Can & Can'tankerous

by Harlan Ellison

“Ah. Yes, of course, I do indeed remember the bronze medal and how you cried. Well, let me say this, Master Charles Trimbach: you are a very nice young man. You need not be so unforgiving, of yourself, and of those for whom you labor. You have turned out to be an absolutely imperial young man, and I hold no bad cess for your having come to deliver this nasty news.”

  I handed him the envelope containing the severance check. Though how you could pay him for what must have been hundreds of years of maps, well, I don’t know, Howard; I just don’t know.

  He reached into a shelf beneath the slant-top of his desk, and removed a derby hat. He placed it carefully on his head at a rakish angle, took one last look around the shop—the greenery seemed to rustle a farewell—and he walked me to the door.

  We stepped out into the Chicago night. It was lit by a full moon. He closed the door behind us, and turned to me as he locked up. “But with all your capacity for producing a map down to the last grain of sand in the Gobi, Charlie, the sad thing is that now and forevermore no one will be able to provide the questing customer with a route to Baskerville Hall, or Riallaro, or Nimmr in the Valley of the Sepulchre. With the closing of this little oasis, Charlie, your little civilization loses for all time to come. There is no Charta Caelestis for the improbable.”

  And when I turned back to see, the shop was gone. It was now a boarded-up derelict, what had once been a deli or a place where they sold banded 12-packs of socks. Seconds.

  Abner Wonacott and I walked out into the street, left the alley, and headed toward the city lights. It was terribly cold, that special awful Chicago cold that makes you think of the end of the world. He held his derby on with one hand and hunched deeper inside his jacket. I wished I’d brought a heavier topcoat. It hadn’t been supposed to get this cold, this soon.

  “What will you do now?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “Perhaps I’ll retire somewhere nice and warm. I hear Boca is pleasant.”

  I wanted to cry. Just like that, so damned casually, I’d made everything go sour in the world. I fingered the bronze medal fob on my watch chain. I was a bad person, no matter what the old mapmaker said to ease my guilt. A bad person. I told him that. He smiled wryly and said, “Most of us think we’re more important than we really are, Charlie. The universe isn’t watching. It mostly, for the most part, doesn’t care.”

  And at that moment, before I could wallow much more in sophomoric self-pity, a stout lady with one of those wire shopping baskets on wheels came up to us, and she looked at Abner Wonacott, the one man who could actually tell you where King Kong resided, and she said, “Excuse me, mister, is there a Domenick’s around here?”

  “No, not too close,” he said. “There was an A&P for a long time, but it’s gone. I think there’s a Jewel Supermarket about a mile toward Lincoln Park, but…oh, wait a moment…yes, now that I recall, yes indeed there is a Domenick’s.

  “You’ll have to go over three blocks that way, and then go left for two more blocks to…”

  He paused, looked thoughtful for a moment, then reached into his inside jacket pocket and brought out a lovely fountain pen and a pad. “Here,” he said, “let me draw you a map.”

  And all at once, the wind wasn’t nearly as cold as it had been; and the night was not nearly as empty.

  Finally, someone said, “Are you all right?”

  And I said, “Well, I seem to be.”

  Then someone said, “Would

  you like us to help you up?”

  And I said, smartmouth to the end,

  “No, I thought I’d lie here till the

  return of the Ice Age.”

  Susan helped me up.

  I was able to walk.

  I got to bed.

  Next day: walker, wheelchair, in hospital.

  GOODBYE TO ALL THAT

  “Like a Prime Number,

  the Ultimate Punchline stands alone.”

  DANIEL MANUS PINKWATER

  He knew he was approaching the Core of Unquenchable Perfection, because the Baskin-Robbins “flavor of the month” was tunafish-chocolate. If memory served (served, indeed! if only! but, no, it did nothing of the sort…it just lay about, eating chocolate truffles, whimpering to be waited on, hand and foot) he was now in Nepal. Or Bhutan. Possibly Tanna Touva.

