Thirteen Phantasms (39 page)

It was a clever idea, I suppose, disguising themselves as amphibians. Or it would have been had they given it more study—shrunk the turtles, kept the toads out of the water. That subterranean river, I know now, is a river into the stars, figuratively speaking. My neighbor was closer to the truth than he knew.

About a week ago I saw Myron Chester clambering along the shore of the pond at midnight. He stumbled not so much because of the darkness as because of frantic haste. There was a good moon, and the pond was marbled with shadow and silver light. He was searching for them; that much was clear. He stooped; he peered into the dark water; he swatted at an insect. He hunched along, watching the ground. I saw him wave frantically, but I couldn’t see the object of his attention—something that floated, on the pond. Nothing came of it. He stooped again, scrabbling in a heap of stones up on the bank. When he straightened he held a toad in his hands. He seemed to be speaking to it. He gesticulated wildly with his free hand, debating, insisting, pleading. The toad sat mute. It might have croaked once or twice—I was too far away to hear—but that’s about all. It was quite simply the wrong toad, with no access to spaceships of any sort. And, to its great good luck, it quite apparently didn’t care about such things; it felt no kinship to the aliens and was indifferent to Myron Chester and to starships and to the promise of pending enchantment. Just to make absolutely sure, I watched his search through the kaleidoscopes. There was no doubt; the dancing colors had vanished long since. The aliens were gone. I’d seen them go.

Two months ago, again on a moonlit night, Mrs. Krantz’s dog ran amok. Its howling was astonishing. I had been asleep, but it carried on in such a dismal way that I hurried upstairs and lit my candle. The beast, when I saw him through the window, lay on his back like a bug. The pond was still and empty. The alligators had disappeared. Off in the west a fading green radiance lit the glades as if a convention of glowworms and fireflies was just then breaking up and the creatures were blinking out and wandering off.

The alien ship, beaded with lights, sailed up into the heavens, arcing again across the grinning face of the moon—a finned, silver vessel bound for a distant shore. In a moment it was just another star.

The dog ceased to howl and hasn’t suffered any fits in the months since. Myron Chester, as I said, frequents the pond now at night, searching out toads, pursuing axolotls, questioning turtles, hoping to stumble across that curious pair of alligators. Sometimes I regret not having given the man a glimpse of the aliens through the kaleidoscopes. It’s quite possible that the sight would have satisfied him.

But I don’t think so. It may have driven him wild like Mrs. Krantz’s dog, which, I suspect, also knew of the existence of the aliens. Who can say? Now I’m not so sure what he meant when he revealed, there at the crumbling warehouse, that
they
wouldn’t leave him alone. Was he plagued by amphibia that he suspected to be star beasts, or by the promise he’d seen within that glowing ship? It seems likely to me now that he searches for El Dorado along the shores of that little pond at night, for an avenue to the stars.

As for me, I’m still at my vigil. I have renewed faith in the enchantment of moonlight washing across the tumbling, reflected jewels in the kaleidoscopes, but I don’t depend on aliens or search along the banks of an empty pond at midnight. It’s unlikely that they’ll return. They didn’t find much here to attract them. It’s a pity, as I said, that they didn’t study us a bit more before choosing to appear as amphibia. They were bound to be whacked with broomsticks and threatened with knives and skillets. I wish Myron Chester could have set them straight. But he, of course, didn’t know they wore disguises.

I suppose I suffer the same fate as the dry goods man, even though I’ve seen things a bit more clearly. As far as I know, I haven’t yet replicated Wegius’s coincidence. I’m watching the jewels fall, off and on, as I write this, and as I do I can hear Myron Chester splashing along out in the night, talking with toads. It would be very funny if, about now, the jewels would fall in Wegius’s twin showers, and I’d let out a shriek and tumble in among them, never to return.

You’d find me, perhaps months from now, after the newspapers piled up on the porch and the trumpet flower vines covered and obscured the house. I’d be in a cold stupor, and this would be one of those unfinished narratives that were popular in the pulps. It would end with a cry of startled surprise and a last wavy, trailing stain of ink; then silence.

