When the UFO passed over me, my entire sense of reality took a good crack in the jaw by the gnarly-knuckled fist of Fate.

I was driving from the desert, a two hour trip back into the city, being unfaithful to my wife—with a woman from my past.

I'd been seeing Roni five months now; twice a week I went out to her desert home, spending the day with her, sometimes even the night—if it seemed right, if circumstances permitted. I was an investigative reporter for San Diego's largest newspaper, and the excuse of an assignment or research allotted me time for extra-marital activity.

I'm not sure if my wife, Sheila, cared. Our marriage had been falling apart for some time; and was, I knew now, a mistake from the beginning.

I didn't know how to get out.

I'd been unfaithful to her before: the impromptu one-night stand, the occasional married friend who also wanted a mutual break from the spouse. I didn't doubt Sheila had done the same...I didn't blame her if she did.

I didn't care.

Roni was different. I knew her from before, another life; she wasn't a lover, she was my first wife's best friend.

I was driving back from the Anza-Borrego desert, from a little town called Borrego Springs, heading into San Diego, not sure what reality was anymore, when reality got weird.

The UFO was big, black, and triangular.

#

"Just tell me," I said to Roni, before I left, "and I'll do it."

She smiled, pushing her curly blonde hair from her eyes. All she wore was a long beige skirt. Her breasts pressed into me. "Tell you what?"

"Tell me to leave Sheila," I said.

"I'm not going to tell you to do anything. If you want to leave her, leave her. That's a decision you have to make on your own."

"Don't you want me to leave her?"

"I want you to do what you feel you want to do," adding: "and need to do."

"It doesn't bother you that I'm married?" I asked.

"No," she said.

We were lapsing into a conversation we'd had many times, as lovers tend to do. I just didn't understand her position. And I told her this, too.

She sighed, and slipped a t-shirt on. "I've been in a lot of relationships, Neil. Good, bad, beautiful, and ugly. What do we have? We have the good and the beautiful. We love each other. You're in a bad marriage. Being here with me is good for you. And it's good for me. I was celibate for three years out here, all alone. But do you really think if you got a divorce and came out here more often things would remain so nice and wonderful? One of the reasons it works is because we see each other twice a week, under a time constraint, so we're always missing each other, and every moment is..." She smiled. She didn't have to go on.

"I'll still only come out twice a week," I told her.

"No. It'll be more often. You'll spend several nights, maybe a whole week, maybe two weeks. At first, it'll be great. But then..." She was still smiling.

"Then?"

"I really need a lot of private time and space," Roni said Her smile went away. "You haven't seen my bad side."

"You don't have a bad side."

"Oh yes I do," she said, seriously.

Maybe I didn't want to know.

"I'm just confused," I said.

"I know," she said. "So am I. That's part of it."

"Part of what?"

A shrug, and, "Everything."

"Maybe it's the mid-life crisis thing on the horizon," I said. "I'll be forty soon."

"Me too."

"I guess I should go."

She held out her arms. I went to her. We kissed.

Roni said, "Then again, I could be wrong, and we might be able to spend life together in bliss, forever in an embrace."

"See you Thursday," I said.

"Thursday," she said.

#

It was a moonless, star-filled night. My car went dead. The black triangle was about fifty feet above the ground. I got out and looked at it. It was several hundred feet long. It didn't make a sound. I'd heard about flying aircraft such as this, like on the Art Bell show. I'd read about them here and there, even through faxes that came into the newspaper offices late at night, often small towns with a great number of witnesses, outlandish stories that always disappeared.

I told myself it was a stealth military craft. There were secret bases out here in the desert, the military had them everywhere. I never doubted sighting stories, there were just too many; but I also knew our military was testing a whole lot of goodies it didn't want to make public.

The black triangle disappeared.

One moment it was there, the next it was gone.

I watched it vanish. Poof. So long.

A greenish-purplish ripple followed, like a jagged line in the sky, small at first, getting larger, coming toward me.

The ground below me rippled as well, like waves, like a silent earthquake. I lost my balance. I saw my car shaking.

Then it stopped.

Everything was quiet.

The stars twinkled.

