The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1

by Carol Emshwiller

  We’re all depressed by this news. Some of us feel sure there is something out there. Some of us have seen a flash of color out of the corners of our eyes as though the invisible had been made almost visible. We’re thinking, too, how, later, socks and underwear might return magically from under beds to be found clean and folded in a drawer, and cups of coffee could appear out of nowhere just when most needed, and the refrigerator might never run out of milk or ice cream.

  For a while I think seriously of going on by myself. Perhaps if I crept back, alone, sat quietly dressed, not in the Marine’s dress uniform, but in something that blended in. Maybe if I sat still and made no proud gestures, they’d get used to me, even eat bananas out of my hand, and come, in time, to recognize an authoritarian figure, and perhaps learn a few simple commands. But I have to obey my orders.

  Still, I want to make one more move toward these creatures. I sneak back along the trail and leave a message where it won’t be missed—something they’ll be sure to understand: A heart shape, and the words I Love You. I sit for a while and listen for sighs. I think I hear something. And I think I see something, white on white in the glitter of the snow. Invisible on purpose, that’s for sure—if there at all.

  Well, if that’s how they want it, let them live as was said: “In the shadow of man.” It serves them right.

  I ask the psychoanalyst, “Who are they, anyway?” but then I change it to, “Who are we?” He says about ninety percent of us ask that same question in one form or another, while about ten percent seem to have found some kind of answer of their own. He says that, anyway, we will remain essentially who we already are whether we bother to ask the question or not.

  Orbit 21, Harper & Row, 1980

  The Start Of The End Of It All

  FIRST THE DISTANT sound of laughter. I thought it was laughter. Kind of chuckling… choking maybe… or spasms of some sort. Can’t explain it. Scary laughter coming closer. Then they came in in a scary way; pale, with shiny raincoats and fogged glasses, sat down, and waited out the storm here. Asked only for warm water to sip. Crossed their legs with refined grace and watched late-night TV. They spoke of not wanting to end up in a museum.… neither them, nor their talismans, nor their flags, their dripping flags. They looked so vulnerable and sad… chuckling, choking sad that I lost all fear of them. They left in the morning, most of them. All but three left. Klimp, their regional director, and two others stayed.

  “It is important and salutary to speak of incomprehensible things,” they said, and so we did till dawn. They also said that their love for this planet, “this splendid planet,” knows no bounds and that they could take over with just a tiny smidgen of violence, especially as we had been softening up the people ourselves as though in preparation for them. I believed them. I saw their love for this place in their eyes.

  “But am I”—and I asked them this directly— “am I, a woman, and a woman of, should I say, a certain age, am I really to be included in the master plan?” They implied, yes, chuckling (choking), but then everyone has always tried to give me that impression (former husband especially) and it never was true before. It’s nice, though, that they said they couldn’t do it without me and others like me.

  What they also say is, “As sun to earth, so kitchen is to house, and so house is to the rest of the world. Politics,” they say, “begins at home, and most especially in the kitchen, place of warmth, chemistry, and changes, means toward ends. Grandiose plans cooked up here. A house,” they say, “hardly need be more than a kitchen and a few good chairs.” Where they come from that’s the way it is. And I agree that, if somebody wanted to take over the earth, it’s true: they could do worse than to do it from the kitchen.

  They also say that it will be necessary to let the world lie fallow and recoup for fifteen years. That’s about step number three of their plan.

  “But first,” they say (step number one), “it will be necessary to get rid of the cats.”

  Klimp! His kind did not, absolutely not, descend from apelike creatures, but from higher beings. Sky folk. We can’t understand that, he said. Their sex organs are, he told me, pure and unconnected to excretory organs in any way. Body hair in different patterns. None, and this is significant, under the arms, and, actually, what’s on their head really isn’t hair either. Just looks like it. They’re a manifestation in living form of a kind of purity not to be achieved by any of us except by artificial means. They also say that, because of what they are, they will do a lot better with this world than we do. Klimp promises me that and I believe him. They’re simply crazy about this world. “It’s a treasure,” Klimp keeps saying.

  I ask, “How much time is there, actually, till doomsday, or whatever you call it?”

  No special name, though Restoration Day or (even better) Resurrection Day might serve. No special time either. (“Might take a lifetime. Might not.”) They live like that but without confusion.

  But first, as they say, it is necessary to get rid of the cats, though I am trying to see both sides: (a) Klimp’s and his friends’ and (b) trying to come to terms with three hyperactive cats that I’ve had since the divorce. The white one is throwing up on the rug. Turns out to be a rubber band and a long piece of string.

  Of the three, Klimp is clearly mine. He likes to pass his cool hands…his always-cold hands through my hair, but if I try to sit on his lap to confirm our relationship, he can’t bear that. We’ve known each other almost two weeks now, shuffled along in the park (I name the trees), the shady side of streets, examined the different kinds of grasses. (I never noticed how many kinds there were.) He looks all right from every angle but one, and he always wears his raincoat so we don’t have any trouble.

