Tell Me What You Saw

A large glass pane set into the office wall enabled my furtive surveillance of the main workspace beyond. I might have attained a more expansive view of the place if I had dared to shift my chair a little to one side, but the dread of calling attention to myself kept me from doing so. In any case, I doubted I would get far before I found my progress halted by the handcuff securing my left wrist to the desk in front of me.

My seat was situated at such an angle that I could gaze out of the window without a great deal of twisting, and so for the past half hour, I had stared absently at the transparent sheet of glass, watching silent scenes unfold behind it like muted episodes of a television program. The sheriff’s secretary had spent several minutes at the printer against the far wall, pretending that the stream of paper had her full attention, all the while casting fleeting glances in my direction. A young deputy in a khaki uniform continually crossed and recrossed the room, always emerging from and returning to the same cubicled desk. Each time he passed in front of my window, he would flick his eyes towards me, find me returning his look, and turn away with a sheepish expression on his boyish face, which gave me some satisfaction.

Though I constantly wished for his reappearance, the sheriff himself had not yet returned. He had beat a hasty retreat after fastening my arm to his heavy wooden desk, ensuring that the handcuff did not disturb the bandage winding from my left shoulder to the middle of my forearm. I noticed that he did not forget to lock his office door on the way out. His continuous discourse throughout this process might have been an apology, explanation, or excuse for his actions, but an obvious unease had distorted his speech beyond my abilities of comprehension.

Since his hurried departure, nobody had spoken to me or even acknowledged my presence, which both frustrated and unsettled me. This willful ignorance had an upside, however. Amidst a lack of attention, I could easily maintain the appearance of steady self-confidence. The truth was that every minute passed without interruption plucked a nerve like a harpstring, and that after a half-hour of unbroken silence, I was nearly out of my skull with anxiety.

A sudden bloom of movement in the outer workspace caught my eye, effectively dissipating the introspective haze that had enveloped me within the past few minutes. The sheriff, who apparently shared my opinion that his absence had endured long enough, erupted into my line of vision, moving at a rate that I would have previously thought unachievable for someone of his age.

It seemed that his agitation had only increased since leaving me alone in the office. His gray side whiskers stuck out at right angles to his face, and his wide blue eyes raked the room in a frantic search. He caught sight of the young deputy, who had just set off on another round about the room, and made a beeline for him, speaking through his teeth all the way. He flailed his hands fiercely, obviously hoping to convey some important point, but it was not until a new figure trailed the sheriff into the window frame that I thought I began to understand the official’s distress.

There was nothing particularly notable about the newcomer aside from his clothing, which consisted of a crisp black suit, dress shoes, and large sunglasses with frames that gave the impression of a permanent frown. In the practical, unremarkable context of the sheriff’s office the man stood out like a roadside flare, even though in actuality, he was entirely ordinary in appearance. His dark hair had gone silver at the temples. A large birthmark, darker than the skin around it, rested just under his cheekbone like a shadow, giving one side of his face a hollow look. He gripped a clipboard with one hand, but as I watched, he shifted it into the other in order to greet both the deputy and secretary via handshake. As he did, fluorescent lighting caught a wedding band on his left ring finger. His face was angled in my direction, and I saw his mouth pull into a tight smile as the sheriff spoke to him.

My breath caught in my throat when I realized that the man had been looking directly at me for some time. Dark lenses hid his eyes entirely, but his shoes and shoulders pointed squarely at the window serving as my vantage point. The sheriff, recognizing that his guest’s attention had been drawn elsewhere, followed the suited man’s sightline. The deputy and secretary did the same, and within moments I felt ready to collapse under the pressure of four distinct stares beaming in through the office window. Suddenly, I had a great deal of sympathy for aquarium fish.

Forgetting all about my unbothered facade, I twisted in my chair and pretended that some aspect of the room around me had completely captured my attention, though I still felt the burning sensation of eyes on my face. I imagined that the look of the suited man seared hotter than the rest.

Behind and to the right of me, there came the sound of a key turning in a lock. I swung my head around in time to see the sheriff take a cautious step through the office door, followed closely by the man in the dark suit, whose heavy gaze remained focused on me. The taut smile had never left his lips. I initially resolved to stare defiantly back at him, but when he raised a hand and made to remove his sunglasses, my heart lurched and my eyes dipped down to my feet. I shuffled a little closer to the desk.

“Doing alright, miss?” the sheriff queried nervously.

“Alright is one word for it,” I returned dryly. I did not look up.

