Static!

by Michael R Collings

  Then things changed, slowly but irrevocably.

  The changes were simple at first, non-threatening, almost compellingly logical. For one thing, Payne began selecting more of the films, sometimes by himself. From the beginning, they had enjoyed fingering through the master index and tossing off suggestions for the night’s viewing almost as much as they enjoyed watching the final choice. But as the summer progressed, more than once the chosen disc was already nestled in the DVD player when Nick arrived.

  The evenings also took on a spooky seriousness for Payne.

  For the first while, the two men talked openly during the movies, chatting about town, weather, people, or crunching crackers and popcorn, popping soda or beer cans, and laughing when one or the other got sprayed. Sometimes they ignored the film altogether and drifted into conversations that would last until well past midnight and be totally forgotten by the next dawn.

  Then Payne became more attentive to the films, hesitating to answer Nick’s questions, responding with something like irritation when Nick spoke.

  Finally, one night in mid-June, while they were watching Gothic, Nick turned to Payne.

  “I don’t like this,” he said.

  “Shhh,” Payne hissed without taking his eyes from the screen.

  “Hey...,” Nick began, but Payne silenced him with another “Shhh.” Melodramatically (Nick thought at the time), he pressed his finger against his lips and shook his head. It looked so hokey, so much like something out of a bad soap opera that Nick burst out laughing.

  “Shit!” Payne said, jumping up and slapping the palm of his hand against the power knob on the monitor.

  The picture died, suddenly and abruptly, without the fading half-light Nick expected.

  Payne whirled to face Nick.

  “You want to talk, okay, let’s talk!”

  “Look, man...,” Nick began, half-rising from the sofa.

  Payne glared at him for a moment, then something died in his eyes and he smiled and motioned Nick to sit back down. He turned the monitor back on.

  “Forget it,” he said. “I just got too involved in the thing. Sorry.”

  “No problem,” Nick said. But for the rest of the evening, the only sounds in the room came from the monitor.

  The kind of films Payne chose changed, too, subtly but definitely. Episodes from Star Wars or Star Trek and the bloodless high-tech SF clones that followed them soon disappeared. In their places, Payne began concentrating on high-violence, high-blood epics. Alien was the first, even though it was one of the older films they watched; it was also one of the last ones they chose by consensus. It was part of the pattern, Nick later realized, but a pattern isn’t too easy to spot when there is only one point. How can you have a streak of one?

  But it was the first point.

  On the day Nick finally understood that there was a problem, that the evenings were no longer what he had expected and come to enjoy, Payne had thumb-tacked a note to Nick’s screen door sometime after noon, long after Nick had left for a stint at the Tamarind Valley Community College library.

  For the first hour or so, he struggled through a couple of volumes of mandatory criticism that he was surprised to see on the shelves in such a small library. The stuff was frustrating to read, some of it so self-involved with the ingenuity of the critic that it seemed more masturbatory than elucidating. Disgusted, he gave up and instead checked out the local holdings in Renaissance drama.

  There wasn’t much, so he spent another hour or so skimming through some SF novels on the week-checkout table.

  He didn’t return home until later than usual—almost 7:30. He almost didn’t notice the sheet of lined yellow foolscap paper, but he dropped his key and, kneeling to pick it up without spilling the load of books balanced precariously in the crook of his arm, found himself eye to eye with a thumbtack and a fluttering scrap of paper.

  He hurried into the house, dropped the books on the table, and went back outside to retrieve the note.

  He recognized Payne’s scrawl before he read the words: “Something good today. Film at 8. Don’t be late.”

  “Nuts,” he said, as much out of frustration at Payne’s marginally peremptory tone as at his own lateness.

  He rushed inside and threw some soup onto the stove, taking a quick shower while his Campbell’s cream-of-chicken heated, then wolfing down the hot soup as he stood, towel wrapped around his waist, eating over the kitchen sink and staring out the window. Almost before he swallowed the last spoonful, he let the bowl fall clattering onto the stained porcelain.

