A Honeymoon Disrupted By a Close Encounter

Ilana Masad

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An excerpt from Beings by Ilana Masad

This is how I like to imagine them:

Sitting in the sky-blue Chevy Bel Air, he behind the wheel with both his hands on it, a man who took driving seriously, who understood that the weight and speed and thrust of a car are as full of latent danger as a bullet nestled in the chamber of a gun, and she his trusting passenger, not only willing but also eager to shed responsibility in favor of frivolity, which in this moment meant keeping the little dog, Dee, curled on her lap while her eyes freely roamed the landscapes flying by, endless woven tapestries hanging on either side of the black asphalt corridor. It was a cold autumn night in 1961.

They knew how to be quiet together, these two.

But not always, nor even frequently, for each was brimful with thoughts and opinions, and it was in their particular natures to take pleasure in vocalizing these. Both, moreover, had learned long ago when and where to stay silent in order to preserve their own sense of dignity, not to mention their physical safety, and had spent quite enough time keeping their mouths shut and faces impassive even as they yearned to contradict, correct, or at the very least challenge the record in rooms full of white men. Together, then, there was no need for self-imposed muzzles.

Among their earliest joys, these mutual funnels of sometimes suppressed speech, tornadoes of words twining round one another as they sat up late at night in those early days, when he was still married to his first wife and she was trying very hard not to appear to wish it were otherwise. In those white wicker chairs on the porch of the boarding house where they first encountered one another, his family slumbering, they talked about everything under the moon, he offering her cigarettes first, until his case ran out and she told him to hang on a minute and dashed to her room, all five feet of her, elevated another one and a half inches by her sensible, black, thick-heeled shoes. He knew he desired her when she returned unshod, a half-full pack of smokes in her small hand for them to share, but this was nothing new nor particularly alarming, only a measure that he was as much a man then as he had been at thirty and twenty-five and eighteen and sixteen. Desire, anyhow, did not always lead to divorce, so he lit her cigarette that first night and lit one himself and they continued discussing the state of the world and the wrongs they saw in it, and if sometimes she said the kinds of things that he heard in rooms full of white men, well, they were alone on a porch together. Later, after he had divorced his first wife, they were alone in motels together, until, eventually, they were alone under her own roof as often as he could get a weekend off work and then, finally, once they had married and he got the transfer to Boston and moved in with her, they were alone together in the home that was now theirs, shared, and when it was just the two of them, he felt fully within his rights to contradict, correct, and at the very least challenge her ideas. He noted that first night that she did not flinch like other small white women might when he did this, but rather leaned forward as if to shorten the distance between her eardrums and his mouth, her eyes a little narrowed either with the effort of listening or from the smoke.

There was intimacy in this shared silence too, now, only months after he had moved in with her, his second wife, to whom he was, too, a second husband.

They had set out from the Canadian border some hours ago, and it was now after midnight. She wished this brief, belated honeymoon would not end, but there was a storm coming and they had not brought enough money with them for a third night at the motel. She hoped her husband did not blame himself for this. The weekend was his idea, a welcome and romantic surprise, sprung on her when he returned from work in the morning just four days before. Oh, she hoped he was not in a bad mood now. He got mad at himself sometimes, a quiet anger like parental disappointment, his expression similar to how she imagined he must look at his boys if they were up to something naughty or got a low grade at school. He held himself to such high standards, became annoyed when he had missed a turn on Route 3 an hour or two ago. They doubled back and stopped to ask for directions at a restaurant, had ended up eating there, too, and the moist slice of chocolate cake she had gotten sat in her stomach, its weight welcome, sweetness still lingering in her mouth. She shuffled nearer to him on the bench seat—Dee slunk off her lap to the floor in response—and leaned forward to kiss the fat knuckle of his thumb. He did not like taking his hands off the wheel except to shift, especially when it was as dark as all this, which she knew, and so she nuzzled her forehead against his shoulder, just once, quickly, and moved back. He smiled, eyes still on the road, and she knew he was all right.

