The Third Personality: A Novel (29)

MUNCIE, Indiana - Hamilton Boggs said as little as possible to Harley Boggs regarding his father's diminished rebounding abilities. So when an aging and frail-looking Harley, who only had just turned 61, bounced the basketball back to Ham Senior at the empty playground court's foul line, Ham casually accepted it and prepared for his next free throw in their game of tips. He'd intentionally missed his last shot.

"Sixteen-five," Hamilton recited.

"I know the score," Harley said. "Just shoot."

Ham's free throw attempt again missed, and his father made no effort to leap and re-shoot the easy rebound. Hamilton himself retrieved the ball this time.

"What else is going on here, Dad," he asked somberly.

"I miss your mother," Harley replied.

"I know how that is - don't I," Ham said with a wince. "But there's more here you're not telling me."

"The deluded preacher-man speaks," Harley grunted.

"Stop it, Dad."

"I'll stop it - when my 41-year-old son shoots the ball."

Looking away, Hamilton then dribbled the ball at the line.

He put up another unenthusiastic jumper that circled the rim and sailed, and again Harley didn't budge as the ball bounced behind him and bounded off in decreasing arcs.

Their game of tips was no longer a game of tips.

For the next several minutes, then, neither of the wifeless Boggs men spoke to one another. In fact, they barely moved.

* * * * *

"Your behavior's giving me the creeps," his son said flatly, again breaking a long silence, only this time at the dining room table in Harley's small one-bedroom apartment on the southern outskirts of Muncie.

Hamilton then shifted in his chair, sighed - and waited for his father, sipping on a cup of decaf, to respond. Enough with the small talk, Ham then decided. So far his trip to see his dad had been a huge waste of time. "So talk, already," he ordered.

Harley looked up at him. "This has nothing to do with you," he said curtly.

"Hell it doesn't," Hamilton laughed darkly.

"It doesn't," Harley said. "But it's why your mother left."

"Mom left you because she said you were drinking," Ham said.

"Not as much as she wanted to believe," Harley shot back. "I tried to talk to her about what was going on, but she wouldn't have it. I think I scared her. In fact - I know I did."

"Scared her. How?"

Harley paused. "You ever heard of Whitley Strieber?" he asked. "Ever heard about the book he wrote recently?"

"Whitley who?" Tom frowned.

Harley chuckled darkly this time. "You're a piece of work, Hamilton," he said. "You know that?"

His son stared back. "I don't understand."

"When you wanted to wrap yourself around aliens and trance mediums, no one dared challenge you about your convictions. So damned sure of yourself. And look what the hell happened."

"That's history - it's over and done," Hamilton said. "I was young, made mistakes. What's that got to do with you now?"

Harley jumped up out of his chair angrily, and glowered across the table at his son - shocking him.

"Where's your wife - right this minute," Harley demanded.

Hamilton was startled. "In North Carolina - with Hammie," he said.

"I wouldn't bank on it!" Harley growled. He then turned and stormed around the corner, out of sight, into his kitchenette.

Hamilton was suddenly seated alone.

Thereafter, he felt a silence throughout the apartment unit.

"Dad?"

Harley's voice then fired back at Hamilton from the kitchen.

"We're done here, Hamilton. Go back to your mother's," he said. "And on your way back to Richmond, stop by a bookstore. Buy yourself a copy of that book I was telling you about."

"You didn't tell me the name of the book, only its author," Hamilton gulped. "Whitley something."

"Strieber," returned Harley's voice. "The book came out about a year ago - you can find a copy now in paperback. Its title is "Communion.""

"'Communion?'" Ham gushed. "Well, okay. What's it about?"

"For starters, it's about a lot of expensive psychotherapy."

"What," Hamilton muttered, stunned.

"A lot of hypnosis, a lot of recovered memories, dating all the way back to childhood," came Harley's voice. "That's what."

Hamilton tried to smile, but failed. "I don't understand."

Harley's voice then sarcastically blurted out five musical notes from the kitchen - five notes very familiar to Hamilton, as they used to be the ones his pretentious, specially- designed family doorbell made years ago back in Laurinburg: …up a full step, down a major third, down an octave, up a perfect fifth …

"Bong - bong - bong - bong - bong!!" Harley's voice sang.

It was the main theme from John Williams' musical score to Steven Spielberg's movie, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

* * * * *

Hamilton completed his hour-long drive back to Richmond from the southern outskirts of Muncie on farm road/highway 35, crossed over I-70, and then turned left in his pickup (with North Carolina tags) toward the book stores over on the east side of town.

