But wow, is it ever small.
It’s not even really a mountain. It’s like … it’s like a little dung heap or something.
Okay, okay, he thinks and goes over and stands on it.
The work he does there is not the work of his masters. It is less. It is more modest; it is messier. It is small and minor.
But at least it’s his.
He sent the trained dog that is his talent off in search of a fat glorious pheasant, and it brought back the lower half of a Barbie doll.
So be it.
Better than being stalled out forever.
He’ll make a collection of lower halves of Barbie dolls and call that a book.
And the thing is: it is a book. That’s what a book is: a failed attempt that, its failure notwithstanding, is sincere and hard-worked and expunged of as much falseness as he could manage, given his limited abilities, and has thus been imbued with a sort of purity.
A book doesn’t have to do everything, I remember saying to myself back then, as a form of consolation; it just has to do something.
So, although this book is short and took seven long years to write, and is truncated and halting, and is, yes, dark and maybe even a little sick in places, I remember the years during which it was being written as some of the richest and most magical of my life, full of hope and love and aspiration and the satisfaction of, finally, making something happen.
A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room
It’s like this, and it is no dream: First off, a plastic palomino and its stiff-armed rider float above a toybox. The rider is a dyed Custer, and everything’s red. I mean boots and kerchief and holster and eyebrows even. He is one ruined and reduced cavalryman, he was poured and solidified with horribly bowed legs, simply because his only reason for existence is to straddle the palomino. Denied Comanches. But the horse and rider float and revolve anyway, on the lookout for marauders. They rotate at about a revolution a minute, as per specs. Also: a velour basketball, half the size of a real basketball, hangs mid-aired over a crib. In the closet, the arms of tiny jackets and sweaters wave and salute wildly. The threads of the carpet flatten out like grass under a helicopter, and then circular waves run outward from the middle of the room. When the waves die down, it’s just a regular carpet again. The whole cycle takes three and a half minutes. An empty rocking chair rocks faster than any mortal granny could.
Out the wide window across the room, it’s a crescent moon in bough-crook kind of thing; caramel lights through sectioned panes in houses of white wood, trees blown and slanting like smoke. Windows and doors of the houses wide open with Trust. Children breathe pillow air. Hills roll away behind the row of houses in a fairly pastoral manner. It is a kind of smooth blue Ireland. And the blue is in the room too. It is the blue of night scenes in animation. The cloak of night and all that. It is very much like the nights when little kids point at the moon and say odd things. There is the smell of very clean carpet. There is no sound of bugs and no sound of rocking chair or wind or of anything scraping the windowpane. But you can hear the air conditioning. I rub my window clean and enjoy a soft drink.
Here’s something, basically the abuse of an elderly couple. Watch: when they first step in, I’m not worried. They stand in the doorway. He pushes back his baseball cap. She goes for the camera and says, “Cry Pete, woudja lookit all this …” All is well. His hands are behind his back and he steps in, to figure out how it all works. She inspects the finish on the dresser. That she can touch. I have no problem with that. He gets closer and closer to the window (and the village of the caramel lights) and, by gar, it still looks real. It even looks real when his toes touch the crib. Which sits protectively in front of the window. But then he puts his dusty boots on the crib, and his hands on the window frame, and pulls himself up, leans in close to the pane. I cannot have that. I key the mike: “Please refrain from interaction with the components, sir!” Is that any way to talk? Still, it’s a living.
He jumps down like he’s been pinched on the inner thigh and chunks his elbow on the crib and loses his hat in the plastic birds of the mobile. He has acquired a hot and red face, with awkward strands of white hair plastered across it. They stand in the doorway for a long time. He breathes hard. They don’t want to look like they’ve cut and run.
I opt for the Juarez at the Hollo-Chick Haus. It’s a South of the Border Taste Riot. A Hollo-Chick is a kind of chicken conglomerate, the size of a football and hollowed out. You can have whatever you want in there, croutons or sweet-and-sour pork or a light salad even. The Juarez is the one filled with sour cream and refried beans and some little sliced black things. I opt for extra sauce packets.
