A Handful of Time

by Rosel George Brown

  Furthermore, she displayed, for the first time, a marked affection for Arthur. He no longer felt he was the object of her passion solely because he kept everybody else locked out. Now she followed him around, she took his word as law, she obeyed his every whim, even to the extent of doing simple housework.

  Within a week, Arthur felt secure enough to sleep soundly at night without locking Frances in her cage, though he had to warn her severely about going for long walks in the woods, moon or no moon.

  “Stay close to the house,” he’d say, and she did. He sometimes waked at night and saw her out of the window, white and beautiful under the moon, just standing there enjoying the wind in her hair.

  If Arthur thought he was God, he soon had Frances to back him up. And as she drew closer to him she became, in a sense, more distant from the world. She grew more spiritual, more distant in the eyes, whiter, even almost luminous.

  The initial alertness supplied by Francesa arthura began to change a little. She did not droop in languor, but she became more inward, supplying something to Francesa arthura as it was supplying her with its intoxicants.

  Soon she gave up her long walks, her dancing about the house. She did nothing, but it was a different sort of nothing from what she had done before. It was a happy, purposeful nothing.

  She just stood around outside, mostly.

  She… vegetated.

  One morning, several days after Frances stopped eating, Arthur found her leaning against a tree, sending rhizomorphs into it.

  He was horrified.

  He cut them off. (It was not painful as they were naturally vegetative rhizomorphs.)

  He brought her inside, forced her to eat, increased the nitrogen in her diet. “You’ve got to fight back,” he said. “It’s a symbiote, not a parasite.”

  But Frances wasn’t interested in fighting back. She ate, as Arthur instructed her to, and for a while there were no more rhizomorphs. The rhizomorphs became merely something to remember about, not to fear.

  Until this matter of fate came up. Fate has little literary validity, but is very important in life.

  Arthur got sick.

  It was only pneumonia, which nobody gets very excited about any more, but it necessitated Arthur’s being in the hospital for two days and there was absolutely nothing he could do about Frances except instruct her to eat regularly. After the two days, the doctor insisted on two more, and you know you can’t leave without a release.

  Arthur drove back, expertly jockeying his little foreign car through the trees, and he had the feeling you always have when you know something awful has happened. “In five minutes I’ll be laughing at myself,” he said, and tried to laugh without having to wait the five minutes.

  He rounded a stand of trees and saw her, a yard or two from the cabin’s clearing, sitting by a rotten tree stump, her arm resting on the stump, her beautiful white head resting on her arm.

  “Frances!” he cried and bumped the car to a stop beside her.

  She smiled at him dreamily, recognizing him faintly somewhere beyond the grey smoke of her eyes.

  “No!” he cried, because she seemed so immobile, despite the fact that she drew her legs under her a little and moved her head.

  “You didn’t eat?” he asked.

  She roused a little, took a breath, so that he noticed she hadn’t been breathing. That was what had made her look so immobile. “I wasn’t hungry,” she said.

  “But I told you.”

  “I forgot,” she said, and stopped breathing, smiling to herself.

  Arthur began to pull at the rotten wood and found it threaded with rhizomorphs.

  “Bring me a drink of water,” Frances said, as Arthur went into the house after his knife. “It hasn’t rained since I started rooting.”

  “Mushrooms don’t root,” Arthur said, and this added to his irritation, because he had explained to her a thousand times that a rhizomorph is not a tree root.

  “You’ve got to learn to be more self-sufficient,” Arthur said as he cut away at the thousand tiny tendrils that extended through her pores and into the rotten wood. Frances held the glass in her hand and drank the water.

  She ate two coddled eggs he gave her after he brought her in and cleaned her up. (It had been dusty out there, and there were insects and what not.) But she threw them right up. She did a little better with the consommé and Arthur let it go at that.

  “It’s a matter of habit,” he told her. “We’ll start working up to solid food again tomorrow.”

  He had missed her badly those four days, and held her close to him while he slept. She still didn’t sleep, but he had given her stern instructions not to get up and wander during the night.

