The Brooklyn Rail

In fall 1961, Barney and Betty Hill were driving through New Hampshire when they saw a light moving in the sky above them, perhaps even following them. Their experience, later recalled under hypnosis, seemed sensational at the time but included what we now think of as familiar elements of alien abduction claims. Their story forms one of three strands of Ilana Masad’s second novel, Beings.

The Hills’ story as presented in the novel is a creative reinterpretation by and with commentary from the Archivist, the present-day narrator of the story’s second strand. The Archivist, who is unnamed, may have had their own childhood encounter with aliens—one they, like the Hills, cannot remember on their own. When the book begins, the Archivist has just heard from a documentary producer who wants to interview them, and who has sent along a link to a video interview with the Archivist’s child self.

Spending quiet days answering researcher queries in the Queer Writers Archive, the Archivist stumbles on what becomes the book’s third strand, letters from Phyllis Egerton, a queer writer in 1960s Boston trying to get her start in science-fiction magazines. Phyllis is writing to Rosa, her childhood friend and love, whose return letters the reader never sees.

Initially, I was most drawn to the Archivist and Phyllis, whose chapters gently explore those characters’ feelings of alienation and uncertainty. “They’ve always been bad at this sort of thing. Interacting,” the Archivist thinks the first time they meet their next-door neighbor as she chases down her wandering cat. The Archivist is stunned by the intimacy of the interaction, the strangeness of observing their neighbor’s toothpaste-stained top and leftover mascara, and doesn’t quite know what to do with the experience. The Archivist wants “strangers to care about them. They want to care about strangers.” But “when they try, and they do sometimes, something always goes wrong.” Sometimes the aliens are other humans; sometimes they’re ourselves.

Phyllis, too, spends her early years in Boston mostly alone: “It’s an awful feeling, Rosa,” she writes in one letter, “to sit alone at night and count on one hand the number of people who would care if you vanished from the earth.” Only slowly does Phyllis make connections with other queer people who show her how to understand herself.

Though Phyllis and the Archivist do make significant strides toward real-world relationships, many of the connections in Beings are parasocial: Phyllis writes to a version of Rosa who lives in her imagination long after the real Rosa has cut off contact between them. The Archivist becomes fascinated by the Hills and Phyllis through the materials they’ve left behind. We often think of these kinds of relationships as false or dishonest because of their one-sidedness, or because the object of fascination seems to have an unfair amount of influence on the other person. But in Beings, Phyllis and the Archivist use these relationships to reclaim something for themselves. Phyllis, writing to imaginary Rosa, expresses her queerness and shares her loneliness at times when she can’t do so openly in her real life; as she finds her place and becomes more comfortable with herself, Rosa’s name disappears, the letters becoming more like diary entries.

The Archivist, meanwhile, draws courage from reading Phyllis. The Archivist also writes their version of the Hills’ story, an intentionally “one-way conversation” in which they are “trying to explain myself to myself.” Perhaps the Archivist is using the story to try to find a way into their own unremembered alien encounter and explore what going public about the experience might be like; perhaps they’re trying to solve the mysteries of human interaction by imagining their way into the relationship between Barney and Betty Hill. Part of the beauty of Beings is that, rather than tying everything up with a definitive ending, it leaves space for many interpretations without feeling incomplete.

The extraterrestrials in Beings are an ongoing question mark—the Hills’ account is, of course, never proven conclusively true or false; the Archivist is never sure whether they’ve recalled anything at all of their own possible alien encounter; Phyllis, reading about the Hills in the newspaper, chooses to believe that aliens exist only in science fiction (and draws several ideas for her own fiction from reading the Hills’ story). This uncertainty seems part of the point: that we don’t necessarily need verification to find solace or connection in someone else’s story. All we need is the act of engaging with it. “To be looked at,” the Archivist thinks after that first meeting with their neighbor, “to be seen, however fleetingly, is to exist.” And that fleeting moment is all humans need to start finding meaning.