Tommaso Pincio

Love-Shaped Story

Translated from the Italian

by Jon Hunt

Flamingo

To Kurt Cobain

‘Now it is well known that when there are many of these flowers together their odor is so powerful that anyone who breathes it falls asleep, and if the sleeper is not carried away from the scent of the flowers, he sleeps on and on forever.’

L. FRANK BAUM, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

1. Smalltown Alien

2. The American Sleep

3. High There

4. Home Run

5. Independent Days

6. Smalltown Ghost

7. Alter Echo

About the Author

Author’s Note

Copyright

About the Publisher

1.
Smalltown Alien

What about love?

It was approaching the turn of the last century. The Nineties, as they were then known - the years of creeping unease, as they have since been called - had just begun. Homer B. Alienson, a human being who had already used up more than half his natural life expectancy, stepped out into the new decade with this question ringing in his brain: ‘What about love?’

Everyone was haunted by questions back then. Questions like ‘Who killed Laura Palmer?’ So there was no reason for Homer to be surprised when this unwelcome query started pestering him. It was in the air. Sooner or later, he too was bound to have his life needlessly disrupted, be confronted by a problem that had never before been a problem to him.

He was indeed expecting it. But he was hoping to avoid the problem, find some system for being over-looked, missed out, some tiny gap in the registers that charted the flood of living beings. But he was the first to doubt that he could really count on such unlikely eventualities, and even on his brighter days he couldn’t imagine himself truly safe. There are some things you just can’t avoid; they’re bound to happen sooner or later. But at least let it be later, let him be granted a reprieve.

It wasn’t that he’d never thought about it. It wasn’t that he didn’t know what love was. He hadn’t done anything about it yet, he was prepared to admit that, but what was the hurry, anyway? Why now? Why him? Why didn’t they take their questions somewhere else? Why didn’t they leave him alone, when with his space toys and his system of life he wasn’t bothering anybody? It wasn’t that he wanted to avoid the problem; all he asked for was a bit of peace and quiet. He would think about this love thing, he knew he was going to have to do something about it. Just, not now.

They came from far away, such questions. From far, far away - so far away, they were already posing themselves long before you were born. Formulating themselves in some dark primordial pit, they devoured lightless years to come and seek you out in the grayest holes in the universe, in places you wouldn’t have wandered into even by mistake - places you’d never have found even if you’d been looking for them.

And was there a grayer hole in the world than Aberdeen? It did nothing but rain there, the constant drizzle echoing the steady fall of chopped-down trees. Not a trace of its colorful past now remained; the ‘women’s boardinghouses’ of Hume Street were a thing of the past. All that was left was a wasteland of lumberyards beside the river Wishkah and the smell of rain-soaked wood. With time, even the loggers had been supplanted by machinery. The wood was cut with lasers now, and there was nothing left to do except go and get drunk in taverns like the Pourhouse, or jump off a bridge.

There were said to be more suicides in Grays Harbor County than anywhere else in the country. And yet people needed that record. It instilled calm, it seemed to explain things that didn’t bear explanation. People heard about their highest rate of suicides and it made them feel better. Not exactly good, just better. But this was a place where one of the highlights of the year was the annual chainsaw championships. Not to mention that sky, the cheerless evergray sky of Aberdeen.

Homer could sit musing for hours on that color, and on the real substance of what were perhaps only apparently clouds. Prehistoric clouds that had already been there in the age of the dinosaurs. Clouds too heavy to be scattered or dragged off somewhere else by the wind. He looked at those clouds and it occurred to him that they were the reason why there was no space base in Grays Harbor County. You wouldn’t have a hope of getting a rocket into space from there. He imagined the rocket lifting off, then dwindling in size till it vanished at the end of a trail of whitish smoke. Then he heard a boom and saw bits of metal raining from the sky, and he realized they were the fragments of the rocket falling back to earth. Not even rockets could pierce the evergray vault of Aberdeen.

What about love?

He couldn’t remember exactly when the question had first appeared, but he had reason to believe that it had been on one of those hopeless noontides when he would slump on the couch and sit there motionless, contemplating the grayness that seeped in through the window. It must have fallen from the sky in a single frozen moment, a rain effect in stop-motion created by fragments of one of those rockets that failed to pierce the vault of Aberdeen.

This kind of inductive memory only served to insinuate the question yet more deeply into his mind. Homer knew very well that he wouldn’t break free of it easily. He knew very well that it wouldn’t let him alone till he’d given it an answer. And not an evasive answer, either. He would have to present a plan of the steps he intended taking to address the total lack of love in his life, give a precise and credible account of what he meant to do, how he would go about it, and above all, when. In other words he would have to show some initiative - that is to say, venture onto ground that was definitely not his forte.

At the time when the question first appeared, 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 - they seemed to him like unhappy ghosts, tormented souls who sought illusory relief in an unobtainable issue of 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. It wasn’t bad, the library job. It was something to do, and it was one more reason for staying awake at night, though he had 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, and when the time of integration would begin? He decided he’d better be careful, and immediately adopted the recommended behavior. Impermeability. Insensibility. He resolved to reduce communication with others to a minimum, and spent all the time on his own, concentrating on his collection of space toys.

But if the second point wasn’t much of a problem, the first - how to avoid being body-snatched - had a drastic solution. It was perfectly simple in theory, but in practice … in practice it meant giving up sleeping. Because that was how the change came about. You fell asleep and you woke up different.

In the film footage, Dr Bennell had spoken of how people often became dehumanized, losing their identity so gradually that they weren’t aware of any alteration in themselves.

Homer couldn’t agree more. That was exactly how it had happened. His mother, the garbage man and all the others. The change was imperceptibly slow until the final, irrevocable moment of palpable difference. But this didn’t make it any easier to accept the drawbacks of the solution. It’s all very well to talk, but how are you supposed to react when somebody comes along and tells you it’s quite easy, all you have to do is not sleep?

All you have to do, he says.

Homer Alienson’s voluntary insomnia continued for an extraordinary length of time. Nigh on eighteen years, give or take a month or two. This was not an easy period, nor was it devoid of consequences. It was an established scientific fact, even in those days, that the need for a periodic suspension of the activities of the will and the consciousness - a need sometimes referred to as ‘switching off - was necessary to the regeneration of physical and/or psychological efficiency. It had, moreover, been proven that a prolonged lack of sleep made you irritable, altered your metabolism, and led to feelings of nausea and states of hallucination. This knowledge, however, was based on studies that embraced a limited time span or at least a period below the critical threshold of ninety-six hours. Homer was unique. He was the only case of a higher living organism that had permanently succeeded in eliminating from its metabolism the physiological need to switch off. How he succeeded in doing so is still a matter of debate. There is no doubt that he was determined not to fail in his intention and sincerely convinced that he never had, but since nobody was there to keep a check on him, we cannot be absolutely sure that he did not inadvertently close his eyes now and then.

