Love-Shaped Story. Tommaso Pincio
rolling drums, Homer bent forward over the coffee table, brought the length of straw to his nose and inhaled the powdered system. At first he felt nothing, except, after a few seconds, a bitter taste in his mouth. He lay back on the couch, convinced he would soon fall asleep. The film continued and when Becky Driscoll, played by the delightful Dana Wynter, made her entry into Miles Bennell’s office, Homer was more wide awake than ever. He was still wide awake when it came to the scene where Uncle-Ira-who-isn’t-Uncle-Ira pushes the lawnmower across the lawn, exactly as Uncle Ira would do. And he was still wide awake when Becky and Dr Bennell, hunted by the Santa Mira police, who are now themselves in thrall to the difference of the body snatchers, hide in the office and swallow pills to stay awake. This is the scene where it becomes clear once and for all that it’s when people are asleep that the body snatchers take their places. So, Becky and Dr Bennell prepare to spend the night in the office and Bennell tells Becky she mustn’t close her eyes.
‘Or we may wake up changed? To something evil and inhuman?’ Becky asks.
‘In my practice I’ve seen how people have allowed their humanity to drain away. Only it happened slowly, instead of all at once. They didn’t seem to mind,’ muses Bennell.
‘Just some people, Miles,’ Becky objects.
‘All of us, a little bit. We harden our hearts, grow callous. Only when we have to fight to stay human do we realize how precious it is to us, how dear.’
At this point Miles breaks off, gazes into Becky’s dark, fawnlike eyes, her perfect profile silhouetted against the white of the curtain that filters the sinister light from the street, and adds: ‘As you are to me.’ And as the violins soar, their faces draw together till their lips touch and they kiss.
And it was no good.
He was still awake.
Perfectly, totally, utterly awake.
He should have been getting worried, seeing that a fair time had passed since the beginning of the film footage and his taking of the powder, yet he felt inexplicably calm. He sat there watching those two magnificent specimens of the human race kissing - a sight that would normally have made him very uneasy - as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if he weren’t really there, in front of the TV, as if he were watching from the VIP box of a grand theater full of gilded stuccoes and velvet hangings. Dresses rustled, trails of cigar smoke rose, chandeliers glittered, and a confused murmur of voices mingled with the rustle of the dresses, which took on the smell of the bodies, which rose with the cigar smoke till it reached him in the box where he sat, as he kept his eyes fixed on one sparkling light in particular, a white light that spread outward till it occupied his entire field of vision, till it entered him, entered his body, heating him and relaxing him, a hot, white light that softened his legs and his abdomen, that set his chest ablaze and made first his shoulders then his arms go limp. He was perfect. He was relaxed. He was suspended. He was white. He was everything. He was safe. And he understood. He understood…. Now he understood that he had spent his whole life worrying and protecting himself for nothing. He understood that he had wasted his best years shielding himself from people, from the world, from the differents. He understood that there was nothing to worry about after all. What could they do to him? Who could ever have done anything to him? Why had he been so worried? Why had he been so tense? The anxieties of a whole life suddenly seemed incomprehensible.
He watched the film of the body snatchers continue to run, but those alarming pictures that had once revealed the true nature of things to him - those pictures that had been the cause of his not sleeping for eighteen years - didn’t disturb him as he’d imagined they would. He was well aware of the dreadful reality depicted in the film, yet it seemed as if all those things didn’t concern him, or concerned him only to a certain extent, that they couldn’t do him any harm.
Not anymore, anyway.
Not now.
He wondered how this could have happened and whence came this sense of calm that he had never felt in his life before, this white light that heated him from within, this white light of white heat.
He wondered when the system would begin to take effect.
The system that enabled Homer B. Alienson to sleep again - the system that he privately called ‘Kurt’s system’, after the person who introduced him to it - is extracted from the pods of a plant whose scientific name is Papaver somniferum, which means the sleep-inducing poppy.
Commonly known as the opium poppy, it is a flower of extraordinary beauty. A black heart encircled by scarlet petals, bobbing at the top of a long stalk, with pods full of gold-green seeds.
It has a long history, stretching back to the lost civilizations of Persia, Egypt and Mesopotamia.
The discovery of some fossilized poppy seeds suggests, indeed, that even Neanderthal man knew how to extract a system of life from this flower so beloved of the Impressionist painters.
He woke up at three in the afternoon. The television was still on and tuned to the VCR channel. Homer couldn’t believe he had slept so late. In fact he couldn’t even remember sleeping. Nobody really remembers sleeping - even he knew that, despite his scant experience of that state. But he hadn’t expected such total darkness.
The last time he’d looked at the clock it had been just before six. The body-snatchers tape had just finished rewinding and Homer had been on the point of starting it again. He’d already seen it twice, and still hadn’t fallen asleep. Deciding that he’d been too cautious, he’d inhaled another two lines of powdered system.
There had been high points and low points. Moments of white light with white heat and moments when he wondered when the system was going to take effect. He distinctly remembered seeing for the third time the sinister sky of shifting clouds and hearing the apocalyptic music. He thought he also remembered the scene of Uncle Ira pushing the lawnmower, but couldn’t swear to it.
Then he had woken up. Three o’clock in the afternoon. Nine hours. He had slept nine hours and he couldn’t believe it. Never before had he erased such a large portion of time from his mind. He knew that this was what happened when you slept, but he wasn’t used to it. Such intervals of unconsciousness were a new experience to him.
He had lived the last eighteen years in their entirety, second by second, always conscious of himself and of time. Not that he remembered those years clearly. Far from it. Had he been required to think back through them, it would have taken him no more than a few hours; a day at the very most. But that was because his life had been reduced to a few essential coordinates, a perfect geometry of tedium from which he had never escaped.
There had been times when his thoughts had wandered, it’s true. And other times when he’d daydreamed. But he was sure that - if he’d really had to - he could have reconstructed nearly the entire film of those eighteen years, perhaps with the help of some newly invented mind machine or some special memory-enhancing technique.
He straightened up and sat there on the couch, staring at the length of straw and the few grains of system left on the coffee table. The television was emitting its pale blue light and a constant, low electronic hum, but Homer didn’t notice. He was in a daze. The signals sent out by the world of physical things were too weak for his present state. He gazed at the coffee table without really seeing anything. His mind, too, was focused on nothing, sweetly void of thought.
All at once, for some inexplicable reason, without anything recalling him to reality, he came to. He emerged from the daze as suddenly as he had fallen into it. At first this puzzled him, especially as he wasn’t sure how long that strange, trancelike state had lasted. It couldn’t have been more than about ten seconds, but they had been seconds that didn’t correspond to one’s normal perception of time. Seconds that had slowed down till they almost stopped. Seconds drawn out to their maximum temporal extent, like an elastic band stretched to its limit. Time that had stopped while continuing to flow.
It must be an after-effect of the system, Homer told himself. And if he was really honest, he hadn’t found that trancelike state at all disagreeable. He cracked his knuckles and decided to go and stretch his legs in