Was that it, then? Wren asked her. All she remembered before therapy?
No. She remembered being rescued. She’d grabbed onto a piece of wood-or it grabbed onto her. Who knows? That’s what saved her. An old cellar door. She was on it for at least a day before they found her.
Who found her? Wren asked. The police, the firemen?
No, she said. Not the police or firemen.
Then who?
Aliens.
Wren managed to keep his incredulity in check. He asked her to tell him about that. The aliens.
Well, they weren’t exactly aliens, she explained. Not at first. It was their robots.
I was on the door. I remember being hungry and thirsty and wet and feeling like I was in this dream that I just couldn’t wake up from. There were all these dolls in the water, floating Raggedy Anns and Raggedy Andys. But they weren’t dolls, of course. When my therapist took me back, I saw them. All the dead people in the water, hundreds and hundreds, open-eyed, but like the eyes of dead fish, you know, that white, filmy, soulless look. They kept bumping up against the storm door, bobbing up out of the water as if they were trying to climb up there with me, but of course they couldn’t. They were all dead. That’s when the robots came.
Wren asked her to tell him everything she remembered about the robots.
She was drifting, she said. Maybe she’d even fallen asleep. She suddenly woke up, heard this kind of sloshing sound. They were coming through the water for her. White robots. They had arms and heads, but no hands or faces. That’s how she knew they weren’t human. They moved in slow motion, like mechanical dolls.
How many? Wren asked.
Six or seven, she said.
And did they speak to her?
How could they? she reminded him. They had no faces, no mouths. They just made these clicking sounds-like dolphins.
The robots had lifted her up from the cellar door. Then they’d carried her off.
Where? Wren asked.
Their spaceship.
I was on this table. Some of this stuff I always remembered, and some of it came back later under hypnosis. I was strapped onto this metal table and they were examining me with these awful-looking instruments. As you know, or don’t know, that’s pretty common with alien abductions. Have you ever read Whitley Schreiber’s book?
Wren said he hadn’t.
She explained that it was pretty much the bible among alien abductees. Schreiber had been abducted three times.
Wren said he’d be sure to pick up a copy. He asked her to go on.
I was on the table, she said. I couldn’t move my arms and legs. There was this… light shining down on me-a kind of blue glow-it was endless, as if there were no real source to it, understand? They were staring at me.
Wren reminded her she’d told him that the aliens didn’t have eyes.
Those were the robots, Bailey corrected him. These were the aliens. She was in their spaceship now. The aliens had eyes. But no mouths. Which means they couldn’t speak to her, either. But they could communicate with her. They could put their thoughts into her head. Like telepathy.
What thoughts were those? Wren asked her.
Well, she couldn’t really remember exactly. That she shouldn’t be afraid, mostly. That they weren’t going to hurt her. Even if that didn’t turn out to be entirely true.
A couple of things did hurt. They put some of the instruments inside me-my mouth, and, well… lower down. I remember crying and asking for my mom and dad.
Wren asked her to describe what the spaceship looked like.
She couldn’t really see it. She was strapped down. There was this blue light boring into her eyes. She could only see them, pretty much. The aliens. There were a bunch of them. But one alien-he seemed to be their leader.
He was the one right there, examining me. The others seemed to be… well, kind of like his helpers.
It went on and on, she said. As if she were strapped onto that table for days. She knew it couldn’t have been days, that it wasn’t possible she was there that long, but that’s what it felt like. Then it was just over.
Wren asked her if she could describe that. How it ended?
She couldn’t.
That’s the part I don’t really remember. They must’ve put me back-that’s all.
Where? Wren asked.
Somewhere dry. Somewhere people could find me. I guess they did-because I’m here, right? The lone survivor and all that? I was a big story for a day or two. Of course, if it had happened now, they’d put me on CNN. Not those days. Anyway, I was taken in by cousins in Sacramento. And I’ve never been back-not that there’s anything to see, I guess. It all washed away.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The next morning, Wren was still absent.
I walked into his cabin to return his notes and make some coffee.
I was only half-successful.
He’d gone into Fishbein for supplies, he’d said. He needed them. He was out of coffee-seemingly out of everything.
A gray mist was hovering inches above the lake. It felt like fall. I half expected to see swirling leaves carpeting the ground.
On the way back to the highway, I reached over to turn up the heat just as a panicked deer flew across the dirt road. It clipped my hood with its back hooves, then tumbled off into the brush.
I lurched to the right and stopped dead, then took a good minute or two to catch my breath.
My heart wasn’t the only thing racing. My mind was too, replaying Bailey Kindlon’s surreal story. Floating houses spinning down the street. Hundreds of dead people bobbing around the water. The part of her story that was real.
Do you believe in fairy tales?
If you did, you would have to believe in the rest of her story. Little blue aliens with no mouths. White robots with no faces. Medical exams in the bowels of a spaceship.
A fairy tale worthy of the Brothers Grimm. If they were on mushrooms maybe.
I drove straight down the PCH without stopping.
The forests thinned, the surf quieted, the steep cliffs turned into flat sand, the B amp;Bs into motels and fish fries. I found a classic rock station with a DJ named Frankie Foo and tapped the steering wheel to “Soul Sacrifice,” “Layla,” and “Brown Sugar.”
When the sun went down, I could just make out the Ferris-wheel lights on the Santa Monica Pier. It made me think of my one and only childhood visit to an amusement park. Not really a park-one of those traveling carnivals with junky rides and shoot-water-in-the-clown’s-mouth concessions. After Jimmy died. After I told the police and the caseworkers that he slipped on the ice. That he fell in the tub. That he walked into the door. What happened, Tommy? An accident. He was clumsy. At the carnival my mom took her lying son for a spin around the Ferris wheel, then threw up while we were suspended at the top. The resulting screams had nothing to do with the cheap thrill of being carted up to the stars. One sniff of her breath once we were back on the ground was enough to secure her a lecture on responsible child-rearing-this from an itinerant barker who looked like he did a fair amount of drinking himself. It was enough to swear me off carnivals forever-though not enough to swear her off Jim Beam. Do you still blame her? Dr. Payne had asked me. He meant did I blame her for being a drunk-for being verbally abusive, for fucking anything in pants. He didn’t know what I really blamed her for.