Orbit 13 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  “Nothing.”

  “The ba—”

  “No. Of course not.”

  She waits a beat. “The CO thing.” I start to answer again, but her fingers tighten on my head. “I know it’s getting to you.” Her tone: strangely serene, as if separate from the words.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Nothing,” she says then, “is something inside out.”

  I have to look up. The dark eyes slip back to that other place. I can’t help trying to press deeper into them. . . .

  This is one night.

  The horror lies in that there is no horror.

  * * * *

  I sank back into the dry, distended hand of the chair, the chair crackling, accommodating me. Out somewhere the crickets began to chirp, a sound like the clicking of poker chips.

  Rocking. Trying to rock. I held my breath. I couldn’t smell then. Or see. I tried not to feel. Only the motion. And the story.

  I remembered our first week. My II-S had expired that quarter. The first days of our relationship were like the first bites of a watermelon before you hit a seed. It started at Santa Monica. She was walking out of the sea and the sunlight was firing blinding bolts around her silhouette and I stood transfixed and just watched her come up to meet me. The next day my eyes peeled burned skin. She said she had run away from a place where they wrapped her in wet sheets.. When she found out I lived in Silverlake, too, she asked me if I had a car. I told her I didn’t and she moved into a new apartment ten miles away just to test me.

  I was the one who gave her the book, along with Albion Moonlight and From Bindu to Ojas and some others. Of course you will blame me, as you should. Naturally. It started with a visit to his office in Little Tokyo; you know the type: Monday night Zen classes served up with brown rice; the following night another course. The regimens. Something. I didn’t go. The vigil at the Friends House, a WRL meeting, maybe a counseling session somewhere or hours alone just going over and over my duplicate file. I don’t remember.

  When she came home I had turned down the bed. Afterward she shook herself like a puppy coming out of sweet grass and smiled around the house and left her hair down the rest of the night. In the morning she woke me to announce that she had dropped something. We searched the floor for her last pill, more valuable than a contact lens—it couldn’t be insured. She wished it had been an IUD. Later she tried to drink a bottle of Jergens Lotion while I was out mailing a letter to the Board. “It smelled so good,” she said. “Just like burnt almonds!”

  After the Form was filed I had to beg the usual collection of “imminent piety” reference letters. Then the reclassification: I-A. No surprise. It did not take long; the Justice Department is no longer involved. Then the appeal. Then the request for a personal appearance. Then the letter requesting an appointment with the government Appeals Agent, a Compozed Larry Blyden impersonator who knew nothing. A formality. I can no longer remember when her thinness first became frightening. Then the personal appearance and the two counselors along as witnesses: refused admittance, of course: one more detail duly noted in case of a court test. The refusal to reopen the classification. Then the appeal to the County Board, where it is said the rubber stamp falls like a blade every eleven seconds. Then the filing of Form 151 with the Local Board, followed by their refusal to reclassify and rewind the appeal procedure for another replay. Then the preinduction physical, follow the colored stripes up and down the stairs and get in line for short-arm inspection. Later the fellow next to me bit his lip and spat blood into the beaker and it almost worked. Then the appeal to State Headquarters. Their reply. Then the letter to the National Director. She spidered her fingers around cups of mu tea, talked rapidly of tests in darkened rooms and small bottles and extractions. Then the first set of induction papers. Then the change of address through a front in San Francisco. Then the flight up to the Local Board there for a transfer of induction—$11.43 each way on PSA. Then the National Director’s refusal to intervene. Then the new induction date in Oakland. Then the transfer back down here. Then the letter from the Friends counselor pleading for a new hearing. Then the letter requesting another-appointment with the Appeals Agent, adjusting his glasses with sweaty fingers, handshake clammy. Then the new induction date. Then a final transfer back up to the Oakland Induction Center. . . .

  Shyla. Shyla. It grew more and more difficult for her. I don’t know how it happened. I don’t even know what happened to her. Her condition was not enough for a III-S under the new law. For a time I thought of her like the place where I had met her: storms rend the sea but never change its hardness. If anything she seemed to be growing softer, more sensitive. That was good. I thought that.

  * * * *

  One night coming home from there like so many other nights.

  Looking up and seeing her halfway through the bead curtain.

  Her body like one of those starving African children, bloated belly and pencil-thin wrists.

  I stand and take her hands. “Hey, your gloves are cold,” I tell her.

  “I’m not wearing any.”

  I breathe on her fingers. We sit. After a while I say, “How is . . . ?” The way she looks, I don’t want to press it.

  “H-he’s pleased with my progress. He said so. The examination—”

  She creates a little pull at the corners of her pallid mouth but her eyes lid over. Her finger makes a fine tracing around my jawline.

  “David,” she pronounces. That is enough, I think. Then her lashes fly together and I can feel the strain growing as it draws together in her. It feels something like desperation. “David, let’s get out of here.” Her eyes open. She is unbelievably sanpaku, I notice, and for some reason, though I know better, much better, I get a cold rush in my chest. “Now. Tonight. We could start fresh—in Mendocino. Anywhere. Oh shit.”

