Can and Can'tankerous
Page 17
In a second-floor flat in London, a man removed one of three hardbacked books from a stylish slipcase. He took the book to a large Morris chair and sat down beneath the gooseneck reading lamp. He glanced to the wall where the overflow of light illuminated a large and detailed painting of a long-extinct prehistoric lepidopteran. He smiled, addressed his attention back to the book, turned a few pages, and began reading. In a shipping office in Kowloon, a young woman badly-trained for her simple tasks placed a sheet of paper from a contract in the wrong manila folder, and for days, across three continents, “verticals” raged at one another.
Sixty-five minutes after the exchange of parcels at the Flatiron Building in New York, a 70 lb. triangular concrete cornice block did not somehow unpredictably come loose from a construction pile being hoist on pulleys above Wabash Avenue in Chicago, but a white man whose collar fit too snugly did not, also, go to his office at the international corporate office where he was a highly-paid Assessment Officer: instead, he made a dental appointment, and later in the day he removed his daughter from the private pre-school she had been attending. Nothing whatever happened in the Gibson Desert in west central Australia; nothing out of the ordinary.
In London, a man sat reading under a painting of a butterfly. For every action…
However inconsequential it may seem…
There is an equal and opposite reaction in the River of Time that flows endlessly through the universe. However unseen and utterly disconnected it may seem.
Every day, in Rio de Janeiro, late in the afternoon, there occurs a torrential downpour. It only lasts a few minutes, but the wet, like bullets, spangs off the tin roofs of the favellas beneath the statue of Christ the Redeemer. On this day, at the moment nothing was happening in the Gibson Desert, the rain did not fall, the Avenida Atlantica was dry and reflective. Pernambuco had hail.
Later that day, a trumpet-player in a fusion-rock band in Cleveland, Ohio heard from a distant cousin in Oberlin, who had borrowed fifty dollars for a down-payment on a Honda Civic ten years earlier and had never bothered to repay him. She said she was sending a check immediately. He was pleased and told the story to his friend, the lead guitarist in the group. Four hours later, during a break in that night’s gig, sitting in just a clue y’know, a woman unknown to either of them drifted up between them, smiled and inquired, “How are ya?” And in the course of a few minutes’ conversation both the guitarist and the trumpet player recounted the unexpected windfall of the stale fifty dollar repayment. They never saw her again. Never.
Even later that day, a hanging ornament from a 4th Century BCE Dagoba stupa originally from Sri Lanka, missing from a museum in Amsterdam since 1964, was mailed to a general post office box in Geneva, Switzerland stamped STOLEN PROPERTY ADVISE INTERPOL. Stamped in red. Hand-stamped. At the Elephant Bar of the Bangkok Marriott, a Thai businessman was approached by the bartender, extending a red telephone. “Are you Mr. Mandapa?” The gentleman looked up from his gin sling, nodded, and took the receiver. “Hello yes; this is Michael Mandapa…” and he listened for a few seconds, smiling at first. “I don’t think that’s possible,” he said, softly, no longer smiling. Listened, then: “Not so soon. I’ll need at least a week, ten days, I have to…” He went silent, listened, his face drew taut, he ran the back of his free hand across his lips, then said, “If it’s raining there, and it’s monsoon, you will do what you have to do. I’ll try my best.”
He listened, sighed deeply, then put the phone back in its cradle on the bartop. The bartender noticed, came, and picked up the red telephone. “Everything okay?” he said, reading the strictures of Mr. Mandapa’s face. “Fine, yes, fine,” Mr. Mandapa replied, and left the Elephant Bar without tipping the man who had unknowingly saved his life.
Somewhere, much earlier, a man stepped on, and crushed beneath his boot, a dragonfly, a Meganeura.
The next morning, at eight AM, four cars pulled up in front of a badly-tended old house in Fremont, Nebraska. Weeds and saw-grass were prevalent. The day was heavily overcast, even for a month that usually shone brightly. From the first car, a Fremont police cruiser, stepped a man wearing a Borsalino, and from beside and behind him, three uniformed officers of the local police force. The second car bore two Nebraska State Troopers; and in the third car were a man and a woman in dark black suits, each carrying an attaché case. The fourth car’s doors opened quickly, wings spread, and four large men of several colors emerged, went around and opened the trunk, and took out large spades and shovels. The group advanced on the house, the Sheriff of Fremont, Nebraska leading the phalanx.
He knocked on the sagging screen door three times.
No one came to the closed inner door. He knocked again, three times. An elderly white woman, stooped and halting and gray, and dusted with the weariness of difficult years, opened the inner door a crack and peered at the assemblage beyond the screen door. Her tone was mid between startled and concerned: “Yes?”
“Miz Brahm?”
