The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1

by Carol Emshwiller

  The young male townspeople imitate the animal. They stand at the street corners with their heads at a noble angle, their cigarettes between thumb and forefinger. They all have political opinions now and they fondle stray cats.

  The woman still walks her dogs four times a day as usual. She has bought three red leashes for them.

  There is much conjecture as to whether the animal is actually capable of experiencing real love in spite of the complications of his political beliefs and the nuances of his art. One never knows how imitative such things may be. But it does look as though the animal considers the three dogs exceptionally graceful. It looks as though he is interested in becoming friendly with the dogs, but he has recently given up smoking and there is no longer any excuse for her offering him cigarettes. Perhaps cough drops if he coughs a bit and she notices, but she doesn’t.

  There are changes afoot. Professors have come to study his reflexes and they have found that they are in no way different from those of the townspeople. This hasn’t surprised anyone since they have all, long ago, recognized their animal origins. Yet there is a general sense of foreboding. There has been a reorganization in the department of parks. Younger townspeople are coming in to replace older men. There will certainly be new theories on the influences of such a creature as the animal living in plain view of everyone. Many studies are already under way as to whether there has been more or less crime since his capture. Attitudes of the teen-age townspeople are being questioned by teams of graduate students and the animal’s writings are being studied by experts in animal behavior. The animal himself has expressed the view that he would like to be considered as an individual as well as an animal. Soon there will be a symposium. Everyone has a theory or two. The lady with the three dogs will be there as a representative of the citizens’ council of residents of the park area. It is said that the animal himself will preside as chairman, though he will have no real say in the proceedings. No doubt it will be broadcast.

  The animal has not yet expressed any opinion of his own. Most likely he is waiting for the results of the various studies to be published. The townspeople are eagerly waiting for him to speak out, for they are sure, as with all his writings, that what he says will not be ordinary.

  The woman with the dogs feels her responsibilities deeply and is even more inclined to wear black than ever, but she still allows herself red leashes. She doesn’t think it proper for her to discuss anything with the animal at the present time.

  On sunny Sundays the park is full of dogs including the three with the red leashes. Townspeople who own dogs can always find something to talk about with each other. It’s too bad the animal doesn’t own a dog. There is so much he could have joined into. Later the townspeople will remember this and think: If only we had given him a dog since he had to live in the park, anyway. But of course it’s too late now.

  He has evidently come to a decision and walked away into the deepest part of the forest without writing a single word on the question of his good or bad influences. He has left all the townspeople with an empty feeling inside. Their park seems deserted.

  The woman walks with her head up. There are rumors about her but nothing anyone can prove. Her dogs act as though they own the park. Not a single tree is sacred to them. Many townspeople wonder, were they really that way before? What if she has shown the animal some secret results from some secret studies? Had she some information not yet released to the general public? Or is it that she has finally grown bold enough to realize her love and confess it? And was he, after all, capable of some sort of loving response of the same nature as the townspeople’s responses? But how will they ever know now all that their animal might have been capable of? And they will always be wondering why he went just at this particular time, before the symposium had even begun. They will think how great was his need to return to the land of his origin. They will say he pined for his animal family, his possible animal wives and children, or they will say that he searches for his youth in the places where he once was young or that it is for the townspeople’s sake, because of his influence, perhaps sinister and yet so subtle only he was aware of it, that he has hidden himself there, alone and lonely, writing his poems out on birch bark and whistling themes from the music of their long-dead composers, able to avoid capture this time because of his greater knowledge of the townspeople’s methods.

  Oh, come back to us, they sometimes call out silently toward the forest, come and write us your animal opinions. Sit in our park. Adorn our cocktail parties. Crime wave or no, you were really good for us in the long run, and even if that may not be true, why, you belonged to us and no other town had one like you.

  But there’s nothing for them to do but to await the sons and daughters of the animal, those conceived on the nights of freedom, if it really was the animal who was responsible for (and capable of) that rash of rapes. Will the children of the animal, they wonder, follow him back to the deepest part of the forest by instinct, off in search of their father as soon as they are old enough? And what of the youngest? the one that some of the townspeople believe must have been conceived the night he left: will he or she stay as a gift to the townspeople from the animal, decorating first their schools, their birthday parties, baseball games, even roller skating in the very park where her father spent so much of his time, later the college, the dances, contributing to the courses in logic and philology, majoring in history or French and then marrying one of the townspeople and conceiving sons and daughters of her own?

  Surely, the townspeople think, surely the blood of the animal is with us still and will, in some future time, be a part of us all.

  Orbit 4, G.P. Putnam, 1968

  Methapyrilene Hydrochloride

  Sometimes Helps

  I AM NOT SICK. I have been healed of all my various ills by Dr. Alexander D. Ostrander, my doctor for the last ten years. I am now, he says, of these various ills cured. I believe he’s written it officially on some hospital form or other: Mrs. Room 318 will be considered, that is until some new morbidity, completely recovered.

