M31

by Stephen Wright

  Eleven

  FATHERHOOD IS A CRUCIFIXION. You die by degrees with outstretched arms.

  It had been raining steadily since he left, a violent late summer downpour, loud torrents lashing at the pavement, drumming on the roof inches above his tensed head straining to keep the road in front of him, the wipers useless, guiding on the blurred running lights of a recklessly weaving van with a GOD RULES sticker plastered to its rear door. White veins of lightning stood up stark as winter trees on the far sky where he half expected to spot a grim black finger or two reaching down through the low racing clouds. The rain, this hard precipitate of polluted American lunacy, was, he knew, a shower of lead. When the country took a piss it came down out here and if you were wise to the facts you stayed in your car, under cover, let the others fend for themselves, let it come down on their Judas heads back there in the mud of their failed Calvary.

  On May 15, 1973, Joseph and Rebecca Saunderson of Findlay, Ohio, hurrying home from a family reunion in Pennsylvania just ahead of a threatening squall line, observed an egg-shaped luminous ball hovering motionless over the Pymatuning Reservoir. The frightened couple watched in stunned disbelief as a tube descended from the belly of an obviously manned craft to touch the surface of the water. They described this tube to local police as resembling a giant drinking straw. Of course. The Occupants grow strong on the fermentation of our decay.

  Probably it was late. He wore no watch, never had, never would, it was a device that tended to tease one down the wrong road.

  The gun lay gleaming, a child’s toy, in the shadows on the passenger’s seat beside him. He picked it up, pointed it straight ahead through the windshield at the round target of a spare tire mounted on the back of the bouncing van. He pointed the barrel to his left at a passing Mitsubishi and squeezed the trigger. He had no son. He tossed the empty weapon back onto the seat.

  On Etheria the main occupations were war and hunting, spiritual combat in accord with the rules of creation.

  Once when he was young he drove all night in the rollicking company of Les “The Best” Squires, ex–Brandenburg High first string tackle and future County General lab tech, on the rumor of a party worth losing sleep over. Festivities were well into the third day the morning they arrived. There were unconscious bodies sprawled all over the yard. There was a pig in a fire. There were naked people up in the trees. A contingent of Hells Angels dropped by, friends of a friend. All the Angels had seen UFOs at one time or another, singly or in clusters, and when they caught him smiling, they stomped on his fingers and whipped his back with car antennas. He had never before seriously considered the subject.

  In his personal kit he packed two small vinyl brushes, one for his teeth, one to scrub away the dirt, the “collections,” from beneath his nails. He chain-sucked rolls of Pep-O-Mint Life Savers. He drove in his stockinged feet, though he wasn’t tired, his eyeballs sat like marbles of pure receiving crystal in the bony box of his face. He was amazed how calm, how light, he felt flying eastward through the rain. He was not angry. Except for the child in soiled clothes draped unconscious across the backseat, he might be absolutely anyone out on a casual trip to almost anywhere.

  Families were bunk, temporary and uneasy alliances of strangers who would hate each other less without the coercion of blood, the spiraling bonds of genetic ivy holding its victims fast to a blasted tree.

  Women loved him. Other women. At the conventions they thronged about, seeking autographs, pictures, the big answers, the urgency in their faces that pleads, Beam me up.

  On Etheria there were no women, each being an integrated bioset of the basic three.

  A cold November morning in 1980. Arthur Klein, an insurance salesman out of Rochester, New York, was driving alone on the road to Albany. The sky clear, the highway empty. He had just checked the time (4:41 A.M.) when a large bell-shaped object zoomed up over the trees ahead, stopped abruptly right above his car, which had just lost all power. The night turned white. Then the car was working again, he was a mile down the road, brain reeling from the aftereffects of what felt like at least two double martinis, and a radio DJ was clocking the A.M. at 5:28. Forty-seven minutes removed from the life of Arthur Klein without a trace. He had been spliced by the chronosurgeons of Etheria. Painful months of hypnotic regression therapy helped reclaim this sequence of events: mysteriously levitated from the interior of his car, he was drawn upward, helpless as a baby, into a glowing room, unceremoniously stripped, arranged on a cold slab of blue stone, penetrated by a black wandlike device, and serviced by a naked Occupant with barren eyes who sat patiently atop his shuddering groin, waiting for him to finish. In a confidential memo to the ICU (International Clearinghouse on UFOs), Klein reported that the texture of an alien vagina was similar to that of “oily emery cloth.”

