Subject: (urth) Short Story 125*: Sightings at Twin Mounds

From: Marc Aramini <marcaramini at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2015 20:09:29 +0000

#SIGHTINGS AT TWIN MOUNDS

 Inverting the usual order of things, “Sightings at Twin Mounds” was first
collected in Wolfe's 1988 collection *Storeys from the Old Hotel* — though
it was reprinted in the 1996 themed anthology *UFOs: The Greatest Stories*.

 #Summary:

 The story does not follow a traditional narrative, instead representing a
collation of supposedly objective sources to narrate the events in
question: “This puzzling case presents several unique features; because it
is of more than ordinary interest, I shall quote several of the documents
in full.”

 The first article, which attracted the narrator's attention, is a news
snippet entitled “UFOs Spotted Over Park” and mentions the brilliant blue
and white lights over Indian River State Park in Duke County
(certainly set near
Rochester, New York or possibly New England, conceivably near the Canadian
border, though probably entirely fictional) which residents often see after
midnight, with several hundred people witnessing the lights. When police
were dispatched to investigate the lights, they found an incoherent man
there.

 Then, the narrator includes the description of the (most certainly
fictional) Indian River area which includes many mounds, including Eagle
Mound, Twin Mounds, and Snake Mounds. “An Algonquin legend has it that the
site commemorates a raid on an Algonquin village by Iroquois, in which all
the Algonquins perished with the exception of the chiefs daughter, who fled
into the forest pursued by the Iroquois warparty. Encountering the wendigo,
she begged it to defend her.” The two were killed, and their remains
interred under Twin Mounds. The entry ends with, “This legend may arise
from the similarity of the hemispherical mounds to a woman's breasts.”

 The narrator then includes an encyclopedia entry describing a wendigo, an
ogre in the mythology of some northeastern tribes - “Hunters lost in the
forest without food are thought to turn cannibal and, through the effects
of eating human flesh, become wendigo, fearsome enemies of human beings
possessing great strength and appearing and vanishing at will.”

 The narrator requests copies of the *Colbyville Courier*, noting “several
carried half-jocular stories concerning moving lights and 'giant
spaceships' hovering over Indian River State Park”, but quoting only
appropriate parts.

 One article details the man found unconscious, Stanley J. Robakowski, who
was admitted to the hospital and was not truly considered to be responsible
for the lights: “Several witnesses stated emphatically that they had
observed moving lights above the trees after police departed with Mr.
Robakowski in custody.”

 The narrator looks up Robakowski's information and is certain that he is a
“contactee” of aliens or UFOs. By the time he arrives in Colbyville,
Robakowski has been discharged from the hospital. The narrator manages to
arrange a meeting with Robakowski over the phone, but cannot find his way
to the apartment in the rain, calling to arrange another meeting for the
next night when he returns to his hotel.

 “With a day to kill in Colbyville”, the narrator visits the park and talks
to people who had seen the lights. “They were described as very bright,
usually white or blue-white, but occasionally yellow. ?One informant stated
they proceeded from what she termed a 'wingless airplane' ? that is to say,
a torpedo-shaped flying object.” He drives to find Robakowski's apartment,
which is actually the upper story of an old house, and sees the shadow of
an embracing couple on the curtains. He decides to wait and telephones from
a nearby cafe. When he returns, he notices that the door was ajar. After
ringing, he enters and finds blood all over the kitchen, bedroom and hall,
then calls the police at once, though he states no arrest was ever made.

 The doctor who treated Robakowski publishes his account of his stay at the
hospital in *The Journal of the American Psychiatric Society*, using the
pseudonym Stan Roland to identify Robakowski (though both names in the
various objective sources are described as belonging to a man employed at a
paper mill). Roland is described as exhibiting neither hostility nor
aggression and as having no history of psychopathic or psychoneurotic
disturbance. Having come to the park with friends to see if they would
witness the lights, he saw a dim blue light moving in the area of the Twin
Mounds, but others did not believe him. Roland climbed the fence of the
park and claimed that the trails he had known since boyhood had vanished,
being almost free of underbrush. He saw moving blue and white lights but
could not approach them.

