ALBERTINE and I had the dining room to ourselves that night. After dinner, I built a fire in the lounge, poured the last of the cognac for us, and began reading the sixth episode of Dead Air, “Flying Saucers: The Untold Story,” to an audience of one.
DUDLEY BEAKER was a fussy, educated man who lived next door to my maternal grandparents. Encouraged by my mother and tolerated by my father, he took an interest in my development. He never missed an opportunity to correct my course —
LOU burst through the door, beaming, pulling mittens from his hands, and said, “What’s this? You started without me?”
“Lou!” said Albertine, clearly pleased to see him.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I couldn’t stand to miss a single thrilling episode,” he said.
“A single — what — do you mean — ?” sputtered Al.
“If you’ve got a room available, I want to sign on for the whole tour.”
“Gee, I’ll have to check.”
“Actually, I’m going to need two rooms for the next few days,” said Lou. He turned toward the doorway and called, “Honey?”
A woman came into the lounge. She was bundled in an enormous insulated jacket that might have served for an assault on Everest, and she wore a fur hat, but her long and stunning legs were virtually unprotected. “He kidnapped me,” she said, laughing.
“Get near the fire,” Lou told her. “I’ll fix you a hot toddy, or a Tom and Jerry — or how about a hot buttered rum?”
“How about a hot cup of coffee?”
“Good. I don’t know how to make any of those other things.”
“I’m Elaine,” she said. “The impulsive old geezer behind the bar is my father.”
“Jeez, I’m sorry,” said Lou. “Where are my manners? Elaine — Albertine. Albertine — Elaine. Elaine — Peter. Peter — Elaine.”
“We interrupted you,” she said to me.
“Oh, that’s — ” I began.
“No, no,” said Lou, flapping his hands. “Go on. Go on.”
So I did, beginning again at the beginning.
DUDLEY BEAKER was a fussy, educated man who lived next door to my maternal grandparents. Encouraged by my mother and tolerated by my father, he took an interest in my development. He never missed an opportunity to correct my course, and I came to loathe him for that. I kept my loathing to myself, lest he discover it and correct the tendency, but it was bound to come out someday, and, under the influence of flying saucers, it did.
Flying saucers were a craze when I was a boy, but I couldn’t make myself believe in them. I tried. I wanted to believe in them. I understood that it would be fun to believe in them. I followed the reports of spottings and tried to swallow them, but it wasn’t easy. The photographs were especially hard to accept. I kept seeing flying hubcaps, pie pans, and Jell-O molds instead of saucers.
One of the magazines devoted an entire issue to “Flying Saucers: The Untold Story.” It began with a summary of saucer sightings from earliest times to the present and ended with plans for a saucer detector. I built a detector, but only for the sake of scientific inquiry. I didn’t expect it to detect anything. I was a skeptic and a realist.
When I finished the detector, I was proud of my work, of course, and, full of enthusiasm, I brought it up from the cellar to show it to my parents. I brought the magazine, too, so that they could see how well I had reproduced the detector pictured there, which had been built by professionals who had at their disposal professional-grade tools, a fully equipped workshop, and a staff of assistants.
Dudley Beaker was visiting when I came up from the cellar. He and my parents looked the detector over, and I explained what it was supposed to do. My parents admired it, as parents will. They praised my effort and execution, just as they would have if I had made a painting, written a novel, or cleaned my room.
Mr. Beaker, however, took it upon himself to go further. He had to consider the worthiness of the underlying goal. “I’m beginning to think that the human race will never grow up,” he said.
“Huh?” I said.
“People still have a need to believe in things.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I said.
“They won’t accept ideas based on logic and evidence — ”
“Like what, Dudley?” asked my mother.
He said, “Oh, quantum physics or evolution, for example, or the dignity of labor — ”
“I worked pretty hard on this,” I said.
Ignoring me, he continued: “ — but quite a lot of them do believe in God, and astrology, and flying saucers.”
“One of the articles traced saucer sightings back to prehistoric times,” I said.
“Stop and think a minute,” said Dudley. “If there were sightings in prehistoric times, how could we know about them?”
“Well — ”
“Do you know what prehistoric means?”
“Yeah,” I said, “‘before recorded history’ — ”
“Yes, and — ”
“ — but you know that’s not accurate.”
“ — and — but — what?” he spluttered.
Having made a start, I plunged on, and to my surprise, I discovered as I spoke that I knew more than I realized, that in reading about flying saucers I had actually picked up something that might be true. “It would be accurate to say ‘preliterate,’” I said, “but it isn’t accurate to say ‘prehistoric,’ because they recorded history.”
“Oh? And how did they do that?” he asked.
“Cave paintings,” I said.
“Really?” said my mother. “That’s fascinating. They kept their history in cave paintings? Why did they paint in caves?”
“Well, they lived in caves,” I said, guessing. “And caves are a safe place to work, where the painters wouldn’t be interrupted by saber-toothed tigers, and other people wouldn’t be criticizing them all the time.”
“Are there flying saucers in these paintings?” asked my father.
“You can judge for yourself,” I said. I flipped the magazine open to the cave paintings.
Mr. Beaker took one look, shook his head, chuckled, and said, “You know, flying saucers are presumed to be ships from other worlds, and in a sense this is true, since most of them come from — ” He paused and took his pipe from his pocket, and then finished with a sneer in his voice: “ — the world of the imagination.”
Dudley would have called himself a realist, and he would have been proud to claim the title, but I think that he was a realist only by default, because he was a person who had come to mistrust and even fear his imagination. He had become one of those people who prefer the examined life to the imagined one, who disparage that alternative world where I live so much of the time, the world in which survivors of prisons and concentration camps dwell while they endure their trials because it is a place where they can keep self-respect alive, and thought, and will, and hope. Mr. Beaker had driven me there. When I had looked at the cave paintings earlier I hadn’t been able to see anything that looked like a flying saucer, but now I could, because now, inspired by a desire to annoy Dudley Beaker, I believed.
[to be continued]
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