Dennis paused in front of the monitor. He reached out and touched Roxanne’s image. “You want to come here?”
“Yes. Dennis, you sound funny. I wish I could see you. When can I come over?”
Dennis walked over to his bed and took the black silk suit from its resting place. He carried it to the loveseat, caressing it absently.
“Dennis?” Roxanne slumped in her chair. “Okay. I guess I said too much. I won’t bother you any more.” She lifted a hand and cut off her end of the connection. She sat stiffly on the end of her bed, sobbing hopelessly.
“Roxanne!” Dennis jumped up, the black suit sliding to the floor. As he leapt for the screen, his foot slid on the fabric of the suit. He reached down to throw it out of the way and then stopped himself. He gathered the suit into his arms. Slowly, he turned back towards the loveseat. He watched Roxanne for a few seconds. Looking from his shabby apartment to her beautiful self-imposed prison.
“Phone on. Call Roxanne.” He smoothed his hair and straightened his robe as he waited for Roxanne to answer the phone.
After a few minutes, Roxanne answered. “I hope this is you, Dennis,” she said wearily. She lay on the bed, her arm covering her eyes.
“Yeah, it’s me. I fixed my output.”
Roxanne uncovered her eyes and sat up to view her screen. “Dennis? You’re not... Who are you? If this is some kind of a joke, I’m not amused!” she said furiously. “I’ll have the police trace this call if...”
“Roxanne, it’s me. Dennis.”
She stopped her tirade. “I don’t believe it, what happened to you?”
“Rox, it’s me. Look at me. Please, really look at me. Do you recognize me even a little?” he pleading, praying to whoever might be listening that she would see him.
“I don’t understand.” Her eyes searched his image. “Why do you look like this? Where are you calling from?”
Dennis sighed. “It’s what I look like. This is what my apartment looks like. I’m a slob. And you’re the first person in three years to see the real Dennis Casper.”
She stared into the camera, searching his room and his face. “I recognize the hair. And the eyes. And it’s definitely your voice.”
“Yeah, I know. But I’m fatter and shorter. And uglier. Should I go?”
“You’ve been lying to me?”
“Yes, I’m truly, truly sorry. I’ll go now.” Slowly, he reached for the screen.
She reached out as if to stop him. “No, please don’t. I don’t think you’re ugly. You’re still Dennis. No matter what you look like. It’s just a shock. I never suspected—I mean, it never crossed my mind.” She walked over to the phone. “Sit up straight, and let me get a good look at you.” Dennis complied. For what seemed like the hundredth time that night he ran his fingers through his hair in a vain attempt to smooth it. “Well,” he said with a waver in his voice, “Do I pass?” More quietly he asked, “Do you still love me? I’m sorry I lied to you.”
Roxanne smiled. “I love you more. Now I know why you never invited me out. I was always so worried you would and I wouldn’t know what to say.” She looked puzzled. “But how did you—do you—change yourself?” Dennis held up the suit. “It’s a long story. Why don’t I come get you and bring you back to my apartment? It’s time for us to meet.”
“I think I could leave with you. I’ll be looking for you. Goodbye. I love you.”
Dennis cut the connection. The screen went black. “I love you, too,” he whispered.
Dennis Casper got dressed and, for the first time in three years, left his apartment.
Fredric Brown
Expedition
Fredric Brown (1907-72) wrote award-winning mysteries and such excellent fantasy and science-fiction novels and tales as What Mad Universe, Rogue in Space, The Mind Thing, Martians Go Home, The Lights in the Sky Are Stars, “Arena,” “Knock,” “Star Mouse,” and many other memorable compositions. He was a master of the difficult short-short story form, of which the following amusing bit of hyperbole is a popular example.
“THE FIRST major expedition to Mars,” said the history professor, “the one which followed the preliminary exploration by one-man scout ships and aimed to establish a permanent colony, led to a great number of problems. One of the most perplexing of which was: How many men and how many women should comprise the expedition’s personnel of thirty?
“There were three schools of thought on the subject.
“One was that the ship should be comprised of fifteen men and fifteen women, many of whom would no doubt find one another suitable mates and get the colony off to a fast start.
