Men in Black

by Scott Spencer

  “Hi,” I said, settling into the seat.

  “Hi there,” she said, in a way that would suffice if we’d never met before or had shared other greenrooms in other cities. She wore a leopard-spotted one-piece something-or- other, with her Olympic gold medal around her neck. Her fingernails were long and curved and orange; her toenails, though shorter, were the same color. I imagined she and Will would talk about that, before he played a number from her album.

  Across the room sat Tony Randall, who was in town previewing a play. He wore gray slacks, a blue blazer. He studied Hungarian for Travelers and every once in a while said something aloud in Hungarian, repeating the phrase two or three times, enjoying the feel of it in his mouth. I remembered the catty things I’d said about Randall and felt ridiculous; it took seeing him in person to make me realize I didn’t know anything about the guy.

  The fourth person in the room was an unusually small man in a three-piece suit, whose feet barely touched the floor as he sat staring at me, his tiny hands folded in his lap. At first I thought he might be meditating, but there was an appraising flicker in his eyes. I shifted my weight and his gaze followed me. I seemed very much on his mind.

  “Hello,” I said.

  He nodded at me.

  I wondered who he was and what he was going to be doing on Fisher’s program. Fisher himself had started in the business as a comedian (a long stint with a Canadian improvisational group, a season on “Saturday Night Live”), and he tended to choose his guests for their entertainment value. This compact, middle-aged man surely had nothing to do with show business; he looked like an inventor, a vegetarian, the uncle you used to love but who’s gone quite mad from loneliness. Now and again, Fisher was not above inviting some overly earnest person onto his show, to explain, say, the ins and outs of saxophone repair or how to build your own food dryer, and Fisher would deadpan interest. It was petty, cruel humor, bear baiting without the bear, and I hoped the old gent wasn’t in for that.

  And I hoped I wasn’t, either. Heather and I had discussed the possibility that Fisher might be having a bit of fun at my expense. After all, the subject of my book lent itself to mockery. His engineer might cue up the theme from “The Twilight Zone” when I came on.

  The door to the greenroom opened and a young fellow dressed in Wall Street suspenders and yellow tie poked his head in. “John Retcliffe?”

  I raised a finger.

  “Follow me, please. Ivan Rudmanian?”

  The small gent across the room stood up, straightened his clothes, and then lifted an enormous black leather briefcase, which looked large enough to house him. His tongue darted in and out of his mouth.

  We followed the assistant out of the greenroom. Tony Randall looked up from his Hungarian lesson and said, “Good luck.”

  Ivan Rudmanian and I walked through the narrow, airless corridor. The walls here were painted silver and purple, the dream decor of some nerdy, dateless college boy. A couple of Teamsters sat chatting near an upended sofa wrapped in brown paper. Our guide introduced himself as Darryl and said that because Mr. Fisher had come late to the studio today we wouldn’t have the customary preliminary time with him. “Don’t worry, though,” he said. “Mr. Fisher is very familiar with both your work.”

  “We’re going on together?”

  “You’ll have to discuss that with Mr. Fisher.”

  “When do you suggest we have that conversation?” I said. “On the air?”

  “I don’t know, John. My job is to escort you from the greenroom to the sound stage.”

  “Then we are going on together.”

  “I’m sorry, John, I just do what I do.”

  I wasn’t crazy about the show-biz familiarity of his calling me by my first name—even though it wasn’t my actual first name.

  “I know for a fact we are scheduled to speak with Mr. Fisher together,” said Ivan Rudmanian. He had a deep, booming voice.

  The “Will Fisher” set was done in I-won’t-grow-up! modern: beer signs, basketball hoops, a fifties juke box, pinball machines, black shag carpeting. Fisher, his hair slicked back, drummed his fingers on his desk, which had been shaped and painted like the face of Jimi Hendrix. Fisher looked gaunt and a little spooked, like a man who has quickly lost fifty pounds, doctor’s orders. He sat alone, somehow private, though there were a dozen technicians and an audience of two hundred, in front of whom he was in full view. (Heather told me that Fisher’s was the only show on radio that broadcast in front of a studio audience. I had clutched my chest and pretended to have a heart attack.)

