The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1

by Carol Emshwiller

  (Of what use to him someone else’s attractive, frigid wife?) She says: “I wake up almost every morning as though in a distant land.” Afterwards she said: “He was very gracious.”

  Still (he thinks) after the vast reaches of space, the black loneliness of it, the dangers, he might rest and assimilate some vestiges of humanity and humaneness without fear of losing his own alien essence.

  This he has decided to do.

  However, marriage is unthinkable.

  “Mr. Monstrosee, have you ever been called upon to—to set out some difficult real life situation (sexual) that might be encountered in some scene later on, as, for instance, your hand on her breast and then slowly (and specifically, on the inner part of her thigh), feeling your way up under her skirt (first the tactile experience, later the visual experience, this strange earth woman) and then rehearsed other things that you might be called upon to do after that?”

  “Well,” he replied in his clipped, British accent, “it’s between the scenes, actually, that we come to grips with ourselves and others in genuine social encounters, during the smoking of one more cigarette or sipping something hot. It’s at those times that we look into each other’s eyes and sometimes fall in love (star to sponsor, gaffer or grip to extra, a writer of the series to some young script girl) and that’s when the real danger comes, between the scenes when a light falls down or somebody trips on the wires. Gladys, for instance, knocked on the head and her green diaphanous gown set on fire by a quartz lamp. She lies on a fake sand dune dying.”

  “Gladys, you’re among friends, lovers, and men who want to becomes heroes. You’re among sponsors, one or two ordinary men, gaffers and grips and Mr. J.H.B. Monstrosee. There is a type of microphone here to sensitive that I can record your last breath from a distance of thirty yards.”

  And all the while the writers of the series have been enclosed in this valley now for who knows how long, days or fortnights? Some last minute means of escape must be found.

  “Come on out now and save the world.”

  One writer is writing a part of Gladys in which she will be wearing a diaphanous green gown. Meanwhile the monster in the form of Mr. J.H.B. Monstrosee is off with the frigid lady. There is some thought as to her safety in his hands. There is some question as to his sexual capacities and equipment. There is some concern as to her mental condition. (They have both been in therapies of sorts, hers Freudian, his behaviorist conditioning.) Each, in their own way, has doubts about their capacities as sexual objects or performers, particularly under stress. They are both, however, fairly attractive people and are driving along the freeway with the top down and the wind in their hair.

  (The monster keeps a red and black king snake in his pants pocket.)

  She was asking him if changing size was possible. If some other part of his body could play the role of penis. Discussing various softnesses and harnesses and medium hard or soft. She was just wondering—and maybe wishing a little…that this could be a turning point in her sexual experience. While he was asking what were suitable ingresses and erogenous zones.

  Minutes pass.

  He says: “I’ve inhaled too many fumes from dead planets, too much interstellar dust. I’ve grown a little older than I first thought. I’ve taken on a form incompatible with my own shape and way of life. I’ve been going through a difficult period of psychological readjustment to environmental changes. (I really don’t belong in this world at all), however, if I could use some other unmentionable part of myself, something might be worked out that would be mutually satisfying, alternatively, at least, if not simultaneously.”

  Any new little J.H.B. Monstrosees may be native born United States citizens (or full blooded Indians). It is hoped they will find their shapes compatible to their (sexual) aspirations.

  Proceeding without foreplay, he says, “By the way, where I come from, after you mate you’re no longer an autonomous individual, but the male rides between your legs and carries on all his business affairs from there while you become a permanently attached secretary and chauffeur. (Our clothes are adapted to the situation and to the female’s natural feelings of modesty under these circumstances.) The mating is not severed until the male member is dislodged at the birth of the offspring. This, the dislodging, usually happens sometimes during the early contractions of the labor, after which the male assists in the birth by applying a steady pressure at the small of the female’s back. After parturition, both parties are free to choose a new partner until the next birthing, though, it is true that some of our Northern relatives mate for life. During the latter years of these life-matings, the spouses become real adjuncts to their husband’s work, sometimes knowing almost as much about his business as he does and quite able to carry on if the male should become temporarily comatose.”

  The writers of the series have certainly failed to understand the importance of, and the mature of the creature’s sexuality, otherwise they would never have sent Gladys out into the desert in a diaphanous green gown. But this was long afterwards. By that time he must have passed the initial period of readjustment to his present situation.

  “I had to change from within.”

  “(Because of my hard, pioneer forefathers) I should have come here a hundred million years ago, night flights on leathery wings and naked morning dips, breathing strange gaseous substances from holes in the earth, feet (pseudopods) in magma, throwing rocks into a surf a thousand feet below. But there’s a time limit to everything (though I’ve always suspected I was never really born. Suddenly I was part of it all. Going my own way) and now, suddenly, I’m here. I’ve made up my own name and made love and driven the freeways with the top down and been listening to music in a place where each day is divided into its parts, which follow consecutively one upon the other. I may even have committed (inadvertently) (in the garden) a murder. I admit to my mistakes and I’ve tried to explain my feelings. I hope we can come to some mutual understanding and acceptance of each other not dealing in stereotypes.

