M31

by Stephen Wright

  From between the peeling bars of the loft railing Edsel watched the funny lady. She acted like a clown. First she rolled the sleeping bag up, then she let it get away. She rolled it up, it stuck out its tongue. It was difficult not to laugh. When she bent over to tie up the strings her breasts swung about inside her shirt. His sister’s were bigger. She turned the bag on end and sat down facing the TV. The set was off. She didn’t move. This was boring. After a while he snuck back to his stool. Under the smudged glass the green hand went round and round. He watched. They’re here! he saw himself shouting from the rail, family faces beaming up with pride. He watched, but the screen was always empty. Then he crouched on his bed, knees digging into the lumpy mattress, head hanging out the open window. The sun was everywhere, and he could see forever, all the way to Timmy’s house, a bike ride away if Mom would only get up and let him go. They played terrorists in the spooky barn. He could see the funny man with b.o. walking far away down the road. Grown-ups could come and go without permission, but all they ever did was fight and shout and make ugly faces at each other. He already knew what he wanted to be when he grew up—happy. He leaned out, chest flat against the sill, until his head was directly above the steps. He brought up some spit from the back of his throat, puckered his lips, and let drop a nice juicy hawker. It made a dark star on the dry cement. He puckered his lips again, and suddenly something made him look up. The funny man was gone. The sun was everywhere, and he could see forever. It had been a sound, a new one, like one of Arnie MacGuffin’s M-8os. He waited, watching. It did not happen again. He let the gob fly from his mouth. Boom! A direct hit. Boom, boom, boom. Saturation bombing. He went back to check the screen. If people had radar eyes, instead of black dots in the middle, there’d be fuzzy little green windshield wipers clicking around in circles and everyone would be able to see vast distances and know in advance about storms and missiles and aliens. It could be fun. He slipped over to the railing. The lady was still there, digging at the back of her head with her fingernails. This was the most boring house in the world. When would Dad get back? When would Mom ever wake up?

  Seven

  GOOD EVENING, YOU’RE ON the air, what is your question, please?”

  “Huh? Hello? Am I on?”

  “Yes, sir, you’re on the air, go ahead, please.”

  “Uh, what? Hello?”

  “Turn down your radio, sir.”

  “Oh, oh yeah, uh wait a…okay?”

  “Yes, sir, go ahead, please.”

  “Yes. I was wondering, uh, about this electricity business? There was a fellow on the tube the other night said no one really knows how the stuff works or even what it is. Now I was thinking, seems these UFO things spend a lot of time out in the country buzzing around those big utility poles, and I was wondering like maybe they feed off them or something, like electricity is maybe sacred to them like water maybe.”

  “What about that, Dot, Dash?”

  “It’s interesting the caller should mention this, it’s one of the reasons we live out where we do, although we believe they’re not feeding so much as just listening.”

  “Our daughter, you know, spends hours sitting quietly beside the wall sockets.”

  “Really? The wall sockets?”

  “Yes, and it’s highly likely that people who die by electrocution are actually killed by an inability to process such a concentrated dose of pure information.”

  “The Occupants tell us that electrocution is a most spectacularly pleasant form of death. You go over in possession of everything you need.”

  “So wait a minute now, what are you saying here? Electrocution involves some sort of divine ecstasy and maybe what—since it’s such a rush, we should perhaps consider executing capital offenders by some other, more punishing method?”

  “I suppose that’s for the state to decide.”

  “Fatal injection?”

  “Well, that’s a whole other issue, what the chemicals would do to your pilot.”

  “Your pilot?”

  “What is it that differentiates us from this table, for example?”

  “The table has four legs.”

  “Electricity. Look at the Frankenstein myth. That’s what life is, amps, juice, a steady current. And human thought? Sparks leaping a gap.”

  “I am shocked.”

  “Excuse me, excuse me, please.”

  “Yes, sir, go ahead, get in on this, it’s your question.”

  “Well, I just had a thought, what about that pointy thing on top of the Capitol dome, what is that, anyway? Looks like some kind of lightning rod to me, pulling all that electric down out of the sky. Messages, maybe. Probably they know all about ’em in Washington, always have. Maybe the next step is plugging into each of our heads, suck out the juice in there.”

  “All right, sir, thank you for your call, I guess we might all consider wearing metal hats.”

  “Whole dome looks like one big skull to me, anyway.”

  “Thank you, sir, we have to be moving on now. All right, then, let me see, before we suffer a grid failure here. These so-called Occupants which you both, which your entire family has apparently seen, communicated with on numerous occasions, yet you refuse to describe—”

  “There’s nothing to describe. Human words are a by-product of a specific human environment, arising like our plants and animals out of exceedingly local conditions in a universe of a billion billion environments. The Occupants are a product of an entirely different set of options. As such, they exist beyond our language.”

  “Beyond language?”

  “Certainly.”

  “One is struck dumb. As in our own family.”

  “All right, but whatever they are, they visit our planet in spaceships that might be said to resemble giant amoeba. True?”

