by Scott Heim
On that hot Friday afternoon, my mother suggested we go fishing—something we hadn’t done since my father lived with us. “An angling excursion,” she called it, and I agreed. I brought along a skimpy paperback, Searching the Skies. Its final sentence made a poor attempt at scaring preteen readers: “Will you or your family be the next to make contact with a craft from another world?” I lobbed the book into the backseat. “Stupid,” I said.
My mother steered onto a sandy, tree-framed road that led to a field of grazing cattle. A family named the Erwins owned the land. Years before, Mr. Erwin had told my father he could fish in the pond whenever he wanted. My mother wasn’t certain the welcome still extended to her, more than three years after the divorce. “What’s the worst that could happen?” she asked. “You and me, hauled into jail for trespassing.”
We sidled through weeds, carrying our poles toward a pond shaped like a mirror-image Oklahoma. Fish bones and plastic six-pack rings littered the bank. Wind winnowed through maples and oaks that circled the water’s edge, the sound like distant applause. It served as percussion for the bawling cows in the distance. I mooed back at them. My mother sighed and plucked a bass lure from the tackle box. It was the same box that Deborah and I had bought my father for Christmas years ago, the same he had abandoned. She held the lure toward the sunlight. It looked like a beetle coated with purple feathers, and my mother squinted at it as if it might suddenly spring to life. “There’s nothing like the taste of grilled widemouth bass,” she said. Crescents of sweat had already formed on her blouse.
“I predict there will be no widemouth bass in this pond,” I told her. “Perch, catfish, carp maybe”—I guided a wriggling night crawler onto my hook—“but no bass.”
I cast my line. I breathed in, and the confectionery air filled my nose. Kansas always smells great when summer has kicked into gear—damp, almost flowery, as if an exotic tea is brewing in each cloud. My mother and I sat on buckets of white plastic, the buckets we hoped would carry loads of fat fish by the day’s close. She chewed gum that smelled like apples. When I asked her for a piece, she tongued her fingers and wiped on her jeans. She bit her own gum wad in half, rolled it into a green ball, and dropped it into my open mouth.
My bobber floated in the center of the Erwins’ pond, and I examined it for the slightest movement, any ripple of water. Nothing. Beside me, my mother reeled in slowly, remembering what she could about the proper way to snag a bass. She hummed a melody I seemed to remember from some faraway time. Aisles of cattails rose from the incline behind her. Above her head, bobwhites overpopulated the oaks. A single meadowlark stared down from a tree limb, its black V a banner across its yellow chest.
Watching the pond’s surface made me queasy. The water was the sort where some faceless and neglected kid might drown, only to be dredged up years later. I waited ten minutes; when no fish nibbled, I lost patience. I reeled in and reached for the coffee can my mother had filled with worms and mud clods. That morning, she had stepped to the shade beside the back porch. She had stabbed her shovel into the ground, drawing out triangles of black earth. “Voilà,” she said. She pinched night crawlers from the mud and dropped them into the can.
I baited my hook with another cashewlike worm. The hook tore it in half, and it wriggled in the dirt, blindly searching out some earthly haven where it could perish in peace. I stared, humming, my mind drifting elsewhere. Avalyn, I thought. Her TV show was scheduled to air at nine o’clock that night. I couldn’t imagine how it would dramatize her UFO abduction. I planned to record it with the VCR my mother had bought last Christmas, to watch the program over and over. I wondered if Avalyn had fished in ponds around this area. Perhaps she had ponds of her own, centered in the fields that surrounded her farmhouse, the fields where they’d beamed their spotlights before whisking her into their ship.
My mother stood from her bucket. Her pole bent slightly, and I knew she had a nibble. She said “Shhh,” and I held my breath. The sun’s rays continued their heavy massage, and the wind paused. My mother reeled in slowly, teasing her fish, and in that silent space of time I realized how alone we were. Quite possibly there was no one within a mile radius, only us. I thought about the UFOs, the alien spacecraft that could suddenly stall over the barren fields. I thought of how, even in broad daylight, we could be taken, and of the utter simplicity of our abduction—how the aliens could beam us up just as they’d done to Avalyn. No one would see it, no one would suspect a thing.
