Someone Else’s Miracle
Encounters of the Fifth Kind
My feet found the warm yellow patches of sun on the floorboards when I got out of bed. I pumped a pan of water, splashed it on my face as always, and started the potbelly for coffee. The same board creaked as it has every morning when I step onto the porch — but I shall never hear it again! The sun was bright in the clear blue. I thought it might rain.
I ran down the lawn to the mailbox to get the postcard. It was a cartoon of two children holding a perfume bottle from an opened package. Underneath was written, “It says you should put some on your bosom — whatever that is.” Perhaps it was meant to be funny. On the back was “Hi Jess, Just for (something I couldn’t read) time to (something).” It was signed Gerald without any other closing. Then I walked toward the center of the road to feel the wall as usual. Mother thinks that’s silly, or thought it was.
I always knew exactly where the wall was, but this time I bumped it with my face a good three feet before I expected it! And it had lost its usual springiness, having more of a wooden hardness. And not only that, there was a painful tingle when I struck it, like the feeling of hitting an elbow the wrong way. I ran back to the house. “Mother,” I shouted, “the wall has moved!” I had thought she wouldn’t believe me, but I was wrong.
“Get your father,” she said. “No time to waste, it’s moving day. If you’ve anything you must keep, get it quickly. Don’t take more than you can easily carry.”
I grabbed my book and my collection of postcards. I roused Father from the couch.
“What?” he said. “What is it? Check on the ranks?”
“Mother says it’s moving day.”
“Oh, moving day,” Father said. “Get my suitcase. The train’s leaving. Pack your bags.”
We stood on the front lawn, Mother with a small full paper bag, I with my book and cards, and Father holding his shaving case above his head like a trophy. I stepped toward the road carefully, one hand in front. The wall wasn’t far, only about five feet now, and pausing for a moment I could feel it moving up the slope toward the house.
“Try that way,” Mother called to me, pointing to the east. I did, and found the wall again, about fifty feet away. “Is it moving?” Mother asked.
“Yes,” I said, “it’s coming toward the house.”
Then I tried to the west, with the same result.
“It looks like the path will be behind the house,” Mother said. By that time, the wall had reached them on the lawn, forcing retreat. I went east again and followed it around the side of the house to the back yard. Suddenly, in the direction of the pond, I fell through it. Mother and Father had come round the house too, and she pulled him along toward where I lay on the ground. “That’s it,” she said. “Let’s go.”
We crawled through an invisible tunnel past the pond and past the ducks that we never could reach, and on and on. Then a new horizon came into view — as the old one turned pale and faded! We came to a new house, a strange and colorful house so much finer than the old gray wooden one I had lived in all my life.
Inside were too many newnesses to comprehend. I will start listing them tomorrow, and perhaps sketching a small picture of each. Father suddenly came into his own, naming so many things I had never seen. About one of them, a brown box with round knobs and a great gray glassy side, he said “A T-V, a T-V. Oh, a T-V.” And then he played with the knobs, seeming to expect the box to do something, and when it didn’t, he sat on the floor and just stared at it for a long time.
Later, Father found an oddly shaped black object he immediately recognized. He put the curiously elongated part, attached by black rope to the heavier body, up to his head and said things like, “Hello, Jones? When do you plan to send us home?” Soon he tired of that thing too, which he called a “fone.”
I of course found this marvelous book of blank pages, giving me the chance to practice further the writing that Grandfather taught me. But I will stop now because my hand aches and I’m tired. I will continue tomorrow. It’s getting dark, and we haven’t found a lantern or a single candle yet.
***
Where to begin? It’s all too fantastic. What could have been more incredible than yesterday? Well, my little blank book, the answer would be, today.
I awoke before Mother and Father as always, and went to the kitchen where it was only my great hunger that overcame the natural tendency to look and touch and push and twist and lift all the wonderful implements. We seemed to have forgotten to eat after the move! Yesterday, Father had paraded through the house naming almost everything, and now in the kitchen I found food in the large white box he had called “refrigerator.” It was cold inside, like winter.
At our old house, of course, we awoke some days to find our pantry refilled with new food. Here, I suppose it will be our refrigerator, and the many cabinets on the walls. I obtained some wood, stacked neatly outside as it was at our previous home, and started a fire in the stove in a lower compartment.
What a mistake! The room quickly filled with smoke and the top of the stove never got hot. Tomorrow I shall again attempt to understand how this new stove works — the rest of the excitement left no time for further investigations today.
Mother was awakened by the smoke, and came into the kitchen. She knew no more than I about the stove, and I momentarily wondered if it really was a stove — but Father had clearly repeated its name over and over, yesterday. We opened the back door and the kitchen windows, which helped greatly. Then came the biggest shock of my life.
She appeared in the kitchen door, apparently awakened from some unknown location by the smoke. Yes, she. Her name, I later learned, was Inez, but at the moment my world had shattered. I still don’t know what to make of it. For some things, like the new house and now Inez, there are no answers.
