Love-Shaped Story

‘Flying saucer guns get used too.’ His mother’s logic was fatally flawed.

‘Don’t argue. I’m telling you it’s different.’

‘It isn’t different.’

‘Yes it is.’

‘No it isn’t.’

‘Yes.’

‘No.’

‘Listen, I don’t care what you say, I’m not buying you another flying saucer gun.’

‘Well, I don’t care what you say, I want another one.’

On Christmas morning Homer came downstairs convinced he had won the argument, but the package under the tree was too shapeless to contain the present he had asked for. He picked it up and gazed at it apprehensively. It was heavy - too heavy for a plastic gun. It had a strange texture and seemed grainy to the touch. He unwrapped it and to his utter dismay found himself looking at a piece of coal. Homer stood there contemplating this affront. His mother had been in a bad mood for the past few days because of some quarrel she’d had with Dad. But what did that have to do with him? He felt himself sinking into the cold grayness that immersed his home and the town of Aberdeen and Grays Harbor County and Washington State and all the other united states of America and the separated states of the whole world. There rose within him such a rage that he squeezed the piece of coal till it hurt, flung it at a window and ran upstairs to his bedroom, fleeing the sound of shattering glass. He took one of his school notebooks and started tearing out the blank pages one by one. He wrote the same thing on every leaf: ‘Message to the people of Aberdeen. Homer B. Alienson hates his Mom because his Mom hates him because his Dad hates her. Everyone hates everyone and I just want to cry.’ Then he ran downstairs with the sheets of paper and a roll of adhesive tape, dashed out of the house before his mother could say or do anything and tramped round the neighborhood sticking his proclamation of pain on every door.

A few days later he found the fifth flying saucer gun on his bed. He had gotten what he wanted, but he wasn’t exactly satisfied. He almost always did get everything he wanted during that period of his life, because his parents had split up in a manner that, at the age of only seven, had taken away all his joy in living. Gratifying his strange determination to possess dozens of copies of the same toy was the least compensation his parents could give him.

He didn’t even unwrap those toys. He merely recorded them in a notebook and put them in cardboard boxes which he sealed with packing tape to keep out the dust and everything else. Why he did this, even he didn’t know. Maybe the world frightened him and, not knowing how to defend himself, he was trying at least to defend something that belonged to him. Maybe he was driven by an impulse like that which impelled the pharaohs to have themselves buried along with their treasures. Maybe he saw life as a pyramid, a funerary labyrinth fitted with hidden traps. But if that was the case, he wasn’t aware of it. He simply did what he felt like doing, and went on doing it for a long time. Then one day, in that mysterious way that, sooner or later, children stop doing certain things, that obsessive inclination of Homer’s sank into oblivion. It re-emerged several years later in a different form, one day when he was in Olympia, the state capital. He had happened to enter one of those stores for collectors that sell old comics and science-fiction books in little plastic bags. He had never been into one of these places, mainly because there weren’t any in Aberdeen and he seldom went to Olympia. The place reeked of nostalgia, and Homer felt a shiver run through him, a mixture of cold and sweetness, as if the mangled corpse of a beautiful girl had climbed out of the plastic wrapper in which it was lying to creep up behind him and kiss him on the neck.

A bell tinkled as the door opened. Homer turned and saw the sheets of paper pinned to the noticeboard stir in the gust of cold air that had blown into the store. For no particular reason he started reading the requests and offers. He received a strange impression of the people who’d written them - they seemed to him like unhappy ghosts, tormented souls who sought illusory relief in an unobtainable issue of some comic lost in time, a time only they remembered. He imagined them as zombies, creatures that had suffered terrible mutilations at some point in their lives. People disfigured by fast-food joints and department stores, corroded by irreversible degenerative processes. Overweight guys who lay hidden for most of the time, who gradually lost the capacity for social living, who ventured out onto the streets furtively, sidling along walls, constantly looking over their shoulders, starting at the slightest sign of misunderstood hostility - a pair of eyes met by chance or the distant cry of a mother scolding her child. People whom Homer feared he might one day grow to resemble and in whom he refused to recognize himself.

True, he himself kept relics of his space-age childhood packed away in boxes at home, but that didn’t make him a collector. Collectors are usually people who are perversely searching for something they will never be able to possess or have lost forever, something captured, deep-frozen, in the collected object. And the rarer the object, the deeper-frozen is the anxiety of the search. But Homer wasn’t searching for anything. He had stored away his space toys in real time, on the spot, when he was still a kid, when they were among the easiest things to find. In a sense he had stored away provisions in the same way as ants or people in fall-out shelters do. And now he was like an ant that had been told that the planet was heading for global desertification and that in a few years’ time there would be no more winters, even in the Antarctic. He was like an ordinary man who had invested his savings in an underground bunker dug in his backyard only to learn that the Cold War was going to end, with worldwide nuclear disarmament. He had accumulated enough robots and spaceships to immunize himself for all eternity against any form of nostalgia. He no longer felt any affection for those toys, sealed up in their packets. Quite the reverse, in fact - at the memory of his sufferings as a child, he loathed them. To him they were indissolubly linked to his unequal struggle for survival in a world of adults who could never be trusted. Sometimes he had felt an urge to take the boxes and throw them all into the river off the North Aberdeen Bridge in the hope of breaking the circle of nothingness that imprisoned him. The only thing that stopped him doing so was a superstitious respect for those guiltless toys. He reflected that, after all, they were the only living part of the child he had once been and that for this reason alone they deserved to be saved.

