The Essential Ellison Part 115

I looked at the meal.

" No, nothing else," I said. " As if I were ent.i.tled."

He looked at me with nothing like compa.s.sion. Then he smiled a face without teeth and said, " I could mebbe sneak ya some lahb' ster dat dey t' rew out when de Moabites wuz slaughtered." I knew about that. I snorted and went back to my plate.

There she lay, bitter and flavorless, as she had been every night since I had died. And I was required to down every last morsel. In life we had fought; in life I had never given an inch; in life we had gnawed on each other for fourteen years. Then she had put her left hand through the gla.s.s display case in the reception area of my office waiting room, and taken a shard and opened the other wrist, all the way to the inside of the elbow. Right there in front of the receptionist, who had been too frightened to help her. And she had bled to death in the office, so the senior partners and my co-workers could see the enormity of my failure to save her from her past.

" Not to your likin' ?" said the necro waiter, still standing behind and to the side of me.

" Not much," I said, lifting my fork, poking at the gray and brown substance that had been her soul. " Would it do me any good to ask for salt and pepper?"

He moved closer. He reached down and took the plate off the table, replaced it on the tray. " I got pity f' you, poor j.a.ponica. You nevuh gone get your fill on some diet lahk dat. Here," he said, removing the last small plate remaining on the tray, a plate I had not seen before. " Here. Try dis."

He put it before me. It was a new culinary treat, and its presence at my table alerted me that the next phase of what I was to know forever had begun.

I had been married more than once.

Never order hamburger at the Long Pig Bar & Grille.

PROCESS: Do you remember a roll of candy wafers, hard little circular troches, called Necco Wafers? When I was a little boy, they were a favorite sweet for the movies because they lasted so long. They came in different flavors, and all the flavors tasted chalky except for the chocolate ones. And so, because you shared the pastilles with the kids sitting on either side of you, your chums and mates and pals, you carefully orchestrated how fast you ate your Necco Wafers, so you would always be offering a licorice one, or a lemon one?, or a cheery cherry. But you were always alert so the chocolate ones were retained.

One day, lifetimes ago, I felt my heart miss its rhythm when I entered a small co-op grocery store on the other side of the tracks in Painesville, Ohio, and saw for the first time the roll of all-chocolate Necco Wafers. Surely, there was a G.o.d. To this day- and they are now hard to find- I cannot resist a roll of chocolate Necco Wafers.

I was standing in a movie line. I had brought two rolls of candy with me, and as I waited for the line to move, I ate a pastille or two. Behind me, a man my age, speaking softly to his female date, not wanting to seem to have been snooping, said, with hushed awe, " He' s got Necco Wafers!" and the woman, considerably younger, repeated what she thought she had heard, and she said, " Necro wafers?" and he corrected her and explained; but I had already misheard what I wanted to hear. Necro waiters. Yes. For what are they waiting? How did they die? Oh yes! Necro waiters. Process.

MARK.

At forty-one minutes after midnight on the night of 28 April 1910, with Halley' s Comet boiling through the ink black skies directly overhead, in a graveyard in Elmira, New York, two young boys worked feverishly digging up a freshly-laid grave. The tombstone had not yet been set; the ground had not settled sufficiently.

It was cold for April, but the boys were sweating.

It had been cold a week earlier in Redding, Connecticut, when he had died at sunset.

It had been cold as thousands had filed past the casket, as he lay there in a freshly-pressed white linen suit, in Brick Presbyterian Church, in New York City.

And it had been cold all the while they were bringing him to Elmira for burial.

Cold, past midnight, a 15 slice of moon not nearly as bright as Halley' s Comet, and the boys dug, they dug, really dug.

" Tom," whispered the taller of the two diggers, the one wearing the crushed and chewed-out straw hat. There was no answer. " Tom? I say, Tom, you all right down there?"

A voice from below. " Except for the dirt you drop on me."The tall boy made a whoops, sorry sound. " Tom, danged if' n I ain' t afeared to be out here. I wisht we wasn' t here. It' s awful solemn like, ain' t it?"

