The monkey didn't offer me any immediate solutions to my imprisonment, but did offer me a banana.

Starving, I actually ate it. "Thank you...Did you get anything to eat?"

The chimp whimpered a little, rubbing his belly. The message seemed to be `It's okay, I'll be fine,' even though he did seem a bit thin.

"What's your name?"

He responded with sign language.

I don't know anything about ASL, but I had this...feeling that the hand gestures meant "Henry"...and when I looked into his eyes, I also had a hunch that it had its own name, something that didn't translate directly into English. It more or less meant `Strength.'

The chimp had a cut on his foot. It seemed he'd been given rough treatment by his captors.

Feeling sorry, I touched his wound and found myself saying "Ouch," without thinking about why.

I felt, I don't know, some kind of warm energy flowing from my hand to the monkey's injury, and then my finger glowed.

When I noticed this, and saw the wound healing up, I yelped and hid my hand up my sleeve. "Oh shit oh shit!"

I'd seen enough movies to guess that if people saw me glowing, or making objects levitate with my mind, they'd never let me leave.

Fearful of spending eternity in a boring padded cell, I tucked my finger into my armpit, waited for that part of my prison uniform to stop shining like a Glo-Worm.

The light slowly but surely died out. Well, as far as I could tell.

I backed away from the cage, staring at the chimp, and my hand.

I briefly entertained a strange thought that maybe ET considered himself the kid in the padded room, and I the monkey in the cage.

I sat down, listening to the primate making soft "Ook" noises as it stared back at me.

There was something weird and gentle about Henry's eyes. When the light reflected off his pupils in just the right way, I caught a flash of something like a memory...but not, like it were happening right then:

The interior of a spaceship, one that looked like a forest. A group of five creatures, members of ET's species, huddled around a big tree in its center, silently working together on mysterious projects.

Squat frog-like bodies, large heads, with the faces of turtles, light brown-olive skin. To the untrained eye, the aliens all looked the same, but you could say the same about human beings.

If you looked closely at these ET's, they had distinguishing features, birthmarks, scars, one even had a little facial hair. I knew which one was my ET.

The navigator set his hands on a set of glowing crystalline mushrooms. Somehow the things allowed him to see the ship's position in space without a window, perhaps some mental interface. Other aliens busily...gardened. They had samples of plants from all over earth, some really beautiful stuff from Hawaii and Japan. One of them put Gertie's pot of geraniums into better soil, packing dirt around its roots. In addition to all that, they tended a bunch of vegetation that I didn't recognize from any encyclopedia, stuff from other planets with names that I didn't recognize, but popped into my brain when I looked at them.

The ship, consisting largely of organic plant matter, provided them everything they needed: Air, food, juice, even a source of electrical power.

They kept zoological specimens in a lower level. I got the sense they'd built a kind of Noah's ark.

Near the sleeping quarters on the lower floor, my ET lay in a reclining bed that looked like a pumpkin somehow grown in the shape of a chaise lounge. The glowing roots of the big console tree upstairs came down in this place, wreathing ET's body, connecting with a pair of crystal mushrooms at the head of his bed.

Another alien observed...something in his brain. They seemed to be...debriefing him, a crystal orb near the bed displaying scenes from earth, straight from his mind.

The first thing I saw: Clips of urban poor in places like Syria, Lebanon and West Germany throwing rocks at tough looking guys with riot shields, you know, the kind of stuff Peter Jennings shows all the time on World News Tonight. Strangely, the soundtrack appeared to be John Mellencamp's Hurts So Good.

The crystal showed an atom bomb exploding, archival footage of Nazis goose stepping through Berlin, and the inside of my closet.

ET spent a lot of time in that closet, so much that I thought his crystal was broken, but then I saw him toying with my radio, listening to Come on Eileen and Journey's Wheel in the Sky.

He hid...a lot. Like a dream, it flashed to the reasons why, all those men in biohazard suits.

So that's what ET's doing, I thought. Giving reports.

Then I saw myself in the orb, not a memory, but me at that very moment, in the padded cell.

ET reached out to me...in the exact direction I watched him from. "Elliott!"

I saw a blinding flash, and the vision disappeared. I found myself curled up in a ball on the floor.

I could only hope I hadn't been glowing the whole time.

An hour later, the men came and took Henry away.

The monkey screeched, clawing the sides of the cage as it bumped the threshold of my cell. Before disappearing, it slyly flashed me a thumbs up, then pretended to be sucking its thumb like a monchichi.

When the door clicked shut, it didn't close all the way.

Henry had stuck something into the locking mechanism.