As you requested, Mr. Webb, I'm going to describe everything
I can remember about the most recent "event," so that you can
add it to your investigation file. Since I've already given you
most of the bare facts, I'm going to tell this in my own way, as
seen through my own personal lens of regard and feeling. I
can't promise to be 100 percent objective (are any of us ever
completely certain about what we see), but I do intend to be
fully honest and faithful to the verity of my witness. I assure
you--for whatever it's worth--that I am a truthful woman.
I recall the precise moment when I first saw the light (as I
prefer to call it) again. I was washing dishes, scrubbing a
cake tin after my young nephew's birthday dinner, and I
happened to look up at my reflection in the darkened kitchen
window. My bangs were falling into my eyes, and I reached
up with my wet hand to brush them aside.
Just then an intensely white light appeared, right in the
middle of my forehead. For an insane moment, I thought the
light was part of my reflection and that, perhaps, my head
was about to explode. Then I realized that the light was
actually suspended in the ink-black sky, over the low hill
across the road from my house.
I turned toward Justin, my twelve-year-old nephew, who was
sitting at the kitchen table. And I said, "That light is back
again."
He refused to look toward the window and continued to eat
his cake. He mumbled something with his mouth full,
something that sounded like "So?"
"I would think you'd show a little excitement," I said. "Most
boys your age like mysteries and space and things of that sort.
Don't they?"
Justin stopped chewing and turned toward me with the
grimmest expression I had ever seen on a twelve-year-old's
face. "I've seen it before," he said. "It never does anything but
float around up there. It doesn't change anything."
"But still," I said.
"Can I go?" he asked sullenly. "I need to finish my
homework." The light was streaming through the window
now, making his face look waxy and pale.
I sighed and said "Of course."
Justin flashed me a simulated smile, of the type that older
boys put on for adults, then rose and ran up the stairs.
My nephew is a enigma to me. In the two years he's lived
with me--since the accident--I've tried and tried to encourage
him to behave like other boys his age. I could tolerate some
rambunctiousness, even a bit of delinquency. Instead, it's as if
I'm living with an old bachelor brother, who reads, putters,
eats, sleeps, disappears for several hours every day, but is
generally diffident and quiet. He assures me that he is no
longer grieving, is not silently seething or secretly depressed.
But I don't think this behavior is typical of twelve-year-old
boys, based on my limited observations. Is it? Perhaps you'd
know. Anyway, his birthday dinner had been a rather sad
affair for a twelve-year-old--just the two of us.
Excuse the digression. I recall that I turned back to the
kitchen window. The light was now pulsating in a peculiar,
repeating pattern, as if trying to signal something.
To repeat some of the details I gave you before, I estimate that
it was about the size of a large car or maybe a truck, at a
distance of several hundred feet from my house and
suspended about 300 feet over the hill. The light was rather
shapeless, but if I had to assign it a shape, I would say it was
roughly an oval--a sort of fluorescent Easter egg. It was
getting brighter, and already the first sight-seers had stopped
along the road. I watched a young couple get out of their car.
The man pointed to the thing in the sky, then put his arm
around the woman. I thought it was rather romantic.
I began to scrub the pan again, musing over the juxtaposition
of my drab domesticity with this weird phenomenon, when I
heard a vehicle coming up the driveway. Its headlights
flashed through the window for a moment, but they weren't
much competition for the light in the sky, which, by that
point, was almost too bright to look at.
I opened the exterior kitchen door just as Albert, the man I
mentioned to you the other day, climbed out of his rusty van.
"Still driving that clunker?" I called to him. "Yeah," he said.
"Still gets me where I want to go. On this planet, anyway."
Albert is the local dog warden, so he is always driving around
on the county roads, but I hadn't seen him in a while. We had
dated from time to time, but not "seriously," as they say.
"What brings you out this way?" I said, trying to sound
casual, even as I realized how stupid the question was, under
the circumstances--with that thing bobbing around in the sky.
Albert was wiping his boots on the mat in front of the door.
