I yawned. Harrumphed wearily at extra inflow of distasteful air. Killed the TV. Too drowsy to absorb any more. Or to keep my eyes open. I wallowed onto my back. With my shoes on, and no bedclothes or pillow under me. Didn’t care. Falling asleep was a good way to shut out the odor, and as I drifted off I mused that Wil might as well stay out till morning and let me get a restorative eight hours.
What the hell? I awoke disoriented, in the stinking dark, in a cold sweat. The smell reminded me of where I was, but why I was up was harder to fathom. And much more worrisome. I lay still, with exhalation stuck in my throat. Then a plastic dog toy squealed loudly on the floor. Something was squeezing a long, shrill, bending note out of it. A foolish sound to find so unnerving! It died away, followed by a hiss of indrawn air as the hollow plastic refilled, and as the room filled with the certainty of a furtive presence. Wil would be apologizing by now if he’d tiptoed in and accidentally rousted me, and it couldn’t very well be Elsie. I reached out slowly and waved my hand to and fro till it bumped the lamp on the side table next to the sofa. My fingers brushed the cord and pulled, and I closed my eyes against the shock of brightness.
I sat up and scanned the floor in front of the bed while my blinking eyes finished adjusting. To my right, Elsie’s toy, a coiled yellow snake in porkpie hat, stood out on red and black carpet and grinned as if nothing was amiss and it had never, ever squeaked. In a filthy blue jumper, Morgan was on the move in unbabylike fashion, in deathly, unnatural silence, away from the jolly snake and toward the kitchen door. The jarring expulsion of darkness had made no overt impression. He heedlessly became entangled in jumbled undershirts and socks and used Kleenex, and just as heedlessly cast them off, as he clambered hand over hand while lolling back and forth on spasmodically twitching belly. Chinese takeout cartons and pillows and yogurt tubs he flopped onto and over like a lungfish humping along a Devonian beach. His legs dragged limply, or kicked up and down to no effect. A swimmer out of water. On litter-free floor, his progress was still laborious, like that of an insect climbing a sticky wall. I began to tremble at the understanding that this was not a baby gone exploring. He took no interest in me or anything in his path.
I was in no state to guess at what had set the body in motion. Butting nursery door open with its head must have made the noise that spoiled my sleep. Nothing but inertia was maintaining it on haphazard course to the kitchen, where it had no reason to go. It had no reason to do anything. Nobody, in human terms, was piloting that flesh. Nothing remained of Morgan but a specimen of “crawling skin syndrome,” whatever that really was.
My curtailed view of him from up on the bed counted as my one transient blessing. Only the back of his head, bobbing loosely at each exertion, showed outside of ratty blue jumper. In the stark light, through bleached-out hair fine and dry as flax, infant scalp was gray and porous like a barren moon. Or as if rot and regeneration were vying with one another. In untenable deadlock.
Then fortune frowned and Morgan’s lunging shoulder failed to clear the doorframe. Thumped into it and tried to keep going. Inertia twisted him into profile. If Morgan were the vessel of something sentient, it was well disguised. Jaw hung open as if unhinged and forgotten. Glazed, bulging eye never blinked, conveying the blank indifference of a shark. Soulless energy goaded Morgan into repeatedly nudging the doorframe till he pivoted right around and was inside the kitchen, and without pause he scuttled mechanically into the shadows. My eyes and ears strained compulsively after him. A soft bump marked his collision with wall or stove or fridge. No further sign of activity emerged, all the while I kept fixated vigil, sitting up in bed as if catatonic, eyes steadfast on the kitchen doorsill. Sense of time deserted me. I may have been staring for hours.
From somewhere faraway and irrelevant, a key jiggled in a lock. Sometime afterward, Wil was bending over me, hand floating over my shoulder, as if wary that I might react to contact as savagely as Lucinda. “Jeff? You okay? Have you been up all night? It’s 4 A.M.”
“Morgan,” I croaked, and raised a cramping arm toward the kitchen. At a loss to say or do more.
