Men in Black

by Scott Spencer

  “He’s not very well known,” I said, hoping to comfort him. “His books aren’t even in print.”

  Just then the door opened, and one of the “Chicagoland Confidential” production assistants poked his prematurely bald, round-as-a-cue-ball head in. “You’ll be going on in a few moments, Mr. Redford.” Then: “Just sit tight, Mr. Retcliffe, okay? You’ll be going on right after Mr. Redford.”

  Redford put his book down in his linen lap. “Retcliffe? John Retcliffe? The author?”

  “I don’t really think of myself as an author,” I said.

  “Well, you’ll get no argument from me on that one,” he said.

  “Look—”

  “One of my ranch hands is reading your book about the Men in Black. He’s circling the key words and drawing arrows all over the pages. And in the meanwhile, I just lost one of my best barrel horses because this clown is up all night quaking under his army blanket, waiting for some creature with three heads to fly into his cabin.”

  “I don’t think you can blame my book for that. I’m sorry about the horse, though.”

  “You guys. Ever hear of working for a living?”

  “I am working for a living, Bob. And if you don’t like what I do, then too bad. I wasn’t exactly transported by what you did to The Great Gatsby.”

  Knock, knock. The door opened. Bald-headed assistant, this time with “Chicagoland” host Irwin Carr, a tall, sleek fellow with an underslung jaw, long nose, piercing eyes; he looked like a guy with a finger in a lot of pies—a string of rib joints, a Cadillac dealership in the ghetto.

  “Mr. Redford!” he said, heartily, as if just having sold him a parcel of Florida swamp land. “Do me the honor of allowing me to escort you to my humble set!”

  Redford followed Carr out of the room, and I moved to where he had been sitting, where I feasted on cheese and grapes. In Miami, there was crabmeat in the greenroom; in Houston they had chicken wings and a blue-cheese dip. Here, the Brie was cool and tasteless and the grapes were warm, soft, as if Redford had roughed up the ones he hadn’t eaten.

  There was madness in the carpet. I dug the toe of my shoe into the rug’s gray weave and wrote my real name— I was writing it large, and in order to finish my last name I had to stretch my leg so far I practically slid out of my chair.

  The door opened and in walked Ed Bathrick, hot on my heels in his promotional tour for the book he had written about compulsive gamblers. He wore a T-shirt that showed a man on one side and a woman on the other; the letters said, THE BETTER HALF VERSUS THE BETTOR HALF. He looked at me sprawled in my chair and tried to remember where he had seen me before.

  “Hello there,” I said, not bothering to sit up.

  Eventually, I was escorted to the set, with its cushy orange chairs, the skyline painted on hinged panels behind Carr’s desk. The main camera was being run by a woman in shorts and combat boots. The audience sat in folding chairs; they seemed an unusually raucous group—whistlers, booers, catcallers, many of them with tough faces, hard faces, strongly scented hair gel. Redford had already hightailed it out of there; the seat he had used was still wrinkled and warm.

  “So level with me, John,” said Carr, holding my book and moving it up and down, as if he was trying to guess how much it weighed. “What does Visitors from Above have to do with Chicago?”

  Was it then, or significantly before, that I took final leave of my senses? Was it then that the laws of cause and effect seemed antique, outmoded, and that I began to “think” that if I were to fall off my chair and curl into a fetal position on the carpet that it would be no big deal? Was it then that my heart became a frightened animal and my tongue first felt cold, sour, and metallic, like a soup spoon?

  “Chicago?” I said, according to the videotape.

  “I’ve often wondered,” said Carr, “why is it that the people who see flying saucers and things always live in Armpit, Arkansas? How come no smart Jewish surgeons on the Gold Coast?”

  “What’s so smart about surgeons on the Gold Coast?”

  “Do you have to believe in these things in order to be contacted? Is that the deal?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so?” He looked out at the camera, made a droll face.

  It was then that I noticed Carr was dressed in black.

