M31

by Stephen Wright

  “Tracking tornadoes,” replied Dallas. He climbed to his feet, brushed his palms on the back of his pants. “Anyone want a beer?”

  But Beale had spied the chunks of tektite scattered along a peeling windowsill and in a rush of enthusiasm seized Gwen’s hand and hurried over to hold each piece to the dimming light as if searching for perfect facets. “Incredible,” he proclaimed. “Actual fragments of Marduk.”

  Pop! came a sound from behind the partition.

  “Hey, Maryse,” called Trinity.

  “What?” answered a voice from inside The Object.

  “Oh,” said Beale, turning. “Another one. That’s great.”

  “Wanna join the tour out here?”

  “In a minute, maybe, I’m nursing.” She sat inside at the pilot’s seat, listening to every word. When the baby sucked it went right through her, little lips and tongue lapping away at all the secret places.

  Dallas shuffled back into the room, printing out a trail of footsteps in sticky spaghetti sauce. He plunked down at a table against the rear wall and started riffling through a greasy pack of cards. Gwen’s legs were poised in a crouch before the faded map of Sharpsburg, Maryland, tacked to the opposite wall amid a riot of newspaper clippings, magazine pages, Crayola renditions of Hollywood spaceships and carrot-shaped monsters, and dozens of amateur photographs depicting the miracle of flight. Blue veins crawled over the backs of Dallas’s hands. On television everyone ran around in gauze masks.

  “These pictures,” declared Beale. “Some of them are the actual originals.”

  “From the actual actuality,” explained Trinity.

  The wind began turning the door on its hinges, then abruptly hurled it shut. “Let’s get these windows closed,” said Trinity. Dallas looked at his sister and belched. “Get the herbert to do it.” Methodically he laid out a game of solitaire.

  Gwen ran her fingers through her unwashed hair, and it stood up just like Dallas’s after he had fussed with it for about an hour. “Is there a john?”

  “In back.” Trinity pointed to a wooden door. She watched her brother watching Gwen walk.

  “I guess Dash and Dot aren’t here at the moment,” said Beale, tilting his head toward the walled-off altar end of the room.

  “No,” said Trinity.

  “They out speaking or something?” thoughtfully stroking the clump of black moss hanging off the end of his chin.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, do you by any chance happen to know—”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow,” he repeated, bony fingers busily stroking.

  Dallas rapped the side of the deck sharply against the edge of the table.

  “Well, we’d sure like to meet them if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Thought you already did,” said Dallas, engrossed in the lengthening columns of alternating black and red.

  “No, no, we were just in the audience, in Yellow Springs, big audience, just listening.”

  In the john, which was a cramped stall with an elevated water tank and a stained toilet bolted to a wooden platform, Gwen splashed some funny-tasting water on her face and looked into her eyes in the speckled mirror, her eyes, the ones she looked out of, and then it was too late, the questions started their routine, and, hands riveted to the electrified sink, she went into the black holes: who is this guy? where are we? why are we here? who’s that boy? when will he try to rape me? how do I get out? why did I come? who am I when I say who? She finally managed to pull herself off the mirror, the part that goes before you and clings to things, peeled it off the glass and slumped on the stool, studying some hands, and feeling for several long minutes presences other than her own using her eyes.

  “You can throw your sleeping bags on the floor,” said Trinity.

  “Long as it’s no imposition.” Beale pulled his beard into a stiff point. “Gwen’ll be thrilled. We’ve followed your parents all over the country, Buffalo, Albuquerque, Fort Smith, like a couple of groupies actually, but of course they’re more important than any rock star, as I’m sure their own daughter knows, look here.” He knelt down, unfastened the straps, and lifted the flap on a backpack stuffed, jammed, bursting with paper. “I’ve read all their work. Everything still extant, that is.” He began filling his long arms—inches longer than the frayed sleeves of his unseasonably warm shirt—with books, magazines, pamphlets, newsletters, handbills, her parents having appropriated every print medium except cocktail napkins and matchbook covers. “The load gets heavy now and then, but sometimes words are more important than food.”

  In celebration of the thirst for knowledge, Dallas wandered back out to the kitchen. Pop!

