The Color Over Occam

by Jonathan Thomas

  In right-hand pocket, Francis Thayer described those links galore, but instead of supporting what I thought I knew, they plunged it all into doubt. He obviously had recourse to primary sources beyond arid research figures, and flipping ahead, the lack of bibliography at the end was a letdown. But why should that negate his credibility? Faculty Annual articles must have undergone some vetting and peer review. Thayer also won points for using a Selectric with new ribbon cartridge, crossing out and revising text in neatly printed red.

  His introduction fleshed out what I’d just read. The aerolite had crashed on the farm of the Gardner family, who marveled at its putty-like texture, amenable to gouging, and then at its overnight contraction, to about 80% of its original diameter. Fascinating in its own right, but nothing to bring on that constrictive prickling of nerves till Thayer rendered 1882’s abstruse data in modern layman’s terms and began striking a series of familiar chords. Among the meteor’s properties was magnetism, which made me flash back to the stubborn misdirection of Wil’s compass needle during our midnight hunt for corpse-lights on the reservoir. The spectroscope’s revelations were good for a much bigger jolt, in terms of “eliciting bands of reputedly unidentifiable color.” How like the shifting and finally mystifying pigment of the submerged anomaly, of stillborn Warren, of dust that gathered in reservoir cove and smothered forest floor in my painting of “blasted heath.” Meteoric sample also glowed in darkness, as had Lucinda’s obliquely tinted water the night it broke, and as Lucinda herself had, eventually.

  Further traits were captivating, without any bearing on my personal experiences yet. Embedded in the malleable rock was a glossy nodule, like an impractically large Christmas tree ornament, that had miraculously survived its plummet to earth, but vanished like a bubble on being tapped with a hammer. I made no more of that at the moment than had the professor remiss enough to use a blunt weapon on a unique unearthly relic. Back at the university, none of the solvents in a Victorian lab exerted any effect on the samples, though contact with glass resulted, to quote Thayer’s jesting Cold War usage, in “mutual assured destruction,” and air per se caused slower but unstoppable disintegration. Moreover, the Gardners’ cosmic debris was prey to electricity, as its obliteration one night by multiple thunderbolts attested.

  Much more germane to me were developments on the farm after the storm, as compiled, according to Thayer’s footnotes, from newspaper items, Gorman County records, and oral histories. Regional lore affirmed that the Gardner fields and orchards flourished beyond the family’s dreams into September, in parallel with today’s riotous growth of weeds and bushes toward the reservoir. Then like the crescent of plants close around the cove or the pumpkins by the gas station, every single ounce of produce putrefied, and whatever retained a veneer of edibility was no less rotten inside. The following spring, Nahum, the Gardner patriarch, found the authorities as unreceptive as I had when he claimed the meteor had poisoned his soil. The Gazette (decades before its merger with the Advertiser) didn’t scruple to ridicule him in print, and I sympathized with his pathetic attempt to persuade a smug urban editor into taking misshapen, discolored saxifrage leaves seriously.

  What really wrenched at my heart from across the centuries, though, was the arrival of gray dust amidst the stunted crops and the livestock’s bloated cadavers. As I’d already anticipated, the Gardners about that time succumbed to erratic behavior and soon to caterwauling madness, according to the testimony of their neighbors’ grandchildren. That tragic past was now repeating itself in the persons of Wil and Lucinda and unnumbered secluded others, wasn’t it?

  I was unused to thinking of the dust as a byproduct of fragmenting plants and animals, and not as the encroachment of an alien environment. But that begged the question of how a meteor’s impact, or something in the meteor itself, was supposed to have created an otherworldly rift. Obstinately or not, I wasn’t ready to scrap the idea of a portal, in view of the planar, doorway-like look of the so-called corpse-lights, as well as the calamitous, if vaguely described, end of the Gardners’ ordeal. In October 1883, family members who hadn’t recently died at their own or one another’s hands came to grief in a conflagration that eradicated every building and its contents, save for foundations and a well. Had too much admixture of alien environment with our own triggered an inferno? Affidavits by a coroner and policemen at the scene skirted any hint of supernatural or nonhuman intercession, unless I chose to read between those lines relating how “everything that had ever been living was gone.” I chose to do so and concluded that celestial trespassers had been purged, and the portal sealed off a while, at the cost of five acres under a residue of unearthly dust, whose epicenter was the farmhouse cellar hole.

