Communion: A True Story (13 page)

Her gaze seemed capable of entering me deeply, and it was when I had looked directly into her eyes that I felt my first taste of profound unease. It was as if every vulnerable detail of my self were known to this being. Nobody in the world could know another human soul so well, nor could one man look into the eyes of another so deeply, and to such exact effect. I could actually feel the presence of that ocher person within me — which was as disturbing as it was curiously sensual. Their eyes are often described as "limitless," "haunting,"' and

"baring the soul." Can anything other than a part of oneself know one so well? It's possible, certainly. To an intelligence of sufficiently greater power, it may be that we would seem as obvious as animals seem to us — and we might feel as exposed as do some dogs when their masters stare into their eyes.

The realization that something was actually occurring within me because this person was looking at me — that she could apparently look into me — filled me with the deepest longing I can ever remember feeling . . . and with the deepest suspicion.

I wondered that night in the cabin if it was the sheer impact of the experience that had fixed the image of this being so vividly in my mind, or had communion somehow come alive within me? And was she still here in some sense . . . watching even as I sat before my fire?

As I remembered her I found myself filling with a formless question. Groping for what it was that perplexed me, I recalled an exchange that now came to seem very important. I'd had a very distinct impression of her, that she was old. Not just aged, like an elderly person, but
really
old. Why had I felt this? I could not be sure.

I still remember her voice, soft, coming from I know not where, answering me: "Yes, I'm old." When she spoke in my head, there was a lilting quality to it. But when she used her voice, it was startlingly deep to be coming from so slight a creature. It was more than a bass: It sounded like it was booming out from the depths of a cave.

I remembered my protest to her when she reassured me about the operation not hurting me. The sense of helplessness was an awful thing to contemplate. "You have no right," I had said.

"We do have a right." Five enormous words. Stunning words.
We do have a right
. Who gave it to them? By what progress of ethics had they arrived at that conclusion? I wondered if it required debate, or seemed so obvious to them that they never questioned it.

The fire before me sputtered. I opened the vent on the stove and it obediently flared up again.

Maybe their right came from a different direction than one might think. If they were a part of us, it might be that we granted them the right they assert.

Listening to the crackle of the fire mingle with the ticking of the clock, I thought that perhaps I might welcome voices of instruction. After finishing
Nature's End
with James Kunetka, I began to feel strongly that the present world situation was unsustainable. I did not think that the world was actually ending, but I could easily have been persuaded that the biosphere would soon change so catastrophically that an immense amount of human life would be lost.

I wondered if a mind, contemplating terrors such as this, might provide itself with gods, if only to ease the burden of being alone with the fear.

If they were real visitors, though, I wanted to know the ethics behind their assertion of their "right." Of course, we ourselves barely question our rights over the other species on earth. How odd it was to find oneself suddenly under the very power that one so easily assumes over the animals.

I thought of some lowing cows, their bells tinkling on a long-ago Texas evening, or of my cat asleep on my lap back in the city. trusting its little self utterly to an affection that to me was casual, but to Sadie was the center of the universe.

I remembered when my father took me to a slaughterhouse in Fort Worth. and I heard the rumble of panic and saw the bucking backs of the steers and the creamy whites of their eyes.

I smelled the slick of manure and urine and blood, and heard the steady crunching of the blows and the blare of the saws.

And at a research institute in San Antonio I saw monkey cages with rows of doctored capuchins, shaved, their pink heads sewn or laid delicately open, and the trembling brain probes and the gabble of noise when the vocalization center of one of them was stimulated for the information of graduate students.

What did the monkey with the needle in its brain think of its observers? Were they gods to whom it submitted itself with a noble passivity because it could do nothing else? I saw monkey carcasses in the dumpster, too.

Try as I might, I simply did not have the feeling that the visitors were applying the same cold ethic to their relationship with us as we did to ours with the animals. There was something of that in it though, very definitely. I had been captured like a wild animal on December 26, rendered helpless and dragged out of my den into the night.

Nor did I feel that they were simply studying me. Not at all. They had changed me, done something to me. I could sense it clearly that night but I could not articulate it.

Later, I thought to myself that they were taming me. Maybe this gradual increase in the intimacy of contact that has occurred over the years has to do with that: They are taming us all.

After the dialogue about rights, the female called me their chosen one and I proceeded to get mad. I viewed it as a ploy and reacted with scorn. She wagged her head from side to side, singing "Oh. no. Oh, no." There was insistence in her voice, and humor.

I distinctly remembered seeing a woman wearing a flowered dress being told this. But where? When. The memory was free-floating, without reference. There was just this woman in a white floral-pattern dress standing before a group of them shouting "Praise the Lord" as she was told she had been chosen.

Maybe what they meant was that we have all been chosen — and we are all being tamed.

Nobody has ever domesticated mankind. We are thus a wild species, as wild as the day we first went howling across the savanna. Perhaps the self-taming process of becoming a civilized species did not tame us to visitors, but only to ourselves . . . and then not very well, given our violent history.

That first night back at the cabin, I looked at the couch where they had left me on December 26. I wondered if the old earth did not settle in some obscure, internal way just at the moment I came to consciousness there. Perhaps its low-frequency emissions changed and I fell not from that hidden room in the sky but rather from some lurching walkabout in my own night house. I wondered if there was any relationship between my experience and the mystic walk of the shaman, or the night ride of the witch.

I had read far in the works of mystical search and mythology, and in retrospect it surprised me that I would be so amazed when I finally reached down into the darkest part of the soul and found something there. Now that I was back at the scene of my experience, I felt that I always knew what I would find, and that all of my surprise was itself a sort of illusion.

