After the Saucers Landed Read online

  “Our souls switch around?” I ask.

  “That’s just a way of speaking. It’s a physical thing.”

  “How do you mean? What’s a physical thing?”

  “The soul is physical. It’s our ideas of ourselves. Your idea of yourself, your idea of Brian Johnson that switches,” she says. “Our names: Brian Johnson, Harold Flint, or Asket, those are spiritual.”

  Harold picks up a damp towel from the worktable, wipes his hands, and then hangs the rag on a hook underneath the table. He claps his hands together, stands up, and starts for the door.

  “Where are you going?” I ask.

  “She doesn’t need me after all,” he says. He turns to look at her. “That’s right, isn’t it? You don’t need me? I can leave?”

  Asket is unsure. She doesn’t want him to leave, but at the same time she doesn’t appear to want to look at him. She’s averting her gaze. “I don’t need you here, but I do need the idea of you.”

  “What does that mean?” Harold asks. “You’re here for my soul?”

  “No. I want…I want you to give him back his idea.”

  She looks at him finally, a bit sternly I think, and she reaches for the zipper of her jumpsuit. Even though I’ve seen this before I’m a little surprised by the gesture, a bit embarrassed for her. “You don’t know how to give an idea,” she says. “You’ve forgotten how, but I’ll show you. You’ve got everything backward. I’m not here as an alien at all. I’m not with them.” And then she unzips.

  But as she steps out of her clothes I find that I can’t look at her. I’m unable to look in the right direction or to focus my eyes properly. I’ve lost track of her, somehow. I can’t find her even though she’s hardly moved and is clearly still in the room.

  “Where did she go?” I ask Harold.

  “She’s…” he starts, but he can’t see her either.

  2

  charles rain and quality pie

  Harold Flint and Charles Rain have entirely different theories about Missing Time. If both of them were presented with this story, if both were told about the jump or discontinuity that came after Asket unzipped, their answers would not merely be different, but would be opposite. That is, if the past is any guide, Rain would blame the Missing Time or memory loss on us, on Harold and me, and he’d point to what is now known as an established fact as the explanation. We humans have been approached, off and on, by higher intelligences from the Pleidien system since the beginning of civilization, and we have always been found wanting. There is Missing Time because we can’t cognize the eternal truth that Rain is offering for $19.95.

  Harold, on the other hand, would claim that our memory loss was a good thing. That is, forgetting is always a part of remembering, and recognizing that we’ve forgotten, ferreting out a discontinuity, should clue us in on the fact that we always forget. Nothing is really continuous from one moment to the next. The important thing about UFOs, for Harold, isn’t what planet they came from or what their intentions are, but rather the enigma itself as an enigma. He likes discontinuities for their own sake, and if he were writing this, if he wanted anything more to do with the UFO subject, I’m guessing that’s what he’d set on the page. If Harold were co-writing this he’d do his best to convince me to leave it there and move on. Fortunately, however, I’m on my own and I’m not going to leave you hanging.

  Charles Rain was already thirty-six years old when the Pleidiens decided to allow him to remember them. In 1975 Charles had been forced to seek work as a security guard at Macy’s department store to supplement what was turning out to be a dwindling income as a designer and fine artist. He had three sons, a wife who was unhappy with their living situation (she felt that five people living in a two-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side was less than ideal), and a bit of a drinking problem. Things weren’t working out for Charles and he was on the verge of giving up on his art, on his life really, when, on March 23rd, 1975, everything was resolved and solved by a deus ex machine–style intervention.

  Before he actually saw them, before they landed their garbage pail lid–shaped saucers at Rain’s parents’ cabin in the Catskills, he heard a voice. He was sitting at the breakfast table at five a.m., drinking instant coffee, and trying to cure his hangover with greasy sausages and Tabasco sauce, when he heard her talking. It was a woman’s voice, surely, but not his wife’s voice, and while the voice was speaking to him, definitely to him, she was not using a language he could understand. That is, it was an alien language he was hearing, and it took a few moments before the alien words were supplemented with more direct/nonlinguistic representations.

