A Handful of Time

by Rosel George Brown

  Arthur also had a curl in the front of his dark hair which, late at night, fell over his forehead in an unconsciously engaging way. Arthur didn’t exactly set the curl, but he did sort of comb through it with hair oil and wind it over his finger.

  So that he usually managed to have his friends in at home‌—‌all his friends were beautiful girls and for them he had made his apartment slightly exotic. They took well to hallucination parties for two and mushrooms are cheaper than gin and don’t leave a hang over.

  Everyone can’t do this, you understand. The women have to be weighed, for instance, to be sure of proper dosage. They must be free of certain diseases‌—‌heart ailments and respiratory disorders, etc., and only an expert with Arthur’s additional intuitive perception could know which fungus goes with which girl.

  Arthur became, as the years went by, something of an artist in this line and eventually came to be much sought after by society matrons.

  But he was a man of principle, and a seeker of the Silver Chalice, and he never Did It for Money.

  Besides, he had a thriving mushroom farm in Pennsylvania. He had a good foreman and there really isn’t a great deal one needs to do for mushrooms except go pick them at the right time. Arthur had no taste for button mushrooms, himself.

  Arthur had been working on a variety of Lepiota which looked very promising. Indeed, he’d been neglecting his women for several weeks and hadn’t the least desire to do anything but hover over his spores.

  But just to deny the faint suspicion that occasionally came over him that he was getting middle-aged and peculiar, he accepted an invitation to Betty Rankin’s cocktail party. If you are single long enough, you become an eligible bachelor, and if you refrain from being excessively unpleasant about not having got “caught” (or caught again), you get invited to everything there are extra women at.

  Arthur, let us add, did not have the “I was smart” complex with which most bachelors ward off implied charges of homosexuality, frigidity and unacceptability to women. He knew he was attractive to women, he knew what he wanted and hadn’t got yet, and he didn’t have to be defensive (or offensive, as I’m afraid we frequently become).

  “I just don’t seem to be lucky in love,” he’d say from under his curl, and women just loved it.

  And there, across the room, he saw her.

  Never in dreams, never in imaginings‌—‌but he knew her when he saw her.

  She had ash-blond hair and heavy, straight-brown eyebrows and deep-grey eyes and a rounded body with apparently neither bones nor fat in it. Glaucous and firm fleshed were the words that came to Arthur’s mind. A head shining like Agaricus campester (Gris.). Her age might have been anywhere (with good care) from twenty-five to forty.

  She was dressed in a simple black sheath and a frilly white apron.

  She was the maid.

  Now, Arthur Kelsing was no callow youth and he knew better than to try to make love to the maid at a cocktail party. He quietly got her name and address from Betty Rankin, and became intimate with the extra debutante at the party, as he was expected to do, and watched Frances out of the corner of his eye.

  The debutante was nervous and excited and hadn’t wanted to make her debut in the first place (it was her mother’s idea) and always broke out in pimples before parties. Let us put it to Arthur’s credit that she had a good time not only at that party but also at subsequent ones, where the air of being used to older men gave her a sophistication that eventually led to her marriage to the heir of a brass manufacturer’s fortune.

  Arthur went home that evening and looked at himself in the mirror, seeing in amazement that having found Frances made him look no different.

  Frances. Frances Griffith was her name.

  But Arthur went on looking at himself, inside and out, and felt for the first time inadequate.

  He was ashamed, for instance, of his curl. It was mannered, it was artificial. She would see through it. He wet his comb and combed it out.

  He looked less handsome, but more real.

  I’m Me, he thought. It would be foolishness to try to offer her anything else.

  Except the mushrooms.

  Yes, that would be the one really original thing, the one thing Arthur alone could offer.

  The proper mushroom.

  He stayed up all night, leafing through his notebooks, thinking there must be some he had forgotten, though he knew them all by heart.