  He had spent the previous night at a less-than-opulent b&b in the tiny, forlorn village of Moth’s Breath—which had turned out to be, in fact, not a hostelry, but the local abattoir—and he was as yet, even this late in the next day, unable to rid his nostrils of the stultifying memory of formaldehyde. His yak had collapsed on the infinitely upwardly spiraling canyon path leading to the foothills that nuzzled themselves against the flanks of the lower mountains timorously raising their sophomore bulks toward the towering ancient massif of the thousand-peaked Mother of the Earth, Chomolungma, the pillar of the sky upon which rested the mantle of the frozen heavens. Snow lay treacherously thick and deep and placid on that celestial vastness; snow blew in ragged curtains as dense as swag draperies across the summits and chasms and falls and curved scimitar-blade sweeps of icefields; snow held imperial sway up here, high so high up here on this sacred monolith of the Himalayas that the natives called the Mother-Goddess of the Earth, Chomolungma.

  Colman suffered from poriomania. Dromomania was his curse. From agromania, from parateresiomania, from ecdemonomania, from each and all of these he suffered. But mostly dromomania.

  Compulsive traveling. Wanderlust.

  Fifty United States before the age of twenty-one. All of South America before twenty-seven. Europe and most of Africa by his thirtieth birthday. Australia, New Zealand, the Antarctic, much of the subcontinent by thirty-three. And all of Asia but this frozen nowhere as his thirty-ninth birthday loomed large but a week hence. Colman, helpless planomaniac, now climbed toward the Nidus of Ineluctable Reality (which he knew he was nearing, for his wafer-thin, solar-powered, internet-linked laptop advised him that Ben & Jerry had just introduced a new specialty flavor, Sea Monkey—which was actually only brine-shrimp-flavored sorbet) bearing with him the certain knowledge that if the arcane tomes he had perused were to be believed, then somewhere above him, somewhere above the frozen blood of the Himalayan ice-falls, he would reach The Corpus of Nocturnal Perception. Or The Abyss of Oracular Aurochs. Possibly The Core of Absolute Discretion.

  There had been a lot of books, just a lot of books. And no two agreed. Each had a different appellation for the Ultimate. One referred to it as the Core of Absolute Discretion, another the Intellectual Center of the Universe, yet a third fell to the impenetrable logodædelia of: The Foci of Conjunctive Simultaneity. Perhaps there had been too many books. But shining clearly through the thicket of rodomontade there was always the ineluctable, the inescapable truth: there was a place at the center of it all. Whether Shangri-la, or Utopia, Paradisaical Eden or the Elysian Fields, whether The Redpath of Nominative Hyperbole or The Last and Most Porous Membrane of Cathexian Belief, there was a valley, a greensward, a hill or summit, a body of water or a field of grain whence it had all come.

  A place where Colman could travel to, a place that was the confluence of the winds of Earth, where the sound of the swaying universe in its cradle of antiquity melded with the promise of destiny.

  But where it might be, was the puzzle.

  Nepal, Katmandu, Bhutan, Mongolia, Tibet, the Tuva Republic, Khembulung…it had to be up here, somewhere. He’d tried everywhere else. He’d narrowed the scope of the search to a fine channel, five by five, and at the end he would penetrate that light and reach, at last, The Corpus of Nocturnal Perception, or whatever, and then, perhaps only then, would his mad unending need to wander the Earth reach satiation.

  Then, so prayed Colman deep in the cathedral of his loneliness, then he might begin to lead a life. Home, family, friends, purpose beyond this purpose…and perhaps no purpose at all, save to exist as an untormented traveler.

  His yak had died, there on the trail; he presumed from sheer fright at the prospect of havi
ng to schlep him up that great divide, into the killing snowfields. The yak was widely known to be a beast of really terrific insight and excellent, well at least pretty good, instincts.

  Death before dishonor was not an unknown concept to the noble yak.

  Colman had tried several simple, specific, and sovereign remedies to resuscitate the imperial beast: liquor from toads boiled in oil to help reduce the fever; leaves of holly mixed with honey, burned to ash in oast ovens and rendered into syrup; the force-feeding of a live lizard tongue, swallowed whole in one gulp (very difficult, as the yak was thoroughly dead); tea made from tansy; tea made from vervain.

  Absolutely no help. The yak was dead. Colman was afoot in the killing icefields. On his way to Utopia, to Shangri-la or, at least, The Infinitely Replenishing Fountain of Mythic Supposition. There had been just a lot of books.