He was indeed in good enough spirits, although distracted. He was tired, and the hamburger he had eaten hoping it would give him energy had instead made him lethargic, his eyes heavier now. He should have had a coffee, but his ulcer had only recently subsided and he was limiting himself to three cups a day, none later than 5 p.m. He tried to fix his mind on something. The radio was off. It had begun emitting too much static, that gray shuffling noise, in the twists and turns of the highway making its way through the White Mountains. He did not wish to engage in conversation with his wife; he was too tired to feel intelligent, and the road was dark, demanding his concentration. He knew he instinctively glanced at her when they talked in the car and the margins were narrow on this road. It was better not to risk it.

His mind turned over the events of the weekend, the good food and the music, the Negroes he had noticed in Montreal and how surprised he was, never having considered that men of his race might live in such a strange, somewhat exotic place, all that French. Silly, he realized now, driving, as of course Negroes lived all over the world. He had friends in the service who told him about Negro Frenchmen and even Germans, although they had had a bad time of it during the war. He thought again about a conversation that he occasionally found himself having with certain men over the years, a talk that always went the same way, about how they noticed themselves, sometimes, thinking about things as if they were white, with the same advantages handed to them and thus the same ease of bestowing judgment upon others. As if the way white folk talked and lived, their innocence or, more commonly, their willful ignorance or outright racism, had permeated something in them. He and his wife had recently attended a scientific lecture about the blood–brain barrier, a set of selective cells in the brain that form a semipermeable border that only some substances can penetrate. That was what it felt like: the prejudices he saw all around him doing just what they should not do, what he wished he could prevent them from doing, and jumping the blood–brain barrier.

Before we go any further, I want to acknowledge my choice of racial terminology, which in my era is outdated and offensive. But the couple did not live in my era, and this is their story, the couple’s. For their time, and specifically their generation and class, the use of the term Negro was widespread and politically correct. Younger people, students and activists mostly, were just beginning to reclaim the word Black, but this wouldn’t achieve widespread acceptance and popularity until the end of the decade. Not until the mid-2010s did it become consistently capitalized in written media. I’ve chosen to use the terms contemporary to the couple in order to avoid anachronisms.

Language changes. What is widespread or preferred or acceptable changes from one era to the next. The language I use in my asides—preferred and respectful in my era—may well read as old fashioned, rude, or downright bigoted by the time anyone reads this.

His musings were interrupted by his wife asking him to look outside, at the bright star near the moon. Was it moving? He glanced up, puzzled. It did seem as if a speck of light was slightly farther from the bright moon every time he took his eyes off the road. Surely there were no satellites orbiting above New Hampshire, but perhaps, he ventured, one had drifted off course.

She kept watching the speck grow brighter, wondering if it was a trick of their own progress that made it seem to move. The moon hung like a big, beautiful lamp that night, drowning out many of the stars nearest it. The sky looked for a moment like the pictures in a storybook she had read when she was a child, during the days when her mama had limited her to one a day because no one had time to go to the library as often as she wanted, and there certainly was no money for books, not even before the Depression. The book was loaned by a neighbor, children’s stories about the constellations. She remembered so few of them now, but she had for a while begged her mama to stay outside after dark on weekend nights with a small flashlight so she could look up at the stars and down at the book and try to find all the constellations she could in the sky above her. There had not been any moving stars then, never, except when one fell, lucky, and she would make a wish. But the roving light she saw now, one hand nervously fiddling with a blue earring, seemed to be going much too slow to be a good luck charm and too fast to be a star at all.

At her feet, the dog was whining just a little bit. Dee was a good dog, well trained, did not make a fuss when she needed to go to the bathroom, and never went on the floor at home or in the car, but just asked quietly, like this, whether her needs could be attended to. So her owner asked her husband to stop the car, for the dog, but also so she could look at the light, and see if it really was moving.

He stood outside the car, smoking, while his wife walked the little dog down a stretch of highway. He kept looking back and forth up the road, worried that a trooper might come by or a policeman or just a driver out late and bored and looking for trouble.

She took the cigarette out of his hand and smoked it and called him a sleepyhead, for he had not noticed her coming right up to him with the dog, not until she touched him. He could be like that, lost in thought and space, and she thought him almost too handsome in this stoic state. She loved his smile too, of course, even if his teeth were fake. They fit well and looked very natural on him, so that most people did not know.

