He wonders if he would have missed them tonight if he hadn’t come home early. And he wonders if they'll come back. He
wouldn’t have been home, not when they came that is, except that his boss had asked him if he felt okay, if he wanted to leave
work early. At first he said, "No, I’m fine," but then he changed his mind. After all, it wasn’t often that the theater manager
volunteered to do something nice like let him leave before the last show was over, so he figured he should take advantage of it,
or rather, once he thought about it, he realized that, in fact, he really didn’t feel too good. He felt exhausted, run down, and if even
his boss noticed it, maybe he should leave early.
What finally made up his mind though was Marie saying she could cover for him. "It’s a slow night," she said, meaning that
there were maybe a dozen or so people in the theater. Of course, now that everyone and his dog had a VCR, most nights at the
Marquise Theater were slow, since not many people went out to see a movie anymore, or rather, they didn’t go to see movies
that would look just as good on their small TV screens: classics, art films, foreign films, any movie that didn’t have spectacular
car-chase scenes or airports blowing up or breathtaking panoramic shots of Africa or Hawaii or something. No, not enough
people wanted to see old movies like, say, Gaslight or Blow-up on the big screen anymore.
He thanked Marie, told her he’d make it up to her, and she smiled like, it’s no big deal, don’t worry about it. Then she asked him,
"You gonna think about it?" and he stared at her, blank-faced, so she added, "The earring. Think about getting your ear pierced."
He blushed, and she laughed, not amused by his reticence, but charmed by it. "I’m too old for that sort of thing," he said, but she
waved aside his protest, lightly rested her hand on his shoulder, and leaned close enough so only he could hear her whisper,
"Some things a body’s never too old for. You’d look sexy with an earring, maybe a simple gold stud or something. Make you feel
like a new man. Think about it." She gave him a friendly wink, and he told her he’d think about it, but he had to be going now.
As he left, he said goodnight to her and then to the big blonde kid with bad skin who worked the concession stand, and he
prayed he could slip out before the manager noticed, but he wasn’t that lucky. Before he could get past the glass doors, his
boss called after him, "Goodnight, Dave. Say 'Hi' to Mister Spock for me," and he laughed like this wasn’t the millionth time he’d
made that lame joke.
"Sure thing. Night." And with a tired sigh inside his head, he pretended to laugh as he hurried out of the theater.
Now he sits at home in his recliner, paying scant attention to the drone of the TV, wishing he could tell his boss to screw
himself. No, that wouldn’t do any good, probably just make things worse. What he really wishes is that he’d never told him
about them in the first place, that he’d never told anyone about them, maybe even that they’d never contacted him at all. Yes,
maybe even that. But for sure, he wishes he hadn’t told his boss at the Marquise. He only mentioned it to him once, but people
like that hold onto things, hold on like a bulldog with a favorite bone, slobbering all over it and never letting go. He doesn’t mind
much, the kidding that is, since the sneers are gone now. Long ago he learned to laugh along with the jokes, stale as they
were, and people started to think he’d been pulling their legs, and they stopped being nasty about it for fear it might seem like
they’d fallen for it, like they, not he, were the dupes. So now they joke about it, people like his boss, but with a hint of a bite when
they do, like they’re saying, "Pretty funny, Dave, but don’t do it again," and he usually lets it go at that. Still, it reminds him that no
one ever believed him. Not his friends, not his coworkers, not his sister, and especially not his wife. No one. And that always
bleeds a little something out of him.
#
As he looks down at the crumbled remains of the morning newspaper littering the floor around his recliner, he thinks about an
article at the bottom of the front page: "Kansas Farmers See UFO". As it turns out, none of them, those farmers in Kansas,
actually said they saw a UFO, just that they saw strange lights in the evening sky that were moving too fast to be airplanes. He
nods to himself. They were smart not to say too much, since no one would believe them anyway. People would call them crazy,
laugh at them, steal their dignity, even though they were only trying to tell someone--anyone--what they saw. He wonders why
there are so many UFO sightings in rural Middle America. Perhaps it’s due to the vast, inky blackness of the night sky in the flat
American Midwest, far from the glare of city lights, there in the cornfields and wheat fields which used to be great seas of grass
before we invaded them. Or maybe it’s just that people there are calling them somehow, calling the aliens, that is, like he used
to.
