The Color Over Occam

by Jonathan Thomas

  “I can hear you.”

  “I can’t help noticing you’ve organized a chronology. Would you mind telling me what the endpoint’s going to be? Whatever has some bearing on your well-being probably has as much on mine.” Castro cleared his throat like a bird of ill omen. I paid him no heed.

  Thayer snorted through his nostrils as if dispelling fumes. “How many beers did you have, gearing up to face me? Christ, I can smell them from here.” If I’d said only a couple, would he have trusted me or else his stereotypically acute blind man’s nose? “No, don’t tell me. I ought to be insulted in any case. Listen, if I’m not casting pearls before swine, I’d advise you not to drink the water, to disabuse yourself of the idea you can do anything helpful, and to top off your gas tank and pack a suitcase for a quick getaway to the next county. You won’t need me to say when.” Pronouncements verging on the oracular! Castro cleared his throat again, with the same undertone of ill omen. I ignored him, a little annoyed at getting less than I’d given on the data front.

  “Okay, professor, sorry to be overstaying my welcome, but I’d really appreciate a specific word or two about what this alien entity is like, what it wants, and what its ultimate effect around here is going to be. That is, if you’re really better informed than I am.” In my youth, I’d pretended that psychological manipulation was beneath me. Live and learn.

  Thayer stretched his neck toward what would have been a sightline over my head. “Pray indulge us, Castro.” He lowered his face toward mine again. “Castro can be zealous in enforcing my eight-thirty bedtime, allegedly for my health, but I suspect he’s in a hurry to tuck me in and enjoy several hours without me. His apartment is four doors down.”

  “You are wicked, Francis,” Castro protested. “I am in no hurry for selfish reasons.”

  “Then please, let me defend my scholarly honor from this little upstart.” Fair enough. “Now, to assuage your curiosity, item by item, unless incipient dementia trips me up. What do earthly creatures want over the long run, as a rule? To complete their life cycles and spawn more of themselves. The thing in the reservoir is no different. Beyond that, it’s parasitic, and everyone and everything that comes into contact with it is affected to an extent. But it’s a finicky parasite and has an arbitrary taste for some hosts more than others. Or if something particular does motivate its choices, we’re unable to determine what. Moreover, on certain victims it simply feeds, whereas in others you can follow the stages of its life cycle. Or did you know all this already? Maybe, to paraphrase your earlier remark, knowing it without knowing you knew it?

  “As for what the entity is like, as opposed to what it is, it’s been described as an indefinable color, a sensation of burning cold, a wave of hatred, a violation of the will. We have no scientific knowledge of what it is, and no standard of measurement to ascertain that knowledge. Hence your appeals to those in a position to deal with the danger will fare no better than if you were warning of an invasion by ghosts or elves.

  “In regard to what’s coming, well, don’t quote me because I’m descending into guesswork. In Nahum Gardner’s era, it couldn’t exploit the pervasive liquid medium of a city water supply, so its future behavior may constitute a wild card. However, considering the theoretical upshot of its life cycle, it’s ‘here to go,’ as one of your beat-generation auteurs put it, and when it does, whatever it has impregnated will go with it. On the matter of its lengthy gestation, I’m prone to speculate it left such a minuscule amount of itself behind in 1882 that only now has it matured into its migratory phase, or its homing phase perhaps. And if I were to anticipate when all hell should bust loose, my target date would coincide with the Piscids, or the Orionids at latest. Those are meteor showers, and I’ll leave you to replicate my logic. Now is there anything else, before we make Castro cross? You don’t want to do that.”

  “Francis, really, you are becoming too cranky. I am well aware you enjoy few chances to lecture any more. But you need your rest.”

  Could it be that Castro had taken umbrage at being treated like a cigar-store Indian? “All right, Dr. Thayer, one more thing. How did you meet Castro? Or would he care to fill me in a little about himself?”

  Thayer abruptly sat back, unprepared for my change of subject. “My factotum had been on the payroll of the Anthropology Department till the university discorporated. He acted as a guide and an informant in various locales. Do you wish to add more, Castro?”

