Aliens of Affection

by Padgett Powell

  He decided to make a thousand copies of the letter and somehow devise a mailing list that would be appropriate and have mailing labels applied by a machine so the entire affair would not be labor-intensive and he wouldn’t have to lick a thousand stamps and write addresses and harass himself further. The sexual harassment of one’s own self was the most insidious form of sexual harassment and there was to his knowledge no legal protection against it.

  That want seemed a huge oversight on the part of the stewards of modern civilized life who had turned life into injury and redress, loss and litigation. The final moment in it all would be every citizen suing himself or herself for damages resulting from his or her own excesses and negligences with respect to himself or herself and his or her personal aggrandizement or lack thereof. The vista of the denizens of the modern world suing themselves into bankruptcy gave hope where there had not been any. This was a beautiful prospect to Mr. Albemarle, patrolling all along the watchtower—a kind of global legal self-immolation that would leave a few survivors who bore no one else and themselves no ill will. He suddenly felt, in possession of this vision, that he might be a prophet of some sort: the elect, here all along the watchtower not to guard a moat of the brokenhearted but to witness a Trojan War of Tortes. He was going to observe World War III, which was going to be a global litigious meltdown, from a safe purchase on his lawless wall.

  Mr. Albemarle left the letter on top of the writing desk with instructions for its copying and mailing to one thousand appropriate parties, TBA. He had no idea whom the instructions were for, but if someone came along and assumed the duty it would be better than if someone didn’t. Leaving the desk he noticed a phone booth he had never seen before and stepped in it and dialed a number.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello. Good, it’s you.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Troy Albemarle.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. I just wanted to tell you that I’m lonely.”

  “You have the wrong number.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You don’t? You don’t know me and I don’t know you.”

  “You’re a woman,” Mr. Albemarle said, with more force than he intended, “and I just wanted to tell you that I’m lonely.”

  “Look, mister. That’s what you tell your own woman, not a stranger.”

  “Look, yourself. If I tell my own woman I’m lonely, she’ll think me silly.”

  “Maybe you are.”

  “Maybe I am. I don’t dispute it. But to admit that one is silly is not to deny that one is lonely.”

  “It probably accounts for it.”

  “It probably does!” Mr. Albemarle all but shouted, slamming the phone into its chrome, spring-loaded cradle, fully satisfied.

  When he saw Dale Mae approaching with a shotgun, he thought to test the wisdom of the conversation with the strange woman, with whom he was in love.

  “Dale Mae, I’m lonely.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Dale Mae said.

  “Yes!”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Do you want to shoot some skeet?”

  “Of course I want to shoot some skeet.”

  “Well, come on. There’s a skeet range down the way.”

  “I never saw a skeet range all along the watchtower,” Mr. Albemarle said. “A lot of things, actually, are—”

  “Come on, lonely heart. My daddy taught me one thing and I’m going to show you what it is.”

  “Do, do, do,” Mr. Albemarle said, taking a look around for the presence of witnesses to this exchange. There were none that he could see, which, he knew, meant not much. Nothing apparent meant more, in these days, than something obvious. He was getting used to that. It took some doing, but he was doing it.

  The skeet range was of the nothing-apparent type. Dale Mae stopped walking, put two shells in her gun, and crisply closed it, looking dreamy-eyed at Mr. Albemarle and patting the gun and saying of it “Parker” in the lowest, sexiest voice he’d ever heard, and then her eyes cleared and she turned to face the void beyond the wall, said “Pull,” and blew to infinitely small pieces a thing which seemed to fly from the front face of the wall. It looked like a 45 rpm record before she hit it; Mr. Albemarle concluded it had been a clay skeet after she hit it. She kept saying “Pull” and blasting that which flew, left right high low, to bits, and she took a long, lusty snort of the thick cordite smell in the air and scuffed some of the wadding from her shells off the wall and said, “Mone get me some iced tea and fried chicken when I get through shooting, and then kiss you to death,” and resumed firing, shooting backwards and between her legs and one-handed from the hip, like a gunslinger with a three-foot-long pistol, missing nothing, and Mr. Albemarle started talking, uncontrollably, agreeably:

