thick, the wall surrounding Roseland’s fifty-two acres had been built of concrete faced with stones gathered from the property. In the only gap, the impressive gates at the driveway entrance were not formed from pickets and rails through which the curious might peer, but were solid panels of bronze decorated with copper discs like those in the floor of the stable.
The gatehouse was of the same stone. Like the guesthouse tower in the eucalyptus grove, its windows were narrow and barred, and its ironbound-oak door stood like a challenge to barbarians.
About fourteen feet on a side, the building was large for its purpose, containing an office, a kitchenette, and a bathroom. I’d had only a glimpse inside, through the open door, on our second day here. But I could not have failed to notice the gun rack on the farther wall: two shotguns—one with a pistol grip—and two assault rifles.
Apparently, they intended to leave no doubt in the minds of door-to-door salesmen that when they said no, they were serious.
On the north side of the structure, adjacent to the driveway, an extension of the sloped roof, supported by four posts, provided a six-foot-deep shelter where a guard might stand in bad weather to speak with arriving guests. In that shade, to the right of the door, Henry Lolam sat in a captain’s chair with a padded seat.
He was perhaps thirty, and handsome in such a boyish way that on first encounter he seemed callow. Unlined face, mouth as innocent as that of a child who had not yet spoken one curse, cheeks the pink that sometimes blushes peach skins, he looked as if nothing hard in the world had touched him, as if he’d drifted through it like dandelion fluff on the softest warmest breeze that ever blew.
His green eyes were alien in that boyish face, full of loss and anguish and, at times, bewilderment.
As on the two other occasions when I had sought him out, Henry was reading a book of poetry. On a small table beside his chair were other haphazardly stacked volumes by such poets as Emerson, Whitman, and Wallace Stevens, a dangerous crew to let into your head.
Some will be skeptical of the contention that a security guard—a “rent-a-cop,” in the mocking Hollywood argot of our times—might be immersed in poetry. The uniqueness of every soul is not a theme that our current culture, obsessed with group identities, cares to assert. But Henry was himself and no one else, and judging by the intensity with which he focused on those verses, he sought from them something profound.
While he lingered over the last stanza of a poem, I leaned against a porch post and waited. He was not rude, merely preoccupied.
I had come here to ask him about Kenny Randolph Fitzgerald Mountbatten, who claimed to be a Roseland security guard even though he hadn’t worn the uniform—gray slacks, white shirt, blue blazer—that the other guards wore and though he was in so many ways more flamboyant than Henry and his colleagues.
Waiting, I watched what appeared to be a peregrine, judging by its immense wingspan and the universal pattern of its underwings. These falcons generally hunted smaller birds, rather than rodents, making spectacular swoops and seizing their prey in midair.
When Henry closed the book and looked up, a lost expression marked his eyes, as if he knew neither me nor where he was.
I said, “I’m sorry to interrupt, sir.”
His confusion, or whatever it might be, ebbed, and in ebbing washed a smile onto his beach-smooth face. He appeared as boyish as any preadolescent in a Norman Rockwell painting—as long as you did not care to see more in his eyes than the green of them.
“No, no,” Henry said. “I enjoy our chats. Sit down, sit down.”
To the left of the door, he had earlier put out a second chair, apparently in anticipation of my visit. I settled in it, deciding there was no point in asking about an eclipse.
“I’ve been brushing up on my UFO history,” Henry said.
He was intrigued by reports of abductions by extraterrestrials and alien bases on the far side of the moon. Although I could not say why I felt so, I suspected that he sought the same thing in UFO lore that he pursued in poetry.
Aware of the irony of a spirit-seer debunking the possibility of visitors from outer space, I nevertheless said, “I’m sorry, sir, but I just can’t buy into flying saucers and all that.”
“Several of those who’ve been abducted have passed lie-detector tests. There’s a lot of documentation.”
“See, it doesn’t make sense to me that a superintelligent race would come all the way across the galaxy just to abduct people and put probes up their rectums.”
“Well, that’s not the only thing they do in their examinations.”
“But it always seems to be the first and most important thing.”
“Don’t you think a colonoscopy is advisable now and then?”
“I can get one from a doctor.”
“Not as thorough as the one the aliens give you.”
“But, sir, why would aliens be interested in whether I have colon cancer?”
“Maybe because they care,” Henry said.
I had learned that to get to a subject that I wished to discuss, I had to indulge Henry’s bizarre fascination with proctologists from other worlds. Indulging him, however, didn’t mean taking a craziness pill and tripping with him, and I remained a skeptic.
“I suspect they’re just very caring,” Henry persisted.
“Coming fifty light-years to give me a colonoscopy is so caring it’s downright creepy.”
“No, Odd, you see, fifty light-years to them might be like fifty miles to us.”
“Coming even fifty miles to force a probe up my butt without my permission is a pretty good definition of a pervert.”
Henry’s face was alight with wonder at the idea of aliens, and dimpled with the amusement that any mischievous boy feels when he gets a seemingly legitimate chance to talk about butts and such.
“They’re probably taking DNA samples, too.”
I shrugged. “So I’ll give them a lock of my hair.”
Smiling dreamily, but turning the book of poetry over and over in his hands as if agitated, he said, “Some UFO experts think the aliens have conquered death and just want to give us immortality.”
“Give it to everyone?”
“They’re so compassionate.”
“Lady Gaga’s cool,” I said. “But a thousand years from now, I don’t want to have to listen to Lady Gaga’s seven hundredth album.”
“It wouldn’t be boring like that. Immortal, you could change careers again and again. Be a singer like Lady Gaga, and she can be a fry cook.”
I grimaced. “I can’t sing, and I have a hunch she can’t cook.”
He thumbed repeatedly, insistently through the pages of the book without looking at it, making a sound like shuffled cards. “Enhanced
