When he came out of the bathroom, Trish was reclining naked across the turned-down bed, drawing curlicues in the air with the ember of her cigarette. Her long, angular body was a precise duplicate of Trinity’s. And the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, so they took for themselves such women as they chose.
“Okay, Dash,” she announced, rolling over to stab out the cigarette, “let’s see just how fast you really are.”
She grunted and groaned on cue for him, whispering furiously into his ear, and when it was over, she sat up cross-legged against the peeling wall and smoked another cigarette, as if on break from unloading heavy crates off a truck. “You liked the dirty talk, didn’t you? You officer types always do.”
There were yellow bruises on her legs and thin ugly scars down her arms.
“I want to do it like dogs,” he said.
She shrugged. “Bow-wow.”
There was a place he had to get to, the urging of the car over the final hill, past the last peaking into a true end, clarity of an alternate order, stationary, whole, unimaginable. He looked up at the specter of himself doubled in the dim bureau mirror against the far wall, stripped, flushed, kneeling as if in prayer, and plugged securely into the soft socket of a trusting ass upraised just for him. “I love you,” he said. His blood gathered into a fist, punched through the bounds of his body.
He opened his eyes, though he had not yet been asleep, converging on the parallel tubes beaming down from a yellowy ceiling, the once white impasto shattered like a windshield into a black-veined web that seemed to pulsate with the rhythms of human breath. Little cigar-shaped apricot objects darted about just ahead of his glance, afterimages of the fluorescents overhead. He felt as if his insides had been scraped clean of residue, an odd tepid sensation neither sweet nor sad, simply different. His hand went out, encountered the momentary surprise of adjacent flesh, nerves measuring, remembering. He turned onto his side to look, to fill all that new inner space with the splendor of light descending in gentle sheets, fabricating a pair of flawless buttocks in layer upon layer of gold leaf.
He opened his eyes, though he no longer slept, to discover the tubes off, the room in total darkness, and this Trish perched like a bird on the end of the bed, the penlight from his bag stuck in her mouth. All he could see were radiant teeth, a disembodied grin of phosphorescent bone.
He opened his eyes on hands of orange, hands of yellow, climbing agile as monkeys up the flowered drapes. A black mist swept dramatically across the ceiling. He could smell the wood laughing as it went up. He rolled over. She was gone. The empty cash box lay upside down on the already warm floor. Pulling on his pants, he ran to the door. The wall behind him cackled and blazed. Out in the corridor a gray-bearded bald man hobbled up, clutching a foam fire extinguisher. He was wearing a strikingly immaculate white terrycloth robe, and his small blue eyes were dancing with either the luster of alcohol or the tenacious vigilance of the mad. The man held a crooked forefinger to pursed lips, signaling hush, then with a conspiratorial hunch of the shoulders, mouth trembling in an expression of suppressed glee, he pointed crazily upward. Dash raced down the hallway and on up the murky stairwell, two steps at a time, flight after flight, and crashed on through a battered metal door onto the roof of the hotel and the manifestation of a dawn for the end of time.
His bare feet padded unfeeling over the droppings, the nails, the cinders, the nasty rosettes of glass from smashed wine bottles. He could neither speak nor call to mind the simplest word. The sky was on fire, a gyrating compass of flame. The big blue lid had popped open, and all the treasure denied us for so long was raining down, an incarnation of perfect benevolence, an outpouring of M31. It was what he expected, it wasn’t what he expected. Packets of radiant energy rippled in ticklish waves over his face, burnishing the skin, playing nerves like guitar strings. He was aware of the changes in pressure, the subtle variation in weight of each distinct color, and the not unpleasant sensation of heat building on the receptive surface of his body. It was the day the stars came out, it was fireworks forever, it was the Fourth of July on Labor Day, it was special effects for everyone. A shower of illuminated disks, haloes, coronas, blotted out the sun, and against a searing expanse of unbearable red a storm of silver flakes, glittering like mica, fell over the stunned marble of the entombed city. As susceptible as any primate to the seductions of flashing and blinking, he stood transfixed to the melting roof, a charged antenna of hair and skin. Hundreds of incandescent ships in all the known shapes and sizes went shuddering diligent as electric bugs, a harmonized proficiency, spinning the air into beams and girders of pure color, condensing majestically, inevitably—beauty as revelation—into an overreaching lattice of burning crystal. And the sound of their passage was the sound of massed voices lifted in ecstatic song. And all around there were winged creatures with peeled heads and lidless eyes and chattering tongues. And the rivers of light cascaded down, flooding the floor of the earth. He looked up and high above his craning head was an immense crown of red and blue and green and yellow winking in unison like a ring of painted mouths opening and closing, a slip away from the discovery of speech, and he saw lowering through a wide funnel of light the platinum hull of the mother ship and he could see outside and inside simultaneously and wherever he looked was a whiteness of such intensity as to scorch the eye though vision persisted, miraculously, beyond pain and the loss of line and tint, deep into the nova furnace at the heart of matter where, amid the rush and roil of eternal fission, a form was assembling, moving toward him out of a cloud, the resplendent triangular head of a giant being with great obsidian eyes in which his own insignificant reflection was sucked instantly away into the infinite. Then he realized this head was speaking to him in a telepathic language based on units of intuition rather than words and into the private honeycombed spaces of his body always just out of reach of booze or food or sex there came a thick welling of sweet oil, of goodness. The light grew on him until it pierced his eyes and he held up a hand and could see right through it. Other figures approached then out of the flux, smaller, more human shapes with faces he could recognize and yes, Trish was indeed here and behind her Dot and Trinity and Dallas and Edsel and little Zoe and Maryse and her Mignon and Gwen and her Beetle and others, too, the music of a vast intelligence enveloping all like a warm fluid. Then a hatch dropped open in this illuminated egg overhead and he couldn’t help it but tears fell onto his cheeks and buoyant with rapture he stepped out to greet the beginning of his real life and the big silken ship started getting bigger and bigger but without moving because he was moving, weightless at last, going up and up and up. Hey, he could fly. It was amazing. He was light.
