The days ended, then started over again, like dull redos. The heat kicked on; the heat kicked off.
I made no attempt to see my few friends left from high school, who when I conjured them in my mind seemed dull and thickened strangers. In the fall I had written a note to one, my friend Krystal Bunberry, who for no real reason (but unwitting prophecy) we used to call Krystal Berry Bun; her father had worked his whole life in the toilet paper factory and on retirement received not only a free lifetime supply of toilet paper but a diagnosis of colon cancer. He then received a colostomy as well. “Rusty drainpipe removal” it was called by Krystal herself. She had written me to see if I needed any toilet paper — they now of course were giving it away. And so I had written her with my condolences, even though her father hadn’t actually died. The previous year I had been in one of my friends’ weddings, Marianne Sturch’s; she had worn a sequined, strapless wedding gown, and left her bridesmaids to wear brightly flowered dresses fit for a kind of pornographic milkmaid: low-cut and laced up the midriff with a sort of shoelace. “What Scarlett O’Hara might have done with a shower curtain, if she were trying to snag a plumber,” said my mother, who perceived the loud ugliness of the dress even through the fog of her bad eyesight. Our shoes were white patent leather, what Marianne called “pattin’ leather,” though I was never sure whether this was on purpose or not. Not just the outfits but the entire wedding in a rental hall at the Ramada felt tawdry and embarrassing; thirty minutes in, I found I never wanted to marry. The bride carried what looked to be a cord of pink and gold gladioluses but were really only three scepterlike stems in yellow and peach; reminded of my mother, I was woozy, seeing them. After that, I couldn’t muster the energy to phone Marianne — she and her husband, Brendan Brezna, went to Orlando and Cancun for their honeymoon, a busy five-days, four-nights package with a cruise — and our paths, especially with my staying in the house like a shut-in when I came home, failed to cross.
Everyone here seemed a stranger, if not an outright alien. Before I was born, the town of Dellacrosse had been preposterously named Little Spread Eagle, after a local Indian warrior hunted down like a dog by government militiamen and turned first into the name of a golf course, then a motor lodge, then finally a town — everything about the place had been a kind of jokey curse from the start. When the village councilmen changed it to Dellacrosse, they also decided to try to remarket it as an extraterrestrial tourist site. Rumors of spaceships in the outlying cornfields and fiery brassy things floating through the night sky and even one or two probings of overweight Little Spread Eagle housewives (or the occasional passing-through truck driver) by strange creatures in black helped create the possibility of a mystique. It caused Dellacrosse to become the self-declared “Extraterrestrial Capital of the World.” (“Not another anal probing,” my mother took to saying, reading the Dellacrosse Courier. Or once, rather angrily to my father, “Why don’t they just name this town what it is: Buttfuck, USA!” “Gail!” chided my father. “Get a grip!”) Little paper alien heads were fastened to the streetlights on Main Street, and people sold Venusian vanilla sundaes with Mars Bar crumbles. At first it was hoped that people would come from all over the country and camp out and stay put to try to see the spaceships and aliens that might appear in the roadside parks and fields outside town. The burst of commerce and national publicity lasted less than a year and then it vanished, like the spaceships and aliens themselves. People said the council had packed everything up in a rocket and sent it back to its planet, leaving some strays behind.
The strays I felt were my own friends, who were now like martians to me. They guzzled brandy straight from the bottle, drank TheraFlu recreationally like toddies on weekends (though, truth be told, I still did that myself). They wore T-shirts that said DELLACROSSE: IT’S JUST THE TICKET, since the place had now acquired some notoriety as a speed trap. Prepositions mystified. Almost everyone said “on” accident instead of “by.” They said “I’m bored of that” or “Wanna come with?” They pronounced “milk” to rhyme with “elk” and “milieu” as “miloo,” as in skip to my loo — when they said it at all. And they used tenses like “I’d been gonna.” As in, “I’d been gonna to do that but then I never got around toot.” It was the hypothetical conditional past, time and intention carved so obliquely and fine that I could only almost comprehend it, until, like Einstein’s theory of relativity, which also sometimes flashed cometlike into my view, it whooshed away again, beyond my grasp. “I’d been gonna to do that” seemed to live in some isolated corner of the grammatical time-space continuum where the language spoken was a kind of Navajo or old, old French. It was part of a language with tenses so countrified and bizarrely conceived, I’m sure there was one that meant “Hell yes, if I had a time machine!” People here would narrate an ordinary event entirely in the past perfect: “I’d been driving to the store, and I’d gotten out, and she’d come up to me and I had said …” It never reached any other tense. All was backstory. All was preamble. The past was severed prologue and was never uttered to be anything but. Who else on earth spoke like this? They would look at the tattoo on my ankle, a peace sign, and, withholding judgment but also intelligence, say, “Well, that’s different.” They’d say the same thing about my electric bass. Or even the acoustic one—That’s different! — and in saying it made the same glottal stop that they made pronouncing “mitten” and “kitten.”
And they’d grown fat, especially the boys, it was said, from air-conditioning. There were no more hot summer spaces to take away their appetites and sweat them thin — the diners, the houses, even the tractors, were newly air-conditioned inside. It was increasingly difficult to recognize people. I began to think of everyone I knew there in the derisive terms my mother sometimes used—“schnooks and okey-dokes”—meaning hicks who pretended to mean well, or rubes with some plan up their sleeve. To me, they had taken on a repellent creatureliness, like ancient monsters that were thought to live in deep northern lakes, or like the dinosaurs rumored still to be roaming the vast interior of Africa, the world having rushed forward into the future without them. And so, I imagined, when the glacier had retreated it had trapped the resident driftless knuckleheads of Dellacrosse, whom time forgot. Or else they all were the dimmerwits from outer space who’d forgotten to get back on the spaceship and so the ship had left without them. Deliberately! Dellacrosse had the aspect of having been left behind by many ships. It seemed the outer space of outer space.