The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1

by Carol Emshwiller

  Well, that’s several names to cross off the list if I went to bother finding out what name he goes by, but not worth the trouble. What about, on the other hand, the unlived (so far) part of my life? How to pass it? She smiles, she cries, she pleads, she rages, she makes up. Nothing new in any of that.

  I stand up and stretch. He’s still talking.

  “… If, on the other hand, my name had been Roland or Tristram or Ezra or Somerset, love would have been an entirely different thing for me, and poetry also.”

  But I’m at the door already and I leave, closing it with a bang. He calls out after me, “I knew you’d go.”

  I turn around and come right back.

  “I knew you’d be back,” he says.

  I go to the corner and pick up the contraption collapsed there. Though awkward, it’s not heavy. Then I really do leave, closing the door gently this time.

  “I knew you’d leave,” he shouts, “but you’ll be back.”

  Paralysed for a moment by the image in the hall mirror of my wrinkled face with its halo of wispy white hair, overwhelmed for a moment by something resembling the truth: What if the cat, for instance, represents one form of the universe as we—as he—knows it? Or myself, for that matter, and other things playing roles I cannot even guess at? But once outside the front door, all my tears are for myself. Stars out. No clouds. Brisk breeze. Moments like this in my life have been few and far between. Courage, I tell myself. (If anyone asks me what I’m doing out here at this time of night, I’ll say that I’m renaming all the streets for Nicanor.)

  He said I’d be back. Well, maybe so; but does one return to a house one has forgotten the address of as well as the name of the principal occupant? Does one return when one has the (possible) source of one’s own pleasures hanging over one’s shoulder, so to speak, or, as he said, a chance at inner peace or something very near it?

  I place the contraption on the dewy grass of the front yard, get on it and start pumping as hard as I can. I’m not thinking moose, moose, but Nicanor… Nicanor….

  Portland Review, Vol. 28, No. 2, 1982

  Mental Health and Its Alternative

  IF ONLY I could define myself in terms of my up-days, all the curves of my graph rising at the same time and staying up for more than a couple of hours. And if only I could feel that I was I at more than just those few exhilarating moments, how my breasts would loom and swell up into the landscape and his hand (spontaneously)—or yours, even—would come into view across my stomach, and another hand under my head or under my buttocks, I suppose. I’d call it fortunate if such a thing could be. “The King Kong of cows and finally,” I’d say (or “again”) though actually a small King Kong Queen of Caw (K.K.Q. of C.)—however no really right way to be a woman that I can find at this particular time.

  “Feel free to exist anyhow,” the psychologist says. Fear of heights makes him grab for his crotch.

  “Oh, if only I could, I would like to end up with a little bit of both sexes: status, comfort, and compliance! Brute force! Surrender! Be a mystery and a big-shot!”

  Yes, the legendary Doctor Sanglant will fulfill all expectations. He has said it (but forgot to tell me expectations change). Looking down his delicate nose (his best feature) he has already told me I will one day write exquisitely, or at the very least, much faster. He wears a top hat, white tie, etc., and as I enter the office, he throws a little piece of lighted flash paper while I open a can labeled “Mixed Nuts” and out pops a long, green snakey, spring-thing.

  “Pick a card. Any card.”

  I hide behind my hair, my glasses, my thumb and two fingers. I cross and recross my legs to create a diversion, but it may turn out I will no longer have to choose the Queen of Swords now that I have dreamt King Kong Cow.

  “I dreamed,” I tell him, “that you stuck your little finger in my ear and then put it up your nose.”

  Doctor Sachlich jots that down. I try to sneak a look, but he plays his cards close to his chest.

  So far, there’s no blood on me. It’s all on Doctor Sangfroid’s dress-shirt front: the only splash, or rather drip, of color. It comes from a small stab wound I have inadvertently inflicted in his side (or was it yours?). I yell, “Don’t hurt me. I’m helpless!” Doctor Sanglot sighs and keeps silent, nonintervention his best policy. Agony is mine and always has been, because if I should, by some mistake, show joy, someone might think I was happy and do nothing for me.