He followed my gesture casually, as if humoring me. “Was he restless? I’m sorry. You really didn’t have to concern yourself. And sorry I’m so late, but you can’t imagine all the rigamarole we had to plow through.” Why wasn’t he in more of a hurry to deal with his wayward son? Moreover, what was Wil’s very personal meaning of “restless”? The coherence to address these matters was still beyond me. Instead, I valiantly marshaled my wits to ask how Lucinda was doing.
“They’re very compassionate over there.” Uh-huh. Evasion had become second nature to hopelessly beleaguered Wil. Tending to the baby now lent him ample excuse to say nothing else about his wife. “Be right back.” He ducked into the kitchen without turning on the lights.
After a hushed, oppressive while, he bustled out with Morgan wrapped in a threadbare dishtowel, with scarcely a sliver of gray, concave cheek exposed, perhaps for Wil’s own sake as much as mine. The towel and its contents behaved as one lifeless bundle for as long as I squinted.
“Sometimes he gets restless in the middle of the night.” Apparently “restless” was Wil’s code word to help him cope with what I’d witnessed. It didn’t help me, though, and on second hearing, convinced me I’d be crossing a line of ghoulish complicity unless I said something. Let the chips finally fall where they may.
“It’s only a body, Wil. Has Morgan ever acted like a normal infant?” I was afraid of being too blunt, and of being too oblique.
“He’s not like other kids. We accept that.”
Wil’s self-deception was beginning to make my own skin crawl. “He’s dead. That’s what you have to accept. I don’t know what that so-called restlessness is about, but it’s not life. You can’t keep him here.”
That did it! Wil was bristling, but inappropriately, as if I were cutting Morgan from the Little League team, or as if Wil could bicker away the reality of his plight. “Who are you to say? Are you going to report us?”
I wasn’t, but didn’t feel I owed him either a free pass or a straight answer. Without him, I had no friends in this town, no way to keep OGAM afloat, and no long-term future for the Chronicles. I couldn’t stand idle while he sacrificed his sanity on the altar of a parenthood he hadn’t wanted in the first place. He had to snap out of it. Be himself again. “I can’t condone this. It’s unhealthy on every level in the book.”
“Whose side are you on?” Oh crap. Had I overplayed my hand already? Hard to tell without taking the full measure of Wil’s paranoia.
“You have to do the right thing on your own. Might be easier while Lucinda’s away.”
Wil reddened and pressed limp offspring tighter to his shoulder. “Fuck you! You got a goddamn lot of nerve trying to turn me against my wife and kid. I think you better go now, and don’t plan on coming back.” He stalked to the door and flung it wide and glared at me.
Game over. I was in past my depth and couldn’t have acquitted myself more competently, not against Wil’s advanced pathology. Yes, just like that, our friendship was on the rocks, and I was in shellshock. Who’d have expected the chips to fall straight to hell? We eyed each other warily as I withdrew, as if we were newly capable of inflicting bodily harm on one another without a second thought.
At my nearest approach, he leaned involuntarily away and thudded against the wall, spreading protective hands across Morgan’s swaddled, quiescent back and head. Over the threshold, I compulsively gulped relatively sweet air and braced for the door to slam an inch from my butt. To my amazement, though, after an anxious pause, Wil was entreating me from the doorway, “Do you think the water’s at the root of all this? Am I to blame for spending so much time at work out there?”
I shook my head, but without taking my eyes off the corridor’s hideous burgundy carpet. Inner turbulence, I reckoned, had briefly dredged a more lucid, pensive Wil to the choppy surface. Hemmed and hawed for some innocuous reply that his milder self could latch onto l
ike a lifeline. Too slow! The door slammed, and from the other side I heard “asshole.”
8
Poor Wil! Sometime during the groggy, spacey eon when I drove home and watched the sunrise and breakfasted and changed clothes and reported to heinous work, I realized that he, amidst Job-like trials, was now as friendless as I. Lucinda had implied as much by naming me “the only one” while begging me to post fliers for Elsie, when the Perseids were at their peak. And more was the pity, because I’d plucked a theory at long last, out of that mental fog where free associations thrived, to account for what was afflicting Occam. But I wouldn’t be sharing it with Wil, and if not him, then with whom? By the same token, he’d never enjoy due credit for delivering the final dot that formed my theoretical picture.
