M31

by Stephen Wright

  “It’s an interesting topic.”

  “If you’re a farmer.”

  Edsel jumped in his seat. “Dallas kicked me under the table,” he yelled.

  “I did not.”

  “You did too.”

  “Did not.”

  “I don’t care if that steak grows fur,” said Dash. “You’re going to sit there until it’s gone. And turn down that damn television.”

  There were eyes of grease, clear as a cat’s, lying flat and still on the surface of the gravy.

  “I had a dream while you were gone,” said Maryse.

  “We don’t want to hear it,” said Dot, stirring her iced tea as if ringing a bell.

  “Pass the ketchup,” demanded Edsel.

  “I saw your hotel room on fire.”

  Edsel spanked the bottom of the bottle, once, twice, and a red plug shot out onto his plate, releasing a flood that swiftly submerged one small outpost of Switzerland.

  “There was a painting of a windmill over the bed. It was in flames.”

  Employing a butter knife, Edsel sawed away with clumsy intensity, the steak darting from him as if alive, pushing before it a thick tomatoey tide that broke over the rim of the plate in a long dripping arc across the tablecloth.

  “Do you remember?” Dot asked.

  “Sure,” said Dash, “I always take careful note of every example of motel art.”

  “Then there was just a rectangle of fire, burning up into space.”

  Edsel managed to stay the meat long enough to detach a wieldy chunk that he was carefully maneuvering, trapped between fork and finger, toward his open mouth, when his mother seized his arm, twisting it over his protests to expose on the hairless underside of the elbow a weeping patch of raw skin cloved with grit.

  “What happened here?” she demanded.

  “I fell.” The meat plopped back into the red sea.

  “What do you mean you fell? Are you all right?”

  “Sure, Mom.” Now his spoon took up the chase, unsuccessfully pursuing the quarry about an obstacle course of untouched cauliflower.

  “No one is listening to me,” Maryse complained.

  “That’s right,” agreed Dallas.

  Edsel switched back to a fork and almost immediately speared his prey.

  “Why didn’t you clean this out? Do you want an infection? Where’s your bicycle? How did this happen?”

  He pulled the slippery lump off the fork with the ends of his teeth and began to chew, long, slow, thoughtful chews. “I don’t know,” he said.

  Outside the windows, the land was as flat, as interesting, as the head of an anvil, and the shadows of the corn advanced like the rifle barrels of an approaching army. Something touched Gwen under the table. It was not the cat.

  “Were you fooling around with those MacGuffins again?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he mumbled through a full mouth.

  “He has a whole other life,” commented Trinity.

  He had already assumed his habitual pose, back to the living, face to the radiant screen—Dot more familiar with the hairs on his head than the freckles on his cheeks—when the points of his thin shoulders shot upward and his body convulsed for a moment in the exaggerated grip of the gag reflex. He raised his hand to his mouth and placed with deliberate neatness to the side of his plate a wet wad of gray, tooth-marked fiber. Calmly he turned to his mother. “I told you I didn’t like it.”

  “My God,” cried Maryse, “cover it with a napkin, please.”

  “I had a dream,” said Dallas.

  “You did not.” She was arranging a wall of bowls between herself and the “thing” on the table.

  “We were living in one of those big old houses with black turrets and funny curlicues hanging off the gutters and it was out in the woods someplace and it was always dark and outside behind all these jungle bushes were strange humanoid shapes with hoses for faces and big railroad gloves and I was the only one who knew but I couldn’t tell whether they were trying to get in or trying to keep us from getting out.”

  Maryse made an elaborate show of lighting her cigarette. “Better luck next time, kid.” The match dropped hissing into her chalky glass.

  “Why does she get to smoke at the table?” asked Dallas.

  Dash ignored his son. “Chicago,” he said to Maryse. “The Great Fire. That’s what you were seeing.”

  “Of course.”

  “Our adventures were not so dramatic.”

  “We were bumped,” said Dot.

  “Again?” asked Trinity.

  “By Blascoe Gadgett.”

  “I’ve heard of him,” said Beale, putting down his beer. “Isn’t he the one—”

  “Yes,” said Dash. “Who impersonates famous men so he can go to bed with famous women and write famous books to be made into profitable movies starring these same famous women.”