  There were none, of course. Except a variety of Stropheria he had whose spores he was momentarily expecting to germinate. He strode over and turned on the mic lamp in the damp, cold little room which was his laboratory. Nothing yet. It chilled him a little, as it always did, to see in what wretched circumstances his dreams must incubate. He checked the temperature and humidity and switched off the light.

  There had been the Collybia in Nicaragua, of course. Arthur had been in a cautious phase then, having recently been poisoned with a Boletus laricis, but they had stayed in his mind and he had a feeling…

  Arthur paced his apartment, scratching his hand across his emerging beard, blowing faint whistles of air through his teeth.

  He was possessed with excitement, both physical and metaphysical.

  Because it shows something, that Frances should exist at all. That she should answer, down to the smallest detail, a description which he had not known was in his mind. But which must have been there all along. Otherwise he would not have recognized her so immediately and so intensely.

  And so, therefore, must the mushroom exist, whose dream would be the dream Frances. So that she would have two existences, one in reality and one in unreality, each as real as the other and together constituting Arthur’s ideal. And thus making a solid link between the inside of Arthur’s mind (which he sometimes worried about) and the outside world (whose existence he was sometimes unsure of).

  There was not a thing wrong with either Arthur’s theories or his conclusions.

  The only thing he had not consciously noticed was that what Frances really looked like‌—‌blond and alabaster of skin and boneless and fatless of body‌—‌was an Amanita solitaria.

  But it is certainly not fair to go poking uninvited into Arthur’s unconscious, and one has no reason to link this up with later events. And if Robert Burns’ love could be like a red, red rose, why should anyone find it queer that Arthur’s love was like a white, white mushroom? (Except that Arthur didn’t make the connection.)

  Arthur knew he needed a warm shower and a nap, having had no sleep at all and not being young enough not to show it. But sleep was out of the question and a warm shower did not seem the thing at the moment.

  So he had a cold shower and shaved and drank a cup of coffee improved with brandy and went to see Frances.

  Even if she weren’t home, he could begin to become familiar with her natural habitat.

  The street Betty Rankin had written down was respectable enough at the south end. But Frances lived at the north end.

  And as Arthur watched for the 900 block, he began to feel a little unsettled inside. For this was almost a slum. Rows of houses, once splendid, now rooming houses bursting at the seams with the poor, the derelict, the hopeless, and somewhere in there a few families about to climb out of it all.

  But where, in all that, a place for Frances?

  Griffith. He looked for cards at the entrance, but there was nothing to betray the inhabitants of 902 Elm Street. Children spilled across his feet, babies in drooping diapers bumping down the steps, headed for the curb.

  “I’m looking for Miss Frances Griffith,” he asked an older child, who should have been in school.

  The boy leered, asked for a cigarette, led the way through a hall that reeked of stale people, up two flights of stairs, stopped before a peeling, dark green door and yelled, “Francie!” at the top of his voice.

  Then he held out two fingers for another cigarette and left.

  Arthur didn’t smoke but he always carried cigarettes and a lighter. Women loved this
kind of foresight. Arthur was irritated when he discovered he’d done this for Frances. It was part of the charm he’d been accumulating for several decades and he didn’t intend to use it on Frances. He wanted to strip himself bare for her.

  He stood sweating nervously before that unpropitious looking door, forcing himself not to think of charming things to say to Frances.

  He wanted to be unprepared. But he needn’t have worried.

  Frances opened the door. She was brilliantly glaucous in a negligee with a striate margin and she opened the door only far enough to extrude a dark, heavy man dressed in striped coveralls and a mechanic’s cap.

  It was Frances who began the conversation.

  “Next,” she said.

  Arthur married her anyway. That is, in spite of her and her family’s objections. They felt she had quite a career in front of her (as indeed she would have) and nobody could see any advantages in Arthur.

  She was, however, easily led and subject to drugs and Arthur managed the legalities with no trouble. The reason he married her was so he could keep her locked in his apartment. This was absolutely necessary as she had a strong tendency to wander off toward any man that went by, and her old boy friends were always trying to look her up.

