by Douglas Lain
“Ralph let him leave? What about Carole?”
“She left too, and it wasn’t that Ralph let him leave, it was more that he couldn’t stop them.”
Carole was dead. I’d been to her funeral, it had been an open casket, but now I realized that I couldn’t be sure who it was I’d seen in that box. On the other hand, if they’d been trying to get away from the Pleidiens and Carole had died that way, then why would Harold cover that up?
“They left the ship,” Asket says. She puts down the book on my side of the bed, leaves it open and face down, like she’s going to return and keep reading from where she left off, and I follow her out of the bedroom and back to the kitchen where the coffee is still brewing.
“Here,” I say. I take a coffee cup, my Henri Lautrec mug with the kicking Folies girls on it, and slip it onto the burner. I exchange the pot for the smaller cup, and then pour what’s in the pot, the little bit of coffee there is, into the ceramic mug. “They left the ship? What does that mean?” I ask.
Asket doesn’t know how to explain it to me, so she decides to draw me a picture. She finds a memo pad in the drawer underneath the phone, goes to the drawer like she knows where things are kept, and then uses a nubby pencil to draw five boxes. In the first box she quickly makes a line drawing of a cloud and the right tip of what turns out to be a cartoon saucer. The ship is flying through the panels, moving left to right, but when Asket points to the line drawings to explain what they mean to me she doesn’t point to the saucer or the cloud or to any of the drawings inside the frames but to the space in between the boxes.
“When Harold left the ship he went there,” she says.
Asket explains that there really isn’t anything in between the boxes. That she didn’t mean to suggest that there was a place that Harold went to, and it was an empty place, but more that there was a person he went into. What happened was that, in order for Harold to escape Reality and get back to himself, to get back to what he knew of himself, he had to draw a new box. He had to be somebody else.
And then Asket looks at me. She looks at me and I remember that I’d been at the MUFON convention too, that I met Ralph Reality there, before our encounter with the FBI. I was there, by the kiosk, and maybe I was there in that hotel room with Asket, with Patricia as she called herself, too.
“What’s going on?” I ask. She’s sipping from my Lautrec cup, keeping her eyes on me, and I want to snatch the mug away from her, maybe smash it to pieces. Her talk of boxes is just crap, it’s a distraction. It’s exactly like the kind of thing I’d come up with for a communications course with a name like “After Individuality” or “Modernity and the Masses.”
They did something to me, at the FBI, or maybe at the MUFON convention. And now Asket is doing something to me to. She’s finishing the job with her story about Harold creating a new identity, a new person. That can’t be the answer.
“Don’t you remember?” Asket asks. “Reality gave you twenty-four hours. You’re going to join us, get back onboard really, in twenty-four hours.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s all right, baby,” Asket says. She puts down the coffee cup and moves across the gap between the sink and where I am by the breakfast table. She’s at my side, with her hand on my neck. “It’s okay.”
I push her away.
13
harold’s happening
The Happening with Harold takes place in the University art studio and I’m chewing a stick of Black Jack while he winds a bedside alarm clock and considers the idea that his second wife isn’t really dead. He doesn’t seem surprised but just adjusts his tie, his stupid skinny navy blue tie, as I explain what happened at the MUFON convention and instruct him on how this Happening is going to happen.
“We’re going to figure out what’s really happening, Harold. We’re going to get some facts this time.”
But he gives no indication that he understands anything about what I’m saying. He improvises instead. He finds the laser tag gun that I left by the mannequin and points it at me.
“Sit down, Brian,” he says.
“Harold, you’re not listening,” I say.
He laughs at this at then sits down himself, returning to his work of cataloging 1961. All the old sarcastic trinkets are lined up on his worktable and he picks up a pencil and licks the lead.
“Ten-hour clock,” he says, and then writes it down.
