“What type?”
“B. Rh positive.”
“Thought you told me that once. Gail is in the hospital. They have to replace every drop of blood in her body. She may die anyhow.”
I thought of the little fluff and squeak that was Gail. I eat de crus’ of de toas’.
“What’s the matter with her?” I asked fearfully.
“That damn Hiserean child is poison. Gail had a little cut inside her mouth from where she fell off the slide at school.”
“I’ll be at the hospital in ten minutes,” I said, and hung up shakily. “Dinner is set for seven-thirty,” I told Clay and Billy, and rushed out.
The first person I saw at the hospital was not Regina. It was Mrs. His-tara.
“How did you know?” I asked. Her integument was dull now and there were patches of scales rubbed off. Her eyes were almost not visible.
“Mrs. Crowley called me,” she said. “In any case I would have been here. There is in Hi-nin also of poison. There remains for him only the Return Home. We must rejoice for him.”
The smile she brought forth was more than I could bear.
“Gail’s germs were poison to him?”
“Oh, no. He poisons himself. It is an ancient hormone, from the early days of our race when we had what your Mrs. Baden so wisely calls aggression. It is dormant in us since before the accounting of our history. An adult Hiserean, perhaps, could fight his emotions and cure himself. Hi-nin has no weapons—so your physicians have explained it to me, from our scientific books. How can I doubt that they are right?”
How could I doubt it, either? It would be, I thought, rather like a massive overdose of adrenalin. Psychogenic, of course, but what help was it to know that? Would there be some organ in Hi-nin a surgeon could remove? Like the adrenals in humans, perhaps?
Of course not. If they could have, they would have.
I hurried on to find the room where Gail was. She was not pale, as I had expected, but pink-cheeked and bright-eyed. They were probably putting in more blood than they were taking out. There were two of the other mamas from our car pool, waiting their turns.
Rejgina was sitting by the bed, her face ugly and swollen from crying.
“She looks just fine!” I exclaimed. “Only in the last fifteen minutes,” she said. “When I called you, she was like ice. Her eyes didn’t move.”
“We’re lucky with Gail. Did you know about Hi-nin?”
“The little animal!” she said. “He’s the one that did it.”
“He didn’t do anything, Regina, and you know it.”
“He shouldn’t have been in the car pool. He shouldn’t be with human children at all.”
“He’s going to die,” I said quickly, before she had time to say things she’d have nightmares about later on.
“Sorry,” Regina said, because we were all looking at her and because her child was pink and beautiful and healthy while Hi-nin…
“Regina,” I said, “what did you do after it happened?”
“Do! It scared the hell out of me—that creature shaking all over and Gail screaming. At first I didn’t know what had happened. Then I saw that thing flopping around on the front seat and I screamed and threw it out of the window. And then I noticed Hi-nin’s wrist, or whatever you call it. I said, ‘Oh, God, I knew you’d get us in trouble!’ But the creature didn’t say anything. He just sat there. And I let the other children off and brought Hi-nin to you because I didn’t want to get involved with that Mrs. Baden.”
“And Gail?”
“She seemed all right. She just climbed in the back with the other children and pretty soon they were all laughing.”
“And all that time little Hi-nin… Regina, didn’t you even pat him or hold him or kiss it for him or anything?”
“Kiss it!”
At that moment Mrs. His-tara came in, with Mrs. Baden and a doctor behind her. I should have known. Mrs. Baden didn’t leave people to fight battles alone.
Mrs. His-tara looked at Mrs. Baden, but Mrs. Baden only nodded and smiled encouragingly at her.
The doctor was gently pulling the needle out of Gail’s vein. The room was silent. Even Gail sat large-eyed and solemn.
“Mrs. Crowley,” Mrs. His-tara began, obviously dragging each word up with great effort, “would it be accurate to tell my son that Gail has received no hurt from him? We must, you see, prepare him for the Return Home.”
Regina looked around at us and at Gail. She hadn’t dared let herself look at Mrs. His-tara yet.