  Thank god for melamine, he thought as he heard bowl and spoon chitter together in the bottom of the pitted sink. By then, he had pulled the towel off and was halfway into his bedroom and his pile of clean shorts, T-shirts, and socks.

  It was 7:53.

  In spite of everything, by 8:00 sharp, he was dressed and standing on the porch only a few yards from the old glider-swing, half a box of Better Cheddars under one arm and a six-pack under the other. His finger reached out, still shaking from running across the yard, and touched the doorbell button.

  The buzzer crackled electrically.

  Payne’s porch seemed dark even though the sun still had an hour and a half before setting and there was almost two hours until full night. The inside lights were off when Payne opened the front door to greet Nick on the porch and usher him into the study.

  “Everything’s ready,” Payne said as Nick settled into a new chair.

  White, but somehow less frigid-seeming than the older pieces of furniture.

  “Where’d you get this?” Nick asked, running his fingers over the smooth vinyl armrest.

  Payne laughed.

  “Had to spend another hour arguing with the lawyers on that one. Apparently I’ve already made more changes in the place than Aunt Emilia would have liked. According to them.”

  “It’s about time,” Nick said, then looked up apologetically. “Look, Payne, I didn’t mean that the way...I mean...it’s your place and all.” His voice trailed off.

  “No problem,” said Payne, laughing again. “I feel the same way. And anyway, it’s sort of a game now: Payne 3, Lawyers 0. It helps that I’m a kind of problem, keeps them off balance sometimes.”

  “Huh?”

  “Technically, I suppose, I’m not even supposed to be here. My mother was actually Aunt Emilia’s heir, had been for years even though no one back home knew that—or probably would have cared if they had known. It was very specific in the will, though. Mom got everything. No one else was mentioned beyond being excluded from inheriting anything. It was an idiosyncratic will, but iron-clad.

  “Apparently Aunt Emilia never knew Mom was sick—certainly she didn’t know how desperately ill Mom really was.”

  He fell silent.

  There was something self-absorbed, grieving about the way he dropped heavily onto the end of the worn white sofa, only an arm’s distance from where Nick sat. Nick wasn’t sure what to say.

  He finally decided not to say anything.

  After a couple of moments, Payne continued.

  “Mom was...it was pretty bad for the last couple of months. Lots of pain. For both of us.”

  He looked up and glanced around the white room as if seeking an escape from the prison of his memories. In the flat light, his face looked haunted. Then he relaxed and settled into the soft cushion of the sofa.

  “Aunt Emilia died the day after Mom did, even though we didn’t find out for a while afterward. And Mom died without saying a word about this to anyone.” He gestured absently to indicate the house. “I don’t know if she even knew. I didn’t. But suddenly, instead of all of this going to Aunt Emilia’s niece, it went to her heir, Emilia’s great-nephew. Me.”

  He thumped himself theatrically on the chest.

  “The lawyers had a fit when I walked into their office. They had sent letters, papers to sign, even flight information and a ticket, but somehow had never quite caught on that I was me, not my mother. Took a while fo
r that shock to pass.

  “But this is probably the last time they’ll let me bend the rules of the will,” Payne said, grinning, as he leaned across the short gap between sofa and chair and patted the slick surface of the armrest, just missing Nick’s outstretched hand by a couple of inches.

  Nick didn’t care for Danish modern, and the chair was more angular than he enjoyed, but it was passable. In fact, from that moment on it was de facto Nick’s chair during the films.

  Payne seemed satisfied with the old white sofa.

  Nick wasn’t sure what to say—an increasingly common and frustrating situation that evening—so he glanced up at the monitor. Everything was ready, including the disc, already in the player and set to go since the red idiot light along the bottom of the screen was on, indicating that the machine was warmed up.

  He sighed.

  There was an oddly stifling sense in the room, an unusual heaviness of air. Another point on a pattern not yet apparent.