  He waked the next morning with a Jetstream of sunshine in his face and a heaviness of Frances’ head on his right shoulder. He felt weak and convalescent. He’d done too much, after spending four days in a hospital bed.

  He leaned up and Frances’ gaze shifted from the window to his face and she smiled with her coral mouth. “I’m attached to you,” she said.

  “Yes, but you’re hurting my shoulder.” And as he went to turn over he saw what she meant.

  She was attached to him.

  He got his knife again, an awkward procedure as Frances was attached at his shoulder and hip, but it wasn’t as easy as hacking away at a rotten log.

  It didn’t hurt when he cut the hyphae, but blood began seeping out and it soon became evident that it was his blood.

  And for the first time he felt a wave of disgust for his wife. “You’re a parasite,” he said. “You’re no better than anybody else. At least most of them are willing to settle for money.”

  It was then that Arthur decided to divorce his wife.

  You will wonder, perhaps, why Arthur did not simply murder her. That is safe only in stories. Murder is illegal, and particularly unsafe among married couples, where the motive is obvious.

  But divorce takes a long time and there had to be an immediate separation.

  Arthur therefore called a doctor (partly to do this minor surgery safely, partly to serve as a witness that his wife had become a dangerous parasite).

  Dr. Beeker had never (Good Heavens!) seen a case of this kind before and recommended (strongly!) that the two of them be brought immediately to a hospital to have the separation made.

  But Arthur said No, it might be dangerous to wait, his wife had been acting very peculiar and he didn’t know what she had that he might catch and furthermore he had just been ill himself and was feeling weak from loss of blood. (Though, indeed, she wasn’t stealing his blood, only the nutrients from it.)

  “I don’t know,” Dr. Beeker said, slicing unhappily at the rhizomorphs with a scalpel, “what effect this is going to have on Mrs. Kelsing. I really feel she should be seen by a specialist. Ah… well, tropical diseases, maybe.”

  “A botanist,” Arthur suggested. “My wife needs a good going over by a competent botanist, and although we will be separated, I intend to pay for it.”

  But by the time Dr. Beeker had given Arthur a coagulant and an antibiotic and written a prescription, Frances had slipped out and attached herself to the tree stump again.

  Dr. Beeker could not bring himself to cut her rhizomorphs again.

  Arthur drove into Fayetteville, had a botanist and the police sent out to his cabin, and consulted a lawyer.

  As it turned out Frances was considered non compos (or non compost, as a cartoonist later put it). But Arthur had to retain the lawyer in any case, because the botanist became suspicious and called in a mycologist and the general conclusion was that Frances was not a natural phenomenon and Arthur in fact was accused of attempted murder.

  Arthur’s lawyer was pleased no end as there were fascinating legal problems involved, one of which was that the Frances upon whom the attempted murder had allegedly been perpetrated could not be produced. She did not exist. (Not any more.) On the other hand, a most important element of the crime of murder was missing. No evidence of a d
ead body of Frances could be produced. The D.A., being in his right mind, would not accept the charge. As Arthur had figured, there were no existing statutes covering the situation. Or at least none except one most people had forgotten about.

  By the time the scientists had finished their studies, Frances’ condition had proceeded to the state that it was not safe to separate her from the stump and indeed, she had no desire to do anything except be watered during dry seasons.

  Eventually Frances became one of the eighth wonders of-the world (it has been years, of course, since she has moved or spoken) and considerably enriched the state of Arkansas via the tourist trade, including a large number of artists, poets, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists and general aesthetes. And she remains‌—‌perhaps will remain forever‌—‌happy and famous and beautiful.

  Whereas Arthur, who made all this possible, was convicted by the people of Arkansas under an old witchcraft law. It was the final ignominy for Arthur, that his life’s work should be dismissed by the people of Arkansas as witchcraft.

  And so he died, despised, misunderstood, a figure of tragic irony, but returning, we hope, to the reality from which he sprang, the eternal hallucination.