“I can imagine.” The sheriff’s voice resonated with apology. “I’m sure this is all very—uhm—inconvenient.”

I nearly laughed aloud at the monumental understatement but chose instead to shift my wrist and draw an unmistakable jangle from the handcuffs.

“This gentleman here just wanted to ask you some questions,” the sheriff went on helplessly. After a pause, he added, “Badly.”

“It shouldn’t take long,” an unfamiliar voice assured me, sending a shiver up my back. “Sheriff, if you wouldn’t mind.”

The lawman assented eagerly. I heard his footsteps retreat to the door. There was a creak and a click, but no noise of the key in the lock this time.

A pale hand placed a pair of sunglasses on the desk in front of me. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched the shape of the suited man move toward the window, reach up, and pull at a cord that sent a set of blinds rattling down over the windowpane. I got a good look at the three nervous expressions on the figures outside just before the plastic slats clattered to a stop against the sill.

Stepping around the desk, the stranger settled into the chair doubtlessly intended for the sheriff. He briefly scrutinized his clipboard, squinting a little in a farsighted fashion, before turning it towards me and placing it on the desk and facing me with an air of expectancy.

For the first time, I met his eyes. They shone a cutting shade of gray and regarded me with alarming intensity. I thought they had an inexplicably avian quality to them, and in fact the longer I studied him, the more the man seemed to resemble a bird of prey.

“Can you verify that information for me?” the stranger in the suit asked politely, nodding toward the clipboard.

I peered down at the paper on the desk and felt my mouth tumble open in shock as I read my own legal name, my own home address, my own age, and the words “No Criminal History,” all written in a neat, square type across the page.

“Looks alright,” I stammered.

The man grinned and reclaimed custody of the clipboard. “Amazing what you can find out with a license plate and database access. You know, speaking of it, your car is one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you tonight.”

“My car?”

“You contacted emergency services earlier this evening to report an incident that left your car damaged and yourself minorly injured. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“The injuries have been attended to, I see.”

I glanced to my left, where white gauze had been applied from my shoulder to my forearm. Underneath, the sting of a wicked scrape still lingered. The handcuff encircled the skin at the very border of the bandage. Though I could not see them, I had been told that butterfly strips had been used on the laceration above my left eyebrow.

“Yes,” I repeated.

Nodding his approval, the man reached into his blazer and removed a sleek cell phone from an inner pocket. He tapped the screen a few times, then set the device on the desk between us. A recorded voice issued from the speaker. It took me only a moment to realize that I was now listening to the phone call I had made little more than an hour ago.

“Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”

“Hello.” The shake in my voice was unmissable. “I—uh—well, there’s been an accident.”

“What kind of accident?”

“Car accident. On Old Highway 6. Or—maybe not a car accident, actually, more like—I don’t know, I never—”

“Did you see what happened, ma’am?”

“Yes, I—it was my car—I was driving up a hill when everything just stopped, and things got really bright—”

“Bright?”

“—but I felt like I was still going up—ascending—and so I looked out my window and I was—I was rising off the pavement—”

“Did you say 'rising’?”

“Yeah. But before it got much higher, I opened my door and—kind of fell out—I must have hit my head on something, there’s—blood—on my shirt. But I’m okay otherwise, it’s just that my car—”

“Where is your car now?”

“It dropped it right after I fell out, but it must have rolled off the side of the highway or something—it was still in drive, and I don’t see it anymore—”

“It dropped your car, ma’am? Did you see something lifting it?”

I suddenly remembered what I had said to the dispatcher at this point, and with the memory came a suspicion that would explain why this man had wanted me handcuffed to a desk in the local sheriff’s department. I curled my fingers into fists, closed my eyes tight, and braced for the words that I knew were coming.

“I don’t know, it—it looked like a flying saucer!”

The recording evidently ended there because complete silence fell after this statement and stretched on for several uncomfortable seconds. When I inevitably gave in to the urge to glance up, I locked eyes with the man in the dark suit. He had leaned over the desk with a searching expression, hands clasped tightly together on the polished wooden surface. I felt like a mouse in a trap under his birdlike focus.

“The call continues, but you never give much detail about your accident over the phone. I’m hoping to hear what you left out now.”

“I—Detail? Where did you—”

“Tell me about what happened. Tell me what you saw.”

“Didn’t I?” I protested, extending a hand towards the silent cell phone.

The man shook his head. “I think you can do better than that.”

I spent a beat staring at him in mute confusion, but he said nothing more, and his gaze never once wavered from mine. I swallowed with some difficulty, laboring to string words of explanation together in my mind.