But whether it was partial or total, his self-imposed, continuous insomnia did have one consequence. It caused a kind of temporal displacement of Homer’s whole existence. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to describe it as a hitherto unknown form of hibernation.

What happened, put very simply, was that while the time of the world around him continued to flow at its usual speed, Homer’s sleepless time expanded by almost a decade. The years passed, but Homer’s years remained the same, and from that February 20th, 1967 when he took his momentous decision, Homer continued to be the nine-year-old kid that he had been then. By constantly staying awake through the icy darkness of the night, he put his best years in the freezer, like a packet of frozen peas, a reserve to be consumed at the right moment, when it was safe for him to sleep again.

It was as if he had been assigned a new birth date: February 20th, 1967. It was like coming into the world a second time to spend sleepless nights watching the drops of rain slide glistening down the window pane. And while his mother slept peacefully in all her difference, Homer lay on his bed listening to the rhythm of his own breathing, the rhythm that accompanied the profoundly sad darkness of those hours when all was still, except the rain that fell and those glistening drops that slid down the window pane, one single, immense, everlasting moment.

Never sleeping.

* * *

Many years later, when our story reached its inevitable conclusion, when there was nothing more to say, and to add anything would have seemed not only gratuitous but disrespectful, Homer B. Alienson’s mother issued a statement.

‘Our divorce was a devastating experience for him. It destroyed his life. He became … how can I put it? Totally sad. You couldn’t say anything to him. He was so irritable. Always sullen. Tetchy. He slept very little, I could hear him tossing and turning in his bed till late at night. He always had been hyper. Some time before, the doctor had put him on a course of Ritalin, but that only made him even more nervous. Sometimes he didn’t go to sleep till four in the morning. And after I split from my husband he just went wild. The divorce and the Ritalin were an explosive mixture. He seemed to stop sleeping altogether. He was always brooding on things. On the bathroom wall he wrote DAD SUCKS and MOM SUCKS with an arrow pointing to the toilet bowl. He was mad at us, that’s obvious. And he lost all enthusiasm. He wasn’t interested in anything, apart from his space toys. He became very inward, too. He’d go whole days without saying a word. He held everything in. It was as if he distrusted everything and everybody. He hadn’t been like that, before. He changed completely. He was different.’

Different, him. That was rich, coming from her. Oh sure, he was different. Different in the sense that they’d fucked up his life for good and all. ‘The truth is, I had nothing in common with them,’ Homer would have said, if he’d been in a fit state to make any comment. ‘I don’t want to push this body-snatcher business too far. Maybe they weren’t as different as all that. But even supposing I got things out of proportion, the problem is that when you’re nine years old and you find you no longer have a family, you feel… unworthy. Yeah. That’s the word. Unworthy. You feel ill at ease with your friends.’

Friends? What friends?

‘Well, okay, not exactly friends. Classmates. The kids I hung out with. They all had normal families and did the things people do in normal families. In our family, nothing was normal.’

After the divorce it was agreed that Homer would live with his mother. But that didn’t last long. By now he had become impossible to handle. After a year, at her wits’ end, his mother sent him to live with his father, who’d moved to Montesano, another logging town not far from Aberdeen.

Homer was far from happy with the new arrangement. They camped out in a trailer park, in a sort of prefabricated shack on wheels. It was the pits. He had nothing to do except ride his bike down to the beach. What’s more, he was constantly anxious about his space toys. He was terrified by the - by no means implausible - thought that his mother would throw them out. He must return to Aberdeen.

‘My mother was bad enough, but my father was a real asshole. He was obsessed with sports. Baseball and that kind of thing. I was hopeless at sports, but he wouldn’t accept it. He had never been any good at sports himself. But despite that he insisted I join the wrestling team. I hated wrestling. I hated the gym too. And the jocks that went there, and the training. Everything.’

After the move to Montesano, Homer’s father found a job as a tallyman in a logging company. Whenever he had a day off, he’d take his son to his workplace.

‘It was his idea of a father-and-son day out,’ Homer would explain. ‘He’d leave me sitting in the office while he went and counted logs. He did nothing else all day. Even on his days off.’

An intolerable situation. To make matters worse, Homer had a new mother to contend with. ‘A really sweet woman,’ was his father’s description of her. Homer took a different view, and when, a few years later, he reminisced about his father’s new partner, his judgment was scathing: ‘I’ve never met anyone so two-faced. And she was a lousy cook. You’d come home and find a disgusting, shriveled-up meal on your plate that she’d lovingly prepared and left sitting in the oven for a few hours.’

Homer spent most of the time in his father’s cluttered toolroom, and when he poked his head out he’d find that his father had bought some new toy for his younger stepbrothers. Useless Tonka trucks or stupid Starhorses.

It became clear even to his father that the boy 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.

The year was drawing to a close. It was the middle of the night, and Homer was preparing for one of his walks in the woods. As ever, the air was cold and the darkness smelled of rain. But no rain was falling. He looked up at the sky, which that night was a mantle of darkness shrouded in turn by an even greater darkness. The beginning of all things. Visible and invisible. The nothingness of all things. Audible and inaudible. He listened to the darkness in the hope of hearing the echo of the great cosmic bang, the residual wave that had been spreading through the dark matter of the universe since the time of creation. The sound was imperceptible to the human ear, but Homer had heard of two young radioastronomers who had picked it up on an unusual kind of radio antenna.

Their names were Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias. At first they had mistaken the signal for interference caused by the droppings of pigeons that nested on their horn-shaped antenna. But when not even cleaning eliminated the…

A scream. Someone had let out a scream like the ones he himself hurled up at the skies on those nights when he lay on the riverbank. For an instant he thought he had screamed himself, without being aware of it. Is this what all those years of forced sleeplessness have reduced me to? he asked himself. But before he could answer…

Another scream spread through the dark matter of the night. He was sure now that it hadn’t been him. The scream came from the North Aberdeen Bridge, which was at least a hundred yards from where he was standing. A call, he thought. Someone - or something- was trying to draw him toward them. Was it a trap laid by the differents?

He stood there, a statue cast in dark matter, wondering what to do. Caution advised him to keep well away, but his eye fell on one of those anti-change graffiti. It was written with a black marker on a post owned by the local electricity company:

GOD TAKES IT IN THE ASS

For some inexplicable reason the slogan seemed propitious. He decided to chance his luck, and set off in the direction of the scream. Toward the North Aberdeen Bridge. He moved slowly. Step by step the darkness became a cryptogram of shadows. Homer tried to decipher its content as he walked. For about thirty yards the forms wavered between pure abstraction and ghostly vision, until, under the planks of the bridge, he was sure he saw the makeshift camp of a young bum and, sitting with his face to the river, the young bum himself.

