Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story

by Lorin Stein

  And Jack, in the rationality that puts us in mind of meaningless philosophical puzzle, refuses this most basic hospitality and believes himself justified.

  Norman Rush

  Lying Presences

  Jack liked his office and it was all right to like your office. He would say that basically it worked. It was nicely enigmatic. All the tools of his trade, his papers and portfolios, were kept out of sight in a block of chrome-plated file cabinets with unlabeled drawers. He liked one thing on his desk at a time. The only way somebody uninitiated might guess he was an agent for illustrators of children’s books was through the painting on the wall behind him of a pig in armor.

  The walls were a naïve yellow. At eight floors up, he was the right distance from the sounds of the street. His window looked across onto the fluted blank raw cement wall of a telephone switching center, which in his opinion conveyed a faintly Romanesque feeling that was congruent. He might concede some disappointment in the way his custom desk had worked out. It was supposed to suggest an obsidian cube, but the joins in the black plastic slabs could be detected. The flooring, black rubber tile in a raised dot pattern, heavily underpadded, was a definite success. He bounced his heels on it a little before attending to finishing his lunch.

  What he wanted to know was why you had to be some kind of expert to unwrap these little foilbound wedges of Gruyère without getting cheese under your fingernails. Skinning garlic cloves was a similar thing.

  Business had been good in this office. Maybe the subtle playroom associations made clients regress. It was an idea. He was scraping rusk crumbs into his palm with an index card when he heard something in the outer office. Afraid, he listened.

  *

  It was his brother.

  Perfect. Just what he needed at this point. He felt indescribable. It was unfair. Showing up unannounced when he was supposed to be living happily ever after on the other side of the country was vintage Roy. All Jack wanted to know was who was to blame. Helen was, for leaving the office door open when she went to lunch. She was going to suffer. Jack made himself smile at Roy, credibly he thought. He got up. He held his palms up, showing a good-natured surrender to fate. Roy came over and they shook hands. They said each other’s names.

  Roy was about the same as three years ago. As usual and like their father he had something on his mind, as his expression was making abundantly clear. Roy was acting bloody but unbowed. Actually, that was Roy’s main facial expression. Except that it was interesting that Roy was afraid of something. Roy had lost weight, some. But he was the same grim proletarian persona as always, with his cheap Coast Guard surplus raincoat, short haircut, foreman clothes, no tie, shirt buttoned to the throat. Roy was taking off his raincoat. Jack considered giving Roy the proletarian a tip. In Roy’s shirt pocket the tops of four ballpoint pens showed, and more than one pen showing was like a full-page ad for insecurity. But why should he tell Roy anything?

  Roy went to look for a chair in the outer office. Everything about their grim father was coming back. It was okay to drink Benedictine because the Benedictines were okay, but no Chartreuse, ever, because there was something bad about the Carthusians. You were supposed to shun anyone who bought a Volkswagen because of slave labor, and this was as late as the sixties. People who visited Spain before Casals went back were lepers. Their father had been a basement inventor. He had invented a dispenser cap, called Metercap, for toothpaste, that would measure out a generous average dose and thus cut down waste. The company that bought it suppressed the invention. Waste was the enemy of mankind. The company was criminal. Property was theft and so on into the night. Roy was against waste.

  Roy was back, carrying a heavy pedestal chair that wasn’t meant to be moved. He positioned it off the right corner of Jack’s desk. He folded his raincoat scientifically into a pad and sat on it. Was the idea that sitting on it would somehow press it by body heat? Anything was possible.

  Why was Roy here? Jack was trying to come up with a benign reason and getting nothing. Everything was settled between them, supposedly. Three years ago Roy had left for Phoenix taking his half of an inheritance that was not immense but not nothing, either. Roy had made his own bed, with a vengeance. Jack had argued the insanity of what Roy was doing, going out to be the executive secretary of some bizarre foundation having to do with flying saucer research. Roy was supposed to get perpetual room and board and subsistence, like an annuity, in exchange for his twenty-nine thousand. For a year newsletters from Roy’s foundation had come, all of which Jack had returned unopened, marking them Of No Interest/Return To Sender in black block letters that left nothing to the imagination vis-à-vis his contempt for the whole thing. Now this. And typically Roy had no reaction whatever to the office.