"Just driving by," he said. "Saw the light."
"Do you want some coffee?" I asked. Albert was still wiping
his feet. "Stop that and come in," I said.
"Yeah, I could stand a cup," he said. "Thought you and Justin
might want to come out and watch the light, though." He took
off his fishing cap, brushed his mop of gray hair with his
hand and sat down at the table.
"Well, me--yes. Justin, I'm afraid not," I said, as I filled a
mug with coffee.
"No? He doesn't want to see it?"
"After the first time we saw it, no," I said. "He claims he's
bored by it now. But I think it's really that he doesn't like
bright lights. Even when I take him to he dentist, the part he
hates the most is that bright light shining in his face. Can you
imagine? Not the drill but the light. I think maybe it reminds
him of the oncoming headlights, you know."
"The accident? His parents?" Albert knew all about the
accident that brought Justin to live with me, a never-married
career woman with no experience of little boys.
"Mmm-hmm," I said.
I looked out the window again and saw that more cars had
stopped along the road. This was the third night in a month
that the light had appeared, and each time the crowd of
gawkers had seemed to assemble a little sooner. I don't know
if people out driving happened to see the light and made a
bee-line for it, or if people were calling each other on the
phone to come look at it, or what. But I was beginning to
think I should set up a concession stand in my yard and sell
refreshments.
"Are you still worried that they'll take him away?" Albert
asked. He was referring to the social workers, the ones who
check up on me periodically to make sure I'm doing a proper
job of raising Justin.
"A little," I said. "He's not like other boys his age. At least I
don't think he is. He doesn't seem to have any real friends.
And something like this…this light…doesn't interest him? I
really don't understand it."
"When I was that age, you couldn't have kept me away from
something like that," Albert said. "I would have been right
out there screaming 'beam me up.'"
I nodded. "Maybe if you asked him to go out with us," I
suggested. "He does like you."
Albert slurped his coffee and winked at me. "Let's try," he
said.
We climbed the stairs and hesitated for a few moments in
front of Justin's door--and the sign on it that said "Trespassers
Will Be Violated."
I knocked, and after a few seconds--it seemed like a few
minutes--Justin said "come in" with a tone of utter
resignation. We found him hunched over his desk, examining
a book about insects and apparently writing something on a
sheet of lined paper. He didn't turn to greet us.
"Hi, fella," Albert said.
Justin looked back at us, mildly surprised to see Albert. "Oh,
hullo," he said, "Mr. Barstow."
"Albert," Albert said. "Watcha reading?"
They both turned to look at the book. I had seen this insect
book, with its huge, grotesque pictures of glistening
mandibles and segmented thoraxes, before. So I took the
opportunity to surreptitiously examine what Justin had been
writing.
To my surprise, it didn't seem to have anything to do with
schoolwork--unless schools today have changed for more than
I've realized. Rather than a report on insect morphology, it
seemed to be some kind of odd poem that snaked down the
page is an S-shaped curve of text. I could only make out some
of it:
We have come a long way
to tell you what most of you
have long suspected:
That your home is elsewhere,
that you exile is self-imposed.
It meant nothing to me. It didn't sound like something that
Justin--taciturn, unimaginative Justin--would compose on his
own, or like anything from a tome on insects. But it was
definitely written in Justin's own cramped handwriting. I
wondered where he had gotten it from.
Justin caught on to what I was doing and, mock-casually,
placed his hand over the writing.
"….always loved insects when I was your age," Albert was
saying. "My dad kept some bees in a hive."
Justin nodded and gave Albert a wan little smile.
"Well, who knows how long that light is going to hang
around this time," Albert said. "How about we all go across to
the hill and watch it for a while?"
"Um, no thanks," Justin mumbled, sounding a bit nervous.
"Not me. I've seen it before and I got homework to finish.
You two go."
"Well, I hate to leave you here alone," I said.
"Aunt Mary, I'm twelve years old!" Justin said, as if
that settled the matter.
