M31

by Stephen Wright

  “No, I can’t say that olives ever reminded me of eyeballs.”

  “Pass the ketchup.”

  His body. Even alone at night in her musty sleeping bag in the lee of The Object, she dreamed of it lying warm beside her. “I wanna jump your bones,” he hissed into her ear one starshot night out in the cemetery, jolting her own body into the ascents of an orgasm so intense she thought she might briefly have lost consciousness. Later she could usually hear him snoring away in the loft above her and once she crept up the creaking spiral stairs to his narrow bed under the robed trio in stained glass and they made love there without uttering a sound, the emerald glow from the radar Edsel used as a nightlight washing endlessly over their tangled bodies, the dish on the steeple scanning the skies with the incurious tenacity of the purely mechanical. But many a night he never returned at all from work and the only place she could touch him was in her dreams.…

  “Shut the fuck up. How many times I got to tell you? They’re sleeping there right above your head.”

  “But what is it, man, what you got in there?”

  The sheer blackness of the house loomed up beside them like the stone face of an unscalable cliff. Before the darkness floated a shifting curtain of white dots pale as dandelion fuzz. Donnie lost his balance on the wet leaves, skull thumping hard against the brick foundation. “Shit!” All the dots flared together like hundreds of synchronized flashbulbs. He sat back on the ground, shaking droplets of beer from his hand.

  “Hey!” Dallas cuffed him on the back of his head. “Quiet!”

  Donnie grabbed for the hand he couldn’t see, missed, and spilled more beer on himself. “God, have you got bad breath.”

  “Shut up and get in there.”

  “Sure. I’m gonna crawl under that.”

  “Scared?”

  “Fuck.”

  “I’ll be right behind you.”

  They worked their way in under the house like plumbers on their hands and knees, grunting through their noses, the dank earth sticky between their fingers.

  “Jesus, you people ever clean this crap outta here? Feels like fresh shit. Smells like shit, too. And I left my fucking beer outside.”

  Dallas flicked on the penlight.

  “Holy—!”

  “Sssssh.”

  The face was mostly gone by now, bright ridges of bone cresting through unrecognizable layers of peeling gray; sockets sunken to dry cocoons whitish and webbed, lipless teeth locked in perpetual grin. The clothes were rag bindings almost indistinguishable from the body itself, woven by time and weather into one soft, uniform shape. Hordes of sleekly carapaced bugs fled the thin beam of light into the tunneled interior.

  “Who is it?”

  “Guy that came with her. A jerk.”

  “You do him?”

  “He kinda did himself.”

  “Kenny has got to see this. He’ll freak.”

  “I decide who sees. It’s mine, I own it now.”

  “He’s leaking oil real bad. Lemme that stick.”

  “It changes. I’ve been making Polaroids with my father’s saucer camera. You can watch it disappear. Pretty soon there’ll be nothing left.”

  Donnie poked tentatively at it as though testing for doneness until suddenly the stick plunged with alarming ease deep into the squishy mystery of the thing itself. His hand jerked back as if from an open flame. There was a short bubbling sound, and dark liquid ran out of the hole and was sucked away instantly into the porous ground. Donnie’s eyes were big. “Ooooo,” he whispered in simple wonderment. “Biology.”

  Later, squatting solitary atop ALPHEUS PAGE, bare skin flowing lean and luminous under the absolute cool of the moon, toes curled birdlike over the edge of ancient pitted stone, Dallas raised the dripping stick, a wand of celestial magic, over the unknowing land. In this sign you will be as gods. In the darkness of juice, in the smoke of goo. The sky was bisected into perfect halves, one green, one red. The lobes of the Master. Pulse. Deaf. Spasm.

  “Hot muffins, oh boy!”

  “This turkey has three drumsticks.”

  “We had money before, we’ll have money again.”

  “You can’t make a meal on animal crackers.”

  “Rejoice, kiddies, it’s the Age of Arnold.”

  “There’s French fries in her nose, for Christ’s sakes.”

  “They won’t let us on television anymore because of calls from Washington.”

  “You dip the leaf into this brown sauce and pull off the pulp with your teeth.”

  “It’s not the blast, it’s the shock wave.”

  “Don’t you dare speak to me like that again in front of the children.”

