M31

by Stephen Wright

  “Yes,” he said, trying to match verbal affability with the smile centered on her eyes, brown and bovine. “I am exactly who you think I am.”

  Her ringed hand, sliding the bill facedown across the table, paused, her eyes shrinking slightly, the habitual wariness of the long-term service employee. “Excuse me, sir?”

  “Quite all right. I’m used to it by now. Happens wherever I go.” The smile fixed at the same width and intensity.

  “I’m sorry, sir. What happens?”

  “Perfectly natural. I’m startled, too, whenever I encounter anyone famous.”

  “You’re famous?”

  “Yes, I’m Dash.”

  “You are.”

  “Yes, I thought you recognized me.”

  She leaned forward, peering. “Sure,” she said. “Dash. It’s just that we get so many famous people dropping in here. And the sunglasses and everything. Nice to meet you, Dash.” She formally extended her hand. “Have a nice day.”

  “You, too,” he replied. “Make your own reality.”

  Because there are other universes next door. Vast systems turning in dimensions beyond the reach of intellects constructed out of home-grown materials. The systems orbit around and through one another and where they touch, within the undetectable ellipse of their intersection, there is slippage in the gears: whirlpools, singularities, premonition, coincidence, accident.

  It was amusing to see himself encased in a blue bubble rolling merrily over bleached cement. The passing countryside was not his. The people in the surrounding cars were all strangers. Even the weather was odd: in a disturbing reversal of the seasons the days, as they declined on toward fall, were growing progressively hotter, the land withering in drought. Southerly winds and bad energy prevailed.

  Zoe sat up cranky and hung over, creased face slick with sweat. She immediately began to wail and tried to dislodge the ball bearing of pain from her head by knocking it repeatedly against the back of her father’s seat. He tossed a handful of M&Ms over his shoulder, calming her down.

  It must have been hanging out there for some time, bright as a pocket watch against the blank expanse of unadorned sky, spinning as if on a fob, and spinning, he knew, was a form of watching. He pulled the Bug off the road and waited. It was about a mile off to the right, revolving on its axis a couple hundred feet above some high tension lines, a file of huge stick figures marching away over the beanfield. It twinkled and sparked as if to burn a hole through the screen while blind tourists roared by oblivious. He had no idea how long he watched. “Zoe!” He reached back over the seat, shook her roughly by the shoulder. “Zoe, Zoe honey, wake up!” She groaned. “Zoe, c’mon now, quit faking.” She didn’t move. “You little bitch!” He threw open his door, got out, and pulled her from the car by her ankles. She lay facedown in the white gravel, whimpering. “Now look,” he said in his most pleasing abject manner, “look, look, look,” lifting her up by the waist and carrying this life-sized marionette around to the front of the ticking car, where he braced himself against the hot fender, she propped more or less upright between his tight legs. “Now looky up there.” Cupping the exemplary shape of her head in his hand, he directed her gaze to the proper quadrant. “See, see that.” He jerked an arm about in feeble mimicry of her grand ballet. “They want to talk to you. They’ve been searching for a long time. Now talk.” She sagged against him, knees buckling. “C’mon now, sweetie, this might be important.” He raised her own arms in his and waved them strenuously about. The wash from passing cars shuddered into them, hot and damp as dinosaur breath. They stood together like that for some moments, swaying unsteadily like sailors on dry land. Her arms were like rubber batons, and while it lasted it was he who stood upon the podium, he who conducted the music of the spheres, but there was no response. Then a rosy nipple of light atop the blazing object winked back at him, an encyclopedia of feeling communicated totally in an instant, and the thing was gone, it was there and then it wasn’t.

  Charles Fort: “I think we’re property…something owns this earth—all others warned off.”

  Einstein communed regularly with agents from beyond our solar system, meeting the muddy-faced entities over strudel in his Princeton, N.J., home. He had been a contactee from the age of five.

  Jonathan Swift was an alien.

  That afternoon he spotted the first dero team, the usual trio in a black Mercedes with tinted windows, trailing him right behind the Hyundai. He saw himself smiling in the mirror, remembering the two policemen blinded by cosmic rays in Zacatecas; Captain Mantell’s last words over Godman: “It’s metallic and tremendous in size!”; the besieged family in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, bouncing bullets off the goblins at their windows; the firefight between a training squad out of Ft. Hood and men in cerulean suits with glass heads; Grover’s Mill, N.J., 1938; and Dr. Reich himself, who downed several over Orgonon in 1955. He was about to enlist in the shooting war.

