Patterns in the mud. Swoops and vectors. Sine and cosine waves. Like calculated lines on a graph, there had to be some sense to it. There was something about them that refused to be disregarded. Refused not to be recognized. More familiar to my gut than my brain, but as resonant to my eyes as a chime to my ears. Somewhere perfectly balanced between order and chaos, between math and art. There was intelligence in the trails.
I stood there at the edge of my empty backyard swimming pool mesmerized by the patterns. Each line had a twin running parallel to it, keeping the exact course and berth from its partner, like narrow tire tracks but smooth and without tread marks. The mud puddle around the drain had been there for weeks, ever since I emptied the pool last fall. Residue from the acidic rain and air particulates of a Southern California winter. The lines and trails were all drawn in mud pulled up from the bottom of the pool, almost like finger paints. But these fingers weren't those of humans.
1979. The 13th of May. Another hot summer ahead. Maybe the droughts would wane and the rains would fill the reservoirs. Maybe this year I could fill the pool. But right now, that was the furthest thing from my mind. Never was much of a swimmer anyway.
My eyes rose from the markings to the pale blue morning sky, maybe so my mind could take a break from deciphering the intelligence within the disorder. When the sunlight got too much for my retinas I looked down. The fluffy little belt around my bathrobe had come undone. My day old underwear were shamefully thin and yellowed like a cigarette filter. It didn't matter. The privacy hedges kept out any lookie-loos.
These markings in the pool had been left here for a purpose. They were in my pool for a reason. No one else needed to see the markings yet, because no one else would recognize them. Not until I had a chance to solve their riddle.
I was still as sharp as a tack, but they were too much to digest in one sitting. Even for me. I rubbed my eyes to work out the darkness of the night and welcome the early morning sun. It was warm again. Finally. The cold winter had past. I needed some coffee. Something to awaken the circuits of my brain. Maybe then I'd have cognitive fortitude to find the answers laid before me.
I came into retirement almost against my will. They let me retire, sure, but not without a push out the door. Pricks wouldn't allow me to retire with any dignity. They ran me out on a rail. Had to make room for the young blood, I suppose. Times are a changin' they say. No room for old men anymore. No tolerance for a drink at lunch. Two drinks. Three drinks. I needed a drink today. Had to get my brain straight.
A little hair of the dog that bit me. Old Fashion was just the thing I needed. A little sugar and bitters with a twist of lime instead of orange. That felt good going down.
There was talk of extraterrestrials across the pond. Something the Brits picked up over the TV. Vrillion. Ashtar. Saucer nests in the fields. Things not of this Earth. The patterns in my pool looked just as confusing but clearer than they did in the early morning. This was like learning a new language, one deeper and wider in range than my native tongue. I was handicapped by this insufficient human syntax. I had to elevate above it. Had to see how all the pieces could fit together more than I ever had before. Another drink. Get my mind right. It would come to me. I was sure of it.
By noon I was feeling the warmth of the booze and the sun. How long had it been since I'd decided to upgrade from my bathrobe and underwear? I looked down and noticed I managed to slip into a pair of old jeans but didn’t bother with a shirt or even zipping my fly. My stained undies were still there for any neighbors peeking through the hedges to see. The trails of mud turned incomprehensible symbols in my pool were beginning to dry and flake away. My set-up for Old Fashions had been forgotten. I had switched to whiskey on the rocks hours ago. Where had the time gone?
The ice was melting in my glass. The highball was wet with condensation. The lime had dried out. I chucked it over the privacy hedge into the dirt alley beyond it. As it tumble through the air, I watched its course. Something about its trajectory caught my attention. The physics of it. Flight. Gravity. Lift and angle of attack. It was all there in its path, as plain as it had been drawn out for me in the pool. That was what this was all about: Flight.
I pulled my lawn chair closer to the edge and looked down deep inside. Oscillations. Amplitudes. Trajectories. Vectors. Flight paths. A map perhaps. The motion of stars and planets and celestial bodies. All the answers were here scribed in the drying mud. All I had to do was learn the lexicon.
A vocabulary of the cosmos. A syntax of physics. A perfect form of communication from a perfect race.
I must have nodded off a bit. The sun was falling ever closer to the horizon.
I heard a noise.
"Hey!" I yelled.
