Can & Can'tankerous

by Harlan Ellison

  But they began dating on the sly, catching a double-bill during the Haya Harareet Film Festival at the Luxor multiplex, flogging fellahs and feeding the pieces to Nubian lions, sneaking out for a smoke behind the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut; and in general carrying on the way young people in love have carried on since Ra was only a twinkle in the cosmic egg.

  And finally, it became clear to Osiris that he had to come clean; that he could not stumble through eternity without Isis Luanne Jane Marie at his side. So he sat her down one evening in front of the baboon paintings at Tuna Gebel, where they had gone to eat because they’d heard that Gebel made the best tuna in pita anywhere in the Twin Kingdoms, and he told her he was from this wealthy family in Upper Egypt, and his mother was Mut, and if they were ever to be as one they would have to go and see his mother to get her blessing.

  At first Isis was beside herself. She wept and tried to run off, but Osiris held her and soothed her and told her he loved her more than sliced papyrus, and finally she was able to sob a question. “What about your father? Wouldn’t he intercede for us?” And Osiris thought about his dad, who spent most of his time worrying about wheat and barley, and figuring out ways to con Osiris into coming into the family business, and he replied, “Much as I love Amon, I think Pop ain’t going to be much help. Mom’s got him pretty well whipped. I don’t think he’s ever gotten past the vulture head. You know, they were sort of betrothed at birth kind of thing.”

  But they knew what had to be done, and so they went to see Mut.

  It had been a particularly shitty day for Mut, that day they came, what with the sun halting in the heavens again, and the plague of murrain, and so when Osiris appeared in the throne room with Isis, Mut gave a little shriek with two of her three heads, shaking her plumes of truth. “Where the hell did she come from?!” she demanded. She was clearly distraught.

  “You know my beloved?” Osiris cried.

  “Know her…?” Mut screamed, “Of course I know her, you ignorant twit! She’s your goddam sister!”

  “Oops,” said Osiris.

  “Don’t tell me you did it!” Mut howled. One look at the young lovers was enough. “Oh, name of the Trinitarian,” Mut lamented, “no wonder I can’t get the sun to work properly. You useless brat. I told your father sending one of the twins away wouldn’t be enough, but oh no, not him, Mr. Soft Hearted!”

  And she proceeded to strike Osiris dead. And Isis fell to her knees and tried to bring him back to life. And she tried real hard, she really did; but nothing. Naught. Zip. Yet her power was formidable, and she gave birth to their child right there in the throne room.

  And Horus was looked upon by his grandmother Mut, and he was found comely in her eyes, and eventually she got it on with him, and when they cast the movie Mut was slapped around by Jack Nicholson till she admitted, “He’s my husband…he’s my grandson…he’s my husband…he’s my grandson…he’s my husband and my grandson,” and John Huston got off clean, no indictment at all, and the sequel lost a fortune.

  N IS FOR NIDHOOG

  Amos Gaskill met the only tree on Skillet Six Mile Flats neck-first. It was a stunted, ugly thing, the only tree out there on Skillet Six Mile Flats: it came thrusting up out of the hardpan at a fifty-degree angle, its roots aboveground like a junkheap of a thousand wicker chairs broken and cast abandoned, black and tangled, clots of hairy dirt embedded in the coils, the roots twisted and joined the bloated ugly thick and oily trunk in gnarled sutures that could be imagined as charred open mouths sucking at pregnant bark; without leaf or bud, crippled limbs bent and flung in corrupt shapes against the gray sky; like a famously scorched corpse, all black and sooty, tormented in design, blighted in every particular; a single desperate shape gasping for life in blasted flatland.

  They had to cut the rope by a third, and retie the knot, before they looped it over the topmost branch: at its original length, circling the black neck of Amos Gaskill, as black as the bole of the unlovely tree, he would have been standing on the chapped, cracked earth, the rope hanging limply past his shoulder. And even when they had cut it by a third, and retied the hangman’s knot, and pulled him up tight, the best they could get was the toes of his work-boots barely scraping the hardpan, making irregular slashes in the ground as he choked and struggled and swung himself to and fro trying to get his legs to stretch that quarter of an inch so he might stand, and stop choking, and not die. But all he got was a shallow furrow below each boot, and the spittle and gagging and swollen tongue.

