A Strange, Green Light

T Bay is a medium-sized community near the head of Lake Superior. It has a terrific Finnish restaurant. There is gray market for perogies. God’s country is all around, just a few minutes by car in any direction.

It happened on a weekend fishing getaway at Red Rock, a beautiful spot, just three of us, not a care in the world. I didn’t have much luck catching fish, but that wasn’t really the point. I was sleeping peacefully in the tent, my feet protruding slightly, when Sam woke us up.

“Is there a bear?” Jeff asked, worried.

“No,” Sam began.

“We agreed,” Jeff answered grumpily, “that we would only wake up for a bear.”

“But it’s a green light,” Sam insisted. We all peered out into the glorious dark, the stars splendid overhead. There was a green light. “What do you think it is?” Sam persisted.

“It’s not a bear,” Jeff answered.

“I dunno, could be lots of things,” I mused.

“The Atlanteans left abandoned copper mines here. Might be ectoplasm!” Sam suggested.

“Atlantis? What plasm?” Jeff was losing what little patience he had left. “You mean that ESP slime gunk from the movies?”

“Ectoplasm,” Sam, not knowing better, continued to argue. “A paranormal substance exteriorized in the course of interventions by mediums and psychics. And it’s green!”

“Interventions!” Jeff scoffed.

“What do you think?” he turned to me.

I thought it would be good to go back to sleep. That would not be possible with the two of them arguing. “All of life’s questions are answered in the movies,” I began. We film profs can say these things. We can even quote lines like that without people being upset. After all they know that we know. They both looked confused. I continued. “In the best ectoplasm movie, they solved it by thinking of the Staypuff Marsmallow man.” I saw Jeff trying to decide whether to beat me with a log.

It worked for Sam. “Then it manifested,” Sam pointed out.

“It worked out well in the end,” I noted.

Sam gave it a try. He reclined in his sleeping bag, and murmured, “Staypuff Marshmallow Man…” Enervated, he was asleep in seconds.

“You entered the architecture of his delusion,” Jeff objected. “You’re not supposed to do that. I’ve told you many times.”

Psychologists. Impractical. I put my head down. “It worked,” I said to Jeff.

After the briefest pause, he remarked, “The guy got the girl.”

“What?” I asked sleepily.

“In the movie—Bill Murray got the girl—he got Sigourney Weaver.”

“Something you’re thinking about?” I asked cautiously.

“Cindy,” he said.

“Ah, are you going to ask her? Congratulations!” I whispered, not wanting to awaken Sam.

There was a pregnant pause. “I don’t know how to ask,” Sam admitted. “She’s a sophisticated lady.”

I started running through the index cards of my mind. Somehow being half asleep seemed to make it easier and faster.

“Well,” I began, “in the Victorian period you would ask in a way that protected both of you from any possible embarrassment. Actually you would give her a kind of heads up. There are movie scenes like that.”

“What do you mean?” Sam asked, interested.

“You wouldn’t just say, ‘Cindy will you marry me?’ First of all, is Cindy short for a longer name?”

“Lucinda, I think,” Jeff responded.

“Okay. So you might say to her something like, ‘Miss Lucinda, if you will be at home this afternoon around two o’clock, I shall have something very particular to ask you.’” I let him think about that.

Jeff turned it over in his mind a bit. “I see,” he said. “Then, if she’s going to say no…”

I interjected, "the camera would do a closeup on her, and she would say, 'Jeffrey, I fear I shall not be at home this afternoon.'”

“Hmmmn,” he considered. “That way the pressure’s off. No one’s going feel humiliation or fear of humiliating the other person. And if she’s never going to be ready to say yes?”

I got into character, as best as I could, “The camera would look up at her compassionate face, and she would say, ‘Ah gentlest Jeffrey, I fear I shall never be at home for that particular question.’”

“Oh that’s good,” Jeff agreed. “But if she wants to hear the proposal?”

“A zooming in shot, very close up on her dancing eyes, and ‘Fair Jeffrey, dear heart,’” I began, and he blanched a bit, “’do but come at two and join me in the conservatory. I shall be delighted to answer your question.’”

“Aha! So that’s how those foxy Victorians did it! Just one thing, we’re not in the Victorian period, and Cindy, Miss Lucinda, is not very Victorian.”

