Perhaps these notes will help explain the events of the past few weeks, so that not everything I have been witnessing will be lost to speculation and hearsay. Maybe I’ll be back in due time and will tear up these pages with deep embarrassment; I will cut ties with Ethan and refer him to one of my colleagues. Though, should he ever be allowed to tell his side of the story, everyone in my profession will shake their heads and use my case to warn their disciples against grotesque transgressions. Even by committing these lines to paper, I am one step closer to ridicule and ostracism. The best outcome, I’m afraid to say, would be if Ethan disappeared from the face of the Earth and took any evidence of my involvement with him. Yet if what he reported in our sessions and intends me to experience should be true, I want the world to find the tracks, the traces, the trail of glistening flints I dropped from my pocket. Because should my patient have been telling the truth, I might no longer be able to finish this story myself.

On entering my office one rainy Tuesday afternoon in March, the young man appeared to let the last remaining daylight escape in the second or two it took him to close the door. Instinctively, I stood to turn on the two lamps in my room, though they hardly illuminated my visitor’s face. Ethan Samwell hadn’t made an appointment; one of his teachers had walked him over to our building at the far end of campus. “I don’t want to be here, I’m sorry,” was the first thing he said, in a voice that sounded hesitant, as though the speaker wasn’t quite sure if the words matched his intentions. “I didn’t want to alarm anyone. I’m just, I guess, screwed up?”

He was my height, about six feet, with a large head and badly cut hair, dirty glasses. There was a certain stiffness to his movements, and his long, bony limbs seemed to cause him discomfort. “I talked about suicide as a distinct possibility, in theoretical terms. I don’t intend to kill myself. Yet.” He adjusted his large glasses with one finger and curiously gazed at the knickknacks on my shelves, mostly items I find on my beach walks — toy cars, shovels, mud pie shapes, trap floats and buoys — plus some lowbrow art I’ve collected throughout the years, cute monsters and gruesome children. “I don’t want to waste your time.”

I asked Ethan to recount what exactly had happened in the classroom. I leaned back in my leather chair, all five fingers of one hand touching the corresponding fingers of the other hand. It is supposed to improve memory and concentration. I use the gesture when I’m nervous, when something in my patient’s demeanor leaves me unmoored.

Maybe he didn’t listen, maybe he ignored my question. He sat silently for a few moments, then said, “I think it’s because I lost my parents. People expect me to feel a certain way. I’m not sure I can help them.”

“Help them?” I repeated.

“They don’t like me,” he said. “There’s something off about me. If I told them I cry myself to sleep at night, they’d be comforted. If I said I miss my parents every hour of every day, they’d feel consoled.”

“You’re not crying, though. Is that right?”

“I don’t. It makes people react with anger. Scorn might be a better word. Scorn, yes.”

“What happened to them?”

Ethan put his large hands on his knees, then held them up to his face to inspect the jagged nails. “I should take better care of myself,” he said flatly. “Girls don’t like me either.” I didn’t respond, just watched the young man’s odd performance. He indeed looked disheveled, but not like the male students in my classes who come from their dorm rooms in jammies and shower sandals. Their hair might be messy, but more often than not, sleep and laziness can’t hide the fifty-dollar haircut. Ethan’s hair had been cut by inexperienced hands, maybe himself. He wasn’t pretty, he didn’t appear to work out, and still, there was something about him that commanded interest. Yes, he commanded attention, but at the same time made you feel guilty for looking. He made you dislike yourself for watching his every move.

“They didn’t die together,” he finally started in a strange monotone. “It wasn’t like that.” The Samwells had lived on a ranch near the coast, three-hundred acres, one-hundred goats, and a handful of cattle. They leased out plots of land for viniculture, and they put a modular home on a meadow and rented it out. Even so, the ranch didn’t make enough money for Ethan’s dad and mom to quit their day jobs. More than once, Robert, Ethan’s father, had considered selling his land, but the property had been in his family for six generations, and the portraits of his forebears hung in the living room and threatened him with stern gazes and furrowed brows. Without his wife Susan, he might have sold the ranch anyway, but for her, living anywhere else was unthinkable. This was their slice of heaven, she said, and leaving it would leave them without meaning. “She said that a lot, slice of heaven,” Ethan remarked. “Actually, her words were ‘slice of paradise,’ but I don’t like the rhyme.” He turned to face me. “Is it wrong to alter her words?”

“Do you think it is?”

