The Endless Fall and Other Weird Fictions Page 12

  THE SPECTATORS

  I was lucky. The Spectators didn’t arrive at the same time, so the first people who encountered them were not forewarned. I can only imagine waking up to find one of them standing at the foot of your bed, or in the shadows of the basement when you went downstairs to do your laundry, or waiting inside your bathroom – maybe standing in the tub – when you groggily went in to brush your teeth that first morning. There was panic, people running out into the street screaming. There were heart attacks. Many people assaulted the Spectators, even shot them.

  I was lucky in that I was one of those later people who were ready. But could you really be ready? You could try not to be surprised, but you were still shocked when the day came that you acquired one of the Spectators, too. So waiting for them was really just traumatic in another way. I was nervous in those days of anticipation, sleeping with the lights on, creeping stealthily from room to room like a homeowner searching out an intruder. And wasn’t that what they were?

  My Spectator was waiting for me in my daughter’s bedroom, but since I no longer used it the thing might have been standing there for hours or maybe even several days before I finally discovered it. I had gone in looking for something…I can’t recall now what. It might be that what I really wanted to do was just stand in the room and stare at the border of cute animals my wife and I had stuck onto the walls together. It was all that remained of the nursery, but I could still see the crib in my mind’s eye, the changing table, the little bureau. All gone now, but in the place where the crib had been, a figure now stood on the bare floorboards, almost in the corner. I experienced an intense jolt. I had seen other people’s Spectators – the three spaced throughout my sister’s house, for instance (one for her, one for her husband, one for their son) – but this one was mine. I owned it. Or did it own me?

  “Fuck,” I said to it when I finally could draw breath again. “Fuck you, okay? Fuck you!”

  I hadn’t been expecting it to appear in here, simply for the reason that I seldom came in my daughter’s former room. Why not the living room? The bedroom? Not much going on in those two spaces either, though, truth be told. What would it have done in the living room – watch me surf porn or flirt in chat rooms on the web? In the bedroom, what? Watch me masturbate to some skin mag, or a set of sexy photos I’d taken of my wife long before our child died of SIDS? Long before we split apart, and she moved down to Florida to be close to her parents?

  The Spectator did not turn its eyes to me at my curses. Somehow they seemed to see everything without looking at anything in particular. They resembled us in general outline – that is, they appeared like humans. Was this their true form, or one chosen for our benefit? Might their true appearance have been too horrible for us to bear inside our homes? Though to me, I would have preferred them not to be human, because they hadn’t got it quite right. And that wrongness was very unsettling.

  They all looked the same. Whether you were an old man, a young woman, a toddler…your Spectator would look like a tallish man of good build, standing erect as if at attention. No clothing or sex organs. Mannequins, they looked like, with no hair anywhere on their bodies, and their skin pitch black. Not African black; no human has ever been that black. It was the black of obsidian, and glossy like obsidian as well. It was the black of space. The gulf, or maybe the hell, from which they came.

  Their eyes were black, too, except for their silver pupils, as bright as mirrors.

  Expressionless, immobile, my Spectator seemed unaware of me, but that would have made no sense. They came to observe us, on that we could all agree. But some said, in order to study us. Others said we were a form of entertainment for them. Each one picked or was assigned one human being to study or be entertained by. Well, I wasn’t going to be a particularly fascinating subject for this creature…but then, how many of us were?

  “Good,” I told my new guest. The only other person – person? – who shared my apartment now. “You stay in here. Enjoy.” I shut out the light, closed the door, and chuckled bitterly. I knew once they had elected their position, they would not choose another.

  At first, people had picked them up (when they’d satisfied themselves that the beings would not resist or fight back), and carried them out of their houses. Many had been piled up and burned by angry villagers – in India, in Africa, in American suburbs – but a new Spectator (or the same one, reconstituted?) would appear in the same spot from which the first had been taken. If you shot one in the head with a shotgun – and there was no blood, no brain, only broken shards like volcanic glass – the first time you took your eyes off it, the thing would become whole again. No matter how long you stared at an empty spot where a removed Spectator had been, or kept vigil over a defaced Spectator, they would not take action until you were gone. No one, as far as I knew, had ever actually seen one of them materialize.