Hollo-Chick Haus is national. Everyone knows Hans the Hollo-Chick. In the TV ads he strolls along an alpine trail, steam pouring from his beak. One enormous and multi-colored wing is draped over some kids. They look pleased. The voiceover says, “The chicken with the inside as big as all outdoors—and better tasting!”
I finish my Juarez and return the extra sauce packets to Annie, my girl. She used to work at the Haus by the storage units. But then she got transferred in. She says the food set-up is the same, but in here, atmosphere is imperative. At the counter she tells me she has to stay late. This is an Employee Objective Assessment Evening. I forgot. I hang my head and thumbprint the stainless steel counter.
Bart the Manager squeezes between Annie and the heat lamps, in the unit’s Hans suit. That really hacks me off, that squeezing. He puts his left wing on her and tells me he’ll get her home, not to worry. At least that’s what I think he says. It’s muffled through the beak. He squeezes back the way he came. I wonder how much he can feel through that suit. Annie sneaks me a free Coke and I drink it in the tunnel, on the way back to the Room. You’re nuts if you think I’m making any of this up.
˜
I shut it all down manually and come out. Everything floats slowly down and the lights come on in the room. It’s bright enough to see the paint strokes on the white furniture. The window has gone blank and looks like a movie screen, set up in someone’s living room and waiting for films of Uncle Pete’s trek across the Mojave. Overall, it feels like morning in the real room of a real kid, though it’s actually just after midnight. I vacuum the carpet and scrub the baseboards. I check the wiring in the Palomino Quadrant. I remake the bed and dust the dresser. When it’s like this, it’s easy to believe that Employee Parking is behind the window. Which it is. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve tried to grind against Annie down there, at my car. Even in her brown polyester uniform. And rust vest. And hair net. And lederhosen. I just can’t help it. I’m a man.
On the phone, Annie tells me about last night’s dream: Bart the Manager, in an ill-fitting tuxedo, picks her lock and compels her to don odd lingerie. He looks almost svelte, out of the Hans suit. He kisses her with his overly red mouth and his wispy mustache. Again and again, and with the TV on. They make popcorn, he keeps kissing her. She tastes the butter and salt on him. He tells her a pitiful story from his youth, something about his bathing trunks and a schnauzer, and persists in the kissing. She begins to warm to him. And on and on. It gets mildly kinky; some kind of strange submission scenario where he forces her, at butter-knifepoint, to carry the TV down into the parking garage and back up again. They reach new heights. “I swear, it seemed so real!” she tells me, in a tone of wonder. I tell her it’s interesting.
˜
The couple is young. Their eyes adjust to the dark and she says, “Hot Damn!” He looks around coolly and says, “Shout down Babylon.” She says, “Still, there’s something about it,” and he says, “Ay, ‘tis dreamlike, lass,” and squeezes her breasts from behind. He slinks around in front of her and faces the same way she does and takes her hands, slides them down over him. He pushes her back against the wall, beside the picture of Mother Goose in the sensitive garden. For a while I think it’s going to be okay, but then she actually opens his pants. I have my finger on the mike button but then they
move so fast and fine, there is a flurry of clothes and his buns shine globe-like in the light from the caramel village. They really start moving then, together. Above the waist she is dumplings on tramps. I do not key the mike. I do not say anything. And it is not mere voyeurism either. And it is not just the idea they are fucking, standing up, in the Floating Object Room. It is their talking. They have each other kind of by the ears and they’re staring at each other hard and bucking wildly too. And the talking never stops. There is something about a time by some train tracks. Wild geese, seen from a porch. He says he will tomb with her. But first Mexico, and all that implies. God, what are they talking about? It is a foreign tongue. I want it.
