Strange Wine

by Harlan Ellison

  “Not right now. In a little, maybe.”

  “You’ll fall asleep in front of the set again.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll be up in a little while.”

  She stood watching him for a moment longer, then turned and climbed the stairs. He listened for the sounds of the upstairs ritual–the toilet flushing, the water moving through the pipes to the sink, the clothes closet door squeaking as it was opened, the bedsprings responding as Estelle put herself down for the night. And then he turned on the television set. He turned to Channel 30, one of the empty channels, and turned down the volume control so he did not have to hear the sound of coaxial “snow.”

  He sat in front of the set for several hours, his right hand flat against the picture tube, hoping the scanning pattern of the electron bombardment would reveal, through palm flesh grown transparent, the shape of alien bones.

  In the middle of the week he asked Harvey Rothammer if he could have the day off Thursday so he could drive out to the hospital in Fontana to see his son. Rothammer was not particularly happy about it, but he didn’t have the heart to refuse. Kaw had lost his daughter, and the son was still ninety-five percent incapacitated, lying in a therapy bed with virtually no hope of ever walking again. So he told Willis Kaw to take the day off, but not to forget that April was almost upon them and for a firm of certified public accountants it was rush season. Willis Kaw said he knew that.

  The car broke down twenty miles east of San Dimas, and he sat behind the wheel, in the bludgeoning heat, staring at the desert and trying to remember what the surface of his home planet looked like.

  His son, Gilvan, had gone on a vacation to visit friends in New Jersey the summer before. The friends had installed a freestanding swimming pool in the back yard. Gil had dived in and struck bottom; he had broken his back.

  Fortunately, they had pulled him out before he could drown, but he was paralyzed from the waist down. He could move his arms, but not his hands. Willis had gone East, had arranged to have Gil flown back to California, and there he lay in a bed in Fontana.

  He could remember only the color of the sky. It was a brilliant green, quite lovely. And things that were not birds, that skimmed instead of flying. More than that he could not remember.

  The car was towed back to San Dimas, but the garage had to send off to Los Angeles for the necessary parts. He left the car and took a bus back home. He did not get to see Gil that week. The repair bill was two hundred and eighty-six dollars and forty-five cents.

  That March the eleven-month drought in Southern California broke. Rain thundered down without end for a week; not as heavily as it does in Brazil, where the drops are so thick and come so close together that people have been known to suffocate if they walk out in the downpour. But heavily enough that the roof of the house sprang leaks. Willis Kaw and Estelle stayed up one entire night, stuffing towels against the baseboards in the living room; but the leaks from the roof apparently weren’t over the outer walls but rather in low spots somewhere in the middle; the water was running down and triculating through.

  The next morning, depressed beyond endurance, Willis Kaw began to cry. Estelle heard him as she was loading the soaking towels into the dryer, and ran into the living room. He was sitting on the wet carpet, the smell of mildew rising in the room, his hands over his face, still holding a wet bath towel. She knelt down beside him and took his head in her hands and kissed his forehead. He did not stop crying for a very long time, and when he did, his eyes burned.

  “It only rains in the evening where I come from,” he said to her. But she didn’t know what he meant.

  When she realized, later, she went for a walk, trying to decide if she could help her husband.

  He went to the beach. He parked on the shoulder just off the Old Malibu Road, locked the car, and trotted down the embankment to the beach. He walked along the sand for an hour, picking up bits of milky glass worn smooth by the Pacific, and finally he lay down on the slope of a small, weed-thatched dune and went to sleep.

  He dreamed of his home world and–perhaps because the sun was high and the ocean made eternal sounds–he was able to bring much of it back. The bright green sky, the skimmers swooping and rising overhead, the motes of pale yellow light that flamed and then floated up and were lost to sight. He felt himself in his real body, the movement of many legs working in unison, carrying him across the mist sands, the smell of alien flowers in his mind. He knew he had been born on that world, had been raised there, had grown to maturity and then…

  Sent away.

