Orbit 2 - Anthology

by Edited by Damon Knight

  “There’s a discrepancy here,” said Dr. Corte. “If the persons are separate, how can you change from one to another?”

  “I do not change from one person to another,” said Diogenes. “There have been three different Diogenes’ lecturing you here in series. Fortunately, my colleagues and I, being of like scientific mind, work together in close concert. We have made a successful experiment in substitution acceptance on you here this evening. Oh, the ramifications of this thing! The aspects to be studied. I will take you out of your narrow gestalt-two world and show you worlds upon worlds.”

  “You talk about the gestalt-two complex that we normally belong to,” said wife Regina, “and about others up to gestalt nine, and maybe a hundred. Isn’t there a gestalt one? Lots of people start counting at one.”

  ‘There is a number one, Regina,” said Diogenes. “I discovered it first and named it, before I realized that the common world of most of you was of a similar category. But I do not intend to visit gestalt one again. It is turgid and dreary beyond tolerating. One instance of its mediocrity will serve. The people of gestalt one refer to their world as the ‘everyday world.’ Retch quietly, please. May the lowest of us never fall so low! Persimmons After First Frost! Old Barbershop Chairs! Pink Dogwood Blossoms in the Third Week of November! Murad Cigarette Advertisements!!”

  Diogenes cried out the last in mild panic, and he seemed disturbed. He changed into another fellow a little bit different, but the new Diogenes didn’t like what he saw either.

  “Smell of Wet Sweet Clover!” he cried out. “St. Mary’s Street in San Antonio! Model Airplane Glue! Moon Crabs in March! It won’t work! The rats have run out on me! Homer and Homer, grab that other Homer there! I believe he’s a gestalt six, and they sure are mean.”

  Homer Hoose wasn’t particularly mean. He had just come home a few minutes late and had found two other fellows who looked like him jazzing his wife Regina. And those two mouth men, Dr. Corte and Diogenes Pontifex, didn’t have any business in his house when he was gone either.

  He started to swing. You’d have done it too.

  Those three Homers were all powerful and quick-moving fellows, and they had a lot of blood in them. It was soon flowing, amid the crashing and breaking-up of furniture and people-—ocher-colored blood, pearl-gray blood, one of the Homers even had blood of a sort of red color. Those boys threw a real riot!

  “Give me that package of coriander seed, Homer,” wife Regina said to the latest Homer as she took it from his pocket. “It won’t hurt to have three of them. Homer! Homer! Homer! All three of you! Stop bleeding on the rug!”

  Homer was always a battler. So was Homer. And Homer.

  * * * *

  “Stethoscopes and Moonlight and Memory—ah—in Late March “ Dr. Corte chanted. “Didn’t work, did it? I’ll get out of here a regular way. Homers, boys, come up to my place, one at a time, and get patched up when you’re finished. I have to do a little regular medicine on the side nowadays.”

  Dr. Corte went out the door with the loopy run of a man not in very good condition.

  “Old Hairbreadth Harry Comic Strips! Congress Street in Houston! Light Street in Baltimore! Elizabeth Street in Sydney! Varnish on Old Bar-Room Pianos! B-Girls Named Dotty! I believe it’s easier just to make a dash for my house next door,” Diogenes rattled off. And he did dash out with the easy run of a man who is in good condition.

  “I’ve had it!” boomed one of the Homers—and we don’t know which one—as he was flung free from the donnybrook and smashed into a wall. “Peace and quiet is what a man wants when he comes home in the evening, not this. Folks, I’m going out and up to the corner again. Then I’m going to come home all over again. I’m going to wipe my mind clear of all this. When I turn back from the corner I’ll be whistling Dixie and I’ll be the most peaceful man in the world. But when I get home, I bet neither of you guys had better have happened at all.”

  And Homer dashed up to the corner.

  * * * *

  Homer Hoose came home that evening to the g.c.— everything as it should be. He found his house in order and his wife Regina alone.

  “Did you remember to bring the coriander seed, Homer, little gossamer of my fusus?” Regina asked him.

