During the standoff between the smalls and my friend and me, an uncanny stillness prevailed. But then their heads swiveled simultaneously. Each turned toward another. They didn’t seem to be exchanging glances, though, or even looking directly into one another’s glassy, empty eyes—not as my friend and I looked to each other with the same thought in our minds. We couldn’t run around them, because they surrounded us. And we didn’t want to jump down the steep incline at our backs and land in the small town. So we began to move slowly through their ranks, not knowing what to expect. While we had come there to harm them, our taste for that was now lost. It seemed to us, as we later talked of it, that we could not understand them at all or what malevolence they might harbor toward us.
Very slowly, then, we sidled our way among them, and they didn’t attempt to block our path. However, they did do something, or seemed to do something. This was to lightly press their bodies against ours as we passed. That turned out to be worse than any brute physical encounter we could have had with them—their touch. For they were not stiff and rigid as we expected, not the hard, plastic toys we might have neatly torn apart, bloodlessly dislodging their seemingly prosthetic limbs. Instead, we found that they were soft, very soft. Their shapes felt as if they were giving way as they lightly pressed themselves against us. But they were also swivel-headed dummy-things—freakish unrealities like their town and maybe everything having to do with small country. Did they even exist as our minds conjured existence, both our own and that of all else within our perception? What were these things that seemed to be all appearance and no substance? Fortunately, such questions did not paralyze us.
Once my friend and I were on the other side of the smalls, we ran without pause to where we commenced our terribly misconceived incursion into small country. The rest of the night we spent shivering with cold and fear in the lavatory hut at the old park on the edge of town. The only time we spoke was in the morning. Just before we parted for our respective homes, my friend looked at me with an abysmal expression on his face and said, “My dad will kill me if he ever finds out what we did.”
“Yeah,” I said, drawing out at length that single, stupid syllable, exhaling it in a dead voice.
***
Not long after our misadventure, my friend moved away with his family. And before the end of that school year, those signs went up with the simple faces on them. They first appeared at the edge of town and then proceeded for some miles along the open road beyond. I made a point of going around and finding all the signs I could, noting which direction their arrows pointed to indicate small country. I saw that people still went to the old park. They must have been aware that small country wasn’t far away, but that made no difference to them, not as it did to me.
A few weeks before it was time for the new school year to begin, I received a letter from my friend. It was hand delivered to me by my mother, who first took a moment to interrogate me about any packs of cigarettes I might have hidden in the basement, which was where I happened to be at the time, lying on an old sofa we had down there. After that night in small country, my friend and I tried smoking cigarettes for a while. I think we both wanted to do something we’d never done before, something to make us feel we had changed and were no longer those kids who talked so much about the smalls. I kept the last pack of cigarettes we shared, and my mom found them. I hadn’t even smoked since my friend moved away.
I was elated when I got his letter, which was only a single page. But I read that page countless times, savoring its words and even reciting them in my friend’s voice. There was nothing more in the letter than my friend’s banal depiction of the new place he was living and the school he would be attending. That was enough to relieve the sense of demoralization I felt since he had gone. I wrote back to him, of course, and that initiated an exchange of letters between us, and even some phone calls. I told him that I still had the last pack of cigarettes we shared, even though my mother had taken them. What I never asked him was whether he had made any new friends.
In mid-winter, I opened the latest missive from my friend after a hiatus during which he had answered none of my letters. What I read in it revived a kaleidoscope of memories and emotions, none of them welcome to my still delicate state of mind. The news my friend related was that his father had disappeared about a month before. One day, he didn’t return from work, and his family had heard nothing from him since. My friend didn’t write a word about any particular suspicions he had, and that I also nurtured. He did say that the police had come to his house. As a rule, his mother wouldn’t have allowed them into their home to poke around. His father had never trusted the police or any other persons of officialdom, and neither did his mother. But in this circumstance, that rule went out the window.
The police didn’t find anything that interested them in the house, but when they looked around the garage they turned up a lock box hidden underneath a workshop table. My friend’s mother gave them permission to open it, and inside they discovered, as my friend quoted them, “stacks of literature.” Then he wrote, “Both my mom and I were fairly certain that what they called literature wasn’t pornography or anything of the kind. It was stuff about them.” That was the first reference to the small people I could recollect appearing in our correspondence with each other. Naturally, this was a subject that we didn’t want to linger over. My friend continued regarding what was hidden in his dad’s lock box that the police pried open: “Some of it was in envelopes with postmarks from all over the world.” The police rummaged through the material until my friend’s mother told them there wasn’t anything in there that would help them find her husband. “The cops didn’t say a word after that,” my friend wrote. “I thought they might. It seemed to me they should have, the way they were looking at each other. But they just piled the envelopes and stuff back in the box and shoved the box back underneath my dad’s workshop table. Then they left, and we haven’t heard from them since, the bastards.”
