“We worry it not,” a third said.
“A constituent of the orders—”
“To not know—”
“Precisely what we are about.”
“So we just, as men with balls and ordnance must, go about the business at hand, whatever it is.”
“And we suggest you do, too.”
This made fine sense to Mr. Albemarle. “One more question of you fine fellows, then,” he said. “Down there”—he pointed down and over the edge of the wall—“any idea what’s down there?”
“Moat,” a sodier said, “with something dangerous in it.”
“That’s what I thought,” Mr. Albemarle said. “Any idea what?”
“Crocodiles.”
“I think badly deteriorated scrap metal, like thousands of bicycles, cut you to ribbons.”
“Get tetanus before you hit the water.”
“Definitely.”
“Get a booster, dude, you plan on swimming in that moat.”
“I don’t plan on swimming in that moat,” Mr. Albemarle said. At this the sodiers laughed solidly and loudly, approving of Mr. Albemarle’s prudence.
They all shook hands, and Mr. Albemarle thanked them for the gifts, and they him for the smokes, and the sodiers decamped. Mr. Albemarle was feeling good. It had been a fine rendezvous all along the watchtower, and as he resumed his pointless patrol, he patted and slapped all his fine new gear, more ready now than ever before for whatever it was he was ready for.
“I prefer the cloudy day to the sunny day,” he announced toward the moat, trying to detect from any echo if it was crocodiles or bicycles down there, or anything at all. No sound came back.
Some aliens showed up. This was clear, immediately, to Mr. Albemarle. That they were aliens made sudden eminent sense of his theretofore murky task. He had been all along the watchtower watching for aliens. No one could have specified this without appearing to be crazy. Mr. Albemarle understood everything, or nearly everything, now.
The aliens were very forthcoming. They looked perfectly alien, no bones about it. All gooshy and weird, etc. They made calming hand gestures, inducing Mr. Albemarle not to raise his jammed M-16 in their direction. They slid up to him as if on dollies and said, “We are aliens. We are aliens of affection.”
“What?”
“We are the secret agents, as it were, in cases of alienation of affection.”
Mr. Albemarle said, “You mean, when a man finds his wife naked on another man’s sailboat and he sues the yachtsman for alienation of affection—”
“Yes. We are in attendance.”
“We are on that boat, usually,” said another alien of affection.
The first alien slapped this second alien upside the head with a flipper-like arm. “We are always on that boat.”
Mr. Albemarle offered the aliens of affection cigarettes and looked at them closely. In terms of gear, they were without. In terms of clothes, they were without, yet you would not, Mr. Albemarle considered, be inclined to regard them as naked. The slapped alien appeared ready to accept a cigarette until he received a stern look from the first alien and put his arms, or flippers, approximately where his pants pockets would have been had he had on any pants. Mr. Albemarle reflected upon—actually the thought was exceedingly brief, but trenchant—the apparent absence of genitalia on these aliens of affection. To his mind, affection and genitalia were closely bound up. The notion of secret agents of affection without genitals struck him as either ironic in the extreme or extremely fitting. He looked closely at the slapped alien, up and down, to see if there were misplaced genitals, if that would be the correct term. He saw none.
“What do aliens of affection do?” he asked, aware only after he did so that he might be forward in his asking.
“We alienate affection,” the first alien said.
“There’s Cupid and there’s us,” the second said. Mr. Albemarle expected him to receive another slap for this remark, which struck him as impertinent, or low in tone, but there was no objection shown by any of the other aliens. There were nine of them, as there had been nine sodiers. Mr. Albemarle was unable to detect the status of missing incisors because he could not determine, watching them speak, if they had teeth at all, or, really, mouths. They were weird, as he supposed was fitting. They were so weird that they weren’t weird, because aliens are supposed to be weird, and they were weird so they weren’t weird. He liked them, rather, but he was not as fond of them as he had been of the sodiers. They did not give him any gear, but beyond that they did not give him any comfort. Why should they? he thought. He had mismanaged his affections, and now it appeared feasible these guys might have had something to do with it. Every time he had broken a heart, or had his broken, maybe one of these gremlins had been there aiding and abetting, helping him fuck up. Perhaps this was the enemy. Perhaps these thalidomide-looking wizened things were why he was walking all along the watchtower in an ill-defined mission, preferring cloudy days to sunny.