I still just stand there, even when, at the end, he reaches out with some kind of broad and calloused hand and whacks the basketball out of the air and across the room. It jangles the metal trash can in the corner, that which has never been jangled before. I let them finish. Boy do I.
He is breathing hard after, with his face down in her hair. He says, “Babylon has been shouted (gasp), in a sense …” and I hit the mike button without thinking and say, “Damn right!” For just a second they’re as stunned as the old couple and it makes my stomach hurt. But then they’re themselves again and he says come out come out wherever you are and I do, grinning like an initiate. He beats my ass from here to Topeka. He wipes my lip-blood with the velour basketball. The room is a mess.
I feel them help me up. I see the tidy, coyote-less hills of the night scene, and the trees still appearing to blow in a fictional wind. I smell her next to me, her sweat and what’s left of her perfume and the smell of them on her. He is saying some things. At first I am just waiting for the words to stop but then I start to hear them. They sound a little like an apology, or at least an explanation. He says I violated something. He says a lot of things. The words sound like instructions and then finally they sound like an invitation.
˜
We drive in a fine and maniacal desert. We drink cheap wine and mine tastes bloody. But I don’t care. We see pink stars over glaring mesas and delicate red and white mini-marts and a hitchhiker dressed like Bing Crosby. The desert is all prophets and loam and rusty gas tanks, if you see what I mean. I’m sitting between the two of them and our knees touch. He keeps calling me bud. We’re singing obscure songs I didn’t know I knew. Dusty folkloric ballads and oddball songs from the sixties, songs about unions I guess, and simple blond girls on next-door porches, freightjumpers, that kind of thing. We’re having a hell of a time. We sing them loud. We rollick.
After a while I ask to be left in the desert and they leave me in the desert. They give me a bottle of wine. I drink it on a big rock. The rock has little pits in it and a smashed Mountain Dew can. My lips hurt a lot but I keep drinking and starting up those songs. I sing them as far as I know them. The foreman said well bless my soul. Everything in the black and hacked desert is twinkling like mad and I throw red rocks like arrowheads into the dark, and sit in that desert and think, think, think.
This story was originally published in Northwest Review, Volume 24, Number 2, in 1986.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GEORGE SAUNDERS’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Story, and other publications. In 1994, his story “The 400-Pound CEO” was awarded a National Magazine Award for fiction. He lives in Rochester, New York, where he works as a geophysical engineer for an environmental company.
For
Mom, Dad, Nancy, and Jane
who taught me joy
and
Paula, Caitlin, and Alena
who completed it
Read on for an excerpt from George Saunders’s
Tenth of December
TENTH of DECEMBER
The pale boy with unfortunate Prince Valiant bangs and cublike mannerisms hulked to the mudroom closet and requisitioned Dad’s white coat. Then requisitioned the boots he’d spray-painted white. Painting the pellet gun white had been a no. That was a gift from Aunt Chloe. Every time she came over he had to haul it out so she could make a big stink about the wood grain.
Today’s assignation: walk to pond, ascertain beaver dam. Likely he would be detained. By that species that lived amongst the old rock wall. They were small but, upon emerging, assumed certain proportions. And gave chase. This was just their methodology. His aplomb threw them loops. He knew that. And reveled in it. He would turn, level the pellet gun, intone: Are you aware of the usage of this human implement?
Blam!
They were Netherworlders. Or Nethers. They had a strange bond with him. Sometimes for whole days he would just nurse their wounds. Occasionally, for a joke, he would shoot one in the butt as it fled. Who henceforth would limp for the rest of its days. Which could be as long as an additional nine million years.
Safe inside the rock wall, the shot one would go, Guys, look at my butt.
As a group, all would look at Gzeemon’s butt, exchanging sullen glances of: Gzeemon shall indeed be limping for the next nine million years, poor bloke.
Because yes: Nethers tended to talk like that guy in Mary Poppins.
Which naturally raised some mysteries as to their ultimate origin here on Earth.
