The Unreal and the Real - Vol 1 - Where On Earth

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  My mother, Mrs. J. J. Sunn, died in Wichita, KS, in 1944, at the age of 79. She was a fine woman and my experience of women in general does not apply to her in particular.

  Since they invented the kind of biscuits that come in a tube which you hit on the edge of the counter and the dough explodes out of it under pressure, that’s the kind I buy, and by baking them about one half hour they come out pretty much the way I like them, crust clear through. I used to bake the dough all of a piece, but then discovered that you can break it apart into separate biscuits. I don’t hold with reading directions and they are always printed in small, fine print on the damn foil which gets torn when you break open the tube. I use my mother’s glasses. They are a good make.

  The woman I came here after in 1949 is still here. That was during my brief period of infatuation. Fortunately I can say that she did not get her hooks onto me in the end. Some other men have not been as lucky. She has married or as good as several times and was pregnant and pushing a baby carriage for decades. Sometimes I think everybody under forty in this town is one of Edna’s. I had a very narrow escape. I have had a dream about Edna several times. In this dream I am out on the sea fishing for salmon from a small boat, and Edna swims up from the sea waves and tries to climb into the boat. To prevent this I hit her hands with the gutting knife and cut off the fingers, which fall into the water and turn into some kind of little creatures that swim away. I never can tell if they are babies or seals. Then Edna swims after them making a strange noise, and I see that in actuality she is a kind of seal or sea lion, like the big ones in the cave on the south coast, light brown and very large and fat and sleek in the water.

  This dream disturbs me, as it is unfair. I am not the kind of man who would do such a thing. It causes me discomfort to remember the strange noise she makes in the dream, when I am in the grocery store and Edna is at the cash register. To make sure she rings it up right and I get the right change, I have to look at her hands opening and shutting the drawers and her fingers working on the keys. What’s wrong with women is that you can’t count on them. They are not fully civilised.

  Roger Hiddenstone

  I only come into town sometimes. It’s a now and then thing. If the road takes me there, fine, but I don’t go hunting for it. I run a two hundred thousand acre cattle ranch, which gives me a good deal to do. I’ll look up sometimes and the moon is new that I saw full last night. One summer comes after another like steers through a chute. In the winters, though, sometimes the weeks freeze like the creek water, and things hold still for a while. The air can get still and clear in the winter here in the high desert. I have seen the mountain peaks from Baker and Rainier in the north, Hood and Jefferson, Three-Fingered Jack and the Sisters east of here, on south to Shasta and Lassen, all standing up in the sunlight for eight hundred or a thousand miles. That was when I was flying. From the ground you can’t see that much of the ground, though you can see the rest of the universe, nights.

  I traded in my two-seater Cessna for a quarterhorse mare, and I generally keep a Ford pickup, though at times I’ve had a Chevrolet. Any one of them will get me in to town so long as there isn’t more than a couple feet of snow on the road. I like to come in now and then and have a Denver omelette at the café for breakfast, and a visit with my wife and son. I have a drink at the Two Blue Moons, and spend the night at the motel. By the next morning I’m ready to go back to the ranch to find out what went wrong while I was gone. It’s always something.

  Edna was only out to the ranch once while we were married. She spent three weeks. We were so busy in the bed I don’t recall much else about it, except the time she tried to learn to ride. I put her on Sally, the cutting horse I traded the Cessna plus fifteen hundred dollars for, a highly reliable horse and more intelligent than most Republicans. But Edna had that mare morally corrupted within ten minutes. I was trying to explain how she’d interpret what you did with your knees, when Edna started yipping and raking her like a bronc rider. They lit out of the yard and went halfway to Ontario at a dead run. I was riding the old roan gelding and only met them coming back. Sally was unrepentant, but Edna was sore and delicate that evening. She claimed all the love had been jolted out of her. I guess that this was true, in the larger sense, since it wasn’t long after that that she asked to go back to Ether. I thought she had quit her job at the grocery, but she had only asked for a month off, and she said Needless would want her for the extra business at Christmas. We drove back to town, finding it a little west of where we had left it, in a very pretty location near the Ochoco Mountains, and we had a happy Christmas season in Edna’s house with the children.

