The Top of the Volcano: The Award-Winning Stories of Harlan Ellison

by Harlan Ellison

  The man driving the Cadillac had no neck. His head sat thumped down hard on the shoulders. He stared straight ahead, took one last deep pull on the cigar, and threw it out the window. The still-smoking butt landed directly in front of Gaspar as he passed the car. The old man stopped, stared down at this coprolitic metaphor, and then stared at the driver. The eyes behind the wheel, the eyes of a macaque, did not waver from the stoplight’s red circle. Just outside the window, someone was looking in, but the eyes of the rhesus were on the red circle.

  A line of cars stopped behind the Brougham.

  Gaspar continued to stare at the man in the Cadillac for a moment, and then, with creaking difficulty, he bent and picked up the smoldering butt of stogie.

  The old man walked the two steps to the car—as Billy watched in confusion—thrust his face forward till it was mere inches from the driver’s profile, and said with extreme sweetness, “I think you dropped this in our living room.”

  And as the glazed simian eyes turned to stare directly into the pedestrian’s face, nearly nose-to-nose, Gaspar casually flipped the butt with its red glowing tip, into the back seat of the Cadillac, where it began to burn a hole in the fine Corinthian leather.

  Three things happened simultaneously:

  The driver let out a howl, tried to see the butt in his rearview mirror, could not get the angle, tried to look over his shoulder into the back seat but without a neck could not perform that feat of agility, put the car into neutral, opened his door and stormed into the street trying to grab Gaspar. “You fuckin’ bastid, whaddaya think you’re doin’ tuh my car you asshole bastid, I’ll kill ya…”

  Billy’s hair stood on end as he saw what Gaspar was doing; he rushed back the short distance in the crosswalk to grab the old man; Gaspar would not be dragged away, stood smiling with unconcealed pleasure at the mad bull rampaging and screaming of the hysterical driver. Billy yanked as hard as he could and Gaspar began to move away, around the front of the Cadillac, toward the far curb. Still grinning with octogeneric charm.

  The light changed.

  These three things happened in the space of five seconds, abetted by the impatient honking of the cars behind the Brougham; as the light turned green.

  Screaming, dragging, honking, as the driver found he could not do three things at once: he could not go after Gaspar while the traffic was clanging at him; could not let go of the car door to crawl into the back seat from which now came the stench of charring leather that could not be rectified by an inexpensive Tijuana tuck’n’roll; could not save his back seat and at the same time stave off the hostility of a dozen drivers cursing and honking. He trembled there, torn three ways, doing nothing.

  Billy dragged Gaspar.

  Out of the crosswalk. Out of the street. Onto the curb. Up the side street. Into the alley. Through a backyard.

  To the next street over away from the avenue.

  Puffing with the exertion, Billy stopped at last, five houses up the street. Gaspar was still grinning, chuckling softly, with unconcealed pleasure at his puckish ways. Billy turned on him with wild gesticulations and babble.

  “You’re nuts!”

  “How about that?” the old man said, giving Billy an affectionate poke in the bicep.

  “Nuts! Looney! That guy would’ve torn off your head! What the hell’s wrong with you, old man? Are you out of your boots?”

  “I’m not crazy. I’m responsible.”

  “Responsible!?! Responsible, fer chrissakes? For what? For all the butts every yotz throws into the street?”

  The old man nodded. “For butts, and trash, and pollution, and toxic waste dumping in the dead of night; for bushes, and cactus, and the baobab tree; for pippin apples and even lima beans, which I despise. You show me someone who’ll eat lima beans without being at gunpoint, I’ll show you a pervert!”

  Billy was screaming. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m also responsible for dogs and cats and guppies and cockroaches and the President of the United States and Jonas Salk and your mother and the entire chorus line at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. Also their choreographer.”

  “Who do your think you are? God?”

  “Don’t be sacrilegious. I’m too old to wash your mouth out with laundry soap. Of course I’m not God. I’m just an old man. But I’m responsible.”

  Gaspar started to walk away, toward the corner and the avenue, and a resumption of their route. Billy stood where the old man’s words had pinned him.

