The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1

by Carol Emshwiller

  “Why not later?”

  “It’s now or never.”

  I knew this was what I wanted, but suddenly it seemed too easy. I could hear, by now, not only clacks, but also the rush and rustle of the great river nearby. I even heard the sound of a boat, the bump of wood on wood as a skiff came up to the dock. I heard the thump of stone tablets being placed upon the shore, and I knew they were full of women’s thoughts . . . women’s writings . . . women’s good ideas. Even old women’s good ideas. Then the old women danced toward me with flowers, and suddenly I was standing up on my white quilt and I was wearing my old white nightgown, which I know I had not put on to come out here in. (I know better than to walk around at night in nothing but that.) And I worried because I wondered what had happened to my vest with all my best finds in it. But the Venus read my mind. “If you give us up,” she said, “you have to give up those, too. You have to give up the proof that there were some little germs of sanity to what you were doing.” All the old women came one by one and looked me right in the eye then and smiled; and all their eyes were blue, every one of them, the exact same blue. I could see that they wanted me as much or more than I wanted them and that we would talk and it would be my kind of talk. I knew that my left hand would write, then, many books on stones.

  “And they will be found here,” the Venus said, “and will be deciphered and all in less than five years from now.”

  “Otherwise?” I said.

  “Otherwise, nothing. No library, no books, no mirror, no Venus.”

  “I’ll take nothing,” I said, and the Swan swooped down and knocked me over. I fell, clutching feathers, and I thought, They lied to me. I’m dying right now. They lied to me and took me anyhow.

  But it wasn’t dying. I woke up to voices and to the sound of a van and my daughters and two men. They don’t have to say anything. I know where they’re taking me, and I know that I chose it myself. I will go silently and with dignity. I will walk like a queen. I’m thinking that I’ll find something there to make an effort for. I’ll find something so I can do. I’ll not just be.

  Odd thing, though. I pick up my vest lying there all torn. It’s as though it had been attacked in anger. There’s hardly an inch of it without a tear. I check what’s left of the pockets. Everything is gone, just as they said it would be—every single smooth, white stone and all the other things—and I’m standing here like a crazy woman, bare feet, nightgown (I feel sure I didn’t come out here like this). And I am surrounded by feathers . . . white feathers. When I move they float out all around me. When I shake my head they flutter down.

  Omni, Feb. 1987

  If Not Forever, When?

  IN THE BEGINNING there was a goddess from whom all things flawed flowed. Pretending to be sure of herself, she made a man. She chose a Turk’s head squash for head, bamboo for arms and legs. She liked the knee joints (apples) and the belly button (a lentil). She used old gold pieces for eyes. It was a sacrifice, but she wanted him to have eyes as golden as a toad’s, and she wanted to sacrifice. Into the mouth she blew her own hot breath and called, “Man, man,”—in a loving way, of course, for who would come to any other kind of call—but he didn’t wake up.

  She thought of names, then, to summon him forth by: Sir Delight or Daylight or Midnight Blue. Mister Old Gold, Mister Pleasure-in-the-Morning, Mister Radish. Nothing worked, but she did not despair. She knew that always the proper word comes first, as “meadowlark” and then the lark. She was not in a hurry. There were many things yet to consider: How to instill a scorn for commerce? How to instill a passion for art? She knew, as was already written, that when, or if, he did awaken he would “immediately experience, first fear, and then desire.” When that desire came, she wanted to be ready to imprint him with herself. She needed for him to follow her everywhere. She wanted him to wake up and find her dancing there, with her green goddess-scarves. Unfortunately the phone rang and, at just that moment, the golden eyes opened. It was the sound that woke him. She was in the next room answering the phone.

