Alien Accounts (14 page)

After dinner Andor walked around outside. The evening was chilly and damp. After ten minutes he began to feel uneasy. Five minutes later his uneasiness had grown to a mild panic. He was relieved when the other passengers came out of the restaurant and began boarding the bus, and he could join them. What would he have said to the book-keeper if it had been he indeed?

The drizzle lifted as Andor woke, moving his shoulders to ease their stiffness. Despite a night of indigestion and strange underwater dreams, he was content this morning. This was his favourite time of day, the purple hours just before dawn. The bus stopped for fuel at a kind of depot-restaurant out on the turnpike, far from civilization, where a dozen other buses nudged up to the concrete building like piglets at a sow. After dozing over a cup of coffee, Andor tried to board the wrong bus. Though it sat in the exact position he recalled it sitting in before, the driver was now tall and grey-haired rather than fat and red-haired. He asked Andor to see his ticket, then told him he was on the wrong bus.

‘This is number E-2842, and you came in on number E4799, over on the other side of the building. Better hurry up and see if you can still catch it.’

Andor saw his mistake at once. He had entered the restaurant by one door and left by another on the opposite side. He now ran back in through the glass doors, past the rows of empty pink-and-green leatherette booths, and out the proper door. The driver was just starting the engine as Andor bolted up the steps and back to his warm seat. Even though the danger was past, it took him several minutes to recover himself from panic.

That morning Andor divided between watching the billboards advertising tyres and distant casinos and reading the travel brochure describing his resort. At lunch he ate roast turkey and creamed potatoes, cranberry sauce and wax beans. Dessert was chocolate pudding.

His hotel, the brochure informed him, had a ballroom with dancing nightly, a cabaret, a restaurant, and a heated floodlit swimming pool. Even in coldest weather – although the weather was never really cold, the brochure assured him – he could slide into the warm blue liquid and glide silently about, safe from the gelid moon. It seemed to him almost as if he had been there already.

Andor noticed a series of power-line pylons set along parallel to the interstate highway. He began to count them, and fell asleep at one hundred and twenty-odd.

Dinner was a club sandwich, potato salad, and a glass of ginger ale, with tapioca for dessert. Andor bought a package of caramels and took them aboard with him. The driver removed another coupon from his ticket,
which still seemed undiminished. Andor briefly considered counting the remaining coupons, to see if they were actually the same number as before, but it was too much work, and how was he supposed to account for it if they were? The whole idea was silly and profitless. Andor watched the sunset, aware of his own boredom.

Next morning was very warm indeed. The bus entered a great terminal where Andor bathed and changed clothes and ate bacon, eggs, hash browns, and coffee. In his coffee he poured cream from a tiny tetrahedronal container. He picked up a red plastic tomato and considered squeezing it over his hash browns, but decided against it. The coffee, he thought, tasted very like the coffee in that town – what was the name of it?

It seemed to Andor as if the name he was searching for were somehow the name of a town he had not yet reached.

The magazine he was reading was one he’d borrowed from a clergyman. It featured an article on spiritual fulfilment. In front of Andor two men in college sweaters were playing cards on top of a suitcase. Two nuns sat across from them, in front of a sleeping soldier. In front of them a businessman wrote steadily in his notebook. Behind the soldier a cowboy argued with his wife, while a family of swarthy foreigners looked on interestedly. Two clergymen of different denominations chatted genially across the aisle. Back of them sat more servicemen, and several vacationing pensioners.

Lunch was tuna casserole de luxe, diced carrots, and lettuce salad with french dressing. Dessert was custard pie. Andor imagined that he saw at the counter the salesman he’d talked to earlier, but dressed as a sailor. He seemed to see everyone twice, as on a merry-go-round. Motion was blending people and days together like soft ice cream.

Dinner at another restaurant with a spire. Andor felt a slight unpleasant sensation as he rode along afterwards. There were darkening blue fields wheeling past him, but Andor had no sensation of motion at all. It was as viewing a landscape painted on canvas, moving past on wooden rollers; it was cinematic illusion, badly done; it was a cheap mirror trick; it was, in short, motion that refused to become
real
. He felt the bus accelerate against the back of his head, and his ears heard the roar of engine in the back, but these too seemed piped-in sensations. Was there an engine behind him? As well insist there was a string orchestra playing show tunes somewhere in the compartment (he had ceased to think of it as a ‘bus’). The only reality in all this seemed to be the warmth spreading outward through him from his stomach, where enzymes, he supposed, were now attacking macaroni and cheese, butter beans, and malted milk. He dozed.

Things were no better in the morning, at least not at first. Counting back, Andor could not discover how long he had been travelling. Time was undone; days were become as alike as a row of ‘red’ signs against the flat,
‘green’ landscape:

Beards grow faster

In the grave …

He had to keep reminding himself that all was viewed through blue glass, that colours were not true. Whenever he stepped out of the bus, earth and sky took on an uncanny pink tinge.

A waffle and sausage; a morning paper from a strange city; counting his money and finding to his delight that he had more than he’d figured; these restored Andor’s good humour for the morning. He recovered himself sufficiently to hum along with the sprightly show tunes.

But after his lunch of Yankee pot roast and escalloped potatoes, Andor felt uneasy and depressed. The date on his paper was the thirtieth, and he determined to use it to find out his day of departure, by counting backwards. But not only could he not decide whether he had been four or five days
en route
, but it occurred to him he might have yesterday’s paper. He asked the soldier across the aisle for today’s date.

‘Wish I knew,’ the soldier apologized. ‘I got a calendar watch, but now and then I forget to set it right. Let’s see – Sunday was the twentieth or twenty-first, so Sunday again would of been the twenty-seventh or eighth. But I forget every time whether it’s May or June has thirty days, and so I get my watch off one day. It registers thirty-one days every month, see, unless I reset it.’