“I guess it was round,” I finally forced out, “and flat. It was shiny, like metal—like steel, maybe. The whole thing looked like a frisbee. It made a space fan kind of noise. My car was in a beam of light that came from underneath. The light wasn’t a cone, like from a flashlight—it went straight into the ground, like a pole or something. It was windy, the way it is when a helicopter comes in for a landing.”

I got no reaction aside from a dissatisfied quirk of the eyebrow. I scoured my brain for further details, tapping a nervous rhythm against the floor with the toe of one sneaker.

“When I fell out of the car, a disc on the underside kind of—slid across the light and cut it off, and then it just—let the car go. All of a sudden, it was like nothing had ever been holding it.”

The man said nothing.

“The car hit the road and rolled down the embankment into some trees, and then the—it—started to go up slowly, then more quickly. It seemed like it was speeding up at a steady pace. But it never changed direction. It just kept going straight up until I couldn’t see it anymore. That’s it,” I added at the end. “That’s all I remember.” I had nothing further to give, I had no desire to continue talking to the man in the suit, and I was ready for somebody to take the handcuffs off. All of this I hoped to make abundantly clear to the stranger in front of me.

The man leaned back in his chair and studied me silently with narrowed eyes. An uneasy feeling took up residence in my chest, and my heartbeat grew audible in my ears.

“This was only a couple of minutes—maybe less. I didn’t see anything else.” By this time, I had adopted a pleading tone, completely disregarding maintenance of my self-assured facade. I did not doubt that this stranger had seen through my faux steadfastness from the start.

The man in the dark suit shook his head, and I felt the panic in me grow until the edges of my vision began to fade out.

“This is everything. I promise. When do I get out? Is there something I’m supposed to say? Everything I told you is true. That’s what I saw tonight.”

The man smiled, and the expression set a stampede of goosebumps loose on my arms.

“My problem exactly,” he said.

The words knocked the breath from my lungs. I stared, wide-eyed and wordless, at the man across the desk, searching his face for indication that this whole evening was a mistake, or a practical joke, or a psychotic social experiment whose personnel had somehow singled me out as a prime subject.

“What, was I supposed to lie?” I seethed, attempting to raise my hands in an exasperated gesture of inquiry. The handcuff yanked my left arm back down before it reached shoulder height. The suited man only smiled at my small outburst. While I returned his gaze with a steady glare, realization began to dawn on me.

“I was supposed to lie, wasn’t I?”

“Maybe.” The man shrugged goodnaturedly. His grin had grown wider, though none warmer. “Even so, they say there’s no time like the present.” He gave me an encouraging nod, glancing meaningfully at my one handcuffed wrist.

“Well, then I didn’t see a flying saucer,” I stated flatly.

The man tapped his hands together in mock approval, but his face told me clearly that more would be required.

“Progress,” he acknowledged. “But in that case, what did you see?”

“Oh, uhm—some animal. A bear. A bear walked onto the highway. I didn’t want to hit it, so I swerved, and I ended up down the embankment and in the woods. I—” I looked to my left and lifted my bandaged shoulder. “I slipped and fell trying to climb the embankment.”

“And your phone call?”

“Er—I was in shock?”

My interrogator smirked, then extended his right hand in my direction. I reached out and shook it gingerly. He rose, straightening his suit and retrieving his sunglasses and clipboard, placing the former over his eyes and tucking the latter under his arm. He reached out and tugged one more time on the cord operating the blinds. The outer office came into view once more, revealing the sheriff, deputy, and secretary staring at the window with identical stressed expressions. All three turned away quickly once the blinds were up.

“Good night,” the man said to me by way of good-bye. “Drive safe, now.” He turned and stepped through the office door, deliberately leaving it ajar.

The sheriff approached him with an inquisitive look, but the man held up a hand, preemptively stemming the flow of precipitate questions. He proceeded to hold a brief conversation with the lawman, and through the open doorway, I heard the words “mild shock” exchanged several times. The two shook hands one more time at the end of the conference, then the man in the dark suit strode decisively to a rear corner of the room, where he prepared to make his exit. Before stepping out, however, he turned and looked my way. Just like earlier in the evening, every set of eyes followed his example, and for an instant, I was once again the sole object of attention.

While I shrank in my chair, intimidated by the numerous gazes suddenly turned my way, the man in the dark suit took the opportunity to place a single pale finger over his lips in the universal signal for secrecy. I, the only witness to this gesture, watched without expression. The man, apparently satisfied, waved once in my direction, turned, and was gone.