  “I accept,” I say, when he asks me a few days later, anthropomorphizing as usual, and tired of falling in love with TV stars and newsmen or the equivalent. I put on my old wedding ring and start, then, to keep a record of the takeover, kitchen by kitchen by kitchen…

  Klimp says, “Let’s get in bed and see what happens.”

  Something does, but I won’t say what.

  I haven’t seen any of them, even Klimp, totally naked, though a couple of times I saw him wearing nothing but a teacup.

  (They read our sex manuals before beginning their takeover.)

  But willing servants (women are) of almost anything that looks or feels like male or has a raspy voice, regardless of the real sex whatever that may be, or if sex at all. And sometimes one has to make do (we older women do, anyway) with the peculiar, the alien or the partly alien, the egocentric, the disgruntled, the dissipated… But also, and especially, willing servants of things that can fly, or things, rather, that may have descended from things that could fly once or things that could almost fly (though lots of things can almost fly). But I heard some woman say that someone told her that one had been seen actually vibrating himself into the sky, arched back, hands in pockets… had also, this person said, been seen throwing money off the Ambassador Bridge. The ultimate subversion.

  Also I heard they may have already infiltrated the mayonnaise company. A great deal of harm can be done simply by loosening all the jar lids. Is this without violence! And when one of them comes up behind you on the street, grabs your arm with long, strong thumb and forefinger, quietly asking for money, and your watch, and promising not to hurt you… especially not to hurt you, then you give them. Afterward I hear they sometimes crumple the bills into their big, white pipes and smoke them on the spot. They flush the watches down toilets. This last I’ve seen myself

  But is all this without violence! Klimp takes the time to explain it to me. We’re using the same word with two somewhat different meanings, as happens with people from different places. But then there’s never any need to justify the already righteous. Sure of his own kindnesses, as look at him right now; Klimp, kiss to earlobe and one finger drawing tickly circles in the palm of my hand. He sees, he says, the Eastern Seaboard as it could be were it the kind of perfection that it should be. He says it wil
l be splendid and these are means toward that end.

  Random pats, now; in the region of the belly button. (His pats. My belly button.) Asks me if I ever saw a cat fly. It’s important. “Not exactly,” I say, “but I saw one fall six stories once and not get hurt, if that counts.”

  As we sit here, the white cat eats a twenty-dollar bill.

  I was divorced, as I mentioned. We were, all of us women who are in this thing with them, all divorced. DIVORCE. A tearing word. I was divorced in the abdomen and in the chest. In those days I sometimes telephoned just to hear “Hello.” I was divorced at and against sunsets, hills, fall leaves, and, later on in the spring, I was divorced from spring. But now; suddenly, I have not failed everything. None of us has failed. And we want nothing for ourselves. Never have. We want to do what’s best for the planet.

  Sometimes lately, when the afternoon is perfect… a pale, humid day, the kind they like the most… cool… white sky… and Klimp or one of the others (it’s hard to tell them apart sometimes, though Klimp usually wears the largest cap ... yellow plastic cap)… when the one I think is Klimp is on the lawn chair figuring how to get rid of all the bees by too much spraying of fruit trees or how best to distribute guns to the quick-tempered or some such problem, then I think that life has turned perfect already, though they keep telling me that comes later… but perfect right now, at least as far as I’m concerned. I like it with the takeover only half begun. Doing the job, it’s been said, is half the fun. To me it’s all the fun. And I especially like the importance of the kitchen for things other than mere food. Yesterday, for instance, I destroyed (at the self-cleaning setting) a bushel of important medical records plus several reference works and dictionaries, also textbooks, and a bin of brand-new maps. When I see Klimp, then, on the lawn, or all three sometimes, and all three gauzy, pale blue flags unfurled, and they’re chuckling, and whispering, and choking together, I feel as though the kitchen itself by its several motors, will take off into the air ... hum itself into the sunset, riding smoothly on a warm updraft, all its engines turned to low. I want to tell them how I feel. “Perfect,” I say. “Everything’s perfect except for these three things: wet sand tracked into the vestibule, stepping on the tails of cats, and please don’t look at me with such a steady, fishlike gaze, because when you do, I can’t read the recipes you gave me for things that make people feel good, rot the brain, and cost a lot.”

  But I shouldn’t have reminded them of the cats. They are saying again that I have to choose between the cats or them. They say their talismans are getting lost under the furniture, that some of their wafers have been found chewed on and spat out. They say I don’t realize the politics of the situation and I suppose I don’t. I never did pay much attention to politics. “You have to realize everything is political,” they say, “even cats.”

  I’m thinking perhaps I’ll take them to the state park outside of town. They’ll do all right. Cats do. Get rid of them in some nice place I’d like to be in myself by a river, near some hills ... Leave them with full stomachs. Be up there and back by evening. Klimp will be pleased.

  But look what’s coming true now! Dead cats… drowned cats washed up on the beaches. I saw the pictures on the news. Great flocks of cats, as though they had been caught at sea in a storm, or as though they had flown too far from shore and fallen into the ocean from exhaustion. Perhaps I understand even less about politics than I thought.

  I decide to please my cats with a big dish of fresh fish. (Klimp is out tonight turning up amplifiers in order to impair hearing, while the others are out pulling the hands off clocks.)

