Again, Dangerous Visions

by edited by Harlan Ellison

  Elouise cut off her compassion, heard the doctors writing out checks and orders for food. If Ananias McCallister had been alive to see this scene . . .

  In the forecourt.

  The Congenitals and the Starving were mixing with each other, exchanging grief for grief, displaying their twisted and unfed children to one another, each father vying to be most deserving of sympathy for how little he could do to help his family. A wall was chosen for the banging of heads, and those that could not find a space used the floor. Those that could not bend down rent their hair, and wailing and whimpering and beating of the air and breasts began at first chaotically and then in rhythm. Feeling was running high. Even with charity checks, what kind of a life was it? The question went up into the fetid air of the forecourt, rising and falling, passed about, reiterated. The doctors would have worried at the atmosphere out there had it been caused by any other groups of people. But need they worry at enfeebled threats of people whose talents lay in basket-work and knitting, the making of felt pictures and the reading of Braille? Who among them could cast steel into sword, or spin a perfect gun-barrel? Which of them could lift a sword or aim straight?

  Secure, the doctors drank their whiskey, argued lightly whether Elouise should be given to sacrifice or not, and aired their personal theories about what should happen to her otherwise.

  Elouise heard nothing of what they said. She appeared to be asleep.

  .

  Encapsulated, capable of saying I.

  .

  The rays of the sun lit up the scene in the forecourt, making it seem as if a Spring Festival were in full swing. A doctor predicted that no good would ensue from the happenings that day and a big man with a face like a bird said:

  "Don't lose your cool."

  .

  Enclosed in the cavern of her own immaculate body, Elouise began to examine the walls. In a corridor of ridges there were waving plants, cilia reaching and retracting, snatching at the short white gown, trying to thrust her out. They banged at her knees.

  "Back! Turn back! Foreign body!" they screeched at her, but she with her newfound Will swept on, and the floor heaved but still she slid in the slime toward a division in the corridor. The left-hand fork would do fine, she decided. On and on. Into smaller passages she made her way and then stopped and fumbled in her handbag. Oh! Handbags! What a pest they were, one could never find anything. Paper and bottles and clips and mirrors and letters and make-up and manicure sets. She selected a nail file and a powder compact. Then, like many another freedom fighter before her she began her campaign by writing on the walls. Taking her nail file she scratched the words:

  "I WANT TO BE FREE. I WANT TO GO WHERE THERE ARE OTHERS LIKE ME."

  Mucus bubbled up around her feet, blood ran down the walls, she opened the powder compact and scattered the contents about in the air that blew first one way, then back. The walls closed in on her, there was a rush of wind echoing, and a mighty explosion.

  .

  The doctors had finished the whiskey, had come to a provisional decision about the patient. A doctor handed some papers to Matron who prepared to announce.

  Suddenly Elouise coughed a great racking, whooping, echoing cough. A triumphal arch of sputum and blood leapt from between her parted lips followed by a cloud of fine powder. She coughed again, clutching her throat and a dribble of blood marred her chin. Sweat poured from her pallid skin and she trembled as if in a fever.

  There was a short and profound silence before an immense uproar broke out in the auditorium with clattering and screaming and the breaking of glass and the scraping of feet. A colostomy bag burst onto the pink plastic floor and was ground and spread by a gouty foot. The great doors opened and in swept a crowd of Starving and Congenitals. They saw the blood on the short white gown and became enraged, Starving and Congenital alike catching the mood, breaking and scrambling, beating and flailing with their skin and bone. Crutches made fine skull-breakers, glass eyes beneath the foot broke legs and hips, leg-calipers broke calcified teeth and a hearing-aid choked effectively and doubtless sonorously one who would soon have died from cirrhosis of the liver.

  Elouise became suddenly panic-stricken; it seemed that the sight of her self-induced sickness did not procure the acceptance into normal society that she had hoped. How had she judged wrong? The urge to cough was frightful but with all her strength she screamed out: "Someone release the force-field on this bloody chair!"

