in it.
During the day he went out as little as possible and talked even less. Other people found him a mystery. They never knew what he was thinking, or feeling, assuming that he had any feelings. Maybe he thought he could solve his problems by keeping a low profile. Had it been possible, later, to ask him for an explanation, he would simply have said, ‘I couldn’t communicate with people, so I kept to myself.’
What is certain is that before he reached age ten Homer B. Alienson was already a manic depressive, like the guys who committed suicide by jumping off bridges. This was when he started taking walks in the woods. He would go there at night, when the smell of the rain grew so strong that it clogged his nose. He would set off along Route 12 and then cut in through the woods that lay beyond the trailer parks. Some nights, instead of walking he would stop at the Weyerhauser, the abandoned lumberyard. He’d climb on top of the piles of rotten logs and sit there contemplating the blackness of the night, thinking about the extinguished lights of the fast-food restaurants on the other side of the river. Often he’d end his nocturnal excursions by lying down on the riverbank. He’d listen for a while to the sound of the water, and when his body was so soaked through with cold that he felt as if he had rusty nails instead of bones, he’d scream over and over again till he ran out of breath or his throat was sore. Many other social outcasts used this technique to relieve the anguish of exclusion. But in his case it worsened his already weak physical constitution and further complicated a medical profile that included scoliosis and incipient chronic bronchitis.
The future looked grim for poor Homer. He was doomed to sleeplessness and to pain, both physical and spiritual. As his tenth year approached he seemed to have no other prospect than that of waiting for total collapse. But although he was unhappy, and irremediably so, he had a hunch that the circle had not yet closed, that other things would happen and that a better time would come. It was an inexplicable feeling, and an irrational one, because any change was by its very nature destined to take shape in the difference of his mother and of everyone else, the difference he abhorred and in which he saw the purulent consumption of the world. But it was still a feeling he couldn’t do without, for it was thanks to that hunch that he was able to give a positive meaning to this wait for a future time, that he found the strength to live like that, sleepless among the differents. It was the kind of feeling one can have at an age when the word suicide does not yet indicate the sphere of things that concern us directly. It was only a kid’s feeling. But what if it was? That kid felt so bad. What other feelings would he have to endure in the future?
They had electricity, supplied at competitive prices. They had plenty of gas, piped in by the Gas Company, and they had the US West telephone service. They had dozens of cable channels, provided by AT&T Cablevision of Washington State, and a total of a hundred and one churches scattered around the county. They had a hospital with two hundred and fifty-nine beds, and as many trees as anyone could wish for. The inhabitants of Grays Harbor County had everything they could possibly need, or so it seemed. But it was clear that something was still missing, even if nobody knew quite what.
People drove a lot that year.
The Coca-Cola Company replaced its traditional product with a sweeter formula called New Coke. People had to drive for miles to reach the few towns where stocks of the old Coke were still available, and as they drove they wondered why the Company had changed something that was perfect the way it was.
Homer didn’t drive at all; he just walked in the woods as usual. And yet things started to change for him, too. First, he took that janitorial job at the library. Second, he set up home on his own, to the great relief of that different his mother and her sailor boyfriend. Lastly, he started selling flying saucers and other space toys by mail order, to the point where it became a fully fledged business and he was able to quit the library job.
That was the year the President underwent an operation to remove a cancerous growth from his intestinal tract.
That was the year after 1984.
It was 1985.
That was what it was.
The library, setting up home on his own and the mail-order business were fine, but they were simply minor tremors. Novelties that prepared the ground for the moment he had been waiting for all his life, the moment of the Big Sleep.
There had been premonitory signs. Signs he’d read in the streets of Aberdeen in the form of graffiti scrawled on the walls of private houses, public buildings, meeting places and shopping malls. Primitivist inscriptions that said:
ABORT CHRIST
or
NIXON KILLED HENDRIX
or
GOD IS GAY
He wasn’t too hot on theology. And he had a vague recollection that this Nixon guy had had a cast-iron alibi for the death of Hendrix - and for the deaths of a whole lot of other people, too, come to that. But there was something he approved of in those statements. He read in them an opposition to change, a rejection of induced nostalgia, a resistance to the sinister plan that was being implemented in that unspeakable decade. Not everyone was different. His hunch had been right. Something could still happen.
The year was drawing to a close. It was the middle of the night, and Homer was preparing for one of his walks in the woods. As ever, the air was cold and the darkness smelled of rain. But no rain was falling. He looked up at the sky, which that night was a mantle of darkness shrouded in turn by an even greater darkness. The beginning of all things. Visible and invisible. The nothingness of all things. Audible and inaudible. He listened to the darkness in the hope of hearing the echo of the great cosmic bang, the residual wave that had been spreading through the dark matter of the universe since the time of creation. The sound was imperceptible to the human ear, but Homer had heard of two young radioastronomers who had picked it up on an unusual kind of radio antenna.
Their names were Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias. At first they had mistaken the signal for interference caused by the droppings of pigeons that nested on their horn-shaped antenna. But when not even cleaning eliminated the…
A scream. Someone had let out a scream like the ones he himself hurled up at the skies on those nights when he lay on the riverbank. For an instant he thought he had screamed himself, without being aware of it. Is this what all those years of forced sleeplessness have reduced me to? he asked himself. But before he could answer…
Another scream spread through the dark matter of the night. He was sure now that it hadn’t been him. The scream came from the North Aberdeen Bridge, which was at least a hundred yards from where he was standing. A call, he thought. Someone - or something- was trying to draw him toward them. Was it a trap laid by the differents?
He stood there, a statue cast in dark matter, wondering what to do. Caution advised him to keep well away, but his eye fell on one of those anti-change graffiti. It was written with a black marker on a post owned by the local electricity company:
GOD TAKES IT IN THE ASS
For some inexplicable reason the slogan seemed propitious. He decided to chance his luck, and set off in the direction of the scream. Toward the North Aberdeen Bridge. He moved slowly. Step by step the darkness became a cryptogram of shadows. Homer tried to decipher its content as he walked. For about thirty yards the forms wavered between pure abstraction and ghostly vision, until, under the planks of the bridge, he was sure he saw the makeshift camp of a young bum and, sitting with his face to the river, the young bum himself.
Homer stopped behind the figure and peered at him, holding his breath. He seemed to be fishing, but it was impossible to say for sure. It was dark. Maybe he was just looking at the river. Or maybe he was admiring the darkness, which there under the bridge smelled not of rain but of rot. Seconds passed. The sound of running water. The young man sitting on the shingle and Homer standing behind him, both of them motionless, as in a painting where people are more inanimate than things and the air is nothing but a veil of transparent varnish. This might have gone on indefinitely had the young bum not turned around. They stared at one another, though the darkness prevented them from looking one another