In 1956 the downtown square mile of the city of Orange was a collection of old houses: craftsman bungalows and tile-roofed Spanish, and here and there an old Queen Anne or a gingerbread Victorian with geminate windows and steep gables, and sometimes a carriage house alongside, too small by half to house the lumbering automobiles that the second fifty years of the century had produced. There were Studebakers at the curbs and Hudsons and Buicks with balloon tires like the illustrations of moon-aimed rockets on the covers of the pulp magazines.

Times were changing. Science was still a professor with wild hair and a lab coat and with bubbling apparatus in a cellar; but in a few short years he would walk on the moon—one last ivory and silver hurrah—and then, as if in an instant, he would grow faceless and featureless and unpronounceable. There would come the sudden knowledge that Moon Valley wasn’t so very far away after all, and neither was extinction; that the nation that controlled magnetism, as Diet Smith would have it, controlled almost nothing at all; and that a score of throbbing bulldozers could reduce the jungled wilds around Opar and El Dorado to desert sand in a few short, sad years. The modern automobile suddenly was slick and strange, stretched out and low and with enormous fins that swept back at the rear above banks of superfluous taillights. They seemed otherworldly at the time and were alien reminders, it seems to me now, of how provincial we had been, balanced on the back edge of an age.

The pace of things seemed to be accelerating, and already I could too easily anticipate stepping out onto my tilted front porch some signifying morning, the wind out of the east, and seeing stretched out before me not a shaded avenue of overarching trees and root-cracked sidewalks but the sleek, desert-like technology of a new age, a new suburbia, with robots in vinyl trousers sweeping fallen leaves into their own open mouths.

•

There is a plaza in the center of town, with a fountain, and in the autumn—the season when all of this came to my attention—red-brown leaves from flowering pear trees drift down onto the sluggish, gurgling water and float there like a centerpiece for a Thanksgiving table. On a starry evening, one November late in the seventies, I was out walking in the plaza, thinking, I remember, that it had already become an artifact, with its quaint benches and granite curbs and rose garden. Then, shattering the mood of late-night nostalgia, there shone in the sky an immense shooting star, followed by the appearance of a glowing object, which hovered and darted, sailing earthward until I could make out its shadow against the edge of the moon and then disappearing in a blink. I shouted and pointed, mostly out of surprise. Strange lights in the sky were nothing particularly novel; I had been seeing them for almost twenty years. But nothing that happens at night among the stars can ever become commonplace. At that late hour, though, there was almost certainly no one around to hear me; or so I thought.

So when she stood up, dropping papers and pencils and a wooden drawing board onto the concrete walk, I nearly shouted again. She had been sitting in the dim lamplight, hidden to me beyond the fountain. Dark hair fell across her shoulders in a rush of curl and hid her right eye, and with a practiced sweep of her hand she pulled it back in a shock and tucked it behind her ear, where it stayed obediently for about three quarters of a second and then fell seductively into her face again. Now, years later, for reasons I can’t at all define, the sight of a dark-haired woman brushing wayward hair out of her eyes recalls without fail that warm autumn night by the fountain.

She had that natural, arty, blue-jeans-and-floppy-sweater look of a college girl majoring in fine arts: embroidered handbag, rhinestone-emerald costume brooch, and translucent plastic shoes the color of root beer. I remember thinking right off that she had languorous eyes, and the sight of them reflecting the soft lamplight of the fountain jolted me. But the startled look on her face implied that she hadn’t admired my shouting like that, not at eleven o’clock at night in the otherwise deserted plaza.

There was the dark, pouting beauty in her eyes and lips of a woman in a Pre-Raphaelite painting, a painting that I had stumbled into in my clodlike way, grinning, I thought, like a half-wit. I too hastily explained the shooting star to her, gesturing too widely at the sky and mumbling that it hadn’t been an ordinary shooting star. But there was nothing in the sky now besides the low-hanging moon and a ragtag cloud, and she said offhandedly, not taking any notice of my discomfort, just what I had been thinking, that there was never anything ordinary about a shooting star.

