Love-Shaped Story

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 in the eye. Then Homer spoke. He had to speak. He felt he had no alternative.

‘You screamed.’

After a moment’s pause the young bum said:

‘I was doing some exercises to strengthen my vocal cords.’

Homer didn’t know what else to say. Maybe there wasn’t anything else to say. He said nothing and didn’t move.

‘Are you going to stand there all night?’ asked the young bum.

Homer thought this might be an invitation to sit down, but wasn’t sure. Nor was he sure if he could trust this person. But something impelled him to trust him. He wanted to trust him.

‘God takes it in the ass,’ said Homer as if giving a password, which in fact wasn’t far from what he intended.

‘You said it, man. Shit.’

This didn’t sound like a coded reply.

‘Anyway, yeah. I’m the one who writes that stuff.’

Homer said nothing and didn’t move.

‘I’m Kurt.’

Homer racked his brains for something to say next, since it was clearly his turn again. Finally he thought of something.

‘Homer B. Alienson.’

This was an extremely rare occurrence for him. It usually took him far longer to break down the barrier that he put between himself and others.

‘Homer B. Alienson,’ repeated Kurt. Then: ‘What does the B stand for?’

‘Boddah,’ said Homer, astonished at his own ability to reply without hesitation.

‘I used to have a friend called that. Boddah.’

Was this a pure coincidence? Homer wasn’t inclined to believe in coincidences. Life had taught him that they were very rare. There was always a design. Or almost always.

Kurt had turned away and resumed what he had been doing before.

‘Are you fishing?’ asked Homer.

‘I’ve got to eat something. Eating fish is okay. They don’t have feelings like other animals.’

‘They’re poisonous.’

‘Nah. You’re confusing them with snakes.’

‘The fish in this river are as poisonous as snakes.’

‘I’ll make sure I don’t get bitten, then.’

‘You’ll die anyway. The problem’s the water. It’s the water that’s poisonous,’ Homer said. ‘You can’t eat those fish.’

‘Fuck you,’ said Kurt, addressing the fish, or maybe the water. Or maybe Homer, who knows.

‘Is this where you live?’

‘Temporary accommodation. I got kicked out of my home. Sometimes I sleep in a friend’s van, other times I come here.’

‘What do you do in the daytime?’

‘I go to the library.’

‘The Public Library?’ Although he had stopped working there, and Aberdeen only had one library, to Homer this was a coincidence that required verification.

‘Sure. I read and take notes. Sometimes I go to sleep.’

Whenever he heard the word ‘sleep’, Homer couldn’t help shuddering, with a kind of cosmic regret. ‘What books?’ he asked.

‘What books what?’

‘What books d’you read?’

‘I like writers whose names begin with B.’

‘Like Boddah,’ said Homer on an impulse.

Kurt smiled. A smile that was more of a grimace than a smile. ‘Yeah, like Boddah.’ He had turned around now. There under the bridge, with the damp seeping out from every dark corner, Homer saw that the boy’s shadow was a shivering mass, a variegated repertoire of nervous tics and muscular twitches.

‘What about you?’

‘Me?’

‘Yeah, you. D’you wander around under bridges every night?’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘I usually walk in the woods.’

He was on the point of telling him about the times he lay down on the riverbank to scream into the night, but restrained himself.

‘What’s the matter, don’t you like sleeping?’

Homer considered the question.

‘Well?’

‘It’s not that I don’t like it. I can’t.’

‘You can’t?’

Homer shook his head ruefully.

Kurt cracked his knuckles. One of those tics of his. One of the most frequent, Homer was later to learn.

‘It’s because of the people.’

Kurt looked at him.

‘The different people, I mean.’

‘And how long is it since you last slept?’

‘It’s eighteen years.’

‘What’s eighteen years?’

‘Since I last slept.’

‘Eighteen years?’

‘Eighteen.’

Kurt cracked his knuckles. ‘Fuck. Some problem you got there.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Don’t you wish you could sleep sometimes?’

‘Yeah.’

Kurt sighed, gazed at a point far away in the night and said: ‘What you need is to find a system.’

‘Yeah.’

‘I have problems with people too, Boddah.’

‘Homer.’

‘Yeah, sorry. Homer.’

