At last he goes down the hall to the bathroom and I shift back under the shirts and socks and stretch my legs. What if he undresses like my grandmother did, under a nightgown? under, for him, some giant, double-bed-sized thing?
But he doesn't. He hangs his coat on the little hanger and his tie on the closet doorknob. I receive his shirt and have to make myself another spy hole. Then off with the shoes, then socks. Off come the huge pants with slow, unseeing effort (he stares out the window). He begins on his yellowed undershorts, scratching himself first behind and starting earthquakes across his buttocks.
Where could he have bought those elephantine undershorts? In what store were they once folded on the shelf? In what factory did women sit at sewing machines and put out one after another after another of those other-worldly items? Mars? Venus? Saturn more likely. Or perhaps, instead, a tiny place, some moon of Jupiter with less air per square inch upon the skin and less gravity, where Mr. Morrison can take the stairs three at a time and jump the fences (for surely he's not particularly old) and dance all night with girls his own size.
He squints his oriental eyes towards the ceiling light and takes off the shorts, lets them fall loosely to the floor. I see Alleghenies of thigh and buttock. How does a man like that stand naked even before a small-sized mirror? I lose myself, hypnotized. Impossible to tell the color of his skin, just as it is with blue-gray eyes or the ocean. How tan, pink, olive and red and sometimes a bruised elephant-gray. His eyes must be used to multiplicities like this, and to plethoras, conglomerations, to an opulence of self, to an intemperant exuberance, to the universal, the astronomical.
I find myself completely tamed. I lie in my cocoon of shirts not even shivering. My eyes do not take in what they see. He is utterly beyond my comprehension. Can you imagine how thin my wrists must seem to him? He is thinking (if he thinks of me at all), he thinks: She might be from another world. How alien her ankles and leg bones. How her eyes do stand out. How green her complexion in the shadows at the edges of her face. (For I must admit that perhaps I may be as far along the scale at my end of humanity as he is at his.)
Suddenly I feel like singing. My breath purrs in my throat in hymns as slow as Mr. Morrison himself would sing. Can this be love, I wonder? My first real love? But haven't I always been passionately interested in people? Or rather in those who caught my fancy? But isn't this feeling different? Can love really have come to me this late in life? (La, la, lee la from whom all blessings flow.) I shut my eyes and duck my head into the shirts. I grin into the dirty socks. Can you imagine him making love to me!
Well below his abstracted, ceilingward gazes, I crawl on elbows and knees back behind the old books. A safer place to shake out the silliness. Why, I'm old enough for him to be (had I ever married) my youngest son of all. Yet if he were a son of mine, how he would have grown beyond me. I see that I cannot ever follow him (as with all sons). I must love him as a mouse might love the hand that cleans the cage, and as uncomprehendingly too, for surely I see only a part of him here. I sense more. I sense deeper largenesses. I sense excesses of bulk I cannot yet imagine. Rounded afterimages linger on my eyeballs. There seems to be a mysterious darkness in the corners of the room and his shadow covers, at the same time, the window on one wall and the mirror on the other. Certainly he is like an iceberg, seven eighths submerged.
But now he has turned towards me. I peep from the books holding a magazine over my head as one does when it rains. I do so more to shield myself from too much of him all at once than to hide.
And there we are, confronting each other eye to eye. We stare and he cannot seem to comprehend me any more than I can comprehend him, and yet usually his mind is ahead of mine, jumping away on unfinished phrases. His eyes are not even wistful and not yet surprised. But his belly button, that is another story. Here is the eye of God at last. It nestles in a vast, bland sky like a sun on the curve of the universe flashing me a wink of heat, a benign, fat wink. The stomach eye accepts and understands. The stomach eye recognizes me and looks at me as I've always wished to be looked at. (Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.) I see you now.
But I see him now. The skin hangs in loose, plastic folds just there, and there is a little copper-colored circle like a fifty-cent piece made out of pennies. There's a hole in the center and it is corroded green at the edges. This must be a kind of "naked suit" and whatever the sex organs may be, they are hidden behind this hot, pocked and pitted imitation skin.
I look up into those girlish eyes of his and they are as blank as though the eyeballs were all whites, as blank as having no sex at all, eggs without yolks, like being built like a boy-doll with a round hole for the water to empty out.
God, I think. I am not religious but I think, My God, and then I stand up and somehow, in a limping run, I get out of there and down the stairs as though I fly. I slam the door of my room and slide in under my bed. The most obvious of hiding places, but after I am there I can't bear to move out. I lie and listen for his thunder on the stairs, the roar of his feet splintering the steps, his hand tossing away the banister.
I know what I'll say. "I accept. I accept," I'll say. "I will love, I love already, whatever you are."
I lie listening, watching the hanging edges of my bedspread in the absolute silence of the house. Can there be anyone here at all in such a strange quietness? Must I doubt even my own existence?
