Can & Can'tankerous

by Harlan Ellison

  “So, if it’s nothing, Boss, why d’you keep staring at me like I just fell off the moon or something?”

  “When was the last time you got laid, Jacobs?”

  I was truly and genuinely shocked. The man was twice, maybe three or four times my age; he walked with a bad limp from having taken an off-duty slug delivered by a kid messing with a 7-Eleven; he was married with great-grandchildren stacked in egg-crates; and he was Eastern Orthodox Catholic; and he bit his nails. And he chewed paper. I was truly, even genuinely, shocked.

  “Hey, don’t we have enough crap flying loose in this house without me having to haul your tired old ass up on sexual harassment?”

  “You wish.” He spat soggy paper into the waste basket. “So? Gimme a date, I’ll settle for a ballpark figure. Round it off to the nearest decade.”

  I didn’t think this was amusing. “I live the way I like.”

  “You live like shit.”

  I could feel the heat in my cheeks. “I don’t have to—”

  “No; you don’t. But I’ve watched you for a long time, Francine. I knew your step-father, and I knew Andy…”

  “Leave Andy out of it. What’s done is done.”

  “Whatever. Andy’s gone, a long time now he’s been gone, and I don’t see you moving along. You live like an old lady, not even with the cat thing; and one of these days they’ll find your desiccated corpse stinking up the building you live in, and they’ll bust open the door, and there you’ll be, all leathery and oozing parts, in rooms filled with old Sunday newspaper sections, like those two creepy brothers…”

  “The Collyer brothers.”

  “Yeah. The Collyer Brothers”

  “I don’t think that’ll happen.”

  “Right. And I never thought we’d elect some half-assed actor for president.”

  “Clinton wasn’t an actor.”

  “Tell that to Bob Dole.”

  It was wearing thin. I wanted out of there. For some reason all this sidebar crap had wearied me more than I could say. I felt like shit again, the way I’d felt before dinner. “Are you done beating up on me?” He shook his head slowly, wearily.

  “Go home. Get some sleep. Tomorrow we’ll start all over.” I thanked him, and I went home. Tomorrow, we’ll start all over. Right at the level of glistening black alleys. I felt like shit.

  I was dead asleep, dreaming about black birds circling a garbage-filled alley. The phone made that phlegm-ugly electronic sound its designers thought was reassuring to the human spirit, and I grabbed it on the third. “Yeah?” I wasn’t as charming as I might otherwise have been. The voice on the other end was Razzia down at the house. “The three women…them models…?”

  “Yeah, what about them?”

  “They’re gone.”

  “So big deal. They were material witnesses, that’s all. We know where to find ’em.”

  “No, you don’t understand. They’re really gone. As in ‘vanished.’ Poof! Green light…and gone.”

  I sat up, turned on the bed lamp. “Green light.”

  “Urey had ’em in tow, he was takin’ ’em down the front steps, and there was this green light, and Urey’s standin’ there with his dick in his mitt.” He coughed nervously. “In a manner’a speakin’.”

  I was silent.

  “So, uh, Lootenant, they’re, uh, like no longer wit’ us.”

  “I got it. They’re gone. Poof.”

  I hung up on him, and I went back to sleep. Not immediately, but I managed. Why not. There was a big knife with a tag on it, in a brown bag, waiting for me; and some blood simples I already knew; there were three supermodels drunk with love who now had vanished in front of everyone’s eyes; and we still had an old dead man with his head hanging by a thread.

  The Boss had no right to talk to me like that.

  I didn’t collect old newspapers. I had a subscription to Time. And the J. Crew catalogue.

  And it was that night, in dreams, that the one real love of my life came to me.

  As I lay there, turning and whispering to myself, a woman in her very early forties, tired as hell but quite proud of herself, only eleven years on the force and already a Lieutenant of Homicide, virtually unheard-of, I dreamed the dream of true love.

