Mysterious Skin

by Scott Heim

  “Then let’s find shade somewhere,” I said.

  Avalyn led me to a mulberry tree. Earlobe-size berries hung from the leaves, ranging in color from white (under-ripe) to red (halfway there) to a deep purplish black (fully ripe). The blacks polka-dotted the ground around the tree, staining Avalyn’s bare feet. “The red ones are my favorites,” she said. “They’re sour.” She pinched some from the tree; dropped them into my hand.

  Two birches stood beside the mulberry tree; an island of grass stretched at one’s trunk. The tree’s bark was scabrous and mottled and mushroom colored, the color of an extraterrestrial. Nearby, a scattering of bees swirled in the air between two bushes: one bulged with yellow roses; the other, with pink. The heavy smell lingered in the air. Avalyn and I sat in the grass simultaneously; on our way to the ground, the frames of our glasses clicked together. I shrank back, but Avalyn laughed.

  Avalyn lamented that she hadn’t fixed a picnic lunch. “I’m always hungry.” She leaned against the tree, strands of hair loosening from her bun. The teardrop earrings glittered from her lobes. She parted her legs a little, exposing the scar. It curled like a worm against the white thigh. I remembered when I used to attend church; the booklets with photographs of stigmata and other miraculous hieroglyphics on human bodies. Avalyn’s scar was like that—remarkable, holy, a mystery imprinted on her skin that only she and I could unravel.

  The afternoon droned on. Avalyn loved to talk. She told me about her mother’s death from cancer, her brother’s death that same year in a car accident. “It’s been four years now,” she said. “And Daddy still hasn’t gotten over it.”

  Avalyn cut her history short and asked more about me. “I want details you haven’t told me yet,” she said. I related what I knew about my father, the life I was no longer part of. I told about Deborah, now in San Francisco; how she planned to return home for the holidays. I filled her in on my mother’s recent promotion at the prison, about my nervousness concerning the upcoming autumn and my first year at college.

  Avalyn listened to everything. Still, the words we spoke about our lives and families seemed conspicuous substitutes for what we truly wanted to say. Avalyn and I kept swinging back to the matter at hand: the experience of our abductions, the bond and the link from the majority of people who walked the earth around us.

  Avalyn suggested that hypnosis would be the best way to discover the truth. “But specialists in regression for UFO abductees are expensive. And they’re mighty hard to come by in Kansas.”

  “We have money,” I said. I stared at the purplish smudges on her foot soles. “We’ve always had it, even since my father left. But I doubt that my mother is ready to send me to a hypnotist.”

  “I’m not saying you’ll only remember through hypnosis,” Avalyn said. “It sounds to me as if you’re on your way already. Keep logging the dreams you talked about. They act as clues. Be your own detective. If you see a place in a dream, hear a name, whatever, be sure you seek it out. Soon you’ll have the answers you need.”

  By five o’clock the breeze began picking up. Wind gusts carried the odor of distant fireworks, the dangerous musk of gunpowder that often stained my mother’s hands. “It smells as though the world is burning,” Avalyn said. Through the crisscrossing nets of branches above us, an airplane trailed across the blue air, sparkling like tinsel, scarring the sky with its vapor. The people on board had no idea that Avalyn and I sat thousands of feet below in the grass. They had no idea what had happened to us.

  I didn’t want to leave, but I had recently started helping my mother with cooking—I fixed dinner on alternating nights—and I needed to arrive home before her. I told Avalyn I planned to bake a Cornish hen with stuffing. She Mmmmed and rubbed her stomach.

  We walked back to the house. “It would be a good thing to meet your mother,” Avalyn said, and I agreed. She smoothed wrinkles from her dress. “We could all go to the Cosmosphere together.” I hadn’t told Avalyn about my obsession with the space center. She just knew.

  Inside, the frangipani and sandalwood replaced the firecracker smell. I poured myself a glass of water; Avalyn went to her bedroom for “some gifts,” as she called them. She returned with a handful of pamphlets. “These were published underground,” she said. “They are hard to get, unavailable in bookstores.” I scanned the titles: “What Our Government Isn’t Telling Us,” “Were You Abducted?,” and, my favorite, “The Wild World of UFOs.”

