Frances. Frances Griffith was her name.
But Arthur went on looking at himself, inside and out, and felt for the first time inadequate.
He was ashamed, for instance, of his curl. It was mannered, it was artificial. She would see through it. He wet his comb and combed it out.
He looked less handsome, but more Real.
I’m Me, he thought. It would be foolishness to try to offer her anything else.
Except the mushrooms.
Yes, that would be the one really original thing, the one thing Arthur alone could offer.
The proper mushroom.
He stayed up all night, leafing through his notebooks, thinking there must be some he had forgotten, though he knew them all by heart.
There were none, of course. Except a variety of Stropharia he had whose spores he was momentarily expecting to germinate. He strode over and turned on the mic lamp in the damp, cold little room which was his laboratory. Nothing yet. It chilled him a little, as it always did, to see in what wretched circumstances his dreams must incubate. He checked the temperature and humidity and switched off the light.
There had been the Collybia in Nicaragua, of course. Arthur had been in a cautious phase then, having recently been poisoned with a Boletus laricis, but they had stayed in his mind and he had a feeling . . .
Arthur paced his apartment, scratching his hand across his emerging beard, blowing faint whistles of air through his teeth.
He was possessed with excitement, both physical and metaphysical.
Because it shows something, that Frances should exist at all. That she should answer, down to the smallest detail, a description which he had not known was in his mind. But which must have been there all along. Otherwise he would not have recognized her so immediately and so intensely.
And so, therefore, must the mushroom exist, whose dream would be the dream Frances. So that she would have two existences, one in reality and one in unreality, each as real as the other and together constituting Arthur’s ideal. And thus making a solid link between the inside of Arthur’s mind (which he sometimes worried about) and the outside world (whose existence he was sometimes unsure of).
There was not a thing wrong with either Arthur s theories or his conclusions.
The only thing he had not consciously noticed was that what Frances really looked like—blond and alabaster of skin and boneless and fatless of body—was an Amanita solitaria.
But it is certainly not fair to go poking uninvited into Arthurs unconscious, and one has no reason to link this up with later events. And if Robert Burns’ love could be like a red, red rose, why should anyone find it queer that Arthur’s love was like a white, white mushroom? (Except that Arthur didn’t make the connection.)
Arthur knew he needed a warm shower and a nap, having had no sleep at all and not being young enough not to show it. But sleep was out of the question and a warm shower did not seem the thing at the moment.
So he had a cold shower and shaved and drank a cup of coffee improved with brandy and went to see Frances.
Even if she weren’t home, he could begin to become familiar with her natural habitat.
The street Betty Rankin had written down was respectable enough at the south end. But Frances lived at the north end.
And as Arthur watched for the 900 block, he began to feel a little unsettled inside. For this was almost a slum. Rows of houses, once splendid, now rooming houses bursting at the seams with the poor, the derelict, the hopeless, and somewhere in there a few families about to climb out of it all.
But where, in all that, a place for Frances?
Griffith. He looked for cards at the entrance, but there was nothing to betray the inhabitants of 902 Elm Street. Children spilled across his feet, babies in drooping diapers bumping down the steps, headed for the curb.
“I’m looking for Miss Frances Griffith,” he asked an older child, who should have been in school.
The boy leered, asked for a cigarette, led the way through a hall that reeked of stale people, up two flights of stairs, stopped before a peeling, dark green door and yelled, “Francie!” at the top of his voice.
Then he held out two fingers for another cigarette and left.
Arthur didn’t smoke but he always carried cigarettes and a lighter. Women loved this kind of foresight. Arthur was irritated when he discovered he’d done this for Frances. It was part of the charm he’d been accumulating for several decades and he didn’t intend to use it on Frances. He wanted to strip himself bare for her.
He stood sweating nervously before that unpropituous looking door, forcing himself not to think of charming things to say to Frances.
He wanted to be unprepared. But he needn’t have worried.
Frances opened the door. She was brilliantly glaucous in an evanescent negligee with a striate margin and she opened the door only far enough to extrude a dark, heavy man dressed in striped coveralls and a mechanics cap.
It was Frances who began the conversation.
“Next,” she said.
Arthur married her anyway.
That is, in spite of her and her family’s objections. They felt she had quite a career in front of her (as indeed she would have) and nobody could see any advantages in Arthur.
She was, however, easily led and subject to drugs and Arthur managed the legalities with no trouble. The reason he married her was so he could keep her locked in his apartment. This was absolutely necessary as she had a strong tendency to wander off toward any man that went by, and her old boy friends were always trying to look her up.
And what he planned to do in no way impaired her domestic abilities, as she only had two domestic abilities, the other one being a talent for standing around holding trays of hors d’oeuvres. There was a maid to do the housework.
Still, there was no denying the initial disappointment that came to Arthur when he found her conversation was limited to “Yeah,” and “who cares” and “not on your life.” He could overlook her morals, but the stupiditity was more difficult.
There remained the hope, for a while, that she was educable. But there were insurmountable difficulties. For one thing, she was very nearsighted. This gave her eyes a distant, enchanted quality, but it also enabled her to say with truth she couldn’t see the letters on the page. “Not on your life,” she said when faced with a book. Also she was completely intractable. “So you want me to look at the pictures,” she’d say, not looking. Mostly she slept and changed clothes. She didn’t even spend much time putting on make up, because she didn’t need it.