I felt sick. I was dizzy, my stomach was twisting in on itself. I thought I was going to vomit. I tried. I didn't.

I sat there on the ground for a minute.

I got up, went back to my car; didn't know if it would start.

It did.

I slowly started driving away, back on course for home.

Ten minutes later, I retrieved my cell phone from the glove compartment and called Roni.

"Yes," she said.

"You won't believe what just happened to me."

"Neil?"

"Yeah."

"I can't talk right now."

"What?"

"I just can't."

"You want to hear this," I said.

"Neil, I cannot talk..."

"What's going on?"

"Call me tomorrow."

"When?"

"Whenever," she said, and, "sorry," and hung up.

I saw what looked like a hitchhiker up ahead. It was. It wasn't quite human, either. It wore a shabby suit, and stood on two legs, but had a long green tail and three elongated heads three times the size of a human being's head; each head had three eyes and three mouths with rows of shiny sharp teeth, like something out of a wild Saturday cartoon. It held out a very long arm with a very long thumb and was staring intently as I drove by.

I drove by fast.

"Sorry," I said, "no ride for you."

I saw it again a mile up. Or another creature like it. Better suit, same appearance.

"HEY," all nine mouths of the three heads yelled, "GIVE ME A LIFT!"

"Right," I said.

My cell phone rang. I hoped it was Roni.

"Yeah."

"Mr. Haldeman?" a metallic-sounding male voice said.

"Yeah."

"Take this advice, and don't talk about what you just saw."

"What's that?"

"Don't think about it, don't utter a word, pretend it was all a dream."

"Who is this?"

"Listen to me," the voice said, "don't talk about what you just saw, to anyone. You called your girlfriend, you were going to tell her. Don't do that."

"Yeah," I said, "and what did I just see?"

I passed another thumbing three-head, three eyed, three-mouthed, now wearing an Armani.

"Don't play games," said the voice.

"Games? Games? Who the hell is this?"

The line went dead.

An octopus-looking thing was standing on several tentacles in the middle of the road. I slammed on the brakes. It sprouted wings and flew over my car.

#

The rest of the drive was uneventful.

I got home at eleven-forty-five. Sheila was in bed, watching The Tonight Show. Jay Leno was telling some bad jokes and smiling his big-chinned smile. I thought if he had three heads and three mouths, he might look like those hitchers.

Sheila and I said hello to one another.

As I always did when returning from Roni and the desert, I took a shower—I guess to get Roni's smell off me, or maybe to feel clean when returning to my other life, this married life.

I got into bed, naked.

Sheila was looking at the TV.

"I don't know what reality is anymore," I blurted out, looking at Jay Leno.

Sheila did something surprising. She reached over and kissed me. It was a deep kiss, an erotic kiss, helped by her hand reaching down to my crotch.

It didn't help enough. I wasn't into it.

"Bastard," Sheila said, turning away from me.

She knew. I should've said, "Let's just get a divorce and make this clean." Instead, I laid there. Sheila went to sleep. I turned off the TV. I listened to her light snoring. I looked out the bedroom window, at the stars.

The stars just aren't the same in the city as they are in the desert.

#

"Do you ever think about Jenny?" Roni had asked me once, maybe twice.

"All the time," I'd told her. "Not as much as I used to, like ten years ago. But a day doesn't go by when I don't think about her one way or the other"—like seeing someone walking down the street that had straight black hair like she did, like smelling something that reminded me of a smell she liked—a food, a perfume, a body...her body.

Roni'd said, once or twice or maybe even more, "I always think about her."

"Of course"—they'd grown up together, had been best friends.

Roni'd said, "Sometimes I wonder what she'd feel, about the two of us being together now."

"Are we together?"

"You know what I mean."

"I wonder about that too," I'd said.

"She'd be happy, I believe this," Roni'd said, once, twice.

"Yes," I'd said, but I was uncertain.

"She would, because when we're together, it's almost like magic."

"Almost?"

"We're almost there," Roni'd said.

#

Sheila was gone in the morning. She was at work. She was a public defender; work started early in the morning for her.

I called Roni. She didn't answer. She didn't have an answering machine or voice-mail, neither of which she believed in. "If you're meant to get in touch with me," she always said, "you will."