  Our lives were bits of tape that could be altered at will by these masters of psychotronic technology, and at the Zero Time, if he had a choice, there were certain sequences he wished edited permanently from the Dash memory loop: an old black house turning on a platter of vegetable green, a gutted unfinished saucer gleaming in the morning sun, a goat at the window, a cat on the stove, a vampire wife, a ghoul son, a demon daughter, a scrawny-assed witch—snip, snip, and burn it up.

  He drove with offensive relish, concentrating on the game in which you were docked for each vehicle that managed successfully to pass your own. He crossed one entire state without losing a point.

  In space even the darkness possesses the clarity of light, a chunk of black quartz veined with starshine, a kid’s notion of a robot brain.

  At The Hunting Lodge in Bedford Falls he left Zoe locked in the VW while he went in to negotiate with the desk clerk. When he returned, dangling room key in hand, an amazingly blond family in white shorts was gathered about the car, which was rocking furiously on its struts, the filthy opaque windows vibrating with the scary cries of an undomesticated and certainly illegal beast. “Stand away from there,” Dash commanded, “circus property,” and hastily got inside, backed away through a scattering of tanned limbs, and gunned the blue Bug around to a parking space directly in front of their room, where he could hustle his jungle daughter inside like a smuggler slipping a load of contraband through customs.

  The long odyssey to M31 is also, of necessity, a calibrated passage through a series of rooms on the mother ship, each room a cube of different-colored light—blue to purple to green to orange and so on—a seven-chambered decompression lock of bone-deep wavelengths of energy that gradually reconditioned the human body for the home it had lost: Etheria.

  He turned on the shower, yanked Zoe out of her raggedy dress, shoved her into the stall. As she splashed happily beneath the warm, pacifying spray, he stretched out on the bed and closed his eyes. Immediately the mattress began moving under him, bumpy as the car, rolling down a motel corridor of curtained windows and creamy mango paintings of a pseudoVenice expiring in a pseudosunset. It is the heart that winds the springs of time. It is the head that forges the hands. He had no family, never did, never would. A white divider line skipped across the imagined ceiling in a broken current of metronomic beats, each speaking his name in a clear familiar voice quite close to his ear…Dash…Dash…Dash.…His eyes flicked open and for a moment he didn’t know where he was or where he was supposed to be. Clouds of vapor were floating eerily into the room, all the mirrors were fogged. He rolled off the bed, rushed into the bathroom. Zoe, naturally, had fiddled with the faucets, turning up the hot, but she was standing docile as a drenched cow in the heat and steam, munching contentedly on a candy-sized bar of crimson motel soap. He toweled her off, opened the drapes, and positioned her naked in front of the window. The sky was a bloated gray, the bulging undersides of the clouds tinged with a dull yellow as though something with a lantern were struggling to work its way out. “C’mon, sweetie, talk to them.” He seized her head, aimed it up. She wriggled under his grip, made protesting squirrellike noises. “Do what I tell you, damnit.” She spun away from him, knock
ing the phony brass nautical lamp off the fiberboard table, a sharp explosive puff as the bulb shattered. “Fucking Christ!” She crawled under the bed just out of reach.

  There is no money on Etheria. Everyone gets what they need. For nothing.

  When she got hungry, he brought back a greasy bag of powdered jelly doughnuts they consumed sitting side by side on the floor. He gave her a piece of tektite to fondle. He watched television without really being aware of what was on. The ends of her nerves were miniature plugs that connected directly to the mainframe. Why couldn’t we all do that? Suddenly down on his knees, chest unexpectedly full, he hugged his daughter’s tense whippetlike body, ghost bugs of her energy skittering through his flesh. He kissed her cheek and nuzzled her ear. “I love you,” he whispered. When he let go, she tried to scratch at his eyes. Through the plaster partition he thought he could actually hear the sound of breathing in the next room. Of course. The next room is always occupied.