Tom, four feet down in the rectangular pit, jacked a foot onto his shovel, wedging it deep in the dark soil so it stood up of its own accord. He wiped sweat from his nose and forehead, but his face still shone in the dim light of the lantern at the pit' s edge. He looked up at his companion. " Knock off that cornball dialect, will you, 'Hucky,' and keep moving that pile of dirt away from the edge before it buries me."

Huck looked chastened. " Sorry, Tom- "

" And for Pete' s sake, stop calling me Tom!"

" Sorry, Migmunt, I just thought...in case there was anybody around, you know, just happened to be listening, I should stay in character..."

" Listen, Podlack, just keep shoveling. My back is killing me and I want to get out of here- "

A voice, m.u.f.fled heavily by at least a foot of dirt, interrupted him. " And I want to get the h.e.l.l out of here, you pair of imbeciles!"

The boys looked at each other with panic, and without a sound began shoveling furiously.

Fifteen minutes later, the coffin had been uncovered. There was a steady banging from inside. And the voice: " Get this infernal thing off me! Come on, move your weird b.u.t.ts!"

Podlack, also known as Huckleberry, dropped into the pit and, using a claw hammer, began prising loose the nails that held the coffin lid in place. " Just a minute, sir; we' ll have you out of there in a jiffy."

" Jiffy, my groaning sphincter, you incompetent! You should have been here yesterday! Move yourself!"

Finally, with both boys straining, the lid was wrenched free; they leaned it up against the end of the pit.

The white-maned old man with the drooping mustaches sat up, cricked his neck till it popped, then got to his feet by bracing his hands against the sides of the coffin. " By G.o.d, I think my bladder will burst," he said, beginning to unb.u.t.ton his fly. He suddenly realized the boys were staring at him. " Do you mind?"

They turned their backs. After a minute Migmunt, also known as Tom, said, very politely, " Oh, we' d best hurry, sir. The shuttle won' t wait, you know."

Behind them, the old man snorted. " It took long enough to get here in 1835, and it' ll be well bed.a.m.ned long enough pokeying till it gets me home; it' ll wait, or I' ll have that insipid comet-jockey up on charges so fast it' ll make his be d.a.m.ned escutcheon tarnish!"

They peeked around, and saw he was trying to crawl out of the grave, despite what he had said. They hastily clambered out the other side of the pit and extended their hands down to lift the old man. He slapped at the hands. " Get away from me," he snarled. " What the h.e.l.l' s the matter with you; what do you think I am, some crepuscular, withered, senescent sack of sheep-dip, to be yanked around at your pleasure?"

As he complained, he crawled up the side of the grave, dirt slipping away under him, dropping him back two feet for every one he gained. Finally, he reached ground level and brushed himself off. He looked around carefully. " You' re certain we' re alone here?"

" Yessir, yessir," they both said, almost in chorus.

" Let' s hope so," he replied, pulling off his clothes.

Standing buck naked in the dim amber glow of the lantern, he said it again. " Let' s hope so." Then he reached down between his big toe and second toe on the left foot, grasped the sealing strip between thumb and forefinger, and unzipped his body from bottom to top. Then, shrugging off the clever plastic disguise with all four of his arms, he scratched his blunt yellow beak and drew a deep breath, a prisoner freed from a confining jail cell. He turned to look up at Halley' s Comet, and smiled as best a beak could smile.

" Give my regards to Broadway," he said, and began loping off toward the pickup point, Tom and Huck pumping along as hard as they could behind him, unable, in their clever plastic disguises, to keep up with him.

" Sir...sir..." Migmunt named Tom called, wheezing heavily as he tried to shorten the distance between himself and the former owner of the estate called Stormfield. " Sir...could you...would you...if you please, sir...slow down a bit so I can ask you..." He abruptly felt considerable pain in his face as he ran full tilt into the beaked, feathered, webbed-and-spur-footed personage who had perspired inside the sh.e.l.l of Samuel Langhorne Clemens for the entire seventy-five year tour of duty. No-longer-Mark had stopped suddenly.

