Susan Lumenello // Fiction

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A Long Wait for Professor Ferry

So there’s Ferry, in the lovely, lush backyard of his white-columned, much-admired home in the suburban ease of coastal Massachusetts. It’s September. Three in the morning, give or take a few minutes, and refreshing at last after a day that peaked at ninety-nine.

Ferry stands beside the old concrete birdbath, soiled, stained, waterless, and birdless. His sneakers press into the sun-scorched lawn, underfed in Ferry’s housekeeping apathy. He wears his chinos, a short-sleeved seersucker shirt, a light barracuda jacket. He has no hat, but there’s a travel toothbrush in his shirt pocket. He’s left behind his cane in the umbrella rack in his foyer. Somehow he thinks he will no longer need it, as if his new friends will cure a chronically unreliable hip. They will be friends, he’s sure.

Ferry’s a handsome man still, strong and capable still. He has wavy white hair and gray eyes with what, had he been asked, he’d call a glint. Since last week, though, his face features a vivid sunburn that runs from Ferry’s forehead to his notable chin, a chin he’s jutted at insipid colleagues on a regular basis through the decades. The chin juts no longer, though. Ferry feels, most often, defeated.

The burns also cover the backs of his hands, forearms, and the tops of his feet. He’d worn sandals that night, and you don’t get a sunburn at night, certainly not from the sun. The morning after, Ferry wrote those words in his diary on a page that he later tore out and destroyed. At some point, he is sure, someone will wonder about that torn-out page and come up with a wrong explanation.

There’s also a song that repeats in Ferry’s left ear. He thinks of it as a song, though he can’t really make out what it is. It’s like something caught in between radio stations, with high-pitched and tinny voices. For a day or two after it happened, Ferry would sit on the edge of his bed, his head cocked, trying to catch a significant phrase. He accepts the sounds now, considers them part of the deal. Like a song in a dream, they can’t be captured fully. He suspects the sounds could even become something of a comforting presence. He expects to be told all about it.

It wasn’t easy for Ferry to give in to this fact, and he now considers it a fact. Once it had been, he assumed, a hallucination. It was a quirk of the eye, a retinal mirage. Some sort of weather experiment or a celestial oddity, something any bright young astronomer could account for. Then it became a supposition, a frightening one at that.

When he finally got to bed that morning, he thought about what it was he might have seen out in the backyard. He ran over and over his mind the little inner movie of the thing in the black sky that skittered across his field of vision. And there were noises coming from it, the same ones that were bothering his head. Wasn’t it all true?

Ferry groaned, his head resting uneasily on the sweet-smelling pillow. Oh, dear, he thought, here’s a simple diagnosis for you students: your retiring professor of psychology is having himself a break with reality. Not a violent one, thankfully, but not pretty either. All of the sadness of the past few years, in combination with an undeniable face-to-face with his mortality, has culminated in a rather pathetic wish-fulfillment exercise, delivered to him by his eyes and ears, on orders from his tormented brain.

Ferry slept poorly that morning and woke, mid-day, with the same uncomfortable thoughts. Though late, he had his usual breakfast of sliced bananas and vanilla yogurt by a window that overlooked the backyard. Ferry couldn’t help searching it for some physical sign of a visit. But there was no tell-tale circle of burnt grass or odd scrap of alien metal or anything else that Ferry might have expected, though he didn’t know what he was looking for precisely. Something that hadn’t been there before.

Ferry became tired of analyzing himself, and he allowed his mind to entertain strange possibilities, to try to define—rather than ignore—what he’d seen. It was a relief from the thoughts that he ordinarily breakfasted with: unforgiving images of his wasting wife in a hospital bed, of his daughter’s plain uninterest in an airport departure lounge, of stealthy colleagues feigning sympathy.

Someone, it was his childhood friend Diamond actually, tried once to convince Ferry that visitations from the dead were possible, but only if one were receptive. This stuff interested Diamond, who’d lost too many people too early. His friend’s curiosity was perhaps natural, but it frightened Ferry, who was mostly interested in things he already knew about. Ferry found Diamond slightly ghostly, though he was very earthly, a round-faced, convivial storyteller, fond of laughing. Not like a real diamond at all, Ferry always thought. Not so multifaceted, not so hard. That’s what Ferry liked about him.

