by Steve Almond
“And to think,” Beth said afterwards, “we once considered filming ourselves.” Now, she was sitting up in bed, stabbing at an ominous-looking chart with a Mont Blanc. “Just do a chapter a night. How bad can it be?”
Flem lugged Larsen’s novel onto his chest and glared at his wife. He read aloud,
Chapter Three: In the Belly of the UFO Beast At first, Red couldn’t have said where he was. A moment earlier, he had been preparing to make love to Rosetta Stone, the most voluptuous and beautiful coed at Colgate Dental College, listening intently as she gasped at his shining manhood. But now, everything around him was like bright white crystals, as if he had been transported into one of those glass balls where you shake them and it snows.
“Where am I?” Red exclaimed in confusion.
The voice that came to him was not of this world. Yet it was the same voice that had come to him so many times before, in times of tribulation, all those times he’d thought he was just imagining things.
“Relax, Red. You will not be harmed,” the voice oozed from overhead, like an ominous waterfall.
“Who are you?” Red interrogated.
“We are from the planet Galaxion,” the voice boomed calmly.
“Okay,” Beth said. “I get it—”
“No,” Flem said. “I don’t think you do.”
Red tried to lift his body, thinking to make his escape. He was, after all, the state champion in the decathelon, a bona fide Olympian, according to coach Hardy. But Red found himself unable to ambulate. He was stuck in place, like a paralyzed mummy.
“Please don’t attempt anything foolish, Red,” the voice from above boomed. “It would be quite … useless.”
“What … what do you want?” Red raged in rage.
The crystals overhead pulsed like supercharged quasars. “We want merely to guide you,” the voice said. “We on Galaxion have a different conception of life than you so-called humans. We are not interested in you’re ‘survival of the fittest.’ We are interested in maximizing the potential of all our kind. We have come to earth to observe a few select homo safiens, those of, let us say, extraordinary abilities and aptitudes. We are interested to see if they might be able to maximize their potential. With our help, of course.”
“I don’t understand,” said Red, still confused. “But why did you take me away when I was just about to make it with Rosetta Stone?”
The voice from above chuckled in a fashion so eerie it sent shivers like tiny daggers up and down Red’s muscled spine. “You would have impregnated her, had three children by her, and gone into insurance sales to support the family. By age 52, you would be dead of cancer, owing to the free-floating asbesto in your office.”
“What’s asbesto?”
But there was no answer from above. In fact, Red found himself back in his apartment, watching Rosetta Stone pounce back into her clothing. He remembered nothing of his experience with the Galaxions, only a vague sense of being different somehow. “Wha, what’s the matter, baby?” he queried in confusion.
“I have never been so insulted in all my life,” Rosetta screeched. Her green eyes blazed like a forest fire ablaze.
“What did I do?” Red declared, his eyes like the eyes of a deer whose eyes are caught in a set of headlights.
“Don’t you remember? You told me I wasn’t your type, and that you were sure I would meet someone someday, but that you couldn’t risk your future just for the sake of a lust-based relationship.”
“I said that??” Red proclaimed in confusion.
But the only answer he received was the slamming of his door, like a crack of thunder inside the eardrum of his heart.
Beth’s head was under her pillow.
“Say uncle,” Flem said.
“Uncle,” she said.
“Proclaim it in confusion.”
“‘Uncle,’ I proclaim in confusion.”
“You’re going to work with me on this?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Wow. Poor Jude.”
“I KEEP TRYING,” Flem said. “It’s right by my bedside. Top of the stack. It’s just … I get so tired.” Even discussing Larsen’s novel, Flem found, made him tired. “Like a depression. Like I actually get depressed. All this stuff about the soul of a jazz musician? It’s like seeing him naked.” Flem had actually seen Larsen naked, about three years ago, and it had been enough to cause him to find a different gym. “You should read some of this thing. I mean it.”
Dr. Oss nodded smugly. “I’m not sure that would be appropriate.”
“All I’m saying is, before you make any of these generalizations about what it all means, you should try reading the thing.”
“What do you suppose my reaction would be?”
