If I sit very still I feel a tiny sliding movement, a tiny, snaky motion of withdrawal inward. My feet just barely touch the ground. Away goes another plane and I feel my heart lurch.
But the three hundred dollars. Has it been a half hour yet? I forgot to check the clock at the start. I will have to wait for another half hour to go by before approaching the desk. My feet dangle. I am like a girl in woman’s clothes. Anyone glancing this way will wonder who has dressed me in these woman-sized things and why. Has she lost her own clothes somewhere, they wonder. Was she in some sort of accident? Did she soil herself? Was she sick and had to wear her mother’s grown-up things? I do not think, if I went to the desk in my present condition, that they would give me the three hundred dollars at all. And even if I did have the money, would they serve me in the coffee shop? If I wait much longer I will have difficulty climbing up on their stools and it would be quite embarrassing for everyone if I continued to shrink right before their eyes as I sat there with my coffee and my sandwich. They would all know I wasn’t a bit like them then. Just as we suspected when we first saw her sitting down and watching the planes, they would all say. Just as we suspected all along.
By now I don’t even mean woman anymore. I am midget, waiting. I represent all midgets (there can’t be so very many) waiting for their midget life to turn into real life, which is, of course, indefinitely postponed. (I am becoming quite sure that they did say “indefinitely” now.)
This slithering sensation, minute as it is, makes me itch, but, here in this huge, public place (there is room for quite a few airplanes in here, should they ever wish to pull away the glass walls and wheel them in upon these polished floors), here, I do not believe I should scratch myself
My feet no longer dangle. I must slide off this chair before the drop becomes too steep. This I can manage easily within my clothes. By now people must think someone has left a new brown coat on the chair. I squat, wrapped in a stocking, under the overhanging edge of it, and in a few minutes more I am small enough to step into my satchel. There it is comfortable and dark. I curl up next to the cantaloupe and newspaper and nibble on a peanut. I had not realized it, but I am quite exhausted. I roll my stocking into a pillow and lean back upon it. Smallness, I am thinking, must be quite as comfortable as largeness. They each have their advantages. Here, snug as… as anyone might be in a soft and dark, black satchel, I fall asleep quickly.
How long I sleep, I have absolutely no idea, it may have been but a few minutes or the full clock around (and at my size time may seem different); at any rate, I wake, still within my satchel, to the movement of being carried, smoothly and with a rhythmic, wavy motion. I put my eye to the hole in the center of one of the grommets that hold the handles on. I see a sign, Lost Articles Department. Inside this large, shelved hallway, I am filed beside other satchels and suitcases of similar size and color. Well, I have my cantaloupe, my peanuts, and my newspaper. But I do see that the man here already wrinkles his nose as he comes by my shelf
No one will be coming for me. That I am sure of How long will they keep me here? Not long, for I see he has wrinkled his nose again. You don’t suppose my feet, my tiny feet can still…? What is that smell? he is thinking. I will have to search it out. Something is spoiling here in one of the packages, something just recently brought in. People just aren’t careful, he thinks. They put perishables in their suitcases and then forget them for other people to dean up. Disgusting messes. They don’t care. He thinks, perhaps I’ll just throw it out without the disagreeable task of examining it. No one could want something spoiled anyway. I won’t wait the allotted time (is it a week? a month?). Well, I just won’t wait, he thinks. Out it will go by tomorrow; sure.
Perhaps, just at the last moment, I will call out to him and he will discover me here.
How will it be, finding a not very attractive, one-foot high, completely naked woman in the lost and found department? Not so young anymore, either. (But he is not so young and quite completely bald.) How will it be finding a woman who was, to say the least, peculiar… different, even when she was of normal height?
Will he blush, seeing me? Would he take me home with him secretly, hidden in the satchel? Keep me, perhaps, in a comfortable corner of his room with a little box “for my bed and a cushion for my mattress? Of course sex will be impossible between us…
But this is ludicrous.