  “In the first grade had a teach name Mrs. Campbell that was the end of sweetness for me in the, ah, official realm. Next year ozone, I mean second grade in orange groves, etc. Mother had water break and taxi to hospital, golf-course father, had swimming lessons chlorine nose. A siege of masturbation ensued. Declined professional life—had choice, too. Somehow at juncture early in life where you elect to watch birds or not I deigned not. Fuck birds. This is sad. I am holy in my disregard of the holy. Sitting upright in a Studebaker or some other classically lined failure is the attitude in which I see myself for a final portrait in the yearbook of life. Depth charges look like 55-gallon drums, but I suspect they are really not that innocent-looking up close. Reservations at hotels and restaurants and airlines are for—” He stopped and snorted lustily the cordite himself and realized he had been aping Dale Mae’s shooting in mime. He looked like a fool. She kept shooting. She was a one-person fire-fight. She would fill the moat with clay shards and wads.

  “I want the certainty of uncertainty. I declare nothing to customs, ever. Transgressions of a social and moral sort interest me: philosophically, I mean. They assume—I mean those who assume to know a transgression—that points A and B for the gression to trans are known. I’ve had trouble, since the ozone of second grade and the chlorine and my mother holding herself, having peed in her pants and cursing my father, and since the large beautiful hognose snake I was too scared of to pick up in the orange grove so went home to get a jar to invite him to crawl into, which took about a half hour, and well, the snake didn’t wait around, I’ve had trouble knowing point A and point B in order to correctly perceive, or conceive, transgression.”

  “Let’s go get some chicken,” Dale Mae said.

  “That sounds delicious. That sounds good. That sounds not urbane but divine anyway—”

  “Shut up, baby. I can’t kiss you, you go off your rocker.”

  “You shoot that gun I shoot my mouth, is all. I—” There was, not improbably, tea and fried chicken in a handsome woven basket, and a red-checkered tablecloth for them to have the picnic on, all along the watchtower.

  Selling hot, melted ice cream from a rolling cart, like soup, or to put on pastries, or something, he supposed, Mr. Albemarle pushed an umbrellaed cart all along the watchtower. It had four rather small wheels instead of the more conventional two large wheels used by food vendors, and they flibbered and squalled, drawing his attention away from trying to figure whose idea it was to try to sell hot ice cream to pondering how much of life, finally, was pushing things around on wheels. The sick were flibbering and squalling down halls of disinfectant, the healthy down freeways of octane, dessert in a good restaurant flibbered and squalled up to you in a cart much like his—if the human race had gone as mad for fire as it had for the wheel, the earth would be a black cinder. Instead, it was a scarred, run-over thing, tracks all over it, resembling in the long view one of the world’s largest balls of twine, in this case one as large as the world.

  Dale Mae was down the way and Mr. Albemarle moved along the way. Who was going to buy hot ice cream? Who, all along the watchtower, was going to buy anything? There was no one all alon
g the watchtower, so far, except the sodiers, the aliens of affection, and now Dale Mae. Mr. Albemarle looked around to see if perchance anyone was watching and pushed the cart of bubbling ice cream—it smelled cloyingly sweet—over the edge of the watchtower into the moat, brushing his hands together briskly as if he’d handily completed a nasty task. He whistled a happy tune, one that appeared to be random notes, and sauntered all along the watch-tower.

  Mr. Albemarle stopped his whistling and sauntering in mid-blow and mid-step. He had an old-fashioned crisis. He was suddenly transfixed by one of the old human anti-verities: he had no idea what he was doing, or was supposed to do. Pal with sodiers, let aliens of affection feel you up, romp with a Dale Mae, push boiling ice cream into a moat—these things you did in life because they came along. You did them. You even did them well, if you cared to—Dale Mae said the worm of his passion was exquisitely twisted. But so what? What of it? What then? What now? What point?