  The first thing he saw was himself in the mirror she’d brought in to check up on her dancing. She had wanted to make sure his first sight of her would be at her most graceful. One would think, by this first view of himself, that he would be narcissistic like the rest of us, but he saw his big red head which frightened him. First fear, then, as was predicted. After that desire, and he was attracted to the glassy surface of the mirror rather than to his image in it, and, hence, to all things with sheen and/or sparkle, and/or depth, including the pupils of eyes, windows, puddles, bubbles, clear soups, chrome, rhinestones, ice cubes…. It was a good thing she wore glasses.

  The world had already been formed by then, the ground below and firmament above, New York on one coast, L.A. on the other, complete down to the tiniest blade of grass.

  His first words were: “I want,” and after that, “I go.” (Inside she’d sewn up Webster’s Third International to give him ballast, and he could spell as well as speak.

  Already he’d started for a door, but it was the closet so she had time to lock the front one. “I go?’ he asked, realizing his mistake. Then he reached to hold her hand but missed. She had pulled back because she wasn’t sure who he was yet. She knew his being could not yet have blossomed and was still but a tiny dot (which is as we all begin). And she knew she hardly knew him (what was there to know so far?), but already she felt pain as if her lover or her youngest son was leaving. “You need guidance,” she said, “even the suburbs will destroy you, not to mention the city. And you have no money and no knowledge of it. You might have to trade your eyes for nourishment and then you would lose your hope and your good red color.”

  He said, “I will not squander this present moment with thoughts of other moments no less nor more important than this very one.”

  “At least tell me your name before you go.” (Perhaps with the name she would have some control.) She was thinking she wanted to kiss his imitation lips because she’d drawn them so fine and so full, but when he turned and looked straight at her, she noticed that she’d set the golden eyes much too close. Even so, his luminosity was not like any living squash she’d ever seen.

  “I am just this which I am, as you see.”

  Oh, my God! she thought. He has said, “I am that I am,” or might as well have. I have fashioned my own master. This always happens. (She had already born six chiefs of state.) She knew that, were he an ordinary person, he would not be saying, “I am,” so soon after coming into being. She wondered if she had fallen in love with him for that reason—for that great “I am”—or if it was mainly because he wanted to leave her.

  This time, when he reached for the door, she let him. In less than five minutes he’d figured out the locks and the doorknob and started down the stairs. She followed as she was, in her green goddess-dress, taking time only to grab her purse and running shoes. On the table in the hall she’d left the squash seeds from when she hollowed out his head in order to fill it with the good brown broth of thought. She had roasted them and salted and buttered them. She grabbed those also so as to have a snack for later.

  Though stiff and with jerks, also a limp (she must have made one leg quite a bit too short) he stepped out into the sunshine like a king, arms raised, fingers spread. “Look,” he said, “Look.” His eyes just then caught the sun and she saw a spark in each one. “Look,” he said, “here are the leaves of the trees as well as the branches,” for there were trees there, lined up along the curb all the way to Second Avenue and it was Spring. “And these are the trunks of them. How unusual.”

  “No,” she said, “it isn’t. Besides, the force that causes trees to grow is known.” She was glad she had made him a head taller than most men. “I forgot to tell you,” she said, “that the world is round and floats in an infinite black sky.”

  “How unusual,” he said. She said, “It isn’t. Look at me, am I unusual?” “I didn’t choose another world than this one,” he said. “I didn’t choose this nor another on
e unlike it.”

  But she was thinking it was she who’d not only chosen him, but everything to make him out of—this particular squash and this particular sugarcane between his legs. And she was thinking she’d rather have lost control of the wind and the tides and the local weather (and that sometimes happened) than of him .

  When she saw that he would leave, her hope had been that he’d head straight for the art museums, but he turned in the opposite direction. She decided, anyway, to tell him all the ways in which art is useful. “It starts conversations,” she said. “It stands for other things. It tells all, and more than can be said in words. It attracts important people. It begins again and again. Sometimes just one single sung note can be of unimaginable length and beauty.”

