M31

by Stephen Wright

  Gwen assumed, perhaps wrongly, that he was speaking to her and nodded her head in sympathy. She wondered how he could possibly see anything with those sunglasses on.

  Dallas handed his father his board. “Not that one, idiot, does that look like it could fit in here?”

  Zoe, running out of open lawn, smashed into the fence, ringing the wire all around the yard.

  “It’s like a Christmas tree,” Beale proclaimed, toasting the universe with upraised beer can, “minilights, a million strings of ’em,” and then seemed to surprise himself by abruptly sitting down backward on the uncushioned ground.

  The only light this summer night was what fell naturally out of the sky, hard bitter starflakes, the soft laving of the moon. No cheery hearthlike glow on these bare horizons, no comforting sense that somewhere nearby competent people were up and about, taming space with motion, making a human noise, keeping a vigilant eye on things. Instead there was distance and wind and the ever-troubling notion of a total world totally asleep, plunged in unconsciousness, night inside, night outside, a volatile equilibrium of critical elements. Because out here it was actually possible to experience a darkness that was more than an absence, a temporary quality, but a living fluid as vivid as daylight, masked only momentarily by the magnitude of the sun and moving as freely among the sleek shiny spaces between the stars as within the dank textured depths of the mushroom shadow of the big cemetery tree that went thump, bark to flesh, beneath the inevitable collision with Zoe’s body, a battery-powered toy that immediately reversed itself and went rolling away, apparently undamaged, in the opposite direction.

  “If my child grows into something like that…” Maryse shifted the infant in question from one arm to another, careful to keep the plastic nipple plugged in place.

  Gwen’s head went up and down in agreement, almost an automatic reflex by now. Were these people really speaking to her? Beale sat huddled Indian style on the ground, privately worshipping at the pale altar of the beer cooler. “This is great,” he was mumbling to himself. “This is fucking great.” Here was Maryse’s kid, Gwen thought, plus a couple decades. He had the oddest-shaped head. She could pick him instantly out of any-sized crowd. That is, if she wanted to. She wandered out into the yard.

  The moon, slightly flattened on one side like a big snowy paperweight, was almost as round and bright as a moon could ever be. It reminded Gwen of a harsh tower light overlooking a grim prison yard.

  “Do you know any constellations?” Trinity asked, edging up behind her.

  Gwen shrugged. “The Big Dipper?”

  Trinity laughed. “Yes, that’s one.”

  “My father once tried to show me when I was about Edsel’s age. I told him there weren’t any pictures up there, and he told me to make up my own. I still couldn’t see any.”

  “Have you noticed my father’s?”

  “The painted ones?”

  “Yeah, up on the ceiling.”

  “Sorry, no pictures there, either. I don’t know, maybe it’s something only fathers can do.”

  “Good. I like that. Tell it to Dash, see what he says.”

  “What are you two whispering about?” asked Maryse, lurking near.

  “You,” Trinity responded at once.

  “Oh.” She shifted Mignon to the other arm. “They’re ready. Dash wants to show Gwen the moon.”

  “Fine. Do you want to see the moon, Gwen?”

  “Sure. I guess.”

  “Okay, then we will.”

  Dash was in a portrait photographer’s crouch behind the binoculars, fiddling with the focusing rings. “A little this way…a little that way…a little more lubrication, please.” He stepped back with a flourish. “Here she is, the big-bottomed goddess herself.”

  Hesitantly Gwen leaned into the glasses, the black eyepieces, cold and hard, seeming to leap forward to seize the bone of her face, and the lifeless, boring old moon burst into shocking clarity inside her head, a ball of burning tissue illuminated from within by the eerie gelid light of a consuming disease, the pearly-blue lesions, the thin black spider fractures, the deeply shadowed pox. “God,” she gasped, “it’s beautiful.”

  “One of the pair of cosmic eyes watching us day and night,” Dash explained. “The sun bright and quick, the moon slow and milky. That’s why night is a good time to hide.” She felt his large hand settle gently onto her shoulder.

  “Grandpa Warden always used to say the moon was a golf ball,” said Trinity, “so whenever I went outside after dark I’d have to put a pot on my head just in case it fell down.”

