“Are you looking?” Gene asked.
“I’m looking,” Nora said. Since Gene’s car was so small and low to the ground, she made a show out of leaning forward and craning her neck to see out the windshield, but she couldn’t see much of anything because the dome light was on. Taylor, on the hump in the back seat, needed it to film.
“Do you mind if I have a beer?” she asked, taking the single she’d brought from her purse.
“That’s fine,” Gene said, though he didn’t seem pleased about it. She wondered if she was fucking things up, making it less serious.
It was the five-year anniversary of Gene’s UFO sighting in Holly Springs and he wanted to recreate everything exactly as it had happened, but with a camera to document it when the aliens showed up. Unfortunately, his Lincoln Town Car died a few years back and the two guys he’d been with before had other plans—one had a sick kid and the other had people coming over to watch the Saints game, a standing invitation that he somehow hadn’t accounted for.
Nora had wanted to get out of it as well, but he’d kept texting to give her updates: Taylor with his camera and the theremin playlist he’d put together, a possible stop for Mexican food if she liked Mexican food, on him. Nora liked Mexican food. She had never heard of a theremin. Her friends were all weirdos like her, artist types who didn’t have regular jobs, which was not to say they were any fun. They had migraines and depressive episodes, hangovers so severe they had to be hospitalized. Her closest friend was hardly allowed out of the house because she’d cheated on her husband one too many times in an open marriage gone awry.
“One time I showed up for a radio interview only to find out it was live TV,” she said, “and I hadn’t even showered that day and had to borrow a cardigan from the producer. It was awful. The sweater was mustard yellow. I looked like a bruise.” She added that she would never watch that interview, would never watch or listen to any interview she had ever done. Like Gene, Nora was a writer, not a very successful one, but she still got interviewed on radio and TV sometimes.
“The first rule of a documentary is you don’t mention the camera,” Gene said.
“I know, I’m sorry. I’ll stop. This camera is just really up in my face.” Surely Taylor could edit that part out. What kind of documentarian would he be if he couldn’t edit out the boring and inappropriate parts?
“What’s this music again?” she asked, glancing at Gene.
“The theremin. You play it without hands.”
“What do you mean, without hands?”
“It’s electronic and there are these two metal antennas—”
“And they don’t touch it?”
“No, they don’t touch it.”
“But somebody’s singing.”
“No,” he said, and Taylor chimed in to tell them about the guy who’d invented it, Leon Theremin, who had been kidnapped from his New York City apartment by the KGB in the late 1930s and taken to a labor camp in Siberia for thirty years. It was an interesting, if irrelevant, piece of information. Taylor went on and on about an eavesdropping system Leon had developed, how the FBI hired him to build a metal detector for Alcatraz, and Nora stopped listening.
When they arrived in Holly Springs, Gene drove one way and then the other on the frontage road, hunched over the wheel like a maniac.
“I’m pretty sure it was right around here,” he said. “Walmart’s there and we followed it to that parking lot . . .”
There were too many trees. Nora couldn’t see the Walmart, couldn’t even see the sign. She took a sip of her beer, which was nearly gone. She should have brought another. She’d thought there would’ve been a twelve-pack on the floorboard, assumed there would be a party atmosphere because it was all a joke, or something like a joke. Gene couldn’t really believe the aliens would return to meet with him five years later. His expectation was demoralizing and it made her question herself. She tried to think of something she believed in, but couldn’t come up with anything except for her dog, her love for her dog, though he would live only another five or six years. Best-case scenario she might have the dog as many as seven or eight years if the lumps on his stomach were indeed fatty deposits as the vet claimed, but he hadn’t been able to confirm it without a painful and invasive surgery, which he had not recommended.
Nora tried to play along, peering intensely out the windows, moving her head about. She had no desire to see a UFO or to interact with beings from another galaxy, and if the reports were true, she certainly had no desire to be experimented on, tagged, and monitored. The whole thing felt unwise, like inviting spirits into the room with a Ouija board, an activity she’d engaged in as a teen when she had tried her best to be popular.
Gene shot forward. “Are you even looking?” he asked.
“I’m looking,” she said. “I am.”
“Fuck,” he said, and then he described how the blue orbs dropped—one and then another, but they couldn’t see where they’d landed because of the trees.
“Were y’all drinking?” Nora asked, finishing off her beer. She crushed the can and put it back in her purse.
“We picked up Drew from the airport and brought a joint for him to smoke, but we were sober.”
“And all three of you smoked the joint?” Nora asked.
“Yeah.”
“Was it unusual stuff?”
“No,” he said, “and there’s no way each of us hallucinated the same thing, Nora.” He gave her a slitty side-eyed look.
“Of course not,” she said. “I didn’t think that. My biggest fear is that something weird’ll happen and the first thing people ask is whether I’ve been drinking—and if it’s after five o’clock I’ve been drinking, but that wouldn’t mean anything.”
Nora told them about hypnagogic hallucinations, adding that it couldn’t account for all three of them seeing a UFO, obviously. In the essay she’d read, a woman was convinced she was being haunted because she saw ghosts every night in her bedroom, but then she’d done a sleep study and found it was a form of narcolepsy triggering the hallucinations. Nora thought such a diagnosis would be a relief and yet much less interesting than a haunting.