  “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen this one,” said Trinity, reaching for an off-center two-tone cover proclaiming News From Etheria.

  “I’ve read it three times,” offered Beale enthusiastically. “Everything’s invisible and going on in perfect freedom right among us and the sky is all the time filled with these gigantic creatures shaped like amoebas that are floating around propelled by this weird energy and beaming down instructions.”

  “Yeah, we’ve seen ’em,” interrupted Dallas, coming through the door, the open can held brazenly in his fist.

  “You have?”

  “More than once. First time Dad tried to communicate with them, second time he started taking shots.”

  “Wasn’t that the other way around?” said Trinity. This book was a mess.

  “No, the mirrors were in Circleville.”

  “The tubes and pipes up on that little hill?” The printing job was typical; lines of fat overinked blotches thinned into readable words that usually managed to keep their shape for a couple paragraphs before wasting away into pale, barely visible suggestions of legibility. A column of jagged type slanting left leaned up against a column slanting right.

  “Benton, right. That was later.”

  “Who cares? I was gone a lot then.” Published just two years previously, the volume was not aging well; light had already established around the edges of each page that ugly brown border that crept irredeemably—the clock was always ticking—toward the shrinking white nebula at the center of every cheap book. Everywhere the fire Father raved about.

  Gwen emerged from the john, the pink of her scrubbed face now matching her eyes.

  “It’s cool,” Beale assured her. “We can stay until Dash and Dot get back.”

  “This felt like a good place,” Gwen declared.

  “We were talking about Etheria. They’ve actually seen The Occupants.”

  “A glimpse,” admitted Trinity.

  “I rode in one,” said Gwen calmly, as if announcing the time of day.

  In between the sheets of static rested the woman from the beginning of the show with tubes up her nose and after she said something to the man a smiling nurse came in and gave her an injection on the television set.

  “It’s covering the whole screen!” shouted Edsel in a breathless soprano.

  The windows had darkened dramatically. Clouds boiled behind the glass like chemicals in solution. Cool air poured in around the warped frames. The tasseled corn dipped and tossed. Outside everything was streaming, and as they watched, it was as though they were moving, too, passengers at the rail, slipping away from the last solid pier. Then lightning broke the flow into pieces, and all their faces went dead, featureless moons of calcified white, silenced in a moment echoing with thunder, beaded with fear.

  “Imagine us,” said Beale brightly, “lost out there in that.”

  “Wet,” commented Trinity, and led their visitors away from these exposed windows back into the kitchen and the dinner to be mopped up and the dinner to be prepared.

  Dallas stayed behind, watching the gray hull of the storm pass majestically overhead, waiting for the spiral hoses to come dangling down and vacuum up specimens off the planet floor. But swiftly the sky smoothed its threatening ridges and suspicious bumps into a low flat innocuous ceiling, and he turned away, agile fins snea
king soundlessly across the empty room, to the musty bundle of Beale’s pack, stealthy fingers at the insides: the collected heap of Dash and Dot, a dark green T-shirt wadded about a cracked transistor radio, a crushed blue baseball cap missing its insignia, several aluminum packets of freeze-dried hiking snacks, a small vial of either perfume or vanilla extract, another plaid shirt, a pair of weathered bib overalls, and then a quick look over his shoulder and in plunged the arm up past the elbow into this cozy private darkness and a ball of roughness probably wool, probably socks; elastic bands of…underwear no doubt; the pliant coil of a leather belt; a round metal can of shoe polish? of chewing tobacco? something in cellophane; something long and plastic; something, something…up sprang his arm into astonished air, the trembling hand attached—custom-fitted, actually—to the trite reality, the phallic heft, the lethal delight of a chrome-plated Saturday Night Special.

  When the hail hit the roof it was like a chattering of insects.

  Two

  THAT NIGHT BEDS WERE too hard, beds were too soft, sheets scratched, covers oppressed, and the dark grew luminous with possibility. Sleep, when it came at last, settled over them like a thin rag.

