M31

by Stephen Wright

  He riffled through the pages of the phone book and dialed the number of The Washington Post. “I want to speak with one of the Watergate guys.” In the world of hold he was entertained for several endless minutes by a stringed deluge of “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head.” According to Zoe, the Zero Time will come when 70% of the American people accept in mind and body the fact of an alien presence in our sky. The last Gallup poll put the percentage of believers at 57. We’re just a mere 13% from our goal, people, please help us, help yourselves now and come forward, open your arms and accept the craft into your heart. Please. A male voice with the curt tone of the young and ambitious came on the line to take his story, see that it got to the right people. “What I have to say is too important to entrust to underpaid functionaries.” He yanked the cord out of the wall, tossed the phone crashing to the floor. “Let’s go, kid.” And he lifted her into his arms and hurried down the stairs and into the street where two new formations were demonstrating their skills for all to see, one in the shape of a large red diamond, the other a flashing blue circle that rotated in silent grandeur over the White House.

  Zoe started clawing at his arm the moment they entered the Senate Office Building. Gleaming corridor vistas, unnatural odors, insolent individuals on the march, it must have seemed to her a replica of the Institute. She shrank back toward the door, mewling. Dash waved a fresh packet of M&Ms in front of her nose and led her down the hall, one M&M at a time, checking the plaques posted outside each door until he recognized a name and walked in. The receptionist was young, blond, too little that was organic in her smile. The Senator was away in Japan. “I’m a registered voter and a tax-paying resident of Buchanan County.” The Senator had been in Japan since last Monday and would not return until late next week. “And I’m the Speaker of the House. He was on television only last night discussing Star Wars from this very office.” The Senator often gave interviews that were broadcast later by tape delay. “Can I go in and see if he’s at his desk? Maybe the Senator caught an early flight.” The Senator appreciated hearing from his constituents, and perhaps if you would care to write him at this address…Could your little girl get her hands out of the jelly bean bowl?

  The television station, at least the part of it he was permitted to see, looked just like a real estate office. No one there knew his name, either. The talent coordinator was at lunch. “It’s important,” he said. “Thirteen percent.” Neither the bewildered secretary nor several affable fellows from building security seemed to disagree. But unattended for far too many empty minutes, Zoe had managed to overturn a large chrome ashtray, wriggle out of her panties, and was just assuming her preparatory crouch over the beige mound of spilled sand, butts, and ash, when someone grabbed his arm—rude, machinelike fingers tight on his flesh—and an extended moment of consummate physicality ended out on the sidewalk, father and daughter raging together for once at a common enemy without Unit affiliation. The sky seemed exceptionally large and open here, and when he looked up he could feel the magic light falling down around him, the tickling pressure of it, steady as a wind against the translucent fabric of his face.

  Out on the Mall a gang of scruffy kids was tossing around a yellow Frisbee, the athletic contortions of their bodies oddly reminiscent of little Zoe at her window. Their dog, an untethered menace, came bounding instantly over, fangs bared. Zoe screamed, hung cringing to Dash’s leg. “Sarah!” called one of the boys, and the dog swung around. “Sorry!”

  “Keep your creature off us,” yelled Dash, stroking his daughter’s head. “I’ll mess him up good, I’ll break his back, I’ll tear out his balls.”

  June 3, 1981. Betsy Strickland’s cocker spaniel is run over by a furniture van on the street outside her home. The dog’s skull is cracked open, revealing that one-half of the animal’s brain had been replaced at one time by a smooth silver lobe of unknown origin and construction. The object is handed over to local police for further examination and is never seen again. The dog had liked to sit by the picture window for hours on end, staring out at absolutely nothing.

  When they arrived at the Reflecting Pool, Zoe broke loose and jumped in fully clothed, splashed in a frenzy among the reflections, glossy fragments of blue and white, the way things are. Then a cop with a shellacked exterior ordered Dash to pull her out. Up in the air lights gathered and wheeled in mute chorus.

