Variation 26. Aki Escapes
He looks out from a small chamber at the products that flail and squirm within the noise of a larger chamber. Some of the products are able to maneuver themselves so as to approach the smaller chamber and beckon him to join them. The product fears the larger chamber, but he also wishes to escape the smaller one. Eventually, he will discover a way to escape into a third chamber elsewhere. This chamber is larger than the first but smaller than the second. It makes the product feel at ease. But soon, lying down, he will imagine that he is back in the smaller chamber, looking out into the larger one at the products that flail and squirm and beckon him to join them.
Variation 27. Lauren and Steve Reconstruct
In times of sun closure after small products stored within the house are successfully relieved of consciousness, Lauren and Steve enter their chamber and, when not depleted of energy tokens, perform a binding of limbs, fingers, mouths, and genitals to attempt reconstruction of a fleshy sculpture that, in combination with a series of other binding methods, fastens their lives together, to this chamber, to the small products stored within the house. If the reconstruction is successful, Lauren and Steve will feel themselves overtaken by the sculpture and imagine the sound of hands slapping together in amazement.
Variation 28. The Binding of Hilary
In a chamber draining of light and the chirping of birds, she lowers herself onto the soft apparatus. Slowing her breath, she unhooks the memories of the day and binds herself carefully to the things that she wants. Once she is securely fastened, with her eyes shut and her head buoyed by the spongy item beneath it, suspension becomes possible: the apparatus falls away gradually and she can begin again to reconstruct sections of the sky that have been fractured or broken by the mechanisms of other chambers.
Variation 29. Michelle’s Reentry
A ringing scream pulls her back into a chamber with no light. It is her fourth reentry since the birds stopped chirping, and this time the product beside her does not move. Through the darkness she will feel her way to the other chamber and bind herself once again to the screaming product that awaits her.
Variation 30. The Chambers
In the chambers the products wait to enter another chamber.
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We are now able to offer this esteemed series, compatible with most chambers and enjoying extensive replay value. Once within or returned to its chamber, the product can be fastened comfortably, and the Variations will proceed.
The Process Is a Process All Its Own
Peter Straub
I have this thing I do because the thing reminds me of you know. You use these little deals, like the hearing-aid batteries that go into that thing deaf guys put in their shirt pockets, the thing with the wires that come out. You dump these batteries out of the pack and swish them around in three to four inches of water. Little bubbles begin to come up: in fact, little bubbles show up almost immediately. Why, I don’t know, but they do. Maybe for reasons we will get into later. The batteries rest like little machine turds down there on the bottom of your ashtray or whatever. (I use an ashtray mainly.) Then what you do is, you sniff the bubbles.
Huh.
If you push your head right down next to the water, the bubbles open up right under your nose. Which is the point here, O Unseen. They give off this strange little smell. Those bubbles from Ray-O-Vac hearing-aid batteries smell like what happens when you shove your nose right into the middle of an old dictionary, the gutter where the two pages come together, and inhale. That’s the smell you get from the bubbles out of hearing-aid batteries.
If the odor you get from the bubbles from hearing-aid batteries has anything in common with the odor you get from thrusting your nose deep into the seam of an open dictionary, particularly a dictionary of some vintage, then it cannot be inaccurate to say that the odor must be that of words. One comes across the odors of words in many, many contexts, and the odors of words are usually the same from one context to another. Only the strongest, most distinctly individuated, if that’s a word, of individuals can control the colorations of the words that pass through them.
Nothing in this situation is odd, actually, odd given that we are dealing with words. Words are produced within the medium of air, and balloons and other empty spaces that produce bubbles do so because they themselves are filled with air. Air itself must be thought to be laden with words, to be word packed, word jammed. In fact, words tumble out of every orifice, panting to be born, screaming against the resistant membrane, trying their best to … Here’s the deal. Words have plans. Ambitions. Goals. They are always trying to veer around us & zoom away. They wish to leave us in an abysmal darkness. You can think what you like about this.