I learned that her name was Jane and that she had sketched that fountain a dozen times during the day, with the blooming flowers behind it and the changing backdrop of people and cars and weather. I almost asked her whether she hadn’t ever been able to get it quite right, but then, I could see that that wasn’t the point.

Now she had been sketching it at night, its blue and green and pink lights illuminating the umbrella of falling water against night-shaded rosebushes and camphor trees and boxwood hedges.

It was perfect—straight out of a romantic old film. The hero stumbles out of the rain into an almost deserted library, and at the desk, with her hair up and spectacles on her nose, is the librarian who doesn’t know that if she’d just take the glasses off for a moment…

I scrabbled around to pick up fallen pencils while she protested that she could just as easily do it herself. It was surely only the magic of that shooting star that prevented her from gathering up her papers and going home. As it was, she stayed for a moment to talk, assuming, although she never said so, that there was something safe and maybe interesting in a fancier of shooting stars. I felt the same about her and her drawings and her root beer shoes.

She was distracted, never really looking at me. Maybe the image of the fountain was still sketched across the back of her eyes and she couldn’t see me clearly. It was just a little irritating, and I would discover later that it was a habit of hers, being distracted was, but on that night there was something in the air and it didn’t matter. Any number of things don’t matter at first. We talked, conversation dying and starting and with my mind mostly on going somewhere—my place, her place—for a drink, for what? There was something, an atmosphere that surrounded her, a musky sort of sweater and lilacs scent. But she was distant; her work had been interrupted and she was still half lost in the dream of it. She dragged her hand in the water of the fountain, her face half in shadow. She was tired out, she said. She didn’t need to be walked home. She could find her way alone.

•

But I’ve got ahead of myself. It’s important that I keep it all straight—all the details; without the details it amounts to nothing. I grew up on Olive Street, southwest of the plaza, and when I was six and wearing my Davy Crockett hat and Red Ryder shirt, and it was nearly dusk in late October, I heard the ding-a-linging of an ice cream truck from some distant reach of the neighborhood. The grass was covered with leaves, I remember, that had been rained on and were limp and heavy. I was digging for earthworms and dropping them one by one into a corral built of upright sticks and twigs that was the wall of the native village on Kong Island. The sky was cloudy, the street empty. There was smoke from a chimney across the way and the cloud-muted hum of a distant airplane lost to view. Light through the living room window shone out across the dusky lawn.

The jangling of the ice cream bell drew near, and the truck rounded the distant corner, the bell cutting off and the truck accelerating as if the driver, anticipating dinner, had given up for the day and was steering a course for home. It slowed, though, when he saw me, and angled in toward the curb where I stood holding a handful of gutter-washed earthworms. Clearly he thought I’d signaled him. There were pictures of frozen concoctions painted on the gloss-white sides of the panel truck: coconut-covered Neapolitan bars and grape Popsicles, nut and chocolate drumsticks, and strawberry-swirled vanilla in paper cups with flat paper lids. He laboriously climbed out of the cab, came around the street side to the back, and confronted me there on the curb. He smiled and winked and wore a silver foil hat with an astonishing bill, and when he yanked open the hinged, chrome door there was such a whirling of steam off the dry ice inside that he utterly vanished behind it, and I caught a quick glimpse of cardboard bins farther back in the cold fog, stacked one on top of another and dusted with ice crystals.

I didn’t have a dime and wouldn’t be allowed to eat ice cream so close to dinnertime anyway, and I said so, apologizing for having made him stop for nothing. He studied my earthworms and said that out in space there were planets where earthworms spoke and wore silk shirts, and that I could fly to those planets in the right sort of ship.

Then he bent into the freezer and after a lot of scraping and peering into boxes found a paper-wrapped ice cream bar—a flying saucer bar, the wrapper said. It was as big around as a coffee cup saucer and was domed on top and fat with vanilla ice cream coated in chocolate. He tipped his hat, slammed his door, and drove off. I ate the thing guiltily while sitting beneath camellia bushes at the side of the house and lobbing sodden pink blooms out onto the front yard, laying siege to the earthworm fortress and watching the lamps blink on one by one along the street.