My wife Marla insisted with an intensity I found curious at the time that my oldest and best friend, Wagner Bach, was totally nuts.

“Crazy,” she said, standing at the edge of our back patio, a glass of Cabernet in hand, staring across a field of asparagus gone to feathery seed. Her attention was focused on an odd, dome-like building taking shape out there. I was at the grill, trying to concentrate on a hunk of meat that seemed ready to be flipped. I brushed olive oil on two ears of corn and placed them on the grill next to the meat, then took a long pull from my can of Bud. A breeze was coming in off the big lake a few miles west, the sun still about 15 degrees above the horizon, turning the high cirrus baby-cheek pink. A perfect summer evening in western Michigan. Marla looked over at me, eyebrows raised, waiting for a reaction to her statement, and when she didn't get one, she shook her lovely head in disgust. “Completely cookoo,” she said.

But who's to say? It was true that Wags, as he'd been known all his life, told us he got the plans for the structure he was building from aliens; aliens as in strange beings from another galaxy. But at least he didn't claim he was handed those plans in person, so to speak. He received them telepathically. And it was his property, after all, his asparagus field to do with as he pleased, within reason, and within Mason County's liberal zoning ordinances.

So what do you do when the man you'd trust to hold your winning million-dollar lottery ticket tells you such a thing, and your levelheaded wife insists, with surprising vehemence, that your friend has gone off the deep end this time? You defend your friend, of course. After all, didn't he defend you against the playground bullies at Franklin Elementary? Didn't he teach you how to dig for wigglers in the back bayous of the Pere Marquette, and how to rig the ugly little bugs to catch perch by the bucketful? Didn't he take the fall for you when a deputy pulled you over in your rattletrap Plymouth Belvedere, both of you schnockered, and found that little baggie on the dash board? He got two months in Juvie for that.