Some boy, some punk teenager had snuck halfway through my privacy hedge. I could tell there were more of them behind this first kid. His stupid haircut, or lack thereof. Blonde. His little gang was following him. He stared back at me like a fish in a bowl. He had a foot in my yard. A dirty hightop shoe but no sock. No shirt. Skin already colored ozone pink.
"Get the hell out of here!" I swore at him.
I heard him yelling to his friends behind him, "Go! Go! Move it!" And then he was gone.
Interlopers. Interferers. Interruptions in my studies. I couldn’t afford this. Time was critical. The speakers of this language might come again this very night. But I would need to give them a clean sheet of paper of which they could scrawl their words. A freshly stretched canvas.
My whiskey on the rocks had turned into a warm whiskey and water in my hand. I dumped it down my gullet and chucked the highball over the hedge just to watch it soar. Somewhere beyond the boundaries of my world I heard it shatter against rock and gravel and dust, or maybe just against my neighbor's stucco. I had more highballs. More importantly, I still had about half left in the bottle. That would carry me through.
But that would have to wait. I had work to do. I walked from the pool's edge to the spigot. I'll admit it. I staggered. The hose was already screwed onto the spigot. I cranked open the valve and wrestled with the hose, finally finding the nozzle and dragging it pool-side. A fresh sheet of paper. A nice clean canvas.
It was a terrible risk. They might never come back. I might lose the message forever. But it must be done. I had to have faith that they'd come again. That the message they'd left for me was important enough for them to bring it to me again and again until my simplistic confounded brain saw through.
The nozzle sprayed water from the spigot. It was inches from my pool and the markings. My heart raced with irregular beats under my bare chest.
Wait.
I cranked the nozzle shut, stopping the water before it washed away the patterns.
My camera. Dear god, I hope it had film. I dropped the hose and ran inside. As soon as I was out of the sun, I could feel my skin was hot and tender to the touch, even through the alcohol. I ignored it. My camera, an old 35mm, was buried in some drawer. In my kitchen? I rifled through one drawer and then another. No. My nightstand. The bottom drawer I never used. Another run through the house. I pulled on the drawer and the whole damn thing came out. Scraps of paper, bobbles and knick knacks spilled everywhere. My hands swam through the debris. A tin of pipe tobacco. Old car keys. A transistor radio. My .38 revolver. My camera. I held both. Camera in my right hand. Gun in my left. I checked the cylinder of the .38, found it full but one chamber and tucked it into the loose waistband of my falling jeans. I took the camera and forwarded the film to make sure I didn't double-expose on some old shot on my past life. A photo of my ex-wife or my estranged son. Didn't matter what was on the rest of the roll. This was a new life. A new opportunity. A new exposure.
Back to the pool. The sun was almost down. I set the gun next to the whiskey bottle and Old Fashion set up. I took the camera and snapped a half a dozen pictures of the markings. Snap. Wind. Snap. Wind. Trying to sum up the whole through the narrow view finder. Snap. Wind. Then I grabbed the lawn chair and pulled it back under the eve of the house. I'd wait for them in the shadows. I saved a dozen exposures for when they came back. I'd catch them in the act. But first...
Back to the hose. It pained me, but I cracked open the nozzle. I clinched my eyes and turned the stream of water on the markings. All those curves and swirls and waves of sine and cosine melted like an artist's masterpiece dumped with turpentine. The sides of my pool rinsed clean. The mud reset down into the puddle by the clogged drain. A fresh monochromatic palette of earth awaiting its artist. Still strings waiting for their virtuoso.
Back to the lawn chair. Back to the bottle. Back to the gun and the shadows of the setting sun. The camera was there, ready. The whiskey comforted me, brought me back to its warmth after waking from my afternoon doze. I took another strong pull straight from the bottle. There. It burned good. Cleared my mind. I had to be tuned just right when they came.
The sun dropped below the horizon. A quick shadow claimed the landscape. I watched the light retreat and helped the bottle drain. The whiskey claimed my consciousness. As the lights of the valley came on, mine went out.
They came, but I wasn't cognitive enough to take it all in. Or maybe my human mind wasn't strong enough to comprehend it. I couldn't come full awake so these visions came in front of my eyes, blurred and distorted.