  “Ah, I remembered to get it, Regina, but I don’t seem to have it in my pocket now. I’d rather you didn’t ask me where I lost it. There’s something I’m trying to forget. Regina, I didn’t come home this evening before this, did I?”

  “Not that I remember, little dolomedes sexpunctatus.”

  “And there weren’t a couple other guys here who looked just like me only different?”

  “No, no, little cobby. I love you and all that, but nothing else could look like you. Nobody has been here but you. Kids! Get ready for supper! Papa’s home!”

  “Then it’s all right,” Homer said. “I was just daydreaming on my way home, and all that stuff never happened. Here I am in the perfect house with my wife Regina, and the kids’ll be underfoot in just a second. I never realized how wonderful it was. ahhhhnnn!!! you’re not regina!!”

  “But of course I am, Homer. Lycosa Regina is my species name. Well, come, come, you know how I enjoy our evenings together.”

  She picked him up, lovingly broke his arms and legs for easier handling, spread him out on the floor, and began to devour him.

  “No, no, you’re not Regina,” Homer sobbed. “You look just like her, but you also look like a giant monstrous arachnid. Dr. Corte was right, we got to fix that hole on the corner.”

  “That Dr. Corte doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Regina munched. “He says I’m a compulsive eater.”

  * * * *

  “What’s you eating papa again for, mama?” daughter Fregona asked as she came in. “You know what the doctor said.”

  “It’s the spider in me,” said mama Regina. “I wish you’d brought the coriander seed with you, Homer. It goes so good with you.”

  “But the doctor says you got to show a little restraint, mama,” daughter Fregona cut back in. “He says it becomes harder and harder for papa to grow back new limbs so often at his age. He says it’s going to end up by making him nervous.”

  “Help, help!” Homer screamed. “My wife is a giant spider and is eating me up. My legs and arms are already gone. If only I could change back to the first nightmare! Night-Charleys under the Beds at Grandpa’s House on the Farm! Rosined Cord to Make Bull-Roarers on Hallowe’en! Pig Mush in February! Cobwebs on Fruit Jars in the Cellar! No, no, not that! Things never work when you need them. That Diogenes fools around with too much funny stuff.”

  “All I want is a little affection,” said Regina, talking with her mouth full.

  “Help, help,” said Homer as she ate him clear up to his head. “Shriek, shriek!”

  <>

  * * * *

  Kit Reed, a young Connecticut newspaperwoman, received a $22,000 award from the Abraham Woursell Foundation in 1965. She is the author of two novels, Mother Isn’t Dead She’s Only Sleeping (Houghton Mifflin) and At War With Children (Farrar, Straus).

  The most memorable thing said by anybody at the Milford Writers’ Conference a few years ago was Carol Emshwiller’s “Inside every fat person is a thin person screaming to be let out.” Now Mrs. Reed, who was not there, has unexpectedly inverted this epigram. . . .

  * * * *

  THE FOOD FARM

  By Kit Reed

  So here I am, warden-in-charge, fattening them up for our leader, Tommy Fango; here I am laying on the banana pudding and the milkshakes and the cream-and-brandy cocktails, going about like a technician, gauging their effect on haunch and thigh when all the time it is I who love him, I who could have pleased him eternally if only life had broken differently. But I am scrawny now, I am swept like a leaf around comers, battered by the slightest wind. My elbows rattle against my ribs and I have to spend half the day in bed so a gram or two of what I eat will stay with me, for if I do not, the fats and creams will vanish, burned
up in my own insatiable furnace, and what little flesh I have will melt away.

  Cruel as it may sound, I know where to place the blame.

  It was vanity, all vanity, and I hate them most for that. It was not my vanity, for I have always been a simple soul; I reconciled myself early to reinforced chairs and loose garments, to the spattering of remarks. Instead of heeding them I plugged in, and I would have been happy to let it go at that, going through life with my radio in my bodice, for while I never drew cries of admiration, no one ever blanched and turned away.