  I thanked her. Avalyn smiled, exhibiting shrimp-colored gums. She handed me another book, a copy of Ren Bloomfield’s Stolen Time. I’d already read it, but I didn’t tell her. “One of the people studied in chapter five is based on me,” she said. “They used a pseudonym—I’m ‘Georgia Frye.’ How silly. Anyway, you can have that copy. I autographed it for you.”

  Inside the front cover, Avalyn’s writing appeared beneath the title and author’s name. To Brian. To know you’re not alone. We have to stick together. Love, “Georgia Frye,” i.e. Avalyn. Below her signature, she’d drawn a series of tiny valentines.

  The dreams continued. The shell was cracking; pieces were showing through. I filled page after page, scribbling additional revelations in the log. I even dreamed about that Halloween night, years ago. Far from elaborate, the dream featured me in the hokey Satan costume, peering up at a blue cone of light in the sky. Simple as it was, I understood it as necessary information.

  I telephoned Avalyn nearly every day. One afternoon, two weeks after our visit, I was rereading a pamphlet when I found myself thinking about Little League. I could remember that first baseball practice—how nervous I felt, my clumsiness at holding the glove and the bat, the row of teammates that had gawked as if I were a cripple.

  I closed my eyes and saw myself as an eight-year-old. Another kid held my hand, leading me forward. Both of us wore Panthers uniforms. It was crazy—I could somehow feel the boy’s damp palm, could smell the freshly mown grass, could hear the thunder that boomed from the storm around us. The boy directed me into an open door, and we stood in a room diffused with blue light. Was it the interior of the UFO? I couldn’t quite tell, but as we stepped into the light I saw that someone else stood there, someone taller than the two of us. The person’s presence commanded us like a king’s. I looked up at the tall figure—and then, the daydream ended. No matter how desperately I pushed it, nothing else materialized across my screen of memory.

  My mother was napping, so I dialed Avalyn’s number. She must have been at Inman Grain, because no one answered. Still, I couldn’t let this new recollection rest. Something Avalyn had told me kept repeating in my head: her insistence that my dreams were clues, that I should seek out the necessary information. “Be your own detective,” she’d said. And now I knew that the aliens had kidnapped someone else besides me, another boy on my Little League team. I asked myself if this boy might still be around, still living in Hutchinson. And I wondered what, if anything, this boy had managed to remember.

  It was essential, I thought, to determine the names of the kids who’d played on my baseball team that June. Most had lived in Hutchinson; they hadn’t been boys from my school. Perhaps there were records somewhere. I remembered the Hutchinson Chamber of Commerce, the building on the city’s west side where my father had taken me at that summer’s outset. Surely they had files, documentation that could lead me toward the boy I’d dreamed about.

  I did something out of character and decided to take the car into Hutchinson without asking my mother’s permission. I found a shirt in the pile of dirty laundry, tugged it over my head, and bounded down the steps. I scrawled a note—“URGENT. BE BACK SOON”—and stuck it to the refrigerator door with a magnet shaped like a celery stalk. Then I rummaged through my mother’s purse; the car keys, a lipstick, nickels and dimes, and a few bullets toppled to the floor. Without cleaning the mess, I grabbed the keys, ran outside, and hopped into the Toyota. I turned the key in the ignition, praying it wouldn’t rouse my mother.

  The roads into Hutchinson needed r
epair, but I took them at seventy miles per hour anyway. I sped past fields of corn and wheat; overgrown meadows intersected by branches of Cow Creek and the Little Arkansas River; pastures where cattle hunched under trees to avoid the heat. Oat and sorghum silos gleamed in the sun, and farmers I’d never met waved as I passed. Leftover fireworks debris had been strewn through the ditches. When I passed the turnoff toward Inman, I thought of Avalyn.

  The Chamber of Commerce stood tall and shining in the center of a series of buildings, a buckle on the belt of the street. A few people milled around inside. I entered the main hall and opened the first office door. A dark-haired receptionist sat at her desk, nibbling on beef jerky, one hand typing fiercely at a manual typewriter. She turned to me, asked the standard “May I help you,” and listened as I fabricated a foolish story. I was researching a college baseball player who’d played for Hutchinson Little League teams ten summers ago. “This guy’s going to be the next big thing,” I said. “I’m doing a story on him for the community college paper.”