  “Hey, hey.”

  I see she is struggling to stay ahead of herself. “I can’t have it this way. I want to get out of here, out of LA. We have to, don’t you see? This place is some kind of—of necropolis for—for the waiting dead.” She shudders, unbelievably.

  I have no idea what to say to that.

  Then her eyes, flicking between mine, lose some of their depth and withdraw in the manner of a camera iris stopping down, click. And I know she has remembered my case and the way its weight has me anchored here.

  I take her head in my lap and stroke it. Now there is neither resistance nor consent. . . .

  * * * *

  She casts the yarrow stalks. She sits cross-legged, staring as into scattered entrails. She is still for a long time. Then she takes the book down from the shelf and unwraps it and the three coins and throws them, too. I ask her for the reading.

  “ ‘If the bridge is weak at both ends,’ “ she recites in a dull, emotionless voice, “ ‘it does not matter what happens in the middle.’ “

  The hours unravel and I cannot think of a thing but her.

  In bed she tosses just outside my arms. Once she sits up.

  “What is that?” she whispers out of what sounds like terror.

  “That?” I try to follow the trajectory of her stare. “That?” I get out of bed, pad to the corner, find a thing, pick it out of the dust. “Well, what do you know?” I turn it over and over. “It’s nothing. It’s an old pretzel! Ha.”

  I start to toss it over to her but I am afraid she might scream.

  Just before I drop off, I study her face, the flawless line of her nose, her soft lip, her shoulders. I can no longer be sure when she is asleep, awake.

  There are marks in the muscle of her upper arm.

  I bend closer. Everything is a grainy blue-gray in the near dark. But there they are: tiny specks also dot her face above the eye sockets, her forehead, her temples, her cheekbones. With a shaky finger I tip her head to one side on the pillow. Marks along the tendons of her neck. I wonder how many other marks there are.

  Dr. Soeul, I realize, has been practicing—what?

  What do they call it?
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  A fist tightens in my stomach.

  She promised that she is seeing an obstetrician as well. I believed her. I was busy.

  She is weak. It is more than that. It can be stated simply. Something in Shyla is missing. It has not always been this way.

  * * * *

  In the middle of the long night I wake at the sound of her voice close by me.

  “... All cold and clammy and brassy like a mummy’s fingers ... !” Her voice is racing, lost.

  “Shyla?”

  No answer.

  I try to sleep some more. But I keep listening to her dreams. It is as if I need to hear them.

  I wonder what happens when the dreaming stops—or goes mad.

  Morning and I come out of it to find her on her back staring into the mottled pattern the sun makes on the ceiling.

  I kiss her. No response. I feel like a man who has awakened to find himself bound in cement.

  I blow the spider web of hair off her forehead. “Sleep okay?”

  “For a while I couldn’t,” she replies. “The moon on the bottom of the bed wouldn’t let me.”

  I blink, resume breathing.

  But “I thought I heard a voice calling me,” she goes on. “Then in the dark I heard a voice answer, ‘yes?’ “

  I can’t even shudder.

  Finally I come up with, “Well, I hope you feel better than you did last night. You know—”

  “Last night,” she says, still staring at the ceiling, the walls, “I felt my brain shaking like jelly. And the water seeping into the ground.”

  I just look at her.

  “It’s all right, David,” she says. “You understand what’s happening, don’t you? I’m only coming closer and closer.”

  “To what?”

  “To the far away.”

  I laugh, tight-lipped. I try to think that it is beautiful to have a woman who knows things she will never tell me. I try. She must know. I have to believe in her. I have to return the belief.

  * * * *

  She grew thinner and thinner. I continued to fight my case. The time came. Almost came.

  Mostly I remember the shadows of the leaves on the trees covering the walls of the living room in a moving black wash through the glass. Shyla on the couch. This one day she chose the darkening living room. I don’t know why.

  She wouldn’t leave the city without me and I had to be with the lawyers at the CCCO. And she wouldn’t change doctors. I must have tried and tried. You would think so.

  She had been reading a lot of poetry that day. Lastly she was studying the cold black flaming on the wall. Sun through leaves. Black centers deeper than the light.

  “I need the dark,” she says suddenly, settling the squirming shape behind her almost translucent belly. Her voice is like a rustling now, her body dotted all over. I haven’t left this room for three days. The file. “Do you know? It gives all . . . and it takes nothing back!”

  Turn from the pane. Start to speak. But see. There is no longer any Word possible between her and the dark now.

  Something quietly leaves the room.

  The sun nails black to the wall. . . .

  * * * *

  I sat in the chair. There. After cutting the grass. The sun outside gone away. I don’t think I even noticed when it happened. They say it will rain tomorrow. I don’t worry about the weather. I haven’t for a long time. The sky has lost control.

  This afternoon I burned my draft card. I thought about it a long time. I read it over and over. Then I knew you can never decide from the words. Consider the spaces. She taught me that. I think she did. I squirted it with lighter fluid and touched a match to it and threw it on the air. It flared to something black and fell apart. After that I took my file and scattered it down the hillside.

