Again, Dangerous Visions

by edited by Harlan Ellison

  There was a blinding flash of white, and when Craven could see again, Pahlevsky lay before him, naked, legs spread, scrotum open to a kick. The lawyer reeled; he was facing the classic posture of defenselessness. As the wolf defeated exposes his throat to trigger the act of mercy from a stronger wolf, Pahlevsky was exposing himself to the most punishing blow a man can absorb. He had stripped the last facade of mere objective reality from the trial, and flung on the screen the psychological crux at which the two attorneys had arrived. Craven, as a man, could not deliver the kick . . .not knowingly; but to be a professional means to do things no layman can. Craven blinked his eyes and popped his cerebral hemispheres. When he looked again, instead of Hans Pahlevsky, Judith Hlavcek lay in the same posture. From her, it did not invite a kick.

  Stumbling in the effort to peel off his jockey shorts, Craven flung himself on the woman. He was rewarded with a long scream of agony from Pahlevsky, and a great golden flash which printed on the report in see-through letters, "Defendant will install filters and organize transport, making the best contract it can with Nallard Plastics or other buyer of its effluent. After today, defendant's drain is not to be used for any runoff more polluted than rainwater. Counsel will present appropriate order."

  Jerking the hood from his head, Craven sat up. With trembling hands, he unscrewed the blood mixer from his wrist fitting. Still groggy with effort, he stumbled to the toilet and basin in the corner. After relieving himself, he splashed water on his face. As usual, both shoes had been kicked off in the course of the hearing. Every stitch of his clothing was soaked with a sour sweat. The last person he wanted to face was Judith Hlavcek when she came in the door. "Don't, don't," he said, as her arms slid around him. "You don't know." He suddenly remembered the ghastly maneuver at the end of the trial, and stiffened.

  "I know. I know. Whatever it is, I know it. Don't worry, funny man." She kissed his ear and slid out the door as Pahlevsky staggered off the couch, hand over mouth.

  After throwing up, Pahlevsky accepted a wetted towel from Craven, and said, "You won. You draw the order." He lurched to his feet and picked up his grief case from the counsel table. "Next week we're in that three-cornered fight with Charley Kroger. Back to back?"

  "Damn right. You hold him and I'll hit him."

  "We'll tear both his arms off. So long." Pahlevsky dragged his soggy neckcloth into a presentable knot and went out the door of the hearing cube.

  The victorious lawyer lingered for a moment, casting his mind back with mingled shame and pleasure to the memory of Judith Hlavcek on the ground. With a start, he realized that Pahlevsky had projected himself on a bed of oyster shells. Craven shuddered at the thought of the sharp shells digging into Judy's back, put his hat on his head, and went out in the hall. Judith Hlavcek was passing by. Her face gave him a smile that managed to be both inviting and defiant. "Counsellor," he said. "How do. Who you been clawing up?"

  "Just a routine bucket of blood today. And you?" She twisted her beads.

  "Hansl Pahlevsky and I had it. Real rugged little dreamer, that one."

  "You won. I can tell. You always talk sweet about lawyers you've defeated."

  He stood stock still. She had observed him closely enough to read factual truth from his verbal smokescreens! "Oh—oh yes. Justice triumphed."

  They smiled together at the old chestnut. He grimaced with effort, swallowed, and said, "I like you in that suit."

  "Thank you." She looked at him with a level stare. Obviously, she was replying to the idea, rather than the statement, for her costume was just another version of the working clothes she wore every day. Serviceability, rather than looks, is required of trial lawyers' clothes. "Will I see you tomorrow, or do you have a day off?"

  "Oh, no rest for the weary. I'll be here . . . see you then."

  "See you."

  He took the elevator to the clerk's floor to dictate the order in Hazlitt. When Craven left the front door of the old courthouse, passing by the bible open in its glass-topped stele, he saw her at the corner, under the live-oak trees. Prudently, as becomes a counsellor at law, she held a folded newspaper above her head to foil the pigeons who were settling to roost in the branches. In the mellow afternoon light, the skin of her buttocks rolled and tumbled under the glistening column of her back.