  “He thought we were evangelists from Arkansas,” said Dot. “Then Zoe tried to bite the lady with the clipboard.”

  “The place was crawling with dero,” said Dash. “Everyone with Hollywood hair and button shark eyes.”

  “Dero?” Edsel’s child’s forehead crinkled up into adult worry lines. “Did they have guns?”

  “No self-respecting robot could be fully detrimental without one,” said Trinity.

  “It’s the echo they can’t stand,” said Dash. “Once she cranks up her echo we might as well edge toward the door. You know how television despises repetition.”

  “We should stick to radio,” said Dot. “Where our friends are.”

  “Sure. And our ninety seconds in between processed cheese commercials. Like the baloney in the bun.”

  “That’s terrible,” said Gwen, genuinely shocked. She thought anyone who wanted to should be allowed on TV. She had been on once herself.

  “We dwell in the shadow of the electronic sun.”

  At that moment the real sun, spent and ailing in its long passage, dropped into the slot of the middle window on the western wall, turning faces to jaundice all along the opposite side of the table. Figures on the television screen were bleached a dim protoplasmic gray. Beale shielded his eyes with an uplifted hand. Gwen squinted down into her beets. Trinity yanked a cord, and a tremendous curtain of black cloth fell with dramatic suddenness, cutting off the light like a blade. The room seemed to go from color to black and white.

  “Can I light the candles?” asked Edsel.

  “Eat your Swiss,” said Dot.

  As soon as Maryse got the first wick going, Zoe’s hand moved out across the table. Dot tapped her rod against a chair leg and the hand withdrew.

  “Okay,” said Dash, rubbing his palms briskly together, cornbread crumbs sprinkling down on his sauerkraut, “now let’s hear what everyone learned while we were away.”

  “Me,” cried Edsel. “Me, me.”

  “He’s been waiting all week for this,” said Trinity.

  “Okay, go.”

  “I learned about light.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s fast, faster than anything, faster than bullets. If you turn on a light in a dark room and you’re standing in the way, it could kill you. And time couldn’t work without it or clocks, either. If you had twins and put one in a dark room the second it was born and kept it there where there wasn’t even the tiniest crack, after a while the one outside would be an old man and the one in the room would still be a baby.”

  “It’s true,” said Trinity. “A fact of science.”

  “Who told you this?” Dash asked.

  “Arnold did. He knows everything. He’s in the sixth grade.”

  “Who the hell is Arnold?”

  “One of the MacGuffin twins,” said Dot.

  “The one they kept in the dark?”

  Edsel was the only one who didn’t laugh. “Isn’t that true about light?”

  “Yes,” said his father. “It’s true.”

  “I have some facts,” said Maryse. “Ever hear of the Iveys, the Ivey family
of Mercator, Kansas? Ma and Pa and all the young ’uns and the cousins quote unquote and the animals in and out and on top of the little sod house in windy prairie nowhere. A wagon trail ran by the front door and today that’s part of I-80. Travelers disappeared a lot in those days and nobody wondered much about it, hazards of the road and all. The last Ivey, a shriveled-up aunt who claimed to have slept with Buffalo Bill and said he had two navels, lived well into her nineties and died about the time of the stock market crash. They tore down the house for a gas station and found a root cellar full of human bones. Stacked up like firewood for a long winter. Neighbors weren’t surprised, they’d been seeing things for years, certain members of the family they weren’t supposed to see, mongoloids, dwarves, hairless monkeys, toads with fingers, lizards with pink skin. Inbred worse than royalty. Seems the Iveys lived by the philosophy ‘Fuck one another and kill the strangers.’”

  “How the West was won,” said Trinity.

  “The women stood behind parlor curtains and strangled visitors in their chairs with strips of braided rawhide. Strong women with strong arms from churning butter all day. They melted everything down in a shed out back.”

  “What’s this goop?” asked Edsel.

  “Cottage cheese,” said Dot. “You like that.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I learned,” said Trinity, “the importance of consecrating my life anew to the principles of stringent contraception.”

  “Good thing I didn’t believe that,” said Dot.

  “And what about you?” asked Dash, turning to his eldest son. “What did you learn?”

