Love-Shaped Story

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.

The doctor watches the tranquil old man pushing the lawnmower up and down the lawn and doesn’t know what to think. The similarity to the case of the little boy is undoubtedly curious. But Miles Bennell is a man of science and as such can only draw one conclusion.

‘Obviously the boy’s mother was his mother, I’d seen her. And Uncle Ira was Uncle Ira, there was no doubt of that after I’d talked to him,’ he said off-screen, after advising Wilma to see a ‘doctor’ friend of his. This, he made quite clear, meant seeking psychiatric help.

If Homer confided in his mother, or in anybody else, as Jimmy and Wilma had done, the same would probably happen to him. They’d make him see a shrink. And although he didn’t know exactly what went on in such people’s offices, he had a pretty good idea that it wouldn’t be pleasant.

That piece of film showed him that ‘difference’ was not confined to the dreary township in the bleak Northwest where he’d had the misfortune to be born. The same kind of difference that Homer had observed in Aberdeen was present in all its disturbing virulence elsewhere in the world too. Such a universal and constantly spreading phenomenon certainly couldn’t be stopped by a nine-year-old boy.

It was impossible for him to get away. All he could do was devise techniques of passive defense, try not to do anything that might jeopardize the status quo, try to blend in with the ‘differents’ around him. Here the film evidence was a great help, for the director had not merely revealed to the world the invasion of the differents - conventionally described as ‘body snatchers’, a term that conveyed very well the appalling nature of the change that was taking place - but had also given two crucial pieces of practical advice. First: what you had to do to avoid being body-snatched - integrated into the change that was taking place. Second: how you could conceal your extraneousness to the replicants - your intention not to be changed.

As far as the second point was concerned, no great effort was required. You simply had to feign indifference to the differents’ hostility. Be impermeable. Not let them rile you. The differents always acted in a deliberately hostile manner, to provoke normal people into giving themselves away. Homer’s violent reaction to the provocation of the Christmas piece of coal, for instance, was something to be avoided. He had probably only gotten away with it because he was a kid. But who was to know how long the period of immunity would last, and when the time of integration would begin? He decided he’d better be careful, and immediately adopted the recommended behavior. Impermeability. Insensibility. He resolved to reduce communication with others to a minimum, and spent all the time on his own, concentrating on his collection of space toys.

But if the second point wasn’t much of a problem, the first - how to avoid being body-snatched - had a drastic solution. It was perfectly simple in theory, but in practice … in practice it meant giving up sleeping. Because that was how the change came about. You fell asleep and you woke up different.

In the film footage, Dr Bennell had spoken of how people often became dehumanized, losing their identity so gradually that they weren’t aware of any alteration in themselves.

Homer couldn’t agree more. That was exactly how it had happened. His mother, the garbage man and all the others. The change was imperceptibly slow until the final, irrevocable moment of palpable difference. But this didn’t make it any easier to accept the drawbacks of the solution. It’s all very well to talk, but how are you supposed to react when somebody comes along and tells you it’s quite easy, all you have to do is not sleep?

All you have to do, he says.

Homer Alienson’s voluntary insomnia continued for an extraordinary length of time. Nigh on eighteen years, give or take a month or two. This was not an easy period, nor was it devoid of consequences. It was an established scientific fact, even in those days, that the need for a periodic suspension of the activities of the will and the consciousness - a need sometimes referred to as ‘switching off - was necessary to the regeneration of physical and/or psychological efficiency. It had, moreover, been proven that a prolonged lack of sleep made you irritable, altered your metabolism, and led to feelings of nausea and states of hallucination. This knowledge, however, was based on studies that embraced a limited time span or at least a period below the critical threshold of ninety-six hours. Homer was unique. He was the only case of a higher living organism that had permanently succeeded in eliminating from its metabolism the physiological need to switch off. How he succeeded in doing so is still a matter of debate. There is no doubt that he was determined not to fail in his intention and sincerely convinced that he never had, but since nobody was there to keep a check on him, we cannot be absolutely sure that he did not inadvertently close his eyes now and then.

But whether it was partial or total, his self-imposed, continuous insomnia did have one consequence. It caused a kind of temporal displacement of Homer’s whole existence. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to describe it as a hitherto unknown form of hibernation.

What happened, put very simply, was that while the time of the world around him continued to flow at its usual speed, Homer’s sleepless time expanded by almost a decade. The years passed, but Homer’s years remained the same, and from that February 20th, 1967 when he took his momentous decision, Homer continued to be the nine-year-old kid that he had been then. By constantly staying awake through the icy darkness of the night, he put his best years in the freezer, like a packet of frozen peas, a reserve to be consumed at the right moment, when it was safe for him to sleep again.

It was as if he had been assigned a new birth date: February 20th, 1967. It was like coming into the world a second time to spend sleepless nights watching the drops of rain slide glistening down the window pane. And while his mother slept peacefully in all her difference, Homer lay on his bed listening to the rhythm of his own breathing, the rhythm that accompanied the profoundly sad darkness of those hours when all was still, except the rain that fell and those glistening drops that slid down the window pane, one single, immense, everlasting moment.

Never sleeping.

* * *

Many years later, when our story reached its inevitable conclusion, when there was nothing more to say, and to add anything would have seemed not only gratuitous but disrespectful, Homer B. Alienson’s mother issued a statement.

