M31

by Stephen Wright

  The boy, Edsel, returned from the mall alone, cheeks flushed, sweat running out of his hair, one nostril crusted with blood from which a brown trickle disappeared down into his mouth.

  “I got 28,210 on Cosmic Creatures,” he cried. He was wearing a black T-shirt with a silver motto: LIFE’S A BEACH.

  Dot seized his shoulder and drew him toward her. “Were you riding on that elevator again?” she demanded, tilting his chin. “After all the times I’ve told you.”

  He shook off her grip and headed back out the door. “Where’s Poly?” he asked. No one knew.

  In the crabgrass outside Dash and Beale sat elbow to elbow on identical web loungers behind scepters of iced tea, chatting away like deck passengers on a liner bound to ports of coconuts and ease. But it was only their minds that voyaged as the lengthening shadow line of the house turned toward them certain as a minute hand and the stone dice of the cemetery locked in midtumble under the sieved shelter of the old tree. They talked and talked, and their conversation was of matters primal and architectonic, astral and eschatological.

  “Look at a piece of wood,” offered Dash. “What do you see?”

  “Knots?”

  “There’s a galaxy in the whorl of the grain.”

  “Why, of course,” piped Beale immediately in junior scientist dawn-of-wonder tones.

  “Seashells and wood screws, water spouts and pinecones. Spinning maple seeds. The secret is in the shape.”

  Gwen slipped back inside where Maryse asked her how old she was and apparently finding the answer unsatisfactory turned away without a word and crawled back into The Object, banging the hatch behind her.

  Voices from the kitchen kept going in and out of hearing all afternoon like soap opera dialogue on a too distant channel, so when the line “Wipe away the smirk, young lady, I won’t have that in this house” arrived loud and clear, answered by “You’ll have it any way I give it to you,” Gwen peeked around the open doorway to glimpse mother and daughter facing each other over a table heaped with sliced peppers and diced onions, paring knives poised.

  Gwen retreated to stand before a wall of high windows. She looked out, she counted the panes, she looked out at the road. A dust as fine and white as spilled pesticide powdered the summer weeds along the shoulder and the folded leaves of corn behind the wire in the adjoining field. The crowded tassels drooped like jesters’ caps, and the stainless sky in the plunging fall of its descent was as sheer and pure as the face of a freshly split gem. All she could see was road, corn, and sky, and none of it had an end. Behind her the floor creaked on under Zoe’s relentless rocking. Gwen had her hand on the bathroom door when Beale came up from behind, hissing insanely at her ear, “What’s wrong with you? You’re screwing up everything royal.”

  She stood there with the door angled between them. “Let’s go.”

  “Go?”

  “I want to leave.”

  “We just got here.”

  “His eyes. They’re like black holes.”

  “You’re jealous.”

  She stepped inside, locked the door, and paused, hand at the latch, head cocked like a wary bird’s. When she could no longer hear the distinctive shuffle of Beale’s boots, she turned, and out of this cramped space lunged a form, dark and nameless, and she choked back a scream. It was her own startled reflection. She covered the mirror with a musty towel and sat down on the cracked stool. She could cry at any moment now if she wanted to. The wood under her feet was warped and spongy and emitting a harsh stablelike reek. A fat fly bumped along up the wall, a furious buzz searching for a way out. Under the sink was a wicker basket stuffed with old wrinkled magazines she had never heard of. It was twilight in here, hidden from the sun and all its commotion, her only company the cave movement of unseen things dripping, gurgling, sighing away in long cool subterranean rushes. In any home this always seemed to be her special room. Someone came and rattled the door.

  “You still in there?” It was Beale’s voice.

  She refused to answer.

  “If you’re not out by the time I get back, I’m coming in anyway.” He paused. “Dash says I know more about his work than his own kids do.” He paused. “Gwen?”

