by Douglas Lain
“Is this your wife?” Cokely asks.
“Maybe.”
“Is this Virginia Johnson, formerly Virginia Keenan?”
“I don’t know.”
“There is nothing you can point to, is there, Brian? No way that you can find one fixed quality in her and say ‘this is my wife.’ The pattern has changed. That’s what a person is. A person is a pattern, a way of going, and that’s what we recognize and call ‘wife’ or ‘friend’ or ‘FBI agent,’” the agent says. “But these ideas aren’t the same thing as the people who we give the name, these ideas aren’t bodies, they aren’t our arms or brains or any physical part of us.”
“These ideas are our spirit,” the woman says.
The woman who I’m sure is my wife steps up to me, takes my hand, and gives it a squeeze. She puts her other hand against my cheek, and I feel nauseous. This is all going wrong.
Mr. Cokely returns to his desk and puts away the wave machine while this woman who might be Virginia continues to explain. I glance over at Asket now and find she’s smiling. She’s staring at this shorter version of herself, this New Age bimbo, and smiling at her like a morning talk show host smiles. Asket is nodding along.
“Descartes showed us that the concept of wax was empty. The concept doesn’t match up to any one empirical fact but was an idea about a collection of empirical facts. People are the same. People, the idea of a person like your wife, are concepts. They are ideas we use to speak about sets of empirical facts,” this woman says.
“Think of it this way,” Cokely tells me. “What’s your favorite song?”
“My favorite song?”
“Or your least favorite,” he says. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Chopin’s ‘Prelude,’” I say. ‘“Number four.’”
Cokely looks pleased with this choice. He tells me to imagine that I’ve gone to the store and purchased Chopin’s greatest hits on vinyl, to pretend that I did this thirty years ago, in 1962.
“You purchased a recording of John Browning,” Cokely suggests. “And you’ve played the record a hundred or a thousand times over the years. You’ve tried to take care of it, always stored it in its sleeve, but despite your best efforts the record has become scratched. About a minute in there is a deep scratch on the record and it skips. You know what I mean?”
I nod.
“Now,” he asks, “would you replace the record? Would you maybe buy a copy of Chopin’s ‘Preludes’ on compact disc?”
I get where he’s going with this analogy, but it still seems wrong to me.
“No, wait. Listen. If you were to buy Chopin’s ‘Preludes’ on CD, a remastered compact disc of the same John Browning performance, would you be listening to the same music when you got it home?”
“It would be the same pianist?” I ask.
“It would be the same recording. It would just be a digitally remastered copy of the same original magnetic tapes,” he says.
“Then, yes. It would be the same music.”
“But,” he says, “the music would sound different. The music would have a richer tone, it would be cleaner. These new compact discs can store more information than vinyl records, with less information in the low frequency range, but more in the high frequency range. And a CD, it won’t scratch at all. There wouldn’t be any hiss. Are you sure it would be the same music?”
“Yes.”
“But the object would be completely different, it would be a different size, it wouldn’t be grooved. The CD isn’t the same body, the same physical object, at all. But it’s the same song,” he says.
“It’s the same song,” I agree. “But, Mr. Cokely, you’re not listening to me. I came here today because my wife is missing.”
“Your wife is missing?” he asks. He glances at the woman in the sequined jumpsuit and then looks back at me.
“Listen, people aren’t songs. People aren’t piano music.” I feel like doing something physical, maybe grabbing this woman who looks like Virginia, maybe dragging this man, this agent, out of his chair and shaking him. Asket is still smiling blankly as if somebody has put her on pause. I can’t even tell if she’s breathing.
“Virginia,” I say.
“I’m not Virginia,” the woman tells me.
I turn to Asket. She is still smiling, still vacant.
Cokely nods at the woman who says she’s not my wife and she steps over to the edge of the cubicle and around the corner. When I stand up to go after her Cokely is on me, pushing me back down in the chair and holding me there.