“Let’s take a reading on Loverboy here,” the first alien said, and very quickly the slapped alien was very close to Mr. Albemarle. He had, in the popular expression, invaded Mr. Albemarle’s air space, as had once a homosexual photographer who stood inches from him with wet lips and gleaming eyes and asked, “Do I make you nervous?” Nervous, Mr. Albemarle of course said no. Another time his air space had been invaded by a turkey in a barnyard, a big cock turkey, or whatever you called the male, which could in raising its feathers expand itself about 300 percent and make you pee in your pants if you were, as Mr. Albemarle was, disposed to be frightened of all things in a barnyard. Mr. Albemarle was not similarly afraid of a wild animal, but all things in a barnyard had been husbanded there by a human malfeasant who wore Wellies and had relations with the things in the barnyard, which consequently would bite you or kick you or step on you when they could.
The slapped alien stood next to Mr. Albemarle with a gleam in his eye and had a lip-smacking expression, if a lip-smacking expression can be had by a party without, apparently, any lips. As he had with the photographer and the turkey, Mr. Albemarle held his ground, standing erect and turning ever so slightly askance to the alien so there would not be a clean, open shot to his private parts if it came to that.
It came to that. No sooner had he thought of that turkey the size of a tumbleweed in its waist-high dirty feathers gazing with its evil scaly wattled head at his crotch than the alien of affection touched him there very lightly and very quickly with a flipper. “Hey!” Mr. Albemarle said.
“Just a reading, old man,” said the alien. “No fun intended.”
“What’s a reading?”
“We read your affinity for affection,” the first alien said to Mr. Albemarle. Of the second alien he asked, “What’s he look like?”
“Twisted.”
Mr. Albemarle adjusted himself subtly in his pants and turned a little more askance from the alien who had touched him. “What do you mean, ‘twisted’?”
“The worm of your passion,” the first alien said, “is twisted.”
“Well, it straightens out,” Mr. Albemarle said.
“No,” the alien said. “You straighten out, sir, as Johnny Carson once elicited from Mrs. Arnold Palmer that she straightens out Mr. Arnold Palmer’s putter by kissing his balls. You straighten out, sir, but the worm of your passion is twisted.”
“Your desire, in other words,” the second alien said, now a respectful distance from him, “is not clean and open but dirty and veiled. Something untoward happened to you at a delicate moment in the opening of the petals of your heart—”
“Shut up,” the first alien said. “Excuse him,” he said to Mr. Albemarle. “He tends to make jokes when he should not. We are safer in not speaking of flowers. We are safer in speaking of worms. And the worm of your passion is twisted, bent, kinked, and not, as it should be, straight, straight, and straight.”
“Is this bad?”
“It is bad, yes, but you are not alone. Only one person on earth we’ve checked
out is straight. That’s Pat Boone.”
“Everybody else is…twisted?”
“More or less. You are more than less.”
The second alien, who had taken the actual reading, said, “Lucky you’re alive, man. It’s like a Grand Prix course down there.”
“What he means, sir,” the first alien said, “is that before the engine of your desire crosses the finish line it must negotiate a tortuous course and use the transmission to preserve the brakes and discard and remount many new tires and—”
“Hey!” It was the second alien waving them over to the edge of the wall. All the other aliens were peering down.
“Can you guys see down there?” Mr. Albemarle asked. “Take a reading?”
The aliens of affection were whistling to themselves in amazement. “Never seen the like of it.” “That is bizarre.” “Takes the effing cake.”
“What is it?”
“Nothing, man,” one of them said.
“Nothing? Don’t nothing, man me, sir. I patrol the watchtower and have every right to know what is down there.”
The aliens went on marveling at whatever it was they could see or detect in the moat, if it was a moat. Mr. Albemarle looked in appeal to the first, apparently chief, alien, who pulled him aside.
“We’ve encountered the odd thing of the heart in our job,” he told Mr. Albemarle.