  The stab wound is a Jesus-wound, as in the paintings: one cool, clean trickle of blood from probably just the screwdriver part of a small jackknife. It can’t have done much harm, and as a matter of fact, Doctor Sangriento tells me that so far, I have been doing exactly what my type of neurotic always does. I’m glad. I always wanted to do the customary thing, though to be truthful, I have conflicting feelings about this. On the one hand, yes, to know the norm so as to achieve it: the criteria, that is, for proper behavior, legitimate bliss, orthodox ecstasy, customary bed-mates, sanitary raptures with suitable objects of desire…. But, on the other hand, I want the dazzle of forbidden mysteries: hypnosis, trances, LSD! Legendary lust behind the psychoanalytic doors. I want to know all the private, lecherous details of the other patients’ lives, knowledge of the psychologist’s secret vices, plus totally new and (especially) unimaginable positions for it. I want to live, giddy, at the edge of abandonment (and yet somehow still be in the 92 percent of everybody, or the 56 percent, if only that). He has said, “Pick a card,” but I want the whole deck.

  And I do pick one, but I don’t let him see it. This time I escape attention by telling him about King Kong Cow who is black and white or all-over tan and fatter than a gorilla, would not climb the Empire State Building nor take women away, except to some better land; would perform, if asked, willingly for the stardom of it and to see herself on TV. “Great Cow, I mean Great Primordial Cow,” I say, “was once queen of everything, or some like to think so. She has thirteen breasts. Seven virgins suck there, the milk of the sweet sense of (female) self.” Really it’s four hundred breasts and four hundred virgins, but I don’t want to boast.

  And now I have already gone home and come back a week later in an entirely different mood and Doctor Sanguiferous has a little clown-smile painted over his lips. He wears a paper party hat. It’s a blue-and-white, deja-vu hat because I already dreamt he would have one like that. I can see in his eyes that he is laughing at me. That makes sense. Especially since I don’t remember a single thing he said to me last time nor what I said to him.

  “Pick a card. Pick a card.” And I do, but this time he won’t let me see it. I neither get to see my own card nor a glimpse of depravity.

  This time I had tried to make a grand entrance, throwing my red scarf back over my shoulder (and I’m wearing boots, too), but I had slipped on a small, black smudge, probably a raisin. (Perhaps one of my own since I’m into health food. Perhaps, though, one of his, deliberately put there to trip me up.) Next I had tried for a passable (at least) preliminary gesture. I wanted to do something right, but I realize now that I must get adjusted to the full alphabet of myself, up to F for failure, up to I for incomplete. (I will probably walk out with his raisin stuck to my boot.)

  “Struggle on,” I thought I heard him say, “with your ridiculous, inept, exaggerated, far-fetched and overly emotional, female-type thoughts, Dumb Broad.” Why he’s Daddy, Freud, Houdini, and society-in-general all rolled into one! I see that now, and now I have heard it—those very words that seem to lie unsaid behind so much of what is said—have heard it, or thought I heard it, from his own lips. The basic truth at last and at this price, or cheap at any. I decide I like his little painted-on, V-shaped smile. I try to smile one like it for my own cross-purposes, no longer feeling like Queen King Kong, but rather more (sitting squirming here) Queen of the termites and visible, damn it! This chair (but I already knew that) for feeling uncomfortable in. It has a broken spring that, as I try to wriggle away, catches on my buttocks. It’s the pain that makes me cry. I wipe
my tears on my blindfold.

  I tell him that I have already broken seven mirrors.

  I tell him I have changed all the names in order to protect the guilty.

  I tell him (and I dreamt this) that the cunt is a silk purse made out of a sow’s ear.

  I tell him that I have been locked in so many trunks with false bottoms. That the keys to the handcuffs were put between my teeth as in all the symbolic movies, but that I forgot they were there and I swallowed them. “Perhaps I could have recovered them later, on a menstrual pad,” I say, “if I had thought to look, but that only occurred to me right this very minute.”

  “There are drinks,” Doctor Sans Pareille says, “that can make you seem to fly or change sizes or feel sexy or see everything as though from under water. There’s poison mushrooms and toad’s juice.

  But I’m not listening.