He bypassed the turnoff to his parents' home near South E Street (where only his mother now lived), and shortly thereafter passed through Richmond's modest (and very Hoosier) downtown.

Ten minutes later Ham found himself perusing a New Age bookshelf inside a store in the air-conditioned Richmond Mall.

There he found a copy of Whitley Strieber's Communion (in both paperback and hardback) - adjacent to hardcover editions of Gary Kinder's Light Years and Bud Hopkins' Intruders - the Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods. All three books, Ham noted, were about reported (and unrelated) UFO/alien encounters, and had been published by major hardback publishers in 1987.

Heretofore, that hadn't been the case for such sensational reports about UFOs. But Ham knew he'd been out of the UFO-encounters loop for so long, he'd lost touch.

"What's all this crap?" Hamilton mumbled softly to himself as he flipped through a Strieber hardback. A college-aged girl, sampling books one bookshelf over, apparently overheard him, for she looked up, smiled good-naturedly, and returned to browsing.

Hamilton then glanced a few shelves further down, and what he saw there astonished him: book after book by so-called "channelers," and their purportedly "non-physical" co-authors.

Channeling was the latest jargon for mediumship, apparently.

"Holy shit," Ham whispered absently, shaking his head.

"Pretty neat, huh," the girl giggled, now grinning his way.

* * * * *

Harley once again decided he'd eat dinner in bed, and picked away at a heated bowl of canned chicken �n dumplings with a spoon.

Lately he discovered he desperately needed to grasp all of the contexts about what'd been happening to him. It proved some tough going. There were not only precious few experts on the subject, he'd found out, but very few serious investigators even bothering to look into his problem. Dismayingly, he'd discovered not one of the western universities took reports such as his seriously. Their strictly-material world view was, Harley decided, illogical, given the number of empirical studies suggesting a vastly more complex and illusionary universe was far more likely. Yet the physical world remained the only one accepted in Newtonian physics despite all of the contrary quantum evidence.

So he gave up on the university literature a long time ago.

Even his own Quaker faith, which recently fell victim to the same Christian "conservatism" that had been eating up all mainline protestant denominations like a Pac-man, had let him down.

Harley's Hicksite Quaker beliefs were now openly belittled.

Damned conservatives. Damned self-righteous fools… (Didn't conservative once mean erring on the side of caution? Only that just wasn't how things were, nowadays.)

But in any event, yes; on the subject of shifting realities, Harley had become a wee bit obsessive. ("Shifting realities," yet!)

Tell him something he didn't know.

Jesus, he frowned. Where was that passage?

Beneath Michael Talbot's paperback, "Mysticism and the New Physics," and an obscure hardback from some outfit known as the Institute of Psychophysical Research in Oxford, England (a book entitled, simply, "Lucid Dreams"), Harley found the maroon-colored paperback he was looking for. A thin woman's face (with an open mouth) gazed out exaggeratedly at the reader from its worn cover.

Yes!, Harley squinted, finding the page he was looking for - I marked it! He then eased his shoulder on his pillow, and read:

"…Your physical form is the result of great emotional focus. The fantastic energy of your psyche not only created your physical body, but maintains it. It is … in a constant state of pulsation, and because of the nature of energy and its construction, the body is actually blinking off and on.

"Now: This is difficult to explain … but even physically, you are not here as often as you are …"

And Harley continued reading on. He did this a lot lately.

The passage began on page 98 of a book called "Seth Speaks," by the woman whose unflattering image was captured on its cover: an Elmira, New York housewife named Jane Roberts.

* * * * *

Hamilton Boggs found himself standing foolishly in his mom's living room shortly before supper, holding out his just-acquired paperback copy of Strieber's Communion for his mother to see.

His arm got pretty sore while he waited for Winifred Boggs to turn around and see what his father - her husband - had that day insisted ought to be required reading for Ham. (Or anybody.)

"Put your arm down," Winnie Boggs sighed while dusting a sill that hardly merited her attention. She didn't even turn toward her son when she said it. Then she stood up. "I know the book."

Ham was slightly taken aback. "You know about … UFOs?"

"I know the book," his mother repeated.

"Mom. We're talking flying saucers here."

Winnie finally turned, and stared hard into Hamilton's eyes. "I know the book, Ham. I know the subject."

He gulped, and gazed back uneasily. He appeared speechless.

"It's time we had a talk, Hamilton," she said.

Over supper - one in which Ham barely poked at his meal - Winifred Boggs told her son some things she'd pretty much kept a secret from everyone she knew - including her son and husband.