  What Charles heard was a voice from another dimension, a voice coming from what he figured, after counting up from a simple dot to the sunburst-shaped copper wall clock next to the refrigerator, was probably the fifth dimension, but it might have been the seventh. Later on, after his Saucer Wisdom books were published but before the Pleidiens and Ralph Reality arrived, Flint would comment on the Platonic character of Rain’s claims. The important bit of what Rain wrote, the most important claim, wasn’t the number of dimensions he said he’d visited or heard from, it wasn’t the number of light-years that his Space Brothers and Sisters traveled before presenting themselves over the pine trees and stables at his parents’ ranch, but rather it was the metaphysical claim contained in the very first sentence that Rain thought he understood at the breakfast table back in 1975.

  “It is difficult to communicate with you clearly from here. Where we are, in Eternity things are different. Our experiences don’t translate into the material universe,” the voice told him.

  This idea of Eternity, of a higher-level reality from which angelic voices could be heard and redemption could be found, was just the same old delusion that had been repeating in various guises throughout all of Western history. Old Greek philosophers wrote about the fifth dimension too, only they said it was water, or if not water then fire. Then again, maybe Eternity was a realm of pure ideas, of perfect concepts. What Rain was claiming, what the feminine voice he heard over sausages was telling him, was that it was possible to know the truth, the essence of things, directly and this knowledge could fix things. The Space Brothers, the Pleidiens, could square the circle, they could resolve the problem. Lions would lie down with lambs, war was over, and Charles Rain could quit pacing from ladies’ wear to the bed and bath department. All of a sudden he had a new job, maybe even a calling.

  “We feel our emotions differently, more directly, and we experience joy,” the hallucination told him. And, in that moment, a cult was born. Only, of course, it turned out not to be a delusion at all, and Charles Rain did not end up as just one more long bearded mad man presiding over credulous and stunted followers, but ended up as something much more than that; Charles Rain ended up as a global celebrity and as the human CEO of the first intergalactic 501(3)c. Harold knew Charles before the landing; they knew each other before either had seen a single UFO, and even back then Harold had had the same criticism of the man who would become humanity’s Space Brother. The problem was that Charles Rain was too reassuring, too optimistic, both as an abstract expressionist, and as a drinker. Charles’s paintings were brightly colored niceties created with posters and mechanical reproduction in mind. He wanted to be hung in suburban homes on both coasts, he wanted to go well with the furniture, but his work was too boring to really catch on. Rain’s paintings were competent, sometimes purchased, but never quite loved by anyone. Worse, as a drunk Rain was sloppy and sentimental.

  Harold drank with him at the Cedar Tavern back in the ’50s, nearly twenty years before the breakfast epiphany, and even then Rain had been a fount of positive thinking. He’d once even gone so far as to try to offer Mark Rothko a hug.

  It was embarrassment just to know Rain, and what was worse was that Rain had helped Harold out so often. He’d helped Harold find galleries for his work, helped him find a publisher for his first UFO book, and even helped him out in matters of love. If it hadn’t been
for Charles Rain, Harold would never have met the woman who became his second and now late wife.

  “Hold on,” Harold says. He puts his chin in his hands and looks down at the basket of onion rings and fries, the QP basket as it’s called, and then looks at me and my wife Virginia. He seems skeptical about something, about Virginia especially, and then, to my surprise, he reaches out to her across the yellowed tablecloth and takes hold of her hand.

  “It’s not true that Rain was responsible for setting me up with Carole,” he says.

  “It’s not?” I ask.

  “No,” he says. “Rain sent her to me because her sighting, her abduction, whatever you want to call it, it didn’t fit with his narrative. He didn’t want her around his people, but he didn’t arrange anything more than an interview.”