The rainy scent of the night grew more intense. ‘You have problems with people too,’ Homer prompted.

‘The different ones, I mean.’

‘The different ones.’

Kurt didn’t continue.

‘The different ones,’ Homer repeated.

‘Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not after you. Isn’t that right?’

It was, indeed, dead right. ‘Yeah,’ said Homer.

‘I was an alien too, when I was a kid,’ said Kurt. ‘I was convinced my dad and mom weren’t my real parents. I thought I was from another planet. I wanted to be from another planet. Real bad. At night I’d stand at the window and talk to my real parents. My family in the skies. My real family.’

This guy really seems to know the score, Homer said to himself.

‘And I thought there must be thousands of other alien kids. Kids from another world who’d been dropped off all over the place by mistake. I hoped I’d meet one of them, sooner or later. Maybe I did, I’m not sure. Maybe all kids are aliens, when they’re born. Then they change.’

‘They become different,’ concluded Homer.

‘Yeah, that’s about it.’

Homer waited for the boy to get to the point. But after a lapse of time that might have been a couple of minutes - an eternity when you’re waiting for someone to say something - he began to suspect that he wasn’t going to get to any point and was going to spend the rest of the night gazing into the darkness. Without saying anything else.

‘What I need is to find a system,’ said Homer, in an attempt to spur him into speaking again.

‘What system could help against tough love? No money, no home. Die of hunger, die of cold. Die of nothing. Punk.’

‘Tough love?’ Homer was losing the thread.

‘It’s a way of dealing with negative types. Suppose you’re aggressive or antisocial. Okay, so they tell your mother to apply tough love therapy. It means she cuts off all your supplies. Food, money, help, affection. Everything. It’s supposed to make you change your attitude.’

‘Does it work?’

‘It works with the people it works with. You don’t sleep, right?’

Homer nodded.

‘It wouldn’t work with you, then.’

Homer wasn’t sure he had quite understood. ‘Yeah, but what about the system?’

‘I told you. Punk. The bridge, the poisonous fish, the night. What system could help against that? Curl up in a fucking corner and die. That’s the only system.’

‘I meant for sleeping,’ Homer hazarded.

‘Oh yeah. Sleeping.’ Kurt seemed to have forgotten the point from which their conversation had begun.

‘You mentioned a system.’

‘I did?’

Kurt shrugged as if to say that it wasn’t his fault if that’s what he had understood.

‘So you want to sleep?’

Homer didn’t reply, but it was easy to see what a state he was in. Kurt felt sorry for him. If ever he might have met a kid from another world, that kid was Homer. He cracked his knuckles. Then he stood up, put his hand in the pocket of his faded jeans and pulled out a little glassine pouch containing something that looked like powder. He dangled it in the darkness between thumb and index finger.

‘The system.’

He set off for home at daybreak. The sky in the east was the color of steel, and the silence itself was a thinking presence that had momentarily brought the whole world to a standstill.

The silence seems deeper now than at any time of night, thought Homer. Maybe that’s because silence is invisible when it’s dark. This was one of those rare moments when the present was absolutely pure, stripped of any sense of before or after. For as long as that steel light lasted, time would simply float, a cork on the viscous calm of the river.

He walked homeward feeling sick at heart, as if he had just said a tearful goodbye - something he had never actually done in his life - as if he were abandoning everything that surrounded him. The agitation aroused in him by his meeting with Kurt formed a stark contrast to the stillness of the dawn. As he walked along with his hands in the pockets of his sweatpants, the fingertips of his right hand caressed the plastic pouch. The system. He tried to retrace the course of those sleepless years in his mind, but couldn’t. They were a continuum, and a continuum is difficult for the memory to get a hold on. Especially when you’re still caught up in it. He tried to remember if there had been other dawns like this one. He sought them among the dawns when he had returned home after nights spent walking in the woods or screaming from the riverbank. The dawn after a sleepless night is the worst time for someone who has to stay awake. He had always hated it - hated the silence, the false innocence of all the differents savoring their last minutes of sleep. He would return home feeling tense, with nausea and stomach cramps. Often he’d kneel down with his head over the toilet, his arms braced against the wall, ready to vomit out the whole wide world. But nothing ever came up. For how can you vomit out a thing like wakefulness?

