Alleymanderous and Other Magical Realities Read online

  You watch the mask twist in anguish and agony and you see the lips move and you hear the mask whisper, “Oh, gods, I don’t know why but do know this: my pain is absolute, eternal, for I see the damage it has done for generations to come and to you.... am so sorry.” Tears well up, flow over the mask and it slowly dissolves until you can see your grandmother’s mask reappear. You still have fear but now you know why. You let the fear go, replaced by compassion, sorrow, grieving, for all the pointless pain and the lost generations.

  But! It’s really more like this:

  Tug. Tug. Tug.

  You feel something insistently pulling at your shirt sleeve. “Huh?” you say, “wha—?”

  You open your eyes. You’re still drifting, but much more slowly now. You see Alleymanderous looking at you from behind a mask of Buddha. “Wake up,” he says. “It’s time to go to sleep.”

  “Huh?” you say again.

  “Sleep on this: ‘infinite wisdom, infinite compassion.’”

  “What else is there?” you ask, feeling yourself begin to drift off again.

  “Good try,” says Alleymanderous, “but, unconsciously, you’re still scared shitless of her, ain’tcha?” And he holds up the mask of your cigar-smoking, abusive, Nazi grandmother.

  You wince. “Not as bad,” you say, “and someday, I’ll get over her entirely.”

  “In your dreams, my friend,” says Alleymanderous in the voice of your grandmother, “only in your dreams.”

  Instantly you feel hope. “Since this is a dream, I’m over you.”

  “What if this dream is reality?” says Alleymanderous.

  Right then, you hate Alleymanderous. Now you feel dread. Since you’ve tried in vain to wake up and since that hasn’t worked, this is the reality. And as you ponder your despair, you notice that you are entering a darker realm of space and you slow even more.

  “Dark matter,” says Alleymanderous.

  “Dark indeed,” you muse, aware of the irony. Yet you are also aware of being so tired, so very, very tired.

  The stars suddenly begin to expand, then blowing off shells of matter, they collapse in on themselves and abruptly, their light winks out and you feel the space around you distort.

  “Black holes,” you whimper.

  Alleymanderous holds up a mask of Newton; it caves in on itself, turns inside out, collapses into a neutron star and zips away.

  Alleymanderous looks wistfully in the direction the star has gone and says, “End of the masks. They simply don’t work anymore, now that you have seen the real face of the Universe.” Alleymanderous drifts with you, now looking like the cat that he is, all black and white and gray fur, but, upon closer inspection, the black fur creates patterns of galaxies. And he looks at you through glasses; his eyes appear very large and green, his stare absolute, somewhat unnerving. He’s on his back, front paws folded upon his chest, but his stare is of vast serenity and a mild curiosity.

  You look at him and you say, “How can you be so calm? We could be engulfed by a black hole at any moment.”

  “That is true,” says Alleymanderous. “Not much we can do about it.”

  “There must be something,” you say, feeling yourself a bit petulant and put out by all this.

  “There is,” says Alleymanderous.

  “What?”

  “Sleep.”

  “Huh?”

  “Sleep. Three, two, one, sleep deeply.”

  Bang. You’re gone. You are gone, gone, and deeper into that goneness you go and you have the sense of floating, drifting and this endless sense of just going deeper, deeper asleep. Images come to you.

  You are on the planet Mars. It’s a 1950s Mars with canals, blue sky, cities. You see a figure sitting at an easel on the sidewalk, painting. The sidewalk tops a levee that contains the water of a canal. It’s the artist Chesley Bonstell again.

  You say to him, “Hello. I didn’t get a chance to say that I thought you did great photo-realistic space art. I’ve always wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed looking at the snowscape picture you painted called, ‘Saturn As Seen From Titan.’ So familiar yet so strange.” Almost breathlessly you ask, “What are you painting now?”

  Chesley, young, bright eager, gets up so you can better see his latest creation: You gulp. It’s Alleymanderous, dressed like your grandmother, holding out, in an outstretched paw, a Mars Bar.

