Can and Can'tankerous (11 page)
Read Can and Can'tankerous Online
Authors: Harlan Ellison (R)
“You see what I have to put up with, Doctor?” said the middle, his eyebrows arching helplessly. “We have problems.”
“Uh, excuse me,” said Dr. Bucovitz, “did I understand you correctly? Did you say Godzilla was ‘she’?”
“Big mouth!” the right head said to the left head. “Now the lizard’s
really
out of the closet!”
“Oh, sure, I’m the gay one here, right?”
“No, you’re the homophobe!”
“Flex in here, you shit, I’d like to bite off your eyelids!”
“Yo’ mama!”
“Now, now, now!” Bucovitz said, waving his hands. “You really can’t go on like this!” His words went unheard, however. The three heads were snapping at each other, twining and untwining, undulating and striking. “Stop it!” the psychiatrist shouted. “Stop it at once, you’re the worst patient I’ve had in here since that little kiss-up E.T.” He paused, then added, “Or Streisand.”
But there was no hearing him. The three heads of the wyvern lashed at one another, knocking holes in the wall, tearing gobbets of leather from the chaise, clacking and snapping and deafening everyone in the waiting room.
Bucovitz was thrown from his chair by the left head as it performed a loop-the-loop in an attempt at burying its fangs in the carotid of the right head. The psychiatrist crawled to the intercom and slapped open the switch with a bloody hand.
“Ms. Crossen, quickly! I need a second opinion here. Get me Dr. Cerberus immediately!”
Great gouts of flame and thick, oily smoke now filled the office. In the murk Bucovitz could hear the wyvern trying to bite off its own heads. He tried to crawl to the door leading to the safety of the reception room, but the dragon had smashed so much furniture that the exit was blocked. Bucovitz lay in a corner, his head covered by his arms, silently wishing he had gone into electrical engineering.
Suddenly, there was silence.
Bucovitz crawled across the office. He reached the French doors that opened onto the balcony overlooking his townhouse’s central garden court. Fumbling through the thick, roiling smoke, he found the latch and lifted it. He threw the doors open and crawled out onto the balcony. Smoke poured out of the room.
As the smoke thinned, he lay on the balcony looking back into the office. Shambles. The definition of the word
shambles.
“Wait’ll you get my bill!” he shouted. But from the thinning veil of smoke there was no answer.
“You’d better have damned good Blue Cross!”
Still no answer.
“You do
have
coverage, don’t you?”
Silence.
“Answer me! Dammit, answer me!”
Now the smoke was clearing, and the wyvern could be seen lying in a spavined, sprawled, sanguine heap, each head smiling contentedly. The middle head looked up and winked at Dr. Bucovitz. “Didn’t you wonder why Dr. Hildreth, who hates your guts since you stole his wife and practice, and almost got him disbarred, referred us to you?”
“No…you can’t mean…”
“Doctor,” said all three heads in unison, “we have problems. And so do you.”
What is the sound of one psychiatrist weeping?
X is for XOLAS
From the Alacalufs, the indigenous natives of Tierra del Fuego, we learn of the supreme being Xolas, who infuses the newborn child with soul upon its birth, who reabsorbs that soul when death takes the vessel.
Last week Xolas had a garage sale.
Your mother bought two floor lamps with tassel-fringed shades, a lava lamp, and the slightly soiled soul of Joseph Stalin.
Guess what you’re getting for your birthday?
Y is for YOG-SOTHOTH
More terrible than even those who “created” him could know. They did not dream him into fiction.
He
dreamed
them
into life. There was no being named Howard Phillips Lovecraft, no man named Clark Ashton Smith. Bits of cosmic debris inhaled by the Great Old One, they were blown back out in the shapes that would create the dream of the god on this side of the rift. But its name is not Yog-Sothoth. When the dream-men Lovecraft and Smith absorbed the directions for creation, to build the being that would be worshipped first by readers, then by cultists, then by all…the message was garbled by the veil, warped as it came through the rift. Its name is not Yog-Sothoth. When the anagram is unraveled, and the true name is written, the veil will split, the rift will open, the darkness will come.