  Poppy-head the nerve-specialist came wavering forward and threw the vital switch and she stood up to run but he stood grinning down at her, grotesquely pretty and obviously angered.

  "You betrayed yourself!" he whinnied, lower teeth displayed in resentment.

  "I don't know what you mean! I'm in mortal danger, can't you see?"

  "But listen . . ."

  She did not listen, saw only his face come near in earnest discourse; brought up her foot with force to his groin which made it seem that he fell beneath a blade, harvested along with the corn.

  She ran breathless and retching across the stage and found herself in a small storeroom at the end of a corridor. Too late she saw that she should have made for the "Exit" door at the back of the Theatre. The shelves were stacked with rows of drugs and chemicals and cylinders and wads; she sorted blindly through them, shutting her ears to herself. Big action was what was called for; some sweeping, cleansing, final act!

  Potassium cyanide capsules.

  Oh! what a beautiful blue jar, what a fine decoration of skull and cross-bones. She clutched up the heavy jar as if it were her baby and left the storeroom and soon found the steps she hoped for; those that led up to the gantry in the flies. Up there she had a fine view of both stage and auditorium. The chaos and mess and smell and everything down there were utterly disgusting.

  She shook out the little glass bubbles so that they fell cracking onto the floor beneath, dropped the jar and ran as fast as her failing breath would allow, gown clutched over nose and mouth until she finally found her way outside into the pure fresh air, having banged the door shut, close, behind her. The last sounds she heard from that place were screams of mass-death and an accusation against herself that she was in league with Ananias McCallister.

  "Superstition! Corruption! Plotters!" she countered raspingly as she ran. How different the evening from the morning. The day had started calm and golden; the evening descended triumphant and scarlet.

  She passed the barren gravelly land and came to open fields where she lay down to rest; all her body was in pain and distress, every sensation of malfunctioning totally new so that much harder to bear. She was listening to her own confused thoughts of how perhaps she had done her job too well, scored the message too deep, and wondering what to do next and where to go; thinking that to rescue her mother and hide away would be futile. Her mother would soon die anyway, and had she not bid for freedom? Someone approached and flopped down on the grass beside her, startling her into terror and convulsions of coughing. It was Poppy-head the nerve-specialist.

  "But you were in the . . ."

  "No I was not. I rose from your attack and left the place immediately. I thought you might do something horrible, I foresaw it."

  She was too fatigued to move, lay back instead weeping and pleading, explaining herself pitifully.

  He ignored what she was saying and spoke over her.

  "You realize of course that you would have come to no harm if you had remained calm and waited?"

  "No, no, they would have killed me . . ."

  "Not at all. We had decided that you could act as a kind of living fetish for them, provided that they did you no harm. That way they would have been satisfied, you would have been accounted for. We decided that it was not your fault for being so damnably healthy, but your mother's."

  The dew was falling, making everything damp and chill.

  "What shall I do now? I am so lonely, there is no place for me."

  "I suppose you feel like a special case," said Poppy-head, rising from the
ground, fingering his damp backside dubiously.

  "But I am, I am, I'm different . . ."

  He turned away silently, making it plain he thought that no excuse for what she had shown herself capable of; self-betrayal, mass murder.

  "But they were so disgusting," she murmured, knowing now that whatever she said was irrelevant.

  She slept the night on the cold ground, disturbed by coughing and vomiting and dreams that she could not recall when she opened her eyes on the dawn. Her body was racked with sensations that she guessed to be pneumonia. She pressed her hot forehead into the cool herbs and then passed time watching a poppy unfold in the rising sun. She did not pick it but simply watched it.

  "I only wanted to be free. I never meant to hurt anyone."

  Her words were blown away on the airs of Pergamon.

  Afterword

  1 Four fifths of human nature is submerged. It is time we discovered what it is that keeps us afloat and what it is drags us under.

