M31

by Stephen Wright

  The moon, minus a nice bite-sized piece, shed a weak fluorescent glow across the land. A quick black shadow slid over the silver grass, stretched itself out, monstrous, spindle-limbed, along the bright surface of the road. This was Dallas, strolling down the center line with all the confidence of a property owner who knows the country at night is his alone. As he passed he counted off the telephone poles to a certain number and then his steps and when he stopped he executed a smart right-face his father would have been proud of and plunged through the crackling brush into the high corn where it was very dark. There was nothing there. He looked all around, then squatted to peer in among the stalks. Yes, the thing, a heap of crumpled black, lay on the dirt two rows away. He pushed through the leaf walls and stopped. A dark odor settled over him like a hood. From his pocket he slipped the penlight his parents used to inspect crumbling teeth and inflamed throats and squatted down again on strong webbed claws, the smell a clotted ball of twisting forms in his mind. He clicked on the light, its thin beam filling with the sudden image of (here was a good shivery thrill) a human eye that neither glared nor gaped, squinted nor blinked. Its function had changed, its color had faded, it resembled a spoiled egg. The face itself had gone to blue, a new blue absent at least from the media palette that furnished color to Dallas’s world. The rest of it, the attached body, was a broken lump that seemed to have been dropped from a great height, a spaceman perhaps, tossed out a hatch by laughing barbarians in iridescent suits. The thing had lain here for three nights now and each night Dallas had made his pilgrimage, a scientific excursion, really, out to this spot to record privately the organic changes. He was an obsessive student of process. The slow shift of color across a spectrum of nameless energies. The dark bubbles blooming on the peeling cheeks, the ballooning body, shirt stretched taut across the rigid shoulders, pants inflating around the thighs. And the rich and infinitely varied aroma of nature’s gourmet kitchen. Dallas crouched there in the bottom of the tasseling cornfield and looked on in wonder, the yellowy circle of light playing up and down, experiencing the flushed sensations of an anthropologist stumbling unexpectedly upon a wholly new form of life. He tore a strip of cloth from the thing’s fraying shirt and tied it around his ankle. He sat on his haunches like a native and contemplated his find. Left here this specimen could age naturally into whatever shapes and hues awaited at the end of the process, but time was also pushing its hours up the stalks and soon Old Man MacGuffin would be out for the harvest and what a scene that would be—discovering the surprise vegetable in the patch clogging the blades of the combine. Dallas switched off the light and put it in his pocket. Working as carefully as he could, he managed to heave the thing up onto one shoulder and trudge out of the field onto the road. Muscles developed at work made the job easier than expected. Wouldn’t all be amazed at the bacon he was bringing home now? Halfway there a cold liquid began seeping through the back of his shirt. He smiled. Better and better. The hard shiny road was a length of chrome. There was a handful of neon moons burning behind a grille of tightly strung wire in the open sky. In the cities there’s ash on the roof and a fine sprinkling of metal from clouds black as chimney soot. His eyes are yellow with vertical pupils of red. The hollow ground trembles through padded feet. The impatient concert crowd at the sold-out Polydome is chanting his name. They are waiting for him, tonight’s superstar.

  He approached the house from the shadowed side and slunk up along the wall, a sweating Santa with a big bag of goodies, stooping beneath the windowsills, ever alert to the dangerous curiosity of naughty little boys and girls. He rounded a corner and stopped, listening hard for a moment, before easing his load to the ground. He stopped again and looked behind. The cemetery tree looked back, displayed its incurably arthritic arms. He got down and crawled in under the church on his belly, dragging the thing behind him. There was a wall in here where steps from a trap in his parents’ room led down into a dank closet-sized space just right for a wine or tornado cellar or handy “counseling” room for “disturbed” female parishioners. It was hard work pulling that weight along the ground, shoving it tight against the bricks, covering it with sticky clods of dirt, piles of damp leaves. He sweated like a miner and when he was done he went out and sat on top of good ol’ ALPHEUS PAGE and chugged the two beers he had hidden there after dinner. He lobbed the empty cans twinkling in the moonlight out into the shadowy corn and wiped his lips on the back of a hand and tasted dirt—what night is made of, he thought. Back inside he paused, pondering the dark enigmatic shape on the floor that was Gwen. Then he climbed the stairs on soft catlike pads, stripped, and eased into bed beneath the perpetual astonishment of Larry, Moe, and Curly. Headphones clamped to his ears, he withdrew down stone tunnels of sleep to the amplified clang of metal on metal and the screams electricity makes forced through a wire.