  She appeared in a green light. I understood that…it was part of the dream, from the things the bum Richard had said, that the women had said. In a green light, she appeared, and she spoke to me, and she made me understand how beautiful I really was. She assured me that Angie Rose and Hypatia and Camilla had told her how lovely I was, and how lonely I was, and how scared I was…and we made love.

  If there is an end to it all, I have seen it; I have been there, and I can go softly, sweetly. The one true love of my life appeared to me, like a goddess, and I was fulfilled. The water was cool and clear and I drank deeply.

  I realized, as I had not even suspected, that I was tired. I was exhausted from serving time in my own life. And she asked me if I wanted to go away with her, to a place where the winds were cinnamon-scented, where we would revel in each other’s adoration till the last ticking moment of eternity.

  I said: take me away.

  And she did. We went away from there, from that sweaty bedroom in the three-room apartment, before dawn of the next day when I had to go back to death and gristle and puzzles that could only be solved by apprehending monsters. And we went away, yes, we did.

  I am very old now. Soon I will no doubt close my eyes in a sleep even more profound than the one in which I lay when she came to release me from a life that was barely worth living. I have been in this cinnamon-scented place for a very long time. I suppose time is herniated in this venue, otherwise she would not have been able to live as long as she did, nor would she have been able to move forward and backward with such alacrity and ease. Nor would the twisted eugenics that formed her have borne such elegant fruit.

  I could have sustained any indignity. The other women, the deterioration of our love, the going-away and the coming back, knowing that she…or he, sometimes…had lived whole lives in other times and other lands. With other women. With other men.

  But what I could not bear was knowing the child was not mine. I gave her the best eternity of my life, yet she carried the damned thing inside her with more love than ever she had shown me. As it grew, as it became the inevitable love-object, I withered.

  Let her travel with them, whatever love-objects she could satisfy, with whatever was in that dirty paper bag, and let them wail if they choose…but from this dream neither he nor she will ever rise. I am in the green light now, with the machete. It may rain, but I won’t be there to see it.

  Not this time.

  AFTERWORD

  I had no idea where I was going. I let the voice that was narrating—it was first-person—narrate until I got halfway through. Then I sat back and thought, When you read a story, you read it in a man’s voice. There’s no reason for that. Unless it’s Anne of Green Gables, or Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, or it’s a YA novel where they give you Katniss Everdeen, it’s automatically a man’s voice.

  This sounded like a man, a hard-boiled detective. Let’s cross this audience up.

  Right in the middle, you realize it’s a woman. You have to go back to the beginning and read it all over again, not because anything was any different but it was a different person talking to you now. I wrote myself into a position where I had nowhere to go. So I turned left…and went where no man had gone before.

  Apparently, some time prior to 2014,

  I had had a minor stroke on the left side.

  I don’t know when.

  Two years ago,

  five years ago,

  ten years ago?

  Twenty years ago?

  But like the Energizer Bunny, I just kept

  going

  and going

  and going…

  INTRODUCTORY NOTE:

  LOOSE CANNON, OR

  RUBBER DUCKIES FROM SPACE

  “Loose Cannon” wa
s one of the great stupidities of my life. I’m really willing to accept blame for everything I do. I fuck up badly when I fuck up. And I cop to it.

  The assignment was to write a story around an illustration; it was a young black man climbing up a narrow space between two buildings, using his feet and his shoulders, and underneath him are rubber duckies. I thought, All right, I can do that.

  But I misread the instructions. It was supposed to be 100 words. I thought it said 1000 words. I mis-read my directions. I ended up with two 100-word parts. My embarrassment at having been such a schmuck that I didn’t read the instructions has lasted to this day.

  It’s a cute story; it’s not Les Misérables. No one is going to say, “I’ve seen Faust, but have you read “Rubber Duckies from Space?” It’s a jape…a gag…a gallop. Neil Gaiman wrote a brilliant introduction, included here at no extra charge.