  “What’s on for tonight?” he asked as he settled back into the chair. He swallowed once, trying to calm his stomach. The cream-of-chicken soup was sloshing around inside as if it hadn’t had time to settle into the serious business of digestion—which, in fact, it had not.

  Payne stood up.

  “Something you’ll like, I think. Alien.”

  “Great. I missed that one.”

  “I know. You mentioned that last time.”

  “All right, then,” Nick said, gesturing magisterially (and, he felt, idiotically) toward the screen. “Home, James. On with the show.”

  Payne laughed—giggled almost.

  Nick started to laugh, too, but the sound didn’t make it past his lips. His stomach still churned.

  In point of fact, Nick had seen neither Alien nor Aliens although he had heard and read about both of them. He had fully intended to see them. Once, three years before, just after he had moved into his place, he had even gone so far as to plan to rent a player and the two film, but on the way to the video store, he had run over scrap of wooden shingle from a decaying house nearby and picked up a nail in his rear tire—the only one on the car that was anywhere near worth its weight in rubber.

  Since the previous flat had been changed by the pros at the tire shop, the lug nuts were screwed on so tightly that it took him almost an hour and four scraped fingers before he finally made the change. By then he was out of the mood for movies. Instead, he just drove back home, wrenching the steering wheel viciously at the blind corner just off Greensward, and screeched up outside his house.

  He had stomped inside, not even stopping to turn on the hall lights or anything, but went right into the cramped bathroom and, under the rippled reflection in the mirror, dribbled merthiolate across his knuckles.

  From there he went into the kitchen and pulled out a bottle, got quietly drunk to forget the sting, and passed out fully dressed on the living room couch, mindless of lumps and sprung springs and sagging cushions.

  That was it for Alien and Aliens.

  Somehow, after that, he had just never gotten around to renting them. So his enthusiasm was genuine, his interest high. It should have been a great night. But the viewing went subtly wrong.

  Oh, the physical arrangements were no different from when they had watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid grab hold of that belt and leap yelling from the cliff into nothingness. There was still the single sofa, now next to the Danish modern chair Payne seemed to avoid. The curtains still cut the light from outside like it was a physical substance that could be severed with a kitchen knife; on the other hand, the resulting darkness sharpened the clarity of the images on the screen glowing from the monitor that hung from dead-white wall.

  On the surface, everything was the same.

  But there was a difference nonetheless. Payne seemed ill-at-ease, talking more than usual. He stood again and left the room suddenly, yelling “Be right back” at Nick as he trailed down the hallway to the kitchen.

  He returned carrying a hunk of cheese on a wooden cutting board and a bowl for Nick’s Better Cheddars. After he sat down, he chattered, almost querulously it seemed. Nick nodded vacantly, looked up at the monitor filled with snowy static, glanced around the sterile study, hmmmmned absently at appropriate times—and felt a cold shiver crawl along his spine when he remembered that he had done the same thing to Mrs. Harrison the day she died.

  Just before the credits began, Payne let something slip, something that altered the tenor of the evening.

  “You’ll like this one.”

  “Yeah,” Nick agreed. “I think so. I’ve heard enough about it.”

  “I’ll have to invest in a copy of Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection,” Payne said as he came through the door. “They’re the only ones Aunt Emilia apparently didn’t have time to collect. They made big enough splashes when they came out.”

  By this time, Nick was halfway out of his seat, offering to help set up the cheese and crackers.

  Payne motioned for him to sit back down.

  “I really wanted to see them, too, when they came out,” Nick said from the depths of the chair. “But I just didn’t have the bucks. Not to mention that my folks wouldn’t let me go to see them anyway. I was what, fourteen or fifteen when Resurrection finally made it to the theater in our little metropolis in Montana. Figured I’d have to wait until I got a bit older and it showed up in the video places.”

  “I’ll try to pick it up this week,” Payne said absently as he made some adjustments to the plates and bowl, studied the final effect, and nodded to himself.