No. No. I will not call out. I will not… I will never reveal myself. If I have to perish at the bottom of a garbage heap, I will never call out.
Orbit 7, G.P. Putnam, 1970
Yes, Virginia
I WAS THE FIRST woman to stay awake for 206 consecutive hours in a telephone booth.
I was the first woman to sink in quicksand up to my forehead and still survive.
I was the first woman to have my face carved out of the living rock a thousand feet high.
I was the first woman to see and to assess in twenty-five words or less the Abominable Snowman from thousands of feet above sea level.
I was the first woman to copulate with a porpoise named Harry under thirty feet of water.
I was the first woman to write twenty-nine poems on love with two radios and a TV set turned on in the same room.
After an unproductive summer, I found myself at loose ends in a medium-sized midwestern town. I was (understandably) shipwrecked on an uninhabited island off the coast of California and I had taken a one-room apartment in the middle of an emotional desert over a bookstore owned by a white, middle-class and aging bachelor.
I had experienced a crisis of collective guilt.
I had thought about the universe.
I was tired.
“Give me,” I said, “informal interpersonal relationships, a rent-controlled apartment, and one little avant-garde love affair.”
“Right now,” I said, “all I might ask is to join a company of wandering street performers.” I would play both heroes and heroines. I would sing songs and do the most modem of dances rather like Yvonne Rainer’s in style. I would, I hoped, find myself surrounded by active, simple people, psychologically oriented toward the good of humanity in the best sense of the words.
(But this was not to be. At least not at this moment.)
(I just wonder sometimes why life is like that.)
Meanwhile I wandered the streets at dangerous hours of the night while thousands of Communist Chinese were staging a protest demonstration in front of the Soviet embassy and four American airmen were being detained in Cambodia.
Three flights up and turn left twice above the bookstore and I was already lost in the mist and hearing the beginnings of a number of disparate conversations. I met several creatures resembling human beings in every respect but one. (I had found my way ashore on a rubber life raft. I had brought enough Tampax to last six months. I hoped to find some sort of man Friday in a few weeks. I had seen footprints in the sand.) This would be an unusual opportunity to experience, at first hand, social customs with which I was totally unfamiliar.
I prepared for departure bright and early the next morning, hoping to take a trip into the outlying districts. I was thinking that these creatures might have an entirely different way of lovemaking. They reminded me of walruses or manatees. Sex seemed their natural element. They organized around it, read it, talked it, liberated it, rehearsed it, delayed it, policed it, entertained with it. They had thirty-three different words for fuck with all different shades of vulgarity, each one denoting a slightly different position. (They had no word for perversion.)
Under circumstances like this I think of myself as a sea slug, sea cucumber, caterpillar or soft, white-underbellied thing, psychic energy concentrated in the mucous-membranous areas. What would Antonin Artaud have thought had he seen me from some high insane asylum window, my typewriter on my back, a mechanical means of birth control in my pocket, a guttural (Artaudish) shout on my lips?
“An honest expression of the life force,” he said.
I laughed and changed the subject.<
br />
( Life is like that. )
“What I’m really waiting for,” I said, “is much more than love.”
I wanted a monument to myself in granite. I wanted my face in seven different colors. I wanted I LOVE YOU in giant red letters on top of the Museum of Modern Art. I wanted a new bridge across the Hudson in my name. I wanted a three-volume history of the Greeks dedicated to my memory. I wanted a filmed version of my life in Ektachrome commercial. I wanted the Mercedes-Benz no longer to be for Mercedes.
But I have small breasts.
I have been to the edge of the desert, to the brink of disaster. I have looked into the abyss. I have seen Medusa and told about it afterward. I have looked back and not been changed into a pillar of salt. I have married my father/mother and not put out my eyes. I have had my mother’s love withheld from me, my psychological needs not met. I have spoken the secret name of God.