#

Getting dressed, I recalled a dream from last night. There was something, somebody, at my window. The window was open. The stars were really bright. This person at my window was large and gray—human-like, with a lot of muscles, and wings and glowing red eyes.

"What do you want?" I asked.

"Not you," it said in a whisper: "I want her."

He pointed a long-nailed finger at Sheila.

"You want my wife?" I asked.

"You don't," it said.

#

I took a shower, then tried calling Roni again. Nothing. I tried Sheila at work. It was eleven-thirty, she'd be back from court.

"Something weird happened last night," I said.

"Yeah," she said, "tell me about it," and hung up.

I decided I should go into work myself. The great thing about being an investigative reporter with a good track record, I kept my own hours. None of that nine-to-five bullshit for me. I liked it this way. I hoped it always would be this way. I dreaded a life where it was anything otherwise.

Outside, leaning against my car, was a six-foot-five man with very pale skin. He was extremely thin. He wore a shiny black suit with a thin black tie, a button-down shirt, shades, and a black fedora.

"Mr. Haldeman," he said. His voice sounded...I don't know. Like a robot. Had I heard it before?

"Yeah?"

"Didn't I tell you, last night, not to talk about what you saw?"

"What?"

"I called, remember?"

Oh, yes, I'd heard that metallic voice not too long ago.

I said, "That was you, huh?"

"Of course it was me!" he yelled; not much emotion in it, though.

"I didn't say anything," I said.

"Mr. Haldeman, come with me please."

"No."

"Come with me please," he said, a hint of anger in the voice. He pointed to a black sedan parked across the street, tinted windows.

My curiosity got the best of me. It was part of my job, my life. I wanted to know where this would go, and what this was about.

I went with him.

"Do you have a name?" I asked.

"No," he said.

"You're just one of those mysterious Men in Black, right?"

"Right."

There were three of them, actually. One behind the wheel, one riding shot-gun. They all looked exactly the same, like clones. I sat in back with the first one. The car drove away, wandering around the neighborhood streets.

"Well," my MiB said, "here we are."

"What's the deal?"

"I admire your journalism. I read much of it last night."

"What's the deal?" I asked again.

"I gave you a warning last night. But you've been trying to call your girlfriend, with the intent of talking about what you saw. And you called your estranged wife, wanting to talk to her as well. But she didn't want to talk to you. She's very unhappy with you. As you are unhappy with her. Do you know that she has not, in fact, been unfaithful to you, as you have been? That will soon change, I'm sure."

I asked, "How do you know so much about me?"

He replied, "I am resourceful."

"Who are you?"

"Who do you think I am?"

"The government?"

All three laughed, in unison, robot-like. They stopped at the same time.

"Okay, I get it," I said. "Last night I saw a test flight of some secret aircraft. That's what this is about, right? I saw the black triangle, you don't want me to talk about it."

"The airship is not our concern," he told me. "It's what started this. It's what you saw on the road."

"The weird creatures?"

"They might take offense to that description."

"Those were hallucinations," I said.

"That's a good start," the MiB said. "Think of them as...bad dreams. Think of me as a bad dream. This ride, this car, this whole conversation. File it away as a bad dream before it becomes an ugly nightmare. We're here, we want to go back, we don't need complications. It's the nature of colliding realities."

"What if I decide to write about this?" I said. "I could do a story for the newspaper, expose it all."

The three laughed again, shorter this time: a concert chuckle.

"You'd lose your job," my MiB said. "Your editor, your employer—they'd think you're crazy. They wouldn't publish your article. And if they did, your readers would think you're insane."

This I already knew.

"And you know this," he said.

"Yes," I said.

He leaned into me. "What's that saying? 'Mum's the word.'"

The car stopped.

"You may get out."

"You won't even take me back home?" I said, smiling.

"No. We have other business to attend to. It's not a long walk. The walk will do you good. You haven't been exercising lately."

I got out. The sedan drove away. I looked around. Maybe half a mile walk back home. I had a nauseating feeling, like I did last night, and heard what sounded like the crack of a whip. I turned around. The black sedan wasn't anywhere in sight.

