by Douglas Lain
“That makes about as much sense as a ten-hour clock,” I say.
“You want to do something, but what you really want is to stop yourself from thinking,” Harold says. “That woman Asket, she says she was my wife. But, she was also an artist living in Seattle, an artist’s model, a Pledien visitor, and she was your wife too. She was Virginia.”
“She was Virginia,” I say. “No. She only pretended to be Virginia.”
“Right. And now it’s time to stop pretending,” Harold says. “Be honest with yourself. You know the truth and you just don’t want to face it. Who are you Brian?” Harold asks. “Other than this word ‘I,’ other than this body standing here, and your stupid voice that is prattling on and on, who are you?”
“I…uh.”
You’re me, Brain. You’ve been saying, over and over again, that you think therefore you are. You’ve been telling all these little stories, trying to make as if you exist on your own, as if you have this history of your own and a fixed, a material, place in the world, but you don’t. You’re just me, a part of me, an extension of and a distortion of me, and I’ve been letting you run this show for too long.
“Where are your quotation marks?” I ask.
Harold tells me that he doesn’t need quotation marks anymore.no, that’s not right. I don’t need quotation marks anymore. Let’s stop this. Stop fighting this. You know what happened at the MUFON convention, you know that our identity was split. No. It’s my identity that was split, and you’re just a projection. Now it’s time for you to stop. You can stop now. There is nothing for you to do but to stop.
“I grab the control sticks for the red Rock ’Em Sock ‘Em and try to remember if there was a jingle for this toy. I know it was advertised on television, but there wasn’t a jingle just a running commentary from an off-screen announcer. The joke was the announcer was treating this kids game like a real boxing match. The announcer said something like, ‘They’re slugging it out. A left to the body, a right to the jaw, and…Pow! ZOOM! He’s knocked his block off,’” Brian says.
But, Brian Johnson is just a younger version of me. He’s who I’d like to be, in a way. He’s more approachable, younger. He’s a bit fat, fatter than I’d hoped for, but he’s less worn out and less cynical. So what if he knocked my block off? It’s just a game. And, if he’s picking up the whole toy set now, if he’s lifting it up off the table and over his head, that doesn’t matter. He can swing it down as hard as he likes. He can really let me have it right on top of my head but it won’t mat-
Everything “meta” contradicts itself. Metaphysics, for example, contradicts itself and so does metafiction. Here’s how it works or doesn’t work with metaphysics. Metaphysical theories claim to give us the tools we need in order to perceive the reality behind or underneath the universe. The claim is that we can actually see, either through reason or through some other faculty like intuition or faith, that which is by definition unseeable. That’s a contradiction.
Likewise metafictional stories claim to pull back the curtain on literature. The idea is that by making the literary conventions employed in a work obvious, by reminding the reader that he or she is, in fact, reading a made-up story with its own rules and traditions, and by demonstrating that this story can’t be said to have any relationship to the real world outside the text, metafictional stories hope to deliver a message about that outside world.
Bertolt Brecht wrote an essay about metafiction back in 1936, only he called metafiction “Chinese theatre.”
“Above all, the Chinese artist never acts as if there were a fourth wall besides the three surrounding him,” he said. “He expresses his awareness of being watched. This immediately removes one of the European stage’s characteristic illusions.”
Metafiction and Chinese acting both aim to lead the reader or audience member into a state of self-awareness, and both paradoxically rely on setting up an identification in order to make the reader or audience member think of himself, but, and this is the important bit, Brecht got it wrong when he said that the Chinese artist never acts as if there is a fourth wall. That is, it’s true that in Chinese theater the fourth wall isn’t between the artist or actor and the audience members, but that doesn’t mean there is no fourth wall at all. There is a fourth wall, but in Chinese theater both the actor and the audience are on the same side of it. Both the audience and the actors are, in a sense, on stage. In a book, both the writer and the reader are characters in the story.
In a traditional European play or novel the audience member or reader identifies. That is, the reader suspends disbelief and imagines that what he’s reading is actually his own lived experience. The reader takes leave of his or her own life and forgets himself in the process of reading. In a metafictional story, on the other hand, the reader is made aware of himself as a reader but she still identifies with a character, only the character the reader identifies with in metafiction is the author or the narrator.
Brecht aimed to create the proper amount of distance between the audience and the actor, to break the habit of identification, but what he actually achieved was an even stronger identification, one based on an abstraction. That is, what the audience identified with was the common experience of watching a play, and because it was based on this abstraction, based on the mere concept of sight or awareness, the identification was taken to be real.
Think about the words you’re reading now and the person you assume has written these words. Who am I? So far, in this story, the first-person narrator has been the character Brian Johnson. Johnson, the experimental writer whose work on UFOs and whose relationship with the Ufologist Harold Flint led him into some confusing and troubling circumstances. He’s our point-of-view character, or he was until very recently. But who am I, the person writing these words right now? Am I still that character? Or are you and I fully outside of the story at this point? Are we at least very distant from the story? How could I still be Brian now that I’ve realized, admitted, that the fourth wall doesn’t stand between us? How can I be me and also admit that I’m just a contrivance, a device? Wouldn’t it be more likely, considering everything that’s happened so far, for me to be somebody else?