He might have asked someone else, but Andor suddenly gave up. Why was the date so important anyway? He would get there when he got there – to the resort whose name escaped him for the moment.

It was not as if he had not read, heard, or spoken it often enough. Rather, he knew it almost too well. It was become a piece of mental furniture so familiar as to be invisible in the background of his mind; he could not make his tongue trip over it. Indeed, he knew it so well, Andor could almost imagine having been to the resort already. Knowing how difficult it is to conjure up a forgotten name, he turned his thoughts to the more or less neutral topic of approaching dinner.

Dinner was basic fish sticks, french fries, baked beans, and lettuce salad with french dressing, followed by a banana split. Afterwards he walked out for a moment under the darkening sky, watching stars appear. But there was something vaguely terrifying about the first few points of light in that immense blackness …

He read a detective novel to the point where an unknown assailant struck the detective. The reading light went off.

Andor lay awake in the darkness, imagining the unread portion. It seemed not improbable that the detective was going to lose his memory from this blow on the head.

He awoke in utter darkness, among strangers, alone and afraid. But almost as if it had been awaiting his cue, the sky began to lighten. Soon
he could make out the shapes of billboards and the grey tangles of an interchange.

Dozing again, he dreamt of the resort. Andor swan-dived into a pool of blue jello. Cutting through the viscid stuff, his body moved deeper and deeper into blue protecting darkness, until by some miracle reversal, he emerged at the centre of the sky, at the sun, and he flowed down like pale-green rain to the sun-flooded beach.

Bacon and eggs, coffee with cream from a tiny tetrahedron. Pale-green check from the pale waitress. He found he had read the detective novel before, or at least started it before. Washing his hands in the tiny sink at the rear of the compartment, he wondered if he would ever reach his goal.

It amused him to postulate two Andors, one moving from A to B, the other moving from B to A, each passing through the other – but perhaps neither arriving at his ever-receding goal. Perhaps he approached the end asymptotically, riding three seats behind the driver in perpetuity.

He counted his money, discovered there was more than he’d thought. The driver took another coupon from his never-diminishing ticket. Meat loaf and gravy, mashed potatoes, string beans, coffee. Apple pie à la mode.

Each night,
he thought,
when I’m asleep, I slip back one notch in time. If I travel all day, I may just make up that slippage. It’s some kind of treadmill.

Garden peas, Yankee pot roast, fried potatoes, and coffee with cream. Andor ignored the tiny paper envelopes of sugar. Tapioca. ‘Land of the Pharaohs’.

I’ll get out,
he thought.
They can’t keep me on the bus.
But he found it more terrifying than ever, just imagining the solitude out there, stars and blackness and the frozen disc of the moon. Whenever he had to move from the bus to the restaurant, Andor hurried without looking up.

He had been to the resort already; that much seemed certain. He could recall it all so clearly: the night fireworks, by day the heated blue pool. He had picked up a woman there whose name he could not recall. A drink at the hotel bar, a dip in the pool, and so on. Later they had visited the fabulous amusement park and observed a yacht race in the dazzling sunlight.

Dinner: creamed dried beef on toast, steamed potatoes, spinach, coffee, bread and butter. Dessert: butterscotch pudding.

Hamburger steak, creamed corn, hash browns. He squeezed a red plastic tomato over the potatoes.
I’ll stay out,
he decided, but he was afraid. When the time came, he reboarded the proper bus.

It’s a treadmill in time, a suspension between present and past. If I try to stop anywhere, I’ll be swept backwards, backwards …

Always into a yesterday, always into a sealed-off, completed past,
undying – because already dead?

A stranger eased into the seat beside him, holding an attaché case and a rolled-up magazine.

‘Going far?’ he asked.

Andor did not appear to hear him. The stranger seemed satisfied with Andor’s silence, for he settled himself and began to read. Andor continued to stare out the deep-blue window, as into the depths of a pool, until it grew so dark outside that there was nothing to see but the reflection of his own face.

REMARKS: (extra sheets may be attached)

You, the expediter who deals with this, may find it ironic that I use a form on which to make my complaint, and the wrong form at that. But then, is there a correct form for a problem of this type? Or is my case unique?

My case.

Briefly, I have discovered that all written records pertaining to me have disappeared. I can think of no reason for this, and feel it is an unnecessary discrepancy which should be cleared up at the earliest opportunity.

I blame no one. I could blame it all on the ‘bureaucracy’, but I have been too long on the other side of the counter. I know that bureaux are only groups of human clerks, like me. Like you.

I should say that I like forms. I like filling them out, printing clearly in ink only. I like stamping them, filing them, copying or checking them, even bringing in a fresh stack from the stockroom. But especially I like reading them. One of my favourite quotations is line 4 of
Computation of Social Security Self-Employment Tax:
‘Net income (or loss) from excluded services or sources included on line 3'. Smile at my enthusiasm, but consider for a moment the precision and balance of that line.
Income
vs
loss, excluded
or
included, services
and
sources
. I’d like to shake the hand of the clerk who wrote that.

This form is also well set out, nicely planned, though possibly this Remarks section could be larger. I see I’m running out of space already, and my true remarks have not yet begun. Attaching extra sheets, then, let me begin:

At the beginning, I had a responsible job in a government documents office. Without becoming close friends with anyone in the office, I had managed to command some respect for my work and perhaps my person. No one seemed unduly envious when Mr Boyle told me I was being promoted in grade. The promotion involved a transfer to another department, in which I would be working with classified documents.