  *

  Naturally it developed that what Roy wanted from him was amazing.

  Jack recapitulated, working to keep his tone unmocking, “Now see if I have this straight. What you say is I’m supposed to take you into the house, you live with us, for two or three months. And I do it without asking why or getting any reason for it from you that I can give to Judith. We just take you in. Like that. On my say so to Judith, just like that.”

  “That’s what I’m asking.” Roy was never apologetic. Probably that was admirable.

  Jack said, “And just nothing, no personal history for my benefit on this? Whether you’re in trouble or on the run or something like that? Well, look. A few years ago you did something I took exception to, would be putting it mildly. Now here you are. I mean, Roy, there was money involved if you recall. And what I pick up in all this is I’m out of line if I even speculate about what’s happened. I take it the money is gone, somehow?”

  Roy was a baritone. “Jack, I told you. I’m not asking for money. I need, and all I need, and for about two months maximum, is housing with you and Judy. I just need that. I don’t plan to eat meals with you. What I wish is you’d accept it when I tell you I’m doing you a favor not telling you any details on this. And please, there is no legal angle on this! I guarantee if you just do this for me, just do it and don’t question me, there’s no disadvantage. Really.”

  “But Roy, why do I get the feeling … how can I put this … you’re doing me a favor even asking me to do this for you, to put myself out, which is what it is? Why do I feel that?”

  A silence resulted.

  *

  Jack said, “I don’t think you grasp the position you put me in. Suppose we say this, though. First of all, you’re my brother. Now suppose I say okay, you can stay with us, just so you give me some explanation of what’s going on. Is that a lot to ask? I mean, considering I’m the one who has to carry this off with Judith? By the way, she wants to be called Judith instead of Judy. It’s important. Professional thing.”

  Roy, still unreadable, said, “It sounds like what you’re saying is to make something up.”

  “Roy, hey, don’t do this. I’m telling you something that isn’t so complicated. I need some explanation. I need something I can give Judith. If you knew anything about our relationship you’d know that at this point I can’t just ask her to do something on faith or because she’s my wife.”

  Roy looked thoughtful. “If I tell you something fairly fantastic, I wonder if you’ll make a big judgment on it?”

  “I’m trying to get through to you the position I’m in. It would really be smarter of you not to try and put me in a box. By the way, what about your bags? You must have more than that flight bag.”

  “In a locker at the station.”

  Roy rose, still thinking. Jack looked at his watch.

  “Okay,” Roy said.

  Jack was unsure what that meant.

  “I’ll be back,” Roy said.

  “Could you make it around four, since I have to see a couple of people this afternoon? Four-thirty would be even better.”

  Roy nodded and left.

  *

  Jack was brilliantly spending the afternoon obsessing on causes. He knew it was pointless.
It went back to their father and the feeling of being put down if you weren’t sacrificing yourself for some reform or at the very least living on the exact amount of money and food it actually required to sustain you so that if you were doing nothing else in life you were avoiding waste. When he thought of the trial and anguish it had taken him just to get minimally free of that, it was pathetic. And, of course, no one ever raised the question of how much time anybody should devote to a cause aimed against a thing doomed to come to a natural end on its own whether you spent your life going to meetings over it or not. For example surely just the ratios of reproduction between eighteen million blacks and four million whites meant you could perfectly safely let apartheid lapse its way out of existence. Or people who belonged to the English Speaking Union, speaking of wasting your life promoting a sure thing. Who ever raised the question of how many people were actually doing cause work just for the opportunity it offers to display how much contempt they have for people who have to work for money, or actually want to work for money? Also why did Roy’s flying saucer movement, if that was the right word for it, qualify as any kind of cause? So what if space civilizations were sending spaceships down. People seemed to accept flying saucers anyway, as a kind of strange fact of life, so what was the point in organizing around it?

