"Mouth open?"
"Yeah."
"When his mouth was opened, it was round?"
"Yeah. Puckered. Big puckered."
"Did you see him when he wasn't smiling?"
"Yeah, when he was doing the operation on me." "What kind of operation?"
"Well, it was kind of like a test."
"What did he do?"
"It was a disease on my arm."
"He did something to your arm?"
"No, wait. He kept your nose cold like when you eat a lot of ice cream."
"Did it hurt?"
"No, not really."
"You say you were examined on the porch. What do you mean by that?"
"Well, they took me onto the porch. There was no way to get me into an operation room because of all the moving equipment. And then by the porch light I mean kind of like the outside lights at the country house. You know at the country house there's that porch light?"
"Yeah."
"That's the light that was on. Then they took special lights and examined my nose and took X rays and stuff." (This last statement could easily be a buried memory of a babyhood injury to his nose. which involved an X ray to determine whether it was broken. But this memory seems to be mixed in with other material of a totally different nature.)
"What kind of lights?"
"Some were blue lights and they would look through the front of it and the blue light would make them see through me without an X ray."
"And there was an orange light that was supposed to see not my bones but the inside skin and what was happening. Instead of having X rays and stuff, they had lights. They had big lights. Green lights."
"Ever remember a dream where a monster came in the house and Mommy fainted? What's that from?"
"That's one of my journal stories."
"Yeah. Why'd you make that one up for your journals Do you know?"
"I don't know Not really. I remember it vaguely. Because I wrote that one along time ago." (Early Call. It watt now March.) "It was free journal story period and I couldn't think of anything. I was tossing and turning in my desk truing to think of something. And then suddenly that dream just popped in my head "
"What was it like, that dream?'
"I was in a — I didn't explain it totally on the journal. It was in a cornfield, my mommy and me, and I was chewing on a piece of corn and my mom was telling fairy tales. And then suddenly this big, big — about let's say from the lobby of this building up to the top — hovered over us. It was colored orange, green, had blue feet." (Orange and green are colors associated with lights on the flying disk that has been seen in our area.)
"It was a thing, like an animal or a creature?"
"It wasn't like anything. It was just this big, massive thing. It had these big bumps all over it that were blue and its feet were orange —"
"Do you suppose you were seeing something flying over- you that was blue and orange and green, and you were confused as to what it was?"
"It was like it was flying. Kind of."
At this point I felt that I had made a mistake with me last question, in that it was so heavily weighted with suggestion. I concluded our conversation by reassuring my son that he'd had some really neat dreams that were very interesting to hear about.
He then went about his afternoon business, reading Tin-Tin and making a St. Patrick's Day card for his grandmother.
I sat in my chair, haunted by what my son had said. Most particularly, I thought of the incident in the cornfield. I will relate a dream I had had shortly before we spoke.
The three of us were together in the English countryside to my dream. We had rented a cottage. The inside of the cottage was identical to our cabin. I was confused, because Anne and our son were not there and it was already the evening. I was sitting up in bed when I got a call on the phone. I remember saving to the caller. "No, it's all right, they're full staving out all night." On some level I was full of fear. but on another I seem to have accepted their disappearance by justifying it to myself
In the middle of the night there was a knock at the front door. I opened it to find my son in the company of a group of "rescue workers," ordinary men and women with deep, soft, and loving faces. My son was naked except for a dark blue cap that one of them had put on his head. He was moving strangely, as if he had no control over his own muscles. His eves looked as if he were in some sort of trance. I gathered him in my arms, because they told me that touch and hugging would bring him back to normal. Then I looked around for my wife.
They shook their heads sadly, and the care and love radiating from their eyes was such that I was not bereaved but reassured that she would be back soon.
Then I was abruptly transported to another place. I was given to understand that Anne and our son had been found here, hiding. It was a cornfield. just like our son's dream.
At bedtime that night he wanted to talk more about dreams. I did not record our conversation, but he complained of two things. The first one was that when he started to go to sleep, his whole body would tingle and he would feel as if his hair were standing on end. A voice would then ask him about his day. how he felt, and "private things" which he did not wish to discuss with me.
He also complained that he saw a skeleton looking at him when he was trying to relax.
The conversation went as follows:
"A skeleton?"
"Yes, and it keeps staring at me like it was right in front of my face and it won't go away "
"What does it look like?"
"Well, its — oh. It's not a skeleton, it's one of the thin ones that stood around behind the doctors."
"What thin ones?"
"You know, the thin ones that are always saying 'We won't hurt you'? Them. It's not a skeleton, it's one of the thin ants."
The appearance of these people has never been discussed with my son at all, not by anybody, and vet his description of short ones and taller, thin ones is not only consistent with my own observations, it is consistent with the experiences of many of the other people who have encountered the visitors.
He had bought a book of haiku at the Strand used-book store that afternoon, a book entitled A Net of Fireflies. I did not tell him that I had bought the same edition when I was twenty and living with my grandmother, and derived immense pleasure and comfort from it.
He wanted us to read haiku to one another. I read:
With tender impact on the icy air,
The peach-buds burst: their silken petals flare.
He smiled his huge smile and commented, "That was really a lot of pictures for so little words." Then he read:
Without a sound the white camellia fell
To sound the darkness of the deep stone well.
Afterward he said, "Dad, you know, we like the haiku and all the beautiful words. But the thin ones, it's like they are the haiku. Inside, they are haiku."
That night a father staved a long time with his child, wondering about the soft fire of communion that might be hidden between the breaths of his life.
SIX
No building ever came into being as easily as did this temple — or rather, this temple came into being the way a temple should. Except that, to wreak a spilt or to desecrate or destroy it completely, instruments obviously of a magnificent sharpness had been used to scratch on every stone — from what quarry had then come? — of an eternity outlasting the temple, the clumsy scribblings of senseless children's hands, or rather the entries of barbaric mountain dwellers.
-FRANZ KAFKA,
" The Building of the Temple"