M31

by Stephen Wright

  “So finally I told my mother and she made me see a doctor who said it was hormones and bad periods and he gave me pills that changed nothing, they keep on coming whether I take the medicine or not, whether I have a period or not, and now I’m thinking maybe they even fixed it so I’d take the pills because they need something that’s in them and that’s why I came to you because it’s not stopping and I’m afraid and sometimes I’m afraid because I think maybe I like it and I think about how thoughts are like scabs on top of something else and what it would be like to have that tearing go all the way through, your thoughts picked clean away, who would you be then? and please, I’m sorry, I haven’t told all this to anyone except Beale.”

  She stopped, the tears fell without a sound. The room was all blobs and streaks of light. Trinity leaned over and popped the Off button. Dot fiddled with the silverware.

  “We know,” said Dash, and there was a new tenderness in his voice. She looked up through salty prisms at his bulbous head and glittering insect eyes. “You are not alone,” he said.

  “What was playing?” asked Dallas.

  “Huh?” She wiped her face with a napkin.

  “At the theater where you worked. What was playing that night?”

  “I don’t know. It was a multiplex.”

  “You were abducted, my dear,” proclaimed Dot. “There’s little question of that. Why, we’ve got cases in those filing cabinets that would—”

  “Sssssh.” Dash had raised a hand.

  Zoe was twisted around in her seat, burning eyes aimed between the bars of the chair she gripped with bony paws, staring through the open window as if the night were staring back. A soft wind dark with dust and decay pushed in over the sill, teasing the candles and rattling like husks the curling photographs pinned to the opposite wall, the whole armada of hubcaps and pie tins fluttering together on the verge of spectacular launch. The window framed a field of deep black, intermittently broken by the nervous light of a handful of fireflies. Or were they fireflies? Snip, snip, snip went the shears of the unseen clock. Zoe apparently possessed the ability of certain game animals, deer, rabbits, to hold her body immobile for incredible lengths of time. Dallas, bored, turned away, a carrot stick cracking between his teeth with the sound of splintering wood. Zoe slipped from her chair and crept trancelike to the window, soiled dress unbuttoned halfway down her back, round head balanced on her small square shoulders like a stone. She stood motionless as her watchers waited and the wax trembled and dropped in hot quick tears down the thick candle stems. Then her arms went up as if to still a crowd and held there, reaching skyward, a midget preacher prepared to bring down the brimstone on an audience of “normals.” Moths flapped in confused orbits around the flames. Her breathing came wet and labored. Beale lifted a beer can to his mouth. It’s happening again, thought Gwen, it’s happening again. There must have been a signal, some cue pitched off the end of the spectrum or a soundburst silent as a dog whistle, for a shudder rippled across Zoe’s back and her arms twitched and lifted in a conductor’s pause and then, round-toed Keds rooted to the floor, went jerking about her body in a mesmerizing sequence of cryptic gestures, each move performed with such electric concentration the possibility of meaning hovered around her like the aurora borealis, shifting, dancing, flirting, but never quite present, never quite within reach. She seemed to wave to a friend, she seemed to sketch a figure in the air, she seemed to twist a tool, but were the metaphors real or was this commotion nothing more than what initial appearance suggested so strongly—a mad semaphoring of the night? After a while, perhaps because of fatigue, her elbows dropped to her sides, hands faced one another and began executing their own group of nimble signs, each hand representing a little head engaged in animated conversation or merely demonstrating the physical equivalent of speaking in tongues. For if an intelligence guided these nerves, it was one apart and unrecognizable, having chosen to exhibit the structure of chaos in the frantic pantomime of this troubled little girl. Like a volcano or a geyser or any act of nature, Zoe had to expend herself before her arms would cease and a haunting stillness descend over her for the length of several unhurried breaths, and then she turned and stumbled into a flat-footed run around the dinner table, pink sneakers hitting the bare floor like a drill sergeant’s jump boots. On the second revolution she started to scream.

  “Zoe!” Her mother rapped on the table with a heavy soup spoon. “Zoe!” Dot tried to grab her, but she dodged her arm, veering across the room, and, still wailing, hurled her small unprotected body as if it were some separate inorganic object flat against the screen door and was gone.

  Edsel took his hands off his ears.

  Maryse lit a cigarette.

  Dash sipped from his beer and carefully replaced the can in its own wet ring on the table.

  Beale’s eyes were as large as saucers. “Was that…was she in communication just then, was she actually talking to The Occupants?”

  Gwen could feel her pulse in her teeth.

  “Hand jive,” said Maryse.

  Inside The Object Mignon began to cry.

  “Look, she’s woke the baby again.” She stabbed her cigarette into her glass and pushed back her chair. “I want to know when somebody’s going to do something about this.”

  The howl waxed and waned as Zoe circumnavigated the house, and the wind from her passage entered the window like air blown across the mouth of an empty bottle, and in the convulsions of the candle flames huge shadows writhed and leaped against the walls. The television picture, having lost the horizontal, rolled endlessly from top to bottom.

  “She knew,” said Dot. “She always knows.”

