Adrift in the Noösphere (20 page)

The rope broke, of course, and Lazarus skinned his
knee.

The Womb

Twice have I stood a beggar

Before the door of God!

Angels, twice descending,

Reimbursed my store.

Burglar, banker, father,

I am poor once more!

Emily Dickinson, 1858

i.

My father despised biographies, but even more (or so he told his followers) he detested movies and novels and invented stories of every kind. “Fiction is the gossip of those who don't get out much, Rosa,” he told me once, with a smile. No doubt I was curled up with a book at the time. “Purveyed,” he added, sarcastically, “by those who don't get out at all.” So here I am writing a story, his story, perhaps my story as well, possibly the chronicle of us all. No doubt my father would laugh heartily at this. Will laugh. I don't know.

My father, after all, is the Rev. Daimon Keith who revealed to us, in the years prior to his second disappearance, that as a youth he had been abducted from the vicinity of a Clayton school playground by small gray aliens. Indeed, Daimon had been taken up into UFOs not just that once, in Australia, at the age of twenty, but from infancy, and over and again. No doubt it was this germinal and outlandish experience that caused him to devote his middle years to the establishment of the Church of Jesus Christ, Time Traveller (or, as the American chapters have it, “Traveler”), and later Scionetics. At last, as his madness grew deeper and more hilarious, its equivocal memory fetched him to the belief that it was his own Nazarene face which the black-eyed aliens had sculpted from a eroded mesa on the surface of Mars, memorialized so ambiguously in the famous 1976 NASA photographs and twenty-two years later so conclusively unmasked, despite his angry blustering, as my father's fame neared its zenith.

To exist in the shadow—the dark aura, perhaps—of such a father is, you might suppose, inevitably to grow up as a wretch obliged to launch the tale of her own life with details of her father's name and lunatic obsessions. Do not think to find me out so readily. My life has not been so straightforward, nor is Daimon's notoriety altogether just. I am a student of narrative, as are we all in these early days of the millennium, fully up to the mark with anxieties of influence. I have every intention of constructing and revising my father's testament, if only I can find my way to the bottom of it. For now perhaps a sketch must suffice, or a series of arbitrary laminations.

You should know at once that for a long time I understood that he tried to force my mother to have an abortion (or so I was told frequently) and, when she refused in horror, attempted to give me up for adoption three days after my birth, which he would inform his followers had occurred on July 20, 1969, a little after midday, Eastern Australian Time. This, the elderly among you might recall, was the moment Neil Armstrong set his foot upon the Moon, during the first landing by the Apollo astronauts. In fact, I was not born until the middle of 1975, and the gap serves my father's purposes admirably, for people are always taken by how young I seem. It is a subtly tacit endorsement of his esoteric teachings.

His own birthdate is hardly less notable, for Daimon entered the world—by his own account—on August 6, 1945, within hours of that other Little Boy who squalled into heat and light over Hiroshima. An untrustworthy natal date.

One last prefatory point: although his family and friends call my father “Deems,” a childhood nickname, his proper given name is not pronounced “Demon,” as the ignoramuses of the mass media assume, but “Die-moan,” in the way of its Greek source. If that vulgar error was an occasion of chagrin for a man of the cloth, even cloth so self-elected and flamboyant as my father's, he never allowed his family to perceive it. His name had been gifted to him from his Scottish grandfather, a classicist of minor note in the Ballarat gold fields, and it means, as you may know already, a kind of indwelling spirit or force of nature. Certainly he became that for his daughter, even as Daimon became convinced that he himself was now infested by illuminations from beyond the present: from beyond the world itself.

For all that, I am not Rosa Keith but Rosa Rosch, named fore and aft by my mother Margaret, the strong-willed woman who stole me away me from his clutches when I was five years old.

ii.

