The beautiful alien angled the bar and sliced it upward through the air. Mark’s right hand jerked slightly, fingers rising, hand pulled upward and hinged at the wrist, the lower arm still as if sewn to the mattress. Mark’s head rolled slightly toward Jim as if in reaction to that hand, but his features remained slack.
Jim thought of a marionette, his son dancing off the bed and hitting the floor with a crash of broken parts, his head lolling on a loose-jointed neck. “Stop!” She turned and her eyes took him in. The blue wash in her eyes was so heavy her pupils were almost obscured. “Please. Stop,” he said.
“Very well,” she said. “This need not be done just now.”
“What’s the point?” Jim found he had to look away from the terrible, wonderful blueness of her eyes.
“Perhaps you should not watch.”
“If it’s going to be done, I need to watch.” Jim stared at Mark’s body. Once she had removed the bar, it held no more life than the mattress.
“Something may come of this,” she said. She had moved closer. Jim looked down into the ever open eyes. They looked into him as no other eyes could. He found himself searching their surfaces.
“What’s going to come of this?” he whispered.
She found his hand. The sensation of her fingers wrapped around his own, guiding, controlling, was strange, but he could not look away from her face. She took him to her room.
*
“What is it you are looking for?” she asked softly.
He didn’t know what to say. It was a true question; he was looking for something. But he had no words for it. As if to mine for the word, to draw it out of him, she reached up and wrapped her narrow arms around his neck, pulled herself up to him, and placed her mouth over his. It wasn’t a kiss exactly, at least not like any kiss he had ever had. She simply held her lips against his, as if to allow breath and saliva to be exchanged, to become acclimated one to the other, to become chemically compatible.
He tried to move his lips against hers, to rub and work his way into some sort of kiss he was accustomed to, but her lips would not budge. Then he tried to close his mouth, but her lips prevented that as well. Her lips had muscle, were capable of more tension than human lips, and when she began moving them up his face toward his eyes he was finally able to pull his head away from her. He could see that the dark lipstick she wore was simply human camouflage, obscuring the additional lines demarking the various muscles of her lips. Then she pulled him back to her lips, and he could not free himself from their strength again.
When she reached his eyes it was as if her lips extended to gain better purchase, as she sucked and tasted his eyes, so vigorously he thought she might draw them completely out of their sockets, but somewhere short of pain, where an exquisite pleasure still hides. In the grip of her lips his vision was of liquid landscapes, his flesh melting to join her flesh, Alicia’s flesh, the last decaying vestiges of his son’s flesh.
“Noooo …” he tried to speak, but it came out a moan of pleasure. He could feel his body becoming alien, with its need to flow.
She ran her strong, smooth fingers down his chest, finding the soft strips between the ribs, the pockets lower down where fat had gathered to shield the pains in his belly. He could feel places opening up all along her surface, mouths opening up to taste him, smell him, to test his flesh with minute amounts of glandular secretions, heat sweat, tears. Inside his skull the closed flower of the brain stem began to bloom.
His thighs spread and peeled apart. Wounds gathered over his intestines and multiplied, revealing the pockets beneath his rib cage. His mouth tasted of melons, then of melted steel.
He saw the blue white crescents smiling under Mark’s eyes, and imagined his own eyes the same. He saw Mark’s arms flopping like something wounded, Mark’s body falling, separating into meat. His tears seemed to run backwards, etching trails as they made their way down his throat.
“What is it you are looking for?” she asked again, insisting.
“I want the flesh,” he said, crying, “the flesh he would have been. The flesh that lasts forever.”
And then she opened up around him, and in so doing pulled him apart. And he lost the last vestiges of his control. And the secret flesh within him began to whisper in Mark’s voice, filling the emptiness of his body.
*
When Jim arrived at the hospital the next morning a different technician was in charge. A young man, short dark hair, very professional. A human. The young man Mark might have been. A sheet covered Mark’s body.
The technician frowned slightly. “You are?”
“His father.” Always.
The young man’s composure slipped a fraction. “Oh, I’m sorry. The committee … made a decision. We …” He gestured toward the body.
“That’s okay,” Jim said. “There’s no need to apologize.”
The young man’s movements suddenly became quick and slightly awkward. He touched the bed bearing Mark’s body, and twisted back to look at Jim. There seemed to be a vague sort of panic in his eyes. “You can view the body, if you wish. Would you like that?”
“I already have,” Jim said, and turned away.
The flesh that would have been Mark’s. A flesh that would last beyond the small details of a life. What he had always needed. What anyone needs. Jim could feel the gift of their lovemaking opening up inside him, new sensory apparatus for interpreting and dreaming the world.
Somewhere below Jim’s rib cage, hidden among pancreas, kidneys, and intestines, the organ of his secret flesh took nourishment from longings and dreams, and with a steady supply of blood began, at last, to function.
ORIGAMI
BIRD
Almost at once it became habit. During long days in the file room with no one to talk to, his hands normally unoccupied would snag some scrap of paper or trash and speak what he was unable to find words for. Staring at the scenery his eyes invented out of textured ceiling, out the window where gorgeous creatures reclined in cloud, he would catch his hands pulling and twisting at a candy wrapper, a hen-scratched Post It, a sheet of lost and yellowing stationery, until at last the first glimmer of bird came through.