  “Are you trying to discredit me?” I asked him. “Because if you are—let me make it easy for you. My book is a piece of shit. Okay? I wish people would stop buying it, stop referring to it, stop, stop, I just want the whole thing to stop.”

  “Now look here, John—”

  “Don’t call me that! Please.”

  “Okay. What would you prefer? Mr. Retcliffe?”

  “Fuck.” I closed my eyes. Lowered myself into the bat cave of self. I felt calm. It seemed my body temperature had dropped twenty degrees, pleasantly so. And then I noticed that not only was I cooler but the studio had gotten darker. I looked up. All of the bright lights had been turned off and the camera operator was standing near her camera, with her arms folded over her chest, looking at me and shaking her head. Irwin Carr was standing behind his desk; stagehands were milling around; the audience was talking among themselves; Phil Baz was approaching me from the wings. It was all too silly, too much. I closed my eyes again.

  And then, the very next thing I was aware of was O’Hare Airport, where I was alongside an elderly airport security guard watching my carry-on bag through the screen of the X-ray machine. I saw the greenish skeleton of what I owned. Hundreds of flights had been canceled because of the bad weather—a late-spring storm had flapped north from the Gulf of Mexico. Only one runway was working; I was told if I ran I could catch the plane to New York, which left from Gate 6 in a few minutes. I ran, with my suitcase, which I had somehow managed to pack, in one hand, and my ticket, which I had managed to buy, in the other.

  The plane was sold out. Half the passengers were from other canceled flights; all were willing to brave the high winds and turbulence. The stewardesses walked quickly up and down the aisle, paying more attention than usual to our seat belts. We took off into gusts of headwinds; we bumped over successive currents of wind. The engines were straining. The stewardesses were double-strapped into their pulldown seats, their faces blank, rigid as mummies. You had the feeling at least one of them was deciding on a career change.

  “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen…” someone in the cockpit said. I, of course, felt perfectly calm. Airline safety was not on my mind.

  I fell asleep while we were still climbing. The jet fought gravity and nosed its way upward through surging clouds, and I dreamed I was kissing Olivia while the phone was ringing. I woke for a moment, feeling exhausted, unstable, unclean. I felt my jacket for my wallet, poked my foot beneath the seat in front of me to make sure my bag was still there. And then I fell asleep again, for over an hour. I seemed to be speaking to myself as I slept, a dream of soliloquy. I told myself I was going home. I said, “The first thing you must do is hold the children.” I was dimly aware of shifting in my seat, banging into the people who sat on either side of me. But nevertheless I slept, and would have slept even longer had not the man sitting to my left— a florid, high-school coach of a guy in a sky-blue nylon windbreaker, the kind who carefully shaves in the airport bathroom and then has a couple quick beers before the flight, one of those hard-living, not quite well-meaning men who go up and over the hill too fast for their own good— grabbed my arm and shook me awake.

  “We’re starting to crash,” he said, his blue eyes wild with panic.

  “Where are we?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know,” he said in his Mel Torme whisper. “But the pilot’s trying to land and we can’t get down through the storm.”

  Where had he gotten his voice? Is this what he came up with after a few people told him he was speaking too gruffly, that he was shouting in people’s faces?

  I rubbed my eyes, tried to wake up. I was aware that he had just told me we were going to crash,
but the information was taking time sinking in.

  I tried to look out the window, which was to my right. Sitting on that side of me was a long-faced, ectoplasmic guy dressed in an old-fashioned black suit. He was wispy bearded, hollow eyed; he looked like an Amish junkie. He kept his bony hands folded in his lap; though his hands were as smooth as ivory, his bony wrists were darkly furred. A Man in Black! Had I run so far only to come to this place? He did not look at me. His mouth was a straight, unexpressive line. If this plane was going down, it did not so much as make him blink.

  “Would you mind if I asked you a question?” I said to him.

  What did I need to know? Was I going to ask him if he had deliberately sat next to me on this flight, or if he had followed me? Was I going to ask if he was a part of a (nascent) disinformation campaign trying to discredit my book? Or if he was in fact a visitor from another planet, another galaxy—what the hell, another dimension (why be a piker in these matters?)? Are you by any chance from a parallel universe?

