Thomas M. Disch (9 page)

One good thing had come of it. She knew with absolute certainty that no matter what awful mess she might get into in the future, she would never, ever do such a dumb thing again as try to kill herself. She knew it the moment she’d come to, when her first thought was: I could have gone dogsledding.

All her life, ever since she’d read
The Call of the Wild
, she’d dreamt of going up to the area north of Duluth to go dogsledding. Greg actually had a friend in Boy River who took people on dogsledding trips, camping out overnight on frozen lakes and fishing through the ice. If she had killed herself, she would never have been able to realize that dream. Or anything else she’d ever wanted to do. She would never know how things worked out on
General Hospital
. She would never know what she might look like as a redhead, supposing she could ever get up the nerve to dye her hair. There were hundreds of things she’d never do or know about, and all because she’d had the imbecile idea of killing herself with her mom’s sleeping pills. Jesus, she was lucky.

The fact remained that she was also in deep trouble. Never mind the embarrassment of calling off the wedding. That would be no great loss. They hadn’t been able to afford anything especially wonderful. No caterers, no reception, not even a bridal gown rental, since there wouldn’t be anyone to see her wear it. The ceremony wouldn’t have been in the main church, which was also awfully expensive, but in the chapel around to the side—the wedding equivalent to the kind of funeral they give to suicides or homeless people—and in a way Alison was relieved not to have to go through the motions of pretending to be the radiant bride. It would have been like one of her wretched birthdays, with little candles stuck in Hostess cupcakes and her mom woozy with booze and self-pity. Who needs that kind of celebration?

No, her real problem was the one located inside, and not inside her mind. Inside her uterus.

She did not want the baby. Not if it meant living here in the trailer with her mom, instead of marrying Greg and having her own place to live. Not if it meant dropping out of school and wasting all the time she’d clocked in, including the whole summer when she’d taken the makeup course in algebra.

Not if it meant becoming someone like her mom. Alison was grateful to her mom. She’d made real sacrifices in bringing up Alison all by herself. But it had taken a terrible toll. And it would do the same to Alison, because she wasn’t that different. After twenty years of unemployment or jobs waitressing or changing bedpans, with boyfriends and booze as the only antidotes to the drudgery, Alison would be another Lila. At thirty-seven, while other women still looked like movie stars, she’d be a fat, bitter, alcoholic failure with a child who couldn’t think about her without feeling ashamed.

Abortion? Could she really be thinking of an abortion? Pious Miss Sanders, who’d taken such shit from her classmates when she’d been seen on TV

picketing the same abortion clinic on Cedar and Lake she might now be going to herself?

Well, why not? If she’d been that afraid of spending eternity in hell, she wouldn’t have kept jumping back into the sack with Greg at every opportunity. Each time they’d fucked was a mortal sin, and the abortion would be only one more added to the tally, with the advantage that once this sin was done, she wouldn’t be tempted to repeat it on a regular basis.

The number she needed was in the phone book. She knew because Greg had pointed it out to her when she’d first told him the good news. She dug out the phone book from where it was buried under a stack of old magazines and ran her finger down the first column of names under
A
. There it was: Abortion Central Information. 555-6116.

She dialed the number, and after five rings, a man’s voice said, “This is Abortion Central Information. Can I help you?”

Alison sighed and said, “I hope so.”

The following is excerpted from chapter eight of
A Prolegomenon to Receptivist Science
, by A. D. Boscage (Exegete Press, 1984): The explanation for the problems I’d been having—the lapses of memory, the motor control difficulties, the phone calls, and the increasing tension between me and Lorraine—became clear to me at the very moment when it might have seemed to an outside observer that I’d finally become certifiably insane.

This was in July of 1981, when I’d gone to be Guest of Honor at the annual UFO-Con gathering in Rodez, a city in the south of France that reminded me very much of Poughkeepsie, where I grew up, though it is only half the size.

Ever since the famous “Alphane” photographs of 1963, Rodez has been a mecca for UFO investigators hoping for their own close encounter. Because of my long-standing fear of air travel, I had not been to Rodez before; but because I was to be Guest of Honor, the convention committee had kindly undertaken to pay my way aboard the Polish ocean liner Stefan Batory. They also paid for Lorraine, on the understanding that she was my secretary. I found the voyage invigorating and provocative, but poor Lorraine was ill the entire six days from New York to Le Havre, partly because of the motion of the boat but also because she was again withdrawing from the amphetamines.

I find there is nothing in my journals about how we made our way to Rodez from Le Havre. I know that neither Lorraine nor myself was in shape to drive a car, especially where we would have had to look up the words on the road signs in our dictionary, a paperback Larousse that I had retained from my days in college in 1964, and which had cost only sixty cents at that time, when it was in its
fifty-sixth printing!
I still have that same book within easy reach of my desk as I write these pages, and it still contains, as a page marker, a receipt from the pharmacy near our hotel in Rodez, Le Comte d’Aveyron, where Lorraine was finally able to fill the phony prescrition written out for her by the homeopathic healer we met on the
Batory
. Lorraine has an incredible ability to meet exactly the people she needs to meet at any given time.

The actual panels at the convention were without surprises. I had difficulty slowing down my speech to allow time for my simultaneous translator to keep up with me. Her name was Hélolse (I cannot remember her last name, which began with either a
V
or an
F
), and she had the most extraordinary jet-black hair, which she wore in a kind of loose chignon that was very becoming. I showed the slides of the Boulder anomalies, which Alyx West had lent me for the occasion, and I told about my own experiences in writing
The Transmentated Man
, more or less as they are set down in chapter four of this book. Interestingly, there were three or four gentlemen in the audience who had had similar experiences. This is no longer surprising to me, though at that time I had not known whether to expect to find others like myself on the far side of the ocean. Though what is the distance of a mere ocean to Beings who have bridged the abysses of Space?

