Mysterious Skin

nine

The dreams began two days after Avalyn’s appearance on “World of Mystery.” Generic at first, they harbored images of rubbery-armed spacemen with blue-gray skin and penetrating eyes that seemed equivalent to the Hollywood depictions I’d seen on TV. These aliens petrified me nonetheless.

After the second dream, I telephoned my mother at work and told her how the memories had revealed themselves. She returned home that evening holding a spiral notebook decorated with an elaborate bow. “To record them in,” she said. “Whatever’s inside your head, let it come out.” I drew a crescent moon and stars on the notebook’s cover; beside that, a spaceship whizzing past a chunky cloud.

I kept the journal at bedside, and during the following week I logged what I could from each alien scenario, sometimes sketching a face or hand or beam of light. In my half-sleep, I’d misspell words or stop midsentence. A typical entry:

6/29/91-

I get out of a station wagon, my little league uniform is on-I stand in the middle of a yard-crows are flying (indecipherable) getting darker. My hand is crammed into the baseball glove my father bought when (indecipherable)-in the trees a blue light, the color at the bottoms of swimming pools, I walk closer but it seems I’m ru

The dream log aided my memory. But something else bolstered my ability to remember, something apart from the dreams, something I couldn’t explain to my mother. I began recalling other bits and pieces about my first abduction, images beyond those that took shape during sleep. I would be watching TV, eating lunch, or sunbathing on the side of the hill, when out of nowhere a scene would surface in my head. For instance, I suddenly remembered this: that halfway through my final Little League game, it had begun to rain. The rain became a downpour, and the umpire had officially canceled the game midi

Had that been the moment I’d initially been taken? Had the aliens witnessed me through the net of clouds as I’d lingered, alone, on the baseball field? I wasn’t yet certain. I had no idea why I remembered these pieces now. The more I remembered, the more alone I felt, as though some devious secret were just now being revealed, as if for ten years I’d been the butt of an enormous joke. Yet I knew the information that tangled like wire inside my head was all-important, clues that moved toward some destination.

July commenced with a telephone call from Avalyn Friesen. Her voice sounded angelic, just as it had on the TV program I’d rewound to watch at least twenty times by then. She said she had received my letter-“my first and only piece of fan mail,” she called it-and wanted to meet me. “You said you think you’ve had similar experiences,” Avalyn said. “Well, Mr. Brian Lackey, your eagerness is usually the first step toward coming to grips with the truth.” She paused, and a dog yapped from somewhere on her end of the line. “I just hope you’re ready.”

We talked for nearly an hour. I informed Avalyn of additional details beyond those I’d written in my letter. I mentioned my recent series of dreams, and she told me she’d been through a similar pattern. “Your memories are ready to make themselves known to you,” she said.

We scheduled our meeting for July third, Avalyn’s day off from her job as secretary at Inman’s grain elevator. I dialed a couple of numbers to cancel my lawn-mowing appointments. Then I called the prison in Hutchinson. A receptionist directed the call to lookout tower number five, where my mother no doubt sat staring over the prison yard, her.38 in her side holster. She picked up, and I asked if I could borrow the car.

“I’ll find another ride to work that day,” she said. “This is something you have to do.”

On July third I dressed in my best khaki pants, a short-sleeved blue oxford, and a pair of oversize loafers I’d confiscated from a box of clothes my father had never returned to fetch. I slicked back my hair and touched a pair of zits with dabs of my mother’s flesh-colored makeup. I didn’t look half bad.

The stretch of highway from Little River was one I’d passed hundreds of times, but on that afternoon it seemed utterly new. Midway between Little River and Hutchinson, I slowed for the turnoff toward Inman and glanced at the inside cover of my dream log. There, I’d jotted instructions for reaching Avalyn’s: “Go six miles east. Right after the sign advertising Kansas Beef, look for driveway with the blue mailbox…”

The Friesen farm sat a quarter mile off the main road. Holstein cattle grazed in overgrown stretches of pasture. A lane of flesh-colored sand trailed toward the house, flanked by trees that appeared centuries old. The trees folded over themselves like clasped fingers, squirrels and birds darting between the branches. I drove under them, parked at the side of a boxy log cabin, and rechecked my reflection in the side mirror.

I’ve never excelled at meeting people, but meeting Avalyn seemed inevitable. My nervousness was nowhere near as uncontrollable as I’d feared. I passed rows of zi

Avalyn introduced me to her father, an ancient-looking man who slurped from a coffee mug. Beneath his red cap, his face was grooved with wrinkles. He had thick, ta

Avalyn’s father opened the refrigerator’s top compartment, unwrapped a green Popsicle, and gestured toward the back door with it. “I’ve got work to do in the field,” he said. He took off his hat. Hair fluttered from his head as if startled.

After Mr. Friesen had gone, Avalyn led me toward a rocking chair, and I sat. I surveyed the simple room-the TV, a dusty wood-burning stove, a rolltop desk, her collection of stuffed animals. The wall displayed various pictures of an older woman, assumedly the late Mrs. Friesen, and a chubby young man with a crew cut who resembled a platypus in military garb. Avalyn saw me staring. She shrugged, stepped into the adjoining kitchen, and returned with a plate of Saltines and a bright red sardine tin. “I haven’t eaten lunch,” she said. She unsheathed the tin with three twists of the tiny key, then placed chunks of sardines on the crackers. They were the kind doused with mustard, and yellow blobs spilled onto the plate. “Help me with these,” Avalyn said. I bit down, cupping my hand to catch the crumbs.

I began. “I videotaped your TV show. I’ve watched it over and over.”

“It wasn’t bad,” she said. “A little showy for my tastes, and they left out some things I told them, but they managed to get across the right idea.”