  The scene changes to third person viewpoint where you see yourself running down that sidewalk, with the sky filled with meteors, asteroids, smashing into the surface, exploding around you. You come to a cliff and the Great Northern Ocean of Mars is seething, roiling and steaming from the heat of the impacts and looking down, beside you, Alleymanderous is there. He is dressed up as Buck Rogers and he points, saying, “Not science fiction but science fact.”

  “What does it mean?” you ask.

  “What Ray Bradbury could not know: so right, so wrong. Mars was but a canvas for our fantasies that the Universe really was a nice place and we really weren’t alone and there wasn’t really any violence anywhere.”

  When you look to Alleymanderous again, he momentarily changes to a feline Beaver Cleaver from Leave It to Beaver. And he looks up imploring. “Can we go to Mars? I hear i’s really neat. Can we, huh? Can we? Can we?”

  You look out to the chaos before you, of a Mars not terraforming but martianforming and your heart wants to break.

  Abruptly night falls, and just as abruptly, it is daylight: the Northern Sea has vanished, the sky is pink and Alleymanderous, now in a space suit, looks out over the scene.

  You abruptly realize that you, too, are wearing a space suit and you wonder, more to yourself, What happened?

  You hear Alleymanderous in your earphones: “The Mars equivalent to Reaganomics.”

  “What?” you ask.

  “Or,” says Alleymanderous, “what happened to you at the hands of your grandmother.”

  Night again, then day dawns. But it’s a world you do not recognize. A great sea is before you, and you stand in what appears to be grass. The sky is a deep and wonderful blue. Before you, an ocean, the waves crashing upon a rocky shore with a mighty and slow rhythm like the slow, powerful and ponderous heartbeat of the world, Ka-woomph, ka-woomph, Ka-woomph.

  You turn around; not too far off in the distance, you see a great cliff and beyond that, the gentle slope of a great volcano with icy white summit.

  And beside you, dressed in child’s clothing, blue shorts, red, short sleeve shirt, there is Alleymanderous, a child-sized kitten, and you can tell he’s excited at what he sees. Somehow, he is able to smile, his green eyes so dilated that they look as if they’re taking in the entire world.

  He looks up to you, face filled with delight and wonder, and says, “You as Mars; the way you would have been without your grandmother.” He looks back to the scene and you watch a moon, Deimos? Phobos? tumble, fall, through the sky. Alleymanderous looks back up to you again and says, “You as Mars, as you could still be, in spite of your grandmother.”

  You reach down and gently stroke Alleymanderous on the head, and you can feel his whole body vibrate, thunder with his purring. You feel the wonder, the power and nature of the dream that can yet become—the reality. But—

  2:30 am

  —of course, it all changes. And the next thing you know, you’re sitting in a bright blue lawn chair. Above you, a starless sky, at the horizon, brightness, like the sun rising but appearing to be stuck and the light is unchanging. It’s neither warm, nor cold; you look down and touching the ground, you feel the texture of the surface: slightly coarse, not hard, not soft; it almost reminds you of a dark gray sheet of asphalt stretching off into infinity. Abruptly, you turn your head and there is Alleymanderous, sitting in a lawn chair, a laptop computer on his lap. You didn’t think it was anatomically possible for cats to have laps, but there sits Alleymanderous, diligently tapping away on his computer. You aren’t even going to guess how a cat can type on a keyboard. But he does: tap-tappy-click-clikkity click—tap—

  You look at him. He’s dressed in a blue shirt with red flowers printed on it in all shapes, sizes. He’s got on red shorts and you can make out lettering on one lower left side of the shorts, just above the opening, in yellow lettering: CatzMeYow.

  “I’d hate to guess what you’re writing,” you say.

  Alleymanderous stops, then reads aloud. “—of course, it all changes. And the next thing you know, you’re sitting in a bright blue lawn chair. Above you, a starless sky, at the horizon, a brightness—”

  “Stop,” you say. “It kinda feels like déjà vu.”