It began, she explained, a few years after Ham had founded his peculiar (and misguided) church in Laurinburg - an act which at the time, she said, scared her half to death. She just didn't understand her son's behavior - either in dismissing out-of-hand his lifelong Quaker faith without so much as a blink, nor in his willingness to trade all of that in on some crazed pseudo-religion based on gabby gaseous entities (and space ships) from Venus.

Hamilton, listening to his mother intently, dropped his head. "Ah, I know, I know - it was dumb. I'm sorry I …"

"Let me finish, Ham," Winnie interrupted, reaching across the table to place her hand on her son's. "There's a lot more to say to you here - about what your father insists to this day he went through and what I did as a result of all that. You have to know that if I was worried about losing my son to UFOs, then losing my husband and my marriage to more of the same..; it made me crazy."

"More of the same?" Ham grimaced. "Dad said today he tried to tell you about what happened, but he insisted you didn't listen."

Winifred Boggs rolled her eyes wearily. "Oh, I listened."

"Well, then, so - what happened?"

"Have you seen your dad's old study since you moved back?"

Ham gaped at her, and shrugged. "Not really. It's locked."

"Then come with me," Winnie said, standing. "It's long since time we did this. There's something I need to show you."

Ham followed his mother to Harley's former study, which she unlocked with a house key she'd kept in her purse.

While Ham was growing up, he was taught never to go in that room unless invited. As he'd never violated that rule, he was surprised now that his mom felt a need to keep the door locked.

Winnie turned the knob, and pushed open the door, encouraging her son with a nod to enter. Ham then stepped in ahead of her.

Abruptly, he stopped in his tracks. "Holy shit," he softly groaned for the second time that day - temporarily oblivious to the realization that his mom didn't used to like him using curse words.

Today, however, she acted like she didn't give a rat's ass.

As Ham stared around the room, he saw three walls of large, tall bookshelves filled with every book imaginable on the subject of flying saucers and unidentified flying objects. Four shelves alone were devoted to videos about, or related to, the subject.

Some related materials even had to do with, of all things, mediumship.

Mediumship - as in Yam-oriented trance channeling!

"This is all dad's?" Hamilton gasped in amazement.

"No, sweetie," said Winifred Boggs, a slight smile starting to form on her lips. Her face then changed - and her voice reverted back to that which Ham now remembered from his childhood.

If only briefly, Winnie had become Mrs. Boggs. Ham's mother.

"Almost all of this," she then offered tenderly, "is mine."

It was just over 14 years ago, Winnie then explained to Ham, when initial indications surfaced that something dark and odd was taking place in his father's life. It'd begun, near as she could tell, she said, on a night a few weeks before Christmas in 1974.

It was right before baby Hammie's second birthday, she said, for she recalled her remarking about "the terrible twos." Harley was supposed to be gift shopping for the toddler that night. But instead, a very strange and worrisome event had interceded.

Harley came home six hours late from Muncie - six hours that he said had just disappeared and couldn't be accounted for.

Winnie let her words hang in the air, and Ham reacted. "Dad couldn't remember what happened for six hours? That's crazy!"

"Not then, anyway," Winnie sighed. "But several years later, when Harley'd finally agreed to go see a psychiatrist - he was having terrible nightmares by then, and he and I were in counseling about our failing marriage … Well. It all came out one afternoon, while the psychiatrist had him under hypnosis."

Ham then recalled his father earlier in the day saying something about his having undergone some "expensive" psychotherapy.

"Dad said whatever it was he experienced had been going on since childhood. What happened? And since whose childhood?"

"Not yours," Winnie said to calm her son, again reaching across the table as they sat facing each other in the den. "His. He insisted that you and I were always asleep when they came to mess with him in the middle of the night, oh, every few months."

Ham blinked at his mother. "They? They who? You mean some aliens broke into our house? What did they come there to do?"

"Oh, Hamilton," Winifred whispered, looking away briefly. "You'd think, given your predilections, you'd be less thick about this. It'll be hard … but you have to read that book you just bought …

"They - as in the same ones who stalled your father's truck out in the middle of unlighted Highway 35 that night - the same road you drove back in from Muncie today!" Winnie railed bitterly, her voice once again hardening. "The UFO folks who abducted your father, took him aboard their spaceship … or whatever the hell was … and did horribly unspeakable things! Back then - and now!"

"What!?" Hamilton blurted back. "This is still going on?"

Winnie's eyes sagged, as she nodded. "Your father told me he doesn't think it ever will end … His experiences inside their �ship' have changed over the years, he once told me - and, oh, yes, Hamilton, I did listen. But the abductions never stopped!"