“The second was that the ship should take twenty-five men and five women—ones who were willing to sign a waiver on monogamous inclinations—on the grounds that five women could easily keep twenty-five men sexually happy and twenty-five men could keep five women even happier.
“The third school of thought was that the expedition should contain thirty men, on the grounds that under those circumstances the men would be able to concentrate on the work at hand much better. And it was argued that since a second ship would follow in approximately a year and could contain mostly women, it would be no hardship for the men to endure celibacy that long. Especially since they were used to it; the two Space Cadet schools, one for men and one for women, rigidly segregated the sexes.
“The Director of Space Travel settled this argument by a simple expedient. He—Yes, Miss Ambrose?” A girl in the class had raised her hand.
“Professor, was that expedition the one headed by Captain Maxon? The one they called Mighty Maxon? Could you tell us how he came to have that nickname?”
“I’m coming to that, Miss Ambrose. In lower schools you have been told the story of the expedition, but not the entire story; you are now old enough to hear it.
“The Director of Space Travel settled the argument, cut the Gordian knot, by announcing that the personnel of the expedition would be chosen by lot, regardless of sex, from the graduating classes of the two space academies. There is little doubt that he personally favored twenty-five men to five women—because the men’s school had approximately five hundred in the graduating class and the women’s school had approximately one hundred. By the law of averages, the ratio of winners should have been five men to one woman.
“However, the law of averages does not always work out on any one particular series. And it so happened that on this particular drawing twenty-nine women drew winning chances, and only one man won.
“There were loud protests from almost everyone except the winners, but the director stuck to his guns; the drawing had been honest and he refused to change the status of any of the winners. His only concession to appease male egos was to appoint Maxon, the one man, captain. The ship took off and had a successful voyage.
“And when the second expedition landed, they found the population doubled. Exactly doubled—every woman member of the expedition had a child, and one of them had twins, making a total of exactly thirty infants.
“Yes, Miss Ambrose, I see your hand, but please let me finish. No, there is nothing spectacular about what I have thus far told you. Although many people would think loose morals were involved, it is no great feat for one man, given time, to impregnate twenty-nine women.
“What gave Captain Maxon his nickname is the fact that work on the second ship went much faster than scheduled and the second expedition did not arrive one year later, but only nine months and two days later.
“Does that answer your question, Miss Ambrose?”
Dan Potter
Tripping the Light Fantastic
“Tripping the Light Fantastic” has driven me crazy since 1974, when a literary agent submitted it for a paperback anthology I was editing. Unfortunately, manuscript page six was missing, so I asked the agency to mail it to me, but though it was only a few days later, they no longer represented Dan Potter. I tried to track him down, but though he was briefly affiliated with other agencies, I was always one step behind
. Finally, years and years later, a reference in Books in Print to a novel, Crazy Moon Zoo, led me to try a phone number in Oklahoma City. Calloohl Callayl The right Mr. Potter answered! He couldn’t recall which magazine had published “Tripping” and had misplaced the manuscript, so I sent him my copy and he wrote a new sixth page. Now, at long last, I am delighted to present this tale of an alien (?) whose bar stool emits—but find out for yourself why for fifteen years I’ve wanted to anthologize this far, far, tar-out story!
A SPOOKY NIGHT not so long ago: Halloween and raining black cats and stray dogs, me celebrating my thirty-third autumn with a sixth or seventh double when
KA-WHAM
the lightning struck, the lights quirked off and on again, and Big Naomi let out a scream that frizzled my hair. Her three hundred twenty pounds of black flesh were dancing in place like an orgy of mud, quarter-sized eyes flipped out toward the door where the young stranger stood: thigh white and angle thin, fish wet—and glowing. Seemed an eye trick at first, an aftermath of lightning, but later on Big Naomi whispered: He’s got the aura.
Is it catching? I asked.
You honky drunk, she said. He’s got it. The glow seemed to fade (for me at least) when he stepped to the bar, whipped out a notebook and printed:
UNO SCOTCH AND WATER, POR FAVOR.