“What’s down there?” Mr. Albemarle observed the alien in apparent consideration of whether, and how, to tell him.
“I’m in charge here,” Mr. Albemarle said. “Need to know.” He’d always liked that phrase: we’ll keep you on a need-to-know basis, so when they torture you, you will be on a need-to-be-beat basis for only so long.
“Broken hearts,” the alien said.
“Sir?”
“About four million broken hearts down there—scrap hearts, badly deteriorated, cut you to ribbons before you hit the water.”
“Not crocodiles or bicycles?”
At this the alien started laughing. The other aliens came over to see what was funny.
“What?” they said. The alien laughed even harder and refused to tell. They began goosing him with their flippers, trying to tickle it out of him, Mr. Albemarle supposed. Mr. Albemarle became embarrassed. He had said something, it was clear, ridiculous. But a moment ago, crocodiles on the one hand and bicycles on the other had made sense.
“I said crocodiles or bicycles,” Mr. Albemarle told them. “I thought it was crocodiles down there, and some sodiers thought it was old bicycles.”
The group of aliens politely tried to contain its mirth. The slapped alien generously came up to Mr. Albemarle and comforted him. “Understandable, man. No way you could know. We’ve never heard of it ourselves.”
“I don’t even know what I’m doing out here, all along the watchtower,” Mr. Albemarle said. “Let alone what’s in a goddamn moat I can’t even see.”
“Well, buddy,” said the slapped alien, to whom Mr. Albemarle felt the most affinity (and he hoped it wasn’t because this alien had touched lightly and quickly his crotch), “you know what you are doing now. You are watching over a giant spoilbank of broken hearts.”
“My God. Still, what do I do?”
“Not sure on that. We break them. We are not concerned with their repair or storage. It would appear that these hearts here have been, in Navy parlance, mothballed. It appears you are simply to watch them.”
“Watch all the broken hearts, all along the watch-tower.”
“Yes.”
“In the world.”
“Yes.”
“And mine—it’s broken, too?”
“The worm of your passion is twisted, sir. Your heart is up here on the watchtower, not altogether broken. We have no orders to break hearts. We merely alienate affection. The broken heart is, you might say, collateral damage.”
“I have mismanaged my affections.”
“That you have, sir. In spades. We have no orders to further alienate your affections. The reading we took of you was casual, informational only, whimsical.”
“The worm of my passion is twisted?”
“Twisted badly, sir. But the worm is alive.”
“Is that good?”
“Depends, sir, on your outlook. Are you an absolutist or a relativist, ideal or practical in your worldly posture?”
“I am a muddle of—”
“Muddlers, sir, do not go unpunished. The moat is filled with muddlers.”
At this Mr. Albemarle peered over the edge of the wall, frightened and yet oddly buoyed up by this talk. He was a twisted muddler but not (yet) down there on the spoilbank of the broken. It gave him a sudden hankering to have his hair cut in a barbershop where they’d put sweet-smelling talc and tonic on his shaved neck and let him chew Juicy Fruit in the chair. He could chew fresh Juicy Fruit after the haircut, walking down the fair street with his perfumed head gleaming in the sun. He could find a girlfriend and try it again.
“Hey!” he said to the aliens. “If you guys…I mean, do you guys have any plans for me? Am I on the list?”
“No. You’re singing the blues already, sir.”
“Okay.”
In a parade of salutes and waves—Mr. Albemarle did not want to shake hands with the flippers, and the aliens did not actually offer them—the aliens were gone.
When the sodiers and aliens had left him alone, patrolling all along the watchtower better informed of his mission and better equipped for it, Mr. Albemarle felt momentarily better. He had that new-haircut sweet air about him and felt he was wearing new clothes, and he stepped lightly and lively all along the watchtower.
But soon the drug put in him by the sodiers and the aliens wore off. The gear began to seem a rather Sodier of Fortune aggregation of pot metal and fish dye, and it was clanky and in the way. He discarded it in a neat pile.