He stretched once more and put an arm around her shoulders, asked if the dog was all right now, and she said yes, so they climbed back into the car. She settled herself and Dee as he pulled back onto the road. The cold night air and the little walk had refreshed her, and she looked out the windows with renewed interest.

There it was, the same peculiar light movement, and she began to track it again, the comfortable joy of a moment previous turning liquid inside her, sharpening into nervous curiosity. She pointed and asked her husband to look again, and told him he was being ridiculous if he thought the growing light could possibly be a star or even a satellite, so much farther away would it have to be then.

He raised his eyes cautiously. No, she was right, it could not be a star, and he said so, told her that he had made a mistake, that it was simply an airplane on its way to Canada. Yes, he soothed himself as he kept driving, it was just something regular like that, no need to get excited. The turns were getting sharper, and he wanted to pay attention, for there were too many stories in the paper of cars crashing in these mountains, usually when a driver was drunk or fell asleep at the wheel. He did not want to become a story in the newspaper, and he did not want such a pleasant trip to be ruined by his inattention, by his wife’s fixation on this perfectly ordinary airplane.

Still, he wished they would see another car, anyone who they might be able to shine their high beams at to say hello to, maybe even stop for a moment to ask if they, too, were seeing the persistent moving brightness overhead. He knew better than to be spooked just because it was dark, but his wife’s nervousness was putting him on edge. She had her face right up to the window on her side, he noted, keeping watch, and just as he was about to say something coolly rational to her, to himself, he heard her gasp and instinctively his foot hit the brake pedal. When he looked out past his wife, he saw the Canada-bound light, bigger now, as if the plane’s altitude were dropping—which could not be, it had many miles to go before the next airport, why would it be descending already?—and he saw it shudder in stillness that seemed entirely unnatural and change course, no longer northbound, passing them, but reversing entirely from its former direction and heading south. Toward them. After them.

Unnerved, he pulled the car sharply into the next rest area he saw, a little clearing with picnic tables and some trees and what looked like an outhouse tucked sheepishly far back. He got out, and she followed.

She sensed he was rattled, her husband, and that he would not admit it. He had his superstitions, everybody did, whether they copped to it or not, but still, he was a man most often inclined to take the rational route through things. He believed, or tried to believe, that reason would prevail, that he could reason his way into people’s hearts, into legal justice, into equal protection under the law. He was a man who liked to learn, who fiercely sought out experts on matters he did not understand, whether in books or lectures or TV and radio broadcasts. She loved him for this, and for much else, but she also thought his cerebral bent could be rigid, limited, and in this moment knew she simply must shake him out of his stubbornness, for she was beginning to get really frightened now and told him that whatever he wished to call it, it was still there and it seemed now to be following them, and even worse, now that they had stopped, it seemed to be closing in on them.

He shook his head and lit a cigarette for her, handed it over, and lit another for himself. He insisted again that it was a commercial liner, nothing else, but she asked how that could be, since she had never heard of a passenger airplane with a destination reversing its course in the middle of its journey like that. Preposterous. She was right, he knew this, and was glad now that his boys had not come with them on this trip. When he was first imagining the vacation, on his long shift four nights before, he allowed himself an expanded fantasy, one where his former wife could be reached in time, where she would allow her sons to take a day or two off school and take this trip with them. The boys liked his new wife, perhaps because, while she was not as fine a cook as their mother, she did allow them dessert every night.

His boys would have become excited by this roving light. Or perhaps they would not, but only because they both would have been asleep in the backseat this late, after 11 p.m. already. His mind conjured the cozy image of the smaller one leaning his head on the chest or shoulder of the bigger, and another option, of them curled up, toe to toe, sharing the blanket that was always folded in the backseat, just in case the car ever broke down in the middle of the night or in winter and he had to wait until morning for someone to drive by and give him a hand or a ride to the nearest gas station to call for help.

Of course, this image of his sons was foolish; they were teenagers now, one still in high school, the other due to start college in the spring. Yet he always pictured them as younger than they were, missing the prepubescent boys who gave their affection freely, who had not felt the need to posture at manhood.

It was thinking of them, his sons, that brought another idea to mind, one that was so obvious that he almost laughed in relief as he exhaled.