  There was a crowd in front of the White House, an angry eruption of the populace outfitted in grotesque masks and black armbands, a parade of red placards jostling along between the wooden barricades, the uneasy teams of helmeted police stationed at ten-yard intervals, chanting something unintelligible about abortion in a performance designed as much for the network lenses as that curious figure who maybe even now might be lurking behind the curtains across the deep green lawn. There were unmarked cars lining the curb, manned, engines idling; a row of uniforms behind the iron gate; much nervous coming and going in the guard booths—the dero machinery in high activation all around the block. Dash took in the scene at a glance and decided this was not the day to petition his leader. Turning away with Zoe in tow, he shouted back at the demonstrators, “Fuck the monsters, fuck all of ’em!”

  Every president since Truman has known exactly what you suspected they knew. Details are presented in the initial briefing right after the oath. In 1954 Eisenhower himself met secretly at Edwards Air Force Base with a delegation from Alpha Centauri. It changes a man. The millstone of such knowledge dragged through life like a curse and on down into a marble crypt.

  Funny, but he couldn’t for the moment recall the name of the hotel or how to get there. He wandered around with the tourists, feeding Zoe Eskimo pies and orange soda. At a shady fenced-in playground he sat on a green bench beside his fellow parents and watched his daughter ignoring the other children. The sky had grown so busy with intricate movement he dared not look up for fear of vertigo. The kids on the swings were cutting neat parabolas into the blue afternoon humidity. A small boy with a round outsized head kept going up and down the circular slide; up, around, and down; up, around, and down. In a child the fundamental affinity for the delights of that shape were clear and undisguised, easy access at that age to the helical truth of our nature. Up, around, and down. It’s the shape that is the key: you can find it prominently incised on the shimmering walls of the mother ship.

  He must have rested his eyes for a moment because when he opened them it was dark out there, too, and all the children had flown away home. He walked the streets, aimlessly, through inexplicably deserted neighborhoods, hoping for the appearance of a familiar sign. Light spun without cease in the darkness above, and there were glittering deposits of devil’s jelly all along Pennsylvania Avenue, clumps of angel hair dense as Spanish moss glowing momentarily in the leafy branches of the trees and evaporating without a trace. He was exhausted—there is no surcease for the prophet—but sleep, he recognized, was at this point a fluctuating region lying well beyond the rim of plausibility. So he walked, the sound of honey bees swarming in the hollows of his ears and somewhere the faintest suggestion of many voices reaching out together toward real melody.…

  The convoluted eye of the plastic rose in the clear plastic vase on the nightstand had obviously been focused on him for quite some time. When he got up off the bed, there were hairs left behind on the pillowcase, an alarming number of them. In the bathroom mirror he saw fallen lashes on his cheeks. He checked his teeth and gums. Still firm. The bombardment was probably coming from that office across the street.

  It was daytime, so stores must be open. He went out and bought several rolls of aluminum foil to tape over the window. Later, he sat at the rickety desk, a cap of foil molded to his head, writing in his notebook: In the space of mind there is universe. This is factual. They seek to intervene. Violation is the goal of the terminal entities. Cosmic consequences that you read as comic. Ssssss. And heed. Don’t let the Egg Man touch you there. The inside is all down from when you fell out of the clouds. Don’t worry. The pai
n of reentry can be endured without loss. Remember the great Doktor Reich. Listen to your organ.

  When he peeked out the window again, it was night. Bewildered, he looked around the room. Zoe. Where was she?

  He slid his bag out from under the bed, removed an army field cap, and secured it firmly on his head over the foil shield. He tucked the revolver into his belt. The notebook he hid in the desk behind the top drawer. He took some bills out of his cash box and left the hotel.

  Stuff that has fallen out of the sky, documentation available upon request: rocks, metal plating, chunks of green ice, pellets of fire, baby snakes, toads, hairy spiders, black goo, fresh blood, flakes of meat, pieces of tooth.

