Mr. Splitfoot (31 page)

“I don’t know.”

“That’s his real name?”

Mr. Bell pulls his hair behind his ears. “Probably not.”

“How’d he wind up here?”

“Drove out from Utah. The mine was shutting down, so he got it for a song. Moved his followers in, up here. Closer to God and outer space meant farther away from people’s families and the law. Isolation set in. He starts chattering about being the messiah, about apocalypse. He starts in on underage girls.”

“What?”

“People’s daughters. He made them his wives.” Mr. Bell sheds his blanket, standing. “There’s a copy.” He brings it back to them. “
Book of Ether.
All yours. My gift.”

Ruth cracks it open, reads aloud:

Ruth stops. “What?”

“He took
The
Book of Mormon,
a little
Cosmos,
a little Bible. Some Queen and Grace Jones. Neil Young. Cher. Bowie. Whatever moved him.”

“It’s plagiarized?”

Mr. Bell’s smile shows his teeth. “Think of it more as a catalog, a collection of the words that made one man.”

“Are you an Etherist, Mr. Bell?”

He shakes his head. “No. I am not an Etherist.” He pulls the blanket over the back of his head. “Historically, culturally, yes. I’ve been dipped in the dye, raised by the hand, but I haven’t believed a word Mardellion whispered since I was twelve.”

“What happened then?”

“He made my mom disappear in the middle of the night.”

“What?”

“She was mad about the girls. She was his actual wife, his legal wife.”

“Mardellion’s your father?”

“I suppose he is.”

“Yikes.”

“Indeed.”

Nat’s gone to bed. The sun set and it’s still snowing, a supernatural snow, though probably the trees and rocks don’t see it that way. Ruth stokes the living room fire, then draws a chair up before the records again. She thumbs her way through Rita Coolidge, Richard and Linda Thompson, Marianne Faithfull. She cues up the Thompsons’ song “Wall of Death.”

“You know the story behind this?” Mr. Bell asks.

“No. The Father didn’t allow much music.”

“It’s the last record they made together before she lost her voice.”

“Why’d she lose her voice?”

“Hysterical dysphonia. Broken heart. She and Richard were splitting up after a long marriage, three kids. He had a girlfriend, I think. Maybe Linda hit him over the head with a guitar, kicked him in the shins or something? He probably deserved it. They treated each other poorly, but they still had to sell the record, had to go on tour and sing together.”

“She couldn’t talk anymore?”

“It happens.” Mr. Bell shrugs. “The second-to-last night of the tour, they were in LA, maybe the new girlfriend was in the audience, maybe there was a knife or a gun. Who knows. People say Linda sang more beautifully that night than ever before. Something beyond human abilities.”

“Fury.”

“Maybe. Grief. Shock. They’ve never released the tapes. Then she lost her voice.”

“She ever get it back?”

“Yeah. But it took a long time. I’d imagine a person could get used to not talking. It would be hard to start again.”

“If you grew up here, how’d you know about that?”

“My dear.” Mr. Bell leans back; his T-shirt lifts, exposing a flash of stomach. “I’ve not lived among the Etherists since I was fourteen,” he says, as if he’s just a normal boy who grew to a man in America, someone who likes rock and roll.

Ruth makes a funny smile.

“What is it?”

“Nat and I used to think we invented you.”

“Hmm.”

“Like you were a dream we had. We made you up because we could never imagine where you came from.”

“I’ll try to take that as a compliment.” He screws his eyes in mock puzzlement. “I might be strange, but I assure you”—his voice lowers—“I’m real.” And to demonstrate his realness, Mr. Bell lifts Ruth’s hand to his forehead like she’s a cool towel on a fevered brow. He drags it across his cheek until Ruth is cupping his chin, his breath.

Ruth drops her hand back to her leg, breathing heavily, burned.

“The Thompsons spent some time in a religious sect themselves.”

Ruth listens to Linda sing. “She did?” Linda Thompson’s voice is power and submission, spirit without religion.

“Sure. Religions need women. Who else would do all the work?”

Ruth nods.

On the album cover, Richard sits on the floor in a yellow room. His legs are open, his arms are too. Bravado and confidence. Linda’s trapped in a framed photograph on the wall above him. Just her head, no body. Richard doesn’t look at Linda. Linda doesn’t look at him.

“I often wonder who I’d be if my mother raised me. Maybe I’d be better.”

“Maybe you’d be dead,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“And maybe you wouldn’t be the wholly perfect Ruth you already are.”

There’s a closet in the living room. Ruth ducks into it, flushed. She digs through the board games and books there to calm the idea that Mr. Bell will, any minute now, devour her in a way that’s not yet been confirmed in her life. In the closet she finds a Walkman and an old tape recorder that looks like a mini robot with a plug-in microphone and five lever buttons at one end. Beside it, a carton with three blank tapes. Ruth calms herself by pushing the buttons. She brings the device to him. “I want to record some of these songs.”

“On that?” Mr. Bell lifts his top lip, like there’s a bad odor. When Mr. Bell tries to act older than he is—as if he’s full of knowledge and experience—it ends up making him seem even younger to Ruth.

“Yeah. So I can take it with me.”

“That”—he points to the tape recorder—“is a Dictaphone. This,” Mr. Bell says, flanking the stereo, his hands like a spokesmodel’s, tilted to display, “is a hi-fi system. You know what that means?”

“No.”

“High fidelity. Intense truthfulness. Painful purity. You cannot use an old Dictaphone to capture faithfulness.”

Ruth thinks about this for a moment. I’ll just record it when he’s asleep. Hell with fidelity. She’s not leaving the mountain without Linda Thompson. Ruth returns to the stacks. She thumbs past Mario Lanza and Kenny Loggins. “What’s this?” She pulls out several copies of the same record. Each one wrapped in plain brown kraft paper like a porn mag. She removes one from its sleeve and is surprised to find that the vinyl is not black but a beautiful glowing yellow gold.