 >At this point, Roland invariably became agitated, and the order of
subjective events is unclear. “She ran into me in the dark.” “I thought I
heard somebody screaming off to my right — there was a lot of yelling, and
all of a sudden this girl was holding onto me.” “I was just walking along,
trying to go fast, you know” And all of a sudden my arms were around her.
There is no objective evidence for the existence of this mysterious young
woman, who Roland said could not speak English and seemed terrified.

 They run, assaulted by invisible beings. Roland claimed he could see the
young woman but could not see their attackers, “who were thus tactile and
auditory hallucinations only.” He says that they became separated, but
still feels as if “they and she were still searching for him.” The young
woman called something that sounded like “Where'd he go?”

 ?He said that neither she nor those who had attacked them could see him
now; nor could he see them.

 The narrator concludes by saying that UFO contactees have often felt that
they were shadowed or threatened, “most frequently by *men in black
(MIBs).* Physical harm at their hands are rare, ?and murder almost
unheard-of; and yet murder would appear to have taken place in the
mysterious case of Stanley J. Robakowski.”

 More sightings have been sparse and difficult to verify, but two years ago
an archeological excavation of Twin Mounds was begun, but “All activity was
suspended indefinitely when it was discovered that the site had been
contaminated by ?modern materials.”

 ##Commentary:

 ###I. An Incidental Displacement

 “Sighting at Twin Mounds” is presented as a series of reports and
supposedly objective source stories. According to Wolfe's introduction
to *Storeys
from the Old Hotel, *this framing technique came about in the following
fashion:

 >"'Sightings at Twin Mounds' was written last year as a sort of experiment
... From time to time, no reading gives me more pleasure than supposedly
factual accounts of UFOs, black dogs, vanishing hitchhikers, and similar
apparitions, although all such accounts are ultimately unsatisfactory. (I
recommend *Sasquatch: the Apes Among Us*, by John Green, should you ever
come across a copy.) It seems to me that a good, and indeed entirely
satisfactory story could be written in that style. It is a framed story, if
you like, in which the frame is the whole story; and if you like it, that
makes two of us."

 The concept of John Green's book involves a series of objective reports
and interviews to get a complete picture of the phenomenon, with the
evidence presented logically. This is clearly the inspiration for the
structure of the short story, which uses small snippets to paint a larger
picture (from which the narrator and collator seems unable to draw a final
conclusion which should be fairly obvious.)

 While some readers assert that Wolfe's narrators lie assiduously, I have
always believed that for the most part we are given the truth, unless it
contradicts some other bit of information or forms an identifiable, if
subtle, pattern. For example, when Marsch says that he could not write
because of the cat bite in *The Fifth Head of Cerberus's* final novella, he
might be actually telling the truth, but in a way that we could not have
anticipated on our first reading before we understand that the Shadow child
infection thrives in the saliva of the mouth. When the narrator of many
portions of *The Book of the Short Sun* denies being Silk, he does so as a
psychological defense mechanism that is readily ascertainable: Silk would
not admit that his student Horn has died to bring him back, and as long as
he can hold on to Horn's memories, it is a way to keep his student
alive. Subsequently,
I am reluctant to identify information as a red herring or a useless
lead without
an extremely compelling narrative hint that this is actually the case. The
story features flashing lights, time travel, the corruption of an Indian
word, and the factual, objective structure inspired by Green's book, in
addition to descriptions of the alien cylinders by supposedly objective
witnesses.

