Communion: A True Story (17 page)

My first few months in London were bliss. I felt as if a burden had been lifted. The school was fun. I spent a great deal of time in film-history classes watching old movies. My nights were occupied at the National Film Theatre watching more old movies. I met interesting friends. Then, in July, there was another incident. I cannot recall what happened with any clarity. It was simply too confusing, too jumbled. I was at a friend's flat in the King's Road, Chelsea. For years I have described it as a "raid" from which I escaped by "crossing the roofs." What I actually remember is a period of complete perceptual chaos, followed by the confusing sensation of looking down into the chimney pots of the buildings. Then there was blackness. I woke up the next morning in my own place with no idea of how I got there.

Whatever may or may not have happened in the flat was never acknowledged or referred to again by anybody who was there, with one exception, which I will recount in a moment.

The next day I decided to leave London for the Continent. I couldn't stand England for another week, not another hour. One of the people who had been present in the flat warned me against going, saying that I would "never come back." I scoffed. It was to be a two-week vacation. He said that he would get a witch to cast a spell to bring me back. I thought, What
superstitious nonsense
. Recently I looked him up and asked him about this incident. He couldn't think why he had acted as he did, although he remembered a feeling of dread being associated with my journey.

I took the train to Italy, second class. On the train I met a young woman and we began to travel together. At this point my memories become extremely odd. If I do not think about them they seem fine, but when I try to put them together they don't make sense. I recall that we went to Rome, but that we spent a few days in Florence on the way. For eighteen years I told the story that I stayed in Florence for six weeks. But when I went there in the summer of 1984 to promote Mondadori's Malian edition of
Warday
, I realized that I had almost no memories of the place. Even so, I placidly accepted this anomaly. For some reason, I left the young woman in Rome and dashed off on the train with no ticket, traveling almost at random.

I ended up in Strasbourg, where I saw the cathedral, then suddenly rushed to the station and grabbed another train, a local, that crept across France, ending in Port Bou on the Spanish border. There I took a Spanish train to Barcelona. I was broke, so I holed up in a back room in a hotel on the Ramblas. I can remember nights of terror, being afraid to put out the light, wanting to keep the window and the door locked, living like a fugitive, never wanting to be alone, haunting the Ramblers, grateful for the unceasing crowds. The rest of the memory is a jumbled mess. I am just not certain what happened, except that I lost weeks of time. I remember something about being on a noisy, smelly airplane with someone who called himself a coach, and something about taking a course at an ancient university. I also recall seeing little adobe huts, and expressing surprise to somebody that their houses were so simple I returned to London in an odd way, weeks later than I had planned, with no way to explain those weeks. I cannot say how I got back. What I do know is that I found myself outside a hotel at about six in the morning. I went in and booked a room, then slept until noon. After lunch I went to my lodgings and found that my room had been let and my belongings stored in a trunk in the basement. The management was quite put out. They told me that I had said I would be gone for no more than two weeks and had disappeared for much longer. Since I had not kept a my rent, my room had been given to another student on their long waiting list.

At the time, I simply accepted all this, stayed with a friend for a while, then found a fiat on Westmoreland terrace in Pimlico, where I lived until December 1968. If such incidents were a frequent occurrence in my life, I might suspect some sort of trance or fugue state.

There are certainly many odd incidents, but they are too variable in their nature to suggest the symptomatic consistency of disease.

I recall little more until the spring of 1977. From 1970 until then, my wife and I live in a two-room fiat on the top floor of an old building on West Fifty-fifth Street in Manhattan. We were happy there, if cramped. Our marriage grew solid there, and we became confirmed in our life together. One evening in April 1977, something so bizarre happened that I still cannot understand why we didn't make more of it. With both of us sitting together in our living room, somebody suddenly started speaking through the stereo, which had just finished playing a record. We were astonished, naturally, when the voice held a brief conversation with us.