They had visited him for two weeks over the summer—Philadelphia was nearly a six-hour drive away, a longer bus ride because of all the stops, and so their summers and Christmas were the only occasions he expected to be able to see them for an extended period, a reality that constricted his heart when he let himself dwell on it, as he sometimes did during the long nights at work, and which made him desperately unhappy in a way that caused him to nearly, if not quite, regret all his actions of the last few years—but when they had last visited, they did what they had sometimes done when they were younger: went plane-watching. In Philly, he had taken them to the road near the airport, and they would make a game of guessing where the planes were going and listing all the things they knew about the state or the country they were imagining as its destination. He taught them how to tell what designs on the tail belonged to which airline.

As he stamped his cigarette out, he told his wife it was a Piper Cub, surely, some hunters flying around in it who must have stayed out too late and gotten lost and now could not see very well in the dark and were trying to make contact with the nearest air traffic control. But she told him it was not hunting season, which was true, although they could be poachers, of course, and perhaps they were flying at night like this because their flight had never been approved in the first place. She also told him she could not hear any noise, and a Piper Cub would be making some, especially one flying lower, nearer. He suggested the wind might be carrying the sound away; his wife raised her brows at him. The night was still and windless.

She remembered the binoculars she had meant to get out of the car before and hurriedly retrieved them, handed them over to him. He put the strap over his neck; her mouth twitched. She had made fun of him just days earlier for doing the same thing at the Niagara Falls, which they had gone to see on their way to Montreal. He had said the binoculars were expensive. Such a careful man, she thought lovingly even as she teased him for his overabundance of caution, tickling him and making him drop them from his eyes over and over.

Now she watched his face as he looked up, his mouth widening as he squinted. Her heart was pounding, for she had a suspicion, but not one she was willing to voice quite yet, especially not as her husband, who had seemed so relieved only a moment ago, became increasingly agitated. He hated not knowing things, did not take well to the unexplainable. He would think her ridiculous for even considering it. Her sister had seen some years ago one of those unidentified flying objects people spoke about sometimes, more so back then than recently, she thought, and her sister had a good head on her shoulders, children, a husband, a nice home, and plenty to be taking care of without inventing silly stories. So, yes, she had believed her sister, what her sister had seen, while her rational husband clearly had not, although he claimed to be agnostic on the topic. She knew she should not bring this up now, not when he handed her the binoculars with a slightly shaking hand and lit another cigarette from the butt of the last one.

She brought the lens up to her eyes and was disoriented for a moment by the view of the stars, but then saw it—there!—flying in front of the moon. She could see its shape silhouetted at first, but she kept with it and soon saw some colored lights go on and off along the sides. It sped up and she lost it, then found it again and noticed it was slowing down as it passed in front of the moon again. Because she was prepared this time, she focused closer on it and could see its shape, longish and curved, with narrow bands of flashing lights, red and amber, green and blue. She asked her husband if he could see them too and he repeated that it must be an airplane, it had flashing lights on it like they did, and when she interrupted to ask where its tail was, where its wings were, he said it clearly was not a commercial airliner or a hunter’s private vehicle but rather a military plane of some kind.

She suddenly realized, as she handed the binoculars back to him, that their little dog was sitting at her feet and shivering as if cold or terribly afraid, much like when they arrived at the veterinarian’s office, the site of shots and other indignities. Taking pity on the sweet thing, she brought the dog back into the car, soothing and shushing while she waited for her husband, who was taking another look at the sky, cigarette hanging between his lips.

As he watched it, he wished again for some other nighttime driver to pull off the road, bear witness to this matter. He had read once about the phenomenon of folie à deux and was frightened to think that he and his wife might be going mad together. As he watched the plane—or whatever it was, for he had to admit that he had never seen any aerial vehicle change directions as fast as this one did, nor had he ever heard of any that could change altitude or speed as abruptly—he strained to hear something, anything, other than the soft rustle of leaves from the trees sheltering the picnic tables in the clearing nearby or the crickets singing in the grass. He had turned the car motor off, and although he could hear its mechanical clicking as it cooled, there was no whir from above, no slight buzzing, not even a hum. He had the distinct notion that the flying vehicle, which was moving back and forth still across the moon but seemed unwilling to go off in a direction that would take it away, away, away, was looking back at him.

