Scott Heim - Mysterious Skin

Neither story interested me, so I turned the page. What I saw took a few seconds to register. The individual letters U and F and O were stamped across the top of the paper. On the page’s left side, someone had penciled an amateurish drawing of a spaceship.

I’d seen similar drawings in hundreds of books, but I never expected an everyday newspaper to run a story about UFOs. “Listen to this,” I said to my mother. I announced the headline. “NBC to Broadcast Local Woman’s Extraterrestrial Story.”

The car swarmed with a gunpowder smell that emanated from my mother’s skin. She looked at the newspaper in my lap and nodded, pressing me to read on.

I skimmed the article’s first half. “This woman from Inman,” I said. “She doesn’t live that far away. Her name’s Avalyn Friesen. This says she’s been abducted by aliens at various times during her life. It all came out under hypnosis. Some TV show is doing a special on alien visitations this coming Friday night, and she’s among the people they’re featuring.”

I believed the woman’s story, and my mother knew it. She and I had discussed UFOs countless times. Before my parents split up, these discussions had acted as a bond: my father hadn’t accompanied us when we witnessed the UFO hovering over our watermelon field, so talking about the incident was our way of shutting him out. My mother knew I still read magazines and books, still watched TV shows about unexplained spacecraft and close encounters.

“I feel sorry for her,” I said. “People in her town will think she’s a freak.” I stared at the thumb-size picture of Avalyn. She had chubby, rouged cheeks and a closemouthed smile that looked like a tiny bow tie. She wore oversize, rhinestone-framed glasses. She resembled a widow, struggling against the pull of tears. She didn’t seem the sort who’d fabricate an outlandish story for attention.

According to the caption, Avalyn had drawn the UFO herself. She shaped it like a gray football with legs and antennas. I could remember the spectacle of our UFO as if I’d sighted it only yesterday. During the first week of school after that summer, I had drawn a similar spacecraft on poster board, its lights shooting beams of energy in blue crayon. I was in third grade then. I remember standing for show-and-tell, displaying my handmade poster, and relating my UFO sighting to my classmates. They had laughed until I fell back into my seat. On my walk home from school that day, a group of kids wrenched the poster from me. They stomped and spat on the drawing until all that remained were tattered bits in a puddle of mud.

The grocery was located two blocks from the Cosmosphere. When we got to the store, I usually loitered in the parking lot, squinting at the Cosmosphere’s marquee to check for any upcoming shows or special announcements. But now I’d found something more important, more real than the shows I watched from month to month on that domed screen.

I followed my mother through the store’s aisles, carrying the newspaper in front of my face, sidestepping other shoppers. I kept staring at Avalyn’s photo. For years I’d wanted to actually meet someone who confessed to an alien encounter. I didn’t know anyone beyond my mother and sister who claimed to have even seen a UFO; now, twenty miles from my own home, a woman had been abducted and taken aboard a ship from some other world. Even through the photograph’s grainy ink, I could tell she knew something remarkable, something ethereal and profound. Beauty resided in that knowledge. I wanted it. Perhaps Avalyn Friesen was in Hutchinson at this moment, maybe even shopping at this very store. Carts wheeled past me, and I looked up from the photo for any scrap of resemblance. While my mother bagged radishes and cucumbers, I noticed the profile of a woman weighing zucchini: similar nose, same hair pulled into a bun. I moved to stare into her face. The woman turned away. It wasn’t Avalyn.

I waited for my mother to finish, then stepped out the sliding glass doors. A plane of heat replaced the store’s cool air. I knelt before the newspaper machines- Hutchinson, Kansas City, Wichita. No headlines about Avalyn, but I guessed that a story might be lurking somewhere within those pages. I took a chance on Wichita. I plugged two quarters into the machine, pulled out two papers instead of one, and returned to the Toyota.

On page C- 12, in the “People and Places” section, I found it. The story in the Wichita Eagle-Beacon mirrored the one I’d read in the News, complete with the innocuous spacecraft drawing. But this piece contained specific additions. Avalyn had drawn one of her abductors. The alien was short with droopy arms and an enormous, hairless head shaped like a lightbulb. It had tiny pinpricks for a nose. Its ears were question marks. Its mouth thinned to a slit, a mere line scissored into its face. But the wildest aspect of Avalyn’s alien was its eyes. She had blackened them in, huge almond-shaped pools embedded in its face. The drawing was crude, almost childlike. I tried to imagine coming face-to-face with this being, this thing that had touched Avalyn’s skin.

Beneath the pair of columns was something else the first article had omitted. A psychologist who specialized in treating alien abductees had provided a list of signs and signals that indicated possible interaction with aliens.

HAVE ALIENS CONTACTED YOU?

Wondering about the possibility of a past alien encounter? Ren Bloomfield, psychologist and self-professed “spiritual counselor,” lists six signs that could indicate a “close encounter” in his third and most recent book, Stolen Time. According to Bloomfield, some signals to look for are:

1. Any amount of stolen time; missing hours or even days you can’t account for.

2. Recurring, overwhelming nightmares-especially those of flying saucers or extraterrestrials, or of being examined by these aliens on an observation table.

3. The occurrence of unexplained bruises, sores, nosebleeds, or small puncture wounds.

4. Constant foreboding feelings, paranoia, and sensations of being watched.

5. Fear of the dark or of being outside alone.

6. Unexplained, continued interest in movies, books, or trivia about unidentified flying objects-sometimes to the point of obsession.

If you have experienced more than one of these phenomena, chances are you’re not alone. Memories of a close encounter may lie buried within your subconscious mind.

Item number one, regarding the stolen time, reminded me of the night I woke in the crawl space. Sometimes, even now, serious concentration could bring back the air of that room, the smell of my nose’s bewildering blood. Ren Bloomfield had mentioned nosebleeds in item number three. And I remembered times in my life when the dark had petrified me, times I’d felt paranoid, times I’d had strange dreams. Finally, the list’s last item was an understatement in my case. Ever since the day I’d seen my UFO, I’d been fascinated, searching everywhere for scraps about extraterrestrial life. Chances are you’re not alone, the article said. The urge to speak to Avalyn overwhelmed me. I wanted to discover all the knowledge she’d been unwillingly given.

My mother tapped on the passenger’s side window. I jerked my head from the article and saw her standing in the parking lot. A chubby kid stood beside her in an ink-smudged apron, his arms laden with grocery sacks. “Open the trunk,” my mother yelled. I folded the paper in my lap and pulled the latch.

“Let’s get ice cream,” she said as I started the car. When I didn’t answer, she stared at me. I pointed to the newspaper on the dashboard, and she picked it up.

“Oh, her again,” she said. She began the article, her finger guiding from word to word, and while she read I coasted through the Snow Palace drive-thru and ordered the regular.