‘Our divorce was a devastating experience for him. It destroyed his life. He became … how can I put it? Totally sad. You couldn’t say anything to him. He was so irritable. Always sullen. Tetchy. He slept very little, I could hear him tossing and turning in his bed till late at night. He always had been hyper. Some time before, the doctor had put him on a course of Ritalin, but that only made him even more nervous. Sometimes he didn’t go to sleep till four in the morning. And after I split from my husband he just went wild. The divorce and the Ritalin were an explosive mixture. He seemed to stop sleeping altogether. He was always brooding on things. On the bathroom wall he wrote DAD SUCKS and MOM SUCKS with an arrow pointing to the toilet bowl. He was mad at us, that’s obvious. And he lost all enthusiasm. He wasn’t interested in anything, apart from his space toys. He became very inward, too. He’d go whole days without saying a word. He held everything in. It was as if he distrusted everything and everybody. He hadn’t been like that, before. He changed completely. He was different.’

Different, him. That was rich, coming from her. Oh sure, he was different. Different in the sense that they’d fucked up his life for good and all. ‘The truth is, I had nothing in common with them,’ Homer would have said, if he’d been in a fit state to make any comment. ‘I don’t want to push this body-snatcher business too far. Maybe they weren’t as different as all that. But even supposing I got things out of proportion, the problem is that when you’re nine years old and you find you no longer have a family, you feel… unworthy. Yeah. That’s the word. Unworthy. You feel ill at ease with your friends.’

Friends? What friends?

‘Well, okay, not exactly friends. Classmates. The kids I hung out with. They all had normal families and did the things people do in normal families. In our family, nothing was normal.’

After the divorce it was agreed that Homer would live with his mother. But that didn’t last long. By now he had become impossible to handle. After a year, at her wits’ end, his mother sent him to live with his father, who’d moved to Montesano, another logging town not far from Aberdeen.

Homer was far from happy with the new arrangement. They camped out in a trailer park, in a sort of prefabricated shack on wheels. It was the pits. He had nothing to do except ride his bike down to the beach. What’s more, he was constantly anxious about his space toys. He was terrified by the - by no means implausible - thought that his mother would throw them out. He must return to Aberdeen.

‘My mother was bad enough, but my father was a real asshole. He was obsessed with sports. Baseball and that kind of thing. I was hopeless at sports, but he wouldn’t accept it. He had never been any good at sports himself. But despite that he insisted I join the wrestling team. I hated wrestling. I hated the gym too. And the jocks that went there, and the training. Everything.’

After the move to Montesano, Homer’s father found a job as a tallyman in a logging company. Whenever he had a day off, he’d take his son to his workplace.

‘It was his idea of a father-and-son day out,’ Homer would explain. ‘He’d leave me sitting in the office while he went and counted logs. He did nothing else all day. Even on his days off.’

An intolerable situation. To make matters worse, Homer had a new mother to contend with. ‘A really sweet woman,’ was his father’s description of her. Homer took a different view, and when, a few years later, he reminisced about his father’s new partner, his judgment was scathing: ‘I’ve never met anyone so two-faced. And she was a lousy cook. You’d come home and find a disgusting, shriveled-up meal on your plate that she’d lovingly prepared and left sitting in the oven for a few hours.’

Homer spent most of the time in his father’s cluttered toolroom, and when he poked his head out he’d find that his father had bought some new toy for his younger stepbrothers. Useless Tonka trucks or stupid Starhorses.

It became clear even to his father that the boy couldn’t stay in Montesano, and after being shuttled about an uncertain number of times between various relatives, Homer was sent back to his mother. She, however, was not only even more different than before, and far from overjoyed to see her son again, but had found herself a man who was even worse - if that was conceivable - than the husband she had ditched. He was a sailor, and a pretty weird one. A paranoid schizophrenic. Homer’s mother never knew whether he was really at sea or not, and when he was at home he would often beat her up. His voice was rough with alcohol and he was always coming home smelling of other women’s perfume.

One day Homer’s mother took her revenge. She was tired of people dropping by the store where she worked to say, ‘Guess who I saw your sailor with the other night?’ She went out with a friend and got drunk. But instead of feeling relieved, she got so mad at her partner that when she came home she took out one of the guns he kept in a little closet and tried to shoot him. The incident was over before it started because she didn’t even know how to load a gun. But since she had to do something, she put all the guns in a sack and dumped them in the icy waters of the river Wishkah. Homer watched from a distance, and in the middle of the night, while everyone else was sleeping the sleep of the different, he fished out the guns and sold them. Naturally, he invested the proceeds in space toys, among them a particularly rare early specimen, a Günthermann Sky Rocket, which had been manufactured in the American zone of postwar West Germany, but was now, through the mysterious workings of destiny, gathering dust on a remote shelf in a store on Route 12.

These were difficult years, as can readily be imagined. He didn’t feel at ease anywhere. Things were completely out of control. He never had a moment’s peace, and just when it would seem to him that something was on the point of sorting itself out, lo and behold that something would suddenly change, leaving him alone. He always had to be on the alert. Whenever he went out with his mother - to go shopping, say - he’d notice men looking at her in a way that drove him wild. ‘Mom, that man’s looking at you!’ he’d say to her.

‘Don’t be silly,’ his mother would snap, and then as likely as not return the smile. One day a man eyed his mother in an even more objectionable manner than usual and Homer, beside himself with rage, ran to find a policeman and told him about it. The officer looked down at him with that condescending air so typical of adults and dismissed him with a smile. From that day on, Homer hated cops. They were different, too, like everybody else. They were all in it together. A vast web of glances, grimaces and knowing gestures was being spun around him, and sooner or later he would be caught 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…