Love-Shaped Story

Tommaso Pincio

Love-Shaped Story

Translated from the Italian

by Jon Hunt

Flamingo

To Kurt Cobain

‘Now it is well known that when there are many of these flowers together their odor is so powerful that anyone who breathes it falls asleep, and if the sleeper is not carried away from the scent of the flowers, he sleeps on and on forever.’

L. FRANK BAUM, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Cover

Title Page

1. Smalltown Alien

2. The American Sleep

3. High There

4. Home Run

5. Independent Days

6. Smalltown Ghost

7. Alter Echo

About the Author

Author’s Note

Copyright

About the Publisher

1.

Smalltown Alien

What about love?

It was approaching the turn of the last century. The Nineties, as they were then known - the years of creeping unease, as they have since been called - had just begun. Homer B. Alienson, a human being who had already used up more than half his natural life expectancy, stepped out into the new decade with this question ringing in his brain: ‘What about love?’

Everyone was haunted by questions back then. Questions like ‘Who killed Laura Palmer?’ So there was no reason for Homer to be surprised when this unwelcome query started pestering him. It was in the air. Sooner or later, he too was bound to have his life needlessly disrupted, be confronted by a problem that had never before been a problem to him.

He was indeed expecting it. But he was hoping to avoid the problem, find some system for being over-looked, missed out, some tiny gap in the registers that charted the flood of living beings. But he was the first to doubt that he could really count on such unlikely eventualities, and even on his brighter days he couldn’t imagine himself truly safe. There are some things you just can’t avoid; they’re bound to happen sooner or later. But at least let it be later, let him be granted a reprieve.

It wasn’t that he’d never thought about it. It wasn’t that he didn’t know what love was. He hadn’t done anything about it yet, he was prepared to admit that, but what was the hurry, anyway? Why now? Why him? Why didn’t they take their questions somewhere else? Why didn’t they leave him alone, when with his space toys and his system of life he wasn’t bothering anybody? It wasn’t that he wanted to avoid the problem; all he asked for was a bit of peace and quiet. He would think about this love thing, he knew he was going to have to do something about it. Just, not now.

They came from far away, such questions. From far, far away - so far away, they were already posing themselves long before you were born. Formulating themselves in some dark primordial pit, they devoured lightless years to come and seek you out in the grayest holes in the universe, in places you wouldn’t have wandered into even by mistake - places you’d never have found even if you’d been looking for them.

And was there a grayer hole in the world than Aberdeen? It did nothing but rain there, the constant drizzle echoing the steady fall of chopped-down trees. Not a trace of its colorful past now remained; the ‘women’s boardinghouses’ of Hume Street were a thing of the past. All that was left was a wasteland of lumberyards beside the river Wishkah and the smell of rain-soaked wood. With time, even the loggers had been supplanted by machinery. The wood was cut with lasers now, and there was nothing left to do except go and get drunk in taverns like the Pourhouse, or jump off a bridge.

There were said to be more suicides in Grays Harbor County than anywhere else in the country. And yet people needed that record. It instilled calm, it seemed to explain things that didn’t bear explanation. People heard about their highest rate of suicides and it made them feel better. Not exactly good, just better. But this was a place where one of the highlights of the year was the annual chainsaw championships. Not to mention that sky, the cheerless evergray sky of Aberdeen.

Homer could sit musing for hours on that color, and on the real substance of what were perhaps only apparently clouds. Prehistoric clouds that had already been there in the age of the dinosaurs. Clouds too heavy to be scattered or dragged off somewhere else by the wind. He looked at those clouds and it occurred to him that they were the reason why there was no space base in Grays Harbor County. You wouldn’t have a hope of getting a rocket into space from there. He imagined the rocket lifting off, then dwindling in size till it vanished at the end of a trail of whitish smoke. Then he heard a boom and saw bits of metal raining from the sky, and he realized they were the fragments of the rocket falling back to earth. Not even rockets could pierce the evergray vault of Aberdeen.

What about love?

