Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Transfixion
Roy holds a branch, picking at some of its leaves. The TV is still on, but he seems impervious to the sounds of the news report explaining away the strange events which he witnessed in the desert as some kind of freak electrical storm.
He turns around and walks toward the massive mountain of earth, plants, bricks, garden furniture, chicken wire and papier-mâché. The object takes up the entire living room, leaving less than half a foot between the ceiling and its summit. It looks as like a huge version of the clay lump from the model train set, but slightly different, more detailed and defined with little bits of branches stuck around its base forming forests, and huge sheer walls of mud sculpted into a rock like texture leading to a flat top.
He scrambles between the wall and the side of the mountain, and finds the perfect spot to plant the tiny tree.
As he reaches down to push the stick through the muddy surface of the lump it becomes difficult to discern his body from the texture of his creation. His face, hair, and bathrobe caked in a mixture of everything at his disposal; black creosote handprints cover his thighs and his bare feet encrusted with dried bits of concrete and plaster and dirt up to his knees.
He shuffles over to the window to wipe his hands on the drapes. It's a typical balmy Indiana August afternoon. Kids play Frisbee, a man in Bermuda shorts and Ray bans washes his Buick. Roy chatters to himself, "How can you continue to, to, wash your fucking car? Walk your dog in the face of this, this...this?.."
It slowly dawns on him that he might be alone in his realization, that maybe that was why Ronnie was crying, that maybe he is loosing his mind.
He draws the curtain slowly, slumps against the wall and begins to weep.
The Telephone rings. It's his sister in law. Roy demands to speak to Ronnie. "Don't hang up…I'll see that guy tomorrow…right now, if you want…yes, yes, I'll talk to him don't you think its worth it? Please, Ronnie, don't hang up…Ronnie!"…CLICK!
With an enraged and exhausted wail he hurls the receiver and phone through the TV screen, replacing the images of Voyager 2 launch with smashed glass and sparks.
He swings around to the mountain, screams "WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME? WHAT, WHY HAVE YOU...WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO ME!" He lunges at it, tearing out lumps of dirt, beating his fists against the broken lawn furniture that makes up its base.
He falls to his knees in defeat and convulses in sobs.
He looks at the peak through his bleary eyes, and the truncated cone begins to draw him in again. The TV hisses and sparks, the dial tone of the phone inside it emulates the sound of a flat line from a heart monitor. He begins to look drugged; every limb seems to hang inertly from his fixed and immovable stare. He drools a little, closes his mouth, lets out half a chuckle.
He begins to feel his sense of self-dissolve. The corners which discern his body from his environment become hazy as a kind of halo of empathy expands from the mound and drapes itself over him, the box files, the broken model trains. It slowly, somehow, seems to cradle and sooth his lingering worries about his sanity, about Ronnie and the kids, about the amount of time its going to take to clean up this mess.
As he gazes through its muddy surface the sensation of its presence begins to morph. It feels as if it is confronting him, in a way similar but bigger than the body of another person.
He has the idea that it's pulsing, alive but closer to something synthetic. The sound is too regular and sharp to be organic. But then again, it's not quite a sound. A sound muffled by smell perhaps, or made more acute by its taste. Maybe it's closer to a texture he thinks, or a temperature. He can't quite grasp it. It keeps approaching his sensual faculties but recedes just as quickly. It crosses the wires of these senses before slipping under them, tentacle like, and expanding throughout his body.
The more he lets his mind sink into the mound, the more intelligible the strange feeling becomes. It's as if it is building a new organ in Roy's body capable of harboring an empathetic relation with whatever its purpose might be.
This indescribable feeling fills Roy and begins to crystallize. It feels deeply familiar, the consolidation of affect into matter. It reminds him of the intense combination of primordial desire and relief when he began to build the mountain first.
Its breath begins to articulate into a whisper, moves through his muscles, telling his arms and legs that they aren't any different from the mountain, telling his mind that it is made from the same chemical elements as its own surface of dirt and garden chairs and household paints.
He can only agree, and slowly slips into catatonic obedience. His limbs are the mountain now, and the mountain is his body.
Its arms and legs spasm as they struggle to meet its will. Like a newborn foal, it topples over onto itself, and gets up shakily, and topples over again. Its eyes open and shut, struggling to understand what it is to see shapes and forms in space. It groans with indiscernible words, sounds, wrestling with the unwieldy combination of tongue and mouth and vocal cords.
It doesn't like these new sensations; they are confusing and terribly abrasive. It feels too intense, to active, not inert anymore.
Awkwardly, it manages to pick up the shovel. It flops its weight through the handle and plunges its tip clumsily into the softest part of its surface, slowly carving out a hole in its base. It lets out a low and drawn out howl, the same note as the sound of the dialtone of the phone. It crawls inside, and claws deeper under the dirt and newspaper and paint cans, yanking at its skeleton of wood and chicken wire, which impede a way deeper into its belle. It collapses, forcing it to crunch into fetal communion with itself.