  With a staccato of Oxford heels on hardwood to signal his approach, Thayer’s factotum bent close and whispered in his ear. Trying too hard all the while not to eye me like a cutthroat.

  Thayer nodded and summarily announced, “He says no.”

  I had scant cause to doubt Thayer about the foolishness of angering Castro. Stood up and said, “I hope you found out everything you were after.”

  “Likewise, I’m sure.” Thayer then went blank and mute like a mechanical fortuneteller in want of nickels. Castro escorted me through the partitioned domains of music and literature, taciturn except at the door, where he bid me “Good luck.” He sounded genuine but skeptical about my prospects and, if I weren’t overinterpreting, about the likelihood we’d ever meet again. What a relief to exit Thayer’s hothouse and shiver as my sweat beaded up in the drafty corridor.

  Down the stairs, and across the drawbridge, I was in a buoyant mood at having navigated Akeley Street and Danforth Manor hassle-free, till I was unlocking the Taurus and saw how the driver’s side from stem to stern had been keyed. A crude scar of gray undercoat, a crooked lance, to knock me off my cloud. The typical greeting for a stranger in the neighborhood—or, to flout Occam’s razor, was this a calculated display of official harassment that entailed trailing me, second-guessing my reasons for parking at that address, and choosing an especially petty means to dishearten me? Once City Hall was back on my mind, I regretted neglecting to ask Thayer if alien parasitism might include possessing bureaucrats without depriving them of their “normal” personalities. But had he considered that a stupid question, I’d only have earned more of his contempt to no good end.

  I was home before realizing that I’d been separated from the green folder, and at an absolute loss to pinpoint when, and by what sleight of hand, Castro had snagged it. Who to blame but Castro, since I was never even within a handshake of Thayer? Had the odious typescript been shredded to confetti while I was still in the building?

  17

  I was probably wrong, reading a challenge into Thayer’s low opinion of my competence in the teeth of disaster. On the other hand, I wasn’t ready to write him off as one of those overbearing father figures who always brought out the unseemly teen rebel in me. One such dad, wherever he was now, should have served for a lifetime. No idea why I repeatedly evoked him in others.

  Nor was Thayer an ally. Egregiously in it for himself, with indispensable Castro along for the ride. Thanks to me, two senior citizens, at any rate, were on the alert for portents of when to hit the road, the rest of us be damned. People were soon to die by the hundreds or thousands, and Occam might join Petra, Pompeii, and Babylon on the list of cities in perdition. Meanwhile, what was I doing to preempt mass suffering, or at least post the facts where the public could choose to accept them or not? What a paste pearl I’d have for a soul if I failed to muster even a token effort, now that Thayer had confirmed the scope of the crisis. Give him credit for that much.

  So I wrote a letter to the editor. Basic exercise in free speech. With the stipulations that unblemished honesty was bound to backfire. That I had to withhold all except my most pedestrian talking points. And that the third floor would vent further underhanded spleen at my disgruntled activism. Unlike our elected leaders, I was, without reservations, only human, and in dread of ugly reprisals, but I was marginally more in dread of submitting to the bastards, alien or not, and wallowing in craven apathy.

  Accordingly, to the tune of North Star by Philip Glass, and tapping into the creativity in a tumbler of merlot, I composed these paragraphs, a
nd e-mailed them to the anonymous recipient at letters@occamadvert.com:

  To the Editor:

  As a longtime employee at City Hall, I have become increasingly aware for some months of unresolved concerns about water quality in the Gorman County Reservoir. Although each concern, taken individually, may seem minor or open to alternative explanation, the total picture presents a more serious argument for thorough investigation in the public interest. This picture includes diseased and inedible fish in the reservoir, a die-off of vegetation immediately around the reservoir and of various crops dependent on city water, the sudden disappearance of Canada geese from the reservoir, and tragically, a sharp rise in stillbirths and infant mortality. Because standard tests for harmful chemicals and bacteria detect nothing unusual, local government is understandably reluctant to exacerbate its budgetary shortfall by embarking on expensive analyses without knowing what to look for.

  Therefore I am appealing to anyone with relevant observations, insights, resources, or expertise in scientific fields from epidemiology to chemistry. Please help identify and correct the problem in our water supply before it proves unmanageable. I can furnish documentation and other supporting materials for every above-mentioned claim, and am reachable at City Hall during normal business hours.