“Yes, I do. But I like my version better. It’s why people don’t trust me. I don’t live up to their standards. I’m ashamed of my mom’s bad rhyme.” Before I could utter a word, he continued his story. In the fall of 2018, his dad had visited a relative in Ventura. On the second night of his stay, a wildfire had rushed down the mountain slope and threatened to burn the relative’s house. But instead of evacuating, the men of the family decided to stay behind and fight the approaching flames. A police unit scouring the neighborhood for stragglers had finally rescued them, but Robert had died three days later from smoke inhalation. “He hated that I smoked. Not cigarettes. I used to smoke a lot and he worried about my health.” Ethan looked down at his hands. “It was weird. My mom got so much money from the life insurance, she quit her job. She sold the goats and remodeled one of our barns and turned it into an art studio. She bought a wheel and a kiln and everything else and started to make pottery. Her first exhibition, a small one at a hair salon, opened in March of 2020.” Three months later, Susan died after Ethan had driven her to the emergency room. He also contracted Covid but recovered after about a week. His mom never came home. “She had health issues before that, but she wasn’t old. Not even fifty yet.”

Financially, he was secure, but he couldn’t adjust to living alone on the ranch. “I smoked weed all day. I took pills. I got really freaked out.” Twice he admitted himself to a psychiatric clinic. “Then I met someone here at school, and I wanted to show her that I could be somewhat normal. It’s not like she demanded it, but I thought I could be better and maybe she would like that. And I invited her to the ranch.”

He wanted to continue that afternoon, but our time was up. Since I had a cancellation, we made an appointment for the next day. “You don’t think I’m going to kill myself?” he said with a hand on the doorknob.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Is that your professional opinion?”

“Yes, it is.”

He nodded gravely, then a scant smile pulled at his face, but maybe I don’t remember the moment correctly. Eyes and faces, I have come to understand, are not the mirrors of our soul, they merely give rise to inadequate interpretations. “Tomorrow, then,” he said. “Maybe we can talk about the crazy stuff. Maybe I shouldn’t use that word.” There might have been more on his mind, but after another second of hesitation, he walked away without closing the door behind him.

*

I have learned to stop thinking about what my patients tell me the moment they leave the office. Like rows and rows of mailboxes in dank hallways of an apartment complex, I keep containers stuffed with my patients’ information in the uglier regions of my mind. I have the keys and only open them when needed. Of course, that’s just an image, but it has helped me lead a life that is no longer dominated by alcohol. Whiskey closed those containers as well, but at night, the small doors swung open, and come morning, I couldn’t recognize myself anymore.

In graduate school, maybe every single student imagines themselves to become the next Pulitzer Prize winning Harvard professor. If not for these dreams, you wouldn’t even start a career in psychology. I’m no exception, and for a short while, my path forward seemed promising. I wrote several well-received papers on teenage suicide, and I secured a book contract for a work on American teenagers who chose extreme social isolation, what the Japanese call hikikomori. The book was published, but nobody seemed to take notice. It was as simple as that. At times, I tell myself that I was ahead of my time, ahead of my peers. Instead of ascending to a position at Harvard, Yale, or Stanford, I was hired by a regional university in Northern California.

This county is a cruel county. Rents are sky-high, food prices keep rising. I bought my house a decade ago and wouldn’t be able to afford one now. Back then I was married, but Stacey left after the first fire season, in 2017, and returned to Michigan. California had lost its luster, only a few months after I had lost any luster for her, and she had raised the topic of separation. She didn’t hate me; we didn’t have any irreconcilable differences. What she said was that we knew each other too well — I didn’t add much to her life anymore. When she said that, I joked about being a tube of toothpaste she had squeezed dry, and she said, “Not like that. But Rich, I knew exactly you’d be making this bad joke.” She has opened her own architectural firm in Grand Rapids and posts pictures of birds visiting her feeder on Instagram. Maybe she’s dating again, but we don’t talk much these days. After some brief, humiliating stabs at resurrecting my love life, I have learned to be alone. During the pandemic, I isolated so successfully that I find it hard to go back to my previous life of seeing patients in person. Most days, I wish I didn’t have a body.

That night, after a light dinner, I sat on my back patio watching the sky lose its colors and let go of the last light. And even though I should have known better, I went down that ugly hallway in the bowels of my mind, opened the small container with Ethan’s name on it, and listened to his last comment. “Maybe we can talk about the crazy stuff.” I was anticipating his visit with something akin to joy. This should have been deeply troubling to me, but I slept well for once, not waking up until my alarm sounded at 7:00 in the morning and it was time to get ready for another day.

*

He was late for his appointment, appeared changed. His curiosity seemed gone, his interest in himself and in telling whatever his story was, had apparently dried up. After he answered my first three questions with puny statements about the weather and his midterm grades, which he suspected to be lacking, I fell quiet. We sat in silence for some time; he checked my wall clock once in a while, and when only seven or eight minutes were left, he said, “You won’t believe me. Nobody does. It’s better not to expect too much from other people. I think I can live with that. Maybe not. Once you’ve spent time in a mental hospital, it’s hard to convince people that their vision of the world isn’t superior to yours. You exist in some lower region of reality.”

