by Gwynn White
Before I realized I had started crying, I felt the warmth of tears trickling down my face.
Damn. I wished I could absolve myself of responsibility for him. My baby brother. My goddamn fucking baby brother who could blow the brains out of people who he constantly judged through the lens of bias and discrimination and his own dark sense of self-loathing.
2
We got to LAX an hour before takeoff. I preferred to arrive two hours early, but that just wasn’t possible this time. We’d gotten the go-ahead from Liam with very little time to spare. He’d been trying to get us into the Roswell compound for months. When one of their leaders finally said yes, he didn’t want to give them a chance to change their mind.
Security was especially tight. Police were walking around with submachine guns. I’d never seen that before. There were also a lot of TSA canine teams. I’d seen the dogs before and always assumed they were brought in to sniff for drugs and explosives.
Juggling suitcases and backpacks, we rushed into the airport terminal, printed out our tickets at the kiosk and checked a few bags. Then we walked as quickly as possible to the security line.
The first TSA person we passed reminded me of a strict librarian. No smile. Her hand covered in a blue glove shot out in front of us. “Tickets.”
I shifted my backpack from one shoulder to the other and fumbled in my pocket for the ticket I’d just shoved in there.
When I looked up, I noticed her staring at me with steely brown eyes. It was a bit unnerving. Gave me the feeling I was a suspected criminal. I tried to shake it off. Her job sucked, I told myself. Maybe she was at the end of her shift, tired and irritable. I smiled and said, “Here you go.”
She took it. She stared at me as though trying to make lasers shoot out of her eyes and snapped an order: “I.D.” She could have asked for that upfront. Pulling the backpack off my shoulder, I unzipped the front compartment and fished out my driver’s license.
Grabbing it, she looked back and forth between me and my picture. I started sweating under my armpits. Did I still look anything at all like that picture? The expressions I had on my face in all my DMV photos—because they took them with something like a half-second warning—were always a cross between deer caught in the headlights and scary grimacing lady. And, oh shit, was that the picture from when I had tried putting rainbow streaks in my hair?
Yup. It was.
Finally handing my papers back to me, she said, “You should get a new photo taken with your present hair color. Otherwise, you’re just asking for trouble.”
I had to bite my tongue to keep from rolling my eyes and saying, “Yes, ma’am, but my middle name is trouble,” in the most sarcastic tone possible. Instead, I just thanked her for her advice and apologized for not doing it sooner. The atmosphere wasn’t normal. The vibe of fear hung in the air as palpable as poison gas.
I waited for Nat to go through the same process.
Waving a blue glove in my direction, steely-eyed librarian said in a tone saturated with annoyance, “Go. Go on.”
There was no way I was going to get separated from Nat. I wanted to make sure we both got on our plane. I said, “We’re together.” That sounded awkward. We weren’t together together; we were just traveling together.
She smirked and turned to Nat. She gave him much less of a hard time.
We had three more sets of TSA inspectors to get through. One at the bottom of an elevator taking us up to the main security checkpoint, one at the actual checkpoint, and one at the place where bags are screened and bodies scanned.
Nat got pulled over for a random testing of his hands and full-body search. I looked away to give him some semblance of dignity. He didn’t seem too bothered by any of it, just seemed like he wanted to get it over with as soon as possible.
As soon as I stepped through the scanner, the alarm went off. Nine times out of ten, this happened to me. There was always something I hadn’t thought of. This time, it was my cargo pants. Too many metal rivets and zippers in what must have been an overly sensitive machine.
The body search was rougher than anything remotely acceptable. The burly woman patting me down didn’t warn me where she was going to put her hands. She patted me down hard, then grabbed me in the crotch. Bitch! I didn’t have any drugs in there, but I suddenly felt like I could use some.
When we finally got on the plane, I looked through the booze menu. As soon as we took off and were allowed to place orders, I got myself a couple larger bottles of wine. I knew I needed to pace myself. I didn’t want to get sloppy drunk on a business trip with Nat. I ordered some snacks and a movie to pass the time.