 The interpretation which uses the most of these features is the standard
reading: Stan Robakowski is caught by the blue and yellow lights that are
formed when unidentified flying objects travel at extreme speeds above Twin
Mounds, and, caught in the wake of their super fast displacement through
space, is accidentally displaced in time temporarily (when the underbrush
disappears), where he forms a deep union with the young Indian girl. He
seems to be stuck in a kind of phase shift joining the two times together.
Stan and the young girl are attacked by the Indians which they cannot see,
which “Stan Roland” describes as “tactile and auditory hallucinations.” The
union they form leads to a joint occupation of past and present, as he
feels he is still being hunted. When the pull finally creates another
conjunction, our narrator sees Stan and the Iroquois girl embracing on the
window before they are pulled inexorably back into the past and are buried
together under Twin Mounds, to become the legend (and the modern
contaminants).

  If we assume that the lights represent the movement of alien ships, the
redshift/blueshift spectrum and doppler effect allows us to guess that
these ships actually emit green light: they would appear blue as they are
approaching at extreme speeds, and appear yellow as they are leaving (green
is situated between these two in wavelength). Thus, it is their passage
which explains the displacement of space and time and winds up resulting in
Stan's remains buried in the past as the “wendigo” (which he hears as
?Where'd he go??when the girl says it) and introducing modern material
under the hill, such as his clothes or any artifacts of contemporary
consumer technology he carried upon him at the time.

 This reading firmly places the story as a science fiction story in which
UFOs incidentally create a vortex in time, possibly unintentionally via the
wake of their passage, but at least one other interpretation favors an
extremely unreliable narrator bent on cannibalism.

 ###II. Framing the UFOs

 Though I do not necessarily endorse the following reading, available on
the WolfeWiki, Robert Pirkola's recreation of events involves the concept
of a murderous narrator who is attracted to Stanley Robakowski as a
“contactee” and potential victim for his cannibalistic tendencies, and
there are at least two metatextual statements that are offhandedly ominous.
The first is the narrator's statement that he had “a day to kill in
Colbyville”, which is the kind of double entendre Wolfe enjoys at times.
The second is less ominous but conceivably more remorseful: “No doubt I
should not have done what I did,” though of course by the surface reading he
is simply stating he should not have entered someone's house - rather
than saying
that he should not have eaten them for dinner (or breakfast).

 Under Pirkola's timeline, the narrator comes across the newspaper clipping
from the United Press Wire Service while Stan Robakowski is still at St.
Joseph's hospital, and, his interest piqued, orders recent copies of the
*Colbyville Courier*. After he travels to Colbyville, he arranges a
meeting, and rather than being unable to find the apartment, prevents the
duplex door from locking (open in anticipation of his arrival) and then
phones Robakowski to say that he could not find it. Pirkola's recreation
involves the narrator returning that night or in the early morning of the
next day, killing Robakowski, and dragging him from the bedroom down the
hallway into the kitchen (where he eats him) to account for the trail of
blood found there. He also takes Stanley's personal effects to later bury
at Twin Mounds. The yellow lights the narrator notes as being reported are,
in this case, the headlights of his car going to the park. Pirkola makes
the following claims:

 >The narrator only felt safe enough to report the event more than two
years later, after he had kept tabs on whether anyone had been arrested for
the murder. In a final bid to mislead would-be investigators, he plants the
idea that MIBs may have been involved. ...The narrator's interest was first
attracted by the fact that there was an incoherent man found near a site of
possible supernatural happenings. This opens the door to occult
explanations for such a man's disappearance and the opportunity to feed
without notice. Not only are there apparently extraterrestrial/supernatural
goings-on near an occult site, but there is an interesting legend attached
to the area that the cannibal narrator can later appropriate and use to
distract future investigators. The narrator only feels sure that Robakowski
was a "contactee", which is to say a potential meal, after gathering
information about the occult nature of the event and confirming that
Robakowski had been psychiatrically hospitalized at St. Joseph's for at
least 5 days.