  If we do nothing, the impact on our lives, our community, and even the historic bricks and stones of Occam will be profound. The specter of Love Canal may be hovering closer than we care to think. This is, unfortunately, not just another idle gripe about the “Gorman taste.”

  I had so ruthlessly divested my plea of anything outré that it rang altogether false to me. All the same, I had to grit my teeth in advance of detractors who needed no affiliation with the third floor, or first-hand knowledge of my facts, to condemn them as fantastical, reckless. As hippie or eco-Nazi propaganda. That I would draw the ire of Occam’s self-appointed white corpuscles, the lifeblood of any editorial page, was a given. But worth the aggravation if even one reader, in the course of debunking me, instead hit upon irrefutable signs of alien infringement. As anyone would, on dispassionately retracing my steps. Let me save but one life, with bonus points for more lives saved in turn, and my conscience might let me off the hook. That was its best offer.

  The next few days at work persisted in their suspicious calm, as if I were skimming over still, dark waters while something big and hungry kept pace below. In that insular, deceptive tranquility, doing my job posed no hindrance to woolgathering, largely about my nascent plan for literally getting to the bottom of the reservoir’s secrets, going explosively public with them, burning bridges between me and ever working in this town again, by pulling a stunt an order of magnitude ballsier than a basic-cable broadcast or a letter to the newspaper. I might wind up under arrest, though that was a badge of honor in the realm of civil disobedience.

  The third floor’s warped, cold-blooded attitude toward everyone’s well-being, framed as fiscal responsibility, smacked of nonhuman values, even if my sidelong scrutiny of the bureaucrats had yet to yield dead giveaways of extraterrestrial traits. Mr. Big Shot Recorder of Deeds, or Edward Orne in deference to the name on his frosted-glass door, was shaping up as my best study subject. When we passed on the stairs, his selective snottier-than-thou vision consigned me to the usual invisibility, and he still reminded me of a woodchuck. Otherwise he was becoming a different, lesser person. His pumpkin-colored suit fit him loosely, as if suspended on a wire hanger. Within flapping sleeves and trouser legs, his bearing was rheumatic, almost herky-jerky. Prematurely decrepit by a decade or two. His features were indrawn as with malnutrition, and his complexion bluish and gray and riddled with pockmarks, like the kid’s at Radio Shack. But unlike that kid, he carried himself with no air of victimhood. Was he sustaining an iron sense of entitlement in spite of, or with the collusion of, arrogant cosmic parasite? In any case, he wasn’t the kind of fond acquaintance whose health I, or anyone, would choose to ask after.

  Wednesday evening, the one exception to spam in my e-mail was from an Alijah Hutchinson, so-called Content Editor at the Advertiser. Expressing perfunctory thanks for my submission. Without comment on what I had to say, but with instructions to say it in 37 fewer words, to accommodate their 200-word limit. And to tone down the sophisticated language, e.g., “exacerbated,” “epidemiology,” and “specter,” for their average readership’s eighth-grade education. None of this struck me like a bolt from the blue, though “specter” was too high-falutin’? Really? Was the Advertiser adapting to a decline in literacy or contributing to it? I could argue, or I could dilute my message just enough to make the op-ed grade and stand some slim chance of helping people. I plugged away at an abridged version for a couple of hours and attached it as a Word document to a note thanking Hutchinson for his generous advice. A show of specious gratitude, operating on the premise that hypocrisy makes the world go ’round. And now I was good to go, right?

  Even that cynically leavened optimism proved erroneous. I checked too soon for the letter Thursday and Friday in newspapers lying around City Hall. And then on Saturday and Sunday at gas station newsstands, buying a few gallons each time to excuse rifling through an Advertiser’s editorial section. Forewarned was forearmed, I rationalized, and I didn’t want to be the last man at City Hall to know when my screed had gone to press. But could I really brace myself for the third floor’s reaction? Only now was it sinking in that the orchestrators of this cover-up might not rest content with firing me, that I was still playing a game where everyone else might be playing for keeps.