He had been fascinated with the idea of UFO’s when he was a boy growing up in Nebraska back in the flying-saucer-crazed
1950’s. He used to go out into the backyard on warm summer nights and shine a flashlight up into the sky, up toward the Big
Dipper or Orion, any constellation he fancied at the moment, blinking the light off and on in the Morse code he had learned in Boy
Scouts, a beacon to any wandering aliens looking for a willing subject to pick up and whisk away. After all, being abducted by
aliens seemed the easiest way out of the boredom of his life on his grandparents’ small farm where, orphaned, he had grown
up.
He tried to explain it to his sister once. "There’s miles and miles of cornfields and pasture lands out here, and it’s all dark, all
except this here flashlight. So, way I figure it, any space aliens up there will see my signal and come down here to investigate.
Then I’ll get to see their ship, see what they look like, maybe talk to them. Maybe they’ll even take me for a ride in their
spaceship!" His sister got scared and ran back to the farmhouse, not sharing his sense of adventure, his longing to visit the
stars. Or maybe she did, but not at the price of being carried away by creepy green monsters with fangs, eyestalks, and bumpy
gooseflesh. But he never got any takers, at least not back then, so she needn’t have worried. Decades later, however, she
worried about him even more when he told her about the ones who did visit him.
#
He looks up at a photo set in a simple aluminum frame atop a cluttered bookshelf beside the television. It’s a picture of himself,
years younger and with a full head of curly brown hair, and he’s flanked on either side by moss-green monsters--the photo is
black-and-white, but he remembers the colors well--with large, multifaceted eyes, scaly skin, and gaping grins displaying
dagger-like teeth. All three of them are waving at the camera, the two unearthly creatures displaying webbed and clawed hands,
and behind them a silver flying saucer stands on three stilted legs. They had been on the set for the first movie he ever wrote,
Marsh Monsters from Outer Space. A pretty, young brunette from the wardrobe department took the picture for him, and to thank
her, he took her out to dinner that evening.
"You’re crazy. You really are," she said after he told her all about Lounge Lizard, the next script he was working on. Then she
smiled and added, "But in a good way."
That was how he got to know his wife--his ex-wife, that is--telling her about a singer in a piano bar who gets mutated into a
gigantic, iguana-like creature by the radiation from nuclear waste buried beneath the bar. She didn’t laughed at the idea, at
least, not derisively, so he even got up the courage to sketch out some of his other ideas, to tell her that he was lucky to have
gotten into SciFi, and that there was a big future for movies like Marsh Monsters from Outer Space and Lounge Lizard, and she
believed him. And why not? He believed it too, didn’t he? That is, he believed there was a bright future for low-budget SciFi
movies. He wasn’t so sure about the "lucky" part of it, meaning that it wasn’t the type of writing he’d expected to be doing when,
after college, he’d rushed off to Hollywood to become a famous writer in the movie industry. But a job writing scripts for such
SciFi films, creating cheap parodies of the worlds that had refused to come to him when he was a boy, seemed a good enough
place to start while he waited for his big writing break.
The problem was that his big break never came. That and the fact that the golden prospects for such tawdry movies had
tarnished badly with the special-effects boom that followed in the wake of Star Wars.
#
His cat, Ulysses, jumps up onto his lap and demands to be petted. Absorbed in his thoughts, he strokes the cat with absent
attention until it slaps at his hand to remind him of his petting duty. He looks down at it and finds its large, golden eyes staring
up at him, a piercing gaze set in an impassive expression that reminds him of eyes he first saw years ago, eyes belonging to
two people who had seemed, unaccountably, out of place at the time.