For a few days, I didn’t know what to write in response to my friend’s letter. I considered phoning him, but I didn’t think that was a prudent action to take. Finally, I composed a short letter of vague condolences and hopes that his dad had business he thought it best not to share with him and his mother. My letter was a mass of circumlocutions that I was sure my friend would understand. To my grief, I never received a response to that letter, and it was almost spring before I could admit to myself that I would never hear from him again.
I said that my friend avoided mentioning the smalls in our letters. However, as I later pored over our correspondence I saw that he had written something to me that I blocked from recall. The erasure of his words from my memory was understandable, for what he wrote was simply too strange to reflect upon for very long. If you’ll remember, Doctor, I posed the following question: “How could we know we were keeping certain truths from ourselves regarding how things are in this world at its deepest level?” And the answer I gave to my own question was this: “Because we had done it before.” Well, that’s exactly what I had done when I read what my friend wrote to me in one of his letters. Here is my recitation of it from memory: “My dad got drunk last night and told me things I had never heard from him before. I didn’t understand most of it. What I do remember was his repeating what he called a spectral link between the smalls and some people in the real world. Then he went on about people who looked and acted like humans but were not human. Maybe he said they were not completely human. He did have a term for them. It was half-small people.”
You might be able to comprehend, Doctor, how disquieted I was to see written in my friend’s hand certain words that, at least in concept, had occurred to me only in a dream. I hated to think that there was a spectral link between myself and the smalls, and though I have spoken of peculiar truths regarding how things really are in this world at its deepest level, truths that we keep ourselves from knowing, I concluded with stark lucidity that there was absolutely no spectral link between myself and the smalls
—not as I understood my friend’s father to have used these words. If anything, it was exactly the opposite. The small people were drastically alien to me. I was derided by my parents as a shameful little bigot because of my fear of them and my hatred of them, feelings that I had not known to exist in anyone else besides my friend, and vicariously through him his father—and his mother, too, it seemed, who I believe had also gone the way of the rest of my friend’s family. But where they had gone I couldn’t bring myself to ponder.
While continuing to be afraid of the smalls and to hate them, I now transferred these emotions with a rabid vehemence toward the half-smalls, who my friend added sometimes devolved—or whatever the proper term might be—in both appearance and nature into small people through and through. Following this transformation, which they might not even know was possible or consider desirable—there was nothing for them to do except move into small country and live among their kind, that is, if they didn’t regard this prospect as so repellent that they took other measures rather than lose the sense of who they were, or thought they were, and what they were, or thought they were. With its small people, this world just seemed a preposterous mess to me, and now it was revealed to be even worse than I knew. Why couldn’t things be different? What would it take for our lives to make some kind of sense? Maybe that’s just not possible, I thought. Maybe any world would be just as preposterous. Yet the existence of the half-smalls nevertheless still inspired in me a crawling fear, a new unseen horror, as I’ve mentioned having this sensation in dreams, along with a hatred of them for having what I thought was a weakness connecting them in some spectral manner with the small people. At least the latter were something of a phenomenally known quantity to my mind, however little I understood about them. But the halfers were something else—interlopers in a world where they didn’t belong, the source of all questions about who or what human beings might be as a life form. For as tiresome as it has become, the question of what it means to be human continues to fervently preoccupy us—because without that definition we cannot positively know if our laborious self-perpetuation is worth the candle we keep lit in the blackness of the universe. We cannot decide whether we should continue or terminate the human race, if there is anything that might be called the human race, since we are as fragmented in the aggregate as we are as individuals—things of parts and not the integrated organisms we represent to ourselves. All the same, as naïve and arrogant as this may sound, I felt that my sensibility enabled my insight into this immemorial affair. I thought of this sensibility as a type of instinct that actually forced me to see things as they were and not as I was supposed to see them so that I could get by in life.
From this point on, as I walked the streets of the town where I lived, I could see only how contrary everything was to the picture of it I was psychologically strong-armed into having. Now the place where I grew up was no more than another preposterous mess. The town’s motto on the sign as you entered Main Street was: “A Good Place to Live”—not exactly a boastful statement. In actuality, though, it was pretty crummy. Not crummy in itself, I should say, because I had never lived in any other towns. They might be as crummy as my native town. The whole planet might be crummy for all I knew then. When I looked closely at the city hall, for instance, I could see it was wobbly. Maybe at one time I would have thought nothing of walking through the wide front doors of the place. Now that my eyes could see that they tilted quite visibly, I wouldn’t have entered its space on a dare. Or take the post office. If my mother had ordered me in her most calmly intimidating voice to go buy her some stamps, I wouldn’t do it. Not one foot would I set inside, because its bricks were set together all wrong. One of them could slide a little, I gauged, and the walls might come crashing down in a flash and bury me alive as I was standing in line to buy some rotten stamps which had images on them that were so faded and cock-eyed I couldn’t tell anymore what they were supposed to represent. Once they were printed with images of monuments in one place or another where my family went on vacation, as I remembered in my mind’s eye, but from then on they appeared all bent up and sagging. And they were all supposed to be so grand. Taken in total, the whole world was supposed to be so grand. But it wasn’t, not from my perspective, which was no longer so muddled I couldn’t see things for what they were and not how I was supposed to see them. In my view, all the earth and anything that stood upon it was just like the town where I lived—not a good place but a crummy place. Even new places that people were always rushing around to build were crummy from the start—wobbly and tilted, bent and sagging. All the energy and hustling that went into building a car wash or a row of stores that seemed to shoot up overnight like mushrooms—it was just so useless. And the most piddling events were elevated as a matter of course beyond their significance, as testified by the ubiquitous Grand Openings wherever you looked. It was all supposed to amount to something, whatever it was. Everything had to be imbued with consequence. But nothing amounted to anything. It was all just trying to be what it wasn’t—real, that is, authentic in every sense of the word, and not fatally bogus.