  But in fact I asked him none of these questions; I asked him nothing. He did not respond to my initial request, and a moment later the plane hit a pocket of air that seemed as intransigent as cement. The plane jerked up and to the left and suddenly the oxygen masks came dancing down like marionettes.

  No one told us what to do; I looked up and down the aisle and saw only a few passengers putting on their masks. I held mine to my nose and sniffed at it. It smelled of plastic and cold chemicals.

  Finally, a voice came over the public address system. It told us to ignore the oxygen masks. “Please stay in your seats with your seat belts securely fastened until we get out of this choppy air.”

  “‘Choppy air’?” said the florid fellow to my left. “We’ve been circling for the past fifteen minutes.” He showed me his digital watch. The numbers were a blur.

  Then another voice came on, this time the pilot’s. “Ahhh, we’re waiting for clearance to land at Buffalo Airport,” he said, and even over the PA I could sense the frightened boy that existed at the core of his Right Stuff voice. “In the meanwhile, we’ll just have to sit tight.”

  All I could see through the window was surging gray waves of cloud; it was as if we were flying under water.

  No one cried out, no one spoke. I heard the sound of thick cold air running over the top of the plane. Pebbles of sleet scratched at the steel. There was an odd sense of lightness at the bottom of us. It felt as if a hole had opened up for us to fall through. The once-neat cabin was suddenly disheveled. Newspapers were strewn in the aisles, pillows on the floor. The light was weak, green, and gloomy. The sharp chemical smell of the toilets was in the air.

  My eyes, sharpened by dread, now noticed how cheap and tasteless, how makeshift and bottom-line-obsessed everything about this plane was—the tacky carpeting, the welfare-office wall coverings, the cut-price chairs, the flimsy plastic ceilings. Why weren’t they thinking about us when they made this plane? But why wasn’t I thinking about my family when I made love to Nadia? Why wasn’t I thinking about the power of lies when I wrote that book?

  I wrote it for money, just as they had built this plane for money, and flown it during a storm. Yet the people who owned the airline were big-time capitalists. They cornered markets, they kissed and then kicked OPEC’s ass. All I wanted to do was pay for my kid’s shrink appointments; I wanted to plant some tea roses around the house; I wanted to be able to order a nice bottle of wine with dinner without anxiety ruining the whole meal. Was that such a crime?

  Evidently.

  Beyond the windows, the jet engines struggled mightily. I heard them groaning in agony. It brought back my father’s voice to me, when he was in a small production of King Lear and night after night he rehearsed the dying Gloucester, pressing his notion that death on stage must be as horrifyingly real as real death, full of gasps and gruesome animal noise.

  Braving the turbulence, several passengers staggered rubber-leggedly to the front of the cabin to use the GTE Air Phones to say goodbye to loved ones.

  The nearness of death had a clarifying effect on me. I was not nearly so insane as I had been when I first boarded this jet. Still, I could not help but speculate as to why I, who had made such a tidy sum speculating about strange skyward occurrences, would be meeting my end in the sky. And why would it have to happen sitting next to this waxy man in black?

  Had we been pulled into the force field of some UFO squadron? Was I dreaming?

  I reached for my carry-on bag. The plane shuddered; I hit my head against the seat in front of me. I opened and poked through my bag and finally pulled out my copy of Visitors. I didn’t know what I was doing; I could neither meditate nor premeditate. I simply opened the book and poked my finger onto the page. “Hidden.” I blindly opened to another page and pointed randomly again. “Travelers.” Ah: hidden travelers. It seemed to want to mean something. I repeated the process and came up with “flood.” Next was “Palenque.” What the hell was Palenque? Oh yes, that Aztec ruin in the Yucatán, with the carving of what could be construed as an interplanetary commuter at the controls of a spacecraft. Well, that probably didn’t mean anything. Drop “Palenque” and go on to the next word. Flutter through the pages, jab onto—“vast.” Again: “flash.” Again: “in.” Fuck the prepositions. Again: “aloneness.” All right. “Hidden travelers flood vast flash”—okay, use the preposition—“in aloneness.”