The couple had parked their battered VW van on the street not far from where he sat on a park bench, just wanting to be left
alone, and they got out to ask him directions. He stared at them, a couple of hippies, both pale and slender with wide faces and
large, sensitive eyes. The man had long brown hair and wore a tie-dyed tee shirt and frayed bell-bottom jeans. The woman had
a shower of curly blonde hair falling over her shoulders and wore a peasant dress and sandals. Apparently this pair hadn’t
heard the latest fashion news. By that time, the mid-70’s, such attire was out-dated, not so much so that he was suspicious of
them, but enough that he found them curious. The woman sat down next to him and asked, "Do you know how to get to Griffith
Observatory?" or, "Can you direct us to the Observatory?"--something like that--and he gave them directions. He wasn’t in a
mood for conversation so soon after his son’s accident, but for some reason, perhaps it was just his good manners, he found
himself embellishing. That is, he not only gave them directions; he also offered chatty descriptions of the observatory,
anecdotes about its history, and tips regarding its programs--things like that. But that was all he discussed with them, the
Observatory and nothing else. At least, that’s how he remembered it, although afterwards he often dreamed about that
encounter, and he always awoke from those dreams remembering that in them he had talked to that strange couple about other
things, things he could never quite recall after he woke up.
"I had one of those dreams again," he’d tell his wife. Or he’d say, "I dreamed I told things to those two strangers--I don’t know
what exactly--about my life." Then he’d add, "You know, I don’t think they were human," and she’d tell him to forget it. "It’s just a
dream," she’d say, then look at him oddly, like she thought maybe he had started snorting coke or something, and she was
searching for evidence to support her suspicions, a trace of white powder under his nose maybe.
After a while she began to lose patience with him. One morning as amber sunlight slanted through the French windows into the
dining room, he insisted that he felt like they were watching him. His wife sighed and turned to the Metro section of the
newspaper. "In your dream, you mean?" she asked offhandedly, her attention fixed on the article she was reading.
"Well, yeah. That too, I guess," he said as he slowly traced circles in his scrambled eggs with his fork. "But then, after I wake
up. Then too. Sometimes I feel like they’re still watching me after the dream ends. After I wake up, I mean."
His wife neatly folded and laid aside the newspaper. She set down her coffee cup with a clink which echoed in the large room.
Her eyes narrowed slightly, and in a whisper which seemed to fill the room, she said, "I swear to God, I am sick of hearing about
these stupid dreams and these stupid little green men of yours." Before he could protest, she cut him off with a sharp flick of her
hand, a gesture that barely missed knocking over her coffee cup. "I don’t want to hear it. I don’t! You’re crazy. You really are,"
she said, her voice raising sharply with each word. She grabbed her cup, splashing coffee into the saucer, some of it splattering
onto the linen tablecloth, and she stood, screeching back her chair on the hardwood floor. Quivering with rage, she glared at
him, then drew a deep breath to calm herself. With the ice in her voice beginning to melt, she said, "You need help, David.
Professional help. Understand? And if you don’t get it..." Her voice trailed off as if it were falling down a well, and he stared at
her, any possible reply frozen in his throat. She turned and hurried out of the room.
So against his better judgment, he resigned himself to finding a psychiatrist. "It couldn’t hurt," he told himself, but deep down
inside he wasn’t so sure about that. Just the thought of going to a psychiatrist was painful, but he went anyway. It seemed a
small enough sacrifice to make for some measure of domestic tranquillity.
He explained to the psychiatrist that he would be willing to consider the possibility that there was some sort of psychological
explanation for his dreams if she would consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, something extraordinary really had
happened to him. And if so, he wanted to learn how to deal with it, not to destroy it. That is, he wanted her to understand how he
felt: that his wife’s scorn, his friends’ jokes, and her clinical labels--all the things that other people did to deny his experience--
were robbing him of something magical, or at least, something special.