But now his hatred of the dawn had suddenly vanished, to be replaced by guilt at having hated it so much. Guilt at having found the system. Yet despite the thrill of caressing the system in his pocket, he felt uneasy, and for some reason unworthy. He wondered whether that feeling of guilt might actually be an alarm bell. A warning against taking the system for granted. After all, why should he trust a guy he had never met before, who loafed around under the North Aberdeen Bridge like the hobos and ate poisonous fish?

He had no reason to trust him. But he wanted to trust him, nonetheless. He had made up his mind to trust him, from the outset. He had never met anyone like Kurt. Anyone so sad and so… He stopped to think. Then - though it wasn’t easy for him to formulate such a concept - he finished his imaginary sentence. So beautiful.

Besides, he couldn’t take any more, he just wanted to sleep. And he’d decided to trust Kurt because he was too tired to go on resisting. Fuck the change and fuck the differents. Do what the hell you like, but let me sleep. This, too, was an ambivalent feeling, however. Now that he finally had the system, the imminent prospect of sleep made him almost nostalgic about the continuum that he was about to break. It was almost painful to bid farewell to the dimension of heroic voluntary insomnia in which he had lived all those years.

When he got home he slumped on the couch and stared at his own thoughts, mirrored in the void before him. He was trembling. He stood up and took the bag of system out of his pocket. He laid it on the coffee table where he usually rested his feet, boots and all. He slumped back onto the couch. He let out a long, slow breath. Then he sat up straight, the way people do in dentists’ waiting rooms. He was trembling a little less now. Again he stared at his thoughts, now mirrored in the little pouch on the table.

There was little to see, in truth. The questions to trust or not to trust, to try or not to try, were merely token scruples of his conscience. Not that everything was crystal clear, of course. On the contrary. The reflections he saw in the glassine bag were only too opaque, morally speaking. Homer was well aware that the system must have side-effects. Any remedy does. And often, the more effective the remedy, the more dangerous the side-effects. Even the first amendment was subject to this greater, universal law. It was not unusual for some unlucky citizen to get a bullet in the forehead because this was a free country.

But Homer had decided to put off considering the side-effects until a more appropriate moment, though he sensed that by the time that moment came it would already be too late. He found himself in the condition described by a Russian writer of the previous century: that of a person who has reached the final frontier. In practice, he was delaying the time when he would take his decision; he was like someone who gazes across the final frontier and glimpses on the other side, far away on the horizon, the unknown consequences of that decision. Moments of aesthetic uncertainty. Anyone who comes to the final frontier always oversteps the limit. In every sense.

Perhaps the only one of his mirrored thoughts over which he lingered was his memory of what Kurt had told him about Boddah. Eventually Boddah had disappeared. This had happened when Uncle Clark had asked Kurt if he could take Boddah with him on his next trip to Vietnam, where he was being sent on military service because of some war that was going on out there. Boddah could keep him company, Uncle Clark said.

‘So he went out there and never came back,’ Homer had surmised.

Kurt had gazed at him quizzically. Then he’d explained: ‘Boddah didn’t exist. That’s why they wanted to send him to Vietnam.’

‘Huh?’ Homer didn’t get it.

‘To force me out into the open, don’t you see? My mother was tired of laying the table for someone who didn’t exist. So Uncle Clark made up the Vietnam story to force me to admit that Boddah didn’t exist, that he was a figment of my imagination.’

Now at last it was clear. We all have imaginary friends when we’re small. But there was something else in all this that defied logic, something Kurt hadn’t explained to him. Something that cast a sinister shadow over the whole situation. But what the hell? Sinister shadows were always being cast over all kinds of situation, Homer mused. Life was too short to worry about them all.

He slouched further down in the cushions and stared at the glassine pouch, which no longer mirrored any thoughts. His life was going to change. Man, was it going to change.

He cracked his knuckles and sighed.

2.

