by Sladek, John
The women also pursue a hopeless path. Theda loves patient Glinda, a gracious Southern lady with a flair for entertaining, granddaughter of the governor of her state. Glinda married your reporter six years ago. They have no children.
Perhaps for this reason she is drawn to the youthful, robust Dolly Hand, who once danced for a living and can still kick high as a man’s eye. Her loves includes spinach, basketball, and Etta Peer Warner, the latter hopelessly. Etta allegedly remains true to her former love, the darkly beautiful, brawny brewmistress.
Although the hotel staff do their best to make everyone as comfortable as possible, they are prisoners and they know it. When, late in the afternoon a plane flies overhead, they all rush out to the beach to wave at it. Passing low, it seems to be flying on out of sight without noticing them. Then as it reaches the mainland, it begins to bank around, coming back for another pass.
Unfortunately it is too low for this manoeuvre. One wing brushes a treetop, and all at once the plane is a mass of flame, pinwheeling along through the forest. It explodes and settles, starting a forest fire on the mainland that rages all night, seen only by helpless witnesses on the island.
Book Four: Dolly
‘I am a drug addict. Do not pity me. I ask only for your understanding. This illness has been my secret for a long time. Too long…’
Thus begins Dolly’s amazing narrative. She gives the background of the persons present: addicts all. Dick, her Dicky-bird, was once addicted to cocaine stirred into cocoa, though now he lives on reserpine stirred into raspberry brandy.
Etta and Adrian mix thorazine and thiamine, laced with Meretran and Serutan. ‘Pothead’ Van Cook and Glinda move in a dream of Nembutal and Hadacol, Darvon and Ritalin, while Farmer Bill and Theda have long existed utterly without food, taking in only methedrine and methanol.
And of course Dolly herself. Having tried every drug in the vocabulary, she is currently experimenting, mixing drugs and liqueurs, such as benzedrine/Benedictine, such as dramamine/Drambuie … The night gets longer.
Why is it, she wonders, that everyone lies? Wish-fulfilment explains some of it. Van Cook pretended Farmer Bill loved him when the opposite was true. But why does he ignore Theda’s love for him? How can he ignore her attempted overdose-suicide? Can he keep claiming she just wanted to hog the horse?
Alas! If Theda could only love Glinda, things might be far different. Poor little Glinda, seven months’ PG, half blind from Sterno breakfasts, head-over-heels in love with Theda. She even offers to sit with little Ebo, while Theda takes her overdose.
Adrian, after twice being the object of sick Dick’s affections, now returns the favour, but too late. Dick has written a poem to his new love, Etta, comparing the sound of her horn to the clash of waves on the seventh level of his consciousness. Etta tries to use him to get at Dolly, who admits feeling only disgust for the little Serutan-head.
Words crowd in upon Dolly here. She never wanted to be an addict; they told her pot would help her march better, as she led the high school band. It was a lie.
Now she leaves her manuscript for a moment to try to caress Adrian, who is passing in the hall.
Now Adrian’s firm hand adds that he has smashed Dolly in the teeth with her steel baton. It is, he adds, manufactured by Farmer Bill’s corporation.
Book Five: Etta
As only she and her husband know, Etta is an endocrinologist. In clinically precise terms, she details the events of the fifth day.
Food and water are running low, and sanitary facilities are less than adequate. Etta has divided the remainder of the quinine and insect repellant, and rations it strictly. She tries to make do with a crude first-aid kit, treating Theda’s ear, Van’s eye and the lacerations on Dick’s face. Now a clumsy waiter spills crèpes suzettes on Farmer Bill’s lap, inflicting second-degree burns. Then there is Dolly’s mouth requiring dental tools Etta does not have, and Ebo develops diaper rash.
Moving about only before or after the midday heat, the men gather firewood for nightfall, as well as a few straight boards for splints. The women tear up sheets for bandages. It becomes increasingly hard to sterilize everything, especially in time to deliver Glinda’s stillborn child, but by working night and day, Etta manages somehow, and somehow manages to keep up her journal, too. Glinda is very weak and very ill. Only the hope of Theda’s returning her pitiful love keeps her alive. Etta makes Theda be nice to Glinda.