  Dallas was picking his teeth with his fingernail. “Nothing,” he said.

  “Of course, nothing.” Dash addressed the table. “Your major field of study for the last five years.”

  “Let’s not start,” said Dot.

  “But I want to hear about the Lost Order, Dunker church, the Burnside Bridge, blood on the corn. I was looking forward to it.”

  Dallas sat silent.

  “How about those weeds?” He might have been inquiring about a favorite football team.

  “Yeah.” Dallas poked at his mashed potatoes as if there were something dangerous under them.

  “They finished yet, is what I want to know.”

  “Some.”

  “And how many exactly is that?”

  “What it sounds like, I guess.”

  “In half a month you can’t yank out a couple dozen sick weeds?”

  “It ain’t like that’s all I got to do.”

  “No, no, of course not, I understand that, when you’re not considering ‘nothing’ you might have to put down a beer can long enough for your hand to risk heat stroke.”

  “Let’s try to enjoy our dinner,” said Dot.

  “Good luck,” said Trinity.

  The telephone began to ring and everyone froze in place. Dash glanced at his watch. “Are they still calling?”

  “Every day,” said Trinity.

  “They know when you’re at home eating dinner.”

  The phone made an old-fashioned clacking sound like a metal ball being shaken vigorously inside a wooden box.

  “They’re threatening to place a blemish on your permanent record.”

  “Hah. Debt is the engine that powers this country. We should be commended on the depth of our patriotism.”

  “I said you certainly did appreciate the gravity of the situation and would be getting back to them at your earliest convenience. They said you were shirking a moral obligation. They’re trying to appeal to your ethical centers.”

  “Yes, well, did you also inform them that the hours at our centers have been drastically reduced?”

  “Are we going to have to move again?” asked Edsel.

  “No.” Dash’s voice was huge and firm. “Nobody’s moving anywhere.” He was cutting ham into boneless slivers he dropped one at a time to the complaining cat at his feet.

  “But I like moving,” said Dallas.

  “But I like moving,” said Zoe.

  Gwen watched the sun struggling against the dark curtain and thought, This is the second dusk I’ve seen here, I don’t want to see a third.

  Finally the ringing stopped, a series of diminishing ghost echoes left hanging in the gray air.

  “Gwen, dear,” said Dot. “You’ve hardly touched your dinner.”

  Gwen stared wistfully down at her rearranged plate. “No, I’m sorry, I guess I wasn’t very hungry.”

  “Hardly a surprise now, is it,” said Dot. Gwen avoided her eye.

  “But look how rude we’ve been,” Dash exclaimed. “All this bickering has reduced our guests to silence.”

  “Not at all,” said Beale. “This has been quite an education.” The beer had begun to interfere with his note taking.

  Dash was looking steadily at Gwen, smiling in a manner that seemed foreign to his facial muscles. “We’d like to hear your story,” he said.

  “My story?” She was suddenly aware of her voice as others must hear it, a thin tentative sound. She wanted to flee to the sanctity of the john, but Dot was watching her, too. “I don’t have anything interesting to say.”

  “There’s no such thing as an uninteresting contact,” said Dot.

  “It’ll do you good,” Beale urged. “You know that.” He turned to Dash. “She keeps all this bottled up too tight.”

  “We understand,” said Dash softly, and the black lenses of his glasses seemed to be pressing in against her. “Trinity, honey, would you please get the machine now.”

  “This is silly,” protested Gwen. “It’s just going to put you all to sleep.”

  A portable tape recorder appeared to the right of her plate. Trinity’s thumb depressed the red button. Dash gave her an encouraging nod. Gwen stared at the little holes in the recorder’s leather case. They waited. She took a breath. “Okay,” she said, “it was like this.”

  Even Zoe sat motionless, as if to listen, her hard churning body gone into idle, its stupendous force humming on quietly, spinning gears, momentarily disengaged.

  “The first time was two years ago, the summer I worked the booth at Cinema West. I liked that job, I felt safe in there behind the glass on my vinyl stool, punching the ticket buttons, watching the faces come and go, the light already in their eyes. It was kids mostly, we showed a lot of space war stuff, but I never bothered, I never even looked at the sky. I used to pretend I was a guard in a box at the border, processing happy refugees. In between shows I read fashion magazines or talked to Tommy, he was one of the ushers, and sometimes, when the movie was loud, you could hear crashes and explosions through the closed doors, and my clothes and my hair always smelled of popcorn.