  They passed the bottle of McCormick bourbon from man to man, till all four had depleted the aquifer by half. They scratched and squatted and shifted from foot to foot, all the while fascinated by the dying. Amos Gaskill was their first activity, and for a black guy who’d had the misfortune to stop at an ATM while they were sitting in the bank’s parking lot around five in the morning, drinking and bragging about how they were going to make America a White Man’s Nation once again, he was doing the dying pretty impressively.

  Amos Gaskill seemed determined not to choke to death. He kept swinging, kept gagging, twisted even though his eyes had rolled back to show elephant ivory, twisted around and then spun back again; but wouldn’t die. In fact, they had tied the knot so ineptly, had placed it so incorrectly, that even had they dropped him from a height, with his toes not scraping the gray claypan every time he moved, his neck would not have snapped, his breath would not have been cut off. They were simply too new at this business, and weren’t very good workmen to begin with. In fact, had they wanted to do it properly, they might have hired Amos Gaskill to assist them: he was a master carpenter, cabinetmaker, bricklayer, and all-around excellent, meticulous handyman. He would have rigged the garrote imperially.

  They muttered among themselves, why the hell don’t he die, but Amos Gaskill all white-orbed and tendon-stretched, continued to thrash and tremble and almost snarl around his swollen tongue. And then they heard the faint ratchet sounds of rats nibbling beneath them. Not rats, no, perhaps not rats, too strong and getting louder to be rats; probably a prairie dog or a family of prairie dogs, maybe a mole, or a snake moving in its tunnel. And the sounds grew louder, with a peculiar echoing quality, like a twopenny nail being scraped along the stainless steel wall of a wind-tunnel or caisson sunk deep in the earth; like a vibration from the core coming to the surface. And the ground trembled, and the claypan fractured in tiny running-lines like the smile wrinkles on an octogenarian’s face, and the rifts grew wider, deeper, and the dirt thrust up—a mound of it right under Amos Gaskill’s feet, and he was able to stand, gasping, his eyes reappearing—and the limbs of the tree writhed as the kraken woke and slithered up the well, Hvergelmir, and broke the surface first with its many-nostriled snout, sniffing the dry heat of the Skillet Six Mile Flats, and then one eye on a twisting, moist stalk, looking around wildly for what had done the quickening, what had done the awakening, and then a portion of the head, immense and lumpy and gray as the dust itself, and then the rest of it, Nidhogg, Nidhoog, Nidhug, the gnawing life at the root of life, and it came forth in full, cracking their faces like cheap plastic, letting the blood run down its jerking shape to water the roots, and it dipped the limb till the rope slipped off, and it stared balefully at Amos Gaskill, and considered diet for a heartbeat, and then withdrew, leaving spasmed earth in its wake.

  And Amos Gaskill gathered the pieces of the leaders of the White Man’s Nation, and those that were not dry and could not be stacked by hand he spaded up with a shovel from the back of the little red pickup truck in which they’d brought him from the bank’s parking lot very early that morning, and some of the pieces were simply too small or soggy, so he left them to rot in the heat, and he drove away from the lone tree in the middle of Skillet Six Mile Flats.

  To be canny rulers of the White Man’s Nation, one must know the answer to the question why the hell don’t he die, which is: never lynch a man on Yggdrasil, the ash tree that is the foundation of the universe, the life tree at whose roots forever dwells and
noshes the insatiable Nidhug.

  Only fools try to kill someone on the tree of life.

  O IS FOR ONI

  From the NEW LAROUSSE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MYTHOLOGY: “Oni: invisible devil-demons, whose presence may be detected because they sing, whistle, or talk…”

  O, I got plenty of Oni,

  and Oni’s plenty for me.

  I got my Yin, I got my Yang,

  I got my supernaturally.