  Eight

  SHE CAME TO IN dark water, clawing for air and a strange silver surface rippling far, too far, away. The weight of an ocean pressed down across her, cold salt tide tugging at her belly. She couldn’t see, she couldn’t breathe. Blackness gurgled through an open pipe. Dash unzipped her bag and spit inside. This was every night now. Real as death. But by dawn he was a ghost and at breakfast merely a dream. What was true? She didn’t know.

  When she left the bathroom the others were already in place, more or less, around the long table, chewing, sipping, smoking, fluid stems of blue and gray twisting into quick complicated spirals too giddying to consider at this unassembled hour. It was a gray morning, and the early light lay like powder on sleep-wrinkled faces. No one spoke, entertained as they were by the audio portion of The A.M. Show already well in progress behind the closed wall of the mysterious room at the altar end of the house:

  “Pick what up?”

  “Try using your eyes for a change.”

  “That? I didn’t put it there.”

  “Oh no, of course not, you never leave anything out for me to trip and break my neck.”

  “I see the bullshit’s flying with the crows today.”

  “See what you want to see.”

  The pale tepid orange juice tasted as if a nail had been dissolved in it. The toast was cold and slightly damp. She went to the kitchen for an apple and discovered the cat on top of the stove, lapping out the bottom of the frying pan. She wasn’t really hungry, her stomach hurt.

  From behind the wall:

  “Selfish? Selfish?! I’ve devoted my life to that child.”

  “Oh, just forget it. I don’t know why I bother. You haven’t heard me for twenty years.”

  Zoe reached out, overturned her cup, and began banging her head on the edge of the table, strands of lank hair whipping through the puddles of spilled milk. Dallas tapped a spoon against his plate in time with an irritating rhythm inside Gwen’s head.

  “Do something, for Christ’s sake!” shouted Trinity. “It’s your goddamn turn.”

  “Shit!” He leaped from the chair, seized his baby sister by the wrists, and dragged her off into The Object, where, using frayed rope the goat had chewed on, he tied her securely to the pilot’s seat, command central to the stars.

  When he returned, the voices had stopped. “They’re screwing now,” he said, licking butter off the blade of a knife and looking right at Gwen, and it was scary because there wasn’t any way she could stop his eyes from going in as deeply as they wished.

  “Just the image I want to have between me and my cornflakes,” said Trinity.

  He shrugged. “It’s what they do.”

  “Isn’t it time for you to go to work?” asked Maryse. She poked at the swaddled mess lying motionless in her lap. Only the head was visible, a lumpy, somewhat round object sprouting transparent wisps of crinkly fiber. Eyes and mouth firmly shut, Mignon resembled a soap carving of a baby. Maryse pinched the colorless cheeks with intensifying force until the lips jerked open, emitting a brief rodentlike squeak. Satisfied, she plugged the hole with the stubby nipple of a plastic bottle and settled back, glaring around the table
, daring anybody to utter one word.

  Dallas pointed the wet knife in Gwen’s direction. “So, what now?”

  Carefully, she focused her gaze on a spot at the center of his forehead. “I don’t know.”

  “Have trouble without dickhead around to decide for you?”

  Behind her, like some monstrous motorized sculpture, The Object came eerily to life, began to wobble slowly back and forth, its cheap metal skin buckling and popping on the hardwood floor. “Not at all,” she replied, trying, as usual, to negotiate the least hazardous path through the familial wood. “It’s just I can’t think too clearly here.”

  “Yeah? Tell me about it.” He dumped an incredible amount of sugar right out of the bowl and into his coffee cup, stirring it in with the knife.

  “What’d you dream about last night?” asked Maryse innocently.

  Gwen hesitated. Was it actually possible this weird woman with the bad complexion and dirty fingernails could help unravel the disturbing mystery of her nights, sort event from illusion, cast the cataracts from her inner eye? “I can’t remember,” she said. “I think I dreamt I was awake.”