  “It must be the cheese.”

  “Who broke the goddamn pepper mill?”

  She stood transfixed before the open refrigerator door, paralyzed in the generous spill of frosted light and cold celery air between the last of the Granny Smiths and a runny wedge of yesterday’s coconut cream pie. He was behind her before she could even register the presence of another body anywhere in the house.

  “Oh,” she blurted, rather too quickly, turning and stumbling against the door, killing the light, her suddenly frail hands seeking at her back contact with the power humming from the walls of this big white enameled appliance. “Hi,” she said in a lower tone.

  Dash was wearing soft round-toed shoes with high rippled soles, and there were silver bands circling each thick, hairy wrist. “Relax. I’m not the bogey man.” He looked like someone attempting to smile through a botched face lift.

  “I didn’t know there was anyone here.” She curled her fingers around the edges of the door, digging her nails into the insulation so he would have to pry her off this machine.

  “Why are you so afraid of me?” He remained just inside the doorway, poised against the weakening light of late afternoon, the crumbling gray erasers of night already beginning to smudge the planes and edges of the room. Someone should turn on the overhead.

  “I’m not.”

  He hadn’t moved, he stood across from her as if waiting for her to make the first move so he could act. “Don’t be. I hate that.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I hate that, too.”

  She had begun recently to think of the topography of his face, so big, so bloodless, so blank, as a species of foreign sky rarely troubled by the drift of a mood, the ragged wisp of an emotion. It was a surface knowable only with the aid of instruments. In the silver pools of his sunglasses she was split in two, distinct and identical images of herself peered back out of convexities of opaque aggression.

  “You make me nervous,” she admitted finally. “I don’t always know what to say.”

  He stepped closer. “That’s obvious.” The table, cleared of dishes and wiped clean, was still between them. She gauged the distance to the knife rack. “And quite silly.” He turned his back to her and rummaged through a counter drawer. When he turned around again he was holding a Phillips screwdriver, twisting the blade between his fingers.

  She shrugged helplessly. “Just a jumpy girl, I guess.”

  “Yeah. It’s that kind of world.”

  The silent cat appeared in the doorway, regarded each separately with an Oriental gaze, and decided in favor of retreat, slipping quickly away behind the throbbing refrigerator.

  “I…” she began, and stopped. He was as still as a mantis on a stick. “I wondered if there was any salad from last night.”

  His silver mirrors looked at her looking at him. “My wife has a talking vagina,” he said. But he didn’t say that. He said, “Sit down.”

  He eased cowboy style into the chair opposite her. She watched his face. Was this what a daughter felt like, waiting for Dad to administer the dreaded punishment?

  “The situation here,” he said, “in all probability, is approaching critical proportions. The time frame will be relatively brief. I thought you should know.”

  “Yes?” She continued to look at him, this strange man in quasi-mil
itary costume; the dark doorway, the gray stove, the fading butcher’s chart on the wall, all streaming in taffylike attenuations across those insect eyes; his strung presence, insistent as a magnet, drawing her out in deformed shapes she could neither easily recognize nor quickly control. She never understood, she never knew how to respond.

  He contemplated the starred tip of the screwdriver. At the window behind his burr head the sky was darkening but still blue, dark blue, a simple undisturbed blue. Summer was shrinking but not yet done. The corn still had its ears.

  He looked at her. “My son fucks my daughters,” he said. But he didn’t say that. “For instance, Zoe,” he said. “Been checking her out lately?”

  “Yes. Someone should stop her from scratching and banging so much. Her face doesn’t look so good. She could get a bad infection.”

  “Thank you, we are touched by your concern. I was referring, of course, to her transmissions. Have you noticed?”

  She pretended to shuffle through recollections. “She’s at a different window every time?”

  “No, no, the gestures have changed configuration entirely. All new signs, new messages. I’ve only been able to catch about half of it, her hands are moving with such urgency these days.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “You know what it means, you toothsome cunt.” But he didn’t say that. He said, “The Intervention.”