When he read the ad in the store in Olympia, Homer sensed an opportunity. ‘DESPERATELY seeking Yonezawa Moon Explorer. Up to $150 offered for specimen in good condition. Jim (206) 352-ITEM’, it said. The accompanying photograph was hopelessly blurred, but Homer didn’t need its help. He was well acquainted with the Yonezawa Moon Explorer, and if he remembered correctly there must be at least two under his bed, their packaging still intact. The toy was a Japanese-made lunar exploration module about eight inches long. A tin-and-plastic gadget with an amazing range of functions that could be remote-controlled from a handset shaped like a rocket. Rotating aerial, flashing lights, lunar module sound effects, openable central hatch. But it wasn’t a particularly attractive object to look at. It was made of shoddy materials and to a rather rough-and-ready design which made it unconvincing. The usual cheap 1950s Japanese product that wasn’t worth buying more than twice. It was undoubtedly one of the more expendable objects in his store.

All things considered, why not? This guy seemed really keen on the Yonezawa Moon Explorer, to judge from the way he’d written DESPERATELY. The toys Homer had persuaded his parents to buy him when he was a kid were doomed to remain mummified in their packages, and there was no denying that a hundred and fifty dollars was a tidy sum. He tore off one of the strips of paper bearing Jim’s phone number and as soon as he got home called him.

352-ITEM.

It was a difficult conversation, stifled by pauses and awkwardness. At the sound of the mumbling, breathless voice at the other end of the line, Homer felt a sense of unbearable anguish. Eventually he made a deal with the guy, but when he hung up he felt sad and drained. He went out for a walk. The sky was so oppressive that his state of mind worsened.

Jim had asked him if he happened to have any other spacecraft to sell. Homer’s reply was deliberately vague. If he’d given him an inkling of what he had at home, Jim would never have stopped pestering him till the end of his days. He said maybe he did, he’d check.

‘Great,’ enthused Jim. ‘A-and can I call you tomorrow? To find out?’

‘No,’ Homer replied bluntly, and followed this up with a barefaced lie: ‘I’m not on the phone. If I find anything I’ll write and tell you when I send you the Moon Explorer.’

What does this retard take me for? thought Homer. Some sort of nostalgia geek, like him? Jesus, I’m a normal person. Let’s just keep our distance, here, shall we?

So that’s what he did. He kept his distance. He told Jim he’d let him know where to send the check, then went to the post office, got a mailbox and called him back.

‘P.O. Box 911. Aberdeen.’

‘P-pack it carefully, please,’ Jim implored him.

‘It’s been packed away carefully for years,’ said Homer curtly.

‘Oh,’ said Jim, not quite knowing how to take this. ‘A-and about the possibility of other…’

‘I’ll let you know.’

‘Y-yes, but don’t forget.’

‘Don’t worry, I won’t.’ He hung up and thought, Jesus, am I right to keep my distance from these guys.

Then he went out to take another walk in the woods before the rain came.

By the time the question of love appeared to disrupt the placid insignificance of Homer’s days, his mail-order sales of space toys had burgeoned into a regular business. Of course, they weren’t going to make him rich, but his needs were pretty basic. Apart from the special system he needed to make him sleep.

His first contact with Jim was followed by others. Numerous similar geeks, who’d gotten his address from Jim, started sending desperate appeals to Homer’s mailbox at the rate of a dozen per week. They asked him for rarities like the Yoshiya Space Scout 7, the Horikawa satellite target practice kit, the Nomura Planet-Y space station, the mobile TV unit, also made by Nomura, the legendary Rex Mars battle rocket, and the atomic water pistol with a red handle shaped like a light bulb, a pistol ‘guaranteed to atomize any space invader’. All articles of which Homer had at least two copies in stock and for which his customers’ offers ranged from a hundred to a hundred and fifty dollars.

He only needed to sell a couple per week to make a decent living, and, at a conservative estimate, if he maintained that average his stock of space toys would last for another seven years. He thought about this. Seven years was a long time; a lot can happen in seven years. But he didn’t make a systematic plan. He decided to consider each case on its merits, toy by toy, request by request. Maybe he could try gradually raising the prices, or holding impromptu auctions to eke out his stocks. Two hundred dollars per item would be enough to keep him going for fourteen years. And what was two hundred dollars for one of his perfectly preserved rarities?

He felt that he could risk it; those guys would go to any lengths to get their clammy hands on one of his toys. Well, maybe not all of them. But some, for sure. The most regressive of them would probably kill to get hold of one, let alone spend a measly two hundred dollars. Maybe even three hundred. Which would mean, to Homer, survival for another seven years. Twenty-one years in all, not bad. Twenty-one years doing fuck all. Just selling toys. Just reading the requests and deciding which of them to grant. Waiting for the check and taking the package containing the sold toy to the post office.