Homer stopped behind the figure and peered at him, holding his breath. He seemed to be fishing, but it was impossible to say for sure. It was dark. Maybe he was just looking at the river. Or maybe he was admiring the darkness, which there under the bridge smelled not of rain but of rot. Seconds passed. The sound of running water. The young man sitting on the shingle and Homer standing behind him, both of them motionless, as in a painting where people are more inanimate than things and the air is nothing but a veil of transparent varnish. This might have gone on indefinitely had the young bum not turned around. They stared at one another, though the darkness prevented them from looking one another in the eye. Then Homer spoke. He had to speak. He felt he had no alternative.

‘You screamed.’

After a moment’s pause the young bum said:

‘I was doing some exercises to strengthen my vocal cords.’

Homer didn’t know what else to say. Maybe there wasn’t anything else to say. He said nothing and didn’t move.

‘Are you going to stand there all night?’ asked the young bum.

Homer thought this might be an invitation to sit down, but wasn’t sure. Nor was he sure if he could trust this person. But something impelled him to trust him. He wanted to trust him.

‘God takes it in the ass,’ said Homer as if giving a password, which in fact wasn’t far from what he intended.

‘You said it, man. Shit.’

This didn’t sound like a coded reply.

‘Anyway, yeah. I’m the one who writes that stuff.’

Homer said nothing and didn’t move.

‘I’m Kurt.’

Homer racked his brains for something to say next, since it was clearly his turn again. Finally he thought of something.

‘Homer B. Alienson.’

This was an extremely rare occurrence for him. It usually took him far longer to break down the barrier that he put between himself and others.

‘Homer B. Alienson,’ repeated Kurt. Then: ‘What does the B stand for?’

‘Boddah,’ said Homer, astonished at his own ability to reply without hesitation.

‘I used to have a friend called that. Boddah.’

Was this a pure coincidence? Homer wasn’t inclined to believe in coincidences. Life had taught him that they were very rare. There was always a design. Or almost always.

Kurt had turned away and resumed what he had been doing before.

‘Are you fishing?’ asked Homer.

‘I’ve got to eat something. Eating fish is okay. They don’t have feelings like other animals.’

‘They’re poisonous.’

‘Nah. You’re confusing them with snakes.’

‘The fish in this river are as poisonous as snakes.’

‘I’ll make sure I don’t get bitten, then.’

‘You’ll die anyway. The problem’s the water. It’s the water that’s poisonous,’ Homer said. ‘You can’t eat those fish.’

‘Fuck you,’ said Kurt, addressing the fish, or maybe the water. Or maybe Homer, who knows.

‘Is this where you live?’

‘Temporary accommodation. I got kicked out of my home. Sometimes I sleep in a friend’s van, other times I come here.’

‘What do you do in the daytime?’

‘I go to the library.’

‘The Public Library?’ Although he had stopped working there, and Aberdeen only had one library, to Homer this was a coincidence that required verification.

‘Sure. I read and take notes. Sometimes I go to sleep.’

Whenever he heard the word ‘sleep’, Homer couldn’t help shuddering, with a kind of cosmic regret. ‘What books?’ he asked.

‘What books what?’

‘What books d’you read?’

‘I like writers whose names begin with B.’

‘Like Boddah,’ said Homer on an impulse.

Kurt smiled. A smile that was more of a grimace than a smile. ‘Yeah, like Boddah.’ He had turned around now. There under the bridge, with the damp seeping out from every dark corner, Homer saw that the boy’s shadow was a shivering mass, a variegated repertoire of nervous tics and muscular twitches.

‘What about you?’

‘Me?’

‘Yeah, you. D’you wander around under bridges every night?’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘I usually walk in the woods.’

He was on the point of telling him about the times he lay down on the riverbank to scream into the night, but restrained himself.

‘What’s the matter, don’t you like sleeping?’

Homer considered the question.

‘Well?’

‘It’s not that I don’t like it. I can’t.’

‘You can’t?’

Homer shook his head ruefully.

Kurt cracked his knuckles. One of those tics of his. One of the most frequent, Homer was later to learn.

‘It’s because of the people.’

Kurt looked at him.

‘The different people, I mean.’

‘And how long is it since you last slept?’

‘It’s eighteen years.’

‘What’s eighteen years?’

‘Since I last slept.’

‘Eighteen years?’

‘Eighteen.’

Kurt cracked his knuckles. ‘Fuck. Some problem you got there.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Don’t you wish you could sleep sometimes?’

‘Yeah.’

Kurt sighed, gazed at a point far away in the night and said: ‘What you need is to find a system.’

‘Yeah.’

‘I have problems with people too, Boddah.’

‘Homer.’

‘Yeah, sorry. Homer.’

The rainy scent of the night grew more intense. ‘You have problems with people too,’ Homer prompted.

‘The different ones, I mean.’

‘The different ones.’

Kurt didn’t continue.

‘The different ones,’ Homer repeated.

‘Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not after you. Isn’t that right?’

It was, indeed, dead right. ‘Yeah,’ said Homer.

‘I was an alien too, when I was a kid,’ said Kurt. ‘I was convinced my dad and mom weren’t my real parents. I thought I was from another planet. I wanted to be from another planet. Real bad. At night I’d stand at the window and talk to my real parents. My family in the skies. My real family.’

This guy really seems to know the score, Homer said to himself.

‘And I thought there must be thousands of other alien kids. Kids from another world who’d been dropped off all over the place by mistake. I hoped I’d meet one of them, sooner or later. Maybe I did, I’m not sure. Maybe all kids are aliens, when they’re born. Then they change.’

‘They become different,’ concluded Homer.

‘Yeah, that’s about it.’

Homer waited for the boy to get to the point. But after a lapse of time that might have been a couple of minutes - an eternity when you’re waiting for someone to say something - he began to suspect that he wasn’t going to get to any point and was going to spend the rest of the night gazing into the darkness. Without saying anything else.

‘What I need is to find a system,’ said Homer, in an attempt to spur him into speaking again.

‘What system could help against tough love? No money, no home. Die of hunger, die of cold. Die of nothing. Punk.’

‘Tough love?’ Homer was losing the thread.

‘It’s a way of dealing with negative types. Suppose you’re aggressive or antisocial. Okay, so they tell your mother to apply tough love therapy. It means she cuts off all your supplies. Food, money, help, affection. Everything. It’s supposed to make you change your attitude.’

‘Does it work?’

‘It works with the people it works with. You don’t sleep, right?’

Homer nodded.

‘It wouldn’t work with you, then.’