  LOOSE CANNON

  AN INTRODUCTION BY NEIL GAIMAN

  Like you, I have no doubt, I cannot forget what I was doing the day that Harlan Ellison was killed. We knew it was coming, of course. We simply didn’t know when it would happen, or how many of them Harlan would manage to take with him. “He died,” as Lenny Bruce, who came back from the dead for one unique CNN interview, explained, “so that the rest of us could live.”

  Still, in the months and years that have followed Harlan’s burial and subsequent explosion, the world has seen an astonishing outpouring of Ellisonia: his collected letters, his unfinished stories, his unfinished letters, the astonishing Helmut Newton photographs, and the Scent for Men he was working on shortly before he announced that he was “A Cranky Old Jew Who Was Going To Do Something About It” (as the ABC biopic title had it. Richard Dreyfuss in the starring role made, perhaps the best Ellison of all the network “Harlan Ellisons,” although no one, not even Dreyfuss, was able to complain when Margaret Cho, virtually unrecognizable under the prosthetics, took home the Oscar for her role as Ellison in Quentin Tarantino’s life-affirming biopic Harlan? Put Down the Pineapple Harlan).

  Still, we knew there was one thing more. The novel. The rumored hard science-fiction novel, which Harlan had been working on since 1958. Robert Silverberg (now Saint Robert Silverberg) reported having read a 300,000-word draft in 1962, which Ellison had pronounced “Not quite ready.” In 1975 Norman Spinrad mentioned in an interview that he had read the novel, which had now reached a length of 2,000,000 words spread over an impressive seventeen volumes.

  It was at this point that Harlan famously began trimming the book down to its essentials. Troy Newsome’s early days (covering volumes one to four) were simply discarded (indeed, Ellison was rumored to have burned them during the official opening of Disneyland’s short-lived “Mass of St. Secaire”). Between 1978 and 1982 Ellison made tremendous progress: he removed the entire “love interest” plot, the stuff about aliens in Studebakers, the vast right-wing conspiracy, the vast left-wing ditto, Gordon Mushbaum, all references to Liechtenstein (except for the unavoidable description of Liechtenstein Public Library on pages 991–1021) and many adverbs.

  By 1983 progress had slowed, although Harlan succeeded in leaving Chapter 31 on a bus in Tulsa. In 1984 he actually began restoring adverbs to the text, which was, he claimed, now hopelessly corrupt (and would in fact be briefly imprisoned during May 1985 for attempting to sleep with a uniformed member of the Los Angeles police force).

  As the years went by, Ellison continued to chip away at his novel, paring away a sentence here, a scene there, a character elsewhere. It became a passion, a crusade, a calling. One night Harlan telephoned me triumphantly at two thirty AM (I was still living in the UK at the time, and it was, in his defense, only tea-time in Los Angeles) to tell me that he had managed to reduce the entire dolphin subplot to half a chapter.

  “Is that good?” I asked, groggily.

  “Good?” he said. “Why, you philistine! In 1966 the Dolphin Revolution took up volume fourteen of the novel, and was widely believed to have been uncuttable. Dorothy Parker read it and said it was the best thing she had ever read, and could I get her a packet of Chesterfields and a bottle of Johnny Walker?”

  “But if it was so good, why did you cut it?”

  He said, quietly, as if speaking to a small child, “Because it could be better.” Then he put down the phone.

  Who can forget the party Harlan threw when he got the manuscript down to 15,000 words? Ed Bryant was allowed to read it and he said it was the best thing anyone had ever written that there was not a word in the text that should not have been there. There were no adverbs. It was a triumph of concision. The partygoers threw their hats into the air with joy at the news. The celebration lasted for months. There are photographs that still turn up on the Internet from time to time. Yet even then, Harlan was not happy. “Shorter,” he said to me over the dessert tray. “Shorter is better. Trifles make perfection, but perfection is no trifle.”

  “Actually.” I said, dipping my spoon into my bowl, “This is a pretty much perfect trifle. Not too much sherry, perfect custard, really good sponge, and as for the pineapplargh.”