  But they were vain and in their vanity my frail father, my pale, scrawny mother saw me not as an entity but a reflection on themselves. I flush with shame to remember the excuses they made for me. “She takes after May’s side of the family,” my father would say, denying any responsibility. “It’s only baby fat,” my mother would say, jabbing her elbow into my soft flank. “Nelly is big for her age.” Then she would jerk furiously, pulling my voluminous smock down to cover my knees. That was when they still consented to be seen with me. In that period they would stuff me with pies and roasts before we went anywhere, filling me up so I would not gorge myself in public. Even so I had to take thirds, fourths, fifths and so I was a humiliation to them.

  In time I was too much for them and they stopped taking me out; they made no more attempts to explain. Instead they tried to. think of ways to make me look better; the doctors tried the fool’s poor battery of pills; they tried to make me join a club. For a while my mother and I did exercises; we would sit on the floor, she in a black leotard, I in my smock. Then she would do the brisk one-two, one-two and I would make a few passes at my toes. But I had to listen, I had to plug in, and after I was plugged in naturally I had to find something to eat; Tommy might sing and I always ate when Tommy sang, and so I would leave her there on the floor, still going one-two, one-two. For a while after that they tried locking up the food. Then they began to cut into my meals.

  That was the crudest time. They would refuse me bread, they would plead and cry, plying me with lettuce and telling me it was all for my own good. My own good. Couldn’t they hear my vitals crying out? I fought, I screamed, and when that failed I suffered in silent obedience until finally hunger drove me into the streets. I would lie in bed, made brave by the Monets and Barry Arkin and the Philadons coming in over the radio, and Tommy (there was never enough; I heard him a hundred times a day and it was never enough; how bitter that seems now!). I would hear them and then when my parents were asleep I would unplug and go out into the neighborhood. The first few nights I begged, throwing myself on the mercy of passers-by and then plunging into the bakery, bringing home everything I didn’t eat right there in the shop. I got money quickly enough; I didn’t even have to ask. Perhaps it was my bulk, perhaps it was my desperate subverbal cry of hunger; I found I had only to approach and the money was mine. As soon as they saw me, people would whirl and bolt, hurling a purse or wallet into my path as if to slow me in my pursuit; they would be gone before I could even express my thanks. Once I was shot at. Once a stone lodged itself in my flesh.

  At home my parents continued with their tears and pleas. They persisted with their skim milk and their chops, ignorant of the life I lived by night In the daytime I was complaisant, dozing between snacks, feeding on the sounds which played in my ear, coming from the radio concealed in my dress. Then, when night fell, I unplugged; it gave a certain edge to things, knowing I would not plug in again until I was ready to eat. Some nights this only meant going to one of the caches in my room, bringing forth bottles and cartons and cans. On other nights I had to go into the streets, finding money where I could. Then I would lay in a new supply of cakes and rolls and baloney from the delicatessen and several cans of ready-made frosting and perhaps a flitch of bacon or some ham; I would toss in a basket of oranges to ward off scurvy and a carton of candy bars for quick energy. Once I had enough I would go back to my room, concealing food here and there, rearranging my nest of pillows and comforters. I would open the first pie or the first half-gallon of ice cream and then, as I began, I would plug in.

  You had to plug in; everybody that mattered was plugged in. It was our bond, our solace and our power, and it wasn’t a matter of being distracted, or occupying time. The sound was what mattered, that and the fact that fat or thin, asleep or awake, you were important when you plugged in, and you knew that through fire and flood and adversity, through contumely and hard times there was this single bond, this common heritage; strong or weak, eternally gifted or wretched and ill-loved, we were all plugged in.

