Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories

by Michael Bishop

“He looks like an enraged baby.”

  The women forgot me, making tender fun of the only male in their household. When they heard Girmisur snort in his sleep, they rolled their eyes and broke up again. Just then, I meant as much to them as a doorstop. That was fine. I relished my facelessness and the women’s evident affection for an old fool.

  Back in Ganhk, I underwent the procedure. The lightscalpel found, cut out, and scorched the tumor that had given vigor if not life itself to my Corderism. The structure afterward lay in a basin, an obscene bit of charred pink.

  The procedure relieved me of my enthusiast tendencies, at least for a time. I went to work in Ganhk handcrafting lutes, dulcimets, and guitars from materials altogether new to me, instruments that sold well and cropped up in the hands of young men and women on Kivit’s riverwalks.

  I saw Zarafise Koh several times, but always at a distance, running errands for her chapterhouse and twisting her fingers about as if threading beads, even though she never had anything in them.

  When it stormed, I liked to go up into a glass building and walk through a skybridge. The Kivit boiled, and the courtyards clattered. At such times, I imagined Chaba Girmisur cavorting like a lunatic ape in the scree above Iiol.

  A checkup twelve days after the procedure indicated that a fresh structure had begun to grow under my left arm. I asked for a meeting with another physician. Dr. Garer suggested a colleague. When his test results duplicated hers, I returned to Dr. Garer. She did the procedure again at a cost that my work barely enabled me to meet. This time I stayed tumor-free nine days.

  “Take it out again,” I told Dr. Garer.

  “And the cost?”

  “I’ll sell my tools and equipment.”

  “There’s no guarantee it won’t come back, Drei.”

  “Remove it anyway.”

  She did, and a fresh structure appeared five days later in my groin, like a piece of gravel. At great cost, surgery again excised it, but three days later Dr. Garer found another tumor at the base of my thumb. A colleague, Dr. Kets, offered me the surgery again, this time as an outright gift.

  “No,” I told him. “Enough.”

  Although I ache to live on Doen as a lucidist, I am clearly one of those in whom the structure repeatedly grows back. At night in bed this knowledge bewilders me, but during earthquake and storm it goads me irresistibly to my feet.

  Tomorrow, I go hunting Zarafise Koh in earnest. I want to put something like hope—maybe even an evergreen branch—in her hands.

  Simultaneously, to my chagrin, I want to invite Pinalat Garer to a picnic on the nearby bluejoint prairie. Despite my affliction, she could say yes.

  Help Me, Rondo

  OPEN ON:

  A patio with a life-sized ceramic statue of a lop-eared puppy atop a stone pedestal, which WE CIRCLE slowly. CRASHING SURF SOUNDS from the beach below the patio.

  A WOMAN’S VOICE

  “What charms us in a puppy—its big head, its outsized feet—unsettles us in a grownup person. When disfigurement accompanies this unexpected bigness, we stare or look away depending on our upbringing, our allotment of gall, our degree of fascination with the grotesque. Even when we look away, we may want to look back, to obsess on the disfigurement that we have escaped (if only outwardly), and to take comfort from our own, well, normality.”

  Two brutal-looking hands seize the puppy statue and fling it away. SOUNDS OF BREAKING PLASTER briefly override the SURF, which grows LOUDER as the hands withdraw, and as we TRACK over the empty pedestal toward an uninhabited beach and the surging ocean beyond.

  DISSOLVE TO:

  EXT. SMALL BEACHSIDE HOUSE—DAY

  The words GULF HARBORS, FLORIDA // SUMMER, 1950 appear superimposed on the house and a middle-aged WOMAN in a print dress who stands on her walk watering her zinnia and Mexican sunflowers. After six or seven beats, the legend fades, and a change of light causes the woman to start. A shadow falls across her, that of a YOUNG MAN. Continuing SURF NOISES do not prevent us from hearing her speak in the same voice we just heard.

  MABEL

  “You almost gave me a heart attack. Yes, people call me Mrs. Hatton, Mabel Rouse Hatton. My husband Rondo passed away a little over three years ago. No, not here—on the other west coast, California’s, not Florida’s. I came back to Tampa for the funeral and lived there again for a year before buying this little place.

  “What? Do I think you resemble Rondo? What a question. Almost no one looks the way Rondo did, kiddo.