  Thayer traced evolving rumors and superstitions about haunted woods and blasted heaths and blighted homesteads to the meteor and the blame it had absorbed from the Gardners for their farm’s undoing. Forty years carried the myths across and outside Gorman County, fueling those lingering fears about impurities when the reservoir atop the Gardner place went into service. Thayer’s collation of this folk material was distinctly flavored with a grain of salt, but to the insidious gray dust he attached more weight. He had requisitioned two phials of it from storage at the university museum, purportedly collected at the Gardner cottage an hour before its incineration. Therefore he could vouch for the reality of the dust and for the sad facts, jotted on a sheet of brittle onionskin wrapping the phials, that the nameless color had faded after a month, and the remnant compound was largely alkaline phosphates and carbonates. Well yes, the powder must have been somewhat “denatured,” or it and the glass phials would have atomized each other.

  Still, it was the only specimen available in 1982, and under the incongruous heading “A Modest Proposal,” Thayer detailed a protocol to subject smidgens of the powder to X-rays, a major “reagent” undiscovered one hundred years earlier. It would be “instructive,” he anticipated. And there the typescript ended. No findings, no discussion, no explanation for alluding to a Jonathan Swift satire endorsing cannibalism. Nor a References section, as I already knew.

  Typically for me, the more I learned, the more it muddied the waters. My second and third digestifs weren’t helping. Something must have befallen Thayer or the university, which was on its last financial legs about then. Where could I look up whether 1982’s Faculty Annual had even gone to press? The university and everything under its aegis were scattered, a dead issue. In the sober morning, would I see a way clear to plug Thayer into the next OGAM Chronicles? At the moment I couldn’t get past his missing pages. To undertake the saga of the meteor and Thayer and his “instructive” experiment without knowing the outcome felt shoddy.

  And more vexingly, why had I never heard of a meteor that had whipped up a “media frenzy” in newspapers from Occam to Boston, that according to Thayer had roused such “great excitement” in stolid professors? Pretty much a reflex for me to answer by positing a conspiracy that downplayed, trivialized common knowledge till it was forgotten, to cover alien tracks. But if I stepped into the more sensible shoes of those professors, their aerolite had dwindled into obscurity because it had physically dwindled into nothing. Its composition, its properties, made it sui generis, incompatible with anything else in science, and after it had vanished, what could pragmatic men do, where could they go, with mere scribbled notes on foolscap? Scholarly pursuit of the meteor had reached a dead end. Similarly, out in public, reporters and readers alike forgot the meteor when there was no more to write about it. Yes, that was the more level-headed take, which didn’t, however, automatically make it correct.

  Just before I eyed the bottom of my third glass and decided it was bedtime, I reflected further that Thayer might never even have read “A Modest Proposal.” In the ’80s, I’d swear it was, that tendency first surfaced among literary pretenders, from rock critics to infotainment hosts, to spice up headlines with quotes and allusions that sounded clever but made no sense in context. Thayer at the typewriter was s
imply behaving like a product of his times.

  14

  In the dead of night, I woke up with urge to piss. Couldn’t get back to sleep for two hours. Now, dammit, Atwood’s blunt edict to stay out of his hair replayed and replayed at random junctures. And between times, the misgiving plagued me: Suppose I’m mistaken about the portal, and the meteor alone is behind whatever’s emanating from the reservoir? Atwood might have listened if I’d had hazardous substances from space rubble to warn him about. No, that was bullshit. Atwood had been stringing me along from the beginning, till I gave him some excuse to read me the riot act. Very cunning, these fifth columnists.

