A Burned-Over District

  Chapter 6

  Back home again after the book club meeting, with Albert down for the night and Lu getting ready for bed, I finally took a look at Matt’s website, as much out of curiosity as to record my own observations. Matt had decorated the home page with graphics of streaking comets, spaceships, flaming satellites in mid-reentry, deities with their gleaming heads poking out of clouds, ET-type extraterrestrials, and a lot of dancing question marks. There were dozens of sightings already posted, some strictly objective, others emotional and even inflamed. One guy, from the very tiny town of Demerit CA, swore he’d seen prancing horses hauling a fiery chariot, and even heard the rumbling of celestial wheels. An elderly widow in Reno, emerging from a casino on her way to an all-night steakhouse, had looked up to see what was clearly a spaceship in distress, breaking up in the atmosphere. She heard a sizzling sound and smelled burning flesh as the lights passed over, spinning off flaming debris and chunks of alien bodies. And our own Madame Malesherbes, French and Latin teacher at Mildred High and an amateur ham radio operator, claimed to have discerned fragments of a Morse code message in the pulsing of the lights. Her report was generally discounted by the other online commentators because the three words she’d decoded had apparently been in French, and then why would the aliens use Morse code, when hardly any humans knew it any more?

  Most of the observations were somewhat more measured than these, although in the whole list I could only find one other person who believed the lights had been meteors entering the atmosphere. Unfortunately, he was a Chilean radio astronomer, or claimed to be one, who had not observed the phenomena in question. Nearly all the witnesses focused on the lights’ erratic behavior – the starts and stops and changes of brightness and direction – as indications of their supernatural or at least extraterrestrial origin. Most of them were especially impressed by the slow lowering of the lights onto the dark desert and firmly believed that a thorough search out there would yield something interesting. One problem was that they had all, no matter how far north or south, seen the lights land due east of them, which meant we had several thousand square miles of desert to comb over. Alien visitation was the most popular interpretation by a margin of almost two to one, although there was a strong subset who saw the lights as a clear sign from God, calling for behavior adjustments on our part ranging from a ban on homosexuality to imposition of stiffer gas mileage standards on SUVs. Most of the religious respondents (my wife was one of these) had adopted the more nuanced position originally voiced by Father MacGill, suggesting that the lights were indeed a sign, but that we couldn’t know what it meant. Instead, we were being called to examine our lives and adjust our behavior and secret thoughts as needed. Margaret Quitclaim had posted her own vision of the lights as a sort of mass psycho-mythical manifestation that, whatever its source, provided our desert community with an unparalleled opportunity to transcend its mundane daily life and tap into the ancient universal reservoir of human spirituality. At the opposite end of the spectrum, two or three skeptics pegged the event as the kickoff of a clever advertising campaign.

  The Cowboys had also checked in, along with a small contingent of other anti-government enthusiasts. The theories favored by this group included advanced weaponry, communications, and/or space vehicle testing, secret laser surveillance of the population, mind control by way of subliminal messages encoded in the lights, or some kind of nuclear accident whose fallout was already irradiating our bone marrow, with effects that might not reveal themselves for 50 years but would certainly be devastating.

  There was even a tiny group that was trying to bridge the alien and government theories, regarding the sighting as evidence for (A) Federal collusion with the extraterrestrials, with the goal, of course, of subjugating the unsuspecting people of America, or (B) a titanic space battle between NASA and the aliens. These observers cited the two different colors of the lights, their rapid maneuvers, and the final crash out on the desert. The aliens, with their super-advanced technology, would doubtless prevail in this unequal contest; but it was bracing to think of our brave, anonymous astronauts up there, battling desperately like medieval knights charging a panzer division.

  Many of these folks had clearly spent some time reading the other entries, and the sheer number of sightings, occurring in many different locations along a north-south axis 200 miles long, had convinced most observers that there had been not two lights but dozens of them; that if only they hadn’t been distracted by their own lights’ spectacular behavior they might have noticed others to the north and south – a massive, invasion-like event, in fact. This accounted in part for the popularity of the alien visitation theory, although it didn’t rule out any of the other explanations either, except of course the meteor theory. The absence of observations since Christmas Eve, far from casting doubt on the whole idea, merely served to increase the certainty and uneasiness of this faction. What were “they” doing out there, anyway? When would they show themselves? How should we be preparing for first contact?