  After he left she filled the sink with cold water and plunged in her face. She counted methodically to ten and straightened up, gasping, water snaking in transparent veins down her neck—a ritual performed whenever she happened to begin worrying about her worry lines. She dried herself off, and as she stepped out of the bathroom she heard Beale’s laugh, loud as sunlight, erupting through the open windows, lancing through the solid walls. It sounded like someone twisting a balloon.

  So when Dallas reappeared from wherever he skulked she said yes to going for beer, yes to his smile and the danger at the corners of it. The interior of the car smelled of rotten fruit, and the floor was deep in empty soda bottles and fast-food wrappers. She arranged herself quietly on the sprung seat with a formal deliberation. “Bye,” called Beale from his lawn chair. At this distance he resembled Charlie Brown. Gwen watched whatever presented itself in her half of the windshield without expression or gesture in the manner of famous felons being escorted to the state pen, even as the spinning tires slapped grass divots off the side of the house and the creaking car veered a corner, mounted a bank of crackling weeds, and burst, fishtailing, onto a narrow county road of potholes and loose gravel. Stones banged against the bottom of the frame. Her head bumped into the roof. Dallas turned toward her a display of smirking lips. She ignored him, watching the white inverted V of the road opening endlessly on. Dust coiled out behind like a tail of chemical smoke. Good-bye, she said to the receding scene, a passenger again on another machine careening through space. They exchanged no more than a few syllables all the way in to Albert. Spokes of corn strobed past in hypnotic green succession. The sky was a clear bowl a million miles deep. She counted off the utility poles and imagined them tumbling behind like matchsticks as the wire dipped and climbed, dipped and climbed, over ground as flat as a table on out to the edges where voices drown, the familiar rhythms reasserting themselves all too easily now and everything had already been seen and felt and the road merged into The Road: truck exhaust and sticky clothes and pavement glare and humid nights and cramped seats and perverts with b.o. and clogged toilets and greasy milk and piles of metal and glass buckled and splintered from sea to shining sea, temporary roadside shrines spontaneously erected in daily numbers duly noted and recorded as sacrifice to the spirit of good motoring that kept America on wheels. At night the revolving lights of red, white, and blue clustered about these sites like the fires of ancient Indian encampments where human flesh in unexpected poses seemed to leap out of the dark, naked and monstrous as those blind sea creatures who exist at levels beyond the reach of light. Gwen remembered the Blue Man who came to earth between a runaway Mustang and a wet oak somewhere west of Columbus when an eddy of time caught up and juggled some muscles and neurons, some tires and pistons, into a pattern too intricate to endure. As the Mustang left the rain-slick road, bouncing between an out-of-control Pontiac, a skidding Mayflower van, and a stubbornly immobile bridge abutment, the door snapped open and the driver, already unconscious, started to fall, slipping sideways out of the car until the tree stepped forward, slamming the door shut across his waist, where he remained to be pinned in the glare of the ambulance lights, head the size of a pumpkin, hair stiffened into bloody clumps, an upper torso glued to the side of a Ford. If she wasn’t blown up first, Gwen was convinced she’d die in a car crash, her dreams had told her so. What had the Blue Man’s dreams told him? His skin was the color of the interior of The Occupants’ ship.

  The road was running through her now, filling her insides with outside, warping inner distance so that all points recognizable and safe expanded away from one another, deforming her sense of self into something strange, as alien and rampant as the country outside. Like the corn, for instance. The corn was winking at her, a bright spangling of light. It had stood out here fo
r so long the paint was wearing away, revealing the shiny metal underneath. There were no shadows anywhere. She needed a pair of those wraparound sunglasses with the mirrored lenses.

