Acres of Perhaps

by Will Ludwigsen

  The brand name of the ammunition for the Christmass killing was Super X. I fired ten shots, leaving the boy on his back with his feet to the car and the girl on her right side and her feet to the west.

  For the more recent killing, the girl was wearing patterned slacks and I used Western ammunition. The boy was shot in the knee.

  I hadn’t planned to write my first letter until I’d developed the proper voice and taken at least twelve or thirteen victims, but I saw something extraordinary tonight and it has me thinking big things.

  A man. Just walked. On the Moon.

  I saw it right here on my mother’s awful television, as cloudy and grey as her left eye. A little man in a heavy white suit went down a ladder and he said that he was taking a small step for a man but a giant one for mankind. The news people helpfully put LIVE FROM THE MOON on the screen. I think they should have put GODDAM MOON there for good measure.

  Like the rest of my neighborhood, I went outside afterward. Some kids down the street set off firecrackers and there’s a little boy marching around in long slow strides with a bucket on his head. Their parents are sitting out in lawn chairs with beer bottles heaped at their feet, staring up into space like there’s any hope of seeing the glint of that tiny lander.

  I understand the impulse to look up, though. To wonder.

  I wonder if there will be women on the Moon someday. They’ll have to be thin and pretty of course with all of that training, the kind who don’t look twice at the wrong men. What will they wear under their suits? Will their boots have heels? Will you see their flowing hair in their helmets or the curves of their breasts under the silver fabric like in all the movies?

  I wonder who will be the first to kill one. Will it be the timid geologist who only wanted her soft warmth on his narrow metal bunk? Will it be the strapping Mission Commander whose heroic seed cannot be wasted lest it blast a hole in the LM? Or maybe it will be the man no one ever sees with the wrench in his hand and the grease under his nails.

  I wonder how he will do it. There must be lots of ways. He can pull an air hose and let her life hiss away to a sleeping silence. He can drill a hole in the side of her helmet and let the plume of her decompressing blood and brains spray in a graceful arc to the soil. If he doesn’t want to fiddle around with that, he could simply shoot her; the bullet would go a lot farther if he missed the first time. Maybe she’d be watching it with awe and disgust when the second one got her in the lady parts. That is where he’d have to aim, with all the junk wrapped around her chest where the heart hides.

  And then she’ll be there. She’ll be there forever, and as the Moon sweeps over our heads, we will know that she’s there, that there is a dead woman on the Moon, and the whole thing is nothing more than a giant glowing tombstone.

  They’ll probably catch the man who does it. Maybe they’ll have a trial for him on the Moon, make a little courtroom on the Mare Crisium, the sea of crises. If he’s smart, he’ll ask for a death by hanging, but they could just as easily put him outside to pound frantically on the reinforced portholes until he totters like a felled tree into the dust.

  We will know his name, though, and we will talk forever about why he did it.

  I used to think the perfect crime was not getting caught. I was careful with those teenagers and they didn’t even see my face, blinded as they were by my lights. I came up on them quickly and they still had their hands deep in each other’s pants and skirts, having a ball; I had a ball, too. The ones who ran didn’t get far, going down where the bullets told them to. They screamed and thrashed and moaned a little, but no one heard.

  The blue meannies will never catch me, and it wasn’t even hard. The ammunition is too common and the tire tracks too bald and smeared, and the guns I used are now broken into pieces and spread hither and yon. I didn’t know the victims. I live quietly in a distant neighborhood where the little old ladies invite me in for iced tea after I clean their gutters or patch up the front steps.

  I used to think the perfect crime was not getting caught, but watching those men tonight changed my mind.

  In a world where we have landed a flying Volkswagen on the Moon, I think we can expect more from people who die than merely crumpling in a heap, don’t you? I think we can expect more from their hunters, too.

  I am not going to the Moon. You are not going to the Moon. None of the kids I killed are going to the Moon. But now other people have and we look like a bunch of assholes, missing the toilet with our piss or forgetting to take out the trash, bussing tables at a diner or running numbers in an office.