Watching him?

Ridiculous.

No, he had to shake himself free from such nonsense. He got into the car and told his wife they really should hurry on so they could get home. At this rate, he grumbled, with all the stopping and starting, they would get no sleep at all. He repeated that the thing outside was likely a military plane, perhaps something they were not even supposed to see, and maybe that was why it was sticking close to them, to make sure that they would not tell anyone. His wife asked how anyone that far away could possibly know what they were going to do, and besides, they could pull off at the nearest gas station and make a phone call and whatever it was flying up there would not be able to stop them. He gripped the steering wheel tighter and suggested that perhaps they were playing games with them, then, some air force hotshots that got their rocks off by trying to frighten gullible women in the night. He knew at once that his voice was too loud, that he had given away his own fears, and regretted his lost temper. He hoped she took his anger as part of his usual ambivalence about the military, in which he had served, and which had torn his face open and killed too many of his brethren both here and abroad. He was a patriotic man, proud of his service, but he could not always put away his conscience, that voice that asked what good it was, fighting wars, especially wars that had nothing to do with them.

They drove, uneasy with one another in a way that felt new and vaguely itchy, as if their bodies were wrapped in sackcloth rather than their sensible garments of cotton and silk. He knew the car was going far too slowly for his stated impatience to get back to Portsmouth, but neither he nor she mentioned it. She kept her eyes fixed upward, through the windshield, occasionally leaning against the side window. Cannon Mountain was ahead, a looming shadow with a bright peak, the lights of the eatery and tramway terminus looking like a Christmas tree in a dark room, only the angel still switched on.

When the moving light disappeared behind the mountain’s silhouette, he pulled the car over again, breathing a little easier, waiting silently with his wife to see whether it would appear again. He hoped terribly that they would soon be laughing at this strange tension, attribute it, quite rightly he thought, to their tiredness and the long trip, their eagerness to be back home.

She clutched the edge of the seat as he started onto the road once again, her breaths a little shallow with anticipation. She had to admit that she was excited, even eager to experience something out of the ordinary. She desired this even after a trip that was as out of the ordinary for the two of them as it could be, for it was their belated honeymoon, and while neither of them was in their first blush of youth, nor was this her first marriage or his, it was still special to be alone with her beloved for days at a time without the imposition of work or friends or civic duty. She wished fervently that this could be enough; it was all she had ever really and truly wanted, to be desired by a faithful man and be his intellectual comrade and make a life together that was as unselfish as they could make it while also enjoying the fruits of their labor every once in a while, as when they had been sent that wonderful photograph of President Kennedy, signed by his own pen, thanking them by name for their work stumping for him in New Hampshire.

They breathed together, the dog panting a smile up at them, and he started to drive again. For a few quiet moments it seemed like whatever had been happening was now over.

But it wasn’t, of course. If it had been, I would likely have known nothing about them. The vast majority of us, after all, know little to nothing about the vast majority of us.

It was not over, he realized, a pulsing pain beginning to throb in his gut. The bright object came out from behind the mountain as they surpassed its breadth, and rather than returning to its earlier position directly above them, it remained to their right, dipping lower than ever so that it was obscured on and off by the trees.

They passed a small sign, illuminated by the high beams, that directed interested tourists to take a right for Flume Gorge. Flume. It sounded like a conflagration, a sudden and violent plume of fire, and he gripped the wheel harder. There were few lights on the narrow, curving highway. He slowed further, distracting himself with the sensible fear of a speedy driver coming round the bend without care and plowing into his wife’s pretty car. Fluming.

She watched for the bright object, a thrill trapped in her throat. She said nothing when they drove right past a motel, VACANCIES lit up in neon above a single yellow square. She imagined the night manager inside, feet on the desk, trying to stay awake with the paper or a small TV set. How glad the clerk would be to have the night’s boredom interrupted! But they did not have enough cash with them for a room, and besides, as frightened as she was, she wanted dearly to see what would happen next. Her whole body tingled with the fear, the adventure. She could not believe any real harm would come to them. Nothing so very bad had ever happened to her, even though many things had threatened to over the years. She had survived diphtheria, two bouts of pneumonia, a likely unnecessary appendix removal—the doctors were all so hot for appendix removals in the ’30s—and she believed in some quiet corner of herself that she was a little bit blessed, that God watched over her safety.