  He reconciled the thought: I’ll never make it with all this gear. Then, the inevitable follow-up: I’ll never make it without all this gear. He unshipped the dead noble beast and began, there on the slope, to separate the goods into two piles, seeing his chances of survival diminish with every item added to the heap on his right. He lifted his tinted goggles onto his forehead and stared with naked eye at the massif looming above him. There were more than a few hysterical flurries of snow. Naturally: there was a storm coming.

  He knew he was nearing the Heart of Irredeemable Authenticity because the happily-buzzing laptop informed him that not only had geomancy been declared the official state religion of Austria, but that Montevideo had been renamed Happy Acres. An investment banker in Montreal had been found dismembered, parts of his body deposited in a variety of public trash bins and dumpsters, but Colman didn’t think that had anything of the significant omen about it.

  The storm had broken over him, sweeping down from the pinnacles; less than two hours after he had crossed the great divide, broached the slope, and begun his ascent toward the summit now hidden by thunderheads. Abrading ground-glass flurries erupted out of crevasses; and the swirling lacelike curtains of ice and snow were cruelly driven by a demented wind. He thought he had never known cold before, no matter how cold he had ever been, never anything like this. His body moaned.

  And he kept climbing. There was no alternative. He would either reach the Corporeality of the Impossible Metaphor, or he would be discovered eons hence, when this would all be swampy lowland, by whatever species had inherited the planet after the poles shifted.

  Hours were spent by Colman coldly contemplating the possible positions his centuries-frozen (but perfectly flash-frozen) corpse might assume. He recalled a Rodin sculpture in a small park in Paris, he thought it was an hommage to Maupassant or Balzac, one or the other, and remembered the right hand, the way it curled, and the position of the fingers. He envisioned himself entombed in just that way, sculptural hand with spread fingers protruding from the ages of ice. And so, hours were spent trudging with ice-axe in hand, up the killing icefields, dreaming in white of death tableaux.

  Until he fell forward and lay still, as the storm raged over him. There was silence only in that unfrozen inner place beyond the residence of the soul.

  When he awoke, not having frozen to death at all, which eventually struck him as fairly miraculous (but, in fact, easily explained by the storm having blown itself out quickly, and the escarpment just above him providing just enough shelter), he got to his feet, pulled the staff loose from the snow pack, and looked toward the summit.

  High above him, blazing gloriously in the last pools of sunlight whose opposite incarnations were fields of blue shadow, he beheld the goal toward which he had climbed, that ultimate Utopian goal he had sought across entire continents, through years of wandering. There it was, as the books had promised: The Singular Scheme of Cosmic Clarity. The center, the core, the hub, the place where all answers reside. He had found lost Shangri-la, whatever its real name might be. He saw above him, in the clearness of the storm-scoured waning day, what appeared to be a golden structure rising from the summit, its shape a reassuring and infinitely calming sweep of dual archlike parabolas. He thought that was what the shapes were called, parabolas.

  Now there was no exhaustion. No world-weariness. He was not even aware that inside his three pairs of thermal socks, inside his crampon’d boots, all the toes of his left foot and three of his right had gone black from frostbite.

  Mad with joy, he climbed toward those shining golden shapes, joyfully mad to enter into, at last, The Sepulchre of Revealed Truths. There may have been a great many books but, oh frabjous day, they were all, every last one of them, absolutely dead on the money. The Node of Limitless Revealment. Whatever.

  It was very clean inside. Sparkling, in fact. The tiles underfoot were spotless, reflective, and calming. The walls were pristine, in hues of pastel solicitude that soothed and beckoned. There were tables and chairs throughout, and at one end a counter of some magnificent gleaming metal that showed Colman his ravaged reflection, silvered and extruded, but clearly wan and near total exhaustion. Patches of snowburned flesh had peeled away on both cheeks, chin, nose. The eyes somewhat unfocused as if coated with albumin. The Sanctum of Coalesced Revelations was brightly lit, scintillant surfaces leading the eye toward the shining bar of the magic metal counter. Colman shambled forward, dropping his ice staff; he was a thing drawn off the mountain barely alive, into this oasis of repose and cleanliness, light and succor.