  At dusk he noticed a second Mercedes approaching from behind in the passing lane. He peeled away off the interstate, one of the black cars still pacing him. He pulled into the first gas station on the right and sat quietly by the pumps under the harsh yellow light, watching in the mirror. The traffic came at him in colors: blue, green, brown, blue, red, blue, blue, gray…no black, no black at all. The greasy guy in the glass booth was giving him the eye, so he got out of the car, gathered Zoe in his arms, and headed for the john, just a respectable father here, tending to the lavatory needs of his youngest. He set her down on the pot like a doll. “Pee, damnit!” he barked. She yanked the toilet paper roll off the wall. Her clothes stank, and his brusque attempts at cleaning her limbs and face with a wet paper towel only succeeded in rearranging the grime into charcoal streaks across her skin. She yelped when he touched the scabs on her cheeks, a nice infection brewing there. He carried her back to the car, filled up the tank—one eye on the road—and bought her a couple bags of chips and pretzels and a can of grape soda—she needed the vitamin C. From under the scratched and dimpled hood fringed still with bits of leaf and twig he removed a hefty elongated contraption of bound metal pipe and rubber tubing—it resembled an old nineteenth-century Gatling gun—and laid it carefully inside the car, balancing it across the tops of the seats. He checked his money, the gun in the glove compartment, and one of his tattered maps, plotting out a deviously complicated route along the jagged blue capillaries of secondary roads. “Wave good-bye to the nice man,” he said, and rumbled off into the night.

  He didn’t have long to wait. Thirty minutes later on a deserted stretch of rolling two-lane blacktop—the glow of an occasional farmhouse drifting by on either side comforting as a harbor buoy—a set of piercing high beams popped up into the mirror. He accelerated for a mile, then slowed to well below the speed limit. The lights stayed where they were, pacing him precisely. “Okay.” One hand on the wheel, he reached back, settling the pipes out straight and level. “No, honey,” he cautioned Zoe, who had come alive at this novel activity beside her, “no, don’t touch.” A spacebuster’s rule of thumb: always aim between the lights. Now. He pressed a red button at the base of the device. There was no flash, no sound, the dero machine simply vanished forever from the mirror. The war had begun.

  Now he drove like a professional, attacking the paved surface, pedal to the floor on the straightaway, downshifting the curves, hysterical trees leaping out of his path, disintegrating clouds of gnats, barreling through towns so small the only sign of life was the traffic light blinking a slow forlorn yellow at the single intersection, vacant early morning hours, the country deep into REMs, the troubled territory under the covers, and he alone the solitary soul awake to the menace stalking the land across these four postwar decades of pap and pop. The signal had gone out from the steeple, and the rider bounded through the night with the message. The message was in the child. A child shall save you.

  He bounced over potholes, he rattled over “gatorbacks,” wheel jumping in his hands, “crickets” chirping in the engine, oil spla
ttering from the crankcase a quart every hundred miles, eyes tunneled out ahead on the road stripes sliding and weaving across the dark like white snakes desperate to mate, their frustration hypnotic in its anxious beauty, mind and body locked together on automatic pilot, an entranced state of exhilarating movement, pure flight without destination, the truest flight of all.…The arrow flew at him and away before there was time to respond. He jammed both feet onto the brake pedal, sending the VW into a crazy sideways skid down the center of the road to stop several hundred feet past the sign pointing in reflective bubbles straight toward WASHINGTON, D.C. The headlight burned weakly through a haze of rubber smoke, the engine was dead. When he tried to restart it, he flooded the carburetor and had to sit there like a fool astraddle the divider line, exposed, impotent, hoping the antique battery wouldn’t give out altogether before he got going again and that Zoe, who had been catapulted to the floor, would stop screaming for Christ’s sake before a patrol car happened by and hauled them both in as public nuisances. He waited a couple minutes, spoke aloud a word given to him through Zoe by The Occupants, twisted the key, and the plugs fired and an hour later he was cruising along the beltway through the dead air of a D.C. dawn.