HABLA ESPANOL? I asked on paper.
NEIN, he printed, then: PARLES VOUS FRANÇAIS?
NO.
TOO BAD, he wrote.
WHY?
He stared at the WHY? and scribbled: SORRY, NO READ ENGLISH.
A Halloween midnight with three customers in the place (old man Johnson was making Zs in a booth), and one of them a stone mind-blower. At that point Naomi interjected the aura bit and I wasn’t impressed.
Poor damn mute, she added.
The kid smiled. Right up his sleeve, I thought.
(I say kid: could’ve been eighteen or thirty. Seemed to be both at times.)
WHAT’S THE NAME OF THE BAR? he asked in print.
ZEROES, I penciled.
I BELIEVE IT, he returned.
Description of Zeroes: dim, drab, destitute; no color at all except the jukebox, which stood out in the room, a lighted jewel in a dark whore’s navel.
But we liked it the way it was: the wrong place on the wrong side of the tracks in the wrongest midwestern city in the world. A place where people who, for whatever reason, had been at the wrong place at the wrong time throughout their lives could relax with their own kind—all of them, all of us, one step comfortably below the lowest common denominator of failure.
The most comfortable place in the world: like the song says, when you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose.
WHAT’RE YOU LOOKING FOR KID? I asked, thinking I’d found another one of us.
TO BE LEFT ALONE, he printed.
YOU’VE FOUND THE RIGHT PLACE, I conveyed.
HOW MUCH YOU WANT TO BET?
TAKE IT FROM ME. I KNOW THIS PLACE.
IT’S NOT IN YOUR HANDS. I DRAW TROUBLE LIKE FLIES.
I tried to reassure him: YOU’LL LIKE IT HERE.
I DOUBT IT.
Big Naomi and I got to writing all sorts of things, but he wouldn’t answer, not then or for the next two months. Big Naomi kept going on about the aura until—while he was gone to the john—she accidentally plopped on his bar stool.
KA-WHAM
She turned on like a mile of radios.
Things changed fast. Soon as Big Naomi spread the word about her trip on his bar stool.
❖
It got so toward the last when he came in the crowd would part to let him pass: twenty or thirty people buzzing through the loud room drunk with booze and smoke and dime-a-dream music and endless flak-bursts of conversations through which he’d move adagio, a dancer in his own mind, aloof, apart from us, the smoke, the fumes, the queasy stomachs and queasier sex surging amoeba-like, a half-mass trying to complete itself.
He never seemed to notice the commotion—people jumping up to offer him a seat at the bar, whispering, That’s him, That’s the guy, and then he’d sit and the place would swirl and smoke and burst with flak and stumble and grasp again as though he had not entered. But sooner or later everyone would watch him: each of us knowing by that time we were in the presence—as Big Naomi put it—of a presence.
Slight, not much more than a hard sliver of something as big as moon, as elusive as wind, he sat night after night unaware (or so I thought) of being watched and studied, awed over, sworn by. And, toward the last drank thirteen scotch and waters every night, watching the hard bouquet of color TV over the far end of the bar, as though waiting for a’ final commercial. Waiting.
Thirteen scotches and looking neither right nor left and pausing to urinate after each four drinks so that a pattern was established: four drinks down—a little less than an hour—a trip to the water closet and back for four more, with apparently no idea what happened in the room when he left.
He didn’t seem to know that all those people were there—had started coming there—because of him: that the bar had an average of six customers a night before he appeared. Then all of a sudden thirty to forty people showing up every night.
And all of them sworn to secrecy. Not one of them was willing to tell anyone else about him (never knew his name)—about what happened when he took his nightly breaks in the john.
Or what happened when you sat on the seat he had vacated: a seat I had finally to reserve for each customer, forty-five seconds each, no more, and was booked up with repeats until Christmas 1975.
One of the old-timers didn’t believe at first. That was Lady Night. (Lady’s a figure of speech.) Hard as a killer’s gleam, that one, unredeemable (or so I thought). Stone bitch and pretty if you didn’t see the snake in her, always coiled, always flashing her colors to distract you enough so she could sink mind-fangs into your eyes and make everything you saw turn scaly.
