This seemed
on the face of it so small a thing that from a certain angle it was hardly
worth the telling. But it was there, if only for a moment.
And I was
sitting on the sofa just two weeks ago, not late, a little before ten p.m., when
a bright light flew silently past a window which, high in the wall and from
where I sat, looked out over the neighborhood, at the sky just above the houses
across the street. It was a very bright white ball, moving fast, though not
shooting as a meteor would shoot, but slower than that, and it was low in the
air, low to the ground, maybe one or two hundred feet above. It happens sometimes
that I can see naval fighter jets that come flying over through this same
window from that very spot, and they will cross at the same low altitude, but
this was not that – this white light was soundless. Not quiet, but soundless. The
jets, when they come for their practice runs at the simulated aircraft carrier
flight deck nearby, are anything but. They’ll shake the nerves right out of
your spine.
The window,
at that angle, offers a very narrow view out, since I was some distance from
it, and it is small and high up the wall above the stairs. That this bright,
low light flew past that specific area, from right to left, just so that I
could see it, struck me as not an accident, but as something that I was
supposed to see. I ran to the window, jumped up the steps to look for more, but
it was gone. I don’t remember being able to see much of the stars, whether it
was clear or overcast or what – that didn’t seem to matter at the time, since I
was certain it wasn’t a shooting star. Something in me came back to life then
and I felt excited again, as if something wonderful were near, like this was an
announcement of sorts, letting me know it was still around. It was very much
like the light I saw shoot off over the freeway one night in Indiana, while driving
cross-country. For all I know, it’s the same light. For all I know, it’s
nothing.
Coming then,
as this did, just before the regular drive I make inland to Utah at this time
of year (and which I’m currently in the midst of), while making preparations
and coming to grips with leaving the island home that I’ve only recently come
to feel I’ve got real roots in, I imagine this as a signal of a similar
crossing. I like to think that I have an ongoing relationship to something
inexplicable, and that these teasing hints and subtle clues are perhaps just
the surface, and that they in and of themselves have meaning. Yet I’ve been
reluctant to write up this account, brief and peripheral as it is, on that
possibility that I’ve only imagined such a relationship, while this flat and
lifeless feeling creeps back over me, rendering everything meaningless.
Perhaps this
isn’t a matter of choosing one thing over another – fantasy or reality, belief
or disbelief. I’ll never prove anything to anyone, and not to myself either.
For now, I’m driving over a flat earth, one that seems sometimes to glow in the
gathering night from within, and it is spectral and strange, and I’m amazed
that I can see at all, and I think of how I love the earth, and that the world
is warm, even where it is blasted and dead and cold, and that in it there are
stories still to be made and told, and that I am still this squirming thing
that is alive and weird and staring, and exactly and always right here.
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