  I will never walk on the Moon. When I am dead, my footprints will be gone.

  I used to think the perfect crime was not getting caught and killing as many people as you can, but I’ll never reach the heights of Hitler or Stalin, Johnson or Nixon. I’d hoped to be known for the quality of my hunt—the drama and beauty, not to mention my own untouchable safety—instead of the quantity.

  But right now, every wakeful eye on Earth is pointed in the same direction, toward the silver island in the dark, and what I’m learning is that an achievement is not an achievement if no one sees it.

  The perfect crime is being seen going 240,000 miles farther than anyone else ever has.

  This is my Moon. I shall walk in ways men have never walked and kill in ways they have never killed, and I shall tell you all about it so you can tell the world what heights we have finally reached.

  I shall strike with such terror that my victims will only fully know life at the very end, not just teenagers but adults and maybe some kiddies, too. I shall build death machines in an antiseptic room for my mission, flashlight gun sights and remote-trigger bombs, a black hooded spacesuit to recycle the tang of my own breath. I shall write ciphers that only computers can decode. I was going to write beautiful eloquent letters like a gentleman hunter, but now my words will froth on the page in ways that are not exactly mine.

  I shall take my name from the eternally watching heavens, but I will not give it to you yet.

  This is my Moon landing, and it will take your own room full of men in narrow black ties and horn-rimmed glasses to catch me. I will shift and wobble in parallax with the stars, not quite myself when I kill or when I write. And even if you do, it is enough to get to the Moon; coming back can only be disappointing.

  This isn’t the right letter to send first, I see that now. There is too much of me in it, too much truth, and that’s no way to start a mystery. Much better for you to think that I’m insane, barely in control, my letters slashed on the page like knife strokes instead of neatly typed through 3 layers of carbon.

  What I shall do instead is fold this neatly into a sealed black metal box and bury it so deep that only the ones who come after us can find it. They will live in the world we make, one that much more vivid and artistic, and they’ll want to know who to thank when they send back an expedition from their gleaming bubbled cities in space.

  We are now the kind of people who can walk on the Moon, but I am the kind who can kill there. All it takes is one small step.

  S1E5: “SINGING EACH TO EACH”

  Air Date: November 9, 1961

  Writer: David Findley

  Director: Tim Jokannsen

  Synopsis: Recent widower Paul Hansen (played with tragic schlubiness by Norman Westfield) gets up from his desk at a dead-end accounting job and starts to walk with no apparent direction in mind. He wanders through the city, peering forlornly into windows and removing his oppressive suit a little at a time—leaving a hat in the park and his jacket on a fence and his tie in the gutter.

  Near sunset, he finds himself at the farthest edge of a jetty. There, after gazing at the sea, he begins to remove his shoes, ready to commit suicide.

  Before Paul can leap from the rocks, a beautiful mermaid bobs to the surface nearby. The mermaid (portrayed by Ginger Quinn, tragically dead herself from suicide less than three years later) soothes him with talk of a wondrous world beneath the sea full of hope and beauty
and peace. He chooses not to kill himself and returns each day to talk. They clearly fall in love, and on his third visit, she offers to take him away with her. He doesn’t hesitate, climbing down the rocks and within her reach. She takes him by the hand and pulls him into the water where she drowns him.

  As his body floats face down on the surface, she emerges from the water and clearly has two normal human legs instead of a tail. She wraps a towel around herself and walks to shore along the jetty.

  Commentary: “Singing Each to Each” marks the first of David Findley’s stories to appear onscreen and, not coincidentally, the first to receive a horrified memo from the studio to Hugh Kline. Though the original memo no longer exists, Kline later told fan audiences that the studio objected less to the theme of the episode—which was, after all, a sharp recrimination of dreaming of escape from capitalist society—and more to Quinn’s obvious demented glee in her role.