“Wait a minute,” he says. “Hold on a minute, Mr. Johnson. You just hold on a minute.”
“Virginia!” I shout. Then I shout her name again. “Virginia! Virginia! Virginia!” I shout out to her, but of course she doesn’t return. She’s gone now. Somehow I know it. She turned the corner and then disappeared.
“Mr. Flint,” Cokely says.
“No,” Asket says. Her smile falters. “This is Johnson.”
“Mr. Johnson,” Cokely says. He has me pinned on my chair, his face is right up next to mine so that we’re nose to nose, he’s spitting my name at me, and again I involuntarily relax. It dawns on me right now how I can break out of this. They think they’ve got a tight hold on me, that they’ve got this all figured out, but they’ve forgotten something vitally important.
“Okay, okay. We’re all songs. Concepts, names, they’re like songs. But…” I say. “But, what about Christmas?”
Back in the early ’60s, when I was five or six years old, I figured out what it meant to have a personality. It was during the holidays, maybe a week or two before Christmas, and we were at the local elementary school for a Christmas pageant and arts and craft sale. My mother was concerned that I not get separated from her in the crowd, she was concerned that I would get lost amidst the bubble lights and paint by number wooden ornaments. I remember watching the chorus that was on stage in the gymnasium, walking the length of basketball court with my mom, and looking back and forth at the folding tables set up as sales booths. There were fruitcakes and cookies, Christmas ornaments and lights, homemade gift-wrap, strange wooden lawn ornaments of gnomes and goblins, and all manner of hardback books with purple and red covers.
The thing was, while I was walking and looking at Christmas, at this Christmas pageant, I realized that one thing about it was always the same. I was always at the center of it all. What made me different, what set me apart from the other children and parents, what set me apart from the merchandise, the paint-by-number Frosty placard, from my mother even, was that I was at the center. I was the personality through which everything else had to pass.
“Hold my hand,” my mother told me. And I realized that I had a personality. That I was friendly and funny. I was smart and precocious. I was bad even, a little bit selfish. But, the point was, that I was me. There was nobody else that was me and all the fruitcakes and Christmas pageants were set up around that fact. We might, each of us, have a personality, but I definitely did. I was there, in that moment. I was taking everything in, and I was Brian Johnson.
“What about that?” I ask. “What about the solution? The ‘I think’ part,” I asked.
The agent frowns at me but he loosens his grip and steps back. “Mr. Johnson,” he says. “You came here to warn the Federal Bureau of Investigation about the Pleidien threat. Is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“We at the Bureau appreciate your loyalty, your patriotism, your humanism,” Cokely says. “But the thing is, Mr. Johnson, you aren’t in any position to explain this to us. We at the Bureau, we understand what is happening much better than you or Mr. Flint, and while we want your help, you are not going to be the ones to explain this to us. Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you? Are you following me here?”
I don’t. Not exactly.
“Let’s show him,” Asket says. “I think it’s time we show him.”
And there are hands on my shoulders, on my back, under my arms. I’m be
ing lifted from my chair, my hands are behind my back, and I find myself walking, trying to keep up and walk in the direction they are shoving me. There are two more FBI agents now, I can’t see their faces, but I can sense them behind me and looking down and to my left and right I see their blue trousers and black leather shoes.
“We’re going to show you now,” Asket says. She’s jogging along beside me and her eyes are open wide and I think that, while nobody has their hands on her, nobody is manhandling her, she’s being moved along too. “We’re going to show you the truth now,” she says.
One of the doors in the Javits Federal Building leads to a flying saucer. I’m not sure how this is done, whether or not there is a bit of Missing Time involved here or whether there is some sort of teleportation at work, but when we turn the corner around a carpeted cubicle wall and Cokely takes hold of the chrome door handle, I find myself in one of Charles Rain’s saucers. We’re back in time or seem to be. Surrounded by mainframe computers with blinking lights, we’re in a room with curved walls and an oval-shaped desk, a white plastic desk with an egg-shaped chair behind it. And, in the chair, there is Ralph Reality. He’s sitting there in his jumpsuit looking like Barry Gibb from the Bee Gees, only without the beard.