Aboard the Zetan craft

In his dreaming confusion, he knew that it had started again. The musty stench reminded him of mice, the piles and heaps of mouse droppings they'd found in his uncle's empty weekender when they'd gone to Queenscliff for a cheap winter holiday. The bench he lay on was not quite hard, and the long, lighted oblong above his head burned like a pink musk-stick sucked to a piercing sweetness in the vacant eternities of geometry and geography classes. His dry tongue searched his mouth for the absent taste. The brothers would snatch the candy from his mouth if they found him enjoying it during a lesson. Once, Brother Ronald had literally seized his jaw in one handball-roughened fist and pinched the nerves, forcing the nub of musk-stick out from between his teeth, made him spit it on to the scratched school desk. In the pink darkness, as his heart accelerated with the fright of being here once again, he felt a quirky grin move his lips, at that memory within a dream, because at least Brother Ronald isn't around to torment him.

Something was standing at his side. Something like a doll formed hastily from putty and not left long enough in the sun, moist and pliant, curvy and dirty white. He could not bring himself to turn and look at it. Yet the disgust he felt seemed, somehow, to come from the creature itself. There was another of them at the foot of the slab, with its blobby head and wraparound eyes, doing something to his left foot. That was hard to understand, because normally he was very ticklish. If one of the guys grabbed his bare foot, he'd go into a girlish paroxysm of giggles and flailing around. The thing down there was fooling with his foot, and it wasn't making him giggle one little bit. Quite the contrary. He felt sick with anxiety, and numb, and heavy in the limbs.

He screamed, then, a hard sharp yelp, as a needle went into the flesh between his big toe and the next toe along.

“Hey! Cut it out!”

In the funny atmosphere, his words hung in his ears like underwater echoes. Had he even spoken?

“Fuck!” The bastard was shoving the fucking needle deeper into his god-damned foot! “Jesus!”

This was unbelievable. Every time he came here they did something like this. And every time he told them how much it hurt, how vehemently he detested their invasion of his private places, but it never made the slightest bit of difference. Never did the faintest bit of good. But they were not cruel, he knew that. The one at his side touched his forehead with a cool tube, it felt like, something glimmery and pale, not metal and not plastic, and it soothed him at once. It took away the pain. No, the pain was still there, but it didn't hurt any more. Did that make any sense? It was like shoving with your tongue at a dead tooth. That baby tooth he'd pried at with his fingers and his tongue for a week and half, deciduous tooth they call it, when he was seven years old. He'd even tried that old trick they tell you about, loads of laughs, cheaper than a visit to the dentist, and you got your lucrative visit from the tooth fairy that much sooner. You tied a piece of string around the loose tooth and attached the end to a door knob, and another kid jerked the door open and out popped your floppy baby tooth. It hadn't worked. It had hurt like blazes, and the string tightened and cut into his gum, and he got his backside tanned when Mum came in from the back yard, drawn by his yelping and howling, and found him with this bloody string hanging out of his god-damned bleeding gum like he'd been gargling with a tampon or something.

Deliberately, he turned his head and stared at the putty-gray creature at his side.

Look away! the gray thing told him in his mind. Stop staring at me! You know we don't like you looking at us!

He averted his gaze, feeling horribly guilty, as if he'd been caught staring through a crack in the wall into some girl's bathroom while she was taking a pee or something. Which he had done, now that he thought about it, back in that old dairy they'd had in Olive Street, Jesus, how incredible, he'd been 11 or 12 and they still ladled out fresh creamy milk into washed bottles you brought from home there to the dairy, right in the middle of the suburbs, well, okay, out on the edge of the metropolitan area, but still. And there were milkman's delivery horses, was that right? Hairy hoofed big bastards, sweet natured and much given to shitting placidly and copiously right there in the street. His father made him rush out after they'd been past, carrying a flat-bladed spade and a hessian sack, to scoop up the steaming, heavy-smelling horse crap and bag it for the garden, God, he'd been so embarrassed, none of the neighbors did that, they probably thought his father was a perv of some kind, a manure fancier, maybe they thought we ate it with our milk and white sugar and Weeties.

Get up, the alien told him. We have to go now.

He seemed to float in an amazingly heavy way. They went across the curved brushed-aluminum floor toward the huge curving windows full of stars, and there was a door in the wall but it wasn't actually a door, it wasn't even marked as a door, they went through it without its opening, holy shit! He had just passed through the fucking wall like smoke. No, as if the wall was smoke. Curdled for a moment. Floating. There was that strange stink again. What do these guys eat? With mouths like that, how could they eat anything? Maybe they sucked blood through a straw. And here was that room again, that hallway, full of green-gold tubes in serried ranks. Each was twice the height of a tall man, and inside each there hung a human body, male and female alike, naked, long-haired. Their eyes were closed as if they slept, or were dead. In the green medium they floated, as he floated down the corridor in their midst, and their long hair streamed out from their scalps.