At first there was just noise. A steady drone from a half dozen speakers all set about the room in different locations, each playing a harmony ever so slightly off key from the next. The drones would rise and fall in pitch like traffic coming and going. Then a single source would cut to silence for a suspended moment. My ears nervously waiting for the drone to reconnect. I was afraid the noise was gone for good, but it came back with a CRACK! and then more of that white noise.
It seemed like years past. I became aware of visual stimuli that matched the audio. Bodies were moving inside the pool. Almost human like, but inhuman in their smooth motion and speed. I knew immediately that these bodies were leaving fresh marks inside the pool. They swirled and twisted and bobbed momentarily and only partially into view. Strange creatures. My mind ached for more consciousness that I couldn't grasp.
I was missing it. I tried to force myself awake as if I was having a nightmare, but I wasn't running from some terror; I was being held back from something wonderful. This was my new start. My new chance. My new life full of meaning and purpose and importance. I had to come to and capture this. My camera was just inches away, but I couldn't affect my limbs to reach for it. God damn it! I was missing it.
The audio stimuli reached a crescendo. There was a clattering collision and a tumbling outro of this alien orchestra. Then laughter, too human like. Were they laughing at me? Had they given up on my inadequate brain? I couldn't let this happen.
My eyes fought for more of the vision, and what I saw was beautiful.
One of the beings came clear above the lip of the pool. It was silhouetted against the slightly darker backdrop of my privacy hedge. It was airborne. Suspended in flight. Held aloft by nothing but inertia and physics. It had droned before but now it held silent in this brilliant suspension. This beautiful thing, too quick to fully take in… It seemed paused there for that one brief second, detached from this pathetic terra for one precious moment. It crested, rotated and plunged back inside the pool. There was another audible CRACK! and then more voices. Laughter and cheers.
Finally, I came awake.
My arousal took form in a mumbled grumble turned yell. My arms flailed. I knocked over the whiskey bottle and the last few dregs dribbled onto the table. The 35mm fell to the patio floor, broke, and spilled out all those images of my past life and future hopes. My fingers found the grip of the .38 and I sat up.
The vision was gone. There was no motion, just my empty backyard. The droning white noise abandoned the night to the crickets and far away sounds of suburban, a drone of a whole different nature. But I couldn't see inside of the pool. Maybe, just maybe they'd left more messages.
I stood up and hacked up phlegm that sleep had left in my throat. My head spun. Then I heard a voice. A human voice.
"Oh shit!" Then a whispered, "Let's get out of here!"
Kids, stupid young kids in swim trunks and tennis shoes began pouring out of my pool. Long haired miscreants, laughing and swearing and fumbling with their things. They had ruined everything! They had interrupted my vision! They'd trespassed into my opportunity for something greater, something with potential, the one thing left in life that could give me the existential push I needed so badly.
I leveled the .38 over the pool as they scattered out of it. I’ll admit it. I was drunk. I didn't aim, but by god I fired. The first time I pulled the trigger the hammer fell on the empty chamber. I pulled the trigger again.
The shot immediately deafened my ears. Whatever exquisite nuanced drones and hums and cracks and tumbles I could make out before had now turned to a ringing squeal. I fired again.
That boy, the blonde boy with the pink skin, I saw him scramble up the side of the pool. I fired again. He dropped something. Somewhere, someone screamed. The boy scrambled his feet and through the hedge. They were gone.
The night turned quiet. True night now, not dusk. It was a black field with as many lights from various garages and windows and street lights as stars in the sky. The crickets had gone silent. If it weren't for the ringing in my ears, I may have heard the scuffs and scrapes of rubber soles on the alley's gravel, but all I could hear was the high pitched whine.
I let time have a moment of inaction. A moment for the pseudo-silence in my ringing ears.
I shuffled to the edge of my pool. The patterns in the mud were back, only a few of them smudged, smeared, or trampled by the interlopers. Imperfect due to their interference, but still perfect in their nature.
Waves. Troughs and crests. Vectors and trajectories. Weaves and swoops. Each running its flight path with its parallel twin. Strange such a precise message to be marred by the flaws of youth. And in the center, slowly rocking back and forth like a metronome needing a nudge, was a skateboard.