What a strange thing a woman’s friendship is, Etta thinks. Like the love of a leopard, it is wild, shy and a little hurtful. She means not only Glinda’s love for Theda but her own love for Dolly, who seems to be, poor silly bitch, in love with her own husband.
But are the males less fickle? Today Adrian spurns the love of Dick Hand as resolutely as yesterday he sought it. Dick chases him from copse to copse as they gather fuel. Adrian expresses his concern about Glinda.
‘I don’t care whose child it is,’ he says hoarsely. ‘I’ll marry her, if she’ll have me.’
But Glinda loves Theda, who loves her husband Farmer Bill fiercely. Now Farmer Bill brings in Van Cook, who has collapsed with sunstroke, and there is a new tenderness in the industrialist’s eye as he gazes on the stricken man. Ah, what strange things are our endocrines.
Van Cook whispers in his delirium one name over and over: ‘Etta!’
Book Six: Farmer
In tough, short sentences, Bill spells it out. He loves Etta. No one else. Others may have time to mess around. Not Bill. He knows what he wants, now, after a lifetime of banging around from one job to another. He wants to paint.
Some say it takes guts to do this, to scrap your life and start all over. It doesn’t. A man does what he has to do, that’s all. Bill has to paint.
It’s like breathing. From the chest. Where the heart is. If a man goes wrong, he might as well rip out his heart and smash it. Bill paints, and it’s right.
He wants to paint Etta nude, maybe in fresco ten stories high, the way he feels about her. What she has doesn’t need a name.
But Etta has a lesbo hang-up with the Southern girl, Gilda, who is mooning over Dolly the Dyke. It’s enough to make a real man puke.
Doll is meanwhile gone on her own freaky husband, tricky Dicky. But he as usual has eyes for a man, Van Cook. If you can call him a man, the way he simpers at Adrian Warner.
At least Adrian has real balls. He’s hung on Theda, your narrator’s wife. The original castrating bitch. She’d like to castrate Bill, and keep him from painting. So he couldn’t paint Etta nude. Theda admits as much.
She admits loving Bill.
Book Seven: Glinda-girl.
Because it don’t matter what Her sisters thought of Her that time in Billy Framer’s dirty-green roadster out back of the feed sump, everyone seems like they’re dying and the afternoons so still you could hear the town bumblebee clear down to the Metro. At the Rich Hand place they got someone’s guts strung out hanging all over a tree at Xmas like firehose because Theda means death you know some folks don’t like Cookie what he done to Dolly’s nipples with the broken Agri-cola bottle was real mean even if she loves him and what father don’t but Cookie’s a idiot certified by Doc Sam H. Smith. She wishes it was Rich Hand in that car not Billy though he’s a hunchback too he at least has one pretty blue eye like Etta’s dress and loafers made of human skin Rich likes Dolly because she’s his son, that’s why he raped her with the dove-handle.
Because Etta means teat She wishes Her sister Etta had gone ahead and hatched out that baby inside of her so that She could play with it but it was by Adrian, their son from that winter when they were so poor there wasn’t nothing to burn in the stove but dried snot Etra wants to be nice and flat for Billy. The rats ate his toes off that same winter and Theda the woman with no jaw she’s got hair on her chest Adrian says he should know he’s her mother but she wants him for some reason he only liked Theda whipping her with his saw again last winter the Doc took off her arm up to the elbow and Reverend Bregs said to thank God for what’
s left only this year they took off the rest of it Theda says it’s time to stop being thankful she lost it the time Adrian’s pig hospital burned to the ground the same night he asked Etta to marry him he still loves her like a brother but she wants Billy to touch her again with his double finger he’s all fat and greasy She can see why Etta don’t want him no more but Theda does still.
Because She loves Rich Hand even helping him dig his mother’s body up to make sure about the rings and something had eaten the fingers She laughed till She split but no one loves Her but Cookie all covered with sores from sand fights and can’t move his armpit since the railroad flood he says he never hanged a baby before.
Book Eight: Dick: Epilogue.
