Orbit 10 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  She reached into the canvas knapsack I’d packed up the moun­tain and took out the thermos and some foil parcels. “Soybeef,” she said, pointing to the sandwiches. “The salt’s in with the hard- boiled eggs. There’s cake for dessert.”

  Filling my stomach was easier than stripping my soul, so I ate. But the taste died in my mouth when I thought about Jody fixing meals all the rest of our lives. Food for two, three times a day, seven days a week, an average of thirty days a . . . Always un­varying. Always food for two. God, I wanted children! I concen­trated on chewing.

  After the meal, we drank beer and watched the city below as five million Denverites turned on their lights. I knew I was getting too high too fast when I confused pulling the tabs off self-cooling beer cans with plucking petals from daisies.

  She loves me.

  Funny how melodrama crops up in real life. My life. Like when I met her.

  It was about a year before, when I’d just gotten a job with Mountain Bell as a SMART—that’s their clever acronym for Service Maintenance and Repair Trainee. In a city the size of Den­ver there are more than half a million public pay phones, of which at least a third are out of order at any given time; vandals mostly, sometimes mechanical failure. Someone has to go out and spot- check the phones, then fix the ones that are broken. That was my job. Simple.

  I’d gone into a bad area, Five Points, where service was es­timated to be eighty percent blanked out. I should have been smart enough to take a partner along, or maybe to wear blackface. But I was a lot younger then. I ended up on a bright Tuesday after­noon, sprawled in my own blood on the sidewalk in front of a grocery store after a Chicano gang had kicked the hell out of me.

  After about an hour somebody called an ambulance. Jody. On the phone I’d just repaired before I got stomped. She’d wandered by with a field crew on some documentary assignment, snapping holograms of the poverty conditions.

  She loves me not.

  I remembered what we’d quarreled about in September. Back in early August a friend of Jody’s and mine had come back from Seattle. He was an audio engineer who’d worked free-lance with the Hayes Theatre. He’d seen Jody.

  “Man, talk about wild!” my friend said. “She must’ve got cov­ered by everything with pants from Oregon to Vancouver.” He looked at my face. “Uh, you have something going with her?”

  She loves me.

  “What’s so hard to understand?” Jody had said. “Didn’t you ever meet a survivor before? Didn’t you ever think about survi­vors? What it’s like to see death so plainly all around?” Her voice was low and very intense. “And what about feeling you ought never to have babies, and not wanting even to come close to tak­ing the chance?” Her voice became dull and passionless. “Then there was Seattle, Paul, and there’s the paradox. The only real de­fense against death is not to feel. But I want to feel sometimes and that’s why—” She broke off and began to cry. “Paul, that’s why there were so many of them. But they couldn’t—I can’t make it. Not with anyone.”

  Confused, I held her.

  “I want you.”

  And it didn’t matter which of us had said that first.

  She loves me not.

  “Why don’t you ever say what you think?”

  “It’s easy,” I said, a little bitter. “Try being a lonely stoic all your life. It gets to be habit after a while.”

  “You think I don’t know?” She rolled over, turned to the wall. “I’m trying to get through.” Her voice was muffled by the blankets.

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  She sat up suddenly, the sheets falling away from her. “Listen! I told you it would be like this. You can have me. But you have to accept what I am.”

  “I will.”

  Neither of us said anything more until morning.

  She loves me.

  Another night she woke up screaming. I stroked her hair and kissed her face lightly.

  “Another one?”

  She nodded.

  “Bad?”

  “Yes.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  There was hesitation, then a slow nod.

  “I was in front of a mirror in some incredibly baroque old bed­room,” she said. “I was vomiting blood and my hair was coming out and falling down on my shoulders. It wound around my throat and I couldn’t breathe. I opened my mouth and there was blood running from my gums. And my skin—it was completely covered with black and red pustules. They—” She paused and closed her eyes. “They were strangely beautiful.” She whimpered. “The worst—” She clung to me tightly. “Oh, God! The worst part was that I was pregnant.”

  She roughly pushed herself away and wouldn’t let me try to com­fort her. She lay on her back and stared at the ceiling. Finally, childlike, she took my hand. She held my fingers very tight all the rest of the night.

  She loves me not.

  But she did, I thought. She does. In her own way, just as you love her. It’s never going to be the way you imagined it as a kid. But you love her. Ask her. Ask her now.

  “What’s going on?” Jody asked, craning her neck to look directly below our ledge. Far down we saw a pair of headlights, a car sliding around the hairpin turns in the foothills road. The whine of a racing turbine rasped our ears.

  “I don’t know. Some clown in a hurry to park with his girl.”

  The car approached the crest of a hill and for an instant the headlights shone directly at us, dazzling our eyes. Jody jerked back and screamed. “The sun! So bright! God, Pittsburgh—” Her strength seemed to drain; I lowered her gently to the ledge and sat down beside her. The rock was rough and cold as the day’s heat left. I couldn’t see Jody’s face, except as a blur in the dark­ness. There was light from the city and a little from the stars, but the moon hadn’t risen.