The fish slipped away. My mother pulled her line from the water and frowned. “Must not have been a bass.” She sat back down, opened the tackle box, and began rummaging through the mess of lures and weights and hooks.
My thoughts moved to another abduction story, one I’d read about in books. In October 1973, two men, Charlie Hickson and Calvin Parker, were fishing near the town of Pascagoula, Mississippi, when a UFO landed near the lake. I always remembered this story—first, because it had happened almost exactly one year after I was born, and second, because the description of the craft—platelike, with blinking blue lights—resembled my own UFO. As I scrutinized my motionless bobber, I rattled on to my mother about this case as if she were my student. “The aliens were as short as dwarves,” I said. “When they came toward them, one of the guys fainted. But the other stayed awake, and unlike most people he remembered everything. They examined him on a silver table. There was a weird contraption, like a moving eye on the end of a rod. It gave his body a series of X rays.”
My mother played along with my lecture: “Then what happened?”
“Nobody believed either of them,” I said. “Even when they passed lie detector tests.” I wondered if Avalyn had taken such a test. I wanted to ask her a million questions.
“What would you do,” I asked my mother, “if a UFO came zooming over those trees right now and sucked us into it?”
Her mouth twisted into the half-smile of a disbelieving judge. “I’m not sure. When we saw that one before, all I wanted to do was stare. It was so odd, like a Ferris wheel floating through the sky. I’m sure there was some explanation.” The half-smile evened out, and I knew she was playing along. “But now, if one tried to take you away, I’d probably run for my gun. I’d blast them all between the eyes before they could harm you.”
“I doubt you’d have the chance. They’d be quick.” I paused. Sunlight needled through the trees, stinging my eyes. “Besides, they’d stun you or something. You wouldn’t know what hit you, and you wouldn’t remember it afterward.”
My mother rummaged through the tackle box. When she pulled her hand out, it held a green can of mosquito spray. She doused her forearms with it and threw the can to me.
I sprayed my neck, arms, chest, and legs, then asked, “What do you think about the fact I’ve been obsessed with UFOs and stuff like that all my life? Do you think that’s odd?”
She didn’t answer, so I continued. “That article about Avalyn Friesen. It’s made me think. There’s a specialist on the UFO abduction thing. He conducts hypnotic regressions of these abducted people. Anyway, he says that an unnatural preoccupation with UFOs may mean you’ve had some sort of past contact.”
“If you had gone to some other planet, surely you’d know something about that—” My mother stopped and stood again. The bucket tipped from behind her, somersaulting toward the water’s edge. “Bite, Brian,” she said. “A bite.” My bobber was shaking back and forth, its red and white now a pink blur. I gripped the handle of my pole. Whatever was under the pond paused, then took the bait, endeavoring to speed away with the worm. The bobber shot downward, purling the water, and I tugged at my pole, keeping the line tight as I reeled in.
By eight o’clock, the sun had slid beneath the row of oaks. The shadow spilled across our faces like an enormous veil. “Are we done?” my mother asked. She didn’t wait for an answer. “Then let’s leave.” She had snagged three perch, which she had tossed back, and one catfish, which she kept. I had caught a pair of keepable catfish. The second
had a flat and loamy gray head as large as the ball of my foot.
We walked to the car. I sat and sandwiched our catch between my feet. My mother drove through the Erwins’ pasture, the foul-smelling water sloshing at each bump and splashing the seat’s burgundy vinyl. I thought of afternoons long past, when my family had chugged home in my father’s pickup from a day of fishing. I remembered Deborah and me lounging in the back of the cab, choosing our favorites from the fish that curled against one another in the bucket’s brackish water. My father, the experienced angler, had caught them all. He would gut and filet them. My mother would cook, and the whole family would eat.
