On that warm Saturday evening, David Minsky had just closed Terroir, his downtown wine shop, after a well-attended tasting of Sicilian reds, and was corking the unfinished bottles and tidying up when he noticed a man in sunglasses standing at the door, looking at him with that annoying insistence of certain customers who prefer jiggling doorknobs to reading signs, although to be fair, he was just standing there, if rather stiffly. He was tall and very pale, about his age, well-dressed in a dark suit, with short gray hair and a lean, long-chinned face. David smiled and shook his head, pointing to his watch, even as it occurred to him that a man wearing sunglasses at dusk might be blind. Without acknowledging his pantomime, the man turned and headed toward the crosswalk, the question of his blindness apparently resolved by his rapid stride and the absence of either a stick or a seeing-eye dog.

As he was counting the day’s receipts, David happened to notice that the man was now standing in front of the Treetop Restaurant directly across the street, his broad back bathed in the glow of a green-shaded lamp positioned above the menu mounted in a glass case next to the front door. As if feeling his gaze, the man half turned and looked at him over his shoulder, no longer wearing sunglasses and with an odd expression on his face, the features of which, especially his very large eyes, were disturbingly sharp and clear at this distance. He stared back, unable for some reason to look away. The man turned and strolled out of the circle of light into the encroaching darkness. David looked down and realized he’d lost count. He went over to the tasting table and emptied the dregs of a Nero d’Avola into a plastic cup, took a sip, then carefully set down the cup and held his hands before his eyes. He felt strange. It wasn’t dizziness, exactly, yet somehow vertiginous, as if his thoughts were being sucked away in a kind of negative pressure, like the deceptively quiet withdrawal of the ocean from the shoreline just before the vast shoulder of a tidal wave rises blackly out of the distance.  

He heard screaming, as abject and distressing as the squeals of a wounded animal, that he only gradually realized was himself. He smelled red wine, and opened his eyes.  He was sprawled on the tile floor, surrounded by broken glass. The back of his head hurt, and he realized that he must have hit it when he…  what? Fainted? Taking care where he put his hands, he sat up, feeling woozy, then pushed himself to his feet, holding onto the table for support. Walking carefully, he got a paper towel from the bathroom and pressed it against the back of his head. It wasn’t bleeding much. He looked at his watch:  ten minutes after eight. He couldn’t have been out for more than two or three minutes. He poured himself a cup of brandy from a bottle under the counter and sat down on the stool, sipping from it as he tried to piece together what had happened. He thought of his wife, Susan, and reaching for the phone, dialed his home number. There was no answer, and he didn’t leave a message. She’d be cooking dinner about now, and it was possible she was in the middle of something and couldn’t pick up, but feeling anxious, he decided to leave the counting and the mess on the floor as it was and head home now. Worrying about Susan seemed to help keep him oriented.  

As he was walking to the small parking lot behind the store, he saw an ambulance, its lights flashing, in front of The Dominion Grill, one of his downtown hangouts. He passed a man leaning against a building, his tie loosened, face gray and sweaty, who seemed about to speak to him, but when he slowed his pace, the man covered his eyes with one hand and staggered off. David sat in his car for some minutes before starting the engine, sobbing as he hadn’t since childhood, then pulled himself together and headed home.  

After he’d passed the third traffic accident, the number of police cars and ambulances began to add up in his mind. At a stoplight a few blocks from his neighborhood, a young Asian woman lurched across the street in a similar state of dazed distress as himself and the man leaning against the building. He passed cars pulled off the road, their drivers sitting in the grass or on the curb, and several more accidents, some of them serious. As he turned into his driveway, a patch of color under the maple tree caught his eye. It was Susan, smoking a cigarette, a habit he thought she’d given up. He hurried across the lawn toward her, noticing other people wandering around in their yards and in the street, looking bereft and disoriented. Her head was down and she was gripping her elbows as he reached her, but when she looked up and showed him her stricken face, the fear that all the way home had been rising in him finally named itself.

“Are you all right?” he asked. She nodded without answering. Hearing his own voice for the first time since recovering consciousness, he thought of a dog given the power of speech.  

“I fainted in the store, Susan.”

“Oh.”   

“You, too?” he asked.  

She finished her cigarette and nodded.  

“You weren’t hurt?”

She shook her head. “I was sitting down when it happened.”

“Let’s go inside,” he said, taking her by the arm.  