The voice was entirely clear, not like the sort of garbled message sometimes picked up from a passing taxi's radio or a ham operator. Never before had it happened, and it didn't happen again. I do not remember the conversation, except the last words: "I know something else about you." That was the end. I was left dangling. We did not completely ignore the incident. I called the Federal Communications Commission. A man explained to me what I already knew, that ham radios and taxis and police radios sometimes interrupt stereos. But a conversation, he asserted, was impossible. Our stereo had neither a microphone nor a cassette deck. It was a KLH, a good and relatively inexpensive model readily available in the midseventies. At the time, I'd had it for about four or five years.

A few weeks later I became possessed of an overwhelming desire to move. Anne agreed.

There were good reasons: We needed more space, and I'd gotten a nice raise (I was then working in the advertising industry). We could afford a move. By the end of May we .were living on West Seventy-sixth Street on the top two flours of a brownstone. All went well there until the next year. In June 1978 something terrible happened in the middle of the night.

I have variously thought of it as a phone call followed by a menacing visit, and as a series of menacing phone calls. I do know that I called the police, and they came up and checked out the roof, finding nothing. I remember only looking out our, bedroom window onto the roof garden and seeing somebody standing there. Just a prowler, perhaps, but it has always seemed to me that there was more to it than that.

Again without relating the incident to a subsequent sudden desire to move. I almost immediately decided to move to Connecticut. We rented a house in Cos Cob, the term to begin in July 1978. We then left :dew York for Texas, spending most of the intervening weeks there. We slept no more than a few additional nights in that apartment. Again, we felt we had good reason to move. We had forgotten the horrifying incident, whatever it was, and attributed what in retrospect seems the obvious outcome of panic to a rational desire to leave the city. Because Anne was pregnant, we wanted to get out of our walk-up. It never occurred to us that we were making a radical move to another city almost on the spur of the moment.

We were running, but we didn't know it.

We didn't remain in Cos Cob for a full year. In early 1979 I was awakened by the bizarre impression that there were people pouring in through the windows of our rather isolated house. I was terrified. We had a new baby. I remember trying to get to him and that is all I remember. A few nights later we were awakened by the neighborhood filling with terrible screams. Even though we called the police, they never came, and nothing was ever said by neighbors about the shrieking. Within weeks we had left Cos Cob because we were "tired of the country" and wanted to get back to city living.

An interesting further occurrence of screaming took place in August 1986 in Provincetown, Massachusetts. We were staying with friends. In the middle of the night we were awakened by truly bloodcurdling shrieks coming, it seemed, from above the house.

Neither our friends nor anybody we spoke to the next day had any memory of anything unusual happening that night-except for one person. When I asked him if he'd slept well, he said that he'd been awakened by screaming. His house was about a mile from ours. He, also, has had a visitor experience in his past.

In January 1980 we took an apartment on the top floor of a high rise on East Seventy-fifth Street. All went well until September of that year. This episode began when I saw a strange light streak down the night sky. It moved faster than an airplane and left me with the feeling that it had something to do with me. I was deeply and inexplicably moved, and left with an obscure foreboding. In the middle of the night we were awakened by our son's crying. He was desperate, almost wild with terror. I rushed into the living room, heading for his bedroom. I recall the impression of a small, dark figure dashing toward the sliding doors that led to our thirty-third-floor balcony. Then there was a terrific explosion and beads of glass burst out of the pantry. I kept running for my terrified baby. reaching his crib after what seemed an eternity. I cradled him in my arms while Anne rushed through the house turning on lights.

Then she took our son and I went to see what on earth had happened. A siphon of seltzer had exploded, so violently that the glass was reduced to ads, to dust. There wasn't a trace of the water that had been inside. Anne cleaned up the mess while I calmed our son. Then we went back to bed.

In November we closed on a co-op and by January 1981 had moved again, this time to our present apartment in the Village. A dozen times I have told a story of being menaced by an old college acquaintance, whose terrifying appearances and phone calls had driven us from our Seventy-sixth Street walk-up to Cos Cob, then from there to the East Seventy-fifth Street high-rise. and finally to the Village. A part of this myth is the kindly detective who hypnotized me and enabled me to identify this individual by listening to his voice on a tape.