I didn’t answer. I shifted slightly in my seat and kept my eyes trained on him.

“I’m sorry I didn’t put more effort into this.”

I shook my head. “We’re going at your speed. You can’t disappoint me. But you only have six sessions. This was number two. If there’s something that bothers you, something urgent you might need help with, don’t hesitate. You’re safe here.”

“I know that,” Ethan said quickly. “Well, I guess I don’t, but it doesn’t feel exactly dangerous. The trouble is that when I go home, the world is not the same it is here. Do you believe in aliens?”

“To a degree,” I said. “I’m pretty certain that there’s all kinds of life out there, much of it probably of the sort we wouldn’t understand. They’re probably not green and flying around in saucer-shaped spaceships, though.”

“No, no saucers, certainly not,” he said slowly. I felt I hadn’t answered the way he’d hoped for, but I hadn’t completely disappointed him. “Have you ever seen any?”

“No, I don’t think so,” I said.

He got up, grabbed his bag and water bottle before saying, “You want to?”

*

Everybody in my profession knows about John Mack. He was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, an expert on child psychology, adolescent psychology, and the psychology of religion. He taught at Harvard and served as the head of the department of psychiatry for nearly thirty years. In the 90s, Mack studied some two-hundred people who claimed to have been in contact with or abducted by aliens. He looked for signs of mental illness in his subjects but couldn’t detect any pathologies. In the interviews he conducted, people told him that the alien encounters had drastically changed their perception of themselves and of this world. In fact, Mack found that many interviewees had become more caring and spiritual and voiced concerns about the society and the environment.

When Mack went public and was accused of taking his subjects’ stories at face value, he said, "Face value I wouldn't say. I take them seriously. I don't have a way to account for them." On another occasion, he commented, ''There are aspects of this which I believe we are justified in taking quite literally. That is, UFOs are in fact observed, filmed on camera at the same time that people are having their abduction experiences.... It's both literally, physically happening to a degree; and it's also some kind of psychological, spiritual experience occurring and originating perhaps in another dimension.” And "I would never say, yes, there are aliens taking people…I would say there is a compelling powerful phenomenon here, that I can't account for in any other way, that's mysterious. Yet I can't know what it is, but it seems to me that it invites a deeper, further inquiry."

According to a 2001 Gallup poll, a third of U.S. adults say they believe aliens have visited the Earth at some time in the past. If you want to be taken seriously, however, you need to side with the other two thirds. Harvard started a secret investigation against Mack, a first in the history of the university, with loss of tenure a possible outcome. He was later censured for methodological errors, but no steps were taken to remove him from the faculty or from his position as head of the department. Still, his willingness to listen to stories of alien abductions and see the phenomenon as an “authentic mystery” was followed by a fall in the estimation of some of his peers.

*

After work I had dinner with a colleague from the art department, a connection from the days when we had enough staff to do outreach and talk to departments about mental health services on campus. She didn’t call often, and I didn’t either, but each time we saw each other, it was pleasant enough. Like me, she had gotten divorced recently; at times, dinner had led to exasperated fumbling in one of our cars. Once, she had spent the night. Never had we talked about dating.

We met at a local Japanese restaurant, and after we’d ordered, she talked about the strangeness of her new crop of students, the damage the pandemic had done, odd behaviors she’d never encountered before. “They think it’s okay not to come to class when they don’t feel all shiny, and they still expect a good grade. They don’t think they should be made to clean up their spaces, and now everyone wants to have their own studio space; sophomores and juniors are going to the dean complaining about that. It’s crazy.”

She wasn’t the first one to tell me about the strange shift in student behavior, and of course, the counselors had noticed it as well. The number of students with mental health problems had doubled and tripled. “Do you believe in aliens, Caroline?”

Her eyes widened before she burst out laughing. Then she had to cough, and by the time she had collected herself, her face was red, and tears had smudged her make-up. She drank some water, made sure she didn’t have to cough again, then said, “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“What if someone told you they had been in contact with them. You don’t know the person, but suspect they’re not out to fool you and not completely deluded either?”

“One of your patients? I know you can’t say, but if a student told me, I’d stay away from them. If you told me you’d encountered an alien, I’d stay away from you!” She winked at me.

“Is there anybody you would believe?”

“No.”

“So, if aliens knocked at your door and had a chat with you and then left, who would you tell and who do you think, from the people you know, would believe you?”