A savory smell greeted him as he opened the front door, but neither of them commented on it. He opened a bottle of Barbera and poured two glasses, and they sat down at the kitchen table. She lighted another cigarette.

“Should we turn on the news?” she asked, her normally hurried speech sounding clogged and indecisive.     

“I think whatever happened was widespread,” he said.  

“You mean everybody?” 

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. There were police cars and ambulances all over the place.”

They drank for some moments in silence, and then Susan began speaking in a low, halting voice. “I’d made lasagna, and was out on the back porch having a glass of wine.  Not thinking about anything in particular. Then I started noticing the drone of cicadas in the trees, unusually loud, I thought, though they probably weren’t, not for this time of year. As the drone periodically faded I could hear evening bird calls, combined with the usual mowers and blowers, and then children’s voices from the fenced yard behind us.  But the cicadas kept drawing me back. There was a rhythm to the drone, a slow intensifying:  it was almost musical. I found myself listening to it in a way I never had before. The rise to crescendo, which is just their collective mating call, I guess, began to seem like something much more profound, that I was only just beginning to understand.  I had this crazy thought that the combined life energy of the cicadas was being harnessed in some way, in order to transform the world we know, the material world, into something else, something…  I don’t know, spiritual, maybe. But the drone kept falling short of the proper frequency. 

“At some point, probably just a few seconds later, I realized that I was losing myself in the cicadas’ drone, becoming part of it. I wanted to put my hands over my ears and shut out the sound, but it was as if—hard to put this into words—as if I couldn’t find my body. It was terrifying. I thought I was dying. The crescendo came again, and this time I knew I wasn’t coming back from it. I felt like…  like an ant ground under the heel of God, of no more importance to His purposes than a single grain of rice is to the life of a human being. I must have passed out, then. When I came to, the wine was all over me and the glass was broken on the floor.” 

She put down her wine glass, then picked it up again, as if she needed to have something in her hands. “I dropped acid once, in college,” she said. “That was scary enough, but this was a thousand times more intense. Everything I thought I was is gone, like it was blowtorched out of me. I feel like an empty shell, like the nothing I’ve always been. The difference is, I see it now.” She drank off her wine and poured another big glass.

After a silence, he spoke. “I’d just closed the store, and was counting. I looked up and saw this guy standing at the door, like he wanted in. I shooed him away, and he walked across the street to The Treetop. At some point he turned and looked back at me, with the oddest expression on his face, that I’ve been trying to think of the words to describe. I can’t. It was a human face, but not a human expression. It was only a moment or two, and then he was gone. I don’t know if he had anything to do with what happened next.”

“Go on,” she murmured.    

“I had the weirdest sensation, like the bottom was dropping out of my mind. I thought I might be having a stroke. Then, something came, something very big and very fast, from a long way off, but from inside, not out. It passed right through me—through my mind—and took me with it. But it’s as if a tiny piece of what went through me stayed inside, the infinitely small fraction that my brain could hold, and that’s all I can talk about. Just before that I’d had a sip of wine, and in desperation, just for something to hold on to, I thought about wine, the Piedmont region. I saw the vines being harvested, a line of oak barrels, the racked bottles covered with dust. The phrase ‘time in a bottle’ occurred to me, then ‘the fruit of time’, then ‘time’s blood,’ then ‘the soul is the wine of the body,’ then ‘life is the blood of time,’ then ‘time is the wine of the gods.’  Each of these thoughts was represented by a barrage of images, sounds, smells, tastes, coming too fast to assimilate, and each was more complex than the last, like a link in a chain being pulled through me in a way that was wrenching and painful to the core. I tried to fight it, but it just swept me away, toward this looming monster of an idea that I knew would swallow me whole:  ‘I’ was one drop in the ocean of blood/wine/soul/time stuff that the gods—whatever they are—must consume, not for nourishment or pleasure in any sense that I could understand, but out of eternal necessity, without pity or cruelty. Somehow I knew that the next link in the chain was the reason why this world exists. And yet that unimaginable ‘why’ was simply one more link in this infinitely long chain of divine or cosmic thought. I think that’s when I fainted.”

After a long silence, Susan said, with the grimmest of smiles, “Maybe it’s the Second Coming.”  

“I don’t know what it is,” David said. “All I know is, they weren’t my thoughts.  I’m not that deep.”