  The psychologist of the happy is a happy psychologist. He laughs all day and only cries from too much laughing. When he has a picnic at the beach for all his patients they let loose caged birds along with helium balloons, and after that they breathe the helium and talk in squeaky voices, and when suddenly the sun comes out (if it wasn’t already), all the patients turn cartwheels in the sand and play psychological pranks and do all sorts of psychological shenanigans. They are relating to each other like a bunch of psychotherapists at their annual August Psychoanalytic conference, winking and hugging each other. They are gazing deep into each other’s eyes, patting each other’s shoulders, rubbing the backs of each other’s necks, and to them, the seagulls are sounding soft as doves. (Caws, quacks, and screeches, on the other hand, follow me wherever I go and a lot of those sounds I make myself.)

  Doctor Sans Souci is getting his patients all mixed up. Now he thinks I’m the one who never had an orgasm. What folly! And now he thinks I’m the one who’s trying to adjust to having only one breast. “Talk about it. Try,” he says.

  “About what?”

  But perhaps he means breasts and orgasms figuratively speaking.

  I had rehearsed the telling of a very long dream, but I decide, out of spite, not to tell it. He is, I see it now, only partially omnipotent.

  “Women,” he says, “they’re all losers, still looking for living space in the living room.”

  He is breathing down my neck. My back is against the wall. (The jaws of my womb have already snapped shut. I can feel it at the base of my spine.) He has just made a claustrophobic gesture. I stare at the floor pretending not to notice. Which of us is winning so far, I wonder-you, him, or me?… Daddy, Houdini, Freud, or society-in-general?

  Now when they shout “Camera! Action!” all I can say is, What’s the plot? Not wanting any of the same old stories, and anyway, I don’t like it… to be left stumbling here as Queen King Kong of Cow crushing kittens… I mean kitchens and the little phony buildings of a toy Tokyo as if it mattered, dragging my udders over bridges and no-man’s land and a man’s hand sometimes, and me doing more harm to myself than to any of”them.” “If only she could have used her power for good,” they keep saying, “instead of talking so much.” But how does K.K.Q. of C use… I mean milk and eggs and mother’s mooing? And it’s always some man choreographs the cow-trip through the city. Oh, anyway, I love the look in his eyes, the choreographer’s. I’ll let him overpower me easily despite my size. This man has got to be crazy… (I mean about me) and I know what crazy is.

  But what’s the logic of holding on to some poor male in my big fist like this? He’s balding, paunchy, forgetful and preoccupied (though not with me), sweating, busy, has cancerous lumps on the skin of his face and sometimes gets out of breath right in the middle of making love. (I forgive him some of these things.) But my hands, I suppose, clutch at whatever drowning man I can reach at any given time.

  Queen Cow sighs… is sighing again. “It’s birth order,” she says (having, for the moment, forgotten all about her older half-sister), “the crux of the whole thing.”

  “If only you could have used your power for good,” he says, “instead of in the service of ambivalence ” I answer with a soft mooing which he takes for a groan. “Drink this,” he says, “and come nearer to perfection.”

  She is already salivating at the sight of his little bell.

  “You will need a temporary love-brace and perhaps some special devices, all electronic, or simply two candles. You will need kisses across each clavicle. You will need to let your fingers play around in somebody else’s pubic hair and vice versa. You will need both hands on your man, your lips on his nipple. You will also need changes in a flash, Shazam! or in a shower of sparks! But meanwhile I will give you,” he says, “three wishes.”

  But he has looked into my one good eye and suddenly stopped talking.

  “I need,” I say, “I need, but all I ever get is to cavort along the sidelines, though tricks and sometimes treats.”

  “Ah,” he says, “now you’re finally catching on, but that’s a somewhat different topic. It was, some say,” he says, “for the sake of an old woman that the Aztec cut out a million, or rather, millions of hearts and also sometimes sucked away the brains. The human equivalent of the cosmic… just what you’re talking about—tricks or treats, that is—that make some kind of sense out of the universe through the female….”