Around the next bend, the trees thinned out on the right, and when she looked through the binoculars again, she felt the early stirrings of what, much later, she would recognize as awe: the thing above was huge, round. She could clearly see now two rows of lit windows. Her heart raced. She told her husband he must stop and look, he must, and reached for his arm, tried to convey the urgency she felt, the need to share this moment. It was like nothing else he had ever seen, she told him.

They were in a stretch of emptiness just south of Indian Head, a kind of summer campground where two imitation wigwams sat empty in the middle of the clearing. He could picture his boys, when little, running in and out of the structures, could imagine them playing war games, holding sticks and yelling Bang! at each other, or mingling with the children of other families and putting together an impromptu baseball team. But it was dark and deserted now, cheerless, and she was still clutching his arm. He stopped, to humor her, and took the binoculars.

He left the car running and leaned against its soft, comforting vibration. The plane that was not a plane hovered at an angle a hundred yards away and maybe two hundred yards up, a treetop’s worth above those standing silent and tall below. His wife demanded to know if he saw it, her voice shaking. He was scared too. He knew planes well enough. He was a rational man. He understood that there were things the military did not share with the populace, but this—this hovering silence, bladeless, wingless, its lights all wrong—it seemed to be far beyond the capabilities of what he knew of modern engineering.

The thing swung over the road from one side to the other, and he followed it through the binoculars, his mouth dry. Small fins silently emerged from its sides, each with a red light at its end, and the two rows of curved and lit windows tipped toward him, as if the thing was looking at him, at them. He shut the car off and walked away, crossed the rest of the road, walked onto the dewed grass as if compelled; he had to get nearer, had to see it better.

In the car, his wife bent over to pet their dog with a trembling hand, murmuring nonsense comfort words to it, to herself. When she sat back up, she fully realized just how spooked her husband must be, because he had left the vehicle right in the center of the road, between southbound and northbound lanes. Anyone coming from either direction might smash right into them. Worse, the man took the darned keys with him. So while she could not move the car, she could keep her eyes peeled, watch the road while her husband watched what she was beginning to allow herself to call a UFO, at least silently. She would call her sister tomorrow morning, once she had slept.

In turning her head back and forth between the front and back windows of the car, her gaze caught something moving. Her husband. His figure blurred into the darkness and density of the trees, the field he was crossing, the shadow cast by the now enormous object above him. He looked so very small beneath it.

She screamed his name, and the dog yelped at the sudden loudness of her voice. He probably could not hear her, she realized, so she slid over to the driver’s side, to the open door, and called out for him again, again, again.

Whether or not he registered a sound in the distance, he would never remember later. He was too focused on what he saw above him through the binoculars. There, behind the windows, were a dozen figures crowded together, all wearing uniforms, black and shiny. They did not look quite right; something was wrong with their skin, with their eyes, those eyes that seemed to meet his gaze. For a wild moment, he felt he had the upper hand—after all, they did not have binoculars, so surely he was seeing them much more clearly than they could see him.

All at once, they stepped away as if called by something, someone, and moved to a wall full of lights and buttons behind them, which reminded him of a telephone switchboard or an electrical panel. Only one figure remained at the window. The husband’s fingers moved, trying to focus the lens on that face, a face he could not reconcile with anything he had seen before. It seemed to be getting closer, the face, the craft, descending. He felt powerfully that something terrible was about to happen.

That he was going to be taken.

Captured.

In a panic, he turned and ran to the car. Get away, get away, get away, he must get away, he thought, his entire body shivering despite the mild still air, even as he sprinted faster than he had since basic training. His bowels shifted in him, his heart raced, his ulcer pulsed. He heard his wife shouting for him, saw her coming out the driver’s side. She slid back in and babbled as he thrust himself into the car, put it in gear, and started driving, but he could not register any of her questions, so full was his head with the word run, so full his mouth with the word capture.