The American Sleep

It changed all right. Man, did it change. It was as if a chasm had suddenly opened up, splitting time into two distinct ages: systemic on the one side, presystemic on the other. Far more than simply enabling him to sleep, the system transformed and colored every aspect of his life. Before long, the distinction between the two ages became second nature to Homer, and he found he could instantly slot things into one or the other category. As time passed, his life became more and more systemized, and the traces of the presystemic age grew correspondingly weaker. Yet they didn’t entirely fade away: they were constantly popping up at the most unexpected moments and in the remotest corners of his days. They’d suddenly appear in front of him, alarming links between his present state as a Homer systemicus and his former one as a Homer insomnis. They were like fossils of some creature that was now extinct or unidentifiable, so deeply buried in his consciousness that he couldn’t be sure it had ever existed.

There came a point where he could scarcely believe that he, a magnificent specimen of Homer systemicus of the family Alienson, had ever been a Homer insomnis. That earlier incarnation seemed like a remote ancestor, a kind of prosimian that had managed to survive in a state of continuous wakefulness, as the eutherian mammals in prehistoric times had adapted to life in the trees.

But Homer was not aware of the metabolic changes that the system wrought in him. If he had been, he might have realized that it was his present, not his former self, that was more ape-like. For by this time he was totally and utterly systemized.

It wasn’t like that at first, however. The beginning was bland, impalpable and diffuse. A blissful, heavenly calm. A beginning so gentle and evanescent that it was almost imperceptible. He often recalled, in later times, the hazy moments of the dawn, those dilated instants when everything, beginning with the coffee table in front of the couch, took on the consistency of foam rubber. He would sit on the summit of the world, watching, and between the foam-rubber world and his vantage point the air seemed to condense into a protective film that cushioned or muffled the offensive solidity of objects and the menacing hostility of the human race. If ever he had been destined to experience moments of happiness, those moments must have been the early days of the system. They were his golden age, his paradise lost, his nirvana before death.

Unfortunately, the era of happiness in which he thought he was living receded, slowly but remorselessly, into the past. Eventually it vanished completely, except for occasional flashes, sadistic manifestations that only served to intensify his regret, to heighten his oppressive nostalgia for those halcyon days. Reluctantly, Homer was forced to conclude that one of the strengths of the system was precisely this: the elusiveness of its beginnings. And that was what made it so desperately desirable; so intimately indispensable.

He realized, in other words, that his unconditional subjection was explained by his anxiety to rediscover that indescribable glow that he thought he’d glimpsed in the early times. Beginning to see the light, he’d heard someone sing once on the radio. That was exactly how he had felt. He had begun to see the light - a light connected, in his memory, with the dawn glow of that day when he had returned home with the little pouch of system in the right pocket of his sweatpants. Then everything had gone blank.

With the passing of time he discovered that the more use he made of the system, the more his need to relive the feelings of the early days increased, while still remaining unsatisfied; the more he systemized his life, the weaker the feelings he was seeking became. He began to form the conviction that the whole complex of his sensory capacities had undergone a radical and irreversible change. He began to suspect that he no longer experienced things in the same way; that he no longer had feelings - at least not in the sense that he thought he should attribute to the concept of feeling. If he’d been obliged to explain the phenomenon, he would probably have said that feelings had been replaced by states, ranging from the transitory state of wellbeing he’d felt in the early days to a perpetual state of discomfort (the prevailing state from a certain moment onward), with, in between, a wide range of other states, all of them tending toward the negative.

After a while he understood that the fundamental state, the one that determined the nuances and gradations of all the others, was his addiction to the system. It occurred to him that it might be a good idea to change his system of life. And he tried to do so, at least initially. He tried to give up the system and return to the heroic Spartan sleeplessness of the presystemic age. He discovered, however, that it wasn’t so easy to escape; he felt the overwhelming strength of the system and discovered how much he had come to depend on it; he discovered that the perpetual state of discomfort was nothing compared to the pain that awaited him beyond the protective cushion; he discovered that if you live even for a short time in a world of foam rubber, contact with the hard material of things and the rough minds of people hurts too much; he dis-covered that when you return to feelings after living in states, the only feeling open to you is that of pain; he discovered pain in all its forms, a species of pain unknown to those who had never entered the system; he came to know pain as a form of life and discovered that pain itself could become a system, a far more invasive and unbearable system than the one that enabled him to sleep. For this and other reasons he never really tried to leave the system. Never even contemplated it. When you’re inside it, the thought of leaving is only a dream, a way of deluding yourself and killing time. And when, in the early Nineties, the question of love was put to him, he couldn’t remember ever having had a thought that had even the remotest connection with the possibility of leaving it. The system had gradually and definitively gained the upper hand, so that now it was no longer appropriate to speak of Homer being totally systemized, but rather of the system being homerized. Totally.