“So you think we somehow eavesdropped on the thoughts of a god?”

“Sounds insane, doesn’t it? But something made contact with us. You felt it.”

“Yes.”  

“Something not human at the very least, maybe not even material. The same thing may have happened to half this city, too—and who knows, maybe half the planet—but the form of the hallucination, vision, whatever, seems to have been shaped by what we were hearing, seeing, and thinking at that exact moment. I was thinking about wine. Your attention was drawn to the sounds in the yard, but especially to the cicadas, and as this Intelligence, or whatever it was, entered your consciousness, the nature of your experience took the path of that insect drone, as if whatever mind had momentarily intersected with yours was hearing the sounds through your ears, and thinking about them. But what for this mind might be just idle, passing thoughts was for you a frightening sense of merging with the sound, of losing yourself. Maybe this Mind X doesn’t acknowledge or concern itself with such arbitrary boundaries as subject/object, self /not-self, or in your case, the human mind and the cicada mind. Your mind was utterly supplanted, hijacked, as mine was, and probably everyone else’s as well. I don’t think the effect of this is going to fade away anytime soon, if ever.”

Susan nodded agreement. “If you gave a cat human intelligence for five minutes, could it ever go back to being a cat?”

“Yes, I think it could,” he said. “Because it wouldn’t have the mental capacity to remember what thinking was like, or a sense of past and future. Those alien experiences would fade away like dreams. But our minds? I don’t know. Maybe we won’t be allowed to forget.”

“Do you want to eat?”

He shook his head. “You?”

“The idea kind of disgusts me. I guess that’ll pass.”

“Look out there,” he said, walking over to the bay window. There was a growing crowd of people milling about in the street, some carrying flashlights. In all the years they’d lived here, they had never seen so many of their neighbors together at one time. “They’re probably doing the same thing we are,” he said. “Trying to get a grip.”   

“Should we go out there?” Susan asked, joining him at the window.  

“They won’t know any more than we do,” he said.

“Let’s find out.”

It troubled him that the visions had not been experienced by everyone. Surely it was in the power of whatever had caused this to force the experience on every human being. Why hadn’t it? Now, he thought, we’ll divide ourselves into two camps:  the Chosen and the Forsaken, or the Touched and the Untouched. Biblical and no doubt apocalyptic interpretations were inevitable, and the results would almost certainly be catastrophic. If he were a scientist from another planet, wouldn’t it be a more fruitful experiment to give half his lab rats a brief taste of higher consciousness, and leave the other half as a control group? A feeling of desolation swept over him. He realized that nothing would ever be the same again.  

Halfway across the yard they encountered a boy about ten loping across the lawn.  He paused long enough to look intently into their faces, then lowered his eyes and hurried on. David guessed that the boy was one of those not affected. He’s looking for fellow Forsaken, he thought. And he recognized at a glance that we were in the other camp. Was his own face, or Susan’s, so obviously different than before? As they neared the end of the driveway, they saw and were seen by people they’d known for years, but it was as if their faces had been taken apart and then put back together by uncertain hands:  discomposed now, stripped of pride and pretense, naked in their irremediable distress. Tonight we’ve seen the Universe, he thought, or at least a tiny fraction more of it than germs in a drop of water ever get to see. And it was too much for us. Far too much.

A car had turned onto their street and was picking up speed as it rounded the curve. Someone shined a flashlight on the car to alert the driver to the crowd’s presence. David saw the car out of the corner of his eye, his attention drawn to the boy he’d seen running past them before. He was now lying on his back a few yards away, staring at his hands silhouetted against the sky, breathing so hard that David wondered if he was having some kind of fit. He began screaming and thrashing in the grass, then went limp, and at the same time Susan yelled “Stop!” and he turned to the sounds of shrieks and saw the car plowing through the crowd that too late had tried to scatter. Bodies were hurled into the air, becoming projectiles that struck down fleeing bystanders. David and Susan had stayed on their own property and weren’t in the path of the car, but they were nearly trampled by the crush of people reeling back from the street.  

David stumbled up the driveway to the house, thinking as he picked up the phone, I was wrong. There’s no chosen and forsaken. It’s all of us now. But the line was dead, and it was only after he’d hung up that he noticed someone standing outside his front window, facing the crowd, a tall, pale figure in a dark suit. Rooted to the spot as much by fascination as by fear, David watched as the head slowly turned in his direction.

 

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