  With sudden resolve, Corky cried, "Hey Jude! Wait up!" Hat straight on his head, shoes in his left hand, clothes draped over his right arm, he began to run after her.

  Afterword

  A story has an independent life of its own, like a statue or a painting. It may "mean" something different, something more or less than its writer intended or expected. That is why I do not explain my stories. If they are ambiguous or polemic, that may or may not be what I had in mind. I keep all the drafts, and if it ever really becomes important (an event I find both amusing and impossible to conceive), someone can squeeze a Ph.D. dissertation out of the contradictory versions the stories went through on their way to sale. Writing is a craft to me, and craftsmen customarily enjoy what they do. I don't suffer when I write. Producing briefs and pleadings, of which I have written ten billion words, give or take a million, has freed me of inhibitions. I know perfectly well that if an idea exists, it can be expressed.

  I am deeply interested in the drug culture: not just marijuana smokers, acid droppers and speed freaks, but what might be called the emancipated middle class, who save up their highs and lows by using meprobomates, bromides, nonnarcotic sleeping tablets, and even aspirin (in sufficient quantities, a pretty good tranquilizer) only to find that they can't recover the euphoria on weekends or on vacations, neither with psychic energizers nor with alcohol. Alcohol was the forbidden goody of my generation, and I have mystical feelings about the stuff. I don't see much evidence that other drugs are any more finally liberating than Scotch, Tequila, or Sneaky Pete, a party punch we used to make at the U of T by soaking orange peels and raisins in grain alcohol for two days before the festivities; but nothing can pervade our general culture with fear and longing as drugs do today without having something to teach us. I'm not through writing about either drugs or the law.

  Introduction to

  MONITORED DREAMS AND STRATEGIC CREMATIONS

  Rules have been broken for Bernard Wolfe, and frankly, screw the rules. Talk about coups! Can you dig that this book contains twenty-four thousand, eight hundred words of brand-new, never-before-published, never-seen-by-the-eyes-of-mortal-men fiction by Bernard Wolfe, one of the incredible legends-in-his-own-time of Our Times? Can you perceive the magic of that? If you can't, cup your hand around your ear and listen to the West, and you'll hear me going hallooooo among the Sequoias.

  I wanted Wolfe in Dangerous Visions and it just didn't work out. But when I knew there would be a second volume, I assaulted his privacy and badgered and cajoled, and stole these two remarkable stories—"The Bisquit Position" and "The Girl With Rapid Eye-Movements"—away from Playboy and other flush periodicals that pay Wolfe three grand per story, and they are here because they were so ordained for publication by a Gracious God who takes time off from being (as Mark Twain called him) "a malign thug" every once in a million years.

  Bernard Wolfe edged briefly into the sf field back in 1951 with his Galaxy novelette, "Self Portrait," and with rare good sense (like Vonnegut, years later) scampered for dear life and a reputation in "the Mainstream."

  Yet despite Bernie's fleetness of foot, the rapid eye-movements of perceptive readers caught the slamming of the door and, having been dazzled by "Self Portrait," they began asking, "Who the hell was that?" They found out in 1952 when Bernie's first novel, Limbo, was published by Random House; and for the first time insular fans who had had to put up with dilettantes like Herman Wouk sliding into the genre to proffer insipid semi-sf works like The Lomokome Papersi, had a mainstreamer they could revere. Preceding by almost twenty years "straight writers" like Hersey, Drury, Ira Levin, Fowles, Knebel, Burdick, Henry Sutton, Michael Crichton and a host of others who've found riches in the sf/f
antasy idiom, Bernard Wolfe had written a stunning, long novel of a future society in purest sf terms, so filled with original ideas and the wonders of extrapolation that not even the most snobbish sf fan could put it down.