At M.I.T., right now, a hacker with too much time on his hands, grown bored with computer bulletin boards, role-playing games, and cheap paperback novels, is running a decoding program.
How many variations can
you
make from the name Yog-Sothoth? The hacker is only fifteen minutes ahead of you. Closing your windows will not keep the darkness from seeping in.
Z is for ZEUS
Chief deity of the Greek pantheon, called the father by both gods and men, he was an abused child, having been snatched from the jaws of death by his mother, Rhea, when his father, Cronus, decided to eat his children.
Like father, like son.
Don’t invite Zeus to dinner.
Talk about disgusting table manners.
Afterword
There’s a third one I’ve been planning to do: “From A to Z in the Lemon-Lime Alphabet.” It’ll be lost islands and sunken continents—Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria, all of those—and the notes for it are sitting on my desk. I’ve had a little health setback, so things are a
liiiiiiiiittle
harder these days, but eventually, I may get around to the third story…or maybe the fourth: “From A to Z in the Licorice Alphabet?”
Sunday I stayed in bed.
Didn’t feel badly, got up, did some chores,
wrote some letters, the usual shit.
The Energizer Bunny just kept
right
on
going…
Introductory Note:
Weariness
“Weariness” is the most recent example of “Ellison under glass.” I was the literary guest at Foolscap VII in September 2005 in Bellevue, WA. I was to lead a writers’ workshop of one hour in length. We gathered around a big conference table and paintings—for which reproduction rights were available—were downloaded from the internet and printed; there were about forty of them.
I picked one, and each of the students took one. I told them I wanted a story by the end of the hour. I sat down and wrote “Weariness” on my portable Olympia typewriter, clacking with two fingers, 120 words per minute sans typos as I’d been doing for something like 50 years at that point…as they labored around the big table with their electronic doodads.
It was my state of mind at the time. I was not well. I did not like being at the convention.
Weariness
V
ery near the final thaw of the Universe, the last of them left behind, the last three of the most perfect beings who had ever existed, stood waiting for the transitional moment. The neap tide of all time. The eternal helix sang its silent song in stone; and the glow of What Was to Come had bruised itself to a ripe plumness.
The ostren fanned itself. Melancholia had shortened it, one entire set of faculties could do nothing but sigh. And it had grown uncommonly warm for her, in sight of the end.
The velv could not contain his trepidation, peering out around the perplexing curvature of space.
But the tismess, that being who had summoned the helix, knew boldness was required, here and now at the final moments. And it stood boldly forth, waiting for the inevitable. All three—there were no others—were at the terminus of uncountable multiple trillions of eons, and weary.
Heaviness hung, a dire swaddling.
“What is there to fear?” the tismess said, rather more nastily than it had intended.
Reify
, it had thought, urgently.
Heaviness hung, undiminished.
“What is there to fear?” Again, trying to flense the tone of nastiness, chagrined at its incivility.
The velv whimpered and stared at the great helix, receptors clouding as the brightness fattened. The point of alarm had been reached and abandoned long since. “I am the last,” it said.
“As is each of us,” thought the ostren. “We are, each of us, you and you each, we are, each of us, the end of the line. Out of time,
all
time, the last. But why are you frightened?”
“Because…it
is
the end. The question at last answered. There will be no more. No more I, no more you, no more of any living species. Does that not terrify you?”
“Yes,” thought the ostren. “Yes. Yes, it does.”
The tismess was silent.
And the great helix solidified, its colors steadied, and the last three stared as only they were able, looking into the future, for the past and present were now gone, looking to see what would overwhelm them as they were vaporized, gone like their kind, gone forever, not even motes, not even memories. And they saw, the three last, absolutely perfect, beings; they saw what was to come.
“Oh, how good,” whispered the velv, her tissues roiling most golden. “How wonderful. And I’m not afraid…not now.”
The ostren made the sound that very little children had once made when they had truly learned where the puppy farm is. But there was no fear, either, in the ostren.