Much has happened since that fateful vacation. After their rescue these eight characters part and go each his own way in search of a story. Dick Hand keeps track of them, however:
He has stopped loving Dolly and divorced her so that he could be with Adrian. Unable to bear this, Dolly has travelled to the tropics where she witnesses an unusual savage torture, organic crucifixion. She settles on this as her mode of suicide, and employs expert savage torturers to help her. First a yab-yab, or needlewood tree of the proper height and shape is selected. Four of its spiny limbs are severed, and to their stumps the natives securely bind Dolly’s hands and feet. In the fast-growing tropics, the limbs mature again in a matter of hours, piercing her extremities. To torture Dick, Dolly records every minutes of her seven-hour agony on the tape, and arranges for it to be mailed to him.
Etta meanwhile has left Adrian and is actually on the train going to live with Dolly when she hears over the radio of the former drum majorette’s tragic death. Petrified with horror and grief, Etta descends from the train at once, in the city where by chance Adrian lives.
Adrian has just received a long mash note from Dick, which so depresses him that he goes to the train station, with the half-idea of throwing himself before a train. But he sees Etta and falls in love with her all over again.
It is, alas, too late. In vain does Adrian take Etta to the basement of Piedmont Tower, his architectural triumph, and in vain does he explain the concrete truss. Etta seems like a zombie.
Still she must somehow absorb part of his lecture on super-stressed concrete, the circular cantilever, the ‘primum mobile’ principle, etc., for later that night she returns to Piedmont Tower alone, with an acetylene torch. The watchman, having seen her in the company of the architect, suspects nothing as he lets her into the basement once again.
There she straps herself to one of the huge concrete beams – so like a bent bow – and cuts through the restraining steel support! The beam straightens suddenly, and as Piedmont Tower splits apart from top to bottom, she is flung one hundred thirty stories into the air – to fall impaled on the United Pin Company’s giant sign.
Adrian learns of her death that night. He at once books passage on the liner Henkersmahl, his hold luggage two steamer trunks. One is filled wit nitric acid in a delicate glass envelope; the other with plastic explosives, pickled in turpentine. He supervises their loading to make sure they are placed next to each other. The process of loading naturally breaks the glass envelope, and it will take exactly seventy-two hours for the nitric add to eat its way out through the thick metal of the trunk.
The second night of its voyage, the Henkersmahl sends out a call for help. ‘Some madman’ has poured gasoline into the lifeboats and set them afire. The ship is saved only by casting all lifeboats adrift. Only one ship, the Vivisectress, hears the call for help. It is too far away to alter course, just for the loan of a lifeboat or two, though it wishes the Henkersmahl well.
The following night a flaming explosion tears out the bottom and sets the ship afire. Blazing oil coats the water all about. The lifejackets are discovered to be soaked with fuel oil. It is suicide to enter the water wearing one.
Adrian seizes the ship’s wireless to explain to the world his crime: suicide.
‘The cut wrist, the gas oven were not sure enough,’ he shouts, over the screams of old people and children. ‘We all know how the life-principle thwarts our pitiful suicide attempts. I had to leave myself no escape at all …’
The transmission ends.
Theda has gone to work in a beauty parlour, where she soon falls into the hands of a vicious lesbian white slave ring. After contributing several articles to men’s magazines (‘Passion Darlings of the Hell Camp for Lesbians’; ‘Chained Virgins for the Half-Beast Women’; ‘I Was a Love Slave to the Handmaidens of Horror’; ‘I Was Possessed by the Harpies from Hell’; ‘TRAPPED! – by Sex-Amazons of the Queen of Slaughter!’) she quietly succumbs, dildoed to death in an alley off a fashionable street.
At the other end of the city in the bohemian district lives her husband, Farmer Bill. No longer a foundry executive, he has become a starving frescoist. He loves Glinda, who has long since returned to her birthplace in the South. Now working as a group therapist in an exclusive brothel, Glinda cares only for her dashing husband, Van Cook.
Van, seeking still to impress Theda with his bravery, has quit his newspaper job and become a hot pilot, a cropduster. He limits his writing to a novel about this new life, THE CROPDUSTERS. (‘The story of those happy-go-lucky flyboys who daily face death over Nebraska, to combat the Third Horseman, Pestilence. The story of the planes they fly, the lives they live, the women they love.’) But this dangerous, manly occupation does not advance him in Theda’s favour at all; she loves Farmer Bill. When Van Cook hears of her death, he sends off a suicide telegram to Dick, then crashes his plane, a Mr Mulligan, into the corn.