Try the following experiment. Choose any old balloon you happen to see lying by the side of the path in a public park, even a balloon that may have been blown up for a child’s birthday. (But make sure it’s a balloon balloon, or you might not like the results!) When you thrust these poor old things underwater, pierce their hides with your knife, your hat pin, whatever, and then inhale the fragrance of the hazy penumbra substance that escapes into the water and bursts above it in bubble form, nine times out of ten, five out of six anyhow, there may be heard the off-key delivery of birthday songs, the chanting of inane good wishes, on top of these frequent invocations of the birthday child’s name, and distributed through all of the intermediate spaces the names of his wretched friends and, guess what, lists of the silly birthday presents given and acquired on this date. And this tired, tired smell. All this verbal information can be detected within the exhalations to be had from these semideflated pastel-colored balloons. Once you really commit to this process, pretty much the same goes for gadgets like tape recorders, typewriters, old over-under cameras, headphones, microphones, everything like that. Once they have been plunged under water and agitated crushed berated abused destroyed, one can detect beneath the more prominent odors of distressed metal, rubber, and plastic, the ambitious stench of words that once passed through these various windows.
To a casual observer, dear little friend, all of the above may seem overspecialized, in fact obsessive. I can scarcely pretend that I am a casual onlooker. To illustrate the exact nature of my function, which at the moment I am perhaps a bit reluctant to do, I might allude to the properties of another set of bubbles and the nature of the inhalations contained within, which is to say, getting at last to the point, well, one of my points, the bubbles found in blood. Blood is particularly given to the formation of bubbles. Those with the stomach to lean over bubbles of blood and inhale their messages will find that they have in the process acquired a complex detailed subtle record of the life from which that blood emerged. It is one of the most delicate and moving instances of information transmission that I can imagine. It is certainly one of the most beautiful experiences that I have ever known—the catching of the deep, particular inflections within the bubbles of blood that issue from the human throat. Voices contain smells: all human structures carry—on their backs sides bellies feet cocks pussies scalps—stinks and perfumes. We cannot escape into any goddamn odor-free realm. Any such realm should scare us right out of our you know. Odors fasten us to our common world. Rot, fragrance, bud, and bloom exude the physical aura of the process that animates them. It does not take a scientist to detect a verbal motion, a verbal smell, within the bubbles of blood of a recently deceased beast or human. There is, however, perhaps only one given my particular history who may with a reasonably good assurance of being believed claim that when words are detected within the blood of human beings they generally have an English smell. It is the odor, and I understand that what I am telling you might seem arbitrary, of fish-and-chip shops on barren High Streets, of overcooked roast beefs, of limp, glistening “chips,” of blank-eyed mackerel reeking on the departing tide, of dull seaweed and wet wool, of humid beards, of crap Virginia tobacco, of damp hair, likewise of cheap cologne and hair oil, also of flowers sold three days past
their prime in Covent Garden, also of similar flowers wilting in the hair of neglected women—all of these structures are to be detected in the bubbles that form when blood is released from any human being, cart man, prince regent, or vicious greedy poxy trollop.
Those kinds of people I was talking about before, they do not produce these English smells. With them, it’s all different, you don’t know what you’re going to hear. Fortunately they are very few in number.
Am I being fanciful? All right, perhaps I’m being fanciful. And yet what I tell you is on the nose. Most of the time, an English accent is what you get. What’s more, it’s usually a Cockney accent—turns out, words are blue-collar guys.
I don’t want you to think that I mess around smelling blood bubbles, for God’s sake. Nobody has that much time. Time is a luxury. And what human beings do with luxuries is very much their own business, thank you very much.
—T.H., June 1958
A man named Tillman Hayward wrote these words in a Hardy & Badgett leather-bound notebook, five by four inches, with pale-blue lined paper. He had purchased the notebook, along with three others like it, on sale for $9.95 at Ballantine and Scarneccia, a high-end stationery store in Columbus, Ohio. He “lived” in Columbus. His real life took place elsewhere.
