Roswell
by J. T. Green
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
We drove for three days toward New Mexico. We did not speak of what was coming. At last, Father stopped and called from a payphone.
“We’re meeting an old friend of mine,” he said, getting back into the truck.
“To help us?”
“Right.”
We pulled out onto route I-20 and wound toward I-70, deeper and deeper into rural New Mexico.
“The Trinity site is near here,” Father said. “The bomb was so bright you couldn’t look right at it. It was ten times hotter than the center of the sun.”
I looked out at the horizon and tried to imagine such force. Beneath the overwhelming pressure of that vision I tired and eventually fell asleep.
* * *
When I awoke, we were off the road, pulled along a copse of alligator junipers. Father was out of the truck talking to a man. Behind this man was a truck similar to ours. I heard scratching beside me and I turned and I screamed.
In the driver’s side window was a large, green head, ovoid, without ears. It had huge, sad eyes and a tiny mouth and tiny flat teeth. It looked as though it had stepped directly out of the picture I’d drawn for Lilly.
Then the head — which had only been a mask — disappeared, and it was a boy, about my age but with a stupid, mean face covered in dirt, hair greasy and slicked back over his head. This boy was laughing silently at his prank.
Father, or the man, must have said something to him, because the boy frowned, glanced in the men’s direction, and walked away, looking petulant. I stepped out of the truck.
“Sorry about that,” the man said. “He’s a bit of a trickster.”
“Sarah, this is Mr. Bruckner,” Father said.
“How do you do, little lady?” Bruckner said and stuck out his hand.
He was about Father’s height and build, but he was darker, and his hair fell in dreads. He wore a faded, green Army tunic and cutoff-jean shorts and red, high-top Converse sneakers. His beard hung to his waist. He looked like a drifter. In short, he appeared to be the exact opposite of the type of man Father would know.
I shook his hand, saying, “How do you do?” then caught sight of the boy over his shoulder.
Mr. Bruckner saw the direction of my gaze, Without turning, he addressed the boy. “Avery, get your ass over here and stop fooling around.”
The boy dumped the mask into their truck and shambled over, hands stuffed deep in his pockets, eyes shifting uneasily.
“Avery and Bruckner here are going to help us tomorrow,” Father said.
“We’re going to scare them in costumes?” I asked.
“Kind of,” Father said.
He looked embarrassed. I couldn’t say I’d ever seen him embarrassed before.
Bruckner glanced at Father, who looked away, but nodded as he did.
“Your Father and I, we go way back, to Vietnam. I was one of his field agents. Do you know what that means?”
“Spy stuff,” I said, realizing who this man was. “Wait, Father, he’s the man from the photo.”
“What photo?” Father asked.
“The one in your office, with the girl and the mushroom cloud.”
“Ah, yes,” Father said, “he is.”
I turned back to Bruckner, suddenly very angry. “For a tough Special Forces guy, tom-foolery like costumes doesn’t seem very becoming.”
Bruckner only laughed, as though I’d just told a great joke.
“Gabe, she’s got your spirit,” he said, then addressing me: “Right, well, you’d be surprised. Anyway, one of our many jobs was obtaining information from captured VC...”
“We’re going to torture them?” I asked, breathlessly.
“No, no,” Bruckner said at the same time his son said, “I wish.” Bruckner shot an elbow into his side. “No, we had more subtle methods then, too.”
He reached into his tunic and pulled out a black vial, labeled X11-3HG.
“This was a substance we used. It makes people very... pliable, with the right triggers.”
He walked to the truck. I followed and looked in. Inside were two costumes of the Roswell type and a movie projector.
“Essentially,” he continued, “we’re going to create a new reality for them. One in which beings that look like these,” he lifted the lifeless arm of one of the costumes, “no longer exist. Or at least, exist in such a way that your sister doesn’t want anything to do with them.”
“I see,” I said, turning to Father. “So we’re brainwashing them.”
“Rewriting their narratives toward a desired end-state,” Father corrected.
“That’s rather clinical, given the fact it’s your daughter we’re talking about.” As I said it, I felt immediately that I’d gone too far. I waited for a rebuke, but Father only turned and looked at the horizon.
