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Childhood's

Confession

Lou Grinzo


My name is Hank lnnes, and I'm writing this to correct the public's view of the Visitor Fight. It's been over forty years since it happened, and, except for the official version, there's hardly been a single word printed or publicly said about it since Richard Polanski's trial. Because of this, everyone still thinks of Polanski as the lowlife he was portrayed to be. This is inaccurate and unfair, and it should be corrected.

To date, no one has been able to tell what really happened the day of the fight, the day the Visitors left Earth in disgust and headed back to their planet, wherever that is. None of us who were involved wanted to challenge the government and try to get our account of it published, even anonymously. That's why you'll be reading this such a long time after the Visitor Fight, after I'm dead, when even the government can't do anything to me.

Where to begin? The popular view of what happened that day is full of the reckless nature of Richard Polanski and the innocent behavior of ten-year-old boys. Both parts are just plain wrong. Polanski, God rest his soul, was a decorated Army officer with an outstanding service record, and he was a well-respected member of the Secret Service. But he made a bad decision under the kind of pressure that would destroy most people.

As for the childrens' part in what happened, I know better than anyone why the fight really happened. You see, it was my fault.

For most people, the terrible events of that day are recorded in that single black-and-white newspaper photograph. Sure, there are the tapes of the trial and the interviews and the live TV reports from the site, but the event collapses into that one photograph, showing a group of small boys standing around a body on the ground.

It's funny how that happens, how a shutter tripped by a photographer's instinct creates an image that instantly becomes the photograph that tells a story, as if all of mankind had conferred and agreed on the matter. It happens all the time, of course, but that doesn't make it any easier to understand. That one portrait of Princess Diana that's been the unofficial portrait of her ever since she died. The photograph of TWA Flight 800 wreckage floating in the water. Michael Jordan hugging the NBA championship trophy. The Visitor Fight. Each historic moment, compressed forever into a single negative.

It's important that you understand what it was like, being in the fourth grade and having an honest-to-goodness alien in your class. You've seen the pictures of the Visitors. How they didn't wind up being tagged with some stupid name straight out of a bad science-fiction movie, I'll never know. The point is, from the day "Bob" showed up at school, life ceased to be normal.

 

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One day, a group of men in suits walked into our classroom--- right in the middle of a history lesson, I can still remember it that clearly, we were learning about Shay's Rebellion--- and the look on our teacher's face instantly told us something unusual was happening. One of the men was the President of the United States. Most of the rest were probably Secret Service agents, although I didn't know that at the time. There was a White House photographer and a single TV news team there to record the exact moment when an alien child entered a human classroom. The class was dead silent as we tried to understand what was going on. Keep in mind that the public had only seen the Visitors on TV up until that point, and even then it was mostly staged photo opportunities with world leaders.

The alien kid and one of his parents came shuffling in. He was taller than all the kids in the room, dressed in one of those silky blue robes they wore, all horrid looking and wheezing, with too many arms, and breathing some sort of gas mixture through a respirator connected to a lunch box-sized contraption he carried. The class erupted. It should have been clear to the adults involved that this was a bad idea, and they should have found a diplomatic way to call it off right then and there. But they didn't, of course.

Once everything calmed down, the President made his famous "Children of the Universe" speech, which I'm sure you've heard a thousand times, and explained how this Visitor child would attend our school as a sign of mutual trust. Our teacher, a frail little woman with huge, liquid brown eyes, looked like she was going to have a breakdown. Even then, I remembered feeling sorry for her.

From that day on, a significant part of our lives was spent avoiding reporters. But the kids got the worst of it. Every recess, every school function, even the slightest sign that something the least bit out of the ordinary was going on at the school was cause for us to be swarmed by reporters carrying cameras and bright lights and microphones up and down the halls. It took a while before the media and our parents came to an agreement, but there were still intrusions and occasional parental lectures.

We weren't even aware of what the Visitors were doing here. All those meetings that they had at the United Nations, all the hints of wondrous things that could come out of a friendship between our species, none of it was explained to us at the time. The adults were scared stiff that we would do something inconvenient and screw it all up. No one even tried to make us see things from Bob's point of view. He was probably scared out of his mind. Maybe the way they treated us contributed in some small way to what happened.

Bob didn't seem to be bothered by any of it, although it was hard to tell. I guess the pressure on him was even worse than it was for the rest of us, considering how difficult it was for him to communicate with us. Any race that would put one of their children into a position like that would probably have lectured the kid to death on how important it was that he behave himself. But who knows, if this species was that concerned with such things, maybe it's part of their nature, and they wouldn't have to stress it.

But I feel like I'm avoiding the issue here.

 

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Thomas Alva Edison grade school, in Union City, New Jersey, is your average inner-city public school. There are lots of fights, and almost every group of boys knows of at least one fight that will take place after school on any given day. But on the day it happened, there were no arranged fights, at least none that were exciting enough for the gang I hung out with. So one of us came up with the idea of getting the class bully, Karl, into a fight with Bob. I was the one; it was my idea.

I won't try to justify what happened with some sort of flippant "boys will be boys" attitude. None of us saw the ramifications of what we were doing. We'd been lectured almost nonstop since Bob came to our school about how important it was that we got along, that we "set an example" for humans and Visitors. God, how I learned to hate that phrase, "set an example." No one let us forget for a minute the strange microscope we were all under. The point of all this is simply that, yes, we were little boys, but we knew better.