  Darryl delivered us into the care of a large, lively woman, whose red face looked as if she had just scrubbed it with sea coral. Large amber beads the size of kumquats heaved on her chest.

  “Will’s going to announce you, and then I want you to walk out there as if you were strolling into your own living room,” she said. Then she turned from me and looked at Rudmanian. “Hello, Ivan.”

  “Hello, Mary.”

  “You two know each other?” I inquired, as lightly as possible.

  “Oh, yes,” said Mary, leaving further details to my imagination.

  When Will Fisher spoke, his voice, sweetened by electronic bass enhancers, boomed through the backstage area. Even Mary, who must have heard him a thousand times, seemed suddenly reverential.

  He deftly set up our segment, pegging me as an internationally best-selling author and identifying Rudmanian as an expert on unexplained phenomena of all kinds—everything from telepathy to Bigfoot. With the old novelty number “Purple People Eater” coming through the speakers, Rudmanian strolled from the wings of the sound stage and Mary gave me a not-terribly-gentle shove at the small of my back and I was on the air, too.

  The audience applauded generously, for the very existence of us—one of the privileges of being media-ized is that people cheer just because you’re, well, you.

  What happened after that? I have no idea, except that it “went well.” I fit into the chair, and I was placed closer to Fisher than Ivan was. Fisher nodded amiably as I spoke, reassuring me that I was making complete sense. I had already boiled my standard presentation into three main points: (1) the powers that be don’t want reasonable inquiry into UFOs; (2) the Men in Black are spreading disinformation everywhere, though it’s still unclear if the MIBs are from outer space or our own government; and (3) sightings of extraterrestrials have been a constant since the beginnings of recorded history. I made my points as confidently as possible—indeed, as Retcliffe, I was generally chatty, glib, relaxed, even charming—but I was always uncomfortably conscious of Rudmanian on my left, sitting there, 110 pounds of shrieking refutation.

  But my dread of Rudmanian, of Ivan, was ill-founded. When the little tape that fame had placed in my skull in place of my mind stopped playing and it was Ivan’s turn to speak, he was not only supportive of Jivin’ John Retcliffe but downright laudatory.

  “Mr. Retcliffe has written a good book,” Ivan boomed in his oversized baritone, “and a valuable book as well. I don’t think any book written for the general reader has ever presented the case for sightings more cogently than Mr. Retcliffe’s.”

  “Please,” I said, resisting the impulse to pick adorable Ivan up and place him on my knee. “John.”

  “So at least we know they aren’t cousins,” said Will, leaning over his desk and smirking at the audience. They all liked that a great deal. Fisher’s joke assumed the audience was aware of the backstaginess of life, which flattered them. Like stock traders looking for special information, America was becoming a nation of inside-dope addicts.

  “We’re nearing the end of the millennium,” opined Ivan (God, he was good at this), “and we can expect sightings to become more frequent with every passing month.”

  “Why? Why with every passing month?” asked Fisher.

  “There’s always a lot of anxiety at the end of a century,” I said. “With the end of a millennium that anxiety is increased tenfold.”

  Fisher looked at m
e rather blankly. I had somehow given the wrong answer. In fact, I quickly realized that my remark tended to trash the thesis of my book—these blips on the horizon were supposed to be real, not the concoction of stressed-out optic nerves.

  “John’s right, of course,” said Ivan. “But he’s also being very modest. As his own book makes remarkably clear, the year 2000 is a target date for extraterrestrials. There have been an increasing number of isolated landings, and as we get closer to the target date there will be more, and then sometime in the year 2000, there will not be a man, woman, or child on our planet who has not had direct contact with a visitor from above.” He looked at me and smiled beneficently. “It’s right there in your book, John.”