  “I think they were drawn by Gwen’s story,” said Dash.

  Edsel crawled under the table.

  Dot scooped out the meat from half an acorn squash. “And she’d never seen frame one of any of those movies, either. Not even Twilight Zone on TV. So you know where it’s got to be coming from.”

  “Our telephone to the stars,” said Trinity.

  “Has she ever seen a doctor?” inquired Gwen. Again something living touched her leg, she hoped it was Edsel.

  “What do they know?” asked Dash. “Look at you.”

  “Lightning,” claimed Dot. “Simple as that.”

  “Cosmic rays,” said Dallas.

  The news had come on and a very important head kept jumping from the bottom of the screen to the top, from the bottom to the top, from the bottom to the top. Gwen didn’t feel so well. The Soviets, announced the head, the Soviets.

  “What a strange day,” said Dash. “All that thunder and not a cloud in the sky, those rainbows and not a drop of rain.”

  “I was four months along,” remembered Dot, “carrying in groceries from the car, we were in Circleville then, and I never saw or heard a thing.”

  “The lights went out in the house,” said Trinity.

  “It sounded like a bomb,” said Dallas.

  “I remember how hard the driveway was and the cans all over me and I had a pounding head as big as the Liberty Bell. My skin smelled like Edsel’s train set.”

  “What did the doctors say?” Gwen could hear the child rounding the house like a ravening wolf.

  “What could they say? Of course, she seemed normal at first, but once all this business started up it was pretty obvious to everyone. Lightning.”

  “Well, either that,” said Dash, “or just plain bad chromosomes. I mean, look for Christ’s sake at the rest of ’em.”

  “Hah, hah,” said Dallas. Gwen didn’t like the way he looked at her. She didn’t like the way the father looked at her, either. “What’s that?” she asked.

  There was a banging coming from beneath the house.

  Trinity groaned.

  Dash looked at his son. “Go get her.”

  Dallas leaned back, stretching out his legs. “She’ll get tired.”

  “I’m going to count to three.”

  “Don’t look at me,” said Dot to her son, busy herding her p
eas into a neat pile. “I’m just the mother here.”

  “One.”

  Dallas’s hand slipped under his shirt. Edsel climbed back up into his chair, never missing an opportunity to see his brother in trouble.

  “Two.”

  Dallas’s finger rubbed the metal surface of the revolver in long contemplative circles.

  It was Trinity’s turn to scrape back her chair. “I’ll go,” she said.

  Dash watched his son. His face was orange in the warm candlelight, and the flames reflecting up across his sunglasses seemed to be burning inside so that his head resembled a Halloween pumpkin.

  Dallas was looking at Gwen. “Don’t you like my mom’s cooking?” he asked. “Looks like you’re gonna be keeping Edsel company at the table here.”

  “We know why she’s not eating,” said Dot.

  “Yeah, why?”

  Now there was banging and scratching under the floor, some desperate creature attempting to claw its way in.

  Arms went churning at one end of the table.

  “Edsel put his meat on my plate when you weren’t looking.”

  “I did not.”

  “Did too.”

  “Did not.”

  Dot sighed. “Ten hours in a hot car with Zoe wasn’t as bad as this.”

  “Trade plates,” Dash ordered.

  Edsel stared hopelessly at the mess set before him. “I can’t eat this.”

  “Then sit there all night.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Then eat it.”

  “Why don’t you leave him alone,” said Dallas. “Who cares what the fuck he eats?”

  “I certainly wouldn’t expect you to.” Dash’s voice was quick and harsh, a wire whipping out.

  “Good-bye,” said Dot. She stood and headed toward the front room. “I’m locking the door,” she said. She didn’t bother to look back.

  “Satisfied?” asked Dash. Father and son faced one another over the dinner remains like strangers in a bar.

  Beale and Gwen pretended not to listen. Gwen watched each one leave the table like sentinels falling off a wall. All this space made her nervous.

  “Your lip curls any further,” said Dash, “it may have to be pressed.”

  “I’m real scared.” And as Dallas rubbed the gun metal he felt the genie awaken and she was deep inside him where the changes start from and a quickening moved over his body like a beam of cool light and flesh stiffened, cells locking into alien combinations, and his skin took on a strength and an iridescence even as gravity shifted beneath his feet and he was a solid piece, he could walk through the atomic fire.

  “What’s happening with you? My own son talking to me like this.”

  The beating under the floor grew louder.

  “You’re insane,” Dallas said, and got up and came around the table, hand fumbling under his shirt, and passed his father and started up the spiral stairs, the beginnings of a smile working the corners of his lips at the thought of what he could have done and yet did not.

  “Well,” said Dash, looking about the table, “I guess it’s just the four of us for dessert”—then noting the other son sullen over a congealing plate—“or three, anyway. I don’t know what we’ve got out there in the kitchen, but I’m sure it’s good.”

  “Could I have another beer?” asked Beale.

  “The UFO made him do it,” said Edsel.

  There were voices now under the floor and the muffled sounds of struggle.