It was so easy to start, too. A couple of us simply dared Karl to fight Bob. That, plus a little encouragement, was all it took, since Karl lived for chances to be a tough guy. Several others talked to Bob and somehow convinced him that he had to defend his honor or some such nonsense, not that I think he fully understood what was happening. We were just pleased with having arranged something exciting. Now, I can see how ridiculous and foolish it all was, but at the moment, I was thrilled to have started it.

When school let out that day, about fifteen of us followed Karl and Bob down the block and into the empty lot behind our favorite candy store. There was the usual little boy bravado about it all--- everyone was talking tough and taking sides and savoring the delicious anticipation of it, especially this fight. Karl dramatically dropped his books and took off his dark blue windbreaker and threw it down. A bunch of us started pushing and moving around for a good view. Bob just stood there, with his skinny, ropy arms at his sides, obviously unaware of what was expected. Karl walked up to him and pushed him hard on one shoulder, and that's when things got crazy.

Cars squealed to a stop in the street; doors opened and men in dark suits came piling out too fast for anyone to react. They all had guns. One man in particular--- Richard Polanski--- walked toward Karl and Bob. He pointed at them with one hand--- the one without the gun--- and said, "OK, boys, let's break it up. We don't want to have a fight here."

Those were his exact words. I'll never forget them or the pleading, almost hysterical tone in his voice. It was as if he knew with absolute certainty what was going to happen, and he wanted desperately to stop the future from coming true.

Karl got this defiant look on his face, that same look he'd get every time he was about to do something to anger a teacher. He turned away, as if to comply with Polanski's request, then turned back around and punched Bob in the face. The alien teetered for a second, then hit the ground flat on his back.

And Polanski shot Karl. A single, clean shot in the chest that threw him to the ground, dead.

One of the other men started screaming, "What did you do that for? Where are your brains? Give me your gun, Polanski!"

Some of us started crying, some of us just stood and stared at Karl on the ground, and a couple of us turned and ran home. I was convinced that these men with guns--- Secret Service agents, I found out later--- knew about my part in the fight and were going to shoot me as punishment. I kept looking breathlessly at each one in turn, trying to spot the one who would do it, waiting for one of them to raise his gun.

Reporters and the local police were there in minutes, and that's when the famous picture was taken. I'm the second kid from the left in the crowd, the terrified one wearing the white polo shirt and dark pants.

The archived news reports say that somehow all the Visitors knew at that moment what had happened, and they turned to whomever they were with and demanded to be brought together, and to see Bob. As soon as the delegation was assembled and they determined that Bob was not seriously hurt, they had a brief meeting and gave the highest ranking person available, Secretary of State Frankel, their famous message: We refuse to associate with barbarians.

Within days of the shooting, Richard Polanski was the victim of the biggest smear campaign in the history of mankind. He was a decent man who made a mistake, but everyone ganged up on him--- the media, the government, old friends. He was branded a maverick, a "loose cannon" who refused to follow orders--- everything they could hang on him to "prove" to the Visitors that Polanski wasn't a fair example of what mankind was really like. No one had the guts to stand up and say, "Wait a minute. Dick was a good man who messed up. Let's have a little compassion here." We were pleading to the sky, screaming for the Visitors to come back, and Richard Polanski was sacrificed in the process.

 

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For a case with that kind of pretrial publicity, it should have taken weeks, or even months, to pick a jury. But they did it in a single day. It took an emergency session of the New Jersey state legislature to legalize capital punishment, but they did that in record time, too.

The trial itself was a farce, as one liar after another was paraded through the witness stand. One piece of falsified evidence after another was presented. And all of it was choreographed to say exactly the right things, while Polanski's defense was a fraud. And when the two-day trial was over, they pronounced him guilty of first degree murder and sentenced him to death in the electric chair.

But the worst part was the execution. They showed it on television! The rationale was obvious. They wanted to make absolutely sure that the Visitors knew what we did. But didn't anyone in charge have the brains to see what a mistake it was? If the aliens had had any thought of coming back, that surely drove them away for good.

 

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About twenty years after his death, I talked to Nicole Polanski, Richard's widow. She was in her late fifties by then, but she looked much older. Her hair was almost completely gray, and the lines around her granite-colored eyes showed the burden she'd lived with. It was as if her ordeal had never ended, and had continuously worn her down over the years. We took great pains to be clandestine, although I doubt we fooled anyone. If the CIA or anyone else still cared, they probably knew what we were doing but figured we were harmless.

Nicole insisted that I watch recordings of the trial with her, so she could refute the lies one at a time. It was like a private trial, decades after her husband's death, as she clutched at a chance to prove to someone that her husband wasn't an ogre. The way she swiftly and confidently argued against the images on the screen, it was clear to me that she'd rehearsed this a hundred times, waiting for an audience. In all those years, no one was willing to publish her story or a single interview with her.

If the law firm I hired does their job, and the government doesn't intervene, then this document will be sent to every major newspaper and radio and TV station in the civilized world. The fact that I got this far with my arrangements gives me hope that this account will get published. Maybe everyone's finally given up trying to lure the Visitors back, and the government's realized it's time to drop the public act.

Just as my friends and I were children that day, and we didn't understand what we were doing, the entire human race unwittingly proved that it was still in its own childhood, not yet fit to associate with the adults as an equal partner.

Hank Innes

Wilkes-Barre, PA

17 November 2041


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