A Saucer of Loneliness (2 page)

“Don’t … don’t … I can’t swim!” I shouted, so she clawed me again.

“Leave me alone,” she shrieked. “Oh, dear God, why can’t you
leave
” (said her fingernails)
“me …”
(said her fingernails) “
alone!
” (said her small hard fist).

So by her hair I pulled her head down tight to her white shoulder; and with the edge of my free hand I hit her neck twice. She floated again, and I brought her ashore.

I carried her to where a dune was between us and the sea’s broad noisy tongue, and the wind was above us somewhere. But the light was as bright. I rubbed her wrists and stroked her face and said, “It’s all right,” and, “There!” and some names I used to have for a dream I had long, long before I ever heard of her.

She lay still on her back with the breath hissing between her teeth,
with her lips in a smile which her twisted-tight, wrinkled-sealed eyes made not a smile but a torture. She was well and conscious for many moments and still her breath hissed and her closed eyes twisted.

“Why couldn’t you leave me alone?” she asked at last. She opened her eyes and looked at me. She had so much misery that there was no room for fear. She shut her eyes again and said, “You know who I am.”

“I know,” I said.

She began to cry.

I waited, and when she stopped crying, there were shadows among the dunes. A long time.

She said, “You don’t know who I am. Nobody knows who I am.”

I said, “It was in all the papers.”

“That!” She opened her eyes slowly and her gaze traveled over my face, my shoulders, stopped at my mouth, touched my eyes for the briefest second. She curled her lips and turned away her head. “Nobody knows who I am.”

I waited for her to move or speak, and finally I said, “Tell
me
.”

“Who are you?” she asked, with her head still turned away.

“Someone who …”

“Well?”

“Not now,” I said. “Later, maybe.”

She sat up suddenly and tried to hide herself. “Where are my clothes?”

“I didn’t see them.”

“Oh,” she said. “I remember. I put them down and kicked sand over them, just where a dune would come and smooth them over, hide them as if they never were … I hate sand. I wanted to drown in the sand, but it wouldn’t let me … You mustn’t look at me!” she shouted. “I hate to have you looking at me!” She threw her head from side to side, seeking. “I can’t stay here like this! What can I do? Where can I go?”

“Here,” I said.

She let me help her up and then snatched her hand away, half-turned
from me. “Don’t touch me. Get away from me.”

“Here,” I said again, and walked down the dune where it curved in the moonlight, tipped back into the wind and down and became not dune but beach. “Here.” I pointed behind the dune.

At last she followed me. She peered over the dune where it was chest-high, and again where it was knee-high. “Back there?”

I nodded.

“So dark …” She stepped over the low dune and into the aching black of those moon-shadows. She moved away cautiously, feeling tenderly with her feet, back to where the dune was higher. She sank down into the blackness and disappeared there. I sat on the sand in the light. “Stay away from me,” she spat.

I rose and stepped back. Invisible in the shadows, she breathed, “Don’t go away.” I waited, then saw her hand press out of the clean-cut shadows. “There,” she said, “over there. In the dark. Just be a … Stay away from me now … Be a—voice.”

I did as she asked, and sat in the shadows perhaps six feet from her.

She told me about it. Not the way it was in the papers.

She was perhaps seventeen when it happened. She was in Central Park in New York. It was too warm for such an early spring day, and the hammered brown slopes had a dusting of green of precisely the consistency of that morning’s hoarfrost on the rocks. But the frost was gone and the grass was brave and tempted some hundreds of pairs of feet from the asphalt and concrete to tread on it.

Hers were among them. The sprouting soil was a surprise to her feet, as the air was to her lungs. Her feet ceased to be shoes as she walked, her body was consciously more than clothes. It was the only kind of day which in itself can make a city-bred person raise his eyes. She did.

For a moment she felt separated from the life she lived, in which there was no fragrance, no silence, in which nothing ever quite fit nor was quite filled. In that moment the ordered disapproval of the buildings around the pallid park could not reach her; for two, three clean breaths it no longer mattered that the whole wide world really
belonged to images projected on a screen; to gently groomed goddesses in these steel and glass towers; that it belonged, in short, always, always to someone else.

