The Believer, page 26
Earlier in the night, Don clicked to a slide showing an insect that looked like an enormous ant. Explained that certain witnesses reported seeing the occupants of the crashed saucer, described their large heads and wide-set eyes as looking like a Jerusalem cricket, the insect known in New Mexico by the translation of its magnificent Spanish name: child of the earth. Don is now being asked about an entity that was reported to have survived the crash, and to have been taken into government custody. There was an account, he replies, from a witness about seeing this alien in captivity at a government facility. That witness recounted feeling sorry for it and receiving the distinct message: Don’t have any feelings for me because there’s nothing more that can be done.
I click on more articles about the fires. Read about the prime minister, Scott Morrison, not responding directly when asked whether climate change is responsible for what is happening.
Believe it or not about the captive alien, and I don’t, its purported message evokes a dreadful familiarity—the logically extended reasoning of those at the lower end, the bad tenants, the dangerous, the egotistical, the expansionist children of the earth. So then I started to wonder, Don had said, sipping his tea, are we dealing with time travel? Are we dealing with us?
I put my phone back in my pocket, walk out into the cold night where the lights on the water look like an airstrip. I am thinking about those scraps of debris, how Don described them. The material was paper thin, he said. Weightless in your hands. A bullet wouldn’t cut it. A sledgehammer just bounced off it, wouldn’t mar it.
Soon Don will be back on the debris field for another archaeological dig, using metal detection and subterranean radar in his continuing effort to recover a piece of his “holy grail.” I try to imagine something bright, at once physical and ethereal. Something abiding, self-healing, carrying the imprint of itself so firmly within itself that it is fated to return to form regardless of external influence. Of course it would be called “memory material,” this substance which was insistently everlasting if not truly indestructible—shattering, as it did, into so many fragments instantly on impact with the hard reality of the earth.
44
The Kingdom of Heaven
Becky & Tim
Tim Kreider, baby on his lap, hums the first note. Then his wife and their six sons and Marie, the teenage girl visiting from Pennsylvania to help with the kids, all harmonize around the hymn which starts their daily family worship. Their voices coil like vines in their living room where sunlight coats the battered walls. My god, this music. My love for the sound of it arrived fully formed, announcing itself that first day down in the dirty train station like the discovery of a second heart underneath what was—yes, at first—an ironic amusement. But the sound poleaxed me. And the magnetic attraction that snaps me to it never leaves me and it never diminishes. It is with me months later when I walk down the street listening to it, small and tinny, through shitty headphones and when I sit alone at my desk, watching other Mennonite choirs on YouTube, tears burning my eyes. It can’t be the lyrics. I am unmoved, at least in the intended manner, by say, “Trust and Obey” or “There’s Power in the Blood” or “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood” or “Are You Washed in the Blood” or “But for the Blood” or “Paid in Full (By the Blood of the Lamb).” And it isn’t a question of technical mastery; the voices are by no means perfect. But each time it causes within me a certain pool of feeling—a tenderness. A vulnerability which, strangely, gives me energy, bends towards strength. Something I have not found words for, and perhaps that is the point.
They don’t read music, are liberated from the page in that regard. “They grew up with it,” Becky shrugged when I asked once how the harmony is taught. “At church, we don’t have a choir because we want everybody to be involved.” And that’s everything, really. These songs are houses with warm rooms for everyone. This is what it could feel like.
Though PS 83 is just down the block, the older boys attend school in their basement, where Becky is now heading to check that they are starting their afternoon lessons. I’m not quite sure how I can do justice to the Kreider kids, sufficiently close in age and similar-looking that they bring to mind a Pennsylvania Dutch matryoshka doll. I can tell you that they are a healthy balance between playful and serious, autonomous and cooperative. Getting closer, now, to what I want you to know: they are kind and thoughtful and, while they are raucous in the sorts of ways that bruise the ceiling and pancake the couch cushions and break foot bones, they are also placid and joyful and loving. I watch their faces when Tim or Becky speaks with them and although the theological content of these discussions is as useful to me as the operating instructions for the Mars Rover, many times it feels as though I am getting a master class in parenting. Perhaps most telling: the character of these children is the strongest proof of a happy home.
