The Early Stories (145 page)

In addition to the base cost per truckload there is $10.50 an hour for the driver, plus an occasional gratuitous, graciously offered beer, @ $1.80 per six-pack.

P
ROBLEM:
Why is
C
doing all this?

5
. A's psychiatrist thinks he is experiencing growth, measurable in psychic distance attained from
C
. However, by Tristan's Law appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability. Attainability is somewhat proportional to psychic distance. As a psychic mass
M
is reduced in apparent size by the perspectives of recession, its gravitational attraction proportionally increases. There exists a curve whereby gravitational attraction
overpowers reason, though the apparent source of attraction may be, like the apparent position of all but the nearest stars, an illusion.

P
ROBLEM:
Plot this curve. Find the starlike point where A's brain begins to bend.

H
ELPFUL
H
INTS:
The “somewhat” above translates to
³
/
₇
.

Midas's Law: Possession diminishes perception of value, immediately.

6
.
B
is beautiful. Clear blue eyes, blue denim miniskirt, dear little blue veins behind her silken knees.
C
is receding rapidly, a tomato-red speck in an untroubled azure. A's 4 children have all been awarded scholarships. His psychiatrist has moved his couch to walnut-panelled, shag-carpeted quarters above the Laundromat, up just one quick flight of 22 steps. The price of pea stone has dropped dramatically, because of the recession. It is a beautiful day, a bright-blue Monday.

P
ROBLEM:
Something feels wrong. What is it?

The Man Who Loved
Extinct Mammals
 

Sapers lived rather shapelessly in a city that shall be nameless. It was at a juncture of his life when he had many ties, none of them binding. Accordingly, he had much loose time, and nothing, somehow, better filled it than the perusal of extinct mammals. Living species gave him asthma, and the dinosaurs had been overdone; but in between lay a marvellous middle world of lumpy, clumping, hairy, milk-giving creatures passed from the face of the earth. They tended to be large: “During these early periods,” writes Harvey C. Markman in his pamphlet
Fossil Mammals
(published by the Denver Museum of Natural History), “many of the mammals went in for large size and absurdity.” For example,
Barylambda
. It was nearly eight feet long and half as high. It had a short face, broad feet, muscular legs, and a very stout tail. “It combined”—to quote Markman again—“many anatomical peculiarities which together had little survival value. One might say of this race, and other aberrant groups, that they tried to specialize in too many ways and made very little progress in the more essential directions.” It was extinct by the end of the Paleocene. “Who could not love such a creature?” Sapers asked himself.

And who is to say what is an “essential direction”?

Barylambda
was an amblypod, meaning “blunt foot,” an order (or suborder) of ungulates that had, Webster's Dictionary told Sapers, “very small smooth brains.” The “small” was to be expected, the “smooth” was surprising. It was nice. The man who loved extinct mammals resented the way Markman kept chaffing the amblypods; nothing about them, especially their feet and their teeth, was specialized enough to suit him. One could hear Markman sigh, like the sardonic instructor of a class of dullards, as he wrote, “At least one more family of amblypods must be mentioned: the uintatheres. By late Eocene time some of these grotesque creatures
had attained the size of circus elephants. Arranged along the face and forehead they had three pairs of bony protuberances resembling horns.…” In the accompanying photograph of a
Uintacolotherium
skull, the bony protuberances looked artful, Arp-like. Sapers didn't think them necessarily grotesque, if you tried to view them from the standpoint of the Life Force instead of from ours, the standpoint of Man, with his huge, rough brain. Sapers shut his eyes and tried to imagine the selective process whereby a little bud of a bony protuberance achieved a tiny advantage, an edge, in battle, food-gathering, or mating, which would favor an exaggeration from generation to generation. He almost had it in focus—some kind of Platonic ideal pressing upon the uintathere fetuses, tincturing uintathere milk—when the telephone shrilled near his ear.

It was Mrs. Sapers. Her voice—alive, vulnerable, plaintive, his—arose from some deep past. She told him, not uninterestingly, of her day, her depressions, her difficulties. Their daughter had flunked a math exam. The furnace was acting funny. Men were asking her to go out on dates. One man had held her hand in a movie and her stomach had flipped over. What should she do?

“Be yourself,” he advised. “Do what feels natural. Call the furnace man. Tell Dorothy I'll help her with her math when I visit Saturday.”

“If I had a gun, some nights I'd shoot myself.”

“That's why they have firearms-control laws,” he told her reassuringly, wondering then why she wasn't reassured.

For she began to cry into the telephone. He tried to follow her reasoning but gathered only the shadowy impression that she loved him, which he felt to be a false impression, from previous fieldwork as her husband. Anyway, what could he do about it now? “Nothing,” Mrs. Sapers snapped, adding, “You're grotesque.” Then, with that stoic elegance she still possessed, and he still admired, she hung up.

Mammae, he read, are specialized sweat glands. A hair is a specialized scale. When a mammal's body gets too hot, each hair lifts up so the air can reach the skin. The bizarre
Arsinoitherium
, superficially like a rhinoceros but anatomically in a class by itself, may be distantly related to the tiny, furry hyrax found in nooks of Asia and Africa. The saber-toothed tiger was probably less intelligent than a house cat. Its “knife tooth” was developed to prey on other oversized mammals, and couldn't have pinned a rabbit. Rabbits have been around a long time—though nothing as long, of course, as the crocodile and the horseshoe crab. Sapers thought of those saber teeth, and of the mastodon's low-crowned molars, with the enamel in a single layer on top, which were superseded by the mammoth's
high-crowned molars, which never wore out, the enamel distributed in vertical plates, and he tried to picture the halfway tooth, or the evolutionary steps to baleen; his thoughts wandered pleasantly to the truth that the whale and the bear and Man are late, late models,
arrivistes
in the fossil record. What is there about a bear, that we love him? His flat, archaic feet. The amblypods are coming back! There was a delicate message Sapers could almost make out, a graffito scratched on the crumbling wall of time. His mistress called, shattering the wall.

