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Frank Szalai -- Phoenix, Arizona
1997 (the first year)
[ Newest ] [ 1998 ] [ Jan.-June 1999 ]
Kristin and Brent came down from Denver for Christmas. Four days. Marlys cooked like she used to, the lefse and the meatballs and the rice pudding with the almond in it, and whoever gets the almond gets a prize. Brent got it. He's a good kid. He's getting used to us.
The day after Christmas Kristin found me in the garage and shut the door behind her. She said, "Dad. Mom told me about the thing. The lights. Being taken." She said, "Is it true?"
I have been thinking about how to answer that since August. I said, "It's true that she believes it." Kristin said, "That's not what I asked." I said I know it isn't, honey, but it's the only true thing I've got.
She cried a little and I did too, standing between the workbench and the Buick. Then she said, "Is she sleeping?" and I said no, not much, and Kristin said, "That's what I'm worried about. Not the other thing." My daughter is 22 years old and smarter than me.
My father came over from Hungary before the war and worked forty years in a foundry in Cleveland and never once told anybody he was scared of anything. I'm starting to think that was not the good idea he thought it was.
Marlys has been reading. Library books, a stack of them on her nightstand, all about people who say they were taken. The one on top is "Communion," the one with the gray face with the big black eyes on the cover. I turned it face down at night. She thinks it's because I don't want to look at it. That's exactly why.
I read one of them myself this week, a different one, so I'd know what she's reading. I read it at the kitchen table with a pencil like it was a blueprint.
Here's what I noticed. Every person in it was scared. Every person in it had somebody at home who didn't believe them. And every person in it said the not being believed was almost as bad as the other thing.
I don't believe it. I want to be honest on this page, that's the whole reason I keep it. But that part of the book I believe. I closed it and went in and sat on the edge of the bed and held her foot through the blanket, which is a thing I do, and she didn't wake up, or she let me think she didn't.
The mark on her leg.
There's a little dent in the front of her right shin, about the size of a pencil eraser, sort of scooped. She showed it to me Tuesday. She says it's new, since March. She says the people in the books have them too.
I have known that leg for twenty-four years. I could not tell you if that mark is new. I don't think a man looks at his wife's shins that close, or if he does, I didn't. She could have banged it on the dishwasher door in 1985. She could be right. I don't know.
What I said was, "Let's have Dr. Hale look at it." She said, "So he can tell me I'm crazy." I said nobody's saying crazy. She said, "You're thinking it." I'm not. I'm thinking my wife hasn't slept a whole night since March and I can't fix it, and I've fixed everything in this house including the swamp cooler twice.
Marlys got up at two in the morning Saturday to watch Princess Diana's funeral, which started at three our time. I got up at five and she was on the couch with the Kleenex box and the afghan, and the two little princes walking behind the coffin on the TV. And Mother Teresa died Friday. Marlys said, "Everybody's dying, Frank." I said not everybody, hon. I made eggs.
The truth is she wasn't up for the funeral. She was up anyway. She's up most nights now. The funeral just gave her something to do with it.
Saturday night at the kitchen table she told me.
She said she's been remembering. She said the night of the lights, after I went to bed, from eleven to a quarter after one when I found her in the lawn chair, she wasn't in the chair. She was taken. Up. She said it plain and flat, the way you'd say the store was out of milk. No crying. That was the worst part.
I asked her how she knows. She said, "The way you know you've been cut before you see the blood."
I didn't know what to say, so I said, "I believe that you believe it." That was the wrong thing. She said that's what you say to a crazy person, and she went in the bedroom and shut the door. I sat in the kitchen with the fan going until two.
Here's what I know. I found her in that chair and she was cold and she didn't know what time it was. That's all I know. Everything else is hers.
That Mars landing on the Fourth, the little rover that rolls around looking at rocks. Marlys sat three feet from the TV the whole weekend watching the pictures come in. Red rocks and red dirt, looks like Gila Bend.