  My assignment at work next day led me to ponder if powers-that-be were cognizant of when the new Chronicles was due and wanted to remind me of all the superiors I might offend. According to inviolable custom, hard copy of City Council agendas went to all managerial personnel, whether they wanted it or not, on the morning of a meeting, though e-mails would have saved trees and done the same job. The role of delivery boy fell to me, and my stops included Atwood’s bewitching receptionist, whose smile was growing sphinx-like, and stern Ms. Lathrop, who made no eye contact while tapping mauve fingernail on the desk where Westcott’s copy should go, and sepulchral Mr. Marsh, who seemed to stare right through me as he nodded passively, and the Recorder of Deeds, whose eyes narrowed testily at me and then at what I laid on his desk. Nobody said thanks or hello. Brusqueness as usual, or the slow burn of official rancor at my perceived insolence?

  Afterward I labeled envelopes and stuffed them with overdue notices from the City Collector to delinquent homeowners. Pay down your property tax or we auction the equity out from under you! Felt like a bastard putting the squeeze on the nouveau poor, even in such a peripheral role, but on the plus side, the monotony of the chore lent itself to contemplation, mostly of the potentially explosive new Chronicles. I had no material that would not be construed as thumbing my nose at the regime. A meteor crater radiating virulence from the bottom of the reservoir? Well over a century’s history of madness, disease, and the occult surrounding that submerged site? Twitching roots and weeds that drank of the same water as Occam? Baneful dust from deep space whose sizeable beachhead by 1926 was a subject for Sunday painters, and which was spreading today via the water supply? I envisioned third-floor bureaucracy tuning in to any of this, and as their expressions curdled, I grimaced.

  Presenting a confrontational half-hour would be inevitable, unless someone else did the presenting. That might mean a different figurehead hosting my content, ostensibly leaving me out of it. Or I could postpone riling up a hornets’ nest altogether by extending my OGAM colleagues free rein over an episode, for once. A copout, yes, this desertion of a public trust, but didn’t I deserve a little breathing room, to regroup, to lull opponents into thinking I’d desisted, to safeguard my income a while longer? As for OGAM, after a few months’ hiatus, reconnecting and catching up with people was in order, and extra hands, if only with the camcorder and lighting, would be nice. A team effort, the way it used to be, before the personalities clashed and the fun wore off.

  The team, as I should have predicted, had its own opinions. And possibly self-interest at heart. To save time, I grabbed a falafel at Abdul’s, around the corner from City Hall, and kept it warm on the drive home by cranking the heat and venting it at the plastic carton on the passenger-side floor. On the floor of the backseat was a six-pack of Spaten Optimator from the liquor store next to Abdul’s, to lighten the drag of dialing a dozen numbers. Dining was a futile race against rapidly cooling food, after which I poured a beer for dessert and phoned the Johnson twins. They’d moved here from Rhode Island five years ago and had lapsed from active membership upon one too many rebuffs of their pro-demonology agenda. I could never distinguish Keith’s voice from Carl’s, so I was okay with Mrs. Johnson answering, though my long-term memory was unequal to naming which twin she had married. We put the bland salutations behind us, and I tried to crack the ice by asking, “Did you know a meteor came down around here in the nineteenth century? Kind of a big deal when it happened.”

  No, she didn’t, and the ice was undamaged. I forged on, professed how that was a pity because I needed more info for a show about the meteor, but did she or Keith or Carl feel like pitching in with the production anyway?

  A pause followed. I rashly hoped that fond remembrances were tilting her mental scales my way. “Pass,” she finally resolved. “And I can speak for all of us. We don’t hear from you for months and months, and now it’s only because you want something. You can’t expect a group effort out of us if you have to call all the shots.”

  “Well, maybe another time then.” A dumb-ass thing to say, but better than a whole evening snarled up rehashing whose insistence on what priorities had planted the wedge between us.