Gene didn’t say anything. Taylor said he’d never heard of it and made her repeat the word “hypnagogic.” She googled it so they could listen to the computer pronunciation.
“The best part was how clearly she’d seen the ghosts even though her eyesight was terrible—they were crisp while everything else in the room was wavy and distorted. I really liked that detail.”
No one responded.
“Can’t you picture it?” Nora asked. “It’s so vivid.”
Gene sighed. He was done with her and her attempts to make this a lighthearted evening. She wished Taylor would pipe up again from the back seat. She would be willing to listen to him talk about Leon’s metal detector or the KGB, but he had the luxury of silence. What a luxury! She wished she were at home with her dog.
The light seemed to be getting brighter. If she could see what Taylor was seeing, she would’ve felt better. She had a shape-shifting face—several of her exes had said so. She recalled one of them standing at the bottom of a set of stairs, looking up at her, the casualness with which he told her she had become completely unrecognizable to him.
After one more loop around the frontage road, Nora pointed out the Mexican restaurant they’d passed four or five times.
“Are y’all hungry?” Gene asked. “We can stop. Let’s stop and regroup.”
Nora didn’t know what regrouping might entail, though she liked the idea of food and drinks and getting out of the cramped car with the light in her face.
“I could eat,” Taylor said.
They sat outside at El Nopalito, a wide-open patio. It was mid-September, cool but not chilly. Perfect outdoor weather.
Since Taylor had left his camera gear in the car, Nora felt like she could finally relax. She ordered a beer and Taylor ordered a beer and Gene drank water. Nora set out the little bowls for each of them and poured salsa. She loved having a little bowl to herself.
When the waiter returned, they were still flipping through the enormous menus. Nora sent him away, but then he was there again, standing over them, which was the exact same experience she’d had in every Mexican restaurant she had ever been to. They ordered to make him go away and watched as a large group of young people posted up at the other tables: guys with shirts that showed the entire sides of their stomachs, girls in cutoffs and flip-flops. They were keeping summer alive. They were all smoking cigarettes and had strange, thick accents. These young people were so different from the young people in their own town, nearly like a different species. She wanted to sit with them, talk to them. She knew they would hate her.
Nora recalled that old cover photo of Anna Nicole Smith for New York Magazine, her legs spread and a bag of Cheez Doodles between them, the caption “White Trash Nation” in bold letters across the front. She had recently gone down an Anna Nicole Smith rabbit hole, relishing all the vulgar and sad details. Before Anna Nicole’s son died of a drug overdose, before her own death at the age of thirty-nine, she had gotten fat. There was nothing sadder than that, Nora thought, and yet she had gotten rather plump herself. You let your guard down for a short period of time and it was nice having let your guard down, so you kept it down a little while longer and pretty soon you were finished.
Their food arrived and her shrimp quesadilla was too salty. In another restaurant, at another time, she might have sent it back, told the waiter the shrimp weren’t edible. “Try one,” she might have said. “Try one and see what you think.” Instead of eating, she watched the young people, imagining what their lives were like and if they longed for things like UFO sightings to break up the monotony, but they looked thrilled to be alive in Holly Springs, Mississippi, at the only restaurant open on a Sunday night. She wanted to be one of them, wanted to wear inappropriate clothing and date some guy who had so little awareness of himself that he thought he had a body worthy of showing off.
“How are the enchiladas?” Nora asked.
“Pretty good,” Gene said. “You don’t like your quesadilla?”
“It’s kinda salty, but it’s fine.” Why couldn’t she have just said it was fine and left it at that? Why did she have to be a bitch?
Soon they were back in the car, the creepy theremin music playing more loudly than before. Gene made a final show out of circling the frontage road and she wondered if he was preoccupied with aliens because he was from Pascagoula, if he was more susceptible to this sort of thing because of the famed abduction of two fishermen in the 1970s. She had heard him talk about it on several occasions at the bar, and it had always been fine enough bar talk.
She stared out the window, the light once again shining in her face. It was so dark outside and so bright inside that she felt like she was on fire, and it seemed like the perfect time to spot something, when they’d given up, when they least expected it. She wanted Gene to have his sighting, wanted there to be something else in this world.
She spotted a couple of deer on the side of the road, their illuminated eyes—how she loved their eyes. She waited for one to dart out, for their small car to plow into it or for Gene to turn the wheel hard into the ditch. Perhaps they’d hit a tree and die and the guys who hadn’t come along would talk about their narrow escapes, and the friends who hadn’t been invited would claim that they had been. It would be a big story, the biggest story of the year, if not the decade. They were important enough: two writers and a documentarian out on a search for UFOs in rural Mississippi. What a story! What a story it would be. They might live on in town lore forever. They might be legends. 
Mary Miller is the author of two collections of short stories, Big World and Always Happy Hour, as well as the novels Biloxi and The Last Days of California. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Oxford American, Norton’s Seagull Book of Stories (4th ed.), McSweeney’s Quarterly, American Short Fiction, and others. She is a former James A. Michener Fellow in Fiction at the University of Texas and John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at Ole Miss.