“Doctor!” Regina called suddenly. “Look at Gail’s mouth!”
Even from where I was, I could see it. A scaly growth along both lips.
“That’s a temporary effect of the serum,” the doctor said. “We tried an antitoxin before we decided to change the blood. It is nothing to worry about.”
“Oh.”
“Mrs. Crowley,” Mrs. His-tara began again, “it is much to ask, but at such a moment, much is required. If you could come yourself, and if Gail could endure to be carried…”
But Gail did, indeed, look queer, and she stretched out her arms not to her mother but to Mrs. His-tara.
“The tides,” Mrs. His-tara said, “have cast us up a miracle.”
She gathered Gail into the boneless cradle of her curved arms.
Regina took her sunglasses out of her purse and hid her eyes. “Mind your own damned business,” she told Mrs. Baden and me.
“It is our damned business,” I whispered to Mrs. Baden, and she held my arm as we followed Regina down the hall.
Mrs. His-tara threaded her way through a cordon of other Hisereans who must have been flown in for the occasion. I couldn’t see the children, but I could hear them.
“Him cold!” said Gail. “Him scared!”
“He’s scared of you,” Regina said. “We’re sorry, Gail. Tell him we’re sorry. We didn’t understand.”
Gail laughed. A loud and healthy laugh.
“Gail sorry,” she said. “Me thought you was to eat.”
There was a small sound. I thought it was from Hi-nin and I held Mrs. Baden’s hand as though it were my only link to a sane world.
“Data joke,” Gail said. “Hi-nin ’posed to laugh!”
Then there was a silence and Regina started to say something but Mrs. His-tara whispered, “Please! It is a thought between the children.”
Then there was a small, quiet laugh from Hi-nin. “In truth,” he said with that oh, so familiar lisp, “it is funny.”
“Me don’t do it again,” Gail said, solemn now.
When I got home it was so late that the stars were sliding down the sky and I just knew Clay wouldn’t have thought to turn the parking lights on. But he had.
Furthermore, he was still up.
“Were you worried?” I asked delightedly.
“No. Regina called a couple of hours ago.”
“Regina?”
“She said she was concerned about the expression on your face.”
Clay handed me a present, all wrapped in gold stickum with an electronic butterfly bouncing airily around on it.
I peeled the paper off carefully, to save it for Billy, and set the butterfly on the sticky side.
Inside the box was a gorgeous blue fluffy affair of no apparently utility.
“Oh, Clay!” I gasped. “I can’t wear anything like this!” I slipped out of my paper clothes and the gown slithered around me.
Hastily, I pulled the pins out of my hair, brushed it back and smeared on some lipstick.
“I look silly,” I said. “I’m all the wrong type.” My little crayola note was still stuck in the mirror. Phooey to me. “You’re laughing at me.”
“I’m not. You don’t really look respectable at all, Verne.”
I ran into the dining area. “Regina told you about the boudoir slip!”
I heard Clay stumble over a chair in the dark.
“Obscenity!” he said. “All right, she did. So what? I think you look like a call girl.”
&
nbsp; I ran into the living room and hid behind the sofa. “Do you really, truly think so?”
“Absolutely!” Another chair clattered and Clay toed the living room lights. “Ah!” he said. “I’ve got you cornered. You look like a chorus girl. You look like an easy pickup. You look like a dirty little—”
“Stop,” I cried, “while you’re still winning!”
FRUITING BODY
Note: Bacteria do reproduce sexually—I know a botanist who saw them do it. But apparently all the work on this is very recent and probably has not reached the text books yet.
NO ONE who has wondered what the Giaconda is smiling about has not also wondered what the Francesa arthura is thinking about. We are not so unsophisticated as to attempt to answer either of these questions. But we feel that some account of the life of the author (or Arthur, as his name happens to be) of the Francesa arthura might, despite the protestations of the current generation of critics, prove illuminating. (We are afraid, because the aforesaid critics are so sharp of tooth, to say just how.)