  However, the writers of the series, the sponsors and one or two ordinary men, along with the gaffers and grips, are still imprisoned in the valley or soon will be. Gladys will be sent out to seduce the already sexually exhausted Mr. J.H.B. Monstrosee. She will trip over a wire, knock down a light and die a painful death on a fake, if realistic, sand dune.

  “Gladys, you’re among friends, lovers, and men who want to become heroes…”

  The sponsors continually ask for more action.

  Mr. J.H.B. Monstrosee has traveled so fast that he has already come to the desert area (as though by magic) with the top down and listening to music. He tried to retain his composure. This is what he was hired for and is considered expert at. He is silhouetted in the sunset, red convertible, western hat, sunglasses, square jaw, lending a European touch to the production. He is finding himself among men who want to become heroes, who receive extra pay for extra dangers, who have just so many minutes before the bridge or the entrance to the cave (or the only way out of the valley) blows up. In this case, he wonders, how to lay the groundwork for mutual understanding or even any communication at all?

  “I wonder if anyone will come to my assistance?” he asks, but they don’t understand what he’s saying, he, having reverted, in his excitement, to his alien manner of expressing himself, burps, farts, grunts and mumbles. All the while the sponsors are insisting on death today or death tomorrow. Certainly as soon as practicable.

  “But Madam” addressing Gladys, “mutual support…a little fellow feeling…an hour or two more…one last cigarette at least. I’ll take whatever pay is due me and leave this planet forever.”

  Mr. J.H.B. Monstrosee, in nonsense syllables of anxiety and bewilderment and old words that have been forgotten, is talking about stars in the sky that none of the writers of the series has ever heard of or seen, saying, “There are more durable planets, handsomer suns, constellations beyond your comprehension. There are places where the hours, minutes and seconds are more than twice as lo
ng as here, and other places where even the days go by too fast to count. I know of a planet with a hundred moons, each of which represent a genius of science of a military man…”

  “But now I have come to a turning point in my life.”

  “Now I turn…”

  There will be no explosions.

  Just smoke machines. A few red flares. Hot lights and sunglasses, coffee, French fries, research projects, Friends-of-the-Library, brinks of disaster, the remains of half-eaten meals, and Chet, Bobby, Bing, Norman, Dickey, Marilyn, Raquel, Spiros, Noam, and Sean.

  Etc.

  Quark/2, Paperback Library, February 1971

  Woman Waiting

  THERE GOES the plane for Chicago. They’re up safely. In here you can’t hear any of their racket.

  There they go, engines screaming, but we can’t hear it.

  For us, they’re silent as birds.

  For them, we here below are diminishing in size. We are becoming doll-like and soon we will be like ants, soon no more than scurrying gnats and, later still, bacteria perhaps and fungi. I, too, nothing but a microbic creature. I might be the size of a camel or a mouse, it’s all the same to them up there. Even if I were to stand in the center of the landing field they couldn’t see me at all.

  There they go, swelling toward the sun. Only the sky will have room enough for them now. This landing field will seem infinitesimal. There will be no place on this whole planet, not a bit of land anywhere, unless some gigantic desert, that will seem to them large enough to land on. There, they have already swelled themselves up out of sight.

  But now I see they have begun to board the plane for Rome. In a moment they will fly up as the others did, a great expanding bird, starting out at our size, but growing too big for us. Behind this thick glass I hardly hear those Rome-bound engines begin, one by one, to scream out their expanding powers.

  How nice it must be for all those people to enlarge themselves so. How condescendingly they must look down upon us here.

  I have a ticket.

  I am not unlike those others boarding their planes for Chicago, Rome, Miami, and so soon to be transformed. And I am not unlike these who sit here waiting too. I am, in fact, quite a bit like them, for I have noticed that within my view there are actually three other coats of almost exactly the same brown as mine and I see two other little black hats. I have noticed myself in the ladies’ room mirror, though not so that anyone knew I was watching myself. I only allowed myself to look as I combed my hair and put on lipstick, but I did see how like everybody else I am in my new clothes and from a certain distance. If I could just keep this in mind, for my looks, when I can remember them, influence my actions, and I am sure if I could see myself in some mirror behind the clerks, I would feel quite comfortable approaching them. But then there will be no more need of that.

  But I know rest room mirrors are not quite trustworthy. They have a pinkish cast that flatters and, for all I know, a lengthening effect to make Us all think of ourselves as closer to some long-legged ideal. I must remember that and be careful. I mustn’t fantasize about myself. I must remember I am not quite what the mirrors show me. They are, in a way, like subway windows where one sees oneself flashing by along the dark walls and one looks quite dashing and luminously handsome, needing, one thinks, only red earrings or a modish hat to be a quite extraordinary person, even standing out from the others.