  I don’t know whether Archie was begotten there or at the ranch. I’d like to think it was at the ranch so that there would be that in him drawing him to come back some day. I don’t know who to leave all this to. Charlie Echeverria is good with the stock, but can’t think ahead two days and couldn’t deal with the buyers, let alone the corporations. I don’t want the corporations profiting from this place. The hands are nice young fellows, but they don’t stay put, or want to. Cowboys don’t want land. Land owns you. You have to give in to that. I feel sometimes like all the stones on two hundred thousand acres were weighing on me, and my mind’s gone to rimrock. And the beasts wandering and calling across all that land. The cows stand with their young calves in the wind that blows March snow like frozen sand across the flats. Their patience is a thing I try to understand.

  Gracie Fane

  I saw that old rancher on Main Street yesterday, Mr. Hiddenstone, was married to Edna once. He acted like he knew where he was going, but when the street ran out onto the sea cliff he sure did look foolish. Turned round and came back in those high-heel boots, long legs, putting his feet down like a cat the way cowboys do. He’s a skinny old man. He went into the Two Blue Moons. Going to try to drink his way back to eastern Oregon, I guess. I don’t care if this town is east or west. I don’t care if it’s anywhere. It never is anywhere anyway. I’m going to leave here and go to Portland, to the Intermountain, the big trucking company, and be a truck driver. I learned to drive when I was five on my grandpa’s tractor. When I was ten I started driving my dad’s Dodge Ram, and I’ve driven pickups and delivery vans for Mom and Mr. Needless ever since I got my license. Jase gave me lessons on his eighteen-wheeler last summer. I did real good. I’m a natural. Jase said so. I never got to get out onto the I–5 but only once or twice, though. He kept saying I needed more practice pulling over and parking and shifting up and down. I didn’t mind practicing, but then when I got her stopped he’d want to get me into this bed thing he fixed up behind the seats and pull my jeans off, and we had to screw some before he’d go on teaching me anything. My own idea would be to drive a long way and learn a lot and then have some sex and coffee and then drive back a different way, maybe on hills where I’d have to practice braking and stuff. But I guess men have different priorities. Even when I was driving he’d have his arm around my back and be petting my boobs. He has these huge hands can reach right across both boobs at once. It felt good, but it interfered with his concentration teaching me. He would say Oh baby you’re so great and I would think he meant I was driving great but then he’d start making those sort of groaning noises and I’d have to shift down and find a place to pull out and get in the bed thing again. I used to practice changing gears in my mind when we were screwing and it helped. I could shift him right up and down again. I used to yell Going eighty! when I got him really shifted up. Fuzz on your tail! And make these sireen noises. That’s my CB name: Sireen. Jase got his route shifted in August. I made my plans then. I’m driving for the grocery and saving money till I’m seventeen and go to Portland to work for the Intermountain Company. I want to drive the I–5 from Seattle to LA, or get a run to Salt Lake City. Till I can buy my own truck. I got it planned out.

  Tobinye Walker

  The young people all want to get out of Ether. Young Americans in a small town want to get up and go. And some do, and some come to
a time when they stop talking about where they’re going to go when they go. They have come to where they are. Their problem, if it’s a problem, isn’t all that different from mine. We have a window of opportunity; it closes. I used to walk across the years as easy as a child here crosses the street, but I went lame, and had to stop walking. So this is my time, my heyday, my floruit.

  When I first knew Edna she said a strange thing to me; we had been talking, I don’t remember what about, and she stopped and gazed at me. “You have a look on you like an unborn child,” she said. “You look at things like an unborn child.” I don’t know what I answered, and only later did I wonder how she knew how an unborn child looks, and whether she meant a fetus in the womb or a child that never came to be conceived. Maybe she meant a newborn child. But I think she used the word she meant to use.

  When I first stopped by here, before my accident, there was no town, of course, no settlement. Several peoples came through and sometimes encamped for a season, but it was a range without boundary, though it had names. At that time people didn’t have the expectation of stability they have now; they knew that so long as a river keeps running it’s a river. Nobody but the beavers built dams, then. Ether always covered a lot of territory, and it has retained that property. But its property is not continuous.

