Slippage: Previously Uncollected, Precariously Poised Stories

by Harlan Ellison

  Slippage

  The Harlan Ellison Collection

  Harlan Ellison

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  What are three euphemisms for "museum" in Swedish; what is the most efficacious getaway route by highway from New Orleans; at what depth does nitrogen narcosis take full effect; how does an inmate of an Alabama prison dress and of what are the soles of his shoes made; who said "Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius"; can you name a lost Chinese dialect for me?

  The frenzied call for information at three in the morning; the idle remark that sparks the concept; a well-intentioned push toward completion of a stranded story; an odd request for a certain sort of narrative; medical attention that kept the heart breathing, or abated the fierce itching from shingles while writing in a public bookstore window; a painting that inspired an entire story; years of unquestioning friendship. If the list seems inordinately or insolently long, let it be noted that with any brevity it would not serve the holy purpose of keeping the Author's hubris in check, would not serve as reminder that none of us can do it without help. The list is long. The assistance was invaluable.

  SAMUEL JOHNSON: "Knowledge is of two kinds.

  We know a subject ourselves,

  or we know where we can find information."

  Neal Adams; the executive committee of Albacon 1985 (Glasgow, Scotland); the late Isaac Asimov; Kyle Baker; Steve Barnes; Doug Beauchamp; Jill Bauman; Anina Bennett; the late Alfred Bester; John Betancourt; the late Robert Bloch; the staff of Bookstar, French Quarter, New Orleans; Alan Brennert; Ron Brown; Edward W. Bryant Jr.; Sharon Buck; Octavia Estelle Butler; Tony Caputo; Paul Chadwick; Bob Chapman; Mel (Melony) Clark; Robert Crais; Jim Crocker; Pete Crowther; Janet Cruickshank; Ellen Datlow; Keith DeCandido; Phil DeGuere; O'Neil De Noux; Leo & Diane Dillon; Kathryn Drennan; Susan Ellison; Peter R. Emshwiller; Louise Erdrich; Arnie Fenner; Keith Ferrell; Richard Finkelstein, Director, Bureau of Client Fraud Investigation: New York Human Resources Administration; Gary Frank, Lisa K. Buchanan & the staff of The Booksmith, San Francisco; the manufacturers of SssstingStop & Alpha Eczema; Lazar Friedman of Lazar's Luggage; Dan Fox; Dr. Richard Fuchs; H.R. Giger; Stephen Hickman; Tony Hillerman; the late Mike Hodel; John Henri & Evastina Holmberg; Rich Howell; Chris Hudak; International Hard Suit; the late Shirley Jackson; Warden Charlie Jones of Holman Prison in Atmore, Alabama; Samanda b. Jeudfi; Katrina Kenison; Patrick Ketchum, former President, Cyberdreams; Robert Killheffer; Tappan King; Tim Kirk; Gary Klotz; Ed Kramer; Mark Kreighbaum; Stan Tymorek & Al Shackelford of the land's End catalog; Ron Lee; Robert Lerose; Barry R. Levin; David Loftus; Rod Heather; Sean O'Leary & Joe Martucci of Lore magazine; Mike Lowrey; Alan Luck; Jane MacKenzie; Guy McLimore; Robert Mace Kass, M.D,; Steven W. Tabak, M.D.; Ronald P. Karlsberg, M.D.; John David Romm, M.D.; Morris Middleton; Frank Miller; Rockne S. O'Bannon; Omni Group Cruises, Inc. & the ship Regal Princess of Princess Cruises; Kent Orlando; Chris Owens; Byron Preiss; John Radziewicz; Sam Raffa; Chris Reynolds; Frank P. Reynolds; Susan West Richardson; Joe Roberdeau; Ellen Rosenberg; William Rotsler; Kristine Kathryn Rusch; the late Carl Sandburg; Tracy K. Saritzky; Bob Schreck; Diana Schutz; Bruce Scott, Producer, National Public Radio Cultural Programming; Hannah Louise Shearer; Robert Silverberg; Dean Wesley Smith; John Snowden; Ken Steacy; Allen Steele; Joe Straczynski; Jonathan Strahan, Jeremy G. Byrne & the editorial committee of Eidolon (Australia); the late Eleanor Sullivan of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine; Leslie Kay Swigart; Avon Swofford; Jenna Terry; Larry Teufner; Robert Tidwell; Michael Toman; the very late Mark Twain; David L. Ulin; the very late Jules Verne; Thomas Vitale; Bill Warren; Lauren Weiss, Deputy District Attorney, Los Angeles; Donald E. Westlake; Michael Whelan; Charlie Williams; Robin Williams; Terri Windling; Jann Woosley; William F. Wu; Rick Wyatt; Mark & Cindy Ziesing.