  Dash stared at his son for a moment. “I think it’s time to get out the old Jap lenses,” he said brightly. “Show these folks the real night sky.”

  Edsel did not respond.

  Trinity’s voice came up through the floorboards penetrating and clear: “Don’t you bite me, you little bitch, I’ll knock your damn teeth out!”

  “Amazing how well you can see with these binoculars,” said Dash. “Took ’em off the bridge of a Japanese destroyer at Leyte Gulf.”

  “I didn’t know you were in Vietnam,” said Beale. He had reached that point of intoxication where a sense of true clarity prevails, each object emitting an aura of grand discovery, each word a fascinating piece of flotsam to be inspected with sober concern.

  Dash looked at him. “Navy,” he said finally. “Off the coast.”

  Beale nodded solemnly.

  There was a sharp scream, and someone seemed to be kicking the bottom of the floor.

  “Excuse me,” said Gwen, hurrying off to the cramped sanctuary of the bathroom.

  “She seems to like it in there,” commented Dash.

  “Reminds her of home,” said Beale.

  “Yes,” Dash went on, “you’d be positively astonished at the sights we’ve seen, the wonders of the universe.” He pointed up at the clumsily painted constellations arching in flaking splendor over their heads. “Chariots of the Gods, Bug-Eyed Monsters, the starship Enterprise.” Dry laughter rattled out of him in a long chain. Beale looked around, realizing only now he was alone at this table with a surly kid and a strange, vaguely threatening man he didn’t really know and not even sure he could successfully navigate the few yards between his chair and his backpack.

  From under the house came the cry of a child, a note of pain so pure it seemed a living thing itself, risen up out of the dark foundation, the fright of stone and wood, the loneliness of matter.

  The phone began to chatter again, like a gourd savagely shaken in your face. Its demanding sound went on and on. No one moved. This was a noise that would have no end.

  Five

  THEY STOOD OUT BACK in the middle of the yard in the middle of a darkness that seemed to reduce to tabletop scale the stretch of lawn, the steepled house, the long ripening fields, the whole platter of earth upon which the people themselves were clustered like tiny hand-painted figures set gazing in awkward silence off the edge of a miniature world. The air was still and clear, and the stars burned with a numerical precision, dimming momentarily to dirty gray at the passage of high thin clouds swift as smoke. The binoculars, each lens the size of a mortar tube, were mounted on a tall metal tripod, a prehistoric insect with dark shiny eyes. Dash crouched, cursing, one knee already damp, under the long spindly legs. Poly, the untethered goat, having discovered the open car window, was gnawing enthusiastically on a fibrous seat cover. Zoe went rolling over and over across the uncut grass.

  “There’s so much of it,” Gwen exclaimed. She was wearing an oversized sweatshirt that advertised Gilley’s Pasadena Texas across the chest. Her hands were stuffed in her pockets. “It makes me dizzy.” But she was unable to turn away from the chance that one of those specks of glitter up there just might become unglued at any moment.

  “You don’t get skies like this in the city,” said Trinity. “You come out here and think, this is what an ant feels like crawling across the floor of St. Peter’s.”

  “Right before it gets stepped on,” said Dallas. He kept nervously circling the group, dropping sarcasms on each rotation.

  “Yes,” said Maryse. “We all know you’ve been to Europe. You don’t have to keep throwing that in our faces.” She held the baby in her arms as if it were a magnum of wine wrapped in a cold towel. “Why don’t we all just shut up and listen for a moment.” She looked out dramatically into the fields, out above the flowering heads of the cornstalks, that shadowy mass of closely ranked spectators pressing quietly forward.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Dallas.

  “What?” asked Gwen, turning. “What are we supposed to hear?”

  “More of her shit,” said Dallas. “That’s all.”

  “Each ear hears what it was designed for.” She held her magic doll upright so as to deflect the evil of others.

  “I don’t hear nothing,” said Beale, sitting atop the white Styrofoam cooler, a can of beer clutched in his warm fist.

  “There’s never nothing,” Maryse insisted.

  “Get off of that,” said Dallas. “You’re gonna break it.”

  “I don’t think anyb
ody’s in the mood for amber waves tonight,” Trinity declared.

  Maryse looked steadfastly away. “It’s coming in on you whether you listen or not, getting into all of us, but you need ears we don’t have anymore, frontier ears to catch the sound behind other sounds, the ones you know. Back then Mother Ivey heard it plain, wrote it in her journal: the whisper of the sod.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Dallas.

  Gwen thought she might be able to detect a dull shell-to-your-ear-type roar, something vastly mechanical laboring along under the far ground. “Like a ship?” she suggested tentatively.

  “Yes,” Maryse responded in a suspiciously quick hiss. Was that what she had meant?

  A flat piece of wood went sailing like a wing over the lawn. “Goddamn!” cried Dash. “Could I trouble one of you people for a little assistance WITH THIS GODDAMN THING?” He had a firm grip on one leg of the teetering tripod. “You see,” he declared, holding up another rectangle of plywood, “these are the materials we’re forced to work with.”