Chapter 2

A FEW WEEKS AFTER THE GARDEN-CLUB MEETING, CHARLIE Rider and Jenna Faroli met along Highway S outside of Hartley. This encounter occurred by chance. “Or,” Charlie later said, “did it?” The month was May, the wheat and alfalfa were waving in the soft breeze, the green was so bright in the sunlight, making the pastures and fields so shiny, it all looked like a plastic backdrop. Wasn’t it as if, Charlie would ask her, the Silver People, on an avenue named S, had called to them on that spring day of the spangly colors, when nature looked more phony than phony nature? The Silver People, the glowing dwarfs who inhabited Charlie’s private universe. He happened to be driving in front of Jenna, and it was he who pulled over on the wide gravel shoulder to look across the field to the horizon.

Nature in general was such a dazzling, goofball thing, always bubbling up out of nowhere, always morphing into a crazy something else; one minute you’ve about killed yourself digging out all the thistles in the field, and the next, garlic mustard has spread itself right behind your back. Son of a bitch—nature! And what a sense of humor, blowing your house down, say, and what do you find under the mud floor of the basement but a fossilized T. rex? Thank you very much. The next minute, the trickster goes into ravishing mode without any effort: mist on a pond, the crescent moon—So don’t look at me!—the whole place lit up in blossom time for no one but the bees. What was behind it all, beyond it, not to mention right in front of us? Who knew how many dimensions, scrim after scrim, a person could peel back into if he took the time to pay attention? “Don’t start,” his wife often said to him when he was gearing up on this subject. “What you see is what you get. Reality is reality, period.”

Would Jenna have stopped on Highway S if he hadn’t led the way? She wondered if she would have ignored the bobbing lights in her eagerness to get home if he hadn’t, by pulling over, guided her toward awe. “What are they?” she called to him as she climbed out of the car. She had her hand to her brow, looking, not at the stranger next to her, but at the six or so quivering spheres past the silos, the barns, just above the tree line. “Are we having floaters?” she said. “Both of us? Do we need to see an ophthalmologist right now? Or a shrink?”

Ah, that voice. He was having an out-of-body experience hearing it in the flesh. He had known it was Jenna Faroli who would step from the car, because he’d been watching her from his rearview mirror for the two miles she’d been behind him. He didn’t listen to her program, but whenever he heard it in the background he wished she would stop talking. He wanted her to sing along with him in the sound track that was often going in his head, principally the old-time string-band music he’d learned from his grandfather. “Short Life of Trouble,” “June Apple,” “Going Across the Mountain.” She must have a pure and yet sweetly lusty singing voice, with a spine-tingling vibrato. For a minute he forgot the spheres. The Grand Ole Opry: he’s up there with Jenna, and here comes Dolly, boobs like traffic cones, and, wait, Emmylou, she’s belting out “Pretty Little Girl” with them, too.

“Or do we need a neurosurgeon,” Jenna was saying, “are our brain tumors flaring up?”

Charlie closed his eyes, took a deep breath, raised his full glass to life. Jenna Faroli—biggest cranium on the planet, according to his wife—and here he was with her, looking out to the world revealed. “There’s nothing wrong with your vision,” he said, blinking, checking his own. “Or your circuitry, I suspect, nope, not a thing. You probably don’t have psychiatric troubles, either. Clean bill of health. They, those lights—they might be what you think they are.”

It was then that she turned to look at him. Out of long habit, she masked her censure in the singsong of her satiny tones. “And what do I think they are?”

It wasn’t the tender shape of his dark eyes or his unlashed smile, ear to ear, that first drew her attention, or even his corkscrew curls, the tight spring of them, but the pleading in the long, tapered fingers with the flat pads, as he held them out, in prayer position.

“Here’s my guess,” he said. “You don’t really think those lights are UFOs, and you could never say that they might be, you wouldn’t really even consider it, because then everyone within range of 90.4 FM would think you’d flipped. UFOs aren’t even the word you want for what’s out there. You’re thinking spirit world. You’re thinking alternative reality, maybe. You’ve heard about ionic disturbances, so you could go the science route. But this seems like something different from that description. It’s possible you’d like them to be magical. It’s possible you want to be charmed.”