" Now what the bleeding bejeezus do you want?"

" Sir, it' s just...I' ve been on this tour a lot longer than I' d expected. I was told when I was a.s.signed...that is to say, sir, I was advised...when my orders were cut... "

" That you' d be off this miserable duty in what, ten, twelve, maybe fifteen years?" He tapped his three-toed claw impatiently.

" Well, uh, yes. Sir. That is."

" And you want me to say something to the Archangel of the Guard when I get back, is that it?"

" If you would, sir. If you only would."

" Son," the elder ent.i.ty said, reaching out with one wing and laying his five-fingered talon on Tom' s shoulder, " I was told I' d be mustered out in a maximum of fifty years. Fifty was up twenty-five years ago. It' s a job, boy, a job dirtier than most, living among these idiots; but someone' s got to do it. Can' t have them running amuck allover the place, can we now?"

"But..."

" I' ll mention your plight. Won' t do any good, but I' ll mention it. Now...do you mind if I go home?"

And, without waiting for a proper answer, he whirled on his toes, and loped off again toward the pickup point. Behind him, the two figments of his imagination pumped their knees hard trying to keep from falling too far apace.

When they reached the drop target, the slave unit from Halley' s Comet was already waiting. The egg had opened, the jasmine light poured forth in a perfect pool across the ground, and three field-echelon sqwarbs were waiting, the eldest looking pointedly at his thigh clock. " Let' s go, let' s go, come on and let' s go," he called across the clearing as the three running figures broke out of cover of the trees. " Time' s on the slide, along along, let' s go!"

He who had been Mark slid to a halt, threw a slovenly salute, and said, " Ready to go. Seventy-five years is long enough. Take me on home, sqwarbs!" He turned to the ersatz Huck and Tom who had come to a breathless halt behind him, there in the lee of the egg, and he saw their pathetic looks. Fluffing his pin-feathers, he said to the eldest of the echelon sqwarbs, " These two want to go home, too. Any chance, any hope?"

" Next time," said the clock-watcher.

" Next time? Next time!" Migmunt shouted. " That' ll be almost ninety years I' ll have spent here! Twelve, maybe fifteen, that was what I signed on for, not ninety!"

Then ensued an argument, a violence, a wrangling that would have brought the authorities, had it not taken place in the middle of a clearing inside dense woods, well past midnight, in a remote section of south-central New York state near the Pennsylvania border. Podlack actually hit the youngest of the three field-echelon sqwarbs, knocking him on his tail-feathers and crimping his comb. Migmunt and Huck tried to climb inside the egg, but were driven back by force.

Finally, when it was clear to everyone that the egg would not take their full number, Migmunt and Podlack were chivvied aside by weapons awesome to behold, Mark was hustled onboard, and the egg resealed and sped aloft, leaving the forlorn and furious Huck and Tom behind; for another seventy-five years.

As the egg soared toward the shuttle that was Halley' s Comet, the one who had been Mark craned his neck and shook his feathers and said, " That wasn' t perhaps the smartest thing you could have done, you know."

" What wasn' t?" the echelon grenadier said.

" Leaving a pair of extremely disquieted employees in charge of an operation that big. They were angry enough to do almost anything, even let the creatures know about everything."

" Let them," the clock-watching echelon grenadier said, with a haughty curl of his beak. " How badly can they mess up a primitive society like that in just seventy-five years? What are we talking about here...war, famine, pestilence, plague, cheap entertainment, overpopulation, bad art?"

" Seventy-five years is a tweep in a whirl," said the youngest as he rubbed a.n.a.lgesic on his bruise. " How hard did you work to bring some common sense to them? How well did you do; how much influence did you have?"

Mark fell silent. Very true. The creatures of that sleepless...o...b..were highly resistant to sensible behavior. He had done all he could, but the poor dumb things were seemingly determined to stumble about blindly, like sqwarbs with their heads cut off.