I photographed these new patterns with the 35mm, but the camera was inadequate in capturing the essence of the entirety. I hosed away the messages and stayed up through the rest of the night, waiting. Nothing came. I slept through the next day and kept watch through the next night. And the next night. And the next. The messages never came back.
I stood there at the edge of my empty backyard swimming pool mesmerized by the patterns. Each line had a twin running parallel to it, keeping the exact course and berth from its partner, like narrow tire tracks but smooth and without tread marks. The mud puddle around the drain had been there for weeks, ever since I emptied the pool last fall. Residue from the acidic rain and air particulates of a Southern California winter. The lines and trails were all drawn in mud pulled up from the bottom of the pool, almost like finger paints. But these fingers weren't those of humans.
1979. The 13th of May. Another hot summer ahead. Maybe the droughts would wane and the rains would fill the reservoirs. Maybe this year I could fill the pool. But right now, that was the furthest thing from my mind. Never was much of a swimmer anyway.
My eyes rose from the markings to the pale blue morning sky, maybe so my mind could take a break from deciphering the intelligence within the disorder. When the sunlight got too much for my retinas I looked down. The fluffy little belt around my bathrobe had come undone. My day old underwear were shamefully thin and yellowed like a cigarette filter. It didn't matter. The privacy hedges kept out any lookie-loos.
These markings in the pool had been left here for a purpose. They were in my pool for a reason. No one else needed to see the markings yet, because no one else would recognize them. Not until I had a chance to solve their riddle.
I was still as sharp as a tack, but they were too much to digest in one sitting. Even for me. I rubbed my eyes to work out the darkness of the night and welcome the early morning sun. It was warm again. Finally. The cold winter had past. I needed some coffee. Something to awaken the circuits of my brain. Maybe then I'd have cognitive fortitude to find the answers laid before me.
I came into retirement almost against my will. They let me retire, sure, but not without a push out the door. Pricks wouldn't allow me to retire with any dignity. They ran me out on a rail. Had to make room for the young blood, I suppose. Times are a changin' they say. No room for old men anymore. No tolerance for a drink at lunch. Two drinks. Three drinks. I needed a drink today. Had to get my brain straight.
A little hair of the dog that bit me. Old Fashion was just the thing I needed. A little sugar and bitters with a twist of lime instead of orange. That felt good going down.
There was talk of extraterrestrials across the pond. Something the Brits picked up over the TV. Vrillion. Ashtar. Saucer nests in the fields. Things not of this Earth. The patterns in my pool looked just as confusing but clearer than they did in the early morning. This was like learning a new language, one deeper and wider in range than my native tongue. I was handicapped by this insufficient human syntax. I had to elevate above it. Had to see how all the pieces could fit together more than I ever had before. Another drink. Get my mind right. It would come to me. I was sure of it.
By noon I was feeling the warmth of the booze and the sun. How long had it been since I'd decided to upgrade from my bathrobe and underwear? I looked down and noticed I managed to slip into a pair of old jeans but didn’t bother with a shirt or even zipping my fly. My stained undies were still there for any neighbors peeking through the hedges to see. The trails of mud turned incomprehensible symbols in my pool were beginning to dry and flake away. My set-up for Old Fashions had been forgotten. I had switched to whiskey on the rocks hours ago. Where had the time gone?
The ice was melting in my glass. The highball was wet with condensation. The lime had dried out. I chucked it over the privacy hedge into the dirt alley beyond it. As it tumble through the air, I watched its course. Something about its trajectory caught my attention. The physics of it. Flight. Gravity. Lift and angle of attack. It was all there in its path, as plain as it had been drawn out for me in the pool. That was what this was all about: Flight.
I pulled my lawn chair closer to the edge and looked down deep inside. Oscillations. Amplitudes. Trajectories. Vectors. Flight paths. A map perhaps. The motion of stars and planets and celestial bodies. All the answers were here scribed in the drying mud. All I had to do was learn the lexicon.
A vocabulary of the cosmos. A syntax of physics. A perfect form of communication from a perfect race.
I must have nodded off a bit. The sun was falling ever closer to the horizon.
I heard a noise.
"Hey!" I yelled.
Some boy, some punk teenager had snuck halfway through my privacy hedge. I could tell there were more of them behind this first kid. His stupid haircut, or lack thereof. Blonde. His little gang was following him. He stared back at me like a fish in a bowl. He had a foot in my yard. A dirty hightop shoe but no sock. No shirt. Skin already colored ozone pink.