The onus shifted to me again. “Okay there’s what Umberto Eco said.”

“Well he’s more up to date,” Jeff thought, “or is he more medieval?”

“He said it’s difficult to declare love to a sophisticated Italian woman because all the good lines have been taken and everything sounds plagiarized or naive.”

“Exactly!” Jeff enthused, almost waking Sam, who stopped his soft snoring, and again said, “Staypuff. Okay.”

“I mean, Cindy’s probably read half the library. What I am going to come up with?”

I sensed I was on the right track. “He said to quote something, something classic, something obvious.”

“Obvious?” Jeff asked, not sure whether to believe me.

“Yeah,” I explained. “That way, you might have meant it sincerely, or it might just be witty.”

“Witty,” Jeff struggled to comprehend the tactic.

“Which protects you both from embarrassment,” I added quickly, and left another pause for him catch up.

“Ah, I see,” Jeff understood, “So if she doesn’t want me to declare my love, if she thinks that would be too hot-headed, she treats it humorously. And since it’s ambiguous, I might have meant it humorously. So even though I meant it sincerely, I can laugh it off, pretend I didn’t mean it that way but was just being ‘witty.’”

“That’s right. That’s it,” I encouraged.

“On the other hand, if she wants to hear it as a true declaration of love, she can interpret it as sincere. Oh this is great—thanks!”

I rolled onto my side, turned my face to wall of the tent, and fell asleep listening to Jeff mull over the possibilities.

“This is great,” he intoned softely. “I could do Romeo and Juliette, or Bogie and Bacall. Yeah, Here’s lookin’ at you kid! That’s a good one….”

The next day, at home in T Bay, looking out over the lake at the Sleeping Giant, I read the Chronicle Journal. There were two articles about the mysterious green light. One of them mentioned ectoplasm. That would get Sam going. I checked my watch. It was time for the black market perogie delivery to the convenience store. I hot footed it down the road. Those perogies disappear really fast.

I got there on time, with three or four other customers. There were just three dozen left. I grabbed some sour cream and butter (I always have an onion on hand) and stood in line. “Did you read about the green light?” one asked.

“Read about it, I saw it!” one patron remarked. “What do you think it was?”

“I dunno, some new missile defence?”

That was not a bad idea. Since the abandonment of the DEW line of missile defence, there were undoubtedly many experimental substitutes. Everyone could draw a line on the map and see that we were in the prime fallout area for fallout from a nuclear war.

I had two phone messages when I got back home. One was from Jeff. “I just want to tell you that it worked! I used a Bogart line and it worked! We’re engaged!”

Wow, that was fast, I thought. Did that have something to do with something I said? No matter, Jeff had no family in T Bay, I would have to dream up an engagement party. Something soon, not too formal. I thought of it. Friday was student film night at P.A.C.I., the high school. Students showed off their films. We could all go to that, then come back to my place for sparkling wine and nibbles, hors d’oeuvres, kickshaws, something like that. Good idea, I thought.

The other message was from Sam: “Did you see the paper? It was ectoplasm!” Hmmmn, amazing I managed to talk him into going back go sleep.

I called Jeff first, congratulated him, and confirmed the event. Then I reached Sam to invite him along. “But did you see the paper?” he asked.

“Yes I did, and you were there!” I exclaimed. “Did you feel any residual side effects?”

“What do you mean?” he asked apprehensively.

“Any restlessness, mood swings, changes of appetite?”

“I did get the munchies,” Sam said thoughtfully.

“Well there it is,” I said breezily, “exposure to ectoplasm.”

A small gang of us showed up to the high school Friday night. Cindy and Jeff were wearing rings. The first two films were documentaries, one on pollution from the paper mill, done well enough, I thought, and another a ‘follow the money’ film on a grant to a company that had supported a local politician. Good efforts.

Then came the third film, in the science fiction category. The title clip was black with orange writing screaming out, “It came from the amethyst mines!” the text shouted. “It showed no mercy for the living…” And then a shot we all recognized from close to our campsite—“the sticky goo came from another world, the world of the undead…:” The screen showed a green light, filmed from the very spot we where we had seen it. “ECTOPLASM!!!!!” The screen went black and we all applauded.