“Ah, Brian,” Ralph Reality greets me. “Sit down. Sit down.” The agents pull up a plastic stool for me and then pushes down on my shoulders so that I sit again.
Reality’s smile doesn’t falter as he waits for me to speak, waits for me to break the silence. The computers are churning around us, paper is falling from a slot a few yards to my left, and I focus on the rhythm of it, counting the beats as each connected sheet emerges and folds along the perforation before heading down onto what I’ve decided is some kind of linoleum floor.
Asket walks around the oval desk and stands next to Reality. She reaches behind her back and unhooks her dress as he opens a hidden drawer under the flat surface and pulls out a jumpsuit for her. It’s a clean white polyester number with red sequins on the front and Asket pulls her dress off over her head and stands naked for a moment before stepping into these new clothes and zipping up.
“You realize now,” Ralph Reality says, “that your wife is not your wife. The question is, what else do you know?”
Ralph Reality wants me to respond to cartoons. He places a pile of 3 × 5 flashcards on the plastic oval desk in front of me and asks me a series of questions about each cartoon, photograph, and painting. The first card depicts a group of seven men and women—four women and three men—divided into two groups. The first group contains four people (two women and two men) and the second contains three people (two women and one man). The men and women are all of them dressed for business, each one young and attractive, and all of them working on their careers, on bettering themselves, and on getting ahead. I can tell all this about them despite the fact that the men and women consist only of solid black shapes and negative space. That is, these people have no features, no faces. The face is supplied by the viewer. I supply each person with a face as I fill in the gap between where the solid black shape of their clothes end and the solid black shape of their hair begins. There is nothing in between.
“What are they talking about?” Ralph Reality asks me.
Above each of the figures there is an empty speech balloon, and Reality wants me to fill these in. To create dialogue for the scene.
“They could be talking about anything,” I say. “There is no way to tell. That’s the whole point of it. The point is that we, the viewers, don’t know what these hip and important people are saying to each other. The point is that they know something and we don’t.”
Reality nods, apparently I’ve said the right thing, but then he presses me. “Okay, that’s true, but make a guess. What might they be saying?”
Asket has come up behind me, she’s gently stroking my back and looking down at the cartoon print with me. I glance up at her with the hope of some sign of camaraderie, some sign that she’s still on my side, but all I get back is a look of sincere compassion and encouragement. She seems to be trying to assure me that I can answer the question. It may seem difficult, she’s saying, but I can find the right answer. I squint at her, trying to convey some message back to her, something along the lines of “fuck yourself,” but she just frowns her concern at me. All I get from her is more and more sincerity.
“I can’t tell what they’re saying. Probably something about which copy machine is best or how to use a fax machine,” I say. “The whole thing looks very corporate.”
Reality waits for a moment, maybe hoping I’ll say something more, and then sighs and flips the card over so that I can try again.
The next one is a blue card with black outlines of two faces, two silhouettes of a man and a woman facing each other, pressed against each other as if for a kiss. It’s a Venn diagram of faces actually with the two profiles sharing a common nose. One of the faces is a solid black and one is a light grey, so the nose is a mix, it’s a charcoal color.
The thoughts of the two heads, the images inside their skulls, are different. The man’s head is full of gears while the woman has a head with a more organic tree shape inside. The thought inside of the woman’s head is filled with branches and roots. The woman’s thought is growing while the man’s idea just keeps clicking along, round and round, repeating.
“What’s this about?” Reality asks me.
“It’s about language,” I say. “It’s about men and women and their opposed way of communicating.”
“That’s good,” Reality says. “But what are they saying to each other?”
“They aren’t actually talking at all,” I say. “It’s something more like telepathy happening.”