  The sugary confections of government sprang up about him, the aggressive spike of the Washington Monument, the rounded and ribbed lid of the U.S. Capitol, the Jefferson Memorial’s planetarium dome, all fashioned of the same creamy edible substance, images so familiar their three-dimensional actuality was preposterous, objects dreamt into being on a whim. Low in the pink breaking sky a couple of rogue lights cavorted, gathering and dispersing in exquisitely timed coordination, a company of supremely intelligent fireflies rehearsing an extraordinary dance. And despite his pleas, his urgent gestures, Zoe, perversely stubborn, ignored completely this astonishing air show. When her cup was empty, he refilled it with flat brew.

  Ten days in July. When saucers were strung like Christmas lights over the city and the radar at both National and Edwards registered anomalous blips buzzing Congress, the White House, violating restricted air corridors, making a mockery of national security, and interceptors were scrambled from Wilmington, Delaware, and as one of the jets was surrounded by clusters of blue and white the pilot radioed the ground, “They’re closing in on me. What should I do?” This was in 1952. No one had an answer then. No one has an answer now.

  As if on cue, morning congestion closed rapidly around, boxing him in, sleek black cars patrolling every lane, guided one and all by button shark eyes. Caught in this current of chrome and glass, he was across the Potomac and touring through Alexandria before he had a chance to exit and turn around. A cup came flying over the seat, narrowly missing his head. If he could have stopped, he’d have whipped her with his belt. She’d wet her pants again, too; he’d been inhaling the fumes for the last hour.

  Back in the District he cruised the alphabet streets, searching for the hotel (name forgotten, of course) he and Dot had enjoyed a memorable stay in during the famous International Saucerology Forum commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Kenneth Arnold’s epochal Mount Rainier sightings. A deputy from the UN Secretary General’s office had attended, along with half a dozen frequent flyers to the backside of the planet Venus, the man whose lunar potatoes (a breakfast gift from congenial Star Persons) had been mysteriously confiscated by the federal government, a wall-eyed grandmother who sold cloud portraits she’d done in needlepoint, a cast member of the television series Star Trek, a dog who’d been to Pluto (do you know even know where you are?), and the usual assortment of CIA, dero, and disguised Occupants. Edsel had been conceived there in a room somewhere among the upper stories, but it wasn’t nostalgic sentimentality that sent him cursing up and down and around and around—the place, as he remembered it, was cheap and clean.

  Here in this part of town black cars were replaced by black faces and the wedding-cake columns and frosted facades of the country’s monuments to itself were glimpsed down shadowed back streets from unfamiliar, unphotographed angles. In the middle of the sidewalk on an old kitchen chair sat an emaciated woman in a winter coat, nylons rolled down about her sagging ankles, a rotting fish in a metal pan laid across her lap like a sleeping child, blue-and-green bottle flies swarming over the fish, her hands, her face. Two elderly men in a dirt yard were trying to kick one another without losing a drop from the brown-bagged wine quarts clutched in each right hand. A pack of mongrel dogs chased some quick-limbed furry creature over the moon rubble of a vacant lot. A sweating adolescent with muscled arms strode across an intersection, a belt of live M-60 rounds draped about his neck.

  On Etheria the snow is warm and there are violet moons and each inhabitant is cradled in the velvet webbing of the others’ minds. Everyone can fly. Everyone is free.

  He passed the nondescript yellow brick building twice in his impatient circling before he even noticed the sign: MOUNTJOY INN. It looked like the kind of residential hotel people grew old and died in, waiting for something else to happen. Forty-five minutes later he finally found a parking space a minor march away. Carefully, he locked the car, then struggled down the street with bag and money box in one hand, Zoe in the other, pulling at him like a stubborn dog.

  On the corner outside the hotel was a big man in small ill-fitting clothes hunched over a lusterless battered saxophone. The instrument case lying open on the pavement in front of him contained a few scattered coins bright as the eyes that peered surreptitiously through a snarled curtain of gray unwashed hair. Out of the bell of the horn erupted a cacophony of sour notes whose disorienting progression seemed to have something to do with the periodic switchings of the WALK–DON’T WALK sign suspended from the pole above his head. At their approach he peeled his lips off the mouthpiece and chuckled, “Heh, heh, heh, you two sure do look like hell.” Then he closed his eyes and blew his way back to whatever world these discordant squawks sounded sweet on.

