The Top of the Volcano

by Harlan Ellison

  …work. Other experiments. She had said the word experiments, with a tone in her voice that made McGrath shudder. And she had said again, “For McGrath hath murdered sleep,” and he asked her if he could take her car, and she said yes, and he had driven back to the 101 Freeway and headed north toward Santa Barbara, where Anna Picket said Le Braz now lived, and had lived for years, in total seclusion.

  It was difficult locating his estate. The only gas station open in Santa Barbara at that hour did not carry maps. It had been years since free maps had been a courtesy of gas stations. Like so many other small courtesies in McGrath’s world that had been spirited away before he could lodge a complaint. But there was no complaint department, in any case.

  So he went to the Hotel Miramar, and the night clerk was a woman in her sixties who knew every street in Santa Barbara and knew very well the location of the Le Braz “place.” She looked at McGrath as if he had asked her the location of the local abattoir. But she gave him explicit directions, and he thanked her, and she didn’t say you’re welcome, and he left. It was just lightening in the east as dawn approached.

  By the time he found the private drive that climbed through heavy woods to the high-fenced estate, it was fully light. Sun poured across the channel and made the foliage seem Rain Forest lush. He looked back over his shoulder as he stepped out of the Le Sabre, and the Santa Monica Channel was silver and rippled and utterly oblivious to shadows left behind from the night.

  He walked to the gate, and pressed the button on the intercom system. He waited, and pressed it again. Then a voice—he could not tell if it was male or female, young or old—cracked, “Who is it?”

  “I’ve come from Anna Picket and the REM Group.” He paused a moment, and when the silence persisted, he added, “The real REM Group. Women in a house in Hidden Hills.”

  The voice said, “Who are you? What’s your name?”

  “It doesn’t matter. You don’t know me. McGrath, my name is McGrath. I came a long way to see Le Braz.”

  “About what?”

  “Open the gate and you’ll know.”

  “We don’t have visitors.”

  “I saw…there was a…I woke up suddenly, there was a, a kind of mouth in my body…a wind passed…”

  There was a whirring sound, and the iron gate began to withdraw into the brick wall. McGrath rushed back to the car and started the engine. As the gate opened completely, he decked the accelerator and leaped through, even as the gate began without hesitation to close.

  He drove up the winding drive through the Rain Forest, and when he came out at the top, the large, fieldstone mansion sat there, hidden from all sides by tall stands of trees and thick foliage. He pulled up on the crushed rock drive, and sat for a moment staring at the leaded windows that looked down emptily. It was cool here, and dusky, even though it was burgeoning day. He got out and went to the carved oak door. He was reaching for the knocker when the door was opened. By a ruined thing.

  McGrath couldn’t help himself. He gasped and fell back, his hands coming up in front of him as if to ward off any approach by the barely human being that stood in the entranceway.

  It was horribly pink where it was not burned. At first McGrath thought it was a woman, that was his quick impression; but then he could not discern its sex, it might have been male. It had certainly been tortured in flames. The head was without hair, almost without skin that was not charred black. There seemed to be too many bends and joints in the arms. The sense that it was female came from the floor-length wide skirt it wore. He was spared the sight of the lower body, but he could tell there was considerable bulk there, a bulk that seemed to move gelatinously, as if neither human torso nor human legs lay within the circle of fabric.

  And the creature stared at him from one milky eye, and one eye so pure and blue that his heart ached with the beauty of it. As features between the eyes and the chin that became part of the chest, without discernible neck, there were only charred knobs and bumps, and a lipless mouth blacker than the surrounding flesh. “Come inside,” the doorkeeper said.

  McGrath hesitated.

  “Or go away,” it said.

  Lonny McGrath drew a deep breath and passed through. The doorkeeper moved aside only a trifle. They touched: blackened hip, back of a normal hand.

  Closed and double-bolted, the passage out was now denied McGrath. He followed the asexual creature through a long, high-ceilinged foyer to a closed, heavily-paneled door to the right of a spiral staircase that led to the floor above. The thing, either man or woman, indicated he should enter. Then it shambled away, toward the rear of the mansion.