The real significance of my trip to this area of France did not become apparent until after the convention, when my hosts as a special courtesy took me to visit the ruined abbey church at Montpellier-le-Vieux. It was here, Alyx West had told me, that a second series of Alphane sightings had taken place in the early seventies, almost a decade after the original event. Although there is no photographic record of these later sightings, Alyx had been able to examine two of the witnesses under hypnosis and discovered clear evidence of memory alteration.

I realize that some of my readers may not be familiar with—or may not credit—Alyx West’s theory of the mnemocyte. For those readers, let me offer a brief explanation here, since I can think of no better explanation for my experiences at Montpellier-le-Vieux and afterward than to suppose that I had been infected many years earlier with a virulent strain of mnemocyte that had blocked all my teenage memories of abduction and replaced them with images of what I believed to be horror movies. When in adult life I tried to rent VCR

tapes of these movies, I discovered that none of them existed! Apparently, none had ever been made! Then what, I had to ask myself, had I been watching during those evenings when I had been an usher at the Rialto Theater in downtown Poughkeepsie? Whence came these images of skin being flayed from the breasts of living women, both Negroes and Caucasians? These mutilations, decapitations, eviscerations?

A Freudian would say that these false memories were in fact the diseased by-products of my own bubbling id. AJungian would say that I achieved some kind of psychic rapport with archetypes of the collective unconscious. And I had thought that I was remembering old Hollywood horror movies. What had really happened? Until my visit to Montpellier-le-Vieux—when I entered the crypt of the ruined abbey church and found myself hurled back through the centuries to the time when that church was being built—I could not know that those recollections of “horror movies” were not really false memories, nor fantasies from my id, nor Jungian archetypes, but
actual events that I had been forced to witness and take part in!

What a profound relief it has been to realize that I did not “make up”

these dreadful images that have haunted me throughout my life and which I have often represented, in modified form, in my fictional writings—to the distress of so many would-be censors and indignant school librarians. No, Mrs.

Stevenson, of Champaign, Illinois, I have not escaped from a lunatic asylum, and I am not a serial killer. In point of fact, I so much detest the sight of blood that I have been a strict vegetarian since the age of twenty-four (excepting for the period, noted in chapter five above, when I was living in the Vancouver commune with Valerie Hoover).

It should be noted at this point, in terms of an understanding of the origins of Receptivist Science, that I had been fasting for three days before my visit to Montpellier-le-Vieux. In addition, I had taken a megadose of vitamin C. There is no television transmitting station nor any power station within several miles of Montpellier-le-Vieux; the ether is, therefore, exceptional clear, especially in the infrared area of the spectrum. So, as a result of my own internal condition and my external physical circumstances, I was in a state of exceptional receptivity. My nervous system was like a satellite dish newly installed on an Andean peak.

Poets have tried to describe the beauty of Montpellier-le-Vieux, and all have failed. I will make no attempt. It is a scene of uncanny beauty. The ruined blocks of limestone, eroded by the savage weather of the Cévennes, writhe and twist like the souls of the damned, assuming shapes that defy the imagination. Towering above them all are the massive truncated pillars that once supported the lead tiles of the roof of Notre Dame de Gevaudon, their capitals embellished with the curious carvings of Lombard workmen dead now for almost a millennium. Upon one column may be discerned the spread wings of an eagle—or of some creature that antiquarians have called an eagle for want of a more precise term. And the figure on this column? A dragon of some sort? One would really have to ask the mason whose chisel did the work what he had in his mind, and whether his is a work of imagination unassisted by any model.

And you
can
ask that mason—for I am he! I am, or I have been, Bonamico of Lombardy.

It is difficult to believe, I know. It would be months after that first visit to Notre Dame de Gevaudon before I could admit to myself that what I had witnessed that afternoon had not been some trance-induced shamanic vision but rather, a
direct apprehension of tragic historical events
. But at last it could not be denied, for I came into possession of incontrovertible physical evidence of a sort that simply could not be explained away by any other hypothesis.

It is a book. Written on crumbling parchment, the ink on its first pages faded almost to invisibility. A book of only ninety-six pages, but oh, the implications of what is written on those pages! For it was not written by any human agency, and the message it conveys was never intended for human eyes.

Was it, then, the work of aliens visiting this planet at the dawn of our Western Civilization? I cannot surely say, for it seems to me equally plausible that the book was written by a being of supernatural rather than extraterrestrial origin.

All I can say with certainty is that I have read that book, and what I have read therein fills me to this day with a strange dread, which is also (this is its strangeness) a sense of longing that is inexpressibly sweet.

“Well, then, cheers,” said Peter Bryce, lifting his glass of Diet Pepsi in a halfhearted toast to clink against the glass in his twin brother’s hand.

“Cheers,” Patrick agreed. He took a sip of the soda and shook his head in a pantomime of wry resignation. “I’m sorry we can’t order wine. It didn’t occur to me that they wouldn’t have a liquor license here. But I’ve been told it’s a good restaurant. If you like Italian food.”

“Not to worry,” said Peter. “I’ll survive.” He felt that he was being punished for the table talk at their last two-man family reunion in March, which had got somewhat out of hand as the bar tab had mounted, though at the time Patrick seemed to have no difficulty entering into the spirit of the occasion. With his Roman collar off, Patrick had frisked about like a puppy off its leash, sniffing at all sorts of forbidden ideas and even producing a few of his own. No one eavesdropping on that conversation would have believed one of them was a priest—or if they had, they’d have believed it of Peter.