“Nobody, and no one. There’s not a single person in my life who wouldn’t think I’d either be stupid, insane, or trying to pull their leg. If that should ever happen to me, I hope the aliens don’t leave me behind.”

Our food came, and the conversation turned to more mundane subjects. The university was reorganizing schools and departments, the art building was falling apart, and a hiring freeze was decimating the faculty and course offerings. Even though the state of the institution was dire, our talk relaxed me, and I felt grateful for Caroline’s presence.

“I’m dating again,” she said over dessert, green-tea ice-cream.

“Who is the lucky guy?” I asked.

“It’s not a guy,” she said in a mock-whisper. “She’s amazing. But I can’t tell Craig, he’d be scandalized. You’re not scandalized, are you? I know we have, but it’s not like…do you think I should have warned you?”

I told her I was happy for her, and I was, even though it meant spending the rest of the evening by myself. I made myself some coffee when I got home, set on the front stoop and watched neighbors walk their dogs. For the umpteenth time I wondered if I would stay in the area once I had the means to retire, and if my pension would be enough to pay for the mortgage and whatever else I needed. Where would I go if this county proved too expensive? After leaving work for good, who would still care to know me?

*

My next appointment with Ethan came on a Wednesday in the early afternoon. “I’m sorry I acted all weird last time,” he said once he’d put down his backpack, wiggled out of his coat and perched himself on the edge of the seat, as though he wanted to be ready to jump up and flee. “It’s not the easiest topic to talk about, and sometimes I’m not ready, really, to talk at all.”

“Let’s talk about aliens,” I said.

“That sounds terrible.” He pulled his lips outward, exposing long teeth.

“I know. I think if you claimed to have been visited by the Virgin Mary, people would cut you more slack.”

“Should I say that instead?”

I shook my head. “Just a stupid example.”

He took his time to think about what I’d carelessly said. “I never thought about it that way,” he concluded. “Huh, do you think they could be, I don’t know, be divine beings?”

“When did you meet them for the first time?”

“A few weeks ago, I had just put mom’s kiln up for sale.” He paused briefly, raised his head, shook it as though he was coming up for air. “It was the first time I thought about all the stuff she’d left behind, stacks and stacks of plates and bowls. I’d never paid them any mind. Really, I don’t remember much of her death; I wasn’t allowed to see her. I had just recovered from Covid myself, and my aunt, her sister, came and handled all the paperwork and everything about the funeral. I was out of it most of the time. I’m pretty ashamed of it now. I only got up to eat, I think, and I didn’t even buy new clothes. I wore one of my dad’s suits, it was a bit short, and after the service I sat in the car while she was put in the ground. I think my aunt hates me.”

Ethan was alone on the ranch and rejected his relatives’ offer to visit once a week. He didn’t want to see them, couldn’t face, as he put it, “their expectations of sadness and regret.” “I was plenty sad, and I did regret I hadn’t died as well, but seeing my aunt and uncle only made it worse. It was as though I owed them some strange spectacle of remorse.” Instead, once he had fully recovered, he let himself and much of the property go. Only after his two stints at the clinic and meeting a girl in one of the seminars did he become interested in what was to happen to him. He began to walk his property, something he hadn’t done since middle school. He discovered that weed growers had taken over a secluded part of his land, and he called the police. He called them again after he noticed that the neighbor to the east directed his wastewater into the creek that marked the border of the two properties. In other words, he started to take an interest in where he lived, and what he was to do with his inheritance in the years to come. “I sold my mom’s van and bought a truck. It’s not really me, but I needed something to lug around old equipment and get hay for the cattle. And Leah liked to help. I still don’t know if she liked me or if she just loved that I lived on a ranch. Maybe both? Maybe you can’t separate the two.

“It was so weird, one day we’re just walking along the vineyards, and we just had sex on the hill that overlooks the road toward the coast, and she says, ‘It’s a slice of paradise.’ I couldn’t believe it. And when I explained to her why I was laughing, and that Mom had said the same thing, she got really angry.” She accused him of being selfish and heartless, and why didn’t he have any photos of his parents around? It was the first real fight they had, and she left the ranch that night, even though it was Friday and they had wanted to spend the weekend together.

The next day he met them for the first time. It wasn’t at night, no milky light emanated from a hovering disc. “They were just there. I wanted to get something from the truck, a toolbox, and I stepped out of the house, and there they were.”

I shouldn’t have asked, shouldn’t have interfered with Ethan’s story, but I failed to control my impulse. “What did they look like?”

He appeared startled, as though I had popped up in my chair like a Jack-in-the-box. “I don’t know,” he said after a pause. “I do know, I guess, but I don’t know how to describe it. They’re not like people. When Leah left, I could see her walk down the hill and then see her disappear behind the trees. I felt awful, but Leah was distinct from me. She had her own body. That Saturday, when I stepped off the porch, I stepped into them. And I say ‘them,’ but I’m not sure that’s really true. It felt like there were several, like you’re in a crowd at a concert or in a club, and people bump into you from all sides, that kind of thing.”

