Again, Dangerous Visions

by edited by Harlan Ellison

  BED SHEETS ARE WHITE

  Evelyn Lief

  KEEP OUR HIGHWAYS CLEAN

  DON'T LITTER

  KEEP CLEAN, KEEP WHITE

  The traffic moved slowly.

  Gart's palms were sticky. His shirt clung to his stomach.

  Noon. Two hundred fifty more miles. I'll never make it in time.

  Gart drove his car forward two feet. He knew he was wedged in by the sound of bumpers clashing in front and behind him.

  White cars reflected the sun's light.

  When Gart looked straight ahead the light blinded him. So he looked down into the car.

  My eyes hurt. Maybe I've got a pair of sunglasses.

  Gait opened the glove compartment, bent down and looked in.

  Nothing. Oh yes. Last week. I remember. They passed a law against them. Just about the last thing to go.

  Wish I had a pair of sunglasses.

  The line of cars started moving slowly forward. Then, one after another, the cars jerked to a halt.

  Not even halfway there.

  So tired.

  Should never have tried to make the trip in one day. Should have listened to Rita.

  Sunglasses. Yeah.

  I remember when we still had the gray-blue and gray-black roads. With only a white line down the middle. No line now. Just all white.

  He shut his eyes, and held his hands over them.

  Ah, nothing.

  Gart pressed down and took his hands away quickly.

  Red.

  The side of his head was red. Blood trickled down past his ear and under his chin.

  I was pushed against him. People were on all sides of me.

  Above the mass of heads surrounding me I could see a mounted cop. I turned to go the other way. The fuzz was there too.

  They were circling. Making the circle smaller and smaller.

  NOWHERE TO GO.

  The guy with the bloody head fell down. Couldn't see him. But I could feel him next to my feet.

  The crowd was pushing against me. They were shoving me toward the empty space over that guy's body.

  I'd have to step on him or fall.

  NO.

  I pushed back, but only managed to stay in the same place.

  A chant started, unclear at first. Then:

  DOWN WITH LADYBIRD. WE WANT OUR DIRT.

  DOWN WITH LADYBIRD. WE WANT OUR DIRT.

  Again, again. I felt a sense of power within me. The chant grew louder, louder.

  DOWN WITH LADYBIRD. WE WANT OUR DIRT.

  Then they sprayed us with the hoses.

  I got a stream right in the face. I turned away and fell down over that guy with the bloody head.

  I got kicked in the side. Heard some girls screaming. Covered my head with my arms. More kicks, and people stumbling over me.

  Then it stopped. No more hoses. Everybody was running away.

  Somehow 1 managed to get to my feet and run. Halfway down the block 1 looked over my shoulder.

  The fuzz was laughing.

  Fuck you bastards.

  Then I ran.

  Run. I'd like to get out and run between the aisles of these paralyzed lumps of scraps with those automatons inside. Run and wave my arms and shout, "My bed sheets aren't white,"

  How those guys would envy me. They all like what they do in bed. But they'd never admit it.

  To be pure, keep clean, keep white. That's THE LAW to them.

  God, do I want my sunglasses.

  Some cars were turning off the road. Lunch hour was over. The traffic was a little less now, and Gart was able to move at a steady thirty miles per hour.

  On my way. At last. Still won't make it home before nightfall. I'll have to stop at a motel.

  Tired.

  That argument last week with Rita. Too much. What does she want me to do? Change the world by myself?

  Those demonstrations years ago didn't do any good. THEY just have more organization, more weapons. Can't do a thing.

  Just sit around and rap about it. She thinks something gets done that way.

  "White is just a compensation for their guilt. If you can just convince one person of the idiocy of the White Laws, well, then we're making progress."

  Those are her favorite lines. And what good does one or two or three more people do?

  Nothing. That's what.

  And then at night she puts that pink sheet on our bed. Just to spite them, she says.

  But what does she do first thing in the morning? Why, she changes it to white. Just like everyone else.

  There's one thing they can't make a law against. Can't stop the sky from being blue. And all those hues of red at sunset.

  It's almost night. Didn't notice the time at all. You can get hypnotized by all these white buildings.

  Better find a motel.

  Gart traveled another fifteen minutes looking for a motel advertisement. It was getting darker.

  I got a great idea. Rita wants me to do something? I'll just continue driving at night. I'll only be out another hour. And besides, I would like to see everything in shades of black.

  Already things aren't so white anymore. I can almost imagine purple or green shades on the sides of the buildings.

  Yeah. I think I'll drive home at night.

  A half hour later Gart heard a siren.

  I knew it. Can't get away with a thing.

  He pulled over to the side of the road. The cops came up alongside him.

