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