He soon realized that his psychiatrist was convinced from the start that his encounter with aliens was all in his head, that he had
made it up for some obscure reason, a reason which she was determined to ferret out. "Did you feel guilty about your son’s
autism?" the psychiatrist asked him, and he said, "No," because he never had. In fact, he told her that he had always felt that
Jason was a very special little boy, different from other children, yes, but not bad or damaged, so why should he feel guilty? She
tried another approach, asking him if he felt responsible for his son’s death, or rather, did he blame himself for not taking better
care of the boy, not protecting him from the accident. He had to stop and think about that one. Actually, he didn’t have to think
about the answer. Of course he felt guilty, responsible; what parent wouldn’t? Rather, he was wondering how truthful he should
be, knowing what the psychiatrist would make of such an admission. Finally he decided there was no sense paying this woman
$75 an hour and then lying to her, so he said, drawing out each word carefully, "Doctor, have you ever seen a child of yours die?"
She shook her head sadly, compassionately--or was it just cautiously?--and he continued, "Well if you had, you’d know that not a
day goes by that I don’t wonder if there wasn’t something I could have done, anything I could have done differently that day that
would have saved Jason’s life. Anything."
The psychiatrist’s office was silent for a minute, and he waited to be told that his grief, or maybe his sense of guilt, had created a
hallucination of an alien visitation. Mercifully, the psychiatrist knew better than that, could see that such banality would only insult
his love for his child, his sorrow over his son’s death. Instead, she shifted her focus away from his contact with aliens and
explained to him that he had to let go of his son, to say goodbye to him, so he could retake control of his own life. He politely
thanked her, and when his hour was up, he left her office, knowing she was right, yet also knowing he wasn’t ready to say
goodbye to his only son.
He never went back to her, or to any other psychiatrist, again. He stopped telling his wife about his dreams too, but it was too
late. She knew, and the damage was done.
#
Continued on page 2
wouldn’t have been home, not when they came that is, except that his boss had asked him if he felt okay, if he wanted to leave
work early. At first he said, "No, I’m fine," but then he changed his mind. After all, it wasn’t often that the theater manager
volunteered to do something nice like let him leave before the last show was over, so he figured he should take advantage of it,
or rather, once he thought about it, he realized that, in fact, he really didn’t feel too good. He felt exhausted, run down, and if even
his boss noticed it, maybe he should leave early.
What finally made up his mind though was Marie saying she could cover for him. "It’s a slow night," she said, meaning that
there were maybe a dozen or so people in the theater. Of course, now that everyone and his dog had a VCR, most nights at the
Marquise Theater were slow, since not many people went out to see a movie anymore, or rather, they didn’t go to see movies
that would look just as good on their small TV screens: classics, art films, foreign films, any movie that didn’t have spectacular
car-chase scenes or airports blowing up or breathtaking panoramic shots of Africa or Hawaii or something. No, not enough
people wanted to see old movies like, say, Gaslight or Blow-up on the big screen anymore.
He thanked Marie, told her he’d make it up to her, and she smiled like, it’s no big deal, don’t worry about it. Then she asked him,
"You gonna think about it?" and he stared at her, blank-faced, so she added, "The earring. Think about getting your ear pierced."
He blushed, and she laughed, not amused by his reticence, but charmed by it. "I’m too old for that sort of thing," he said, but she
waved aside his protest, lightly rested her hand on his shoulder, and leaned close enough so only he could hear her whisper,
"Some things a body’s never too old for. You’d look sexy with an earring, maybe a simple gold stud or something. Make you feel
like a new man. Think about it." She gave him a friendly wink, and he told her he’d think about it, but he had to be going now.