“How did you communicate?”

“I’m not sure we did. But I felt immensely happy, so happy I grew afraid I could die right there and then and miss the best thing.” Ethan grinned crookedly, a half triumphant, half-apologetic gesture. “They didn’t have bodies, but where they stood — huh, it’s so weird to say ‘stood,’ I really don’t even know if they were lying or sitting or standing — anyway, where they were, it didn’t seem like there was anyone there, but you couldn’t really see clearly through them either. Like a swarm of bees, if the bees were sort of translucent but there are so many that your vision gets all blurry. There was a sound to them, more than anything.” He grinned sheepishly and pulled out his phone, said “pew pew” into the text app and held out the device to me.

“Star Wars,” I said.

“Light sabers, isn’t that horrible? But yes, it sounds a bit like them. Sort of.”

I was disappointed, suddenly wished the day were over and I were sitting in the backyard with a full glass of Laphroig and no one else around me. Okay, I thought, this could have been fun; it would have been nice to get at least a good story out of this. Aliens in West County, encounters of the strangest kind. But no. Pew pew. Of all things.

“And then we took off,” Ethan said. “Just like that.” When I failed to respond, he looked at me with a disappointment that must have been so much worse than my own. “Yeah, I know. No cool spaceship, no nothing. They just moved me as though I didn’t weigh a thing.” He grinned again, but there was no triumph in it this time, it just seemed to speak of exhaustion. “When I told Leah the Monday after that, she broke up with me right away.”

“Where did they take you?” I asked lamely. I tried to be professional, of course I did.

“Out to the water.”

“The coast?”

“Maybe, but there was no coast, just water. I don’t know why we went there.”

“And then what happened?”

“You don’t believe me, right?”

“I believe you experienced something that was meaningful…”

“Bullshit,” he interrupted. “We were out over the water, maybe thirty or forty feet above the waves, and I couldn’t hear anything but the noise they made. And then they just unpacked me. I couldn’t see or hear anything anymore, but I knew I was still there, and they were studying every cell, every atom. We were all just there humming, and I don’t think I’ve ever been less afraid or more content.” He paused for a moment. “I’m trying to convince you that this really happened; I kind of hate myself for that.” He stood, reached for his backpack and water bottle and left. I was certain that I had seen the last of him.

*

The following day, a young woman approached me after work. She had been sitting outside our building on a bench and when she saw me, her face scrunched up. She rose and asked, “Are you seeing Ethan?”

She was tall and seemed incredibly thin despite somewhat baggy clothes — gray sweats and a baseball jacket. Her hair was dyed green and purple and was starting to grow out a very dark brown, the same color, it appeared, as her wide-open eyes. She had several piercings — nose, lip, eyebrow, and ears — and her fingers were full of rings. The directness and intensity of her demeanor left me baffled; I’ve never been quick-witted, never been able to adjust quickly to what life throws at me. “I can’t…you know that there…” I stammered.

“Yeah, you’re seeing him,” she concluded. “I need to tell you something.”

“Would you like to make an appointment? It’s…”

“It won’t take long, I promise.”

“Are you…?”

“I’m Leah. He might have mentioned me. Or not. He’s such a weirdo.”

I protested halfheartedly, but truth is, I wanted to hear what she had to say. I asked her to follow me to a group of picnic tables nearby which, at the end of the day, were left unoccupied. We sat down on opposite sides of a rickety contraption, and I asked her to begin.

She seemed to have lost momentum, her face reddened, but then, after a few false starts, she said, “I don’t want you to tell him. What I’m going to say now.”

“You know that…” I started, but she interjected immediately.

“No, no, he hasn’t done anything. I mean, I’m not reporting him or anything. But I don’t know who I should tell, because I can’t go to my parents, that’s totally out of the question, and I don’t want to talk to him, but…I just don’t know.”

“How do you know that…”

“I didn’t. Somebody I know who’s in his class told me that the professor walked him over to you guys, and I’ve been asking everyone who came out of your offices the same question.”

I assured Leah that as long as her story didn’t contain anything I needed to report, and as long as Ethan’s personal safety wasn’t involved, I would be able to honor her demand.

“He hasn’t done anything, I mean, not like that, and I don’t have AIDS or something. But I’m worried about him. It’s just, I don’t want to see him right now, I really can’t. My mental health hasn’t been great these past few weeks, and I can’t deal with his weirdness anymore.”

“His weirdness,” I echoed.