Inez. I think of her now, I say her name out loud, and the miracle of her existence explodes inside me all over again. She was lovely, there in the doorway in her pink flowered nightgown, her skin the color of toast, and her hair long and black. She would have been lovelier still, had her eyes not stared as if to pop from her head, and her mouth not held an expression of wordless terror. She stared for a moment, transfixed on Mother and myself, and then she screamed well beyond anything needed for pain. She turned and ran through the front room and out the door onto the lawn. Naturally I followed her, that Mother, oddly, calmly remained in the kitchen.
Inez dashed toward our new mailbox, then past it, as if her gown were on fire. I yelled a warning, but she couldn’t or wouldn’t hear me, and she hit up against the wall with great force. There were flashes of light in the air around her body, and she fell in the road (which is not dirt now, but a hard, black, coarse surface). When I reached her, she was unconscious, and I sat and held her head in my lap.
I ran my fingers over the length of her nose and touched the perfect softness of her cheeks. Her hair felt like cool sheets on a hot day. I lifted some of it to my face and reveled in its clean smell. But my feelings were mixed. I tingled at the thought of touching her further down, while at the same time realizing that this was forbidden from what Grandfather had told me of “courting” — a talk I’d not understood well at the time, but which now I attempted to recall with eagerness. As she lay there breathing lightly, she might have been my happy bride, a vision so fanciful that I had to pinch myself.
But she awoke screaming, scrambled to her feet, and staggered awkwardly, apparently remembering the encounter with the wall. With her hands in front probing, she quickly found it again and followed it down the road. Shortly she was forced to turn directly left, and she sidled up the gentle rise of the lawn, on the far side of our new house. I followed her, trying to engage her in conversation, but to no avail. It was as if this were her normal mode of life: to scream and dash and yell and stumble and scream some more.
This went on for the entire length of the wall around our yard. The tunnel, of course, was no longer there — I had checked that yesterday. Inez did some lame jumping, then searched for something to help her climb the wall. She managed to prop our new picnic table against it, and when I tried to help her up, she screamed even louder and batted repeatedly at my hand.
Eventually she exhausted herself and simply lay on the lawn, crying. I sat down next to her. Despite her condition, she managed to recoil a few feet to a sitting position, getting grass stains on her pretty nightgown. “Who are you?” she screamed, with what seemed the full force of her lungs.
“I’m Peter,” I said, trying to be cheerful for her.
She just yelled at me, “Ahh, Ahh, Ahh,” over and over. It changed into sobs, and her head sank down on her chest.
“Why are you so unhappy?” I asked her.
She didn’t answer for a long time, and I just waited. “My name is Inez,” she said finally, having calmed a little. “So what is this, some kind of C-I-A thing?”
I certainly have no special cleverness at conversation, but I felt Inez was actively negative whenever I spoke. It was quite impolite. Her expression was almost always pained, her utterances often breathless or angry, and her demeanor either sad or rude. Try as I might, she was nasty to me. She kept thinking that something called the C-I-A or the F-B-I had put her into my life — a life that she thought outlandish! I explained that this is how it is and has always been, and there’s no sense trying to puzzle it out.
When it began to get dark, and began to rain as well, I persuaded her to come inside. I was going to suggest bed, since she was tired and I had not had a chance to look for candles, but — wonder on top of wonders — she scratched a thing on the wall and the whole front room was flooded with light! Father didn’t do that, I suppose, because he went to bed early yesterday, but Inez seemed to know, as he did, the names of most of our new items. She played with the round knobs on the T-V like Father had done — and curious flashing white dots appeared in the gray glass! She stared at it as Father had and played more with the knobs, but tired of it more quickly than he had.
Finally she began to be calmer, and even seemed to take an interest in our existence. She asked how we got food, and I explained that it appeared overnight every once in awhile, just when it seemed like we were getting low. I told her about moving day, and our old house. She wondered if I had gone to school, which I had heard of from Grandfather, but of course I had to answer no, school being just a fantasy.
Later, when Mother and Father had retired, we sat alone in the front room. I was excited just to be in her presence — it made me happy in a way I’d felt only in some dreams. We were entirely unchaperoned, as Grandfather would have said. But try as I might to take the initiative, as Grandfather had said a man should in this situation, I could not guide the conversation the way I would have wished.
Then, to impress her I suppose, I showed her my book, Alice Ross Colver’s The Wish Fairy and Dewy Dear. She laughed! — the first time she had done so. She looked at the first pages of the book. “Nineteen twenty-two!” she exclaimed. “And you say this is all you have to read?”
What else could I have, I wondered.
“There are thousands, millions of books,” she said, becoming agitated again. “Shakespeare, Joyce, Anne Rice, Maya Angelou. My god, nineteen twenty-two. The Wish Fairy!” Then she had a fit of laughter again.
Despite my embarrassment, I was pleased to see that the laughter made her easier to talk to. She began telling me about where she had lived before coming to visit us — a fantasy world for sure. She spoke of a place called New York with millions of people, and cars (which Grandfather had called automobiles) all over, and huge buildings and on and on.
“This may sound crazy,” Inez said at one point, “but I may have figured out what’s going on here.”