  Dallas steered with one elbow poking out the window, the other arm, tanned and muscular, draped over the wheel. He grunted constantly, shifting restlessly in his seat as if the car were an organic thing susceptible to urgings of the flesh. Gwen almost said something to him, but she changed her mind. Suddenly the VW hopped a bump, and for no apparent reason the road changed into a length of smooth asphalt over which the sloping blue snout of the car glided like the head of a vacuum cleaner. Gwen turned her face into the cooling wind. A white farmhouse floated by, big and clean, on a big clean patch of lawn, its porch wide and deeply shaded, the big picture window opening, she imagined, into refrigerated rooms of mahogany furniture and porcelain animals as the reflected image of the car zipped across the glass. Off in the distance a large green spidery machine under no apparent human supervision trundled over a plowed field, doing something funny to the dirt. She hadn’t seen another person outside her window since leaving the house. It was an abandoned landscape out here in the heart of the country where all the food came from, and disquieting events seemed about to transpire on their own—the sort of place one sped through without stopping. The road went abruptly back to gravel, and the frame began to chatter. Gwen had counted eighty-six poles.

  “This scenery hurts my eyes,” she said to the window.

  “Yeah,” said Dallas to the back of her head, “wait ’til you see what it does when you’ve been out here long as us.”

  At the corner of her eye his arm on the rattling wheel was scored by a crosshatching of cuts, random, razor thin, that excited her in a troubling way. A yellow butterfly exploded against the windshield, one shredded wing struggling to rise from a gooey star. A black 61 inside a white circle rushed at her and was gone—a highway marker planted in a clump of thistle. A little bearded man was peering inquisitively out of the top of each ear of corn. She wasn’t even sure what state she was in.

  At the first intersection with stop signs there were the first trees, the cement blockhouse of a 7-Eleven, and a Shell station without any pumps. Dallas screeched into the lot at an angle, cutting across two parking spaces. Gwen waited in the car, reading the misspelled sale signs in the store window. She felt like a runaway delinquent on a cross-country crime spree with her sociopathic boyfriend. A thin man in a zippered jumpsuit stepped from the shadows of the Shell garage to stand bow-legged, staring at her as he wiped his smudged fists on an oily rag. Then he began a series of maneuvers too strangely fascinating to ignore. He opened the zipper on his right thigh, tucked the rag in the pocket, and closed it. He opened the zipper on his left arm, removed what appeared to be a pocket calculator. He punched some buttons, examined the result, replaced the calculator, and closed the zipper. He was still staring at her. He opened the zipper on his chest, extracted a black box the size of a cigarette pack, held it to his mouth as his lips moved in a furtive whisper, replaced the box, closed his zipper and ambled back into the garage. She couldn’t see Dallas anywhere inside the store. She leaned over, tried the horn, but nothing happened. A hard-used pickup banged mufflerless into the sun-scorched lot, its cab crammed with an impossible number of adolescent boys in knee-high black rubber boots and bloodstained pants, who paraded past her, key rings jingling at every waist, eyes roving boldly over hers, their very skin seemingly about to burst from the pressure of its fermented contents. Gwen knew the type: strands of pubic hair caught in every fly. One of them with head hair combed sleek and black as the wing of a crow, half a cigarette tucked behind a freckled ear, came to pose in the window, punching at a video game machine with his hips. Dallas backed out the door with four cases of beer. He was smiling.

  “Who were those guys?”

  “More saucer people.” He jerked the stick into reverse and skidded out backwards at high speed. “Hell, you’ve probably already met ’em on your various travels.”

  Gravel spat out behind them. Gwen said nothing. At the stop sign he popped open a can of beer and turned off onto a different road, recently resurfaced and bisecting infinite fields of the same monotonous corn. He chugged the can, wiped his mouth on the back of a hand, and flipped the empty over his shoulder onto the rear seat. Ahead of them the road ran straight and flat and empty, a runway to nowhere. He drove with one hand, sipped his second beer with the other. There was a blue bandanna knotted around his sunburned neck, and when he drank his eyes rolled up off the road and his Adam’s apple hopped as if a creature crouched there in the warm well of his throat. She started counting the animal pancakes frying on the hot pavement. A big dark bird symbolic of something or other swooped in low over the stalks. Dallas leaned over, bare arm brushing the surface of her denimed thigh, and fiddled briefly with the radio knobs.

  The sound hit her in the cheekbones. The tiny car speakers were buzzing like mutant wasps.

