Another shape bent over him, the waves leaping up. He could remember that this was Jessica, and she was talking to him, but he was too tired. Make sure that the aose and mouth are not obstructed. Kneel to one side of the casualty’s hips, facing his head. Artificial respiration is used to make a person whose natural breathing has stopped start breathing again. Saskia! These swaying to-and-fro movements must be repeated regularly at a rate of twelve to fifteen a minute (what are the sounds a drowning man makes?) and continue this until natural breathing begins. Drowning is caused by complete immersion of the nose and mouth in water for a length of time which varies with the individual circumstances. At “tulip time,” particularly April through mid-May, a thirty-mile strip of land between Haarlem and The Hague is covered by a dazzling blanket of tulips, daffodils, and hyacinths. When apparent recovery has taken place, the casualty should be placed on his side in a warm bed, given a hot drink, and encouraged to sleep. Saskia!
The waves died down, and the water began, very slowly, to recede. Graham could feel its level with his fingers over the edge of the bed. He was asleep.
It was a long way back. Streets, and where they led, were impossible for a while. The fragile dominion he exercised over the bed was gradually extended to the boundaries of the room. In the faded blue pajamas he would rise at noon and sit silent for moments on the edge of the bed, trying to extricate himself from the drugs. Then, later in the day, the slant light yellow in the air, he would walk, carefully, holding his breakable self, on short journeys around the room. From the bed to the desk, she had put red and yellow flowers in a pot on the desk, from the desk to the chair, a cup of coffee. Then he would move to the window, now the shade was left up for part of the day, but the street and even the look of the street still threatened, and he would move back to the bed, in a rush except at such a slow pace, and fall back, his eyes shut, his face closed and drawn.
Work not so hard as delicate, this gathering up and putting together of parts. As the waters receded, they could inspect the damage done, the carpets ruined, veneers curling, paint rotted away. The holes in solid things. Jess had thoughts of the acrobats in circuses who built, with apparently ordinary apparatus, extravagant structures. The careful, precise piling up of tables, chairs, bicycles, bottles, into a trembling tower, and the final triumphant perching of the sequinned, sweating performer on the top.
Slowly he began, with Jess and the child, to take short walks again, out to the shops to buy milk, a newspaper.
The first ventures seemed possible only when they had a goal, to go out and bring something back. It was as though without that he might be distracted, detoured, lost.
He had become, through this thing, very thin; the flesh he had put on so quickly fell away as though it had been a costume, layers of cloth. Now he was very thin and strangely hunched over. The doctor described this bent state as common in cases of severe depression, and predicted that with the return of health he would straighten. It was true. Jess watched him unfold, slowly, like a calcium flower into the precarious, upright, human state; head erect again on the fine bone stalk of spine.
Sometimes he wondered whether the answer lay in that lost six hours between New York and Amsterdam, CITY ON THE WATER. Amsterdam has been called the “Venice of the North.” It is built on huge piles driven through the marshy surface soil and intersected by countless canals.
The breakdown, they referred to it by name, his breakdown, “my” breakdown, proprietorially, like old ladies talking of operations; became a node to date by. Things had happened before or after the breakdown. Going there and coming back. As he grew better, things took on some of their old shape, the outward forms of eating, sleeping, seeing friends began to be possible again without the conscious effort of holding things together. But it was in the invisible area that permanent change had taken place, the mind’s dark library. Some of the things he had known, thought he knew, were gone, swept away with the floods or rotted away with water and mildew afterwards, and some new things were there. He understood now that the world, and his purchase on the world, were less protected and more vulnerable than he had thought. He knew of the way in which we build our islands out of the empty sea, how we fail, and how, with temporary dykes erected and windmills pumping out the brine, we inhabit our failures. He had discovered what we know and do not believe, that he was breakable, and that the dykes make only an uneasy peace with the water and that, in the end, the water is bigger and can wait longer for victory.
