and so it was after the migraine medicine went down and didn’t work, and after the Szechuan takeout that tasted bland, and after closing the last page of The Secret of Placido Jones, that they became visible for the first time, the UFOs. Many of them at once, I think you could say hundreds of thousands, but the optical frame was so limiting you couldn’t aspire to count. I stood on the parapet gaping, at first frozen with disbelief and then, by degrees, warming to appreciation and then even something like rapture. They swirled their way down, and seemed to melt on contact with hard surfaces, the pavement, the road, the walkways leading up the lawns to the chapel and the slaughterhouse and the university, most particularly the university since there are so many infidels there who think all the flying objects in the known universe have been, or soon will be, identified. But without any question these were all unidentified and, you had to countenance it, speedy and the apparent disparation, you could say literally melting into the sky, might well have caused alarm had not the population generally been in a state of intoxication. They came down, landed, settled in, at any rate, and we had to grasp that the creatures who were emerging from them, in a race, I think, before the disappearances, were in themselves wholly invisible to the human eye, except for the alarming fact that