  And what he planned to do in no way impaired her domestic abilities, as she only had two domestic abilities, the other one being a talent for standing around holding trays of hors d’oeuvres. There was a maid to do the housework.

  Still, there was no denying the initial disappointment that came to Arthur when he found her conversation was limited to “Yeah,” and “who cares” and “not on your life.” He could overlook her morals, but the stupidity was more difficult.

  There remained the hope, for a while, that she was educable. But there were insurmountable difficulties. For one thing, she was very nearsighted. This gave her eyes a distant, enchanted quality, but it also enabled her to say with truth she couldn’t see the letters on the page. “Not on your life,” she said when faced with a book. Also she was completely intractable. “So you want me to look at the pictures,” she’d say, not looking. Mostly she slept and changed clothes. She didn’t even spend much time putting on make up, because she didn’t need it.

  What she was, Arthur soon realized, was a pale reflection of a reality that existed in a hallucination he had not yet had. She was, in another sense, a shadow in the cave. And further, Arthur (who never hesitated to mix his literary allusions) began to feel like the Lady of Shallot. He was half sick of shadows and he was ready to look down to Camelot. Only he didn’t expect any curse to come upon him (any more than Plato would; it took a Romantic to think up that part.)

  You see, Arthur, in searching for simple ideals, the perfect woman, the perfect hallucinogenic mushroom, inadvertently stumbled on the secret of the universe, which had eluded scientists and philosophers all these centuries. The secret of the universe is that the world isn’t real. This was indisputably proved by Frances, whose unreality was unquestionable. Obviously no Deity, no elan vital would create something like the objective Frances. On the other hand, one has to account for her, and this is best done by assuming that Arthur is God (it grates at first, but see how well it works out). Thus he can recognize this odd manifestation of Frances as a corner of reality sticking into this swirling dream of matter which we have all agreed to call “reality.”

  Which leaves Arthur to explore the actual reality which he has already created but from which he had been diverted by things like being born and living and what not.

  That is what mushrooms are for.

  And Arthur was the only person in the world who combined expert botanical knowledge with a native talent for understanding and absorbing hallucinogenic mushrooms. Talent plus hard work, that’s what makes an outstanding artist, such as Arthur, or God.

  The Stropharia Arthur had been working on when he met Frances wouldn’t do at all. It was not even hallucinogenic, though he had crossed it with a strain of Psilocybe mexicana.

  He had therefore to fly to Patagonia for the Boletus and when he got back Frances was gone. Fortunately, she didn’t have enough sense to go far, and he found her back at 902 Elm St. and had to stand in line for an hour outside her door, so as not to make a public scene.

  “Get lost,” she told him, when his turn came. But he then and there fed her the Boletus and then was in a fever to get home and try the new mushroom himself.

  He’d been right. This was It.

  Now, this might have been the end of the story, except that the objective Frances continued to be so much trouble when the effects of the Boletus wore off.

  And furthermore she became less and less attractive, by herself.

  Having achieved so much, Arthur had a brilliant idea, to perfect Frances.

  Why should not Frances and her mushroom become symbiotic on each other, as in the case of lichen, especially since they had a natural affinity?

  Why not, as a matter of fact, grow this Boletus inside of Frances, thereby rendering her permanently happy, her chemistry improved by the exudations of the fungus, and the fungus in turn nourished by Frances’ body (or even, perhaps, her mind?)

  This did not seem as impossible as it may at first sound to the layman, or even to the scientist. Bacteria, which grow inside of people, are fungi. Mushrooms are fungi. Both reproduce sexually, which means they can be bred for certain characteristics. (It has only recently been observed that bacteria reproduce sexually, but they have actually been doing it all along.)

  There is much that is not understood about the relationships or possible relationships between fungi and people, since medicine and mycology are two different specialties, and physicians and mycologists do not always agree about what is a fungus.

