Intrusions

by Freddy Durbin

I 

The first thing her husband related to her was that he had not recognized her when he awoke.

“All of it, out of place,” he said. “The house, the fields, the cat,” he said. “And you.”

The second thing he related to her was the shear of light he’d seen in the sky the night before. A blue-hot glister at the head of the trail, the farmhouse’s old joists shuddering when it struck earth. He’d been wedged in the slender interstice of sleep and wakefulness, his body work-worn and sciatic, but this had not been part of any dream. Damn if he could dream so well as that.

“The sound,” he said, “you heard it?”

She nodded vaguely.

The third thing he related to her was the helical climb of smoke coming from the field’s northern extreme and his inability to puzzle out how in the world the smoke was so bright, how it seemed to luminesce and to throb every other second to a brighter, hotter pitch of white. The swollen tobacco leaves kneeling with each pulse, his paltry head of hair and threadbare beard bristling with static as he watched on the back porch.

She was retreating, almost imperceptibly, to her side of the bed. She looked unsteadily at him. There was the urge to look over her shoulder and out the window.

The fourth thing he related to her was his pleasant buoyant walk through the field toward the smoke, his hands after each bush he parsed coming back wet and stained black with nicotine, his pantlegs soaked with it too, his legs filmed beneath the denim.

“I didn’t want to walk out there,” he said. “I promise I didn’t.” He sounded strangely apologetic, then hardened again. “And walking isn’t even the right word for it.”

The fifth and final thing he related to her was the hardest for him to relate. He’d reached the crash site but besides a dark halo scorched into the ground, tobacco leaves flattened into two-dimensions, there was hardly evidence anything had occurred. Only smoke in the air coiling and uncoiling like gouts of blood in water. He was standing in the center of the halo when the smoke enwrapped him and his legs pulled from the ground. And as he rose and rose, was it euphoria or terror or not quite either, some feeling lodged between the two refusing to become fully discrete?

He felt the smoke enter his nose and mouth and slip down his throat. He was able to move his eyes but not his head and he saw in his upper periphery a vessel, an aperture shuttering open, his body trapped in a great cone of light. He continued to rise until he could see past the swaths of tobacco and the dark swell and fall of the distant limestone hills.

Inside, it was too large to make sense. Dull metal walls gave back disjointed reflections. Lights strobed. Doors opened, lithe bodies entering and exiting. Shadows flitted about him.

He was stripped, restrained supine on a metal board, then prone, then sideways. There wasn’t a moment without a circus of hands or something like hands raking and surveying and entering his body. There were soundings, forced contortions, chemical drips, and what he could only think to call a rebreather affixed to his face, perhaps to tolerate the rarefied air, perhaps for some other purpose. It was interminable, all of it, the parts he thought he understood and the parts he knew he did not and wouldn’t ever, and then there was a surge of vertigo and he was back in the middle of the field balled up nude and snarled with tobacco leaves, everything inside of him scraped out, scalded, bruised. Finally, there was a soundless windless pulsion above him and the vessel’s lights receded east into gray predawn sky, vanished.

“They dropped me here,” he said, his voice small but precise. He gestured to her, to the room, to the cat curled obliviously up at the foot of the bed. “They dropped me here, and thought I wouldn’t notice.” he said. Every detail struck him as a replica of the details he’d known, all the details except his own, he said. He reached out slowly to touch her face, pulled back.

II

The first thing she related to him was that she had not recognized him when she awoke.

“The cat, the silence,” she said. “And you.” She was rigid against the headboard and when her words wavered she cleared her throat and took a breath. “You were the sole thing out of place.”

The second thing she related to him was the casement-rattling drone in the middle of the night, her sleep-drunk reticence to stay awake long enough and confirm that what she was hearing was not something carried over from a dream.

The third thing she related to him was what she’d seen in the sky. She’d stood there squinting through the dew-pocked window trying to puzzle it all out. A weather balloon, she’d ridiculously thought. She thumbed sleep from her eyes and cupped her hands against the glass and saw it, just as he’d described: a vessel with a trio of enormous headlights, like a train’s, boring palely through the darkness, the tobacco yielding and folding flat as the vessel descended further. A bout of silence, the means of propulsion cut, the vessel’s bottom opening and a man tumbling down.

“It was a kind of a birth,” she said. “Your birth,” she said.

The fourth thing she related to him was how he’d stood as if nothing had happened after the vessel left, facing the farmhouse with his head tilted up to her window and walking toward the porch with a perfect soldier-like stride. How the tobacco shriveled and blackened in his wake, how a mantle of smoke clung to him, or not quite smoke, but something fluid and luminous like the soft pirouetting veil of jellyfish.

She climbed from bed, watching him, unblinking and never looking away. She regarded him as something in stasis, dormant. She opened the armoire and reached beneath a stack of jeans and pulled out a rifle, chambering a round fluidly and squeezing shut an eye and training it on him.

The fifth and final thing she related to him was that he did not belong here, that he was an intruder, the first of an inevitable infestation. She knew it could happen one day. They both did, did they not? Had they not talked often about it, had they not been laughed out of rooms for believing in such things? Of course he hadn’t felt he belonged here, because the only place he belonged was the place from which he’d come.

He held his hands in front of his face and made himself small and winced and pleaded. She inspected the details of his naked body that she’d known so well for so many years: the trio of moles on the chest, the oddly sunken navel, the dark birthmark on the left hip. They’d done a good job, better than good.

She had never seen him cry like this. And would he, if it were really him, cry like this?

They could figure it out, he said. They could make sense of it all. He could lure them back to the fields, he could lure them back and he could try to reason with them. Please, he said.

III 

The first thing that she will relate to him, when they inevitably catch her and ferry her away to that other place, that place where she’ll be the intrusion and he the intruded, is that she had shot the false him in the head after he’d begged her not to, had dragged his body out into the field and pitched a lit match onto his kerosened body, a quarter of the field ablaze by the time she’d gotten in her truck. And she’ll relate what she saw in the rearview as she fled: a glister of light screaming through predawn sky and crashing soundlessly in the forest half a mile away.

“I didn’t want to pull over,” she will say to him. “I didn’t want to get out,” she will say. “I didn’t want follow the smoke.” She will move closer to him; she will see her reflection in his eyes, the replica that he is seeing. “But I did,” she’ll say, frantic. “I did, I did, I don’t know why, but I did.”

He will rise from bed and say some things, it won’t matter what, since she’d already said them herself, and open the armoire and pull a rifle out from under a stack of flannels. And her husband will do the same thing she had done to him, and there will be nothing more to relate for either of them.