  The people I used to meet coming through generally said they came down Humbug Creek from the river in the mountains, but Ether itself never has been in the Cascades, to my knowledge. Fairly often you can see them to the west of it, though usually it’s west of them, and often west of the Coast Range in the timber or the dairy country, sometimes right on the sea. It has a broken range. It’s an unusual place. I’d like to go back to the center to tell about it, but I can’t walk any more. I have to do my flourishing here.

  J. Needless

  People think there are no Californians. Nobody can come from the promise land. You have to be going to it. Die in the desert, grave by the wayside. I come from California, born there, think about it some. I was born in the Valley of San Arcadio. Orchards. Like a white bay of orange flowers under bare blue-brown mountains. Sunlight like air, like clear water, something you lived in, an element. Our place was a little farmhouse up in the foothills, looking out over the valley. My father was a manager for one of the companies. Oranges flower white, with a sweet, fine scent. Outskirts of Heaven, my mother said once, one morning when she was hanging out the wash. I remember her saying that. We live on the outskirts of Heaven.

  She died when I was six and I don’t remember a lot but that about her. Now I have come to realise that my wife has been dead so long that I have lost her too. She died when our daughter Corrie was six. Seemed like there was some meaning in it at the time, but if there was I didn’t find it.

  Ten years ago when Corrie was twenty-one she said she wanted to go to Disneyland for her birthday. With me. Damn if she didn’t drag me down there. Spent a good deal to see people dressed up like mice with water on the brain and places made to look like places they weren’t. I guess that is the point there. They clean dirt till it is a sanitary substance and spread it out to look like dirt so you don’t have to touch dirt. You and Walt are in control there. You can be in any kind of place, space or the ocean or castles in Spain, all sanitary, no dirt. I would have liked it as a boy, when I thought the idea was to run things. Changed my ideas, settled for a grocery.

  Corrie wanted to see where I grew up, so we drove over to San Arcadio. It wasn’t there, not what I meant by it. Nothing but roofs, houses, streets and houses. Smog so thick it hid the mountains and the sun looked green. God damn, get me out of here, I said, they have changed the color of the sun. Corrie wanted to look for the house but I was serious. Get me out of here, I said, this is the right place but the wrong year. Walt Disney can get rid of the dirt on his property if he likes, but this is going too far. This is my property.

  I felt like that. Like I thought it was something I had, but they scraped all the dirt off and underneath was cement and some electronic wiring. I’d as soon not have seen that. People come through here say how can you stand living in a town that doesn’t stay in the same place all the time, but have they been to Los Angeles? It’s anywhere you want to say it is.

  Well, since I don’t have California what have I got? A good enough business. Corrie’s still here. Good head on her. Talks a lot. Runs that bar like a bar should be run. Runs her husband pretty well too. What do I mean when I say I had a mother, I had a wife? I mean remembering what orange flowers smell like, whiteness, sunlight. I carry that with me. Corinna and Silvia, I carry their names. But what do I have?

  What I don’t have is right within hand’s reach every day. Every day but Sunday. But I can’t reach out my hand. Every man in town gave her a child and all I ever gave her was her week’s wages. I know she trusts me. That’s the trouble. Too late now. Hell, what would she want me in her bed for, the Medicare benefits?

  Emma Bodely

  Everything is serial killers now. They say everyone is naturally fascinated by a man planning and committing one murder after another without the least reason and not even knowing who he kills personally. There was the man up in the city recently who tortured and tormented three tiny little boys and took photographs of them while he tortured them and of their corpses after he killed them. Authorities are talking now about what they ought to do with these photographs. They could make a lot of money from a book of them. He was apprehended by the police as he lured yet another tiny boy to come with him, as in a nightmare. There were men in California and Texas and I believe Chicago who dismembered and buried innumerably. Then of course it goes back in history to Jack the Ripper who killed poor women and was supposed to be a member of the Royal Family of England, and no doubt before his time there were many other serial killers, many of them members of Royal Families or Emperors and Generals who killed thousands and thousands of people. But in wars they kill people more or less simultaneously, not one by one, so that they are mass murderers, not serial killers, but I’m not sure I see the difference, really. Since for the person being murdered it only happens once.