  “Why are you holding my hand?” Virginia asks. “That’s wrong, isn’t it? Me holding your hand,” Harold says. But he holds on for a moment more, looking at her directly, maintaining eye contact. Then he lets go and stands up from the table. Walking around the booth, examining the coffee stains on the white Formica tabletop, the faded red vinyl upholstery, the dirty orange carpet, he seems perplexed. When he gets all the way around he sits back down. “How did we get here?” he asks. He points to Virginia but looks at me as if he’s going to back me into a corner with his next question. “How did she get here?” he asks. Looking out through the plate glass windows I see that my Volkswagen station wagon is parked near the entrance. I can spot it easily even though its forest green paint job looks purplish underneath the flashing red lights from the saucer hovering overhead, but when I mention my car to Harold he isn’t interested. “We were at the Studio Art Building talking to the crazy bitch alien, I was working on the reproduction of my anti-art matches, and now we’re here,” Harold says. “And she’s here with us.”

  My wife takes a sip of ice water and then places the dark yellow Vaseline tumbler back down a bit too heavily so that it cracks. Ice, water, and yellow-tinged glass flow across the dirty Formica and Virginia starts sucking her thumb. She’s bleeding and her hands are trembling.

  I put down my Reuben and watch her.

  “Have we done this before?” Virginia asks. “That’s an interesting question,” Harold says. “What’s wrong, Virginia?” She tells me she’s feeling strange. “Déjà vu,” she says.

  I wait for her face to change, for the flat line of her lips to soften, or for anything that might indicate that she’s past it, but her panic doesn’t fade. She’s staring at Harold and her mouth is held in a tight frown. She’s waiting for the next thing to happen and she keeps staring at Harold the whole time.

  “Is what I’m saying now a part of it?” I ask.

  “What?” Virginia asks. “You’ve got déjà vu? So, what I’m saying now, is it following the script?” I ask. She nods.

  “And now?” I ask. The malice in my voice is unintended and I regret it. I regret how I’ve made Harold smile and nod along. I clear my throat and try again. “Is this sentence that I’m saying right now a part of the sequence?”

  Virginia shakes her head no, but I can’t tell if she’s answering or rejecting the question. She picks up her napkin and starts to clean up the mess she made with her water glass, but stops to suck her thumb again. Then she stands up to leave. “Excuse me,” she says.

  Virginia is wearing an off-white sweater dress with a high turtleneck collar and a short hemline. She twists to step sideways around a rather rotund transvestite at the diner’s counter and I realize that this new outfit is provocative. She looks different, is dressed differently than is the norm. Her sweater dress is too short for one thing and I’m staring at her legs as she twists again. Not only is she exposing a lot of leg, but she’s barefoot. All in all she seems exposed, maybe a bit vulnerable. When the transvestite gets up from his stool at the counter, when he follows her around the corner, I wonder whether I should go back there myself to make sure she’s okay.

  “Do you think she still wants me, us, to continue on with UFOs?” Harold asks.

  For a moment I think Harold is confused, that he’s stuck in the last scene, but as he takes a fry and dips it in the little paper cup of ketchup I rationalize. Virginia was one of his abductees, one our clients. Harold and I have that in common. I met Virginia for the same reason Harold met Carole, because she wanted to know what her saucer sighting meant. In that context, Harold’s question might make a bit of sense?

  “She’s quite pretty,” Harold says.

  I don’t like it. Yes, Virginia is pretty. So was Harold’s second wife.

  Carole met Charles Rain first. We’ve already established that. She met him at the Buffalo UFO conference in 1981. She was an artist too, she’d seen many UFOs in the late ’70s, and hoped that Charles might be interested in the work she was doing around reincarnation. She’d been visiting channelers and psychics, was working with Tarot cards, had even tried out hypnotism, but Charles wasn’t interested. The problem was that she didn’t want to know about UFOs, not really. What she wanted to understand was how she might use her experiences in order to change figure painting. What Carole liked about the New Age and Ufology was the folk and outsider art that came out of it. What she hoped to do was discover a new way to paint that would be informed by what she called mythic modernity or, alternatively, retro-futurism. For Carole, imagining a future, imagining what it would mean when the saucers landed, always involved a return to the past. For Carole the idea of Missing Time, the fact that we lose some things as we remember others and how we always become something we don’t want as a consequence meant that we are, all of us, reincarnated while we’re still alive.