* * * * *

That night, Harley's bedroom window was open, and brisk air tossed the thin curtains on either side into undulating chaos.

Moonlight reflected off of the dewy-damp, undusted sill.

Then, for a time, the curtains fell to a dangling rest.

Harley Boggs was sitting up in his bed, his back resting against the cheap headboard. His covers were hurled to either side of his bare feet. He appeared to be unconscious. His eyes were closed, his head was tilted, and his breathing seemed shallow.

But he was very conscious, mentally. He simply felt heavy.

His pajamas were overdue for a trip to the washing machine, he was thinking to himself parenthetically - when They came.

Harley's "second body" stirred. Its eyes fluttered briefly.

Then it sat up in bed, as two light-fingered hands on either side of his (real, sleeping) body helped lift it/him off of the bed, pulling it (and him) fully away from his sleeping physical form.

.........Oh dear God not again oh dear God not again oh dear God..........

Once more, the screaming child within Harley was silenced.

Then his Lucid Dreaming Self - quite clearly - kicked in.

Yeh, yeh - same old shit, his Lucid Dreaming Self mused.

And by the way, Harley: PAY ATTENTION TO THE REALITY SHIFT.

(Pay attention), Lucid Dreaming Self repeated, more mutedly.

.....(....(...[..P.ay....At.t.e.n.t.i.o.n..]...)....).....)......).......)........)

Then the pulsations began. In and out. In-and-out, faster.

The elder Boggs felt airy if numb as no less than four short, silhouetted beings with spindly limbs lifted him over their heads and carried him out (through a sold wall) into the deep night.

Into the very darkest of moonlit nights.

Harley's evacuated physical form remained still, in bed, as his consciousness, in a duplicate body, drifted up/away in light.

And always, the pulsations. In-and-out. Like a metronome.

The shift in realities - which separated Harley's "second body" from his heavy, physical first (the denser one, as usual, was commonly left behind to snore away disconsciously in bed)-

...Lucid Dreaming Self: Snore..? "Disconsciously?!"

-The Shift was a lot like, yes, the shift in a metronome's beat - from a downbeat, de-emphasized; to an upbeat, emphasized:

The heavy, dense physical world pulsed in-and-out like this:

...ONE-and-TWO-and-THREE-and-FOUR-and …

While the invisible camouflage reality of Harley's abductors (into which his "second body" now entered) pulsed more like this:

....One-AND-two-AND-three-AND-four-AND …

Like a metronome - pulsating in-and-out. Only in reverse. Syncopated.

During the reality-shifting transition within these standard abduction sequences, Harley would feel drugged, black out - and then re-awaken, his "drugged" consciousness now noted. (This new lively lucidity wouldn't last. His abductors would see to that.)

Harley again found himself outside of his house - in the air!

Slowly lifting his head, he recognized the source of a warm light (warm beam of light): a familiar airship directly overhead.

[L-D-S: This has to look preposterous, from ground level!]

The ship was a disc with blinking colored lights surrounding its circumference. The powerful beam flowed out from the center of its belly onto Harley, and onto the four (-plus) figures still quietly surrounding him, floating on air, and rising up with him.

.....(....[...(..A.nd....Bl.a.c.k.n.e.s.s..)...]....).....)......).......)........)

* * * * *

Harley then found himself standing in a circular domed room with white empty walls. On either side of him were individuals who were gazing at a gurney in the middle, where a teenaged boy was lying on his back, staring vacantly up at the domed ceiling.

Across the room from Harley (and she hadn't noticed him yet) was Hamilton's wife, Mary-Madonna - who was sobbing! Two human people on either side of her (as with those straddling Harley) appeared unduly focused on the inert, expressionless youth before them.

A long table, Harley now noticed, stood parallel to and away from the wall to his left - as overhead lamps highlighted its bare top, while lightly glowing formless figures sat back away from it in the shadows as unidentified (and unidentifiable) non-human observers.

This whole business had something to do with the boy.

What exactly, in God's name, they were doing, Harley had no idea. Was this some kind of test? A type of ceremony? He then gazed across the room, and attempted to gain Mary-Madonna's attention.

(Why hadn't she noticed him by now?)

When she glanced back - and met Harley's eyes - her mouth fell open into a silent, twisted wail. Her eyes were red, Harley noticed, as she desperately, limply, motioned to get him to look at the gurney - and at the pubescent adolescent lying on it.

Harley frowned, and glanced down at

............Oh, dear God - the boy..!

Harley didn't recognize him at first, because he was now in his teens - and he hadn't seen the kid for years, at this point.

But it was him.

A dulled, semi-conscious Hammie Boggs, Junior!

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