  There was a term, a dry bone of legalese, that had been rattling inside his head, amusing, pertinent: alienation of affection. Our sin, our chain. Curse of the clan.

  “I have something to say to you,” said Dot. That was all she ever said. In his mind her face was always her first face. It didn’t change.

  He had no family.

  The television tube eyeing him so intently picked up just one channel, an independent station broadcasting nonstop reruns of sixties sitcoms he’d never seen any humor in the first time around despite the nagging laugh track, the sets as identical as the families inhabiting them, so what was young Dot doing bustling about the antiseptic spaciousness of one of these dummy kitchens illuminated so cleverly even the pastel cupboards cast no shadows and each chintz-framed window opened out on the exact same view? She was dressed apparently for the prom, the features of her face exaggerated into acute and revealing detail he’d never noticed before. Her hands, always just maddeningly out of view, were engaged in an obviously complex food task as a squad of black-and-white emperor penguins milled around at her feet. Then he was there, too, walking into forgotten doors, banging against strange furniture he didn’t even know he had, trying unsuccessfully to knot a tie of some slithery trick material while the potted plants on the sill laughed at him and the cooking timer went bing and Dot shoved a warm cookie into his objecting mouth. Then he stepped on a webbed foot. But the plates shone like mirrors and the spoons sparkled and the tollhouse cookies were piling up in fragrant mounds on the gleaming countertops and the suds in the sink swelled like eggs of a certain reptilian nature and the crowding penguins made movement difficult, but the cookies were good, the shelves stacked with colorful cans, it was always summer outside, as a bill nipped his hand and the heat from the oven began to build and the bubbles were spilling onto the waxed linoleum, breaking, oozing, releasing a—but the cookies…He woke with flushed cheeks and a hollow thudding in his sinuses and a clear sense of crucial knowledge imparted that was fading now quick as he tried to embrace it. He staggered to the john to find Zoe swishing her hands deliriously about in the toilet bowl. “Stop that!” he shrieked. Her hands beat faster against the porcelain, so he was forced to pull down her panties and discipline her there right on the wet tile, crying, “You little bastard!” until she screamed and bit his thumb. It was time to check out.

  Jellyfish over Jericho, pie tins over Poughkeepsie, aluminum bathtubs over Alabama. The wonders to behold if we simply lifted our heads.

  It was a grim industrial dawn, the morning carnival in full revelry, interstate traffic steadily thickening, arterial movement narrowing down to a sputtering stream, a gooey trickle, closing toward complete cessation and final seizure. His eyes in the rearview mirror looked back at themselves without recognition. His head ached terribly. Some joker during the night had ripped off the antenna, leaving a radio capable of providing only the desolate distraction of static. He opened the glove compartment, checked that the gun was still there hidden among the cracked sunglasses and wrinkled maps. Cars inched along for miles like prisoners on a chain, then abruptly darted forward for a couple dozen yards, changing lanes with abandon, stealing into sudden pockets of space just large enough to squeeze bumper to bumper. And he helpless before such commuter idiocies, punching in futile rage on the silent horn as Zoe, having quickly forgotten the recent bathroom scene, bounced energetically about the backseat, emitting a run of gutturals, her song, private as blood and the tangled skein of her unique wiring.

  Sometimes, in small towns on moonless nights so dark you might as well be underground, there would be visible, if you stared long enough in the right direction, a play of mild light out in the graveyards, soft fuzzy dots moving around among the trees and the stones like lazy croquet balls for up to an hour or more, occasionally hopping over one another in a tranquil game of leapfrog, then, without warning, rocketing straight into the air, high, higher, directly up into that huge circular thing with revolving spheres of red and blue you never noticed until now. It’s gone before you can even comprehend what you’ve seen. A fact little remarked upon in the literature, but true: they like to linger over our cemeteries. Why?