Marie is leading the boys in an antiquated (and commensurately offensive) hymn before they open their books. Jesus loves the Eskimo, they sing, In the land of ice and snow . . . Sprinkled with pimples, reclining in her chair, she then guides them to their work, staying ahead by following the teacher’s guide. Like Becky, she is wearing a cardigan and the long dress that I ask about as we return upstairs. “Our conference wants their ladies to wear a dress,” Becky answers. “We try to teach our young girls to look sweet and feminine but not to be out to grab attention.”
From my discussions with Loisann and Becky, I now know that a girl’s or woman’s membership status in The Light of Truth Mennonite Church signifies that certain things are more likely than not to be true. She’s going to cover her head with a small veil. She’ll be wearing a full-length dress that she purchased at a Mennonite op shop or made for herself in about four hours. That dress may be a pleasing shade of purple or pink or peach but it will definitely not be red, which is an immodest color because it begs attention. She will be wearing sneakers, probably some sort of black Nike situation, not because it is cool or for the purpose of exercise but because it is cheap, durable and comfortable for the many hours of standing to perform housework and child care which her days demand. She is going to be somber in church; she is not necessarily going to be somber outside of church, where she might dissolve into giggles should she recall something hilarious that happened once. She is not going to wear makeup or nail polish or jewelery or perfume or pants, pants being masculine and her being mindful of the need to maintain a clear line between the sexes. However, while she can wear a blue dress—the masculinity of the blue being satisfactorily offset by the femininity of the dress—it cannot be said that the reverse is true; her husband, if she has one, and if she is in her twenties she probably has one, is unable to wear a pink shirt, the femininity of the pinkness not being sufficiently overridden by the masculinity of the shirt. She may have finished high school all the way through to the twelfth grade like Becky, but more likely only the tenth grade like Loisann; either way she will most definitely not have gone to university.
“We just try to stay out of this kingdom,” Becky explains when I ask how a typical Conservative Mennonite family celebrates occasions like birthdays and holidays. “You won’t find us celebrating Memorial Day or the Fourth of July because we’re not politically active. You won’t see any flags or patriotic discussions going on, for the most part.” She takes a rare breather, sitting on the couch after putting the baby down for a nap while her three-year-old plays nearby. “You won’t find Christmas trees or Santa Claus or anything unreligious-related. A very typical Mennonite thing is Christmas caroling. We’ll go around as a church and sing for our neighbors. Of course, in the city, you don’t just go knock on someone’s door and ask if you can come inside,” she laughs.
“We tend to abstain even from social drinking. The Bible says take a little wine . . .” She smiles, explaining that while drinking isn’t a sin, it’s wiser not to get started. “We’ve had enough experience with people who were drunkards or alcoholics that’ve tried to come back.” She shifts on the sofa, her skin pale as a page. With her white veil and her dark dress, from the side she evokes the sober image of Whistler’s mother and this is how I think of her, though we are the same age.
“As a rule, we tend to stay away from public facilities and do things at home, but we frequent the botanical gardens and the zoo, parks, the beach on the off-days,” she says, by which she means the cooler summer days on which it is easier to avoid “the undressed.” She nods at one of the older boys coming into the room as she grabs the toddler’s coat. Zipping him up, she tells him, “You can go down with the other boys and play chalk.” His older brother gently picks him up and carries him outside.
When I ask whether the church has a position on parenting or discipline, I get one of Becky’s laughs. “There isn’t, like, a paper that you get that says this is how to raise your children—unfortunately. The biggest thing, probably, is the Bible. Just to make sure they see God in their lives.