So she raised her eyes, and there above her was the saucer.

It was beautiful. It was golden, with a dusty finish like that of an unripe Concord grape. It made a faint sound, a chord composed of two tones and a blunted hiss like the wind in tall wheat. It was darting about like a swallow, soaring and dropping. It circled and dropped and hovered like a fish, shimmering. It was like all these living things, but with that beauty it had all the loveliness of things turned and burnished, measured, machined, and metrical.

At first she felt no astonishment, for this was so different from anything she had ever seen before that it had to be a trick of the eye, a false evaluation of size and speed and distance that in a moment would resolve itself into a sun-flash on an airplane or the lingering glare of a welding arc.

She looked away from it and abruptly realized that many other people saw it—saw
something
—too. People all around her had stopped moving and speaking and were craning upward. Around her was a globe of silent astonishment, and outside it she was aware of the life-noise of the city, the hard-breathing giant who never inhales.

She looked up again, and at last began to realize how large and how far away the saucer was. No: rather, how small and how very near it was. It was just the size of the largest circle she might make with her two hands, and it floated not quite eighteen inches over her head.

Fear came then. She drew back and raised a forearm, but the saucer simply hung there. She bent far sideways, twisted away, leaped forward, looked back and upward to see if she had escaped it. At first she couldn’t see it; then as she looked up and up, there it was, close and gleaming, quivering and crooning, right over her head.

She bit her tongue.

From the corner of her eye, she saw a man cross himself
. He did that because he saw me standing here with a halo over my head, she thought
. And that was the greatest single thing that had ever
happened to her. No one had ever looked at her and made a respectful gesture before, not once, not ever. Through terror, through panic and wonderment, the comfort of that thought nestled into her, to wait to be taken out and looked at again in lonely times.

The terror was uppermost now, however. She backed away, staring upward, stepping a ludicrous cakewalk. She should have collided with people. There were plenty of people there, gasping and craning, but she reached none. She spun around and discovered to her horror that she was the center of a pointing, pressing crowd. Its mosaic of eyes all bulged and its inner circle braced its many legs to press back and away from her.

The saucer’s gentle note deepened. It tilted, dropped an inch or so. Someone screamed, and the crowd broke away from her in all directions, milled about, and settled again in a new dynamic balance, a much larger ring, as more and more people raced to thicken it against the efforts of the inner circle to escape.

The saucer hummed and tilted, tilted …

She opened her mouth to scream, fell to her knees, and the saucer struck.

It dropped against her forehead and clung there. It seemed almost to lift her. She came erect on her knees, made one effort to raise her hands against it, and then her arms stiffened down and back, her hands not reaching the ground. For perhaps a second and a half the saucer held her rigid, and then it passed a single ecstatic quiver to her body and dropped it. She plumped to the ground, the backs of her thighs heavy and painful on her heels and ankles.

The saucer dropped beside her, rolled once in a small circle, once just around its edge, and lay still. It lay still and dull and metallic, different and dead.

Hazily, she lay and gazed at the gray-shrouded blue of the good spring sky, and hazily she heard whistles.

And some tardy screams.

And a great stupid voice bellowing “Give her air!” which made everyone press closer.

Then there wasn’t so much sky because of the blueclad bulk with
its metal buttons and its leatherette notebook. “Okay, okay, what’s happened here stand back figods sake.”

And the widening ripples of observation, interpretation and comment: “It knocked her down.” “Some guy knocked her down.” “He knocked her down.” “Some guy knocked her down and—” “Right in broad daylight this guy …” “The park’s gettin’ to be …” onward and outward, the adulteration of fact until it was lost altogether because excitement is so much more important.

Somebody with a harder shoulder than the rest bulling close, a notebook here, too, a witnessing eye over it, ready to change “… a beautiful brunette …” to “an attractive brunette” for the afternoon editions, because “attractive” is as dowdy as any woman is allowed to get if she is a victim in the news.