  He stood there feeling slump-shouldered and low. He had a vision of a different kind of life. There were men who, say, ran car dealerships and bought acreage and had their friends out to shoot quail and they all drank out of these Old-Fashioned glasses with pheasants painted on them, painted “by hand” it said in the expensive mail-order catalogue the car-dealer quail-shooter’s wife ordered the glasses out of. The wife and the other wives were in the kitchen discussing what the wives of car dealers and bankers and brokers discuss. They were wearing pleated Bermuda shorts and none of them was too fat. The men were content with them, even loved them, and did not have affairs too much. The men laughed easily among themselves at things that were not too funny. Mr. Albemarle was outside this, all of this.

  He knew that were he inside it, the point-of-life problem might not be resolved, but he knew it would not, if he were drinking Wild Turkey and talking Republican politics, come up. From his vantage and distance, quail glasses and okaying the deficit might well be exactly the point of life, he could not tell. But he was certain that he—all along the watchtower, with (accidentally) a woman who could (incidentally) shoot the quail but who would (certainly) shoot the quail glasses also—was never going to get the point. He was, he realized, standing there looking at the ball. He did not see that it helped anything. If you paused to look at the ball, you were going to be tackled for no gain, or for a loss; whereas if you just at least ran, you stood a chance of gaining yardage. That you had no idea what a yard meant was no argument to lose yardage, or was it? How had he gotten to walking all along the watchtower? Was it not a losing of yardage? Was being on the watchtower with a woman who could probably shoot the painted quail off a glass without breaking the glass not somehow the negative image of life on the plantation, where the plantation had nothing planted on it but feed for the birds who would be painted on the glasses lovingly held and admired as symbols of the good life? At this cerebration Mr. Albemarle was forced to sit down and say, “Whew!” He’d had, he thought, some kind of epiphany. “Whew!” he said again. It helped.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Dale Mae said, scaring him. He’d not heard her come up. He wondered if the watchtower was getting softer, or something.

  “Nothing,” he said. “If I threw a hand-painted quail glass in the air, could you shoot the paint off it without breaking the glass?”

  “Do it all the time,” Dale Mae said. “Problem is catching the glass. That’s hard. Usually you get you a party of car dealers and brokers to shag ’em. Out there in their Filson pants and Barbour coats, pumping hell-for-leather through the gorse, flushing actual quail. There are ironies.”

  Mr. Albemarle looked at her hard. Either she was demonic and had possessed his brain or something else of a weird and too intimate nature was going on.

  “Where are the wives?” he asked.

  “What wives?”

  “To the glass catchers.”

  “In the kitchen with Dinah strummin’ on the old banjo.”

  “Thought so.”

  “Let’s get us some ice cream.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I rolled the cart into the moat.”

  “You what?”

  “Well, it was boiled ice cream. Did you want boiled ice cream?”

  “No. I want hard cold ice cream.”

  “Me too.”

  Like that, they were together, hand in hand, strolling all along the watchtower looking for ice cream proper, Mr. Albemarle’s epiphany behind him.

  They walked by the writing desk where Mr. Albemarle had left instructions for the phantom secretary to mail his one thousand letters it seemed just seconds before, and the desk was covered in vines. He remarked on it to Dale Mae.

  “Heart mildew,” Dale Mae said.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s what grows on sites of affection. If you’d left that desk alone, or left a real letter on it that was to be mailed to one thousand people for whom you never had or expected to have affection, there’d be no vine on it. Your letter, lame-o one that it is, brings on the jungle. Am I on that mailing list?”

  “Not yet. I only have the brokenhearted on that list.”

  “A thousand?”

  “Well, I rounded up.”

  “As well you might. As well might we all. It is a proposition of such close tolerances, at least before the parts are worn out from friction, that pairing a thousand bolts to a thousand nuts does not seem excessive. Consider thread count, mismatched metals—”

  “Dale Mae, could we talk about something else?”

