Shatterday

Harlan Ellison has been called “one of the great living American short story writers” by The Washington Post. In a career spanning more than 40 years, he has won more awards for the 74 books he has written or edited; the more than 1700 stories, essays, articles, and newspaper columns; the two dozen teleplays and a dozen motion pictures he has created, then any other living fantasist. He has won the Hugo award eight and a half times, the Nebula award three times, the Bram Stoker award, presented by the Horror Writers Association, five times (including The Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996), the Edgar Allan Poe award of the Mystery Writers of America twice, the Georges Melies fantasy film award twice, two Audie Awards (for the best in audio recordings), and was awarded the Silver Pen for Journalism by P.E.N., the international writer’s union. He was presented with the first Living Legend award by the International Horror Critics at the 1995 World Horror Convention. He is also the only author in Hollywood ever to win the Writers Guild of America award for Most Outstanding teleplay (solo work) four times, most recently for “Paladin of the Lost Hour” his Twilight Zone episode that was Danny Kaye’s final role, in 1987. In March (1998), the National Women’s Committee of Brandeis University honored him with their 1998 Words, Wit & Wisdom award.

Harlan Ellison

An [
e- reads
] Book

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, scanning or any information storage retrieval system, without explicit permission in writing from the Author.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locals or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 1980 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation
First e-reads publication 1999
www.e-reads.com
ISBN 0-7592-0042-8

Fear is implanted in us as a preservative from evil; but its duty, like that of other passions, is not to overbear reason, but to assist it. It should not be suffered to tyrannize in the imagination, to raise phantoms of horror, or to beset life with supernumerary distresses.

—DR. JOHNSON

Jim Blish once dedicated a book to me.

He did other things for me:

He introduced me to the music of Charles Ives, to the taste of Vander Flip, to the urgency of avoiding the said-bookism, to the concept of the watershed, to the pleasures of Indo-Ceylonese food.

He taught me the value of uncompromising literary criticism and the absolute necessity for perfect grammar, and I try, Jim, God knows I try. But the most indispensable lessons he taught were how badly I could write when I wasn't paying attention, and how I could be king of the world when I did the work with love and courage.

Jim is gone now, but for all that, and for much more, this progress report, this book, with respect and friendship, for

JAMES BLISH

When the time comes to assemble the indicia matter for one of my books I am invariably astonished at how many dear friends, wise sources and dedicated readers have lent their encouragement, store of obscure facts, concern and, sometimes, homes in aid of the creation. To sum them without naming them, to say, "You know who you are," would be to demean their invaluable gifts at precisely the moment I needed them. And so, with your indulgence, a compendium of worthy heurists, with love and thanks: Isaac Asimov; Haskell Barkin; Keith Berwick; Victoria Bolles; Ben Bova; Jacques Brel; Ed Bryant; Ms. Marty Clark; John Clute; Arthur Byron Cover; Jack Danon; Richard Delap; Bill Desmond; Leo & Diane Dillon; George Alec Effinger; Lori Ellison; Audrey & Ed Ferman; Stacey Franchild; Kelly Freas; Kenneth L. Gross; Jim Harmon; Fred Harris & Carole Hemingway of KABC-AM, Los Angeles; Gary Hoppenstand; the Iguanacon committee of the 36th World Science Fiction Convention; Walter Koenig; Shelley Levinson; Edward London; Barry Malzberg; Lydia Marano; Sheryl Dichter Martin; Terry Martin; Vincent McCaffrey & the staff of the Avenue Victor Hugo Bookstore, Boston; Thomas F. Monteleone; Michael Moorcock; Jonathan Ostrowsky; Tom Owen; Ms. Eusona Parker; Sue Pounds & the staff of The Portobello Hotel, London; Charles Ryan; Mary David Sheiner; Robert Silverberg; Julie Simmons; Linda M. Steele; Leslie Kay Swigart; and with greater sense of loss than I can convey, to the memory of Victoria Chen Haider, my editor at
Playboy
, who died on 25 May 1979 in the crash of a DC-10 in Chicago.

Introduction
Jeffty is Five
How's the Night Life on Cissalda?
Flop Sweat
Would you Like a Penny?
The Man who was Heavily into Revenge
Shoppe Keeper
All the Lies that are my Life
Django
Count the Clock that Tells the Time
In the Fourth Year of the War
Alive and Well and on a Friendliness Voyage
All the Birds Come Home to Roost
Opium
The Other Eye of Polyphemus
The Executioner of the Malformed Children
Shatterday

WITH A TOUCH of quiet pride the Author states that he has watched the Johnny Carson Show only once in his life. (The single blot on an otherwise exemplary record occurred when I was pressed, one night, into sitting through consummate dreariness to reach the moment when Robert Blake, a friend of many years even though he's an actor, was to sit and talk to Orson Welles, one of my heroes despite his hawking of inferior commercial wines. It was a moment I wish had been denied me. Bob, a good and decent and talented man, clever, witty and articulate, perhaps driven mad by the fame and cheap notoriety of having become a television cult hero for several seasons, proceeded to insult Mr. Welles in a manner I suppose he thought was bright badinage. It was a maleficent spectacle in overwhelming bad taste, culminating in Bob's passing a remark about Mr. Welles's girth.

(Welles sat silently for a moment as the audience—and I—winced in disbelief and horror. Then he said, very softly, very softly, "My weight is correctable only with enormous difficulty at my age, but I live with it comfortably; as opposed to your bad manners.")