  She fell in with Harold, first as his mistress and then as his second wife, and by 1983 she was using his art studio to pile up nudes layered with bric-a-brac, photographs stolen from scrapbooks, and wax paper while he interviewed abductees and went to conferences. Her theory of Missing Time was like Harold’s in so much as she accepted the loss of memory, but it wasn’t like his theory because it wasn’t abstract. She wasn’t trying to get to any kind of truth, but just liked the feeling of applying paint to a canvas, of cutting up other people’s mementos and dreams, of mixing the paint and paper clippings into an orange or blue or green paste.

  “How did we get here?” Harold asks again. We’re still at the Quality Pie restaurant, Virginia hasn’t come back from the restroom yet, and the idea of going out to the parking lot to confront the saucers hasn’t been raised. Harold is about to order some coffee and tell me about Yoko Ono, about one of her performance pieces, something she did before she met John Lennon. But for the moment we’re still stuck on that question. “How did we get here?”

  I try to think of a good answer. I think of Rain’s phony UFO photos with hubcaps for saucers, and the promises of Eternity, and figure that’s the best answer. Given the choice between Harold’s paradoxical metaphysics, his dead wife’s aesthetics, and Charles Rain’s story about Eternity, souls, and flying saucers, I figure there really is no choice to make. The Pleidiens and their saucers is clearly the best answer. Jesus by the Pepsi machine.

  Harold orders a cup of coffee and then lights a Camel cigarette, he’s smoking the filterless kind now, and he settles in to talk. Whenever we get together we end up having the same conversation. It might take different guises, starting out as a conversation about presidential politics or something even more mundane, say the price of asparagus at Met Foods, but ultimately he comes around to his pet subject. With Harold it’s always about skepticism. Incredulity, criticism, doubt, these are his talismans, his power words. Skepticism is his religion.

  “I’ve been thinking about Yoko Ono lately,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about how she failed.”

  For Harold, Yoko Ono is just another artist, and when he mentions her, her failure, I know that he isn’t talking about her singing. He isn’t interested in that. He’s talking about the Yoko he knew before the Beatles.

  “Have you ever seen Cut Piece?” he asks.<
br />
  I bite into my Reuben, take a sip of coffee, and wait. Despite the question mark up there in the previous line my turn to speak hasn’t really come around yet.

  Cut Piece is a work of avant-garde performance that is nearly as old as my wife. In it Ono presents herself in her “best suit” to an audience armed with scissors. Ono sits cross-legged on a stage and stoically accepts the attack that comes. The art of it is in the process of her disrobing, the process of her being stripped of her suit jacket, her wool skirt, her silk blouse, one piece at a time.

  “Ono thought that she could develop a new kind of relationship. That she could present the truth, the truth of her being, to an audience. She wanted to get past the spectator, to eliminate the spectacle and, yes, she was speaking to the usual gender issue too, but really she wanted to keep what was beautiful between the sexes. She wanted to give herself away on that stage and find freedom that way. She was going to yield and yield and yield, like a Judo master, until it was the man or woman left holding the scissors who was naked.”

  I take another bite of sandwich and then move it away, hold it over my plate. The sandwich’s innards dribble out. Bits of it, sauerkraut and Thousand Island dressing fall to my plate.

  “Where is Virginia?” Harold asks.

  “What’s that?”

  “Where is your wife?”

  I find out. Around the corner Virginia is blocking the emergency exit outside the restroom. She’s sitting on a stackable metal chair positioned so that it’s up to next to the push bar for the door without actually putting pressure on it, and she’s got arms folded across her lap. Her sweater dress is stretched so that it covers her knees and she’s looking quite comfortable. She seems nonplussed, doesn’t say anything, but just gives me a wary look.

  “What’s going on back here?”

  “It hasn’t stopped.”

  “What hasn’t?”

  “I’ve been sitting back here watching people pass by, walk through the frame of the entranceway, and each one of them seems familiar. Like that guy there in the leather baseball cap, the jowly man there? I must know him somehow,” she said. “Or the kid with him, the one who looks like an overweight TV actor. Some sitcom kid. I know him too.”