  With the late Cyril Connolly ("England's most influential and controversial literary critic"), I used to believe, though in an antic sense:

  "We are all serving a terminal sentence in the dungeon of life."

  Then I married Susan.

  This book is for her.

  "You must not mind me, madam:

  I say strange things, but I mean no harm."

  Samuel Johnson

  (1709—1784)

  Photograph by Michael Amedolia / Australia

  The Fault In My Lines

  Introduction

  Where to open the fissure: the earthquake or the heart attack?

  The earthquake. It is officially listed as a 6.8-magnitude temblor by the U.S. Geological Survey's geophysicists at the Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colorado.

  The Northridge, California "thruster." It hit at precisely, exactly, 4:31 a.m. on Monday the 17th of January 1994. It had been a pretty lousy year through the 16th, and 1993 hadn't been too cuddly, either. Let us not even talk about '92.

  But as rusty as those first sixteen days of the new year had been, they were nothing but sunny days on the beaches of Ibiza by comparison to 4:31 in the dead black morning of January 17th.

  First, there was the sound of it. Oh, yeah, trust me on this: first, you hear it coming. You don't know that's what the hell you're hearing, but you catch the sound of it hurtling toward you before your bones and back teeth pick it up.

  Let me try to tell you what it sounds like.

  Because just the sound of it can scare your hair white, (Mine started to fall out in the months following.)

  The unimaginative say it sounds like a train coming toward you. Bullshit. Nothing like a train. I used to ride the freights, like a bindlestiff, when I was a kid. Trains have a decent sound to them. A good sound. Tough, but willing to accommodate you. This damned thruster had absolutely nothing in common with a train. Then there are those whose best analogy is, "It was a deep rumbling noise." Yer ass. A deep rumbling noise is what you get out of your stomach when you've had too many baby-backs and hot links. A cranky bear makes a deep rumbling sound. The radiator. The water pipes trying to carry the load. Krusty the Klown makes a deep rumbling noise. I'll tell you precisely what that muther sounded like:

  Ever see one of those Japanese samurai movies featuring the masterless ronin who travels around with his baby son in a wooden cart that rolls on big wooden wheels? The Lone Wolf and Cub films? What they call the "baby cart" series?

  Okay, then: are you familiar with "corduroy roads"? They were common and plentiful in this country up until about forty years ago. Mostly, you could find them in backwoods or rural areas, where dirt roads were still in use, macadam hadn't made its inroads, superhighways were distant myths, and country roads were used for hauling heavy loads. So, to make them capable of supporting the weight of a tractor pulling a backhoe, or a fully loaded hay wagon, logs were laid transversely, producing a kind of ribbed look—something like those speed bumps in parking lots that make you slow down—and the buried logs gave the dirt road the topographical surface of the cotten cloth we call corduroy.

  When you drove down such a road, there was a metronomic bump-bump-bump sound. I'm trying to be specific here, trying to describe the indescribable. Explain the color red to someone blind from birth.

  What it sounded like was this: a gigantic wooden-wheeled baby cart, as big as a mountain, bump-bump-bumping down a corduroy road. Underneath you. Deep underneath you.

  I was awake at that hour. I was upstairs here in my office, working. On the second floor of the office wing I designed and had built some years ago. Walls floor-to-ceiling filled with reference and non-fiction books I might need when working, arranged alphabetically by subject. Several thousand books, mostly hardcovers. And an open central atrium that look
s down on the first floor of the office wing. And my desk and typewriter over here next to the French doors that give onto the balcony and a view of the San Bernardino Mountains thirty-seven miles away across the San Fernando Valley. My office looks out due north toward those mountains.