  I went about my routine. A numbing day at work, and then home again. A microwave dinner – pad thai this time for a taste of the exotic. I resisted as long as I could, but finally, inevitably, my curiosity got the better of me and I went to the room, opened the door and clicked on the overhead light. There it stood, a sentinel guarding the unknown, like a shadow that cast a shadow in the yellow light that reflected off the room’s bare black windows. My wife and I had even stripped away our daughter’s frilly curtains, leaving only blank white shades that stood half open like the lids of unblinking eyes.

  “Enjoy your day?” I asked it. “At least you have a view, huh?” I gestured at one of the windows. Out of spite I considered going to each window and pulling the shade down entirely, but I didn’t. Let it have this little bit. I wasn’t a sadist. They…they were the sadists, I felt, and what they liked most was watching us squirm. That was the entertainment they sought.

  I left the stoic entity, ate my pad thai, read my email (hoping for something from a woman I’d been chatting with…but there was nothing). At last, as if irresistibly drawn to the gravity of a black hole – for there was a profound absence to this being – I returned to the nursery and faced the Spectator again. I shifted side to side but the eyes never followed me.

  “So what are you really?” I asked it. “Where do you come from?”

  Our government – the governments of every nation – had determined that the creatures meant us no immediate harm. But how could they be sure that one day, maybe in a year, or ten, or maybe a minute from now, every single Spectator wouldn’t snap into action simultaneously? And then, kill that person to whom it had been assigned? After which, taking that person’s place here on our sad little planet?

  Was it an invasion, then? Patient locusts, just waiting to take wing?

  The Spectator – my Spectator, my audience of one – was impassive as a sphinx. It revealed nothing.

  I watched more TV programs about them, now that I had my own. Heated debates. Maybe they’re criminals from…from another planet or dimension, one guest suggested, and they’re in exile here, their punishment to be in our company. A female guest proposed, Maybe they find us titillating; maybe they’re voyeurs. No, no, someone countered, if that was true they’d all appear in bedrooms – those that do manifest in bedrooms aren’t even always facing toward the bed. But the woman retorted, Maybe it isn’t just our own sexual activity that excites them…maybe it’s simply being in our presence.

  Maybe, perhaps, and maybe again. It was like trying to pry one’s way inside the skull of God. Who could truly say they understood anything about their motives, their desires, their thoughts?

  Maybe the Spectators felt the same way about us. Maybe we were just as mysterious to them. Perhaps. Maybe.

  And speaking of God; while some interpreted the Spectators as demons, others believed them to be angels…felt their visitation was a blessing, or that they were here to guide us to paradise when Armageddon came, and actually venerated the unearthly beings.

  On Friday night, work finished until Monday, I opened a bottle of bourbon – as had become my weekend habit afte
r my wife had left – and drank it on the rocks while munching chips and lying back in my recliner surfing TV. Soft-core movies, nature programs, crime documentaries, all in a blur after a while, like colored fragments in a churning kaleidoscope. I dozed finally, and dreamed of my daughter. Probably because of the crime programs, I dreamed there was an outline of her body in tape on the floorboards where her crib had been. I woke with a start, got to my feet jerkily, spilling my bowl of chips on the floor.

  Without even planning it, I found myself in the nursery with the overhead light turned on. I pointed at the Spectator, and blurted, “Why here, huh? Why are you standing on that spot, of all places? I thought…I thought you things plant yourselves randomly, but this isn’t random, you fucker, and you know it!”

  The entity looked past me, beyond me, maybe even seeing into its own world at the same time it watched mine.

  Tears streamed from my eyes now, and I slid down the wall opposite the Spectator, sat on the floor and wrapped my arms around my legs. My head was pounding from the booze, and I felt like I might vomit. “Why,” I sobbed. “Why…you fucking sadist?”