  This was the landscape you could never lose. The capital of Dittoland. Pay no attention to the “people.” Avoid the pink street lamps—bad radiation of the worst quality. Actually, the city was rather pleasant at night, the daytime crush of visitors and bureaucrats dissolved completely, the air cooler, the monuments seemed lit from within, constructed out of stone quarried from mines of light in “the land beyond the Pole,” as Admiral Byrd wrote, the hole Adolph Hitler squandered a fortune in reichsmarks attempting to locate.

  He crossed and recrossed the Mall as though weaving an invisible string between the sentinel trees. He walked briskly with upright posture, an important man in an important town on a special mission. He paused in the soft shadow of a large oak, staring up at the white helmet of the Capitol dome looming inscrutably there over all. He could feel the potent thoughts radiating outward from the ornamental tip.

  At the Lincoln Memorial the Old Railsplitter’s gaze was impossible to evade no matter where you stood, discomforting eyes with the pupils scooped out like granite olives without any pimento. Clearly, it was not a human face. The naive folk of that century had dubbed the flying objects “airships.” Mysterious ropes hung down from the heavens.

  He was finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate on the solids and shapes that made up the city, the once persuasive data of his tellurian senses was losing its authority. He felt slightly dizzy, and the expected nausea had arrived, taking his stomach for a ride. It was important to keep moving. He let his feet guide him through areas most tourists never see, where even down in the hole of a night as bad as this one there were still crannies of activity, illumination, and a living presence, even if it was an angry bandit face lunging from the shadows to demand, “What are you doing here?”

  “Do you know me?” inquired Dash. “Don’t I know you?” He removed the gun from his belt. It felt good in his hand, out in the air. “Do you know this?”

  “Hey,” said the man, backing off, “I didn’t mean nothing.”

  “I don’t, either.” He wiggled the weapon impatiently. “Where’s the other two?” he asked, quickly checking his flanks.

  “What two?” said the man. “What’re you gonna do?” There was a barrel and a set of eyes on him that all looked alike.

  “I tasted electricity at Allendale,” said Dash. He paused, as if expecting a reply. “My hands were fired in the furnaces of Andromeda. I know what happens to light when you ride past it. I’ve wrestled the angel. I’ve seen the stars of paradise. Do you think I can be stopped? I’ve got antibodies. I’ve been inoculated with the truth.”

  “Please,” the man begged, “don’t kill me.”

  “You’re already dead.” He pulled the trigger. “Bang,” he said, amused by the ludicrousness of the situation. He was still smiling when he whipped the barrel into the side of the man’s face. It went crack like a nut. It went down like a sack of sand. These dero—so pathetically constructed, yet so dangerous, their powerful mimetic abilities alone enabling them to infiltrate all too easily, to pass as human, friend, wife, son. He knelt down, employed the gun like a hammer. When he was finished, he wiped his hands on the dero’s shirt.

  He walked.

  He tossed the sticky gun under a bush outside the Department of Justice. Go figure, G-men.

  He walked.

  A radiance beckoned to him, a breaching of the darkness where mellow neon spelled RAINBOW CUTRATE LIQUORS. A rowdy band of dispossessed were gathered outside the door around the makeshift hearth of a beat box booming out sounds only his son could have appreciated: “My name is Adam Ace, No words do I waste, Jam my piece up in your face, It’s your bitch I want to taste.” Squadrons in the sky wheeled right, then left, then right again. A stellar wind bore down upon him cold and severe and it was as if his skin wore no clothes and his bones no flesh and when he looked up there were unaccountable tears in his eyes and a splendid white Cadillac drawn up to the bus stop, a fancy painted dragon curled over the trunk, several women crouching at the open windows. He passed a derelict urinating against a wall, stepped through the stream of warm piss dark as blood in the light of the sign. He glanced to his right and discovered a woman there beside him. “Hi,” she said. She had on a white halter top, a pair of red leather pants, and an olive-drab baseball cap just like his. “Need a date?” she asked. He inspected her face. Human eyes looked back. “Yes,” he said, and she took his arm possessively in hers. She smelled of flowers and auto exhaust.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Beanie.”

