Amy Pence
UFO
It was the last summer you lived in Las Vegas. Driving your mother’s car, or maybe it was Lara’s. Could be you were meeting your friends later at Marie Callender’s, where, not long after, Lefty Rosenthal’s car blew but didn’t kill him.
Could be you were driving on Tropicana or Flamingo or Sahara. Dusk. Another 100-degree day. Desert cooling. Desert exhausted. Drum-hard earth. Tumbleweeds scattered by wind, jammed with paper in chain link fences. Your arm, the tensed muscles, rolling the window down.
Maybe you were driving west into the sunset so that you could watch it. Leaking its last colors, scattered clouds mulling the horizon over Black Mountain. You put your arm outside the car, cupping a fistful of hot-as-ass wind. Maybe Hotel California was on the radio and you were looking into your sunglasses and the person you were had an eye that looked back. Smell of sagebrush, always the salt-dust that all the time, every moment, bloomed around you, clinging to cars, to people, to creatures. How those creatures scurried into the jointed brush.
When you first glimpsed it, to the right of your car, you were the only one on the road, which makes no sense, though the memory has lodged there that way, skeletal. The sun had just done its last blip over the mountain’s far edge, the penumbra weakening. Reds and purples, both varied and layered. Scudding clouds indefinite. You looked to your right, just a glance, not wanting to take your eyes from the planet’s nightly shift. But there, something surprising in the sky, moving rapidly but without effort. No exhaust and the craft was crustacean-white—propelled as if from a slingshot, elastic as time. Far away in its distance, yet intimate. Your car and it, this alien thing, occupying a common space.
Time stretched and you struggled to remember the road. Your place on the road. The world plush and fragmentary. This could be heaven or this could be hell, the radio bleated. In front of you, cars had materialized, some just clicking on their lights, taillights bleeding dimly. Are you seeing this? you wanted to ask the other drivers.
But it didn’t appear so. No one else noticed the alien ship entering your same atmosphere, though it was as real as your hand in the wind, as real as every other car, every other mind in every other car. But you didn’t want to stop because the thing was moving so fast it might disappear in seconds.
Spherical, luminous, the alien craft held light at its center. You pressed the accelerator, but the heavy motor in your machine only sputtered. Instead of disappearing, the craft paced you. You understood it would mirror your every move. It could move forward, as you did, and backward. But you wouldn’t go back, and the vehicle moving you forward was cumbersome, barbaric. It’s true of your own body, lumbering into the future, slowed by gravity’s pull.
The alien ship, the not-you, appeared lighter than any body, any concrete thing on this planet. Maybe the sphere was from this universe, after all. Could be, another.
It tracked you, shuddering in your own breath, twinned to your earthly momentum. Moments lingered as you raced forward alongside whatever beings propelled the slim craft. Then a surprising elliptical movement. The blue-tinged thing veered with great speed into the horizon’s apricot. To someplace else. No more straining at the wheel. You slowed the car, not quite stopping. Your head a fog. A mind in the mind. No trace of it in the sky. It had outrun your time.
At first, you held the moment as you would a bird, as if a starling had entered your ribcage, fluttering to say yes, yes, it’s real, this is real. But the further you drove, the more the present turned you toward doubt. Did that really happen? Your confusion attended by the mundane. A group of shirtless teenage boys in a truck swerved around you, cursing as one launched a flashing beer can into the desert.
The starling flew from your mouth and the spell broke. You would explain away what you saw. Of course there must have been exhaust, a contrail you couldn’t see. It was just some kind of aircraft from Nellis Air Force Base. Of course it had not slowed to reflect you as some moving object in time. Everything you had experienced was an illusion. No aliens roam the planet, recessive beneath the surface of the visible.
But everything is alien at one time or another. When you rode the school bus as a kid and Lara got on first: Frankenstein Girl, they yelled, and then to Jiggy, Fat Little Fag. They didn’t know what to call you because you said nothing. You were nothing. You hid so well that you couldn’t even find yourself. You all three sat together: your dark, matted alien hair rising in the breeze from the window, the rolled gray pellets of paper coming hard and fast on your necks and you could only fold into yourselves. You were only real in each other’s eyes.
When you passed Hammerstein’s house, you all stood up, moving to the other side of the bus to look. The wreckage of old casinos tottering: the twin turrets, the Egyptian sarcophagus, a thatched village fanned out across the scorched lawn. The unlit Thunderbird sign patchy in the sun. You didn’t know that behind that magnanimous Old Vegas façade, the man there was a cold nugget of indifference, just like many others you were yet to meet, the ones that would almost break you and your mother in two.
Two: Your mother had changed. Everybody changes, but somehow all her dreams had turned to ice. She existed in time. Sometimes she got the timing right. She was just a Las Vegas showgirl. But she knew exactly when to dance upstage or downstage, when to regally pace, topless, balancing her feathered headpiece, when to take one step at a time and when to take two. She knew when to fall from the swing as Madame de Pompadour and tangle her sex with others on the bed. It was all part of the show at the Stardust. She knew when she could transform into a white tiger, and when to appear and disappear from your life.
And she got the timing wrong. She didn’t know what to say, ever, not once. She was silent as a stone when she died. But as a child, you lay with her on her bed to sleep. By afternoon, when you finally came awake, her two eyes and your two eyes became one eye. Where you looked and what you saw were the same.
You could explain it away: it’s alien, it’s not-you. Or maybe that UFO was you, is you, a you that sees everything, infinite. Or maybe it’s just the you that won’t let you leave it behind.