  “Please kiss me.”

  I kissed her and used the forbidden words. “I love you.”

  I touched her breast; she shivered against me and whispered something I couldn’t quite understand. A while later my hand touched the waist of her jeans and she drew away.

  “Paul, no.”

  “Why not?” The beer and my emotional jag pulsed in the back of my skull. I ached.

  “You know.”

  I knew. For a while she didn’t say anything more, nor did I. We felt tension build its barrier. Then she relaxed and put her cheek against mine. Somehow we both laughed and the tension eased.

  Ask her. And I knew I couldn’t delay longer. “Damn it,” I said, “I still love you. And I know what I’m getting into.” I paused to breathe. “After Christmas I’m taking off for Seattle. I want you to marry me there.”

  I felt her muscles tense. Jody pulled away from me and got to her feet. She walked to the end of the ledge and looked out be­yond the city. She turned to face me and her hands were clenched.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “At the end of summer I’d have said ‘no’ immediately. Now—”

  I sat silent.

  “We’d better go,” she said after a while, her voice calm and even. “It’s very late.”

  We climbed down from the rocks then, with the November chill a well of silence between us.

  <>

  * * * *

  Carol Emshwiller

  AL

  SORT OF a plane crash in an uncharted region of the park.

  We were flying fairly low over the mountains. We had come to the last ridge when there, before us, appeared this incredible valley…

  Suddenly the plane sputtered. (We knew we were low on gas but we had thought to make it over the mountains.

  “I think I can bring her in.” (John’s last words.)

  I was the only survivor.

  A plane crash in a field of alfalfa, across the road from it the Annual Fall Festival of the Arts. An oasis on the edge of the park­ing area. One survivor. He alone, Al, who has spent considerable time in France, Algeria and Mexico, his paintings without social relevance (or so the critics say) and best in the da
rker colors, not a musician at all yet seems to be one of us. He, a stranger, wander­ing in a land he doesn’t remember and not one penny of our kind of money, creeping from behind our poster, across from it the once-a-year art experience for music lovers. Knowing him as I do now, he must have been wary then, view from our poster: ENTRANCE sign, vast parking lot, our red and white tent, our EXIT on the far side, maybe the sound of a song, a frightening situation under the circumstance, all the others dead and Al hav­ing been unconscious for who knows how long? (the scar from that time is still on his cheek) stumbling across the road then and into our ticket booth.

  “Hi.”

  I won’t say he wasn’t welcome. Even then we were wondering were we facing stultification? Already some of our rules had be­come rituals. Were we, we wondered, doomed to a partial rele­vance in our efforts to make music meaningful in our time? And now Al, dropped to us from the skies (no taller than Tom Disch, no wider and not quite so graceful). Later he was to say: “Maybe the artful gesture is lost forever.”

  We had a girl with us then as secretary, a long-haired changeling child, actually the daughter of a prince (there still are princes) left out in the picnic area of a western state forest to be found and brought up by some old couple in the upper middle class (she still hasn’t found this out for sure, but has always suspected some­thing of the sort) so when I asked Al to my (extra) bedroom it was too late. (By that time he had already pounded his head against the wall some so he seemed calm and happy and rather well adjusted to life in our valley.) The man from the Daily asked him how did he happen to become interested in art? He said he came from a land of cultural giants east of our outermost islands where the policemen were all poets. That’s significant in two ways.

  About the artful gesture being lost, so many lost arts and soft, gray birds, etc., etc., etc. (The makers of toe shoes will have to go when the last toe dancer dies.)

  However, right then, there was Al, mumbling to us in French, German and Spanish. We gave him two tickets to our early eve­ning concert even though he couldn’t pay except in what looked like pesos. Second row, left side. (Right from the beginning there was something in him I couldn’t resist.) We saw him craning his neck there, somehow already with our long-haired girl beside him. She’s five hundred years old though she doesn’t look a day over sixteen and plays the virginal like an angel. Did her undergrad­uate work at the University of Utah (around 1776 I would say). If she crossed the Alleghenies now she’d crumble into her real age and die, so later on I tried to get them to take a trip to the Ann Arbor Film Festival together, but naturally she had something else to do. Miss Haertzler.

  As our plane came sputtering down I saw the tents below, a village of nomads, God knows how far from the nearest out­post of civilization. They had, no doubt, lived like this for thousands of years.

  These thoughts went rapidly through my mind in the mo­ments before we crashed and then I lost consciousness.