  Luckily, the receptionist believed my hogwash. She explained that they kept no records of the summer’s teams. “What we do have, however, are old photographs.” She indicated the floor by shuffling her fingers. “In the basement hallway, chronologically by year, are photographs of all the League squads since we began sponsoring the program over twenty years ago. Makes the walls rather unsightly, if you ask me.” She stopped gesturing downward, took another bite of the beef jerky, and turned back to her typewriter. “You might be able to find things easier if you know the name of the team you want.”

  “Panthers,” I said, and descended the stairs to enter the empty basement, its fluorescent lights buzzing. Framed glossy photos covered the hall walls. I could vaguely remember our first team practice, that initial week after my father had signed me to the Panthers’ list. I had made certain my uniform was in place, then lined up with the others as a photographer had snapped our picture. I thought it strange that for all these years, my photo had been nailed to the wall, here in this building, without my knowledge.

  “Nineteen eighty-seven, eighty-six, eighty-five…” I wandered the hall, sliding back in time, until I arrived at 1981. That year’s team photographs were grouped together, twenty-two in all. The navy and white pizzas on our uniforms’ fronts divulged my team. I stood eye-level to the picture. I scanned faces, not really seeing them, until I came to mine. There—me, kneeling on one knee in the front row center. I rested my gloved hand on my other knee, faking a smile. My hair was blonder than I remembered, my face flushed and sheened with sweat.

  I looked away from the photo and made sure I was alone in the basement. And then, for the first time in my life, I committed a crime. I reached up, delicately maneuvered the frame from its nail, and pulled the photo from the wall.

  Upstairs, I wedged the photo inside the waistband of my shorts, then untucked my shirt to conceal it. I scurried through the Chamber of Commerce, my steps punctuated by the chattering of the receptionist’s typewriter. I made it. When I got back to the car, I sat for a second, breathing. I felt as though I’d just done something unspeakable, like a bank heist or a gun blast between someone’s eyes.

  I slid the photograph out, and the smiling faces stared back at me. I focused again on the eight-year-old me. I glossed over the front row, and once again, folds of memory layered in my head: here was a kid I remembered as our pitcher, his arm gunning forward to strike me out during practice; another kid, one of a pair of twins, whom I remembered spraining his ankle during the Panthers’ opening game; and another, the weaselly-looking boy at the end of the row, was the one, I suddenly knew, who’d broken my glasses and laughed at me, that Halloween night when the aliens had returned for me.

  But none of the boys in the front row was the kid in my dream.

  When I switched and began scrutinizing the top row, I found him. He stood there, his jaw clenched, a line of black sunblock below his eyes like warpaint. He wore jersey number ninety-nine. His face looked savage, the face of a kid who’d been raised in the jungle by wolves or apes.

  I didn’t bother looking at the others. I knew those were the eyes that had looked into mine; the hands that had led me into the blue room. The kid stood next to the end of the top row, his arm brushing the arm of the Panthers’ coach.

  Something about the coach stopped me. Strangely, I couldn’t remember anything about him. For years I had recalled things about baseball practices, those agonizing first games I’d trudged through before quitting. But I had erased this coach. Still, something about him looked familiar, as if he’d starred in an outdated movie I’d seen through my half-sleep, years ago. In the photograph, he towered above everyone else, smiling broadly, the expression almost noble, brimming with pride for his team. His teeth shone unnaturally white beneath the broad curve of his mustache. He was the only person in the picture who gave me as intense a response as the boy from my dream, and I wondered if this coach had somehow played a part in the abduction as well. Perhaps he had been there, just as Avalyn’s grandparents and brother had been there when the aliens had kidnapped her on that long-past afternoon.

  My heart was thrumming. I had taken one step, perhaps one giant leap, closer to discovering an answer. “What next?” I said aloud. Curiously, I felt queasy, as if I were being watched by someone or something that wanted to harm me. I glanced at the side and dashboard rearviews, then rolled the window down and squinted up at the sky.