  I should be surprised if we had a serial killer in Ether. Most of the men were soldiers in one of the wars, but they would be mass murderers, unless they had desk jobs. I can’t think who here would be a serial killer. No doubt I would be the last to find out. I find being invisible works both ways. Often I don’t see as much as I used to when I was visible. Being invisible however I’m less likely to become a serial victim.

  It’s odd how the natural fascination they talk about doesn’t include the serial victims. I suppose it is because I taught young children for thirty-five years, but perhaps I am unnatural, because I think about those three little boys. They were three or four years old. How strange that their whole life was only a few years, like a cat. In their world suddenly instead of their mother there was a man who told them how he was going to hurt them and then did it, so that there was nothing in their life at all but fear and pain. So they died in fear and pain. But all the reporters tell is the nature of the mutilations and how decomposed they were, and that’s all about them. They were little boys not men. They are not fascinating. They are just dead. But the serial killer they tell all about over and over and discuss his psychology and how his parents caused him to be so fascinating, and he lives forever, as witness Jack the Ripper and Hitler the Ripper. Everyone around here certainly remembers the name of the man who serially raped and photographed the tortured little boys before he serially murdered them. He was named Westley Dodd but what were their names?

  Of course we the people murdered him back. That was what he wanted. He wanted us to murder him. I cannot decide if hanging him was a mass murder or a serial murder. We all did it, like a war, so it is a mass murder, but we each did it, democratically, so I suppose it is serial, too. I would as soon be a serial victim as a serial murderer, but I was not given the choice.

  My choices have become less. I never had a great many, as my sexual impulses wer
e not appropriate to my position in life, and no one I fell in love with knew it. I am glad when Ether turns up in a different place as it is kind of like a new choice of where to live, only I didn’t have to make it. I am capable only of very small choices. What to eat for breakfast, oatmeal or corn flakes, or perhaps only a piece of fruit? Kiwi fruits were fifteen cents apiece at the grocery and I bought half a dozen. A while ago they were the most exotic thing, from New Zealand I think and a dollar each, and now they raise them all over the Willamette Valley. But then, the Willamette Valley may be quite exotic to a person in New Zealand. I like the way they’re cool in your mouth, the same way the flesh of them looks cool, a smooth green you can see into, like jade stone. I still see things like that perfectly clearly. It’s only with people that my eyes are more and more transparent, so that I don’t always see what they’re doing, and so that they can look right through me as if my eyes were air and say, “Hi, Emma, how’s life treating you?”

  Life’s treating me like a serial victim, thank you.

  I wonder if she sees me or sees through me. I don’t dare look. She is shy and lost in her crystal dreams. If only I could look after her. She needs looking after. A cup of tea. Herbal tea, echinacea maybe, I think her immune system needs strengthening. She is not a practical person. I am a very practical person. Far below her dreams.

  Lo still sees me. Of course Lo is a serial killer as far as birds are concerned, and moles, but although it upsets me when the bird’s not dead yet it’s not the same as the man taking photographs. Mr. Hiddenstone once told me that cats have the instinct to let a mouse or bird stay alive awhile in order to take it to the kittens and train them to hunt, so what seems to be cruelty is thoughtfulness. Now I know that some tom cats kill kittens, and I don’t think any tom ever raised kittens and trained them thoughtfully to hunt. The queen cat does that. A tom cat is the Jack the Ripper of the Royal Family. But Lo is neutered, so he might behave like a queen or at least like a kind of uncle if there were kittens around, and bring them his birds to hunt. I don’t know. He doesn’t mix with other cats much. He stays pretty close to home, keeping an eye on the birds and moles and me. I know that my invisibility is not universal when I wake up in the middle of the night and Lo is sitting on the bed right beside my pillow purring and looking very intently at me. It’s a strange thing to do, a little uncanny. His eyes wake me, I think. But it’s a good waking, knowing that he can see me, even in the dark.