  However, I cannot think of myself as, though well, exactly normal. In my case wellness is relative. Cured is simply the absence of the initial putrefying elements. But Dr. Ostrander has convinced me that I can consider myself at least 20 percent normal in every respect. I like that and I keep thinking about my normal aspects and how they are bridges to reality and factors enabling me, still, to study the world as it is. Thank God, that is, for one arm and one leg as yet completely untouched by any aspect of medical science.

  But let me tell you my exact situation as of now. My body, my actual body (due to circumstances entirely native to my twentieth-century environment), is, as I’ve mentioned, considered by physicians to be approximately 20 percent normal. I owe, as they say, my life to the machine that beats my heart. I owe my bright eyes and my clear complexion to my twice-daily hand-held bowel irrigation accomplished through a permanent hole in the right lower abdominal quadrant. The functioning of my right leg and right side is, on the other hand, left somewhat impaired by the removal of a tumor in the lower thoracic region of the spinal cord.

  My heart-beating box, by the way, goes neither click-click nor tick-tock. It does its work more silently than the heart itself, and Dr. Ostrander says that in spite of cold, heat, exercise and passions, it should continue at an even and restrained eighty beats per minute. So, I feel, the essential I remains in spite of it all. (It’s rumored that a new model will soon be out enabling the heart to beat at more comfortably adjustable rates of from seventy to eighty-five bpm.)

  There are those who keep asking me why I wear this little heart-beating box against my left side and why I wear my, as we could call it, bladder strapped to my inner thigh. They wonder, even, at the unfeminine loss of hair and perhaps, at least I wouldn’t be surprised, they think: What is that strange, illusive, yet not unsweet smell?

  Sometimes they wonder, have I caused all this to be done to myself, in some strange way, on purpose? They ,a
sk me, do I say to myself that I, at least, have brought this to myself while their asymmetricalities are inborn? Certainly they notice that they are not “their own” in the sense that I am “mine.”

  Listening, sitting in my own special version of the lotus position, I think how to overcome inertia in favor of some organic and perpetual peristalsis of the brain. Oh, not for myself. It’s for others (mankind) that I make this study. (I am, by the way, only interested in impossibilities. People make their livings every day from the possible, while I, even in my psychological being, am not so particularly possible anymore.)

  Listening, sitting in my own special version, I think that Dr. Ostrander may enter at any moment bringing new cures. He will prescribe three-colored capsules when he sees how I’ve cluttered my room with remote-controlled devices of alarm. (I’m here alone at night.)

  He can, at any time, turn off the essential machine of my beating being. (I may be too old to have any more children now, anyway, as he often tells me.)

  “Madam, cease this mad prancing after life,” he will certainly say. “The eternal feminine is in some entirely other direction, as you should know by now.”

  “Really, doctor, if you would take your forefinger off my breast I think I could listen to you more profitably.”

  “My dear lady, you will find that the depths of womanhood (note I don’t say ladyhood) lie in the inner soul rather than the outer body. We know you other-sexed creatures, though, by your haircut and your pointed toes (though this is changing) rather than by any apparent vaginal orifice or by any perceptible emanations from the soul.”

  “Dr. Ostrander, dear, if you would remove your thumb from the probing of the uterus, I would not find my mind in this post-philosophical state, and the ratios of comprehension to number of words per five-minute period would appreciably rise to levels we would all realize immediately. Besides, the lotus position is, under these circumstances, even more uncomfortable than it is necessary for it to become in one full hour of spiritual contemplation.”

  “Black lace underwear makes all the difference, too, but, by the way, I do not think the accouterments you find yourself compelled to wear in your desperate clinging to existence, such as your essential left-sided machine and the external bladder, I do not find them contributing to your femininity in the least. Perhaps you are of an age and condition when you should give up sex altogether.”

  “Doctor, do you feel I must do so immediately?”

  “Let me tell you that, as you well know, I am the father of a motherless and nubile daughter and I’m seeing to it that she grows up with, hopefully, all her primary and secondary sexual characteristics intact. Already her little breasts tickle me when I kiss her good night.”

  “Move a trifle to the left, please, and gently, Dr. O. You’ve removed already, I’m afraid, the Fallopian tubes, in spite (or because) of the difficulties and awkwardness of this position. Perhaps they caught on your thumbnail. (If you weren’t so careless I might, even at this late date, have heartbeats from my very own electrical charges.)”

  And so here we are again. What I mean is, we do return to the present environment, as usual. No matter what desperate, dreadful or, on the other hand, marvelous experiences we’ve been through, we seem always to return eventually to the present situation. The present, we might say, though it seems sometimes so remote, is always with us. In some ways, I mean after deaths and disasters, for instance, this is a fortunate thing, this coming back to the ever present present.

  However (and because of this), now, again, one could repeat: Dr. Alexander Ostrander may enter at any moment bringing new cures, bringing three-colored capsules when he sees how I’ve changed my room because I really am alone here every night. Booby traps are all around. I even have advanced warning of the dear doctor’s approach. Bells ring. Lights tell me his feet are eighteen inches from the door and wearing rubbers. He’s only vaguely aware that I’ve prepared myself for him already. Before he can snatch the door open, here I am: the odalisque! Most of me that shows is still here. I have all my surfaces intact except for thin red lines here and there, ventral and dorsal.