He licks the pencil lead again and then puts it down and examines his prank clock. This is what has always bothered me about the old man, what’s caused the cognitive dissonance I’ve always associated with him. Here he is, sitting at a table littered with absurdities—cheap little jokes like a can of 100 percent pure artist’s shit and a mousetrap that’s caught a tube of paint rather than a mouse—but he’s got this serious expression on his face like he’s working out some big mystery. How can it be that such a humorless man has spent his life producing these jokes?
“I’ve met with Ralph Reality and he says I’ve got twenty-four hours. He’s ‘invited’ me to join them. Apparently it’s my time to surrender. It’s predetermined. A matter of fate,” I tell him.
“They love that kind of talk. Fate, destiny, spirituality,” Harold says. He puts down his notebook, sets it next to the mousetrap, and spins toward me on his stool. He clears his throat, letting me fidget in my half panic, and then he tells me how he thinks things really are.
“None of that matters,” Harold says.
“What?”
“The plot, the big conspiracy, all of that is a distraction.”
Harold’s nihilism doesn’t surprise me and under normal circumstances I wouldn’t argue with him, but this time I find myself explaining the obvious to him. If it’s true that the Pleidiens are changing people around, mixing people up about who they are, directing their lives for them, then they have to be stopped.
“What are you going to do? You’ve gone to the police, to the FBI, and that didn’t help. Are you going organize a gang to attack their ships? What are you going to do? They’ve got the White House now. They’ve got the shopping malls,” Harold says.
“We can expose them,” I say. “We’re writing a book, remember? We can nail down the facts, get the evidence, and expose them.”
Harold’s laughter is unpleasant. There is always a sneer tucked away in his laughter, and this time is no different.
“Who are we going to expose them to, Brian? Just who is going to listen? Let’s say we get this on television, let’s say we get the word out, what’s to stop them from switching us all around again, starting the story over, creating another gap?”
Why have I been relying on Harold for so long? Why did I ever tie my reputation to his? What did I think he understood? What did I think he was going to help me with in the end? There is nothing behind this Fluxus bullshit, all these Happenings. His art, the whole movement, has traded on nostalgia and absurdity, but now that something real is going on, now that the saucers have landed, all he’s got is a can of artist’s shit and an alarm clock. He’s got that and this musty art studio where he can tuck himself away at the University’s expense and continue to pretend that the purity of his vision still matters. All he’s got is this room filled with paint brushes stored in coffee cans, crap paintings by second-year students, and four walls. I suppose he finds this is enough. It’s as good a place as any to hide in.
“What is it, exactly, that you think you know, Brian?” Harold asks. “You say that they’ve switched our personalities, confused us about who we really are, but is that what they did to you? Is that what they did to Asket?”
“What they did to Asket?” I ask.
When I stop to think of it Asket never did explain how she became a Pleidien or what happened to her. She really never explained anything.
Harold tells me why it is that he’s working on Fluxus again. He says he’s doing it, taking this inventory of all his work, because he’s trying to rethink the problem.
“What problem, exa
ctly?” I ask.
“Everything,” he says. “Art, life, UFOs. The whole shebang.”
In the beginning Fluxus was like every other avant-garde movement of the twentieth century. The aim was to erase the line between art and real life. It was the same as Surrealism and Dada and Impressionism and Expressionism in that it aimed to bring art down from on high and give it to the masses. The goal was to eliminate the transcendent and make art accessible. Using everyday objects, making art that was funny, making art that was small, all of these Fluxus tactics aimed at bringing art to regular people. The goal was to infuse the world, to infuse everyday life, with an artistic sensibility.
“We went wrong at the very start,” Harold says. “We thought we could erase the line but what we did was reinforce it.”
He points to his alarm clock, points out to me that it is different from most clocks because instead of twelve hours it has ten. The idea of this work was to exhibit something that was, in reality, impossible.