In further discussion online at the Urth Mailing List, Pirkola elaborates:

>It is important to remember that this particular victim is merely one of
many in a presumably longer career of the narrator/cannibal. This is
alluded to in the beginning of the story which starts out as though it were
one tale in a collection of supernatural/extraterrestrial encounters
assembled by the narrator. "This puzzling case presents several unique
features . . ." The features are unique because they distinguish this case
from the other omitted examples in the collection, each of which might
presumably also relate an incident where the narrator engaged in
cannibalism and used the supernatural circumstances as cover. Later on, he
also states "Here I must confess my own shortcoming -- one I regret more
than any other involving UFO studies." The narrator is not a person that
collects U.F.O. clippings first and foremost who then subsequently develops
the desire to consume human flesh, but is instead a cannibal who has taken
an interest in the supernatural/extraterrestrial because he recognizes an
opportunity to feed undetected in modern society by victimizing those whose
disappearance will be subsumed in the fringe culture of the occult. It
would not be strange for a confirmed cannibal to be looking for "random
guys to eat", because that is precisely the life a cannibal would have to
lead. The most difficult questions a modern cannibal would have to face
are: whom shall I eat? and how shall I get away with it serially? Our
narrator has found one (admittedly imperfect, but not bad) answer to these
questions. It is likewise important to remember that we must take the
narrator's word that the sources he claims to be quoting are being quoted
accurately and have not been altered or, for that matter, are not made up
out of whole cloth. The psychiatric account of "Stan Roland", which we have
only the narrator's word was a pseudonym of Mr. Robakowski's, for example,
is supposed to have been written by Dr. Ernest Schwartz. Of course,
Ernest=earnest=serious and Schwartz is German for "black" and so we have
"serious black", or more particularly, a Man In Black (MIB). This is
exactly the type of name a person who spends a great deal of time
researching U.F.O. phenomena would concoct. Therefore, I think the theory
at least admits the possibility that all of the
supernatural/extraterrestrial experiences of Robakowski are made up by the
narrator to tie together the disoriented Robakowski of the newspaper
reports with the legend of the mounds, the girl, and the wendigo. ....

 >In the [original cannibal] analysis, I claimed these different colored
lights might have been the narrator's headlights from when he visited the
mounds to bury Robakowski's "modern materials". I think it more likely that
since the park closes at six p.m. and may be surrounded by a fence (though
the circumferential nature of the fence comes from "Dr. Schwartz" so, grain
of salt) that the yellow lights were in fact the narrator's "four-cell
flashlight" which he would have used to find his way to the mounds.Another
point in the story that seems to support the original theory, but can also
be explained by my own, again comes from the "Dr. Schwartz" report.
Robakowski is supposed to have related that when the trails he was familiar
with disappeared "the heavily wooded area was, paradoxically, almost free
of underbrush, which is not in fact the case." This would correspond to
being transported to a time when Native Americans predominated because they
were, by all accounts, great husbandmen of the forest, clearing the
underbrush by the use of fire and other means. This improved their ability
to see the distance (important for spotting invaders) and allowed for the
selection of useful plants to the exclusion of others. In fact, the
"wilderness forest" that we think of today is much more a tangled mess than
it had been before the arrival of Europeans to the North American
continent. Thus, Robakowski's description would be highly accurate.
However, Robakowski is said to have visited the park frequently in his
childhood. This fascination with park would likely have led him to look
into the history of the area and he probably would have been familiar
enough with the wendigo folklore and the Native American history of the
area to concoct the accurately detailed story related in the "Dr. Schwartz"
report. We are therefore presented with three alternatives for the
psychiatric account: (1) it is made up by the narrator as detailed above,
or (2) Robakowski himself falsified the story which was then repeated by
Dr. Schwartz, or (3) Robakowski actually had the experience. In my mind,
the third alternative is the most quotidian sf reading and removes much of
the depth I would generally associate with a Gene Wolfe story. I doubt Mr.
Wolfe would express the satisfaction with the story he did in the
Introduction to *Storeys from the Old Hotel* if it was as simple as a first
reading would make it seem. It also was written in 1987, so his skills at
creating depth of meaning (as most potently expressed in TBOTNS) were
already masterful. Finally, I think the keystone of my theory lies in the
Introduction: "It is a framed story, if you like, in which the frame is the
whole story." The "frame" is not just the framing device but the fact that
the entire story is the narrator framing the U.F.O.s for the
murder/disappearance of Robakowski. (Pirkola)