But Ferry hadn’t believed his friend. He’d been insulted by the mere suggestion that something so ridiculous, so hopeful in the face of life’s most unhopeful facts, would have the temerity to exist. Diamond waited forever for his visitation and, as far as Ferry knew, never received one.

Science demands reproducible results. Anything can be said to have happened once, but only in repetition can a claim become a fact. Now, this thing in the sky only came once to Ferry. Quite true. But it hardly seems fair, he thinks, to discount it for that. Slim chances should still count. Anyway, science doesn’t help him anymore anyway. So much for a lifetime of study.

Lately, Ferry’s been recalling that line from Conan Doyle, via Sherlock Holmes, something about the truth, no matter how improbable, being whatever remains after all the untruths are cleared away.

He knows how he’d sound were he to utter a word of this to any friend or acquaintance remaining. But Ferry’s not crazy, he knows. He’s not even frightened anymore. No, just the opposite. He spent that early morning in the emergency room, convinced of a stroke. It didn’t explain the burns, only the raggedness of his thinking that night. But they’d only sent him home with a prescription for an antidepressant and a salve for his skin. Driving back, Ferry regretted having given his real name.

Ferry hasn’t seen them, but he has seen their ship, and it was magnificent, just like the one in that movie. He knows, he believes, he hopes that whatever would develop such a craft must have special, supreme intelligence and sensitivity. They can’t be any worse than the creatures he’s been left to mingle with here on earth. Which is how he views himself: as one who mingles. One who can’t settle, can’t rest, only hovers. All of it is unbearably tiring to him.

This was going to be Ferry’s big year, professionally, at least. He was going to get a fourth honorary degree in May, this from his alma mater. He was going to be the keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association next summer. He was in negotiations to bring out a fourth edition of A Theory of Personality. He was going to be granted emeritus status, though this last was not his desire. Ferry wants to remain in the department, teaching full-time. But there’s Myers.

Myers, brilliant, bullet-headed, waits for him to falter, waits for the chance to compose that memo headed “A Recommendation to the Faculty.” But Ferry’s doing fine, much to Myers’s chagrin. Healthy except for the hip, healthier than some of the younger ones in the department. Certainly worth keeping on, one would have to say. My God, Ferry thinks, ego aflame: I resurrected that department after the harassment mess in 1997.

Old news, Ferry reminds himself, breathing deeply to recapture composure, nodding. Unimportant now, he thinks. Ferry pictures another version of himself, in his sneakers, for that seems to help, slowly walking along a wooded path, far from the university, to where no universities exist.

Perhaps they want to talk about universities, about learning, human pedagogy. Perhaps they meant to speak with Myers and had somehow mistaken the two colleagues. That one makes Ferry laugh. There’s part of Ferry that knows he’s wrong, that’s ashamed at how his need is being manifest. He decides to give in to it anyway though, decides to exhaust all probability. It’s like a new hobby, a very private one.

Everything that matters now to Ferry is, for lack of a better word, extraterrestrial. His beloved wife, cynical and sentimental, often at the same moment, dead three years. So many friends, especially Diamond, who went back all the way with Ferry to old Boston Latin School, where he was the superior student. His parents, of course. Even the collie dog that his daughter named Tony C. for the Red Sox player from the ’67 Series who had potential and very bad luck. The player, not the dog.

That daughter, Ferry’s only child, lives in London with a white-collar thief (Ferry’s sure of it, though he’s made no accusations), has for eighteen years. There are no grandchildren. The daughter matters, of course, though she’d matter more to Ferry if he mattered more to her. But he doesn’t, which continues to surprise him.

Ferry stretches his arms over his head, then coughs some damp night air from his lungs. He worries that maybe he ought to have left a note. He even casts a glance back to the house.

But he’d decided against a note, something that might have spoken about “a long journey I always wanted to take.” Any text can be misinterpreted, though, especially a false text. And since he’s sure his body will most likely never be found, there can be no suspicion of suicide, which is what Ferry wished to avoid. Suicide would have harmed his reputation, casting doubt on his competence and muddying things in general. Better to let “the disappearance of Professor Ferry” begin as a mystery and end classified as a crime.