  “Blue.”

  “Giant blue amoeba.”

  “That’s why you rarely see them during the day without special equipment. They blend right in, hovering over us almost constantly.”

  “You know, another reason so many sightings occur at night on lonely country roads is because they’re out there waiting for accidents to happen. An accident is a rather special event. Who has ever come up with a theory that adequately explained the meaning of accidents?”

  “When worlds collide.”

  “So what are you saying, if you want to get to Mars quick, drive your car into a telephone pole? Or maybe stick your finger in a light socket?”

  “Who said anything about Mars?”

  “Who indeed? Well, we’ll try to get our planets straightened out during this commercial break. You’re listening to the Night Owl on WHO-AM/FM, all-day, all-night radio.”

  “Yes,” said Dot, “I thought that went rather well, didn’t you?” Her braceleted arm reached out briskly to close yet again the gaping mouth of the glove compartment.

  “I didn’t like his attitude.”

  “You don’t like anybody’s attitude.”

  “Rub my shoulders.”

  She shifted around uncomfortably in her seat and began kneading the cords of his neck. “God, you’re tight, it’s all knotted up in there.”

  “Any time, darling, just say the word, and we can stop and trade seats.”

  Dash hated driving, especially at night when the effort of holding four bald tires to a shifting road surface he could barely see in the vague wobbling beam of their one unaligned headlight keyed him into such a state he’d spend a good part of the rest of the night tossing in bed reliving the whole trip in grim hallucinatory detail from ignition to final brake unless the dream was happening now, in which case those fast approaching high beams might be real enough to require evasive action. He swerved. The car shook in the roar and blast of a cannonballing gas truck passing inches off their left side.

  “Look out!” Dot yelled.

  Dash eased his foot some off the accelerator. “Driving this thing is like a blind man trying to tap his way home with a rubber cane.”

  “Well, watch where you’re g
oing, for God’s sakes.”

  “I’m in here, too.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “You know I don’t like to criticize.”

  “Sixty-two miles,” said Dash.

  They sat facing ahead through a windshield speckled with tar and exploded insects. Soft darkness rushed at them, screaming.

  “Now where were we?” asked Dot. “You always change the subject whenever I ask a question. You’d think you were running for office or having an affair.”

  “I said he thought we were fools.”

  “So when has that ever mattered before?”

  Home was on her mind tonight and homeyness and the decided lack of, and as usual she was irritable. It seemed now as if she were tired all the time, fatigue radiating out of her bones in long nagging waves. She needed rest, rest and silence and solitude, and where was she going to get that? And when?

  “You know what I mean,” said Dash.

  “It doesn’t matter. They can laugh or cry or curse or smash their radios, but the one thing they don’t do is move the dial and that’s why we’re invited back despite what he may think of us. What are you complaining about, anyway? The electric stuff was wonderful.”

  “I did that last time.”

  “A golden oldie, they loved it.”

  “And why start in on Zoe and the Institute? They’ll try to get her back, you know that.” She subtracted: one from four equals three, not counting the two she had no responsibility for who could be kicked out at will. If Trinity ran off again, that would leave the other two. Two. It had been years since the numbers were that small. Her equations tended lately toward the rounded harbor of placid zero.

  “It was good for her,” she said.

  “The box was good for her?”

  “It was good for us.”

  “She didn’t sleep for a week when she got back. You know who funds that place. They want her, they want all the kids like her. I’m not discussing this again. We’re not discussing this again. End of discussion.”

  There was an image Dot had of herself when young, standing alone out in the open, in a flowing field of golden waist-high wheat, sculpted face turned into the clean wind, hair streaming back, sharp eyes fixed on the blue distance, an assertive image out of an old painting or bronze engraving or head of a coin, never quite clear enough to determine whether the look was one of expectation or dread. And what did this mean, and why was she thinking of it just now?

  Daughters are a disappointment, she remembered her mother remarking casually over afternoon coffee with friends.

  Strange the things that came and went through the mind.

  Damp wind howled across the open windows unable to muffle the steady tick tick tick somewhere behind that had puzzled mechanics in several states. We’ll drive it ’til it dies, Dash had said. The car, the saucers, the family.

  Clouds of bugs swarmed up continually over the hood, thick and brilliant, as if they rode upon a vast bed of embers.

  “Must you drive so fast?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  The car hit a bump, and the glove compartment popped open.

  “I’d like to get there in one piece,” she said, gathering up the spilled maps.

  His mumblings were drowned in car noise.

  She stared unseeing for a moment at the white blips of the center line flashing urgently at them, then turned to him and said, “I don’t like being cut off, either, if you don’t mind.”

  There was a long pause.

  “I give up. Cut off from what?”

  “The show. Several times tonight right in the middle of some important explanation of mine you deliberately—”

  “What do you mean? It was all I could do to keep you from stepping all over me.”

  She turned abruptly to the window and was momentarily startled by the pale reflection of her own face speeding along beside her out there in the dark. The tires thumped, the glove compartment fell open. “You’re a real shit,” she said to the night. “Do you know that?”