  Dallas was stretched out on top of his mattress, arms locked at his sides, as stiff as a patient posing for X-rays. Wind from a cracked window streamed over his body, toes to scalp. He was thinking of rubber gloves with hands inside. The moon, full, clear, freshly scrubbed, dwindled to a dim bulb, weak on batteries, behind the robed figures of colored glass he had named Larry, Moe, and Curly. Black water slid down the wall, dripped from the plugged eaves outside. The round eye of the radar screen was shut. Suddenly he sat up, the gun gripped in both hands, fanning the air in the general direction of the wheezes and snorts that were his brother dreaming of puddles and bricks and shadows with claws. Bam! Bam, bam, bam. The crickets made sounds like screws twisting into dry wood. He fell back into a sleeper’s pose, trusting, vulnerable; he jerked upright, fully armed. Practice: the sign of the professional. He wanted to glide, to be mechanical, he wanted to be it. He pressed the gun up under his nostrils, breathed in the dark, secret aroma. He worked his little finger up the barrel and let the weapon dangle off his hand, a strange growth he wouldn’t allow any doctor to touch, the coming of the new. Later, he tiptoed down the spiral staircase and crept naked among the slumbering bodies, white as a bone. He hovered over a pair sheltering in the rounded shadow of The Object. A bunch of frizzy hair stuck out of the top of one of the down bags. He moved in closer, blood booming in his ears. His hand went out in front of him, the automatic deployment of a reaching device. The approaching surface, sleek in the lunar light, was all humps and folds, a material of uniform texture. Weightless, he dropped dreamily through warm space as the planets sighed, a forest of fiberglass trembled. “Under the table,” mumbled Beale, shifting in his sleep and unknowingly aborting a nearby docking procedure. Dallas disappeared into the kitchen, grabbed a couple beers, and, clutching a can in each fist, a balanced set of weights, stepped out the back door into wet grass and patches of mud that squeezed up cool and sticky between his toes. In the deserted cemetery he found a low bench-sized stone and sat down, the cold raised letters HANNAH printing themselves in mirror image across one cheek of his pimply butt. He popped a beer, drained all twelve ounces in one long chug, head tilted back to that tremendous night sky, his father’s sky, where the stars burned like lights in a grand hotel and every light was a window and every window a room and every room a VACANCY, twinkle, twinkle. He finished the second beer as the cemetery tree deposited something raw and liquid down his knobby spine. The stars were swarming now inside a gentle expansion that was always like a costume to him. He assumed a soldier’s stance upon the convexity of earth marking HANNAH POTTER’s exit from the space-time continuum, cocked his arm, and heaved the imaginary grenade off into the gray corn. He hunted through the weeds along the iron fence until he found some Krylon Red. Then, settling back onto the monument, POT impressing itself into the other cheek, and humming the theme from the old Bonanza television show, he began carefully spraying first one foot, then the other, with successive layers of cool, tickling paint. When he was finished he hopped up on top of the marble, squatted there motionless under the night’s fluorescence, an alien toad.

  In the morning everyone woke up and knew at once exactly who they were.

  In the kitchen in the daylight everything seemed projected on a screen. Three of them sat at a wobbly linoleum table over cups and bowls of amazingly bright plastic. Cold noodles dangled in squiggles and loops from the dishes stacked in architecturally unsound piles on the counter beside the sink. The white enamel was stained and chipped. On the wall opposite the stove and the scorched pot hung a random arrangement of fish-shaped Jell-O molds and a large black-and-white chart showing the commercial and retail cuts of beef, veal, lamb, and pork. Bottle-green flies as big as bees patrolled the air corridors between the table and the counter and the empty 9-Lives cans scattered around the sticky floor. The refrigerator was decorated with a colorful array of little magnets designed to look like pieces of real food. Gwen accepted each disquieting detail with an oddly composed eye. This was a room concocted of images masquerading as objects, and it induced in her a not unpleasant reverie, simultaneously familiar and unreal, the expectation of something “remembered.” She could wait with whatever patience was required. A black-encrusted ketchup bottle the size of a water jug occupied the center of the table with the ludicrously apt authority of a piece of pop art.

  “You don’t have to eat any of this,” said Trinity, pushing away her bowl. “I never do.” The oatmeal resembled shredded cardboard.