Then we put a stop to his game by simply phoning him back after one of his vicious calls. But it didn't happen: none of it happened. It's just a screen memory, like the story of the six weeks in Florence that never happened. (After I realized that I had not actually been there that long, I began to believe another story, that I had gone to Russia and then to France. and been caught in the French strikes of 1968-without reference to the fact that they ended two months before I crossed France.) But why do I need these absurd stories? They are not lies: when I tell them. I myself believe them. I don't lie. Perhaps I tell them to myself when I tell them to others. so that I can hide from myself whatever has made me a refugee in my own life.

A year passed in the Village. quite pleasantly and uneventfully. Then came what we called the incident. of the "white thing." It took place in the apartment and began with the most down-to-earth member of our family. Anne. One night she woke up screaming and reported that something had poked her in the stomach. She had seen it. too: It was translucent white and about three feet tall. She was greatly agitated. Naturally, we took this to be a nightmare. Nothing more was said about it. Certainly, nothing was said to our son.

The next night at about ten I was sitting up and reading. Anne had just turned over to go to sleep. Suddenly I was struck on the arm. As I turned I saw a small, pale shape withdrawing into the hall. I jumped up and followed it, only to find the hall empty. It hadn't been our son: He was peacefully asleep in bed. Again, Anne and I hardly discussed the incident. When she asked me why I'd gotten up, I muttered something about her nightmare being contagious. The next morning I noticed a distinct bruise on my arm, but assumed that I must have banged into a table or something.

A few nights later our son suddenly began screaming the house down. I leaped up out of bed and went to him. He was terribly frightened. He said that "a little white thing" had come up to his bed "and poked me and poked me."

Neither Anne nor our son showed any physical evidence of injury.

The next Sunday Anne and I were at a wedding reception. I called home and our babysitter's mother answered the phone. She said that there had been some trouble, but everything was all right. Needless to say, we went home, leaving the reception almost before it had begun and incurring the permanent anger of the bride and groom. Something had happened to the sitter. She said that she'd been cooking her dinner when a child in a white sheet had startled her by peering into the kitchen from the fire escape. Only my wife heard this story. I did not. We have tried to find this sitter, but it's been years and we know that she did not remain in the area past that semester. We cannot remember her name. There is thus no way to tell whether my wife remembers the story correctly. We finally realized that there was something weird about the white thing. I have to admit that my thoughts went to Casper the Friendly Ghost. Strangely enough, there are other instances of a similar white figure appearing in the context of the visitors, and even acting very much as this one had acted.

However amused I might outwardly have been about the incidents, within a few weeks I was on the run again. The co-op went on the market, although we once again didn't relate our desire to move to any disturbances. We had decided to move back to the Upper West Side.

But this time thins weren't so easy. We couldn't get enough for our pace to enable us to have as much space in a more expensive neighborhood. We finally quit trying.

In late March 1983 something happened. I walked out to get a breath of air for a few minutes and found myself returning three hours later. Anne hadn't been home and our son was in school, but the experience was so inexplicable to me that I invented an elaborate fantasy of having imagined myself back in old New York for the missing hours. I have told many friends this lovely story. I realized as I thought back that it didn't happen. It was a pleasant cover story, obscuring some other events. The truth is I don't know what happened to me during those three hours. I don't even know if I left the apartment. I was just gone.

We finally gave up trying to sell the co-op and instead bought the cabin, which brings me back to the present.

Emotionally, I have a great deal of trouble with the notions of spaceships and visitors. I simply cannot help it, even though I have a feeling that I might seem to future generations to be obtuse. In view of the evidence, the reason for my reticence is obscure, but it is not so different from the reluctance of most of my friends with scientific or academic backgrounds to entertain the visitor hypothesis comfortably.