  “Why not, you remind me often enough.”

  The brakes squealed for an instant as a sharp curve leaped suddenly into the light.

  “We didn’t need Hitler and the hollow earth hypothesis, either. Talk about playing the fool.”

  “What do you mean? Nazis and UFOs, what America’s all about.”

  “Oh please. Mister Night Owl almost swallowed his microphone.”

  “But you were the one who said it went so well.”

  “Well, what do I know?” She turned her head. “Gwen, dear, what did you think of tonight’s show?”

  A figure stirred from the shadows of the backseat where her greasy head leaned against the vibrating window glass, gazing out at the darkness that moved, the darkness that did not. She sat up and shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know,” she said. “I never saw one before.”

  “Well, regardless, you can surely render an opinion.”

  She sat up straighter. Lights had already appeared on this empty road, had revealed themselves personally to her, had danced, had winked. She had kept quiet. She wasn’t feeling well. “Okay,” she said, “I guess it was okay.”

  “There,” Dot grunted. “The considered opinion of an unbiased observer.”

  Dash’s glance came up immediately into the rearview mirror, bone features dim green in the grainy dashboard light, her eyes touching his for only an instant before darting away like shocked fish. Eyes that knew something she did not. Such eyes surrounded her now without cease. In them was the record of events begun in cold distant places and the suggestion that the implausibility of the truth was disguise enough. Her eyes knew nothing. Since coming among these people she had left one life behind and been born again into ignorance and incomprehension. Mysteries thrived about her like weeds, and clear views were difficult to obtain. What had happened that night long ago? What happened any night? The past was a jigsaw readily assembled into any shape. What was happening now? She kept watch, muttering to herself. For conclusions, such as they were, now had to be pieced together in solitary.

  So he ran out on you, Maryse said. So what. I didn’t like him anyway.

  It’s all for the best, said Trinity.

  He was a creep, said Dallas.

  He might come back, said Edsel.

  Not with what’s baking in that oven, laughed Dot.

  His tan and bundled pack stood stiffly upright in a corner beside the door, unclaimed still, a curious object beached there from an awful catastrophe far away.

  “Stop!” Gwen cried. “Stop the car!”

  “Huh?” Dash tried to watch her and the road, too.

  “You heard the girl,” said Dot. “Pull over.”

  The brakes squeaked, the wheels wobbled to a halt, the glove compartment popped open. “Now just what’s the—”

  “Let me out!” She pushed impatiently at the back of Dot’s seat.

  “All right, honey, hold on here ’til I get out.”

  She squirmed from the car, hand cupped to her mouth, and rushed away from the headlight to stand hunched in the brush, vomiting into the dry grass until empty and exhausted she turned away on unsteady legs, loops of saliva dangling off her lips. Dot walked her back to the car, patting her gently, “Now now, now now.” Dash had remained inside behind the wheel, radio turned up to the news out of Chicago. Another abortion clinic bombing. The U.S. rejected the latest Soviet arms proposal. Dot found her an oily rag under the seat she could wipe herself with.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t usually get carsick.”

  “No, I’m sure you don’t.” Dot glanced meaningfully at her husband.

  Gwen curled up on the backseat under a scratchy wool blanket smelling vaguely of cat piss. She tried hard to concentrate on ideas of firmness, stability, lead weights, ships’ anchors, slabs of granite that never budged. Under her the car sped on through darkness so complete it was easy to lie there looking up backwards out the window and imagine you were traversing the
great vacuum at the edge of the universe where the stars stopped and the real nothing began.

  Then all at once they were back at the place even she now thought of as home and she was safe inside the zippered cocoon that smelled of her, hard against a floor she had vowed to quit how many days ago? looking up at church roof and church beams and the familiar darkness trapped within, waiting patiently for the rock of night to soften and dissolve and bathe her sore eyes in a few hours of lidded peace before the light and morning clamor roused her again into yet another loud long fretful day, anxious and confused.

  Later (whatever that meant, time grown tricky and headstrong between these old walls, a magical juncture eerie as the site of an accident) she heard or thought she heard a noise yanking her from sleep or whatever related mental state she happened to be occupying at the moment, creak-creak-creak down the tall spiral staircase. No, she thought at once, and it was more than a word. Her body hardened, inside and out. They’d have to break the shell to pry it open this time, and by then she’d be dead. Huddled there in the bag, she tried to see what was coming with her ears, but it was impossible to penetrate beyond the frantic bounding of her heart. Blind and frightened, so intent on anticipating the cold touch and the moment of sharp pieces, she became aware, only after they had passed, of the steps’ quiet progression across the complaining floor, the soft slap of the screen door. Cautiously she turned and peeked out into the room. There was nothing to see. Had there ever been? Light sizzled blue white above the door as a large beetle hit the current in the Bug Buster. She settled back down and after a while her antenna slowly retracted and blood rapids subsided into the wide lulling swell of a dazed calm she had learned to accept as actual sleep.