“Another thing that’s probably pretty core if they’re going to be able to be successful is self-discipline. The Christian life isn’t just a bed of roses. No life is. Adult life just isn’t,” she says, and laughs mirthlessly.
45
Halfway Home
Lynn
In 2015, Lynn includes in her fifth parole application a thirty-year-old letter from her neighbor saying that she saw Ray backhand the boy down the stairs. Also copies of the Family Court’s protection order against him, his arrest record and a letter of support from the prison superintendent. Assessments show she poses the lowest possible risk for felony violence, rearrest and absconding. Her prison work record and relative lack of “tickets” for rule violations mean that she has been an exemplary prisoner, and there is a job waiting for her as a paralegal for a Manhattan lawyer on her release. Still, she is denied parole as she was in 2007, 2009, 2011 and 2013. The parole board gives her another “hit,” concluding that she “would not live and remain at liberty without again violating the law,” and that her release “would so deprecate the serious nature of her crime as to undermine respect for the law.”
Lynn writes to Columbia Law School’s Mass Incarceration Clinic for help, and law students file a petition on her behalf challenging the outcome in the New York Supreme Court. Finding that the decision to deny Lynn’s parole was “arbitrary and capricious,” the judge orders a new hearing. The sixth time she appears before the parole board it comprises Edward Sharkey, a former district attorney, and Sally Velasquez-Thompson, a former police detective.
“I wanted everything to stop,” she tells them, “what was going on in my household and around me. And I wanted my problems to end. And it was just about the most horrible choice I could have made. I was so deluded by the fact that if I did this, I would end my own problems. I would end the abuse. I would end my situation. I would end the threat of my son being kidnapped or murdered . . .
“All I want is to show other women that this would be the biggest mistake of their life to take matters into their own hands. I want to show other women to leave safely. I want to show other women this is what happens when you don’t. I want to help other people not make the horrific mistake I did.”
“It is not a mistake,” Sharkey says, the past swinging into the present like an axe. “It’s a crime. And you took someone’s life and that’s not your place to do.”
“It’s not a mistake,” Lynn replies. “I misspoke.”
They approve her release. When she walks out of prison with her purple cane on April 28, 2017, she walks out smiling, her white hair reflecting the sun.
Later, a local newspaper interviews Ray’s sister who says, “I hate her with all my being and hope she dies a horrible death. She murdered a good man. A compassionate, caring man.”
Her mother is dead, her father is dead, AJ is dead. Her sister wants nothing to do with her, her son remains unresponsive to her letters. She is free in the most absolute and terrifying sense: no home to return to. She has, however, made arrangements to stay at the apartment of an acquaintance in the city. Arrives to find stolen goods, white powder on the table. The woman asks her to lie to a doctor for prescription pills which she would then hand over for the woman to sell. Lynn refuses and things become tense. The woman’s husband yells at her, triggering flashbacks of Ray. In her small room, she moves the chest of drawers across the door before she gets into bed, wakes at the slightest noise, worried about her safety and the terms of her parole. She has little money. She hasn’t eaten for a day when she leaves. Heads to a homeless shelter, everything she owns in her hands as she walks down sidewalks where everybody is curved like her cane. Looking down, compulsively poking bright squares or speaking, it seems, only to themselves.
46
Theories of Flight
Jaimie & Aspasia
“The myth of the individual is frightening because really we are tribal. We are nothing without each other,” Jaimie Leonarder says, smoking splendidly in his recliner with his long legs crossed before him. Jaimie is the vice president of the Sydney-based group UFO Research (UFOR). He is also its media contact. When I first tried to contact him, I learned that he does not own a mobile phone. His landline’s voicemail message was: Hello. The person you’ve reached is not at home and you cannot leave a message so please call later.