What the aliens had given him was worse: the worm of his passion was twisted. This news, coupled with the revelations about the moat of hearts and about their having no call to further alienate his own affections, had calmed Mr. Albemarle when the penguinesque aliens of affection had been present. But now that they were gone he was nervous. It was like, he supposed, turning yourself over to the doctor during illness; you were still sick as a dog, but the mere presence of a man in charge of that in a lab coat and in an ethyl-alcohol atmosphere suggested your troubles would soon be over.
Now Mr. Albemarle realized the aliens had given him no such assurance. They had said, in fact, he was too alienated in his affections already for them to bother with alienating them further, which was not unlike being deemed terminal by the good doctor.
At first the aliens pronouncing “The worm of your passion is twisted” had had an oddly calming, if not outright narcotic, effect on Mr. Albemarle. That explains everything! was what he had thought. Now he thought it explained nothing, and where it had calmed him it frightened him. “The worm of my passion is twisted,” he said to himself, and aloud over the moat, and all along the watchtower, feeling worse and worse and worse. “The worm of my passion is twisted.”
Mr. Albemarle then had a vision of his genitals twisted into knots. This was oddly comforting, also. It did not bother him. He chuckled, in fact, at the idea, and he recalled a woman once at a cocktail party declaiming to people whom she thought interested but who were not, “My husbands genitals are like knotted rope.” Everyone had left her and gone over to talk with her husband in sympathetic moods.
Mr. Albemarle knew that the aliens meant something deeper and worse, as they had told him, and that they were right. His passion was bent and his desire was dirty and veiled. He knew men whose passion was straightforward and whose desire was clean and open and who were not Pat Boone. They were true cowboys of the heart. They saw what they wanted (and knew it), they asked for it, and when they got it they sang praise around the campfire in a clear voice and got up early and made coffee for it and kissed it and hit the trail, the happy trail, until nightfall and bedfall and bliss. These cowbo
ys had cowgirls: open-eyed girls in red skirts who danced with you if you asked and kissed you back if you waited long enough to kiss them first. And a true cowboy knew how to wait, and he knew whom to kiss in the first place.
Mr. Albemarle did not know whom to kiss because he wanted to kiss no one, really, and when he got tired of that he wanted to kiss everyone. At that point, waiting seemed contraindicated. Waiting for what? For everyone to say yes? It was ridiculous. He had the image of a real cowboy of the heart, his passion straight and clean and open, sitting a bull in the chute, packing his hand in the harness very carefully, and taking a long time while the bull snorted and farted and stomped and fumed and flared, giving the word when he was ready, and in a happy breeze of preparedness blasting into danger and waving for balance astride it for a regulation period and vaulting into the air and landing on two feet and walking proudly across the sand to receive his score, with which, good or bad, he would be content.
By contrast, Mr. Albemarle would not deign get on the bull until the last minute, and then would disdainfully sit sidesaddle on it, and it would erupt and the rest would be an ignominious confusion of injuries and clowns coming to his rescue. That is what “the worm of your passion is twisted” meant. It meant not a ride and a score but injury and clowns holding your hand.
Mr. Albemarle walked all along the watchtower, whistling gloomily and studying the clouds. He imagined the hearts in the moat—the aliens had said a spoilbank of hearts—in great cumulus piles, great billowy stacks of puffy, shifting, vaporous grief, under the still water.
He cupped his mouth and in a low, smooth, strong voice intoned to the moat:
“Cawboy to moat, cawboy to spoils of love—
“What am I going to do with myself, now that I know it to be useless? I am tenebrous, or tenebrious if you prefer, it’s all the same. When the big bulldog get in trouble, puppy-dog britches will fit him fine.”
The water, or whatever was actually down there, remained still.
On his next morning’s patrol, which he went about naked, having liked the sensation of discarding all the sodiers’ gear and not seeing the logical end to discarding things, he met a woman on the wall. This is the way it is in life, he reflected; when you go naked, for once, you run into somebody you might prefer not see you naked. There was a woman not fifty yards ahead and Mr. Albemarle at least had the gumption to keep going, not to run. His nakedness if anything emboldened his step, martialized it a bit, so that by the time he actually came up to her he was in a subdued goose step and was looking perfectly natural about it.
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