Tillman Hayward, “Tilly,” did not work in Columbus. He earned his reasonably substantial salary as a property manager in Columbus, but his real work—his “work”—was done elsewhere. This separation was self-protective.
He was writing with a German-made mechanical pencil purchased for $8.99 at the same store. Faber-Castell, its manufacturer, described it as a “propelling pencil.” He liked the word “propelling”: to propel sounded madly up-to-date. A propeller-pencil. (It, the word, not the pencil, smelled a great deal of Elmer’s Glue.)
Tilly Hayward had been married for nine years to a blonde woman named Charlotte, née Sullivan. Tilly and Charlotte had produced three blonde daughters, each of them the replica of both her mother and their sisters. They looked like triplicates born in different years. These perfect girls were named Edith, Hannah, and Faith. The Hayward family lived in one of the apartment buildings owned by Charlotte’s father, Daniel Sullivan, a flinty Irish immigrant in a flat cap, who had never known a moment’s warmth or sentimentality. Tilly’s job was to oversee the properties, keep them in satisfactory condition, check out whatever new might come on the market, and to make sure the rents came in. He deployed a full range of subcontractors to deal with the tenants’ demands. With his father-in-law’s approval, Tilly also had taken it upon himself to search for other properties to add to his holdings. He had convinced his father-in-law that the city of Milwaukee, his birthplace, was an excellent location for the long-planned expansion of the Sullivan company. Six or seven times a year, sometimes way more than that, Tilly either drove, took the train, or flew to Milwaukee (the handsome General Mitchell Field, where his tricky old Dad used to take the kids to watch the planes take off and land). There, he sometimes stayed with his brother, Bobby, and Bobby’s wife, Mags, in the old brown-and-yellow duplex on West Forty-Fourth Street, where Bobby, Tilly, and their sister, Margaret (later Margot), had been born and raised. At other times, he planted himself in hotels, not always under his real name. “Jesse Unruh” and “Joe Ball” spent a few days at the Pfister, “Leslie Ervin” at the funkier, less expensive Plaza. Although Tilly appeared to be, and sometimes actually was, dedicated in his search for commercial properties, he had as yet to purchase a single one of these buildings for the Sullivan real estate empire.
It was in Milwaukee and under conditions of rigorous secrecy that Tilly’s real “work” was carried out.
Tilly Hayward was one of those men in possession of two lives. Either he was a dark, disturbing criminal sociopath who wore a more conventional person around him like a perfectly fitted suit of clothing, or he was a conventional person who within himself concealed a being like a wild animal. Tillman’s response to his duality was not simple. He wondered sometimes if he were really a person at all. Perhaps he had originated on some faraway star—or in some other, far-distant time. Often, he felt other.
Many of the words whose odors Tillman caught as they emerged reeked of death and corruption. There were some words that almost always stank of the graveyard, of death and corpses. (These were words such as happiness, fulfillment, satisfaction, pleasure, also joy.) Tillman understood that these words smelled foul because the things they referred to were false.
In Tilly’s sensitive nostrils, the word “job” often smelled like fresh vomit. People who spoke of their jobs evoked entire butcher shops filled with rotting meat. Tilly knew that if he ever permitted himself to speak in mixed company, away from his family, of the job he did for Sullivan Real Estate Holdings, the same terrible stench would attach itself to his vocabulary. Therefore, he never did speak of these matters except to his wife, who either did not notice the stinks that accompanied these words or, having grown accustomed to them during childhood, pretended that she did not. Words like sorrow, unhappiness, grief, these words that should have carried perhaps the worst stenches of all, did not actually smell so bad—more like rotting flowers than rotting meat, as though what had once been fresh about them was not so very distant. When Tilly went out in search of the people whom he dealt with as part of his real “work,” he deliberately sought women who uttered the foulest words of all. He had an unerring instinct for women whose vocabularies betrayed a deep intrinsic falsity. He often thought that other people could do the same. He thought that a kind of politeness kept other people from speaking of this power, so out of uncharacteristic politeness he himself remained silent about it. There were times when he wondered if he alone could detect the odors that clung to the spoken words, but if that were true, and the power only his, he could never figure out what to do with it. Apart from being perhaps another indication of his status as an alien from a sphere far different, the power seemed a mere frivolity: like so much else, it had no relevance beyond its own borders.
