by Douglas Lain
My wife is naked and the vibration from the craft is migrating. At first it seems to pass along the floor, move from where Asket is kneeling to the spot under where Virginia is sitting, it moves into the legs of her chair and then up into Virginia herself. It’s my wife who is vibrating now, and as Asket removes Virginia’s white Adidas tennis socks, Virginia starts to hum. The sound consists of one repeated note that is modulating between B flat and G. Asket is no long vibrating. She’s slowing down, she’s finding her way back to the everyday, but Virginia is whirring. She is glowing orange and spinning, speeding up, faster and faster until, in a burst of orange light, she is gone. I imagine it like something from a television show. I imagine my wife’s abduction as accomplished through double exposure and stage lights.
I want to tell my students about it, to warn them that the utopia the Pleidiens are promising is already here, and that it is nothing but a contradiction. There can be no kitschy salvation but only cornball destruction. We can’t trade our humanity, our individual wills, for this fast food version of the spiritual. We can’t let these Pleidiens, these sci-fi angels, be our future for us.
This is what I want to say, but there isn’t space for it. I’ve run out of room because of all the holes I cut into my classroom, into my story. I look at the student who intervened, look at his empty desk, and I can hear it humming.
8
hypnotic suggestion and body snatching
There are three flying saucers hovering over my block, directly over my brownstone, and they’re blinking madly. To get to my front door I’ll have to walk under this light show, I’ll have to pass under another opportunity to surrender. I’m beginning to think that these encounters aren’t entirely a matter of chance. I pause at the corner, look down at my loafers, notice the way the concrete is turning pink and then blue under the saucers, and remember why it is that I’ve never liked nightclubs.
I think it was Immanuel Kant who said that if we were to gain direct access to reality, to have an extrasensory perception that allowed us to know the world directly, to see past the surface of it to the reality underneath, that we’d lose ourselves, our freedom, in the process. It seems to me that the enlightenment on offer costs too much. Knowing ahead of time what’s going to happen robs me of a choice, or it almost does. I can apparently cut holes in this story of my life, see more than one scene at a time, but I can’t choose how things should go. The only choice I might still have is a reactive one.
For instance, when I find that Virginia really has gone, that my vision in class was authentic, I’ll have a choice then. Asket will open the front door for me, right as I get to the top step, before I have a chance to find my house key. She’ll be teary eyed and she’ll tell me that Ralph Reality has taken my wife. She’ll put her arms around me, cry on my shoulder, and ask me to forgive her. And then, maybe, I’ll have a choice to make.
“What’s going on?” Asket asks. I’m on the front step, considering stepping inside, and she grabs me, takes my face in her hands, and makes me look at her. “Why did you do it?” she asks.
This isn’t how the conversation is supposed to go. Stepping inside and turning on the front hall lamp, apparently Asket has been waiting in the dark all this time, I look around at the clean wood, at the artwork Virginia collaged together in 1977, at the skier Suzy Chaffee holding an Escher-style triangle instead of a ChapStick, and I wonder if that work has always been there or if this is new.
“What do you want to do?” Asket asks. There is, apparently, an opportunity here. There’s a choice to make. I try to list my options:
I could call Harold. I could go out for a drive, or visit the corner market under the assumption that Virginia hasn’t disappeared or surrendered but has only stepped out for some milk or some Chinese food. I could interrogate Asket, try to find out what she knows, or we could step back onto the stoop together and let the saucers take us. But none of these options are very attractive.
“We can’t go to Harold,” she says. “He can’t help us.”
She’s sure about this. Just as sure as I am that I can’t trust her. Now that Virginia is gone Asket looks more like her, seems to be her. She puts her hand in mine and then brings my hand to her mouth, touching my fingers to her lips.
“Please,” she says. “We can’t go to Harold. Not yet.”
One thing is certain, Virginia has been kidnapped. That’s something to hold onto under the circumstances, that’s the fact that I can react to, act on. The Pleidien enlightenment, the meaning of their invasion, the connotations that come along with it, none of that matters any longer. My wife has gone missing, been taken. She’s been abducted.
“We need to know what’s going on,” I tell Asket.
“Not from Harold,” she says. She moves closer to me, puts her arm around my waist, and then reaches out to turn off the lamp.
“We need to know who you really are,” I tell her. I turn the light back on again, glance back over at Suzy Chaffee and her triangle, and then say it again. “We need to know who you are.”
Looking out into NY traffic, the green and red and rust-colored Toyotas, yellow taxis, and forest green Mercedes-Benzes, listening to my wife’s duplicate hyperventilate as she looks out of the passenger window at the chaos, I’m driving fast, crazily. Weaving in and out of traffic, I’m speeding along because I know we’ll get there. This is just a ride.
We’re going to see Charles Rain because I figure he knows the Pleidiens the best and more than that, he knows about the end of the world.