  But I can’t stand it! I can’t stand it! Being of the sex that’s responsible for everything sensual or morbid or for those sacred, deadly ball games. Us—get this! me, even—the overturned vessel of doom or standing as a symbol for it! I don’t want to be an archetype. I will send Doctor Sangria a notice to that effect as follows:

  NOTICE OF DETERMINATION OF TERMINATION

  It is ordered, that as of the date of this order, I, King Kong Queen of Cow, no longer shall be thought of as Great Round, Earth Mother, Big Mama; nor Grandmother Spider, nor moon, nor moon-cat; nor, as they call it, “inert, primeval watery mass;” nor western devourer who eats her own children; nor three fates, nor three witches; nor weaver, miller; nor oven of transformations, no; nor in any way connected with intoxicants, nor bringer of intoxication and/or death, as the bringer of life also brings death, I, Queen King Kong Cosmic Cow, not to be considered or confused with anything sacred nor anything fearsome; nor, therefore, with flood or hurricane, nor stand as a symbol for it; nor mother of all the gods, nor of any of the gods, and not even responsible for the conception of a baby more than any man is, no; nor for the luring of the opposite sex into traps of licentiousness, no; nor stand for it in any form—whether wearing a bra or not—not now nor ever stand for it; nor the maw of the earth nor engulfing womb; nor accept any still-beating hearts of warriors, nor devour umbilical cords; nor stroke the heads of cobras, nor any other creature of dread; nor tiger’s tongue in my mouth, nor stand for any such thing as a symbol of it, not now and forever, no.

  Standing-one leg up, the other bent at the knee—in the pose of a whelping bitch—so as to confirm, for all to see, my sex (is it ugly?)—as in an ancient statue there was once of Queen Cow posed in this same half-sitting position, as the mother of even the very first of the gods or as, on the other hand, the overturned vessel of doom—what hand, at such a time as this, dares touch my udders? What hand other than my own golden hand as I, posed here as though it were New York, head facing the twin towers, I, yearning, as usual, self-vindicating cosmic cow, being touched by… what hand, damn it, but your hand! Touch the udder, the golden underside of it, other hand at velvet nose. Cow’s eyes look out at, damn it, you! How, now, not see, when sometimes even Doctor Sagenhaft has to turn away from my gaze? Why, now, you do it too?

  “A raging cow,” Doctor Sache says, “does not become a bull.” He is trying to keep a straight face. I dare not speak again, especially not with words like: numinous or luminous, nimbus, scintillation, or any others like them. And as of this moment, I suspect Doctor Sangrar of everything and anything, and you too, and Daddy and Freud.

  And now I have already gone home and come back and come back and gone home and come back and
Doctor Sanguine, humming to himself, has again offered me those same three wishes of which I have, so far, accepted only two so as to have the last one saved for later. The Doctor is actually singing! I can’t believe it. You would almost think he is the psychoanalyst of the happy, or at the very least, of the mostly sane today. He is reshuffling all his cards and has plucked a silver dollar out of my ear, but sleight-of-hand (I know that by now) is only slightly magic.

  The last time I stuttered it was on the word sex.

  And now I have already gone home and come back and come back and gone home three times again and I have almost called my own bluff.

  If Doctor Santé had wanted to, he could have told me all about myself at the very first session, but I think it’s too late now that he has shrunk to almost normal size, and I can see that he has, after all, problems of his own.

  But wait! Change! Yes—a sudden change, bliss (or almost) and not a moment too soon, either, though I know it’s only temporary. Doctor Songster, foot on desk, hardly cracks a smile at my ridiculous pirouette.

  To you, then, who are about to give… I mean to take, that is, up dancing or something somewhat similar according to your special needs and tastes and talents, having put yourselves into the hands of an experienced master, you ought to know that theory alone will not suffice. To acquire the necessary equilibrium… to be found (having jumped, for a moment, up)… to be found in the right position while actually in midair! Not grace, exactly, but some kind of mastery of movement and time, having dispensed, once and for all, with embellishments, divested of all elegance… (all the mirrors having been turned to the walls)… To you, then, who, having put yourself in good hands and about to leap and perhaps dance and/or to forget as well as to remember and in order to perceive the pleasures of it, to give in and take (in or out), and to take part in, I mean to you… to you who are about to, Doctor Song has sung. Doctor Sang is singing….