LUDIC LOG

"I want you to understand that I wouldn't be here if I thought there was any other way of coping with this."

"I understand. It's not necessary that you believe in my profession. It's only necessary that you honestly want to help yourself."

"I don't mean it as an insult, or anything. Just that I never saw myself as the kind of person who would see a psychologist."

"That's fine. Why don't you just start from wherever you're comfortable?"

"The first time I saw them was, oh, I'm going to say six, seven months ago. It was in a bar on Halsted Street, where I had gone to ask directions to the Music Exchange. I was shopping for drum heads. And I had barely entered the place when I saw how odd it all was."

"Odd in what way?"

"The light and sound seemed designed to create a really hypnotic effect. Everyone had that eerie uniform appearance I told you about in the initial consultation, and they seemed shocked that I was there, as if I'd stumbled onto something that I wasn't meant to see. That was when I first suspected."

"And what makes you think that they're aliens, exactly?"

"Oh, little things. They're not that different from you or me -- normal body type, standard variations in hair, eye and skin color. It's lots of subtleties. Not just the uniformity of appearance, but the strange vocal patterns, the eye movement, the bizarre mode of dress, the coded language."

"What happened at this meeting that disturbed you so much?"

"It's hard to talk about this."

"This is a place of trust and confidence, Gary. I'm here to help you."

"It's not just the fear or humiliation. It's that, well, I've done a lot of reading on this phenomenon, this alien abduction thing, since it's been happening to me, and it's hard to say how much of this is things I thought out for myself, or things that sort of were suggested to me from the books. A lot of the things I didn't realize until I read about them."

"Such as?"

"The lightshow to create a disorienting effect. The Men in Black. The missing time. Especially the...the sexual things. The experiments. A lot of it didn't make sense until I'd studied it."

"Well, just continue, and maybe we can figure out exactly what's your memory and what's perhaps suggestion."

"That day, that was the first time they did the...the experiments."

"Would you like to go into any detail?"

"I'd...no. Not now. Maybe later, it's too hard now."

"I understand."

"But, you know, it was all sexual. Extraction of, of seminal fluid. Probes. Just like in other people's stories. And I don't say that like, oh, I picked it up from their stories, but more like, that's what helped me know I wasn't crazy. That it had happened to other people."

"Go on."

"Well, if that had been it, I would have...well, I wouldn't have gotten over it. But maybe I could have coped. But it didn't end there. I kept running into them -- at nightclubs, parties, when I was shopping, even at the bus stop when I went to visit my mother in Milwaukee. Every time, it would end the same way. I would spot one of them someplace; he would use that strange signal-language to determine that I was, well, onto him, I guess you'd say. And before I knew it, they were repeating their horrible experiments, in endless variations."

"I see."

"I started to feel as if I was in some sort of horror movie, you know? They seemed to be everywhere. I even found out one of my co-workers is one of them."

"How did you find that out?"

"He approached me a few weeks ago, and said he'd spotted me in one of their lairs."

"Which one would this be?"

"Male Hide. It's in Roscoe Village."

"Hmmm. Continue."

"He said he had no idea I was...I was one of them. The feeling was mutual, believe me. I figured, maybe I could use him. I mean, like, infiltrate. Find out more about their plans. He invited me back to his apartment, and while I was rooting around in his bathroom cabinets for evidence, he gave me the chemicals."

"Chemicals?"

"It was in inhalant form. It caused a kind of euphoria. Naturally, it all ended with the extractions and probings. They've started using the chemicals with a great deal of regularity now. I think that's what's responsible for the missing time."

"Interesting."

"I'm at my wit's end. More and more of them seem to be infiltrating my social circle. I can hardly escape them. It's like no matter where I go, they're there, in all my favorite bars and shops and restaurants. I feel completely helpless to stop them or understand them. Do you know what's happening? Am I insane?"

"We don't like to use words like 'insane', Gary. But have you ever heard of 'rationalization'?"

"I'm not familiar with it."

"Actually...I think you are."