  In his human mind, Willis Kaw knew he had been sent away for doing something bad. He knew he had been condemned to this planet, this Earth, for having perhaps committed a crime. But he could not remember what it was. And in the dream he could feel no guilt.

  But when he woke, his humanity came back and flooded over him and he felt guilt. And he longed to be back out there, where he belonged, not trapped in this terrible body.

  “I didn’t want to come to you,” Willis Kaw said. “I think it’s stupid. And if I come, then I admit there’s room for doubt. And I don’t doubt, so…”

  The psychiatrist smiled and stirred the cup of cocoa. “And so…you came because your wife insisted.”

  “Yes.” He stared at his shoes. They were brown shoes, he had owned them for three years. They had never fit properly; they pinched and made his big toe on each foot feel as if it were being pressed down by a knife edge, a dull knife edge.

  The psychiatrist carefully placed the spoon on a piece of Kleenex, and sipped at his cocoa. “Look, Mr. Kaw, I’m open to suggestion. I don’t want you to be here, nor do you want to be here, if it isn’t going to help you. And,” he added quickly, “by help you I don’t mean convert you to any world view, any systematized belief, you choose to reject. I’m not entirely convinced, by Freud or Werner Erhard or Scientology or any other rigor, that there is such a thing as ‘reality.’ Codified reality. A given, an immutable, a constant. As long as what someone believes doesn’t get him put in a madhouse or a prison, there’s no reason why it should be less acceptable than what we, uh, ‘straight folks’ call reality. If it makes you happy, believe it. What I’d like to do is listen to what you have to say, perhaps offer a few comments, and then see if your reality is compatible with straight folks’ reality.

  “How does that sound to you?”

  Willis Kaw tried to smile back. “It sounds fine. I’m a little nervous.”

  “Well, try not to be. That’s easy for me to say and hard for you to do, but I mean you no harm; and I’m really quite interested.”

  Willis uncrossed his legs and stood up. “Is it all right if I just walk around the office a little? It’ll help, I think.” The psychiatrist nodded and smiled, and indicated the cocoa. Willis Kaw shook his head. He walked around the psychiatrist’s office and finally said, “I don’t belong in this body. I’ve been condemned to life as a human being, and it is killing me.”

  The psychiatrist asked him to explain.

  Willis Kaw was a small man, with thinning brown hair and bad eyes. He had weak legs and constantly had need of a handkerchief. His face was set in lines of worry and sadness. He told the psychiatrist all this. Then he said, “I believe this planet is a place where bad people are sent to atone for their crimes. I believe that all of us come from other worlds; other planets where we have done something wrong. This Earth is a prison, and we’re sent here to live in these awful bodies that decay and smell bad and run down and die. And that’s our punishment.”

  “But why do you perceive such a condition, and no one else?” The psychiatrist had set aside the cocoa, and it was growing cold.

  “This must be a defective body they’ve put me in,” Willis Kaw said. “Just a little extra pain, knowing I’m an alien, knowing I’m serving a prison sentence for something I did, something I can’t remember; but it must have been an awful thing for me to have drawn such a sentence.”

  “Have you ever read Franz Kafka, Mr. Kaw?”


  “No.”

  “He wrote books about people who were on trial for crimes the nature of which they never learned. People who were guilty of sins they didn’t know they had committed.”

  “Yes. I feel that way. Maybe Kafka felt that way; maybe he had a defective body, too.”

  “What you’re feeling isn’t that strange, Mr. Kaw,” the psychiatrist said. “We have many people these days who are dissatisfied with their lives, who find out–perhaps too late–that they are transsexual, that they should have been living their days as something else, a man, a woman–”

  “No, no! That isn’t what I mean. I’m not a candidate for a sex change. I’m telling you I come from a world with a green sky, with mist sand and light motes that flame and then float up…I have many legs, and webs between the digits and they aren’t fingers…” He stopped and looked embarrassed.