Reality seems excited by this answer and he leans over his desk, toward me, and I watch his sequins flash as he shifts position under the lights.
“What are they thinking?” he asks. “What are they thinking about?”
“Are they planning something?” Asket asks. Ralph Reality looks up at her, surprised at her, surprised that she might try to lead me. His glance silences her but it’s too late.
“They’re not planning or talking,” I say. “This is just a symbol. The point isn’t what the characters say here, but what they represent. You don’t read it for a story, but for something else.”
The next image shows another face in profile, this time the face is set against a red background and the top of the head is opened up, a partial circle with a rounded edge set at a 90-degree angle from the rest of the head, like a toilet lid on an open toilet. From inside the head there are arms reaching up and out. The hands are open too, the hands are seeking help. There are people inside this psyche, this head, that want out. There are four people, one blue, one dark green, one white, one darker red, and all of them are grasping for support.
“What’s the story with this picture?” Ralph Reality asks.
“What did you do to my wife?” I ask back.
“What do you mean?” he says. “Which one? Which wife?”
“My real wife,” I say.
“Your real wife? You don’t have a real wife,” Reality says. “Mr. Johnson, I understand that you are confused, and that you want answers, but you really should try harder. Answer these questions. We can help you.”
“I don’t want to play your games,” I say. “I’m not going to play your games, not willingly. If you want me to keep answering your questions you’ll have to do something more. You’ll have to make me answer.”
“You want your wife back, is that it? Either this woman here or some other one?” he asks.
Ralph Reality starts flipping the flash cards over, one at a time. He slowly flips over one card and then the next, making sure I have time to see each image before it’s replaced, but no longer asking questions. There is a photograph of a fist punching through a light green plaster wall, there is Holbein’s Ambassadors with its hidden skull, some wavy lines, Betty Page in silk lingerie and black stockings leaning against a stool with her
mouth open wide, there is Garfield the cat, another pin-up model only her head has been replaced by the head of a giraffe, and so on…
It’s the computers, more than these images, that are the problem. If they weren’t clicking and clacking so consistently, if there wasn’t such a steady rhythm of beeps and printing, I could keep up better with what’s happening, with what these images mean and what they’re doing to me.
Asket leans over and whispers in my ear. “Brian, you’re very close to it now. We just need you to answer a few of these to know for sure.”
But I don’t know what the answers are, not anymore. Manet’s Olympia flashes by, a happy family standing in line at a bank, the words “maestro” and “toaster oven.” I don’t know what these things mean and I don’t know what the aliens want from me or what they want me to say.
11
another break
There is another break here in the text. It’s here because what happened on board the UFO, what Ralph Reality ultimately told me, what he demanded of me, can’t easily be expressed in words. There will be another break like this one, a bit later on, when Asket or Virginia or Carole (whatever you want to call her is fine) recounts her own transformation aboard Reality’s spaceship. That one will hopefully be a bit more lyrical, more imagistic and concrete, than this. The aim in this later break will be to bring you the reader into the moment, to convince you that something really did happen. Something mystical and strange did happen, or will happen. But, for now, all you’re getting is this disruption.
When I was on Ralph Reality’s ship and he was flipping through those flashcards, when Asket demanded that I answer, that I fill in the meanings of the icons and images they were giving me, something slipped. In fact, the point of the interrogation wasn’t to get information from me, but really it was this break that was their aim. I’d come in to the FBI offices determined to bring a fight, but they were ready for me and it turned out that a fight wasn’t possible because every possible blow I might deliver was destined to miss the target and boomerang back. I wanted to expose them, but I only exposed myself. I wanted to fight them, but only ended up back here. I only ended up walking through Times Square surrounded by flashing messages from Coca-Cola signs, stacked monitors displaying the clean and well-scrubbed faces of casual fashion models set against primary colors, and the geometric face of the Lucky Goldstar logo. Underneath the glitter and glam of Times Square Asket is explaining why she sometimes looks like my disappeared wife even though she doesn’t.