  Dash fumbled about in his pockets. Zoe was rocking back and forth from her waist in a blind spastic boogie. The Occupants were clever, and this bum had all the marks of a genuine Ditto man. He folded a five-dollar bill twice and tossed it into the magenta-lined case.

  The musician nodded, pausing in his solo to say, “A blessing for you,” and producing from somewhere among the diverse layering of jackets, vests, sweaters, and shirts a small object he pressed solemnly into Dash’s open hand: a used sax reed. Dash gaped as if he’d just been presented with a wad of fresh snot. “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”

  The man shrugged. “You got a horn?”

  Dash looked him up and down, openly contemptuous. “Go wash yourself.”

  “Thank you, sir.” The sax man bowed. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” His smile simple and lucent, untainted by the slightest edge of guile or sarcasm.

  Dash had to drag his backward-glancing daughter up the stone steps of the hotel and into a lobby the size and decor of a cabdriver’s lounge: fake rubber plants listing from the dusty corners, rattling floor fan, cardboard table, tired furniture, pink bald head cresting the top of a shabby brown armchair, a waiting room for interminable waits. The senior citizen behind the desk had wiry unkempt hair colored the flat black of cheap dye and eyebrows drawn on her forehead in high, questioning arcs. The portable television at her elbow was tuned to a professional wrestling match she monitored intently while folding and cutting strips of tissue into clever pastel roses. The counter was a mess of bright paper petals. She handed Dash a registration card and a pen and returned to her scissors. While Dash concocted a recent past, Zoe squatted at his feet, trying to pry the pretty tiles off the floor. Visit A Civil War Battlefield, urged a rack of brochures near the door. In the corner beside the mailboxes was an emerald parrot in a soiled cage. “What’s the word?” said the bird. “Checking out, checking out.” The woman read the address off the card. “Tourist?” The eyebrows resembled croquet wickets.

  “Business.” There was something unsettling and vaguely familiar about her, a face in t
he crowd at some long-ago symposium. He paid a week in advance, and she handed him the key to a room on the third floor.

  “No hot plates, no fans, no smoking in bed,” she intoned, then, spying Zoe attempting to scale the counter, “My, what a lovely child, Mister Klaatu.”

  “A gift from above,” he replied, seizing Zoe firmly by the hand and turning to go.

  “Elevator’s broke,” the woman called after him. “Stairs is over there to your right.”

  Zoe’s legs gave out after one flight, so he had to carry her shrieking up this cinder-block echo chamber to a hallway reeking of stale bodies, smoke, and harsh disinfectant, where peculiar faces peeked out furtively at them, half-cracked doors closing silently as they passed. Their own door was warped into its frame, and after wiggling the key repeatedly in the stiff lock, Dash had to lean his shoulder into the wood to get it open. Inside was a room just like all the other rooms he had put time into on all the other trips of his life. Everything was used, including the air. He went to the window. It was painted shut. On the opposite side of the gray mottled glass, gleaming perfectly even in the dampened light of an overcast sky, the iconic structures of the nation, saintly domes and fairy towers, and above them a clear triangle of light holding steady over the green rectangle of the Mall, each separate disk bouncing playfully within this configuration from one angled point to the next. He watched for a few minutes, too mesmerized to even think of forcing Zoe, who was busy licking out the inside of her cup, to the window. Then he noticed a dark-suited man in a window of the office building directly across the street, staring back at him through a pair of big binoculars. Quickly, he stepped behind the wall, dropped the blinds with a clatter. He looked with spreading horror at this room he now occupied, its cage of space, its useless miserable objects. Zoe was in the upright fetal position on the bed, rocking, rocking over the creaking springs.

  When they put the silence on you, there is no recovery. You are turned into a media buffoon or worse. Roswell, New Mexico, 1947. A bright object falls out of the blue, killing all four aboard. A weather balloon, the press is told. But Edgar Moseley, who witnessed the crash, the pear-headed remains, spoke freely of what he had seen until a visit from the dark suits and the facts vanished into the labyrinth of a stroke. Since 1953 the CIA has managed all news concerning UFOs. The films and tapes made of Zoe’s “seizures” at the Institute they conveniently “mislaid.” Reality is a place you can access only with the proper clearances. Everything genuine disappears. What’s left, the cardboard maze we’re free to scurry about in, is pure Dittoland.