"Yes," I said. "Yes, I can't deny that you are. We'll be back in
a little while, then."
Justin shrugged and hunched over the book again. Albert and
I exchanged glances. "We'll see you in a little while, bud,"
Albert said. There was no response.
***
We had to squeeze between parked cars to reach the other
side of the road. There seemed to be people everywhere; many
just standing at the bottom of the hill and squinting up at the
light, slack jawed. (They looked like a herd of insipid
bovines.) Some had set up telescopes and cameras. Others
had made their way to level places on the side of the hill and
had spread blankets to sit on--it was a warm night. I saw
picnic hampers and bottles of wine, people talking and
laughing. Apparently, they no longer had any fear of the
"object."
At the top of the hill, directly beneath that pulsating and
utterly silent little sun, some young people were dancing.
Their faces and hands and clothes were glowing in the light,
so that they resembled ghosts whirling through the tall grass,
which itself gleamed with reflected light, like green fire.
"Quite a party," Albert said. We were walking up the narrow
cow path that leads to the top of the hill--the one I walked
with you the other day--and had stopped at a fairly level spot
to survey the scene. It was so strange to see everything lit up
like that, despite the velvety blackness of the sky. I felt like I
was in a fairyland.
"How about here," I said. I unfolded the blanket I had brought
and we sat down. "Have you ever seen such a spectacle?"
Albert smiled and shook his head. His face shone in all the
dazzle.
I suddenly felt very lazy, so I lay down on my back. I had to
close my eyes because the light in the sky was too intense. It
was so brilliant that the insides of my eyelids seemed to glow,
the way they do when you're lying on the sand on a sunny
beach. But unlike the sun, the light of the "thing" radiated no
warmth of its own.
Albert began to stoke my forehead and hair. I was mildly
surprised. He usually isn't so tender, but something about this
odd situation seemed to soften him. "Mary," he said. "What?"
I murmured. "Nothing, just 'Mary,'" he said, continuing to
caress my head.
I began to feel dreamy and somewhat disembodied. An image
of the light formed in my mind--a brilliant white dot in a sea
of black, like the pupil of an eye in a close-up photographic
negative.
And then, gradually, the perspective of this mental image
shifted. I was "looking" down now, down at myself lying on
the blanket with Albert bent over me, as if the sky had
become a gigantic mirror. I could see the entire hill and the
crowd of revelers, my house and the dark lake beyond it, and
the village beyond that. I could see it all: Justin's school, the
library where I work, the fields and hills and houses and
barns.
I could see individual people, too. And whenever I looked at
one of them (and I don't care if you don't believe me), I could
sense their emotions! It was the most extraordinary
feeling. The people on the hill were mostly full of foolishness
--gluttony, lust and so on. But some of them were filled with
awe. And I was surprised to find that Albert really cared for
me, with a confusing mixture of feelings that could be love, or
could become love.
And there was Justin--I saw him right through the roof of my
house. I was surprised to see that he was crying, but I knew
that they weren't tears of sadness. Despite some nervousness
he was feeling, Justin was actually happy. And I suddenly
knew--I don't know how--that Justin was going to be fine. He
would grow up and be fine.
I began to "hear" something in my mind, too, something more
than the buzzing voices of the people on the hill. It sounded
like a lot of women's voices, oddly familiar, reciting
something over and over in unison. After a while, I realized it
was my dead sister's voice I was hearing, multiplied into a
chorus. I began to make out the words, and they too were
familiar:
We have come a long way
to tell you what most of you
have long suspected:
That your home is elsewhere,
that you exile is self-imposed.
Albert was still stroking my hair, and I smiled. "Do you
believe in flying saucers?" he whispered.
I opened my eyes slightly. The light was directly behind his
head for the moment, forming a kind of halo.
"Don't be silly," I said. "But isn't it beautiful?"
###
© 2001 by Michael Gates
Web: http://home.comcast.net/~dream_house/dreamhouse.htm
This article was previously published in the online magazine Cenotaph.
