Alien Accounts

by Sladek, John

  Andor noticed a series of power-line pylons set along parallel to the interstate highway. He began to count them, and fell asleep at one hundred and twenty-odd.

  Dinner was a club sandwich, potato salad, and a glass of ginger ale, with tapioca for dessert. Andor bought a package of caramels and took them aboard with him. The driver removed another coupon from his ticket, which still seemed undiminished. Andor briefly considered counting the remaining coupons, to see if they were actually the same number as before, but it was too much work, and how was he supposed to account for it if they were? The whole idea was silly and profitless. Andor watched the sunset, aware of his own boredom.

  Next morning was very warm indeed. The bus entered a great terminal where Andor bathed and changed clothes and ate bacon, eggs, hash browns, and coffee. In his coffee he poured cream from a tiny tetrahedronal container. He picked up a red plastic tomato and considered squeezing it over his hash browns, but decided against it. The coffee, he thought, tasted very like the coffee in that town – what was the name of it?

  It seemed to Andor as if the name he was searching for were somehow the name of a town he had not yet reached.

  The magazine he was reading was one he’d borrowed from a clergyman. It featured an article on spiritual fulfilment. In front of Andor two men in college sweaters were playing cards on top of a suitcase. Two nuns sat across from them, in front of a sleeping soldier. In front of them a businessman wrote steadily in his notebook. Behind the soldier a cowboy argued with his wife, while a family of swarthy foreigners looked on interestedly. Two clergymen of different denominations chatted genially across the aisle. Back of them sat more servicemen, and several vacationing pensioners.

  Lunch was tuna casserole de luxe, diced carrots, and lettuce salad with french dressing. Dessert was custard pie. Andor imagined that he saw at the counter the salesman he’d talked to earlier, but dressed as a sailor. He seemed to see everyone twice, as on a merry-go-round. Motion was blending people and days together like soft ice cream.

  Dinner at another restaurant with a spire. Andor felt a slight unpleasant sensation as he rode along afterwards. There were darkening blue fields wheeling past him, but Andor had no sensation of motion at all. It was as viewing a landscape painted on canvas, moving past on wooden rollers; it was cinematic illusion, badly done; it was a cheap mirror trick; it was, in short, motion that refused to become real. He felt the bus accelerate against the back of his head, and his ears heard the roar of engine in the back, but these too seemed piped-in sensations. Was there an engine behind him? As well insist there was a string orchestra playing show tunes somewhere in the compartment (he had ceased to think of it as a ‘bus’). The only reality in all this seemed to be the warmth spreading outward through him from his stomach, where enzymes, he supposed, were now attacking macaroni and cheese, butter beans, and malted milk. He dozed.

  Things were no better in the morning, at least not at first. Counting back, Andor could not discover how long he had been travelling. Time was undone; days were become as alike as a row of ‘red’ signs against the flat, ‘green’ landscape:

  Beards grow faster

  In the grave …

  He had to keep reminding himself that all was viewed through blue glass, that colours were not true. Whenever he stepped out of the bus, earth and sky took on an uncanny pink tinge.

  A waffle and sausage; a morning paper from a strange city; counting his money and finding to his delight that he had more than he’d figured; these restored Andor’s good humour for the morning. He recovered himself sufficiently to hum along with the sprightly show tunes.

  But after his lunch of Yankee pot roast and escalloped potatoes, Andor felt uneasy and depressed. The date on his paper was the thirtieth, and he determined to use it to find out his day of departure, by counting backwards. But not only could he not decide whether he had been four or five days en route, but it occurred to him he might have yesterday’s paper. He asked the soldier across the aisle for today’s date.

  ‘Wish I knew,’ the soldier apologized. ‘I got a calendar watch, but now and then I forget to set it right. Let’s see – Sunday was the twentieth or twenty-first, so Sunday again would of been the twenty-seventh or eighth. But I forget every time whether it’s May or June has thirty days, and so I get my watch off one day. It registers thirty-one days every month, see, unless I reset it.’

  He might have asked someone else, but Andor suddenly gave up. Why was the date so important anyway? He would get there when he got there – to the resort whose name escaped him for the moment.