  The house has a sort of air space above the attic. If the little vent were removed, a cat could live up there quite comfortably, climbing up and down by way of the roof of the garage and a tree near it. A cat could be fed secretly outside and might not be recognized as one who lived here. It isn’t that I don’t dedicate myself to Klimp and the others. I do, but, as for the cats, I also dedicate myself to them.

  Klimp and the others come back at dawn, flags furled, tired but happy. “Job’s well done,” they say. I fill the bathtub, boil water for them to dip their wafers in. They chuckle, pat me. (They’re so demonstrative. Not at all like my husband used to be.) They move their hands in cryptic signals, or perhaps it’s nervousness. They blink at each other. They even blink at me. I’m thinking this is pure joy. Must never end. And now I have the cats and them also. I love. I love. Luff… loove . . . loofe… they can’t pronounce it, but they use the word all the time. Sometimes I wonder exactly what they mean by it, it comes so easily to their lips.

  At least I know what I mean by “love,” and I know I’ve gone from having nothing and nobody (I had the cats, of course, but I have people now) to having all the best things in life: love, and a kind of family, and meaningful work to do ... world-shaking work... All of us useless women, now part of a vast international kitchen network and I’m wondering if we can go even further. Get to be sort of a world-watching crew while the earth lies fallow. “Listen, what about us in all this?” I ask, my arm across Klimp’s barrel chest. “We’re no harm. We’re all over childbearing age. What about if we watch over things for you during the time the earth rests up?”

  He answers, “Is as does. Does as is.” (If he really loves me, he’ll do it.)

  “Listen, we could see to it that no smart ape would start leveling out hills.”

  “What we need,” he says, “are a lot of little, warm, wet places.” He tells me he’s glad the cats are no longer here. He says, “I know you love (‘luff) me now,” and wants me to eat a big pink wafer. I try to get out of it politely. Who knows what’s in it? And the ones they always eat are white. But what has made me worthy of this honor, just that the cats are no longer in view?

  “All right,” I say, “but just one tiny bite.” Tastes dry and chalky and sweet… too sweet. Klimp… but I see it’s not Klimp this time… one of the others…urges another bite. ‘’Where’s Klimp?”

  “I also love (‘luff) you,” he says and, “Time to find lots of little dark, wet places. We told you already.”

  I’m wondering what sort of misunderstanding is happening right now.

  I have a vision of a skyful of minnows… silver schools of minnows… the buzz of air… the tinkling… the glitter… my minnows flashing by. Why not? And then more and more, until the sky is bursting with them and I can’t tell any more which are mine. Somewhere a group of thirty-six… no, lots more than that… eighty-four… I’m not sure. One hundred and eight? Yes, my group among the others. They, my own, swim back to me, then swirl up and away. Forever. And forever mine. Why not?

  I wake to the sounds of sheep. I have a backyard full of them. Ewes, it turns out. They are contented. As I am. I watch the setting moon, eat the oranges and onions Klimp brings me, sip mint tea, feel slightly nauseous, get a call from a friend. Seems she’s had sheep for a couple of weeks now: Took her cats up to the state park just as I’d thought of doing and had sheep the next day, though she wishes now she had put those cats in the attic as I’ve done, hut she’s wondering will I get away with it? She wants me to come over, secretly if I can. She says it’s important. But there’s a lot of work to be done here. Klimp is talking, even now, about important projects such as opening the wild animal cages at the zoo and the best way to drop water into mailboxes and how about digging potholes in the roads? How about handing out free cartons of cigarettes? He hangs up the phone for me and brings me another onion. I don’t need any other friends.

  She calls me again a few days later. She says she thinks she’s pregnant, but we both know that can’t be true. I say to see a doctor. It’s probably a tumor. She says they don’t want her to, that they drove her car away somewhere. She thinks they pushed it off the pier along with a lot of others. I say I thought they were doing just the opposite. Switching road signs and such to get people to drive around wasting gas. Anyway, she says, they won’t let her out of the house. Well, I can’t be bothered with the delusions of ev
ery old lady around. I have enough troubles of my own and I haven’t been feeling so well lately either, tired all the time and a little sick. Irritable. Too irritable to talk to her.

  The ewes in the backyard are all obviously pregnant. They swell up fast. The bitch dog next door seems pregnant, too, which is funny because I thought she was a spay. It makes you stop and think. I wonder, what if I wanted to go out? And is my old car still in the garage? They’ve been watching me all the time lately. I can’t even go to the bathroom without one of them listening outside the door. I haven’t been able to feed the cats. I used to hate it when they killed birds, but now I hope there are some winter birds around. I think I will put up a bird feeder. I think spring is coming. I’ve lost track, but I’m sure we’re well into March now. Klimp says, “I luff, I luff,” and wants to rub my back, but I won’t let him… not any more… or not right now. Why won’t they all three go out at the same time as they used to?

  What’s wrong with me lately? Can’t sleep… itch all over… angry at nothing… They’re not so bad, Klimp and the others. Actually better than most. Always squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom, leave the toilet seat down ... they don’t cut their toenails and leave them in little piles on the night table, use their own towels usually, listen to me when I talk. Why be so angry?