“I think you’d understand why all the hubbub, you’d see I’m not exaggerating.”
“And that’s important to you? That I view this as ridiculous?” Dr. Oss scratched out a note with his fountain pen.
“Only in the sense that you’d know what I was talking about. I mean, we all have artistic impulses, okay? I took a writing class in college. But that doesn’t mean that I’m going to suddenly go around proclaiming myself some kind of novelist.”
“And this is what your friend has done?”
Flem shifted in his seat. He felt, as he inevitably did under Dr. Oss’s simian gaze, that he was being set up. “I mean, he wrote the thing. He keeps bugging me to read it.”
“Yes?”
“He’s got this whole inflated sense of himself.”
Dr. Oss tapped at his temple with a felty knuckle.
A chimp, Flem thought. I’m being analyzed by a chimp.
“I’m curious to know why this should occupy so much of your concern.”
“Right. My concern. We’re back to that.” Quite unconsciously, Flem began nodding smugly.
Dr. Oss leaned forward. “You seem to be imitating me, Mr. Owens. Is that so?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Flem said.
HE DID OWE Dr. Oss something, though, the little chiseler, because he’d discovered the answer right in his waiting room, at the back of one of the glossies he hid behind before his appointments. Manuscripts Read, the ad read. Ten cents per page. Quick, professional. He slipped one of the temps a fifty to copy Larsen’s novel after hours and got it to FedEx that same night. “It’s all set,” he told Beth. “Done deal.”
The SASE arrived the Monday after Thanksgiving. Flem let out a whoop. “Stop being queer,” said Belle. She was watching him through the railing of the stairs.
“I know you are, but what am I?” Flem yipped. Belle made a face and Flem made a face right back and skipped to his study.
Dear Mr. Larsen:
Not in thirty years as an editor have I encountered a piece of writing so egregiously misguided. In addition to your style (unremittingly cliché) and pacing (glacial), there are your characters to consider. To call them “cardboard” would be unfair, for they lacked the depth and nuance of cardboard. Your plot, if I may abuse that term, contains so many inconsistencies that two of my heartiest readers, faced with your work, were reduced to bed rest. (To cite just one: Red’s mother “meets her mortal coyle [sic]” on page 36, yet appears four pages later, serving her “world famous potato salad” and looking “as diafanous as a fresh-picked daffodil.”)
Just Call Me Bones is surely a labor of love, Mr. Larsen. So, too, was the Third Reich.
Sincerely,
Frederick Malyneux
P.S. Find enclosed a check for the balance of your reading fee, which I cannot, in good conscience, accept, as I only got as far as page 103.
Flem did a little dance of anguish around his study, a sort of panic-stricken fox-trot; he checked the calendar, rooted through his address book, and spent the next hour faxing an excerpt of the novel to a literary critic whose jaw he had reconstructed some years before. He received his reply, via fax, the very next day.
My Dearest Dr. Owens,
No expert, I, in this bus
iness of words (the vagaries of the literary market being something akin, from my perch, to those of Wall Street), but I believe your friend to be in possession a masterpiece. Not since Nabokov, or, perhaps, Kohlschlaunger, have I encountered a writer so deliciously attuned to the conventions of what Eagleton calls the “suburban autodidact.” The wild deviations in tone, the effortless invocation of stereotype, the nearly hallucinogenic syntactical lapses. In short: wickedly, howlingly, funny.
Yet I would be remiss to leave aside the tale’s unexpected rind of postmodern plangency. For so faithfully executed is Red’s “story” that one feels, at odd moments, as if the author actually believes he is creating an important piece of art; it is this heartrending delusion that illumines and redeems the lacquered semiotic artifice, and redirects the reader to the garish parable itself. Beneath the farce, then, une tragedie.
The letter went on for six more pages. He glanced at the calendar above the phone. His Ansel Adams series had been replaced by a greasy, shirtless young man with what appeared to be a zucchini squash in his pants; Belle’s handiwork.
“I must think,” he told himself. “I must not panic.”
In fact, Flem gave it no thought. “Letting the chips fall where they may,” he announced to Dr. Oss. “What do you think of that?”