For the tismess, as it was all coming to an end, suddenly there was what there
was
to be seen.
What was on the other side.
Before him, immediately before him, was the darkness. Heavy, breathing yet silent; it seemed to go on forever. But that
was
the other side. And beyond that darkness was something: something he could
call
the “other side.” Could he see it, could he even imagine it, there had to
be
another side beyond
this
side. He reveled in the moment of knowledge that all there had ever been would go on, would start anew perhaps, would roll on through the final night, no matter how long. There
was
an “other side.”
But, of course, in truth, what he was seeing was only another aspect of the only darkness; and not even darkness; nothing.
What he was seeing was every thought he had ever had, every song he had ever sung, everyone he had ever known, every moment of his trillion aeons never knowing he had nowhere else to go, all and everything of memory; where he had stood, what he had done and what had been done around him, what there was and what there could ever have been.
In that instant, he saw backward into memory, backward into the night that had preceded the first thought.
Faraway, a galaxy became as dust, and vanished, leaving no print, no recollection, no residue. Then, one by one, in correct stately procession, the solitary stars went blind.
The question was answered:
Sat ci sat bene
.
“A painting is a sum of destructions.”
Pablo Picasso
(1882–1973)
Afterword
Running the unacceptable risk of writing an “afterword” oh-by-the-way “note” a thousand times longer than the story itself, I sit down to explicate the “Bradbury connection” to this, perhaps my last-published story. Like Ray, I am now old, and there is an infinitude more to recollect and savor of links between Bradbury and Ellison. Truly, it should suffice for even the most marrow-sucking obsessive fan that Ray and I have known each other close on forever.
Ray contends that in very short order he and I will be sitting down together cutting-up-touches with Dickens and Dorothy Parker, shuckin’n’jivin’ with Aesop and Melville.
Uh…well, okay, Ray, if you say so.
(I am rather less comfortable with that Hereafter stuff than is Ray. As has averred Nat Hentoff, I come from, and remain as one with, a grand and glorious tradition of stiff-necked Jewish Atheists. Ray and I have a long-standing wager on this one; which of us is on the money, and which is betting on a lame pony. Sadly, the winner will never collect.)
La dee dah. Back where we began. Too many words, yet I’ll attempt that undanceable rigadoon.
These days of the electronic babble, every doofus with some hand-held device calls every other male he knows—“
brother
.”
“Hey, Bro! Whassup, Bro? Howzit’ goin’, Bro?”
Strangers: brother. Casual acquaintances: brother. Same skin color supermarket bagger: brother. Other skin-colored guy who tipped you when you parked his Beamer: brother. Much like the oafishly careless, empty, and repetitious whomping of the once-specific, cherished and singular word “awesome,” the sacred word BROTHER has become in inept mouths, a dull and wearisome trope.
(
Awesome
is the word one uses for Eleanor Roosevelt, Mt. Kilimanjaro, and pitching a no-hit no-run ballgame. Not available for the crappy cheese quesadilla you had this afternoon, nor for anybody who Dances with the Stars. With or without a wooden leg.) Same goes for yo
Bruth
-thuh.
I had only one sib, my late sister. The men of my lifelong existence whom I would countenance as my
brother
are less than the number of dactyls on my left hand, and they know who they are.
Apparently, Ray Bradbury and I are
brothers
.
Not in some absurd catchall absurdity of vacuous gibber, but actually and
really
“we are brothers.”
Whence cometh this assertion?
From Ray Bradbury. That’s whence.
“You know, Harlan,” he said to me, leaning in and grinning that Midwestern just-fell-off-the-turnip-truck grin, “we are brothers, y’know; you and I; together.”
I grinned back at him with
my
hayseed Midwestern mien, onaccounta we are both paid liars, from Waukegan and Cleveland, and I played his straight-man by responding, “How’s that, Ray?”