  “Yeah, and look what happened to Grandpa Warden,” said Dallas.

  Beale sat plucking idly at the grass between his legs, rubbing the short fragrant stems into broken pieces he sprinkled on his lap. His attention, shifting in and out of the moment since dinnertime at the apparent whim of playful thumbs twiddling his own knobs, suddenly locked back on, and he looked up at Gwen’s head attached to the huge lenses and demanded loudly, “Do you see The Man?” his consonants beginning to slur. “I want to see The Man in the Moon.” He got unsteadily to his feet, a longer climb than he would have supposed, the yard swaying perilously for an uncomfortable second or two.

  Gwen moved away from the tripod. She could still feel the touch of Dash’s hand, a glowing moonprint on her shoulder.

  “Lemme in here,” ordered Beale, and attempting to assume a properly dignified and well-balanced viewing stance, knocked his head against the binoculars, throwing the barrels out of alignment, the giggles he was certain he had been hearing off and on all evening now returning thick as crickets. He swiveled the lenses wildly about in a grim show of expertise as he tried to focus by twisting a locked nut on one of the tripod legs. “What is this?” he bellowed. “I can’t see a fucking thing.” Dash stepped in and readjusted the lenses. “Oh,” he said, gazing starward, “oh that. Big deal.”

  “Go get Zoe,” said Dash.

  Trinity refused.

  “Zoe,” Dash shouted. “C’mere, Zoe; c’mere, Zoe honey, come to Daddy.” He might have been calling a dog. “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know,” said Trinity.

  “I think I hear something under the car,” said Maryse.

  “Come here, Zoe, come and see Daddy.” He walked toward the VW, voice large with false excitement. “Come on out, honey, see what Daddy’s got.”

  There was the sound of furtive night creatures from under the car.

  “C’mon, sweetie, come give Daddy a hug.”

  She wriggled out like a soldier under fire, elbows digging into the ground, her body dragging behind, and as soon as she was free began rolling away from him toward the road. Dash was on her in a few quick steps, he lifted her up by the waist and carried her, thrashing and screaming, across the lawn, all the while stroking her hair, murmuring in her ear until she stopped struggling and allowed herself to go limp in his arms, her round-toed Keds dangling loosely against his knees. He nuzzled the back of her neck, inhaling her characteristic aroma: a kennellike mingling of sweat, mud, crushed grass, and animal manure, none of it quite strong enough to overwhelm completely the fresh essential vanilla scent of young child. “Look in here, darling, see the moon.” As Dash hoisted her toward the binoculars she stared up at this strange apparatus rearing before her and tried to grab the lenses so he had to hold her to his chest with her arms pinned and, clasping the back of her skull with his other hand, force her head into the waiting eyepieces. “C’mon, honey, you have to look in here.” She immediately began to resist the way a dog or cat resists being shoved toward an unpleasant dish. “Look, looky here.” She was squirming now, but Dash was able to get her eyes lined up under the lenses long enough for the steady succession of grunts “unh, uhn, uhn” to go glissando-ing away into registers usually inhabited by wounded hogs. When she tried to bite, Dash dropped her thrashing body and she got to her feet and ran off to the house, her cries louder and even more disturbing in the dark, breaking out over the land like something greater
than sound, sound crystallized and sprayed into the fields as insecticide. A screen door slammed, the cries went on muffled by the walls of the house.

  “Moon really spooks her,” said Maryse, rocking little Mignon, who had started to cry himself but lacked the wind or strength to produce anything more than a squeak a toy doll might make.

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” said Trinity.

  “But what does she see?” asked Dash. “That’s the damn mystery. We throw her into moonlight often enough, maybe she’ll learn how to swim and teach the rest of us.”

  “It’s stupid and cruel.”

  “So is life.”

  Dash repositioned the binoculars, and they each had a turn gazing at the planet Mars: a twinkling dot of unvarying insignificance and luster both with and without magnification. “It’s a long ways away,” said Trinity.

  “Depends on who’s taking the measurement,” replied Dash.

  Then a peek at Venus: it looked exactly like Mars.

  “Now,” Dash announced with a certain amount of paternal drama, “the jewel in the crown.”

