Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker (48 page)

What would I call this new planet? It had large blue oceans, continental landmasses, and polar ice caps, not unlike Earth. Then it hit me: This wasn’t an exact duplicate of Earth but was very, very similar to an upside-down Earth!

I had to step back from the telescope and steady myself. I looked again, and it still looked like an upside-down Earth, but not as much as it had before. In fact, the more I looked at it, the clearer it became: My God, it wasn’t an upside-down Earth likeness at all but an exact duplicate of Earth! I had been right in the first place!

I was stunned. But then I was struck by a thought that was even more devastating: What if it wasn’t an exact copy of us but instead we were an exact copy of
it
? The possibilities were fantastic! What were we like, I wondered. Were we warlike? Did we look like humans?

So it was with great disappointment that I realized I had been aiming the telescope at a picture of Earth on the wall. I had been right after all: It
was
a duplicate of Earth. And yet it wasn’t a planet. I sat back in my chair, stunned.

When I finally recovered, I began to scan the nighttime skies. What would I find? The possibilities were enormous—everything from an exact duplicate of Earth to a planet that, if you blurred your vision, might look quite similar to our own.

Then I saw it: If that wasn’t a hologram of Earth, I don’t know what was. But who could be projecting such a hologram? Were they like us? Did they have the same hopes and dreams and hologram projectors? Just as I was being stunned by all of this, I heard a voice: “Wake up, wake up!”

I woke up, and then it hit me: It had all been a dream. I had fallen asleep at the telescope. Then I went back to sleep for about three hours, and this time I didn’t dream at all. But I woke up again, and I realized that the next-to-last nap had all been a dream. I was stunned.

“Hey, Bob,” I said. “You wouldn’t believe the dream I had two naps ago. I dreamed I discovered a planet that was just like our planet, Earth.”

“Earth?” said Bob. “Our planet isn’t called Earth. It’s called Megatron.”

I was stunned. What in the name of a supreme being exactly like God was going on here?

“No, wait—I was thinking of another planet,” Bob said. “This
is
Earth.”

Eagerly, I turned the telescope toward the sky. What new marvels were awaiting me up there, I wondered.

1987

GARRISON KEILLOR

HE DIDN’T GO TO CANADA

J
UST
as I was finishing college, in 1969, and was about to join the Marines, the Indiana National Guard made me a wonderful offer, via my father, to join their public-information battalion, and so, despite a lingering affection for those fighting in Vietnam, one bright June afternoon I drove my old Mustang to Fort Wayne to enlist along with my best friend, Kevin. A few miles out of Muncie, he lost his nerve and went to pieces. “I’ll never make it,” he said. “I’m sorry. I thought this could remain my secret, but I’m afraid that the stress of Guard training would crack me like a nut. You see, I have a flaw inside me, a dark place in my soul—something painful and unnamable that can only be eased by alcohol. Let me out of the car. I’m going to Canada.” I let him off at the bus depot and never saw him again. Years later I heard that he had become very wealthy up there selling amphetamines but then ate a bad piece of meat and got worms and died an extremely painful death.

I went to Fort Wayne and reported to the address that the recruiter had given to my dad over the phone, a haberdasher’s called Sid’s Suit City, upstairs from a trophy plant in a cinder-block building. A little bald guy with a tape around his neck who looked as though his feet hurt stuck out his hand. I showed him my papers, and he showed me a nice green knit shirt (short-sleeved), a pair of yellow slacks, and white buck shoes with red tassels and cleats. “Those are golf clothes,” I said.

He grabbed me by the neck and threw me up against the mirror and shoved his grizzled face within an inch of mine. “Don’t tell me anything I don’t ask you for first, you chicken doo. I own you, Mister. If I tell you to play golf, you reach for your clubs, Mister, and if I order you to order two big pepperoni pizzas and a six-pack of Bud, you jump to the phone and do it, Mister, and if I tell you to sit down and watch ‘Andy Griffith,’ ‘Huckleberry Hound,’ ‘Leave It to Beaver,’ and ‘American Bandstand,’ I don’t want to catch you with a newspaper in your hand. You’re in the Guard, understand? Good. Now take your face out of here and get it over to the Alhambra apartment complex, on West Cheyenne Drive. You’re in 12-C. Beat it, and take your convertible with you. You’re gonna need it.”