  Then he sat down and spoke very softly. “Doctor, my life is like everyone else’s life. I’m sick much of the time, I have bills I cannot pay, my daughter was struck by a car and killed and I cannot bear to think about it. My son was cut off in the prime of his life and he’ll be a cripple from now on. My wife and I don’t talk much, we don’t love each other…if we ever did. I’m no better and no worse than anyone else on this planet and that’s what I’m talking about: the pain, the anguish, the living in terror. Terror of each day. Hopeless. Empty. Is this the best a person can have, this terrible life here as a human being? I tell you there are better places, other worlds where the torture of being a human being doesn’t exist!”

  It was growing dark in the psychiatrist’s office. Willis Kaw’s wife had made the appointment for him at the last moment and the doctor had taken the little man with the thinning brown hair as a fill-in, at the end of the day.

  “Mr. Kaw,” the psychiatrist said, “I’ve listened to all you’ve said, and I want you to know that I’m very much in sympathy with your fears.” Willis Kaw felt relieved. He felt at last someone might be able to help him. If not to relieve him of this terrible knowledge and its weight, at least to tell him he wasn’t alone. “And frankly, Mr. Kaw,” the psychiatrist said, “I think you’re a man with a very serious problem. You’re a sick man and you need intense psychiatric help. I’ll talk to your wife if you like, but if you take my advice, you’ll have yourself placed in a proper institution before this condition…”

  Willis Kaw closed his eyes.

  He pulled down the garage door tight and stuffed the cracks with rags. He could not find a hose long enough to feed back into the car from the tail pipe, so he merely opened the car windows and started the engine and let it run. He sat in the back seat and tried to read Dickens’ Dombey and Son, a book Gil had once told him he would enjoy.

  But he couldn’t keep his attention on the story, on the elegant language, and after a while he let his head fall back, and he tried to sleep, to dream of the other world that had been stolen from him, the world he knew he would never again see. Finally, sleep took him, and he died.

  The funeral service was held at Forest Lawn, and very few people came. It was a weekday. Estelle cried, and Harvey Rothammer held her and told her it was okay. But he was checking his wristwatch over her shoulder, because April was almost upon him.

  And Willis Kaw was put down in the warm ground, and the dirt of an alien planet was dumped in on him by a Chicano with three children who was forced to moonlight as a dishwasher in a bar and grill because he simply couldn’t meet the payments on his six-piece living room suite if he didn’t.

  The many-legged Consul greeted Willis Kaw when he returned. He turned over and looked up at the Consul and saw the bright green sky above. “Welcome back, Plydo,” the Consul said.

  He looked very sad.

  Plydo, who had been Willis Kaw on a faraway world, got to his feet and looked around. Home.

  But he could not keep silent and enjoy the moment. He had to know. “Consul, please…tell me…what did I do that was so terrible?”

  “Terrible!” The Consul seemed stunned. “We owe you nothing but honor, your grace. Your name is valued above all others.” There was deep reverence in his words.

  “Then why was I condemned to live in anguish on that other world? Why was I sent away to exist in torment?”

  The Consul shook his hairy head, and his mane billowed in the warm breeze. “No, your grace, no! Anguish is what we suffer. Torment is all we know. Only a few, only a very few honored and loved among all the races of the universe can go to that world. Life there is sweet compared to what passes for life everywhere else. You are still disoriented. It will all come back to you. You will remember. And you will understand.”

  And Plydo, who had been, in a better part of his almost eternal life of pain, Willis Kaw, did remember. As time passed, he recalled all the eternities of sadness that had been born in him, and he knew that they had given him the only gift of joy permitted to the races of beings who lived in the far galaxies. The gift of a few precious years on a world where anguish was so much less than that known everywhere else.

  He remembered the rain, and the sleep, and the feel of beach sand beneath his feet, and ocean rolling in to whisper its eternal song, and on just such nights as those he had despised on Earth, he slept and dreamed good dreams.

  Of life as Willis Kaw, life on the pleasure planet.

