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,