She wouldn't go to the fireworks. We've gone every year since Kristin was little. She said she doesn't want to be out there with all those lights going up. So we sat inside and heard them booming over the rooftops and watched Mars.
She asked me if I thought there was anything alive up there. I said I thought there were rocks. She said, "You always think it's just rocks, Frank." Fair enough. I'm a rocks man. Always have been.
111 today. The cooler can't keep up. We're sleeping with the ceiling fan on high and the bedside lamp on all night, because Marlys can't sleep in the dark anymore. We've been married since 1973 and I have never once slept with a light on. I got one of those eye masks from the drugstore. I look like the Lone Ranger.
She keeps a spiral notebook by the bed now and writes down the dreams when she wakes up. She won't let me read it. That's fine. It's hers.
I got an e-mail from a man in Tempe who found this page and wanted to know if I would be a witness for his investigation group. I told him I'm a witness to five lights and that's all I'm a witness to.
Marlys woke up screaming Thursday night. Third time in two weeks. Same dream every time: she's in bed and she can't move, not even a finger, and there's a light in the hall, and there's somebody small standing at the foot of the bed. She says it's not a dream. She says she's awake.
I went to the library Friday and asked the lady at the desk and she found me an article about a thing called sleep paralysis. Your brain wakes up before your body does, and you can't move, and a lot of people see somebody in the room. It's common, it says. It has a name. I made a photocopy for a dime and brought it home.
Marlys read it standing at the counter. Then she folded it in quarters and said, "That's not what this is, Frank."
But she put it in her nightstand drawer. She didn't throw it away. I'm counting that.
They found all those people in the big house in California yesterday, the ones who thought a spaceship was coming behind the comet. Heaven's Gate, they called themselves. All in the same bunk beds with the same shoes on.
Marlys watched it on the news every hour on the hour. She said, "Those poor people." Then she said, "They weren't wrong that there's something up there, though." I said, hon, that's the part that worries me. She went to bed mad.
She's been going out in the yard every night since the 13th. Sits in the lawn chair and watches the northwest where the comet is, and then turns around and watches the rest. Comes in at midnight, one. I don't think she's looking for the comet.
I'm writing this down because everybody in Phoenix is talking about Thursday night and the stories are already getting bigger. I want mine down the way it was while I still remember it right. I ran a lathe and a mill for twenty-eight years. I'm used to writing down what I measured and nothing else.
Marlys and I were out in the backyard in west Phoenix about 8:15 Thursday night, March 13, to look at the comet, which you can see in the northwest after dark without binoculars. We live under the flight path for the jets out of Luke. I know what a jet sounds like and I know what a formation looks like.
| Time | About 8:20 to 8:25 p.m. |
| Direction | Came from the north-northwest, went south-southeast, over us or close to it |
| What | Five lights (Marlys says six) in a V, like a carpenter's square opened up. Orange-white. Steady, no blinking. |
| Sound | None. I listened for it. |
| Speed | Slow. Slower than a plane coming in to Sky Harbor. |
| Size | Don't know. At arm's length it was wider than my hand. But I don't know how high it was, so that number means nothing. |
| Second sighting | About 10:00 p.m. A row of amber lights low in the southwest over the Estrella Mountains. Hung there a few minutes. Went out one at a time. |
My honest opinion. The ten o'clock lights looked like flares to me. The gunnery range is out that direction and they drop flares out there. The first ones, the V, I can't explain. That doesn't mean they can't be explained. It means I can't.
Marlys held onto my arm with both hands and said "Frank, Frank, Frank" the whole time it went over. After the second ones I went to bed around eleven. She said she'd stay out a while. I woke up at a quarter after one and her side of the bed was empty, and I went out, and she was sitting in the lawn chair in her sweater, cold as ice, looking straight up. She said she didn't know she'd been out that long. I figured she fell asleep out there. I brought her in and made her cocoa.
That's what I saw. -- F.S.
[ Newest ] [ Next: 1998 ]
Frank Szalai -- [email protected]
Last updated 9/26/99