Complete Stories (15 page)

But I digress. Professor Raumer’s rotation was, he told me, the result of an ill-conceived and badly executed attempt to move out along the Aether, above the surface of the Earth, and against the gravitational force.

His technique was to use special thorns as Oars or Pitons, reaching out of our space and into the Aether, thus exerting a force to act against gravity. This worked well enough, but when he attempted to jump free of the Aether and back to the ground, he slipped somehow sideways.

Gravity, weakly acting on that of his cross-sections still in our space, keeps him glued to the ground. He floats, as it were, on his back. By sticking a leg or an arm down into the swirling currents of the Aether sea he is able to slide about Earth’s surface at will. Yet, such is the nature of the Aether-stuff that Professor Raumer is unable to exert the force to turn him-self sideways. His own efforts cannot bring him fully back into our space.

Immediately after the transformation, Professor Raumer slid away from the crowd at the Pompidou Center. He tells me that he was by some higher vision certain that his wife, a practical woman, would take up with the first replacement for him which she found. He could not have been more prescient.

These inquiries finally led me to an apartment above a miserable café in the Monceau district. Professor Raumer had so manipulated himself that only a cross-section of his head and eyes remained in our space. I carried this cross-section tucked between the pages of these very notes.

Throned behind the zinc bar was the inevitable
concierge
, a termagant, a virago. No, she had never heard of a Madame Raumer. I gave her twenty francs. Oh yes, I must be looking for the woman with the American children. She lived upstairs with her fiancé, a fine young man employed by the police force.

“
That’s
not my husband,” cried Mrs. Raumer, an attractive but somewhat hard-looking woman. “My husband is dead!”

The cross-section of Professor Raumer’s head lay on the table between us. Suddenly the shapes of his two hands appeared on the table-top as well. The fingers moved in agile silhouettes, spelling out the words of his plea: “C–Y–B–E–L–E I S–T–I–L–L L–O–V–E Y–O–U. D–O Y–O–U H–A–V–E T–H–E T–H–O–R–N–S?”

Mrs. Raumer started back from the table. She seemed angry with me. “Get out of here, you pompous
blimp
! Take your creepy magic tricks with you! No, I don’t have the thorns, the thorns disappeared with my husband! He’s gone and I have a new life!”

As she railed in this way, one of her children, the littlest, pressed forward and poked a finger into the center of the cross-section on the table. This direct palpating of his brain must have been uncomfortable for Professor Raumer, for he slid off the table, floated to the floor, and disappeared beneath a rug.

The unpleasantly handsome young flic seemed to take me for his rival in Mrs. Raumer’s affections. If I were not a man of generous bulk, the situation might have gone very badly indeed. As it was, I was forced to leave so precipitously that I was unable to retrieve Professor Raumer from beneath the rug. There was nothing for it but to install myself in the dreary drink-shop downstairs and await further developments.

I spent a miserable two hours there, with only a few pinball players for company. The café’s menu was utterly without interest, and their wine was not even deplorable. I regretted having aided Professor Raumer in his fool’s mission of revisiting his family. I had helped him only because of his promise to later reveal certain higher truths to me.

I was on the point of leaving when Raumer’s three children suddenly appeared, trooping down the stairs. Iris, the oldest, was spokeswoman for this pathetic delegation.

“Can you make my Daddy get fat again?” she inquired.

“Perhaps I can help. But not unless he comes away with me.”

“I want him to stay under the rug,” protested Howard. “We can talk to him with our fingers.”

Talk? About what? How absurd to waste so great an avatar on children’s prattle! I controlled myself with difficulty. “Your father belongs to humanity. With my help he can bring us unheard-of knowledge. Tell him he must come to me.”

It was almost midnight, and I was quite dizzy from the many glasses of cognac. The children had long since gone back upstairs. Bleakly I wondered how Professor Raumer could prefer their uncultured company to mine. Just then I saw the familiar stain come sliding down the stairs like a hesitant man’s shadow.

The scene was painful in the extreme. Not having a family, and not wanting one, I cannot pretend to understand his motives. But in the end I promised to help him “get fat again,” and for his part, Professor Raumer shared with me all that he had learned. I give here only a partial summary of what he told me that night before our long journey began.

Thoughts are definite forms…permanently extant, yet in some way parasitic upon human existence.
Parasitism
is too strong a word. Let us say, rather,
symbiosis
, reserving the term “parasitism” for those low and slippery entities which do deserve such a name. I speak, of course, of human emotion, or, to be quite blunt, the ties of love which can make an avatar shrink from his destiny.

Following this, Professor Raumer described to me how the thought-clouds rain lower-dimensional simulacra of themselves upon the infinite Aether sea, dimpling and rippling the sketchy forms of our lowly three-dimensional space.

He told me of how the clouds merge and split, and of the great SUN beyond it all, the SUN which drives the eternal process of sublimation and precipitation. The SUN, the goal of every mystic’s quest…I cannot understand how anyone could ever wish to leave it.

And now, these few notes written, we set off, I know not whence, in search of the sacred bush of Shanker Bola. With its thorns I will lever Professor Raumer back. With the same thorns I shall set myself free. Peace, my brothers.

============

Written in Spring, 1980.

Changes
, Ace Books, 1983.