  Talking about art made her realize she had dressed him all wrong. She’d thought of dignity instead. She’d given him a navy blue pin-striped suit with vest, a wine-red tie, white shirt, Homburg. And he did look princely, red and tall and already his beard was growing. A soft, green fuzz.

  Just then a sparrow flew down and perched on his shoulder. She was thinking that this was unusual, but she didn’t want to say it, and, anyway, before she could, it flew off. She was pretty sure it was a sign of something.

  By now they’d reached the corner. “Watch how everyone crosses when it says, MILK,” She said, “and how they all don’t cross when it says “DON’T MILK.” She was thinking if she confused him he would need her more. Also, surreptitiously, she began to nibble at the squash seeds, thinking in that way perhaps to gain some power over him. “Red for go,” she said, and, “there are as many mysteries as there are shades of green.”

  There, in the sunshine, and he, having had a sparrow on his shoulder, she was thinking she was glad she had made him even though she’d always preferred manageable miracles and, if any, only tiny faults. And she thought that, though he limped he walked and talked as if he were lord of the stuff that holds the birds up. But she wouldn’t call him that even if those were the only words there were to stop him and bring him back. Lord of Air, indeed, and he already too proud and not yet in this world half an hour! Perhaps she should trip him. Have him fall down right there in the gutter. Show him just how much the air held up a thing like him. It would be a favor to him in the long run. And she did that, catching his heel from behind with her toe in a way she knew how to do, so that his own left toe hit his own right heel and he thought he’d tripped himself. He went down but got up just as proud as ever, though limping a little more than before so that she thought maybe it would suit her purposes better if she just told him about his imperfections, from close-set eyes to naiveté. He walked as though he didn’t have a single fault. It was ludicrous . Who would ever love him? But of course she did. And what she ached to say was that, and call him, “Lord of the See-Through Air,” and say, “Glory, Glory. Holiness is in you.” (And, anyway, who else was there to love just then?)

  But where was he off to like this? Did he believe in DO not BE? (One wouldn’t suspect this of vegetable matter.) Better to move around and do than be some vague hero of the contemplative life, whether artist or not.

  There were shop windows now along the Avenue. Often something glittering in them made him pause: stainless steel pans, a dress all sequins, eye glasses…. “Do you want a pair?” Eggs, she called them. “Do you want some of those eggs?” (Perhaps she could win him over with a gift.) He picked tortoise shell frames and pinkish lenses and seemed so pleased with himself that she tripped him again and the glasses fell off and he stepped on them and they broke. “Look what you did,” she said, and said that he should watch where he was milking. Here, in the shadow of a building, without the glint of the sun, his golden eyes were blank. All surface. Vegetal.

  “Are you unhappy?” Searching his face in vain for signs of sadness.

  But even in this light she was struck by his beauty. Perhaps it was exactly those flaws that made him so attractive, or perhaps because she’d made him by hand, one piece at a time (it showed) and she’d not considered the consequences (though when had she ever?). Let there be ambulatory vegetal matter, and there was, and let nothing obviate its vivid originality. Let such things shine forth (in their own natures) as pumpkin, apple, maiden hair fern.

  “If you’re unhappy, art can give you joy,” she said. “Art laughs a lot and is full of non-sequiturs. It’s a chance to rise above the everyday or, on the other hand, get back down to it. A cow might moo no better than MOMA.” She doubted MOM A was in Webster’s Third. All the better then if he thought she’d said Mama.

  He took a right and then a left and she thought maybe he was, after all headed for the Museum of Modem Art, or maybe, though she hoped not, Macy’s or Altman’s. She almost praised him for, at least, a step in the right direction, but it turned out he was going to the Empire State Building. How steer him away from it?

  “Did I already tell you that art is short and for our time? We must hurry. Everything changes.” But he didn’t hesitate.

  It was her breath, damn it, the first breath in his lungs. That would be true even if it turned out he really was (and she still wasn’t sure of it) was the Lord of Air, and yet now hardly a backward glance at her and not even an answer. “If you must go up, at least take the elevator. There’ll be a good view all the way to Long Island, but is that art?” she said, and, “The air’s no cleaner up there than down here.”