  At 4:31 in the morning, the thruster zazzed laterally across the Valley floor, west to south, reached the foot of the Santa Monica Mountains (at the top of which my home sits)...and had nowhere to go but up.

  (Pause. Know-nothings who live in parts of the country where they endure sub-zero weather, tornados, floods, killing pollution, drought, blight, sand storms, provincial bigotry, ultraconservative censorship, hurricanes or Jesse Helms, have been known to remark, "How can anyone bear living in Southern California with all those earthquakes? They must be really stupid not to flee the state!"

  (And go where?

  (It's the same everywhichplace these days, folks. New Orleans or Pittsburgh; Kankakee or Kansas; Eugene, Oregon or Oklahoma City. If the twister don't get you, the rabid militia will.

  (L.A. is okay. I like it here. But I'm no dope. Long before the thruster, I had hired both seismic engineers and structural experts, as well as soil analysts, to tell me how safe I was here on the crest of the North Benedict Canyon slope. Core drilling had been done, and I was heartened to learn that the house sat solidly, a mere five feet above bedrock. Of even more salutary note was the advisement that not only was the house secure just five feet above bedrock, but the seam ran north-south, in line with the house. Meaning: not even the worst of the "rolling" temblors we knew so well in Southern California could trouble me overmuch. If the rolling came, it would not affect the solid cut under me. I was sanguine. And when the Landers quake hit a few years ago, I barely felt it, despite all the serious damage done in other nearby areas. I was sanguine. "The only way you're going to be in any trouble," said an engineer from the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena—a reader of my work who had offered to bring in some ground-testing equipment as a favor—"any trouble at all, is if the whole damned mountain collapses." I was sanguine.)

  The fault line came diagonally across the Valley, got to the base of the mountains, had nowhere to go...so it went up.

  The house was lifted with a 4g thrust. It takes only 6 gravs to throw a rocket to the moon.

  I heard it coming, and I bolted from my typing chair, and got across the office to the deco stairwell before the first wave hit. The house, and everything in it, went straight up. I was lifted off my feet and thrown across the stairwell, crashing face-first against the south wall of the second-floor landing. The right side of my face smashed into a framed photo of the blind Borges in Baltimore in 1983, sitting at the foot of the memorial to Edgar Allan Poe, running his fingers over the bronze commemorative plaque, paying homage, one great fantasist to another. I hit it so hard it shattered the glass and broke the frame.

  Then I was thrown sidewise, as the second wave struck. Thrown left down the winding deco staircase—everything now in pitch darkness—all electricity had gone out across the city—and bent double over the pony wall, cracking my forehead on the leading edge of a Lucite shelf holding pewter figurines of The Ten Greatest Inventions of History.

  And then the main torque hit.

  I was picked up and thrown forward, never touching the final flight of steps from the lower landing to the first floor. I was picked up and flipped heels-over-head to land flat on my back, missing the edge of the pool table by perhaps two inches. If I had been two inches to the right, it would have blasted open my skull; nothing less than a human omelette.

  But before I could rise, off the wall to my left, a heavy painting slightly larger than 3'x3' wrenched itself off its hanger, and crashed down on me.

  (Pause: charming little ironies of near-death experiences. The painting is a surreal rendering of a large stone mausoleum with ominous faces perceivable in the walls. It sits on a hill under a dark blue, threatening sky. Carved into the lintel of the building is the legend 6000 SA MO BL. The painting is called "Six thousand, same old bull." The irony is that 6000 SA MO BL is an abbreviation for 6000 Santa Monica Boulevard, the location of the cemetery crypt and mausoleum in Los Angeles where, among others, Al Jolson is buried. The painting weighs a ton. Well, that's figuratively speaking. It's heavy, because it has a double pane of glass on it—the second pane having stars painted on the inside surface, thus giving a very deep-dimensional look to the already eerie landscape—and when 6000 SA MO BL ripped loose, it plummeted and hit me full in the face, breaking my nose, blacking both my eyes, ripping open gashes in my face.) Knocking me unconscious.

  Not for long, I guess. It was dark, the earth was still growling, I was woozy—maybe a concussion already, I don't know—and even if there had been light, I couldn't have seen anything. Too much blood in my eyes.