She looked at me, holding her breath, it seemed. She sat up very straight and then burst out, “I’m pregnant.” Her eyes watered, and she fished for a tissue in one of her pockets. “It’s so cliché, I know, but…I don’t know how it happened, but…” She was out of breath, out of words.

“Does Ethan know?” I asked.

She nodded her head yes. She pulled another crinkled tissue from her pocket and blew her nose. “We got into a huge fight.” She told me she had wanted to stay the weekend with him at the ranch and was waiting for the right time to talk. She was taking the pill, and Ethan knew, but she had gotten pregnant anyway. “I wasn’t really sure what to think. I mean, we’re, like, still in school, and things are weird right now, and I don’t even know that I really want to have children, but I thought…” She couldn’t continue, fought tears for several moments. On a Friday afternoon they had taken a hike up to the vineyards. They had sex in a spot that, according to Ethan, several wedding parties had used over the years, because you looked out over the neighboring valley. “So, we get up and he tells me this story about the place where we just made love, and I’m, like, okay, I’ll tell him now.” He hadn’t reacted at first, just stayed quiet. Leah had become upset that he wasn’t saying anything and accused him of immaturity, and then he had become agitated. “I can’t handle that right now,” he’d screamed several times, and she had left in a hurry. He hadn’t come after her — she had waited in her car for thirty minutes — and she finally drove off without talking to him again.

Leah’s story matched Ethan’s as to what had occurred that day, but the accounts were so vastly different, I didn’t say or do anything for some long moments. “And you never talked again after that?”

“No, we did. But not right away; it felt so strange. I mean, I just told him I was pregnant with our child, and he doesn’t call or text me. Not at all. But Monday we ran into each other on campus, and he says he needs to talk to me, and I’m, like, oh no, he wants to have an abortion, or worse, he’s going to ask me if it’s really his. But I say, yes, let’s talk, and we go to the duck pond, and he tells me this story about how he was abducted by aliens, and I just lost it. I broke up with him right there and then.”

“You say you’re worried about him.”

“Yes, because I think he really believes what he said. I don’t know what happened that weekend after I told him about my pregnancy, but…he is someone else now, someone I don’t know and don’t want to see.  But I still care about him. For a while, I don’t know, it sounds so cheesy, but for a while I thought we were meant for each other. Like we were living in paradise, kind of. I know, that sounds really dumb.”

At the mention of paradise, my head jerked up. Our eyes met and she fell quiet. “What have you decided?” I asked.

“I’ll have an abortion. I can’t raise a kid by myself. I can’t tell my parents, their whole world would explode, but a friend is helping me.”

I let this bit of news sink in before asking, “I appreciate that you came to see me, but why are you telling me this? How do I figure in this?”

“Because Ethan’s all alone, he only had me. And now he’s spinning tales about aliens that dissolve him and put him back together. I’m scared he’s going to do something horrible.”

“Suicide?”

“Maybe. But he also might do harm to others. Maybe not intentionally, but he might burn his house down, or he might drive off the road and kill someone, I don’t know.” With that, she stood and turned to go. I watched her determined, slightly hurried gait, and wondered why Ethan had failed to mention Leah’s pregnancy. I felt that I believed her account of what had happened on the ranch that Friday, but on my drive home, I had to admit that I didn’t know anything. I had been entrusted with two very different, competing tales, and maybe I would never know what these two truly had experienced. Or maybe both experiences were true. But I was no detective. I was just someone listening to the clamor of minds.

*

I received a call Saturday afternoon. “How did you get my number?” I had come home from a run and just stepped out of the shower.

“Simple internet search. Well, not that simple. Simple enough, but I had to spend thirty-five bucks. It tingles.”

“It tingles?”

“I tingle,” Ethan said. “I know they are coming soon. Ever since that first time, I can feel them approaching.” After a prolonged silence, he asked, “Would you like to visit? I mean, you can at least see the ranch, right? If nothing else happens, at least it’s pretty.”

*

I don’t know why I agreed to make the drive to West County. I might have to pay a price for my indiscretion, for my failure to act the way I had been taught and stay within the bounds of my profession. But it’s too late now to regret my lapse. And maybe it wasn’t a lapse at all, maybe I sensed that this was a chance to take a risk and alter my life. Not for a second did I believe I would encounter an alien life form, not before, and especially not after, Leah had confided in me. Yet, there was a distinct chance I might get dragged into something I would not be able to control. I might even get hurt dealing with a desperate patient. As soon as I got in the car, I regretted my decision, and still, my hands on the wheel were sweaty with excitement.