He sighed and closed his eyes, hoping for some rest on the journey home. It couldn' t really get much worse down there. Not in just seventy-five years. When you wish upon a sqwarb.

PROCESS: Early 1985, and all the foofaraw about Halley' s coming back. And no one pairing up Mark Twain' s birth in 1835 with the Comet' s arrival, and his death in 1910 at its next pa.s.s, with the current swing past the Earth. And I was so fascinated with the idea, that I reread all of Twain. One night, I was reading Tom Sawyer to the son of a woman I had been seeing, he was about ten or eleven at the time, and we were both eating Hydrox cookies; and I told him this thing about how I wanted to write about Twain, and the Comet, and maybe the Comet wasn' t really a comet but was possibly a s.p.a.ceship, or a star, or something like that; and he had his face full of Hydrox, and he said, " When you wish upon a sqwarb..." which wasn' t, of course, what he said; it was what I heard him say.

And I knew what the story should be. Except I didn' t have an ending, so I didn' t write it in 1985. Or '86. Or '88. Or '90. But I write it now. And it still doesn' t have an ending. But I like the opening a lot. Process.

THE LAST WILL AND t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e OF TREES RABELAIS.

My grandparents came from Poland. They came from a town, Bydgoszcz. That' s in the north, right near the middle. I' m probably not p.r.o.nouncing it properly. Bydgoszcz. They weren' t Jewish, they were just Polish. That has almost nothing to do with me or this final statement, but I always tell everybody that my grandparents came from Poland. You never know when it might help. Once I got stopped by a traffic cop as I was speeding to the airport, and I don' t know why, but I told him my grandparents came from Poland, and so did his, not from Bydgoszcz. So he let me off with just a warning.

I like to say: let any three people hose me down, and I' ll wind up making friends of two of them.

Occasionally someone will ask me what that means, and I tell them, it means I' m a very friendly person.

I leave Montana to the descendants of the last surviving member of the original cast of Gilligan' s Island. Go to Montana, if you must. You will hear more intelligent sounds by rubbing a tweed jacket.

Every beach contains the last three chapters of the story of someone' s life. If you look out to sea, to see what you can see, you will see the previous pages bobbing at the top of rolling waves.

I didn' t want to go without telling you what happened to those lovely symbols of the 1939 New York World' s Fair. The symbols of the World of Tomorrow, the famous Trylon and Perisphere. Steel from the orb and the spire now form part of the furnace building in what was Freeport Sulphur Company' s Nicaro nickel plant in Cuba. Before Castro nationalized it. Back in 1945 the plant turned out nickel oxide, an essential alloy used in jet engines. Beauty can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only be converted.

If I' d realized that creating crabgra.s.s, spurge, chickweed, ragweed, dandelion, plantain, kudzu, purslane, knotweed, sorrel, and burdock was mostly to annoy people, I' d have given G.o.d much lower marks on the final exam.

I leave the care and feeding of all Fallacies of Substantive Distraction, including ad hominem, ad misericordiam, ad odium, and post hoc, propter hoc- which is, more precisely, a Fallacy of Causation- to the splendid Sherpa herdsmen of the Nepalese Himalayas; for it is they alone who understand that paper cannot wrap up fire; also that if one plants melons, one will get melons.

Where the h.e.l.l were the cops when I needed them?

All my life I have imagined doorways as the answers, and now with gun in mouth I stand here in the middle of the great Nullarbor Plain, attesting to the truth that there are no doorways large enough for an unprotected species like myself to pa.s.s through.

I leave the face of the moon to those who look for the best ways to unsnarl knotted shoelaces and dampen bad tempers. It is always cool and quiet, the face of the moon. And from far away it appears to resemble the general appearance of young women who danced in Warner Bros. musicals in the mid-1930s.