I reflected that the abduction to a round room had a long, long tradition in our culture: There were many such cases in the fairy lore. The story called "Connla and the Fairy Maiden," as collected in Joseph Jacobs's
Celtic Fairy Tales
(Bodley Head, 1894, 1985). could with some changes be a modern tale of the visitors.

As suggestive as this was of the possibly historical roots of the experience, it was no more definitive of that origin than the whole texture was of the notion of recent visitors.

Maybe the fairy was a real species, for example. Perhaps they now floated around in unidentified flying objects and wielded insight-producing wands because they have enjoyed their own technological revolution.

Every time one decides either that this is psychological or real, one soon finds a theory that forcefully reopens the case in favor of the opposite notion.

The most difficult part of my hypnotic material was the sudden regression to 1957. How could I explain that, even in terms of visitors? To do so, I had to revise my whole understanding of what my life had been. At the beginning of this chapter I described myself as being deeply upset by that unexpected regression. Well, that was true.

But it was no more than a mild state of unease compared to how I felt after I had made a careful inventory of my past.

FOUR

A child said What is the grass?

fetching it to me, with full hands;

How could I answer the child?

I do not know what it is

any more than he

-WALT WHITMAN. "Song of Myself,"

from Leaves of Grass

THE SKY BENEATH MY FEET

A Journey Through My Past

The Journey Back

SUMMER, 1957

The more I thought about it, the less able I was to accept the idea that this had been happening to me most of my life. When Budd Hopkins asked me if I remembered anything in the past, I did mention a few odd incidents. The memory of being taken from the train was not among them.

If I accepted that this happened and that it was buried even more completely than the events of October 4, then what else must I accept? Inevitably, that my conscious life was nothing more than a disguise for another reality. It is easy to speculate about such a thing on an idle evening, but when one considered the terrific intensity of the experience I had remembered, thinking that this might have happened again and again had the potential to shatter me.

Still, I could not simply reject the notion. Why should I? Because it seemed improbable?

All
of this seemed improbable. As an experiment I decided to return to my past and see just what I could come-up with. As best I was able I reviewed the years for hints of this material.

I wondered, though, how I could ever tell if the seeking and the finding were the same act.

Maybe nothing happened on that train. Probably nothing did, and there is no way to tell. I would need some sort of corroboration before I could even begin to entertain it as a serious possibility.

It seemed like a trick of the mind. Then I remembered that hypnosis session. and I thought to myself that the real trick of the mind might be happening now. My memories were so spontaneous. and seemed so vividly real. Not the faintest suggestion was made that I regress to age twelve. And vet . . . I now remembered that row of' soldiers sleeping on those tables just as well as I remembered the drawing room of the train we were on.

To protect my sanity. I had to believe that this was a comprehensible thing. If it was contact, then it must be proceeding
somewhat
along lines I could understand. They've been here for a while. Fine. Lately, because I moved to an isolated area, they found me. That I could at least entertain. But I could not accept the notion that they were so totally involved in my life.

I found a photograph of myself during the spring of my twelfth year, which showed me to the uniform of St. Anthony's School in San Antonio. Here was a child so clean he seemed to have been polished along with the brass crossed rifles on the collars of his uniform. The picture is inscribed: "For my dear father with love. Whitty."

The neatness was a total deception. It couldn't have lasted more than the precise amount of time it took to snap the picture. At twelve I was usually involved in mischief of' one sort or another. I was rarely clean. I was rarely even still.

I looked into the child's eves. He did not look haunted to me, that boy just flirting with puberty. In May of that year my younger brother had been born. and the house was consequently in upheaval. only some of it pleasant. I spent much time in my room reading.

That summer I read
Life on the Mississippi
and it was also the summer of my discover, of'

Kafka. One afternoon I found my mother reading
The Metamorphosis
. After that I read The Trial. I'd go down to the San Antonio Public Library on the bus and, sit in the big reading room under the fan and read Kafka until the librarian started getting uneasy, then I'd shift to Robert Benchley for the balance of the afternoon.

My smiling face hid a person full of conflicts, trying to cope with the sudden presence of an infant to an established home and discovering under the sheets at night that the sins the older boys whispered about were real, and were they ever sins!

I was deeply conflicted about my Catholicism, wondering whether the tenets of my faith could be fitted to the picture I was forming of the world. I asked why the pope hadn't saved the Jews from Hitler. I asked why the Church had burned people at the stake, and what on earth did abstaining from meat on Friday have to do with getting to heaven? And if the worst punishment in hell was to get a glimpse of heaven and not get to go, then what about the nuns in Limbo who were there caring for the unbaptized babies the angels didn't want to bother with? They'd had more than a glimpse of heaven. They'd been there for a while. So wasn't sending them to Limbo actually sending them to the depths of a personal hell?

The pope closed Limbo before we worked that one out in catechism class, unfortunately.

Still, my faith was a burning fire in me. I loved Christ and Mary especially, and used to pray with great fervor whenever I was trapped into going to church. Then the priest would invariably say, "Go, the mass is ended," when there were still ten minutes left. But why?

At home I got hold of a book by George Gamow about relativity. Suddenly I understood how the nuns could take Limbo. I understood why the mass did and didn't end at the same time. It was all relative. Einstein, in describing the physical universe, had also described the internal logic of the Church, enabling me to preserve my faith.

But when I brought up Einstein with my mother, she said, "We are Catholic. Catholics are absolutist." She and I would spend hours together sitting on the front-porch steps talking. We discussed everything from general relativity to the price of tennis shoes. I used to try to talk her out of her religiosity, but she was a Catholic intellectual in the heady days of the fifties, when the mass was still full of mystery and there were many fascinating and subtle potentials for sin.