  “Sure, baby. What?”

  “I once threw away a Craftsman circular saw when all that was wrong with it was a broken tooth on a drive gear. This, the whole-thing throwing away, was a waste. I regret it. That whole saw—motor, blade, and all—in a plastic garbage bag, now in a landfill, I guess, with its bad gear nearby somewhere in the great noncomposting amalgam of jetsam, if you have jetsam on land, or flotsam, I don’t know the difference, but anyway it, the saw, in its exploded view (I did not reassemble it) is packed into some clayey sand with whatever else I threw away with it and whatever else other people threw away that day, and there are seagulls flying overhead so maybe it’s fair to call the saw flotsam, or jetsam, where you have gulls you have salvage, just as where you have smoke you have fire.”

  “Is that it?” Dale Mae asked.

  “No. That is the tip of the lettuce. I once took four baby cardinals from their nest in a relocation program of my own devising. They, the hairless little blue pterodactyls, were to be moved to a ‘safer’ place, God knows where. For this transport they were placed on a wooden paddle of the sort you are to strike a rubber ball with repeatedly as it returns to the paddle via an elastic band. I have blocked the name of the toy.”

  “Fly Back,” Dale Mae said.

  “The birds,” Mr. Albemarle said, “peeping and squalling, were red-skinned and blue-blooded underneath the fine cactusy down on them, giving them a purple scrotal texture until they fell off into an ant bed. The kind of squirming they did, which made me unable (afraid) to cup them on the paddle, did not look radically different from the kind of writhing they did once they fell off and the ants were on them, but it was. They writhed to death, the baby cardinals, right there at my feet, at the foot of the tree in which their erstwhile happy safe home sat empty but for the hysterical parents flitting in and out. Right there at my feet, except I slunk my feet off somewhere to contemplate what went wrong, how the little bastards should have known better than to scare me like that.”

  “Is that it?”

  “No. Another time I sold a puppy to the right people and bought it back and sold it to the wrong people, who got it stolen. The right people I thought the wrong people were kids in a garage band who wanted the dog to protect their equipment. When I got there to buy back the puppy, it was on the knee of one of the boys, watching cartoons with them. I took the dog back. Then I resold it to a family man who had children not yet rock ’n’ roll age. He managed to let the dog be stolen, w
hich the rock ’n’ roll boys would never have done. And what would protect the boys’ amps and drums and guitars now? My point is that my entire life is probably just a series of this kind of blind self-serving fuckup. Everything is cardinal-nest robbing and taking puppies from watching cartoons with their devoted new masters. Every breath is dumb. Even if you are on to this, you have no way of proving it. But the principle of reasonable doubt obtains. There is reasonable doubt that I have done one sensible thing in my life.”

  “Is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “You need to chill.”

  “To what?”

  “Chill.”

  “Are you black?”

  “Do I look black?”

  “My point is, let them have their baby cardinals. Don’t put them on your paddle,” Mr. Albemarle said.

  “Oh, brother.”

  “Are we having a fight?”

  “No, babe. We are going to bed. You’re a case.”

  “Well, bully for me.”

  Dale Mae smelled of gun oil, and Mr. Albemarle kissed her recoil shoulder, imagining it slightly empurpled from her shooting, but it was not. Her shoulder was pale and strong. She cleared his head of broken saws and wheeling gulls and writhing blue baby birds and misplaced dogs.

  He put all of what was left of his desire, dumb or twisted or not, on top of and in this Dale Mae, and went through the motions, which is to say, vulgarly, made the motion, the curious in-out yes-no which all primates figure out or they the out, and it was a more or less standard bedroll except that not only did Mr. Albemarle’s astral body levitate above them but two astral bodies levitated above them, and impersonally looked at him doing this personal thing. This always happened with his one astral body, but with these his two astral bodies the impersonal viewing of his doing the personal thing, yessing noing yessing, was in stereo, as if he were a card in the trombone slide of a stereopticon.