  There was a man in his late thirties standing behind the gleaming metal counter. He smiled brightly at Colman. He had a nice face. “Hi! Welcome to The Fountainhead of Necessary Perplexity. May I take your order, please?”

  Colman stood rooted and wordless. He knew precisely what was required of him—each and every one of the arcane tomes had made it clear there was a verbal sigil, a password, a phrase that need be spoken to gain access to the holiest of holies—but he had no idea what that open sesame might be. The Gardyloo of Ecstatic Entrance. Wordless, Colman looked beseechingly at the counterman.

  He may have said, “Uh…”

  “Please make your selection from the menu,” said the man behind the counter, who wore a classic saffron robe and a small squared-off cardboard hat. Colman remembered a film clip of The Andrews Sisters singing “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” wearing just such “garrison caps.” The counterman pointed to the black-on-yellow signage suspended above the gleaming deck. Colman pondered the choices:

  THE OXEN ARE SLOW,

  BUT THE EARTH IS PATIENT

  CHANCE FAVORS THE PREPARED MIND

  IT TAKES A HEAP O’ LIVIN’

  TO MAKE A HOUSE A HOME

  DEATH COMES WITHOUT THE THUMPING OF DRUMS

  I LIKE YOUR ENERGY

  THE AVALANCHE HAS ALREADY STARTED;

  IT’S TOO LATE FOR THE PEBBLES TO VOTE

  EVERY CLOUD HAS A SILVER LINING

  DON’T LOOK BACK. SOMETHING MAY BE GAINING ON YOU

  YES, LIFE IS HARD; BUT IF IT WERE EASY,

  EVERYBODY WOULD BE DOING IT

  LIFE IS A FOUNTAIN

  TRUST IN ALLAH, BUT TIE YOUR CAMEL

  THE BARKING DOG DOES NO HARM TO THE MOON

  THE MAN WHO BURNS HIS MOUTH ON HOT MILK

  BLOWS ON HIS ICE CREAM

  NO ONE GETS OUT OF CHILDHOOD ALIVE

  SO NEAR, AND YET SO FAR

  MAN IS COAGULATED SMOKE FORMED

  BY HUMAN PREDESTINATION…

  DUE TO RETURN TO THAT STATE

  FROM WHICH IT ORIGINATED

  French Fries are á la carte.

  Colman drew a deep, painful breath. To get to this point, and to blow it because of a few words…unthinkable. His mind raced. There were deep thoughts he could call up from a philosophy base on the laptop, the aphorisms and rubrics of six thousand years of human existence, but it was only one of them, only one—like a prime number—that would stand alone and open to him the portals of wisdom; only one that would be accepted by this gatekeeper of Universal Oneness; only one unknown core jot of heartmeat that would serve at
this moment.

  He tried to buy himself a cæsura: he said to the saffron-robed counterman, “Uh…one of the those…‘Life is a fountain’? I know that one; you’ve got to be kidding, right? ‘Life is a fountain…’”

  The counterman looked at him with shock.

  “Life isn’t a fountain?” Colman stared at him. He wasn’t amused.

  “Just fooling,” the counterman said, with a huge smile. “We always toss in an old gag, just to mix it up with the Eternal Verities. Life should be a bit of a giggle, a little vaudeville, whaddaya think?”

  Colman was nonplussed. He was devoid of plus. He tried to buy another moment: “So, uh, what’s your name?”

  “I’ll be serving you. My name’s Lou.”

  “Lou. What are you, a holy man, a monk from some nearby lamasery? You look a little familiar to me.”

  Lou chuckled softly again, as if he were long used to the notoriety and had come to grips with it. “Oh, heck no, I’m not a holy man; you probably recognize me from a bubble gum card. I used to play a little ball. Last name’s Boudreau.” Colman asked him how to spell that, and he did, and Colman went to his rucksack, dropped on one of the tables, and he pulled out the laptop and did a Google search for the name Lou Boudreau.

  He read what came up on the screen.

  He looked at what he had read on the screen for a long time. Then he went back to the counter.

  “You were the player-manager of the World Champion 1948 Cleveland Indians. Shortstop. 152 games, 560 at bats, 199 hits, 116 runs. You were the all-time franchise leader with a .355 batting average, slugging and on-base percentages and a .987 OPS! What are you doing here, for gawdsakes?!”