  7/21/91—

  A dream about the kid from the ball team—we’re together in the blue room again. This time, we’re on opposite sides of the room, I’m just watching as the tall alien figure glides over to him, slowly stretching him out on the silver table. The alien’s fingers are a sickly gray, the color of fish scales, and they’re shaped like frankfurters, they’re touching my teammate’s arms, his chest, his face—when the fingers get to the kid’s mouth they linger there, caressing the skin of his lips, and then the kid’s lips move—they mouth the words “here we go” and I know the kid is speaking to me, he’s looking at me, and then he smiles and the alien’s fingers penetrate that smile, they slip between the lips, reaching into the boy’s mouth—I’m watching this all, I’m horrified but I can’t move. And then the boy’s clothes are in a pile on the floor. I look up at the blue light that floods everywhere, waterfalls of blue, and I know the boy’s hand is reaching for me, the alien’s hand is reaching for me, but I won’t look at them, I only look at the light, because the light is blinding me, and I want to be blinded.

  7/29/91—

  I stand in the middle of trees, I’m wearing the Satan costume—the Haunted Mansion is behind me, it’s that Halloween night again—and this time when the stick cracks I turn and see the alien—its skin is gray and rubbery, it has unbelievably long arms—its hairless head and those huge black eyes—it resembles a joke sculpture made from marshmallows or bubble gum wads. It shuffles toward me, almost gliding as if its feet are wheels—and then its arm comes reaching out, stretching and stretching toward me—it twists off my mask and its fingers touch my face—I feel the fingers land there like heavy bugs, one-two-three-four. And then it takes me in its arms, it lifts me up to hold me like it’s in love with me, and then the most surprising thing, the alien’s teensy slitted mouth opens and it speaks. It says Brian you don’t remember me do you, but I sure remember you—it says I sure liked you Brian, I always hoped I would see you again, I always wanted you to come back to the team.

  Sleep came fitfully, disturbed by the aliens’ black eyes and their disembodied blue-gray fingers. Some nights I barely slept at all. After dinner my stomach ached, sharp pangs shooting through my body, as if sea creatures rested inside, prodding and flexing their pincers. The pain and the insomnia reminded me of certain UFO cases, and I returned to the books that contained passages about a couple named Barney and Betty Hill. I read how Barney, plagued with ulcers and sleeping disorders for years, had finally opted for hypnosis, only to discover that he and his wife had been abdu
cted during a drive through the White Mountains of New Hampshire in 1961. The Hills knew something I, too, would soon know.

  One night, around 2 A.M., I was preparing for bed when the telephone rang. My mother was sleeping, and the house had been still for hours. The ringing cut through the silence with a clamor I’ve always associated with sadness or bad news. The noise made me think of the night the hospital had phoned to notify us of my uncle’s fatal stroke. It made me think of times when my father would call, those random nights after he’d left, to scream at my mother in a drunken rage.

  Before the third ring, I picked up the receiver and whispered hello. It was Avalyn. I thought she might be calling to cancel the upcoming dinner I’d planned at my house, but that wasn’t the case. She sounded flustered. “Something’s happened,” she said. “I’m a little jittery. I want you here with me.”

  I didn’t question her. But I knew, for the second time in as many weeks, I would borrow the car without my mother’s approval. She hadn’t minded when I snuck to the Chamber of Commerce; I’d told her about the dream and that I’d seen the photo, but she didn’t yet know I’d stolen it. I doubted, however, that my mother would okay my leaving at two o’clock to drive to Inman. But it couldn’t wait. After Avalyn said good-bye, I listened to the swollen hush at the other end of the line and knew I had to go.

  The car radio’s station played nonstop romantic favorites. Faceless singers crooned about finding love, losing it, and finding it again. “Just look at it out there,” the deejay said between songs. “It’s the perfect night for making love.”

  The road linking the highway to the Friesen cabin was spooky after dark. Thin tentacles of moonlight stretched through the overhead dome of trees, accentuating some shadows, deepening others. The area was as gloomy as the roads that twisted through the White Mountains or that fishing pond in Pascagoula. The Toyota coasted forward, and I eased it into the space where I’d parked before. A single light shone from Avalyn’s bedroom window.