  “COME, COME YE SONS OF ART.” That’s what our poster across the street says—quotes, that is. Really very nice in dayglo colors. “COME, COME AWAY . . .” etc., on to “TO CELE­BRATE, TO CELEBRATE THIS TRIUMPHANT DAY,” which meant to me, in some symbolic way even at that time, the day Al came out from behind it and stumbled across the road to our booth, as they say: “A leading force, even then, among the new objectivists and continues to play a major role among them up to the present time” (which was a few years ago). Obtained his bachelor’s degree in design at the University of Michigan with further study at the Atelier Chaumiere in Paris. He always says, “Form speaks.” I can say I knew him pretty well at that time. I know he welcomes criticism but not too early in the morning. Ralph had said (he was on the staff of the Annual Fall Festival), “Maybe artistic standards are no longer relevant.” (We were won­dering at the time how to get the immediacy of the war into our concerts more meaningfully than the 1812 Overture. Also some­thing of the changing race relations.) Al answered, but just then a jet came by or some big oil truck and I missed the key word. That leaves me still not understanding what he meant. The next morn­ing the same thing happened and it may have been more or less the answer to everything.

  By then we had absorbed the major San Francisco influences. These have remained with us in some form or other up to the present time.

  I would like you, Tom Disch, to write a poem about this plane crash in an uncharted region, but really, you know, kind of alfalfa field thing. I’d like the Annual Fall Festival of the Arts (and liter­ature, too, if you must) in it and SONS OF ART. I know you can do it, can do anything which is a very nice way to be and be­ing twenty-eight too and having your kind of future which isn’t everyone’s, not Al’s either in spite of some similarities. Al is, after all, more my age, so even Al might be wishing to be Tom Disch though he wouldn’t give up his long hooked nose and very black hair even for a tattooed eagle on his chest. Tom is kind of baroque and jolly. Al is more somber. Both having had quite an influence on all of us already. Jolly, somber. Somber, jolly. To be shy or not to be or less so than Al? He changed the art exhibit we had in the vestibule to his kind of art as soon as Miss Haertzler went to bed with him. We had a complete new selection of paintings by Friday afternoon, all hung in time for the early performance (Ralph hung them) and by then, or at least by Saturday night, I knew I was, at last, really in love for the first time in my life.

  When I came to I found we had crashed in a cultivated field planted with some sort of weedlike bush entirely un­familiar to me. I quickly ascertained that my three compan­ions were beyond my help, then extricated myself from the wreckage and walked to the edge of the field. I found myself standing beneath a giant stele where strange symbols swirled in brilliant, jewellike colors. Weak and dazed though I was, I felt a surge of delight. Surely, I thought, the people who made this cannot be entirely uncivilized.

  Miss Haertzler took her turn onstage like the rest of us. She was the sort who would have cut off her right breast the better to bow the violin, but, happily, she played the harpsichord. Perhaps Al wouldn’t have minded anyway. Strange man. From some en­tirely different land and I could never quite figure out where. Cer­tainly he wouldn’t have minded. She played only the very old and the very new, whereas I had suddenly discovered Beethoven (over again) and talked about Romanticism during our staff meet­ings. Al said, “In some ways a return to Romanticism is like a re­turn to the human figure.” I believe he approved of the idea.

  He spent the first night, Tuesday night that was, the twenty- second, in our red and white tent under the bleachers at the back. A touch of hay fever woke him early.

  By Wednesday Ralph and I had already spent two afternoons calculating our losses owing to the rain, and I longed for a new experience of some sort that would lift me out of the endless prob­lems of the Annual Fall Festival of the Arts. I returned dutifully, however, to the area early the next day to continue my calculations in the quiet of the morning and found him there.

  “Me, Al. You?” Pointing finger.

  “Ha, ha.” (I must get rid of my nervous laugh!)

  * * * *

  I wanted to redefine my purposes not only for his sake, but for my own.

  I wanted to find out just what role the audience should play. I wanted to figure out, as I mentioned before, how we could best incorporate aspects of the war and the changing race relations into our concerts.

  I wondered how to present musical experiences in order to en­rich the lives of others in a meaningful way, how to engage, in other words, their total beings.

  I wanted to expand their musical horizons. “I’ve thought about these things all year,” I said, “ever since I knew I would be a director of the Annual Fall Festival. I also want to mention the fact,” I said, “that there’s a group from the college who would like to disrupt the unity of our performances (having other aims and interests), but,” I told him, “the audience has risen to the occasion, at least by last night, when we had, not only good weather, but money and an enthusiastic
reception.”

  “I have recognized,” he replied, “here in this valley, a fully realized civilization with a past history, a rich present, and a future all its own, and I have understood, even in my short time here, the vast immigration to urban areas that must have taken place and that must be continuing into the present time.”

  How could I help falling in love with him? He may have spent the second night in Miss Haertzler’s bed (if my conjectures are correct) but, I must say, it was with me he had all his discussions.

  I awoke the next morning extremely hungry, with a bad headache and with sniffles and no handkerchief yet, some­how, in spite of this, in fairly good spirits though I did long for a good hot cup of almost anything. Little did I realize then, or I might not have felt so energetic, the hardships I was to encounter here in this strange, elusive, never-never land. Even just getting something to eat was to prove difficult.