The Mindstorm Chronicles:
Chapter Four
A work of fiction? A work of non-fiction? The work of insanity?
You decide.
As far as I knew, all kids had such experiences. It didn't seem to me to be so highly unusual at all, but often made me think about how special kids were that they had imaginary play mates, or could play pretend about anything at all. I thought that, should anyone ever discover anything really unusual or interesting it would have to be a kid because grown ups just didn't think this way. All the same, the telepathic conversations I was having always seemed to be very real to me, in part because people said things that I just didn't know anything about, which although it was depressing and even frightening at times, was also highly educational. Whenever somebody said something about which I knew absolutely nothing, and it was important, I had to excuse myself and spend some hours just learning about that. And, well, there were so many things that I didn't know, that I had to just keep on learning and learning. Even if it did make my head hurt.
Telepathy itself had been that way for me. My mother had always said that she was telepathic, but I don't think that she meant it in the same way as these conversations, I found out later. She saw images, and didn't really hear words or have conversations the way that I did, apparently, though I never told her about these meetings I was having with an alien and all the other people. So, for me, telepathy was just a fact of life, even before I began to experience it the way that I was. It certainly didn't seem so unusual. Even if what we talked about did.
There was some odd feeling that I would get sometimes, a feeling like someone was watching from far away, and at those times my thoughts began to drift back to the conversations with the alien and the others, which for the most part I was content not to have to think about very much. But there was something just very ominous in the air, something that seemed very important. Now, bear in mind that these memories come back in flashes, and while I could always remember just where I was when these things happened, remembering just when they happened wasn't always as easy. You know, just which conversation came first, although I had a pretty good idea which year it happened.
Now, after the first time that I talked to president John Kennedy, I became a huge fan. My brother had told me all about the book "Profiles in Courage", which had too many big words for me to read. I was such a fan of his that I started wearing my hair like his, now that I was really paying attention to how presidents looked and what they did and all. He seemed like such a nice man when we talked the one time, and I was just sure that he was a very good man as well. Years later my Dad painted a portrait of me from an old photo from that time, and so people got to see my president Kennedy haircut for years and years, and I never tired of telling people that's what sort of haircut it was supposed to be.
As if all that I'd been through up to this point hadn't been strange enough already, the alien was telling me that something very serious was happening. After he explained that I wasn't in any trouble, always my first concern, you know, I told him that I really didn't much want to have any discussions right then, that I felt like I really didn't know enough to be much help, couldn't understand why these people wanted to talk to me, and was not wanting to be depressed again over the sheer enormity of the world's problems anyway. But wouldn't you know it, he said the one thing to me that made all the difference in the world. He said that the president wished to speak to me. But at that point these things seemed so real to me, and I didn't really feel worthy to speak to a president, but the alien said that it was very serious. Back then the only thing I understood about serious is that you never wanted your parents to get that way, because it meant that you were in trouble.
But, well, if he was sure that he wanted to speak to me, well, he was my president and all. He didn't say a whole lot right away, I got the feeling that all of this made him just as uncomfortable as it did me for some strange reason. But then he got right down to matters, and said that our military was going to invade Cuba and he needed some thoughts on what to do. Nothing like this had ever happened before to me, and suddenly I was having images flash through my mind about some big island far away, and a bunch of soldiers waiting in boats. He told me briefly while these images were happening, or rather the images were happening as he told me briefly, that they had expected the people there to rise up against their communist leader and all, which just started me wondering what communism was. It seemed familiar, as if it had come up before, and I wondered how in the world adults managed to ever remember so many things about the world.
He waited for some sort of reply, but I was still sort of lost and didn't really know what to say. I heard the alien speaking to him, but I was too lost in my thoughts to hear them. And then after a moment of silence, I had to ask, what did he want to know from me? That's when he told me that he had just received a phone call from Russia, and that they said that they would shoot some of those super bombs at us if we invaded the island.