  It was not as if he had not read, heard, or spoken it often enough. Rather, he knew it almost too well. It was become a piece of mental furniture so familiar as to be invisible in the background of his mind; he could not make his tongue trip over it. Indeed, he knew it so well, Andor could almost imagine having been to the resort already. Knowing how difficult it is to conjure up a forgotten name, he turned his thoughts to the more or less neutral topic of approaching dinner.

  Dinner was basic fish sticks, french fries, baked beans, and lettuce salad with french dressing, followed by a banana split. Afterwards he walked out for a moment under the darkening sky, watching stars appear. But there was something vaguely terrifying about the first few points of light in that immense blackness …

  He read a detective novel to the point where an unknown assailant struck the detective. The reading light went off.

  Andor lay awake in the darkness, imagining the unread portion. It seemed not improbable that the detective was going to lose his memory from this blow on the head.

  He awoke in utter darkness, among strangers, alone and afraid. But almost as if it had been awaiting his cue, the sky began to lighten. Soon he could make out the shapes of billboards and the grey tangles of an interchange.

  Dozing again, he dreamt of the resort. Andor swan-dived into a pool of blue jello. Cutting through the viscid stuff, his body moved deeper and deeper into blue protecting darkness, until by some miracle reversal, he emerged at the centre of the sky, at the sun, and he flowed down like pale-green rain to the sun-flooded beach.

  Bacon and eggs, coffee with cream from a tiny tetrahedron. Pale-green check from the pale waitress. He found he had read the detective novel before, or at least started it before. Washing his hands in the tiny sink at the rear of the compartment, he wondered if he would ever reach his goal.

  It amused him to postulate two Andors, one moving from A to B, the other moving from B to A, each passing through the other – but perhaps neither arriving at his ever-receding goal. Perhaps he approached the end asymptotically, riding three seats behind the driver in perpetuity.

  He counted his money, discovered there was more than he’d thought. The driver took another coupon from his never-diminishing ticket. Meat loaf and gravy, mashed potatoes, string beans, coffee. Apple pie à la mode.

  Each night, he thought, when I’m asleep, I slip back one notch in time. If I travel all day, I may just make up that slippage. It’s some kind of treadmill.

  Garden peas, Yankee pot roast, fried potatoes, and coffee with cream. Andor ignored the tiny paper envelopes of sugar. Tapioca. ‘Land of the Pharaohs’.

  I’ll get out, he thought. They can’t keep me on the bus. But he found it more terrifying than ever, just imagining the solitude out there, stars and blackness and the frozen disc of the moon. Whenever he had to move from the bus to the restaurant, Andor hurried without looking up.

  He had been to the resort already; that much seemed certain. He could recall it all so clearly: the night fireworks, by day the heated blue pool. He had picked up a woman there whose name he could not recall. A drink at the hotel bar, a dip in the pool, and so on. Later they had visited the fabulous amusement park and observed a yacht race in the dazzling sunlight.

  Dinner: creamed dried beef on toast, steamed potatoes, spinach, coffee, bread and butter. Dessert: butterscotch pudding.

  Hamburger steak, creamed corn, hash browns. He squeezed
a red plastic tomato over the potatoes. I’ll stay out, he decided, but he was afraid. When the time came, he reboarded the proper bus.

  It’s a treadmill in time, a suspension between present and past. If I try to stop anywhere, I’ll be swept backwards, backwards …

  Always into a yesterday, always into a sealed-off, completed past, undying – because already dead?

  A stranger eased into the seat beside him, holding an attaché case and a rolled-up magazine.

  ‘Going far?’ he asked.

  Andor did not appear to hear him. The stranger seemed satisfied with Andor’s silence, for he settled himself and began to read. Andor continued to stare out the deep-blue window, as into the depths of a pool, until it grew so dark outside that there was nothing to see but the reflection of his own face.

  NAME (PLEASE PRINT):

  REMARKS: (extra sheets may be attached)

  You, the expediter who deals with this, may find it ironic that I use a form on which to make my complaint, and the wrong form at that. But then, is there a correct form for a problem of this type? Or is my case unique?