The glittering shield and the florid face bending close: “You hurt bad, sister?” And the echoes, back and back through the crowd, Hurt bad, hurt bad, badly injured, he beat the hell out of her, broad daylight …”

And still another man, slim and purposeful, tan gabardine, cleft chin and beard-shadow: “Flyin’ saucer, hm? Okay, Officer, I’ll take over here.”

“And who the hell might you be, takin’ over?”

The flash of a brown leather wallet, a face so close behind that its chin was pressed into the gabardine shoulder. The face said, awed: “F.B.I.” and that rippled outward, too. The policeman nodded—the entire policeman nodded in one single bobbing genuflection.

“Get some help and clear this area,” said the gabardine.

“Yes,
sir!
” said the policeman.

“F.B.I., F.B.I.,” the crowd murmured and there was more sky to look at above her.

She sat up and there was glory in her face. “The saucer talked to me,” she sang.

“You shut up,” said the gabardine. “You’ll have lots of chance to talk later.”

“Yeah, sister,” said the policeman. “My God, this mob could be full of Communists.”

“You shut up, too,” said the gabardine.

Someone in the crowd told someone else a Communist beat up this girl, while someone else was saying she got beat up because she was a Communist.

She started to rise, but solicitous hands forced her down again. There were thirty police there by that time.

“I can walk,” she said.

“Now you just take it easy,” they told her.

They put a stretcher down beside her and lifted her onto it and covered her with a big blanket.

“I can walk,” she said as they carried her through the crowd.

A woman went white and turned away moaning, “Oh, my God, how awful!”

A small man with round eyes stared and stared at her and licked and licked his lips.

The ambulance. They slid her in. The gabardine was already there.

A white-coated man with very clean hands: “How did it happen, miss?”

“No questions,” said the gabardine. “Security.”

The hospital.

She said, “I got to get back to work.”

“Take your clothes off,” they told her.

She had a bedroom to herself then for the first time in her life. Whenever the door opened, she could see a policeman outside. It opened very often to admit the kind of civilians who were very polite to military people, and the kind of military people who were even more polite to certain civilians. She did not know what they all did nor what they wanted. Every single day they asked her four million, five hundred thousand questions. Apparently they never talked to each other because each of them asked her the same questions over and over.

“What is your name?”

“How old are you?”

“What year were you born?”

Sometimes they would push her down strange paths with their questions.

“Now your uncle. Married a woman from Middle Europe, did
he? Where in Middle Europe?”

“What clubs or fraternal organizations did you belong to? Ah! Now about that Rinkeydinks gang on 63rd Street. Who was
really
behind it?”

But over and over again, “What did you mean when you said the saucer talked to you?”

And she would say, “It talked to me.”

And they would say, “And it said—”

And she would shake her head.

There would be a lot of shouting ones, and then a lot of kind ones. No one had ever been so kind to her before, but she soon learned that no one was being kind to
her
. They were just getting her to relax, to think of other things, so they could suddenly shoot that question at her: “What do you mean it talked to you?”

Pretty soon it was just like Mom’s or school or any place, and she used to sit with her mouth closed and let them yell. Once they sat her on a hard chair for hours and hours with a light in her eyes and let her get thirsty. Home, there was a transom over the bedroom door and Mom used to leave the kitchen light glaring through it all night, every night, so she wouldn’t get the horrors. So the light didn’t bother her at all.

They took her out of the hospital and put her in jail. Some ways it was good. The food. The bed was all right, too. Through the window she could see lots of women exercising in the yard. It was explained to her that they all had much harder beds.

“You are a very important young lady, you know.”

That was nice at first, but as usual it turned out they didn’t mean her at all. They kept working on her. Once they brought the saucer in to her. It was inside a big wooden crate with a padlock, and a steel box inside that with a Yale lock. It only weighed a couple of pounds, the saucer, but by the time they got it packed, it took two men to carry it and four men with guns to watch them.