Communion: A True Story (16 page)

So whatever the visitors did, they did not damage me in a way detectable to our science.

And I am not a temporal-lobe epileptic. The temporal lobe-disorder hypothesis was now triply weak: The physical consequences of what happened and the witnesses mitigated against it to begin with, and now the temporal-lobe EEG suggested that I was not an epileptic.

Moreover, the beef "transients" postulated by, Dr. Persinger could not account for the elaborate experiences I had undergone. Only a full-scale epilepsy could account for them.

So far no hypothesis would explain the motive of the visitors — or the self-confidence they showed by inserting their probe through my germ-filled nasal cavity and into my brain.

No doctor would ever do that, which also means that these are not buried childhood memories of operations. There is no operation that proceeds as the visitors do, jabbing their needles up the nose. What's more, the nasal intrusion is not an epileptic prelude. Mine did not occur until weeks after I had remembered and reported my first experience. Far from suggesting a disorder of some sort, the consistency of the stories and the reported side effects

— nosebleeds and nasal damage — were a strong suggestion that something real was happening.

Had the temporal-lobe intrusion initiated my experience, I would be tempted to suggest that perhaps all my perceptions were somehow tied to it. But the intrusion did not initiate the whole experience. It may well have profoundly altered my perception of what happened to me — and all my past memories as well. Perhaps that is what it was meant to do.

I thought back over the previous few weeks. Most of the things that had happened since December were well documented, in the sense that I had immediately told others as soon as I was aware that they had happened.

Besides the visitation of March 15, which I will discuss in detail in a later chapter, there was one earlier incident that is worth recounting, because it was this incident snore than any other that opened the door to the past. And it did this via my sense of smell. Again, it happened before the apparent temporal-lobe intrusion, not after.

The night of Friday, February 7. we spent in out apartment to the city. I was absolutely frantic. I had an awful feeling. I felt their presence. It was palpable. Most upsetting, I could smell them. I could smell a distinct odor as if of smoldering cardboard, and it was familiar from the past. My wife could also smell this odor; it was one we had both smelled man, times. Until now, though. I had not understood its significance. There was also another odor.

as if of cheese and cinnamon, that I remembered from December 26.

I remained lying in bed. sweaty and sleepless. But I was shocked to discover that hour hours had passed without my noticing. very suddenly. I was reading at midnight, turned a page. and saw by the clock that it was four A.M. and I was no longer wearing my pajamas.

When I got up the next morning I found two little triangles inscribed on my left forearm. I don't know what happened, and there is no way at all to explain the event in a conventional manner. The larger triangle was quite straight. delicately incised in just the outer few skin layers as if by the work of a skilled master surgeon. The other triangle. very tiny. was pointing at the larger one.

On the morning of February 8, I stood looking down at those triangles with the shower pounding on my back. I also remembered the odors I had smelled the night before. Odor is an excellent trigger of memory, and the odor of smoldering seemed to unlock a lot of doors.

I last smelled it in 1972 or 1973. My wife and I had gone down to San Antonio to see my family, and we were sleeping in my sister's old bedroom on the second floor of the house.

Across the hall was another bedroom, which had been mine when I was a boy. In the middle of the night I suddenly awoke with the impression that I'd just heard a loud noise. I decided to get a glass of water. As I left our bedroom I noticed a strange smell, like smoldering cardboard.

As I went toward the bathroom to get my water, a small, dark figure with a red light in its hand burst out of my old bedroom and dashed downstairs. I was momentarily astonished, but decided that it must have been a family member. The fact that this individual was much smaller than a human being did not bother me in the least, nor even give me pause. Why not?

Maybe for the same reason that none of us remembered the events of the night of October 4.

Maybe I was led to reason thus.

There are reports of visitors carrying small lights, and the fairy lore contains dozens of instances of "fairy stones" that glowed.

There was no sequel to the appearance of the small figure, except perhaps a family member's comment the next morning that he had had a terrible nightmare. Nothing further was said then, and he does not now remember the incident at all, much less the contents of the nightmare.

I am amazed to think how much of a fugitive I have been. Another individual I have met who has had visitor experiences, a young woman whose story of a disappearing pregnancy is medically documented as not being of hysterical origin, also describes a lifetime of running.

"All of my life I wanted to move to New York because of the lights and the people."

So did I. And it turns out that she lives a block from me. We have both been running like mad, and we wound up around the corner from one another. A coincidence? Probably, but the mind seeks for large and subtle designs, images in clouds, hunters marching the stars, always for the hidden sense of the world. The same urgency to understanding that drew early man to imagine the constellations in the random spatter of the night sky might draw me to make false connections. And yet, without a general theory of coincidence, how could I know what was finally true? I searched on, deep into my past.

At the age of nine I had been sleeping out with a friend on a lovely Texas summer night when something woke us up in the wee hours, perhaps an owl killing a rat, the stopping of the crickets, or moonset. In any case, we found ourselves awake and deliciously alone in the dark. We went exploring the quiet slips of the night, through our familiar places, the wide lawns and tangled bushes, all transformed by shadows into a new world. The vacant lot behind our house was then an acre of tall sunflowers, taller than either of us boys. We were wandering through these stalks when we heard someone coming toward us. My friend turned and ran. I stood there, then turned and ran as well. When I reached our sleeping bags I was astonished to find him already so completely asleep that I could not wake him up. How could he have gone from running in terror to being dead to the world like that? And why was he still outside at all? Why hadn't he gone running into the house? Again, our behavior was totally at variance with our experience.