  My case.

  Briefly, I have discovered that all written records pertaining to me have disappeared. I can think of no reason for this, and feel it is an unnecessary discrepancy which should be cleared up at the earliest opportunity.

  I blame no one. I could blame it all on the ‘bureaucracy’, but I have been too long on the other side of the counter. I know that bureaux are only groups of human clerks, like me. Like you.

  I should say that I like forms. I like filling them out, printing clearly in ink only. I like stamping them, filing them, copying or checking them, even bringing in a fresh stack from the stockroom. But especially I like reading them. One of my favourite quotations is line 4 of Computation of Social Security Self-Employment Tax: ‘Net income (or loss) from excluded services or sources included on line 3'. Smile at my enthusiasm, but consider for a moment the precision and balance of that line. Income vs loss, excluded or included, services and sources. I’d like to shake the hand of the clerk who wrote that.

  This form is also well set out, nicely planned, though possibly this Remarks section could be larger. I see I’m running out of space already, and my true remarks have not yet begun. Attaching extra sheets, then, let me begin:

  At the beginning, I had a responsible job in a government documents office. Without becoming close friends with anyone in the office, I had managed to command some respect for my work and perhaps my person. No one seemed unduly envious when Mr Boyle told me I was being promoted in grade. The promotion involved a transfer to another department, in which I would be working with classified documents.

  ‘I should warn you,’ Mr Boyle said, ‘that you’ll need a SECRET clearance for this job. If you know any reason you won’t be able to get such a clearance, let me know now.’

  Naturally I knew of no such impediment. Mr Boyle gave me forms for my clearance application, to be submitted in triplicate with a set of my fingerprints and a copy of my birth certificate.

  I applied in person to the state records office for the latter. After a wait of twenty minutes, jerked out on the wall clock, the trim young woman behind the counter explained that my birth record was not on file here. She suggested I try the county records office.

  Next day the county records office clerk suggested I try the hospital. The clerk at the hospital had neither any record of my birth nor any suggestion.

  Such mistakes will happen. Clerks are human. I’m willing to tolerate a few mistakes, a lot of mistakes, any finire number of mistakes, choose one. I returned to the state office and explained my predicament. The clerk, a young woman with short hair, seemed to sympathize. She suggested I try obtaining copies of other documents attesting to my birth and present those to the clearance people. She seemed about to make another suggestion, but I saw by the jerking clock that I was already late for another appointment, to have my fingerprints taken. – I submitted the fingerprints with the triplicate clearance application, attaching a letter of explanation in lieu of my birth certificate. Then I set about tracing my birth.

  Several routes were already closed: (a) My parents were dead, and everyone I could think of who might have known me as a child was either dead or untraceable.

  (b) Tracing my school records was impossible, since the school had burned down.

  (c) I telephoned county and state education departments, who refused to divulge any information whatsoever.

  (d) I wrote to my old family doctor and dentist. The doctor’s niece replied that he had died two years ago, and that she had no idea what had happened to his old files. The dentist did not reply.

  (e) I wrote asking for a copy of my baptismal certificate. The minister who replied (not the one who had baptized me) said that he was very sorry, but his predecessor’s files were in a chaotic state, and my certificate was not to be found. Perhaps out of habit, he urged me not to give up hope of his finding it eventually.

  It was depressing, but still only an odd set of circumstances, up to this point. Then my application for a SECRET clearance was rejected, for two reasons: ‘Fingerprints not clear’ and ‘No birth certificate’. My letter of explanation was not returned with the other documents.

  Mr Boyle called me into his office next day. He explained that the department hadn’t foreseen this new difficulty. Now, since I wasn’t cleared, he would have to give the promotion to someone else. I said I understood.

  ‘I don’t think you do,’ he said. ‘For one thing, when we created the position you were to fill, we also deleted your present position. Now there really is no room for you in our office. Naturally we can’t fire you, but – we think it would be better for everyone if you resigned.’