  “If you say so, but I don’t know when.” We went through the motions of civil goodbyes, perhaps a concession for old times’ sake. Well, I’d managed fine without them for ages. Would just have to go on doing so. In hindsight I might have melted some of the frost by asking after the Johnsons’ health and job situations and news on other fronts. But I had a lot of calls to make. Unproductive chitchat, no less than psychodrama, would kill crucial minutes. Had to get through my Rolodex tonight and find out whether anyone was going to help me or not, so I could budget my time and submit the episode on deadline.

  I disposed of one beer and opened a second. Wrote off that delay as an investment in firmer nerves. Punched in Lavinia’s number. I’d sustained a crush on her for two naive weeks, till burgeoning high-and-mighty airs let slip that she was unequivocally smarter than everyone else, on the strength of an Associate’s Degree from Kingsport Community College. That categorically quashed her sex appeal, along with my ambitions for an OGAM with officers and parliamentary procedure. Why give her such a handy outlet for throwing her weight around? But for now, she was welcome to throw her weight around in my humble home studio. Yeah, she might like that.

  Wrong again. Told her who I was, and she needed several seconds to place me, or to debate hanging up. I skipped the come-on with the meteor, aimed for a casual tone. Did she have any ideas for a segment of Chronicles, or a hankering to direct?

  She spurned the bait. “No, I sure don’t. Sorry to be this blunt, but I haven’t touched base with you guys in so long because you’re not really a serious organization, are you? I mean, you don’t even have a chairperson or regular meetings. Please, do me a favor and don’t pester me anymore. It’s just not a good idea.” She delivered that last sentence like a waitress refusing to date a customer, with implied threat that her boyfriend wouldn’t like it.

  “Okey-dokey then,” I conceded and signed off. Took a liberal swig of Spaten to dull the accurate premonition of trending downhill from here. I ran into a streak of voicemails and old-fashioned answering machines. Spoke after the beep, but no one ever accorded me the respect of a callback. The next live one was nebbishy Ward, who wore black and lived with Mom, and was more partial to horror comics than to paranormal fact-finding. I hadn’t finished my preamble when he cut in, “I can’t be involved with this from now on.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” What more to say? We took unceremonious leave of each other, and I realized that the end of each call marked a relationship severed forever. Drained the rest of my glass in a single mechanical swallow, without tasting it.

  As I had forecast, the next couple of conversations were basically a replay of Ward’s. And at the rest of my numbers, machines picked up. I bleakly pictured ex-colleagues leaning over their telephone tables, screening the call, listening with relief at dodging a bullet while I recorded my message.

  Naturally, this new wrinkle in my life resisted straightforward explanation. To infer that OGAM’s membership had had it with me and my hot-and-cold leadership was perfectly credible. Alternately, I couldn’t rule out someone either possessed or unethical, like Humphrey Westcott, enlisting third-flo
or cronies to research who else belonged in the organization and harass them via phone at unseemly hours. Pressure to quit the group could have taken a slew of forms, from booting cars for unpaid parking tickets to eviction because of a landlord’s ongoing code violations. No great stretch to interpret Mrs. Johnson’s and Lavinia’s defections in the same light as Ward’s. And what had Wil mumbled, off in the woods? “I shouldn’t be talking to you”? I set my glass under the faucet in the sink and left it half full of water. In my present jitters, more beer would be a waste. Wouldn’t have any flavor.

  Coincidences stacked up on the side of a high-level campaign to dissolve my fickle troupe. The theory’s only drawback was its innate paranoia. But as the saying went, that didn’t prove “they” weren’t out to get me. And for a delusion, it had left a lot of fingerprints in the real world. Official opinion had it, then, that I wouldn’t cancel my “crusade” willingly, that I had to be isolated and deprived of collaborators and most probably worse, for the sake of neutralizing more potent gadfly capacity than I thought was in me. Not a species of flattery I could handle comfortably. In fact, that seed of defiance, dormant since Westcott’s over-the-top rant, was sprouting and hungry for sunlight. Jesus, how much alcohol was in those beers? Would my overriding civic duty, personal risk be damned, beckon as vividly tomorrow? Lives and arguably the fate of the world would still be at stake, but sober city clerks tended to procrastinate.