Interactions with the Star People

or

the ball turret gunner

or

An Almanac of Kaleidoscopes

An Antinovel

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Chapter One

Initiation

1.

The Looming Days

You don’t remember when or how it began. There seem to be memories of the shadows moving along your ceiling as a child. Tree branches swaying, their thin forks branching continuously outward, growing more profuse, more dense. As you grew older the world appeared to be operating in accordance with mundane principles. There were the days in school, long rectangular days spent staring out of windows, imagining tentacled beings emerging from the abyss of oceans, or airplanes made of fire drifting through outer space. Sometimes you spent afternoons walking alone, sometimes with Elisa, exploring the bending streets of Queens where vendors set up wooden carts packed with ice and salted fish, and Chevrolet Confederates ambled by over grated streets beneath the shivering cages of fire escapes. Any thin windows that expanded into waking dreams and lost all proportionality, floating over rooftops into bright oxygen skies, dissolving any relation to the sights and sounds of the borough – these disappeared as quickly as a raindrop into a puddle, a flash of lightning inside a cloud, and seemed just as insignificant. Dreams in the mind of an imaginative child, the odd quirks of perception, even if they returned as imprints in candle wax, or carved like symbols into the sides of buildings.

Later you realize that nothing should be dismissed. Street lights that glow brighter intermittently should be closely examined. The sudden appearance of frost on a bedroom window should be questioned until its existence is understood. You now know that inside of everything there are countless other things, and that if there is such a thing as death, there also exists the reality of many other lives.

It was in middle school that you began to count the letters.

[Insert symbol next]

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2.

Specifications

America goes to war. The great hollows of factories begin manufacturing the awesome instruments of death.

Richard Smith, reporter for the Seattle Times, witnesses the B-17 prototype roll out of a Boeing hangar at Plant II, its silver skin glaring with bolted aluminum panels and arrayed with so many machinegun platforms that he writes in the margin of his notebook, “It looks like a flying fortress.” He adjusts his spectacles and takes a long puff of a cigar. His notebook is smeared with grease.

Awake now in the darkness of your bunk, inside the freezing walls of the Quonset Quarters, 1941, England, you can recite their specifications from memory:

13 Browning M-2 .50 caliber machine guns protruding from blisters with fire rates of 13 rounds per second. You hear the sound of the gun shuddering. Lying beneath coarse army-issue blankets you feel the frozen steel of the gun grips and the propulsive recoil in your arms. You hear the howling flak adjusted in predicted concentration while packed inside a clear plexiglass bubble. Black mustaches of smoke erupt and the molten German 105 mm antiaircraft munitions explode eye level before your gunnery turret. 25,000 feet up. So much blue sky in the window of war. The constant sensation of drifting dislocation. Mustaches suddenly punctuating empty screaming space and you hanging over the floating earth, over quilted farmland, velocity at 300 miles per hour and a dozen German artillery specialists dead reckoning you into a barrage. It’s how you wake each night to think of them outside, lining the apron neatly in rows, wings lustrous with cold moonlight. Sheened in ice, you imagine them breathing. Wingspan 103 feet, 9 inches. On the ground 19 feet, 1 inch high, 74 feet, 4 inches long. A bomb load of 8,000 lbs. When the bomb bays open the wind is 60 degrees below zero and the wobbly ladders of the bombs begin to fall, descended individually from the bowels of the plane like animal droppings, a wild-eyed payload raining down onto porches and apple orchards, igniting over school yards and ball bearing factories. “General purpose, high explosive” M43 500 lbs. Ordinance falling sluggishly through the afternoon. Several tons of weight released and drifting in slow motion, their tiny shadows moving softly like dead eyes over the face of the world.

In your bunk you hear the explosion and the world ripping open into sky. The letters hang in the air like the afterglow of a camera flash. They coil and turn, but seeing them more frequently, you are able to align them with particular events. Every time the plane falls the letters multiply exponentially, until they are a blizzard just before the whiteout.

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3.