  “I was just getting to the good part,” says Alleymanderous.

  “That’s OK,” you say.

  Alleymanderous looks at you for a moment more, then continues writing.

  “Well?” you finally ask.

  Alleymanderous keeps on typing, tik-tikka-tappy-click-click—He stops, picks up a cup of coffee. There’s the “Catbucks” logo again.

  “Where’d you get that?”

  Alleymanderous points to his right; off a ways is an espresso stand. You get up and walk toward it, but as you walk, it appears you don’t get any closer to it. Finally, you stop, think better of it and when you turn to go back—you frown. No chairs, no Alleymanderous, no nothing. So, you decide to keep on going and, turning around again, you notice that the espresso stand is even farther away. A song comes to mind, Who was it? you think, Who was it—oh, yeah, yeah, Paul Simon, “...nearer your destination/The more you slip slidin’ away.”

  So, you stop. You sit. You close your eyes.

  “Is that one shot or two?”

  You open your eyes; right before you, the espresso stand. You get up, reach into your pocket but—nothing. Beseechingly, you look at the person behind the c
ounter. You suddenly realize who it is.

  It’s your grandmother—but she’s, what, you figure, seventeen? Eighteen?

  “Surprised?” she asks, “that I was once a young girl who had dreams?”

  She’s sensual, her hair blonde, curled, her eyes green, dressed in a red dress with bright blue flowers.

  “Two shots,” you mumble.

  “Soy? Rice Milk? Whole milk? Two percent? One percent? Non-fat?”

  “Rice,” you say.

  “We don’t have that,” she replies.

  “Then why did you say you had it?”

  “Because we usually carry it. And I never said I had it.”

  “What do you have?”

  “Everything else.”

  She serves you up a double shot latte. You sip it and you spit it out. “This tastes dreadful,” you say. “What did you make it out of?”

  Your grandmother, dressed in a blue shirt with red flowers and blue shorts and who now looks to be about age ten, says, “Apple juice.” Then she says, “You just said you wanted ‘everything else,’ so what I had was apple juice. Not good, huh?”

  “Dreadful,” you reply.

  “Did it ever occur to you people make mistakes?” she asks.

  You look at your drink, pour it on the ground. “Apparently.”

  When you look back, you find yourself staring at the girl who slowly changes into—Alleymanderous. “Just having fun,” he says, “but the principle really is the same.”

  “What’s that?” you ask. “You can’t get what you want?”

  “No,” says Alleymanderous, coming out of the espresso stand and then sitting back in the lawn chair. “People are messed up. It’s up to you to decide how much you want them to affect you.”

  You look at Alleymanderous, then you sit down onto your blue lounge chair which has magically appeared. Then it dawns on you: how much power do we have in how we let others affect us?

  As if answering your question, Alleymanderous says, “Maybe the issue is, why do we keep trusting people who hurt us?”

  You laugh. “It’s like a child thinking that somehow, some way, it will eventually be different, even though the results are always the same. That’s a good definition of being nuts, isn’t it?”

  Alleymanderous goes back to typing on his computer. Tick-tick-tap, tap, tappy-click—

  “What are you writing now?” you ask.

  Alleymanderous looks up, green eyes shining. “God, this is fun,” he says. “Even I learn something.”

  “Like—?” you begin.

  “Get this: maybe it has to do with expectations of trust being generated, then not followed up on. So, whose problem is it really?”

  Alleymanderous looks at you like this is the most obvious thing in the world and you feel as obtuse as ever, but you think you get it. “The person who does that has the problem,” you say slowly. “It becomes your problem if you keep on believing someone who you know doesn’t follow through—”

  “—but you keep expecting them to—then who has the problem?”

  You know the answer to that. Boy, you think, boy, do you know the answer to that. And as you sit there, under that pale sky, on that dark plain with the sun almost rising but not rising, as you sit there, pondering, knowing the answer to that question—you discover, to your dismay, all the implications of that answer. And...