Like it or not, I had to be thankful for my ordeal in babysitting. Otherwise I’d have been much slower to ascertain that something was infesting organisms, blighting them, and imitating the former life within them. Something whose behavior bore no relation to that of ghosts or anything supernatural. It infiltrated hosts via water, as did some parasites and pathogens, but nothing earthly, I felt safe in saying, would reanimate a corpse. Something utterly alien it must have been, and I envisioned a disembodied force or microscopic swarm or class of matter beyond human ability to sense or measure. Ornery decades of mistrusting the reservoir would be justified if its waters had ever previously served as alien conduit. And corpse-lights fit within my scheme as eerie sign that cosmic portal was open, a portal whose opening may have been invisible without the water around it, and from which had also come toxic gray dust and rumors of haunted woods.
I jotted down these conjectures when I should have been drafting a letter to the City Council, outlining the agenda of their next meeting. A quick scan confirmed that no one was spying over my shoulder or sidelong across the room. Hurray. Not that passersby were common in this conference chamber of the mayoral suite. Gingerly I tore the sheet off the yellow lined legal pad and folded it into trouser pocket.
I was up here at the behest of Deputy Mayor Nathan Atwood. A regular guy among the stuffed shirts. Could have been my long-lost cousin or a more together version of myself. We had the same ski-jump nose and navy-blue eyes, and baseball-sized bald spot lurking in the premature gray. I shuffled Atwood’s brace of scribbled notes on various index cards and napkins, but they wouldn’t organize yet. Not till my vagrant speculations had crystallized into a plan of action. The invaders per se were impossible to detect. That didn’t mean they weren’t planting a signature, chemical or radioactive, in the water. A broader range of tests might vindicate me, along with everyone over the years who’d fussed about the “Gorman taste.” The authorities wouldn’t have to believe in aliens for them to condemn alien byproducts as a threat to public health. And if anyone in City Hall could pass for open-minded, it had to be Atwood. My best bet for an ally, and though I might have gone to Wil’s employers or numerous other departments and organizations, City Hall was where I’d need an ally, where nasty opposition had confronted me before I’d even realized I was a whistle-blower.
I scampered out to the suite’s reception area, and the sun shone dazzling on the secretary’s red-oak desk through the high, wide southern exposure. The secretary favored me with a bright smile. She projected a winsome girl-next-door charm, despite photogray lenses masking her eyes. I requested an appointment with the Deputy Mayor. To discuss some environmental concerns. She could pencil me in for fifteen minutes at 10:30 Monday morning. I said that was fine. What a delightful change from the City Collector’s grim domain!
With less divided mind, I assembled Atwood’s letter and attached it as a Word document in an e-mail where I refrained from alluding to our Monday meeting. Couldn’t finesse how to do so without coming off as fatuous. And after punching Send, the daunting prospect of making my case with Atwood, without making an ass of myself, began to sink in. I needed more substantiation. Every bit I could muster. At least enough to get him on my side, and in a position to thumb my nose at Humphrey Westcott and his overreacting ilk.
If Lucinda’s was genuinely one postpartum breakdown among many, even a rough idea of how many would be extremely helpful. The pertinent records, though, weren’t in City Hall. Not that I’d dare court Mr. Marsh’s deadpan displeasure again. The county Department of Health was down Ellery Avenue from Dyer Hall, in the rehabbed Anthropology Department of the defunct university. Out and about with Wil, we had passed the building a hundred times, such that I remembered a Division of Mental Hygiene on the white-and-gilt sign looming over narrow front lawn.
I took the calculated risk of calling from the phone beside the conference room computer. A mayoral number on the caller ID box at the other end should have bolstered my pretext of official business. I ran the gauntlet of automated menu till the extension for Mental Hygiene came up. Someone whose name I couldn’t catch eventually answered. Told her I worked for the city and was researching healthcare delivery in Occam. With particular emphasis on the well-being of women. Decided I’d be more convincing if I stuck to true statements, fibbing only to the extent of connoting a link between my statements. Could she please give me information about any rise in the number of psychiatric admissions for depression or other causes among new mothers in the last three months?
