There’s an object on the floor and I bend down and pick it up. A piece of material—at home I would have thought it was a man’s handkerchief. Maybe it is a handkerchief. Maybe they have colds like us. They catch a germ, the sap rises to combat the infection, and they have to blow their stamens. I open up a drawer to put the piece of material in (I like to be neat), but when I close it, something gets stuck. Another thing I can’t recognize. It’s small, round and either concave or convex, depending on how you look at it. It’s made of something black and shiny. A cloth bowl? What would a vegetable be doing with a cloth bowl? Some questions are too deep for me, but what I don’t know I eventually find out—and not by asking, either.
I go back to the living room.
‘Did you find anything to eat?’ Lorinda asks. ‘Or would you like me to fix—’
‘Don’t even get up,’ Sadie says quickly. ‘I can find my way around any kitchen, I don’t care whose.’
‘I’m not hungry. It was a terrible trip. I thought I’d never wake up from it in one piece. By the way, I heard a good riddle on the ship. What’s round and black, either concave or convex, depending on how you look at it, and made out of a shiny material?’
Lorinda blushed. ‘A skullcap? But that’s not funny.’
‘So who needs funny? Riddles have to be a laugh a minute all of a sudden? You think Oedipus giggled all the way home from seeing the Sphinx?’
‘Look, Daddy, I think there’s something I should tell you.’ ‘I think there are all sorts of things you should tell me.’ ‘No, I mean about Mor.’
‘Who do you think I mean, the grocery boy? You elope with a cucumber from outer space and you want I should be satisfied because he’s human in all the important ways? What’s important—that he sneezes and hiccups? If you tell me he snores, I should be ecstatic? Maybe he sneezes when he’s happy and hiccups when he’s making love and snores because it helps him think better. Does that make him human?’
‘Daddy, please.'
‘Okay, not another word.’ Actually I’m starting to feel quite guilty. What if she has a miscarriage right on the spot? A man like me doesn’t blithely torture a pregnant woman, even if she does happen to be his daughter. ‘What’s so important it can’t wait till later?’
‘Nothing, I guess. Would you like some chopped liver? I just made some fresh.’
‘What?’
‘Chopped liver—you know, chopped liver.’
Oh yes, the ugly mess in the refrigerator. ‘You made it, that stuff in the bowl?’
‘Sure. Daddy, there’s something I really have to tell you.’
She never does get to tell me, though, because her husband walks in, bold as brass.
I won’t even begin to tell you what he looks like. Let me just say he’s a good dream cooked up by Mary Shelley. I won’t go into it, but if it gives you a small idea, I’ll say that his head is shaped like an acorn on top of a stalk of broccoli. Enormous blue eyes, green skin and no hair at all except for a small blue round area on top of his head. His ears are adorable. Remember Dumbo the Elephant? Only a little smaller—I never exaggerate, even for effect. And he looks boneless, like a fillet.
My wife, God bless her, I don’t have to worry about; she’s a gem in a crisis. One look at her son-in-law and she faints dead away. If I didn’t know her better, if I wasn’t absolutely certain that her simple mind contained no guile, I would have sworn she did it on purpose, to give everybody something to fuss about. Before we know what’s happening, we’re all in a tight, frantic conversation about what’s the best way to bring her round. But while my daughter and her husband are in the bathroom looking for some deadly chemical, Sadie opens both eyes at once and stares up at me from the floor.
‘What did I miss?’
‘You didn’t miss anything—you were only unconscious for fifteen seconds. It was a cat nap, not a coma.’
‘Say hello, Hector. Say hello to him or so help me I’ll close my eyes for good.’ '
‘I’m very glad to meet you, Mr Trumbnick,’ he says. I’m grateful that he’s sparing me the humiliation of making the first gesture, but I pretend I don’t see the stalk he’s holding out.
‘Smutual,’ I say.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Smutual. How are you? You look better than your pictures.’ He does, too. Even though his skin is green, it looks like the real thing up close. But his top lip sort of vibrates when he talks, and I can hardly bear to look at him except sideways.
‘I hear you had some business this afternoon. My daughter never did tell me what your line is, uh, Morton.’