The day when the dawn light had been the color of steel and he’d returned home to gaze at his thoughts mirrored in the little bag of system that Kurt had given him, was a day of eager expectation. After cracking his knuckles and sighing, Homer had made up his mind not to try the system until the evening. He wanted to perform the act with due ceremony. It must have all the solemnity of an official occasion, so he would have to devise an appropriate ritual. He had wandered aimlessly round the house, cracking his knuckles at regular intervals, trying to think what might be suitable, but hadn’t been able to think of anything except that he found this new trick of cracking his knuckles really rather agreeable. Then he had gone out and walked toward the bus station without any precise intention. He lined up for tickets, though he had no destination in mind. Only when he found himself at the counter did he return to his senses and realize that he had come all this way for nothing. But he couldn’t tell the ticket clerk that he’d made a mistake. He knew himself only too well and was aware that whatever excuse he might have mumbled out would have sounded suspicious to the ticket clerk, who bore all the hallmarks of the classic different. He couldn’t risk being caught out after years of sleeplessness and only one step away from the system, so he bought a ticket to Olympia, doing his best to seem decisive. During the journey, with his head resting against the icy glass of the window, not really knowing what he was going to do when he got there, he thought about the beauty of being able to close your eyes and go to sleep, gently rocked by the movement of the bus as it devoured miles of wet asphalt. He peered out of the corner of his eye at the little boy sleeping in the row in front, till the mother noticed and glared back at him. Homer responded with an indignant leer. He meant to communicate to that woman and to the whole company of differents his profound sense of triumph. No longer will you hold me in the palm of your hand, that leer meant. Her only response was to take the child in her arms and move nearer the front, to the seat behind the driver. In the old days such behavior would have made him feel trapped, but now everything was different. He felt secure, and rested his head on the window again, enjoying the vibrations of the icy glass pane. The sight of the sleeping child had reminded him of the evening many years ago when he’d seen the famous piece of film footage that had changed his life. He had never again had occasion to see that recording of the dramatic testimony of Dr Miles Bennell of Santa Mira. The pictures had imprinted themselves on his memory, and every time he thought about them he seemed to relive distinctly the feelings he’d had, but if he tried to reconstruct the events narrated in the film he realized that only scattered fragments remained. He could only recall isolated scenes, like that of the central square of Santa Mira in the morning viewed from Dr Bennell’s window, or the one where Dr Bennell crosses the road arm in arm with his old flame Becky Driscoll, or again - more indelible than all the others - the close-up of the wonderful face of Dana Wynter who, toward the end of the film excerpt, personifies the different Becky Driscoll, the one who has turned cold after yielding to the need to sleep. But he couldn’t visualize the whole. He wished he could see that footage again, now that he was capable of viewing it from a completely different perspective. He wondered whether it was worth phoning some TV station to ask them to show the footage of the body snatchers. They might listen to him. Maybe they did take notice of what viewers said. Maybe they even had a special slot, called ‘Film requests’. He lifted his head off the window and thought the idea was really stupid. He cracked his knuckles and sighed. Then he had a flash of inspiration. Why bother to ask the TV people? What was to stop him doing it all on his own? At once he realized that he had not taken the bus to Olympia in vain and knew what he was going to do as soon as he reached town. First he would go around the stores where they rented videos, looking for film of the body snatchers, then he would buy a VCR. That’s what he’d do when he got to town. He was excited, too, at the idea of what he would do when he got home. First he would install the VCR, following all the enclosed instructions, then he would prepare the powdered system, scrupulously following the instructions Kurt had given him, then he would at last try the effects of the system while watching the film of the body snatchers. Fuck it, that was what he’d do. He’d go to sleep watching the film that hadn’t let him sleep for eighteen years. Yeah, that was it. To hell with everyone. God is gay, Nixon killed Hendrix and I crack my knuckles, he said to himself, slouching down in his seat.