  “It wasn’t entirely her fault,” Kline later explained. “She had this inborn smile that spread about two-thirds of the way around her head like a shark’s, and by then she was so high on amphetamines most of the time she probably brushed her teeth like she was choking some poor guy to death.”

  Six days before her overdose, Ginger Quinn dragged a blood-soaked mattress to the front curb of her Malibu mansion. The source of the blood, a considerable amount, was never publicly disclosed by the LAPD.

  THE LEANING LINCOLN

  When I was ten years old, almost all my friends were four inches tall. They drove tanks and piloted spaceships. They rode in my pockets and made camp under napkin tents on restaurant tables. They whispered their emergency plans to me, what we’d do in a fire or a hurricane or a nuclear attack. And at night, they stood on my bookshelves aiming their tiny rifles at the bedroom door, ready for when my father would come thundering in.

  He made no secret of hating Star Wars and G.I. Joe—he made no secret of any of the things he hated—and he’d clearly hoped that I’d come from my mother’s womb ready to ogle girls and scheme over beers with him. He had no idea why little plastic people were so important to me and I think he woke up almost every morning quietly hoping it would be the day they no longer were, the day when I’d finally grow up and understand as he did that the world was grim and brutal and largely run by assholes.

  I did grow up, and I did learn that, and it wasn’t my father who taught me but a tiny cursed lead figure of Abraham Lincoln. Unlike my father, though, he taught me what to do about it.

  The Leaning Lincoln was a gift from Henry Butler, a man my father met at the gun range.

  Henry had been let go as a night janitor at the hospital, and my father’s bookstore had been hemorrhaging customers since Christmas to a big box store where the owner didn’t tell retirees balking at prices that “it’s not the goddamned Depression anymore.” Henry helped my dad sight a .22 Remington and my dad spun his usual stories about the coming invasion by the Soviets, and thus a friendship was forged.

  When they weren’t out shooting watermelons and spray paint cans, they were shooting the shit on our dock by the creek with a heap of beer cans growing between them. That was fine by me; I came to look forward to hearing Henry’s tired green Chevy pulling into our gravel driveway.

  For one thing, it meant an afternoon when my mother and I weren’t going to feel blood pouring down the back of our sinuses after a smack for saying or doing something stupid. For another, Henry loved the things I did but my father hated, like ghost stories and comic books. He had more Atari cartridges than I did and wasn’t stingy about trading them. He gave me his old dog-eared fantasy paperbacks, introducing me to Elric and Conan.

  Henry could show up at our house with anything from a Confederate cavalry sword to a dinner of Kentucky Fried Chicken, but one afternoon he arrived with a large flat wooden box that seemed to take both hands to carry.

  “Hey, look at this, Scotty,” my father cried, steering me to the patio table by the shoulders. He had a way of making even something cool seem threatening.

  Henry opened the box and started setting up small lead figures, soldiers from the Civil War. There were riflemen marching, cavalrymen with sabers raised, snipers taking aim, cannon loaders with those sticks they use to tamp the gunpowder. There were three or four dozen.

  “See, Scotty?” Dad pointed. “You know how I always tell you to keep your eyes open for opportunities?”

  Boy, did I. If I didn’t come home from a bike ride with a box of nails or some plywood from a construction site, he’d send me out again. He called “scrounging” a valuable post-apocalyptic skill.

  He nudged me. “Free lead. You can’t beat that, right?”

  A few weeks earlier, Henry and my father had taken me clamming in a cove off Palmetto Bay. My job was to fill one bucket with clams while my old man filled another with his empty beer bottles. When we were wading in toward shore at the end of the day, Dad had spied something large and square in the sand. We dug up an ingot of solid lead, about eighteen inches on the long side and a foot on the short. There was a stamped seal on top with words we couldn’t make out.

  I knew from Indiana Jones where things like that were supposed to go. “It belongs in a museum,” I said.

  “It’s lead, for Christ’s sake,” Dad muttered, helping Henry load it into the truck. “When opportunity knocks, you don’t check its fingernails, you know what I’m sayin’?”

