Close encounter 2: Brookline Massachusetts, 1984. I went to see the movie "Dune" and a girl talked to me. Now, on its face, ...this is impossible on its face, I realize;...
More »Close encounter 2: Brookline Massachusetts, 1984. I went to see the movie "Dune" and a girl talked to me. Now, on its face, ...this is impossible on its face, I realize; but it is absolutely true. It was opening night, naturally: I went with my friend Tim McGonigal who sat on my left. On my right was the girl in question; she had long curly black hair, a blue jean jacket; I remember she had some sort of injury to her ankle; an ace bandage and she had crutches. She was very tall, I would say: I was starting high school at the time, I would say she was a Junior, but I had never seen her before; she didn't go to my school: I didn't know her name and I never will. She was sitting with someone who I presume was her mother and they were talking about the novel "Dune". They were both big fans, mother and daughter, very unusual. They were talking about how their favorite characters were the giant sandworms. And then it got stranger. That's when she turned to me and said, "Are you looking forward to seeing the movie?"
First of all, I was embarrassed because I had not read the novel Dune at the time, I was merely a connoisour of movies featuring desert planets, as I still am. But it was also the tone of how she asked the question: apropos of nothing, like she didn't even care about the answer, as though she just wanted to talk to me. I did not know what to say. I said "yes". I did not even turn my head. The movie began. I need not remind you that this was David Lynch's version of "Dune", in which all of the characters were sexy and deformed at the same time. There was a character called the third stage guild navigator, which was a kind of giant floating fetus creature that lived in a giant tank with this orange mist of this giant psychedelic Spice swirling around him allowing him to bend space and time. He could never leave the tank or interact with the outside world. He had become in his isolation so deformed and so sexy that he had to talk through a kind of old timey radio to the outside world and could never touch them. I mean, I liked him a lot better than the sandworms. The sandworms were fine: but your favorite character? Please.
When the movie ended, everyone seemed very happy to get up and get out of the theater as soon as possible. Except for the girl. As I walked out her pace slowed; perhaps it was the crutches. But it seemed, ...it seemed as though she might want to talk to me again. When I say it out loud, it sounds so ridiculous that I can only come to the conclusion that it was, what in the alien abductee community they call, a screen memory: a ridiculous false recollection designed by the brain to cover up some trauma, say of being kidnapped and flown off to a sex pyramid. And so I sure am glad I did not slow down to talk to her. I sure am glad I never saw her.
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