Homer wasn’t sure he had quite understood. ‘Yeah, but what about the system?’

‘I told you. Punk. The bridge, the poisonous fish, the night. What system could help against that? Curl up in a fucking corner and die. That’s the only system.’

‘I meant for sleeping,’ Homer hazarded.

‘Oh yeah. Sleeping.’ Kurt seemed to have forgotten the point from which their conversation had begun.

‘You mentioned a system.’

‘I did?’

Kurt shrugged as if to say that it wasn’t his fault if that’s what he had understood.

‘So you want to sleep?’

Homer didn’t reply, but it was easy to see what a state he was in. Kurt felt sorry for him. If ever he might have met a kid from another world, that kid was Homer. He cracked his knuckles. Then he stood up, put his hand in the pocket of his faded jeans and pulled out a little glassine pouch containing something that looked like powder. He dangled it in the darkness between thumb and index finger.

‘The system.’

He set off for home at daybreak. The sky in the east was the color of steel, and the silence itself was a thinking presence that had momentarily brought the whole world to a standstill.

The silence seems deeper now than at any time of night, thought Homer. Maybe that’s because silence is invisible when it’s dark. This was one of those rare moments when the present was absolutely pure, stripped of any sense of before or after. For as long as that steel light lasted, time would simply float, a cork on the viscous calm of the river.

He walked homeward feeling sick at heart, as if he had just said a tearful goodbye - something he had never actually done in his life - as if he were abandoning everything that surrounded him. The agitation aroused in him by his meeting with Kurt formed a stark contrast to the stillness of the dawn. As he walked along with his hands in the pockets of his sweatpants, the fingertips of his right hand caressed the plastic pouch. The system. He tried to retrace the course of those sleepless years in his mind, but couldn’t. They were a continuum, and a continuum is difficult for the memory to get a hold on. Especially when you’re still caught up in it. He tried to remember if there had been other dawns like this one. He sought them among the dawns when he had returned home after nights spent walking in the woods or screaming from the riverbank. The dawn after a sleepless night is the worst time for someone who has to stay awake. He had always hated it - hated the silence, the false innocence of all the differents savoring their last minutes of sleep. He would return home feeling tense, with nausea and stomach cramps. Often he’d kneel down with his head over the toilet, his arms braced against the wall, ready to vomit out the whole wide world. But nothing ever came up. For how can you vomit out a thing like wakefulness?

But now his hatred of the dawn had suddenly vanished, to be replaced by guilt at having hated it so much. Guilt at having found the system. Yet despite the thrill of caressing the system in his pocket, he felt uneasy, and for some reason unworthy. He wondered whether that feeling of guilt might actually be an alarm bell. A warning against taking the system for granted. After all, why should he trust a guy he had never met before, who loafed around under the North Aberdeen Bridge like the hobos and ate poisonous fish?

He had no reason to trust him. But he wanted to trust him, nonetheless. He had made up his mind to trust him, from the outset. He had never met anyone like Kurt. Anyone so sad and so… He stopped to think. Then - though it wasn’t easy for him to formulate such a concept - he finished his imaginary sentence. So beautiful.

Besides, he couldn’t take any more, he just wanted to sleep. And he’d decided to trust Kurt because he was too tired to go on resisting. Fuck the change and fuck the differents. Do what the hell you like, but let me sleep. This, too, was an ambivalent feeling, however. Now that he finally had the system, the imminent prospect of sleep made him almost nostalgic about the continuum that he was about to break. It was almost painful to bid farewell to the dimension of heroic voluntary insomnia in which he had lived all those years.

When he got home he slumped on the couch and stared at his own thoughts, mirrored in the void before him. He was trembling. He stood up and took the bag of system out of his pocket. He laid it on the coffee table where he usually rested his feet, boots and all. He slumped back onto the couch. He let out a long, slow breath. Then he sat up straight, the way people do in dentists’ waiting rooms. He was trembling a little less now. Again he stared at his thoughts, now mirrored in the little pouch on the table.

There was little to see, in truth. The questions to trust or not to trust, to try or not to try, were merely token scruples of his conscience. Not that everything was crystal clear, of course. On the contrary. The reflections he saw in the glassine bag were only too opaque, morally speaking. Homer was well aware that the system must have side-effects. Any remedy does. And often, the more effective the remedy, the more dangerous the side-effects. Even the first amendment was subject to this greater, universal law. It was not unusual for some unlucky citizen to get a bullet in the forehead because this was a free country.

But Homer had decided to put off considering the side-effects until a more appropriate moment, though he sensed that by the time that moment came it would already be too late. He found himself in the condition described by a Russian writer of the previous century: that of a person who has reached the final frontier. In practice, he was delaying the time when he would take his decision; he was like someone who gazes across the final frontier and glimpses on the other side, far away on the horizon, the unknown consequences of that decision. Moments of aesthetic uncertainty. Anyone who comes to the final frontier always oversteps the limit. In every sense.

Perhaps the only one of his mirrored thoughts over which he lingered was his memory of what Kurt had told him about Boddah. Eventually Boddah had disappeared. This had happened when Uncle Clark had asked Kurt if he could take Boddah with him on his next trip to Vietnam, where he was being sent on military service because of some war that was going on out there. Boddah could keep him company, Uncle Clark said.

‘So he went out there and never came back,’ Homer had surmised.

Kurt had gazed at him quizzically. Then he’d explained: ‘Boddah didn’t exist. That’s why they wanted to send him to Vietnam.’

‘Huh?’ Homer didn’t get it.

‘To force me out into the open, don’t you see? My mother was tired of laying the table for someone who didn’t exist. So Uncle Clark made up the Vietnam story to force me to admit that Boddah didn’t exist, that he was a figment of my imagination.’

Now at last it was clear. We all have imaginary friends when we’re small. But there was something else in all this that defied logic, something Kurt hadn’t explained to him. Something that cast a sinister shadow over the whole situation. But what the hell? Sinister shadows were always being cast over all kinds of situation, Homer mused. Life was too short to worry about them all.

He slouched further down in the cushions and stared at the glassine pouch, which no longer mirrored any thoughts. His life was going to change. Man, was it going to change.

He cracked his knuckles and sighed.

2.
The American Sleep

It changed all right. Man, did it change. It was as if a chasm had suddenly opened up, splitting time into two distinct ages: systemic on the one side, presystemic on the other. Far more than simply enabling him to sleep, the system transformed and colored every aspect of his life. Before long, the distinction between the two ages became second nature to Homer, and he found he could instantly slot things into one or the other category. As time passed, his life became more and more systemized, and the traces of the presystemic age grew correspondingly weaker. Yet they didn’t entirely fade away: they were constantly popping up at the most unexpected moments and in the remotest corners of his days. They’d suddenly appear in front of him, alarming links between his present state as a Homer systemicus and his former one as a Homer insomnis. They were like fossils of some creature that was now extinct or unidentifiable, so deeply buried in his consciousness that he couldn’t be sure it had ever existed.