  He looked at her.

  “No, really.” She directed a long filed nail at her head. “My hat. Used to have this silly yellow propeller on top.” She laughed and squeezed his arm. “Like it?”

  “I can’t call you Beanie.”

  “No problem. What do you want to call me?”

  “The name your mother knows you by.”

  She sighed like an exasperated child. “You’re weird, mister.” Then, as if they’d just spent a difficult time haggling over price and she’d had to settle for less, she said, “Trish.”

  “Yes. That’s a name.”

  He led her confidently around the next corner and was pleasantly startled by the apparition of his own lost hotel lurking in feigned gentility behind a couple of shedding sycamores. He escorted Trish boldly through the dim lobby, the nosy clerk dozing unaware amid a heap of ageless blossoms. Queried the parrot, “Checking out?”

  After the usual struggle he forced open the door to his room and she sauntered in as if she’d only left it an hour before. “Cozy,” she said.

  He was scanning table surfaces to make sure he hadn’t left notebook or money in view. “This place is so worn out.”

  “Listen, honey, compared to some of the cribs I see, it’s the Hyatt Regency.”

  “No, I mean all of it, inside, outside, the whole place, it’s a storage locker for bad meat.”

  She stared at him. “You straight arrows are definitely the freakiest.”

  In the fluorescent glare of the overhead the cosmetically enhanced lineaments of her face revealed aspects unforeseen, inestimable. “You look like somebody.”

  “Yeah, I know. Your mother.” She went to the window, the click of stiletto heels loud and menacing in such a tiny space. She fingered a corner of the foil screen, edges of her mouth in a sarcastic curl.

  “Don’t touch that,” he ordered in his most paternal command voice.

  Her mouth shifted into full obscene smile. “Oh, I get it. You’re one of those Pentagon guys, right?” She came over to where he stood, pressed her groin and breasts up against him. “Well, don’t worry about me. I’m in the business of keeping secrets, too.”

  “The Pentagon is a blind den of gibbering idiots.”

  Her hand, delicately thin and ruby-clawed, went to rubbing insistently at his crotch. “CIA?” He stared down into her face, the features so fluid, metamorphic, there’d be no easy way out once you were in.

  “FBI?” She had the other hand now around in back, working his ass.

  “I’ve never been a member of a paramilitary organization of any kind.”

  “Okay, then, let’s just see what we do have here.” She went to her knees and unzipped his pants. “Uh-oh, here’s something that’s bursting with classified information.” She held the gapin
g mouth of his erect penis to her ear and pretended to listen. “What’s that?” she asked in mock concern. “It’s hot and cramped and you’re being held against your will. You want out?” She paused and looked up, hand still gripping him tightly. “Your rubber or mine? You gotta be so careful these days.”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “Sure, mister, try it from my point of view.” She got up off the floor and went to her purse. She tossed him a packaged condom. “Price of admission.” She sat on a corner of the still undisturbed bed and lit a cigarette. “Listen, what’s your name, anyway?”

  He stepped out of his pants and walked into the bathroom. “Dash,” he answered, studying the image of himself in the mirror. There were a few more black eyelashes on his cheek. There were round rosy sores on his chest.

  “Dash?” She let out a short, nasty laugh. “So tell me about funny names. What is it, some kind of code?”

  With his fingernail he could scrape skin snowflakes off the wings of his nose. He opened his mouth. There were fuzzy patches of mold on his tongue. Have you ever looked into the eyes of a goat? he asked.

  “Okay, don’t tell me. I know you military guys, and don’t try to tell me you’re not. I know military from across town.”

  They have my daughter, he wanted to say. Was the bottle of chloral hydrate still in his bag under the bed, or had he left it back in the country in the ashes of a junked life? We can do anything we want in here, and what would it matter finally? he said. He stood above a large turd twisting in the waters of a porcelain bowl. The spiral is the form of thought.