  They did not know that six years earlier, in 1946, Bernard Wolfe had done a brilliant "autobiography" with jazz great Mezz Mezzrow, called Really the Blues. Nor did they suspect that in the years to come he would write the definitive novel about Broadway after dark, The Late Risers, or a stylistically fresh and intellectually demanding novel about the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico, The Great Prince Died, or that he would become one of the finest practitioners of the long short story with his collections Come On Out, Daddy and Move Up, Dress Up, Drink Up, Burn Up. All they knew was that he had written one novel and one novelette in their little arena, and he was sensational.

  In point of fact, the things science fiction fans never knew about Bernard Wolfe would fill several volumes, considerably more interesting than many sf novels. Of all the wild and memorable human beings who've written sf, Bernard Wolfe is surely one of the most incredible. Every writer worth his pencil case can slap on the dust wrapper of a book that he's been "a short order cook, cab driver, tuna fisherman, day laborer, amateur photographer, horse trainer, dynamometer operator" or any one of a thousand other nitwit jobs that indicate the writer couldn't hold a position very long.

  But how many writers can boast that they were personal bodyguards for Leon Trotsky prior to his assassination (or prove how good they were at the job by the fact that it wasn't till they left the position that the killing took place)? How many have been Night City Editor of Paramount Newsreels? How many have been war correspondents for Popular Science and Fawcett Publications, specializing in technical and scientific reporting? How many have been editor of Mechanix Illustrated? How many have appeared in The American Mercury, Commentary, Les Temps Modernes (the French Existentialist journal), Pageant, True and, with such alarming regularity, Playboy? How many have worked in collaboration with Tony Curtis and Hugh Hefner on a film tided Playboy (and finally, after months of hasseling and tsuriss, thrown it up as a bad idea, conceived by madmen, programmed to self-destruct, impossible to bring to rational fruition)? How many were actually Billy Rose's ghostwriter for that famous Broadway gossip column? How many writers faced the Depression by learning to write and composing (at one point with an assist from Henry Miller) eleven pornographic novels in eleven months? How many have ever had the San Francisco Chronicle hysterically grope for a pigeonhole to their style and finally come up with, " . . .Wolfe writes in a mixture of the styles of Joyce and Runyon . . ."?

  What I'm trying to encapsulate with these mere words is the absolute, utter charismatic hipness of Bernie Wolfe, a man who knows more about everything there is to know about than any other writer I've ever met. What I'm trying to say is that his presence in this book elevates it x number of notches, even as his presence at a dinner party elevates the scene to the level of a special occasion.

  Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Bernard Wolfe graduated from Yale in 1935 with a B.A. in Psychology and after a year in Yale's graduate school with an eye toward becoming a psychoanalyst, cut out and (not necessarily in this order) acted as liaison man between the Trotsky household and the commission set up by John Dewey and others to investigate the Moscow Trials, spent two years in the Merchant Marine, taught at Bryn Mawr, learned to play a vicious game of tennis, did some time in Cuba where he picked up a taste for thick (he says graceful), nasty-smelling (he says delicious), evil-looking (he says exquisite) cigars, which he can no longer obtain, due to the embargo. (This does not prevent him from constantly impaling his face with substitutes, equally as offensive to onlookers.)

  Today he lives and works in the Santa Monica Mountains, overlooking West Hollywood. He lectures at UCLA, writes fiction (his latest project, Working-tided Go to the People, is a 1700 page novel based on/focused on the Delano grape workers and their heroic huelga).

  What he has to say for himself he says with uncommon cleverness in the Afterword to these two stories.

  And with two stories in a book that was conceived to contain no more than one offering by any single writer, Wolfe broke the rules, and thereby allowed the rules to be broken for the other Wolfe (Gene, that is; sorry Thomas, sorry, Tom) and for James Sallis. But with stories as good as these, damn the rules.

  For those purists who will say I've stretched the concept "dangerous visions" to include these Wolfepics, contending they aren't strictly—by the rules—sf . . .well . . .

  Damn the rules, here's Bernie Wolfe!