Funny thing: the word “remorse” actually smelled pretty good, on the whole. The word remorse tended to smell like wood shavings and sunburnt lawns; at its worst it smelled of anthills, or something sort of like anthills, sand dunes, Indian burial mounds. He never objected to the smell of the word remorse. In fact, rather to his surprise, Tilly tended to like it a lot. It was a pity that the word was heard so seldom in the course of ordinary conversation.
Tilly, of course, tended not to have ordinary conversations.
In October of 1958 Tilly once again found himself in Milwaukee. He had come not in pursuit of one or more of his many private obsessions, but because he had a genuine interest in a real estate property. Two years before, Tilly had acquired a real estate license. It had required considerable effort, but he managed to pass the qualifying exams on his first attempt. He wanted to be able to justify his trips out of town, especially those to Milwaukee, on commercial grounds. Now he had come to inspect a building, a four-story, mixed-use building on Welles Street. Its only problem was its single tenant: a sixty-five-year-old woman who had once worked for the mayor and for the past six years of her life had claimed to be dying from cardiomyopathy. Tilly had come to see if it might be possible to resolve this tenancy problem by means of certain efficient measures never to be revealed. Yet when he looked at it again, the building had become far less attractive—he saw the old lady, intractable, seated on her unclean old sofa, skinny arms extended as if for hundreds of feet, and chose not to negotiate in any way.
Late in the afternoon of the same day, Tilly decided to take a walk through downtown Milwaukee. He wanted to uncoil, perhaps also to allow passage into the attentive atmosphere some portion of his rabid, prancing inner self. Around the corner on Wisconsin Avenue stood the vast stone structure of the Central Milwaukee Library, and across the avenue from this big, dark building was a bookstore called Mannheim’s.
Tilly had no interest in these buildings and could imagine no circumstance that woul
d persuade him to enter either one. No sooner had he become conscious of this fact than he took note of someone, a young woman, who had no problem being in both. Through the slightly sunken and recessed front door of Mannheim’s she floated, unencumbered by handbag, not to mention doubt, fear, depression, or any other conventional female disorder—perhaps thirty yards away, and already, instantly upon her entrance into his frame, rivetingly, infuriatingly attractive.
The girl was in her midtwenties, and perhaps five and a half feet tall, with dark brown hair and long blue eyes in a decisive little face with a flexible red mouth. She wore a green cardigan sweater and a khaki skirt. Her hair had been cut unusually short, to almost the length of a boy’s hair, though no one could mistake her for a boy. He liked her suntanned fox face and her twinned immediate air of independence and intelligence. The girl glanced at him, and before continuing on displayed perhaps a flicker of rote, species-reproductive interest. (Tilly had long felt that women capable of bearing children came to all-but-instantaneous decisions about their willingness to do so with the men they met.)
She went up the stairs to the sidewalk, moved across the cement, and with a side-to-side flick of her eyes jumped down into the traffic moving north and south on busy Wisconsin Avenue. Delightful little twirls of her hands directed the cars that coursed around her, also to dismiss the few drivers who tried to flirt with her. It was like watching someone conducting an orchestra that moved around the room. She looked so valiant as she dodged through the fluid traffic. Who was this girl: her whole life long, had she never been afraid of anything? At first not entirely aware of what he was doing, Tilly began to move more quickly up the block.
Other Aliens Page 25