Jess was going back, Jess and the child, and he was to stay. They would see each other again, no final decision had been made, he would return sometime before too long or she would recross the water. But though these reassurances were made and given, he no longer had any sense of a sure future containing himself. It might happen, they might survive and meet and come together again, but he knew now the odds against any plan, against anything built staying built and he could admire the architecture but not invest.
TRANSLATE
How big those apples are! How we laughed! What nice apples these are! What a strange story! There is still some food in the kitchen. There are some old trees in the garden. Whose picture is this? Whose are these flowers? How beautiful!
They said goodbye at the airport and he had, the whole time, the sense of a reel winding backwards. A last beer in the restaurant. Rachel was excited, wanted to see the airplanes, and they held her up to the window, her face against the glass. That morning, making love, Jess’s face had tasted of salt. Now they were just polite, there seemed little to say, and she was extinguished, tired. The multi-language voices purled in their ears. He had the quick thought to take her, kiss, slap her, reach her again, but they talked, quietly, until it was time for her to go.
On the coach back from the airport, worn out, he fell asleep almost at once and dreamed a strange dream of the burning of New York; he dreamed that, over the ocean, Jess had leaped out, the child and the blue pig in her arms, and floated down; he dreamed of Holland and of moving through Holland, the flowers, the water.
Elephant with the Wooden Leg
JOHN SLADEK
Note: Madmen are often unable to distinguish between dream, reality, and . . . between dream and reality. None of the incidents in Henry LaFarge’s narrative ever happened or could have happened. His “Orinoco Institute” bears no relation to the actual think tank of that name, his “Drew Blenheim” in no way resembles the famous futurologist, and his “United States of America” is not even a burlesque upon the real United States of Armorica.
I couldn’t hear him.
“Can’t hear you, Blenheim. The line must be bad.”
“Or mad, Hank. I wonder what that would take?”
“What . . . what?”
“What would it take to drive a telephone system out of its mind, eh? So that it wasn’t just giving wrong numbers but madly right ones. Let’s see: Content-addressable computer memories to shift the conversations . . .”
I stopped listening. A bug was crawling up the window frame across the room. It moved like a cockroach, but I couldn’t be sure.
“Look, Blenheim, I’m pretty busy today. Is there something on your mind?”
He ploughed right on. “. . . so if you’re trying to reserve a seat on the plane to Seville, you’d get a seat at the opera instead. While the person who wants the opera seat is really making an appointment with a barber, whose customer is just then talking to the box-office of Hair, or maybe making a hairline reservation . . .”
“Blenheim, I’m talking to you.”
“Yes?”
“What was it you called me up about?”
“Oh, this and that. I was wondering, for instance, whether parrots have internal clocks.”
“What?” I still couldn’t be sure whether the bug was a cockroach or not, but I saluted just in case.
“If so, maybe we could get them to act as speaking clocks.”
He sounded crazier than ever. What trivial projects for one of the best brains in our centur
y—no wonder he was on leave.
“Blenheim, I’m busy. Institute work must go on, you know.”
“Yes. Tell you what, why don’t you drop over this afternoon? I have something to talk over with you.”
“Can’t. I have a meeting all afternoon.”
“Fine, fine. See you, then. Anytime around 4:43.”
Madmen never listen.
Helmut Rasmussen came in just as Blenheim hung up. He seemed distressed. Not that his face showed it; ever since that bomb wrecked his office, Hel has been unable to move his face. Hysterical paralysis, Dr. Grobe had explained.
But Hel could signal whatever he felt by fiddling with the stuff in his shirt pocket. For anger, his red pencil came out (and sometimes underwent a savage sharpening), impatience made him work his slide rule, surprise made him glance into his pocket diary, and so on.
Just now he was clicking the button on his ballpoint pen with some agitation. For a moment he actually seemed about to take it out and draw worry lines on his forehead.
“What is it, Hel? The costing on Project Faith?” He spread the schedules on my desk and pointed to the snag: a discrepancy between the estimated cost of blasting apart and hauling away the Rocky Mountains, and the value of oil recovered in the process.
