by Terry Bisson
Mother called me at work the next day. I have asked her not to do this when I am temping, but sometimes she can’t make the pay-phone thing work. Most companies don’t like for temps to get calls, even from family. E.L. Doctorow had moved to Owensboro and was staying in Dr. Crippen’s house on Wildwood Drive, only two blocks away.
“He has a little beard,” Mother said. “He has a little dog and walks it regularly every day. He’s renting the house while Dr. Crippen and his wife are in Michigan.”
“So he hasn’t exactly moved to Owensboro,” I said, somehow relieved.
“Well, he’s out here every morning,” she said, “walking his dog. Call it whatever you want to.”
I know the house very well. The Crippens are not ostentatiously tacky the way some (indeed, most) doctors are. It was the Crippens who had encouraged me to go ahead and move to New York if that was what I wanted, when everybody else in my class was getting married. It’s not an older home, of the kind I prefer, but if you had to live in a suburban-style house, theirs would do.
All day I imagined E.L. Doctorow watering the plants and looking through Dr. and Dr. (they are both doctors) Crippen’s books. They have the most books of anybody in Owensboro. The next day at lunch I went to Barnes & Noble and looked through Doctorow’s novels in paperback. All together they made a neat little stack the size of a shoebox.
I decided I was glad he had moved to Owensboro.
It’s hard to make friends in New York. I wondered what it was like in Owensboro for famous writers. Did they ever meet? Did they know one another? Did they pay visits, talk shop, drink together? I asked Alan when he called Monday night (right after the rates changed), but he seemed embarrassed by the question.
“Apparently, they have all moved here independently,” he said. “They’re never seen together. I wouldn’t want to speculate.”
When William Styron moved to Owensboro the last day in May, I wasn’t so surprised. At least he was from the South, although two more different regions than the lower Ohio Valley and the Tidewater of Virginia could hardly be imagined. May and even June are nice in Owensboro, but July and August were coming, and when I thought of Styron blinking in the fierce muggy heat, he seemed even more out of place than the urban Jewish writers like Roth, Doctorow, and Bellow. And Updike, a New Englander! I felt sorry for them all. But that was silly. Every place now has air-conditioning.
When I called Janet, she reminded me that Mother’s birthday was coming up. I knew I was expected to fly home. Janet told me all about how she and Alan were planning to take her out to dinner. This was to make me feel guilty. I wasn’t planning to fall for it like I did last year, at the last minute.
It is very hard to make friends in New York. My roommate and her ex-roommate had shares in a house in the Hamptons (well, almost the Hamptons) and I had been invited out for the weekend. “You can’t go home for your mother’s birthday every year,” I tell myself.
Mother called me a few days later—a pay phone again, this one near a deli on Thirty-ninth Street where she had gotten me once before—to announce that J.D. Salinger had moved to Owensboro.
“Wait a minute,” I said. This was getting out of hand. “How come no women writers ever move to Owensboro. What about Ann Tyler? Or Alice Walker? Or Bobbie Ann Mason, who is actually from Mayfield (not that far away)? How come they’re all men, and all these old guys?”
“I suppose you expect me to ask them that!” Mother said. “I only found out the author of Catcher in the Rye moved here because Mr. Roth told Reverend Curtis.”
“Mr. Roth?” So now it was “Mr.” Roth.
“Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus? He’s renting Reverend Curtis’s son Wallace’s house out on Livermore Road, and you know how Reverend Curtis won’t take checks, and they saw this strange-looking man at the cash machine, and Mr. Roth whispers, ‘That’s J.D. Salinger. Catcher in the Rye?’ Alan said he looked like some hillbilly in town from Ohio County.”
“How did Alan get into this?”
“He was standing in line behind them at the cash machine,” Mother said. “He just happened to overhear.”
On Monday night, Alan told me Philip Roth had seemed as surprised as the rest of them to see J.D. Salinger in Owensboro.
“Maybe they had all moved to Owensboro trying to get away from him,” I said, trying to be funny.
“I doubt that,” Alan said. “Anyway, it’s hardly the kind of question you can ask.”
It’s Mother who should marry Alan, not me. They think exactly alike.
As Mother’s birthday approached, I tried to concentrate on my upcoming weekend in the Hamptons. I knew what I had to guard against was the last-minute temptation to fly home.
When I called Janet later in the week from a lawyer’s office—they never watch their phone bills—she said, “Do you know the movie Bright Lights Big City?”
“Michael J. Fox has moved to Owensboro,” I said, astonished in spite of myself.
“Not him, the other one, the author. I forget his name.”