What she was, Arthur soon realized, was a pale reflection of a reality that existed in a hallucination he had not yet had. She was, in another sense, a shadow in the cave. And further Arthur (who never hesitated to mix his literary allusions) began to feel like the Lady of Shallot. He was half sick of shadows and he was ready to look down to Camelot. Only he didn’t expect any curse to come upon him (any more than Plato would. It took a Romantic to think up that part.)
You see, Arthur, in searching for simple ideals, the perfect woman, the perfect hallucinogenic mushroom, inadvertantly stumbled on the secret of the universe, which had eluded scientists and philosophers all these centuries. The secret of the universe is that the world isn’t real. This was indisputably proved by Frances, whose unreality was unquestionable. Obviously no Deity, no élan vital would create something like die objective Frances. On the other hand, one has to account for her, and this is best done by assuming that Arthur is God (it grates at first, but see how well it works out). Thus he can recognize this odd manifestation of Frances as a corner of reality sticking into this swirling dream of matter which we have all agreed to call “reality.”
Which leaves Arthur to explore the actual reality which he has already created but from which he had been diverted by things like being born and living and what not.
That is what mushrooms are for.
And Arthur was the only person in the world who combined expert botanical knowledge with a native talent for
understanding and absorbing hallucinogenic mushrooms. Talent plus hard work, that’s what makes an outstanding artist, such as Arthur, or God.
The Stropharia Arthur had been working on when he met Frances wouldn’t do at all. It was not even hallucinogenic, though he had crossed it with a mutated strain of Psilocybe mexicana.
He had therefore to fly to Nicaragua for the Collybia tuberosa and when he got back Frances was gone. Fortunately, she didn’t have enough sense to go far, and he found her back at 902 Elm St. and had to stand in line for an hour outside her door, so as not to make a public scene.
“Get lost,” she told him, when his turn came. But he then and there fed her the Nicaraguan variety of Collybia tuberosa and then was in a fever to get home and try the new mushroom himself.
He’d been right. This was It.
Now, this might have been the end of the story, except that the objective Frances continued to be so much trouble when the effects of the Collybia wore off.
And furthermore, she became less and less attractive, by herself.
Having achieved so much, Arthur had a brilliant idea, to perfect Frances.
Why should not Frances and her mushroom become symbiotic on each other, as in the case of lichen, especially since they had a natural affinity?
Why not, as a matter of fact, grow this Collybia inside of Frances, thereby rendering her permanently happy, her chemistry improved by the exudations of the fungus, and the fungus in turn nourished by Frances’ body Cor even, perhaps, her mind)?
This was not as impossible as it may at first sound to the layman, or even to the scientist. Bacteria and mushrooms are both fungi. Both reproduce sexually, which means they can be bred for certain characteristics. (The theory that bacteria can reproduce sexually is in no way invalidated by the fact that it is only recently proven.)
There is much that is not understood about the relationships or possible relationships between fungi and people, since medicine and mycology are two different specialties, and physicians and mycologists do not always agree about what is a fungus.
Arthur therefore had a field pretty much uncluttered by previous experimentation and since he knew exactly what he wanted to do, he could go pretty much in a straight line.
(It is a curious psychological fact that Arthur did not spend any time wondering what Frances’ vision was under hallucination. He merely assumed, as he was God, that it was the same as his.)
It took Arthur a year to breed Francesa arthura, which will not be found in the C. M. I. for obvious reasons.
During this time it had been necessary for Arthur to make a few changes in his way of life. There were Frances’ ex-boy friends who were a constant nuisance. Arthur had no compunction about giving Frances drugs, but he couldn’t well keep her asleep twenty-four hours a day and he didn’t want to over use anything from his mushroom pharmacary. The chemistry of hallucinogenic mushrooms is ill understood, even by Arthur, and he did not want to take a chance on building up possible toxic reactions, or causing possible neurological changes, until he had the Francesa arthura ready.
So he bought a cabin in the Ozarks. He had it equipped with all the modern conveniences except a paved road (it was necessary to bump over a pasture and up a wodded slope to get to it. Only his little foreign car could weave between the trees, and even so, one had to know which trees.) He hired two idiot boys from one of the neighboring farms, two miles away, and bought a razor back hog, planning to indulge an old dream of raising truffles, which ordinarily are impossible to raise in America. (This is worthy of mention because it shows that Arthur was not a monomaniac. It is true that his zeal in regard to Frances implies a perhaps unusual degree of uxoriousness. But he maintained other interests, too.)
Once installed, Arthur proceeded with the breeding of Francesa arthura with almost daily success. He crossed the Collybia tuberosa with a Mexican variety and achieved a mushroom that could survive an Arkansas summer. (A generation of mushrooms requires several days.) He then crossed it with a small Daectelea from Cade’s Cove. Meanwhile he was working upward with the largest B. Coli he could find, through filaments of myxomycete plasmodium. (A generation of bacteria takes about twenty minutes, so this went a bit faster.)
