2.

In the month he’s been in Reno, Lenny has begun to believe in aliens. Actually, he’s always sort of liked the idea: hyper-intelligent beings communicating in wavelengths and beams of light. At the long dining table in Berkeley, Lenny’s physics-professor father used to speak of UFOs flashing through desert skies. How a disc-shaped aircraft from alternate angles might resemble a sphere, a donut, a cigar. How it might skip across time folds like a flat stone skipping on a lake. How intelligent life elsewhere in the universe isn’t only a mathematical possibility, but practically a certainty. How human minds will never quantify the majesty of time and space without end, the ever-expanding cosmos where God and truth reside.

These thoughts are a comfort to Lenny, slumped over the sink at the Silver State Steakhouse. At least, they’re thoughts that keep him from thinking about the contents of the sink or the scrim of grease on the water or the injustice of having to wash dishes in Nevada when he has a college degree. Other injustices, too, so raw and private he can’t name them, not without feeling ungrateful for the truth that has come into his life and that’s connected in some essential way to God.

Father loves you. I love you. Receive this loving remedy.

Lenny doesn’t think about his wife, almost ex-wife, as he washes dishes. He thinks of flying saucers, how far-out it would be to take one of those dishes and make it fly across the kitchen, how he’ll never do this far-out thing unless someone tells him to. He thinks how not doing things is sometimes truer than doing them; how somewhere there must be a planet where no one does anything, where there are no wars or broken hearts. He thinks of doing nothing, just being, and the water lapping at his wrists, and the steam and the sound, and the silence beneath all sound and time and space swirling, endlessly swirling …

But there is an end to time at the Silver State. There are young men just like him, greasy and unshaven and skinny under their kitchen rags, pulling off their gloves and muttering — ‘Ohh, man,’ ‘Fuckin’ at last!’ ‘You comin’ to see some titties?’ Most of them, like Lenny, have bandanas over longish unwashed cowlick-y hair. Some have bloodshot eyes, and Lenny is envious of these guys, enough to steal a glance at one of them, a rangy, long-faced dealer who goes by ‘Wile E. Peyote’. Wile E. catches Lenny looking and, with a smirk, makes a series of signs that can’t be misinterpreted: fingertips rubbing against thumb, pressing against pouted lips, invisible plume of smoke escaping lips. Lenny grimaces, shrugs, shakes his head.

‘Pussy,’ Wile E. mouths.

Lenny can’t argue with the word ‘pussy’. It’s what he is, pussy and broke — and, worse still, stone-cold sober. Ever since Brother Ike found the quarter-ounce, Lenny’s allowance has been reduced to just three dollars a week, and all that’s left of his last high is a stale whiff on his gray pea-coat. There’s a twinge inside Lenny’s skull, a pimple swelling hard and headless by his eyebrow. His sneakers are squelchy with dishwater. He’s as dirty and ugly as a rat, pushing out the back door and into the parking lot. There are actual rats cavorting in the dumpster, those same kitchen guys already there, sparking up. Lenny passes them by with barely a nod and looks to the desert sky, thinking maybe tonight’s the night those lights will beam down and take him away.

A sharp sound cuts through the air, makes the back of Lenny’s neck prickle. ‘Hey, baby!’ one of the guys calls out, and Lenny remembers Jim Jones saying the same thing, slapping him on the back, grinning. But the wolf-whistle isn’t for him, he sees; sees the chick perched on the hood of his station wagon slipping off it when she sees him. She bounds up to him like she knows him; fog coming out of her mouth, blond hair framing her face, a cute heart-shaped face with eyes that are all pupil. She’s cute, Lenny sees with a jolt, and smiling like a beauty queen, putting her hand right on his sleeve … what the hell?

‘It’s late, Lenny, so I’ll just say one thing,’ the blonde whispers the words in his ear, foggy and excited, like the opening of a joke that’s all on him. ‘Father loves you!’

Lenny doesn’t know what to think, so he doesn’t think. All through the drive back to the boardinghouse and the dark trudge up the staircase, his mind may as well be a moonrock. In the communal bathroom, he sheds his smelly work clothes and turns the taps with a rusty squeak, which does something Pavlovian to his body. Fog. Lips. Hot breath. An impression of yielding warmth. He steps under the spray, closes his eyes to the dart of hot droplets, and, finally, has a thought:

Evelyn.

He tries to grasp her imperfections, squeeze as much out of them as he can. That her teeth were kind of crooked. That she couldn’t handle drugs, never more than a few tokes and miserable both times they dropped acid together. That night on their Mexican honeymoon when she got sick and left the bathroom smelling foul, worse than cat litter. Those French songs she liked, oddly stupid and infantile: one about lollipops, another about bicycles, another about a ‘hippopotamus woman’. Why love her. Why cry for her. Not a perfect human being by any means, not an actress on a silver screen, not an angel, not as beautiful as his throbbing heart wants him to believe or that choked-stinging feeling in his brain, and, quite frankly, a bitch. God, she was a bitch, and there was that prim school-teacherly side to her as well, which turned him off more than anything, made him feel sometimes like he was living with his mother—

Lenny jerks off. It’s quick for such a poisonous thing, and afterward he feels shaky but okay. Like he’s just been shot and bandaged up by some backstreet doctor and sent home with a sweet dose of morphine. With trembling hands, he dries himself off and wraps a towel around his waist, and it’s only in his room that he realizes the towel isn’t his, and that it has yellowish stains that he didn’t put there. But it’s hard to find the will to care, confronted with his miserable quarters: the bare lightbulb, the rusty radiator, the single bed that no woman has ever shared. And, face-up on the gray floorboards, a note in his landlady’s longsighted hand:

Call ‘Pastor Jim’ tonight!