She said nothing. She used what her producer in the studio called Jenna’s I-hate-you smile, the tilted head, the closed mouth spread to 45-percent capacity, the sincere nod. She had recently done a show about Yeats’s beliefs in palmistry, astral travel, and crystal gazing, about the poet’s falling under the spell of the mystic Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Her guest had gone on to the question in general of well-educated and discriminating people who give themselves over to the occult. Jenna did not doubt that the sacrifice of Yeats’s reason, the force of his sheer wackiness, had yielded great benefits to the culture at large. But in the moment she had never wanted less to be charmed by alternative reality. The one miracle she believed in was kindness—but only if it wasn’t talked about. She was of course open to all points of view, even those of a presumptuous kook. Her stranger’s jeans were so crisp she wondered if they’d been starched and ironed, and the sleeves of his light-green shirt had been neatly rolled up, each to the same level on his forearm. Even as Jenna considered the spectacle at the edge of the sky, she noted that Charlie looked like a schoolboy whose mother had dressed him.

“Are they benign?” she asked. “Those beings caravanning in the spheres?”

“Would you like them to be?”

She again turned to her companion. “I’d like them to be as well dressed as you.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “It’s hard, though, to look like this when you’re traveling. When you’ve come from so far.”

“Yes, that’s true. Especially because you would have had to start out—let’s see—a million miles per hour, and if you came from the nearest star, that’s Alpha Centauri, so … wouldn’t you have had to start out at roughly … give me a minute … I’m not quite sure about the math, but something like the time of Moses?”

“Whoa!” he said. “Math! Wow.” His whole body now seemed to be nodding, the bounce coming from his heels. “But maybe, maybe you have to do that thing where you shift the—what’s it called?—the paradigm. Isn’t it possible that they have other ways to travel? Maybe our laws have nothing to do with theirs. Maybe they can surf the astral plane, or even travel on our thoughts.”

“Poor things! My thoughts would certainly rumple their clothing. Still, however they get here, I maintain that it’s important to make a good impression.”

“You don’t like the green bodysuit? Too casual? You wish they’d snazz it up a little, make an effort? Accessorize?”

“I have large feet, so I always think if you’re a dainty size you should use that. You should wear elegant shoes, at the least.” In her brown oxfords she stepped closer to the field. “What else do I want in my aliens?” She squinted hard at the sky. “Let me just say I refuse to be frightened of creatures smaller than me and those whose pallor is green. I’d like to think they were getting a charge out of us, out of our dramas, that we were providing them with a degree of entertainment. That is, I hope we’re not too dull. Not that I want to be made fun of, no, but I’d like them to be lovingly amused. I’d like them to feel as if they’d seen a masterpiece—a Preston Sturges film, for instance. I’d like them to feel as if the world, our world, was a generous place. A tall order, to be sure.” She smiled at him, a genuine smile this time. “I’d like them to feel lighthearted.”

He was staring at her, all movement suspended. “I don’t know you,” he said after a minute. “I mean, I know you—you know I know you, but I don’t know you. If you know what I mean. So it doesn’t make sense for me to want to tell you a secret. But—I’d like to. I’d like to tell you one.”

“You probably shouldn’t,” she said, “since you don’t know me.”

He noodled the gravel with the toe of his boot. “I can appreciate that—but if you have any questions, about what you’re seeing? Not that I’m an expert …” He rooted around in his pocket and pulled out a card for her. “If you find yourself thinking about this scene, you could e-mail me, and I’ll tell you what I know.”

“Charlie Rider,” Jenna said. She was not going to bring up the Charles Ryder of Brideshead Revisited. “I met your wife a few weeks ago at the library. She was very helpful.”

“The indomitable Mrs. Rider,” Charlie sang out. “It was the greatest night of her life, talking to you.”

“I doubt that,” Jenna said. “At least, I hope it’s not true. Please do thank her again for me. And thank you for this—”

“Miracle.”

“Card,” she said firmly. “Thanks for the card.” The restrained, tasteful font was Eaglefeather, the invention of Frank Lloyd Wright. You could tell a person’s class, or his aspirations anyway, his pretensions, perhaps, by his font. Someone else, she was sure, had designed the card for him. If you had such a lavish head of hair and an impish face, if you had excitement pulsing in your eyes, you wouldn’t be able to see clear to a font like Eaglefeather. As she got in the car, she called back to him, “But what the hell are they?”

“If I told you,” he said, walking toward her, coming alongside her Toyota, “if I told you about the Silver People, you wouldn’t believe me.”

“It all depends on how you tell it.”

“I don’t even believe me when I tell myself the story.”

“Then you’d better get to work on your narrative skills.”

“Narrative skills,” he echoed. He stuck his hand through her open window. “Charlie Rider,” he said, shaking what he had grasped, shaking her fingertips. “It’s an honor to meet you. A real thrill.”