My name was Trees Rabelais. " '

PROCESS: Susan and I chanced to be in the bathroom at the same time. She asked me to hand her something from the medicine cabinet. She preceded the request with Please...

I have no memory of what it was she was asking for, or how it was that I heard, " Please, grab the somethingorother" as Trees Rabelais. But when I repeated it, she said it sounded like the name of the tragic male lead on a soap opera. I thought so, too. And so, to be as one with Miniver Cheevy, Richard Cory, and Wednesday' s child, I dwelt on the heroic, G.o.dlike, impervious nature, and suicide, of Trees Rabelais. Process.

The Museum on Cyclops Avenue The jaunty feather in my hatband? I knew you' d ask. Makes my old Tyrolean look rather natty, don' t it?

Yeah, well, I' ll tell you about this flame-red feather some time, but not right now.

What about Agnes? Mmm. Yeah. What about Agnes.

No, h.e.l.l no, I' m not unhappy, and I' m certainly not bitter. I know I promised to bring her home with me from Sweden, but, well, as we say here in Chapel Hill, that dog just ain' t gonna hunt.

I' m sorry y' all went to the trouble of settin' up this nice coming-home party, and it truly is a surprise to walk back into my own humble bachelor digs and find y' all hidin' behind the sofas, but to be absolutely candid with myself and with y' all...I' m about as blind tired as I' ve ever been, fourteen and a half hours riding coach on SAS, customs in New York, missing two connector flights, almost an hour in traffic from Raleigh-Durham...you see what I' m sayin' ? Can I beg off this evenin' and I promise just as soon as I get my sea-legs under me again with the new semester' s cla.s.ses and the new syllabus, I swear I promise we' ll all do this up right!

Oh, G.o.d bless you, I knew you' d understand! Now, listen, Francine, Mary Katherine, Ina...y' all take this food with you, because as soon as the door closes behind you, I' m going to hit my bed and sleep for at least twenty-four hours, so all these here now goodies will gonna rot if you don' t take 'em and make y' self a big picnic t' night. Y' all wanna do that now? Excellent! Just excellent.

Thank ya, thank ya ever so much! Y' all take care now, y' heah? I' ll see you bunch in a few days over to the University.

Bye! Bye now! See ya!

(Henry, you want to hold on for just a few minutes? I do need someone to talk to for a spell. You don' t mind? Excellent.) Bye! Drive carefully, you be sure to do it! Bye, William; bye, Cheryl an' Simon! Thank you again, thank you ver- (Thank G.o.d they' re gone. Hold on just about a minute, Henry, just in case someone forgot a purse or something.) Okay, street' s clear. d.a.m.n, Henry, thought I' d croak when I walked into the house and y' all popped out of the walls. Whose dumbs.h.i.t idea was this, anyway? Don' t tell me yours, I cannot afford to lose any respec' for you at the moment. I need a friend, and I need an open mind, an' most of all I need a smidge outta that fifth of Jack black sit tin' up there on the third shelf 'tween Beckwith' s HAWAIIAN MYTHOLOGY and Bettelheim' s USES OF ENCHANTMENT.

I' d get up and fetch it myself, but I' m shanxhausted, and you' re the one just had the angioplasty, so I figger you got lots more energy in you, right at the moment.

They' s a coupla clean gla.s.ses right there in the cabinet, unless the cleanin' woman saw fit to move things around while I was gone. Asked her not to, but you know n.o.body listens.

Yeah, right. While I was gone. Just decant me about thirty millimeters of that Tennessee sippin' , and I' ll regale your aging self with the source of my truly overwhelmin' anomie.

No, I' m not cryin' , it' s the strain and the long trip and everything that happened in Stockholm. Truly, Henry. I' m sad, I own to it; but it' s been four days since the street signs changed, and I' m reconciled to it...say what...?

All right, sorry sorry, didn' t mean to get ahead of it. I' ll tell you. It' s a not terribly complicated saga, so I can tell you everything in a short s.p.a.ce. But hold off makin' any judgments till I finish, we agree on that?