As he left, he said goodnight to her and then to the big blonde kid with bad skin who worked the concession stand, and he
prayed he could slip out before the manager noticed, but he wasn’t that lucky. Before he could get past the glass doors, his
boss called after him, "Goodnight, Dave. Say 'Hi' to Mister Spock for me," and he laughed like this wasn’t the millionth time he’d
made that lame joke.
"Sure thing. Night." And with a tired sigh inside his head, he pretended to laugh as he hurried out of the theater.
Now he sits at home in his recliner, paying scant attention to the drone of the TV, wishing he could tell his boss to screw
himself. No, that wouldn’t do any good, probably just make things worse. What he really wishes is that he’d never told him
about them in the first place, that he’d never told anyone about them, maybe even that they’d never contacted him at all. Yes,
maybe even that. But for sure, he wishes he hadn’t told his boss at the Marquise. He only mentioned it to him once, but people
like that hold onto things, hold on like a bulldog with a favorite bone, slobbering all over it and never letting go. He doesn’t mind
much, the kidding that is, since the sneers are gone now. Long ago he learned to laugh along with the jokes, stale as they
were, and people started to think he’d been pulling their legs, and they stopped being nasty about it for fear it might seem like
they’d fallen for it, like they, not he, were the dupes. So now they joke about it, people like his boss, but with a hint of a bite when
they do, like they’re saying, "Pretty funny, Dave, but don’t do it again," and he usually lets it go at that. Still, it reminds him that no
one ever believed him. Not his friends, not his coworkers, not his sister, and especially not his wife. No one. And that always
bleeds a little something out of him.
#
As he looks down at the crumbled remains of the morning newspaper littering the floor around his recliner, he thinks about an
article at the bottom of the front page: "Kansas Farmers See UFO". As it turns out, none of them, those farmers in Kansas,
actually said they saw a UFO, just that they saw strange lights in the evening sky that were moving too fast to be airplanes. He
nods to himself. They were smart not to say too much, since no one would believe them anyway. People would call them crazy,
laugh at them, steal their dignity, even though they were only trying to tell someone--anyone--what they saw. He wonders why
there are so many UFO sightings in rural Middle America. Perhaps it’s due to the vast, inky blackness of the night sky in the flat
American Midwest, far from the glare of city lights, there in the cornfields and wheat fields which used to be great seas of grass
before we invaded them. Or maybe it’s just that people there are calling them somehow, calling the aliens, that is, like he used
to.
He had been fascinated with the idea of UFO’s when he was a boy growing up in Nebraska back in the flying-saucer-crazed
1950’s. He used to go out into the backyard on warm summer nights and shine a flashlight up into the sky, up toward the Big
Dipper or Orion, any constellation he fancied at the moment, blinking the light off and on in the Morse code he had learned in Boy
Scouts, a beacon to any wandering aliens looking for a willing subject to pick up and whisk away. After all, being abducted by
aliens seemed the easiest way out of the boredom of his life on his grandparents’ small farm where, orphaned, he had grown
up.
He tried to explain it to his sister once. "There’s miles and miles of cornfields and pasture lands out here, and it’s all dark, all
except this here flashlight. So, way I figure it, any space aliens up there will see my signal and come down here to investigate.
Then I’ll get to see their ship, see what they look like, maybe talk to them. Maybe they’ll even take me for a ride in their
spaceship!" His sister got scared and ran back to the farmhouse, not sharing his sense of adventure, his longing to visit the
stars. Or maybe she did, but not at the price of being carried away by creepy green monsters with fangs, eyestalks, and bumpy
gooseflesh. But he never got any takers, at least not back then, so she needn’t have worried. Decades later, however, she
worried about him even more when he told her about the ones who did visit him.