  But let me say that my warning system has already guessed that Dr. Ostrander is about to remove the spleen and a small portion of one kidney. Anything for a better disposition, he says, but I’m getting the feeling I should take my heartbeat box and run. My warning system is certainly inadequate except to notify, unless, in some way, I can transfer from flashing lights to machine guns. But what is the motivation for all these removals? What obsession compels him, in this way, to mutilate what he most loves? for certainly a doctor should love a body. But maybe they’re loving subcutaneously to the smooth esophagus, the round red kidneys, the worming bowels. Their love is deeper and more subtle than I had thought. Oh, dear Dr. O., have I misjudged you all this time?

  Actually Dr. Ostrander’s daughter has often visited me, too, all nubile and her breasts expanding by, I would estimate, approximately one-quarter of an inch each week.

  (Oh, Mrs. Room 318, how glad I am that you once, long ago, had children of your own.)

  “There are inside changes as well as these outside changes so I’m taking the liberty, my dear, of describing to you some essentials of the menstrual cycle, for, after all, you’re a motherless girl of twelve and who’s to tell you these things if not I, one of your father’s oldest and certainly best-loved patients? Now don’t be alarmed if there’s blood. It’s all perfectly natural though it is mysterious. But let me quote from one of the latest national magazines: Many women experience premenstrual tension and this may show itself in irritability, nervousness, depression, fatigue, sensitivity. Newspapers say that at this time we’re prone to auto accidents. Mensa-tex at two dollars a bottle may be helpful for cramps. Also these mild exercises which I now demonstrate in spite of my condition.”

  So here we are and she’s gone again (it seems the present is usually empty) and here I am listening and sitting and what, I’m asking myself, as usual, can I as I give to the world-in-general? taking for granted that all of us have something to give, that is.

  I don’t believe, actually, that an enumeration of my minute and excruciating feelings as I underwent my various operations could be of a really unique service even if I were the only person to experience them all with the handsome, though no longer young, Dr. Alexander D. Ostrander at my side. My message, I feel, lies perhaps in my joie de vivre, in my hasty forward steps into “life itself,” my electrical presence, my… for I’m certainly, even lying here all odalisque, engagé in a way many more active people can never be.

  But, on the other hand, an enumeration does serve some purpose and I’m thinking that perhaps not many people are familiar with a bowel irrigation done by hand at eight-thirty every morning and evening. (This is done when the lower section of the rectum has been removed for one reason or another, usually cancer.) I have this little other ass hole. I insert there (left lower abdominal quadrant) an enema nozzle. (I keep this little hole covered, always, with a clean gauze in case of leakage.) I proceed as in all enemas, then remove the nozzle and hold against my side a little horned-moon-shaped pan. Afterward one must rinse the contents down into the toilet. It’s best not to eat onions or cucumbers or beans.

  Dr. Alexander Ostrander taught me how to do it and he was very patient. “A thing like this,” he says, “is all right for men, but my God, woman, what do you take yourself for!”

  New Worlds, July 1968

  White Dove

  I BELIEVE that is a statue of Mr. Pappadakos. Who else could look so Greek? Of course I’ve never seen Mr. Pappadakos without his clothes on and then I can only see the back of the statue from here…what I mean is the face is where I can’t see it at all and, well the hair does seem a bit long and Mr. Pappadakos is very correct about his hair but there are lots of reasons to believe it’s he. I could almost think Mr. Pappadakos himself had been dipped in plaster and set up there, classically balanced on one foot, the hand that rests upon his shoulder as thoug
ht on the way to his forehead. Elegant. Mr. Pappadakos all over.

  I wonder what could be advertised with so gentle and expressive a rear view, vacations Southward? Turkish wine? Saratoga geyser water? If men wore stockings, why then stockings, or the latest masculine lipstick. I’m not saying Mr. Pappadakos looks in the slightest like a girl. How can an ad be any use for men if not all and utterly male? All I’m saying is that the person of this statue wants the silky, bird-like things of life.

  And no wonder I’m in love with him! Look at those buttocks in the moonlight! The color of spackle of library lions and libraries. The wind blows candy wrappers against his ankles. Pigeons pee on his eartips. He is a city god, almost as thin as Jesus except Greek, all Greek like Mr. Pappadakos.

  It’s nice of him, that old man, I mean, who lives across the back from me, nice of him to put the statue out in his garden where we can all enjoy it, at least from our windows. Could I but go down and sit in that garden! I ought to be thankful, though, for such rear views as I can get.

  I’m not happy about the way things are going with Mr. Pappadakos and me (the real Mr. Pappadakos), not happy at all. I have been sophisticated and bought from him a pair of high-heeled suede boots that come up to my knees and I have been paradoxical and worn a black imitation leather jacket and bought red pumps with heels that made my poor metatarsals screech. Oh, I have been suggestive. I have almost worn IN embroidered on my stomach.

  I will cut my hair, this very night I will cut my hair as short as the old man’s. I will dispense with heels.