‘Daddy, his name is Mor. Why don’t you call him Mor?’
‘Because I prefer Morton. When we know each other better I’ll call him something less formal. Don’t rush me, Lorinda; I’m still getting adjusted to the chopped liver.’
My son-in-law chuckles and his top lip really goes crazy. ‘Oh, were you surprised? Imported meats aren’t a rarity here, you know. Just the other day one of my clients was telling me about an all-Earth meal he had at home.’
‘Your client?’ Sadie asks. ‘You wouldn’t happen to be a lawyer?’ (My wife amazes me with her instant familiarity. She could live with a tyrannosaurus in perfect harmony. First she faints, and while she’s out cold everything in her head that was strange becomes ordinary and she wakes up a new woman.)
‘No, Mrs Trumbnick. I’m a—’
‘—rabbi, of course,’ she finishes. ‘I knew it. The minute Hector found that skullcap I knew it. Him and his riddles. A skullcap is a skullcap and nobody not Jewish would dare wear one—not even a Martian.’ She bites her lip but recovers like a pro. ‘I’ll bet you were out on a Bar Mitzvah—right?’
‘No, as a matter of fact—’
‘—a Bris. I knew it.’
She’s rubbing her hands together and beaming at him. ‘A Bris, how nice. But why didn’t you tell us, Lorinda? Why would you keep such a thing a secret?’
Lorinda comes over to me and kisses me on the cheek, and I wish she wouldn’t because I’m feeling myself go soft and I don’t want to show it.
‘Mor isn’t just a rabbi, Daddy. He converted because of me and then found there was a demand among the colonists. But he’s never given up his own beliefs, and part of his job is to minister to the Kopchopees who camp outside the village. That’s where he was earlier, conducting a Kopchopee menopausal rite.’
‘A what!’
‘Look, to each his own,’ says my wife with the open mind. But me, I want facts, and this is getting more bizarre by the minute.
‘Kopchopee. He’s a Kopchopee priest to his own race and a rabbi to ours, and that’s how he makes his living. You don’t feel there’s a contradiction between the two, do you, Morton?’
‘That’s right. They both pray to a strong silent god, in different ways of course. The way my race worships, for instance—’
‘Listen, it takes all kinds,’ says Sadie.
‘And the baby, whatever it turns out to be—will it be a Choptapi or a Jew?’
‘Jew, shmoo,’ Sadie says with a wave of dismissal. ‘All of a sudden it’s Hector the Pious—such a megilla out of a molehill.’ She turns away from me and addresses herself to the others, like I’ve just become invisible. ‘He hasn’t seen the inside of a synagogue since we got married—what a rain that night—and now he can’t take his shoes off in a house until he knows its race, colour and creed.’ With a face full of fury, she brings me back into her sight. ‘Nudnick, what’s got into you?’
I stand up straight to preserve my dignity. ‘If you’ll excuse me, my things are getting wrinkled in the suitcase.’
Sitting on my bed (with my shoes on), I must admit I’m feeling a little different. Not that Sadie made me change my mind. Far from it; for many years now her voice is the white sound that lets me think my own thoughts. But what I’m realizing more and more is that in a situation like this a girl needs a father, and what kind of a man is it who can’t sacrifice his personal feelings
for his only daughter? When she was going out with Herbie the Haemophiliac and came home crying it had to end because she was afraid to touch him, he might bleed, didn’t I say pack your things, we’re going to Grossingers Venus for three weeks? When my twin brother Max went into kitchen sinks, who was it that helped him out at only four per cent? Always, I stood ready to help my family. And if Lorinda ever needed me, it’s now when she’s pregnant by some religious maniac. Okay—he makes me retch, so I’ll talk to him, with a tissue over my mouth. After all, in a world that’s getting smaller all the time, it’s people like me who have to be bigger to make up for it, no?
I go back to the living room and extend my hand to my son-in-law the cauliflower. (Feh.)