I hopped from the car and opened the gate to the Erwins’ pasture. The Toyota trudged past it, onto the sandy road. Behind us, under the trees, a cow mooed, as if saying good-bye. I shut the gate, ending our day of trespassing, and returned to the car. “I had fun today,” I said, and replaced my feet beside the bucket. I meant it. My mother smiled, and I knew this was how the next two months, the remainder of my summer, would fall into shape. Only my mother and I, occupying our days with whatever spontaneous urge pleased us. In the mirror beside my window, the sun melted into Kansas, and the sky made an amazing change from pink to blue.
I ditched the bucket on the back porch. A catfish tail cut the murky water, droplets pearling my shirt. In the twilight, the three fish gleamed like intestines, and I covered the bucket’s top with a towel I’d used for sunbathing.
Inside, my mother chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, and lettuce for sandwiches. The TV was already on. “Coming up next on ‘World of Mystery,’” a voice said, “our investigators probe the terrifying world of UFO abductions. Is the phenomena just mass hysteria, or is it something ALL TOO REAL? And after that, on the ten o’clock news…” I grabbed the VCR’s remote control, punched the record and pause buttons, and waited.
My mother handed me a plate and took her seat beside me. She had changed into terry cloth shorts. A spray of thin blue veins branched up the side of her leg. Trapped among the veins, the red dot of a mosquito bite.
“It’s on,” she said, and the program started. The show’s producers obviously favored style over substance. Eerie synthesizer music comprised the soundtrack, which I loved; the visuals, however, were corny. The first person interviewed, an elderly man from Michigan, claimed a spacecraft had kidnapped him when he was a boy. As his shaky voice narrated, the screen displayed a soft-focus “interior” of a “UFO”: a silver table, an array of lights, and a tray laden with misshapen surgical instruments. “They stuck the damned probe into my stomach,” the man’s voice said. On screen, a blurry hand, which I figured was a kid’s in a wrinkly gray glove, reached for an object shaped like a small silver wishbone. The hand guided it toward a belly button.
Four others were interviewed: a young married couple, a sculptor who decorated his house with life-size replicas of the beings who’d examined him, and a Polish woman who’d been abducted not long after her immigration. The latter woman’s eyes teared when she told of the “horrible, unspeakable acts” the aliens had performed on her. “Get to Avalyn,” I said to the TV. “There’s only fifteen minutes left.”
After a stretch of commercials, the show resumed. The camera panned across a flat, sunlit field, obviously Kansas, where a woman played with a polka-dotted mutt. “It’s her,” I said. Avalyn tossed a ball, and the dog retrieved it. “She looks exactly the same as her picture.”
“She’s sort of homely,” my mother said. “She seems sad, as if no one’s ever loved her.”
According to the lead-in, Avalyn Friesen lived on the outskirts of the farming community of Inman, Kansas. She’d never married, and her brother and mother were both deceased. She shared a small log cabin with her father, and she worked as a secretary at the local grain company. She was thirty-two. The everyday details of her life ended there. “But there is something special about Avalyn, something beyond ordinary experience,” the narrator said. “For as long as she can remember, strange things have happened to her, things she cannot explain.”
The camera centered on Avalyn in a rocking chair. Sunlight angled through a window behind her, illuminating a fourth of her face. I could see a corner of her house; hardback books lined a shelf behind her, and a posse of stuffed animals scattered an end table. She sipped from a coffee mug and began to speak.
“I was always scared whenever I watched movies about UFOs,” Avalyn said. “Even E.T. horrified me. I wasn’t sure why. And one day I saw this book in the grocery store by Ren Bloomfield. In it, he talked about people who’ve had experiences with missing time, pieces of their lives they can’t account for. I’d had so many of those. I contacted Ren, and the rest, I guess, is history.”
During the next part of Avalyn’s story, the camera alternated between its gaze on Avalyn’s face and another soft-focus re-creation of her tale. The music swelled, keyboards tinkling a high melody.