Back in the ’70s Charles Rain’s brand of Ufology contained the kind of doomsaying that was popular after Nixon. He told us that society was sick because even his readership, people more interested in crystals and personal transformation than politics, knew that the power structures and institutions that manage our affairs were corrupt. Every right-thinking person felt a pressing need for change. Nowadays the common wisdom is that it was the preceding decade when the world was contested. People think the ’60s were when revolution was in the air, but people in the ’60s had confidence in the system, in society, in one’s neighbors, but by 1977 these same people felt that what was needed wasn’t a movement so much as a miracle. What needed to change wasn’t some system out in the world but something more fundamental. Our task was to change ourselves, to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.
“The Pleidiens understand us. They know how limited we humans are, they know our struggle for self-transcendence, and they want to help.”
These opening lines from Rain’s 1979 book Directives from the Stars set the tone and direction of his work, of his marketing efforts, for the next decade. All of those books written before the saucers landed were more about getting in touch with your daily life and changing your lifestyle than they were about aliens and extra-dimensional travel.
“The Pleidien leader told me that I need to learn to listen to the Earth, to feel what’s right, and to let go of my obsession with self-talk. ‘Self-talk,’ he said, ‘is a kind of self-doubt,’” Charles Rain wrote.
Still, before the landings, Rain warned us of catastrophe. He told us that we needed to find a better way to live if we hoped to survive the coming ice age, massive heat wave, overpopulation, nuclear wars, and most importantly of all, our collective identity crisis.
We are going to Charles Rain, going to his home to see him personally, because while he might be under the influence of the enemy, he knows the truth.
Sitting under oval-shaped hanging lamps in the corner of his spacious living room, across from a large clean white modern bookshelf containing a plurality of shelves of various shapes and sizes, a combination of squares and rectangles filled with vinyl records, hardback books, potted plants, and framed photographs, I reach out for the brick wall to my left, feel the cold stones there, and then glance at the artwork. There is a painting of red, yellow, and blue squares set together in a pattern that is very similar to his bookshelf’s arrangement.
“Mondrian?” I ask.
&
nbsp; “Not an original. I painted it. Copied it, back in the fifties.”
Asket is sitting next to me, shivering on the metal chairs, looking at the bookcase like she’s been given an assignment of counting every title, and when Charles pulls up a chair to join us at the round oak table she starts.
“Are you still working on abduction research?” Asket asks.
“Didn’t you know that?” Charles asks. He’s still got his long grey beard, the beard that once evoked Eastern mysticism but now reminds me more of the rock band ZZ Top. He’s an old man now, older than Harold even though they’re really just about the same age, Rain may even be younger, but he seems old. When she asks him about abductions his mouth becomes a firm line. “Of course I’m still researching. There is more reason to research the phenomena now than ever. We’ve had everything confirmed. It’s happened.”
We don’t object to this but Asket takes a sip of the espresso he’d brought her earlier and shrugs. The alien looks exceptionally pretty tonight in Virginia’s clothes. She’s wearing some brand of designer jeans and a blue and white Indian print blouse of thin silk. She looks pretty, but vulnerable.
“Do you still get reports of abduction?” I ask. “Even with all these people surrendering? How do you separate that out?”
Charles folds his legs and leans back to examine us both, nods half to himself and half to me, and explains that, while most of his group, his abduction group, have converted and accepted the new reality, a few are still in the dark and they need more conventional, more terrestrial, help. Then Charles says something I don’t expect, something that is certainly not canonical.
“I’m not convinced that the Pleidiens are the only ones visiting us.”
He’s been spending a lot of time rereading the old documents, especially the BUFORA files, which contain cases featuring different kinds of aliens.
“There are things going on, in this reality, that aren’t quite what my brothers think they are,” he says.
“How do they think things are?” I ask. “Just what is it that they’re doing on those saucers?”
Charles smiles at me enigmatically. “You already know the answer?”
Asket shifts in her seat, takes another sip of espresso, makes a face, and then puts the cup and saucer down with a clatter.
“I want you to hypnotize me,” she says.
“Yes. I think I can do that,” Charles says.
“No. You don’t understand. I want you to hypnotize me now.”
In Charles’ furnished basement he has Asket lie down on a couch while he and I sit in nicely designed wood folding chairs underneath one of his more famous paintings. Charles’ work is all about circles and squares, orange and green circles and squares that have always reminded me of television test patterns. Looking at his work I feel as though the network is about to sign off for the night. 3…2…1…
“I want you to relax,” Charles says. Asket just blinks at him and then she sits up.
“Don’t you have a pocket watch or something?” she asks him.
“I just use my voice for this,” Charles says. “I want you to concentrate on my voice.”
“Okay.”
“Are you relaxed?”
Asket’s face loses all expression as she shuts her eyes. Her breathing slows and her hands settle down, she stops fidgeting. Watching her go into the trance I think about how Virginia, my other wife, is long gone, perhaps in outer space now.
“Are you relaxed?” Charles asks.
“Yes.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“I’m lying on your sofa under that insipid painting,” she says.
“What’s your name?” Charles asks. He turns to me and puts his finger on his nose, like he’s being awfully clever to ask her this. As if this might settle something.
“My name? I’m Carole. Carole Flint,” she says.
Charles doesn’t respond to this right away, but it does get his attention. He turns away from his painting of circles, he’d been looking it over perhaps to reassure himself about its merit, but now he’s looking directly at the woman who says she’s Harold’s wife.