  The studio audience was aghast at this prediction, and doubtlessly the audience out there in the radio-electric night was, too. I myself was pretty stirred by it—I didn’t exactly remember writing anything about an increase in space traffic by the year 2000. Was Ivan getting this from my book through deciphering unintentional anagrams, or reading the first words of every other paragraph? Who knew? What the hell? The books were selling, the audience was engaged, and Will seemed particularly pleased.

  Next to the studio there was a bar called Siena, though there was nothing Italian in the decor, nothing Italian in the bar snacks they served. It was just a bar in America. Heather and I had already made a plan to have a drink there after the Fisher show, ostensibly to discuss further stops on my tour. However, I was so grateful for (and relieved by) Ivan’s kind words on the show that I invited him to join us, though I suspected he would demur, or, at the least, confine himself to a Coke or a cup of coffee.

  But he was delighted to accept our invitation and ordered a double-strength vodka gimlet. He tossed his drink down, dabbed his lips with a cocktail napkin, and then turned in his bar stool to face me directly.

  “Let me ask you something quite directly,” he said to me. “Are you a MIB?”

  I glanced at Heather: Help!

  “So, Ivan,” said Heather. “How is it you’ve never written a book?”

  “I have,” said Ivan. “I have written several books.” He would not let her run interference for me. I felt his intelligence bearing down on me, like a mob that meant me harm. “I myself have had contact with MIBs. They are usually taller than you, and usually they are very, very gaunt. But there are similarities as well. In the hands. The large feet.”

  “I don’t think of John as having large feet,” said Heather.

  “And the lack of biography. MIBs have credentials but no biography. Credit cards but no credit rating, housing without mortgages, impressive educational degrees but no friends from school—well, I don’t have to tell you.”

  I felt tense, vulnerable. As I shook my head no, I felt my brain moving around my skull, floating in fluid like a Sea Monkey.

  “I wanted to find as much about you as I could before coming onto Will’s show. Will is an old friend—”

  “Ahhh,” said Heather, as if a mystery had just been solved.

  “Are you?” he asked again, and this time Ivan reached quickly for me and pressed his thumb against my wrist. He was feeling my pulse, to see if it raced when I answered.

  “Stop it, Ivan,” I said, trying to remain calm, lest he mistake the adrenaline rush of aggression for the guilty extraterrestrial conscience of a Man in Black.

  “Are you?” he said, moving closer to me. He peered intently at my eyes—looking for color change? transistor overload?

  “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  “Let him go, Ivan,” said Heather. “You’re hurting him.”

  Ivan’s thumb dug into the veins behind the meaty hump of my palm. The pressure was just short of furious, yet it was curiously painless. He had perfected a bit of technique, doing these impromptu interrogations.

  “Just answer me,” he said, in a somewhat hypnotic voice.

  “I mean it, Ivan,” said Heather, giving him a shove. “We invited you for a drink, goddamnit, not for this kind of shit.”

  I looked over at Heather. Her elliptical nostrils were flared, her spiky hair looked moist, a she-wolf in the moonlight.

  Ivan relaxed his stout, robotic thumb and I pulled my hand away, resisting the impulse to give it a little welcome- home rub.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But you must understand why the question is important.”

  “You want to know what I understand, Ivan?” said Heather. “You really want to know? I understand that you’re a creep. Where do you come off grabbing him like that?”

  “All right,” I said, “let’s forget it.”

  “The MIBs are everywhere,” Ivan said sadly, shaking his head, checking his gimlet glass. There was still some in there.

  “I’m wearing a black suit, but that’s as far as it goes,” I actually said.

  “Listen, Ivan,” said Heather, still seething. “If—”

  The situation had settled sufficiently for me to interrupt Heather by taking her hand. I laced my fingers through hers, and she responded to my touch by squeezing my hand in such a way that it released in me a chain of erotic imaginings.

  Ivan finished his drink, signaled for another. Then he turned his gaze on me and got down to the next order of business.

  “John Retcliffe is not your real name, is it?” he said, very quietly. In fact, he was virtually whispering now, and his eyes took in the rest of the bar to make certain we were not being closely observed.