And so the police will get involved, as will his university. Won’t they love that! His daughter will have to come back to the States for a while, something she won’t like, though she’ll wonder how her father died. Violently, she’ll assume. Like most of her generation, she’s violent in her attitudes.

If only death had taken him. He’s waited for it so often in recent years. He wishes to be lifted up some morning from the expensive orthopedic mattress of his oceanic bed and deposited, after the requisite interview with St. Peter, into one of Heaven’s pristine corners (were there any others in Heaven?). It would be just as he’d imagined when he was a boy. He’d be able to meet up with his heroes, Lincoln and Freud, and his parents, and his wife. But he hadn’t been taken, gracefully or otherwise. Nor had he been willing to bring himself to leave by his own hand.

But then came the mercy of this visitation, different than Diamond had envisioned but a visitation just the same. He’d been unable to sleep and was watching television, sports. A rerun of a preseason football game is what it was. A window had been open.

He’d heard a noise coming from out back, something he didn’t recognize as raccoons or slamming car doors from next door or anything like that at all. This sounded warm and weird, electronic and organic at once.

And what he saw then was terrifying and wonderful, an ocean above his head, consuming him or seeming to. Horrible at first, but then something welcome.

Still, Ferry didn’t like to give in to his first conclusion. He’d never found aliens stories at all engaging and certainly not a plausible narrative beyond fiction. But he couldn’t deny that something had happened, and he wanted it to happen again.

The next day and thereafter he read all about the phenomenon. There was plenty to read, too much really. The online material alone staggered him in its volume. Ferry absorbed the case histories and research (some from Harvard, no less) like a hungry man. People believe this stuff. They make it the frame for their lives, all their decisions. It’s a religion, really.

Ferry’s never been a religious man, but he’s been here in his backyard three nights in a row, his travel toothbrush in his pocket every time. He tries not to feel silly, or worse. He tries to think of something good happening to him. He tries to believe in something beautiful.

Yet he’s a psychologist, a member of the one profession that can explain away the desperation that fuels this fantasy. Well, he tells himself: I’m not a psychologist anymore, clearly not, not a professional anything, strictly an amateur human and affecting delight. Myers can have it all.

So he’s ready, once more. After standing for an hour, Ferry’s sitting in the folding chair he’d brought with him for this purpose, in case they were late. After another hour, he lights a cigar and begins to feel stood up, like a schoolboy. Still, he’s afraid to leave the spot.

His wife, he knows, would have worried for him, insisted that he see someone to chase away this idea that creatures flying around the galaxy were coming especially for him. She wouldn’t even have wanted to entertain the word “galaxy” in their home, not in relation to any destination for Ferry. Nor the word “creatures” either. None of this, really. It was tacky, that’s what it was. Sylvia didn’t care for tacky things.

He could transcribe the conversations they’d have had over the issue, over Ferry’s disintegration. She’d have been kind about it, but she’d have been firm. “I’m worried for you, Ferry,” she’d say. “We can’t know everything about everything,” he’d say.

Perhaps he might have convinced her, he wonders. Even better, she’d have been out there with him that night, out investigating the unaccountable noise.

“Why would I make this up?” he’d say. Sylvia knew he wasn’t the sort to make things up. They were two serious, smart individuals.

But surely Ferry has already worried enough about himself to have satisfied his dead wife, his dead mother, his dead graduate advisor, and anyone else who might be concerned. He’s worried, studied, and concluded, and the visitation is the only possible explanation. He’s fairly sure anyway. It’s the explanation he wants, and if he asks himself particular questions, this answer works.

Dawn comes again, and Ferry, drowsy, shakes a little spider off his knee where it had dropped from the worn-out grape arbor. The sounds, tinny and unfocused, are in his head again. A little later, he’s asleep. His cigar drops to the ground where it fizzles in the morning dew.

Susan Lumenello ’s work has appeared in turnrow, Christopher Street, The Harvard Review, Rain Taxi, and The Writer’s Chronicle. She has an MFA in fiction from Bennington College.

Date of Publication: 22 Nov 2006