  Thass me…

  O-neeeee…

  Yass, I got plenny of Oni,

  An’ Oni’s the gaki fer me!

  (Refrain, second verse, up-tempo.)

  P IS FOR PHOENIX

  The sightseeing bus to Paradise had left nearly an hour earlier, when the tourists from Billings, Montana came wandering back to the Fountain of Youth. Bernie sat on the lowermost branch of the Tree of Life, overlooking the Fountain, using an emery board on his talons and regularly preening his feathers. He watched their approach from the East, and thought to himself, Here we go again.

  The husband and wife came trudging to the edge of the pool that surrounded the Fountain of Youth, and the woman sat down in the sand, and emptied her spectator pumps. Her husband, a corpulent man in his fifties, removed his straw hat, pulled a soiled handkerchief from his hip pocket, and swabbed at his sweating brow. He bent to take a drink from the Fountain.

  “Probably not a terrific idea,” Bernie said, spreading his wings and fluffing through the range of scarlet into gold.

  The tourist looked up. “Beg your pardon?”

  “What I said,” said the Phoenix, “is that it’s not in your best interests to take a drink from this pool.”

  “We’ve been walking across the desert for about three hours,” the man said. “I assume the tour bus left without us.” The Phoenix nodded, aimed a wingtip toward the West.

  “Well, a fine howdoyoudo that is,” the wife of the tourist said, herself a tourist. “Just take off and abandon us without so much as a by-your-leave.”

  “They waited almost an hour,” Bernie said. “The bus driver said something about having to get back for the Apocalypse, or somesuch. To be fair, though, they really couldn’t provide any sort of ‘by-your-leave,’ because you weren’t here.”

  “Three hours,” the man said. “Three hours in the desert, walking back, just because one of the other people on the tour, I think an orthodontist from Beirut, said we could see the remains of the last four or five levels of the Tower of Babel if we walked over thataways.”

  “And you believed him?” Bernie asked, trying to restrain his amusement.

  “Well…”

  “And how much did he stick you for the map?” the Phoenix said.

  “Map? What map?”

  “Then what was it?”

  “Er, uh, you mean the key?”

  “Oh, that’s sensational,” Bernie said, unable to restrain himself any longer. “A key? He sold you a key? To what?”

  “To the secret door in the base of the Tower of Ba—” He stopped. “You’re trying to tell me we were hoodwinked?”

  “Fleeced is more like it,” the Phoenix said. “You know how many millennia it’s been since that idiot Tower crumbled into dust?” He flicked his golden wings imperiously, impressively.

  The tourists from Billings, Montana looked woebegone.

  “What we’re talking here,” said Bernie, “is a real case of malfeasance on the job. Contract went to the lowest bidder, of course; which—in the case of a high-rise should make you more than a bissel nervous, if you catch my drift—meant that there was too much sand in the mix, the design was sloppy, they hadn’t even invented stressed concrete at that point; and forget the rebar. It was a very lousy job, but since nobody spoke the same language, who knew?”

  “And it fell down?” the wife asked.

  “Ka-boom.”

  “A long time ago, right?” her husband said.

  “We’re talking millennia, kiddo.”

  “Well, that’s it, then,” the man said. “We lay out fifty dollars for a key to something that doesn’t exist; and we miss getting back to our bus, and now you’re telling me that I shouldn’t even take a drink, something I desperately need after three hours in the goddam desert? And who, may I ask, are you?”

  “Phoenix,” Bernie said. “But you can call me Bernie; even my enemies call me Bernie.”

  “Why aren’t you ashes?” the wife asked.

  Bernie gave her a look. Arched eyebrows. Querulous mien. “That’s not till I make my exit. Very impressive, but not just yet, thank you. I’m only seven hundred and thirty-two. I’ve got at least another good two hundred and fifty in me.”

  The man edged closer to the pool.

  “Then you go poof?” the wife asked.

  “According to the rules, there can only be one Phoenix at a time,” Bernie said. Then, lightheartedly, “There can only be one Minneapolis at a time, also, but that’s another story.” He chuckled, and added, “Get away from the pool, buddy.”