  Arthur therefore had a field pretty much uncluttered by previous experimentation and since he knew exactly what he wanted to do, he could go pretty much in a straight line.

  (It is a curious psychological fact that Arthur did not spend any time wondering what Frances’ vision was under hallucination. He merely assumed, as he was God, that it was the same as his. Herself, improved.)

  It took Arthur a year to breed Frances Arthuriensis, which will not be found in the C. M. I. for obvious reasons.

  During this time it had been necessary for Arthur to make a few changes in his way of life. There were Frances’ ex-boy friends who were a constant nuisance. Arthur had no compunction about giving Frances drugs, but he couldn’t well keep her asleep twenty-four hours a day and he didn’t want to over use anything from his mushroom pharmacary. The chemistry of hallucinogenic mushrooms is ill understood, even by Arthur, and he did not want to take a chance on building up possible toxic reactions, or causing possible neurological changes, until he had the Frances Arthuriensis ready.

  So he bought a cabin in the Ozarks. He had it equipped with all the modern conveniences except a paved road (it was necessary to bump over a pasture and up a wooded slope to get to it. Only his little foreign car could weave between the trees, and even so, one had to know which trees). He hired two idiot boys from one of the neighboring farms, two miles away, and bought a razor back hog, planning to indulge an old dream of raising truffles, which ordinarily are impossible to grow in America. (This is worthy of mention because it shows that Arthur was not a monomaniac. It is true that his zeal in regard to Frances implies a perhaps unusual degree of uxoriousness. But he maintained other interests, too.)

  Once installed, Arthur proceeded with the breeding of Francesa arthura with almost daily success. He crossed the Patagonian Boletus with a more temperate North Carolina Boletus and with the help of air conditioning, at first achieved a mushroom that could survive an Arkansas summer. (A generation of mushrooms requires several days.) He then crossed it with a small Daedalea from Cade’s Cove. Meanwhile he was working upward with the largest B. coli he could find and filaments of myxomycete Plasmodium.

  At the end of a year Arthur managed to mate a microscopic mushroom with a new parasitic slime mold. Applied to t
he skin of a shaved cat (there were those later who thought the most loathsome thing Arthur ever did was to shave a cat) it showed itself soon in fairy rings. This sounds delightful, but actually it is ring worm. The cat died, of course, not having Frances’ chemical make up. But the important thing was that the Francesa arthura lived.

  It is not to be supposed that Arthur meant to give Frances a bad case of ring worm. Whether it would make a pleasant symbiosis for Frances or not, it would certainly be aesthetically unpleasing.

  No, Francesa arthura was for internal use only, and as Arthur was too humane to give it to Frances without testing it, he fed it to one of the idiot farm boys.

  The effect was noticeable the very next day. The boy became alert, his mouth no longer drooped open, he no longer slept half the day. In fact, Arthur learned upon questioning him, he had stopped sleeping altogether. It should be noted that the boy’s intelligence did not at any time increase, but he certainly looked better. It was almost as though (there were a little switch in him that had been pushed from “slow” to “fast.”

  As it happened, the boy was dead six months later, but it must be remembered that Francesa arthura was not his mushroom, but Frances’, and also that nature had fashioned him perhaps to live slow for many years, and who is to say he was not happier living fast for a few months?

  Anyhow, Arthur meanwhile decided that Francesa arthura was ready for Frances, and Frances was ready (indeed, long overdue) for Francesa arthura.

  Her neural tone improved almost immediately and she presented a problem Arthur had not planned on, though he knew from the farm boy. She no longer slept. Never. But at the same time, she grew to resemble more closely the Frances of his hallucinogenic dream. Her movements became more fluid and graceful. She began to enjoy long walks in the woods. She listened and smiled as he explained his interests to her. (The fascinating varieties of fungi housed in cow patties, for instance, and the interesting habits of lichen.) There was never the least reason to think she understood or cared, but she had learned how to listen, which is a mannerism, not an intellectual attainment.