The They

Saphora pulled my hand and told me not to be afraid as I followed her down the hallway.  The first thing I noticed was that her voice wasn’t right, even before I understood her words. Her voice was different in some important way. It wasn’t fear and it wasn’t anger. In fact, it was hard to pin down. There was something unusual: an authenticity, an urgency that forced me to pay closer attention to everything.

The children had found something. The children had found something.

I remember saying, “But it’s the middle of the night.”

“Come on.” She led me through the den and out onto the deck. The sliding door stood open and cold air filled the front of the house. There was laughter and excited talk in the backyard. It was the voices of our children – but again, there was something different, like a new note in a familiar song. A Christmassy exuberance, but something more. It was not until Mariella came running up to greet me, that I really put my finger on it.

I dropped my coffee cup.

Mariella was running straight and tall.  Her rolling gait was gone. She spoke to me without impediment. “Daddy,  Daddy, we found a comet!”

I was momentarily disoriented. There was no sign of the autism. She was staring right into my eyes. Her speech was pure and crisp. It was impossible. I was stunned to silence, holding her by the shoulders, shaking, searching for identity.

“What’s the matter, daddy?” Mariella tilted her head to the side.

I felt Saphora’s hand on my shoulder. “It’s all right,” she said, and in that moment I realized that her slurring had disappeared, along with any trace of opioid lethargy. I looked back and caught a glimpse of the person I had married, before life had had its way with us. She was clear-eyed now and beautiful.

It was Oscar who finally showed it to me, the small spherical shape comprised of dark metal rings and couched in layers of outer shells, a series of complex geometrical impressions or seams forming patterns on the outside. He manipulated the sphere expertly, with the precision of a machinist and the care of a scientist, my irreverent son who had been kicked out of school three times.

Oscar was explaining how it had come through the mesosphere. He referred to oblique angles and retrograde rotations. It was confusing. He was using all sorts of mystifying terminology and abstract concepts. Then, with a few firmly-placed fingertips situated in well-timed sequences upon tiny shaped plates, he managed to rotate a portion of the metallic ball, peeling it back to reveal an inner cavity, a labyrinth of coiled compartments reminiscent of the inner structure of a conch shell, connected by passages filled with a dark green fluid of some kind.

“What it is?” I said. I felt the back of my neck grow stiff and cold. What was I seeing? Something military in nature? Some high-tech invention of the Russians, or the Americans, or the Chinese – dropped here to be tested on my family? Some toxic relic of a radioactive weapon ejected from a drone or a jet on its way overhead to bomb distant strangers? A viral agent? A psychological experiment cooked up in the think-tank of some wealthy corporation?

Little Santiago looked up at me, and his eyes brightened. “It’s them, dad! They came!” Gone was the dark shyness that had hovered about him ever since he was a toddler, and as he touched the green matter with his finger, instead of being pushed around like the viscous fluid it appeared to be, it pulled itself up onto his finger in a globule and spread out, engulfing the digit in a fine gritty layer. Smoothing subtly, it imparted a sheen at once metallic and oily before disappearing into the very pores of my son's skin.

Santiago laughed, and so did my Mariella. “Try it, Daddy. They want to help you.” And then I noticed the tears in her eyes. And then I noticed the tears in mine.