"Goodness knows," I'll say, "if I'm normal myself." (How is one to know such things when everything is hidden?) "Tell all of them that we accept. Tell them it's the naked suits that are ugly. Your dingles, your dangles, wrinkles, ruts, bumps and humps, we accept whatever there is. Your loops, strings, worms, buttons, figs, cherries, flower petals, your soft little toad-shapes, warty and greenish, your cat's tongues or rat's tails, your oysters, one-eyed between your legs, garter snakes, snails, we accept. We think the truth is lovable."
But what a long silence this is. Where is he? for he must (mustn't he?) come after me for what I saw. But where has he gone? Perhaps he thinks I've locked my door, but I haven't. I haven't.
Why doesn't he come?
Afterword:
Blake wrote: "The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands & feet Proportion."
It would be nice to live in a society where the genitals were really considered Beauty. It seems to me any other way of seeing is obscene. After all, there they are. Why not like them? You can't have all this hiding and have people grow up not thinking there's a reason for hiding. (And when you think that every animal, or almost every animal, in the world has come into being from what we call a "dirty" word, it does seem a sick society.)
I wrote a series of stories on this theme. "Sex and/or Mr. Morrison" really did come into my head while I was attending "The Rites of Spring" ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House. Not the sort of thing I usually do, by the way, but the tickets were gifts. The dancers wore "naked suits," skin-colored leotards with hand prints and stripes in imitation body paint. Sitting there with all those mature-looking, married-looking people in the audience (each of them was one of the sexes and there are only two . . .for goodness' sake, only two!), I suddenly remembered that as a small child I really did feel that people must be hiding themselves so carefully because they were each entirely different from one another. I figured there may be a general male-female opposition, you know, males out, females in (though at that age I suppose I felt, males out, females nothing), but that was all the similarity there could be. And if people didn't wear clothes, I thought, what peculiar and wondrous things we'd see.
This all came back to me as I sat there at the ballet. It suddenly seemed very strange to have those naked suits onstage, as though what I thought as a child was the only possible, logical explanation for all the hiding. Why else should adults, especially this audience, educated-looking and rather elderly, each one sex and looking married to the other, why should they have to see a program with pretend skin on the dancers? Ludicrous!
So, this story . . . .
Introduction to
SHALL THE DUST PRAISE THEE?:
Somehow, inexplicably, I have grown rather fond of Damon Knight, 1st president and founder of the Science Fiction Writers of America. After thought, I must chalk it up to the fact that he is married to Kate Wilhelm, who is a better writer than I am, which offends me, but is one of those truths one must finally face up to. She is also lots prettier. Ergo, because Kate is a better writer than I, I recognize that she is a better person than I, and being a better person, there must be something she sees in Damon that makes him lovable and worth while, and out of respect and admiration for Kate, I have let it slop over onto Damon. A sticky and entirely unseemly situation, at best.
Now there are those who contend Damon Knight is worth while in his own right. As author of Hell's Pavement and The Analogs and Mind Switch, which many contend are brilliant novels of pure speculative fiction. As editor of A Century of Science Fiction and Cities of Wonder and 13 French Science Fiction Stories and eleven other anthologies, touted as the peak of literacy in the genre. As critic of the scene, epitomized by his collection of essays, In Search of Wonder, which helped win him a Hugo in 1956 as Best Science Fiction Book Reviewer. All this is said in defense of Damon Knight. There may even be merit in it.
Yet if this be so, if Knight is indeed the paragon his fans would have us believe, then explain the following:
Knight, sitting in a restaurant with friends, watching James Blish and myself at another table, as Blish explained in pantomime a hilarious newspaper cartoon to me, totally bewildered and bursting into tears when Blish refused to explain the meaning of his bizarre hand movements . . . .
Knight, having incurred the wrath of a host of writers in attendance at the Milford (Pa.) SF Writers Conference (of which he is the founder and director, since 1956), finding two fifteen-foot hardwood pilings inserted through front and back windows of his car, not uttering a word of anger or protest, but merely sulking for two days . . . .
Knight, managing not only to sell "The Man in the Jar" to a leading magazine, but having the audacity to include it in his latest collection, Turning On, without cleaning up the specious logic of the denouement . . . .
Knight, having a surfeit of brilliant Kate Wilhelm stories already bought up for his Orbit series of original science fiction anthologies, refusing to sell a perfect gem of a Kate story to this anthology, forcing the poor woman to sell it to him for some nebulous far-distant collection he is putting together . . . .
Each of these imponderables forces the conclusion that Damon Knight is a spoilsport. Now how's that for feet of clay!
Spoilsport was born in Baker, Oregon, in 1922. He was semi-educated in Hood River, Oregon, public schools. He spent a year after high school studying at the WPA Art Center in Salem, Oregon, then moved to New York and joined an early fraternity of science fiction buffs called The Futurians in 1941. He did some science fiction illustration (which he admits was bad), worked for Popular Publications as an assistant editor on their pulp magazines, and as a reader for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. He has been a free-lance writer since 1950, pouting all the while.