  An iron ball on a long chain sailed into a wall of bricks—the moment as plain as if it were happening before her—and everything began to fall and fell continuously over intonations grave and German punctuated by hammers on anvils, shattering tubes, the held amplified note of a boys’ choir, files on guitar strings, the voice of the president on a loop repeating, “Well…well…well…” in a long dead chime, bottles clattering over concrete, a quartet of chain saws, and the screeching of pterodactyls in a riotous stampede along a broken pulse to an unexpected precipice of silence in which one clear English voice recited harshly, “Twist my lemon, eat my head, crawl down the pipe, dead dead dead,” and then the noise of collapse resumed.

  “All right!” shouted Dallas. “Vic and the Vectors! They’re great!”

  It wasn’t too bad, actually, it gave her head a tooled quality, of something clanky and inorganic, clumsily affixed to her body, and the sensation of momentarily straddling disparate kingdoms was not altogether unpleasant; she experienced a beat, a life, where logic claimed there was none: in the fracture, in the rust, in the crash, and all her control towers were quickly and thoroughly stormed. She shook her head (this new oxidized one) and slapped her hands in time against the dash.

  Beneath Dallas’s foot the accelerator pedal sank squeaking into the floor and they rocked and they rolled all the way down this long lonesome runway and the fields blurred into walls and the road was a wild thing loose as a snake and she was a sound and a force and she had no name and the world was a window and a mirror and the light was in the window and she was the rock hurling toward the pane. Then the tape stopped and the air went out of the car and the flatness out of the world.

  “Vicious,” declared Dallas. His hands with difficulty were maneuvering the vehicle back into the proper lane.

  “Oh,” she said. “Yeah.” This was that vague area between now and not.

  “It’s the only way to really get into these guys. After their last concert at the Amphidome, they found black gunk oozing out of cracks in the foundation. The first two rows tore up their seats. A rent-a-cop had a heart attack.”

  “I wish I had been there.”

  “Me too.”

  She had lost some moments back there, scraps of time blown backward down the road like highway litter, and here she was simultaneously conducting a perfectly coherent conversation (wasn’t it?) in the light and a bewildered search in the dark for something only she could find or even miss.

  “Look,” she said. Clouds from nowhere were getting up on top of one another in a mad pile-on out there at the end of the road. The blue had come hopelessly apart, spilling the stuffing white and suffocating down upon them. They’d be gagging on it in a few minutes.

  “Yeah, we get that shit all the time around here.”

  “Amazing. Amazing skies.”

  “Thanks.”

  He lobbed another can over the seat where it joined the clanking chorus in back.

  She looked out the window and suddenly all the corn was gone and they were running along an
open field of cut grass behind coils of barbed wire and a double row of high chain-link fence hung with big red signs in important capital letters. Dallas switched off the key and they coasted over onto the shoulder, pebbles and sand crunching under the tires. When they finally stopped, a sheet of dust settled evenly over the car. Exhaust drifted forward through the open windows. Gwen could smell the shiny blacktop cooking in the afternoon heat. They sat there in the quiet, staring out stupidly like tourists on a bus. The sun was white. Dallas hooked his fingers through the cardboard beer case and glanced over at her. “Here we are.”

  “Where?”

  He got out of the car.

  Her door wouldn’t work, the handle seemed smeared with butter. A long arm bristling with hair came through the window. “You do it like this.” The door popped open, she had no idea what he had done. The road was as sticky as freshly chewed gum. She followed him over to the opposite shoulder, their bunched shadows slinking behind like strange mongrel dogs, down through a ditch of prickly weeds and up a low grassy bank, driving before them a swarm of gray grasshoppers on papery wings. At the crest was a small circular space where the brush had been flattened by the weight of a large animal.

  “Okay,” said Dallas, pulling her down next to him. Only the tops of their heads were visible from the road where the VW sat abandoned and strangely foreign now, as though it belonged to someone else and was property of the fence. Gnats swirled over them like soot. The stems of brome sawed gently before their eyes. The back of Gwen’s head felt cupped by the sun, like a basketball palmed in a giant hand. Dallas opened another can.