saying they've seen flying saucers and creatures from other planets."
"I'm afraid you've come to the wrong place," Broussard began professionally. "I really can't—"
"Please," his appeal had been direct and unflinching. "You've got to help me."
She had agreed. And after polygraphs, hypnosis, batteries of tests, and analysis, Paul Massieu, an adjunct professor of anthropology at McGill University who loved camping in the Adirondacks, was revealed to be a marginally introverted personality with no evidence whatever of thought or affective disorder. Either he had been abducted by wraithlike humanoid figures in metallic clothing, and examined by them, or he had hallucinated the experience in whole or in part for reasons completely inconsistent with the entire history and practice of psychiatry. Eva Broussard didn't dismiss that possibility.
But then, when word of her work with Massieu got out in Montreal's psychiatric community, others began to show up at her office. Most were so impaired that their narratives of extraterrestrial contacts were specious, either attention-seeking or delusional. Still, for every ten of them, one believable witness would appear. A fifty-four-year-old grocer from Malone, New York. A young computer skills teacher from Quebec City who wanted to be a fashion designer. A Roman Catholic grandmother of ten from Mishawawka, Indiana, who'd been on a tour of religious shrines when she, too, saw the strange beings.
Eva Broussard had gone into seclusion for two months at a Carmelite convent on the St. Lawrence River near Cap-de-la-Madeleine. In silence and barefoot on the old limestone floors she'd considered the nature of cancer, which had claimed her left breast and might eventually claim her life. She had watched her dreams in the Iroquois way for the masked faces who would reveal her deepest need. "To know," the masks had murmured. "Your great need is simply to know." Then she'd pondered the motley collection of frightened people who told of a near-identical experience—contact with beings unlike any known human form.
An original text of F. H. Bradley's Appearance and Reality arrived from Oxford and was carefully read. Experience, the Victorian philosopher told Eva, is what matters. Thinking about experience is a maze of misleading relational complexity. The experience is what it is; interpretations of it are flawed by attempts to describe it as like something else. Paul Massieu and the others had known an experience. Describing it in relational terms was just the way of the human mind. It might be like science-fiction fantasies familiar to Massieu and the others from novels and movies, but it was not, in reality, any kind of fiction at all. Something had happened in the experience of these people. Eva Broussard decided to spend the remaining years of her life trying to identify what that something was. At sixty she felt that her very life, her experience and training, her travel and writing, had groomed her, prepared her, for precisely this. She regarded her decision to pursue the research as the most exciting moment of her life.
Within another month she had closed her office and liquidated enough assets to purchase the old Adirondack camp beneath a mountain where Paul Massieu was examined in a silver craft by papery beings with huge, glassy-black eyes. The creatures smelled, he said, like the aromatic spice called mace.
For Eva it had been a homecoming. Born on the Onondaga Reservation near Nedrow, New York, young Eva Blindhawk had only been taken in by relatives of her father in Montreal at seven, when her mother died of the same cancer Eva herself now fought. In the critical first five years of life she'd been an Iroquois Indian, an Onondaga from whose ranks the chiefa of the six Iroquois nations must, by ancient tradition, be chosen. She'd been the daughter of Naomi Blindhawk and granddaughter of a dream-woman who ordered the midwinter rituals. Tracing her lineage to one of the oldest
"I'm afraid you've come to the wrong place," Broussard began professionally. "I really can't—"
"Please," his appeal had been direct and unflinching. "You've got to help me."
She had agreed. And after polygraphs, hypnosis, batteries of tests, and analysis, Paul Massieu, an adjunct professor of anthropology at McGill University who loved camping in the Adirondacks, was revealed to be a marginally introverted personality with no evidence whatever of thought or affective disorder. Either he had been abducted by wraithlike humanoid figures in metallic clothing, and examined by them, or he had hallucinated the experience in whole or in part for reasons completely inconsistent with the entire history and practice of psychiatry. Eva Broussard didn't dismiss that possibility.
But then, when word of her work with Massieu got out in Montreal's psychiatric community, others began to show up at her office. Most were so impaired that their narratives of extraterrestrial contacts were specious, either attention-seeking or delusional. Still, for every ten of them, one believable witness would appear. A fifty-four-year-old grocer from Malone, New York. A young computer skills teacher from Quebec City who wanted to be a fashion designer. A Roman Catholic grandmother of ten from Mishawawka, Indiana, who'd been on a tour of religious shrines when she, too, saw the strange beings.
Eva Broussard had gone into seclusion for two months at a Carmelite convent on the St. Lawrence River near Cap-de-la-Madeleine. In silence and barefoot on the old limestone floors she'd considered the nature of cancer, which had claimed her left breast and might eventually claim her life. She had watched her dreams in the Iroquois way for the masked faces who would reveal her deepest need. "To know," the masks had murmured. "Your great need is simply to know." Then she'd pondered the motley collection of frightened people who told of a near-identical experience—contact with beings unlike any known human form.
An original text of F. H. Bradley's Appearance and Reality arrived from Oxford and was carefully read. Experience, the Victorian philosopher told Eva, is what matters. Thinking about experience is a maze of misleading relational complexity. The experience is what it is; interpretations of it are flawed by attempts to describe it as like something else. Paul Massieu and the others had known an experience. Describing it in relational terms was just the way of the human mind. It might be like science-fiction fantasies familiar to Massieu and the others from novels and movies, but it was not, in reality, any kind of fiction at all. Something had happened in the experience of these people. Eva Broussard decided to spend the remaining years of her life trying to identify what that something was. At sixty she felt that her very life, her experience and training, her travel and writing, had groomed her, prepared her, for precisely this. She regarded her decision to pursue the research as the most exciting moment of her life.
Within another month she had closed her office and liquidated enough assets to purchase the old Adirondack camp beneath a mountain where Paul Massieu was examined in a silver craft by papery beings with huge, glassy-black eyes. The creatures smelled, he said, like the aromatic spice called mace.
For Eva it had been a homecoming. Born on the Onondaga Reservation near Nedrow, New York, young Eva Blindhawk had only been taken in by relatives of her father in Montreal at seven, when her mother died of the same cancer Eva herself now fought. In the critical first five years of life she'd been an Iroquois Indian, an Onondaga from whose ranks the chiefa of the six Iroquois nations must, by ancient tradition, be chosen. She'd been the daughter of Naomi Blindhawk and granddaughter of a dream-woman who ordered the midwinter rituals. Tracing her lineage to one of the oldest
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