  Gwen stared into a field of glittering stars no larger than pinheads. “Which one?”

  “The big one. Right in the middle.”

  “Jupiter?”

  Dash moved in for another look. “M31,” he said as though pronouncing the classified name of the ultimate weapon. “Home.”

  “That minuscule point,” Trinity explained, “is an entire spiral galaxy in the constellation Andromeda.”

  “Where we all came from,” said Dash.

  “And where we’re all going back to,” added Maryse. “As soon as they bring us the thermium for The Object.”

  “Want to come?” asked Dallas.

  Gwen contemplated the sky. So stars could be galaxies and all look the same. “When would you return?”

  “I said it was home,” Dash declared.

  A light came on behind them, and the dark looming geometry of the house was broken by the yellow rectangle of the kitchen window in which appeared the fuzzy outline of Dot’s head calling, “Dash!” pause “Dash!” pause “Dash!” pause, the cries coming even, inflectionless, like planks being clapped together. Finally he turned with reluctant irritation and in a deliberate voice, low and flat, answered, “What?”

  “Don’t give me that shit. Get up here and help me deal with this. She’s banging her head against the refrigerator.” Behind her, objects clanged and crashed. Dash stared at the beer cooler for a long while. “Show them Pegasus,” he ordered, and stalked toward the house.

  Dallas grabbed the binoculars, swinging them to the west parallel with the horizon. “Fuck the constellations. Let’s check out the neighboring planets.” He peered through the lenses, carefully refocusing, intent as a U-boat commander scanning shipping lanes for unescorted oil tankers. Gwen wondered what marvel of astronomy could be so engaging. Samantha Hostetler’s bedroom, explained Trinity. Oh. She hadn’t noticed the scattered houses sitting lonely as sheds out along the low distant rim of the country.

  There was a pink bathrobe hanging on an open closet door. A pile of clothes on an unmade bed. A wall of pop stars’ posters. Last week he and Donnie had caught a flash of freshly showered tit, profile and full frontal, tasty mug shots just for them.

  Maryse began prodding him on the shoulder. “Stand aside, Einstein, give somebody else a turn.”

  “One minute.”

  “C’mon, we want to see a tube.”

  “Yeah,” added Trinity, “and we don’t care whose it is.”

  “Point that thing at the MacGuffins’. Let’s see if Donnie’s up.” They hunched together like witches, their wild cackles ringing out over the desolate moor, startling Beale at his peasant labors, stooped over the icy cooler, arm submerged to the elbow in black water, numb fingers bumping in vain against the heavy beer cans, elusive as fish. “Fuck you,” he muttered, addressing any who would hear.

  “Go ahead and laugh,” warned Dallas, finally surrendering the scopes, “I told Donnie what you do out here.”

  “Flattered, wasn’t he?”

  “He wants to show you the moon.”

  “I can hardly wait.” She studied the house through the binoculars. “Uh-oh, all dark, must be an eclipse tonight.”

  “Try the Overmeyers,” Maryse urged. “They’re always good for a grin.”

  Dallas spoke to Gwen. “Once, this is great, once last summer we saw the mister and missus buck naked in their living room, not doing anything, him in one chair, her in another, just sitting there quietly without a stitch on, watching television.”

  “ ’Course it was a hot night,” added Maryse.

  “You know,” said Trinity, “I’ve been to that house many times, but going through the front door isn’t half as fun as coming in through the window.”