Until that moment, I had no idea that anyone else had those but us. And then the strangest and most frightening thing happened. Suddenly I thought about our home in the suburbs, and then I saw a man standing somewhere else, and a huge orange flash just came and swept him away. That's when I began to say, "Don't do it! Don't do it!" and was just very shaken by what I'd seen. He seemed to want to know more but I couldn't tell him much at all at that point, just that it wasn't good, and I believe I even described what I'd seen. I didn't recognize the man that I saw swept away by the orange light, not until many, many years later when I finally saw a photograph of a man who looked just like him, a photograph of a much younger George Herbert Walker Bush.
Anyway, the whole conversation was over nearly as soon as it began. I was torn between going to lay down and rest and not knowing what to do. I suppose that it was the first time that I ever began my lifelong habit of pacing when I was worried. The alien assured me that everything was going to be alright, but up to that moment I'd never had to be really serious in my whole life. Later that night I would think about the word "serious" in a whole new light.
I can't remember if it was the same day or the next day, or a few days later, that I decided that I just needed to know a whole lot more about everything. And that I was just going to have to bear down and go through it, and try to remain as unperturbed as possible. I even talked it over with the alien, who just seemed to be still wondering about me, and possibly why I never wondered more about him, or about aliens. He had let me know not to worry about things too much, that he was going to be like some sort of security for me, and we discussed how very difficult this was on me emotionally, and what sorts of things I thought would make me feel better about it all. He was very generous in that regard, and allowed me to carry on quite a spell about such things as grown ups wouldn't have wanted to hear.
There was first and foremost on my mind that there were spies in the government. And for a kid my age, and of that time, there were three things in the whole wide world that one would never, ever want to be, because all of them were the worst of very bad things, and would likely get you killed or worse to be those things that all boys my age hated; Spies, traitors and torturers. You know it was one thing when people did honest battles and such, but being any of those things was about as dishonorable as anything anyone could think of, something about which one could only be ashamed. But of course, that wasn't entirely right, either.
As I paced the alien began to sort of help me to think about how sometimes it takes a spy to capture another spy or a traitor. That's just the way those things were done. Now, I had never really thought of that. And it's not like the alien was telling me so much as I was just understanding somehow, visuals came to mind with a certain kind of understanding, but not necessarily from the alien himself, either. And that's when I noticed that this was from a different alien altogether.
Whereas I would have said the first alien was like a younger man, this other alien seemed to be older. But when I asked him how old he was he said that he was seven years old. Now at this point I spun out on that very thought, thinking surely my imagination did get the better of me and now I'm just going to go plum crazy. He tried to reassure me that aliens are just different and live and think faster than we do. Still, the thought of seven year olds flying spaceships was just more than I could bear. They didn't have names, either, because they were telepathic in a way where they just knew each others faces, which was also more than I could bear. But at least now I felt completely justified. Just as I expected, it wasn't going to do me to much good to be asking questions about these aliens, all along I was afraid that whatever they would tell me, well, that first of all I wouldn't understand it, and secondly, it would probably be more than I could bear. The second alien then began to look upon me with the same sort of perplexed wonder as the first. Or at least it seemed so. So I sort of shook my head and moved on to other business.
Now, about these spies in our government, I wanted to know, whose spies were they? And in my minds eye I saw a whole bunch of men in business suits having a good time, government people of some type, I reckoned, and I could see that several of them were spies. More like I just got that impression somehow.
At this point, however, I didn't really feel like asking the alien any more questions, which would lead to still more confusion on my part, so I did something that was up to that point fairly unusual for me. I stopped to think this all over before deciding who I should talk to next. But somewhere along the line I got the distinct impression that these were Nazi spies. I had no idea how such a thing could be, but just the thought of it was pretty scary.
So I began to think about what little I knew about such things. First of all, if there were Nazi spies in the government, it was going to be difficult to avoid running into them somewhere along the line, or at least that would be a constant concern. Then I thought about friends, and I remembered from old war movies that the British were our allies and our friends, and it struck me as being a good thing to have some friends outside of our compromised government looking in. Then, for some strange reason, I decided that I should be speaking to British Intelligence. Maybe they could help, I thought.