  “But I like it,” Beale declared enthusiastically, raising a dripping spoonful mouthward. “I grew up on this stuff.”

  Trinity glanced at him and lit a cigarette. Her knuckles were large and red as a maid’s. Blue arabesques of smoke drifted against her expressionless face.

  Gwen shifted in her chair. The fumes made her as queasy as the wall clock, a black ceramic cat with a dangling tail that switched in time with the second hand. She had hardly uttered a syllable to anyone since rolling up her sleeping bag and locking herself in the bathroom with the faucets roaring and her head swooning over the splattered stool as bits of undigested spaghetti were flushed briskly away. Then she went out to crouch on the steps, chin on her knees, studying the damp earth and the freshly baptized pebbles and the astonishingly wide spectrum of green generated along a single blade of grass, ignoring Beale and his fussiness until Trinity called them in. Now all she wanted to do was face the open window and the sweet air and the fluttering corn and the distance; had she ever before been confronted at a greasy breakfast table by so much distance? Or so much flatness? Or so much strangeness? The freak quotient here was exceptionally high. Sensations were beginning to align themselves in ways that suggested a ship might be drawing near and extensive travel was imminent. And, of course, a ship was near, a rather obvious one sitting on the floor in the next room. Outside the window the goat was gnawing vigorously on the rind of an old golf ball. The little boy came into view, pedaling a silver dirt bike down the gravel road, tiny rump bobbing furiously from side to side. “This is a far place,” she said at last, turning around. She could see blue pieces of fallen sky in the flooded landscape of her oatmeal. “I feel…bubbular.”

  “Bubbular?” asked Beale, lifting his eyebrows and holding the smirk for Trinity to see.

  “Like a goddamn bubble, you know what I mean.” You rotten creep. “Where’s that kid going?”

  “I think,” said Beale, spacing the words like separate bricks, “the road has flattened all of us out.”

  Smoke jetted from Trinity’s nostrils in audible irritation. She wished the road didn’t always run by her house. These early morning conversations with her parents’ groupies made her feel as if she’d been inhaling her own exhaust for hours. She tossed the cigarette hissing into a cobalt-blue cup of cold tea. She guessed it was her turn to speak. “Travel can
be tedious,” she said.

  “But not for The Occupants, of course,” replied Beale.

  “No, of course not.”

  “It’s practically instantaneous.”

  “Yes.”

  “Biomorphosis, you know.” Droplets of milk clung to the spidery hairs on his upper lip. Trinity lit a second cigarette. Gwen hunched over in a spasm of theatrical coughing. Fuck you.

  Maryse came through the door, a log-sized bundle of gray towels hugged to her chest. “Hi, hi.” She put the towels on the counter and felt the teapot with her finger before twisting on the gas. Overnight the mouse under each eye seemed to have sprouted fur. Her wrists weren’t any wider than two of Beale’s fingers. She looked at Trinity and took a deep breath. “So,” she said.

  “We’re tired,” said Trinity.

  “Of course. When you move around it takes a while for the dreams to find you again.”

  Beale watched Trinity smoke. He tried not to stare, but she performed the act with such languid flair he thought for the first time about taking it up himself. When she exhaled, a cloud of secrets from the dank interior hung shifting and turning in the light, a living organism. Lipstick clung to the filter like flakes of dried blood.

  The bundle of towels began to stir. Gwen wasn’t actually seeing this. It twitched again. “What is that?”

  Maryse laughed, exposing an enormous number of big gray teeth. “Mignon,” she said.

  “Mignon? As in filet?”

  “As in my kid.” She picked up the bundle and placed it in Gwen’s lap.

  “Oh,” said Gwen, folding back the towels. It was a baby, an infant of unexpected qualities. Its head appeared to have been shaped by clumsy hands from a ball of soft cheese, asymmetrical, lumpy, and hairless but for a cap of moldy white fuzz at the crown. The dull black eyes were as animated as a pair of marbles. Tiny transparent fingers were glued into tiny fragile fists. Gwen tickled it under the chin, and it made a sudden sharp sound like the squawk of a bird. “How old is this child?” she asked.