There came a point where he could scarcely believe that he, a magnificent specimen of Homer systemicus of the family Alienson, had ever been a Homer insomnis. That earlier incarnation seemed like a remote ancestor, a kind of prosimian that had managed to survive in a state of continuous wakefulness, as the eutherian mammals in prehistoric times had adapted to life in the trees.

But Homer was not aware of the metabolic changes that the system wrought in him. If he had been, he might have realized that it was his present, not his former self, that was more ape-like. For by this time he was totally and utterly systemized.

It wasn’t like that at first, however. The beginning was bland, impalpable and diffuse. A blissful, heavenly calm. A beginning so gentle and evanescent that it was almost imperceptible. He often recalled, in later times, the hazy moments of the dawn, those dilated instants when everything, beginning with the coffee table in front of the couch, took on the consistency of foam rubber. He would sit on the summit of the world, watching, and between the foam-rubber world and his vantage point the air seemed to condense into a protective film that cushioned or muffled the offensive solidity of objects and the menacing hostility of the human race. If ever he had been destined to experience moments of happiness, those moments must have been the early days of the system. They were his golden age, his paradise lost, his nirvana before death.

Unfortunately, the era of happiness in which he thought he was living receded, slowly but remorselessly, into the past. Eventually it vanished completely, except for occasional flashes, sadistic manifestations that only served to intensify his regret, to heighten his oppressive nostalgia for those halcyon days. Reluctantly, Homer was forced to conclude that one of the strengths of the system was precisely this: the elusiveness of its beginnings. And that was what made it so desperately desirable; so intimately indispensable.

He realized, in other words, that his unconditional subjection was explained by his anxiety to rediscover that indescribable glow that he thought he’d glimpsed in the early times. Beginning to see the light, he’d heard someone sing once on the radio. That was exactly how he had felt. He had begun to see the light - a light connected, in his memory, with the dawn glow of that day when he had returned home with the little pouch of system in the right pocket of his sweatpants. Then everything had gone blank.

With the passing of time he discovered that the more use he made of the system, the more his need to relive the feelings of the early days increased, while still remaining unsatisfied; the more he systemized his life, the weaker the feelings he was seeking became. He began to form the conviction that the whole complex of his sensory capacities had undergone a radical and irreversible change. He began to suspect that he no longer experienced things in the same way; that he no longer had feelings - at least not in the sense that he thought he should attribute to the concept of feeling. If he’d been obliged to explain the phenomenon, he would probably have said that feelings had been replaced by states, ranging from the transitory state of wellbeing he’d felt in the early days to a perpetual state of discomfort (the prevailing state from a certain moment onward), with, in between, a wide range of other states, all of them tending toward the negative.

After a while he understood that the fundamental state, the one that determined the nuances and gradations of all the others, was his addiction to the system. It occurred to him that it might be a good idea to change his system of life. And he tried to do so, at least initially. He tried to give up the system and return to the heroic Spartan sleeplessness of the presystemic age. He discovered, however, that it wasn’t so easy to escape; he felt the overwhelming strength of the system and discovered how much he had come to depend on it; he discovered that the perpetual state of discomfort was nothing compared to the pain that awaited him beyond the protective cushion; he discovered that if you live even for a short time in a world of foam rubber, contact with the hard material of things and the rough minds of people hurts too much; he dis-covered that when you return to feelings after living in states, the only feeling open to you is that of pain; he discovered pain in all its forms, a species of pain unknown to those who had never entered the system; he came to know pain as a form of life and discovered that pain itself could become a system, a far more invasive and unbearable system than the one that enabled him to sleep. For this and other reasons he never really tried to leave the system. Never even contemplated it. When you’re inside it, the thought of leaving is only a dream, a way of deluding yourself and killing time. And when, in the early Nineties, the question of love was put to him, he couldn’t remember ever having had a thought that had even the remotest connection with the possibility of leaving it. The system had gradually and definitively gained the upper hand, so that now it was no longer appropriate to speak of Homer being totally systemized, but rather of the system being homerized. Totally.

The day when the dawn light had been the color of steel and he’d returned home to gaze at his thoughts mirrored in the little bag of system that Kurt had given him, was a day of eager expectation. After cracking his knuckles and sighing, Homer had made up his mind not to try the system until the evening. He wanted to perform the act with due ceremony. It must have all the solemnity of an official occasion, so he would have to devise an appropriate ritual. He had wandered aimlessly round the house, cracking his knuckles at regular intervals, trying to think what might be suitable, but hadn’t been able to think of anything except that he found this new trick of cracking his knuckles really rather agreeable. Then he had gone out and walked toward the bus station without any precise intention. He lined up for tickets, though he had no destination in mind. Only when he found himself at the counter did he return to his senses and realize that he had come all this way for nothing. But he couldn’t tell the ticket clerk that he’d made a mistake. He knew himself only too well and was aware that whatever excuse he might have mumbled out would have sounded suspicious to the ticket clerk, who bore all the hallmarks of the classic different. He couldn’t risk being caught out after years of sleeplessness and only one step away from the system, so he bought a ticket to Olympia, doing his best to seem decisive. During the journey, with his head resting against the icy glass of the window, not really knowing what he was going to do when he got there, he thought about the beauty of being able to close your eyes and go to sleep, gently rocked by the movement of the bus as it devoured miles of wet asphalt. He peered out of the corner of his eye at the little boy sleeping in the row in front, till the mother noticed and glared back at him. Homer responded with an indignant leer. He meant to communicate to that woman and to the whole company of differents his profound sense of triumph. No longer will you hold me in the palm of your hand, that leer meant. Her only response was to take the child in her arms and move nearer the front, to the seat behind the driver. In the old days such behavior would have made him feel trapped, but now everything was different. He felt secure, and rested his head on the window again, enjoying the vibrations of the icy glass pane. The sight of the sleeping child had reminded him of the evening many years ago when he’d seen the famous piece of film footage that had changed his life. He had never again had occasion to see that recording of the dramatic testimony of Dr Miles Bennell of Santa Mira. The pictures had imprinted themselves on his memory, and every time he thought about them he seemed to relive distinctly the feelings he’d had, but if he tried to reconstruct the events narrated in the film he realized that only scattered fragments remained. He could only recall isolated scenes, like that of the central square of Santa Mira in the morning viewed from Dr Bennell’s window, or the one where Dr Bennell crosses the road arm in arm with his old flame Becky Driscoll, or again - more indelible than all the others - the close-up of the wonderful face of Dana Wynter who, toward the end of the film excerpt, personifies the different Becky Driscoll, the one who has turned cold after yielding to the need to sleep. But he couldn’t visualize the whole. He wished he could see that footage again, now that he was capable of viewing it from a completely different perspective. He wondered whether it was worth phoning some TV station to ask them to show the footage of the body snatchers. They might listen to him. Maybe they did take notice of what viewers said. Maybe they even had a special slot, called ‘Film requests’. He lifted his head off the window and thought the idea was really stupid. He cracked his knuckles and sighed. Then he had a flash of inspiration. Why bother to ask the TV people? What was to stop him doing it all on his own? At once he realized that he had not taken the bus to Olympia in vain and knew what he was going to do as soon as he reached town. First he would go around the stores where they rented videos, looking for film of the body snatchers, then he would buy a VCR. That’s what he’d do when he got to town. He was excited, too, at the idea of what he would do when he got home. First he would install the VCR, following all the enclosed instructions, then he would prepare the powdered system, scrupulously following the instructions Kurt had given him, then he would at last try the effects of the system while watching the film of the body snatchers. Fuck it, that was what he’d do. He’d go to sleep watching the film that hadn’t let him sleep for eighteen years. Yeah, that was it. To hell with everyone. God is gay, Nixon killed Hendrix and I crack my knuckles, he said to himself, slouching down in his seat.