  McGrath stood a moment, then turned the ornate L-shaped door handle, and entered. The heavy drapes were drawn against the morning light, but in the outlaw beams that latticed the room here and there, he saw an old man sitting in a high-backed chair, a lap robe concealing his legs. He stepped inside the library, for library it had to be: floor to ceiling bookcases, spilling their contents in teetering stacks all around the floor. Music swirled through the room. Classical music; McGrath didn’t recognize it.

  “Dr. Le Braz?” he said. The old man did not move. His head lay sunk on his chest. His eyes were closed. McGrath moved closer. The music swelled toward a crescendo, something symphonic. Now he was only three steps from the old man, and he called the name Le Braz again.

  The eyes opened, and the leonine head rose. He stared at McGrath unblinkingly. The music came to an end. Silence filled the library.

  The old man smiled sadly. And all ominousness left the space between them. It was a sweet smile. He inclined his head toward a stool beside the wingback. McGrath tried to give back a small smile, and took the seat offered.

  “It is my hope that you are not here to solicit my endorsement for some new pharmacological product,” the old man said.

  “Are you Dr. Le Braz?”

  “It is I who was, once, known by that name, yes.”

  “You have to help me.”

  Le Braz looked at him. There had been such a depth of ocean in the words McGrath had spoken, such a descent into stony caverns that all casualness was instantly denied. “Help you?”

  “Yes. Please. I can’t bear what I’m feeling. I’ve been through so much, seen so much these last months, I…”

  “Help you?” the old man said again, whispering the phrase as if it had been rendered in a lost language. “I cannot even help myself…how can I possibly help you, young man?”

  McGrath told him. Everything.

  At some point the blackened creature entered the room, but McGrath was unaware of its presence till he had completed his story. Then, from behind him, he heard it say, “You are a remarkable person. Not one living person in a million has ever seen the Thanatos mouth. Not one in a hundred million has felt the passage of the soul. Not one in the memory of the human race has been so tormented that he thought it was real, and not a dream.”

  McGrath stared at the creature. It came lumbering across the room and stood just behind the old man’s chair, not touching him. The old man sighed, and closed his eyes.

  The creature said, “This was Josef Le Braz, who lived and worked and cared for his fellow man, and woman. He saved lives, and he married out of love, and he pledged himself to leave the world slightly better for his passage. And his wife died, and he fell into a well of melancholy such as no man had ever suffered. And one night he woke, feeling a chill, but he did not see the Thanatos mouth. All he knew was that he missed his wife so terribly that he wanted to end his life.”

  McGrath sat silently. He had no idea what this meant, this history of the desolate figure under the lap robe. But he waited, because if no help lay here in this house, of all houses secret and open in the world, then he knew that the next step for him was to buy a gun and to disperse the gray mist under which he lived.

  Le Braz looked up. He drew in a deep breath and turned his eyes to McGrath. “I went to the machine,” he said. “I sought the aid of the circuit and the chip. I was co
ld, and could never stop crying. I missed her so, it was unbearable.”

  The creature came around the wingback and stood over McGrath. “He brought her back from the Other Side.”

  McGrath’s eyes widened. He understood.

  The room was silent, building to a crescendo. He tried to get off the low stool, but he couldn’t move. The creature stared down at him with its one gorgeous blue eye and its one unseeing milky marble. “He deprived her of peace. Now she must live on, in this half-life.

  “This is Josef Le Braz, and he cannot support his guilt.”

  The old man was crying now. McGrath thought if one more tear was shed in the world he would say to hell with it and go for the gun. “Do you understand?” the old man said softly.

  “Do you take the point?” the creature said.

  McGrath’s hands came up, open and empty. “The mouth…the wind…”

  “The function of dream sleep,” the creature said, “is to permit us to live. To flense the mind of that which dismays us. Otherwise, how could we bear the sorrow? The memories are their legacy, the parts of themselves left with us when they depart. But they are not whole, they are joys crying to be reunited with the one to whom they belong. You have seen the Thanatos mouth, you have felt a loved one departing. It should have freed you.”

  McGrath shook his head slowly, slowly. No, it didn’t free me, it enslaved me, it torments me. No, slowly, no. I cannot bear it.