Ice-clear skin, the color of clouds in heat; her hair a muted flame; melon-breasted, a 4′9″ perverted Earth Mother. Who: if thoughts were bombs would have wiped out the entire midwest. Who: if looks could kill, was a mass murderer.
Fuck you all, Lady Night would announce when she slithered in each night at nine-thirty, sleek in black leather, a Ms. Zorro, clutching a bronze-headed seven-foot black man ablaze in tailor-made crimson suits.
Like the kid, he never said a word but brooded alone at the far end of the bar, toying with what we all thought was an oversized cigaret lighter. It turned out to be a miniflame thrower that could flick a fury for twelve feet.
He never introduced himself.
Lady called him Fire.
Lady Night believed nothing we said about the kid. Got to hate him because he ignored her; her who kept frantically announcing that she was somebody. And she was: rich, spoiled, on half a dozen drugs at once, her purse a portable pharmacy: Folks said she could swallow pills faster than kids ate M&Ms.
That night Lady got to arguing with a bar stool—and lost.
Fire showed off as usual, doing calisthenics. Jumpin’ jacks, he called them. Jumpin jerks, Naomi said. It looked like Fire wanted to snow the kid. Beside him Fire did scores of pushups off a bar stool. Fire flexed the muscles of his eyebrows.
Fag! Naomi said.
The kid stuck to his seat. He looked neither left nor right. Nor up nor down. See no evil? He was writing something.
FOR ME? I printed.
WRITING A BOOK, he informed me.
ON A PAD? I queried.
BEATS WALLS, he wrote.
A black buzzard, Fire kept circling the kid’s seat. We insiders thought Fire an outsider. Naomi stepped in to keep Fire out. He flexed his eyebrows.
Won’t be no joke if I send you up in smoke, he said.
Won’t no one sing the blues when I make you lose, she answered.
While the kid was gone, Lady Night zeroed in.
But old man Johnson was faster. Frowning, he claimed the magic stool. Then, smiling, he sang “America
.”
Now you git up, Whitey, Fire said. Git up while you got a face.
The old man got, but before Lady could take the seat, Big Naomi joined the act: three hundred twenty pounds of meansweet blackmammy with two big gold earrings ablaze in pierced ears and a small silver one in her broad nose.
Touch that seat, Lady, you answer to me. Allame!
Burn her, said Lady.
Fire aimed his torch.
Drop it, said Big Naomi, ’fore I work some roots on you.
And he did: Fire dropped that thing like a hot potato.
Now kick it on over here, Shorty, she said, and the big black man did as he was told.
Big Naomi lifted one of her giant feet and flattened the thing. She waddled forward, nostrils dilated, eyes burning.
Don’t ya’ll know nothin’? Nothin? Ya’lls in the presence of a presence, she yelled.
Lady slunk toward the seat and Naomi said:
Stay off that, you ruin it, Evil. You sit on it, I break you into chicken feed.
Lady was scared and she screamed for Fire to do something, but without his toy he was a seven-foot freak with a bronze wig and a crimson suit. Lady frowned and pushed Fire across the room to a booth where she continued to sit, I suppose sulking, planning, for the next six weeks.
Big Naomi guarded the kid’s seat that night until he got back from the john and, with a regal sweep of an arm, indicated that the throne was indeed his. He barely nodded and went back to the TV and his ninth scotch.
Thereafter Big Naomi was self-appointed First Lady of the bar; her chief function, the guarding of the kid’s seat when he made his brief pilgrimages.
She’s the one who arranged for everyone in the bar except Lady and Fire to take turns on the stool for forty-five seconds each. And when the word got around and we had thirty to forty people every night, she got the chart going where we booked everyone on the seat up to Christmas ’75 and stood by the door keeping strangers out.
Lady Night was allowed in, but she had to sit in a corner booth and keep her mouth shut and her legs closed: no more performances of any kind. So Lady would sulk and get drunk/drugged every night and Fire would carry her out to the lizard-colored Cadillac.
Lovers and Other Monsters Page 36