She loved him. She told him so. He told her vice versa, picturing her young anatomy, her elongate thighs, her small smooth head, its mane, her spine, her swaying walk, and wondering, mightn't his middle-aged body break, attempting to cater to such a miracle? She told him of her day, her boredom, her boring job, her fear that he would go back to his wife.

“Why would I do that?” he asked.

“You think I'm too crass. I get so frightened.”

“You're not especially crass,” he reassured her. “But you
are
young. I'm old, relatively. In fact, I'm ancient. Wouldn't you like to get a nice youngish lover, with a single gristly horn, like a modern-day rhinoceros, one of the few surviving perissodactyls?”

He was offering to divert her, but she kept insisting on her love, his bones crunching at every declaration. Rhinoceroses, he learned when at last she had feasted enough and hung up, had been backed with unguarded enthusiasm by the investment councils of the Life Force. Some species had attained the bulk of several elephants. There had been running rhinoceroses—“long-legged, rather slender-bodied”—and amphibious rhinoceroses, neither of them the ancestor of the “true” rhinoceros; that honor belonged to hornless
Trigonia
, with his moderate size, “stocky body,” fourteen toes, and “very conservative” (Sapers could hear Markman impatiently sighing) dentition.

What
is
this prejudice in favor of progress? The trouble with his mistress, Saper decided, was that she had too successfully specialized, was too purely a mistress, perfect but fragile, like a horse's leg, which is really half foot, extended and whittled and tipped with one amazing toenail. The little
Eohippus
, in its forest of juicy soft leaves, scuttled like a raccoon; and even
Mesohippus
, though as big as a collie, kept three toes of each foot on the ground.
Eohippus
, it seemed to Sapers, was like a furtive little desire that evolves from the shadows of the heart into a great, clattering, unmanageable actuality.

•  •  •

His wife called back. Over the aeons of their living together she had evolved psychic protuberances that penetrated and embraced his mind. “I'm sorry to keep spoiling your wonderful privacy,” she said, in such a way that he believed in her solicitude for his privacy even as she sarcastically invaded it, “but I'm at my wits' end.” And he believed this, too, though also knowing that she could induce desperation in herself as a weapon, a hooked claw, a tusk. Perhaps she shouldn't have added, “I tried to call twice before but the line was busy”; yet this hectoring, too, he took into himself as pathos, her jealousy legitimate and part of her helplessness, all organs evolving in synchrony. She explained that their old pet dog was dying; it couldn't eat and kept tottering off into the woods, and she and their daughter spent hours calling and searching and luring the poor creature back to the house. Should they put the dog into the car and take her to the vet's, to be “put to sleep”?

Sapers asked his wife what their daughter thought.

“I don't know. I'll put her on.”

The child was fourteen.

“Hi, Daddy.”

“Hi, sweet. Is Josie in much pain?”

“No, she's just like drunk. She stands in the puddle in the driveway and looks at the sky.”

“She sounds happy, in a way. Whose idea is it to take her to the vet's?”

“Mommy's.”

“And what's your idea?”

“To let Josie do what she wants to do.”

“That sounds like my idea, too. Why don't you let her just stay in the woods?”

“It's beginning to rain here and she'll get all wet.” And the child's voice, so sensible and direct up to this point, generated a catch, tears, premonitions of eternal loss; the gaudy parade of eternal loss was about to turn the corner, cymbals clanging, trombones triumphant, and enter her mind. Keep calm, Sapers told himself. One thing at a time.

He said, “Then put her in the back room with some newspapers and a bowl of water. Talk to her so she doesn't feel lonely. Don't take her to the vet's unless she seems to be in pain. She always gets scared at the vet's.”

“O.K. You want to talk any more to Mom?”

“No. Sweetie? I'm sorry I'm not there to help you all.”

“That's O.K.” Her voice grew indifferent, small and smooth. She was about to hang up.

“Oh, and, baby?” Sapers called across the distance.

“Yeah?”

“Don't flub up any more math exams. It drives Mommy wild.”

Giant and bizarre mammalian forms persisted well after the advent of Man. The splendid skeleton of an imperial mammoth,
Archidiskodon imperator
, exhibited in the Denver Museum of Natural History, was found associated with a spear point. Neanderthal men neatly stacked, with an obscure religious purpose, skulls of
Ursus spelaeus
, the great cave bear. Even the incredible
Glyptodon
, a hard-shelled mammal the size and shape of a Volkswagen, chugged about the South American pampas a mere ten thousand years ago, plenty late enough to be seen by the wary, brown-faced forebears of the effete Inca kings. Who knows who witnessed the fleeting life of
Stockoceros
, the four-pronged antelope? Of
Syndyoceras
, the deerlike ruminant with two pairs of horns, one pair arising from the middle of its face? Of
Oxydactylus
, the giraffe-camel? Of
Daphoenodon
, the bear-dog? Of
Diceratherium
, the small rhinoceros, or
Dinohyus
, the enormous pig? Again and again, in the annals of these creatures, Sapers found mysterious disappearances, unexplained departures. “By the end of the Pliocene period all American rhinos had become extinct or wandered away to other parts of the world.” “After the horse family had been so successful in North America … its disappearance from this hemisphere has no ready explanation.”