14
identity crisis
Back at my brownstone Asket is gone and I’m left to examine walls that are papered over in an arts and crafts ivy vine design that I’ve never liked. Sitting on a mock Gustav Stickley chair with oversized leather cushions and an adjustable back I wonder why it is that Virginia and I ended up with such tasteful stuff. Sitting here in the late-afternoon sun, watching the shadows on the stained walnut floor grow, I look around for something that is really mine, something I can claim as reflecting my taste, and all I find is catalog and magazine stuff. We were careful about what we purchased for this place because we wanted to make a good impression.
At least that’s one explanation. The other explanation would be that this room is as blandly tasteful as it is, so vacant of real personality, because it reflects my personality all too well. What I would tell my students if I were to teach a class about this room is that the minimalism of the space, the way it is quaint but not lived in, is an indication of the impoverishment of its occupants. There is no dust here, no hidden-away corners, because everything that might be mine, everything that might be a sign of my private life, my private experience, is missing.
That’s what I’d say if I were teaching a class, but right now, in this room, all I want is to discredit this notion. If Virginia were here I could turn to her for some assurance on this, and when I find her again I’ll bring it up with her.
Sitting here alone, in this clean room with nothing hidden in the corners, I’m determined to discover something private, something that is really mine. If I can do that then I can make a plan for how to change my situation. If I can find one thing that is me, that is mine, I can start there.
But I don’t start. I don’t even think. I want to do something, to make a move, but instead I’m stuck in this arts and cra
ft–style armchair, stuck waiting for Asket to come back to me, waiting for Harold to call, for a saucer to land. Anything. Maybe what I’m really waiting for are some instructions or my next cue.
“What I am doing,” I say, “is having an identity crisis.” It’s helpful to say it out loud like that. It breaks up the flow of the text a bit. I’ll say it again.
“I am having an identity crisis.”
We left the story there for a bit, jumped out after it was suggested that I might be a projection of Harold’s ego, but that isn’t right. It can’t be. Beyond the basic problem, the physical fact of our being different people, we’re not the same in personality or type. We’re very different. There are generational differences for instance. Sure, we both of us hate popular music, but he hates the pop music of the ’60s, aiming his scorn primarily at the Brits, while I tend to despise disco.
Okay, the thing is, I haven’t had much time for music since college. Not since high school really. I’ve been focused on books, on writing, on the UFO question. I haven’t kept up on popular music nor developed a taste for music of other eras. But in high school I actually liked the music Harold hates. I liked Herman’s Hermits, Talk Talk, and that one about comic books… “Sunshine Superman.” I remember being fifteen years old, stoned out of my gourd, and listening to Donovan. I listened to popular music when I was in high school. High school.
I set off to the bedroom because there is proof there. If I’m a projection, some kind of phantom, then I’m a projection that started his freshman year at Farmington High in 1967. That can’t be, can it? If I was created in a flying saucer then I couldn’t have been on the chess team back then, and Shelly Guerin couldn’t have written her phone number in my yearbook back in June of 1971. I can picture it clearly. It has a yellow cover with a sun, it’s a simple design. The sun has arrows sticking out in all directions; it’s just an orange circle with arrows sticking out like oversized rays of light. The yearbook was called Reflections I think. No. It was called Rollcall. That’s what’s on the cover:
Rollcall ’71.
I’ve still got that yearbook, still have Shelly’s number. Maybe I’ll give her a call.
Only, I can’t find it. It’s not on any of my bookshelves. The cardboard boxes in the back closet are filled with Christmas ornaments and research papers. All I’ve got are piles of government documents. I’ve got Project Bluebook back here but no yearbook.
I’d like to call somebody. Talk to somebody who will call me by my name and behave normally, but there is nobody I trust enough even for such a simple thing. Virginia is gone, she joined the other side, and Harold doesn’t believe in me.
I could call a colleague, maybe my boss in the literature department, but what would I tell her? What excuse could I come up with? And what if she could tell that I wasn’t real? What if she noticed?
I open the Baby Boomer Edition of Trivial Pursuit in the parking garage. The trip to Toys“R”Us wasn’t very helpful. They didn’t carry anything that seemed familiar, just Troll dolls, Rockin’ Robots, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but I did find this game. I managed to get in and out of the over-lit store with the box decorated in the same yellow and blue pattern the Cub Scouts use and back to the garage in fifteen minutes, but I’m still hurried. I remove the cellophane, open the box, and spill the cards onto the asphalt immediately. Some of them landing in a small pool of oil in the space next to mine, others fluttering under the back right wheel of my Volvo, but most are still in the box. I dump these cards into the paper sack that came with my purchase, and leave the game board and the rest of the cards on the asphalt. I don’t even feel guilty about it.
This will be my own Happening. I place the bag in the passenger seat and pull a card from inside it before putting my key in the ignition. I read from the famous quotes category before I turn the engine over.