#
He looks up at a photo set in a simple aluminum frame atop a cluttered bookshelf beside the television. It’s a picture of himself,
years younger and with a full head of curly brown hair, and he’s flanked on either side by moss-green monsters--the photo is
black-and-white, but he remembers the colors well--with large, multifaceted eyes, scaly skin, and gaping grins displaying
dagger-like teeth. All three of them are waving at the camera, the two unearthly creatures displaying webbed and clawed hands,
and behind them a silver flying saucer stands on three stilted legs. They had been on the set for the first movie he ever wrote,
Marsh Monsters from Outer Space. A pretty, young brunette from the wardrobe department took the picture for him, and to thank
her, he took her out to dinner that evening.
"You’re crazy. You really are," she said after he told her all about Lounge Lizard, the next script he was working on. Then she
smiled and added, "But in a good way."
That was how he got to know his wife--his ex-wife, that is--telling her about a singer in a piano bar who gets mutated into a
gigantic, iguana-like creature by the radiation from nuclear waste buried beneath the bar. She didn’t laughed at the idea, at
least, not derisively, so he even got up the courage to sketch out some of his other ideas, to tell her that he was lucky to have
gotten into SciFi, and that there was a big future for movies like Marsh Monsters from Outer Space and Lounge Lizard, and she
believed him. And why not? He believed it too, didn’t he? That is, he believed there was a bright future for low-budget SciFi
movies. He wasn’t so sure about the "lucky" part of it, meaning that it wasn’t the type of writing he’d expected to be doing when,
after college, he’d rushed off to Hollywood to become a famous writer in the movie industry. But a job writing scripts for such
SciFi films, creating cheap parodies of the worlds that had refused to come to him when he was a boy, seemed a good enough
place to start while he waited for his big writing break.
The problem was that his big break never came. That and the fact that the golden prospects for such tawdry movies had
tarnished badly with the special-effects boom that followed in the wake of Star Wars.
#
His cat, Ulysses, jumps up onto his lap and demands to be petted. Absorbed in his thoughts, he strokes the cat with absent
attention until it slaps at his hand to remind him of his petting duty. He looks down at it and finds its large, golden eyes staring
up at him, a piercing gaze set in an impassive expression that reminds him of eyes he first saw years ago, eyes belonging to
two people who had seemed, unaccountably, out of place at the time.
The couple had parked their battered VW van on the street not far from where he sat on a park bench, just wanting to be left
alone, and they got out to ask him directions. He stared at them, a couple of hippies, both pale and slender with wide faces and
large, sensitive eyes. The man had long brown hair and wore a tie-dyed tee shirt and frayed bell-bottom jeans. The woman had
a shower of curly blonde hair falling over her shoulders and wore a peasant dress and sandals. Apparently this pair hadn’t
heard the latest fashion news. By that time, the mid-70’s, such attire was out-dated, not so much so that he was suspicious of
them, but enough that he found them curious. The woman sat down next to him and asked, "Do you know how to get to Griffith
Observatory?" or, "Can you direct us to the Observatory?"--something like that--and he gave them directions. He wasn’t in a
mood for conversation so soon after his son’s accident, but for some reason, perhaps it was just his good manners, he found
himself embellishing. That is, he not only gave them directions; he also offered chatty descriptions of the observatory,
anecdotes about its history, and tips regarding its programs--things like that. But that was all he discussed with them, the
Observatory and nothing else. At least, that’s how he remembered it, although afterwards he often dreamed about that
encounter, and he always awoke from those dreams remembering that in them he had talked to that strange couple about other
things, things he could never quite recall after he woke up.
"I had one of those dreams again," he’d tell his wife. Or he’d say, "I dreamed I told things to those two strangers--I don’t know
what exactly--about my life." Then he’d add, "You know, I don’t think they were human," and she’d tell him to forget it. "It’s just a
dream," she’d say, then look at him oddly, like she thought maybe he had started snorting coke or something, and she was
searching for evidence to support her suspicions, a trace of white powder under his nose maybe.
After a while she began to lose patience with him. One morning as amber sunlight slanted through the French windows into the
dining room, he insisted that he felt like they were watching him. His wife sighed and turned to the Metro section of the
newspaper. "In your dream, you mean?" she asked offhandedly, her attention fixed on the article she was reading.