  INTRODUCTION TO: The Diagnosis of Dr. D'arqueAngel

  I’m particularly proud of having written this story. Not that it’s an earthshaker or the most inspired narration I’ve ever lucked into, but because I wrote it and neither Ray Bradbury nor Frank Herbert did.

  That may seem a weird thing to say, but on a day several years ago when Frank and Ray and I wound up all together on the same lecture platform, and we were kicking around ideas and memories of our childhood, I popped this idea–“How about a story in which there’s a doctor who gives you periodic injections of death, so you build up a tolerance to it, and cannot die?”–and all three of us rolled our eyes and said WOW!

  And we all three vowed, in front of that huge audience, to write the story, and it was to be a race to see who could get it set down on paper first.

  And three or four years went by, and none of us did it; and then one day I remembered the idea and plopped down behind this very typewriter at which I now sit, and in nine straight hours of typing I wrote this story.

  I sent a copy to Frank and I sent a copy to Ray.

  They haven’t responded. You think they’re mad at me?

  The Diagnosis of Dr. D'arqueAngel

  “Ordinarily my ratio of concerns is something like this: Fifty per cent work and worry over work, 35% the perpetual struggle against lunacy, 15% a very true and very tender love for those who have been and and are close to me as friends and as lover. But [sometimes] the ratio changes to something like this: Work and worry over work, 89%; struggle against lunacy (partly absorbed in the first category) 10%; very true and tender love for lover and friends, 1%. A stranger would doubt this, but you have known me and observed me for a long time. Surely you see how it is!”

  Tennessee Williams

  The word beautiful simply did not do her justice. She was quantum leaps beyond merely beautiful. Exquisite, perhaps: carried to the nth degree. She sat behind her desk and Romb hoped she wouldn’t stand up; he wasn’t at all sure he could handle an unobstructed view of her, full length. She was purely the most breathtaking human being he had ever seen. He thought she would look perfect standing on a pedestal in Thrace somewhere.

  “You’re staring, Mr. Romb,” she said. Gently. With amusement.

  He felt his face grow warm. He was in his thirties, very slick, good moves–and he wasn’t used to being embarrassed by women. It was usually the other way around. “Oh, excuse me, Doctor; I was thinking about what you said. Then it is possible?”

  “Oh, yes. It’s possible. It can be done. But it comes at a premium, of course.”

  “I expected as much,” Romb said. He had vague feelings of danger: contracts signed i
n blood, loss of immortal soul, less nameable tremblings. He wore tinted aviator glasses and his hair had been styled by an Italian. His suit had been purchased in Savile Row. “Just how much is the question.”

  “Ten percent of what you realize.”

  “I have no idea how much that might be.”

  “Payment deferred. I can wait. My patients are unfailingly grateful. I’ve never had to sue for collection.”

  “Patients? You’ve used these treatments before.”

  “Occasionally. When the circumstances have been, er, extraordinary, shall we say. A high degree of confidentiality is, of course, imperative.”

  He thought about that for a moment. Imperative was as inadequate as beautiful. He had come to the office of Dr. D’arqueAngel as a final act of desperation. He had heard whispers among a strange group of his acquaintances who were involved with witchcraft…a silly bunch of people, really, but on occasion he found them amusing. And they had been talking about her one evening at what they called their “coven,” though it was more like a social tea for over-age singles than a coven as he had read about such things. The whispers had been incomplete, hardly specific; but if what they said about her was accurate, she might be the answer to his nightmarish dilemma.

  Simply stated, it didn’t sound all that desperate:

  Charles Romb wanted to murder his wife.

  The actuality of the situation, however, was a quantum leap beyond desperate. Beyond nightmarish. It was, simply stated, a life sentence in a living Hell.

  “Mr. Romb?”

  He realized he had been staring again. These lapses into preoccupation had been coming more and more frequently. He had been staring into the middle distance, thinking about Sandra, thinking how monstrous his even being here seemed in retrospect. But he had come here, he was sitting across the Saarinen desk from her, and he had confided his desire…to a total stranger.

  An exquisite, disturbing stranger he had heard about only in whispers.