  He left I-80 and drifted along a local road until the inevitable 7-Eleven showed up. The layouts of these places were all the same, so he could find what he wanted and get out in a hurry. He bought a bag of prepackaged snack foods, a couple six-packs, and a child’s nonbreakable, nonspillable drinking cup that even as he drove he kept constantly filled with warm Bud and by early afternoon Zoe was thoroughly wasted, a skinny cherub posed in a careless slump against the dark blue leatherette, a bit of spittle pasted to the comer of her mouth, scarred face in numb repose at last, glowing with false health in the gold light of a newly minted sun.

  “The most interesting skull. Such depth of character. Look at this extraordinary protuberance in back. May I touch it, please?” Her plump wrinkled hands, festooned with metals and glittering rocks not of this realm, reached out avidly to palpate the phrenological wonders of Zoe’s head. Queen Lividia, monarch of all Magnetron and its Moons to the Third Sphere, exerted a pull of almost three hundred pounds on this planet and swathed in great purple robes rarely moved from the silver painted throne set within the shuttered living room of her Escondido bungalow, the odor of Balkan Sobranie still clinging to the faded furnishings though Al had transcended this level many many years before. “Oh!” she exclaimed, hands drawing back with a start. “This child, she’s on fire!” Her eyes bulged like pink gumballs from her over-powdered face and Edsel hid behind Mr. Al’s brown armchair and wouldn’t come out, not even to sample the Queen’s cosmic rhubarb pie. And on the way back to the motel Dot discovered he had wet his pants and Dash spanked him so hard he bruised a muscle in his pen hand and next morning explained to the California delegation at the UFOFEST the soreness was due to a lab accident on Etheria. And even though he couldn’t sign any books they made almost two grand that day, a new record.

  Everywhere the open road was breaking down. Sweaty work crews, coated from hair to boots in concrete dust, nibbled away at the brittle pavement with picks and jackhammers, trucks carting away the chunks like loads of valuable ore, traffic in single file crawling past a shirtless black man in goggles, bandanna tied across his mouth and nose, red flag drooping from his fist, the bored face looking back a dead ringer for Barney Hill’s, famous 1961 abductee.

  Then a brief acceleration ahead to the next bottleneck some twenty miles farther on: a caravan of gawking drivers creeping through a clot of patrol cars, ambulances, pulsing lights, and a Chrysler LeBaron, its windshield splintered into silvery lacework, hood buckled, front tires gone, sitting sideways in a litter of glass, metal fragments, and clumps of rubber, and down in the median gulley a broken Nissan upside down, white sheet draped discreetly over left door and window, the type of ordinary roadside scene Dallas, even as a small child, wanted the family to regard, to stop and photograph. Instinctively, Dash looked to the sky. All clear.

  Thirty bodies the Air Force has locked in a hangar
at Wright-Pat. Sliced, diced, and on ice. Mongoloid heads, no digestive systems, their blood was transparent.

  He stopped for lunch at a joint called Danny’s, a brick-and-glass bunker squatting behind a thick hedge. He parked in the shade in back, freshening Zoe’s cup before he went in. He watched himself approaching the wide glass doors of the restaurant, and he liked what he saw—here was someone definitely from out of state. Inside, the air-conditioned aroma of fried food and the clatter of hungry humans at lunch—adult noises, the sounds of his kind? A waitress brushed by with barely a glance, “Sit wherever you like.” He chose a corner table, back to the wall, senses aimed outward in a radial shotgun pattern. The couple across the room had just had sex but were contemplating divorce. The man in the Izod shirt had stomach cancer. The lonely girl by the door was pregnant. Grandma Blue Hair thought she was in Cleveland on V-J Day. The chubby boy in jeans was a secret rapist. Faces were flowers of flesh, some got pollinated, some did not. From a slot in the opposite wall a disembodied pair of hairy arms fantastic as lobster claws shoved a platter of yellow chicken under a sickly pink light. “Of course no one suspected that he’d be there,” remarked a woman at an adjoining table, and her companions laughed, exposing their false teeth. The coffee machine shone with the boldness of hard surreptitious things. The minute hand on the wall clock was moving too fast. All the eyes in this room were dead.

  The menu was decorated with drawings of curlicue anchors and leering whales. He ordered, chewed what was brought him dutifully as a child, tasting nothing. When the girl returned with the check he understood perfectly what her expression meant.