Twelve
ALWAYS ALONE, SHE’D COME in her clumsy waddle down to the beach late in the day when fun seeking was ebbing with the light and all the surfers and sun worshippers, most of them kids not much older than herself, were already packing up their sandy towels and wrinkled tubes of cream for tomorrow’s party, a few minutes less for each outing now, Fall’s paring knife well into its work. The regulars, of course, knew her by sight, that small pale face appearing vampirishly at dusk, but they found her as easy to ignore as an abandoned lifeguard’s chair or the half-buried antlers of weathered driftwood, aware in an elemental way that even if one bothered to approach her, there would be no response.
She took her place on one of the tall dunes, her dune, land at her back, and gazed steadily westward, drawing tufts of long grass between her fingers, a little girl atop a toadstool of sand. The sea on these vigil evenings was gentle and gray, the shade of the darker gulls, and the touch of salt air a modest rush on her cheeks, a brushing of down. She liked to sit quietly and watch the sun flame out, the great ball growing ever larger, ever redder, as it was delivered with satisfying punctuality to the briny absolution of the Pacific and the waves foamed like milk on the shore and the birds swooped and cried. There was a special clarity to these moments she absorbed gratefully as a plant takes on
light, her mind so stripped, so clean, scraps of the past blew through it like litter down an empty street. She had wept for Beale, but no more. And as for the others, recall what the sheriff said: they just up and disappeared. Up: that was the word. The world was a place of shadow and mystery which time, one poor sputtering bulb, could only darken and distort. But she wasn’t supposed to brood. There was a certain look she’d carry back to the house her mother recognized at once and would make her sit on the living room floor, shades drawn, pressing a crystal to her forehead, rechanneling, endlessly rechanneling.
On the beach her restless fingers, never far from her belly, slipped furtively up under one of these ugly tentlike blouses she would always hate, to stroke in widening wonder this extraordinary swelling that shifted, she swore, in secret sympathy with the tide. And sometimes as the sky contracted, primaries washing to pastels, and bled away into space, she’d find herself smiling goofily for no apparent reason. The faces, of course, were always there, out at the edge, a lingering gallery of faces in variously detailed states of composition, the putative fathers, so many, some not even human, but what did that matter now? She rubbed at her hard belly with a mystic’s innocent faith, utterly certain after all that even as the planet tilted into darkness there was ripening beneath the caresses of her gypsy fingers a globe of skin swimming with colors of astonishing beauty never quite seen before in these particular combinations, colors the future would need to fill in between the lines, whether on this world or on out to the stars.
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About the Author
Stephen Wright is a Vietnam veteran, MFA graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the author of five novels. He has received a Whiting Award in Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and has taught writing and literature at Goucher, Princeton, Brown, and The New School. He was born in Warren, Pennsylvania, and lives in New York City.
Praise for Stephen Wright’s
M31: A Family Romance
“Picking candidates for the Great American Novel may be a fool’s game, but it’s hard to resist…Sometimes a novel so perfectly captures a corner of it you recognize that you want to jump up and shout, ‘This is it!’ Stephen Wright’s undersung M31: A Family Romance is that sort of book.”
—Laura Miller, New York Times Book Review
“M31 is a devastatingly forceful accomplishment and reestablishes its author as a star of the first magnitude.”
—Washington Post
“Hallucinatory and comic…Invigorating shock. Mr. Wright confirms his status as one of the most gifted satirists of recent fiction.”
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“Wright’s unsparingly funny take on pop culture’s spooking and inevitable seepage into our subconscious has a hallucinative power distinctly its own.”
—Newsday
“A brilliantly bizarre novel that will immerse you in another dimension—one in which rational thought is suspended and anything is possible.”
—Playboy
“Comically bizarre…Wright expertly details the mundane and absurd…and in the process gives a mad, metaphorical portrait of what it means to ‘make your own reality.’”
—Spin
Also by Stephen Wright
Meditations in Green
Going Native
The Amalgamation Polka
Processed Cheese
M31 Page 22