couldn’t stay in Montesano, and after being shuttled about an uncertain number of times between various relatives, Homer was sent back to his mother. She, however, was not only even more different than before, and far from overjoyed to see her son again, but had found herself a man who was even worse - if that was conceivable - than the husband she had ditched. He was a sailor, and a pretty weird one. A paranoid schizophrenic. Homer’s mother never knew whether he was really at sea or not, and when he was at home he would often beat her up. His voice was rough with alcohol and he was always coming home smelling of other women’s perfume.
One day Homer’s mother took her revenge. She was tired of people dropping by the store where she worked to say, ‘Guess who I saw your sailor with the other night?’ She went out with a friend and got drunk. But instead of feeling relieved, she got so mad at her partner that when she came home she took out one of the guns he kept in a little closet and tried to shoot him. The incident was over before it started because she didn’t even know how to load a gun. But since she had to do something, she put all the guns in a sack and dumped them in the icy waters of the river Wishkah. Homer watched from a distance, and in the middle of the night, while everyone else was sleeping the sleep of the different, he fished out the guns and sold them. Naturally, he invested the proceeds in space toys, among them a particularly rare early specimen, a Günthermann Sky Rocket, which had been manufactured in the American zone of postwar West Germany, but was now, through the mysterious workings of destiny, gathering dust on a remote shelf in a store on Route 12.
These were difficult years, as can readily be imagined. He didn’t feel at ease anywhere. Things were completely out of control. He never had a moment’s peace, and just when it would seem to him that something was on the point of sorting itself out, lo and behold that something would suddenly change, leaving him alone. He always had to be on the alert. Whenever he went out with his mother - to go shopping, say - he’d notice men looking at her in a way that drove him wild. ‘Mom, that man’s looking at you!’ he’d say to her.
‘Don’t be silly,’ his mother would snap, and then as likely as not return the smile. One day a man eyed his mother in an even more objectionable manner than usual and Homer, beside himself with rage, ran to find a policeman and told him about it. The officer looked down at him with that condescending air so typical of adults and dismissed him with a smile. From that day on, Homer hated cops. They were different, too, like everybody else. They were all in it together. A vast web of glances, grimaces and knowing gestures was being spun around him, and sooner or later he would be caught in it.
During the day he went out as little as possible and talked even less. Other people found him a mystery. They never knew what he was thinking, or feeling, assuming that he had any feelings. Maybe he thought he could solve his problems by keeping a low profile. Had it been possible, later, to ask him for an explanation, he would simply have said, ‘I couldn’t communicate with people, so I kept to myself.’
What is certain is that before he reached age ten Homer B. Alienson was already a manic depressive, like the guys who committed suicide by jumping off bridges. This was when he started taking walks in the woods. He would go there at night, when the smell of the rain grew so strong that it clogged his nose. He would set off along Route 12 and then cut in through the woods that lay beyond the trailer parks. Some nights, instead of walking he would stop at the Weyerhauser, the abandoned lumberyard. He’d climb on top of the piles of rotten logs and sit there contemplating the blackness of the night, thinking about the extinguished lights of the fast-food restaurants on the other side of the river. Often he’d end his nocturnal excursions by lying down on the riverbank. He’d listen for a while to the sound of the water, and when his body was so soaked through with cold that he felt as if he had rusty nails instead of bones, he’d scream over and over again till he ran out of breath or his throat was sore. Many other social outcasts used this technique to relieve the anguish of exclusion. But in his case it worsened his already weak physical constitution and further complicated a medical profile that included scoliosis and incipient chronic bronchitis.
The future looked grim for poor Homer. He was doomed to sleeplessness and to pain, both physical and spiritual. As his tenth year approached he seemed to have no other prospect than that of waiting for total collapse. But although he was unhappy, and irremediably so, he had a hunch that the circle had not yet closed, that other things would happen and that a better time would come. It was an inexplicable feeling, and an irrational one, because any change was by its very nature destined to take shape in the difference of his mother and of everyone else, the difference he abhorred and in which he saw the purulent consumption of the world. But it was still a feeling he couldn’t do without, for it was thanks to that hunch that he was able to give a positive meaning to this wait for a future time, that he found the strength to live like that, sleepless among the differents. It was the kind of feeling one can have at an age when the word suicide does not yet indicate the sphere of things that concern us directly. It was only a kid’s feeling. But what if it was? That kid felt so bad. What other feelings would he have to endure in the future?
They had electricity, supplied at competitive prices. They had plenty of gas, piped in by the Gas Company, and they had the US West telephone service. They had dozens of cable channels, provided by AT&T Cablevision of Washington State, and a total of a hundred and one churches scattered around the county. They had a hospital with two hundred and fifty-nine beds, and as many trees as anyone could wish for. The inhabitants of Grays Harbor County had everything they could possibly need, or so it seemed. But it was clear that something was still missing, even if nobody knew quite what.
People drove a lot that year.
The Coca-Cola Company replaced its traditional product with a sweeter formula called New Coke. People had to drive for miles to reach the few towns where stocks of the old Coke were still available, and as they drove they wondered why the Company had changed something that was perfect the way it was.
Homer didn’t drive at all; he just walked in the woods as usual. And yet things started to change for him, too. First, he took that janitorial job at the library. Second, he set up home on his own, to the great relief of that different his mother and her sailor boyfriend. Lastly, he started selling flying saucers and other space toys by mail order, to the point where it became a fully fledged business and he was able to quit the library job.
That was the year the President underwent an operation to remove a cancerous growth from his intestinal tract.
That was the year after 1984.
It was 1985.
That was what it was.
The library, setting up home on his own and the mail-order business were fine, but they were simply minor tremors. Novelties that prepared the ground for the moment he had been waiting for all his life, the moment of the Big Sleep.
There had been premonitory signs. Signs he’d read in the streets of Aberdeen in the form of graffiti scrawled on the walls of private houses, public buildings, meeting places and shopping malls. Primitivist inscriptions that said:
ABORT CHRIST
or
NIXON KILLED HENDRIX
or
GOD IS GAY
He wasn’t too hot on theology. And he had a vague recollection that this Nixon guy had had a cast-iron alibi for the death of Hendrix - and for the deaths of a whole lot of other people, too, come to that. But there was something he approved of in those statements. He read in them an opposition to change, a rejection of induced nostalgia, a resistance to the sinister plan that was being implemented in that unspeakable decade. Not everyone was different. His hunch had been right. Something could still happen.