The next thing I knew I saw a middle aged man's face, who was from somewhere in England called Tavistock. English stuff was often spelled funny, often sounded different, and I wanted to know just how it was spelled so that I could remember it. And what do you know, I had it about right, there was no "L" in Tavistock, and it was spelled with one "a" and one "o" not two "a's". I was pleased to have guessed something right after all this time. He told me a little about the Nazi's, and about how they kill children that they use for telepathy, but how Tavistock didn't kill the children that helped them. Right then and there I had another brief panic, thinking that the Nazi telepaths might catch on to all of this and be hunting me down anytime now, but the alien was, just like the other one, very reassuring that they just weren't going to allow such a thing to happen. Now if you believe in the premise that all of this is actually happening in the first place, there seemed to be no reason to doubt the alien about that any more than the rest of it, all of which certainly seemed quite real to me, even if it was all just the strangest thing that a body could imagine.
Now, as if all of this wasn't hard enough to describe or explain, what happened next surprised all of us quite considerably. I just began to carry on and on about all kinds of things, saying that they should do this and that, and that something or other was going to happen, and because of those things I was going to need this and that, as if I really had some idea what I was talking about. Not that I really did, mind you, not at all, just that whatever was coming out of me was all so very interesting, and not a little exiting. In my way of thinking, this seemed like a really wonderful story of which I was becoming a part, and it seemed to me that I had somehow stumbled upon my life's purpose, right then and there. But I had a lot to learn. And being that I didn't want to get into trouble with anybody, I was thinking that I would have to avoid the usual thing where I would be meeting with spies in dark alleys and so forth, and thought that they would just have to teach me in other ways. School wouldn't do for these things, I couldn't wait until High School, I had to start learning right away! And so I recommended the source of most of my education to that point in time, television, radio and the movies. And as I got completely carried away, and carried on and on, I saw in my mind's eye teams of writers taking down notes.
The temptation here is to ask myself how and why these things ever happened to me at all, but whenever I thought about that too much I was just sure that I must be going crazy. So I endeavored not to think about it any more than absolutely necessary, which for the moment meant not at all. And I went off exited about the prospect of being a part of something good, something exiting and worthwhile. After pacing around the old dirt driveway for awhile I went inside to rest, but this time it didn't seem depressing at all, just wondrous.
The next few weeks had me stopping to think once in awhile about aliens, and about everything else. My mother told me that animals are naturally telepathic, and I sometimes sat by the porch and tried to communicate via telepathy with my dog. On the question of aliens and whether or not he knew about any of this, he just rolled his eyes up, head between his paws, as if to simply say that he did, and they were out there somewhere, and I got the distinct impression that he thought of them as some sorts of birds because they knew how to fly. But his little brown eyebrows on his face betrayed him to have the same sort of wonder about it as did I.
I'll never know, I suppose, how my dog managed to meet me at the end of the long dirt road that descended from our home every single time I got off of my school bus. My mother figured that he just knew the sound of school bus number eight, but I didn't know why it didn't just mean that he was telepathic, I guess it could have made sense either way. But every time I got off of that school bus, he came running down that old dirt road kicking up dust behind him all the way, hollering and howling as if to scold me for having been away all day. We would greet each other with a sort of happy dance, playing around as I imitated his howls. "Ahrooo, rooo, rooo! Ahrooo, rooo, rooo!" And then we would hike up the old dirt road to the house and both of us drink up a lot of cool, clear mountain water.
After that we would sit and rest for a little while before the inevitable happened. I would begin to look at him and he would look back with an expression that said, "I'll wear you out!" And I would be thinking, "Oh, no you won't!" And pretty soon we'd be wrestling all over the living room and chasing each other 'round the house until we were both winded and sucking up water again.
Despite the fact that the mountains of Big Bear had so few people then, all of us up there sort of hillbillies in our own way, my dog Laddie was most often all the company that I ever really needed, and I felt as though I was one of the luckiest kids in the world to have such a friend. After all, he had saved my life twice, for all I knew, and at the risk of his very own.
By now I guess you can tell that my dog helped me to not worry too much about all of this crazy stuff, I could just begin to slip in and out between these two worlds, one of which I was sure was very real, the other seemed so. Later in my life, you know, dogs don't live as long as people do, it would be something else, like music, or girls, which would help me put all of these worrisome things completely out of my mind. And...
that's about all I have to say about that.
End Chapter Four