“If you try to use a ten-hour clock then what will happen, after the first ten hours, is you’ll lose time,” Harold says. “You won’t be able to keep track of your day with it. A person using this clock would be late for everything, probably. Just consider the math here. If everyone else keeps on using twelve-hour clocks and you had one of these ten-hour jobs, you’d have to read past the surface in order to keep up. You couldn’t just glance at the clock and see it read half past seven and think you knew what time it was. You’d have to keep track of how long you’d been using the clock and calculate the time that way. To know what time it really was you’d have to remember how the numbers on this clock related to a twelve-hour clock.
“What would happen is that, after the first ten hours, the decimal clock would be two hours ahead. It would read two o’clock as noon or midnight in order to keep up with the regular schedule, to keep up with everybody else. Then, after the second ten hours had passed, two o’clock would no longer be noon, but two o’clock would be ten o’clock and four o’clock would be noon or midnight. After the third day the four o’clock would be ten and six o’clock would be noon. And so on…”
I nod at this, tracking it out loud. “By day five eight o’clock would be noon, seven would be eleven, six would be ten, five would be nine, four would be eight, three would be seven, two would be six, one would be five, and ten would be four,” I say. “Nobody could use that clock…but so what? What does it matter that you made a useless clock?”
“What that tells us is that time, the twenty-four hour day, can’t be reduced down to mere clocks. The twelve-hour day is something more than the clocks that measure it. We’d set out to demonstrate how malleable time was and instead we made an object that proved that time, as it was, couldn’t be broken up differently. Time was objective after all,” he says.
“So what?” I ask.
“People are like clocks,” he says. “Being a person, being Brian Johnson, that’s like being a clock. You’re an objective person, but only because of how you fit into the whole system. You’re Brian because you respond to the name, because there is a set of behaviors, a set of movements, phrases, symptoms, attitudes, that are what it is to be Brian, and you match that idea.”
“No. I’m Brian Johnson because I’m alive. I’m right here,” I say. And I thump my chest with my open palm.
“We’re talking about two different things. There is this idea called Brian Johnson, that’s like time, and then there is the body, this thinking thing, that is here right now, and that thing, that body, is like a clock. You’re Brian Johnson as measured out on this clock,” Harold says. He taps my chest with his middle finger. That is, first he makes an “o” with his middle finger and thumb, and then he lets go and taps my chest.
Harold winds the clock again, his ten-hour clock, and sets it down on the table. We both of us stop and watch the second hand move. We let a half-minute tick by as if maybe we expect something to happen. As if we think the clock is going to do something unexpected.
“We could make it work,” I say. “We could slow it down,” I tell him. “We could set it so ten hours on that clock were the same as twelve hours on a regular clock.”
“Actually, that’s how it does work. We just changed the face on a regular clock,” he says. “Let’s forget the clock. Let’s start again. You think the Pleidiens are trying to undo, unhinge, the human race.”
I nod, slowly. That seems right to me.
“But, what exactly are they taking away from us? Just what are we, you and me, afraid of losing?”
They’re taking our identities away from us, obviously. They took Virginia away, took away his wife, or turned her into one of them, into an alien.
“Think of it this way, if they were to erase your identity who would you be when they were done? Or if you were to get switched around, who would you be?” Harold asks.
I pick up one of the other Fluxus works, a series of homemade stamps constructed out of pornographic photos from the ’50s and an old Sears catalog. Catalog images of different tools—a hammer, a pair of pliers, a power stapler—have been cut out and set atop pairs of breasts, a prone blonde with pursed lips and half-closed eyes, a bent leg, and other titillating body parts. Nipples and body hair fill each rectangle and the overall effect is both erotic and cynical. Bodies and desire have been reduced to stamps that might be separated from each other along the perforated lines, licked, and sent out to friends and colleagues in the mail.
If the ten-hour clock is only of interest because of its relation to the twelve hours that make up a normal day, then these stamps are only interesting in relation to the world of pornography and desire. But, these stamps are somehow art precisely because the fracturing of bodies, the collaging of pin-ups, has done nothing to reduce the erotic impact of the original images. A nicely shaped pair of tits or the curve of a lady’s ass is alluring with or without context.