And I did enter the outlying districts and suffered strange vicissitudes. These were not the cultural centers, these islands full of back roads, distant horizons and vast, featureless plains, still some things went on here, and just living over a bookstore was a romantic thing for me. I had had three or four children and this was a change. I had come a long way since then if one measures in time passed and things forgotten. Measured in microseconds, my life was already equal to the age of life on earth. I was already as old as some of the (younger) stones, and if the area I’ve covered in any given year was reduced to the size of football fields and laid end to end, I imagine it might cover Manhattan Island twice at least, or reach to Boston.
But I must have gone to sleep (or passed out) without meaning to, because when I woke up I was on the opposite shore and of quite another opinion and had already made friends with one of them in spite of myself, taming him with nuts and raisins and letting him sleep on my couch on rainy afternoons. We had made love four or five times his way, and I’m glad we did. I established the kind of contact and gained a kind of knowledge that couldn’t be had any other way. I served as an outlet for his exotic longings, he as my informant. As soon as I learned their dialect, I asked him how many moons could be in their sky at the same time at any given moment.
Many of the things they believe in are true.
We’ve all been fooled at one time or another by complicated forms of expression, by blaming the system or by negative results. We’ve all taken rowboats out on a sunny day and come home in the rain. Little things like that. We’ve all been betrayed by our own kindnesses or our satisfactions. I, myself, have hardly ever been the exception to any rule and so I may have misunderstood my informant as thoroughly as anybody might. Psychologists agree, nine out of ten people come to faulty conclusions. Wearing my white pith helmet, I’ve gone through life this way, halfway to my knees, half on tiptoe, so it’s no coincidence that I wanted to bring him back home with me, but that would have been, of course, unkind. (Our air is so much denser.) If I was to have any feeling for this little fellow creature, I must leave him in his own natural habitat to grow and develop as he himself might see fit. Besides, the governor asked me not to, saying: “How would he find happiness, or better still, real joy so far from his home islands?” Abraham Maslow might have noticed me at dawn there, weeping as I left, and he might have had many comments to make about self-actualizing people, and Marcuse might have said that I had done the right thing in the Freudian way.
So, in my short skirts, Hat-heeled shoes and sunglasses, with a bemused expression on my wind-burned face, I had said good-bye to him in a perfectly natural way, squinting at their huge red sun one last time before embarking. (I had eaten six pomegranate seeds and answered each of their questions twelve different ways. I had slept on palm fronds.) (I planned to mail him a package every other week and send a telegram confessing my love, but all of that much later….)
Theirs were strange ways, poetry as prevalent as prose, a musician in every home, aphrodisiacs directly from the jar. They have longer days off than we do, livelier looks in their eyes, blonder hair, and mine was thoroughly one of them.
I used to hold him on my lap.
But I was well aware that I would have to leave him soon and I wanted to foster all his drives outward toward his own kind and away from me. This was done the reverse of the taming procedures, again using nuts and raisins and an occasional reinforcing electric shock. I dumped him off both my lap and my couch though we did continue to have sex together, but my way. (I sometimes wonder, is Freud relevant to the lower beings? I have often felt an affinity to planarian worms, especially when they can’t make up their minds.)
A few days after returning I believe I may have met my husband in the back row of the balcony. I thought it was him. I said, “Excuse me,” and stepped on his toe. It’s hard to say if I did it on purpose or not. It was dark and I was late. I thought I felt his hand touch my breast or the inner part of my thigh. I wanted to ask him if we had ever had any children together and if we’d ever thought about them but I held myself back. “I’m sorry I stepped on your toe, Earth man,” I said (actually I really was).
Well, that was fun on a theoretical level and even the play was good but I wouldn’t want to repeat it. He is an assistant professor in a department of pure science. “Industrial research laboratories are getting all the grants,” he said. Once I asked him, “Let me see you dressed as a woman,” but he was a man of principles.