“Could you say that again please? What’s your name?”
“I’m Carole Flint, the wife of Harold Flint,” she says. “Only, something happened to me.”
9
the alien in the art class
It shouldn’t have surprised her, but it did. After the aliens landed on the White House lawn Harold Flint apologized for his work with abductees and contactees, retired from the field, and returned to making art. What disappointed her was that Harold hadn’t been prepared for it. The arrival of the Pleidiens shouldn’t have been a shock. She’d told him they were coming. She’d told Harold everything when she went to him back in 1983. He must have been only pretending to believe her because now the fact that they’d arrived brought him nothing but embarrassment.
Patricia had given up on the aliens years earlier, around the same time she’d given up on Harold, and she was, like him, focusing on art, on painting, but while Flint’s return to art was hailed as an event worthy of a MOMA retrospective, her return only meant that she’d filled out some forms at the Mt. Scott Community Center and started teaching art history again. She had experience teaching from when she was in graduate school. What was different this time was that her students were middle-aged employees from the tanning salon next door and a few friends she’d met in her Jazzercise class. Most of her students had signed up as a kind of charity.
She reached the end of SE Reedway, the point where the asphalt ended and there was only a small dirt alleyway lined with blackberry bushes and a canopy of birch leaves and Charles fir pines that blocked the sun. The Community Center was just a little ways ahead.
(I’m confused. Is she telling us that she’s Harold’s wife or this other person? Of course, given that it’s Asket, she could’ve been or could be both people. Imitating both.)
Today she was going to lecture on Suprematism before her students tried their hand at figure drawing. The idea was to emphasize expression over technique, to counter the values of realism with something else, with pure geometry and simplicity, in order to maybe mitigate the feelings of inadequacy that most of her students would feel when they saw the results of their first efforts. She knew how disappointing and frustrating it was for most students when they discovered how disconnected their hands were from their minds. The movement from idea to work was very difficult and most weren’t willing to put in the effort. What she wanted was to keep those people, the people who couldn’t and wouldn’t learn to draw, in the class. She couldn’t let anyone drop out because if her attendance level were any smaller she would lose the class. She would tell them that, yes, a simple black square could be art. And, yes, there was more to art than technique. Absolutely.
At 66th the alley ended and Patricia had to turn right to Ramona. At the corner she paused for traffic and took a moment to examine the stop sign. Was an octagon a pure form? She couldn’t remember if Malevich or Mondrian ever employed the shape. The color was primal enough, but did a stop sign express a “pure feeling” in the Suprematist style? It was a question that might draw her students out for ten minutes or so.
The real reason she’d been thinking about Harold was because there was a Pleidien in her class. He turned up in his sequined jumpsuit, sat quietly in the back, and just observed. While most of them, these aliens, acted like Jehovah’s Witnesses, always ready to educate and enlighten and save your soul, this one just wanted to participate in human affairs as they were. It was as if Klaatu from The Day the Earth Stood Still had decided buying Bobby Benson an ice cream cone was plenty enough for him. It was as if Klaatu had taken a room in Aunt Bee’s boarding house and then decided to stay, maybe take a desk job, learn to sew, take an art class now and then.
There was a Pleidien in her class, but he didn’t look like the rest of them. He was the only Pleidien she’d ever seen who was even slightly overweight. And Johnny, he asked h
er to call him Johnny, was balding as well. It was difficult to take him seriously in his ill-fitting jumpsuit. She couldn’t remember if he wore glasses or not, she tried not to look in his direction much.
The topic she had to focus on was Suprematism.
(I don’t want a lecture on art history. I want to know what happened to Virginia. But, apparently, I have to be patient.)
Once class started Patricia opened her 1964 Enlarged Edition of Modern Artists on Art and held the book open so that El Lissitzky’s Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge was visible. She’d just finished explaining how this art of pure abstraction was still used to tell a story, and had already mentioned Lissitzky.
Johnny raised his hand.
“For humans even pure abstractions, say mathematics, contain emotions?” he asked. “A triangle can be angry?”
That was right. Lissitzky had taken the pure feeling, or what might be thought of as pure being or the ontological ground of existence, and brought this to bear in the world. For Lissitzky the Soviet Union, a State that was destined to emancipate humanity from the illusions of Capitalism and the West, was merely the living and political example of “pure feeling” acting in the world.
Johnny nodded solemnly and folded his hands on his rather large belly. “Pure feeling,” he said. “That’s something we understand.”
Patricia’s art class was held in the basement of the Community Center, in the same room as the clock repair class, and the students were crowded in close to her desk, pushed together in order to accommodate the work benches and grandfather clocks, the toolboxes and step ladders, that had been set aside an hour earlier. The Pleidien was in the front row, maybe a foot away from her, and whenever she looked in his direction she felt it. She felt dizzy, anxious, like something had touched her.
“To get an idea of what ‘pure feeling’ is we’re going to try an experiment,” Patricia told the class. She was just going through the motions, her eyes still on Johnny. She didn’t really know what she was saying. “We’re going to see things differently.”