At the end of a year, Arthur managed to mate a microscopic mushroom with a new parasitic slime mold. Applied to the skin of a shaved cat (there were those later who thought the most loathsome thing Arthur ever did was to shave a cat) it showed itself soon in fairy rings. This sounds delightful, but actually this is the sort of thing that ring worm is. The cat died, of course, not having Frances’ chemical make up. But the important thing was that the Francesa arthura lived.
It is not to be supposed that Arthur meant to give Frances a bad case of ring worm. Whether it would make a pleasant symbiosis for Frances or not, it would certainly be aesthetically unpleasing.
No, Francesa arthura was for internal use only, and as Arthur was too humane to give it to Frances without testing it, he fed it to one of the idiot farm boys.
The effect was noticeable the very next day. The boy became alert, his mouth no longer drooped open, he no longer slept half the day. In fact, Arthur learned upon questioning him, he had stopped sleeping altogether. It should be noted that the boy’s intelligence did not at any time increase, but he certainly looked better. It was almost as though there were a little switch in him that had been pushed from “slow” to “fast.”
As it happened, the boy was dead six months later, but it must be remembered that Francesa arthura was not his mushroom, but Frances’, and also that nature had fashioned him perhaps to live slow for many years, and who is to say he was not happier living fast for a few months?
Anyhow, Arthur meanwhile decided that Francesa arthura was ready for Frances, and Frances was ready (indeed, long overdue) for Francesa arthura.
Her neural tone improved almost immediately and she presented a problem Arthur had not planned on, though he knew from the farm boy. She no longer slept. Never. But at the same time, she grew to resemble more closely the Frances of his hallucinogenic dream. Her movements became more fluid and graceful. She began to enjoy long walks in the woods. She listened and smiled as he explained his interests to her. (The fascinating varieties of fungi housed in cow patties, for instance, and the interesting habits of lichen.) There was never the least reason to think she understood or cared, but she had learned how to listen, which is a mannerism, not an intellectual attainment.
Furthermore, she displayed, for the first time, a marked affection for Arthur. He no longer felt he was the object of her passion solely because he kept everybody else locked out. Now she followed him around, she took his word as law, she obeyed his every whim, even to the extent of doing simple housework.
Within a week, Arthur felt secure enough to sleep soundly at night without locking Frances in her cage, though he had to warn her severely about going for long walks in the woods, moon or no moon.
“Stay close to the house,” he’d say, and she did. He sometimes waked at night and saw her out of the window, white and beautiful under the moon, just standing there enjoying the wind in her hair.
If Arthur thought he was God, he soon had Frances to back him up. And as she drew closer to him she became, in a sense, more distant from the world. She grew more spiritual, more distant in the eyes, whiter, even almost luminous.
The initial alertness supplied by Francesa arthura began to change a little. She did not droop or languor, but she became more inward, supplying something to Francesa arthura as it was supplying her with its intoxicants.
Soon she gave up her long walks, her dancing about the house. She did nothing, but it was a different sort of nothing from what she had done before. It was a happy, purposeful nothing.
She just stood around outside, mostly.
She . . . vegetated.
One morning, several days after Frances stopped eating, Arthur found her leaning against a tree, sending rhizomorphs into it.
He was horrified.
He cut them off. (It was not painful as they were naturally vegetative rhizomorphs.)
He brought her inside, forced her to eat, increased the nitrogen in her diet. “You’ve got to fight back,” he said. “It’s a symbiote, not a parasite.”
But Frances wasn’t interested in fighting back. She ate, as Arthur instructed her to, and for a while there were no more rhizimorphs. The rhizomorphs became merely something to remember about, not to fear.
Until this matter of Fate came up. Fate has little literary validity, but is very important in life.
Arthur got sick.
It was only pneumonia, which nobody gets very excited about any more, but it necessitated Arthur’s being in the hospital for two days and there was absolutely nothing he could do about Frances except instruct her to eat regularly. After the two days, the doctor insisted on two more, and you know you can’t leave without a release.
Arthur drove back, expertly jockeying his little foreign car through the trees, and he had the feeling you always have when you know something awful has happened. “In five minutes I’ll be laughing at myself,” he said, and tried to laugh without having to wait the five minutes.
He rounded a stand of trees and saw her, a yard or two from the cabin’s clearing, sitting by a rotten tree stump, her arm resting on the stump, her beautiful white head resting on her arm.
“Frances!” he cried and bumped the car to a stop beside her.
She smiled at him dreamily, recognizing him faintly somewhere beyond the grey smoke of her eyes.
“No!” he cried, because she seemed so immobile, despited the fact that she drew her legs under her a little and moved her head.
“You didn’t eat?” he asked.
She roused a little, took a breath, so that he noticed she hadn’t been breathing. That was what had made her look so immobile. “I wasn’t hungry,” she said.
“But I told you.”
“I forgot,” she said, and stopped breathing, smiling to herself.
Arthur began to pull at the rotten wood and found it threaded with rhizomorphs.
“Bring me a drink of water,” Frances said, as Arthur went into the house after his knife. “It hasn’t rained since I started rooting.”
Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 28