She was sorry, but facts regarding individual patients were confidential. Yes, and rightly so, I chimed in, while suspecting her of deliberately misunderstanding me. Specified that I was only interested in monthly statistics for the last quarter.
Those figures would not be available until the end of the year, she claimed. Without bothering to sound sorry. Impatient with me already, after playing dumb from the get-go. The crummy attitude that gives us civil servants a bad name! This exchange, if I were any judge of sullen vibes, was over as far as she was concerned. Might as well press on for the fun of further annoying her. Okay then, had she observed any trends informally in terms of institutionalizations? Off the record? She wasn’t rising to the bait, damn her. “What did you say your name was?”
“I didn’t.” I hung up. Her petulance had suddenly taken on a thornier edge, putting me on my guard. Making me wonder if friends in City Hall were instructing her to stonewall any OB/GYN-related questions. Or was her every interaction with the public steeped in reflex pettiness? Either way, I was already down one talking point for my presentation Monday, and had trod one slippery step on the descent into conspiracy craziness.
Fortunately, my fact-finding included a Plan B. I had yet to confirm that symptoms of invasion had spread beyond Occam. The forecast for Saturday was cool and cloudless. A preview of chilling fall, perhaps, but ideal weather to cruise the ring road around the reservoir and stop off in those other towns that shared our “haunted” water. Houghton, Hoyle, Chapman, and Armitage proved as disparate as fingerprints, with one disappointing similarity. In whatever landscape I parked and strolled, whether of Georgian mansions and belfried church around an idyllic common, or a Main Street of moribund shops and derelict mills like an Occam in miniature, or a ticky-tacky sprawl laying waste our forefathers’ pastures and cornfields, people were walking their dogs and pushing baby carriages and exhibiting no signs of the careworn or wary. Bees droned lazily in and out of hollyhocks and asters along white picket fences. The sun shone brighter everywhere, without that perpetual, subliminal filter of hometown drear, conspicuous now only in its absence. I had lunch at a blue and silver deco diner and a happy-hour pint in a backstreet bar full of tiki junk and cracked red leather upholstery. No one started a fight, or expressed the slightest bother, about the “Gorman taste,” though it was there all right. In terms of broadening the map of alien infiltration, this trip was a bust. I’d found nothing to further my cause, come Monday morning.
Not, at least, till I re-entered the Occam metro area. Traveled many crooked miles down country roads to avoid a more direct course home through tedious downtown. Filled up at a ramshackle gas station, with white tile walls and green trim. No self-servi
ce. A pocky lackadaisical youth with a Six Flags cap manned the pump, and I moseyed over to the pumpkin field beyond the blacktop apron. Gawked a minute, then whipped my head around toward the kid. He rested an elbow on the roof of the car and chewed gum with a slow, circular movement of his jaw, as if nothing was wrong. The pumpkins really didn’t like the Gorman taste. They and the vines retained mere streaks of green and orange amidst a sea of withered gray and spinning irrigation sprinklers. I fetched a digital camera out of the car and snapped a series from close-ups to panorama. I paid the kid and asked what had happened here, jerking my thumb back at the desolation. He mulled it over for three chomps on his gum and shrugged. “Sucks, don’t it? For the kids, I mean. No jack-o’-lanterns this year.” I agreed and moved on. Hadn’t banked on more incisive analysis from him.
I missed Wil’s input that night, as I reviewed the day’s findings. Felt a tad degenerate polishing off the 32 ounces of Sierra Nevada I would have split with him, but it was better than no liquid inspiration at all. He might also have disputed my musical selection of the Residents’ Duck Stab as an aid to thinking. Well, it worked for me, and that’s what had to matter from now on. My undramatic daytrip, on second thought, hadn’t been a waste of gasoline after all. The putative normality around most of the reservoir did suggest limits to alien capacity. The submerged portal apparently opened toward Occam, and whatever it disgorged was bound by momentum or something more esoteric to continue in a straight line and into the Occam water system. Alternately, the presence had arrived in insufficient numbers or amount to contaminate more than a modest area at once, till it could gain strength or reproduce. None of these speculations, of course, were intended for Atwood’s ears, or for the OGAM Chronicles.
The Color Over Occam Page 6