  A little while ago I sat in the chair. Then I got up.

  I went down the hill. The place called me. I used to go there a lot evenings when I was a kid and it was warm and I was thirsty after helping with the lawn or something.

  I wasn’t thinking anything. Down the hill. The leaves at the corner crackled at my heels. I turned around half-expecting to see myself. Fosselman’s was cool neon at the end of the long block. I thought it looked good.

  Went in the store. Too many flavors to pick.

  Got in line. There was a girl in front of me with a snowy streak put in her hair. She turned around and looked at me and the second time she smiled. But I just turned away. Her dress enclosed her like a self-addressed envelope. She swept out with a cone and didn’t look back. I noticed her ice cream: it was almost colorless, sort of a brain-gray.

  The counter was stainless steel and plastic frosted over on the underside. Leaned my palms on it and looked down.

  “Double or single?”

  “What?”

  Mr. Fosselman gave me a look.

  “You wanna buy something, or you come here to sprout roots?”

  He didn’t recognize. The hair, the way I don’t care anymore. Maybe he did, maybe he did.

  Right then a chill touched my face.

  And I knew that I didn’t want anything there. I turned and clipped over the waxed linoleum squares, past the wrought-iron chairs, the peppermint shaft and the cardboard boy licking it so patiently.

  It was cold outside, but a cold that numbs, without a chill.

  I rolled up my sleeves and then threw away my jacket and started east across town, stripping off my shirt, everything as I went, through all the yellow and red lights, stepping on every crack, all the way.

  Tomorrow I will find him in among his sharp gold needles and small bottles; I will take them all back from him and I will kill him and read his bloodstains like a Rorschach test and find an answer.

  Then I will come back here. They will never find me when they come looking, if they do. I have left everything behind. Maybe I will live here, in the trees and bushes, the lawn and the shadows of the shrubbery, and the headstones. Maybe I will.

  <>

  * * * *

  William F. Orr

  THE MOUTH IS FOR EATING

  LOFDUNS HADNT eaten for five days, and it would be six more before it had any appetite at all, at least in the strictly physiological sense. But it was hungry. The inner lining of its mouth twitched and contracted impatiently as it paced the small hotel room—ridiculously small for a person used to the spacious chambers of the Ansrals villa—and finally resolved to assuage, its appetites. It went to the door and fastened the lock, and then began to search the room for a suitable object.

  A melon would have been perfect now, but melons were all but unobtainable on this pygmy colony. Without fruit, without proper meat, it would have to make do. Its eyes moved slowly around the walls of the narrow room, searching, contemplating, discarding. The low mattress was too large; the night-table, although of about the right size, was an impossible shape, with four long, pointed legs, quite unappetizing. Then it spied one of its own bags standing near the closet, round, smooth, and hard, with just a bit of flexibility.

  It leaned down and emptied the bag carefully onto the floor, its heart speeding in anticipation. It ran its hands once over the surface of the bag, lifted it, and then cursed the pygmy architects for a band of ulcerrridden ignorants, as its head banged against the six-meter ceiling. Stooping again, walking slowly to prolong the pleasure, holding back an urge to begin salivating even before entry, Lofduns took the bag to the bathroom and carefully washed it. Air slipped through its wind-hole in rapid spurts, as it set the bag down and unhooked the straps of the muzzle from around its waist.

  Now completely naked beside the tub, its soft brown plumage hanging loose about its golden shoulders, Lofduns put its hand over its wind-hole—an unconscious gesture of shame—and looked down at its mouth, a thin cross of two creases in the flesh below its belly. Below that, all but invisible, were the brief slits of the sperm and ovum-holes. But it was the mouth that dominated its attention, its primary lips twitching as the muscles began to relax for opening and i
nsertion.

  As it lifted the bag and placed it against its lips, it perversely pictured its Teacher scowling with indignant shock at the sight of its ward “abusing its body,” as it would say. But it smiled at its own reluctance to forget the past, with its pablum people and pablum morality, and eased the bag in, through its wide primaries, between the tight secondary lips, and deep into its expanding mouth, where soft tentacles held it close, and began rubbing its morst-hide surface with a slow, rolling motion.

  All pablum thoughts were gone, as Lofduns’ mind filled with bright, joyous images of hidden cellar rooms, stocked with fresh cuts of meat, huge violet melons, sharp tanya leaves, colmya stalks sprinkled lavishly with contraband rock salt. Its eyes rolled toward the ceiling, its hands hung loose at its sides, and its saliva flowed unchecked around the bag, as it imagined that the mild, musty taste of morst was, instead, the sweet and delicate inner meat of a pantofs melon, raised under the sun and open sky on secret farms in the West, smuggled across the Strait, and bought from an anonymous grocer in some dingy corner by the River. Strong muscles, strengthened by ten circuits of clandestine chewing, rubbing, piercing, and mashing, hugged the bag until its two indented sides nearly met.