  It was then that I resolved not to give Harlan further literary criticism. The world was not ready. Anyway, the trifle was really only so-so.

  He pared his novel down to two hundred-word sections before he died. Had he survived another decade, he might have got it down to fifty.

  LOOSE CANNON,

  OR

  RUBBER DUCKIES FROM SPACE

  A THRILLING TWO-PART SERIAL OF 100 WORDS EACH EXACTLY

  PART ONE

  One would think, with an IQ of 236, that Troy Newsome could’ve found a less criminous occupation than second-storey cat burglar. But as he began his ascent to burgle apartment 4C, 129 Lenox Avenue, the aliens came from space and sought him out. He was only two feet off the alley floor between buildings, his back and feet wedged to provide traction, when the first rubber duckies parachuted onto Lenox Avenue.

  “Why me!?!” Troy hystericaled, when the MasterDuck advised him that they’d come two-and-a-half million light-years to turn over Planet Earth to him. “Why me!?!”

  Don’t Miss the Thrilling Part Two!!

  PART TWO

  Because, telepathed the MasterDuck, when we were engaged to seed this planet, we picked two species for highest intelligence. Since we can’t locate a dolphin at the moment, you being the second most intelligent creature on the planet, we’ve come to turn over ownership.

  Our contract is fulfilled. You’re as good as humans will ever get. I’d do something about lima beans, though, if it were my planet. And every last neoprene one of them absquatulated.

  The trouble with godhood is…first they give it to you, then you have to figure out what the hell to do with it.

  The day I had the stroke was

  the Monday following the Saturday night

  of the first manifestation.

  I was being the best man at

  Josh Olson’s bachelor party.

  It was a bad night.

  I came home in an Uber cab.

  I walked in, got undressed.

  Susan was out at The Thrilling Adventure Hour.

  She came home, said “How was the evening?”

  I said, “I felt a little woozy and came home.”

  She said, “If you don’t feel well tomorrow, stay in bed.”

  INTRODUCTORY NOTE:

  FROM A TO Z, IN THE

  SARSAPARILLA ALPHABET

  I had done an abecedarian story, “From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet,” and it went very well. Twenty-six short-short “Fredric Brown”-like little killers! A few years went by, and I decided that I was enamored with the form…so I did the next “abecedarian” sequence!

  Should it be the Vanilla Alphabet?

  The Maple Walnut Alphabet?

  The Sarsparilla Alphabet!

  Twenty-six short-short stories—a lot of them come from memory, but I have endless books of gods and deities. The letters X and Q usually give you a little trouble, but if I
can’t find one, I’ll make it up.

  I have such admiration for what Fred Brown could do in twenty-two words. Fred Brown was the absolute master of the short-short story, and I have tried to, if not emulate him, then to run in that arena. I hope to be worthy of following in his footsteps; he was an absolutely brilliant writer.

  FROM A TO Z, IN THE

  SARSAPARILLA ALPHABET

  A IS FOR ARCHON

  “One more goddam sanctimonious sound, and I swear by the Demiurge, I’ll snuff out that mealy-mouthed spark,” said #7, sipping cold coffee from a Styrofoam cup.

  “Easy…easy…” #12 said, rewinding his penis. “You’d better be grateful this cell is lead-lined. The Old Man hears that kind of bitching, you’ll be sweeping out the eyes of hurricanes for the next ten thousand years. Remember, kid, it’s just a job. When you’ve gotten as old in the game as I, well, all the hosanna and selah and blessed-be-His-name rolls off your carapace like Sterno off a bindlestiff.”

  The Archon oozed off the wall of the detention cell, dissolved into a puddle of sludge in order to rid himself of an annoying itch in his upper eyeball sphincter, and reformed beside the little tv table bearing the last of the doughnuts. He studied the pastries remaining, and muttered, “Glazed. I hate glazed. Serves us right for sending a goy to buy them. You say raised, they hear glazed. Feh.”