  I agreed. For a moment I sat snapping a card between my front teeth – my rejected, blurry fingerprints – then I rose and shook hands with Mr Boyle. I hadn’t spent ten years in his office to become a liability to it now. I walked with slow dignity to the door, then turned to look at Mr Boyle.

  ‘Good luck,’ he said, and turned to drop some papers in the waste basket.

  I spent the next few days wandering the streets, being ‘unemployed’. For one entire week I stationed myself on a particular street corner and made a note of the serial number of every bus that passed. For an afternoon I sought out weighing machines of the fortune-telling type. I wasted perhaps too much of my diminishing resources on this, and on taking my own picture and recording my own voice, but it was a comfort.

  One day at the dinner hour, the plangent dinner hour, I wandered alone in an unfamiliar part of the city, thinking and no doubt talking to myself. The loss of two or even three documents could be a coincidence. But a dozen? Surely the odds against this were astronomical.

  I found myself standing before a large building that was made of, or at least covered with, cast iron. Fireproof. Enduring. The sun must have been setting, for great flocks of noisy birds began to wheel and wheel in the changing light. A foreign ecstasy began to fill me, drawing me on like a glove. How could mere cards and papers matter, when I was here, alive, myself, and full of ease?

  I must have fallen face down; when I awoke, it was night, and my mouth was full of drying blood. A policeman prodded me in the ribs, gently, with his stick. ‘You okay, fella?’ I sat up and nodded. ‘I seen right away you wasn’t just a drunk. What happened to you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Must have fainted.’

  He asked if I’d been rolled. It was then I discovered that my billfold was missing.

  A policeful day. When I got home at last, two FBI agents were waiting for me: Agent Barkley, and another whose name escapes me. I didn’t really realize how much of my official substance had eroded until our little, as they called it, chat. This took place in their small office – uncomfortably small, it seemed to me, for two large men and a taperecorder and myself. After taking a loyalty oath, I was permitted to tell my story.

  ‘You expect us to believe this?’ asked Agent Barkley.
‘That your high school burned down, and your doctor died, and you’ve lost your billfold with all your ID? And no one else has any records of you?’

  ‘There must be something,’ the other agent put in. ‘Your college transcript. Your dental chart. Old tax records.’

  ‘I’ve moved several times,’ I explained. ‘Certain papers have just disappeared in the shuffle. But surely the Internal Revenue Service has copies of my tax returns …’

  The two agents looked at each other. Barkley asked about my college.

  ‘Cypress University,’ I said. ‘School of Business Administration.’ Again they exchanged looks.

  ‘Kind of a coincidence, isn’t it?’ asked Barkley. He showed me an evening paper, headlining a violent disturbance at Cypress University. Transcript files had been ransacked and many destroyed.

  The FBI men told me I could go home, but not to try going anywhere else. They promised to contact me shortly.

  That night I lay awake theorizing. Three theories might account for what has happened: coincidence, a prank, and a conspiracy.

  (1) Coincidence. The girl in the state birth records office accidentally put her cup of coffee on my certificate and spoiled it. Rather than tell her superior, she destroyed the copy. At the drivers’ licence bureau a man with a cut on his finger, a paper cut, goes awkwardly through the file with it, missing my form. I can see my draft board file accidentally stored under my first name; my social security form crumpled down in the back of the drawer; other files fallen down behind file cabinets; still others turned back to front; my insurance premium card is spindled by a stupid typist, so that it keeps fluttering through the computer, never to be retrieved.

  A mouse nests in my baptismal certificate. The burnt school. The dead doctor. The trashed university files. My letters to my parents were bundled in the attic, and after their deaths, given to a neighbour who moved away, whose kids now play a game with them, ‘mailing’ them through the slot ofa cardboard grocery box, say. One letter to a friend was delivered to the wrong address, where an inquisitive person, having read it, burned the guilty evidence and mixed the ashes with the soil in her window box. Another letter was never mailed, but fell into the lining of a suit I gave away to the Salvation Army. Someday the derelict wearing it will die, and it will be found on him by someone feeling his clothes for thousand-dollar bills. Other letters will be stolen by postal clerks, mutilated by experimental cancelling machines, somehow destroyed as pornography or Communist propaganda, none of the above.