“What do you think I would think of that?” the little chimp bastard said.
ALL SUNDAY MORNING, the phone rang. Flem could hear his daughter, raging away like Lear outside his study. “Why can’t we answer it?” she howled. “We can just lie if it’s him. We’ve been lying for a month straight. Come oooooon.”
Flem rubbed his temples and, every few minutes, shouted No! five times, in rapid succession.
“What’s his problem?”
“Your father is having a nervous breakdown.”
“Don’t tell her that,” Flem snapped.
“Unplug your phone,” Beth snapped back.
“He’ll come over,” Flem said. “I know him. I know how he thinks.” He burst out of his study and hurried upstairs to the bathroom, the one place where he might be able to think. He sat on the toilet, thinking. He thought about Larsen, his gummy grin, his puffy expectations. And he realized, as he sat there unproductively, that he was furious. Why should he, Ted Larsen, be the one writing a novel, when it was he, Flem Owens, who possessed the superior imagination, the joie d’esprit, or what have you? In a moment of excruciating clarity, he recognized that he was, of all things, envious of Larsen.
He made an immediate mental note to never, ever share this with Dr. Oss.
Downstairs, the phone rang. His stomach gave a yelp; his eyes settled absently on the bottle of lye, perched on the shelf above him, with its wonderful black skull and cross-bones. Something like a bell struck inside his head.
This was perfect, incredibly perfect, both plausible and inviolate. Who could argue with temporary blindness? Not even a lunkhead like Larsen. He hitched up his pants and reached for the bottle, thinking that if he got the choreography just right, he could even blame Beth for this. She was the one who was so wild about lye, anyway. He didn’t even know what it was for. (Termites? Mildew?) I was just sitting there, he heard himself saying, when all of a sudden…
Beth opened the door with the portable phone in her hand. She looked at him as he was reaching for the lye and he looked at her and in that single moment, less than a moment, an instant, Flem knew that his wife was on to him, had doped out the whole thing, and he felt both a deep and abiding shame and the consequent urge to throw himself down before her prostrate, or possibly supine, and further, a sense of regret that anyone, even his wife, should know him, his craven self, so thoroughly. He pondered whether his decision to adopt a policy of abject inaction in regard to Larsen’s novel might have precipitated the present rather lurid scene; and, again, further, whether he might not distract Beth by throwing something at her (the lye, for instance) and then rushing past her and out the screen door.
Rather than confronting him, though, allowing him to experience his mortification and be done with it, Beth gazed at him quizzically and—in a move that stoked his long-held suspicion that she was actively collaborating with Dr. Oss—left without a word.
Now Flem wondered, annoyingly, if there was a God and more precisely how God might choose to punish him. Would it be snakes, or something with fire, or maybe having to watch the last play of the 2002 Super Bowl—the ball barely clearing the uprights, the Patriots going nuts, the Rams in agony—over and over. He sought out his wife, but found Belle standing guard outside their bedroom.
“She doesn’t want to see you,” Belle chirped. “You screwed up big-time. What didja do, Dad? Are you having an affair?”
Flem looked at his daughter’s glossed lips and skimpy T-shirt. The word jailbait flashed unpleasantly before his eyes. “Don’t be silly,” he said. “Your mother’s just tired.”
“No, she’s pissed,” Belle said calmly. “I told Larsen you were sick. You might want to remember that next time the whole allowance thing comes up for review.”
Flem spent the rest of the afternoon puttering around the carport. He had about finished alphabetizing his tool kit when he heard Beth sigh in the doorway.
“You mad?” he said quietly.
She frowned. “Not mad so much as … disappointed. You’re acting like an idiot, Fleming, and you’re expecting Belle and me to act like idiots as well. Read the damn book and give him the snow job, or tell him you’re not going to. But quit hiding. It’s pathetic.”
Flem certainly couldn’t argue with that.
Chapter Six: Soul Daddy Bones Comes Acallin’
Red Lawson had known he was different, even before he had entered into the black maw of uncertainty that was the Galaxion’s mother ship, even before he snuck out of his dorm and down to Big Willy’s jukejoint and seen the black folks dance and slide to the mysterious bubbling current that flowed from the place like the scent of fatback sputtering on a potbelly stove.