  There go those Rome people. Soon I will be off up there too. The thought is enough to make me feel dashingly handsome again, as handsome as all these clean-cut people so comfortable in themselves, so accustomed to their clothes and their bodies, and I feel young, almost too young, like a little girl on her first voyage alone (and it has been a long time since I went anywhere so it does seem like a first voyage).

  That Rome plane looks slow from here, but I know how fast they’re really going, and then, the larger you are, the slower you seem. I think they are already noticing how huge they are getting now. Once up, they may not be able to come down at all. They may sit looking out the windows, circling forever, dizzy at their own size compared to down here, unable to risk a landing.

  I’m going back. (I don’t call it home anymore since I’ve been here so long.) I’m going back, but once I get up in that plane I don’t think anything will matter. I’ll see the world as it really is then and I won’t mind never coming down at all.

  I have a seat here by this wall of glass and I don’t think anyone is noticing me. I have been here quite some time, but others come and go. They don’t keep track of how long I’ve been sitting here. And, as I glance down at myself, I think again that I look quite as ordinary as anyone else. Why should they notice me with either criticism or admiration? I don’t think it is at all evident that all my clothes are new.

  I have a little black satchel on the floor beside me. In it I have my glasses, my newspaper, a cantaloupe, and a little; bag of peanuts. The cantaloupe is certainly very ripe. I think I can smell it now and then, a sweet, good smell.

  Just now I noticed a woman who came near me and then moved away to take a seat farther on. I think I know why that was. It could have been the cantaloupe—that strange (to her) pungent sweetness—but I think not. In my haste to come here in time (it’s true I arrived unnecessarily early) I put on all my new clothes without washing myself I might say that washing in my apartment was never easy, and I may not really have washed very well for quite some time. I might as well have feet like a fat man, a very fat man, I should say. My feet are not fat, I mean, but they have a certain fat quality. That woman has found me out, and that is why she is sitting over across the way. So I am not really at all like the others under all my nice clothes. Yet is it a crime to be dirty? I can see very well that it is in a place like this, though I never noticed back in my own room. Here it is certainly a crime, or certainly outstanding in one way or another, different, eccentric, extraordinary, and, I do think, a crime. Well, there’s nothing to be done about it now, though it makes me feel quite shrunken, new clothes or not. How will it be in the plane, how will it be to be shrunken and expanded at the same time, for surely in the plane someone will have to sit next to me whether they like it or not. Perhaps the cantaloupe will help. Perhaps I will keep my satchel on my lap.

  Think if I should drop it somehow up there and this elephantine cantaloupe, swollen with altitude, should squash down on some tiny building, covering it with its cantaloupe-colored pulp, spreading its rich, sweet smell over everything, a cantaloupe large as the moon, ripe and ready, squashing them all in too much sweetness and too much juice.

  Flight 350, Flight 321, Flight 235, Flight 216. I wonder if my feet together with my cantaloupe are capable of permeating the air of this whole interior as that voice does. Perhaps they already have and I am completely unaware of it. Wondering, I almost do not hear my own flight number, 216, even though I have memorized it, rechecked and memorized it a dozen times. Flight 216 has been, the voice tells everyone in the whole airport without a tremble or change of quality, everyone, it tells, not seeking us, the passengers, out, to impart its private information… Flight 216 has been (I should have guessed) postponed.

  Well, so that is the way it is, and now, immediately after, I’m not sure if the voice said just postponed or postponed indefinitely. I wonder if there’s any sense in asking why or when. I wonder if there’s any sense in waiting.

  There goes another plane, I have not noticed where to this time. All the other people’s planes are coming and going but I don’t know why I ever thought mine would, even with my new clothes and my ticket.

  Senseless or not, I am going to wait exactly as I waited before I knew my flight was postponed, but already I see ‘ there is a difference in my feelings as I watch the other planes rise. I am quite shrunken. I am shrinking as they rise up. I am growing too small for my new clothes. They will hang upon me in a most noticeable way, I am sure. I will be a spectacle. I will make a spectacle of myself just walking from here to the door. Everyone will notice.


  But why am I disappointed in Flight 216? I have not even been sure I wanted to go back at all. In truth, I do not want to go back, not really. What did I want then? And the three hundred dollars? If I can get that back will it make up for what I wanted, whatever that was? I wonder if I can get it back, for it certainly would be something to have. I wonder should I try now? But the flight was just postponed, not cancelled.

  I see a man at the desk who seems to be asking something. He is quite out of place there. He is wearing a homemade coat made out of an Army blanket, and he has a tangled, olive-drab beard. If he is asking about Flight 216, and he certainly must be, then I don’t believe that I should. I don’t believe that I should put myself in the company of such people. They might even think we were together, going off to the same destination. Still, I would like to have that money. Perhaps if I wait a half hour or so and ask then, they will not connect me with him.

  So, here I am, a woman waiting. I wish I had some greater meaning at this time of disappointment. Were I a man, I could even be humanity waiting, all humanity, whose flight is indefinitely postponed, but I am woman waiting. Women always wait. Rather a cliche. It doesn’t matter. Let her wait.