  “Really? I can’t think of another soul who’s sought me out claiming to be his son, and you almost certainly have no right to that honor. Okay, given your agitation, I’ll take you just as seriously as you like. Ah. Your jaw, your hooded brow, the subtle broadening of your nose, your lips, even the incipient gapping of your teeth—yes, they do in fact put me in mind of Rondo, but a much younger and fresher Rondo, with a touch of acne, and the lilt of hope and ambition still in him. If you honestly don’t know your biological parents, I can see how you might assume yourself—in your orphanhood—Rondo’s bastard offspring, but I don’t like, or buy for a minute, what such an assumption says about him.

  “Sorry. I’m not laughing at you, only at your fancy that Rondo could have cheated on me with some chippie and taken no responsibility for their woods colt. He didn’t do that sort of crap, kiddo.

  “Okay, what do they call you? Frederick Coby? Frederick Price Coby. Nice name. Rondo’s Daddy Stewart’s middle name was Price—a coincidence, no doubt. You can find scores of Prices in any good-sized city’s telephone book. Hattons don’t crop up that often, but you don’t call yourself Freddie Hatton, do you? Sorry, I mean Frederick.

  “Well, whatever you call yourself, you should savvy your disease well enough to know that acromegalics don’t inherit pituitary adenomas. No, those tumors arise spontaneously for reasons members of the hallowed medical profession just haven’t fathomed yet. A sneaky mutation occurs in one cell of that puny gland, the cell divides and redivides, and a tumor forms; the tumor induces a veritable flow of growth hormone, and if it catches you after puberty—as it did with you, I take it—you don’t turn into a modern Goliath, but instead into a kind of, well, twentieth-century throwback to the face and physique of the reviled Neanderthal.

  “Has anyone diagnosed your acromegaly?

  “Oh. You’ve diagnosed yourself, from Rondo’s films. Well, of course. Everyone should go to the movies to find out what’s ailing them. I learned from Gone with the Wind that I suffer from intermittent narcolepsy. Miracle on 34th Street revealed a case of stomach flu—severe nausea. And, you’re right, critics of the three films of Rondo’s directed by Jean Yarbrough had even worse discoveries about their health. You must still go to a doctor, though, Frederick.

  “What do I think? From my eleven-plus years’ experience as the wife of an acromegalic? Well, you could narrowly pass as a candidate. Tell me your age. Eighteen? Interesting. Born in ’32, between Rondo’s divorce from Immell James and his marriage to me. That year gives you an argument, I guess, but still defies everything I know about Rondo’s state of mind and behavior during that unhappy time.

  “Well, I’ve just about drowned these flowers. Since you’ve hitchhiked all the way here from the Bay, come on inside. You deserve at least a lemonade. Or, once indoors, a bottle of beer or a gin-rickey pick-me-up. Inside, you won’t look like quite such a befuddled urchin, and even my nosiest blue-nosed neighbors can’t see through stucco.”

  INT. MABEL HATTON’S HOUSE—LIVING ROOM—DAY

  MABEL

  “Come in, come in. Let your eyes adjust, then flop down on that beach settee and put your feet up while I fetch you … okay, a lemonade. Maybe you really are just eighteen. If you were older, you’d’ve wound up fighting the Nips or the Jerries and might not’ve made it to my door at all. What? You’d’ve flunked the physical, anyway? Only if you suppose the does at our induction centers better diagnosticians than the high-cost quacks in private practice, which, unfortunately, supposes the p
reposterous.

  “I recognize acromegaly because I married it and then lived with it for nearly twelve years. Besides, Rondo and I saw The Monster Maker not long before Rondo died, a dreadful Producers Releasing Corporation flick about a researcher who injects one of his enemies with a serum that causes the disease. Rondo and I felt sure the goons responsible for that one had him in mind when they dreamt it up, really insulting crap that hurt Rondo’s feelings. My feelings, too, for that matter.

  “Anyway, most doctors have never seen a case of acromegaly, and yours, Frederick, is so fresh and basic that even a Johns Hopkins grad could be forgiven for taking you as simply someone naturally heavy-featured, a young longshoreman type. You have a well-muscled, an athletic build, and don’t much resemble the hideous brute you seem to think you do.