(The players freeze
in situ
as the Bloviating Narrator fills in the background data, thus slowing the movie and shamefacedly doing the necessary bricklaying:)
The table across which Ray was leaning was in a booth at one of my and Ray’s all-time favorite restaurants, The Pacific Dining Car in downtown Los Angeles. The night was in 1965. Our dining companions had both gone off to the toilets. That is to say,
she
had gone off to one; her husband had gone off to another.
Her
name was Leigh Brackett;
his
name was Edmond Hamilton. The queen of fantasy writing. Great movies based on Hammett and Chandler. A legend in this life. The Eric John Stark Stories. A kind and imperially gracious woman. One of the best people ever known to me. Ed looked like something out of
American Gothic
. They called him the Galaxy Smasher—the true creator of the “space opera.” Dozens and dozens of stories all the way back to the advent of Gernsback: The Star King series. All those great comic books, and the Captain Future pulp novelettes. Droll, cosmically smart, one helluva plotter, and kind to tots like me and Ray. They were the Strophe and Antistrophe of our literary infancy.
So, they’re gone, Bradbury and I are alone, grinnin’&schmoosin’ and he proceeds to explain to me that he and I are
brothers
. Not my word,
his
word. (Not to make this too clear, but I have a chasmlike abomination of bloviating sf fans who, upon the death of someone they once met in an elevator, begin to leak like WikiAnything, just to buy themselves the face-time at a memorial. “Oh, yes, I knew Isaac as if he were my brother…” / “Oh, lawdy, I pluckt up rootabuggas with Cliff Simak in de fields…” / “Yes, Octavia Butler and I were ever so close…”) This unlikely story I tell actually
happened
. Go ask Ray Bradbury if you think I’m fudging it. But better hurry…
Anyhow, I says back to him, “How’s that, Ray?”
And he says back to me, “Them.”
And I says to him, “Ed and Leigh?”
And he says back to me, “Our father and mother. They raised us.” I have no memory of the rest of the actual verbiage.
Well, sir, wasn’t that a keen moment!
You see, I was working at Paramount at the time, on one or another of the crippled creations Rouse and Greene had hired me to do for vast sums of money (I was in my “hot 15” at the time). And Leigh, whom I’d known since my teens in Ohio, was writing a dog for Howard Hawks called
Red Line 7000
, starring James Caan (who, coincidentally, played the role of “Harlan Ellison” in an
Alfred Hitchcock Hour
based on my MEMOS FROM PURGATORY only a year or so earlier). Also at Paramount.
Our offices were near to hand.
Ray doesn’t drive. I drive. Every time we both got booked into the same lecture gig at some jerkwater literary potlatch, I drove, Bradbury lectured.
Me, he lectured. (Our politics are about as close as our faiths.)
So, I was always the wheelman on the caper.
Somewhichway, Leigh didn’t have (what she used to call, to mock James M. Cain) a “short” that night, and I can’t remember what Ed’s story was. But I wound up doing the driving down to The Pacific Dining Car, and we left straight from the studio. Ray must’ve come by cab: he met us at the Bronson Gate, and I did my thing downtown for a good big T-bone dinner. Also Bermuda Onion, Rondo Hatton’s-jaw sized tomatoes with Roquefort dressing, and zucchini Florentine. Ray drank; I never touch the stuff. We had an absolutely nova-squooshing dinner.
Thus, before I run on at greater length, the answer to the question “Can you reminisce a bit about your Ray Bradbury ‘connection?’” is frozen in Ray’s asseveration: we’re brothers.
He said so.
But, not to make a big foofaraw of it, Ray has trouble remembering who I am, and who Harlan Ellison is. And then, he’ll remember, howl “Live Forever!” or somesuch impossibility at me, and recall me as “Ah, yes, the ‘Terrible-Tempered Mr. Bang.’” and I’ll smile wanly, and scream back at him, “
Nothing
lives forever, Ray, you crazy old coot! Not the Great Pyramid of Gizah, not the Polar ice caps, not a single blade of green grass, you nut-bag!”
And
that
is the link between us, the “connection.” Nobody ever writ it large on the Northern mastiff of Mt. Shazam…you gotta
agree
with your brother. You just got to love him.