“Grays,” Hakeem said, “are the most common type of ETs reported by people who were abducted and taken up to the mother ship. Their skin is gray. You must’ve seen drawings of them. They’re kind of short, sexless, hairless, with big oval heads and huge dark eyes with no whites. The Grays are up to something, and it’s not good. They want something from us that we can’t begin to imagine. I hope to God I never find out what it is. I hope they don’t get what they want from me.”
This was a haunted man, a troubled man, his life forever sent off the rails because he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and had seen something that he could neither understand nor forget. If I had found him amusing, it was because I tend to find most people amusing. Not least of all myself. After all, each of us is an eccentric in one way or another, to one degree or another. However, I was beginning to feel that Hakeem was a tragic figure, a victim of post-traumatic stress disorder who was trapped in a spiral staircase of dread with no exit at the top or bottom, ceaselessly racing up and down and up.
I indicated the scanning device that he had left on the coffee table. “Is that a Gray detector?”
“No, no. Grays aren’t shape changers. I got this from a techie flying-saucer guru in Arkansas. He builds and programs them himself. It’s based on a Chinese facial-recognition system, LLVision, but without the usual glasses. And it’s not about facial recognition, but about scanning for structural anomalies, anything that might indicate the human form is merely a costume. I’m not mental.”
“Of course you’re not,” I said. “Have you ever scanned anyone who’s set off an alarm?”
“Not yet. But with UFO activity increasing, it’s bound to happen one day. Thank God for Miles Bennell. He’s a genius.”
“Miles Bennell?”
“He’s the guru techie in Arkansas who sells these things.”
Bridget said, “Is UFO activity really increasing?”
Springing up from his chair with the kinetic energy of a jack-in-the-box, Hakeem Kaspar said, “It always has been, ever since the 1940s. It’s always accelerating—the activity, number of sightings—toward some end. Who knows what end? Many nights, I sit out in the yard, in a lawn chair, and I watch the sky. Many nights. If you do that, you’ll be surprised at what you’ll see. You’ll see things that never took off from an earthly airport and will never land at one, immense craft without running lights, dark forms that blot out the stars as they pass. I’ve seen them. I watch, and I see them, and I’m not mental.” His feverish gaze slid from Bridget to me to Sparky. He took a deep breath. “Don’t tell anyone what I said. My job at the power company depends on this being secret. My interest in . . . in these things is something they wouldn’t understand.”
After we promised to keep his secret, we departed.
I was the last to leave. At the door, I put a hand on Hakeem’s shoulder and said, “I’m sorry.” I looked around at the hundreds of UFO photos papering nearly everything. “I didn’t leave myself in the middle of that highway, but I feel responsible for what you’ve been through, for what you’re going through.”
His eyes at last narrowed. He squinted at me, as if scanning for structural anomalies. Then he startled me by throwing his arms around me and saying, “No, no, no. No, no, no.” He released me. His eyes were owlish again and now glimmering with unshed tears. “Before you, before baby you, before that door in the day and that hole in the sky, I was just marking time, just existing. There was no wonder in my life, no magic, nothing to believe in except a paycheck and a six-pack. That day, what happened on that stretch of highway—after that, I understood the world wasn’t just a movie screen, wasn’t just flat, there was depth to it, strangeness and meaning. I don’t know what meaning, but it’s something big, and I’m a part of it. If there are evil Grays—and there are!—then there must be other ETs, good Blues or some other color. Whatever’s out there, it’s anything you could imagine, everything you could imagine, because the universe is that big. I owe you, Quinn Quicksilver. I owe you for my happiness.”
Well. Even I, for all my limitations, discerned two lessons from Hakeem’s heartfelt response. First, it is a mistake to presume to know anyone’s internal emotional landscape based on what external emotional signals they seem to be sending. Second, you can apologize for something you have done, but only a fool apologizes for things that other people have done, for he has no authority to do that. And so I felt like a fool as I left the trailer, though like a fool with the best intentions. I took solace in the fact that, although I had inspired Hakeem to pursue profound meaning where he would never find it—UFOs, Grays, Blues, mother ships, abductees given rectal exams by freaky aliens—at least I had inspired wonder in the poor guy. In time, wonder might lead to that more elevated feeling that is awe, the yielding of the mind to the reverence of what is supremely grand and true.