He decided to quit his job as night janitor at the Aberdeen Public Library. It wasn’t bad, the library job. It was something to do, and it was one more reason for staying awake at night, though he had so many reasons that half as many would have been enough. Also, it was a safe place; somewhat funereal perhaps, but safe. And then he liked the way the echo of his footsteps in the reading room seemed to call forth the rain that arrived unfailingly every night. The gentle patter of the rain and the echo of his footsteps in the reading room. There was a kind of beauty in that.

But what would he do if the opportunity of closing his eyes should present itself, as eventually it did? To go on keeping a night watch over the Public Library’s books would have been to set a professional seal on his sleepless condition. Quitting that job was essential if he was to keep his hopes up and be ready for the great moment when he would be able to lie down on his bed without having to fit his eyes with the Clockwork Orange-style anti-sleep clips he’d made for himself, without getting pins and needles in his arms from holding phials of eye drops over his eyes.

He had a hunch that some day or other he would find a sure system, so he decided to quit the library job. It would really suck if, when he finally found the system, he had to stay awake anyway for professional reasons. For it was only a matter of time. Sooner or later he, too, would savor the sweet fade of drowsiness, the soft abyss of sleep approaching, the warmth of the house receding toward the sharp wetness of the woods. He would savor these things, no longer forced to tap his steps to the muffled murmur of the rain. Nights with nothing in them anymore. Just nights. At last.

Homer B. Alienson quit sleeping a couple of years after the incident involving the piece of coal, at age nine. He was still a kid, but had seen and suffered enough to understand that the adult world on which he was forced to depend was not to be trusted. He’d discovered that the places where you feel protected are the very ones that conceal the most insidious threats, and he’d realized that the happiness of his childhood years was only apparent. It had all been leading up to the time when he would fall into a trapdoor of misery that he would climb back out of with his heart’s bones broken.

He quit sleeping because he’d noticed something suspicious about people, starting with his closest relatives. Starting with his mother, to take the most terrible example. He didn’t know why, but he was sure that she and all the others were out to get him. It wasn’t so much the manifestations of open hostility - like the coal Christmas present - that put him on the alert, but a sinister, indefinable essence. There was something wrong about people; they didn’t seem to be what they should have been. They hadn’t changed much since he had first begun to become aware of their existence. And yet, starting on a day that Homer couldn’t place precisely in the past, a day that wandered around in his memories like a child that’s lost its parents, they had seemed different. They hadn’t changed, yet they were different. If he’d been asked to explain what the difference consisted of, he would have been hard put to it. The difference that he had in mind was indefinable, baseless. It was difference per se. Difference in the most different sense of the word. It was the classic example of a situation that can only be explained in the absolute, what Homer called an absolute spectrum situation.

Besides, it wasn’t as if he could go and explain to anyone. Who could he explain to? There was nobody left. Everybody was different, from his mother to the garbage man. What was he supposed to do? Go up to his mother and say, ‘Mom, why are you so different?’

‘Different?’ she’d reply. ‘What on earth are you talking about, Home?’ That was what she called him, Home.

‘You seem different to me, Mom.’

‘How am I different?’

‘You seem like…’ He’d have to be careful how he put this. One false step and he’d give himself away.

‘Yes, Home?’

‘Like the garbage man,’ he’d say, at length. Which certainly wouldn’t be one of the smartest things to say. But he wouldn’t be able to stop himself, he’d blurt it out. And give himself away. Thereby ruining any chance he had of maintaining the status quo, of continuing to live without having to confront the difference that was spreading all around him.

The maintenance of the status quo was vital. What would happen to him when the others found out that he wasn’t different as they were? Then, one day, he understood. The difference was revealed to him in all its essence. He understood that, quite simply, his mother was not his mother and the garbage man was not the garbage man. Nobody was who they were, except him. Only he had remained the Homer he was.

It was the TV that revealed this to him. In 1967, toward the end of February, Homer B. Alienson saw documented on the small screen a situation alarmingly similar to the one in which he found himself. A little boy called Jimmy Grimaldi was dragged along by his grandmother to the office of one Dr Miles Bennell. The kid seemed to be having hysterics; he kept screaming that his mother wasn’t his mother and pleading with them not to take him home, or she’d get him. Dr Bennell, who for obvious filmic reasons had the fine features of a refined, well-mannered movie actor, prescribed some pills to be taken a certain number of times a day and advised the grandmother to keep the boy at her house for a while. Then, with a thoughtful look on his face, the doctor decided to pay a visit to Wilma Lentz, the cousin of an old flame of his, one Becky Driscoll, whose gentle charm found its own conventional personification in the beautiful Dana Wynter, a movie actress who bore a faint resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor.

Wilma, a woman in her thirties, is in a similar state to little Jimmy Grimaldi: she’s convinced her Uncle Ira is not her Uncle Ira.