He had no inkling of the long traditions of paper folding. He knew far less than his hands knew: of bending, pressing, worrying free the shape poised for flight out of garbage. And when he ran out of garbage he made birds out of the grim chronicles of neglect, disease, and grief salvaged from these long-dead patients’ files.
That first paper bird had been a strange thing: wings with the shattered angles of lightning, beak a twisted black tear. Over the years the shapes refined: at times almost delicate in the ways the multiple-creased necks reached up to support the complicated heads, at times unsoundly fantastic as paper stub wings evolved into great wavering flyleaves of actuarial data ready to take the sad facts of a life and journey south over some dark and troubled continent to the nesting grounds along the far edge of where we all came from.
There was no money in what his hands made, of course, but then he had no talent for money, or much else, working only to clothe and feed his small family. Freedom was something fine and good in the antique gold-tooled novels his grandfather had passed his way, which he had sold after a single reading. And he knew he was lucky to live in a country that had so much of it, although he’d never quite been able to grasp the details.
Years later when they cleaned out the old hospital records, decades of paper and film and what no longer matters, carried the lot to bins and incinerators, they discovered the waste of his hands and heart: birds put away neatly in every folder, birds tucked into envelopes and nested in the gaps of the unused alphabet, birds secreted into record books, birth records, treatment plans, and autopsy reports, birds by the thousands spilling from the boxes the workers carried outside, caught by the wind funneled between the tall buildings, rising with the orderly progress of the flames, set free into air and light, and they all, all of them stopped their lives that day to watch.
/>
IN
THESE
FINAL DAYS
OF SALES
Main thing is, you’re selling something those folks need, something they can’t live without.
“It’s not the bang in your buck, it’s the buck in your bang.” At the end of the commercial the words blaze a brilliant white across the black screen, then fade. Emil remembers a time when clarity was of the utmost importance in sales, conventional wisdom being that people would not buy an unknown quantity. Of course, what they thought they were getting might not bear much resemblance to the object eventually delivered wrapped in brown paper C.O.D., but at least the transaction began with that image in mind, clear if erroneous.
Now, a certain degree of clairvoyance is required to discern what goods are actually being advertised. Emil, himself in the sales business, watches commercials in the hotel rooms along his route, trying to map out exactly what the rules are now. What troubles him most is that they seem to be not just about new sales techniques, but about a change in the human psyche itself. We have become the creatures in our dreams, he thinks, poured into pleasing and biodegradable packaging.
People want something—that has been the message behind the message in every ad or commercial. You want something, they remind us. The ads advertise want. They advertise need. No wonder the actual product remains in the background. At some level the advertisers have finally realized their products are merely symbolic, almost irrelevant.
Much of the mysterious advertising, Emil has finally concluded, is for various brands of pants.
*
After a few years, all the towns, all the countless burgs and villes line up like endless doors opening one by one, and seem like the same town, the same Main Street with the same row of worn brick or whitewashed wood on each side, the same people of pink or yellow or brown in their denims, corduroys, cottons, or polyesters, waving or not waving depending on how friendly toward strangers they are feeling on this particular day. And yet Emil, the professional salesman, has never really thought of himself as a stranger.
That was the first thing he learned in sales: you cannot act like or think of yourself as a stranger. Not if they are going to trust you. Not if they are going to buy. And how is buying any different from shaking a hand, giving a good how-do-you-do, getting married, kissing the kids good night? Not much, when you really think about it. Just another form of social exchange, value for value, you rub my back and I’ll rub yours. You don’t want to be left back on the shelf when everybody’s buying. That’s the very worst thing. You don’t want to remain unsold all your life.
Sometimes Emil is so intent he is on the eventual accounting that he forgets sales is more than that. It is a matter of wishes and dreams, of planning and foresight, of frustration and expectation. After years on the road, each town is exactly what he’d expected it to be. The streets are exactly what he’d imagined; the people are perfectly familiar because they’ve already walked these streets in one of his countless motel daydreams.
It is as if, every day, the citizens of these tiny communities rebuild their town according to his expectations, anticipating his particular arrival. Given how self centred human beings are, this is no doubt a common misperception. It is one of the first things you learn as a salesman, and if you are good at your job, you use it to your advantage.
Emil is not good at his job. In fact, if there is a worse salesman out there on the road Emil has not yet met him. The man with the off-kilter eyes fills the screen with a loopy grin. A dolly back to reveal the rest of the family: the wife rubbing up against him in her new red dress, barely able to contain herself, the kids jumpy. Emil thinks the boy may have peed his pants.
They are all holding up great wads of fake cash to the camera: the portrait on one of the bills resembles Clark Gable more than any president Emil can think of. And yet these people are so thrilled to have it in their hands—they jump around as if affected by some nervous disease.
Having little tolerance anymore for the manic patter of commercials he keeps the volume down as he watches the television family pantomime surprise, joy, delirium. They’ve gotten what they’ve always wanted, or at least now they can afford to buy what they’ve always wanted. Failing that, perhaps they can rent it. If it’s still available. If they can ever figure out what it is.