  “Then you do not yet take the point, do you?”

  The creature touched the old man’s sunken cheek with a charred twig that had been a hand. The old man tried to look up with affection, but his head would not come around. “You must let it go, all of it,” Le Braz said. “There is no other answer. Let it go…let them go. Give them back the parts they need to be whole on the Other Side, and let them in the name of kindness have the peace to which they are entitled.”

  “Let the mouth open,” the creature said. “We cannot abide here. Let the wind of the soul pass through, and take the emptiness as release.” And she said, “Let me tell you what it’s like on the Other Side. Perhaps it will help.”

  McGrath laid a hand on his side. It hurt terribly, as of legions battering for release on a locked door.

  He retraced his steps. He went back through previous days as if he were sleepwalking. I don’t see it here anywhere.

  He stayed at the ranch-style house in Hidden Hills, and helped Anna Picket as best he could. She drove him back to the city, and he picked up his car from the street in front of the office building on Pico. He put the three parking tickets in the glove compartment. That was work for the living. He went back to his apartment, and he took off his clothes, and he bathed. He lay naked on the bed where it had all started, and he tried to sleep. There were dreams. Dreams of smiling faces, and dreams of children he had known. Dreams of kindness, and dreams of hands that had held him.

  And sometime during the long night a breeze blew.

  But he never felt it.

  And when he awoke, it was cooler in the world than it had been for a very long time; and when he cried for them, he was, at last, able to say goodbye.

  A man is what he does with his attention.

  John Ciardi

  * * *

  This is a story titled

  The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore

  1993 Published in Best American Short Stories

  LEVENDIS: On Tuesday the 1st of October, improbably dressed as an Explorer Scout, with his great hairy legs protruding from his knee-pants, and his heavily festooned merit badge sash slantwise across his chest, he helped an old, arthritic black woman across the street at the jammed corner of Wilshire and Western. In fact, she didn’t want to cross the street, but he half-pulled, half-dragged her, the old woman screaming at him, calling him a khaki-colored motherfucker every step of the way.

  LEVENDIS: On Wednesday the 2nd of October, he crossed his legs carefully as he sat in the Boston psychiatrist’s office, making certain the creases of his pants—he was wearing the traditional morning coat and ambassadorially-striped pants—remained sharp, and he said to George Aspen Davenport, M.D., Ph.D., FAPA (who had studied with Ernst Kris and Anna Freud), “Yes, that’s it, now you’ve got it.” And Dr. Davenport made a note on his pad, lightly cleared his throat and phrased it differently: “Your mouth is…vanishing? That is to say, your mouth, the facial feature below your nose, it’s uh disappearing?” The prospective patient nodded quickly, with a bright smile. “Exactly.” Dr. Davenport made another note, continued to ulcerate the inside of his cheek, then tried a third time: “We’re speaking now—heh heh, to maintain the idiom—we’re speaking of your lips, or your tongue, or your palate, or your gums, or your teeth, or—” The other man sat forward, looking very serious, and replied, “We’re talking all of it, Doctor. The whole, entire, complete aperture and everything around, over, under, and within. My mouth, the allness of my mouth. It’s disappearing. What part of that is giving you a problem?” Davenport hmmm’d for a moment, said, “Let me check something,” and he rose, went to the teak and glass bookcase against the far wall, beside the window that looked out on crowded, lively Boston Common, and he drew down a capacious volume. He flipped through it for a few minutes, and finally paused at a page on which he poked a finger. He turned to the elegant, gray-haired gentleman in the consultation chair, and he said, “Lipostomy.” His prospective patient tilted his head to the side, like a dog listening for a clue, and arched his eyebrows expectantly as if to ask yes, and lipostomy is what? The psychiatrist brought the book to him, leaned down and pointed to the definition. “Atrophy of the mouth.” The gray-haired gentleman, who looked to be in his early sixties, but remarkably well-tended and handsomely turned-out, shook his head slowly as Dr. Davenport walked back around to sit behind his desk. “No, I don’t think so. It doesn’t seem to be withering, it’s just, well, simply, I can’t put it any other way, it’s very simply disappearing. Like the Cheshire cat’s grin. Fading away.” Davenport closed the book and laid it on the desktop, folded his hands atop the volume, and smiled condescendingly. “Don’t you think this might be a delusion on your part? I’m looking at your mouth right now, and it’s right there, just as it was when you came into the office.” His prospective patient rose, retrieved his homburg from the sofa, and started toward the door. “It’s a good thing I can read lips,” he said, placing the hat on his head, “because I certainly don’t need to pay your sort of exorbitant fee to be ridiculed.” And he moved to the office door, and opened it to leave, pausing for only a moment to readjust his homburg, which had slipped down, due to the absence of ears on his head.

