My father believed he was abducted by aliens. I think that’s the one fact that kept me from falling apart under the colossal pressure of my visions. He didn’t elaborate too much, and I didn’t want him to, because that might have meant I, too, had to open up. We shared a mystical solidarity, we both knew we’d seen things, and that was that. We weren’t in denial, I wouldn’t even call it fear. No, more like…respect. A deeper sight. It was like finding form in words for our experiences would destroy what the meaning was. When I was much younger, it was different. I was full of questions.
“Why doesn’t everybody else see when the ghosts walk into the room, dad?”
He sat bolt upright, I remember the look on his face, kind of like he was watching some really terrible news story break. He turned his face towards me slowly, and his eyes were bright, alert.
“Amy, what ghosts? What have you seen?”
“Shadows walking” I said. “And things that haven’t happened, but I’m awake when I see them.” I looked at the floor. “Sometimes they do happen, after.”
His eyes narrowed, and his mind seemed to tick like the beautiful clock in the hall. Slowly, he said to me “These shadow people, do they speak to you, or take you anywhere?”
“They don’t” I said. “They look at me, they know I’m there. They make funny faces. I think they want to talk to me, but I don’t think they know how.”
He nodded slowly, processing. It wasn’t for a while after that that he let me in on his secret. We were on a camping trip, just us, and it was night time. We could see about a trillion more stars than I was used to in the city; I was in awe.
“Is that where the shadow people come from?” I said, pointing at the sky. He said he didn’t know for sure, and there was a pause.
“Amy, some things do come from there. I want you to be careful. Do you believe in aliens?”
“Yes, dad. I don’t think they’re like the ones in films either, do you?”
“No” he said, “they’re not.” He leaned towards me. “Some took me once.”
I gasped. “Really?”
“Really” he said.
“Were you scared?”
“No, I knew they were good aliens.”
“What did they do?” I asked.
“I think they healed me, Amy. I think they stopped me from being sick. Maybe so you could be born, because you’re so special. I don’t really know for sure.”
Wow! I lay back. “What did they look like?”
“They were like mirrors, Amy. They were like walking mirrors. They reflected everything, and you could only really see them when you looked out of the corners of your eyes. Amy, listen to me. This has to be our secret, okay? If we tell anyone, they might not like to hear it, and that could be bad. So, I tell you what, if I have a dream about the aliens, I will tap you on the back when I give you a hug in the morning. And if you see shadow people, or things that haven’t happened, you tap right back. But me, you, and these stars” he said, pointing up like I had, “we’re the only ones who can know, so we just have our code, okay?”
“Okay, Dad.”
He smiled, but it quickly faded. “Amy, one last thing before bed.”
“What, dad?”
“If they ever tell you anything, in words, you have to tell me what they said. But only out here, when we’re alone.”
“Okay, dad” I said.
So a few times a week, I’d tap him on the back and he’d be extra reassuring. There were not many times he tapped his hand on my back, but I always hugged him tighter. Then his smart black shoes would click as he turned and went to work, the remains of breakfast piled neatly in the sink. I’d go to school. I grew up in awe of him, knowing he went to work with his secret but it never affected his accuracy rates or popularity, never hid his easy smile behind a black cloud of desperation.
Me, I’d go to school to be met by the stares of people both real and shadow-formed. My sense of being different – the cloying abnormality I felt pooling at the tip of my spine like rank, muddy rainwater – must have rippled out from me and impressed itself on the minds of my classmates. Nobody wanted to be my friend. I would stare out the window at a sky that never seemed to be anything other than grey, muting the already-dull playing fields until the whole scene looked like undifferentiated matter, broken only by the mournful, looping flight-paths of the birds. My pen would grow slack in my hand, until suddenly the teacher’s reproachful, weary voice would ring out, and the class would laugh. Startled and ashamed, I’d look down, often to find doodles of the shadow people all over my workbook.
At least I could doodle. Art was absolutely my salvation. Without it, even with the ever-present solidarity of my father, I might have succumbed to the creeping insanity that pulled at the edges of my mind, and been hospitalised. The art teacher was the only person other than my dad who got excited by me. She had messy, auburn hair that was really quite beautiful, kind eyes and a head full of dreams that somehow, our school never seemed to be able to kill. She wondered constantly at my ‘imagination’. If only she knew.
“You’ve got quite a mind, Amy” she said, after the class had drifted away and I could breathe again. “The world out there is nothing like this school, you know. There will definitely be a place for someone like you in it.”
I kind of shrugged in reply, but I could have cried. That was beautiful. I wasn’t sure if I believed I would ever really feel at home in any place the world might have for me, though. I carried on working hard in her classes even as I failed repeatedly in all the others, and under her tutelage, my skill in many art-forms grew, and I ended up designing jewellery for a living.
They never did tell me anything, the shadow people. They kept their silence like the stars we shared our secrets beneath. Every year we’d go camping, and every year, too, I’d have less to say about my visions. I didn’t want everything to be about that, it was enough that he knew. So at the campsite we’d just immerse ourselves in the escape from the city. He let me drink beer before I was the legal age, which we did around the warmth of the fire in the evenings – the long shadows silhouetting his face, and the stubble that he grew on these trips. I liked the way the shadows from the fire conformed to traditional shadow behaviour.
In the daytime we’d walk under the blaring, almost self-aggrandising heat of the sun. I always thought the sun had a hint of arrogance, which opposed the gentle grace of the moon. We’d observe the wildlife in the reserve, paying minute attention to the movement and habits of the birds, deer, lizards and squirrels. We both had the highest respect for nature.