 I will merely reiterate here that in explications of Wolfe which I think
have a kernel of authorial intention in them, usually previously seemingly
unrelated details can come into a kind of startling new light (something
which I found to be true upon realizing that the Americans were planning to
use the corrupted grain to attack the other nations of the world — thus all
the talk of scents in “Seven American Nights”, or upon realizing that Pete
Palmer was in fact a changeling in the story of the same name). Pirkola's
explanation makes sense of the blood stains and the cannibalistic reference
in regards to the wendigo (which is after all an Algonquin concept for
someone who can also appear and vanish at will, which Stanley must seem to
be doing to the woman), but it tends to treat the alien theme and the
witness description of the “wingless airplane” as complete fabrication.

 ##Names:

 -*Stanley*: The name Stanley means “stone clearing”, derived from an Old
English surname. Robakowski appears to be a Polish family name. The
pseudonym *Roland* implies “famous”.

 -*Ernest Schwartz*: Ernest means “determined” and Schwartz is a
German/Yiddish name meaning “dark” or ?black?. The names do not seem to
have much bearing on this particular story, though Pirkola emphasizes the
connection of Dr. Schwartz's name with the concept of the Men in Black.

 -*Colbyville*: Since it is probably a fictional park and city, it is worth
looking at the meaning of this city name - “from the dark city or farm”.

 ##Connection with other works:

 The fatal embrace across time that Stan Robakowski and the young Indian
girl enjoy clearly echoes the wrestling of Severian and Apu-Punchau, a
possibly consubstantial union that transcends temporality. The
interposition of a series of mysteries through objective sources and the
incorrect conclusion of our purveyor of curiosities is typical of Wolfe
(“Reports of physical harm at the hands of MIBs are extremely rare, and
murder almost unheard-of; and yet murder would appear to have taken place
in the mysterious case of Stanley J. Robakowksi”). Our narrator presents
all the information and even has a first hand account, but fails to draw
the obvious conclusion — that Stanley's trip backwards through time is some
kind of natural resonance rather than an intentional murder.

 Robert Pirkola's explanation does have some metatextual merit, but I am
not certain that we should write off such a large portion of the story in
favor of an extremely subtle hint of cannibalism, evidence which includes
drawings and descriptions of the UFOs as well as a scientific explanation
for the changing color of the light — the ships approaching and then
leaving at great speeds. The Wolfe irony is still in effect even without
the diabolical narrator, for this seeker of accounts of mysteries and UFO
phenomenon never comes to the obvious conclusion even given all his data
and compilation. Almost always, the science fictional/fantastic explanation
is favored over the psychotic reading (though in stories such as “Josh”,
?Mute?, and *The Sorcerer's House*, a clear preference of science or
fantasy over psychosis is very hard to assert confidently. “Beech Hill”,
“Melting”, and perhaps “Suzanne Delage” are general exceptions where the
proper reading seems to be one of low mimesis couched in realism).

 This seems to be another one of Wolfe's “mysterious light” stories, which
were written near the same time and include “Slow Children at Play” and
“The Friendship Light.” These three stories explore the same light from a
religious, a supernatural or horrific, and (for ?Sightings at Twin Mounds)
a scientific viewpoint.

 ##Resources

 -Pirkola, Robert. “Sighting at Twin Mounds.” Urth Mailing List. 20 June
2014. Web. 26 April 2015.
http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/2014-June/054851.html

 -?Sighting at Twin Mounds. Wolfe Wiki. 28 May 2014. Web. 25 April 2015.
http://www.wolfewiki.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Stories.SightingsAtTwinMounds
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