“McInerney,” I said. “Jay McInerney. Are you sure?” I didn’t want to say it because it sounded so snobbish, but Jay McInerney didn’t exactly seem Owensboro caliber.
“Of course I’m sure. He looks just like Michael J. Fox. I saw him walking down at that little park by the river. You know, the one where Norman Mailer hangs out.”
“Norman Mailer. I didn’t even know he lived in Owensboro,” I said.
“Why not?” Janet said. “A lot of famous writers make Owensboro their home.”
Make Owensboro Their Home. That was the first time I’d heard it said like that. It seemed to make it official.
* * *
Janet’s call made me think, and for the first time since I broke up with him, I called Alan. At least he knew who Jay McInerney was, although he had never read the book. “The other Janet said she saw McInerney and Mailer down there at the park,” I said. “Does that mean the famous writers are starting to meet one another and hang out together?”
“You always want to jump to conclusions,” Alan said. “They might have been in the same park at totally different times of the day. Even when they do meet, they don’t talk. The other day at the Kmart, Joe Billy Survant saw E.L. Doctorow and John Irving both in Housewares, and they sort of nodded, but that was all.”
John Irving? But I let it go. “Housewares,” I said instead. “Sounds like folks are really settling in.”
“We’re taking your mother to dinner at the Executive Inn for her fifty-first birthday Friday night,” Alan said.
“I’ve been invited for a weekend in the Hamptons,” I said. “Well, almost the Hamptons.”
“Oh, I understand,” he said. Alan likes to imagine he understands me. “But if you change your mind I’ll pick you up at the airport in Evansville.”
Evansville, Indiana, is thirty miles from Owensboro. It used to seem like a big city to me, but after eighteen months in New York, it seemed pathetic and insignificant: all trees from the air, and hardly any traffic. The one-story terminal looks like a shopping-center bank branch. You climb down out of the plane on a ladder.
There was Alan in his sensible-with-a-flair Olds Cutlass Supreme. I felt the usual mixture of warmth and dismay on seeing him. I guess you might call it warm dismay.
“Who’s that?” I asked, gesturing toward a bearlike figure at the USAir ticket counter.
Alan whispered, “That’s Thomas M. Disch. Science fiction. But quality stuff.”
“Science fiction?” But the name was familiar, at least sort of. Although Disch isn’t exactly famous, he seemed more the Owensboro type than McInerney. “He’s moving to Owensboro, too?”
“How should I know? He may have just been here in Evansville for the speedboat races. Anyway, he’s leaving. Let’s talk about you.”
We drove back home on the Kentucky side of the river, through Henderson.
That whole weekend in Owensboro, I only saw three famous writers, not counting Disch, who is not
really famous and who was in Evansville, not Owensboro, anyway. Tom Pynchon was at the take-out counter at the Moonlight, buying barbecued mutton. He bought three liters of Diet Coke, so it looked like he might be having a party, but on the way home from the Executive Inn we drove past his house on Littlewood Drive and it was dark.
For dinner, we had steak and salad. Mother was a hoot. Alan insisted on paying as usual. We were home by ten, and by ten-thirty Mother was asleep in front of the TV. I got two cans of Falls City out of the refrigerator and sneaked her Buick out of the garage. I picked up the other Janet, just like in the old days, by scratching on her screen. “The Two Janets,” she whispered melodramatically. She said the cops were rough on DWI (Driving While under the Influence) these days, but I wasn’t worried. This was still the South; we were still girls. We cruised down Griffith, out Frederica, down Fourth, down by the river. There was hardly any traffic.
“Has Alan asked you to marry him again?” I asked.
“Not yet.”
“Well, if he does, I think you should.”
“You mean you wish I would.”
The streets were still and dark and empty.
“Sure isn’t New York,” I sighed.
“Well, nobody can say you haven’t given it a shot,” the other Janet said.
At midnight we went to the all-night Convenience Mart at Eighteenth and Triplett for two more cans of beer. John Updike was looking through the magazines (even though the little sign says not to). At 12:12 A.M. Joyce Carol Oates came in for a pack of cigarettes, and surprising us both, they left together.
They’re Made Out of Meat
“THEY’RE MADE OUT OF MEAT.”
“Meat?”
“Meat. They’re made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“There’s no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”
“That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?”
“They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them. The signals come from machines.”
“So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.”
“They made the machines. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.”
“That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.”
“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they’re made out of meat.”
“Maybe they’re like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.”
“Nope. They’re born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn’t take long. Do you have any idea what’s the life span of meat?”
