The Montauk Boys' Academy

In a strangely vivid dream, which I had again and again as I grew up, I am
standing in the front yard with my mother at night and we are looking up at the
sky. She is holding my hand and neither of us is afraid of what we see. Above us,
floating against a background of stars, is a ship, vaguely cigar shaped and
massive. Lights in many colors emanate from its hull, creating moving patterns
of geometric symbols and pictograms in a language we do not know, yet do
comprehend. I know that the ship is there to tell us what will happen, and as I
look up into the play of lights, and the glimmering message forms, I fall asleep.

I wake from the dream certain that this actually happened, trying to remember
when, but in my waking mind the event is lost. The dream is all that is left; or
perhaps all that ever was. The dream itself has become the event; it tells me what
I need to know: The Ship is here to tell us what will happen.

When I was eight, the summer brought a series of strange dreams into my life.
Even the way they came to mind was strange, since this did not occur to me
during the night as I slept, or in the morning as I awoke--it happened during
the day, when I was sitting in the hot shade, immersed in the droning of
cicadas and grasshoppers, drowsy with the heat, the memory of these dreams
would suddenly flash through my mind as clearly as any real event. It was a
shocking and surprising thing that rattled me out of my reverie too quickly to
allow much observation. I came out of it with bits and pieces all jumbled
together.

I remembered being somewhere else at night, someplace far away. It was an
old mansion, a place with many rooms, the large and ornate ones downstairs,
the small barren bedrooms upstairs on the second and third floors. I was
standing at attention in the main hall, one of about twenty boys, all roughly
my own age, and we were about equally afraid of the man in uniform
addressing us, barking the rules of the establishment in our direction. We were
all poorly dressed, if dressed at all. Some of us wore pajamas; some
underwear, or nothing.

It was not a nice place. Physical, mental, and sexual abuse was standard
procedure and part of the training. For long periods we were simply isolated in
small groups in the cell-like bedrooms. Four boys and four bunks in one
plywood walled cell. No mattresses or blankets, no clothing, no facilities. We
peed in the corner if we had to go, so the place stank of urine; we managed to
hold the other, so far as I could remember. We laid on the bare wooden bunks
and waited, looking out the window that wouldn't open, onto the grounds of
the estate that stretched out for acres beyond the rail of the long balcony that
connected the upper rooms.

I did not think of the other boys as my friends. They were competitors. I kept
to myself. One time, I found a loose nail in the frame of the bunk and pulled it
out, used it to scratch my name in the wall, so someday someone would see it
and know I had been there. I did not expect rescue--no one knew I was gone. I
looked out the window while we waited for the training to resume, and I
promised myself that someday I would escape.

The first time I remembered these things I didn't know what to make of it; it
seemed to be a real memory but of course there was no place in my life for it
to have been. It must have been a dream, I decided, that first time. But over
the course of that summer it happened several times, enough that I felt there
should be some reality to it, and I spent considerable waking time reaffirming
that pledge, that someday I would free myself, get away clean. I was hungry
to know more about that awful place, but in the fall the dreams stopped
coming.

Before the hole was plugged, though, something else happened, which seemed
completely unconnected to this. I was sitting in the yard one day when I
reached down to brush a mosquito off my leg and felt a bump on my right
calf. Such things were pretty common for me, growing up in a country full of
things that bit and poked and stung, but I couldn't account for this one. It had
something hard in it, and when I squeezed the flesh around it I could see what
looked like a spearhead about three eighths of an inch long buried flat just
under my skin. I didn't remember it from the day before, and I didn't know
how it came to be there. But I didn't like it. I wanted it out.

My mother was immediately consulted on this medical issue but she refused to
operate, going by the theory that if it isn't hurting you, don't mess with it. I
went off to a private corner of the yard and messed with it. Before long I had a
good portion of it exposed, and my mother relented and dug it out with a
sewing needle. It was smooth, hard, symmetrical, of something that looked
like translucent white plastic. My mother asked me if I had put in my leg
myself, somehow. I was sure I hadn't. It brought no memories to my mind at
all, yet I was absolutely certain I did not want the thing in me. I kept it in a
drawer for a few weeks, going to look at it privately daily while it was still
there. Then one day it was gone, and no one admitted to throwing it away.

From then until my mid twenties I would occasionally dream of training with
a paramilitary squad of people who were roughly my own age, consistently
familiar over the years, maturing as I did. At first we were doing what I now
recognize as training missions, but we were practicing odd tasks, acquiring
talents that would be appropriate for shamans but not for modern military
men. Our numbers dwindled over the years, from twenty to no more than
eight. At first we were equals, but by the end I was group leader. The sandy
haired, blocky young boy I remembered standing near me that first night in
the Academy was my second in command. He seemed to be a little more
afraid of me than of anything around us, which I did not understand at all.
The last time I saw him, only a few years ago, he and two other members of
our team tried to kill me. We haven't been in touch since then. I have no hard
feelings towards them, knowing they were only following orders. I was prone
to do that, myself, for a long long time.