The place was famous for miles around and Red could still remember his mama telling him: “Don’t you go too near that place, young man. That dam of iniquity is no place for a young boy with a 166 IQ like you.” But tonight, Red couldn’t help himself. He had tried to study his study cards of gingivital bacteria. But the music called out to him and washed over him like a river. And it led him out of his room and across the railroad tracks, past the hobos lounged around their snapping fires. He hesitated in front of Big Willy’s, peeking through the steam-laden windows into a room roiling with black sweaty limbs that beckoned to him like serpents of temptation.
He entered the dark continent of smoke and music, and a giant bouncer type with a massive, gleaming head said, “Whobe dis little white boy?”
The music halted, and every lambent brown eye in the room fixated on him. The crowd began to ooze forward, like black lava, swallowing Red up. Suddenly, a voice rose up from the bowels beneath the room. “Dat be Daddy!” the crowd chanted, “Ooooo-yeah, man, dat be de Daddy!” The lava parted, like the Red Sea before Moses, and there stood the man known as Daddy Bones. He was dressed in a sharkskin zootsuit and a goatee clung to his chin like a small black furry animal of some kind.
“Who are you?” Red questioned.
The room boomed with laughter.
“Who he be? Eberbody know Daddy Bones!” the big bouncer bellowed. “He da most famousest black ’n blind singer in alla East St. Louis! He like Ray Charles and Blind Lemon Johnson all wrapped in da one! Yassah!” The crowd surged forward, as if to masticate Red, but he cried out, lifting his voice until it pierced the sky above the ceiling above him: “I came to play!”
“What dat? What he say?”
“I came to play,” Red proclaimed again.
“He say he come to play, he come to play!” Again, laughter cascaded around him. But Daddy Bones silenced the crowd with his finger, which was like a twig, held to his papery lips. “De boy wanna play, we let em play,” Daddy Bones intoned.
Red marched towar
d the small raised stage, and Daddy Bones pressed the sax into his hands and Red lifted the instrument to his lips and began to blow heavenward. He felt the river of his soul swell with every color in the rainbow!
“YOU HAVEN’T MENTIONED Larsen’s novel,” Dr. Oss said quietly.
“No.”
“Where are things?”
“Sort of a standstill, I guess.”
Dr. Oss arched his chimpy little brows.
Standstill was perhaps a bit vague. The past three weekends, he had left messages on Larsen’s work machine citing, respectively, an abscess conference, an allergic reaction to coconut, and a family death: all cross-checked with Belle and his secretaries.
“You’ve read the novel?”
“Sure.”
“Yes?”
“Somewhat.”
Dr. Oss pursed his lips.
“Say,” Flem said, “how come you’re so gaga to know about Larsen’s novel all of a sudden? Who put the fire in your little red engine?”
Dr. Oss set down his pad and looked squarely at Flem. “We are here, Mr. Owens, to ask questions. For several weeks, this issue has preoccupied you. Then it disappears. I am simply asking why.”
“It’s like I told you, it steams me, that’s all. Him going off and writing a novel and expecting me to be his cheerleading section. And then it’s cruddy, and what am I supposed to do? Tell him? Which would crush the guy. Then I’m supposed to feel guilty, when he’s the one who, who brought it on himself.”
“Yes?”
“Sure. He didn’t have to write this thing. He could have gone on like the rest of us, wiring jaws shut and battling plaque buildup. He just had to be different.”
“Perhaps he’s frightened,” Dr. Oss said softly.
“Of what?”
“Of disappearing.”
THAT NIGHT, BETH ordered Flem to stop by Home Depot for ceiling tile, and he was standing there trying to decide between cream ocher and chiffon (which looked identical to him, though to Beth the discrepancy was clearly grounds for divorce) when he heard Larsen say: “Please get down from there, Teddy. Jake, please help your brother get down.” The three of them were farther up the row; Teddy had climbed into a sink display.