  “I saw the original version, though, on TV, when I was a kid,” Nick said.

  “What?”

  “You know, the B-flick from the fifties that they based Alien on. I don’t remember its name.”

  “Me either. Must have missed that one, too.”

  He was still studying the arrangements of cheese board and bowl, his lips pursed and his eyes narrowed.

  “But this one is great. When I was watching it this afternoon....”

  “You watched it already?” Nick said sharply, looking up.

  “Sure....” He pushed the bowl infinitesimally to the left. “Why not?” Payne answered offhandedly—studiously offhandedly, it seemed to Nick. The tone was wrong, so carefully neutral that it sounded practiced.

  Yet there was no reason for it to be other than neutral. There was nothing, after all, to say that Payne couldn’t watch anything he wanted. It was his house, his film. But they had tacitly agreed that on the nights they watched together they would stick to things either definitely old or definitely new.

  Payne had suggested it, in fact. That way, he had argued, they would either discover the film at the same time, or both be able to make intelligent comments.

  Now Payne had watched Alien for the first time just before Nick arrived.

  Speaking into a thick silence, Nick finally answered Payne’s question. “No reason, I guess.”

  Payne continued talking, as if the interruption had never happened.

  “It’s great. Good effects, especially the lighting. I’d like to see it on a big screen, in a real theater. You miss too much, too many details, when everything is television-sized. The sets are strange, though, really strange. Erotic...sexy. I read somewhere that the director or producer or designer or someone had worked penis and vagina imagery all through. Cocks and cunts.”

  Nick stared. It wasn’t simply the sexual references that surprised him. He was used to such things, having survived several courses under Freudians who insisted that every walking-stick or ship’s mast in Hawthorne and Melville stood for the author’s repressed sexuality—or, according to the more aggressive critics, repressed homosexuality.

  Nick had in fact heard similar things said about Alien, from literary people as well as from film buffs.

  No, the references themselves didn’t bother him. But the words did, and even more, that Payne had said them. To begin with, Payne anything but literary-minded. His strength seemed to b
e business, the pragmatic side of life. According to what he had told Nick over the past weeks, he had already begun working through his aunt’s notebooks, trying to interest a number of companies in exploring ideas in them. And he was getting some surprisingly positive responses. But he couldn’t get beyond “hello” in any conversation that was based seriously on writers and writing.

  Payne was stridently practical. He could repair a garage door and mow a lawn, while Nick often had trouble turning on a light. But Payne never seemed to read—at least Nick never saw a book in the house. In the bedroom, perhaps, he might have installed a small bookcase (if he could get it past the lawyers), but Nick didn’t think so. Aunt Emilia had probably covered that particular point quite well in her will. Books would have jarred too violently with the exotically, essentially visual high-tech feeling of the house and its ubiquitous screens. No, Nick was sure The Greer would have argued “Why read a book when you can just turn a screen on.”

  Nor, in the weeks Nick had known him, did Payne seem interested in sex per se. Not that Nick knew much about that part of his life, of course. They shared their quota of mildly blue comments, just two guys kickin’ ’round and by the way did you score last night.

  There was a girl, Nick knew, but he hadn’t met her yet. He didn’t even know her name.

  Generally, though, Payne was even more reserved about matters sexual than Nick was—which meant essentially comatose most of the time.

  He wasn’t backwoods or ignorant, just reserved. His language was oddly straight-laced for someone of his generation, with few words stronger than an occasional darn or shoot. And none of the more common sexually-freighted slang at all.

  So if the words penis and vagina might have seemed uncomfortable coming from him, the other two were shocking. Yet he had said them—calmly, coolly, unemotionally.

  Nick tried to shrug it off. After all, he had only been around Payne a few weeks; he couldn’t really claim to know the other man that well. This was just a new facet, another channel tuning in.

  When Nick didn’t say anything for a long while, Payne glanced over at him, then stood and left the room.