#

Okay, I told myself, it's all a bad dream.

I went to the newspaper building in Mission Valley like nothing had happened, like my life made sense, and sat behind my desk. I didn't look at any of the wires, releases, or phone messages waiting for me, even if they were piled up more than usual.

I just kind of sat there, staring at the screen of my Macintosh.

Aside from my investigative pieces, I also wrote an editorial column that appeared twice a week. I had to turn in 800 words by midnight. I thought about writing of the nature of marriage and love—

Like I knew anything about the subjects.

#

I got married to Jenny when we were both twenty-five. Roni was always around, being my wife's best friend, and I never thought that one day I would be in love with Roni. I never thought that one day Jenny would die, either.

#

I must've fallen asleep at my desk—this is what I was telling myself when I found myself in the middle of the dream, or vision, or whatever it was.

I was standing in front of my apartment building. The sun was setting, a fog was coming in. I had a sense of dread. Something was wrong, something not quite right. My bones hurt. A voice in my head was saying: Don't go inside.

It's okay, I told the voice, this isn't real.

And, of course, my curiosity got the best of me—

So I went inside.

My apartment was dark, and I knew Sheila was here. I could almost smell her. I could hear her. Soft moans coming from the bedroom. I didn't turn on any lights and I'm not sure why. The fog seemed to be coming into the apartment. I walked down the hall to the bedroom. The hall seemed longer than usual, the kind of clichŽ distortion you'd expect in a dream/vision like this. Sheila's moans were increasing in frequency and loudness.

I opened the bedroom door, half-expecting it to be locked, half-determined to bust it open if it were.

The room was dark and filled with fog. The window was open, but it was very warm. The smell of sex was as thick as the fog. Sheila was naked on the bed, lying on her stomach; her rear-end arched high, meeting the thrusts of the figure that was fucking her.

The thing molesting my wife was the gray, red-eyed, winged-man from my previous dream. I caught a glimpse of its oddly-shaped penis going into her, as I moved closer, and said, "Sheila?"

They both looked at me. Sheila's hair was damp, in her eyes; her whole body was covered in sweat. The creature's wings expanded, and I got a good look at them: yellow-spotted like a moth's. In fact, his face was like a moth, fuzzy and gray. His eyes seemed redder than last time.

"Neil," Sheila said, "I'm in ecstasy,"

"Go away," the mothman told me.

I snapped out of the dream, the vision, the state, and stood there, well-aware that this was quite real. I was in the room, the fog was still here, the mothman was still on top of her.

"LEAVE," it said, rising up on its legs to confront me.

"Don't hurt him," Sheila said to her lover.

I ran.

#

My car was outside. I didn't know how I got here, I didn't remember driving here, leaving work, nothing. I called Roni on the cell phone.

"Hello," she said.

"Thank God you're there."

"Neil, I can't talk right now."

"Don't give me that, don't even give me that," I said. "I need to talk to you!"

"Then come out here."

"I'm on my way."

#

A whole plethora—maybe circus is the word—of oddities were trying to hitch a ride on my way to Borrego Springs. They didn't start showing up until I'd gotten out of Ramona and reached San Ysabel, taking Highway S2 to S22 into the desert. The thing with three heads and three mouths and eyes and the good suits started first; next came some amalgamations of squids and birds; monkeys and dragons; fish and giraffes. It was like some mad scientist was going haywire on genetic splicing. The closer I got to Borrego, the more adamant and aggressive they became—yelling at me, calling me names, trying to jump in front of my car. I wasn't going to stop. I'd plow through them all. I wished I had a gun; I knew I would not hesitate to fire upon any of these monsters. They wanted to frighten me away, I realized, and while I was scared, I was also determined. I found it strange how easily I accepted all this. I knew it had to do with the black triangle I saw in the sky. I knew the answers were in Borrego, with Roni.

#

She was sitting serenely on her couch, in a long, dark skirt and blouse, petting some strange cat-sized creature that was sitting demurely in her lap. But it wasn't a cat, more like a small lion, with a goat's head sticking out of its back and a snake for a tail.

"You got here fast," Roni said.

"I drove like hell," I said.