  I woke that Saturday morning curled on my side on the chilly floorboards, my headache worse and my body aching. I lifted the ball of fire that was my head and glanced across the room at the Spectator. Slanting rays of golden morning sun sparkled off its glassy black skin. I might have found it beautiful, had it only been a statue.

  I’d dreamed again, and as I sat up further some fluttering rags of the dream caught on the edges of my mind and held. I’d dreamed that I’d understood the final stage in the Spectators’ plan. Now that they had established themselves here, we humans would vanish by the millions and finally the billions from our world, and take their place in their realm. We would find ourselves frozen like caryatids in the rooms and chambers of their no doubt dark and gloomy domiciles. Freed of their spell, the Spectators would then become animated and move about the Earth as its new inhabitants. And I would stand in the corner of some dank cavern of a room on some other world, or in some other dimension, or in the netherworld itself, unto the end of time.

  “There’s one thing positive about my baby’s death,” I said to the entity in a ragged voice. “God forgive me, there’s one good thing. And that’s that she died before you monsters came. Because I wouldn’t want her to have one of you tied to her. Her soul is clean, you fuck…she’s gone and she’s free.”

  I had my own “maybe” just then, though I couldn’t share it on some talk program. The maybe that occurred to me sitting there on the floor was that these things had been given to us exactly so that we could hate them. Hate them when our jobs were miserable, or we’d been laid off, when our spouses no longer loved us and our parents were eaten by cancer and our children died prematurely. Maybe because of the times we lived in, times of extremis, we’d been given these beings as a gift. A race of whipping boys. Totems upon which we were meant to focus, to direct, all the hatred and anguish that was our lot as humans. They were not here for themselves. They were here for us. Something to help us go on…after we had vented our unhappiness, purged the wastes of our souls, for one more day.

  It could be that this interpretation was simply my way of coping with the being’s presence, my way of reining in my wild fury and confusion, but after that morning – as if I’d had an epiphany – I saw the being in less of an antagonistic light. If it was here for my benefit, so that I might hate it, ironically it had the opposite effect…by inspiring something almost like goodwill in me. I would talk to it every night after I came home from work. Jokingly, I would pull my wool ski hat onto its head, or tie my necktie around its glossy smooth neck. One evening I placed dark glasses over its eyes, but I took them off again quickly – only a joke; I didn’t mean to impede its view. In fact, I opened the shades all the way so it had a better view from my second floor apartment of late winter’s bare tree branches and the crawl of drab gray cars in the street below.

  I considered making this room my living room, to make more of the Spectator’s company, since if I moved it out of the nursery it would simply rematerialize there the next time I was out of the house, or slept. But no, no, I couldn’t do that. This was still my daughter’s room. So I would simply come in to talk to the Spectator with a glass of bourbon in my hand on the weekend, or with a prudent coffee if it was a weekday, several times each day. My serene and calming companion. I was reminded of people I’d read about, who kept the remains of a dead loved one in the house.

  Yes, a dead loved one…I knew why that analogy had come to me. Because I could almost…almost…make myself believe that this being represented my daughter’s soul.

  “No,” I said to it one Saturday night, close to it and cocking my head to one side as I studied that inscrutable visage. “No…you aren’t my baby, are you? You’re me. That’s why you’re here. You’re another version of me. Maybe you didn’t even plan to come here…maybe it was some kind of cosmic accident. But you’re my soul, aren’t you? And that’s why you’re standing in this spot.” I nodded. Yes, another moment of revelation. The Spectators only seemed to be standing in random spots. If people would only open themselves to the Spectators instead of hating or fearing them, if they would only see them for the shadows of themselves that they were – with their black skin and silver eyes, like negative photographic images – they would realize that the places where they had stationed themselves held some kind of intimate significance.

  “Thank you,” I whispered to the Spectator then, without fully understanding why. “Thank you.”

  The next morning when I went in to see the Spectator with my first coffee of the day in hand, I found the nursery utterly empty. There wasn’t even tape on the floor to mark where the Spectator had stood.