  Tommy, beautiful Tommy Fango, the others paled to nothing next to him. Everybody heard him in those days; they played him two or three times an hour but you never knew when it would be so you were plugged in and listening, hard every living moment; you ate, you slept, you drew breath for the moment when they would put on one of Tommy’s records, you waited for his voice to fill the room. Cold cuts and cupcakes and game hens came and went during that period in my life, but one thing was constant; I always had a cream pie thawing and when they played the first bars of “When a Widow” and Tommy’s voice first flexed and uncurled, I was ready, I would eat the cream pie during Tommy’s midnight show. The whole world waited in those days; we waited through endless sunlight, through nights of drumbeats and monotony, we all waited for Tommy Fango’s records, and we waited for that whole unbroken hour of Tommy, his midnight show. He came on live at midnight in those days; he sang, broadcasting from the Hotel Riverside, and that was beautiful, but more important, he talked, and while he was talking he made everything all right. Nobody was lonely when Tommy talked; he brought us all together on that midnight show, he talked and made us powerful, he talked and finally he sang. You have to imagine what it was like, me in the night, Tommy, the pie. In a while I would go to a place where I had to live on Tommy and only Tommy, to a time when hearing Tommy would bring back the pie, all the poor lost pies...

  Tommy’s records, his show, the pie . . . that was perhaps the happiest period of my life. I would sit and listen and I would eat and eat and eat. So great was my bliss that ii became torture to put away the food at daybreak; it grew harder and harder for me to hide the cartons and the cans and the bottles, all the residue of my happiness. Perhaps a bit of bacon fell into the register; perhaps an egg rolled under the bed and began to smell. All right, perhaps I did become careless, continuing my revels into the morning, or I may have been thoughtless enough to leave a jelly roll unfinished on the rug. I became aware that they were watching, lurking just outside my door, plotting as I ate. In time they broke in on me, weeping and pleading, lamenting over every ice cream carton and crumb of pie; then they threatened. Finally they restored the food they had taken from me in the daytime, thinking to curtail my eating at night. Folly. By that time I needed it all, I shut myself in with it and would not listen. I ignored their cries of hurt pride, their outpourings of wounded vanity, their puny little threats. Even if I had listened, I could not have forestalled what happened next

  I was so happy that last day. There was a Smithfleld ham, mine, and I remember a jar of cherry preserves, mine, and I remember bacon, pale and white on Italian bread. I remember sounds downstairs and before I could take warning, an assault, a company of uniformed attendants, the sting of a hypodermic gun. Then the ten of them closed in and grappled me into a sling, or net, and heaving and straining, they bore me down the stairs. I’ll never forgive you, I cried, as they bundled me into the ambulance. I’ll never forgive you, I bellowed as my mother in a last betrayal took away my radio, and I cried out one last time as my father removed a hambone from my breast: I’ll never forgive you. And I never have.

  It is painful to describe what happened next. I remember three days of horror and agony, of being too weak, finally, to cry out or claw the walls. Then at last I was quiet and they moved me into a sunny, pastel, chintz-bedizened room. I remember that there were flowers on the dresser and someone watching me.

  “What are you in for?” sh
e said.

  I could barely speak for weakness. “Despair.”

  “Hell with that,” she said, chewing. “You’re in for food.”

  “What are you eating?” I tried to raise my head.

  “Chewing. Inside of the mouth. It helps.”

  “I’m going to die.”

  “Everybody thinks that at first. I did.” She tilted her head in an attitude of grace. “You know, this is a very exclusive school.”

  Her name was Ramona and as I wept silently, she filled me in. This was a last resort for the few who could afford to send their children here. They prettied it up with a schedule of therapy, exercise, massage; we would wear dainty pink smocks and talk of art and theater; from time to time we would attend classes in elocution and hygiene. Our parents would say with pride that we were away at Faircrest, an elegant finishing school; we knew better— it was a prison and we were being starved.

  “It’s a world I never made,” said Ramona, and I knew that her parents were to blame, even as mine were. Her mother liked to take the children into hotels and casinos, wearing her thin daughters like a garland of jewels. Her father followed the sun on his private yacht, with the pennants flying and his children on the fantail, lithe and tanned. He would pat his flat, tanned belly and look at Ramona in disgust. When it was no longer possible to hide her, he gave in to blind pride. One night they came in a launch and took her away. She had been here six months now, and had lost almost a hundred pounds. She must have been monumental in her prime; she was still huge.