He and I also saw a huge object cross the sky one summer night, an event that I have always remembered as particularly strange. I called him after a lapse of twenty five years. We talked for some time, then I asked about those two nights. I told him nothing specific about my other experiences, nor did I discuss visitors. Of the first memory he said, "We were probably just scared by a dog." He had this to say about the second: "Oh, yes, I remember that thing. It was huge. It looked just like a — well, it was strange-looking. And there was a black car." I remembered that, too. Immediately after the object passed overhead an old black car showing no lights went racing down Elizabeth Road in the same direction that the object had gone.

Were these descriptions of events as they had happened, or screen memories? Perhaps, if great care is taken, a method can be devised of finding an answer to such questions, a method more reliable than hypnosis.

I also recalled flying with some people over the roofs of the neighborhood in a thing like a rubber raft, and waking up on more than one morning with bits of grass and twigs in my bed, as if I had been abroad to the night.

There wasn't anything else even that specific, except for a memory of a terrifying round object hanging in some forgotten babyhood sky, and seeing a crowd of big, gray monkeys coming up across the hillside. Apparently this took place at my grandmother's country home when I was about two, which would have been in the summer of 1947.

From the night at age nine to an event in Austin in September 1967, there were few specific recollections except those that emerged under hypnosis, and none was clear. By 1967

I was attending the University of Texas. In the last week of August I had just rented a new studio apartment and moved back to Austin from San Antonio for the semester when I had an experience I now understand to have been what is known as a "missing time" experience, lasting at least twenty-four hours.

I had moved into the apartment the day before and was sitting on the couch about noon eating a TV dinner when I was confused to discover that the dinner seemed to have hopped from my lap onto the coffee table and gone cold. Now I wonder if there might not have been a period of missing time at that point. I remember getting up to rehear the food and noticing that it was already two P.m. I decided that I had fallen asleep while eating. I put the TV

dinner in the oven and turned on the timer to heat it for fifteen minutes. Then I turned back to the oven to check the temperature setting. I was suddenly woozy, my mouth dry, and the sun was going down outside! The dinner was cold again, and I had — and have — no memory of how the intervening hours had passed I got scared, deciding that I had been the victim of blackouts, and tried to make a phone call for help. It was midnight by the oven clock when I put my hand on the phone. There was no discontinuous memory at all, no sense of being unconscious. One moment the timer showed a little after six and the sky outside the kitchen window was glowing, then I moved toward the phone and the timer showed midnight and the sky was black. It was exactly as if six hours had somehow passed in less than a second. I then began trying to make my way out of the dark apartment. I was terrified. I shook with fear, and I was so thirsty I could barely stand it. The next thing I knew, I was in front of the sink.

The water was running and running into a full glass. My watch said four-fifteen. I rushed out the door of the apartment, and found myself in the cool of a Texas predawn. At this point I remembered something of awesome beauty taking place in the sky, which I later told friends must have been a display of the Perseid meteor shower, which was not active then but had been early in August. I drove to an all-night restaurant called the Nighthawk on Guadalupe Street and had a huge breakfast of toast, eggs, bacon, cereal, coffee, and at least six glasses of orange juice. When I described this singular twenty-four hours to Jim Kunetka, who is good at coining words, he invented a name for my state. He called it a "larconic trance." For years we have laughed about the larconic trance, but I am not laughing anymore. There is no evidence that I suffer from any malfunction of the brain. And I was as sane then as I am now.

Some weeks later there was a frightening sequel. I was lying in bed at my grandmother's house to San Antonio, reading
Time
magazine. It was late at night and I was about to go to seep. In those days I used to stay with my grandmother when I went to San Antonio because my brother, then a teenager, had effectively taken over my old room at home.

Lying in that bed wide awake I had an experience so strange and frightening that I remember it to this day with total clarity. I was suddenly transported back in time and back to Austin a few weeks earlier. I leaped into my car and backed out of the apartment house parking lot. It was night and the windows of the car were closed. I couldn't see out at all. In fact, I could see nothing but the reflection of the inside of the car. I was so blind that I was forced to stop. Something approached the tar. I was frightened to see, peering in the window with its face pressed almost to the glass, what seemed almost to be a demon with a narrow face and dark, slanted eyes. It spoke to me its a high, squeaky voice, and I remember saying that we couldn't leave the car out in the middle of the street.

Then I found myself in an agonizing struggle. I was at once in the car, fighting to keep driving away but unable to overcome an urge to get out and go back into the apartment, while simultaneously fighting, in the real world, an overwhelming urge to -get out of bed and rush outside. I lay on the bed, flopping like a fish. Then it ended. Contrary to my impression, I did not move an inch. The magazine was still propped up in my lap. I could see my grandmother in her bed in the room across the hall, reading quietly. This terrible nightmare had obviously caused not a stir.

Long into the night I lay with the light on. Toward dawn I slept. I believe now that this was a nightmare memory of an attempt I made to escape whatever unearthly thing happened to use in my apartment in Austin. I was reliving an experience which at the time it happened was so unspeakably terrifying that I still don't recall the actual event, only the dream.

There then began a pattern of running that has persisted in my life until the present. A few weeks later I suddenly became obsessed with the notion of getting away from the University of Texas, out of the United States, of going wherever I could, as far away as possible. I fantasized about living in a nice little apartment in some enormous city. I wanted bustle and bright lights, not the sparse Texas landscape and the starry nights.

I didn't have much money, so I contrived various means of getting enough to leave. I obtained a loan from the Minnie Stevens Piper Foundation in San Antonio to study film at the London School of Film Technique. I earned some money translating Seneca's
Thyestes
into English and converting the translation into a film script for the U.T. Department of Radio, Television and Film. I worked as a camera operator. By January 1968 I had saved enough money and I left for London. I have never in my life been so glad to see the back of a place as I was to see the back of Texas. For years I have explained my sudden departure by saying that I couldn't stand the place after the Charles Whitman sniper incident. The truth was, I could have remained after that incident. It was my secret terror that drove me away.