"Well, yeah. That too, I guess," he said as he slowly traced circles in his scrambled eggs with his fork. "But then, after I wake
up. Then too. Sometimes I feel like they’re still watching me after the dream ends. After I wake up, I mean."
His wife neatly folded and laid aside the newspaper. She set down her coffee cup with a clink which echoed in the large room.
Her eyes narrowed slightly, and in a whisper which seemed to fill the room, she said, "I swear to God, I am sick of hearing about
these stupid dreams and these stupid little green men of yours." Before he could protest, she cut him off with a sharp flick of her
hand, a gesture that barely missed knocking over her coffee cup. "I don’t want to hear it. I don’t! You’re crazy. You really are,"
she said, her voice raising sharply with each word. She grabbed her cup, splashing coffee into the saucer, some of it splattering
onto the linen tablecloth, and she stood, screeching back her chair on the hardwood floor. Quivering with rage, she glared at
him, then drew a deep breath to calm herself. With the ice in her voice beginning to melt, she said, "You need help, David.
Professional help. Understand? And if you don’t get it..." Her voice trailed off as if it were falling down a well, and he stared at
her, any possible reply frozen in his throat. She turned and hurried out of the room.
So against his better judgment, he resigned himself to finding a psychiatrist. "It couldn’t hurt," he told himself, but deep down
inside he wasn’t so sure about that. Just the thought of going to a psychiatrist was painful, but he went anyway. It seemed a
small enough sacrifice to make for some measure of domestic tranquillity.
He explained to the psychiatrist that he would be willing to consider the possibility that there was some sort of psychological
explanation for his dreams if she would consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, something extraordinary really had
happened to him. And if so, he wanted to learn how to deal with it, not to destroy it. That is, he wanted her to understand how he
felt: that his wife’s scorn, his friends’ jokes, and her clinical labels--all the things that other people did to deny his experience--
were robbing him of something magical, or at least, something special.
He soon realized that his psychiatrist was convinced from the start that his encounter with aliens was all in his head, that he had
made it up for some obscure reason, a reason which she was determined to ferret out. "Did you feel guilty about your son’s
autism?" the psychiatrist asked him, and he said, "No," because he never had. In fact, he told her that he had always felt that
Jason was a very special little boy, different from other children, yes, but not bad or damaged, so why should he feel guilty? She
tried another approach, asking him if he felt responsible for his son’s death, or rather, did he blame himself for not taking better
care of the boy, not protecting him from the accident. He had to stop and think about that one. Actually, he didn’t have to think
about the answer. Of course he felt guilty, responsible; what parent wouldn’t? Rather, he was wondering how truthful he should
be, knowing what the psychiatrist would make of such an admission. Finally he decided there was no sense paying this woman
$75 an hour and then lying to her, so he said, drawing out each word carefully, "Doctor, have you ever seen a child of yours die?"
She shook her head sadly, compassionately--or was it just cautiously?--and he continued, "Well if you had, you’d know that not a
day goes by that I don’t wonder if there wasn’t something I could have done, anything I could have done differently that day that
would have saved Jason’s life. Anything."
The psychiatrist’s office was silent for a minute, and he waited to be told that his grief, or maybe his sense of guilt, had created a
hallucination of an alien visitation. Mercifully, the psychiatrist knew better than that, could see that such banality would only insult
his love for his child, his sorrow over his son’s death. Instead, she shifted her focus away from his contact with aliens and
explained to him that he had to let go of his son, to say goodbye to him, so he could retake control of his own life. He politely
thanked her, and when his hour was up, he left her office, knowing she was right, yet also knowing he wasn’t ready to say
goodbye to his only son.
He never went back to her, or to any other psychiatrist, again. He stopped telling his wife about his dreams too, but it was too
late. She knew, and the damage was done.
#
Continued on page 2
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