* * *

He arrived home late in the evening. He’d stopped to eat in one of the fast-food joints on the state highway, just outside town, and had walked the rest of the way. He usually steered clear of those places, but that evening dinner was the last thing on his mind, a physiological chore that separated him from that first, great night with the system.

To facilitate taking the system powder, Kurt had suggested he obtain a straw, and Homer, to be on the safe side, had taken four from the dispenser at the cash desk. On leaving the diner, he’d thanked the dark, cloud-laden heavens for allowing him to be born in a country that had reduced to a minimum the time you had to spend on procuring and consuming food.

Going indoors, he went and sat down on the couch without taking his jacket off. He placed the box containing the VCR on the coffee table and studied the instructions, trying to remember the advice the store assistant had given him - though with scant success, because all the time the man was talking he had been thinking about what it would be like to try the system while he watched, after eighteen years, the film of the body snatchers.

Then he set to work, with some trepidation, because he didn’t know much about electrical appliances. But the installation proved less problematic than he expected and, although the timer wouldn’t stop blinking 00:00 from the stop position, the machine seemed ready to perform its essential function, the only one that interested Homer at this moment: that of reading the magnetic content of the videocassette so as to decode it into luminous signals that one enjoyed by keeping one’s eyes fixed on the TV screen.

Preparing everything necessary for the taking of the system was even easier, because actually there wasn’t much to prepare. Kurt had told him to take out of the pouch a large enough dose to systemize himself, which needn’t be very much the first time. In fact he had recommended that it be extremely small, though he hadn’t seen fit to supply a parameter on the basis of which the quantity might be precisely calculated.

Using the corner of his laminated Aberdeen Public Library card as a measure, Homer extracted this blessed, tiny dose from the little pouch and put it on the Formica top of the coffee table. Kurt had counseled the use of a smooth surface, such as a hand mirror, but since Homer didn’t have any hand mirrors in the house, he thought the Formica table top would make a fair substitute, for the time being. On subsequent occasions, if it was really necessary, he would buy a mirror.

Still using the laminated library card, he shaped the extremely small dose of powdered system into a strip about a millimeter thick and just under a half-inch long. Then he took one of the straws into the kitchen and cut it in half. He sat down on the couch again, laying the length of straw next to the strip of powdered system, on the coffee table.

Everything seemed ready. Everything was laid out in accordance with Kurt’s instructions. All that remained, apparently, was to take it. The great moment had arrived. The cassette about the body snatchers was inserted the right way round in the VCR. The television was tuned to the VCR channel. All he had to do was press the Play key on the remote control. The opening credits would start to roll and he would take the powdered system through the nose, as Kurt had demonstrated.

He pressed Play.

Your first systemization is rather like your first kiss. You’re so preoccupied with the problem of where to put your nose that by the time you realize that that thing you felt on your tongue was actually her tongue, she’s already broken away from you.

During the first systemization your dominant thoughts are, first, how long it’s going to take for the powder to take effect; second, how you’ll know when it does take effect; and third, how you can be sure, if at some stage you think it has taken effect, that the feelings you’re having are the right ones.

On subsequent occasions, the difference between the system and kisses is that when you kiss you don’t think very much about it, whereas when you systemize yourself, whether it’s the second or the thousandth time, you do nothing but think. You’re almost always thinking. Thinking about things like whether this time will be better than the last, because last time wasn’t that great, though perhaps that was because maybe you’d had too much to eat, or hadn’t had enough to eat, or because it was better to take three small doses at a distance of, say, half an hour from each other, because when you take it all at once the system must be of prime quality, because if there’s anything wrong with the system - an eventuality known to people inside the system as ‘over-cut’ or ‘badly cut’ or ‘shit’ - you may, if you shoot too large a quantity, throw up, and then you’ve wasted system, time and money, not to mention the fact that if the system is too pure even worse can happen.

Such speculation is known to habitués of the system as ‘paranoia’. Of course, people outside the system get paranoid, too. But it’s not the same thing. Let’s take the example of a perfectly ordinary case of paranoid behavior, like leaving home much earlier than necessary because you’re convinced that the bus driver, not finding any traffic, will get to the bus stop, say, ten minutes earlier than the regulation time and that, since he is traveling with an empty vehicle and knows perfectly well that at the bus stop in question there’s only ever one person waiting, namely you, the person with the delusion of which we are positing an example, he will drive straight past without waiting for the regulation time, and all because you, the paranoiac, have come to the entirely baseless conclusion that the bus driver doesn’t like you.

Now, such a delusion would never even enter the head of a true systemizee. But if by some absurd hypothesis it did, he would soon put the matter in perspective. ‘What do I care when the fucking bus goes by?’ he would say. Note that he would utter these words without the slightest trace of acrimony, and would then continue: ‘Look, I may not even go to the bus stop if I don’t feel like it. Let him drive past when the fuck he wants. I’m going to stay at home and systemize myself. Who needs buses anyway? I’m never going to take another one for the rest of my life. I’m fine the way I am. I’ve got the system.’

Nothing in the world is truly important to a person who’s inside the system. Everything can be attenuated, viewed in a more reassuring light. No matter how big the problem, it can always be cut down to size. When you’re inside the system, having a paranoid delusion that’s extraneous to it seems completely meaningless, because the only, essential, constant source of paranoia is your concern with achieving the highest possible degree of integration. All other things are trivial. Decorative problems, ornamental anxieties, non-essential torments. The only thing that matters is integration into the system.