Tell me, M. Levi-Strauss, have I by chance contaminated the natives with any false ideas or forms of government that might be unacceptable to any later explorers? Did I open the windows of their minds too soon for this stage of their evolution? Did I sow seeds that would destroy their art forms before they reached their highest stages of fruition? Did I even bring in some sort of smallpox germ on my blankets? Did they really all die? Empty apartments? All the artifacts intact? (The only shreds are in the garbage cans?) The governor long since dead? The aging homosexual? Also my little friend and lover? Creature of the little, tickly, stringlike penis? My apartment over the bookstore, for all that, still intact?
I have sought to gain time. Kept out of sight for three months. I have written letters to the editors. I’ve canceled my subscription to the Realist. I’ve even thought of returning to my husband, adopting a child or getting married again to an airlines pilot or a train conductor. But what does it matter?
“I don’t mind being spit at or pissed on,” I said. “I make a lot of little slips myself.”
I may have one more thing to tell them before the trap door is opened or the sergeant of the firing squad says, “Fire.” In fact I’m sure of it. ‘Wait,” I’ll say.
Transatlantic Review, 1971
Al
SORT OF A plane crash in an uncharted region of the park.
We were flying fairly low over the mountains. We had come to the last ridge when there, before us, appeared this incredible valley….
Suddenly the plane sputtered. (We knew we were low on gas but we had thought to make it over the mountains.
“I think I can bring her in.” (John’s last words.)
I was the only survivor.
A plane crash in a field of alfalfa, across the road from it the Annual Fall Festival of the Arts. An oasis on the edge of the parking area. One survivor. He alone, AI, who has spent considerable time in France, Algeria and Mexico, his paintings without social relevance (or so the critics say) and best in the darker colors, not a musician at all yet seems to be one of us. He, a stranger, wandering in a land he doesn’t remember and not one penny of our kind of money, creeping from behind our poster, across from it the once-a-year art experience for music lovers. Knowing him as I do now, he must have been wary then; view from our poster, ENTRANCE sign, vast parking lot, our red and white tent, our EXIT on the far side, maybe the sound of a song—a frightening situation under the circumstance, all the others dead and Al having been unconscious for who knows how long? (the scar from that time is still on his cheek), stumbling across the road then and into our ticket booth.
&nbs
p; “Hi.”
I won’t say he wasn’t welcome. Even then we were wondering, were we facing stultification? Already some of our rules had become rituals. Were we, we wondered, doomed to a partial relevance in our efforts to make music meaningful in our time? And now AI, dropped to us from the skies (no taller than we are, no wider and not even quite so graceful). Later he was to say: “Maybe the artful gesture is lost forever.”
We had a girl with us then as secretary, a long-haired changeling child, actually the daughter of a prince (there still are princes), left out in the picnic area of a western state forest to be found and brought up by an old couple in the upper middle class (she still hasn’t found this out for sure, but has always suspected something of the sort), so when I asked Al to my (extra) bedroom it was too late. (By that time he had already pounded his head against the wall some so he seemed calm and happy and rather well adjusted to life in our valley.) The man from the Daily asked him how did he happen to become interested in art? He said he came from a land of cultural giants east of our outermost islands where the policemen were all poets. That’s significant in two ways.
About the artful gesture being lost, so many lost arts and also soft, gray birds, etc., etc., etc. (The makers of toe shoes will have to go when the last toe dancer dies.)
However, right then, there was AI, mumbling to us in French, German and Spanish. We gave him two tickets to our early-evening concert even though he couldn’t pay except in what looked like pesos. Second row, left side. (Right from the beginning there was something in him I couldn’t resist.) We saw him craning his neck there, somehow already with our long-haired girl beside him. She’s five hundred years old though she doesn’t look a day over sixteen and plays the virginal like an angel. Did her undergraduate work at the University of Utah (around 1776, I would say). If she crossed the Alleghenies now she’d crumble into her real age and die, so later on I tried to get them to take a trip to the Ann Arbor Film Festival together, but naturally she had something else to do. Miss Haertzler.
The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1 Page 29
