Night Thoughts (Alfred Hayes: An Innocent in the Land of Eros)

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Tor Johnson in the film Plan 9 from Outer Space, directed by Ed Wood, Jr. (1959): original image by One Salient Oversight, 4 December 2005; later version by Ibaranoff24, 29 May 2005

At this moment, the town was full of people lying in bed thinking with an intense, an inexhaustible, an almost raging passion of becoming famous if they weren't already famous, and even more famous if they were; or of becoming wealthy if they weren't already wealthy, or wealthier if they were; or powerful if they weren't powerful now, and more powerful if they already were.
 

There were times when the intensity with which they wanted these things impressed me. There was even, at times, a certain legitimacy to these desires. But it seemed to me, or at least it had seemed to me in the few years I had been coming and going from this town, that there was something finally ludicrous, finally unimpressive about even the people who had all the things so coveted by all the people who did not have them. It was difficult to say why...

My hostility, if there was still hostility in me toward the rich, now seemed to flow from another source: a feeling, not quite identifiable, that there was something sinister about the way these people lived.

But then, how could this life possibly be sinister? What harm could there be in a Braque bought in an art shop in Paris and now featured over the low couch against the pale wall? What danger could accrue from the immense albums of records stored in the living room or the den with the brick fireplace and the spotless desk? Why should it strike me darkly that a huge refrigerator, with Coca-Cola perpetually on ice, and grapes kept perfectly cold by a servant, stood on the patio beside the thirty-foot pool?

Why did I persist in reacting so oddly to all their comforts, their acquisitions, their rarities, their cool, large and enviable homes? The fault, most likely, was in myself; they weren't, perhaps, so sinister at all. It was only a kind of a voracity which struck me so, an insatiety that gave off, perhaps, a slight aura of the sinister. Well, I wasn't going to be eaten too. My head, on a platter at La Rue's; my kidneys, in a pie, at Chasen's.

Besides, I had an idea they'd find me indigestible: at least, so I hoped. But one had to be careful. One had to be exceedingly careful.
 

Tor Johnson portraying dead Inspector Clay raised again by an alien race to fulfill their evil plans of conquering the Earth in the film Plan 9 from Outer Space, directed by Ed Wood, Jr. (1959): original image by Carolaman, 25 June 2005; later version by Ibaranoff24, 29 May 2005

My actual arms were about her. Why not here, now, at this instant, no more propitious, no more sincere, no more eternal, than any other providential instant? To say: to say, at last, somewhere, "I love you." To think (even for this small, this false instant) that it had been said.

And she didn't contradict, or question the words.

They hovered between us, and dissolved, like a secret. I had a sense as of some weight being lifted. As though a series of doors, one after another, slowly opened. It was I, now, who reached across whatever divided us, and began in the darkness, my hand a conclusion to something, to unbutton her white silk blouse.

Tom Mason (as Ghoul Man) and Mona McKinnon in the film Plan 9 from Outer Space, directed by Ed Wood, Jr. (1959): original image by One Salient Oversight, 4 December 2005; later version by Ibaranoff24, 29 May 2005

Meanwhile, outside, in the absurdly semitropical night, the geraniums grew. Snails, with their tiny horns, inched down the concrete driveway. Banana trees flourished at the edge of parking lots, and there were lovebirds, paired, in those garages renovated into bachelor quarters in the small canyons where, even now, bobcats came down to feed, and raccoons investigated the garbage pails.

Tor Johnson in the film Plan 9 from Outer Space, directed by Ed Wood, Jr. (1959): original image by One Salient Oversight, 4 December 2005; later version by Ibaranoff24, 29 May 2005

Alfred Hayes: from My Face for the World to See (1958)