“Uh, yeah…”
“We’re here with a search warrant and some legal folks, that lady and gentleman there…” He nodded over his shoulder at the pair of black suits, “…they’ve been okay’d by the Court to go through your propitty, lookin’ for some books your son took to sell on ebay or whatever, for a lady back East in New York. Is Billy here?”
“Billy don’t live here no more.” She started to close the door. The Sheriff pushed his palm against the screen door, making an oval depression. “I asked you if Billy was here, Ma’am.”
“Nuh-uh.”
“May we come in, please?”
“You g’wan, get offa my property!”
At the same moment Miz Brahm was ordering the Sheriff of Fremont, Nebraska off her porch, in Mbuji-Mayi, near the Southern border between The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia, a representative of Doctors Without Borders found his way to a small vegetable garden outside three hut-residences beyond a wan potato field. He carried two linen-wrapped packages, and when a nut-brown old man appeared at the entrance to the largest hut, he extended the small parcels, made the usual obeisance, and backed away quietly. Miz Brahm was still arguing with the Nebraska State Troopers and the men with shovels, and the duo in black suits, but mostly with the Sheriff of Fremont, Nebraska, nowhere near Zambia. There was, however, thunder in the near-distance and darkening clouds. The air whipped frenziedly. A drop of rain spattered on a windshield.
The argument would not end. Inevitably, the officers of the law grew impatient with diversionary answers, and yanked the screen door away from its rusted latch. It fell on the porch, Miz Brahm tried to push the front door closed on the men, but they staved her back, and rushed in. Shouts, screaming ensued.
A hairy, unshaven man with three pot-bellies charged out of a back hall, a tire iron double-fisted behind his head; he was yowling. One of the State Troopers clotheslined him, sending him spawling onto his back in the passageway. Miz Brahm kept up a strident shrieking in the background; one of the attorneys—when attention was elsewhere—chopped her across the throat, and she settled lumpily against a baseboard.
“That ain’t Billy,” Miz Brahm managed to gargle, phlegm and spittle serving as consonants. “Thas his broth-er!”
One of the Troopers yelled, “Let’s get ’em both!” He pulled his sidearm and snarled at the downed tri-belly, “Where’s yer brother?”
“You ain’t gonna take neither of ’em!” screamed the old lady: a foundry noon-whistle shriek; she was pulling a rusty hatchet out from behind a chifferobe. The Trooper kneecapped her. The hatchet hit the linoleum.
Four hours later two of the men with shovels, who had been stacking and restacking magazines, digging out rat nests and spading up rotted floorboards, found Billy hiding in the back corner of the last storage quonset behind the property. He tried to break through the wall, and one of the laborers slammed the spade across the back of his head. The search went on for the rest of that day, into the next, before the attorneys were satisfied. The wee
d-overgrown property was a labyrinth filled with tumbling-down shelves and closets, bookcases, cardboard boxes piled so high that the ones on the bottom had been crushed in: vintage pulp fiction magazines, comic books in Mylar sleeves, corded sheaves of newspapers, and the forty-seven pieces Billy had cozened out of the old woman Back East.
The next day, the entire family was in custody, and at the same time, but eight hours later by the clock, Greenwich Mean Time, the man in London who had been reading “The Red-Headed League” closed the book, looked long at the wonderful painting of an ancient butterfly above the mantel, smiled and said, “Ah, so that’s how it all comes together. ‘Omne ignotum pre magnifico.’ Clever.”
This story is dedicated to the memory
of my friend, Ray Bradbury.
AFTERWORD
“He Who Grew Up Reading Sherlock Holmes” was a conflation of the winds of time blowing exactly at that moment when I was able to do it—I’d finally gotten smart enough to do that story, and the people who wanted a story were exactly the people for whom that story had to be written.
As I wrote it, it unfolded before me. When I got done, I went back to go over it very carefully; I’d been writing it so fast I had left out a word or two, and when I added the word, it all came together. I realized at the end that this is what Churchill called “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” It is a Chinese puzzle box of a story. The first clue is in the title.
It’s not a statue that you can walk around and look at. It’s like looking at Picasso’s Guernica; it is something other than poster art. This story goes on and on and on. Go back to it again and again. It’s supposed to perplex you until you’ve unraveled it.
Everybody says,
“Oh, my god! The recovery’s been miraculous!
It’s the same Harlan.”
Well, it’s not.
I’m discovering impairments.
When you ask me a question, instead of
being succinct and answering it directly,
I go the long way ’round Robin Hood’s barn.
I’m d r i f t i n g
That’s one of the symptoms of the stroke—
I drift a lot;
all the tales seem interlocking now.
