was that he was only a ‘free will’ machine and by that I mean that he was a machine that was programmed to believe that he had free will,” I say. “Of course, Hoover couldn’t do that. He couldn’t think correctly, because that’s not how Vonnegut made him.”
The question for the class, the point of the lesson, was to ask what it meant to be a character, to tell a story, in a world without authors, in a world where God was just a machine. That might be a way in to this new book too. If God were just a machine what kind of machine would he be? Would he be a flying saucer?
“Authors try a variety of tricks,” I tell my class. “They tried a lot of things and are still trying. Some of them tried minimalist writing, like Beckett. Some tried the baroque approach, like James Joyce. Authors who thought of themselves as machines wrote books without punctuation, some of them went so far in their effort to deconstruct their own work that they cut holes in their novels. The idea was to print the book with holes in it so readers could look ahead and see what was going to happen next.”
I turn around and write on the blackboard, I write the name “Dwayne Hoover” in big blocky letters, but as hard as I press and as large as I make the words, what I end up with isn’t legible, so I say it out loud. “Dwayne Hoover. The modern author is like Dwayne Hoover, solipsistic and, because of this, self-contradictory.”
What I really want to know is what happens to people once they’re onboard the flying saucers, what happens to the people who surrender. That would be worth reporting on. People would buy a book about that.
We know that some of them come back to Earth and sell crystals and souvenirs, but what about the others? I wish I had some way of knowing. I wish I could punch a hole in this grubby room, in this story of an academic lecture, and look through it to a flying saucer. Maybe I could look back in time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the red lights on the saucer there. And while I’m poking holes I could poke a hole in the saucer too. What would I see?
Actually, if I could cut a hole and peep through it I wouldn’t look back at the flying saucer this morning at all. I’d look at the present. What I really want to know is how Virginia and Asket are doing. Virginia doesn’t have to teach today so she might be taking Asket around our neighborhood in Brooklyn, they might be looking for a good book at Three Lives & Company or maybe going for a drive on Adams Street, they might be headed to the bridge again on their way to Manhattan, but probably not.
What I imagine is that they’re still at home, still in their terry cloth robes. They’re drinking coffee, or maybe wine, in our quiet and tidy kitchen.
What would it be like to punch a hole and read, not ahead, but at parallel with this moment? I try to piece together what the sentences would be like. I write them down on the blackboard.
“Asket is vibrating in our breakfast nook,” I write this on the blackboard.
Asket is vibrating in the breakfast nook, vibrating like an alcoholic or an epileptic, only she doesn’t seem to be aware of it. Virginia thinks that she can hear a slight hum emanating from this woman. She hopes that she does hear a hum. Virginia would very much like something new, some other kind of strangeness, to happen.
The kid in the front row has this skeptical look on his face. He’s had it the whole time. He hasn’t been taking notes, hasn’t been paying much attention at all. Instead of listening to the lecture he’s been flipping through the big fat paperback that he’s brought along. He’s got a copy of The Plejaren Prophecy, the newest book by Charles Rain, and now the kid is raising his hand.
“Yes?”
“I think the Pleidiens have an answer for all this.”
“You do?”
“Listen,” the kid says. “‘You ignore the signs of extraterrestrial contact because you took them to be dreams, to be unreal. But now, today, the contact experience is the most real thing there is. What the Pleidiens are doing as they rotate and glide over our cities, that is a real thing. It’s time you treated the day to day, all the little errands and various doings of your individual lives, as a dream.’” The kid stands up and steps up to the front of the room, he steps up beside me at the chalkboard. He points to the book, to the passage he’s just read to me, and I look at where he’s pointing, trying to be polite. I nod at him without really knowing what I’m agreeing with.
“Everything has changed,” he tells me. “You’re teaching us about Vonnegut and Beckett,” he turns to the other students, “as if these problems haven’t already been solved.” He opens the big book and reads some more. “‘On the Pleides there is a world of total synchronicity, a world where each thing that happens, every big event, every small and private moment, is meaningful and in harmony.’”
When I stop and think of it Ask
et really is humming. What’s happening is that Asket is vibrating so fast that she’s emitting an orange light and a humming sound. And this is happening because, outside our brownstone, just beyond the front window, there is a flying saucer. The words “you are invited” scroll along the outer edge of the vehicle, round and round, and it’s as if our front step is the front steps of the Metropolitan. People are gathering around and taking off their clothes, mingling together in the street like it’s the Age of Aquarius, and Virginia is sitting very still, silently waiting. She’s holding her halffinished glass of red wine, grasping at the collar of her terry cloth robe to hold it closed now, and watching Asket hum.
“I’ve read that book already,” I tell my student, “and despite those words the problem of the novel continues.” I point out the boy’s seat where he ought to be sitting, but he stands his ground.
I press on. “That book you’ve got wasn’t written by aliens but by Charles Rain and, if you take the time to study it, you’ll find that Rain’s only echoing theosophy. Charles Rain has been shilling a watered-down version of theosophy for over twenty years and the saucers haven’t changed that. The ideas the aliens are bringing us have been here all along. It’s just another old solution that the new writers already doubt.”
How is it that Virginia doesn’t notice that Asket is undressing her? She’s sitting at the breakfast table, her wine glass turned on its side, and twelve-dollar-a-bottle red is spreading across the Formica table, dripping through the seam of the leaf, and onto her legs. But Virginia isn’t reacting. She’s just listening to the hum from the saucer while Asket pulls her terry cloth robe aside. Asket climbs underneath the table, putting her hand down in the cool puddle of red wine, and then reaches up to remove my wife’s underwear.
“The question on the exam,” I repeat. “Why was Dwayne Hoover making a mistake?”