“Now, Benny, if I may suggest—”
“No, Wipp. As you said, I’m head of this expedition. I’m off. I’ll give you a few minutes to get positioned. Then I’ll make my move. Let’s go!”
I found my post, settled in, and eyed the aliens. This affair looked easy. The hardest part, I decided, would be taking the deep breath required for my lengthy disquisition, being bathed as I was by such delicate air as surrounds pig farms.
Steeling myself, I stepped into the shade beneath the arch. I prepared to take in a gulp of air for my assault. I would sweep upon them, the Leader of Mother Earth, with such a rapid-fire, full-force word-volley that these vagrant vegetables could hardly help being disarmed.
I took in the prodigious breath, only to find that what I gulped fell short in the farm-country, eau-de-grange department. I whiffed in an intoxicating cocktail that included compounds foreign to the customary oxygen-nitrogen, so that my mind, full as it was moments before, emptied to become as blank as that old bane of newspaper writers—the blank page—which intimidated poor hacks back in the age before the horror of the endless scroll of the blank screen, which is a terror to even the most talented of the verbally ept.
“But I am the leader!” I managed that even as I reeled. “I am the leader!”
I saw the vegetable fiends that had crouched in wait for me, on each side of the shaded space. They sprayed me again with whatever perfume they preferred in visitors. I felt faint. I was scrolling into the Page Down of unconsciousness.
I was going, going, going, as they say; and try as I might to say something about an experience that lacked any qualities except the absence of qualities, I must rest my description on the good Anglo Saxon word that typically follows going, going, and going:
Gone.
Not long gone, however. It seemed only a second passed.
Yet I faced evidence to the contrary.
I judged this not from the absence of the vegetable aliens, who had bobbed off and were hooting somewhere to the right.
I judged this from the absence of something else.
My clothes.
My clothes had appropriated my former state of consciousness: gone.
I picked myself up and stared down in disbelief. You may not think the sight of your own skin shocking. Try it at an unexpected moment, then. Knock yourself out by surprise, have friends strip you, and then rouse yourself in a dim, head-swimming kind of way. Then take full gander at your skin, which you will find stretches from crown to com, an unremovable dermal underwear covering everything except a few visible bones in the mouth, which escape by the skin of their teeth. The skin’s very prevalence, its very overall-ness, its quality of being so tellingly and acutely you will call forth an ounce of embarrassment per pound of flesh. If you have darker hue of skin consider the luck of your situation. If, like me, however, you have too little pigment, you will find yourself displaying not only a full stretch of intimacy, but also its blood-carrying capacity at overload, until you become a billboard of emotion, a full-frontal affair, at which point we say of your composure that which we have said already of other aspects of the situation: gone.
Thus I found myself. I bolted.
Even after the shock of having Sun strike every plane, bulge, and protuberance of skin and reflect it up at the unsuspecting eye, I remained in control during my retreat, giving my flying limbs a sensible command, viz., to find clothes. I perceived where the nearest covering might be: atop the neighboring pig shed. I would don Wippett’s bird-blind.
I zipped to the pen and leapt the low fence over which, beyond a stretch of dusty, hoof-beaten earth, I saw the ladder that led to the shed’s top.
At that moment I became a believer in mental teleportation.
Normally I dismiss those powers ranked among the “paranormal” unless scads of careful experiments point toward the incontrovertibility of the phenomenon. I like the falsifiable test, and the steady, slow, thick-brained kind of study that unfortunately your normal psychic can see right through.
In this instance, however, I believed instantly.
For I had forgotten about the pigs.
I hung midair, just past the fence over which I had gaily swung myself, naked, and saw, below me, a mass of pigs, exactly more or less where I was to land. Around them stood more, scattered in that haphazard way of pigs.
You might think I hold something against jiggly, fat things on hooves. Not so. At the moment, however, they startled me, and I startled them. They saw me loom above them, a naked man, and squealed. I saw them below me, and I squealed likewise, because, with so many nerves exposed to open air, I was in a state far from the Fogg norm of sangfroid and phlegm. Truthfully, I suspect the high pitch, intensity, and not very yippy nature of my utterance would have made it difficult to distinguish my squeal from the properly executed scream. I made a full-throated effort of which any dedicated screamer would have felt proud.
The concordance of human and pig squeals—we are said to be closely related, biologists tell us, which may help illuminate this strange situation—may have created a harmonic resonance. The sudden eruption of movement among the massed pigs may have exerted an effect, as welclass="underline" undoubtedly they moved into a subconscious mandala that ripened the situation’s potential for psychic occurrence.
Whatever the case, I found myself one instant hovering startled over a congress of equally startled pigs, and, in the next, scrambling up the ladder to the top of the shed, my feet never once having touched soil of pen. I had moved a good twenty-five feet, and had no memory of doing so. I accept without question that instantaneous teleportation is a done and accomplished thing.
In my haste up the ladder I failed to notice the heat in the wood, imparted by the blazing Sun. I then pranced onto the corrugated metal of the roof, barefoot—and continued to prance, alarmed at the earthly version of Protestant Hell I discovered there, high above the pig-yard where I had engaged in ungodly psychic transport. Moreover the steel roof danced with me, coming unmoored with every booming footfall—what little booming could be heard above the sizzling of soles on metal. To make things worse, Wippett had fled. He stood nowhere in sight. His bird-blind likewise. I pranced in perplexity. I put down one gingery, reluctant foot after the next. That next, unfortunately, unbalanced a section of roof. I felt myself go down. The next moment, I felt a tremendous thwack in my rear as the other end of the sheet-metal swung up and biffed me with a sizzler, sending me up and over the side.
I wish I could again say I proved the efficacy of psychic transport. However, as I hung once again midair, I did see my salvation. Beneath me I saw a trough of water, to catch and cool me.
I fell without a splash, which gave me a clue as to my mistaken perceptions.
The trough being deep, I submerged fully before gathering myself and pushing up for air. I opened my mouth and, in a rare and brief vacation from being self-collected, I bellowed with a volume that would have done justice to the elephantically voiced Mr. Wire himself. I pulled rotten apples and potatoes from my eye sockets and nostrils, jumped from the morass, and high-tailed it for the farmhouse, the pigs rioting clamorously over what must have seemed a terrible tease, me going past so quickly and smelling so exquisitely edible.
To avoid painful exploration of fresh wounds, I will note simply that following an outdoors hose bath, the judicious application of a large leaf from the burr oak, and a perplexing moment in a voluminous closet, I emerged from the farmhouse in the ruling Hock style. Except that the Hocks had run out of his overalls, which left me the choice of hers.