“Ren flew to Wichita to meet me. He wound up conducting our first hypnotic regression session. Surprisingly, the stuff just started pouring out of me. Over the next months, I wound up remembering the more-than-twenty times I’ve been abducted.”
I could feel my mother watching me. Outside the window behind the TV, the night sky deepened its smooth, starless black.
“The first time it happened, I was six years old. This was back in 1964 or so. I’d gone on a picnic with my twin brother and my grandparents in Coffeyville. It was getting dark, and I remember Grandpa driving down a dirt road. There was this blinding light behind us that got brighter and brighter.” Bluish white beams strobed across the television square, and I thought about our own UFO, so long ago. The TV framed my mother’s face with that familiar blue.
“Teddy and I turned around in the backseat to see where all that bright was coming from. Suddenly the car swerved off to the ditch and Grandpa made this sound like ‘huh?’ like he had no control over it. The light surrounded the car, a whole ocean of it. It was jewellike and unlike the regular lights you’d see in a regular house. Well the next thing I remembered, at least for the next twenty-three years or so, was my grandparents driving back into the driveway, and my parents waiting there for us, saying where have you been, you’re three hours late, you could have at least called.
“So under hypnosis I found this out: the aliens only chose me to examine. My grandparents and my brother Teddy stayed in the car, unmoving, their eyes closed like they were asleep or frozen in some sort of suspended animation, as Ren calls it. But I floated right up out of the backseat and into the mouth of this disc-shaped ship.”
The synthesizer music swirled, and a pink-dressed girl appeared on screen, an actress in the role of the young Avalyn. The girl bit her lip. Her eyes darted back and forth, and her pigtails shot behind her head like a pair of blond horns. The girl screeched. “Creepy,” my mother said.
“Under hypnosis,” Avalyn continued, “I remembered lying on a table, all silvery white and smooth like Formica. A group of aliens surrounded me. They carried little silvery boxes, out of which they pulled thin tubes and instruments, like things a dentist would use. They were bald with huge marshmallowy heads and tiny arms that appeared as if they didn’t have an ounce of muscle in them. The fingers were cold and didn’t feel human at all. But the worst things about them were their eyes: big black diamonds is the closest description I can give, only instead of hard like diamonds they were all jellylike and liquidy.”
“Yes,” I said, answering her, as if she were speaking only to me.
Avalyn’s interview ended there. The narrator reappeared to describe how many victims of abduction, Avalyn included, were often “tracked”—aliens inserted devices into a person’s brain, nose, stomach, foot, wherever, making it easier to locate the person later. “Humans become guinea pigs,” the narrator said, “with the extraterrestrials coming back for them at various times in their lives, conducting ongoing experiments. One might think that the person is free after the first abduction. But that isn’t always the case in this world,
the ‘World of Mystery.’” A hasty summary followed. The camera zoomed in on a spaceship, moving closer and closer to its rays of white, until the entire screen drowned in light.
Before falling asleep, I thought about how repercussions from a single incident had shaped Avalyn Friesen’s entire life. And the more I considered Avalyn, the more I considered my own life. The idea of abduction made perfect sense. It had first happened on a night more than one decade past: I had opened my eyes to find myself curled in a dark corner of the crawl space, five hours erased from my mind. And if the theory of aliens “tracking” humans was true, I reasoned I was a victim of that as well. My nose had been bleeding that night because of the tracking device the extraterrestrials had jammed deep into my brain. Two years later they had returned to find me again, on that Halloween night when I’d blacked out in the woods beside the haunted house. I was almost nineteen now. Was the tracking device still embedded in my brain like a tiny silver tumor? What other times, I wondered, had I been abducted? Were there other encounters so deeply buried in my mind I hadn’t the slightest memory? And would the aliens reappear to find me again?
I waited until the following Sunday to tell my mother my theory. We were returning from Hutchinson, after the grocery shopping and ice cream. The Fourth of July was approaching, and merchants had fashioned fireworks stands on the roadsides, multicolored banners and signs flapping in the breeze.