"Get the hell out of here!" I swore at him.
I heard him yelling to his friends behind him, "Go! Go! Move it!" And then he was gone.
Interlopers. Interferers. Interruptions in my studies. I couldn’t afford this. Time was critical. The speakers of this language might come again this very night. But I would need to give them a clean sheet of paper of which they could scrawl their words. A freshly stretched canvas.
My whiskey on the rocks had turned into a warm whiskey and water in my hand. I dumped it down my gullet and chucked the highball over the hedge just to watch it soar. Somewhere beyond the boundaries of my world I heard it shatter against rock and gravel and dust, or maybe just against my neighbor's stucco. I had more highballs. More importantly, I still had about half left in the bottle. That would carry me through.
But that would have to wait. I had work to do. I walked from the pool's edge to the spigot. I'll admit it. I staggered. The hose was already screwed onto the spigot. I cranked open the valve and wrestled with the hose, finally finding the nozzle and dragging it pool-side. A fresh sheet of paper. A nice clean canvas.
It was a terrible risk. They might never come back. I might lose the message forever. But it must be done. I had to have faith that they'd come again. That the message they'd left for me was important enough for them to bring it to me again and again until my simplistic confounded brain saw through.
The nozzle sprayed water from the spigot. It was inches from my pool and the markings. My heart raced with irregular beats under my bare chest.
Wait.
I cranked the nozzle shut, stopping the water before it washed away the patterns.
My camera. Dear god, I hope it had film. I dropped the hose and ran inside. As soon as I was out of the sun, I could feel my skin was hot and tender to the touch, even through the alcohol. I ignored it. My camera, an old 35mm, was buried in some drawer. In my kitchen? I rifled through one drawer and then another. No. My nightstand. The bottom drawer I never used. Another run through the house. I pulled on the drawer and the whole damn thing came out. Scraps of paper, bobbles and knick knacks spilled everywhere. My hands swam through the debris. A tin of pipe tobacco. Old car keys. A transistor radio. My .38 revolver. My camera. I held both. Camera in my right hand. Gun in my left. I checked the cylinder of the .38, found it full but one chamber and tucked it into the loose waistband of my falling jeans. I took the camera and forwarded the film to make sure I didn't double-expose on some old shot on my past life. A photo of my ex-wife or my estranged son. Didn't matter what was on the rest of the roll. This was a new life. A new opportunity. A new exposure.
Back to the pool. The sun was almost down. I set the gun next to the whiskey bottle and Old Fashion set up. I took the camera and snapped a half a dozen pictures of the markings. Snap. Wind. Snap. Wind. Trying to sum up the whole through the narrow view finder. Snap. Wind. Then I grabbed the lawn chair and pulled it back under the eve of the house. I'd wait for them in the shadows. I saved a dozen exposures for when they came back. I'd catch them in the act. But first...
Back to the hose. It pained me, but I cracked open the nozzle. I clinched my eyes and turned the stream of water on the markings. All those curves and swirls and waves of sine and cosine melted like an artist's masterpiece dumped with turpentine. The sides of my pool rinsed clean. The mud reset down into the puddle by the clogged drain. A fresh monochromatic palette of earth awaiting its artist. Still strings waiting for their virtuoso.
Back to the lawn chair. Back to the bottle. Back to the gun and the shadows of the setting sun. The camera was there, ready. The whiskey comforted me, brought me back to its warmth after waking from my afternoon doze. I took another strong pull straight from the bottle. There. It burned good. Cleared my mind. I had to be tuned just right when they came.
The sun dropped below the horizon. A quick shadow claimed the landscape. I watched the light retreat and helped the bottle drain. The whiskey claimed my consciousness. As the lights of the valley came on, mine went out.
They came, but I wasn't cognitive enough to take it all in. Or maybe my human mind wasn't strong enough to comprehend it. I couldn't come full awake so these visions came in front of my eyes, blurred and distorted.
At first there was just noise. A steady drone from a half dozen speakers all set about the room in different locations, each playing a harmony ever so slightly off key from the next. The drones would rise and fall in pitch like traffic coming and going. Then a single source would cut to silence for a suspended moment. My ears nervously waiting for the drone to reconnect. I was afraid the noise was gone for good, but it came back with a CRACK! and then more of that white noise.