Glinda, unable to endure life without her man, enters a pie-eating contest in the hope of exploding the walls of her intestines. She does not succeed. Having won the contest by consuming thirty-four apricot pies, she is rushed off to the hospital to have her stomach pumped.
Here kind Fate aids her suicide plan. In this ever-summery Southern city the hospital is located in a veritable forest of honeysuckle, rambling rose and lilac. This summer evening the windows of the pumping room are open for coolness, and the sweet scent drifts in. Glinda is unable to speak, so the attendants assume she is a pill suicide attempt. They strap her down, gag her throat open with a plastic funnel and slide the pump tube down to her stomach. Soon a swarm of honeybees, attracted from their murmurous haunts by the smell of pumped apricots, streams into the room.
Glinda lies helpless as the bees chase her attendants away, then enter this curious red flower, hot on the scent of fetid apricot jam. Her death agonies, Dick speculates in what is for him an unusual moment of subjectivity, must have been excruciating.
When Farmer Bill learns of the death of his beloved, he behaves stoically, determined to transmute his feelings into art. He begins a giant, three-storey fresco called Gilda.
Dick explains here that this is his suicide note. He cannot go on without Adrian, and so has already made ample preparation for his own death:
Having acquired a considerable fortune through investments in horticultural enterprises, Dick Hand has been able to purchase control of the government of a small African nation. Carefully he sows the seed of revolt here, employing men expert in such matters to (1) rouse the populace to acts of rebellion, and (2) persuade the government to take ever-stricter reprisals (decimations, unbearably heavy taxes, compulsory military service for the aged and unfit, curfews in effect at strange hours of the day, fines for drinking water, etc.).
The head of state, President Rudy Bung, is so terrified of his own people that he is forever incognito, wearing a black stocking over his head and giving his speeches falsetto. Having made sure the revolution will succeed, Dick secretly spirits away Rudy Bung, kills him and assumes his identity. Alone in the presidential office, Dick is killed at once by the insurgents and – as he had hoped and planned – unspeakable things are done to his corpse.
This last story is a news clipping, of course. In the next column is an item about the collapse of a large wall; the frescoist Fa
rmer Bill is crushed under seventy tons of wet plaster.
The End
The above ending was rejected by the publisher as ‘too downbeat’. Accordingly the author wrote the following ending, which the publisher accepted:
Book Eight: Dick: Epilogue.
Much has happened since that fateful vacation. After their rescue these eight characters part and go each his own way in search of a story. Dick Hand keeps track of them, however:
Adrian and Etta decide to face squarely and together the problem of his drinking. She works as a movie extra to raise the money for his psychiatrist. Adrian is fiddling with a brilliant new design for a bomb shelter, the ‘clamshell womb’. It has the unique feature of being located well above the blast area, on a tower several miles high. A world-renowned architect, now crippled with age, comes as a humble student to study and admire Adrian’s design. Etta gets a starring role, which she declines. Being Adrian’s wife, she says, is fame enough for any gal!
Glinda and Van Cook are drifting apart, as he gives up his job with the paper and becomes a pilot, seeding clouds. But after all their differences, after the failure of a dozen ministers and marriage counsellors, they are at last reunited by the smallest imaginable of marriage counsellors, a gentleman only five pounds three ounces in weight – Van Jr. Van begins work on a novel about his work, THE RAINMAKERS. He flies his GeeBee racer seldom and with great care – now that he has so much love to come home to.
Theda has become a beautician, Mr Theda, famous on three continents. She has not seen Bill for seventeen years. One day he comes to the beauty parlour dressed in old clothes, his beard rough, his hair a mess, crushing his old hat in hands with broken nails and cracked cuticles. He wants another chance to prove his love for her. Theda means to order him to leave, but she sees tears in his eyes. The sight makes tears spring to her own, and one of her contact lenses is washed out. As they crawl around looking for it, they touch hands …