He wasn’t kidding about the golf. The next Monday morning, forty of us reported, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, to Burning Bush Country Club and were each issued a set of Wally Hammar golf clubs and an electric cart and sent out to play. We were assigned to foursomes. Randy Qualey, Keith Quintan, and Dennis Quintz were in mine, and in the next couple of months we got to know each other like real buddies. We went out drinking together and everything. We shot eighteen holes every morning—sunny or cloudy, warm or cool, it made no difference.

Two months later, I was utterly fed up. I’d been promoted to corporal, but why wasn’t I doing the job I’d joined the Guard to do: inform the public? Was it because of poor grades in college and a low score on the Guard entrance exam? Was it because of my inability to type? If the Guard didn’t have confidence in me, why hadn’t they let me go to Vietnam?

I talked it over with my dad, and he promised to look into the matter. Meanwhile, I met my wife at a dance. It was love at first sight. The next three months were the happiest of my life. Then one day I was called into Colonel Mills’ office at ComInNatGu—the secret Guard command center housed in a complex of deep bunkers around the ninth hole. You entered through a tiny tunnel via a door marked “
HIGH
VOLTAGE:
EXTREMELY
DARNED
DANGEROUS!
” The door was in the janitor’s closet of the men’s room off the Bee Bee Lounge, in the clubhouse basement. Before I reached the men’s room, though, I heard a big, booming voice say, “Sit down, trooper.” It was the Colonel, looming up behind the bar in a green-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt with a bolo tie made from bullets, shaking up a batch of Bombardiers, his face hidden by a broad straw hat with long fronds. “Understand you got some questions, son,” he said. “Let’s talk.”

I climbed up on a stool and leaned forward and started to tell him that I was trying to figure out why the heck I was in the Guard and what I was supposed to accomplish. “Mmmmmm,” he said. “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” And then, in a split second, before I could move a muscle, he grabbed me by the neck and hauled me across the bar and had me flat on my back on the ice chest and was holding a blender to the side of my head. I’ll never forget the cold animal anger in his green eyes as he stared down at me, unblinking, for the three longest seconds of my life. Then he helped me to my feet and offered me a drink.

“Sorry about losing control like that,” he said. “I guess I got angry because I see in you so much of myself. I get fed up with waiting around, too. It’s the hardest part of being in the Guard. And it’s twice as hard in the I.N.G. You want to know why?”

I did.

“Because we’re not even supposed to exist.”

He put a big ice cube in his mouth and ate it like a cherry. “You see, Soviet spy satellites in low orbit are reading Indiana right now like a children’s book, and we have to make sure they see us as a bunch of civilians in one-bedroom apartments who happen to like golf a lot. You see, at peak strength, mobilized, the Indiana National Guard numbers fourteen million men. It’s the biggest secret army in the free world. And one of the best equipped. We’re one ace the President’s got that they don’t know about—maybe the only one. Get in my car, Dan.”

THE Colonel’s beige Buick Electra was moored in a secret parking space under an aluminum roof beside the kitchen. Aluminum confuses the heck out of radar, he explained, and beige is the hardest color to remember afterward. The car shone. A good wax job, he pointed out, prevents a person or persons from leaving messages in the dust. When he turned the ignition key, the car sprang alive, antennas rose, the radio came on, the seats themselves hummed with power, ready to go forward or back at a finger’s touch. “Always fasten your seat belt,” he said. “It’s one thing they’d never expect us to do.” We cruised west into the warehouse district, and he pointed out long, low aluminum I.N.G. buildings where the hardware was kept. “We have more than four thousand forklifts, fifty-two hundred portable biffies, eighteen bulk-milk trucks, and four thousand rider mowers,” he said. Those were the figures I wrote down. There were also more than six hundred infrared cluster-type thrusters with uplink/downlink/intercept capability. “Only two thousand fifty of those puppies in the whole U.S.,” he said. “So, you see, we’re sitting on top of one of the larger secrets in the defense community. Our job: keep it that way. It’s tough to sit tight, no buts about it, but when we get the word to go I want the other side to find out about us all of a sudden. Bang, we’re there. I don’t want the enemy to be studying us for three years and getting a Ph.D. The big secret of the I.N.G. is that we could take ninety per cent casualties with no effect on our capability. I don’t want the enemy to know why. When the time comes, I want to be able to get in there, search, destroy, interdict, capture the flag, and bring the boys home for Christmas.”