  The Intervention: a Dot-Dash title she had read by the orange flicker of crackling pine one mosquito-plagued night in the chilly Appalachians, wide awake in the damp sleeping bag, feet numb, joints stiff, orderly formations of brittle light crossing the black pane of space, mating fireflies winking back at her in prearranged signals, and next morning for breakfast a pallid Beale bringing her dirt-encrusted mushrooms he swore were edible and which tasted like an unwashed crotch and must have been hallucinogenic because every other person she saw for the rest of the day was a scary government dero like in the book, intent on silencing her and the extraordinary truth of the amazing Occupants.

  She considered the hands fiddling with the screwdriver as if trying to find some novel use for it, wondered again if eyes could remember what flesh had known, the revelation of a touch bursting through dreams into certainty.

  There were zones, he was saying, one should flee to in the Zero Time, his voice penetrating memory, sound and cadence evoking a time before her own father departed into a private zone of his own. She looked up at the impervious masquerade of his face, strange lips forming strange words in familiar ways. She produced a vague smile of interest when he looked at her, nodded intelligently when he paused. She knew nothing about this man.

  The good news, he was saying, is that WE ARE ALL GOING HOME, the Ark hidden in readiness high in the Catoctin Mountains, wherever that was, final boarding instructions via the channel Zoe, who must be guarded with special zeal from those who would interfere with her circuitry in this period of rupture and ruin. The threat could develop even within The Unit itself, a brain undergoing cosmic bombardment being capable of the most unexpected and vile activity.

  Let me tell you a story, he said as she sat there immobile on a red plastic seat under a cracked ceiling, the frosted ring of flyspecked fluorescence, the room undergoing that long slow steep into summer night. It was so cold the day she was born that the little frozen car, a scrim of ice dangling from the running boards, lurched and creaked like a wooden ship down the slick white streets. When he turned on the heat the interior filled with snow, condensed crystals blowing up in their faces out of the vents so that it was like sitting inside one of those glass balls you shake with a winter scene in miniature inside. They had to lean forward, breathe on the windshield, to see out. It was beautiful. Blocks from the hospital the car hit a sheet of ice, the brakes locked, and they skidded sideways across a double intersection, clipping a cab, bumping the front grille of a Buick, and shuddering backward into a bank of snow as tall as the roof. Dazed, they crawled out, stumbled the rest of the way through drifts and gusts, blood from where he struck his mouth on the steering column freezing like cherry ice on his chin. The abandoned car, barely visible in the mound of white beneath the saffron swirl of the street lamp, protruded at an angle halfway out into the road, emergency blinkers crying out to the passing world in staccato pulses of regulated color dash-dash-dot-dot, dash-dash-dot-dot.

  The birth was quick and efficient, without complaint from mother or child, a wet blue baby arriving in eerie silence on the planet. Her adjustment to this alien environment was difficult and prolonged, days of decompression in a closed chamber, tiny electrodes cemented to the soft bulging head, and spindly chest now a sort of bruised yellow panting with avian rapidity. Two weeks she shuddered there in a nest of tubes and wire, shit the color of pureed pumpkin squeezing out of her in neat toothpaste coils, no matter what happened the last of a line, the mother had spoken, no more. This was in Circleville in a pit of spiritual malaise and financial depression. He played the organ Sundays in the Methodist church, the rest of the week pop piano in the Rose Room of the Round Table Motor Lodge. She was a disillusioned RN who scorned MDs and disliked the company of the sick. She was tired of nursing, both strangers and her own. So it was the father who learned to hold her, to rock the frail, distressed infant in his arms, to slip the rubber nipple skillfully into the toothless mouth, to soothe her with homemade lullabies, so that science was rebuked and surprised when she lived. And he performed these devotions cheerfully, without resentment, because the child wasn’t even his. Fatherhood was earned, a conscious act of appropriation. And that was why her name was different from the others, the naming of the tribe a crucial task of religious care. He knew he had been properly guided when, in the second month of her second year, the first brief hesitant communication manifested itself, disguised cleverly, of course, as a constellation of medical symptoms. He understood at once in a way no doctor ever could the true meaning of her anomalous behavior. Her first word, do you know what it was? “That!” with one saliva-coated finger directed calmly upward at the tensed blue membrane of perfect sky. “That, that, that,” repeated with echoic persistence until the morning the mother heard an answer and went to respond, her small daughter clutching unsteadily at the sill, the slippery finger pointing out, “dat, dat, dat,” the notes of a clock jammed on the hour, even as the mother crossed the room in a rush of air, seized the thin diapered body in both hands, and without pause or exclamation hurled the child out the open window and not even bothering to witness the impact lay down on the unmade bed, one pillow under her head, one pillow over her head, and still the clock would not stop. The child landed in a hedge of sufficient density to break her fall and a couple of her bones. Of course she attempted no further experiments with tellurian language following that episode, but her destiny could not be denied. Her arms came up and began to move like a robot struggling to dance.