* * *
I stood at the edge of the trees, where the land dropped away and the blue above filled your eyes like the ocean. We were camped on the far side of a valley formed by two small mountain ranges, half an hour’s drive from Lilly’s research station. Looking across the valley, where the ocotillo and creosote blurred into a wash of desert brown, you could see their vast, absolutely wonderful, parabolic dish pointed toward the sky. It was easily fifty-meters across, maybe more. Nestled at the base of this dish was a two-story, grey building that had to be their research station.
This was where Lilly had been living her new life, then, dreaming of things beyond our star, I thought.
I considered this scientific marvel as Bruckner gathered wet sticks and grass. I turned and watched him. He looked to me like some antediluvian throwback. Half-caveman, half post-apocalyptic survivor. Simply barbaric. I hated him.
It had rained just before we arrived, and I didn’t think the grass would light, but Bruckner removed a small battery from his pocket and connected it to twin alligator clips with insulated wire. He then connected these to a flat strip of grey metal, which began to glow bright orange.
“What’s that?” I asked, as he tucked the hot metal beneath the grass and kindling.
“Nichrome wire. From a toaster oven,” he said.
“It’s hot enough for a fire?”
“When it glows red like that? It’s on an order of magnitude with the sun.”
He nestled the contraption in the wet grass. It smoldered a long while. Under the pressure of the glowing nichrome it began to dry and burn, and the men carefully and precisely arranged wood atop the growing flames.
* * *
It grew dark and I moved away from the fire. I’d said I wanted to look at the stars, but really I wanted to look away from the men. Their faces had mutated into gaunt shells in the orange, flickering light and they huddled close together, whispering, sharing a bottle of Jack Daniels.
The boy was repulsive in every way. Before it had grown dark, he managed to catch a rabbit, and he’d taken great satisfaction in my horror as he plunged a knife into its belly, ripped out the intestines, the liver, the spleen, then scooped out the heart. Finally, he’d skinned the animal in one decisive jerk, and tossed it on the ground before me, lewd in its deathly nakedness.
My eyes slowly adjusted to the night, the heat of the fire gone, the world cold. I tried to warm myself by wrapping my arms around my knees and pressing them to my chest.
I looked up at the Milky Way, which stretched from left to right across the sky, and I forgot my body. You couldn’t see stars like this back east. I tried to recall the last time Father had taken us camping, and we’d seen so many constellations. A star fell through the sky. I thought of Lilly’s last communication: Contact Imminent.
What did that mean? And George’s speculation about instructions? Instructions from space? For what? Could any of it really be? I’d heard Father and Mother say the two ate mushrooms and dropped acid. Had Lilly gone over the deep end?
I thought of my day-to-day routine at the Phillips Academy. Its events proceeding like gears in a Swiss watch, a closed universe of well-ordered events. I could not reconcile this with the probabilistic truth of infinite space.
Part of me wanted to warn her, to let her know we were coming. I felt myself split in two, as though the atoms within my skull were magnets of opposite charge, and they’d pushed themselves into groups, fracturing the whole.
This was her dream. Why not let her dream?
But another part of me, well, that part, that was Mother, through and through. Ice. Implacable calculation. We were organisms of a different species, Lilly and I, progeny of a line of men and women who’d been bred for one purpose: power. Real power, the kind that moved mountains, not that trite, vainglory-driven nonsense of traditional politics.
And my function, as an organism of this line, had only one of two purposes: politics or marriage. Father’s and Mother’s brand of politics, of course: subterfuge, espionage, manipulation. It seemed simple. It was what they’d raised me for. Father would plug me into some secret nexus of power, and I’d while away the years, manipulating mass groups of people that I neither cared for nor would ever meet. People whose day-to-day would not affect my health and happiness in any way. I’d stand as some grand puppeteer in a show I neither enjoyed nor thought meaningful.
This made me decidedly unhappy, and so I thought maybe then I’d just marry. They would allow it. I was good-looking, the boy behind me could tell you that. And Father and Mother could use my marriage to broker more power, rooting me in a kindred family where secrets were as normal as taking the kids to soccer, and as deathly serious as finances.
But it all seemed so... limited, so confined. So you had kids, then what? So you helped start a war, overthrow a government, assassinate a president... Then what? None of it mattered, not in the end.