  2:49 am

  ...when you open your eyes again in the dream, you find yourself looking at a television. Alleymanderous is in a space costume complete with silver plastic helmet with little antennas sprouting out of it on either side, each ending in a small red ball. He sits there. His tunic has a picture on the front of it, a cat, soaring up to the heavens, face with an expression of purposefulness, one arm out-stretched, the other, folded in front of his chest, his paw, balled into a fist, and a caption beneath it reads, “Mighty Cat.”

  Alleymanderous points to the television. “Watch,” he says, “this is where it gets good.”

  Dumbly, you stare at the screen. It shows a group of men in security uniforms addressing a man in a suit and tie who you recognize as your father.

  “Dad—” you begin.

  “Be quiet,” says Alleymanderous, “you gotta hear this.”

  You look to your dad. He looks composed, but there’s that edge of nervousness—you see it in his eyes—that you’ve always recognized about him, ever since you could remember. Then you remember him always saying to you, “Save your sanity—drive a bus for a living.”

  You begin to understand why he never talked much about his work.

  Alleymanderous reaches over and turns up the sound. You look at one guy, tall, with dark hair. He’s looking at your father harshly. “Are you sure you’re not an alien?”

  “No,” your father says, “I am not now nor have I ever been an alien.”

  The guy who asked the question—his head abruptly turns into the head of The Fly, from the movie of the same name.

  Another man asks your father, “It’s OK if you are an alien. We’re here to help you. We want to know about your saucer technology.”

  “I tell you,” says your father, “I know nothing! I am not an alien.”

  “Are you sure?” asks the man. Abruptly his head turns into the head of the creature from the movie, The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

  “I’m positive. Why do you think I’m an alien?”

  A fat fellow, with a big nose and dark little eyes says, “Just answer the questions.”

  Suddenly, his head turns into that of the Monster from the Id from the movie, Forbidden Planet.

  And the heads of other men change: one turns into that of a spider, another into the Metaluna Monster from the movie, This Island Earth. Finally your father, who remains unchanged, asks, “Why? Why are you asking me these questions? How many times must I tell you that I am not an alien?”

  Another man, before his head changes to that of Frankenstein’s Monster says, “We know you are not like us.”

  “Thank God,” says your father.

  The T.V. goes blank.

  Alleymanderous says, “Not very good years, that McCarthy era.”

  You sniff. “Any better now?”

  “Define now,” says Alleymanderous.

  “11 January, 2004.”

  Alleymanderous nods. “Point well taken. Some say it’s even worse.”

  “Sure looks like that,” you sigh.

  “But,” says Alleymanderous, “be that as it may, and given that it has happened before, what are you to make of all of this?”

  You shrug. “My father had guts?”

  “Did he?” Alleymanderous removes his space helmet.

  “Guess so.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He got a job driving a bus after he got out of the security business—took his own advice. But—”

  “But?”

  “I’d rather not—”

  “But—?”

  You look at Alleymanderous for a long time. “You know what happened,” you finally say.

  “Yes,” says Alleymanderous, “but I want to hear it from you.”

  “He and his bus and five passengers never got to their destinations one night.”

  “Oh?” Alleymanderous sits on his haunches, out of costume, sitting there in his now resplendent brown and white fur, those yellow-green eyes, so alien, boring into your soul. You stop, not wanting to continue.

  “Oh?” says Alleymanderous, “and were they abducted by aliens?”

  “—can’t rule that out.” You grimace as you say this, because it’s so idiotic, but you continue, “No sign of the bus, my father, nobody. Just—gone. No trace. Zero, zilch, nada.”

  “So,” says Alleymanderous, “as far-fetched as it seems—”

  You sigh. “You can’t know everything, and in the end, you can’t be sure of anything, even as unlikely as it is—”

  Alleymanderous sedately licks a paw. “Can’t know everything. For to know everything—”

  You can’t stand where this conversation is going. “I know,” you say, “I know. It’s the same argument for why one shouldn’t give up, because to give up means you know the future and there is only one entity that knows that, knows everything—”

  “God,” says Alleymanderous.