He couldn’t remember exactly when the question had first appeared, but he had reason to believe that it had been on one of those hopeless noontides when he would slump on the couch and sit there motionless, contemplating the grayness that seeped in through the window. It must have fallen from the sky in a single frozen moment, a rain effect in stop-motion created by fragments of one of those rockets that failed to pierce the vault of Aberdeen.

This kind of inductive memory only served to insinuate the question yet more deeply into his mind. Homer knew very well that he wouldn’t break free of it easily. He knew very well that it wouldn’t let him alone till he’d given it an answer. And not an evasive answer, either. He would have to present a plan of the steps he intended taking to address the total lack of love in his life, give a precise and credible account of what he meant to do, how he would go about it, and above all, when. In other words he would have to show some initiative - that is to say, venture onto ground that was definitely not his forte.

At the time when the question first appeared, Homer B. Alienson’s life was drifting along on a current of placid sadness, like one of the dark logs dragged along by the waters of the Wishkah. The only difference was that whereas the Wishkah had a goal in the ocean, the river of his life flowed monotonously on toward nothing. Or rather, given the manner in which whole days died without the slightest hope of being remembered for anything, the waters of the river Homer followed a course more similar to the cycle of a washing machine.

On the first of every month he went to the Laundromat, stuffed his dirty, malodorous washing into the drum, trying not to touch the metal because it gave him the shivers, elbowed the door shut, put the detergent in the drawer, selected the program, switched on the washing machine, sat down and allowed himself to be melancholically hypnotized by the vortex of the washes and rinses. The movement of his dirty washing took on the features of his thoughts, those thoughts that for a whole month he had not been aware of having and that he could scarcely now recognize as his own. The noise that accompanied the end of the cycle always caught him unprepared and when the drum came to a complete stop, Homer felt a grief take the place of his soul, as if somebody had died, whereupon he clicked open the door with his elbow and stuffed his washing into his bag. The thoughts that a short while earlier he had seemed to descry in the maelstrom of the rinse disappeared, swamped by that familiar, cruel smell of damp, metal and detergent. He zipped up his bag abruptly, as if that gesture in itself were enough to immunize him from the feeling of emptiness into which he knew he must plunge, but there were the plastic chairs and the false ceiling of the Laundromat, and the grayness and the wet streets outside, all just waiting to seize him by the throat. And it was in that frame of mind that he’d go home.

Still, apart from the monthly episodes at the Laundromat, Homer didn’t feel things were going all that badly. Not a great deal happened in his life, and that in itself was an advantage, because he wasn’t the sort of person who could face up to things, and coming to terms with a new situation cost him a good deal of time and energy. By adopting a particular system for living he had also solved an insomnia problem that he had formerly suffered from. What’s more, business was thriving and his mail-order sales of space toys brought in what little he needed to live on. The thought of the number of people who were interested in those objects and the sums they were prepared to pay in order to possess them was sufficient gratification, his childhood’s revenge on the laws of the civilized world.

When he was a kid he adored space toys; he was so crazy about them that he cajoled his parents into giving him the same one over and over again. They weren’t at all happy about this fixation of his; they were afraid he’d become one of those rather dumb, introverted kids who can’t cope with life when they grow to adulthood. So it was with good intentions - though in vain - that they tried to get him to see reason, bring him back to normality.

‘What the hell do you want another one for? You’ve already got five,’ they’d say, but he just wouldn’t listen. There was no way of getting him to change his mind.

For Christmas 1964 he asked for a flying saucer gun. He already had four, but he wanted a fifth and was determined to get it. His mother refused. She told him she had no intention of continuing with this nonsense. She defended her decision with nebulous arguments about the immoral wastefulness of continuing to spend money on the same toy.

‘Immoral?’ said Homer, who harbored doubts about the logic of her argument, let alone the meaning of the word immoral.

‘Immoral is buying the same thing five times when once is more than enough.’

‘You go to the store every day and always buy the same things.’

‘That’s different.’

‘Why’s it different?’

‘Because the things I buy get used.’

‘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.