  I couldn’t imagine how lead could be an opportunity, but Henry could. He liked working with metal, and he annoyed the neighbors from a workshop behind his mother’s house at all hours with the sounds of grinding and tapping. He must have found some molds for the soldiers.

  “Look at that,” my father said, picking up an Abraham Lincoln figure by his fingertips. “The ol’ Emancipator himself. Don’t remember him doing much fighting.”

  “That one didn’t turn out right,” Henry said.

  My father set the figure on the table and it leaned dangerously forward.

  “Kind of looming, isn’t he?”

  “The legs cooled too fast and contracted,” Henry said. Then, brightening, he handed the Lincoln to me. “You want him, Scott?”

  I glanced at my father for a sign of his displeasure, but he didn’t show any. Maybe it was because the figure was of a real historical thing instead of “that stupid science fiction shit,” or maybe it was because it was made of manly lead instead of boyish plastic. More likely, even my old man didn’t often dare look like an asshole in front of Henry. Whatever the reason, a cool little guy was a cool little guy, so I took it and thanked Henry.

  What a miserable mistake that turned out to be.

  Like Tutankhamen’s curse on Carter and Carnarvon, the dread vengeance of that lead ingot came swiftly.

  When I put it in my pocket, the small outline of the sixteenth president would always stain through, a tiny exclamation point with a top hat as the dot. When I held it in my hand, it itched and left greasy gray smudges on my skin. When I set it on my dresser or a bookcase, it had a way of tumbling to the floor and finding its way under someone’s bare foot, usually mine or my father’s.

  The Leaning Lincoln’s first real victim—an injury, thank God, not a fatality—was Mrs. Catanza’s dog Chester, who I hit with my bike while scratching one of those smudges. She’d let him out for his afternoon dump, and I didn’t see him galloping towards me down Blackburn Road. Looking up too late, I wobbled to one side, but it was too late to avoid him. The front tire got him in the side and he yelped like he’d been shot.

  I screamed, lost my hold on the handlebars, and then tumbled headlong into Mrs. Catanza’s rose bushes where it was my turn to yelp. She waddled over to shout at me, taking poor Chester in her arms to soothe while I crawled out of the thorns. All her hollering brought my dad out, cigarette pinched in his lips.

  Without saying anything to me or Mrs. Catanza, he picked up my bike, carried it back to the garage, and hung it in the rafters. That was the gentlest way he’d ever grounded me, probably because
a neighbor was around.

  Over a week, the Leaning Lincoln burrowed a hole in my pocket and burned out the vacuum cleaner motor when it got stuck in the rolling brush. It slowed my watch and made me two hours late for dinner so my mom almost called the cops to find me, earning me a smack from my father after they were gone. It destroyed a load of whites in the dryer with indelible smears of silver. It fell into Bee Gee’s water bowl and he whimpered all day with diarrhea until I found it.

  It’s easy now to see all that as coincidence, but I was a superstitious kid, all confused by cause and effect because in my house, the usual rules between the two didn’t apply. What I knew was what I’d read in Henry’s copy of The Lord of the Rings: certain awful objects could ruin lives and had to be gotten rid of, preferably with a fellowship. So I asked Melanie to help me.

  During the school year, Melanie sat behind me in my classes, but I would never have known how cool she was until we started hanging out over the summers. She was also the kind of freak who read books on ghosts and Bigfoot, though I was the kind of freak who took them way more seriously.

  Melanie had grown less interested in adventures, but she didn’t reject the curse hypothesis when I told her. Her solution was just a little too...simple.

  “Throw it away,” she said as we walked through the woods between our houses. “Why would you keep it in the first place?”

  “We can’t do that,” I said. “The garbage truck has a long way to go to the dump, and God knows what the Lincoln could do. Roll the truck over? Cut off someone’s arm in the compactor?”

  “Okay,” she said. “Bury it out here, then.”

  “But then we couldn’t use the woods anymore. It’d corrupt the trees or something, leach into the soil.”