  “Usually I’d get off somewhere between ten and eleven, about an hour after the last show started, and I’d clean out my drawer and Mr. Newman, the manager, would come and lock the money bag in the safe. We kidded him a lot about his name, he was this porky guy without much hair, no relation, but he said it was being born with that name that had driven him into the movie business. And every night, whenever I left, he always waved and called, ‘Ciao.’ Then I’d walk through the empty mall and out to my car in back. All the display windows would be dark, and all the merchandise, things that were never even alive to begin with, just looked dead. That was why I always wore tennis shoes to work, I couldn’t stand to hear that horrible click-click behind me, gave me the creeps.

  “Anyway, I always tried to park as close to the exit as possible, but by the time I got out most of the other cars would be gone and I’d have to walk across an empty lot with the wind blowing and the moon shining and shadows everywhere and the month before the girl at the glove counter at Sears had been attacked and murdered in the same lot and of course no one had been found and everyone was just waiting for it to happen again. Sometimes I’d dream it, my face lying in a puddle of black rainwater, and I’d wake up and my hands would be cold and wet. So the minute I pushed open the door I knew something was wrong, it was darker t
han usual, there were more shadows. I walked straight toward the car, not too fast and not looking around because I thought if I didn’t see anything, there wouldn’t be anything there. I could feel things scurrying up behind me but I wouldn’t turn around, they couldn’t get me if I didn’t see them. I reached the car and touched the door handle and it was like ice and there were twice as many keys on the ring as usual and when I finally found the right one it wouldn’t work, it wouldn’t turn in the lock, and I started cursing my mother, it was her car, and I started thinking it was her fault, she had taken my keys even though my keys were right there in my hand yanking and twisting and I kept seeing her apron hanging on the refrigerator door handle and I think I might have been crying a little by then. Then I really did hear something, a quick swooshing sound like maybe the wing of a big bird passing over or a big blade flashing down and my heart was going and it was like arms were already around me because I couldn’t get my breath and every time I blinked my lids went click when they touched and my hand wiggled and the keys fell and the sound was like a couple of trash cans rolling over ’cause my whole body, all the skin of it, was tight and focused as one ear and when I stooped down to pick them up something bright jerked at the corner of my eye and I jumped up and started to run over the blacktop toward what I don’t know, chased by my own screams—at least I thought I was running, I didn’t know what was happening then, I still don’t know what happened now—and that’s when the gaps started. I can see myself at different moments but there are holes in between like there’s this stage and the lights go off and everything is rearranged and the lights come on again.

  “The first light hit me in the eyes and I must have fallen in the parking lot because I could feel the rough pavement against my back and smell the oil around my head but my eyes hurt and I couldn’t see and of course I’m thinking it must be a flashlight with a cop behind it so ‘Who is it?’ I say and there’s no answer but I can feel the shadows moving around behind the light and I must have thought I was still near the car because my hands went searching around for the keys to put between my fingers to cut like jagged claws when suddenly, without really understanding, I did know what was happening like in school when you’re taking a test and come to a problem you don’t know and then you do and you have no idea where the answer came from. I knew the answer then and it wasn’t a cop or a psycho killer or a crazy dream. It had come out of the sky and it wasn’t a bird or a star or a piece of space junk. It was something from off the screen at work. And I thought how it was supposed to be like one thing but it was like something else instead because somehow the light from outside went straight inside with nothing to stop it like if a doctor was looking at your eye with a bulb and suddenly it’s shining up on the walls of your skull only you haven’t felt a thing and now you aren’t you anymore but something empty and full like a sponge. I think there was a gap and I felt and then I heard this awful tearing sound like adhesive being ripped, only in my brain, in my consciousness, and I think it was then that some sort of station or terminal was opened in my head for these ‘things,’ whatever they are, to come and go, whenever they please, wherever they like. And I tell myself no, this isn’t true because this can’t happen to people but I know it did because sometimes I can hear them in there and that’s when I know I’m crazy.