Arthur Kelsing collected fungi and women. He occasionally fed the former (not the poisonous variety) to the latter, and frequently wished he could feed the latter (the poisonous variety) to the former.
But civilization is not so ordered. Is not, as Arthur frequently ruminated, either coherent or logical.
But rather (Arthur’s father had been absent and he was reared by a hard-pressed mother who gave the impression of being domineering) civilization seemed to have been cooked up in that intuitive and irritating fashion in which women go about things. And Arthur could only hope that there was some agreeable end in view. Because when women go about doing something in their vague, unreasonable way, they insist they are doing something and if you just wait and mind your own business, they’ll show you what it is when it’s finished.
Arthur’s wife had been, for instance, a woman. This was the real reason why he divorced her.) And the first thing she did was hide all his left socks. All but about three at a time.
“I don’t know where they are,” she’d say. “But by the time you get back to the three you wore first, you’ll have those pairs matching again and isn’t that really all that matters? They should be rotated, so as to make them wear longer, and this just forces you to do something you should be doing anyhow.”
“I don’t like to be forced,” Arthur said. You can see immediately that there was a broad principle involved, not just a matter of the socks. “It’s childish of you to hide my left socks, and you’re to get them out right now.”
“I told you, I don’t know where they are.”
“You’re supposed to wash all the socks at once and put away matching pairs.”
“You’re not supposed to do anything of the kind,” Patty had snapped, unrolling a wad of hair from a brush curler and rolling it the other way with her fingers. “You don’t understand laundry. You wash white socks with the towels and colored cotton ones with the blouses and woolen-type socks with my skirts and nylon socks with my underwear. And some of them get tangled up so you don’t see them and you discover the extra one later and save it to wash next time you wash the things it goes with. You can’t put one sock in the washing machine by itself. Really,” Patty had said, turning from the mirror, her curl vibrating, “I can’t go on loving you passionately if you put on your underwear and socks and shirt and tie and just stand around in your bare legs. Men look nice with bare chests but not bare legs. Why can’t you put your pants on first?”
“Because the crease… never mind,” Arthur had answered, clenching his eyelids and then wondering whether he should tell her right then that she had just ruined their marriage.
It wasn’t just that, either, or the socks. It was fungi, too. She kept filching his best specimens for her dried-flower arrangements.
Anyway, if Arthur Kelsing were now a bachelor, and a confirmed one, you can see there were good reasons for it. And if he were also a confirmed fungus collector, there were good reasons for that, too.
And if he were able to combine his hobbies, there were good reasons for that, too. He found, in fact, a certain similarity, a certain sympathetic magic that took place between certain women and certain fungi.
Most men, all perhaps, are familiar with at least some of the properties of women. Many however, are not similarly familiar with properties of fungi.
Arthur was lucky. As a child he had grown up in a small town in the south and was given to wandering the country side where he could steal watermelons and cow bells and what not. And one day, when he was about twelve, he found some interesting looking mushrooms growing out of a… well, not everybody would have eaten them, but Arthur had eaten mushrooms before and besides, if they were toadstools he’d get sick and it would serve his mother right. (Don’t eat that kind of thing, she’d said. It might be toadstools. As if it were her business what he ate or didn’t eat) So he broke them carefully, so as to leave the cow patty intact, washed them in the nearest creek and rushed home so he could be sick in a public place.
Only he didn’t get sick. He had the most fascinating hallucinations you can imagine—no, you can’t imagine them unless you’ve tried it. (The mushrooms, he discovered later, were of the genus Panaeolus. Anybody can pluck them off of cow patties after a rain and after all, what do you think fertilizer is?)
It was not long after—to be specific it was during a Halloween hay ride—that he discovered women. This particular woman was thirteen years old and as different from his mother as certain Panaeoli are from canned button mushrooms (Agaricus campestris). So Arthur naturally assumed that just as there are different kinds of fungi, so there are different kinds of women.
