Flying saucers flew into the town from the direction of the port. I didn’t really see them; I only heard a sound like in an old cartoon—piercing, high, and sudden. In my hippie days I often imagined flying saucers while smoking weed and watching Scooby Doo, and the cartoon sometimes showed aliens too. My naïve mind didn’t know any other entertainment back then. In fact, even then I already knew—or rather felt—that there was some kind of holiness in the weed, something beyond entertainment, church, and humanity, but most of my buddies smoked it as an addition to Scooby Doo, which was probably healthier and more human than sacralizing the plant.
The plant, anyway, isn’t the most important thing in my story. There are flying saucers, after all. Them, and the girl.
The girl swears she saw them, and although she had taken LSD once, on the day the saucers appeared she was completely and undeniably clean. She wasn’t prone to fantasizing, though it was precisely her incredible imagination that magnetized my heart to her refrigerator. We called her Moog “the fridge.” She was the only owner of a Moog in the entire seaside area. I urged her many times to record an album, but she claimed that any medium kills the eternal reverb of electronics.
She also smoked enormous amounts of weed, and I met her at a Moskwa concert, when—completely drunk—she collapsed onto my lap and slurred, “What’s your name?” Adam, I replied. Ewa, the stranger introduced herself, though of course her real name was something else entirely—Agata.
I don’t remember the concert very well, but years later I recall with some amusement the rumor that I jammed with the legendary Moskwa that day. Possibly, though Agata doesn’t remember it either. I’d have to ask Malejonek, but he probably doesn’t talk to anarchists anymore. He played a great concert in Darłowo with some acoustic project, and I think he even left me an autograph.
But I moved so many times that even my Wah Wah has vanished without a trace, let alone autographs on scraps of paper or equally fleeting, often‑borrowed records. Maybe Agata is right about her Moog and the reverb of electronics. Maybe some elusive things are better left in the realm of elusiveness, like the white butterflies released in Hyde Park in memory of the elusive Brian Jones.
Some things are, or become, legend, and time works like the sea, polishing boulders into sand. With a bit of luck, a small pebble will remain after us, taken by a child from the beach to a big city, or sand where the desert meets the ocean.
As Nico sang, we’ll meet on the desert shore. She’s already there, waiting with a million stories to tell, accompanied by her harmonium—just as Agata has her Moog.
Agata is still alive, and she has just seen the saucers. She says they weren’t particularly spectacular, and she’s not sure, but it seems to her they landed on the eastern part of the beach, and that maybe it would be worth checking.
So I dressed as fast as I could—meaning I threw a coat over my pajamas—and ran past the dunes. It wasn’t far at all. I noticed a greenish‑gold light behind the farthest dune and the last pine. Something serious was definitely happening here; the light trembled in the sea breeze, and the weather itself felt slightly unreal for the middle of winter on the Baltic coast.
And finally, indeed, I see those damn ships. Or rather—judging by their size—exploration capsules. They emanate light, as if from some extraterrestrial radiation source. I walk closer, and I wake up.
I see the soothing greenish lights of the Moog, and Agata is playing and singing, “Hare, Gandzia, Hare.” My first song. I thought it was ephemeral and had already dispersed into the Universe somewhere between the realm of dreams, nightmares, and hopes. It didn’t have much text, but it had a lot of space for an intergalactic synthesizer solo.
I open the local newspaper; I don’t see any strange news. But I remember the saucers, so I ask Agata about them, and she replies with stoic calm that a beautiful Nordic blonde brought her that melody.
Right, I mutter—too much LSD. I, on the other hand, must have eaten too much canned meat, my only meal during long winter days by the beach. What kind of anarchist am I if I eat meat? Meat is substance, and dreams, hopes, and nightmares wait just behind the illusory screen of reality until we decide to reach for them.
I wish I remembered the lyrics—I’d join Agata, and she would once again become the nameless Ewa I met at the Moskwa concert. Time would stand still, or rewind to my “year zero,” and Scooby Doo would solve the mystery of the flying saucers in Darłówko.
But utopias don’t exist, because their natural consequence is dystopia, so the cartoon character will never investigate what lies hidden in that beach. And there are billions of stories of billions of years there, from which I choose one pebble and keep polishing it. One day it will become Neptune’s ring.
But that’s a distant planet, and the Nordic visitor didn’t leave instructions for the ship. Still, I believe that with her web of sound, Ewa and Agata will find the right connections and activate the Moog as the ship’s control panel.
The ship is buried a bit further east, the capsules still wait on their trembling note of light, and we have all the time in the Universe.
So let’s sing cheerfully by the hippie bonfire: “Hare Gandzia, mmm, Hare Gandzia Hare.”
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