Homer’s first time. There’s not much to tell, as a matter of fact. What happened was this: as the TV screen framed a sinister sky of shifting white clouds, to the apocalyptic strains of woodwind, strings and rolling drums, Homer bent forward over the coffee table, brought the length of straw to his nose and inhaled the powdered system. At first he felt nothing, except, after a few seconds, a bitter taste in his mouth. He lay back on the couch, convinced he would soon fall asleep. The film continued and when Becky Driscoll, played by the delightful Dana Wynter, made her entry into Miles Bennell’s office, Homer was more wide awake than ever. He was still wide awake when it came to the scene where Uncle-Ira-who-isn’t-Uncle-Ira pushes the lawnmower across the lawn, exactly as Uncle Ira would do. And he was still wide awake when Becky and Dr Bennell, hunted by the Santa Mira police, who are now themselves in thrall to the difference of the body snatchers, hide in the office and swallow pills to stay awake. This is the scene where it becomes clear once and for all that it’s when people are asleep that the body snatchers take their places. So, Becky and Dr Bennell prepare to spend the night in the office and Bennell tells Becky she mustn’t close her eyes.

‘Or we may wake up changed? To something evil and inhuman?’ Becky asks.

‘In my practice I’ve seen how people have allowed their humanity to drain away. Only it happened slowly, instead of all at once. They didn’t seem to mind,’ muses Bennell.

‘Just some people, Miles,’ Becky objects.

‘All of us, a little bit. We harden our hearts, grow callous. Only when we have to fight to stay human do we realize how precious it is to us, how dear.’

At this point Miles breaks off, gazes into Becky’s dark, fawnlike eyes, her perfect profile silhouetted against the white of the curtain that filters the sinister light from the street, and adds: ‘As you are to me.’ And as the violins soar, their faces draw together till their lips touch and they kiss.

And it was no good.

He was still awake.

Perfectly, totally, utterly awake.

He should have been getting worried, seeing that a fair time had passed since the beginning of the film footage and his taking of the powder, yet he felt inexplicably calm. He sat there watching those two magnificent specimens of the human race kissing - a sight that would normally have made him very uneasy - as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if he weren’t really there, in front of the TV, as if he were watching from the VIP box of a grand theater full of gilded stuccoes and velvet hangings. Dresses rustled, trails of cigar smoke rose, chandeliers glittered, and a confused murmur of voices mingled with the rustle of the dresses, which took on the smell of the bodies, which rose with the cigar smoke till it reached him in the box where he sat, as he kept his eyes fixed on one sparkling light in particular, a white light that spread outward till it occupied his entire field of vision, till it entered him, entered his body, heating him and relaxing him, a hot, white light that softened his legs and his abdomen, that set his chest ablaze and made first his shoulders then his arms go limp. He was perfect. He was relaxed. He was suspended. He was white. He was everything. He was safe. And he understood. He understood…. Now he understood that he had spent his whole life worrying and protecting himself for nothing. He understood that he had wasted his best years shielding himself from people, from the world, from the differents. He understood that there was nothing to worry about after all. What could they do to him? Who could ever have done anything to him? Why had he been so worried? Why had he been so tense? The anxieties of a whole life suddenly seemed incomprehensible.

He watched the film of the body snatchers continue to run, but those alarming pictures that had once revealed the true nature of things to him - those pictures that had been the cause of his not sleeping for eighteen years - didn’t disturb him as he’d imagined they would. He was well aware of the dreadful reality depicted in the film, yet it seemed as if all those things didn’t concern him, or concerned him only to a certain extent, that they couldn’t do him any harm.

Not anymore, anyway.

Not now.

He wondered how this could have happened and whence came this sense of calm that he had never felt in his life before, this white light that heated him from within, this white light of white heat.

He wondered when the system would begin to take effect.

The system that enabled Homer B. Alienson to sleep again - the system that he privately called ‘Kurt’s system’, after the person who introduced him to it - is extracted from the pods of a plant whose scientific name is Papaver somniferum, which means the sleep-inducing poppy.

Commonly known as the opium poppy, it is a flower of extraordinary beauty. A black heart encircled by scarlet petals, bobbing at the top of a long stalk, with pods full of gold-green seeds.

It has a long history, stretching back to the lost civilizations of Persia, Egypt and Mesopotamia.

The discovery of some fossilized poppy seeds suggests, indeed, that even Neanderthal man knew how to extract a system of life from this flower so beloved of the Impressionist painters.

He woke up at three in the afternoon. The television was still on and tuned to the VCR channel. Homer couldn’t believe he had slept so late. In fact he couldn’t even remember sleeping. Nobody really remembers sleeping - even he knew that, despite his scant experience of that state. But he hadn’t expected such total darkness.

The last time he’d looked at the clock it had been just before six. The body-snatchers tape had just finished rewinding and Homer had been on the point of starting it again. He’d already seen it twice, and still hadn’t fallen asleep. Deciding that he’d been too cautious, he’d inhaled another two lines of powdered system.

There had been high points and low points. Moments of white light with white heat and moments when he wondered when the system was going to take effect. He distinctly remembered seeing for the third time the sinister sky of shifting clouds and hearing the apocalyptic music. He thought he also remembered the scene of Uncle Ira pushing the lawnmower, but couldn’t swear to it.

Then he had woken up. Three o’clock in the afternoon. Nine hours. He had slept nine hours and he couldn’t believe it. Never before had he erased such a large portion of time from his mind. He knew that this was what happened when you slept, but he wasn’t used to it. Such intervals of unconsciousness were a new experience to him.

He had lived the last eighteen years in their entirety, second by second, always conscious of himself and of time. Not that he remembered those years clearly. Far from it. Had he been required to think back through them, it would have taken him no more than a few hours; a day at the very most. But that was because his life had been reduced to a few essential coordinates, a perfect geometry of tedium from which he had never escaped.

There had been times when his thoughts had wandered, it’s true. And other times when he’d daydreamed. But he was sure that - if he’d really had to - he could have reconstructed nearly the entire film of those eighteen years, perhaps with the help of some newly invented mind machine or some special memory-enhancing technique.

He straightened up and sat there on the couch, staring at the length of straw and the few grains of system left on the coffee table. The television was emitting its pale blue light and a constant, low electronic hum, but Homer didn’t notice. He was in a daze. The signals sent out by the world of physical things were too weak for his present state. He gazed at the coffee table without really seeing anything. His mind, too, was focused on nothing, sweetly void of thought.