Before watching paid entertainment, I turned on cable news. More reports of UFOs. Lots of fear. The sightings this time were over a stretch of forest in Oregon. Most of the sightings were in isolated places. Very hard to verify them and certainly a place where one’s imagination could go wild.
We had a four-hour-and-a-half flight, including a one-hour-and-twelve-minute layover in Phoenix. As soon as the wine came, I poured myself a plastic cupful. It always seemed strange to pour wine into plastic, but they certainly weren’t going to provide wine glasses in steerage class.
Nat ordered coffee. As soon as the stewardess handed it to him, he proceeded to dump two packets of sugar and some fake cream into it.
More tired than I had thought, I slipped into a nap after two cups of wine.
I was awakened by something.
People were looking out the windows on the starboard side of the plane. A bunch of people were standing in the aisle, holding onto the backs of seats, leaning over the people seated there and pointing out the windows.
Every once in a while, a loud gasp erupted from the crowd.
A woman started screaming, “We’ve got to get out of here! Where’s the stewardess? Get the stewardess! Make her tell the pilot to fly in a different direction!”
A man yelled, “Stewardess! Stewardess!”
A steward came hurrying up the aisle from the back section. He said, “We’re talking to the pilot. There’s nothing to worry about. Everyone, please sit down! It’s not safe for you to be standing in the aisle.”
From the back of the plane, a little boy started crying. Between sobs, he shouted, “They’re going to shoot us down with lasers! All the UFOs have lasers, Mommy! Big lasers!”
Then a calming voice, obviously his mother: “Shhhh. It’s OK. These ones don’t have lasers. They’re friendly.”
Nat was standing, leaning into a space between people across the aisle from us, looking intently out the window.
A steward put his hand on Nat’s shoulder and said, “Please sit down, sir.” Then he moved on to the next person, delivering the same order.
Sitting back down, Nat dropped his tray table from its upright position. He grabbed his coffee off my tray where he must have placed it when he got up to take a look.
I rubbed my eyes and tried to focus. I said, “What’s goin’ on? Did you see anything?”
Nat took a sip of coffee, then said, “Just a flash of silver. It could have been anything. Maybe a plane flying too close to us for a brief moment, I don’t know.”
Suddenly, screaming and gasping arose from the passengers again. This time, people stared out the windows on the port side of the plane, where we were seated. A bunch of people from across the aisle stood up and leaned into the open spaces between seats. A young guy in his early twenties wearing a T-shirt with the words The Truth is Out There! emblazoned on the front leaned over Nat and pointed to our window. I had closed the shade before going to sleep, so I could lean my head against it. He said, “Hurry! Open up your window!”
I started to wake up. The words on his T-shirt: an expression from the X-Files. Oh, right. This was a crowd headed for Roswell. Of course, they were going to believe that every metallic flash of light was a UFO.
It’s never good to defy a true believer when they’re revved up with fear. I sighed and opened the shade.
I leaned away
from the guy leaning into our space. I peered out into the darkness as Nat moved his cup back over to my tray, so it wouldn’t get spilled.
At first, there was nothing out there except a fog of clouds lit up by the lights from our plane. My guess was that’s all the true believers on our plane saw. Light on the backdrop of the clouds served as a kind of Rorschach illuminating the viewer’s own mind. I saw plane lights and clouds. Others saw alien spaceships.
The longer I stared, the sleepier I felt. There just wasn’t enough out there to capture my interest.
In that twilight state right before sleep, my mind flooded with strange, random images. My life as a little girl back in the compound in Utah. The survival drills. The times I had to crawl through a long tunnel on my belly to practice escape should the military come to round us all up. The night I had to watch a woman give birth, so I’d be prepared to deliver a baby in an emergency situation when no one else was around. Fear gripping me around the throat as I watched in horror. I was nine. I prayed I’d never get pregnant if that’s the result. I worried I might get pregnant because I had no idea how it happened. I had a general idea from the animals we kept, but I wasn’t exactly sure how that translated to humans. After the memories, random images of babies being taken away. Babies with green skin and large haunting eyes. Buildings and forests burning. Floods overtaking cities, swallowing them whole. Violent storms and monstrous ocean waves buffeting people around like kites in the wind.