  I started to pull myself to my feet, using the edge of the pool table, when the next wave struck; and this time it threw every book on the upper level out of the bookcases, hurled them over the railing, and down on me in the open space below the atrium. I was struck by hundreds of reference books, knocked to my knees, and then clobbered unconscious for the second time.

  Everything after that, for two years, was recovery, rebuilding, and lamenting the loss of art and possessions I'd spent a lifetime gathering. No need to dwell on it, I've conveyed the part that's pertinent to this book. So now we can move on to the heart attack.

  I had a free ride for fifty-nine years. Ran my body as if it were a PT boat skimming across enemy waters, explosions at every zig and zag. Went where I wanted to go, got involved with whomever I chose, ate everything with disregard for the consequences, fought fights, risked my life, played it fast and loose. Created stories and had one helluva good time.

  "We are all serving a life-sentence

  in the dungeon of self."

  Cyril Connolly

  Not I! For my part, it was the unheeding belief that I would live forever. I'd almost been splattered half a dozen times in different ways—on sports car racetracks, in riots, during civil rights marches in the South, in street brawls—but each time my indefatigable ability to walk the rubber band high across the Grand Canyon manifested itself; and I skimmed on across that bullet-stitched beachhead horizon as if I lived the life charmed. Skimmed along, mixing metaphors and gorging on fried chicken.

  Then in 1992, I got chest pains.

  I was in San Francisco, doing a signing, when I tried to climb one of those fabled hills. Found myself sitting on the curb with the defensive line of the Dallas Cowboys playing johnny-on-a-pony on my chest, and each of them wearing full battle armor.

  Let me explain something you need to know. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but one day you'll be in a place and at a weight where this little bit of data will light up like Times Square neon in your mind. And you'll thank me. Just before they take you off in the ambulance. And here it is, this piece of data:

  It is not like in the movies, where Clark Kent's adoptive father (played by Glenn Ford) suddenly clutches his left arm, winces, and collapses. What it's more like, please try to remember this, is a tension that runs from one side of your chest to the other. At first you think it's indigestion, and it'll pass in a few seconds. Then the pain gets more intense, and you lie down and put your legs up so the heart doesn't have to work so hard pumping blood to all those far lands, but the tension continues. And what is happening to you, is that you've been operating for years with a 90% blockage of the right coronary artery, and you didn't know it, and at last all that pizza and Lawry's prime rib with extra helpings of Yorkshire pudding and creamed horseradish have caught up with you, and you are in deep deep chaos, my friend.

  So. We got me back to L.A. and I went into Cedars-Sinai and they did an angiogram, and saw my 90% blockage, and they did an angioplasty ream-out job on me; and that was in June; and it closed down in August; and back I went; and they did another angioplasty. And I went back to a life of endless deadlines, constant faxes and phone calls telling me I was lat
e with this or that piece of writing, the organized efforts of a quartet of vicious, envious creeps to maim my life and/or my reputation, pressure upon pressure, and I slipped back into the routine I'd come to endure for most of my adult life.

  (Pause. Harriet Martineau, the British writer and journalist, wrote, in 1837, "Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare." Every writer—particularly these days when it's so hard to keep a writing career afloat against the electronic tsunami of the Internet and television and non-books featuring performers in the OJ Simpson circus—needs and values readers. Without them, it all comes to a halt.

  (But there is an aspect of the reader gestalt that is not only troubling, it's terrifying. Not all, but some, of one's readers become obsessive and act as if a writer is denying them their mainline fix if they don't get a new book when they want it. No matter that one has more than sixty other books they can enjoy...they want the next one. And they demand it! They write and complain, as if the writing and publishing of a book were akin to daily milk delivery. It creates in the writer a tension that becomes unbearable, that can even freeze the book in its progress toward publication.

  (The assumption that a new book, not yet published, is already the property of the reader because he or she desires it, is a part of the job they never warned against when you were young and naive and starting out. They never warn you about the gravitic pull of the impertinent, intrusive, hungry audience. And there is no escaping the grip of that 6g pull. We need readers. And so, the produced by-product is tension.)

  I went back to the old routine, and though I had some pains and pressures for the next four years, I still knew I was immortal; and I kept postponing the exercise and the vacation and the easing off. I worked every day, many nights, with the phone and the fax and the FedEx packages filling every waking moment.