Arthur had to have his stomach pumped out six times (one of them after he should have known better) before he learned to be really careful about the toxins in mushrooms.
It only took one marriage to make him cautious about women. But there were other disillusionments that might have discouraged a man of less passion. (Or would perhaps have led a more generous man to compromise. But had Arthur been a better person, he would have been much less interesting.)
But to get back to Flora (the unfortunate name of the thirteen-year-old woman), while Flora had her attractions, when you came right down to it, her only real attraction was that she was willing. And Arthur soon wanted more from life than he got from Flora and the chance variety of Panaeolus. Which brought him to his first experiment.
But meanwhile Arthur had undergone a complete change that delighted his teachers and his poor old mother (who was actually quite a pretty woman of thirty-five and so discreet her employer never regretted taking her on as his mistress also.) Arthur became a junior scientist, a child genius. It is true that he still lagged in English and social science, but he could definitely no longer be classified as a big lout. He even stopped stealing watermelons. He stole mushrooms. He spent hours pouring over heavy books full of diagrams and long words. He was engrossed in studies of botany and anatomy.
Some attributed this remarkable change to the fact that he was beginning to grow up (which was true) and others, particularly his mother, to the influence of little Flora (which was also true.)
But what Arthur had done was to begin his search for the Silver Chalice. He had, so early, perceived if only dimly his ideal. And he glowed with a knightly glow.
Women and fungi; you may think, are not the way.
They are not perhaps your way. But they are a way.
For his experiment, Flora was not it by a long shot, and his lower south variety of Panaeolus was not it, though the differential was less. So he tried a combination of the two. (He had to powder it and put it in her drink. She drank but she didn’t eat mushrooms, especially after he had described the effects. A girl doesn’t have to eat mushrooms, she’d said, to have a good time.)
So that Flora became, briefly, the girl of his dreams—he and Flora both dreaming mushroom dreams, Flora merging with the dream girl produced by Panaeolus.<
br />
But there were difficulties.
For one thing, the dosage was wrong. As a big lout, Arthur had been able to tolerate more than Flora, and he had neglected to take this into account when preparing his Instant Dreams powder. His main objective had been to put in plenty.
For another—most important and key to Arthur’s entire future—the dream girl, the girl produced by the hallucinations of Panaeolus, was not quite right. She had a squint This was due not to Arthur’s mind, which was perfect in its way, but to the type of mushroom he was using. Now, there have been men, romantic poets particularly, who admire a little—sometimes a lot—of grotesquerie in women. (Try some of the French Decadents.) But Arthur had a classical soul, Classical and Romantic being used here in the technical sense. Anything macabre or perverted one sees in him is being read into his character by the beholder. It was amazing, later, how many dirty-minded people…
Oh, and Flora. Unfortunately (or to be honest, fortunately) she died. It was blamed not on Arthur, but on Flora’s mother, who had neglected to tell her, so everyone said, not to eat toadstools.
It was thus that Arthur learned to experiment on small animals first, and thus that he began to be a real scientist. Arthur was quick to perceive that he might have got himself in a whole lot of trouble and he never made the same mistake again.
He made other mistakes instead.
Patty, for instance.
“Patty,” he’d said, “you’re everything I’ve dreamed of.” But oddly enough, she wasn’t. He just happened to fall in love with her when he was twenty-four, for no reason at all. (Actually there was a reason. Patty had his mother’s mannerism of talking with her eyebrows, but Arthur never consciously realized this. He didn’t know that what he’d missed was having a strong woman around the house.)
It was a fine, beautiful, normal love and very boring.
Certain varieties of Amanita he was working on, on the other hand…
Arthur by the age of forty, though he was not as affluent as some mushroom farmers, was very good looking—tall and wide built but thin enough to look emotional—and yet slightly cruel of mouth and cynical of voice, so that women could see there was a lot beneath the surface.
A Handful of Time Page 14