Detaining him was problematic for the Nethers. He was wily. Plus could not fit through their rock-wall opening. When they tied him up and went inside to brew their special miniaturizing potion—Wham!— he would snap their antiquated rope with a move from his self-invented martial arts system, Toi Foi, a.k.a., Deadly Forearms. And place at their doorway an implacable rock of suffocation, trapping them inside.
Later, imagining them in their death throes, taking pity on them, he would come back, move the rock.
Blimey, one of them might say from withal. Thanks, guv’nor. You are indeed a worthy adversary.
Sometimes there would be torture. They would make him lie on his back looking up at the racing clouds while they tortured him in ways he could actually take. They tended to leave his teeth alone. Which was lucky. He didn’t even like to get a cleaning. They were dunderheads in that manner. They never messed with his peen and never messed with his fingernails. He’d just abide there, infuriating them with his snow angels. Sometimes, believing it their coup de grâce, not realizing he’d heard this since time in memorial from certain in-school cretins, they’d go, Wow, we didn’t even know Robin could be a boy’s name. And chortle their Nether laughs.
Today he had a feeling that the Nethers might kidnap Suzanne Bledsoe, the new girl in homeroom. She was from Montreal. He just loved the way she talked. So, apparently, did the Nethers, who planned to use her to repopulate their depleted numbers and bake various things they did not know how to bake.
All suited up now, NASA. Turning awkwardly to go out the door.
Affirmative. We have your coordinates. Be careful out there, Robin.
Whoa, cold, dang.
Duck thermometer read ten. And that was without windchill. That made it fun. That made it real. A green Nissan was parked where Poole dead-ended into the soccer field. Hopefully the owner was not some perv he would have to outwit.
Or a Nether in the human guise.
Bright, bright, blue and cold. Crunch went the snow as he crossed the soccer field. Why did cold such as this give a running guy a headache? Likely it was due to Prominent Wind-speed Velocity.
The path into the woods was as wide as one human. It seemed the Nether had indeed kidnapped Suzanne Bledsoe. Damn him! And his ilk. Judging by the single set of tracks, the Nether appeared to be carrying her. Foul cad. He’d better not be touching Suzanne inappropriately while carrying her. If so, Suzanne would no doubt be resisting with untamable fury.
This was concerning, this was very concerning.
When he caught up to them, he would say: Look, Suzanne, I know you don’t know my name, having misaddressed me as Roger that time you asked me to scoot over, but nevertheless I must confess I feel there is something to us. Do you feel the same?
Suzanne had the most amazing brown eye
s. They were wet now, with fear and sudden reality.
Stop talking to her, mate, the Nether said.
I won’t, he said. And Suzanne? Even if you don’t feel there is something to us, rest assured I will still slay this fellow and return you home. Where do you live again? Over in El Cirro? By the water tower? Those are some nice houses back there.
Yes, Suzanne said. We also have a pool. You should come over this summer. It’s cool if you swim with your shirt on. And also, yes to there being something to us. You are by far the most insightful boy in our class. Even when I take into consideration the boys I knew in Montreal, I am just like: No one can compare.
Well, that’s nice to hear, he said. Thank you for saying that. I know I’m not the thinnest.
The thing about girls? Suzanne said. Is we are more content-driven.
Will you two stop already? the Nether said. Because now is the time for your death. Deaths.
Well, now is certainly the time for somebody’s death, Robin said.
The twerpy thing was, you never really got to save anyone. Last summer there’d been a dying raccoon out here. He’d thought of lugging it home so Mom could call the vet. But up close it was too scary. Raccoons being actually bigger than they appear in cartoons. And this one looked like a potential biter. So he ran home to get it some water at least. Upon his return, he saw where the raccoon had done some apparent last-minute thrashing. That was sad. He didn’t do well with sad. There had perchance been some pre-weeping, by him, in the woods.
That just means you have a big heart, Suzanne said.
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella Page 18