  One of them got out of his car and walked over to Gart.

  "Hey mister, you want to get killed or something, driving around at night? You know it's dangerous. The blackness could give you unacceptable thoughts.

  "See, you're looking at the sky. Don't you know there was a law passed today against that. Sky's never white. That'll be a double charge.

  "Come on out. You're under arrest."

  Afterword

  "This story is trite and schoolgirlish. It's the perfect example of every single thing that can be done wrong, all in one piece of writing."

  On his second day at the Clarion Workshop in Science Fiction and Fantasy (1968), Harlan ridiculed one of my stories. "Show me how a woman can undulate across the room," he said. I couldn't At the end of that class I told him I would write a story.

  But first I took a plain piece of white paper and wrote myself a sign. It said: DAMN YOU, HARLAN ELLISON. Every time I was ready to give up I would look at that sign, and determinedly return to the typewriter. Halfway through the night I added, in small letters, I'm gonna do it. And the next morning I had finished "Bed Sheets are White." For me it would have been sufficient to have written a good story in the face of Harlan's criticism. I waited anxiously for his response. It had never entered my mind to dream he would buy the story.

  For this and much more, Harlan, thank you.

  Introduction to

  TISSUE

  James Sallis's stories may be the only ones in this book to have two Afterwords. One at the front, and the other at the rear.

  I do not find it inconsistent that such a departure from form should be attendant on the work of Sallis, rather than that of any other of the forty-one authors in this book. Jim Sallis is clearly one of the most important writers produced by our genre in some time. His arrival on the scene was a matter of discussion and high expectation long before his first story was published. Unimpeachable critical sources who had read Jim's work in manuscript spread the word: we have something outstanding here.

  The promise has been overwhelmingly fulfilled. Jim's first book of short stories, A Few Last Words (Macmillan, 1970), drew the following comment from Publishers' Weekly—until recently not the most knowledgeable judge of what was worthy in sf, and whose reviews are still marred by the distasteful use of the abbreviation sci-fic—"There's a freshness and life about most of the writing here that breaks some molds, particularly those that use the weariest of science fiction conventions, and makes Sallis pleasant and surprising to read." This was the least complimentary of the reviews
A Few Last Words received. The Virginia Kirkus Service was unstinting in its praise, comparing Sallis to some of the greats of all literature.

  Yet this singularity of talent is not the prime reason why I find it fitting that rules must be broken for Sallis, even though it informs the feeling. Sallis seems to me a fascinating life-study. And as he leads his life, so does he break rules. Not always, I'm sorry to say, to his benefit.

  Jim Sallis seems to me, in a textural sense, one with F. Scott Fitzgerald: the early promise, the critical success, the brilliance of work, and the inenarrable urge to self-destruction.

  In Dangerous Visions I spoke at some length of writers I knew personally, dealing with them not merely as creators, but as human beings; in a (possibly misguided) spirit of proving to readers that the works they admired emerged from some very real places. An attempt to demonstrate that words do not simply burn themselves on paper, but come with pain and enormous effort from human beings. I was pilloried on occasion by critics who felt it was not my place to examine the men and women behind the stories; I ignored the reprimands. It seems to me imperative that everyone who reads the work of these special dreamers understands that there are reasons why a certain story is good, or bad, or derivative, or original. The reasons are always the writer.

  And further, informing the readership of the motives and drives of the human behind the story, permits each of us to expect only what writers can give, not what we want them to give. In this way we deal more correctly with the reality of a writer's capabilities, without expecting some new and glorious height each time out, without expecting more of the same kind of story that pleased us previously, without expecting {lawlessness or perfection. Lautrec once said, "One should never meet a man whose work one admires; the man is always so much less than the work." In the main, I take that to be a tragic truth. Dostoyevsky was a reprobate, a gambler, a wife-beater, a deserter of his children, a man who borrowed from his friends and then invariably stiffed them. Yet he wrote The Idiot and The Possessed and Crime and Punishment. So all is forgiven. Poe was heir to very nearly every vice known to Western Man, ending his life tragically and with fearful untimeliness. Yet he wrote "The Masque of the Red Death" and so we revere him.

  It is quite possible that speaking of Jim Sallis in the same tone as Poe and Dostoyevsky is not overblowing on my part. His early work indicates a mind and a talent of uncommon dimensions. And so, to the end that he escape the fates that were meted out for Fitzgerald and Horace McCoy and Thomas Heggen and Dylan Thomas and Randall Jarrell, let us speak for a moment of James Sallis, in the spirit of love and admiration, almost as an open letter, in hopes the cautionary tone will be noted.

