Paul McAuley: Residuals

We wrapped each other up with restraints and gag orders, and shot off our mouths all the time. Mitchell was out of the loop: instead of deals with Hollywood producers and long lunches with New York publishers, he got tied up in a civil liberties suit because he tried to resign from the U.S. geological survey and the government wouldn’t let him.

Then the Ayatollah took the hostages, and everyone had something else to worry about. Carter became a hostage in his own White House and most of the artifacts disappeared in the C-130 aircrash the conspiracy theorists said was staged. Reagan never said anything on record, but the official line changed invisibly when he became President. The reports on the reports questioned the old findings, and deposits of Mitchellite showed up on Guam and somewhere in Alaska.

I did Geraldo with Whitley Strieber and Carl Sagan, and came off like a hick caught between a rock and a hard place. I had started drinking by then, and tried to punch out one or the other of them after the show, and spent the night in a downtown holding tank. I faced a jury of skeptics on Oprah and was cut to pieces, not by reasoned scientific arguments and rationalizations but by cheap-shot jokes from a studio audience of stand-up wannabes.

I told my side of it so many times that I caught myself using exactly the same words each time, and I noticed that on pre-recorded shows, the presenter’s nods and winks—always shot from a reverse angle after the main interview—were always cut in at exactly the same points. An encouraging dip of the head laced with a concerned look in the eyes, made in reaction to a cameraman’s thumb, not an already-forgotten line from me.

Besides The Omega Encounter and Starlight, there were dozens of books, movies, TV specials, magazine articles, a Broadway play, even a music album. Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “It Came Out of the Sky” was reissued and charted strongly. Some English band did a concept album. John Sladek and Tom Disch collaborated on a novel-length debunking, The Sentients: A Tragi-Comedy. That’s in development as a movie, maybe with Fred Ward.

Sam Shepard’s Alienation, which Ed Harris did on Broadway and Shepard starred in and directed for HBO, looked at it all from the dirt farmer’s point of view, suggesting that Nyquist and me were looking for fresh ways of being heroes since we’d lost touch with the land. The main character was a combination of the two of us, and talked in paragraphs, and the scientist—Dean Stockwell on TV—was a black-hatted villain, which displeased Mitchell no end. He sued and lost, I recall.

By then I was looking at things through the blurry dimple at the bottom of the bottle, living off the residuals from commercials and guest appearances in rock videos and schlock direct-to-video horror movies shot by postmodernist auteurs just out of UCLA film school, though I recall that Sam Raimi’s The Color Out of Time was kind of not bad.

Then I read in Variety that Oliver Stone has a treatment in development raking the whole thing Up, blaming it all on J. Edgar Hoover, Armand Hammer and Henry Kissinger. There was an article in the New York Times that Norman Mailer had delivered his thousand-page summation of the phenomenon, The Visitation. And that’s where I got the idea to get in touch with Mitchell and make some cash on the back of Stone and Mailer’s publicity, and maybe Mitchell had been reading the same articles, because before I can begin to think how to try and track him down, he calls me.

I drive past the place I’m to meet Mitchell and have to double back, squinting in the glare of the big rigs that roar out of the darkness, all strung up with fairylights like the spaceship in Closer Encounters. I do what sounds like serious damage to the underside of the rental when I finally pull off.

The ruins are close to the highway, but there’s a spooky feeling that makes me leave the car’s headlights on. Out across the dark desert basin, where the runways of Edwards Air Force Base are outlined in patterns of red and green lights a dozen miles long, some big engine makes a long drawn-out rumble that rises to a howl before cutting off.

I sit in the car and take a few pulls on my bottle to get some courage, or at least burn away the fluttering in my gut, looking at the arthritic shapes that Joshua trees make in the car headlights. Then I make myself get out and look around. There’s not much to the ruins, just a chimney stack and a line of pillars where maybe a porch stood. People camping out have left circles of ash in the sand and dented cans scattered around; when I stumble over a can and it rattles off a stone, I realize how quiet the desert is, beyond the noise of the trucks on the highway. I get a feeling like the one I had when the three of us were waiting that last night, before we blew up the mothership, and have to take another inch off the level of the tequila to calm down.

That’s when my rental car headlights go out and I almost lose it, because that’s what happened when they tried to kidnap me, the lights and then the dashboard on my pickup going out and then a bright light all around, coming from above. That time, I had a pump-action shotgun on the rack in the cab, which is what saved me. Now, I have a tequila bottle with a couple of inches sloshing in it, and a rock I pick up.

A voice behind me says my name, and I spin and lose my balance and fall on my ass, the tequila bottle emptying over my pants leg. A flashlight beam pins me, and behind it, Elliot Mitchell says, “This was the last socialist republic in the USA, did you know that? They called the place Llano del Rio. This was their meeting hall. They built houses, a school, planted orchards. But the government gave their water rights to the local farmers and they had to move out. All that’s left are the orchards, and those will go because they’re subdividing the desert for housing tracts to take LA’s overspill.”

I squint into the light, but can’t see anything of the man holding it.

“Never put your faith in government, Ray. Its first instinct is not to protect the people it’s supposed to serve but to protect its own self. People elect politicians, not governments. Don’t get up. I’m happier to see you sitting down. Do you think you were followed here?”

“Why would I be followed? No one cares about it anymore. That’s why I’m here.”

“You want to make another movie, Ray? Who is it with? Oliver Stone? He came out to see me. Or sent one of his researchers anyway. You know his father was in the Navy, don’t you, and he’s funded by the UN counterpropaganda unit, the same one that tried to assassinate Reagan. The question is, who’s paying you?”

“Crazy Sam’s Hardware back in Brooklyn, if I do the ad.”

I have a bad feeling. Mitchell appears to have joined the right-wing nuts who believe that little black helicopters follow them everywhere, and that there are secret codes on the back of traffic signs to direct the UN invasion force when it comes.

I say, “I don’t have any interest except the same one that made you want to call me. We saved the world, Elliot, and they’re ripping off our story…”

“You let them. You and Nyquist. How is old Nyquist?”

“Sitting in a room with mattresses on the walls, wearing a backward jacket and eating cold creamed corn. They made him the hero, when it was us who blew up the mothership, it was us who captured that stinking silver beachball, it was us who worked out how to poison most of them.”

I put the bottle to my lips, but there’s hardly a swallow left. I toss it away. This isn’t going the way I planned, but I’m caught up in my anger. It’s come right back, dull and heavy. “We’re the ones that saved Susan, not her lousy husband!”