It seemed like years past. I became aware of visual stimuli that matched the audio. Bodies were moving inside the pool. Almost human like, but inhuman in their smooth motion and speed. I knew immediately that these bodies were leaving fresh marks inside the pool. They swirled and twisted and bobbed momentarily and only partially into view. Strange creatures. My mind ached for more consciousness that I couldn't grasp.
I was missing it. I tried to force myself awake as if I was having a nightmare, but I wasn't running from some terror; I was being held back from something wonderful. This was my new start. My new chance. My new life full of meaning and purpose and importance. I had to come to and capture this. My camera was just inches away, but I couldn't affect my limbs to reach for it. God damn it! I was missing it.
The audio stimuli reached a crescendo. There was a clattering collision and a tumbling outro of this alien orchestra. Then laughter, too human like. Were they laughing at me? Had they given up on my inadequate brain? I couldn't let this happen.
My eyes fought for more of the vision, and what I saw was beautiful.
One of the beings came clear above the lip of the pool. It was silhouetted against the slightly darker backdrop of my privacy hedge. It was airborne. Suspended in flight. Held aloft by nothing but inertia and physics. It had droned before but now it held silent in this brilliant suspension. This beautiful thing, too quick to fully take in… It seemed paused there for that one brief second, detached from this pathetic terra for one precious moment. It crested, rotated and plunged back inside the pool. There was another audible CRACK! and then more voices. Laughter and cheers.
Finally, I came awake.
My arousal took form in a mumbled grumble turned yell. My arms flailed. I knocked over the whiskey bottle and the last few dregs dribbled onto the table. The 35mm fell to the patio floor, broke, and spilled out all those images of my past life and future hopes. My fingers found the grip of the .38 and I sat up.
The vision was gone. There was no motion, just my empty backyard. The droning white noise abandoned the night to the crickets and far away sounds of suburban, a drone of a whole different nature. But I couldn't see inside of the pool. Maybe, just maybe they'd left more messages.
I stood up and hacked up phlegm that sleep had left in my throat. My head spun. Then I heard a voice. A human voice.
"Oh shit!" Then a whispered, "Let's get out of here!"
Kids, stupid young kids in swim trunks and tennis shoes began pouring out of my pool. Long haired miscreants, laughing and swearing and fumbling with their things. They had ruined everything! They had interrupted my vision! They'd trespassed into my opportunity for something greater, something with potential, the one thing left in life that could give me the existential push I needed so badly.
I leveled the .38 over the pool as they scattered out of it. I’ll admit it. I was drunk. I didn't aim, but by god I fired. The first time I pulled the trigger the hammer fell on the empty chamber. I pulled the trigger again.
The shot immediately deafened my ears. Whatever exquisite nuanced drones and hums and cracks and tumbles I could make out before had now turned to a ringing squeal. I fired again.
That boy, the blonde boy with the pink skin, I saw him scramble up the side of the pool. I fired again. He dropped something. Somewhere, someone screamed. The boy scrambled his feet and through the hedge. They were gone.
The night turned quiet. True night now, not dusk. It was a black field with as many lights from various garages and windows and street lights as stars in the sky. The crickets had gone silent. If it weren't for the ringing in my ears, I may have heard the scuffs and scrapes of rubber soles on the alley's gravel, but all I could hear was the high pitched whine.
I let time have a moment of inaction. A moment for the pseudo-silence in my ringing ears.
I shuffled to the edge of my pool. The patterns in the mud were back, only a few of them smudged, smeared, or trampled by the interlopers. Imperfect due to their interference, but still perfect in their nature.
Waves. Troughs and crests. Vectors and trajectories. Weaves and swoops. Each running its flight path with its parallel twin. Strange such a precise message to be marred by the flaws of youth. And in the center, slowly rocking back and forth like a metronome needing a nudge, was a skateboard.
I photographed these new patterns with the 35mm, but the camera was inadequate in capturing the essence of the entirety. I hosed away the messages and stayed up through the rest of the night, waiting. Nothing came. I slept through the next day and kept watch through the next night. And the next night. And the next. The messages never came back.