It was too awful to be borne. He squeezed his eyes shut tightly, and looked away.

Good boy, he thought he heard. Do not look. They are just dolls. But he secretly turned his head again and squinted at the ranks of drowned people and his heart squeezed hard and bumped. The tubes were not as large as he'd supposed, not by a long chalk. They were much closer than he had imagined, and they were smaller than the gray dwarfs leading him in their midst. They were hardly larger than test tubes, if the truth be known, and the creatures floating in them—pale, stringy haired, barely sexed—were like fetuses, limbs slightly curved, bobbing in the liquid that preserved them. The horrid little things were less alien than the gray bastards, but certainly less human than anyone he'd ever seen. In fact they looked like some kind of unholy hybrid, some vile intermixing of the two species. He wanted to scream or vomit or reach out and tear things apart in his rage, but he could not move, and the wall parted without opening and he was in his bed again.

He lay staring at the familiar ceiling for a moment, while the pounding of his heart subsided, and waited for sound to resume. A car went by in the street, throwing the edges of its headlights through the closed louvers, and he looked fearfully around the room through slitted eyes without opening them properly. The putty-gray creature stood there still, on the other side of the bed.

As always, something prevented him from screaming blue murder and waking his parents. Anyway, they had to know about this. Jesus, it had been going on as long as he could remember. Two years old, three? Up in the sky, in the blue gushing light beam, drawn toward the clouds and the shining disk, and his parents sitting frozen on the grass in the back yard, beer glasses in their hands, smiling at each other. They hadn't helped. Or was that when he was six, just back from the hospital after getting his tonsils out? There'd been a polio scare that year, and they'd kept him in the private hospital to see he was okay, and during the night the gray Harvesters had come and lifted him and three of the other kids out of the ward. Nobody ever did anything to stop them, not your parents and not your teachers, nor even the brisk nurses or the doctors, the human doctors, that is. Adults were useless, really. They'd let you get fucked up the arse in front of their very eyes and they wouldn't lift a finger to help.

iii.

20 July 1999, San Diego

My father, Commodore the Reverend Daimon Keith of the spacetime cruiser
Zygote
, sits at ease behind a desk of audiovisual controls. Scionetics devotees face him, cross-legged on cushions. A Saint-Saëns symphony, rendered soft and luminous for New Age sensibilities, fills the room's acoustic background like an odor of cinnamon. At the back of my balding, silver-haired father, on a huge bank of high definition TV screens, a ceaseless montage lifts the hearts of his followers, placing Deems in his proper context: sweet pale Australian sky with little white merino sheep clouds, rust-red outback dunes, the soaring, ancient curve of Uluru like a stone fallen from heaven, the Moon's cratered surface seen from the window of Armstrong's plummeting Lunar Excursion Module thirty years ago to the day, deep heaven itself captured by the Hubble telescope, black as eternity, roaring with a violence of stars and quasar plumes a hundred or a thousand light years in extent. Deems is clad appropriately in his commodore's uniform, silver jump suit cinched at the waist, emblazoned on shoulder and breast with the curiously aching symbols he and his fellow abductees have seen etched into the curved walls of UFO operating theatres. When he speaks to his followers, though, there is no hint of grandiosity or vainglory. This is a man among men and women, a seeker after truth, a witness to the incredible among us.

“Friends,” he says quietly, and his relaxed words are captured and borne lightly by hidden speakers to every ear, “let's talk today about one of the oldest questions of philosophy: the meaning of life. You'll be relieved to learn that I have an answer to this question,” he says with a smile, to a ripple of quiet amusement, “although it would not please the philosophers who first sought its resolution, nor the dreary men and women of today's academies who lack the wisdom or even the curiosity to ask it. I can give you a complete and provable four-word answer to that question, What is the meaning of human life? But my concise reply might merely shock and disturb you, friends, unless we first go carefully through the reasoning that leads us to this revelation—the revelation of the gray harvesters who brought me to its understanding.”