Charlie had always had confidence. He was the sixth and final child in his family. His mother had understood by baby number three that there was little point in worrying, and by baby number five, no point in trying to mold. By the time he came, her wisdom was honed to a comfortable dull edge, that line she worked between concern and neglect. As an infant, Charlie had been happy to lie on his back nibbling his toes, singing to himself, and watching his grandfather play his fiddle. His mother loved his shining eyes, his astonishing curls, and the dreaminess that would later make his teachers want to smack him. The other children had straight hair, were good in math, and had chubby legs. Where had Charlie come from? Once he could crawl, he had the habit of throwing himself into the family swimming pool, and for years he believed the story his brother told him, that he was a creature who had been born of a fish. He believed, that is, that his own real mother was capable of transformation. No fish-child has ever been so variously and well dressed, from matador, to pirate, to magician, to king, to nurse—all professions that required capes and millinery. He drank a bottle until he was seven, pouring the milk from the refrigerator into the Evenflo, and screwing on the blue-rimmed nipple that had a chewed hole the size of his thumb. When his older brothers beat him up at home they were mild about it, and out in the world they defended him. He was lucky in their protection. He seemed, though, not to care much about what anyone thought of him. And he didn’t ever consider himself to be in danger. It was his native happiness, that radiant, dreamy joy, that both invited teasing and shielded him from it.

When he was seventeen and flunking out of high school, a twenty-five-year-old woman named Shirley lured him away from the pool table at Nybo’s Tavern, drove him to her uncle’s house on Lake Margaret, and taught him in one night so many things he wondered if he should make a list of the pleasures in order not to forget. He recalled the way she had drawn his lower lip into her own mouth, the way she had licked his pants before she’d removed them, and the pressure of her finger in a place he had not before considered would hold any interest to a second party. He realized, as he tried to imagine what he would write, that Shirley’s teachings were not things a boy could scribble in a notebook. What had happened with Shirley was a wordless miracle, just as music was, a dissolving happiness into the cosmos. It was essential, then, to keep singing, to keep making love, to keep creating the songs note by note as the sound, note by note, vanished.

After graduation, made possible by Principal Stapleton’s generous interpretation of his efforts, Charlie found jobs here and there around Hartley. He met Laura; they often had sex three times a day; they dabbled in horticulture, including growing marijuana; they bought the farm with money Charlie inherited from his grandfather; they started the business; and they got married. By the time he was forty, he felt that the adventure was over. His wife was never going to sleep with him again; hundreds of people traipsed around their property through the spring and summer, and he would work to keep it at that trembling point of perfection, as per Mrs. Rider’s orders; he would sing “Eyes likeCherries” and other Grandpa Rider songs at the annual St. Lucy’s School fund-raiser; he would marvel at the universe, trying to see into it—and that was his lot. He understood that his feelings of decline were ancient ones, that men before him had suffered in the same way. He knew this because he had been exposed to some classics on the stage—two Shakespeare, one Chekhov. In high school, Mrs. Garstucky had taken them to see Uncle Vanya in Chicago, and he remembered a scene where Vanya, played by George C. Scott, had said something like “I’m forty-seven. How am I going to get through the next years of my life? What shall I do? How shall I fill up these years?” Charlie had come home from the play, and, standing on the lip of the swimming pool fully clothed, he had given his mother that speech in Scott’s growly voice, and then fallen over into the water. There was no one who laughed as hard at him as his mother. Now, at forty-five, he understood Vanya’s sentiments; he could see they were no joke.

It wasn’t that life was unhappy or that difficult, not at all. He was married to his Captain of Industry. They owned their farm, and their business was more successful than they’d imagined it could be at the start. With sixteen employees, he had become, to the surprise of his siblings, a boss. This had never been his goal, in part because he’d never had any particular goals. He loved to sing his grandfather’s songs. He liked to pluck at the banjo. He enjoyed drawing. He loved thinking about what lay beyond the blue sky. He’d loved lying on the floor channeling himself into the dream life of their dog, Beaver; he’d imagine Beaver chasing a squirrel, and by and by the real-life mutt would start twitching and whining in his sleep. There were no limits to the powers of the mind, no limit to what was out in that swirl of gas and infinity. A person, however, did not get paid to inhabit the dream life of a dog or love the mysteries of this world, and so it was best that he and Laura had Prairie Wind Farm Inc. It was probably better than doing hospital transport, although he had enjoyed that job, wheeling patients from surgery to recovery and then to their rooms. He had met Laura en route to having her appendix removed.

It was Laura who had grown the business, Laura who every day gave all of them their marching orders, saving for her husband the jobs that she was pretty sure he could pull off without ruining the machinery or plowing up a section of orchids, or planting the row of twenty-five peonies in the wrong yard. It was Laura, his family believed, who had saved Charlie, who had made the nutcase—the adorable, the lovable nutcase, to be sure—into a solid citizen and a happy man.