A Delightful Comedic Premise
Barry N. Malzberg
Dear Mr Malzberg:
I wonder if you’d be interested in writing—on a semi-commissioned basis, of course—a funny short-story or novelette? Although the majority of your work, at least the work which I have read, is characterized by a certain gloom, a blackness, a rather despairing view of the world, I am told by people who represent themselves to be friends of yours that you have, in private, a delightful sense of humour which overrides your melancholia and makes you quite popular at small parties. I am sure you would agree that science fiction, at least at present, has all the despair and blackness which its readers can stand, and if you could come in with a light-hearted story, we would not only be happy to publish it, it might start you on a brand-new career. From these same friends I am given to understand that you are almost thirty-four years of age, and surely you must agree that despair is harder and harder to sustain when you move into a period of your life where it becomes personally imminent; in other words, you are moving now into the Heart Attack Zone.
* * *
Dear Editor:
Thank you very much for your letter and for your interest in obtaining from me a light-hearted story. It so happens that you and my friends have discovered what I like to think of as My Secret. . . that I am not a despairing man at all but rather one with a delicious if somewhat perverse sense of humour, who sees the comedy in the human condition and only turns out the black stuff because it is now fashionable and the word rates, at all lengths, must be sustained.
I have had in mind for some time writing a story about a man, let me call him Jack, who is able to re-evoke the sights and sounds of the 1950s in such a concrete and viable fashion that he is actually able to take people back into the past, both individually and in small tourist groups. (This idea is not completely original; Jack Finney used it in Time And Again, and of course this chestnut has been romping or, I should say, dropping around the field for forty years, but hear me out.) The trouble with Jack is that he is not able to re-evoke the more fashionable and memorable aspects of the 1950s, those which are so much in demand in our increasingly perilous and confusing times, but instead can recover only the failures the not-quite-successes, the aspects-that-never-made-it. Thus he can take himself and companions not to Ebbets Field, say, where the great Dodger teams of the 1950s were losing with magnificence and stolid grace but to Shibe Park in Philadelphia, house of the Athletics and Phillies, where on a Tuesday afternoon a desultory crowd of four thousand might be present to watch senile managers fall asleep in the dugout or hapless rookies fail once again to hit the rising curve. He cannot, in short, recapture the Winners, but only the Losers: the campaign speeches of Estes Kefauver, recordings by the Bell Sisters and Guy Mitchell, the rambling confessions of minor actors before the McCarthy screening committee that they once were Communists and would appreciate the opportunity to get before the full committee and press to make a more definite statement.
Jack is infuriated by this and no wonder; he is the custodian of a unique and possibly highly marketable talent—people increasingly love the past, and a guided tour through it as opposed to records, tapes, rambling reminiscences would be enormously exciting to them—but he cannot for the life of him get to what he calls the Real Stuff, the more commercial and lovable aspects of that cuddly decade. Every time that he thinks he has recaptured Yankee Stadium in his mind and sweeps back in time to revisit it, he finds himself at Wrigley Field in Chicago where Wayne Terwillger, now playing first base, misses a foul pop and runs straight into the stands. What can he do? What can he do about this reckless and uncontrollable talent of his, which in its sheerest perversity simply will not remit to his commands. (It is a subconscious ability, you see; if he becomes self-conscious, it leaves him entirely.) Jack is enraged. He has cold sweats, flashes of gloom and hysteria. (I forgot to say that he is a failed advertising copy writer, now working in Cleveland on display advertising mostly for the Shaker Heights district. He needs money and approbation. His marriage, his second marriage, is falling apart. All of this will give the plot substance and humanity, to say nothing of warm twitches of insight.) He knows that he is onto something big, and yet his clownish talent, all big feet and wide ears, mocks him.
He takes his problem to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist takes some convincing, but after being taken into the offices of Cosmos science fiction to see the editor rejecting submissions at a penny a word, he believes everything. He says he will help Jack. This psychiatrist, who I will call Dr Mandleman, fires all of his patients and enters into a campaign to help Jack recover the more popular and marketable aspects of the fifties. He too sees the Big Money. He moves in with Jack. Together they go over the top forty charts of that era, call up retired members of the New York football Giants, pore through old Congressional Records in which McCarthy is again and again thunderously denounced by two liberal representatives...