  “Come on, young fella,” Gaspar said, walking backward to speak to him, “we’ll miss the beginning of the movie. I hate that.”

  Billy had finished eating, and they were sitting in the dimness of the apartment, only the lamp in the corner lit. The old man had gone to the County Art Museum and had bought inexpensive prints—Max Ernst, Gérôme, Richard Dadd, a subtle Feininger—which he had mounted in Insta-Frames. They sat in silence for a time, relaxing; then murmuring trivialities in a pleasant undertone.

  Finally, Gaspar said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about my dying. I like what Woody Allen said.”

  Billy slid to a more comfortable position in the lounger. “What was that?”

  “He said: I don’t mind dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

  Billy snickered.

  “I feel something like that, Billy. I’m not afraid to go, but I don’t want to leave Minna entirely. The times I spend with her, talking to her, well, it gives me the feeling we’re still in touch. When I go, that’s the end of Minna. She’ll be well and truly dead. We never had any children, almost everyone who knew us is gone, no relatives. And we never did anything important that anyone would put in a record book, so that’s the end of us. For me, I don’t mind; but I wish there was someone who knew about Minna…she was a remarkable person.”

  So Billy said, “Tell me. I’ll remember for you.”

  Memories in no particular order. Some as strong as ropes that could pull the ocean ashore. Some that shimmered and swayed in the faintest breeze like spiderwebs. The entire person, all the little movements, that dimple that appeared when she was amused at something foolish he had said. Their youth together, their love, the procession of their days toward middle age. The small cheers and the pain of dreams never realized. So much about him as he spoke of her. His voice soft and warm and filled with a longing so deep and true that he had to stop frequently because the words broke and would not come out till he had thought away some of the passion. He thought of her and was glad. He had gathered her together, all her dowry of love and taking care of him, her clothes and the way she wore them, her favorite knickknacks, a few clever remarks: and he packed it all up and delivered it to a new repository.

  The very old man gave Minna to Billy Kinetta for safekeeping.

  Dawn had come. The light filtering in through the blinds was saffron. “Thank you, Dad,” Billy said. He could not name the feeling that had taken him hours earlier. But he said this: “I’ve never had to be responsible for anything, or anyone, in my whole life. I never belonged to anybody…I don’t know why. It didn’t bother me, because I didn’t know any other way to be.”

  Then his position changed, there in the lounger. He sat up in a way that Gaspar thought was important. As if Billy were about to open the secret box buried at his center. And Billy spoke so softly the old man had to strain to hear him.

  “I didn’t even know him.

  “We were defending the airfield at Danang. Did I tell you we were 1st Battalion, 9th Marines? Charlie was massing for a big push out of Quang Ngai province, south of us. Looked as if they were going to try to take the provincial capital. My rifle company was assigned to protect the perimeter. They kept sending in patrols to bite us. Every day we’d lose some poor bastard who scratched his head when he shouldn’t of. It was June, late in June, cold and a lot of rain. The foxholes were hip-deep in water.

  “Flares first. Our howitzers started firing. Then the sky was full of tracers, and I started to
turn toward the bushes when I heard something coming, and these two main-force regulars in dark blue uniforms came toward me. I could see them so clearly. Long black hair. All crouched over. And they started firing. And that goddam carbine seized up, wouldn’t fire; and I pulled out the banana clip, tried to slap in another, but they saw me and just turned a couple of AK-47s on me…God, I remember everything slowed down…I looked at those things, seven-point-six-two-millimeter assault rifles they were…I got crazy for a second, tried to figure out in my own mind if they were Russian-made, or Chinese, or Czech, or North Korean. And it was so bright from the flares I could see them starting to squeeze off the rounds, and then from out of nowhere this lance corporal jumped out at them and yelled somedamnthing like, ‘Hey, you VC fucks, looka here!’ except it wasn’t that…I never could recall what he said actually…and they turned to brace him…and they opened him up like a Baggie full of blood…and he was all over me, and the bushes, and oh god there were pieces of him floating on the water I was standing in…”

  Billy was heaving breath with impossible weight. His hands moved in the air before his face without pattern or goal. He kept looking into far corners of the dawn-lit room as if special facts might present themselves to fill out the reasons behind what he was saying.

  “Aw, geezus, he was floating on the water…aw, christ, he got in my boots!” Then a wail of pain so loud it blotted out the sound of traffic beyond the apartment; and he began to moan, but not cry; and the moaning kept on; and Gaspar came from the sofa and held him and said such words as it’s all right, but they might not have been those words, or any words.

  And pressed against the old man’s shoulder, Billy Kinetta ran on only half sane: “He wasn’t my friend, I never knew him, I’d never talked to him, but I’d seen him, he was just this guy, and there wasn’t any reason to do that, he didn’t know whether I was a good guy or a shit or anything, so why did he do that? He didn’t need to do that. They wouldn’t of seen him. He was dead before I killed them. He was gone already. I never got to say thank you or thank you or…anything!

  “Now he’s in that grave, so I came here to live, so I can go there, but I try and try to say thank you, and he’s dead, and he can’t hear me, he can’t hear nothin’, he’s just down there, down in the ground, and I can’t say thank you…oh, geezus, geezus, why don’t he hear me, I just want to say thanks…”

  Billy Kinetta wanted to assume the responsibility for saying thanks, but that was possible only on a night that would never come again; and this was the day.

  Gaspar took him to the bedroom and put him down to sleep in exactly the same way he would soothe an old, sick dog.

  Then he went to his sofa, and because it was the only thing he could imagine saying, he murmured, “He’ll be all right, Minna. Really he will.”

  When Billy left for the 7-Eleven the next evening, Gaspar was gone. It was an alternate day, and that meant he was out at the cemetery. Billy fretted that he shouldn’t be there alone, but the old man had a way of taking care of himself. Billy was not smiling as he thought of his friend, and the word friend echoed as he realized that, yes, this was his friend, truly and really his friend. He wondered how old Gaspar was, and how soon Billy Kinetta would be once again what he had always been: alone.

  When he returned to the apartment at two-thirty, Gaspar was asleep, cocooned in his blanket on the sofa. Billy went in and tried to sleep, but hours later, when sleep would not come, when thoughts of murky water and calcium night light on dark foliage kept him staring at the bedroom ceiling, he came out of the room for a drink of water. He wandered around the living room, not wanting to be by himself even if the only companionship in this sleepless night was breathing heavily, himself in sleep.

  He stared out the window. Clouds in chiffon strips across the sky. The squealing of tires from the street.

  Sighing, idle in his movement around the room, he saw the old man’s pocket watch lying on the coffee table beside the sofa. He walked to the table. If the watch was still stopped at eleven o’clock, perhaps he would borrow it and have it repaired. It would be a nice thing to do for Gaspar. The old man loved that beautiful timepiece.

  Billy bent to pick it up.

  The watch, stopped at the V of eleven precisely, levitated at an angle, floating away from him.

  Billy Kinetta felt a shiver travel down his back to burrow in at the base of his spine. He reached for the watch hanging in air before him. It floated away just enough that his fingers massaged empty space. He tried to catch it. The watch eluded him, lazily turning away like an opponent who knows he is in no danger of being struck from behind.

  Then Billy realized Gaspar was awake. Turned away from the sofa, nonetheless he knew the old man was observing him. And the blissful floating watch.

  He looked at Gaspar.

  They did not speak for a long time.

  Then: “I’m going back to sleep,” Billy said. Quietly.

  “I think you have some questions,” Gaspar replied.

  “Questions? No, of course not, Dad. Why in the world would I have questions? I’m still asleep.” But that was not the truth, because he had not been asleep that night.

  “Do you know what ‘Gaspar” means? Do you remember the three wise men of the Bible, the Magi?”

  “I don’t want any frankincense and myrrh. I’m going back to bed. I’m going now. You see, I’m going right now.”

  “‘Gaspar’ means master of the treasure, keeper of the secrets, paladin of the palace.” Billy was staring at him, not walking into the bedroom; just staring at him. As the elegant timepiece floated to the old man, who extended his hand palm-up to receive it. The watch nestled in his hand, unmoving, and it made no sound, no sound at all.

  “You go back to bed. But will you go out to the cemetery with me tomorrow? It’s important.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I believe I’ll be dying tomorrow.”

  It was a nice day, cool and clear. Not at all a day for dying, but neither had been many such days in Southeast Asia, and death had not been deterred.

  They stood at Minna’s gravesite, and Gaspar opened his shooting stick to form a seat; and he thrust the spike into the ground; and he settled onto it, and sighed, and said to Billy Kinetta, “I’m growing cold as that stone.”

  “Do you want my jacket?”

  “No, I’m cold inside.” He looked around at the sky, at the grass, at the rows of markers. “I’ve been responsible, for all of this, and more.”

  “You’ve said that before.”

  “Young fella, are you by any chance familiar, in your reading, with an old novel by James Hilton called Lost Horizon? Perhaps you saw the movie. It was a wonderful movie. It was a wonderful movie, actually much better than the book. Mr. Capra’s greatest achievement. A human testament. Ronald Colman was superb. Do you know the story?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember the High Lama, played by Sam Jaffe? His name was Father Perrault?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember how he passed on the caretakership of that magical hidden world, Shangri-La, to Ronald Colman?”

  “Yes, I remember that.” Billy paused. “Then he died. He was very old, and he died.”

  Gaspar smiled up at him. “Very good, Billy. I knew you were a good boy. So now, if you remember all that, may I tell you a story? It’s not a very long story.”

  Billy nodded, smiling at his friend.

  “In 1582 Pope Gregory XIII decreed that the civilized world would no longer observe the Julian calendar. October 4th, 1582 was followed, the next day, by October 15th. Eleven days vanished from the world. One hundred and seventy years later, the British Parliament followed suit, and September 2nd, 1752 was followed, the next day, by September 14th. Why did he do that, the Pope?”

  Billy was bewildered by the conversation. “Because he was bringing it into synch with the real world. The solstices and equinoxes. When to plant, when to harvest.”

  Gaspar waggled a finger
at him with pleasure. “Excellent, young fella. And you’re correct when you say Gregory abolished the Julian calendar because its error of one day in every one hundred and twenty-eight years had moved the vernal equinox to March 11th. That’s what the history books say. It’s what every history book says. But what if?”

  “What if what? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “What if: Pope Gregory had the knowledge revealed to him that he must readjust time in the minds of men? What if: the excess time in 1582 was eleven days and one hour? What if: he accounted for those eleven days, vanished those eleven days, but that one hour slipped free, was left loose to bounce through eternity? A very special hour…an hour that must never be used…an hour that must never toll. What if?”

  Billy spread his hands. “What if, what if, what if! It’s all just philosophy. It doesn’t mean anything. Hours aren’t real, time isn’t something that you can bottle up. So what if there is an hour out there somewhere that…”

  And he stopped.

  He grew tense, and leaned down to the old man. “The watch. Your watch. It doesn’t work. It’s stopped.”

  Gaspar nodded, “At eleven o’clock. My watch works; it keeps very special time, for one very special hour.”

  Billy touched Gaspar’s shoulder. Carefully he asked, “Who are you, Dad?”

  The old man did not smile as he said, “Gaspar. Keeper. Paladin. Guardian.”

  “Father Perrault was hundreds of years old.”

  Gaspar shook his head with a wistful expression on his old face. “I’m eighty-six years old, Billy. You asked me if I thought I was God. Not God, not Father Perrault, not an immortal, just an old man who will die too soon. Are you Ronald Colman?”

  Billy nervously touched his lower lip with a finger. He looked at Gaspar as long as he could, then turned away. He walked off a few paces, stared at the barren trees. It seemed suddenly much chillier here in this place of entombed remembrances. From a distance he said, “But it’s only…what? A chronological convenience. Like daylight saving time; Spring forward, Fall back. We don’t actually lose an hour; we get it back.”