  On Monday my rural gas stations were closed because it was Labor Day, and I had to shell out for a newspaper in town at the bus station. Waste of a half hour and a dollar. Good, I initially thought, I could clock in tomorrow without jitters in advance over what my employers had read today. Conversely, the delay in publishing me hadn’t seemed excessive till I had this whole idle day to dwell on it. The tentacles of conniving authority had shut down my cable TV venue. As for an inside man at the Advertiser, hadn’t some relative of the Deputy Mayor written that fluff piece about hive collapse and crop failure? Ephraim Atwood, wasn’t it? Blindsiding City Hall from any direction was assuming the aura of a pipe dream. Official displeasure, though, had been slow to ignite if Ephraim had informed on me. With mixed success, I tried adhering to the wisdom that brooding on the unforeseeable would solve nothing.

  In the morning, typical of Tuesdays at City Hall after a long weekend, a collective laissez-faire prevailed. Hence nobody batted an eyelash when my personal call during 10 o’clock break went into extra minutes on hold, before a flesh-and-blood larynx at the Advertiser answered, “City Room.” The voice sounded no more organic than the robot’s that listed menu options, but now background bustle and chatter were audible. I gave my name and explained, with imperfect candor, that Alijah Hutchinson had okayed my letter to the editor for publication, and was it slated to run on any particular day?

  “We have nothing from you.” The City Room was somewhat too quick on the uptake with that. I’d seen this coming, but it still knocked the stuffing out of me.

  “Are you positive? Alijah Hutchinson and I exchanged e-mails on Wednesday, and everything was on track at that point.”

  “Wednesday? Nope, I’m looking at what’s supposed to go in for the next ten days. Nothing by Joseph Slater.”

  “It’s Jeffrey Slater.”

  “Still nothing. If you sent it last Wednesday and it’s not going to press by next Wednesday, then it never will. No e-mails from you in the system either. Sorry.”

  I bet he was. “Well, is Alijah Hutchinson available, please?”

  “He won’t be in till tonight.”

  “I’m not speaking to Ephraim Atwood, am I?”

  “Nope. Do you want me to transfer you?”

  Oh hell no. Aloud, I demurred with hastily counterfeited tact. Proffered hollow thanks and got off the line. My ears were burning. What was that adage? Fool me twice, shame on me? Outflanked so handily again! Whether or
not the cloud of intrigue in which I labored was halfway imaginary, I was priming myself to ignore snickering from behind coworkers’ hands, mean-spirited Post-its cropping up everywhere like mildew. In fact, the impersonal hours plodded by the same as during the last two weeks. Which was cause for misgivings right there, in my overwound state of mind.

  Back home, I put on the TV to dispel the ominous vibes that had dogged me from City Hall. Frying up hash browns and a cheddar omelet in cast-iron pans mercifully compounded the distracting noise. I sat at the foot of the bed and ate, spacing out to an episode of It Takes a Thief on some retro digital channel. The clatter of washing the dishes was another calming influence, and as I plunked the last utensil into the drying rack and turned off the tap, the rear doorbell rang. Who the hell? I debated that, unproductively. From here, the swinging ’60’s chase music in the bedroom had a funneled, tinny quality. The doorbell’s subsequent silence began to convince me that the ringing was entirely in my ears, an aftereffect of running the faucet or banging cookware together. I toweled my hands dry and clutched the dishrag as if it might protect me. Peeked past the muslin curtain over the window beside the back door. Nobody. Neither on the stoop nor in the driveway. But someone had sprinkled glitter or sugar on and around my car.

  I opened and closed the door behind me in slow motion, to deaden any creaks or clicks. My skittish survey hither and yon bore out gut feeling that the area was deserted. My field of vision narrowed to the car, and all the sparkles rudely shed their implicit magic. Nothing magical here, aside from my uninvited callers’ disappearing act. Every unit of automotive glass, the windshield, the rear and side windows, even the mirror above the door handle, had been smashed into transparent imitations of baby teeth. Relatively few lay on the hood and trunk and pavement. Most were inside, on the dashboard, seats, and floor. My foolish, angry hands were striving to wring out damp dishrag, and I had to restrain them.