“Count me in,” I said softly as the big car nosed homeward. “I want a piece of it.”

“Just don’t forget who you are,” the Colonel said. “Look relaxed, but don’t be relaxed. Smile, but don’t make a point of it. Drink vodka. Lots of ice. Lemon, not lime. Not too many peanuts. Always turn the conversation to the other person. Pace yourself. Always take the end urinal in the men’s room. Sunday morning, take a side pew. Don’t wash dishes; always dry. Remember: you’re a killer, a professional killer. Your stereo has a sharp needle you could poke a man in the eye with. You know how to take an ordinary putter and beat somebody senseless. With your skill, even an ordinary golf ball is lethal. Killers are what we are. And, by the way, always choose Thousand Island.”

He pulled up in front of the Alhambra. Music drifted out from behind the closed windows, shadowy figures moved behind the drawn shades. “So for now, trooper, your orders are to stay low: play good golf, drink cold beer, and make love to beautiful women. And let’s just hope the Russians aren’t doing the same.”

He came around to open the door for me, but I was ready for him, and when he tried to kick me I got him by the ankle and flipped him up on the roof of the Buick and pounded him twice, hard, in the pancreas. “Good,” he said. “Darned good.”

HIS lecture changed my way of thinking, and for the remaining two months of Guard training I tried to act as normal as humanly possible. It wasn’t easy. A guy looks down at his typewriter knowing it can be switched over instantly to invisible ink simply by typing “Hoosier” (a word that even Russians fluent in English would not be familiar with), and he finds it hard to relax and have a cool time. (I kept my typewriter set on invisible most of the time, in case I forgot the password.) We had to remember to always use electric golf carts on the course, for fast response in case of a Code Green alert. The radio signal would be two longs and a short, on either a horn or a saxophone, on “The Don Davis Show,” on K-WAYNE, or on my own “Dan the Man Show,” on the Gentle Giant 101 (2:00–6:00
P.M.
).

Being an information officer meant that I knew a great deal, and having a popular radio show meant that I was in a position to sway minds, and so, in the event of enemy capture, I was prepared to take cyanide. On the golf course, I kept it hidden in a fake ball (I always used my dad’s Top-Flites, but one ball, which could be pried open to reveal the deadly white pill wound with string in the core, was marked “Top Flight”—a discrepancy a Russian would never notice), and in the radio studio I kept the cyanide in a tiny slit cut in the foam rubber around the microphone. All I had to do was lean forward and bite. It wasn’t easy playing music knowing that death was always two inches from my lips, but I did it. And then one day the war was over.

All of us knew that if the President had pursued an all-out strategy to win the war and had unleashed the I.N.G. against the Vietcong the outcome would have been very different, but we were never allowed to go. We never blamed the President for it—his hands were tied by the press and the protesters—but the tragedy is that we never got the chance to get over there and get the job done.

Twenty years later, millions of Indiana National Guardsmen suffer from postwar regret, waking up in the middle of the night with an urge to go out in the rain and hunker down in the mud, to hold a gun and use a walkie-talkie and for a while I felt bad like that, too, and made a point of playing golf in extremely hot weather and not drinking enough liquids, deliberately pushing myself toward the edge. It was on a real scorcher of a day, playing the Gary Country Club, that I met Colonel Mills for the last time. He was dressed in regulation green and yellow, blasting out of a sand trap. He made a perfect shot and turned and saw me and we exchanged the traditional National Guard wink. (Russians do not wink, and therefore would fail to comprehend this signal.)

“How’s civilian life treating you?” he asked. I told him how I felt and he stood there and said, “You should be proud, soldier. You didn’t burn the flag, you didn’t go to Canada. You did your job. Accept the rewards of a grateful nation.” Then he turned on his heel and went straight up and over a steep hill in front of the green, and I never saw him again.

About three years after that, I actually did go to Canada for a weekend. It was O.K., but, based on what I saw, I was glad that I hadn’t gone there before.

1988

VERONICA GENG

POST-EUPHORIA

Frankfurt Stock Exchange

Frankfurt, Germany

D
EAR
S
IRS: