The Western Lands (31 page)

I WORK FOR THE BLACK HOLE,

WHERE ALL NATURAL LAWS ARE INVALID.

Working for the hole

I'll get a mule to foal

I'm the uninvited mole

The errant lawless soul

I pop out here

and I pop out there

I have no human goal

I'm a singularity

I have no human MEEE

No man can pay my fee

No man can set me free

I'm a lock without a key

A singularity.

The trees are two and three hundred feet in height. Looking up, he can see what at first glance look like brightly colored leaves, but the colors shift and change as the color winds mix and swirl, red, orange, yellow, russet, leaving the green leaves and blue sky sharp and painful. There is a path under the trees, very old, a trough three to four feet deep. Here and there tree roots jut from the sides and cross at the bottom ... have to watch your feet.

But he finds that his body is avoiding obstacles. He is very light on his feet, moving in long strides. His clothes outline muscles, the toes separated, genitals cupped. It is a second skin, made of some light, strong, smooth material, dappled green and yellow, it changes color as he moves through light and shadow.

Silence soaks through him, he cannot formulate "Where am I?" Going and arriving are both present at the same moment, not separated in linear word sequence.

He is walking now by a long, low building. The gutter stretches away into the distance. What look like railroad tracks run along the side of the building and fan out to the side in complex patterns. There are keeps in this labyrinth which only those who live there know, for the labyrinth patterns are built into the soul. Anyone with different maze patterns could never find his way.

He sees canals and paths and bridges, a network to the sky with an intricate series of locks and sluices, gardens and houseboats pulled by huge turtles with eyes for ropes in their shells. The turtles have webbed feet and move with surprising speed and power, pulling barges of produce and passengers.

In the distance he can see a vast lake in milky light. There is no sun or satellite visible. It must be reflected light that gives such a soft, even distribution. Occasionally he meets people on the path. He can feel their bodies as a precise displacement.

He did remember now. Every other time he had been unable to get the dream straight in his waking mind. He had been walking among a great crowd of people, something Eastern about them. There was a terrible bright sun, and the people were half naked. They were silent and slow and their faces had a look in them of starvation. There was no sound, only the sun and the silent crowd of people.

He walked among them and he carried a huge covered basket. He was taking the basket somewhere, but he could not find the place to leave it. And in the dream there was a peculiar horror in wandering on and on through the crowd, and not knowing where to lay down the burden he had carried in his arms so long.

He walked until he reached the railroad tracks. On either side there were row« of dilapidated houses. In the cramped back yards were rotted privies and lines of torn, smoky rags hung out to dry. The earth itself seemed filthy and abandoned. The endless fluid passage of humanity through endless time. A warning ... a shaft of terror, a future of blackness, error and ruin between radiance and darkness. A terrible dream, groaning and shuffling his feet on the floor, and maybe even more than that.

December 25: Yesterday I copied out the dream section from Carson McCullers's
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
.
I was running through the dream in my mind, when I experienced the familiar chill that presages surprised and terrible recognition. . . .

"What is in the basket?"

Recurrent dream of coming into a darkened room. Someone is there on a bed. I wake up screaming,
"No! No! No!"

A basket case. Terrible bright sun stuck in the sky. No place to put down the basket, as he moves on and on through the silent crowd of people with starvation in their faces. Not hungry for food, hungry for something else. Something that isn't there. Not knowing where to put down the burden he has carried in his arms for so long.

A child is dying in the basket.
And there is no help here under this stuck sun in an old film from which life is draining away slowly and silently like the moving crowd.

Sayings of the old White Hunter:

You never have real courage until you have lost courage. Lost it abjectly, completely . . . bolted, crawled. And there is no exhilaration equal to courage regained. That is why it is almost always fatal. How can you top it? And if you haven't got anything left to top, what are you waiting around for?

Never fight fear head-on. That rot about pulling yourself together, and the harder you pull the worse it gets. Let it in and look at it. What shape is it? What color? Let it wash through you. Move back and hang on. Pretend it isn't there.
Get
trivial.
And what will they serve at this faculty party? Some lethal acidic punch no doubt, just the thing to bring on my hiatus hernia. A dreary parade of faculty parties and office parties to remind you that acute fear and boredom are incompatible.

There are many ways to distance yourself from fear. Keep silence and let fear talk. You will see it by what it does. Death doesn't like to be seen that close. Death must always elicit surprised recognition:
"You!"

The last person you expected to see, and at the same time, who else?

When de Gaulle, after an unsuccessful machine-gun attack on his car, brushed splintered glass off his shoulder and said,
"Encore!,"
Death couldn't touch him. You don't say, "Oh, you again!" to Death. Death can't take that.

Francis Macomber and Lord Jim: courage lost. They both bolted. Courage regained: Death.

THE WISHING MACHINE

The old writer lived in a converted boxcar in a junk heap on the river. The junk heap was owned by a wrecking company, and he was the caretaker. Commander of a junk heap. Sometimes he sported a yachting cap. The writer didn't write anymore. Blocked. It happens.

It was Christmas night, getting dark. The writer had just walked a quarter mile to a truck stop that was serving hot turkey Sandwiches with dressing and gravy to go. He was carrying his sandwich back when he heard a cat mewling. A little black cat stepped into his path. As he put down his shopping bag and leaned toward the cat, it leaped into his arms and snuggled against him, purring loudly.

Snow was coming down in great soft flakes, falling like the descent of their last end on all the living and the dead, the writer remembered. So he brought the little black foundling back to his boxcar, and they shared the turkey sandwich.

Next day he walked to the nearest convenience store and bought a supply of cat food. He called the foundling "Smoker" after the Black Smokers. These are clefts in the Earth's crust, two miles under the sea—no oxygen, no light, and enormous pressure. It would seem axiomatic that no life could exist there. However, abundant life teems along the cleft of a Black Smoker: huge crabs and tuber worms four feet long, and clams as big as dinner plates. One brought to the surface is said to have given off an incredible stink like nobody ever smelled before. These creatures eat minerals and suck nutrients from rotten-egg gas.

And Smoker was a strange cat. His fur was a glistening soot-black, his eyes a shiny white that glittered in the dark. He grew rapidly. Smoker, a creature of the lightless depths, where life as we on the surface know it cannot exist, brought light and color with him as colors pour from tar. From the total lack of air, from pressures that would crush a submarine like a flattened beer can, he brings a compressed variety of life. Nourished on phosphorescent minerals, his eyes glitter like diamonds. His body is molded from the absence of light. And Smoker loves the writer with a special affection from his special place, with a message urgent as a volcano, or an earthquake, that only the writer can read.

And the writer begins to write again. Animal stories, of course. He leafs through
The Audubon Society Book of Animal Life
for his characters . . . the Flying Fox, with long thin black fingers and its sharp sad black face, just like Smoker. A Fishing Bat peeks out of a turtle shell. A Pallid Bat creeps forward, the only ground feeder. The writer caresses the pictures as he turns the pages and pulls them toward him, as he's seen a mother cat reach out and pull her five kittens to her.

At sight of the Black Lemur, with round red eyes and a little red tongue protruding, the writer experiences a delight that is almost painful . . . the silky hair, the shiny black nose, the blazing innocence. Bush Babies with huge round yellow eyes, fingers and toes equipped with little sucker pads . . . a Wolverine with thick, black fur, body flat on the ground, head tilted up to show its teeth in a smirk of vicious depravity. (He marks his food with a musk that no other animal can tolerate.) The beautiful Ring-Tailed Lemur, that hops along through the forest as if riding a pogo stick, the Gliding Lemur with two curious folds in his brain. The Aye-aye, one of the rarest of animals, cat-size, with a long bushy tail, round orange eyes and thin bony fingers, each tipped with a long needle claw. So many creatures, and he loves them all.

Then Smoker disappeared. The old writer canvassed the neighborhood with Smoker's picture. He offered a fifty-dollar reward. Finally he bought a Wishing Machine. Directions for use are simple. You put a picture, nail clipping, hair or anything connected with the subject of your wish between two copper plates activated by a patented magnetic device that runs on standard current. Then you make your wish.

"Well, mister. I don't say it
works,
but I knowed a man cleared the acne off his daughter's ugly face. Nobody seen just how ugly it was till he cleared the acne off, and maybe he shouldn't have done it like that. Then he wished the hemorrhoids of his grandmother to recede perceptibly. Before, they was nightcrawlers, now they is like little red worms you play hell threading on your hook. Another bloke kilted a tapeworm in his maiden aunt and her gained ten pounds in one week."

"Will it do anything
positive
,
like bringing back a lost cat?"

"Well, I don't rightly know, but I figure with this artyfact the sky might not be the limit"

"'All is in the not done, the diffidence that faltered.'"

"How's that?"

"Ezra Pound."

"Tell Ezra to pull down his vanity. And bear in mind that this
is
a murder machine. This you gotta hear: man wished his neighbor dead. Neighbor went full crazy and come after the wisher with a chain saw, cut him in two sections like the lady-sawed-in-half act, difference being the wisher was in no condition to take a bow. And then the neighbor dropped dead from the glory of it. So think, before you wish out some rotten-weed wish."

The old Wish Machine peddler drops to his knees and clasps his hands. "Giva me womans, maka me rich!" he mocks.

The Gods of Chance don't like whiners, welchers and pikers. Feed a whiny wish through the Machine, and you will soon have ample cause to whine. And from half-assed wishers shall be taken even that which they have.

"I only want one thing."

"In that case you'll likely get it, one way or another."

"Well, here's your machine, all gift-wrapped for Christmas. Just a few more calls to make."

Back in his boxcar, the old writer unpacked the machine and plugged it in. He sat down in front of the Wishing Machine and formulated a silent, unconditional wish for Smoker's return, dead or alive, regardless of any consequences. He knew that the fulfillment of his wish might occasion an earthquake (unknown in this area) or a winter tornado. Might even rip the known universe apart.

"Let it come down."

From the boxcar window he could see the snow swirling down like flakes in a paperweight. His wish is a giant arm. He can reach out and turn the paperweight upside down. He can break it in two. He can see Smoker racing through the winter stubble, crystals of snow in his fur, closer and closer. Then, incredibly, a scratch at the door and Smoker's chittering cry. He slides the door open and blackness pours in.

"Looks like he opened the door to get some air and suffered a coronary and died from the exposure," a police spokesman said.

An alert, ambitious reporter did some research and came up with a feature story that proved to be his passport to New York and fame as an investigative reporter specializing in the borderline supernatural.

Bizarre Story of Writer's Ghost Cat

"It was like something out of Twilight Zone,' " a neighbor recounts. "I couldn't believe what I was seeing."

When William Seward Hall took up residence in Lost Fork a year ago, only one man here knew who he was and where he came from. That man is Eugene Williams, a retired professor of English literature. The following account is derived from an interview with Professor Williams:

Thirty years ago, Hall wrote a book called
The Boy Who Whittled Animals Out of Wood
.
The story concerned a crippled boy who fashioned animals in wood and finally animated his creations by means of masturbatory rites. When his creatures reverted to wood, he achieved one final animation through his death, and the animals scampered away. This book made him famous. It was bitterly attacked and extravagantly praised. Hall never wrote again.

During his time here, Professor Williams was his only visitor:

"He was a good conversationalist, but I learned not to refer to his writing another book. He looked very sad and asked me please never to mention the subject again, the way someone might feel about a bereavement, and I guess that is the way he did feel. He had killed himself in the story.

"I'd been out of town over the Christmas holidays. When I got back in early January, I went to see Bill. He told me he had found a cat on Christmas Day and had named the cat 'Smoker.' I heard a strange, chittering, mewling noise, but I couldn't see anything. Then I realized Bill was making the sound without opening his lips. It gave me a funny feeling but that was nothing compared with what happened then.

"He opened a can of cat food, all the time making that sound, and I could almost
see
a cat there. And then he gets down on all fours and rubs himself against invisible legs, purring. Straightens up and puts the plate of cat food on the floor. Next thing he gets down on all fours and eats it.

"I couldn't take any more, and it was a week before I could bring myself to visit him. I found him in despair. Smoker, he told me, had disappeared. He was going to offer a reward and show Smoker's picture to the neighbors. The picture was just a black blur of underexposed film, but people humored him and pretended to see a cat. 'Sure is a
black
cat.' I thought of getting a black kitten and claiming I'd found it nearby. But before I could do this, he told me about the Wishing Machine that could bring Smoker back.