  “Oh, really? But that can be quite revealing.”

  “Help!” came a small voice from the closed room. “Help! Help!” growing in volume, the muffled cries of Dot behind the wall. “Someone help me!”

  The Object continued to rock, a big ball bobbing on a big ocean.

  The phone rang. On the tenth ring Dallas lunged at the noise. “Fuck you!” he screamed into the mouthpiece. “No one’s home!” He opened his fist, let the receiver go crashing to the floor.

  Tall white clouds long as ships passed in magisterial review across the row of open windows.

  “Let’s go to the mountains,” suggested Maryse brightly.

  Trinity stared at her in bleak silence.

  “Hitchhike,” Maryse added. “Who needs money?”

  “The mountains suck,” said Dallas.

  The screen door flew open bang! and in rushed Edsel shouting, “Look what I got!” waving a length of old rubber tubing in Gwen’s face. The tube moved, stuck out its tongue, and Gwen flinched.

  “Only a garter,” laughed Dallas.

  Trinity remained at a respectful distance. “They still bite.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Edsel, proudly exhibiting the fresh pair of blood freckles decorating the web of skin between thumb and forefinger.

  Maryse peered at the wounds. “Now you’ll need a tetanus shot,” she said. “And they really hurt.”

  “Look, he shit on me, too.” A twisting trail of whitish slime ran along the underside of his arm.

  “That’s come,” said Dallas.

  Maryse pointed sternly. “Don’t let that stuff get in the bite or you might get pregnant with a big bunch of snake babies.”

  “That’s not how you get pregnant,” protested Edsel. “And besides, I’m a boy.”

  “But you forget,” Maryse reminded him. “You’re not from Earth.”

  Edsel paused. “Yes, I am, too. You’re the one with the alien baby. You’re the one the monster fucked.”

  “Shut your mouth, you little shit.”

  “Get it out of the house,” ordered Trinity. “Now. Let it go.”

  “I hate you,” he shouted, heading for the door. “I wish this snake would bite you in the foot and it’d turn black and fall off.”

  “So.” Dallas looked over at Gwen. “You wanna ride in to work with me?”

  She could imagine his work, a chaotic meeting ground of steel and flesh. “And what would I do—mop up?”

  “Naw, they wouldn’t even let you in the building. You could wander around town, meet us at the truck after.”

  “That’d take a good five minutes,” said Maryse. Mignon had finished sucking and been deposited like a bulky handbag at the foot of her chair.

  “She’s already been through town,” said Trinity.

  “It’s quiet. She wants to think.”

  Something warm touched Gwen suddenly under the table and again she flinched.

  “Jesus, are you jumpy,” Maryse declared.

  “You wanna go or what?”

  “Help!” called Dot inside the wall. “Help me!” Since no one had ever given the slightest indication they had heard these cries, Gwen wondered if maybe she hadn’t begun hallucinating aurally, too, and when a horn sounded outside, stopped, sounded again, she waited for a sign from the others, but they were all looking at her.

  “So?”

  She noticed now how the light concentrated in Dallas’s eyes like night stars or the little bright X’s on a cartoon character who is drunk or knocked out.

  “Help…help…” Dot’s voice grew steadily quieter, fading with repetition in a pleasing echolike effect. But the truck was here and Beale was not and she was struck by the realization that his presence simply did not matter, had never mattered. In this situation every person was on her own. So when Dallas’s chair went scraping across the bare floor, and there he was, looming over her with that maddening bland expression she had given up trying to decode, she got up too and followed him without a word out back where an aging pickup truck she recognized instantly waited, idling noisily, its engine trying and trying to clear its throat.

  “This is Gwen,” Dallas announced, opening the cab door. She slid in quickly across the cracked leatherette seat. “That’s Donnie.”

  She thought she recognized him, too, the one in the window at the 7-Eleven, only now his hair was shorter and a haystack brown and his thick converging eyebrows were dead white and fuzzy as caterpillars. He nodded, “How’s it going?” and jerked the stick into gear, heading out for a smeared blotch of green perched on the horizon like something left unrefrigerated too long.