  “Here. Lemonade. Do you like it a little tart? Rondo used to. Let me turn up the window unit. Sweat’s beaded across your lip like a mustache of pearls, and the smell of it—no, don’t wince, I like it, it brings back memories of bygone intimacies and of Rondo’s intolerance of temperatures higher than sixty-five—well, that smell soothes me. Maybe someone ignorant or hyperfastidious would think you careless of your personal hygiene, but not I, Frederick, not I. Do you have a headache, too? Would you like a Goody’s powder to dissolve in your lemonade? All right, suit yourself.

  “I won’t crowd you, I’ll sit over here in this upholstered monstrosity Rondo used to love. I had it shipped back to Tampa from our little place in Palmdale—Beverly Hills, sort of—not long after his interment in February of ’46. Actually, it’s good to see a man relaxing in my house again. Don’t shake your head, you absolutely qualify as a man. And, say, making a home for Rondo in a town with shameless libertines like Errol Flynn, Howard Hughes, and some other rats I won’t even mention was tough. On the other hand, fighting the Lotus Land ethos put legs under me, Frederick, it filled my every minute in that parched and rootless desert with meaning.

  “You smile, as if a man as ugly as Rondo had no choice but to stay faithful. Don’t kid yourself. Some of the floozies who gravitated to Hollywood would have banged Cheetah, from Tarzan of the Apes, if they figured it’d get them a part, and some of them probably did. Anyway, swarms of frails tried to make love to Rondo, especially during the stretch he had from ’43 on, starting with The Ox-Bow Incident and running through House of Horrors, where he got top billing over, well, actors you probably never heard of. But Rondo never nibbled. He stayed true. He hurried home to me and our little house on Maple Drive, always appreciating that I saw past his looks to the core of American goodness around which he’d shaped his whole off-screen personality. His real self.

  “Rondo would’ve blushed, or even scolded me, to hear me say bang, much less fuck or any other Anglo-Saxon term for carnal relations, and I can see I’ve either stung or disappointed you, too, haven’t I? Well, that’s okay. I admire your ability to blush. I like an innocently boyish man. Still, you do savvy that Rondo Hatton couldn’t possibly have sired you—either on me, because we hadn’t married yet, or a forward old flame from Hillsborough High, or some harlot starlet with bedroom eyes and rocking-chair runners for heels. Don’t you?

  “I’ll shut up for a while, we’ll listen to the air conditioner and readjust ourselves to the mystery of each other’s presence. So sip, sip, sip your lemonade, Frederick Coby.”

  FLASHBACK (1922)—RONDO’S BEDROOM (TAMPA)—NIGHT

  A few years after returning from service in France under a former classmate, Captain Sumter L. Lowry, Rondo dreams that a cloud of sulfur-bearing gas seeps into his bedroom through the cracks around his door.

  Panic-stricken but paralyzed, he rests on his cold floor while a figure in a gas mask approaches with a blinding glass bulb on the end of either a gun barrel or a peculiar futuristic dowsing rod. In the bulb’s hot glare, the gas dissipates, but the figure does not retreat, and Rondo’s extremities—his hands in particular—inflate like rubber gloves attached to invisible canisters of hydrogen. Each hand grows monstrously huge and clawlike. Rondo’s face shrinks into a small agonized appendage of his enormous hands.

  Rondo SCREAMS into this nightmare, “Help me!”—with neither sound nor prospect nor result. His impotent gigantic hands fascinate him. Even in this wretched state, he cannot look away from them.

  INTERIOR—MABEL HATTON’S HOUSE—LIVING ROOM—DAY

  MABEL

  “What happened to Rondo may not happen to you, Frederick. All my researches show that acromegaly sometimes goes into remission. It spontaneously limits itself. You can’t go back to the way you looked before your pituitary tumor provoked the first telltale somatic changes, but the disfigurement stops. It doesn’t worsen. In your case, if the process halted within the next year or so, you could anticipate an altogether normal life. I find you attractive. I’d bet this house that other females—gals at least as strapping as and a lot younger than I—find you pretty dishy, too.

  “Now that blush hasn’t got a thing to do with the heat, it says I’ve either hit the mark or missed it by—not much. Those dewy eyes of yours have wooed and won over their share of pneumatic demoiselles, haven’t they? I’ll bet you look pretty swell in boxing trunks, too, like Garfield in Body and Soul or that new young Lancaster fella in The Killers. Ha! You just get redder, Frederick, as crimson-plush as a knife slice across the thumb. I like that, too.