  MONITORED DREAMS AND STRATEGIC CREMATIONS

  Bernard Wolfe

  1:Bisquit Position

  Napalm aside, he took to the idea of a month in California: he could rent a house. In a valley the size of Tom Thumb's nostril, east of Coldwater, close to Mulholland, he found a good enough cottage, redwood ceilings, rock-coped pool, sauna, terraced hillside. Place for the nerves to go loose. After a day of interviews and setting up sequences with the camera crew he could swim, take softening steam, get in a terrycloth robe to barbeque an aged T-bone or oversize lamb chops in the patio, on the hibachi. He was in holiday mood. It was a holiday when he could stay clear of restaurants and hotels, and nearby shooting wars.

  Then this night he turned into his rippled tarmac lane to find the cul-de-sac overrun. Cars crowded the street on both sides to the turnabout. Attendants in red jackets, the usual college students, flashed up and down, playing musical chairs with the cars, musical cars. Hard-rock guitars jigged the air: the valley's bowl was a loudspeaker. Burble of energized voices.

  There was one property of estate grandness around here, a gabled English Country structure seen in patches through stands of white birch, looking over lawns, balustraded walks, tennis courts. This place, no big thing by Beverly Hills standards but notable on an unshowy street, was diagonally across from Blake's; the party going on there was well-attended by somebodies. An indicative number of the cars bumper to bumper along the road were Cads, Lincolns, Rollses, Bentleys.

  Taking the steps to his hillside perch, not especially interested in the thought he was entertaining about the fourth estate's dearth of estates, Blake was having nonadhesive feelings about coming home to the buzzing insides of a verdant loudspeaker. He felt invaded. But the invasion was so spilling, so area-wide, it sucked up his own house and head, recruiting him into the commotion, adding him to the guest list.

  The sense of simultaneous violation and almost welcome suction got stronger when he reached the porch and found a woman sitting there in one of the wicker chairs. She was in a floor-length velvet gown of royal purple rifted up both sides to the upper thighs. Her face had a tennis pleasantness, her tall body was thin, not bony, so thin in the bone as to require only token fleshing to soften the skeleton's edges. This was his first impression, that she was fine of face, under a fat spiral of red-blond hair, over an elongated body whose memorable dimension was the vertical. The mesh-held thigh exposed in one of the gown's slits looked lank enough to be circled by two unexerting hands but worth a taking hold. Her green eyes were prowlers, dodged to both sides even as they looked with green insistence at and over you. She could not be much past 30.

  "Hello, I'm trespassing," she said. Her voice, pitched low, had reverberances which lengthened the words. Was somewhat fogged aside from that.

  "Long as you don't lie. I hate a trespasser who says he's a telephone lineman."

  "I'll line all your phones, with zebra skin, if you let me stay a minute."

  "Two, if you want." He took the other chair. "Don't you like parties?"

  "Hate them. Especially ones I give. As hostess I get to feeling more the hostage. Over 200 people across the street drinking our champagne."

  "You don't like people."

  "I don't know what to do with just two or three. Hundreds make me a sprinter."

  "There's a thing you can do with people in any numbers, say goodbye. Or don't invite them in the first plac
e."

  "My husband invites them. He's got a bigger supply of hellos than goodbyes. I mean, he's gregarious. Family joke. That's his name, Greg. Another family joke is, I call our place Greg Areas."

  She was probably a little drunk, containing it with styled humor.

  "Why don't you and your husband have a division of labor? He greets, you send them on their way."

  "My trouble is," she said unresponsively, "I'm capable of just so many smiles per day. With a crowd, my quota of smiles gets used up the first 10 minutes, then I'm left with an unfunctional face."

  "I'd say your face was functional."

  "Oh, keeps teeth from hanging out, provides setting for the eyes, yes. But it's not going to smile any more tonight. Your face is very functional."

  "Keeps siroccos out. My ears from merging."

  "I see it on the news. You report wars from various places. Vietnam. Chasing Che in Bolivia."