He clambers toward her on his knees. “The golden records. Man. I haven’t seen these in a long time.”

“What’s on them?”

“Remember
Voyager
?”

“No.”

“NASA sent up two satellites in ’77, and on board both they packed golden records in case the satellite should ever encounter someone who might want to listen.”

Ruth’s eyes flash. “Aliens?”

“Yup.”

“What’s on the records?”

“Pictures of life on Earth. DNA sequences, babies, bugs. Music.”

“A real catalog. How did they choose what got to go?”

“How do you make a record of everything in a finite space? Hard job.”

“Yes. But what are these?”

“Mardellion thought the
Voyager
mission was perfection. Sagan and Ann Druyan produced the records, and for Mardellion it was faultless. See, Golden Records, Golden Tablets. The records made a link between Joseph Smith and Carl Sagan; religion and science. It was natural. So once someone had been with Mardellion long enough, he would ‘reveal’ his involvement with the
Voyager
missions. This was carefully guarded information, a secret, something a follower had to earn by proving their total faith. You’d have to have total faith to believe that bull. NASA hires a pharmacy clerk to represent Earth among the aliens? Not that Mardellion thought it was untrue. I think he really believed he was cosmically responsible for the Golden Records. It wouldn’t be so hard. Belief just takes steady convincing. Mardellion had a studio in Massapequa press duplicates of the original songs sent to space. In reality, he had nothing to do with
Voyager
. Still, that doesn’t mean the records aren’t cool.”

Mr. Bell removes the record from its sleeve. The center label says,
The Sounds of the Earth, To the Maker of Music—all worlds, all times.
He slips it onto the stereo and lies back on the thin and dusty rug. The record begins to pop.

An old man with a funny accent speaks.

“Is that Sagan?”

“Nah. Kurt Waldheim, Secretary-General of the UN and, sadly, a Nazi.”

“They sent a Nazi into outer space?”

“They didn’t know he was a Nazi in ’77. Unfortunate though interesting choice, since it could almost convince you that some cosmic truth of our existence slips in no matter how much Sagan and Druyan tried to control it. Waldheim’s dead now. Lots of the people on this record are dead now. We sent ghost stories up into space.”

After Waldheim, many voices, speaking many languages. Ruth understands only one greeting: “Hello, from the children of Planet Earth.” The record crackles. Then something frightening, shrieking and grunting.

“What’s that?”

“Whales.”

Raindrops, thunder, crickets and monkeys, footsteps, heartbeats, birdsong, trains. There’s the sound of a mother kissing her child, saying, “Be a good boy,” and all manner of songs: classical, drums, bagpipes, yelling, Pygmy girls chanting, Chuck Berry. The vinyl pops. The songs pile up. It keeps snowing. Mr. Bell announces each new track. Russian, Bulgarian, pan pipes, Mexican, Azerbaijani. Stravinsky. One song, just a man with a guitar. The man hums and moans. “Blind Willie Johnson. ‘Dark Was the Night.’”

Ruth closes her eyes. Into Beethoven. Then a scratching, skipping, the sound of a zoom. Buzz and crackle trilling like a machine. “And what’s that?”

“Ann Druyan’s brainwaves.”

“Are we supposed to be able to tell what she’s thinking?”

“I don’t know. Can you?”

Ruth listens. She opens her eyes. “No.”

“She was thinking about falling in love.”

“With who?”

“She and Carl got engaged after the first
Voyager
lifted off.” Mr. Bell sits in front of Ruth. He shuts his lids for a minute. She watches him. When he opens his eyes, he asks, “Could you hear my brainwaves?”

She shakes her head no. “What were you thinking about?”

“Ruth Sykes.”

She smiles at the ground. “Where are they?” She speaks quietly.

“Sagan’s dead.”

“No. Where are the
Voyager
s?”

“They left the solar system a while back. They’re still going.”

“Where?”

Mr. Bell leans back on his elbows. “Away from us. Away from each other.”

The record reaches its end. She draws a circle on the rug with her finger. “Can we listen again?”

“Of course.” Mr. Bell sets the needle at the start.

Ruth leans back on straight arms, makes two mountains of her legs. The record says, “I send greetings on behalf of the people of our planet.” Mr. Bell, golden himself, kneels between Ruth’s knees. “We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking only peace and friendship.” He takes her chin in his hand. Her eyes lift. “We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are but a small part of the immense universe.” Mr. Bell kisses her, his wife, for the first time, for real. “It is with humility and hope that we take this step.” An orbit aligned, Ruth bends into him, returning his kiss, bouncing all she’s got back to him across the soft darkness of deep and distant space.

T
HERE IN THE DARK, DARK, DARK,
the road looks like a silver-and-blue fish. Its scales glitter with bits of glass and tar. The fish/road is as large as a semi. It has the face of a beautiful boy, a man. It lifts its head. “I need water,” the fish says. “I’m dying.” Me too, I think. Someone smashed my head and knocked me out.

When I turn to get the fish a glass of water, I’m no longer on the road but back in the motel room. “One moment,” I tell the fish, stepping into the bathroom. I unseal the plastic off a fresh drinking glass, and I allow the water to run cool over my hand as an idea strikes. “Sir?” Is that how you address a fish? “There’s a large tub in here where you’d be more comfortable. Or the canal. The Erie’s right here. I could help you get back—” I peek my head into the bedroom. “Sir?” But the fish is gone.

“Hi.” It’s Ruth.

“Where’ve you been?”

“I needed to take care of something.”

“I was so worried. What’d you take care of?”