  Beale, having successfully snared a dripping can from the arctic waters, turned his back on the others, their self-importance, their mockeries, wait until he got Gwen alone later tonight, he’d show her, and without a word made his way cautiously as a demo man across the mined yard, trying not to lose a drop of beer, over to the secluded cemetery, its dull stones lying like oversized children’s blocks spilled in the shelter of the tall bushy tree. He was mumbling almost constantly to himself now, nothing truly audible or even coherent, merely the sound track to the film fermented barley was running through his empty head. In the buzzing dark the level of the lawn kept shifting and progress was like ascending the tricky steps of a feebly lit funhouse, so it was without much surprise that he discovered himself tripping over an exposed root, a possible concussion miraculously averted by one hand (the canless one, thank God) flying out and grabbing at the rough edge of one of the monuments. “Whoa!” he cried, and eased himself down onto a conveniently located stool-sized stone, minus only a couple splashes of brew and the dregs of a dignity he no longer cared about. No one appeared to have noticed his clumsiness anyway; they clustered still about the tripod, seemingly far away and terribly vulnerable out there in the open. He was cozy inside a leafy tent, where instead of indulging in childish Peeping Tomism he would meditate for a while on the Grand Ideas, but even as he tried to grasp them his thoughts went slipping away one by one in a disconnected stream on out of sight, leaving behind a blank screen and a body as still and as conscious as one of the stone angels surrounding it in the dark until after a time impossible to clock the thoughts returned again as if bound on wide celestial orbits but so altered he no longer recognized them. He smiled stupidly, pleased with his own giddy sense of disorientation. He glanced down at his hand, noted that it held a forgotten beer which he immediately emptied down his upturned head, little stars winking knowingly back at him from the jagged spaces between the leaves. He let the can fall from his fingers into the grass where its curved aluminum edge caught the moon in a cool arch of comfortless light. Broken mutterings faint as the rustle of the encompassing tree life stammered from his barely parted lips: “Bastards…kicking me out…screw him…never ran away…screw all of ’em…wasn’t my fault…dog knew, always did know…Mom…” His story, the one you tell deep in the ladderless hole of tapped-out nights on secondary roads when there’d be enough money for a couple six-packs and your faith in a country as big as dreams had dwindled to the hope the raw sun wouldn’t find you in a ditch, hot wind from highballing semis blowing cinder dust and ragged litter over your oddly humped back or the moon catch you in a graveyard telling tales to ghosts and even through impossibly thick boughs its soft penetrating beams pick out the thin streak arching over your own cheek and paint it silver.

  Back at the glasses they were finally offering Gwen a turn. She wanted to look but couldn’t help thinking of how she would feel about prying telescopes pointed at her windows. “Isn’t this illegal?” she asked.

  “It’s just neighbors,” answered Dallas. “Out here this is all we have to look at.”

  “And we look at it real hard,” added Trinity.

  “In between long tense periods
awaiting the arrival of The Occupants, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  Gwen pressed her face against the eyepieces. There was a barn with a hooded light above the open door and inside the twitching hindquarters of some cows in their stalls. A truck sat in the yard, tail reflectors glowing crimson like the unblinking eyes of a night beast. The big two-storied house was a riot of electrical display, high wattage pouring from every room, a pervert’s choice of windows to explore. The kitchen was decorated a grotto green, and the excess color seemed to be bleeding off the walls, submerging the room in aqueous air.

  “Well?” asked Dallas impatiently.

  She could see plants in the window, a faucet lifting into view like the slender neck of a chrome snake, the upper-right corner of a sickly yellow refrigerator, closed cabinets, hanging potholders, and a red wall clock in the shape of a smiling tomato. She stared at this domestic scene for several minutes. Nothing moved into or out of it.

  “Try another window,” suggested Dallas. “This is like looking for life on Pluto.”

  Gwen slid over to the living room. The furniture was all of the big brown baggy sort imprinted with vague outlines of the human form. There was one brass floor lamp and a dangling overhead and a bookcase half-full of records and on top of the television a gleaming collection of framed photographs. The television was on. There was no one in the room.

  “What do you see now?” asked Dallas.

  “This is boring,” said Maryse.

  Gwen discovered she was enjoying her maiden adventure in voyeurism even without the undressed walk-ons. The objects themselves were fascinating enough, these props for other lives handled daily by mysterious strangers and now touched by her probing eyes acquired at this distance and in this manner a forbidden aura that transformed the most mundane article—a bag of golf clubs, a shovel leaning near the door, a container of Diamond salt, a heart-shaped trivet—into an intriguing thing of charged complexity. She felt like a detective pondering clues. “Who are these people?”

  “Farmer Bill and sweet wife Irene,” said Trinity. “Only she never comes outside anymore, and he goes around in a filthy jumpsuit with a big cowboy six-gun strapped to his waist and a big silver skull for a belt buckle.”