“‘Say kids, what time is it?’ Who asked this and what was the answer?”
The answer is too obvious. I’m sure that Harold knows this one. He might not have watched Howdy Doody back in the ’50s, not regularly, but even he has to know the answer to this one.
When Buffalo Bob asked “What time is it?” the answer was “Howdy Doody time.”
Turning on the radio and scanning the dial, pushing the buttons for preprogrammed selections first and finding only electric guitar noise, synthesized drum beats, advertisements for Dunkin’ Donuts, there is still nothing there for me so I turn the dial so that the needle is between station and I’m comforted by the static.
I pull out of my parking space and drive the loops ramp to street level.
There really is no way to convince myself that I am who I think I am. On my own I’m useless. On my own I’m just an in-between space. I’m living in static. I have to talk to somebody. I need help.
The flying saucer over NYU Polytechnic is a bit different from the usual hubcap-shaped vehicles with their cherry and orange light displays. This one is more aerodynamic at least in appearance, more like an egg, and there are only a few blinking white lights on the underside. I pull off Smith Street and into the University parking lot just as the hatch opens up and the escalator plank emerges.
This saucer is dedicated to science. I learn this from the brochure in what I’ll call, for lack of a better word, the lobby. A sequined man greets me as I pass through the hatch on the conveyor belt, and I’m handed the promotional material as I step onto more stationary ground.
“The Pleidiens are happy to share our technological and scientific understanding with humanity,” the man tells me. He tells me that his name, not his real name but the Earth name he’s selected, is Andy.
The exhibits on display in this saucer are all focused on aviation and, specifically, the engineering and physics involved in interstellar flight. There is a computer monitor filled with arrows and circles behind the alien tour guide, and when I look at the screen, follow the movement of the circles and arrows, the guide starts in explaining.
“This is a graphical representation of the process of energy release that we generate in our main engine. Notice that each circle has a certain polarity and flow.”
I look where his finger is pointing, see a red circle orbiting a larger yellow dot, and watch as both are followed by a green line, their path traced along the upper half of the screen.
“We reverse this polarity in order to produce the energy required for faster-than-light travel,” my guide tells me.
I shake my head at this, indicating that I’m not understanding, nor do I want to know. This Space Brother is a young man, his blond hair is neatly combed, his eyes open wide, his posture rigid but not tense. I get the feeling that he has never been sick, never suffered any deprivation at all, and I feel deflated. This isn’t going to help me either.
“Can I ask you a question?” I ask him.
“Most certainly,” he tells me.
“Who said, ‘It leads everywhere. Get out your notebook. There’s more’?”
This young man is perplexed but only for a moment. When he’s figured out my question he smiles broadly and opens his arms.
“This is a game?” he asks. “Am I right? You’re asking me to play a game?”
“Trivial Pursuit,” I tell him.
Another couple of Earthlings enter the craft, a couple of guys in polyester shirts and wearing pocket protectors. They’re both of them young too, probably the same age as the tour guide, only far less put together. One of them is rubbing his nose obsessively, sniffing and rubbing his nose with his shirtsleeve.
“Just a moment, gentlemen,” my guide says.
My guide doesn’t know the answer and just guesses that it might have been a police detective, somebody like Columbo or Magnum PI, but when I turn over the card I see that the answer is Deep Throat. Not the actual Deep Throat, but Deep Throat as performed by Hal Holbrook in the movie All the President’s Men.
“Ah, that’s right. That was about Richard Nixon and Robert Redford?”
I tell the alien that he�
�s half right, and reach for another trivia card. His wrong answer makes me feel like I’m getting somewhere. This is progress. But before I can ask him who said “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” he stops me. The alien grabs me by my shoulder.
“Mr. Johnson, isn’t there something else you want to ask me? Maybe another game to play?”
Am I an alien? A robot? A split personality? How can I know? How can I know that I am who I believe myself to be?
“No, no,” I say. “I don’t have a question at all.”
“Maybe I could ask you one?” the Pleidien asks.
“You want to pick a card?”
He doesn’t need a trivia card. The question he asks me is how I know that the world is more than five minutes old.
“What’s that?”
“It’s from your philosopher Bertrand Russell, a quite ingenious problem really. What do you think of it?”
I tell him I know the world is older than five minutes old because of the dust on the first exhibit, the thin layer of what’s probably minuscule flakes of human and alien skin on the model of a starboard engine, but this doesn’t satisfy him. He says that if the universe is five minutes old that it would include the dust, it would include the flying saucers, it would include everything. All of it could have been created in a flash five minutes ago including our memories of it, if you follow the logic, fictional past.
“Isn’t that what your friend Mr. Flint would say too? Isn’t that the whole point of his work?” the alien asks me.
I don’t answer, but fumble with my trivia card, looking at the answer, reading and rereading the name “Deep Throat.”
There has to be a plausible reason to leave.
“Mr. Johnson, calm down. I’m not going to do anything to you, but understand that there isn’t a lot of time left.”
“Not a lot of time?”