  She bounced along between them, gripping the seat edge, six warm denimed thighs jostling together there side by side as a peace medallion dangling on a chain from the rearview mirror swayed in benedictory arcs over them. Donnie punched a cassette into the tape deck, and familiar music assaulted their faces, Vic and the Vectors, “Who Put The Baby In The Microwave?” When Donnie inquired, shouting, what she did, she screamed back, “I’m on hiatus.” The ride ended in a mammoth asphalt parking lot flanked by identical rectangular warehouses of industrial red brick. On one side the chain links of a tall concertina-topped fence were clotted with knee-high drifts of snowy white feathers.

  “Chickens over there,” Dallas explained. “In here we do the hogs.”

  The air had a sharp taint to it, the taste of ozone and hot iron filings. A procession of sallow-faced men and women in T-shirts and jeans passed one at a time through a narrow monitored gate.

  “There’s a guard?” Gwen asked.

  Dallas smirked. “Don’t want you civilians to get too good a look at our secrets.”

  Donnie laughed through his nose. He didn’t seem too bright.

  “Albert’s that way. When you run out of town, come back and play in the truck. When you get sick of the truck, go ahead and walk home.”

  “But watch out,” Donnie warned. “There’s guys like to run strangers off the road for a couple of kicks.” He looked at Dallas.

  “If you’re not here when we get out,” said Dallas, “we’re gone.”

  “Sure.” She was watching the women filing in, searching for a face like her own.

  “Okay,” said Dallas.

  “Fine.”

  “Yeah,” said Donnie.

  They lifted their rubber boots out of the truck bed and walked off in a rolling sailor-on-leave swagger meant to impress her. She started to picture them inside at their jobs and abruptly stopped. Maybe if she could walk like that…A whistle shrieked and a cloud of sparrows burst from a neighboring tree, wheeled over the painted meadow of glaring auto tops, and disappeared back into the dark fluttering leaves. Such freedom, she thought. Because they were too small to eat.

  Downtown Albert was three stunted blocks of abraded brick and commercial disappointment, persisting with seedy stubbornness between th
e boarded facades and gutted interiors. There was one bar, one restaurant, one pharmacy, one beauty shop, willing to “tease” all heads. In the window of D&C Hardware a string of Christmas minilights framed a dusty display of red-beribboned claw hammers and among drifts of Styrofoam snow a tiny Santa was about to be seized in the nasty teeth of a giant monkey wrench. It had been years obviously since the one theater had glowed with the spiritual light of manufactured miracles, the marquee was bulbless, the ticket booth a smashed cylinder of damp plaster and charred wood. Who had occupied the stool that last night? Did she look like me? What was the movie? Unfed parking meters cast a grim row of sad lollipop shadows down the potholed street. A big bright car cruised slowly by, every nice white face inside turning to absorb in an instant all they needed to know about her. She felt an unexpected pang of homesickness (or was it some physical complaint?) and suddenly remembered that it was her mother’s birthday today or tomorrow or sometime last week.

  She slipped into Ace Drugs where a flimsy wire rack of lame greeting cards revolved with protesting noises in the cool artificial air. The place, all shiny and fluorescent, smelled of bleak hospital corridors and dry medicine in capsules and tablets. The door opened and an elderly hunchbacked woman with tight flesh-colored bandages encasing each leg from ankle to knee shuffled in and down the clean, well-lit center aisle, the rubber cap on her aluminum crutch making a violent sucking sound on the gray linoleum floor. Gwen thought of lungs and phlegm and black drains under autopsy tables; she saw Dallas, stripped to the waist, in a close, windowless room under a naked bulb, slippery blade in hand, scraps of tissue clinging to his boots, he looked straight at her, a pig upside down on a steel hook came in between them and when it cried the sound was exactly the same as that of a human baby. “The discharge should clear up in a couple days,” said the bald pharmacist, who had been eyeing Gwen carefully since she walked in. “What?” squawked the woman, crinkling her well-floured face. Gwen looked at the card in her hand. The pond was wax, the ducks stuffed. With Love For You On This Your Day went hastily back on to the rack and she out the door, the single word “prognosis” making a quick escape with her.