“Just a reading, old man,” said the alien. “No fun intended.”
“What’s a reading?”
“We read your affinity for affection,” the first alien said to Mr. Albemarle. Of the second alien he asked, “What’s he look like?”
“Twisted.”
Mr. Albemarle adjusted himself subtly in his pants and turned a little more askance from the alien who had touched him. “What do you mean, ‘twisted’?”
“The worm of your passion,” the first alien said, “is twisted.”
“Well, it straightens out,” Mr. Albemarle said.
“No,” the alien said. “You straighten out, sir, as Johnny Carson once elicited from Mrs. Arnold Palmer that she straightens out Mr. Arnold Palmer’s putter by kissing his balls. You straighten out, sir, but the worm of your passion is twisted.”
“Your desire, in other words,” the second alien said, now a respectful distance from him, “is not clean and open but dirty and veiled. Something untoward happened to you at a delicate moment in the opening of the petals of your heart—”
“Shut up,” the first alien said. “Excuse him,” he said to Mr. Albemarle. “He tends to make jokes when he should not. We are safer in not speaking of flowers. We are safer in speaking of worms. And the worm of your passion is twisted, bent, kinked, and not, as it should be, straight, straight, and straight.”
“Is this bad?”
“It is bad, yes, but you are not alone. Only one person on earth we’ve checked out is straight. That’s Pat Boone.”
“Everybody else is…twisted?”
“More or less. You are more than less.”
The second alien, who had taken the actual reading, said, “Lucky you’re alive, man. It’s like a Grand Prix course down there.”
“What he means, sir,” the first alien said, “is that before the engine of your desire crosses the finish line it must negotiate a tortuous course and use the transmission to preserve the brakes and discard and remount many new tires and—”
“Hey!” It was the second alien waving them over to the edge of the wall. All the other aliens were peering down.
“Can you guys see down there?” Mr. Albemarle asked. “Take a reading?”
The aliens of affection were whistling to themselves in amazement. “Never seen the like of it.” “That is bizarre.” “Takes the effing cake.”
“What is it?”
“Nothing, man,” one of them said.
“Nothing? Don’t nothing, man me, sir. I patrol the watchtower and have every right to know what is down there.”
The aliens went on marveling at whatever it was they could see or detect in the moat, if it was a moat. Mr. Albemarle looked in appeal to the first, apparently chief, alien, who pulled him aside.
“We’ve encountered the odd thing of the heart in our job,” he told Mr. Albemarle.
“What’s down there?” Mr. Albemarle observed the alien in apparent consideration of whether, and how, to tell him.
“I’m in charge here,” Mr. Albemarle said. “Need to know.” He’d always liked that phrase: we’ll keep you on a need-to-know basis, so when they torture you, you will be on a need-to-be-beat basis for only so long.
“Broken hearts,” the alien said.
“Sir?”
“About four million broken hearts down there — scrap hearts, badly deteriorated, cut you to ribbons before you hit the water.”
“Not crocodiles or bicycles?”
At this the alien started laughing. The other aliens came over to see what was funny.
“What?” they said. The alien laughed even harder and refused to tell. They began goosing him with their flippers, trying to tickle it out of him, Mr. Albemarle supposed. Mr. Albemarle became embarrassed. He had said something, it was clear, ridiculous. But a moment ago, crocodiles on the one hand and bicycles on the other had made sense.
“I said crocodiles or bicycles,” Mr. Albemarle told them. “I thought it was crocodiles down there, and some sodiers thought it was old bicycles.”
The group of aliens politely tried to contain its mirth. The slapped alien generously came up to Mr. Albemarle and comforted him. “Understandable, man. No way you could know. We’ve never heard of it ourselves.”
“I don’t even know what I’m doing out here, all along the watchtower,” Mr. Albemarle said. “Let alone what’s in a goddamn moat I can’t even see.”
“Well, buddy,” said the slapped alien, to whom Mr. Albemarle felt the most affinity (and he hoped it wasn’t because this alien had touched lightly and quickly his crotch), “you know what you are doing now. You are watching over a giant spoilbank of broken hearts.”
“My God. Still, what do I do?”
“Not sure on that. We break them. We are not concerned with their repair or storage. It would appear that these hearts here have been, in Navy parlance, mothballed. It appears you are simply to watch them.”
“Watch all the broken hearts, all along the watch-tower.”
“Yes.”
“In the world.”
“Yes.”
“And mine — it’s broken, too?”
“The worm of your passion is twisted, sir. Your heart is up here on the watchtower, not altogether broken. We have no orders to break hearts. We merely alienate affection. The broken heart is, you might say, collateral damage.”
“I have mismanaged my affections.”
“That you have, sir. In spades. We have no orders to further alienate your affections. The reading we took of you was casual, informational only, whimsical.”
“The worm of my passion is twisted?”
“Twisted badly, sir. But the worm is alive.”
“Is that good?”
“Depends, sir, on your outlook. Are you an absolutist or a relativist, ideal or practical in your worldly posture?”
“I am a muddle of—”
“Muddlers, sir, do not go unpunished. The moat is filled with muddlers.”
At this Mr. Albemarle peered over the edge of the wall, frightened and yet oddly buoyed up by this talk. He was a twisted muddler but not (yet) down there on the spoilbank of the broken. It gave him a sudden hankering to have his hair cut in a barbershop where they’d put sweet-smelling talc and tonic on his shaved neck and let him chew Juicy Fruit in the chair. He could chew fresh Juicy Fruit after the haircut, walking down the fair street with his perfumed head gleaming in the sun. He could find a girlfriend and try it again.
“Hey!” he said to the aliens. “If you guys…I mean, do you guys have any plans for me? Am I on the list?”
“No. You’re singing the blues already, sir.”
“Okay.”
In a parade of salutes and waves — Mr. Albemarle did not want to shake hands with the flippers, and the aliens did not actually offer them — the aliens were gone.
When the sodiers and aliens had left him alone, patrolling all along the watchtower better informed of his mission and better equipped for it, Mr. Albemarle felt momentarily better. He had that new-haircut sweet air about him and felt he was wearing new clothes, and he stepped lightly and lively all along the watchtower.
But soon the drug put in him by the sodiers and the aliens wore off. The gear began to seem a rather Sodier of Fortune aggregation of pot metal and fish dye, and it was clanky and in the way. He discarded it in a neat pile.
What the aliens had given him was worse: the worm of his passion was twisted. This news, coupled with the revelations about the moat of hearts and about their having no call to further alienate his own affections, had calmed Mr. Albemarle when the penguinesque aliens of affection had been present. But now that they were gone he was nervous. It was like, he supposed, turning yourself over to the doctor during illness; you were still sick as a dog, but the mere presence of a man in charge of that in a lab coat and in an ethyl-alcohol atmosphere suggested your troubles would soon be over.