  Jim is a gentle man, with that central core of violence that feeds off the need for recognition, approbation, success. Because he is gentle, he is capable of frightening moments of madness in which the frustration of his needs breaks out as senseless activity, followed by a withdrawal into self that is non-productive, alienating, terrifying to Jim and to those who love him and wish to see him succeed.

  The drive for stature and accomplishment whips him to the taking-on of multifarious projects, and the attendant pressure paralyzes him, disallows his satisfactorily completing them. It is a cycle of desperation in which the failure to accomplish what he has sworn to do, sends him into a pit depression from which he can emerge only by divesting himself of the responsibilities. And once having regained control over his scene, he understands that he has foregone the approbation he needed to sustain him, and he starts the cycle again.

  In this way he struggles from light to dark and dark to light, spinning off only those sparks of brilliant work that circumstance and chance permit to be born. Denying him that which he seeks so desperately, and denying us the concerted and sustained efforts we so hungrily want from him.

  Part of this nightmare has been formed by us, the writers and critics and readers who knew the name Sallis before we knew the man and his capacities for handling his own life. We praised him, as Fitzgerald was praised, without reservation, unstintingly. To his detriment.

  In a letter to me dated 17 March 1970, Jim said, "And while I'm at it, I should thank you for mentioning me all the time—in intros and like that. Appreciated, greatly."

  I revile myself for so doing. It only set him up as the dragon to be slain. It only intensified the pressures on him. It only made him seem greater than a man, larger than life, Olympian in dimension. It was a selfish thing for me to do—an unconscious need on my part to reaffirm that greatness can come from speculative fiction. Using James Sallis as the judas goat.

  As I write this, Jim Sallis is in retreat. He took over the administration of the Clarion Workshop from Robin Wilson, transferring it to his alma mater, Tulane University. He edited an anthology. He half-finished two novels for which he had been contracted some time before. The pressures built, and he went into retreat.

  This open letter, then, is waiting for his return. It says to Jim, take care. Go slowly and try to ignore the demands put upon you by an anxious audience, half waiting for your success, half hoping you fail—as streetgawkers hope the suicide will take the dive. And to his audience it says, let the man alone. Let him move at his own pace, in his own time; let him become what he will become without having to play to the gallery. It says, do not kill this writer. He may well be one of the significant ones.

  James Sallis was born in the South in 1944. He attended Tulane University, then lived in London for a year editing the prestigious experimental sf magazine New Worlds, with Michael Moorcock. He lived in Iowa, and he lived in New York. His work has appeared widely in such publications as The Prairie Schooner, Transatlantic Review, Orbit (five of the eight volumes as this is written), Quark, and many anthologies. When he was married, he lived in Boston. He has a son, Dylan, 6 years old.

  Jim prepared two Afterwords to his stories. The one I chose of the pair submitted appears at the end of the Sallis dual entry. The other, which should not be lost, appears here, precisely as he instructed it be printed:

  Box 5, Milford, 17 Mar 70.

  Harlan,

  Sorry as hell that this is late. But when you called I'd just been asleep about three hours: foggy as hell, hardly knew what you were saying, took me a couple of hours to shake the cotton out of my head and at least an hour more to move my body around. Also sorry if this is not exactly what you want. But if I'd been awake, I'd have warned you that I have a thing, very strong, about 'editorializing' on my own work: I refuse to do it. But, for you, I tried. Though perhaps somewhat obliquely?

  I'm enclosing, in fact, two different afterwords. I like the first—begins, It's March 16, 1970, goes on to my leaving NY. I don't care much for the second at all. (But send it to cover eventualities.) Hope the first is acceptable, and that you like it at least a bit. [It's really a lot closer to the story than it first appears, by the way.]

  Two points: Please note the setting, as marked. I want it just that way, okay? (Flush left, one line space between grafs, the poem dropped on to the next line and spaced three, etc.) Second: Please take care that the Polish words are printed exactly as they appear herein; this is most important!!!

  To check . . .I hope you've remembered to cut the last line (which is also the last paragraph) of "53rd american dream". (So that the story ends: ' . . .and the children loved her.') The last sentence (beginning 'Genevieve') is to be dropped, and becomes the last paragraph . . .IS THAT CLEAR? Please let me know. Again, most terribly important!

  ALSO: the two stories, their titles that is, are to be in lower case, as I wrote earlier. Okay?

  And do I get to see the Introduction you write? Hope so. (I trust you'll make it obvious how brilliant, incomparable, etc. I am, of course.) And while I'm at it, I should thank you for mentioning me all the time—in intros, and like that. Appreciated, greatly.

  Sorry, incidentally, to blow my image by not having a girl with me. But as you'll see from the afterword, she had to go to work at seven. (Which is in turn why I'd had only 3
hours of sleep, naturally.)