Arachnocampa Luminosa

When they first came you thought they were remainders within the contours of dreams, sensory and warm, like the brightness of the sun that lingers after closing your eyes. Not exactly apparitions, but glosses of light that diffused and glowed, perhaps made of something gossamer and fibrous – membranes full of capillaries that fluttered with gently coursing electricity. They arrange themselves gradually, only slightly radiating within thin networks that fall in delicate threads, organized and moving in a state of serenity, unspooling their tendrils down. They wash over you in a way that causes you to forget, emitting a gauzy anesthesia of electric smoke, blurring the corners of things, telescoping distances and swallowing sound inside a hive of veins. The first time they came to you they were already familiar. You remembered them from somewhere outside of yourself, like an infant remembering language, the knowledge existing beyond the experience, as though transmitted inside the womb. They don’t really move you, but you are somewhere else nonetheless. Their fragile tissues fall around you, and inside of them run hundreds of thousands of letters, their thin filaments forming an enclosure, until you come to see your mother before you were born, walking a road lined with enormous oak trees, her nose bloodied and her blouse ripped open. You see Elisa standing alone and shoeless in her parent’s living room, wearing a dress and stockings, opening a piece of mail, the address on the envelope written in your handwriting. The membranes spread and flutter, they cover and surround you, they gradually attach themselves to you and begin to fizz. And that is when you begin to see other things, distant things, things that have not yet come to pass. What you see is not a dream and yet does not now exist. You find yourself walking somewhere in the future, over roads that spread and multiply endlessly, roads that lead to other roads, at all hours of the day, in all seasons, in every direction, everywhere, throughout every instance of time.

Your plane has disintegrated into flame, and you along with it.

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4.

Before the War

At night you avoid your father, delirious with alcohol, his complexion bloodshot with broken blood vessels that appear to float inside his face. He eats his dinner alone beside the old Philco. He doesn’t want you there. His wants the day to pass into sleep without thought or memory.

After school you shuffle behind the dime store counter, taking orders, making change. The customers buy candy or wooden toys, magnets or decoder rings, curled soda straws or funny buttons. Your father moves like a cave full of sleeping bats, a deep cavern of twitching hair and chittering mouths folded under wings of skin. You are careful in the way you stock the shelves.

At the age of ten you find his whiskey in the bottom drawer of his dresser. You take it into a clothes closet and shut the door. In the perfect dark, you drink it all, sip by sip, thinking of him. It is the happiest day of your life. A letter falls like a starfish over your entire body. Inside the blackness you understand him and call to him. You find him standing there the same as you – the same age, the same scuffed shoes. He is just a trembling boy. When you get closer to him you see that it is only his eyes, filled with decades of regret, pale as the eruptions of color frozen inside a marble, that are different.

Your mom finds you lying on your stomach on the living room floor. You remember the smell of the doctor’s aftershave and floating balloons full of screaming faces. Your father’s balled fist on the bed beside your temple. You pissed yourself. You smell urine and feel the dried stiffness of your trousers. You remember bloody vomit into mop buckets, remember a retching sound originating from deep inside your organs, a stream of acid expelled past the lower sphincter of your esophagus and projected in a spray of animal bile.

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5.

Elisa

As much as you hate your father, you love Elisa.

You have always known her. There was never a moment in your life when she wasn’t there with you, her stern appearance beneath her straight-cut bangs often giving you pause, causing you to remember moments of importance, even after her father had hit her and she stared at you in silence, even after your father had done far worse to you. Her family lived above yours, and you listened to their exchanges of movement, recognized her footsteps among the others in the kitchen or near the window sill. Her tiny, delicate weight. Often, imagining her presence through the ceiling, you knew what she was thinking.

Gradually it became commonplace that every morning walking to school it was Elisa, that at the beginning of every conversation it was Elisa, and in every classroom there was Elisa in the desk in front of yours, the same part in the hair at the back of her scalp, the same bottoms of her black saddle shoes. She sees the letters the same as you, looks in the same direction when they appear, tries reading them with the same silent concentration. On the playground Elisa sat with her dolls, and walking home you waited until she found you, wherever you might be, even if you’d already started walking home without her, even if you’d purposely tried to hide inside the large concrete tubes of the factory where the wind resonated like brief moans of pleasure.