There should be benign deities who would send ravens to pluck out one's eyes so such sights could be avoided.

I did not need to see my friend make an ass of himself. And I sat there thinking, for a wonder, is
this
what a vast segment of the American viewing public truly accepts as "the rebirth of conversation"? This endless babble and confluence of self-serving "celebrities" who warm studio sets with the indispensable intelligence that they'll be doing
Pal Joey
at the Country Squire Dinner Theatre in Lubbock, Texas from June 12th to 18th?

And I could not contain my sorrow that my friend had been driven mad by television, to sit there having been gulled into thinking he was having a "conversation" before so many millions of moon-white eyes in darkened bedrooms. But this time I will not inveigh against the Monster Video; that was the fulmination that served to introduce my previous collection of stories,
Strange Wine
.

No, this time I would speak of conversation; of speaking to the true and universal darkness that fills so much of our souls. Of mortal dreads and the value of such terrors as I present here.

I do a considerable number of college lectures every year. It helps pay the freight so I don't have to write television ever again. From my lips to the car of god … or whoever's in charge. And frequently I will say something about the human condition that seems perfectly rational and proper to me, because I know we all share the same thoughts. Invariably, some feep in the audience will attempt to pillory me with the stunning accusation, "You only said that to shock!"

My response is always the same:

"You bet your ass, slushface. Of course I said it to shock you (or
wrote
it to shock you). I don't know how
you
perceive my mission as a writer, but for me it is not a responsibility to reaffirm your concretized myths and provincial prejudices. It is not my job to lull you with a false sense of the rightness of the universe. This wonderful and terrible occupation of recreating the world in a different way, each time fresh and strange, is an act of revolutionary guerrilla warfare. I stir up the soup. I inconvenience you. I make your nose run and your eyes water. I spend my life and miles of visceral material in a glorious and painful series of midnight raids against complacency. It is my lot to wake with anger every morning, to lie down at night even angrier. All in pursuit of one truth that lies at the core of every jot of fiction ever written: we are all in the same skin … but for the time it takes to read these stories I merely have the mouth. You see before you a child who never grew up, who does not know it's socially unacceptable to ask, 'Who farted?' "

Thus I try to codify in noble terms the obsession with Art and the inability of the writer to stop writing, to get along with others, to view without rancor the world as a gem, at once pure and perfect. But that's flapdoodle, of course. I write because I write. I can do no other.

It is the love of conversation.

I am anti-entropy. My work is foursquare for chaos. I spend my life personally, and my work professionally, keeping that soup boiling.
Gadfly
is what they call you when you are no longer dangerous, when the right magazines publish your work and you don't have to seek out obscure publications as homes for the really mean stuff, when they ask you to come and discuss matters of import with "celebrities" on the Johnny Carson Show. I much prefer troublemaker, malcontent, pain in the ass, desperado. As I've said elsewhere, I see myself as a combination of Jiminy Cricket and Zorro.
Thus
do I ennoble myself in the times when all the simple joys I've forsworn rush back on me as chances lost, and I'm left with only the work and something Irwin Shaw said: "Since I am not particularly devout, my chances for salvation lie in a place sometime in the future on a library shelf."

Why is he telling me all this?

He's telling you all this because the feeps thought they were getting off a hot one when they accused him of merely writing to shock.

That's my job. To stir the soup, to bite your thigh, to get you angry so you keep the conversation going. Don't invite me to parties for pleasant chat. I want to hear the sound of your soul. Then I can translate it into the mortal dreads we all share and fire them back at you transmogrified, reshaped as amusing or frightening fables.

Look, it's like this: I was in Utah doing some work for the Equal Rights Amendment late last year, and I said some things like this during a radio interview. So the interviewer, who was a very bright guy, pushed at it a little. He asked me to explicate some of these "mortal dreads" that we all share, that I thought I was illuminating by writing such weird and troubling stories. I thought about it a moment, and then in a fit of confession that passes for honesty I told him about writing the title story of this book, "Shatterday."

"I was sitting in a hotel room in New York in the middle of a January snowstorm in 1975," I said. "I had to have the story finished by 7:00 that night so I could present it at a reading uptown at 7:30, allowing myself time to get a cab and find the auditorium … and I was writing furiously, hardly thinking about how the story was creating itself—"

The interviewer looked at me oddly.

"It was
creating itself?"

"Yeah," I said. "I was just the machine that was putting it on paper. That story came out of secret places in my head and ran at the paper without regard for my breaking back or the deadline. It created itself. Well, I finished it barely in time, got downstairs, shoved an old lady out of the way to grab her cab in the snow, and just got uptown in time for the reading. I didn't even have time to proofread the copy.

"So when I was in the middle of the lecture, reading the section where the lead character is having the argument with his alter ego about his mother, I realized for the first time that I wanted
my
mother to die."

The interviewer looked uncomfortable.

"No, wait, listen," I said hurriedly, "I didn't mean that I wanted her to
die
, just to be gone. See, my mother was quite old at that time, she'd been extremely ill off-and-on for years, and in that eerie way we have of exchanging places with our parents when they grow old, I'd become the parent and she'd become the child; and I was responsible for
her
. I supported her, and tried to keep her comfortable down in Miami Beach where she was living, and that gave me pleasure, to play at being a real grownup son, and like that. But she was just a shadow. She hadn't been happy in a long time, she was just marking out her days, and I wanted to be free of that constant realization that
she
was out there
. I loved her, she was a nice woman. I didn't have any rancor or meanness in me … I just had to admit that I wanted her gone."