I start over. I tell Harold that we should hold a press conference. We should announce that he’s returned to Ufology and that he’s discovered an alien conspiracy. The government needs to be on guard, people should resist the allure of the saucers and their perpetual invitation to join the New Church. We should do something to stop this.
“I saw a film where, during an alien invasion, the heroes took over a television station. We might do that,” I said. “Goddammit, we’ve got to do something.”
“You’re avoiding the question. You know something, not about the aliens or UFOs or Carole or some damned science fiction movie, but about yourself and about me. I’ve figured it out and you know it too, but you’re refusing to think it. Who are you, Brian? Where are you from? What’s your earliest memory? You don’t remember, do you?”
I do remember. Of course, I remember. I remember Fort Carson, Colorado, where I grew up. We lived in a tract house there in the ’60s, when I was about six years old and blond. I wore striped shirts, red, brown, and white striped shirts, and corduroy pants. I wore corduroy pants even on summer days.
“How did you get that scar on your chin? Do you remember?”
I had a Big Wheel, it was a hand-me-down from my older sister Helen and it had little flower stickers on the wheels. There were daisies and some other kind of blue flower; there were decals of flowers stuck on the indentations between the plastic spokes on the oversized front wheel. There were red, white, and blue plastic ribbons that dangled down from the handlebars. I could make my Big Wheel roll very fast, but I didn’t take corners very well. I had to slow down at the corner of the block in order to make the turn.
“No,” Harold says. “It was a purple tricycle. Your older sister’s name was Cheryl and she gave you her tricycle. That is, my older sister’s name is Cheryl.
“I had a Big Wheel; a purple Big Wheel made for and marketed to girls. I was teased about it but it went fast. I could make it roll very fast.” But I see it now. Harold has a scar too. We both of us have scars on our chins, scars that run parallel to our bottom lip. Scars that are just to the right side.<
br />
“I got this scar when I was riding my sister’s tricycle on a dirt road in upstate New York. We were on my grandparents’ land and I tried to turn too fast, I was trying to turn all the way around and ride back and the tricycle flipped over. I landed in the tall grass, fell onto a rake that was hidden in the yellow stalks, and I got a bad cut. They had to take me into town to get stitches. I bled and bled,” Harold said. “I was about six, I think.”
“I was almost seven, and there was no rake, no tall grass. I hit the asphalt, face first, when I went off the curb. I couldn’t make the turn.”
Harold stands up from his stool and I shrink back from him involuntarily. Why am I afraid of him? He’s waiting for me to do something, to admit something. But what? I don’t have anything to confess. I turn back to the art objects, reach out for a small box made of blonde wood, it’s about the size of a cigar box, and I pick up the pencil and his notebook, as if I’m going to continue cataloging. That’s when Harold makes his move, the move I should have known was coming.
“We’ve got the same memory,” he says. “We’ve got the same scars.” He reaches over and picks up the Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots game from the worktable. The toy is just where I left it, but I’m surprised to see it. I’m afraid of it, somehow.
There they are, two identical robots in a yellow plastic boxing ring, and Harold has the blue control sticks in his hands and he’s waiting for me to take control of my side of the fight.
“Come on, you have a sporting chance,” he says.
But I don’t.
Harold asks me how it was that I came to know Virginia. “She sang a Peggy Lee song to you. The first time you really met her. Didn’t she?” he asks. “Why do you think Ralph asked you to join them? Why did he want you? All along Asket has been after me, trying to get to me, but now they want you? Suddenly I don’t matter?” he asks.
“We’ve got to stop them,” I say.
“Play the game, Brian. They want you because they want me. They’re going to make you like me, replace me with you. I thought they wanted me to be Rain, but I was wrong about that. It’s me they want. They want you to be me. That’s their plan,” he says.