"Something incredible is happening," she said.

"Tell me about it," I said, sitting cautiously next to her. The thing in her lap looked up at me with three eyes. "What is that?" I asked her.

"Generally known as a chimera, if I know my mythical beasts. She's quite harmless. She's a baby chimera, actually. I don't know if she breathes fire, so let's not provoke her."

I heard a car pull up outside, a door open. Next came several angry knocks.

"Who could that be," Roni said, not like she really cared.

"Mr. Haldeman!" the familiar metallic voice said. "Open up right now!"

I got up.

"Neil," Roni said.

"It's okay," I told her.

I opened the door. There stood my Man in Black. Before he could talk, I punched him in the face. He stepped back. I punched him again. His shades broke, his eyes popped out, green jelly started coming out of his ears. Then springs came out of his head, and he fell down. I started kicking him.

Roni, holding her chimera, came out and said, "Neil, stop, that's not necessary."

"I'm sick of this jerk!" I kicked him some more. Springs popped out all along his body, with loud twangs!

"He was only following the attitude of the image he's in."

I stopped, breathing hard. "Say what?!"

The other two identical black-clad goons came out of the sedan. I was ready for them. I wondered what I'd do if they pulled out weapons. They ignored me; they picked up their fallen companion, took him back to the vehicle, and drove away.

"I knew it," I said. "Their threats were empty."

#

"This is what I think happened," Roni said, as we settled back in her house; she'd seen the UFO as well, it'd passed over Borrego, and the same rippling aftershock followed. "I don't know if that UFO was ours or someone else's, but it kept disappearing and re-appearing. I think it was traveling inter-dimensionally. Maybe it was having problems. I believe it tore open a hole between dimensions—ours and others—and a few inhabitants of those other realms came through here.

"Think about it," she went on. "In the past, people have reported visitations by mysterious Men in Black making all kinds of threats, after seeing a UFO. Just like those three that were at the door."

"You didn't seem at all shocked or surprised about it," I said.

"Not after what I've been seeing around here lately," Roni said, petting the chimera in her lap—first the lion's head, then the goat's head, then the snake head on the end of the tail. "This sleepy little town has been a madhouse of all kinds of creatures of our collective dreams."

"Dreams," I said.

"Yes. These things we have been seeing—they are entities of another reality—a reality we can't even comprehend—taking the shape and form of the things of our myths and nightmares. All my life, I studied about how to inter other dimensions and realities, but I could never do it. Yet there was always the warning: prepare yourself. Many who have gone to other realities have come back insane. The other reality was too much to comprehend, to understand; it didn't conform to this reality.

"I believe the residents of whatever other realities were opened up don't have shape and form or mass like we know and understand. By the same token, this reality we know doesn't make a damn bit of sense to them. They try making sense of it, or becoming part of it, by reaching into our minds and taking forms...of images in our subconscious."

I asked, "Why not just take human shape?"

"Maybe they don't understand something that tangible."

The door opened, and a woman walked in. She was wearing jeans and a heavy jacket. She looked just as I remembered her—her hair, her make-up, her smile.

"There's something else, too," Roni said, softly.

I stood up. "Jenny."

"I had a nice walk," Jenny said.

"Jenny," I said, "what?"

"I think the dead walked through the reality rip as well," Roni said.

#

Jenny wanted to talk with me outside. We took a walk into the dark desert night. "I can't get enough of breathing air again," she said. She stopped me. She hugged me. "I missed you."

"You're alive," I said.

"For now."

"I don't understand."

"Either do I. Does it matter?"

"I guess it doesn't. I don't—don't know what to do."

"Do you have to do anything?" she said.

'I don't know what to feel," I said.

She took my hand. "Feel joy."

We walked in silence.

"What's it like on the other side?" I asked her.

"I don't really remember," she said. "I remember being alive, we were married, and then I died, and now I'm here."

"Almost ten years later."

"Yes," she said.

"I have so many things to tell you."

"Hush," she said, stopping again. She put two fingers to my lips. "I know you re-married, I know you're having sex with Roni. It's okay. It doesn't mean anything to me."

"You're not the Jenny I knew," I said.