John Mack, the Harvard psychiatrist, was on my mind during the drive toward the coast. If things went sideways, my ensuing fall would not be as momentous as his, given that I had never reached the professional heights he had scaled. My fall would be a mere dull thud. But even a thud can destroy you. Even if no one will ever read about you in the Washington Post or the New York Times, you can fail spectacularly. How would I ever explain my drive to Ethan’s ranch?

He had given me the four-digit code for the gate, and as soon as I had passed through, the doubts about my trip became so loud and discordant that I rolled down the other windows as well and let the dust from the gravel road pass freely through the car. To my left rose a steep hill; I spied the manufactured home Ethan had mentioned, a white SUV and an older model Toyota parked in front of it. Two large dogs ran up to the fence and barked incessantly.

The road, which was only wide enough for one car, ended a minute later in an open area; Ethan’s house stood to the left, and two barns at its far end. Old machinery rusted about along the edges. Two ancient trucks had been gutted and housed a few chickens.

In my office, as small and unimportant as it is, I set the rules. I control the environment, to a degree. When I stepped away from the car, I became aware that I no longer controlled anything. All I could see beyond the house were tall trees. On the other side, the creek Ethan had mentioned cut deeply into the terrain. This was not a foreboding place, nor did the wooded hills feel threatening. Still, the silence around me, the lack of an open vista, left me uneasy. I have always preferred the ocean over mountains, even if there’s nothing on the horizon. Crowded spaces are unnerving.

But I didn’t have much time to follow these silly thoughts. Ethan came ambling down a garden path, a large brown mutt at his heels. He looked different here, less despondent, less awkward. His glasses were still dirty, his clothing still baggy, and his hair remained unkempt. But here, he seemed to make sense. I noticed that even his claim that he’d been taken by aliens didn’t appear quite so outlandish anymore.

“This is Gunner,” he said, introducing his dog. I stretched out my hand and let it be sniffed. “Are you hungry?” Ethan asked. “I just noticed that I didn’t really think about what we would do, and I didn’t buy a whole lot of groceries. I don’t really ever have guests.”

Together we drove into the nearby village, and we got spaghetti and beer and water, some cookies as well. The owner, a woman with an Eastern European accent, knew Ethan by name. He paid for our haul, put the bags into the bed of his obscenely large diesel truck. “You keep observing me,” he said.

“I’ve never seen you outside of my office. So how does it feel when ‘it tingles?’”

“Sort of like allergies, when you get all itchy. But when they announce themselves, you don’t want to scratch, it kind of makes you happy. Well, not happy happy, but you’re in a good mood; it’s like remembering something really nice.”

“How long do you feel it before they arrive?” I got into the truck next to him, but after closing the door, he didn’t put the key in the ignition, just sat there staring at the wheel. “I feel bad. I shouldn’t have said anything. I shouldn’t have made you come.” Silence followed this announcement. Then, “I didn’t lie or anything, but it could take four or five days before they arrive. Once I had the itching for almost two weeks.”

I shook my head. “So, you’re not sure when they are coming.” But another thing irritated me much more. “How many times have they visited?”

It took him several seconds and sighs to answer. “Six or seven times.”

“And they always take you out over the ocean?”

He finally turned to face me. “No. Sometimes I let them inside and they take stock of everything in my house. Once they wanted to go inside the barn.” He paused briefly. “That sounds really hokey. Yeah, it’s not all that interesting, I guess. If I were you, I’d probably leave. But hey,” he said grinning and pointing to the bag of groceries behind us, “you might want to stay for dinner now. You can leave after that if nothing else happens.”

I tried to echo his grin and failed miserably. I had hoped for a quick showdown, some outrageous performance — for a while I had even entertained the thought that Ethan might install strange lights or hire some neighbors to play the extraterrestrials — and what he was offering instead was some vague excuse for a spaghetti dinner. My disappointment made me feel only more ridiculous.

On the way back to the farm, I asked him if the renters of the manufactured home had witnessed aliens.

“Not that I know. But I haven’t really asked them directly. You can’t really…you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, you need to be weird in order to discuss that in all seriousness.”

“I guess so.”

“You said they ‘unpacked’ you that first time they arrived. Has that changed? I mean, relationships evolve. You came to my office because you had discussed the idea of suicide, and now I’m sitting in your truck and we’re going to make dinner at your place. How has the aliens’ behavior changed?”

Ethan turned off the highway and onto the gravel road, pressing the button on his remote to open the gate. “They’re more curious, they take their time. Once they’re around you, it’s hard to tell time. I don’t wear a watch, and so I have to check a clock or my phone once I get back, but I usually pass out after they return me, so who knows? Still, I think the first time it was only maybe forty-five minutes or an hour max. The last time I was ‘gone’ for two days.”

“And you don’t know what kind of info they gather on you?”