  I felt my spirits soar. My soul had wings, and it was content to glide within my body like a hawk riding the thermals. We were going to be okay. I felt warm with relief, a human cup of herbal tea. Life! It would continue, and I’d be right there in it! I closed the book, looked at the cover, and then put it into the seat pocket in front of me, along with the in-flight magazine, the safety instructions, and the air-sickness bag.

  “Don’t worry,” I said to the jock at my left, “we’re going to be all right.”

  He looked at me as if I were mad, but he was glad to hear it as well. I patted his arm. He looked at my hand as it touched him, and then his eyes met mine and we smiled.

  “I’m really scared,” he said. “I think I’m going to blow my lunch.”

  “Don’t worry. We’re in good hands.”

  I felt so magnanimous, I even turned to the man in black.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  He stared straight ahead, silent. At last, he nodded: yes.

  I arrived in Leyden near midnight. With the limo waiting at the bottom of my driveway, I stood on my porch, wondering how to get in, until I realized I had the key.

  I opened the door, turned, waved goodbye to the driver, Jake, with whom I had been talking for the past eight hours—he’d driven me all the way from Buffalo.

  Inside, I breathed the aromas of home—butter, paint, carpet, wood. Popcorn. I put my bag down and walked into the living room. A clear glass bowl of popcorn, half-full, was on the coffee table, along with three tall glasses with a little soda in each. Olivia and the kids had been watching a movie together.

  I poured myself a drink, waited for someone to awaken and find me there. But my family slept deeply.

  I opened the refrigerator. The remains of a roasted chicken was on a platter. I broke off a wing, ate it. Home.

  I stepped on the pedal and opened the trash can, dropped the chicken bone in with my family’s garbage.

  The kitchen window was open. The night air was warm, filled with the yearning peeps of the tree frogs. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was Peep Peep Peep.

  I went to my study off the kitchen. A huge stack of mail was piled on my writing table. I picked up pieces at random—subscription notices, Save the Children, Guatemala Watch, Authors Guild. I let them fall from my hands. I turned on my typewriter; it was silent for a long moment and then came to with a rasping hum. I quickly shut it off.

  I sat on the sofa in the living room and finished the popcorn, drank the dregs of each of their sodas.

  Finally, I gathered the courage to go upstairs. I took off my shoe
s, walked as quietly as I could. The floorboards creaked and I stopped, gripped the banister, listened.

  The bedroom doors were all shut. I touched the walls. Home. The word filled me like a second beating heart.

  I opened Michael’s door, looked in. The moon shined in the mirror above his dresser. He slept on his stomach, his feet poking out from beneath his blanket. I didn’t dare walk in. He looked safe. I stood there, watching him sleep.

  Next, I looked in at Amanda. As usual, she was on her back, her hands resting on the satiny border of her blanket, her lips parted.

  Finally, I opened my bedroom door. The reading light on Olivia’s side was on, and she was propped up in bed, looking directly at me.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said, imitating me.

  I didn’t know if I should move toward her. I stood in the doorway. I was returned to where I most belonged in the world, yet I could no sooner put my arms around Olivia than I could embrace a stranger, a woman in another country.

  “I was trying to be quiet downstairs.”

  “This house carries sound.”

  “Sorry.”

  “The phone’s been ringing all night. Are you all right?”

  “Yes.” I closed the door behind me.

  “Ezra called…this…Bill Baz.”

  “Phil.”

  “Everyone wants to know where you are.”

  “I’m right here. Is that okay?”

  “What happened in Chicago?”

  “I quit.”

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. “I wanted to come home.”

  “They were talking nervous breakdown.”

  “No.”

  “They’re very worried.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  She reached over and switched off the lamp. I heard her sliding down in the bed, arranging the pillows.

  “It’s so late.”

  “‘Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and awoke to find myself in a dark wood,’” I said.

  “Sam. Please. It’s late. And I’m exhausted. Michael was in tears all day.”