I stifled a scream. For a moment, it seemed like I’d descended into madness. Then it cleared, like the sun coming out from behind clouds after a storm.
A stewardess approached the guy leaning into our aisle, peering out our window. She said, “Please, sir, you need to sit down.”
At that moment, the plane shook. A tall, lanky woman standing next to the seat behind us lurched forward and spilled the Diet Pepsi she was holding onto the back of Nat’s shirt.
He whipped around. “Goddamn it! Can you please sit down?”
She apologized profusely and went off to find her seat.
Handing Nat a pile of napkins and a bottle of water, the stewardess whose hair and makeup still managed to look perfect this late in the rather tumultuous flight, said, “I’m so sorry,” as if she were the one responsible for soaking him in sticky soda.
Mumbling, “No, no, it’s fine,” Nat grabbed the napkins and water and started dabbing at the soda stain.
Ping! The fasten seat belt signs lit up.
A steward came on the speaker: “We’ll be experiencing turbulence as we pass through a windy area. Please stay in your seats and keep your seat belts buckled. We’ll let you know when it’s safe to get up.”
Attempting to lighten the mood, I leaned over and said to Nat, “It looks like something shit on your back. Something with rather liquid diarrhea.”
Never failing to level up a joke, he replied without missing a beat, “Yup. It’s the secret ingredient in all brown soda.”
Nat gave up trying to remove the stain. Instead, he just leaned back and shut his eyes.
3
By the time we landed in Roswell, my head had cleared. I’d finally managed to take a nap on the second part of our flight from Phoenix. I had also drunk lots of water after worrying the wine might have gone to my head and affected me more than usual on the first leg of our journey. The most eventful part of the second leg was some old guy complaining about the food and a baby crying for about half an hour. Other than that, no problems.
We rented a Land Rover, so we’d have plenty of room for gear and could travel over rough terrain if needed. After throwing all our bags into the back, we headed out to the place Liam had rented for us. The drive was long. Gradually, we left the artificial lights of the city that mostly slept at night. During the day, Roswell was a tourist destination filled with people searching out museums and shops. But at night, those places were shuttered and the streets so deserted, it seemed practically a ghost town.
As the artificial lights dimmed, the moon and stars popped more brilliantly against the dark sky. While I drove, Nat turned on the local radio. They were covering the story of our initial plane flight. Apparently, a number of passengers had called into CNN and MSNBC and their stories were now going viral. Of course, Roswell news would report anything UFO, but especially if it made the major cable news channels. Somehow, that made it seem legit.
Nat laughed. “You think anyone recorded it with their cell phones?”
I shrugged. “Probably. Doesn’t everything get recorded these days?”
Opening a can of Diet Coke, Nat said, “The medium is the massage.” He took a swig of soda.
“Marshall McLuhan,” I replied. Nat liked to throw out esoteric quotes. It was his version of throwing down the gauntlet. I accepted the challenge whenever I could. More than once, I’d cheated by looking it up on my cell phone.
Nat opened a package of pretzels and held it out in front of me. I stuck my hand in and grabbed a handful. Suddenly realizing I was hungry, I said, “We oughta stop someplace to grab a meal. You wanna look up places to eat?”
He said, “Sure,” and started tapping the search into his phone. He said, “It was a typo, you know.”
Staring straight ahead at the road, I said, “What?”
He replied, “The Medium is the Massage. Typo. It was the title for McLuhan’s book about media, right? It was supposed to say The Medium is the Message, McLuhan’s oft-quoted statement, but the typesetter messed it up.”
Hmmm. That I had never heard. “So, he just let the mistake go?”