One of the great things about living in Heidelberg was that we could get in the car and drive to Paris. This story was inspired by a trip there with my wife Sylvia and our three children Georgia, Rudy Jr., and Isabel. I should add that we had a lot more fun on the trip than this story might indicate. Raumer needs to be something of a jerk so that his wife will be glad to get rid of him. “Transreal” doesn’t mean “true.”

The first thing the citizens of Bata notice is a greasy place in the street. A fat man slips on it. Bill Stook comes down in the yellow pickup with the smashed fender and throws on a bucket of sand.

A week later the patch begins to stink. The stuff is thickened and drawn together. There’re lots of flies that come and land on your face afterwards. The kindergarten teacher twists her ankle. Black high-heels and a thin summer dress.

Stook comes back with a shovel, but he can’t get the stuff loose. A few idlers—daytripping feebs—give their advice, spit-talking about glare-ice and mineral oil. Finally Stook throws on some more sand and goes home.

Under the arc-lights the patch is elliptical, four by eight feet. It cuts across the crosswalk and both lanes of traffic. The tire-marks on it extend out into straight smears in either direction. A dog has dropped a bone in the middle.

Maisie Gleaves lives in a Buffalo rooming house. She is black and white, with red lipstick and a christmas-green raincoat. Every night she lies on her bed looking at her Bata High School yearbook. Two years now. Somehow she will go back.

Workmen are putting up a banner saying, BATA SIDEWALK SALE DAYS. Meanwhile a group of men, shopkeepers, inspect the stinking patch of pulp. One of them tries to pick up a bone. His fingers slide off it. It’s an outrage. Bill Stook is called and threatened with dismissal. He covers the patch with sawdust and puts a refreshment stand around it. SIDEWALK SALE DAYS. In the hot sun, people order hot dogs, catch a whiff of decay and put on more mustard. Stook mans the booth, nipping whiskey from a pint bottle. The flattened lump underfoot feels springy.

A white sunset slides under low clouds. They dismantle the booth and the sawdust blows away. Mashed arms and legs, tooth cracklings, scraps of green cloth. The tire tracks are gone from the flattened corpse. The state police take Stook away.

Maisie watches Buffalo TV in a silver diner. Trouble in Bata. She remembers all the lost faces. Ron. She pays for her tea. Back in her room she stares into the mirror for two hours. Her image is moving closer.

Sleeping or waking, it’s all the same now. No more boundaries. Something is coming nearer, growing to connect. She lives on air and thinks only of Bata. She will return.

Bit by bit the corpse grows whole. Slowly the bones link up, imperceptibly the flesh crawls back. One night the face is finished. In the dark it begins to twitch unseen.

Stook is out on bail. He is driving a stolen truck, the pickup they used to let him use. All his rage and bitterness is focused on the corpse in the street. He speeds towards it, past the guards, through the sawhorses. A screech of brakes, a thud. Suddenly his crumpled fender is smooth. The corpse walks off backwards.

Stook runs after the skinny corpse, a woman. She minces backwards towards the bus stop, glaring at him. He catches up as she climbs into the bus to Buffalo. He tries to grab her, but it’s impossible. He cannot alter her past.

Maisie leaves her room and walks. A block ahead she sees a black and white woman in a christmas-green coat climb off the bus from Bata. She is walking backwards, this woman. Maisie hastens to meet her.

The two figures merge and are no more. A cabbie sees them disappear into each other. For Maisie it is different. She walks through the flash and down the street.

Everything is running backwards. Maisie is going back through time, back to Bata. The bus backs up to where she’d seen herself get out. Ticketless, she climbs in the exit door and sits down. She is nervous. The bus is going forty miles per hour in reverse.

As the bus backs out of Buffalo onto the Thruway, the man sitting next to Maisie begins staring at her. He says something backwards, a drooling gabble. She answers anyway. He turns and stares out the dark window. She spoke because he spoke; he spoke because she spoke. He picks off a wad of gum from under his seat and begins chewing it.

When the bus leaves the Thruway and backs past the old filling-station, she walks to the door. It opens, and she goes down the steps. Bata. She’s glad she waited so long. She’ll get a room here, and in two years she’ll be back in high school. Ron. This time it will work out right.

A short, red-faced man is blocking her way. She sets her face and walks towards him. He backs off, drawing farther and farther away. There are police around a pickup parked in the intersection. But there is no traffic.

The little man scuttles crablike into the cab of the pickup. Just to scare him she walks right up to it, right up to the fender. There is a sudden jolt. The pickup squeals its brakes and backs away.

============

Written in Spring, 1980.

Sphinx Magazin
, #16, Spring, 1982.

I got the seed idea for this story while driving from Geneseo to Buffalo in 1978. I was looking in my rear-view mirror and imagining that I was driving backwards. Two years later in a Heidelberg street I saw a woman with red lipstick and a green raincoat, and the story clicked. It’s kind of a retake on the time-reversal diagrams that appear in “Schrödinger’s Cat.” The story’s first publication was as a German translation in a hipster European magazine edited by Udo Breger, my German translator at that time.

Harry enjoyed driving, even though he’d never managed to get a license. He had a whole theory of it, a system of simultaneous differential equations which told him how fast to turn the wheel for a four-wheel skid on a tight turn taken too fast. “Controlled drift,” he called it.

I drew my safety belt a bit tighter. “I’m driving on the way back to the airport, Harry. I only said you could drive on the way to Marston’s. Remember that.” It wasn’t always easy to have a genius for a partner.