before. One day, he didn’t return from work, and his family had heard nothing from him since. My friend didn’t write a word about any particular suspicions he had, and that I also nurtured. He did say that the police had come to his house. As a rule, his mother wouldn’t have allowed them into their home to poke around. His father had never trusted the police or any other persons of officialdom, and neither did his mother. But in this circumstance, that rule went out the window.
The police didn’t find anything that interested them in the house, but when they looked around the garage they turned up a lock box hidden underneath a workshop table. My friend’s mother gave them permission to open it, and inside they discovered, as my friend quoted them, “stacks of literature.” Then he wrote, “Both my mom and I were fairly certain that what they called literature wasn’t pornography or anything of the kind. It was stuff about them .” That was the first reference to the small people I could recollect appearing in our correspondence with each other. Naturally, this was a subject that we didn’t want to linger over. My friend continued regarding what was hidden in his dad’s lock box that the police pried open: “Some of it was in envelopes with postmarks from all over the world.” The police rummaged through the material until my friend’s mother told them there wasn’t anything in there that would help them find her husband. “The cops didn’t say a word after that,” my friend wrote. “I thought they might. It seemed to me they should have, the way they were looking at each other. But they just piled the envelopes and stuff back in the box and shoved the box back underneath my dad’s workshop table. Then they left, and we haven’t heard from them since, the bastards.”
For a few days, I didn’t know what to write in response to my friend’s letter. I considered phoning him, but I didn’t think that was a prudent action to take. Finally, I composed a short letter of vague condolences and hopes that his dad had business he thought it best not to share with him and his mother. My letter was a mass of circumlocutions that I was sure my friend would understand. To my grief, I never received a response to that letter, and it was almost spring before I could admit to myself that I would never hear from him again.
I said that my friend avoided mentioning the smalls in our letters. However, as I later pored over our correspondence I saw that he had written something to me that I blocked from recall. The erasure of his words from my memory was understandable, for what he wrote was simply too strange to reflect upon for very long. If you’ll remember, Doctor, I posed the following question: “How could we know we were keeping certain truths from ourselves regarding how things are in this world at its deepest level?” And the answer I gave to my own question was this: “Because we had done it before.” Well, that’s exactly what I had done when I read what my friend wrote to me in one of his letters. Here is my recitation of it from memory: “My dad got drunk last night and told me things I had never heard from him before. I didn’t understand most of it. What I do remember was his repeating what he called a spectral link between the smalls and some people in the real world. Then he went on about people who looked and acted like humans but were not human. Maybe he said they were not completely human. He did have a term for them. It was half-small people .”
You might be able to comprehend, Doctor, how disquieted I was to see written in my friend’s hand certain words that, at least in concept, had occurred to me only in a dream. I hated to think that there was a spectral link between myself and the smalls, and though I have spoken of peculiar truths regarding how things really are in this world at its deepest level, truths that we keep ourselves from knowing, I concluded with stark lucidity that
The police didn’t find anything that interested them in the house, but when they looked around the garage they turned up a lock box hidden underneath a workshop table. My friend’s mother gave them permission to open it, and inside they discovered, as my friend quoted them, “stacks of literature.” Then he wrote, “Both my mom and I were fairly certain that what they called literature wasn’t pornography or anything of the kind. It was stuff about them .” That was the first reference to the small people I could recollect appearing in our correspondence with each other. Naturally, this was a subject that we didn’t want to linger over. My friend continued regarding what was hidden in his dad’s lock box that the police pried open: “Some of it was in envelopes with postmarks from all over the world.” The police rummaged through the material until my friend’s mother told them there wasn’t anything in there that would help them find her husband. “The cops didn’t say a word after that,” my friend wrote. “I thought they might. It seemed to me they should have, the way they were looking at each other. But they just piled the envelopes and stuff back in the box and shoved the box back underneath my dad’s workshop table. Then they left, and we haven’t heard from them since, the bastards.”
For a few days, I didn’t know what to write in response to my friend’s letter. I considered phoning him, but I didn’t think that was a prudent action to take. Finally, I composed a short letter of vague condolences and hopes that his dad had business he thought it best not to share with him and his mother. My letter was a mass of circumlocutions that I was sure my friend would understand. To my grief, I never received a response to that letter, and it was almost spring before I could admit to myself that I would never hear from him again.
I said that my friend avoided mentioning the smalls in our letters. However, as I later pored over our correspondence I saw that he had written something to me that I blocked from recall. The erasure of his words from my memory was understandable, for what he wrote was simply too strange to reflect upon for very long. If you’ll remember, Doctor, I posed the following question: “How could we know we were keeping certain truths from ourselves regarding how things are in this world at its deepest level?” And the answer I gave to my own question was this: “Because we had done it before.” Well, that’s exactly what I had done when I read what my friend wrote to me in one of his letters. Here is my recitation of it from memory: “My dad got drunk last night and told me things I had never heard from him before. I didn’t understand most of it. What I do remember was his repeating what he called a spectral link between the smalls and some people in the real world. Then he went on about people who looked and acted like humans but were not human. Maybe he said they were not completely human. He did have a term for them. It was half-small people .”
You might be able to comprehend, Doctor, how disquieted I was to see written in my friend’s hand certain words that, at least in concept, had occurred to me only in a dream. I hated to think that there was a spectral link between myself and the smalls, and though I have spoken of peculiar truths regarding how things really are in this world at its deepest level, truths that we keep ourselves from knowing, I concluded with stark lucidity that
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