  Roy’s luggage was going to be humiliating. It was almost a sufficient reason in itself for sending Helen home early. It was impossible. How would he get Judith to be unsarcastic about Roy’s ongoing one-man war on waste? Clothes would be an issue. If you spent money on clothes for anything with a little style you were decadent. I.e. you could find perfectly good secondhand clothes if you knew where to look. You could buy surplus or factory seconds or best of all make your own out of sacking. Probably Roy would show up with luggage that was somehow handmade. You should be examined for not buying day-old bread. Everyone should buy dented cans. Also there was a correct way to do all these things, which was just to do them and not be perceived as spending a lot of mental time on avoiding being duped. Water was the only thing to drink. Also it was free. The point of Roy’s carrying around a change purse full of nuts and raisins was to avoid being duped into going into restaurants on impulse and wasting money, or if you did, you popped down some nuts and you’d order less. And by the way it was desirable to randomly skip meals because in the state of nature wasn’t it obvious nobody was eating three meals a day? If you kept your belly full you were suppressing certain survival mechanisms, as he recalled it. Salt was a better dentifrice than toothpaste. Or was that their father? But then why invent a toothpaste cap? Salt had to be Roy.

  Jack did some deep-breathing exercises to calm down. Of course Roy would never say anything about salt. You’d just have him wandering around the kitchen in the morning with a toothbrush, saying could he trouble you for some salt? And the salt would be in plain sight.

  *

  Jack heard the outer door open and close and bags being dropped. It was late enough that he could have assumed Roy wasn’t coming. He could have gotten out ten minutes earlier, locking up and going. Roy was sensitive and might have decided to go away for good. Roy came in, rolling the pedestal chair on its base-rim this time. Suppose they’d met in the elevator? This was better. He was prepared.

  He was not going to be intimidated. Or made to do something that was anything but in his interest and Judith’s. That was his stance, period. Things cost money. He had the right to remind himself that things cost money, and, for example, nobody was going to chip in to pay Helen for the afternoon off Roy’s arrival had forced him to give her.

  It was getting dark out. The not altogether satisfactory ceiling lights were on. The office wasn’t engineered for night work. He was not somebody who needed to work late. He thought of their mother standing at the head of the basement steps moaning down at their father to come to bed.

  It was on Roy to begin.

  Roy sat down, but was uncomfortable. He got up and went to lean against the wall beside the door, his hands in his pockets, his gaze directed upward at the wall behind Jack. Jack hoped Roy would curb his tendency to talk prolish—like a proletarian, Jack’s private term for it—a tendency that manifested when Roy was discussing some subject he considered significant.

  *

  “Okay, I’ll just start this the best I can.

  “Something I never told anybody is important.

  “You’re too young to remember when Niles died. He was my favorite of all the uncles, somebody I really loved. Anyway, at the cemetery I was really upset and when they started lowering the coffin I just couldn’t handle it. I walked away. Ran away down a path, just trying to get out of sight of what was happening. I was nine, about.

  “I didn’t go very far, not more than five minutes away through some trees and out to a place that overlooked a creek and two small hills with a gap between them. This was bright ten or eleven o’clock in the morning with absolutely clear skies.

  “So I’m standing there all in turmoil when up in the sky I see something absolutely terrifying. It just floated across between the two hills. I’m telling you I can still feel the fear, just talking about it. What I saw was a metal thing that was painted, or rather colored black. What it looked most like was a clamshell or an open umbrella without the handle and made out of metal: you could see the rivets down along the ribs. It was about the size of a car. I saw it I’d say for about three full minutes. It was absolutely silent. I was terrified. The thing was real. I felt the thing had some ominous connection with Niles being dead. I saw every detail. It had no windows. I closed my eyes to see if it would still be there when I opened them. I looked at it with one eye closed. Looked at it through my fingers. It was real. I knew it was evil. My state of terror was just something inexpressible. Anyway, I got out of there, ran the hell back. That was all. I made myself forget about it. This was 1942. Of course I never told anybody. You know the atmosphere in the family. When I thought about it later, I mean as an adult, I wondered if there was some story or fairy tale or something about a box or device that comes to collect souls that maybe I knew of. But there was nothing I could associate it with. And the thing was real. Physical.”