  SMITH’S REVENGE

  IT WAS, Dr. Hodges reflected, absurd that Smith should have been stabbed with the only good paper cutter in the office, a lovely, sharp instrument, and actually a genuine Mycenean dagger. It was by no means absurd that Smith had been done in. No, indeed, Dr. Hodges thought in German, ancient Greek and Bantu, for he was a linguist. The surprising thing was that Smith had survived so long. But with the Mycenean dagger!

  His thoughts were interrupted by the appearance of Dr. Morris from physics. “I say, would you mind reading this Roman numeral for me? Some idiot in France has started using Roman numerals for that new subspace mathematics and nobody knows…”

  “Ha!” Dr. Hodges exclaimed happily. “When the journals started using Arabic numerals we were practically forgotten. Let’s see. That’s five hundred and sixty-eight. Oh and while you’re here, we’ve got a little problem. Remember Smith? Joachim Smith? Or did you have him?”

  Dr. Morris frowned at some unpleasant memory. “Smith. The one who always asked, ‘Now if you reversed the process, what would happen?’ and read a comic book while you sweated out the answer.”

  “That’s him.”

  “I had him for freshman cultural science. Why?”

  “Well, we have him now for a graduate student. And look what someone has done.”

  Dr. Hodges moved aside and waved an arm at Smith’s body, sunk into an attitude of unaccustomed humility in the chair near Dr. Hodges’ cluttered desk.

  Dr. Morris leaned down for a good look. “My God! Can you imagine…!”

  “I know,” Dr. Hodges said sadly. “My Mycenean paper cutter. Pretty inconsiderate, don’t you think?”

  “Your paper cutter! Is that all you can think about? This is murder! Oh, I see. You didn’t… ?”

  “Oh, no. Actually, I didn’t think of it. But if I had, I would certainly have used some less valuable weapon.”

  “Trust Smith to die with the most possible inconvenience to everybody,” Dr. Morris said irritably. “Police all over. Everything in the paper. The trustees in a rage. People leaving their money to Harvard instead of to us. Damn Smith, anyway.”

  Dr. Hodges was thinking fast. An idea occurred to him in Anglo-Saxon. He turned it over in Provencal, ran through it quickly in Old Icelandic, straightened it out in Greek and finally brought it to birth in English.

  “Look,” Dr. Hodges said, “nobody will miss Smith, not even his wife. Wouldn’t it be simpler and safer all the way around just to dispose of the unpleasant remains?”

  Dr. Morris looked pensive. “I can’t help but agree with you. But how? I mean, that’s always the problem with dead bodies.”

  “I have the perfect solution,” Dr. Hodges went on eagerly. “Don’t you people in physics have that Time Machine?”

  “Yes. But Good Heavens, man, it’s still in a highly experimental stage. All the white rats have died.”

  “So what? Smith has nothing to lose at this point.”

  “But man, we can’t go interfering with the past like that. I mean his clothes and the paper cutter and everything. It might make whorls in the stream of history. You know, if people in the past got hold of something that wasn’t invented yet. I don’t know.”

  “Got you there,” Dr. Hodges said, closing the door with the sudden realization that he was plotting something that ought to be secret “All he’s got on is the graduate student’s robe. That we can throw in the dispenser. They get thrown in every few weeks for reprocessing, anyway. And I will make the supreme sacrifice to preserve the integrity of history. I will let him go with the Mycenean paper cutter in him, and we can send him back to Mycenae. Could you do that?”

  “Oh, we could do it. And you’d have to sacrifice the weapon anyway. Too risky, with the blood and all that.”

  “So they’d have a dead body and a very common sort of dagger somewhere in Mycenae. What could be more usual?”

  “Would that be usual in Mycenae?”

  “Well, certainly not improbable. After all, look what happened to Agamemnon.”

  “This isn’t my field, you know.”

  “Agamemnon’s wife stabbed him in the bath when he came home from Troy. His wife was Helen of Troy’s sister.”

  “Cozy little family,” Dr. Morris said dryly. “Well, if you’re sure about the paper cutter, we’ll try it. If it doesn’t work, you explain it to the police.”