He shook his head. “Unh, unh, I don’t speak their language, if that’s what they’re using.”

*

We carried the bag of groceries into the kitchen — a messy affair with coffee cups and plates on every surface. “Truth is,” he said by way of an explanation, “I didn’t think you’d come. I didn’t want to clean and be all disappointed later.” He cracked open a beer and offered me one. I declined and asked for water instead. “You want to see the ranch before we start cooking?”

With Gunner leading the way, we walked past the two barns and followed the creek for several minutes. Along the way, two old tractors had turned nearly green, plows and harrows had been left haphazardly behind and were barely recognizable. “Why don’t you drag them off?” I asked.

“Costs more money than it’s worth. The ranch is over three-hundred acres, there’s tons of space.”

The path turned upward to our left, and we followed it for about fifteen minutes before arriving at the first of several vineyards. Ethan explained who had leased it and what they were growing, but I only half-listened. I was waiting for some confession, some unexpected move, and the longer we walked, the stranger the absence of anything eerie felt. Ethan failed to turn into a wild-eyed killer, and neither did the skies darken by some mysterious force. It was just a pleasant-enough walk, and toward the end of it I felt simultaneously morose and at peace. Nothing would happen, I told myself. Ethan and I would enjoy a mediocre dinner, and before midnight, I’d be sound asleep in my bed at home.

When the modular home came into view, somewhere deep below us, I asked Ethan about the spot where he and Leah had fought.

“Oh, it’s right here,” he said and pointed to a meadow to our right. “Yeah, she was really upset.”

“And you didn’t try to stop her from leaving?”

“Wouldn’t that be creepy?” he answered. “I don’t want to be a controlling guy. She wanted to leave, she was really pissed. I sat here for a while, thinking that if she calms down, maybe she’ll wait for me at the house. But when I got home, she was already gone.”

“And she got upset because you laughed at what she’d said?”

“That might not have been the real reason, I don’t know. But suddenly I was the bad guy, and she just yelled and said she’d had enough.”

 Less than an hour after we’d started, we were back at the house. Ethan cleaned up the surfaces in the kitchen, and I started to boil the water, adding salt and oil. We listened to some music on his phone, and he drank another beer, and I opened the jar of sauce. “Do you miss Leah?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “But you have to trust each other, right? When you tell someone something, and they think you’re lying or out of your mind, you can’t really be together, right?”

“Are you curious about why she reacted the way she did?”

“Not really. It’s a sign of immaturity, if you ask me. Well, you are asking me, right? If I love someone, and they tell me something strange, I know I can trust them. What they say is true. Why would they make up something like that?”

I wanted to ask him about his reaction to Leah’s announcement that she was pregnant, but it felt too early; I told myself it wasn’t the right moment yet. “Do you miss your parents?”

“Not in any obvious way. I don’t mind being alone, but they left so weirdly. No ceremony, no good-byes, no long speeches and promises to keep in touch, no feud and no arguments, just nothing. When something momentous happens it should feel momentous, right? But their deaths didn’t. They just…occurred.”

“Have you ever made a connection between their death and the aliens?” The water was boiling, and I turned away from him and added the whole package of spaghetti, pushing them deeper into the water with a big wooden spoon. “Have you?” I didn’t look his way, I wanted to give him time to think about the answer. It was a question I should have asked early on in one of our sessions. It would have been the prudent thing to do. I waited for the song to end, something about “solitary motion in the wake of an avalanche,” and when it had finally ended, I turned around. And Ethan was no longer behind me.

I called his name, walked around the downstairs of the house. We’d hiked around the ranch, but he hadn’t even shown me the living room. Here I discovered the portraits of his ancestors, and it was a gloomy bunch, staring back at the intruder with disdain. I knocked on the slightly open bathroom door, but he wasn’t taking a leak or washing his hands. Then I heard Gunner bark outside, high-pitched and ugly. I walked to the vestibule and before I put my hand on the screen door, I felt my skin grow tight, as though it were being shrink-wrapped around my face and limbs and chest. I paused, checked my hands and chest but couldn’t detect the source of this sensation. After finally tearing open the door, I hurried out onto the porch, looking at the dog pirouetting, screaming like an angry kid. And because of the noise he made, I didn’t hear the hum at first, and when I finally did, I understood that the garden path in front of me had not ceased to exist, only that the yard beyond, with Ethan’s truck and my own car, had turned blurry.

I watched Ethan appear and disappear in the whirl that ebbed and swelled. A swarm of bees, yes, an ever-expanding swarm, but now shrinking, now moving closer, closer, hesitating.

I don’t want to miss my chance, and so I will stop writing. Who knows if there will be time to finish. It’s April 13, 6:23 p.m.