Читать книгу Love-Shaped Story - Tommaso Pincio - Страница 5

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.

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…

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.