“I see. The trains, eh? Diesels seem to use most of the oil we get. How about steam locomotives, then?”
He clapped me on the shoulder and nodded.
“By the way, Hel, I won’t be at the meeting today. Blenheim just called up. Wants to see me.”
Hel indicated surprise.
“Look, I know he’s a crackpot. You don’t have to pocket-diary me, I know he’s nuts. But he is also technically still the Director. Our boss. They haven’t taken him off the payroll, just put him on sick leave. Besides, he used to have a lot of good ideas.”
Hel took out a felt-tip pen and began to doodle with some sarcasm. The fact was, Blenheim had completely lost his grip during his last year at the Institute. Before the government forced him to take leave, he’d been spending half a million a year on developing, rumours said, glass pancakes. And who could forget his plan to arm police with chocolate revolvers?
“Sure he’s had a bad time, but maybe he’s better now,” I said, without conviction.
Institute people never get better, Hel seemed to retort. They just kept on making bigger and better decisions, with more and more brilliance and finality, until they broke. Like glass pancakes giving out an ever purer ring, they exploded.
It was true. Like everyone else here, I was seeing Dr. Grobe, our resident psychiatrist, several times a week. Then there were cases beyond even the skill of Dr. Grobe: Joe Feeney, who interrupted his work (on the uses of holograms) one day to announce that he was a filing cabinet. Edna Bessler, who believed that she was being pursued by a synthetic a priori proposition. The lovely entomologist Pawlie Sutton, who disappeared. And George Hoad, whose rocket research terminated when he walked into the Gents one day and cut his throat. George spent the last few minutes of consciousness vainly trying to mop up the bloody floor with toilet paper . . .
Something was wrong with the personnel around this place, all right. And I suspected that our little six-legged masters knew more about this than they were saying.
Finally I mumbled, “I know it’s useless, Hel. But I’d better find out what he wants.”
You do what you think is best, Hel thought. He stalked out of my office then, examining the point on his red pencil.
The bug was a cockroach, P. americana. It sauntered across the wall until it reached the curly edge of a wall poster, then it flew about a foot to land on the nearest dark spot. This was Uncle Sam’s right eye. Uncle Sam, with his accusing eyes and finger, was trying to recruit men for the Senate and House of Representatives. On this poster, he said, “The Senate Needs men.” So far, the recruitment campaign was a failure. Who could blame people for not wanting to go on the “firing line” in Washington? The casualty rate of Congressmen was 30 per cent annually, and climbing, in spite of every security measure we could think of.
Which reminded me of work. I scrubbed off the blackboard and started laying out a contingency tree for Project Pogo, a plan to make the whole cabinet—all one hundred and forty-three secretaries—completely mobile, hence, proof against revolution. So far the Security Secretary didn’t care for the idea of “taking to our heels,” but it was cheaper to keep the cabinet on the move than to guard them in Washington.
The cockroach, observing my industry, left by a wall ventilator, and I breathed easier. The contingency tree didn’t look so interesting by now, and out the window I could see real trees.
The lawn rolled away down from the building to the river (not the Orinoco, despite our name). The far bank was blue-black with pines, and the three red maples on our lawn, this time of year, stood out like three separate, brilliant fireballs. For just the duration of a bluejay’s flight from one to another, I could forget about the stale routine, the smell of chalk-dust.
I remembered a silly day three years ago, when I’d carved a heart on one of those trees, with Pawlie Sutton’s initials and my own.
Now a security guard strolled his puma into view. They stopped under the nearest maple and he snapped the animal’s lead. It was up the trunk in two bounds, and out of sight among the leaves. While that stupid-faced man in uniform looked up, the fireball shook and swayed above him. A few great leaves fell, bright as drops of blood.
Now what was this headache going to be about?
