Communion

by Whitley Strieber

This became the Fermi Paradox, which asks the question: given the size of the universe, why do we never detect a single signal? The implication is that, if we aren’t alone, intelligent life is very rare indeed and therefore there is little point in even trying to contact another civilization.

I was aware that I had seen four different types of figures. The first was the small robotlike being that had led the way into my bedroom. He was followed by a large group of short, stocky ones in the dark-blue coveralls. These had wide faces, appearing either dark gray or dark blue in that light, with glittering deep-set eyes, pug noses, and broad, somewhat human mouths. Inside the room, I encountered two types of creature that did not look at all human. The most provocative of these was about five feet tall, very slender and delicate, with extremely prominent and mesmerizing black slanted eyes. This being had an almost vestigial mouth and nose. The huddled figures in the theater were somewhat smaller, with similarly shaped heads but round, black eyes like large buttons.

We just don’t know enough about hypnosis to call it a completely trustworthy scientific tool in a situation like this. While Don Klein certainly didn’t ask provocative questions, there is always the possibility that I was unconsciously eager to comply with an outcome that I might secretly have longed for. I might want powerful visitors to appear, to save a world that I’m pretty sure is in serious trouble. I’d spent the past three years working on books about nuclear war and environmental collapse. I knew full well that we are going to have a really rough time in the next fifty years. Maybe the idea of visitors coming along and saving our necks was more appealing to me than I might consciously have wished to admit. Maybe I hid my desperation from myself in order to live and raise a child with anything like a happy heart. What I can say in favor of these transcripts is that they represent the response of an honest man to the efforts of a recognized expert in the field of medical hypnosis.

I speculated. It could be that the “visitors” were really from here. Certainly the long tradition of fairy lore suggested that something had been with us for far more than the forty or fifty years since the phenomenon took on its present appearance. The only trouble with this theory was that what has been happening since the mid-forties seemed more than just a little different from the fairy lore. Now there were brain probes and flying disks involved, abductions and gray creatures with staring eyes. Surely no change had taken place in the human psyche extreme enough to account for such a radical change in the appearance of the fairy. And yet, there was undoubtedly something here… I thought perhaps the visitors were somehow trying to hide themselves in our folklore. Another thought was that the visitors might really be our own dead. Maybe we were a larval form, and the adults of our species were as incomprehensible to us, as totally unimaginable, as the butterfly must be to the caterpillar. Perhaps the dead had been having their own technological revolution, and were learning to break through the limits of their bourne. Or perhaps something very real had emerged from our own unconscious mind, taking actual, physical form and coming forth to haunt us. Maybe belief creates its own reality. It could be that the gods of the past were strong because the belief of their followers actually did give them life, and maybe that was happening again. We were creating drab, postindustria...

I remembered my protest to her when she reassured me about the operation not hurting me. The sense of helplessness was an awful thing to contemplate. “You have no right,” I had said. “We do have a right.” Five enormous words. Stunning words. We do have a right. Who gave it to them? By what progress of ethics had they arrived at that conclusion? I wondered if it required debate, or seemed so obvious to them that they never questioned it.

If they were real visitors, though, I wanted to know the ethics behind their assertion of their “right.” Of course, we ourselves barely question our rights over the other species on earth. How odd it was to find oneself suddenly under the very power that one so easily assumes over the animals. I thought of some lowing cows, their bells tinkling on a long-ago Texas evening, or of my cat asleep on my lap back in the city, trusting its little self utterly to an affection that to me was casual, but to Sadie was the center of the universe. I remembered when my father took me to a slaughterhouse in Fort Worth, and I heard the rumble of panic and saw the bucking backs of the steers and the creamy whites of their eyes. I smelled the slick of manure and urine and blood, and heard the steady crunching of the blows and the blare of the saws. And at a research institute in San Antonio I saw monkey cages with rows of doctored capuchins, shaved, their pink heads sewn or laid delicately open, and the trembling brain probes and the gabble of noise when the vocalization center of one of them was stimulated for the information of graduate students. What did the monkey with the needle in its brain think of its observers? Were they gods to whom it submitted itself with a noble passivity because it could do nothing else? I saw monkey carcasses in the dumpster, too.

At this point I remembered something of awesome beauty taking place in the sky, which I later told friends must have been a display of the Perseid meteor shower, which was not active then but had been early in August.

ha ha....never heard of this meteor shower before. ten minutes ago I saw an article about it on facebook, and now I'mreading about it.............

“I love her so much. You know, I can’t believe I’m seeing this. One two three four five six. I look up from my book and there are six figures standing at the end of the bed looking right at both of us. She’s turned over and she’s asleep. I say, ‘Anne, Anne, look at this.’ “They’re menacing-looking. Strange. I don’t understand where they even could have come from. They made no sound. They came out of the living room. The door is so dark. Nelson’s sleeping under the bed.” (Nelson was the family dog.) “‘Nelson! Nelson!’ Nelson’s just sleeping under the bed. I feel like I’ve just gotten some kind of weight on me. I want to get up, I’m thinking about my son. I want badly to get up. I’m thinking about my son. I do not know what’s going on here. Is it because we’re so high? Why did I ever get this apartment? Why didn’t I get an apartment downstairs? I feel like crying, because I can’t get up and the door is so dark. They’re just standing there. They don’t say anything, they don’t even look like they’re alive. Five, six, tar babies. Six tar babies standing there. Am I seeing things? ‘Anne, Anne!’ No one sees this. It must be that I’m seeing things. I close my eyes, I open my eyes. And it’s changed. Now they’re around both sides of the bed, about halfway up, like when you stop looking at them they start moving.

My actual condition almost seems to suggest that there was an attempt to render me as helpless as possible, by placing me in a state where each experience was perceived in and of itself, without reference to past encounters. Thus each time the surprise was total. Running through my memories there is a consistent flavor of intense terror. But is it only my terror, the terror of the body, biological terror? There may be things about contact between beings formed in different biospheres that we do not understand at all. Perhaps they feel some instinctive emotion, too. I have the impression that these experiences are very intense for them, if not actually frightening. If the terror is an unavoidable side effect of our biology, then the amnesia can be seen not only as an act of self-protection but as one of kindness also. Assuming the correctness of my perceptions, this book then becomes a chronicle not only of my discovery of a visitor’s presence in the world but also one of how I have learned to fear them less.

On the night of December 26 I felt psychologically destroyed, as if my very self had died. It could be that the basis of the fear we feel for the visitors, and—it seems to me—they for us, comes from a biological, instinctive awareness that our coming together may mean the creation of a third and greater form which will supplant us as the child does his parents.

We need to give ourselves to our experience, without knowing what it is, trusting that our understanding will grow as we proceed. To participate truly in this experience, we must marry the unknown. The only belief is the question itself: Love is a matter of leaping out into the sky. But then again, one cannot be objective in the context of an excess of passion. We must be careful, for the stakes are high: Mankind is in the position of maturing as a species at the same time that our planet could be dying. We have a difficult road ahead. We must resist all temptation to wait for the visitors to save us. If we wait, we can be sure that nothing will save us. We have to learn to live on the edge of the razor.