We’d eat meals together, of pasta, avocado, aubergine, basil, and wholesome soups of parsnip, carrot and potato. When the sun set, we used to watch it fall from the sky, like some kind of renegade angel, from the same, special spot. Dark used to grow on dad’s face for a time as it grew around us. I think he was abducted at nightfall.
“Are you okay, dad?” I often asked, sometimes more out of insecurity than concern.
“I’m fine, Amy. Don’t you worry” he’d reply, as he turned to face me. “I wish we lived out here though” he would smile, and I’d laugh because we both knew that living somewhere destroys its magic, and he loved his job back in the city.
“’Can’t get a good mocha out here, dad.”
I paid more attention to my father’s ageing than I did my own. There’s more of a weight of gravity to the passing of time as someone gets older, I think. I watched thin lines ripple out on his skin as if his smile was a glittering pebble thrown into the mountain spring of his face. I knew he missed mum. I was luckier than him, having no memories of her to mourn, only the idea of a Mother. He lost his soulmate. I think that’s why he put so much energy into caring for me; it helped him transcend her death. It was a choice I deeply appreciated – he could just as easily have resented me, got bitter and drunk.
My own growing up was less graceful, more of a war with myself and my demons to be honest. It was then that his abduction took on the depth of meaning that it holds for me. It was then that his abduction kept me from falling, when nothing else was capable of reassuring me. I would cry at night.
“What does it mean, dad? Does it even mean anything, or is it just torment?” I choked the words bitterly, hugging my knees and looking fixedly at the wall. His face took on an empathetic seriousness.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned, sweetheart, it’s that life is ninety percent uncertainty. Unknowable and unexplainable. Painful and absurd. You just have to take the ten percent that you do get to decide the meaning of and find one hundred percent of your happiness there. I don’t know what the visions mean, I really don’t. Are they getting worse?”
I nodded, and pushed my hair back with a sudden, frustrated movement. “How do you do it, dad? How do you deal with the ninety percent?”
“I think of your mum” he paused, breathing deeply, but his eyes bright, not haunted. Just remembering. “I think of what it means for two people to find each other, and be in love. I think of the age of the universe, and how nothing is new under the sun. I think what can I contribute to the world? and I think of you, Amy. My hope for the future.”
That always used to get me. You know when someone says something like that and means it, there’s not really much you can say in reply. I cried and dissolved in his strong hug.
“The ten percent is worth holding out for. Remember that.”
So I grew up. My teens could be rendered into an anime series. I lived alongside the supernatural, but was unable to interact with it like the characters in those programmes. I never teamed up with, or fought, the shadow people – just endured their gaze, and tried to be as invisible to them as they were to everybody else. I set about finding my ten-percent.
I still had no friends. I had stopped expecting to have any by then, but the angst was stratospheric. I lived inside a storm, a storm my mind made that, with hurricane force, drove people away from me. Only my dad really understood me. Only his abduction anchored me in reality, only his belief in me pushed me to find that place my art teacher spoke of. I lived half my life in books, and painted the rest. Books were my escape into a world that was expected, normal. Obviously I never read sci-fi. People use those books to escape into a world much like mine, thinking it would be the coolest thing in the world. It isn’t. So I escaped into the kinds of books that would give me a taste of a life like theirs.
I knew my dad was dying before he did. Before his doctors did. I saw it. I realised he was my ten percent, and I loved him ferociously. Under the stars, after many beers, on our final camping trip, I hugged him tightly and slowly tapped his back. My tears felt unbearably hot as they dampened his collar.
“What did you see, Amy?”
“Dad” I sobbed. “I think you’re going to die.”
“You saw that?”
I nodded, my chin rising and falling into his collarbone. “I saw you get ill. I saw your funeral.”
His body was tense. He knew I didn’t see things that didn’t materialise.
“We’ll deal with it” he said, his words so heavy they almost dropped like lead before reaching my ears.
And we did. He faced his death with the equanimity that had seen him through life. We were as close as air and lung, and we shared his final months the way we had always shared everything. He imparted so much wisdom to me in those days – in the words he spoke to me in the dark of the night, but also in the way he stood, the way he stirred the onions in the frying pan, the way he cried. It was all so mindful, so rooted in now, so present. So lacking in any distraction or indulgence. He spent his days getting weaker in body, but doing everything he could to strengthen my resolve.
“Amy, don’t be too dualistic about life and death” he said, gently. “They’re not so different. The line between them is blurred.”
“I don’t understand, dad” I said, quietly.
“You will” he said. “When I am just as alive in your thoughts as I am here now, and you live your own life and experience the impermanence of everything, you’ll know what I mean.”
I do. And I am resolute. So I see shadows. Well, my dad got taken. By aliens. He had something happen to him that forever put him outside of others’ experience. He had to deal with the constant questioning of his own sanity, and an absence of explanation or meaning. He lost the love of his life and raised me alone. Yet he smiled, and he took me camping every year of my life, he drew the artist out of me, and he held down the job that paid our bills without ever once succumbing to the sense of loss and desperation that he must surely have felt.
That is why I smile now. It’s why every piece of jewellery I make has his initials incorporated into its design, hidden like a message to the shadows – I am carrying on. I am living my ten percent in his honour, and as long as I can keep in my mind the image of his experience, all those years ago, before I was born, I never become so absorbed in the horror of mine that I give up. I find the strength to deal with the ninety percent.
Mirror Lake Muse 