  2 All you need is Love.

  3 Great ideologies are mass psychoses. To depart from the true Self brings disaster.

  4 Firstly I should say that I find it almost impossible to write about my writing, feeling that if there is anything needs saying about a story, then the story is a failure. But. This story was one of those that worked from the outside, in. The title came first, one morning I found myself saying it aloud, apropos nothing. Then episodes rose to mind, and were written down, I knew only that there was a story, not what it was, or why. I sorted from my thoughts those things I sensed to be part of the Elouise pattern, and when there were enough I rewrote, cut, expanded, put it away awhile, then rewrote again. The thing was then divorced from its origins in the unconscious mind, and had become discussable from a literary point of view. It was finally made into itself through the perspicacious promptings of an editor who knows about writing stories. It is only now that I can say I have written a story about the struggle for personal freedom, with a moral to the effect that anything gained at the expense of other people's discomfort will be invalid. On one level Elouise is the Nazi ideal of superman, and how that experiment went wrong by confusing politics with the means to freedom, which it can never be. It is also about acceptance of Self and the dangers both of egotism and identifying with any mass of people. But if that was what I had wanted to say, only, per se, I could perhaps have written a straight story on those lines. There is always something, which can not be said in any other way, by me, except in the story as it comes. The images are not symbols only of something else, they are symbols period. Which brings me much nearer to painting than writing, for this story. The words of a Sufi Master put very neatly what I always hope to achieve with this kind of work:

  "Some of the stories are mere wonder-tales, but others . . .are of the strange type known by the Sufis as 'illustrative history': that is to say, a series of events are concocted to point a meaning connected with psychological processes."

  If there is anything worth knowing in a story like Elouise, it will go straight into the reader's mind without necessarily being understood or analyzed in an intellectual manner.

  Introduction to

  CHUCK BERRY, WON'T YOU PLEASE COME HOME

  For those too square to have any roots in American music, Chuck Berry was one of the germinal influences who, between 1955 and 1960, set the tone and meter for the rhythm & blues idiom. It is fairly safe to say that no one playing today—and that includes The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and whoever comes next this week—got to his sound without going by way of Chuck Berry. Blues were (and still are, but most importantly were) Chuck Berry's ultimate bag, and putting him alongside B. B. King, Otis Redding, Big Miller, Muddy Waters and Lightnin' Hopkins should draw nothing but nods of approval from students of the Greats. But it was with his upbeat compositions that he made his biggest splash. "Maybellene," "Johnny B. Goode," "Memphis," "Roll Over Beethoven," "Reelin' and Rockin'" and "Sweet Little Sixteen" created a Berry sound that between '55 and '58 made him the single biggest name in R&B. Even today Berry is fine to hear. Not just my opinion: when the Stones go on tour and take along music for their own pleasure, everything Chuck Berry ever recorded goes with them.

  Once having been with Chuck Berry, it is impossible to give any credence to Bobby Sherman. Red beans and rice is a diet in no way enhanced by bubble gum.

  But I digress.

  The Chuck Berry of the story that follows is in no way related to the Chuck Berry of the amplified guitar. But the latter inspired the former in a deranged way that could only have been chronicled by a madman. Segue to Ken McCullough, on a rising note of hysteria.

  McCullough I found at the University of Colorado in 1969. Poet, roust-about, esthete, musicologist, writer, madman. He came into my class and I made the error of quoting Herman Melville: "No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it."

  Madman went back to his cubby and set out to prove me wrong. Well, Chuck Berry ain't a flea, but close enough. Herman may have been wrong.

  McCullough, madman, strikes me as a likely bet for stardom. If he ever gets his head straight. He has a sense for fiction that is platinum-bound by the rigors of poetry; good poetry, muscular poetry. He turns the phrases just so, and his mind wanders down the metaphorical byways with considerable style and grace. The way McCullough treats prose reminds me of a meaningful quotation from an otherwise undistinguished and fearsomely ponderous essay by Graham Greene on the work of Fielding and Sterne: " . . .prose used in fiction as Webster and other Jacobean playwrights used it, as a medium of equal dignity and intensity to poetry, indeed as poetry with the rhythm of ordinary speech."