  The inscrutable sunglasses regarded her like miniature television monitors that had been turned off. “I’m the only one who can interpret her signs.” His mouth, when it moved, reminded Gwen that she too was an unwilling prisoner in a skin suit.

  “Daddy’s girl,” she said.

  He was staring toward the doorway as if listening to movement in the other room. The monitors flashed silver as his head came quickly around. “And what the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  She glanced at the knife rack. “I’m sorry. It doesn’t mean anything. Just that she likes you and you like her. That’s all. What did you think it meant?”

  “I bugger my son in the ass,” he said. But he didn’t say that. He said, “I’ve got a radar device to adjust.” He stood up, towering over her, tapping the shaft of the screwdriver against an open palm. She wondered if he used Trinity’s makeup to achieve that glacial mask effect, there was a grainy quality to the underside of his jaw as of excess powder beaching there. “Oh,” he added, pausing theatrically in the doorway. “It might be wise to keep your kit packed. We may have to evacuate this station on a moment’s not
ice.”

  He was there, then he was gone, leaving behind a black rectangle of shimmering space. The sun had set. A thin gray moss of last light clung stubbornly to the surfaces of things. Across the window the sky had gone out. The cat meowed. She jumped from her chair, lunging for the wall switch. The kitchen snapped back into place, rescued just in time from the terrible tow of the night. She leaned against the smudged yellowy wall, a damp hand gripping the cold greasy edge of the stove, watching faucet water falling monotonously into the empty sink, the hollow metallic ring of each separate drop like the ghostly tapping of a fingernail deep down the line and the dead tone of its song accompanying in impeccable sync the crazed beating of her heart.

  “This melon’s all slimy and gross.”

  “Au gratin, that’s French for eat it if you know what’s good for you.”

  “No, I don’t want the shrimp or fake food of any kind.”

  “Rat casserole, my favorite.”

  “Of course the world, such as it is, exists solely at the whim of The Occupants.”

  “How much noise can you make eating a goddamn carrot stick?”

  “Asparagus causes warts.”

  “I’m old enough to do what I want when I want.”

  “There’s enough animals at this table without feeding the goat through the window.”

  “The water tastes like farts.”

  “No peanut butter for me, thanks.”

  “My chicken is red raw.”

  “So smother it in cholesterol, see if I care.”

  “This is cozy,” she exclaimed, settling comfortably into the down of a pillow as big as a suitcase.

  “Our blue heaven,” said Maryse.

  Gwen was inside The Object with Trinity, Maryse, and Mignon, her first “official” visit, no need to explain those furtive explorations during The Unit’s shopping absences. Today’s invitation to the girls’ clubhouse had come only after all three had shared a grueling morning trying to attend to Zoe while Dot and Dash drove hundreds of miles, the backseat of the car loaded with overflowing boxes of their books and pamphlets, to address the Fourth Annual Abductee Assembly and Galactic Picnic held this year at a rented racetrack just over the state line. Zoe was asleep for the moment, sprawled across her moldering piece of foam rubber in the corner of the room she had territorially marked with teeth and claws and stained permanently with body fluids resistant to even the latest supermarket cleansers. Her snores reverberated through the house like the banging of tenement plumbing, a comforting sound to those gathered inside The Object. After she had overturned the refrigerator and tried to throw Mignon out the window, Trinity and Maryse had quickly agreed to overrule Dash’s explicit instructions and dose her good with the medicine Dot kept hidden in the kitchen cabinet behind the spice bottles. “Speed?” Gwen had asked, incredulous. “Yeah,” replied Trinity, “it has an opposite effect on kids like her. Nobody really knows how it works.” So now the old homestead was quiet for at least an hour or two. There were angry bruises and stinging scratches on all of Gwen’s arms and legs. Her body ached, she felt like a tackle after the big game.