  Over a course of several weeks, all of the Spectators around the globe would have vanished, without anyone ever having witnessed their disappearance with their own eyes.

  So had they all done their job, mission accomplished, and thus gone home? No. Even gone, I could see that many people still hated them vehemently, and most people continued to fear them. Dreaded their return.

  But me…no, there was less dread in my life after that day. Less darkness inside me; I could feel it like a lightening of my very body. I was not thoroughly emptied of my anxieties, but things just seemed more bearable. And later that morning I even poured my bottle of bourbon down the kitchen sink.

  But at that moment, in the slanting golden rays of the early morning sun, with coffee in hand, I stood on the spot where my daughter’s crib had once stood, where the Spectator had stood, and quietly wept.

  BAD RECEPTION

  The 1954 RCA Craig with its seventeen inch screen had cost Stan a whopping $190. Sometimes he regretted not going for the Barton with a twenty-one inch screen, but that would have been fifty bucks more. He made a fair wage at the vast Plymouth factory on Detroit’s Lynch Road, but that didn’t mean he could afford to squander it.

  He was grateful he had passed the automobile plant’s required medical exam. As a Marine, seeking shelter in a trench from North Korean mortar fire, he had sustained a head injury that had required the insertion of a large metal plate in the front of his skull. His head there was markedly depressed. Despite his admission that he suffered chronic headaches, he had passed muster. Furthermore, his supervisor at the auto plant was a World War Two vet, who had taken an immediate liking to him. Maybe it was pity, Stan thought. In any case, he had been working at Plymouth for three months now, his first job since his release from the VA hospital.

  Generally Stan was a frugal man, living alone in a small second-floor apartment, eating Swanson TV dinners in front of his new TV, but a television was more than an indulgence these days; it was a necessity. Especially for a man living alone, with no wife and children.

  Stan’s wife was Lucy Ricardo. His sons were David and Ricky Nelson. His best friend was Joe Friday. His dog was Lassie.

  Like any good husband, father, friend, and master, Stan
often had to undertake extra efforts to ensure the company of his loved ones...to coax and cajole these cathode ray phantoms into their visitations. In that way, his TV was a modern day ouija board. Though the Craig featured “ROTOMATIC TUNING” to “pin-point your station for you automatically,” and “MAGIC MONITOR” circuits to “screen out interference,” Stan relied on a set of rabbit ears resting atop the box-like TV case, without which he’d be a medium without a planchette. This device consisted of a small black sphere from which sprouted two telescopic “ears,” acting as conductors, and between them something like a twisted wire helix. Making adjustments was such a standard routine that Stan barely noticed himself having to set down his TV dinner or bottle of beer to rise from his lumpy armchair and tweak one or other of the antennae just so. One didn’t question the limitations of technology when that technology was all one knew.

  Stan thought the dipole antenna’s black orb with its twin insect feelers resembled the helmet of some outer space monster, poking its head up from behind the TV to gaze back at him as he sat in his otherwise darkened living room with the television’s gray illumination fluttering over him. On weekends, and sometimes even during the week, he would fall asleep there in his armchair with a bottle of Schlitz still in hand. He lied to himself that the beer dulled the pain of his headaches, when in fact it only intensified his suffering by leaving him with crippling hangovers. At least it helped wash down the aspirin.

  Tonight, while slumped back in his chair, he dreamed he was at the plant – but whereas in his daily work he was on the team that installed the steering column, steering gear mechanism, steering wheel gearshift, and even the rear bumper of fish-faced American cars – in his dream he was instead helping to assemble hulking Sherman tanks of the type that had been used in Korea. In fact, the Plymouth plant had supported war-time efforts in the past by manufacturing trucks for the military, though Stan had never been part of such an operation. He had also learned that in a special clean room at the Plymouth facility, a team of Chrysler engineers had developed a cost-saving process for the military, electroplating steel drums with nickel in order to help refine uranium for the creation of atomic bombs, including the very first atom bomb. But Stan had of course never witnessed this project, either.