  As this will he McCullough's first wide-circulation publication, I suspect it would be presumptuous of me to gambol on through fields of verbiage, proclaiming his wondrousness. Rather would I back off and let you hear McCullough in his own voice, first as autobiographer, then as writer of cunning fixated fictions. I will merely add that if you savor this first taste of his work, that you somehow scrounge a copy of the Winter 1971 issue of The Iowa Review, wherein a delight titled "His Loneliness, the Winner" lies waiting for your attention. But till you can, or until McCullough shucks off the lamebrain dreams of Hollywood playacting and gets down to what he does fantastically well—writing mad things with the pen of a poet—here is a complete bio and biblio, and a creature named Chuck Berry.

  "Born Staten Island, N.Y., July 18, 1943 at 9:38 A.M., the first of five children to a marathon runner father from Derma, Mississippi, and a Canadian mother from a long line of centenarians. My father was in the USAF during my formative years so travelled frequently to many podunk sooty places—the best of which was Newfoundland where we spent six years—maggoty folk songs, drunks pissing on your tricycle, the Portuguese fleet, icebergs, horsedrawn funerals, school blazers and school ties and a free bottle of codliveroil from the govt. each month. From this island in the past we returned to the U.S. of A. where there was the television we had missed and Elvis was at his peak. I went off to prep school (St. Andrew's) to get an education. During the year previous I had passed through the puberty rite of being saved, as a Southern Baptist. St. Andrew's is an Episcopal school. After initial hysteria, I was able to fuse these two styles in my peabrain in the best of all possible ways (?). At St. Andrew's I was one of the 'peasants', and had to cop labels from my father's suits during vacations to sew into my Robt. Hall threads. About the only way I could make my dent in this Frank Merriwell-fairytale scene was via athletics since I am no scholar. I became captain of the football and baseball teams. The peak of my career in prep school (except for losing a no-hitter) came when I got a ruptured kidney in a football scrimmage after our second game during the year of my captaincy, and I wrote the team a Win One For The Gipper' letter from my infirmary bed. It worked and those sons-of-bitches went on to a fantastic season inspired by my absence. They lost the conference championship game, however, because the coach didn't put me in as a punter (doctor's
orders). I was all set to run for the winning touchdown instead of punting. I was also active in plays—winning the Drama Award for my portrayal of the angriest man in Twelve Angry Men', and also active in pseudo-piety—punching out our best hitter for smoking during baseball season. I was also Warden of the Student Vestry. Don't get me wrong—I was very much a wiseass. Oh, I won the MVP Award in baseball, and the Eddie Stanky Shitty Award. My height went from 5'8" to 5'7¾" and I became asthmatic.

  "This is the beginning of a new paragraph. Went to the University of Delaware, that bastion of softsqueeze lobotomy, where I addled my brain through more football and baseball (I once hit Floyd Little head-on in a scrimmage against Bordentown Friends as a Freshman), and acted in many of the dramatic productions—my favorite role being Dylan Thomas, eating up the vicarious notoriety and expecting a similar end. Oh, in the summers of all these years (except one when I worked as the social director of a resort hotel in Lake George, N.Y.—a glorious erotic fantasy from which I've never recovered) I worked construction and played semi-pro ball. The scouts always told me I was too short despite feats like striking out 17 batters in the first game of a twinbill and collecting five hits in the second game. At Delaware I compounded my nonessential dilemma by majoring in pre-Med, and by doing innocent cartoons for the school paper for which I got called into the Dean of Students office every week. But with the pre-Med, for a person who is so scared of numbers that a license number freaks him out, I had my difficulties. I say without reservation that I sincerely regret and am heartily sorry for every hour I spent in stinking Chemistry labs with all those pimpled slide-rule weirdos. All that formaldehyde and butyric acid did serve to aggravate my asthma, giving me an eventual 1-Y.