Jaimie and his wife, Aspasia, were involved in setting up the first support group in Australia for people who believed they had been abducted by aliens. After we connected, I learned that the Leonarders are warm and welcoming in person. Also, that I enjoy speaking with them. Which is good because, contrary to my initial assumption, one cannot just talk about UFOs with the Leonarders. Not possible. To inquire about any one thing in that category is to be led inexorably into the lush global ecosystem of information in which they situate the subject. It is to be guided, with great and traipsing gusto, across undulating contiguous terrain that features Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Sean Penn in The Falcon and the Snowman, yowies and the parallel hominid, Marshall McLuhan and media theory, NASA’s shameful absorption of Nazi scientists, quantum coupling, their questions regarding the provenance of both cheetah DNA and the blood type of certain Jewish people, alien-human hybridization programs, the documentary oeuvre of Mel Tormé’s son Tracy Tormé, and corporations and the myth of the individual, which is where we are at present.
This particular thought process might be understood in Cubist terms: to quote McLuhan, an “instant sensory awareness of the whole”—the world as they view it. And you might dismiss that trajectory as fairly non sequitur, Dada, absurd.
That would be a mistake. Fellow travelers on this path include the “conspiracy-pop” musician, David Thrussell (invited to speak this year at a UFOR event), whose band—Snog—has posted content on its Facebook page that is antisemitic and anti-vaccination, and which proposes that the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, in which Adam Lanza killed twenty first-graders and six adults, was a hoax. The UFOR website described Thrussell as follows: “Beloved by iconic figures like Julian Assange and Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin,1 David Thrussell is provocative and controversial and has lots to say.” Jaimie and Aspasia signed off on the post thus: “For our sake, if for no other reason, please humor him.”
Jaimie imprints as some cosmic combination of John Waters, Nick Cave and a slimline iteration of Gomez Addams. Perhaps you recognize him from when he co-hosted The Movie Show on SBS. In an earlier life, he was a psychiatric nurse, a diversional therapist and a youth worker based on the streets of Sydney. He is eloquent and delivers sentences that captivate me, such as: “She is one of the better latter-day UFO researchers” or “I worked the streets—someone with a necrotic toe, I could smell blocks away” or “I will go to my grave with an embarrassment of questions” or “One of the most astounding qualities of the human mind is its capacity to pay attention.” He met Aspasia at work: she, too, was a psychiatric nurse. As Miss Death, she co-hosted their Sydney radio show, “The Naked City,” until 2010. Now Jaimie and Aspasia, in their early sixties and late fifties respectively, are proud grandparents who DJ at a local pub and show rare films in their home where I am currently sitting, stroking their hairless cat, Lilith, who feels under hand like an enormous dried apricot.
In addition to this cat, their warehouse apartment—which is mostly warehouse and only a bit apartment, rather than some more sleekly integrated version of the two—houses a vast collection of films, books, magazines, music, carnivalesque-psychobilly ephemera and an original painting by the serial killer John Wayne Gacy once given to them by a skint ex-flatmate in lieu of rent.
“I always say, ‘Just because you’ve been abducted doesn’t mean you’re enlightened,’” Aspasia had said earlier, without removing her eyes from her knitting. However, while personalities differ, there is a thread of consistency between abduction accounts, the Leonarders would have me know.
“This is the way it usually goes,” she explained. “One night, something will happen and they’ll wake up and remember bits and pieces. So then they want to find out what happened to them. They’ll go and have some hypnosis therapy and find out that it’s been going on all their life from a young child . . . And, this is what they say, that there’s some sort of a cloaking, masking, forgetting of what’s happened so people aren’t traumatized.”
“Most people who have a really close sighting—a sighting of the second and third kind—are probably susceptible somewhere in there to have had an abduction experience, whether they remember it consciously or not,” Jaimie said.
He continued: “Here’s the problem with easily dismissing that. If you have what is purportedly a physical and transcendental experience, where all of a sudden your body—is it your spirit body? Your physical body?—is actually now going through the glass window of your bedroom and up into the sky, how do we, in our perception management, integrate that into our lives? The horror and the fear of it. You’re going to see signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. And so, instantly, you’re going to be diagnosed as mentally ill.