You fell into speaking with Elisa without noticing it and found that your conversations always made reference to previous conversations, picked up in their middle or at their end, trailed off and joined other parts of different conversations that remained forever incomplete. Everything between you and Elisa remained unfinished – neither of you were ever fully satisfied from your interactions and there was always something inside of the moments you spent together that neither of you could find, that neither of you could absorb, even after the sexual pangs of adolescence had commenced their throbbing, even after so many nights spent listening to each other through the ceiling or through the floor, even after so many walks through the chattering teeth of Queens or daydreaming at chalkboard shadows amid the elaborate fantasies that danced outside the lesson-laden windows that were evenly punched through the threadbare theatres of school.

Elisa has a large brown birthmark on her neck just below her left jaw. She chews her fingernails and the skin around her fingernails and her lips are perpetually chapped. She acts as though laughter is a failure of will, and she sleeps with her eyes open.

6.

6

How it Began

When the world exploded into America, it began with planes.

Perforated lines of A6M Zeros swooping low in strings over sun-rinsed waves.

It is December 7, 1941, Queens, New York. 4,500 miles from Oahu. In the newspapers, nations are burning.

You look through the window. Snow falls through a lingering daydream onto the hushed streets.

You pick at the chipped Formica of the kitchen table with a fingernail. In their identical nightgowns, beneath the drying laundry, your sisters play Jacks on the concrete floor. Radiators hiss and steam. At the stove your mother is boiling cabbage.

The old Philco broadcasts the football game. Dodgers and Giants, crowd static hissing like pins and needles.

In that moment you still imagine orderly lives with people multiplying in cities and suburbs, your countrymen producing and contributing earnestly, and the possibility of a life where you don’t go to work at your father’s Five and Dime, don’t learn to take inventory of stock or mark accounts in the ledger. You imagine the Depression is over. No more stories of starving people eating their own hair. No more rumors of men stepping naked from building ledges in broad daylight. In that moment you have no fear of nightmares warping and ballooning into the echoing night, or the shadows of frozen corpses falling from the sky.

Ace Parker scores and Merl Condit kicks off.

You picture the football arcing in the air, turning end over end, reaching its zenith above the heads of spectators and descending. The voices of the crowd rise as the kick is caught and the ball is returned from the three yard line, over the ten, back to the twenty-seven.

And then there are the planes.

Radio WOR cuts out with a slight crackle. A new voice begins speaking.

“We interrupt this broadcast to bring you an important bulletin from the United Press – Flash, Washington – the White House announces Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor …”

7.

7

Hawaii

The bombs rattle windows miles away from the harbor. Japanese Kates and Vals roll in a steep dive and red anti-aircraft tracer rounds float up toward the lead bomber. The eruptions blow the rooftops from drugstores and soda shops, internal pipes and wires coming lose, soda fountains and glassware landing and shattering in the street. There are sudden hysterical explosions, fire writhing inside plumes of fire, rolling in oil-slick waves over the hulls of drowning ships. The heat boils steel into sweating blisters and twists gangplanks and deck railings into blackened curls. There is the shrill whistle of falling ordinance and the staccato repetition of ground-mounted machine guns. Shadows of torpedoes glide beneath the water, slicing clear seams before erupting concussively against reinforced armor. Shudders radiate through the harbor, blast waves throwing burning men from ship decks 50 feet high. Fronds wither and burn from the stems of palm trees, and the sound of warheads exploding beneath the waterline deafens civilians in neighboring towns. Falling Type 98 fluted land bombs. Falling long-tubed Type 91 Model 2 torpedoes, tail fins made of wood. Falling 1,763 lbs Type 91 Model 5 converted naval shells, penetrating several decks before exploding, detonating internally and rupturing hulls, stressing rivets and bloating the exterior glaze of ships. Planes bearing the emblems of bright red suns strafe asphalt into torn zippers and shred empty fighters on Wheeler and Hickman into gouged metallic flumes. Undulating permutations of smoke unfold endlessly into the sky.

It isn’t long before you realize that the letters aren’t really letters at all.

8.

8

Parasites

Common in Africa, Asia and Latin America, adult Taenia solium tapeworms can live inside the human intestinal tract, producing eggs that its human host then expels fecally. As an eye-opening feature in Discover describes, the eggs can get swept up by pigs as the animals forage for food. The larvae hatch in a pig's stomach and make their way into its bloodstream, eventually arriving at its muscles, where it will likely be eaten by a human in, say, a pork taco.