Do you see the possibilities? I envision this as being somewhere around 1500 words but could expand or contract it to whatever you desire. I am very busy as always but could make room in my schedule for this project, particularly if you could see fit to give a small down payment. Would fifty dollars seem excessive? I look forward to word from you.
* * *
Dear Mr Malzberg:
I believe that you have utterly misunderstood my letter and the nature of the assignment piece.
There is nothing funny in a fantasy about a man who can recapture only the ugly or forgotten elements of the past. Rather, this is a bitter satire on the present which you have projected, based upon your statement that ‘people love their past’, with the implication that they find the future intolerable. What is funny about that? What is funny about failure, too? What is funny about the Philadelphia Athletics of the early 1950s with their ninety-four-year-old manager? Rather, you seem to be on the way to constructing another of your horrid metaphors for present and future, incompetence presided over by senescence.
This idea will absolutely not work, not at least within the context of a delightful comedic premise, and as you know, we are well-inventoried with work by you and others which will depress people. I cannot and will not pay fifty dollars in front for depressing stuff like this.
Perhaps you will want to take another shot at this.
* * *
Dear Editor:
Thanks for your letter. I am truly sorry that you fail to see the humour in failure or in the forgettable aspects of the past—people, I think, must learn to laugh at their foibles—but I bow to your judgment.
Might I suggest another idea which has been in mind for some time? I would like to write a story of a telepath, let me call him John, who is able to establish direct psionic links with the minds, if one can call them ‘minds’, of the thoroughbreds running every afternoon (except for Sundays and three months a year) at Aqueduct and Belmont race tracks in Queens, New York. John’s psionic faculties work at a range of fifty yards; he is able to press his nose against the wire gate separating paddock from customers and actually get inside the minds of the horses. Dim thoughts like little shoots of grass press upon his own brain; he is able to determine the mental state and mood of the horses as in turn they parade by him. (Horses of course do not verbalize; John must deduce thos
e moods subverbally.)
Obviously John is up to something. He is a mind reader; he should, through the use of this talent, be able to get some line on the outcome of a race by knowing which horses feel well, which horses’ thoughts are clouded by the possibility of soporifics, which other horses’ minds show vast energy because of the probable induction of stimulants. Surely he should be able to narrow the field down to two or three horses anyway which feel good and, by spreading his bets around these in proportion to the odds, assure himself of a good living.
(I should have said somewhat earlier on, but, as you know, am very weak at formal outlines, that John’s talents are restricted to the reading of the minds of animals', he cannot for the life of him screen the thoughts of a fellow human. If he could, of course, he would simply check out the trainers and jockeys, but it is a perverse and limited talent, and John must make the best of what God has given him, as must we all—for instance, I outline poorly.)
The trouble is that John finds there to be no true correlation between the prerace mood or thoughts of horses and the eventual outcome. Horses that feel well do not necessarily win, and those horses from whom John has picked up the most depressing and suicidal emanations have been known to win. It is not a simple reversal; if it were, John would be able to make his bets on the basis of reverse correlation and do quite well this way; rather, what it seems to be is entirely random. Like so much of life, the prerace meditations of horses appear to have no relationship to the outcome; rather, motives and consequences are fractured, split, entirely torn apart; and this insight, which finally comes upon John after the seventh race at Aqueduct on June 12,1974, when he has lost fifty-five dollars drives him quite mad; his soul is split, his mind shattered; he runs frantically through the^sparse crowds (it is a Tuesday, and you know what OTB has done to race track attendance anyway) shouting, screaming, bellowing his rage to the heavens. ‘There’s no connection!’ he will scream. ‘Nothing makes sense, nothing connects, there is no reason at all!’ and several burly Pinkertons, made sullen by rules, which require them to wear jackets and ties at all times, even on this first hot day of the year, seize him quite roughly and drag him into the monstrous computer room housing the equipment of the American Totalisor Company; there a sinister track executive, his eyes glowing with cunning and evil will say, ‘Why don’t you guys ever learn?’ (he is a metaphor for the Devil, you see; I assure you that this will be properly planted, and the story itself will be an allegory) and, coming close to John, will raise a hand shaped like a talon, he will bring it upon John, he will.. .
Antigrav : Cosmic Comedies by SF Masters Page 9