  “Where did you get that?” snapped Heather.

  I let go of her hand, but, as if to compensate, I moved my knee over a bit, so that it touched her leg. She responded with a slight reciprocal counterpressure.

  “If it is a name you have given yourself,” said Ivan, “then I would say it is a very strange one. Is it? Is it an assumed name, a pseudonym, a nom de plume, or what have you?”

  “First you want to know if I’m a MIB, now you—”

  “All right, fine. You don’t have to tell me. But let me ask you another question. Are you familiar with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?”

  I looked at Heather, wondering if she recalled that this was the pamphlet being sold by the incense-burning zealots at the next booth at the book fair. Heather rose slightly from her seat and tugged at the hem of her skirt.

  “So?” she said, moving her leg away, back again.

  “John Retcliffe,” said Ivan.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “That was the name of the writer, the original author of the Protocols. And if you have made this name up, I wonder why you have chosen the name of a fake who has done the world so much damage. His words justified the slaughter of the innocent. Why would you take such a name for yourself? What are you trying to tell us? And please don’t tell me that this has all been some strange coincidence. I absolutely do not believe in coincidence.”

  In the taxi, Heather was noticeably silent. The driver was humming along with the radio, streetlights darted in and out of the darkness inside the car, and Heather sat as far from me as possible, staring at the closed and abandoned buildings between the studio and the hotel. I was not unaccustomed to these womanly lulls. In Olivia, they stymied and infuriated me; I felt her silences pressing on me like two tons of feathers. But Heather’s being quiet was fine with me; it did not occur to me that she might in some way be thinking of me.

  “Everything all right?” I asked, out of friendliness.

  She shook her head no, which surprised me. I expected an answer a little more evasive or noncommittal. And then she continued to stare out into the mobile night, which also surprised me, warmed me.

  “When Ezra hired me, it was only for the first week,” she said, turning toward me. We were stopped at a traffic light; city workers had dug up the street, a gaping hole in the road, bright lights, a rising funnel of steam.

  “You mean I’m going to be on my own now?”

  “Well, it’s not what I wanted. I’m having so much fun, and, I don’t know, I feel this has really worked out, ve
ry, very well.”

  “This is really a drag,” I said. “Maybe I should talk to Ezra.”

  “Would you? It would mean more, coming from you.” Her spirits quickened. Maybe my convincing Ezra to extend Heather’s services was what she had wanted all along, and that was the reason behind those slightly prolonged glances, the hand holding.

  “Sure.”

  Silence. The meter clicked. The driver scratched his scalp through the tangle of his curly gray hair.

  Finally, Heather nodded. “You don’t have to, you know.”

  “I want to.”

  “I want you to,” she said. And then she moved closer to me and repeated it again, softly, and it was, suddenly, utterly sexual.

  Desire went off in me like an alarm. I took her hand. The lights from a passing car illuminated the down on her face, her fingers laced through mine. I put my arm around her, held her to me—there was a little edge of paternalism in the gesture, as if I might be comforting her, one old crony to another. She pressed her forehead against my chest; I smelled the perfume of her shampoo and the deeper, more real and beautiful aroma of her scalp.

  “Your heart is pounding so hard,” she said, looking up at me.

  I thought she was lifting her face to be kissed, and so I kissed her. She parted her lips; I sensed the dark, drenched emptiness of her.

  When we got to her room, she told me she hadn’t been with anyone in six months.

  “Should I stay here, then?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  We raided the minibar; we were like giants holding these Lilliputian liqueurs in our hands. I sat next to her on the bed. I didn’t really want to kiss her again. I only wanted to hold her. I took her in my arms; she could have been anyone.

  And I could have been anyone, too. We just wanted a bit of comfort. We wanted some specific example of the multitudes whose voices had been surrounding us on our journey. Clothed, we got into her bed, kicked our feet to loosen the stranglehold of the sheets and blankets. She turned her back to me, pressed herself against me. I wrapped my arms around her, feeling her collarbone, smelling her hair.

  “This is so nice,” said Heather.