  She grabbed his arm, but she’d made him of strong, resilient stuff. He jounced her off and started up the stairs pointing with the first fingers of each hand and saying, “Pot, pot.” She had no idea what he meant and she knew it was her own fault.

  “Don’t you even know what an elevator is? You don’t even know.”

  At the seventh landing she was already out of breath but she managed to grab the back of his suit jacket. “Well, what do you think about art then?” She was trying to slow him down with talk. “Maybe you think it’s not for the masses. You think air is democratic. If you can spell at all you know there’s not that much difference, art or air-air/art. Maybe all there is up there is nothing but polluted art from here to New Jersey. The sky so yellow all the eggs in the world won’t help.”

  He didn’t slow down much, even with her hanging onto the back of his coat like that, though she saw the dull gleam of his eye as he looked back. Duller than ever here on the stairs.

  “Lord of Art,” she said, “Art. That got to him. “Arty?” she said, thinking: airy, airborn, aerie, aironaut, wings…. “You can’t fly. I hope you know that. I hope you have that much sense.”

  What he answered was, “If I understand the universe, it is unusual and it is up.”

  “It isn’t. The universe is no more there than right here.” At least he wasn’t climbing quite so fast. “Taken even one day at a time, you know, life is incomprehensible. We can’t unravel the secrets of a single hour. Choose the happiness at hand. If not love now, then when?”

  But he had pulled away from her. Well, there was an easy solution she should have thought of before. She took the elevator from the sixteenth floor and waited for him at the observation deck. By the time he came she’d eaten all the squash seeds. How many years of bad luck would that mean?

  He had those same blank eyes. Had she just not noticed that in the beginning because of the sun? “Are you unhappy?”

  She could have called him Lord of the Evening Air right then and there and, whether true or not, she knew it would please him. Later she always said she had the power to call him back and had always had it, and had it until the very last minute, but right then she didn’t know what was important anymore, air or art, or even which was which or what could set fire to the land or move hearts the most: love or money-money or love, and what little she had of either she couldn’t spare. At lease not without some discussion.

  “I had this dance prepared,” she said, “but I never got a chance to dance it. Watch this. Watch my scarves. It’s air in all its aspects. It won’t take long.” And she began to do that dance
she’d wanted to be doing when he woke. When she caught the flashes of the sun’s rays—the setting sun by now—she thought he was watching and she twirled and pirouetted faster and faster until she was too dizzy to stand up. When she stopped, though everything was turning, she could see that he was already up almost to the base of the spire, hanging on with only one hand and still pointing up, though the gesture was wavering. She had been dancing for nobody but herself.

  Everything was spinning. Even so she had the thought that plant life turns towards the sun and heads right out for the universe as fast as it can. It always does.

  “Wait,” she said. “You need grounding.”

  She thought she heard him mumble, then, “Let there be light,” as though in some doubt about it. Not surprising since, though evening, it was still light. Then he was off. She didn’t know if on purpose or by mistake. For a moment it seemed as though he hovered in the air and she thought she saw the sun as hat or halo, just before the wind took his coat tail and the flapping sounds began. She didn’t have time to wonder whether fall or flight. There was just that split second in which to make a decision. There was just that flash and… reddish, flecked with gray, black… something flew by. Osprey, condor, or some other endangered species, rising from the navy blue suit.

  She would stay up there now and watch the sunset, and after that stare at the stars (though she knew they were nothing but other suns) wondering who, after all was said and done, brought existence into being and continued to cause things to occur. Here, or anywhere else? But she would try again (as she always did). She wondered if she wanted slave or master? Son or lover? Mister Radish or Mister Ion—Mister Neutron? Or Lord of the Poisoned. Lakes or Sky?

  PsychCritique, vol. 2, no. 2, 1987