  LEVENDIS: On Thursday the 3rd of October, he overloaded his grocery cart with okra and eggplant, giant bags of Kibbles ’n Bits ’n Bits ’n Bits, and jumbo boxes of Huggies. And as he wildly careened through the aisles of the Sentry Market in La Crosse, Wisconsin, he purposely engineered a collision between the carts of Kenneth Kulwin, a 47-year-old homosexual who had lived alone since the passing of his father thirteen years earlier, and Anne Gillen, a 35-year-old legal secretary who had been unable to find an escort to take her to her senior prom and whose social life had not improved in the decades since that death of hope. He began screaming at them, as if it had been their fault, thereby making allies of them. He was extremely rude, breathing muscatel breath on them, and finally stormed away, leaving them to sort out their groceries, leaving them to comment on his behavior, leaving them to take notice of each other. He went outside, smelling the Mississippi River, and he let the air out of Anne Gillen’s tires. She would need a lift to the gas station. Kenneth Kulwin would tell her to call him “Kenny,” and they would discover that their favorite movie was the 1945 romance, The Enchanted Cottage, starring Dorothy McGuire and Robert Young.

  LEVENDIS: On Friday the 4th of October, he found an interstate trucker dumping badly sealed cannisters of phenazine in an isolated picnic area outside Phillipsburg, Kansas; and he shot him three times in the head; and wedged
the body into one of the large, nearly empty trash barrels near the picnic benches.

  LEVENDIS: On Saturday the 5th of October, he addressed two hundred and forty-four representatives of the country & western music industry in the Chattanooga Room just off the Tennessee Ballroom of the Opryland Hotel in Nashville. He said to them, “What’s astonishing is not that there is so much ineptitude, slovenliness, mediocrity and downright bad taste in the world…what is unbelievable is that there is so much good art in the world. Everywhere.” One of the attendees raised her hand and asked, “Are you good, or evil?” He thought about it for less than twenty seconds, smiled, and replied, “Good, of course! There’s only one real evil in the world: mediocrity.” They applauded sparsely, but politely. Nonetheless, later at the reception, no one touched the Swedish meatballs, or the rumaki.

  LEVENDIS: On Sunday the 6th of October, he placed the exhumed remains of Noah’s ark near the eastern summit of a nameless mountain in Kurdistan, where the next infrared surveillance of a random satellite flyby would reveal them. He was careful to seed the area with a plethora of bones, here and there around the site, as well as within the identifiable hull of the vessel. He made sure to place them two-by-two: every beast after his kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind, and every fowl after his kind, and every bird of every sort. Two-by-two. Also the bones of pairs of gryphons, unicorns, stegosaurs, tengus, dragons, orthodontists, and the carbon-dateable 50,000-year old bones of a relief pitcher for the Boston Red Sox.

  LEVENDIS: On Monday the 7th of October, he kicked a cat. He kicked it a far distance. To the passersby who watched, there on Galena Street in Aurora, Colorado, he said: “I am an unlimited person, sadly living in a limited world.” When the housewife who planned to call the police yelled at him from her kitchen window, “Who are you? What is your name!?!” he cupped his hands around his mouth so she would hear him, and he yelled back, “Levendis! It’s a Greek word.” They found the cat imbarked halfway through a tree. The tree was cut down, and the section with the cat was cut in two, the animal tended by a talented taxidermist who tried to quell the poor beast’s terrified mewling and vomiting. The cat was later sold as bookends.