- 4 Parasites That Want To Invade Your Brain, by Shaunacy Ferro, posted on Popular Science on August 19, 2013

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Chapter Two

Greetings

1.

The Looming Days

I’m the writer of this novel and a fictional character.

I’m also with you right now, exactly where you are, in this very moment.

I won’t go into detail. Although, since we’ve already found each other, I’ll surprise you with a

thought I’m having: there is no other way that it could have gone. Our meeting here was inevitable, every

moment of your life until now has led to this, and no matter what you choose to do after reading this

sentence, all of the events that follow will in some way carry this sentence along, since you’ve passed

through it, have experienced it on the way into the future.

The rest of this book is about how we found each other.

2.

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The Origins of the Society of Unidentified and Paranormal Ariel Phenomena and Affiliated Scientists

(SUPAPAS)

I created SUPAPAS. That’s not true, but let’s say it is.

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For a long time, perhaps for as long as I can remember, I’ve been struck by the feeling that most

people possess some fundamental aspect of existence that I lack – something that they learned quite early

on, as small children – something that still eludes me. It’s hard for me to describe this quality that I lack,

even though I find it on full display all around me every time I leave the house. Perhaps the closest word

for it is assuredness. Or some variation of confidence. And I don’t mean the type of confidence that

makes someone a good athlete, or demands respect in a boardroom, or makes a person appear attractive in

the way they present themselves inside of bright lights – I’m not referring to swagger or comportment or

poise. What I’m talking about is far more basic. I’m talking about whatever ambiguous aspect people

maintain that allows for the suspension of self-evaluation. I’m talking about a certitude that is expressed

in simple movements, in commonplace interactions, in all of the things that are apparently meant to be

taken for granted – the reflex reactions of daily exchanges in grocery stores or dinner parties, inside those

brief and mundane intersections of communication, as though the natural order of the world unfolded like

a involuntary anatomical function, free of any independent external influences, as simple as maintaining a

pulse, as automatic as the liver detoxifying chemicals in the blood.

I’ve never understood any of this. How are people able to act with such conviction, as though the

rest of the world were a mere consequence or obstacle, as though all around them the world materialized

as nothing more than the result of their decision, finalized and pure? How are people able to be so sure of

themselves when broadcasting who they are to one another, when demanding that things be accomplished

one way or another way, when insisting upon a specific outcome?

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Instead of certainty I live in a world of mirrors. In every moment I see myself and a thousand

other possibilities. I assume that one way is likely just as valid as another, or that other ways exist that

haven’t been thought of yet, and that there is always everyone else to be mindful of – the great mass of

everyone else and their sharp movements and decisive plans.

I was living in a community of drunks who imagined themselves artists, much the same way Don

Quixote imagined himself a knight. We had all the makeshift trappings – a

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5.

A Recurring Dream

You dream of organs outside of the body, floating from viscous umbilical chords in oceans of salt

water. Hundreds of bodies turning, moving inside of tides, their eyes pulled from their sockets on long

chords that sway in the slow moving currents. Sometimes there are those you recognize. A teacher from

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grade school, his intestines bulbous and glossy, unraveling in filmy ropes. The sweet girl who takes your

tickets at the cinema, the one with the small mole above her right lip, all of her organs extended in front

of her like a bloom of jellyfish, moving around one another, carried in the tide. You come to remember

this dream on the runway, crammed inside the ball, flak jacket only halfway on, your feet wedged inside

the stirrups of the gun. Pushed like a bubble outside of the plane, the force of the engines coming alive,

the great roar of the wind and the hydraulics shaking, all of the electrical systems raw and snapping in the

wires. You see their brains glistening in the dim light of the water, the schools of bodies moving without

awareness, being propelled and brought along by forces other than their own. They float there outside of

time, endlessly sleeping, moving in the current of the vast amniotic ocean, everything that was once

inside them ruptured and opened to the world.

6.

Boot Camp

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For an instant they remain fixed in space like the top layer of a dropped birthday cake.

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