All the big problems were solved, or at least we knew how to solve them. The world was just about the way we wanted it, now, except we no longer seemed to want it that way. That’s how Mr. Howell, the Secretary of Personal Relationships, had put it in his telecast. What was missing? God, I think he said. God had made it possible for us to dam the Amazon and move the Orinoco, to feed India and dig gold from the ocean floor and cure cancer. And now God—the way he said it made you feel that He, too, was in the Cabinet—God was going to help us get down and solve our personal, human problems. Man’s inhumanity to man. The lack of communication. The hatred. God and Secretary Howell were going to get right down to some committee work on this. I think that was the telecast where Howell announced the introduction of detention camps for “malcontents.” Just until we got our personal problems all ironed out. I had drawn up the plans for these camps that summer. Then George Hoad borrowed my pocket-knife one day and never gave it back. Then the headaches started.
As I stepped outside, the stupid-faced guard was looking up the skirt of another tree.
“Prrt, prrt,” he said quietly, and the black puma dropped to earth beside him. There was something hanging out of its mouth that looked like a bluejay’s wing.
“Good girl. Good girl.”
I hurried away to the helicopter.
Drew Blenheim’s tumbledown mansion sits in the middle of withered woods. For half a mile around, the trees are laced together with high-voltage fence. Visitors are blindfolded and brought in by helicopter. There are also rumours of minefields and other security measures. At that time, I put it all down to Blenheim’s paranoia.
The engine shut down with the sound of a coin spinning to rest. Hands helped me out and removed my blindfold. The first thing I saw, hanging on a nearby stretch of fence, was a lump of bones and burnt fur from some small animal. The guards and their submachine-guns escorted me only as far as the door, for Blenheim evidently hated seeing signs of the security he craved. The house looked dismal and decayed—the skull of some dead Orinoco Institute?
A servant wearing burnt cork makeup and white gloves ushered me through a dim hallway that smelled of hay and on into the library.
“I’ll tell Mr. Blenheim you’re here, sir. Perhaps you’d care to read one of his monographs while you wait?”
I flicked through The Garden of Regularity (a slight tract recommending that older people preserve intestinal health by devouring their own dentures) and opened an insanely boring book called Can Ba
cteria Read? I was staring uncomprehendingly at one of its pages when a voice said:
“Are you still here?” The plump old woman had evidently been sitting in-her deep chair when I came in. As she craned around at me, I saw she had a black eye. Something was wrong with her hair, too. “I thought you’d left by now—oh, it’s you.”
“Madam, do I know you?”
She sat forward and put her face to the light. The black eye was tattooed, and the marcelled hair was really a cap of paper, covered with wavy ink lines. But it was Edna Bessler, terribly aged.
“You’ve changed, Edna.”
“So would you, young man, if you’d been chased around a nuthouse for two years by a synthetic a priori proposition.” She sniffed. “Well, thank heavens the revolution is set for tomorrow.”
I laughed nervously. “Well, Edna, it certainly is good to see you. What are you doing here, anyway?”
“There are quite a few of the old gang here, Joe Feeney and—and others. This place has become a kind of repair depot for mad futurologists. Blenheim is very kind, but of course he’s quite mad himself. Mad as a wet hen. As you see from his writing.”
“Can Bacteria Read? I couldn’t read it.”
“Oh, he thinks that germs are, like people, amenable to suggestion. So, with the proper application of mass hypnosis among the microbe populations, we ought to be able to cure any illness with any quack remedy.”
I nodded. “Hope he recovers soon. I’d like to see him back at the Institute, working on real projects again. Big stuff, like the old days. I’ll never forget the old Drew Blenheim, the man who invented satellite dialling.”
Satellite dialling came about when the malcontents were trying to jam government communications systems, cut lines and blow up exchanges. Blenheim’s system virtually made each telephone a complete exchange in itself, dialling directly through a satellite. Voice signals were compressed and burped skywards in short bursts that evaded most jamming signals. It was an Orinoco Institute triumph over anarchy.
Strangeness Page 37