  Roy closed his eyes briefly.

  “So just let that incident stay in the background for a while.”

  Jack said, “This hallucination.”

  “Right. Just what I assumed it was myself, when I got older. Let it be in the background.

  “Now as to me and the Society. I’m out of it. Actually, I was expelled. The money’s gone.

  “What happened is simple. I won’t bore you with all the stages and vicissitudes, but what happened is I reached a conclusion about flying saucers that nobody in the Society could deal with, about what they really are.

  “One thing led to another and my position got untenable.” Roy shrugged.

  Jack wondered when Roy’s yes-yeah copula was going to show up. Yes was what Roy felt comfortable saying, but yeah was what he thought he really ought to be saying, being a man of the people. So he would say yes (yeah), with a slight diminuendo on the yeah. Stress would do it. Jack wondered whether the fact that nobody really changes was encouraging or tragic.

  Roy was ready to go on. “First you have to know the Society’s line, which used to be my line, no question, which is that saucers are real and they’re extraterrestrial. The term for it is ETH, extraterrestrial hypothesis, in case you care. The Society is the Vatican of ETHism. Anyway, the saucers are pieces of advanced technology from some other planetary system, you can prove their existence by radar returns and so on and there’s other physical evidence we won’t go into, blah blah blah. So okay.”

  Roy tucked his shirt in more neatly all around. “But here and there a few people began to wonder. For instance, you start studying the close encounter cases where witnesses report occupants in and around a landed saucer. It makes no sense. You never get two encounters with beings who look like they come from the same planet. Your occupant reports run all the way from giants to midg
ets, no eyes, no mouths, Greek god types, robots, spacesuits, tunics, cat eyes, triangular faces, no ears, pointed ears, flippers instead of hands, webbed hands, you name it. Now take a look at craft descriptions. Another circus! Large, small, transparent, globular, cigar-shaped, mother ships, baby ships, cylindrical, lenticular, they divide in two, they turn into clouds … and on and on and on.

  “So the ETHists have a slight problem. You have to start rejecting reports that don’t fit. You have to start calling certain people liars while other people whose stories are just as good are not liars.

  “Now take a look at something else interesting: the phenomenon appears to be getting more vigorous and exotic over time. Saucer sightings started out as primarily visual arm’s length kinds of things. Then you start getting some fairly trivial side effects like broken tree branches and holes in the ground. Then it turns out the saucers can blank out electrical systems in cars. Then in about the sixties you start getting abduction reports, usually with some gruesome physical examination by the aliens thrown in. Or there may be some suggestion the aliens are into collecting sperm or ova or something similarly menacing. They induce amnesia and it sometimes takes hypnosis to even get at what happened. Then beginning in the seventies you get farmers finding their cattle mutilated, dead, all their blood drained out and various body parts excised by laser, it looks like. And the cattle are lying in fields with no tracks on the ground. And people are reporting seeing lights in the sky. So what is this all about?”

  Jack said, knowing it was the wrong thing to say, “The first thing I’d do if I decided to go into this would be invest in a good lie detector.”

  “Jack, let’s try and proceed straight through this. One problem is, you don’t know the literature. I guess what I’m saying is take my word for it that once you screen out all the liars you still have something vast going on. For the sake of argument can we assume some real things are happening to people who are for the most part reporting them in good faith, or not? I mean, I’m a case in point. I had an experience of a real thing and I can swear to God to you it was absolutely real, real in the same exact sense as brushing your teeth.”