Nat laughed. “No, he liked it. He thought it perfectly expressed how media affects us. It brings us all together to share in the same tribal beliefs.”
I thought about that. “Things have changed. Media divides us now.”
Nat said, “Yeah, but only into our own separate tribes. We tune in to listen to the broadcaster for our own unique tribe and war against the rest.” Without a pause, he added, “Annie’s Diner. What do you think?”
I was used to Nat’s conversational shorthand where he interrupted something he was saying with something he’d been talking about earlier. The accelerator pedal for his mind always seemed to be pressed down with his thoughts going at high speed. I tried to keep up. I said, “Sure. Diners have just about everything.”
He added Annie’s to the GPS and I took the van in that direction.
Annie’s was your average diner: a metal box with neon lights, this one out in the desert. The lights etched themselves onto the dark slate of night. Annie’s Diner. Food. Coffee. Last Stop for Thirty Miles.
Nat looked up at the signs. “Hmmm. Good we stopped, huh? Last eats for thirty miles.”
As we opened the front door, bells jangled.
It wasn’t very crowded. A few guys who probably belonged to the trucks outside. A group of teenagers laughing and waving their hands as they talked about something that interested them.
We waited for someone to seat us.
Finally, a middle-aged waitress came out of the kitchen. She had scuffed white shoes, food stains on her apron and mascara painted around her eyes so thick, she seemed part raccoon. Noticing us, she sauntered over. Without smiling, she grabbed two menus out of a rack on the side of the hostess desk and said, “Follow me.”
She stopped at a booth in the middle of the restaurant.
We sat down. Nat asked for coffee and water.
With a tight expression on her face, our waitress nodded. Her name tag said Michelle.
Diners never disappointed in their sheer variety of food. The menu had everything. Not sure if we’d find food before lunch the next day, I overdid my order: cheeseburger with fries, milkshake, coffee, and apple pie with two scoops of vanilla ice cream. I felt queasy around bite number three of pie à la mode.
Nat outdid me: two cheeseburgers with onion rings, a strawberry smoothie, and an ice cream sundae.
While we ate, repeatedly wiping grease and ketchup and dessert off our mouths, we talked about
our strategy for getting into the compound. Liam had arranged a meeting for us with the cult leader. He’d told him that we were quite impressed, after seeing him interviewed on TV, with his knowledge about UFOs and aliens. Lucky for us, the leader had an unhealthy amount of narcissism. He said he’d be happy to meet with us. Our appointment was for 2:00 the next afternoon.
In case anyone connected to the cult was within hearing range, Nat and I talked as though our strategy was more than that, as though we were genuinely interested in the cult’s beliefs. Nat and I knew each other well. We could talk in a fake way and know exactly what was real. We’d invented that type of communication on earlier field research projects.
In between chomping down on his cheeseburger, Nat said, “I’m excited about this group. I think they have a lot of knowledge as to the true nature of these UFOs and aliens.”
I took a sip of my milkshake and replied, “Yeah. Me, too. I want to be on the front lines if we’re being invaded. I say we try to get accepted into the group tomorrow. I’d like to stay there 24/7 by tomorrow night.”
Nat said, “Agreed. It’s a plan then.”
The sound was turned down on a TV attached to the wall up near the ceiling in the back of the diner, but flashing red-and-blue police lights popping up onto the screen caught my attention. A red Breaking News banner lit up the bottom section. A scrolling ticker announced the major details of the story: Two children have been found murdered inside The Astral Plane compound.
I stared at the TV screen. Nat turned around to see what I was looking at. As soon as he realized, he said, “We oughta get the check.”
We paid and left.
Nat took the wheel for his turn driving. As we headed back out into the night, he said, “We should let Liam know.”
I said, “I’ll text him. But it doesn’t change our plans. We’re still going there tomorrow anyway, right?”
Keeping his eyes on the darkened dusty road lit only by our high beams, Nat said, “Of course.” His face had taken on a serious look. As he became lost in thought, I texted Liam, then played a bunch of word games on my cell phone.