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.