  “Actually, in his younger days, Rondo cut a swashbuckling figure himself. He set a breeze blowing around a lot of pretty skirts. He sowed his wild oats, his devil-may-care tares, his libidinous rapeseed. I’m talking figuratively, of course, but until Rondo fixed on my figure alone, he had an eye for figures and a figure for the distaff eye. Sadly, the movies stressed the brutishness of his acromegaly, the way he’d devolved into a lumpy human ogre, but as a kid your age, Frederick, he ran track, pole-vaulted, and excelled on either side of the line of scrimmage as a footballer. But for his disease, he might have impressed Henry King, the director who discovered him out at Rocky Point, as a second Douglas Fairbanks rather than as a shudder-provoking character actor. And girls saw him, then, as more Gable than Karloff, more Lew Ayres than Lugosi. He could buckle a swash, Rondo could.

  “Another lemonade? No? Well, let me show you his photo with an elite high-school fraternity called ‘Ye Royal G. G.’ Unbutton your collar while I fetch it from my keepsake room, my ‘Mausoleum of Remembrance’ as one of Rondo’s irreverent cousins insists on calling it. I had the photo matted and framed after the funeral. No, don’t get up. I’ll bring it to you. Wholly my pleasure.

  “Move over a bit. I’ll hold it for you so you don’t smudge the glass with your fingerprints. Look. That’s Rondo, front and center on the bottom row, broodingly Valentinoesque if you want my cheerfully biased opinion. Ten princely specimens of white Southern manhood, circa 1912, in their tuxedos and emperor-penguin shirtfronts.

  “All right, take it. You do hold it with intuitive respect. Maybe you see yourself peering back out from Rondo’s deep-set, forebodingly hooded eyes. For years, Frederick, I badgered him to tell me what the ‘G. G.’ in ‘Ye Royal G. G.’ stood for. For years he either changed the subject or hit me with absurdities like ‘Goober Gluttons,’ or ‘Gallant Galoots,’ or ‘Good-looking Gorillas.’ The subject embarrassed him. After the failure of his first marriage—or Miss Immell’s failure to forgive the coarsening of his features even as she embraced the coarsening of her own values—well, after their divorce, Rondo couldn’t even think about that club without cringing. The ethos of the guys—carnal opportunism—disgusted him. The more brutish he started to look, the quieter and more self-critical he grew, as if God had afflicted him with acromegaly as an ironic way of scourging his vanity and of ennobling him.

  “Yes, he did, Frederick—he told me during the filming of Moon Over Burma, six years into our marriage. ‘Ye Royal G. G.’ stood for ‘Ye Royal Gonorrhea Guards.’ Isn’t that terrible? Laugh if you like. All right, laugh because it sounds no less an absurdity than Goober Gluttons. And i
t doesn’t, does it? But this time he had truly confessed the club’s dirtiest and most fundamental secret. He swore that the remorse he felt as the high mucky-muck of these smug adolescent playboys had served, over time, to redeem and cleanse him.

  “He said, ‘I stand shame-faced before myself, Mabel.’ His exact words. He never had a line that good in any movie, and he never said any line that he did have with such heartbreaking conviction. You smile? Well, you smile because you’ve seen The Spider Woman Strikes Back, House of Horrors, The Pearl of Death, and Jungle Captive, and you know Rondo couldn’t say ‘Bless you’ without making it sound scripted, much less ‘Stop screamin’.’ Even I knew Rondo couldn’t act. Never, under any circumstances, would he have made a matinee idol in the talkies, but off-camera he lived as soulfully as anyone. Film could never capture his low-key intensity.

  “He always believed the mustard gas he’d inhaled in the trenches outside Paris triggered the adenoma that caused his disfigurement. He saw it as divine punishment for his riotous youth. More than one Beverly Hills doctor told him no medical evidence linked his pituitary tumor to chemical exposure. The Krauts gassed thousands of doughboys, but not every doughboy came home with the clock of acromegaly ticking inside him. And you, Frederick, you were never gassed, were you?

  “But Rondo didn’t believe in accidents, he thought God had finessed him into the trenches as the first step in a redemptive process that included marrying Immell, two-timing her, growing uglier, suffering her rejection, and meeting Henry King when he came to Florida to film Hell Harbor in ’29. Rungs on a ladder. Links in a chain. He felt God sculpting his flesh toward a highly fraught transformation, but during the breakdown of his marriage he started to think the process simply punishment for him and a shadowy warning to others. Only when he met me, and I loved him in spite of his looks, did he begin to reckon that the process had a wholly different object.