He really shouldn’t make fun, he thinks. If people didn’t behave this way, if they stopped looking for something to make them happy, they wouldn’t buy.
Of course, people seldom buy from him in any case. In fact, Emil has come to think of himself as the Anti-salesman, like some super villain with a huge grey cape and unpleasant teeth.
*
Emil has in his pocket a letter from an old salesman he used to meet out on the road a couple of times a year. Their paths might cross in Goodland, or in Hugo, perhaps even in Kansas City. Supposedly Walt had been quite successful in his time, but Emil knows him only as this tired-looking fellow who might have been a retired teacher or someone recently recovered from a lengthy illness.
“Emil, This is a job offer of sorts. Not for a specific job really but it is the promise of a job, a good job with regular hours and good benefits. And there’s no travel involved. My friends and I have had this dream we’ve developed over years on the road, a dream built a stick at a time in hotel rooms and all night diners, of someday having our own town, a factory outlet town where customers would come to you to buy the things they really needed to buy. So no sales pitches or how-many-should-I-put-you-down-fors. Why, any pressure high or low would simply be out of the question! We need salesmen to run the stores of this new town, trained salesmen who have become more interested in helping people than they are in earning high commissions …”
Emil has taken this letter out and unfolded it and reread it so many times it threatens to fragment into a dozen or so worn paper squares held together by a few commas and dashes.
He has never visited this new town. It just makes him feel good knowing that it is there.
*
Sometimes Emil fantasizes that he will find a way to sneak back and catch the residents of a town unawares. Then he will find out exactly what each of these places is really like. Perhaps at last he will discover what people really think about him. The thought is both exciting, and dreadful.
Emil’s career in sales hasn’t always been like this. In the beginning he never knew what to expect when he arrived in a new town. It had been interesting. It had made him anxious. He never knew if he’d find hell or a paradise. Most of the time it had been neither, of course, a necklace of grey towns and grey people, but at least that heady anticipation had always been there.
“The main thing is …” Jack looked around for a place to spit. Emil moved his feet out of the way. Finally the old man looked over his shoulder and spat behind him. “Main thing is, you’re selling something those folks need, something they can’t live without.”
“I don’t want to lie to anybody,” Emil had said.
“Lie? Who said anything about lying, boy? I don’t want you to lie, for chrissake! Who knows what anybody needs? I don’t know what you need. Are you arrogant enough to tell me you know what I need? Do you really know what you need? I doubt it. Even occasional self knowledge is a rare thing, boy. It’s luck, pure and simple. So don’t talk to me about lies. Guesses, would be more accurate.”
“I don’t even know what I’m selling,” Emil said.
“That’s because I haven’t told you yet, boy.” Jack pulled an oft-creased, yellowing square of paper out of his back pants pocket. Ignoring the tiny paper slivers that flaked off and littered the floor, he unfolded it, unfolded it again. When it was about a yard square he stopped and pressed his nose against it. The paper was so worn and discoloured it made Emil think of a thin layer of old skin. He could practically read Jack’s expression through the huge square: the wrinkled forehead, the pursed lips, the mushy dark grey eyes like a baby’s. But Emil couldn’t make out any of the writing, or even if t
here was any writing.
“There’s some difference of opinion on this.” Jack’s voice raised and lifted the paper as if it were a floating tissue. “But encyclopaedias best for a beginner, I suspect. You’re offering them the world of knowledge, the flying carpet to distant lands, all of that for just a few bucks a month. Just gotta remember that with encyclopaedias you only call on people who have kids.”
“Because most adults think their learning days are over,” Emil added helpfully.
“Somethin’ like that. Tell me, are you willing to learn, or do you just want to put your own two cents in?”
“Oh, yes, I want to learn. Really.” It was just to be a short term job following graduation, something to put food in his mouth and a roof over his head until something better came along.
“OK, then. The thing about selling encyclopaedias is you can convince them they need to buy a set for their kids’ futures. Everybody wants to do things for the future of their kids—in this country we spoil them rotten.”
Emil’s own parents had begrudged him every penny. You would have thought they might have found the cure for cancer if only they hadn’t had to worry about their only son.
If he ever had children, if he ever could convince a woman he was worth raising a family with, he’d surely buy them a set of encyclopaedias. A whole damn library. You could not do enough for your kids.
“You’d buy your own kids encyclopaedias, wouldn’t you? I mean if you had any?” It was as if the old man read his mind. A good salesman, according to that first training manual, could tell when interest had peaked, when the customer was growing bored, as well as determine the particular magic phrase that might turn sales, and lives, around.
“Oh, well, of course. If I had the money …”
“Even if you didn’t have the money you’d do it! You’d find a way somehow. Now don’t tell me that you wouldn’t!”
“Well, you’re right …”
“See now, that’s what I’m talking about. In this country we buy our kids things, especially if we have even the vaguest notion it’ll give them a better life than what we’ve had. Something bright and shiny, and fluttering with colour and motion. That’s pretty much the American way.”
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