I could see the same thing in people that I did in the flimsy material world, this junkyard of cast-off ectoplasm. They didn’t meet expectations either, though, as I said, no one yet has been able to say definitely who or what we are. And I don’t think anyone will ever be able to do so. I don’t think they want to. What I do think they want is to say that humans, real humans, are this and that and the other thing—that there are millions of qualities humans have that nothing else has, and they say all this to keep us confused, to keep themselves confused, about what humans really are, except that they’re not small people. But now I was fixated on the half-smalls. Now my sensibility, my special instinct, had become sufficiently honed to discern who was what. Not that I expected any consolation from such knowledge—it was simply something to do while I decided what to do with myself.
At first, as I walked around town during the summer after I stopped receiving letters from my friend, I wasn’t sure exactly how my sensibility was functioning. I would get a feeling, like a tingling inside me, when I saw certain people strolling down the sidewalk or sitting at picnic tables outside the frozen custard stand that did land-office business throughout the summer months. I’m sure you get the picture, Doc. It was show time and nothing but. No doubt some clickety-clack version of it was being enacted by the smalls, as I was now with some confidence able to imagine after beholding one of their own towns in its construction stage, a poor excuse for even the crummiest human town, if one wants to get into degrees of crumminess, that is.
All things considered, my wits were in relatively fair working order, and my sensibility was becoming more and more sharply attuned. Occasionally, the tingling sensation I felt in the proximity of certain persons caught me off guard and pierced my spine with anxiety, but for the most part I was in control. Within the span of about a week, I not only felt something about those people but also began to see little things about them, things you wouldn’t notice without an exacting gaze. After my confrontation with the small people and detecting the smoothness of their faces, which were bereft of the character bestowed by time, unwrinkled and unworn, I saw a family resemblance in the same people who set off that tingling inside me. I wished my friend could have been there, because I was sure he would have seen the same thing about them—that they were halfers.
Some days I’d walk from one end of town to the other, and I’d pick out the real people from the half-small people. As I passed by each person I would check off their identities in my mind—halfer, real, halfer, real, and so on. Mr. So-and-so—halfer. The old woman who walks her dog in the park every day—real. Schoolteachers—halfers every one. Cops, too, all halfers, which made me think of my friend’s family and the investigating officers who found the literature under his father’s workshop table. The girl who sat next to me in math class—real. I was glad about that. The middle-aged lady in the window at the beauty shop—everyone thought she h
ad a facelift done, but she was a halfer. With children it was more of a challenge sorting out the real ones from the halfers. Most of them I let pass as real. There was one group of kids, though, all spindly specimens with empty stares. They had to be half-smalls.
All told, I judged about half the people in town as real and half as halfers. I had gotten to be quite proficient at spotting our citizens as one or the other—too good, in the end. I really should have shut off my thoughts sometimes, but I couldn’t do that.
***
It was Saturday, and my dad was off work for the weekend. My family always barbecued hamburgers and hot dogs on those days and ate them together around a plastic table in the backyard. We don’t tend to see our parents the way we do others. We’re too close to them. Even if they make you miserable and call you a shameful little bigot, they’re still your parents—special circumstances notwithstanding. But after all the time I spent around town separating the real people from the half-smalls, I scrutinized everyone the same. More to the point, I felt that tingling inside me. Being with both my mother and father for an extended period of time on a Saturday afternoon, and sitting with them around a plastic table in the backyard, I was tingling like mad. My father was smiling slightly and staring with concentration as he always did. But I never noticed that he was really staring at nothing in particular—that he was more or less gawking with bottomless eyes. And though the sun was shining on my mother’s smooth face, her big eyes weren’t squinting. Furthermore, they didn’t look right or left, up or down. They were just big eyes like a big doll would have. The longer I sat with my parents eating hamburgers, hot dogs, and potato salad with no egg whites, because from the first time I ate potato salad with egg whites I refused to eat it again that way, the more I tingled inside. My parents did what they had to do in order to be real parents to me. But we weren’t biologically related, as I’m sure it says in your file on me. I was adopted as an infant, and now I knew that I was only a prop, something to aid them in not being found out for what they were.
The Spectral Link Page 5