Lenny wishes he could pretend not to have seen the note, wishes he could simply climb into bed and read Robert Heinlein until his eyes hurt. Yet even the thought of ignoring a summons from Jim feels risky. So he pulls on a pair of drawstring pants and creaks back down to the breakfast nook, practically stepping in a bowl of kibble, practically dropping the receiver, practically misdialing the parsonage. Jim answers after two rings, almost languorously.

‘Is that you, Lenny, my son?’

‘Hi, Jim … Sorry to call so late …’

The apology comes instinctively, and Jim accepts it as his due. ‘Any time, darlin’. You need me, you call me any time.’ There’s a whooshing of breath before Jim speaks again. ‘I know some things lately maybe seem like punitive measures, but it’s only ’cause I care and ’cause I know you stronger. I don’t like to say it all the time, but, son: you’re a born socialist. Which is why it pains me so much to see you squander yourself on drugs and ego relationships.’

‘Sorry,’ Lenny says again, his face already turning pink.

‘Everything I do, I do ’cause it’s best in the long run,’ Jim explains. ‘I see the socialist you can be, and I see you’ll never be that so long as you’re distracted. Evelyn—’ Lenny feels his pulse quicken at the sound of her name; still the loveliest he knows, and still hot with betrayal. ‘— I mean, Evelyn, she got a lotta qualities, but she’s not a born socialist. Everything with her, it’s gotta be intellectual. And she got that ego hang-up. We been workin’ through it, but she still needs a great deal of personal attention.’ Jim sighs. ‘I don’t trust she’ll ever have an honest connection with the Cause. That’s why she gotta be kept close. You understand?’

‘Yeah,’ Lenny hears himself saying. ‘I get it.’

‘That woman … I’m glad I can talk to you. God-damn.’ Jim gives a bark of black laughter. ‘She’s needy. Probably never showed it with you, but once you take away all that pride and intellectualizing, she’s the most insecure, fragile —’

Fragile. The word brings to Lenny’s mind a night from early in their engagement, dining with his parents in Berkeley. Dr. Lynden had been speculating loudly, and at great length, about Apollo-1 when Evelyn interrupted in her dear, sharp voice with some opinion of her own. Evelyn was often interrupting. It was one of the many things that endeared her to Lenny, though Dr. Lynden apparently felt otherwise. ‘Excuse me, but I’m talking here,’ he brushed Evelyn off in his most professorial tone, and across the table Lenny saw her looking like she’d just been struck. A little while later, he found her wiping her eyes in the upstairs hallway and was bemused by her explanation: ‘I’m sorry, but no man has ever spoken to me that way.’ Yet it had felt good to put his arm around her and tell her it was okay, his old man had always been a jerk. It felt good to know she could be fragile, too.

How fragile they were. How fragile it all was. Their fragile, young marriage that never really stood a chance.

‘— She likes to play strong. It’s only ’cause I’m the most empathetic man on Earth that she lets me see otherwise. You should be thankful, friend, ain’t you gotta be holding her up. It’s tiring.’ Jim laughs again, and for a moment Lenny wonders if he’s actually expected to thank him. ‘Course, I’m thankful for the sacrifices you been making. Shows a great maturity. Forbearance. Don’t think I haven’t noticed. Fact is … fact is, I think you’re ready for more responsibility. That’s why I wanted to talk tonight.’

‘Oh?’ Lenny squeaks, relieved by the change in topic.

‘I’ve made arrangements for someone to visit. Someone special,’ Jim says coyly. ‘I know you’ve grown fond of Brother Ike, but I think you’re gonna like this change. In fact, could be the best thing ever happened to you.’

‘Oh?’ Lenny tries not to sound too dubious of the pairing of ‘fond’ and ‘Brother Ike’.

‘Ain’t no small responsibility,’ Jim elaborates. ‘This … visitor, see: they’re new to socialism. Any questions they have, I need you to answer. Think of yourself as my disciple.’

The word ‘disciple’ reminds Lenny of longhaired guys breaking bread and drinking wine. Or maybe sophomore year, when he’d started getting worked up about Vietnam and fraternizing with other young men over marijuana. Evelyn hadn’t been around that year. She’d been in France, and it hadn’t mattered because he hadn’t known enough to miss her: only that she was the minister’s daughter, that she dated a lot but never seemed to have a steady, that he liked her walk and her voice and the way her dark hair caught his eye like plumage.

‘Thanks … Father,’ Lenny chokes out.

‘I trust you, son,’ Jim soothes. ‘Your whole life, you been so terribly overlooked, but I see how precious you are. Ain’t no part of you that isn’t precious —’ Lenny lets Jim’s words wash over him, words as soft as turtledoves and women’s hair and the pillow he wants to be laying his head down on so badly. It’s a while before Jim says the other thing, so strange and startling Lenny is sure it must be dream-talk, some hallucination brought on by lack of sleep. ‘— And, darlin’: I forgive you for thinking about Evelyn when you masturbated tonight.’