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.