I looked up at the enormity of space above me and thought briefly in answer to myself: you die, and you rejoin the world as a massive diffusion of atoms. I knew some people were comforted by that thought: the idea of becoming part of an apple tree, or an orchid, or a butterfly. But, looking up now, I knew the secret fault in that logic: we were all prisoners to this planet, spread thin after death or not. Gravity held us here as implacably as family mores prevented me from dropping out of the Philips Academy and becoming an artist, and we would not leave, not a single one of us, for hundreds of millions of years. Our only chance at drifting away to anything close to the heavens was to dream. Lilly knew that, and so did I.
But who was she to escape? I knew this thought was selfish but, in her act of defiance, she’d opened an entire world of possibilities for me that I would rather have kept closed. I had wanted nothing more than to be an artist. And now I could be, and it was tearing me apart. I felt rage toward Lilly, and this deeply shamed me.
I knew my world wasn’t the same, for the easiest decision to make had been no decision at all.
* * *
It grew cold. Father and Mr. Bruckner became very drunk, I could tell as their laughter increased in volume. A group of nearby coyotes let up a raucous yipping, and I was glad Father and I were sleeping in the truck. The boy disappeared somewhere. I knew he was up to no good. At one point I saw two eyes winking back at me from the dark. I recalled that book, The Time Machine, where the Morlocks drag the soft Eloi off to eat, and I shivered.
We were to make the drive to Lilly’s research station just before dawn. So I left without a word. In the truck I curled up on the passenger’s seat, locking the doors. Sometime much later, Father fumbled with the keys, finally clambering into the driver’s side, his movements sloppy and hard. Then he did not move. I thought he was asleep but, after a while, he whispered: “I love you.”
I couldn’t recall the last time he’d said that to me. My breathing had been quiet before, but now it slowed to nothing. Finally, he began to snore loudly. I thought of an animal in its cave and of Mr. Bruckner’s beard and his clever nichrome wire and of hungry eyes peering out from the dark and of the animal intelligence behind those eyes.
How was it that such beasts could produce things as heavenly and as powerful as van Gogh’s Starry Night or the atomic bomb?
* * *
When I awoke, we were on the road. I wiped the side of my mouth and looked out of the window. The world stretched away as far as the eye could see, everything still in shadow, the sun not yet over the highest tops surrounding the valley.
“How far?” I asked.
“Not five minutes,” Father said.
I turned and looked behind us. “Where’s Mr. Bruckner?” I asked.
“Never slept.”
“Where?”
When he did not respond, I turned to him. “Where is he, Father?”
“He should have them ready,” he said.
Listening to him speak was to hear the voice of a prison guard ringing out over a metallic speaker.
“Perhaps it’s okay, what she’s doing?” I said. “It’s her life, after all.”
He was silent.
“I mean, who’s she hurting? And if this is what she wants?”
I kept hoping he would say something, anything, but his hands were tight on the wheel, his face unflinching. For all I could tell, I didn’t exist. I was floating somewhere outside of the truck, watching this tragedy unfold.
“If you love her, you’ll turn around,” I said at last.
Slowly, he brought the truck to a stop. He closed his eyes and set his head against the steering wheel.
“What you don’t realize, Sarah, is that this was inevitable. You think that if I had turned around, called back Bruckner, that it would have changed anything?”
“Yes,” I said, not understanding.
He shook his head. “There are lines of force at work here, things you cannot possibly untangle. Do you know I tried to quit? After Vietnam, I tried to get out?”
I did not and said so, shocked so deeply that I didn’t ask more. That he had tried to get out, and that I knew instantly that it was Mother who had prevented him, felt like the concluding act of some deep tragedy.
“Anyway, it’s too late,” he said.
“What?” But my voice did not seem to reach beyond my lips.
“It’s already done,” he said.
“No,” I whispered, but I thought of how he’d said Bruckner and that nasty boy of his were already there. They had already made things ready.
I’d been fooling myself, believing I could intervene at some later moment; like my life, I’d childishly done nothing to change the course of events, believing naively that there would always be more time.
He started the truck and we began to move. I thought of the alien costumes. Of the projector. Of the vial of medicine.
I began to cry.
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by J. T. Green