"Of course I'm not," she said. "I've been dead for a decade. It can change a person."

"Why'd you do it?" I said. "I've always wanted to ask you. Why did you shoot yourself?"

She made a face, thinking. She said, "I wasn't happy with life. Maybe I seemed happy on the outside, but on the inside..."

I stepped away from her. "You're not Jenny. She didn't kill herself. She died of cancer. Who are you?"

"Someone who enjoyed pretending to be her for a moment."

This fake Jenny changed shape before my eyes. She became a thirty-foot snake. I was ready to die, for anything. The snake stuck its tail in its mouth and rolled away into the night.

#

Roni had a beer opened for me when I got back, and one for herself.

"That wasn't Jenny," I said.

"I suspected," she said. "I wasn't sure."

"I need to sit down."

"I know."

We sat down together on the couch. I sipped my beer.

"Hold me," I said to her.

Roni held out her arms. I pressed my face against into her breasts.

"All my life I searched for the mystical and the mysterious," Roni said, running her hands through my hair. "That's why I moved out here to Borrego. There's an energy here. It was either Sedona or Borrego, and I picked this desert. I knew it would come to me one day, it would knock on my door when I least expected it. And I also knew I probably wouldn't be prepared, I wouldn't know what to do." She paused. "And I didn't. I've been as flabbergasted as you, as everyone else who's been touched by the other reality."

"Hey," I said, sitting up. "Where's your pet?"

"I don't know. It vanished not long after you left with—with—her....It vanished. I don't think it's coming back. I think the rip in reality is mending itself."

"Then all this crazy shit will stop?" Did I sound too hopeful, like a child?

"Perhaps. But it's changed us as well. So does it ever really stop?"

"I need to go back into the city," I said.

"I know," she said.

"I'll be back," I said.

"I know," Roni said.

#

I didn't leave immediately. I stayed with Roni until dawn, until she was asleep, with her dreams.

As I drove up the mountain to leave the desert, an old man with elongated features was riding a bicycle up with me. He wore red shorts. His skin was a weird tint of orange, his body bony and muscular. He looked like he was a hundred years old. I tried to get away from him. He maintained his speed alongside me.

"Hey there!" he said.

"Hello," I said.

"Amazing, isn't it?"

"What's that?"

"That I can keep up with you," he said.

I picked up the speed, tires screeching around every sharp corner. He was still beside me.

"You see?" he said.

"It is pretty amazing," I said.

"It's like I have super-human strength," he said.

"Maybe that's because you're not a human," I said.

"You make a good point," he said.

"Look, what do you want?" I asked.

"Nothing really."

I shrugged. Let him do what he wanted to do. I ignored him. At some point, I'm not sure when, he wasn't alongside me anymore.

#

Sheila and the mothman were lounging around naked in the living room, drinking coffee and eating bagels and watching the news on TV.

"Hello, Neil," Sheila said, without a hint of embarrassment or shame.

"Good morning," the mothman said.

I sat across from them. "Do you have a name?"

"Call me Bud," he said. He laughed: a strong, confident chuckle.

"This is going to be hard to explain," Sheila said to me.

"No, it won't," said Bud the mothman. "I believe he already understands."

"I remember seeing an image of Bud when I was a young girl," Sheila said. "I was at church, people were singing a hymn. I closed my eyes. I saw him. He was making love to me."

"An unusual image to have in the throes of praise to Jesus," Bud said.

"The rip in reality is closing," I said, sounding like Roni.

"Yes," the mothman said, "it has."

"Don't you need to go back where you belong?"

"No."

"You intend to stay here?"

"Yes," he said, "with Sheila."

She went into his arms. His wings moved in around her.

"You don't want her," Bud the mothman said, "and I do."

"You have Roni," Sheila said. "I was mad at you about that. I'm not anymore. Things have a way of working out."

I said, "He can't possibly exist in this world."

"Of course I can," Bud said.

"How?"

"How does any creature exist in this world?" he said.

"You make a good point." I stood up.

The mothman added, "There have been others, like me, not like me, over the centuries, who have. It's called love."

I gathered up a few necessities into a suitcase and left.

I drove back to the desert.

I needed to exist in this reality as well.