  The tourist from Billings stopped creeping toward the water of the Fountain of Youth, and looked up at the Phoenix. “So you’re the one and only Phoenix…at the moment.”

  “Indeed,” Bernie said. “My predecessor, Achmed, lived to be nearly a thousand years old. Nice chap. Bit stuffy, but what the hell can you expect from a Fundamentalist. Not a lot of laughs in their religion.”

  “I need a drink,” the woman said.

  “As I told your husband—I presume this gentleman is your spouse, yes?—it is really not a spectacular idea to drink from the pool.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because this is the Fountain of Youth, m’dear; and if you drink from it, not only will you get younger, but you’ll live forever. What we, in the Phoenix game, call immortality.”

  The tourists from Billings, Montana looked at each other; and in a flash, or possibly a flash and a half, before Bernie could say anything more, they flung themselves forward; faces immersed in the silvery water of the pool that eternally refilled itself from the Fountain of Youth, they drank and drank, and drank deeply. Occasionally, a water belch would break the surface.

  When they rose, the bloom of youth was in their cheeks. Magnolias. Or possibly phlox.

  They stood, tall and strong-limbed, with the gleam of far horizons in their eyes. The wife put her shoes on; the husband clapped the straw hat on his head; with a wink and a nod, the husband turned and began to stride off toward the West. His wife smiled up at Bernie, gave him a small salute, and said, “Take care of yourself, Bernie,” and she strode off after her husband.

  Bernie sat there picking his teeth with a talon, fluffing back down from gold to scarlet, and sighed a deep seven hundred and thirty-two year sigh. “There’s one born every minute,” he said, to no one in particular.

  The Phoenix smiled, and drifted off into a pleasant doze in which he would reflect on the ramifications of the genes of the gullible polluting the pool.

  Q IS FOR QIONG-SHI

  It was night again, and the vampire was on the prowl. San Francisco’s Chinatown was roiling with fog. The dim and ominous shapes of buildings seemed to slip in and out of the real world as vagrant light from lampposts filtered through breaks in the swirling gray mist shroud.

  Hopping at a regular pace, arms outstretched before it, the qiong-shi sought a fresh victim. Up Powell, down Grand, back and forth through narrow alleys, the vampire hopped, a pale, cadaverous nightmare in moist, fog-clinging funereal robes. At the corner of Kerouac Alley and Columbus Avenue the prowl car spotted him, bouncing high and landing lightly.

  They turned on the gumball machine and slewed to a stop crosswise across the alley mouth. Compensating for the bulk of the prowl car, the vampire came down at an impossible angle, and hit the wall of the building. He fell to his knees, and crouched there, trembling, arms outstretched, eyes glaring at nothing.

  The officers leapt from the car, threw down on him, and ordered him to hug the pavement. The qiong-shi got to his feet unstead
ily, a great bloodless gash across his sulphur-colored forehead, and bounced toward the cops. The rookie fired a warning shot, and the sergeant commanded the suspect to stop.

  But the vampire was already in the air, descending in a great looping arc toward the pair. When he hit, they were there, and the sergeant had his baton at ready.

  They beat the shit out of the vampire for a considerable time, knocking him to the pavement every time he hopped up. It went on for the better part of a half hour, all of it being filmed by camcorders in the hands of one hundred and thirteen residents of the neighborhood, and a television cameraman circling overhead in a chopper.

  When it came to trial, the Chinese-American Protective League and three tong gangs paid for the best attorneys in the state, and the vampire got only two years up at Pelican Bay for assaulting an officer. Or two.

  Apart from his special dietary needs—without a doubt Q was a moveable feast—the qiong-shi comported himself well, became the bitch of a serial razor-killer named Mojo Paw, and was paroled into a halfway house after only sixteen months.

  Rehabilitation was swift, the vampire responded to group analysis, and later ran for public office.

  He lost. Big. His opponent, an ex-tv talk show host, beat heavily on the theme: Be Careful What You Vote For, You Might Get It!