  Later, sliding down the ramp to the car lot, Dr. Hodges reflected that it was just as well Dr. Morris did not know certain things. There was, for instance, the matter of Smith’s wife. Dr. Hodges never permitted himself even to think about Phyllis except in Annamese so there were few, if any, people who knew he once had wooed her. Even she, unfortunately, did not know it.

  This circumstance came about through Dr. Hodges’ preoccupation with his profession. It never occurred to him, unless someone pointed it out directly, that other people did not always follow his thought processes. When, therefore, he met Phyllis at a party for first-year graduate students, it was the most natural thing in the world for him to approach her shyly in Gaelic, become more ardent in medieval Latin and finally break into passionate Provencal. It was one of those typical sodium pentothal parties that start out so companionably and end up with everybody asleep. He had thought Phyllis looked at him tenderly as the capsule of pentothal emptied slowly into her arm. But just as he was waxing actually poetic, her eyes closed and her hostess put her down the laundry chute. As fate would have it, Smith was waiting at the bottom of the laundry chute.

  Dr. Hodges held his key against the electronic beam and waited for his old combustion engine car to come up the lift.

  After that party Smith had pursued Phyllis in the relentless way he pursued everything but knowledge. And Phyllis, who was as worldly as a gilt shepherdess, fell for him. Yes, indeed, Phyllis was fragile and eighteenth-century all the way through. She was meant, at worst, to have her lock raped, but certainly not for the sort of tragedy marriage to Joachim Smith involved.

  Dr. Hodges started his battered old car and pointed it in the general direction of his bachelor apartment, his mind occupied with thoughts of Smith.

  Smith had been annoying merely to look at. He was excessively thick-set and had put such attention to his muscular development that he could hardly move. In a dim light, he had a number of times been mistaken for a robot.

  Dr. Hodges drove absently down the middle of the street. Oncoming traffic slunk far over to the curb and pushed anger buttons. The Fire Music from Die Walkure blared all around. Dr. Hodges nodded forgivingly at his ill-tempered fellow motorists and pushed his only button, a very obscure Elizabethan madrigal. But forgiving as Dr. Hodges could be about everyone else, Smith rankled.

  Smith had a way of running into the library before class and looking up some very obscure
and learned point. Then he would say something in class like, “Professor, wouldn’t you say that the most influential and important character of ancient times was Incitatus?” And if you did not happen to recall that Incitatus was Caligula’s favorite horse, Smith would so inform you and proceed to blame the fall of the Roman Empire on the character of Caligula’s horse. All of which would make Smith appear profound and clever, the professor a silly fool and leave the class so disrupted and full of sniggers they couldn’t take intelligible notes.

  Well, Smith had at last been sent to a nameless obscurity, and the thought was a sweet one. Except for the paper cutter. That was Dr. Hodges’ prize possession. Still, it was a small triumph for the dead Smith to take him to eternity.

  Dr. Hodges triumphantly remembered to get out of his car before it sunk into its parking place in front of his apartment house. When the lift deposited him gently in his living room, he peeled off his coat and was about to throw it on the amoeboid sofa when he noticed something was in the way.

  “Phyllis!” he cried, and broke into a stream of Old Low German, as he was apt to do when surprised.

  Phyllis turned a wan face toward him, her skin like Pentelic marble, her permacolored mouth exactly the hue from a late sixth-century red-figured Attic vase.

  “Dr. Hodges,” she said, “I’ve got something absolutely ghastly to tell you.”

  “And I,” Dr. Hodges said cheerfully, “have a really nice little bit of news for you. Me first?”

  “Oivov?” Anaximander asked rustily, rolling in from the kitchen.

  “I’m sorry,” Dr. Hodges explained to Phyllis, “he doesn’t speak anything but fifth-century Greek. Would you like a glass of wine?”

  Phyllis nodded, her mouth pinched tight and her cheeks slightly puffed out, as though she were holding a mouthful of words that could be neither swallowed nor spit out.

  “See here,” Dr. Hodges said, sitting entirely too close to Phyllis and then occupying himself with stretching the amoeboid sofa to a decent distance. “Your husband. Smith? Joachim?”