  After reading through all these interesting scenarios, along with a few more sober evaluations – all of which, however, eschewed any natural explanation – I entered my own observations, sticking strictly to the facts and not speculating, although I did include a rather tart comment at the end to the effect that everything I’d seen was perfectly consistent with the idea of a meteor breaking up in the upper atmosphere.

  I read my statement over a few times, with a vague sense of dissatisfaction. I was sure my theory was correct; but it lacked fire and mystery, not to mention the clash of pulsed radiation weapons in the icy vacuum of outer space. It also lacked the giant admonishing and sheltering Hand of God, and even the fumbling, prurient hand of the Federal government. I felt a kind of mild contempt for all these gullible people inflating their silly visions of movie monsters or praying to incandescent space dust, and I was particularly annoyed at Matt Matawan, who I thought should know better. So after a while I did something bad: I went to hotmail, created a new e-mail account for myself under an alias, and crafted a whole new observation.

  In my new identity I was a 40-year-old female ex-Olympic equestrian rock-climber/particle physicist, who’d been out exercising my fiery steed in the desert atop Devil’s Table when the lights had appeared, at first motionless, but then suddenly moving directly toward me at frightening speed, growing in size and intensity, surrounded by an enormous, flickering envelope of glowing air, and preceded by a powerful shock wave that badly frightened my horse. The glowing cloud had halted abruptly a few hundred yards to the south of me, and once the pinkish aura of ionized nitrogen had faded I could see that the two lights, one white and one green and both of an unearthly brilliance, marked opposite points on the circular rim of a vast, dark vessel, which was hovering silently and slowly lowering itself into the sagebrush.

  Naturally I couldn’t go too far with this without risking assignment to the same category as the Reno gambler lady and her sizzling alien body parts. I’d wanted to go a little closer, I told my presumably avid readers, to get a look at the occupants of this menacing apparition, but was unable to convince my horse to approach it. In any case, once the thing had landed, I hadn’t heard or seen anything else – no hiss of airlocks, no slanting ramps of celestial light from inside the thing, no communications in unknown tongues. There was only darkness and an ominous silence. I had finally given up waiting and had cantered back to my spread, chilled in body and soul.

  On Christmas Day I had gathered my courage and driven out to the site of the landing on Devil’s Table, which I cautiously approached on foot. Nothing was to be seen there now except a large, perfect circle of almost imperceptibly flattened sagebrush. Since then, examining the area at night with binoculars (I had to confess to a superstitious fear of going out there in the dark), I had sometimes noticed an odd glow flickering along the tops of the desert scrub. Furthermore, my border collie, Agamemnon, had been restless and irritable ever since Christmas Eve and had completely given up hi
s usual diversion of herding the chickens, while my two cats were depressed and sleeping nearly 24 hours a day.

  I was terribly relieved, I added, to read the reports of all the other believers in the extraterrestrial explanation. It was they who had given me the courage to come forward, knowing that there were at least some who understood what I’d experienced and would not ridicule me. Nevertheless I felt that for the time being it was safer not to reveal my name, exact location, and especially the research institution that employed me as a telecommuting theoretical physicist. The site administrator, I was sure, would be completely unsympathetic, and I was already in a precarious position as a blond female in a field dominated by men of the old school. But I urged the administrator of the website, and anyone else who read my report, to redouble their search efforts. There was definitely something out there, and it made my skin crawl to think that “they” were busy doing whatever it was they were doing, while we were all hypnotized by our smart phones. I thanked them all for their trust and signed off as “Shocked and Awed.”

  I sat for a long time, re-reading this effort with my cursor on the Send button, thinking maybe I’d had enough fun just writing the thing, and it wasn’t really necessary to let anyone else see it. I suppose I should have let it sit overnight, which is my usual habit, before deciding whether to send it. But the malicious current in my thinking was a little too strong, and in the end I clicked. Reading it over, it seemed to me that it was an obvious hoax anyway, that only the nut cases would buy into it, and that Matt’s suspicions would immediately be raised by, if nothing else, the anonymity of the entry. And no one matching the description of my blond particle physicist bombshell could possibly have concealed herself out in this tiny desert community. Matt would just add my posting to the crazy folder and go about his business.

  Lu was already in bed, asleep, bathed in the dim glow of the bedside lamp, when I went upstairs. Mervyn’s head and pointy ears protruded from the blankets next to her. I got under the covers, bellied up to the two of them, and drifted off to sleep, moved and saddened by the transient warmth of their fragile bodies.