“Spare me. Okay, maybe they’re only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside.”
“Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads, like the weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They’re meat all the way through.”
“No brain?”
“Oh, there’s a brain all right. It’s just that the brain is made out of meat! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“So . . . what does the thinking?”
“You’re not understanding, are you? You’re refusing to deal with what I’m telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat.”
“Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!”
“Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?”
“Omigod. You’re serious then. They’re made out of meat.”
“Thank you. Finally. Yes. They are indeed made out of meat. And they’ve been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years.”
“Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind?”
“First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual.”
“We’re supposed to talk to meat.”
“That’s the idea. That’s the message they’re sending out by radio. ‘Hello. Anyone out there? Anybody home?’ That sort of thing.”
“They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?”
“Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat.”
“I thought you just told me they used radio.”
“They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat.”
“Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?”
“Officially or unofficially?”
“Both.”
“Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe, without prejudice, fear, or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing.”
“I was hoping you would say that.”
“It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?”
“I agree one hundred percent. What’s there to say? ‘Hello, meat. How’s it going?’ But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?”
“Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can’t live on them. And being meat, they can only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact.”
“So we just pretend there’s no one home in the Universe.”
“That’s it.”
“Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you probed? You’re sure they won’t remember?”
“They’ll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we’re just a dream to them.”
“A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat’s dream.”
“And we marked the entire sector unoccupied.”
“Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?”
“Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen-core cluster intelligence in a class-nine star in G445 zone was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again.”
“They always come around.”
“And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the Universe would be if one were all alone . . .”
Over Flat Mountain
THEY DIDN’T USED TO CALL LOUISVILLE the Mile High City. I know because I was raised there, in the old West End, when the Falls of the Ohio were just dry limestone flats bypassed by a canal, and the river was slow and muddy, and the summer nights were warm.
Not anymore, though.
It was chilly for August when I rolled into Louisville from Indianapolis, heading south and east for Charlotte. The icy mist was rising off the falls where they plunge into the gorge. It was too much trouble to dig a flannel shirt out of the back so I bought a sweatshirt in the truckstop annex, figuring I would give it to Janet or one of the girls later—they wear them like nightgowns—and rolled on out of there without a second piece of pie.
The shirt said “Louisville—Mile High City of the South.”
I bought a CD, 50 Truckin’ Classics, forty-nine of which I already had. I have a library of eleven hundred CDs in my cab. Imagine how much space that would have taken in the old days when they were as big as cookies.
I don’t generally pick up hitchhikers, but I must have felt sorry for this kid. I was an hour south and east of Louisville, just under the c
loud shadow, when I saw him standing in the rain by the CRAB ORCHARD COGWAY 40M/64K sign, wearing a black garbage bag for a raincoat, and I figured, what the hell. He looked more than a little wet. It rains six days out of five south of Louisville since the Uplift.
When we Flat Toppers run, we run. I just barely pulled over and was back in low-two before he was up the ladder and through the inside airlock lens, peeling off his garbage bag like a landlobster molting. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen. He had greasy blond hair tied back with a rubber band under a Delco cap, and under his garbage bag a windbreaker over a T-shirt. Glad to see he had a coat at least. Boots had “hand-me-down” written all over them. Carried his things in a Kmart plastic bag.
He combed the rain off the bill of his cap with one finger and perched on the edge of the seat until I swept the CDs off the seat into my own hat and dumped them into the glove compartment.
“Nice gun,” he said. I had a Brazilian 9 mm in the glove compartment. I closed it.
“Wet out there,” he said.
I nodded and popped Ricky Skaggs into the player. I hadn’t picked him up for conversation. I picked him up because I’d done some hitchhiking myself at his age. Sixteen going on twenty-one.
“Appreciate your stopping,” he said.
“Nice rig,” he said.
I was pulling a two-piece articulated, with a Kobo-Jonni. The KJ is an eight-liter steel diesel with that mighty ring that engines used to have before they went to plastic. A lot of guys fall all over the new plastic mills cause they don’t need oil, but I like oil. I had built the KJ three times, and was just through breaking in the third set of sleeves. Plastic, you just throw away.
The kid told me his name but I forgot it. “They call me CD,” I said. I popped out Ricky and popped in the Hag to show him why.
He had those narrow eyes and sallow skin, like he’d never seen the sun, and if he was from south and east of Louisville he probably hadn’t. And I could tell by his accent he was. Listen, I knew this kid. He was me thirty years ago. You narrow up your shoulders and narrow up your eyes, and since everything in the world is new to you, try to look and act like nothing is.