“Please tell me,” I said sincerely.
Her expression turned cold and disagreeable as she said, “You’re a fucking exhibit in a fucking alien zoo.”
When I asked what she meant, she went on, using still more words that I remember but don’t understand. “Look, Peter, I believe everything you’ve told me, maybe. I’ve never seen anything like that wall out there, and it rained without a cloud in the sky and I really have no explanation how I got here. I was at a party with friends in the city, and I went to the bathroom and the next thing I know, I was here, in a nightgown. If you’d drugged me and abducted me — that still doesn’t explain the wall, or the rain.”
I could only nod encouragement, though I’d have rather moved on to other topics.
“You say you were born here,” she continued, “born in this godforsaken place — or the house that came before — and I believe you. All I can think of is that some aliens captured your ancestors and put them in a little cage like monkeys in a zoo, or maybe this is another dimension and the party is just over the wall, but for chrissakes (or something like that) they feed you. Your father must have been brought in later as a mate — but I don’t think all of him made it. And that weird horizon is as phony as a wig, only you don’t know it because you’ve never seen a real one. Don’t you see, Peter? They just gave you a new cage!” She laughed very unladylike, then said, “But my god, this house is from the sixties Peter. You’re way behind here. You ought to try to get a hold of the keepers.”
And so on.
She spoke her theories, and I thought about them. There were a lot of things I couldn’t explain to her, but her ideas didn’t make very much sense either. Then she said she had figured out how to test her idea. She left for the kitchen and came back with a big sharp knife, and sat down next to me.
“Peter, I apologize for what I’m going to do. You seem to be a civil sort or person, but listen, I have to find out if I’m right.”
“Why?” I said. “Things are just the way they are. Try to be happy.”
She shook her head. “Sorry, I’ve got to get out of here. This isn’t my world. If you want to stay in a zoo, fine, but not me. I’m going to try to kill you. I figure they’re watching, and they won’t let me kill their exhibit.”
Then she rose from the couch and waved the knife at the ceiling. “You bastards, do you hear me? I’m going to kill them all!” Then she brought the knife down right at my chest, fast, like she really meant to kill me.
The knife bounced away as if it had hit a piece of metal. Inez’s head snapped backward, and she arched over and dropped to the floor without using her hands to break her fall. She just lay there. I could see her breathing, so I knew she hadn’t died like Grandfather had. But she didn’t move, so I woke Mother and told her what had happened.
“Don’t worry,” Mother said. She was nodding like she knew exactly what was going on. “Everything will be fine. Now go to bed.”
She seemed very sure, and I was tired, so I went to my room. Well, I’ve finally finished writing about this strange day, in this strange night light, so I think I will go to sleep now.
***
Mother, it has turned out, was right. Everything will be fine now. Inez was very different when she awoke today — she was giggly and happy and playful, and has stopped talking about zoos and cities and leaving. She and Father danced around the room and then sat in front of the T-V for a long time, watching the dots. I myself find them boring.
I remember now that Grandfather told me Grandmother just appeared one day, like Inez. It didn’t mean much then — Grandmother died before I was born. Grandfather called her coming a miracle, but I had never seen a miracle. Nothing new had ever happened in my life.
When I remembered about Grandmother, I asked Mother about Father. Well it turns out he was a miracle too! “Your father appeared one day, like Inez,” she said. “He was wild and angry at first, like she was, and wouldn’t speak sensibly. He wouldn’t eat or drink, and he started to hit us. He fell asleep like Inez did, on the floor, and when we woke him up the next day, he was completely different — the way you always knew him. He was so much happier.”
“How long were you engaged before you were married?” I asked.
“Silly Peter. We were never married. Grandmother and Grandfather were though, at least that’s what Grandfather used to say. But I wouldn’t even know how to do it. Grandfather tried to teach me, but I don’t have your patience.”
“I know all about it,” I said. “Grandfather told me. I’m going to need a ring to give Inez.”
“I have one I can give you. It was Grandmother’s.”
So that problem was easily solved. I will woo Inez and marry her. I know all about that from Grandfather’s stories. I want to do everything right. And have children too.
Before she got happy, Inez had said our house was “from the sixties,” which seemed to mean something bad, but I believe she is content with it now. She doesn’t use as many strange words like “fucking” and “alien” either. Now that she is happy here, I don’t think I’ll bother with puzzles like New York or parties. Happiness is more important than understanding.
Our food is much better in our new house, though sometimes it’s hard to get to it. Father knew a paper-covered metal “can” had food inside, but it took me a long time to open it with a hammer and a screwdriver, and I cut my finger on one of the sharp edges. Instead of the heavy dark bread we used to find in the pantry, there is a puffy white kind in transparent bags. My personal favorite food is a kind of cookie that’s sweet, but also tangy — much better than the ones Mother and I used to make from flour and sugar and butter. They’re called “Ginger Snaps” on the box they were in. They’re different and new, like my Inez, my glad, sweet, radiant Inez. Tomorrow I’m going to ask her what it’s like to be someone else’s miracle.