All at once, for some inexplicable reason, without anything recalling him to reality, he came to. He emerged from the daze as suddenly as he had fallen into it. At first this puzzled him, especially as he wasn’t sure how long that strange, trancelike state had lasted. It couldn’t have been more than about ten seconds, but they had been seconds that didn’t correspond to one’s normal perception of time. Seconds that had slowed down till they almost stopped. Seconds drawn out to their maximum temporal extent, like an elastic band stretched to its limit. Time that had stopped while continuing to flow.

It must be an after-effect of the system, Homer told himself. And if he was really honest, he hadn’t found that trancelike state at all disagreeable. He cracked his knuckles and decided to go and stretch his legs in the woods, to breathe the cold, rain-scented air.

He walked for hours, his head full of thoughts that floated away freely, as if they had a life of their own. By the time he got home it was already dark and his thoughts had calmed. They seemed to have become at least partly his own again. He passed by the North Aberdeen Bridge and stopped to talk to Kurt. He wanted to tell him he’d tried the system and to thank him.

He was bursting to talk, which was another new experience for him. He’d never been much of a conversationalist; he was often at a loss for words, and sometimes for subjects too. But on this occasion he spoke fluently, describing in meticulous detail what had happened and what he thought about it.

Kurt listened in silence, nodding as if he already knew that Homer would say all this. He didn’t reply until Homer had already bid him goodbye and was walking away, when he called after him:

‘Boddah?’

Homer turned. ‘Yeah?’

‘Go easy with that stuff.’

Homer walked on, wondering what Kurt had meant. As soon as he got home, he went over to the couch and slumped down on it. He hadn’t eaten all day, and the TV had been on since he had gone out. But he didn’t notice his hunger or the TV.

Question: how did the system reach Aberdeen?

Answer: by a long, circuitous route. The earliest written evidence of man’s infatuation with the system dates back to the invention of writing itself, when the Sumerians divulged the secret of the system to the neighboring Akkadians, the latter handed it on to the Assyrians, and the Assyrians, through their trade contacts with the Egyptians and the Syrians, extended the system both westward and northward, taking it even as far as Greece.

Then, thanks to the mercantile enterprise of the Arabs, the system reached China, where with enlightened instruction from the Portuguese the population achieved a degree of integration into the system more total than any previously attained in history. The Portuguese taught the Chinese that there was a method of integration far more powerful than their own one of mixing opium with bamboo juice and boiling it with oatmeal. The new technique, inhaling the system through a pipe, proved highly popular in China, and soon opium dens were opening all over the country.

The Europeans discovered that the system was highly profitable, because it could be used as a cheap exchange commodity for silks, spices, and other exotic articles which the Chinese usually sold at high prices. Consequently the Portuguese were followed in rotation, first by the Dutch, then by the French, and lastly by the British. All of these countries traded with the Chinese, offering their opium system in exchange for precious goods.

The British may have been the last to arrive on the scene, but they were the shrewdest operators of all. They gave an entirely new impetus to the lucrative trade by founding the East India Company, thus laying the basis for addiction to the system on a massive scale. By 1840, there were about three million Chinese doing nothing all day but systemizing themselves in opium dens.

Although the three million Chinese derived great benefits from the system, and regarded it as an indispensable part of their lives, the Chinese government for some reason frowned on this development and decided to ban the system in all its forms. This did not go down well with the British, who risked losing a rich source of income. The result was friction, which on two occasions flared up into open conflicts, referred to in the history books as the First Opium War and the Second Opium War.

While quarrels and battles raged in that part of the world, a considerable number of Chinese - some seventy thousand all told - sailed across the ocean and disembarked in the United States, where they worked on the railroads and in the West-coast gold mines. Some of them, naturally enough, took their pipes with them and began to proselytize among the whites, opening opium dens like those shown in some well-known film footage of the story of Wild Bill Hickock and Calamity Jane, starring Jeff Bridges and Ellen Barkin.

Today many people still imagine that when the gun-fighters and cowboys of the Old West came into town, parched with thirst after riding for days across prairies and deserts, the first thing they did was to head for the inevitable saloon - complete with pianist and cancan-dancing hookers - to down a couple of whiskies, usually after limbering up with a hearty fist-fight. In actual fact many of them preferred the exotic peace of the opium dens, where they could drift off into dreams of the system, with an attentive young Chinese girl by their side to keep their pipes primed with opium. That’s how it all started. That’s how the system reached our country.

Question: Okay, that’s clear enough as far as it goes. But what about Aberdeen?

Answer: Well, to be honest, the system never actually got that far. Aberdeen was off the circuit, so to speak, and any inhabitant of the town who became dependent on the system was in deep trouble. But Kurt got to know Grunt, a disreputable character with one redeeming feature: he could get you any kind of system you wanted, because he went around robbing pharmacies with his sidekick.

It was Grunt who initiated Kurt into the great world of the system. Kurt was a perfect candidate for addiction: he was sick, he was neurotic, he was a mass of tics, he hated people, and he harbored grudges by the wagonload. He himself was convinced he’d end up as a teenage schizophrenic, the kind of guy that turns up at school one day with an assault rifle and wipes out half his classmates.

Kurt definitely needed something to soothe him and Grunt had him try Percodan, one of the many system-derived painkillers. Before he knew it, Kurt found himself taking ten a day, so euphoric and relaxed did it make him feel. He almost began to like people.

Then, one summer night, Grunt and Kurt systemized themselves with heroin. Kurt thought he would never let himself get truly integrated, never become a real addict. He thought there wasn’t enough system in Aberdeen for anyone to become hooked on it. What he didn’t know was that all that Percodan he’d swallowed had been more than enough to systemize him. He had been fully integrated from the very first time he had taken it. He was wholly and utterly dependent on the system, though firmly convinced that he wasn’t. It’s quite normal for integratees to think they depend on nothing and nobody.

The ubiquity of the system did the rest.

He tried the system for the second time that same evening. He would have liked to lull himself to sleep with a nice piece of video, but he only had that film of the body snatchers, and he’d already seen it three times.

He decided to settle for a night of television instead.

The first item was a newscast, then came: a commercial break; the weather forecast for the next forty-eight hours; a game show whose rules he couldn’t quite understand; a documentary on the sex life of tropical insects; more commercial breaks; some old film footage of gangsters starring James Cagney; a show where people argued; the fourth inning of a baseball game; another newscast about sports events; a discussion show about incurable diseases; a show featuring a man with an ingratiating smile who talked about God and urged viewers to call a number that scrolled across the screen; another show with a young woman in her underclothes touching herself and panting who also urged viewers to call a number flashed up on the screen, which was not, however, the same number as the one recommended by the man with the ingratiating smile; one of those shows where people talk about their problems, that focused on a boy with a serious form of insomnia whom Homer would have phoned to advise him to try the system, had it not been for the fact that in that show there weren’t any numbers displayed on the screen for you to call and that something warned him against talking to strangers about his relationship with the system.

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