His first story sale (a result of flagrant intimidation and temper tantrums) was to Donald Wollheim (now editor of Ace Books) at Stirring Science Fiction when he was eighteen; since then he has sold close to a hundred stories, five novels, four collections of stories and the previously noted anthologies, et al.
About this Damon Knight story: he sent it in despite the fact that I told him bluntly there was no place for his kind of fellow in such an august collection. I liked it well enough, but I was going to send it back, just to show him nobody likes a smartass, when I received a letter from Kate. She said he had been making her life a living hell. They live in "a large delicate Victorian mansion in Milford, with three active boys, three tomcats and an indeterminate number of tropical fish," and Damon was really taking it out on Kate because I'd asked her for a story, but not him, and he threatened her that if his story was rejected and hers sold, he would have her shanghaied onto a white slave boat sailing for Marrakech.
Needless to say, he got his way, as usual. Thus, you will find in this anthology one Damon Knight story, and none by Kate Wilhelm. We're taking this up at the next Inquisition of the Science Fiction Writers of America.
SHALL THE DUST PRAISE THEE?
by Damon Knight
The Day of Wrath arrived. The sky pealed with trumpets, agonized, summoning. Everywhere the dry rocks rose, groaning, and fell back in rubble. Then the sky split, and in the dazzle appeared a throne of white fire, in a rainbow that burned green.
Lightnings flickered away toward the horizons. Around the throne hovered seven majestic figures in white, with golden girdles across their paps; and each one carried in his gigantic hand a vial that smoked and fumed in the sky.
Out of the brightness in the throne came a voice: "Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth."
And the first angel swooped down, and emptied his vial in a torrent of darkness that smoked away across the bare earth. And there was silence.
Then the second angel flew down to earth, and darted this way and that, with his vial unemptied: and at last turned back to the throne, calling, "Lord, mine is to be poured out upon the sea. But where is the sea?"
And again there was silence. For the dry, dusty rocks of the earth stretched away limitless under the sky; and where the oceans had been, there were only runneled caverns in the stone, as dry and empty as the rest.
The third angel called, "Lord, mine is for the rivers and fountains of waters."
Then the fourth angel called, "Lord, let me empty mine." And he poured out his vial upon the sun: and in an instant grew hot with a terrible radiance: and he soared back and forth letting fall his light upon the earth. After some time he faltered and turned back to the throne. And again there was silence.
Then out of the throne came a voice saying, "Let be."
Under the wide dome of heaven, no bird flew. No creature crawled or crept on the face of the earth; there was no tree, and no blade of grass.
The voice said, "This is the day appointed. Let us go down."
Then God walked on the earth, as in the old time. His form was like a moving pillar of smoke. And after Him trooped the seven white angels with their vials, murmuring. They were alone under the yellow-gray sky.
"They who are dead have escaped our wrath," said the Lord God Jehovah. "Nevertheless they shall not escape judgment." The dry valley in which they stood was the Garden of Eden, where the first man and first woman had been given a fruit which they might not eat. To eastward was the pass through which the wretched pair had been driven into the wilderness. Some little distance to the west they saw the pitted crag of Mount Ararat, where the Ark had come to rest after a purifying Flood.
And God said in a great voice, "Let the book of life be opened; and let the dead rise up from their graves, and from the depths of the sea."
His voice echoed away under the sullen sky. And again the dry rocks heaved and fell back; but the dead did not appear. Only the dust swirled, as if it alone remained of all earth's billions, living and dead.
The first angel was holding a huge book open in his arms. When the silence had endured for some time, he shut the book, and in his face was fear; and the book vanished out of his hands.
The other angels were murmuring and sighing together. One said, "Lord, terrible is the sound of silence, when our ears should be filled with lamentations."
And God said, "This is the time appointed. Yet one day in heaven is as a thousand years on earth. Gabriel, tell me, as men reckoned time, how many days have passed since the Day?"
The first angel opened a book and said, "Lord, as men reckoned time, one day has passed since the Day."
A shocked murmur went through the angels.
And turning from them, God said, "Only one day: a moment. And yet they do not rise."
The fifth angel mois
tened his lips and said, "Lord, are You not God? Shall any secrets be hid from the Maker of all things?"
"Peace!" said Jehovah, and thunders rumbled off toward the gloomy horizon. "In good season, I will cause these stones to bear witness. Come, let us walk further."
They wandered over the dry mountains and through the empty canyons of the sea. And God said, "Michael, you were set to watch over these people. What was the manner of their last days?"
They paused near the fissured cone of Vesuvius, which in an aeon of heavenly inattention had twice erupted, burying thousands alive.
The second angel answered, "Lord, when last I saw them, they were preparing a great war."
"Their iniquities were past belief," said Jehovah. "Which were the nations of those that prepared the war?"
The second angel answered, "Lord, they were called England and Russia and China and America."
"Let us go then to England."
Across the dry valley that had been the Channel, the island was a tableland of stone, crumbling and desolate. Everywhere the stones were brittle and without strength. And God grew wroth, and cried out, "Let the stones speak!"
Dangerous Visions Page 44