It was not like TV, which made it all the more unreal.
Sure, there were the typical bright lights and loss of time-sense, but who hasn’t experienced that particular mind-zap on a week-night, awake suddenly three hours before the nasty clock-radio-alarm, dreading the inevitable approach of “reveille?”
Damn digital alarm clock-radio/time-bomb. Most dreadful techno-majig this side of the stun-gun.
No, it was the talk, the screechy-scratchy gossip of space aliens that told me “We ain’t in Kansas, Toto!” and freaked me for a loop. High-pitched, crunchy sounds, like insects in debate.
Didn’t help my overall emotional condition that I was paralyzed, mute, and positioned in such a way as to be unable to avert my gaze from the neat rows of sharp instruments on a very hard, very cold table.
And of course (of course: what would an “abduction” be without an intimate invasion/violation with anti-septic, phallic instruments?) the requisite long, steely gadgets telescoped up my wazoo.
They “beamed me back” or however they transported me, exactly one minute before the first gush of clock-radio muzak, which lasted an eternity, for I was too messed up to slam the “snooze button,” at six a.m. Cruel bastards. Yes, there is “intelligent life” beyond our ken, and yes it is every bit as diabolical as anything that walks on legs.
And the ultimate question: was it a dream? No. No way. They etched yet another set of infinitesimal numbers on my molars — I keep one of those dentist’s mirror-gadgets to examine myself, post-examination. I’m sure, for their purposes, these were more than just souvenirs. Was I being cataloged, a data-unit on some secret spread-sheet?
Regardless: onward. To the shower, the espresso pot, the car my pod my womb. Two hours in traffic and another half-hour to find parking. May I not collapse on the packed pavement of my destination or drop dead in the cubicle, unremarked till pay day or stink of decay — or impromptu staff meeting!
May I survive this day’s abduction, return home again, home again to night’s dull channels, or perhaps a movie, catatonic lifetimes past unspeakable probes and alien chit-chat in unidentified fleeting objects of deliverance!
Until the inevitable flash-and-scream of cursed dawn.