Chronology of Books by Harlan Ellison®
1958-2015
RETROSPECTIVES:
ALONE AGAINST TOMORROW: A 10-Year Survey [1971]
THE ESSENTIAL ELLISON: A 35-Year Retrospective (Edited by Terry Dowling, with Richard Delap & Gil Lamont) [1987]
THE ESSENTIAL ELLISON: A 50-Year Retrospective (Edited by Terry Dowling) [2001]
UNREPENTANT: A Celebration of the Writing of Harlan Ellison (Edited by Robert T. Garcia) [2010]
The Top of the Volcano: The Award-Winning Stories of Harlan Ellison [2014]
OMNIBUS VOLUMES:
THE FANTASIES OF HARLAN ELLISON [1979]
DREAMS WITH SHARP TEETH [1991]
THE GLASS TEAT & THE OTHER GLASS TEAT [2011]
GRAPHIC NOVELS:
DEMON WITH A GLASS HAND (Adaptation with Marshall Rogers) [1986]
NIGHT AND THE ENEMY (Adaptation with Ken Steacy) [1987]
VIC AND BLOOD: The Chronicles of a Boy and His Dog (Adaptation by Richard Corben) [1989]
HARLAN ELLISON’S DREAM CORRIDOR, Volume One [1996]
VIC AND BLOOD: The Continuing Adventures of a Boy and His Dog (Adaptation by Richard Corben) [2003]
HARLAN ELLISON’S DREAM CORRIDOR, Volume Two [2007]
PHOENIX WITHOUT ASHES (Art by Alan Robinson and John K. Snyder III) [2010/2011]
HARLAN ELLISON’S 7 AGAINST CHAOS (Art by Paul Chadwick and Ken Steacy) [2013]
THE HARLAN ELLISON DISCOVERY SERIES:
STORMTRACK by James Sutherland [1975]
AUTUMN ANGELS by Arthur Byron Cover [1975]
THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE by Terry Carr [1976]
ISLANDS by Marta Randall [1976]
INVOLUTION OCEAN by Bruce Sterling [1978]
NOVELS:
WEB OF THE CITY [1958]
THE SOUND OF A SCYTHE [1960]
SPIDER KISS [1961]
SHORT NOVELS:
DOOMSMAN [1967]
ALL THE LIES THAT ARE MY LIFE [1980]
RUN FOR THE STARS [1991]
MEFISTO IN ONYX [1993]
COLLABORATIONS:
PARTNERS IN WONDER: Collaborations with 14 Other Wild Talents [1971]
THE STARLOST: Phoenix Without Ashes (With Edward Bryant) [1975]
MIND FIELDS: 33 Stories Inspired by the Art of Jacek Yerka [1994]
I HAVE NO MOUTH, AND I MUST SCREAM: The Interactive CD-Rom (Co-Designed with David Mullich and David Sears) [1995]
“REPENT, HARLEQUIN!” SAID THE TICKTOCKMAN (Rendered with paintings by Rick Berry) [1997]
2000X (Host and Creative Consultant of National Public Radio episodic series) [2000–2001]
HARLAN ELLISON’S MORTAL DREADS (Dramatized by Robert Armin) [2012]
THE DISCARDED (With Josh Olson) [Forthcoming]
AS EDITOR:
DANGEROUS VISIONS [1967]
NIGHTSHADE & DAMNATIONS: The Finest Stories of Gerald Kersh [1968]
AGAIN, DANGEROUS VISIONS [1972]
MEDEA: HARLAN’S WORLD [1985]
DANGEROUS VISIONS (The 35th Anniversary Edition) [2002]
JACQUES FUTRELLE’S “THE THINKING MACHINE” STORIES [2003]
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS:
THE DEADLY STREETS [1958]
SEX GANG (As “Paul Merchant”) [1959]
A TOUCH OF INFINITY [1960]
CHILDREN OF THE STREETS [1961]
GENTLEMAN JUNKIE and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation [1961]
ELLISON WONDERLAND [1962]
PAINGOD and Other Delusions [1965]
I HAVE NO MOUTH & I MUST SCREAM [1967]
FROM THE LAND OF FEAR [1967]
LOVE AIN’T NOTHING BUT SEX MISSPELLED [1968]
THE BEAST THAT SHOUTED LOVE AT THE HEART OF THE WORLD [1969]
OVER THE EDGE [1970]
ALL THE SOUNDS OF FEAR (British publication only) [1973]
DE HELDEN VAN DE HIGHWAY (Dutch publication only) [1973]
APPROACHING OBLIVION [1974]
THE TIME OF THE EYE (British publication only) [1974]
DEATHBIRD STORIES [1975]
NO DOORS, NO WINDOWS [1975]
HOE KAN IK SCHREEUWEN ZONDER MOND (Dutch publication only) [1977]
STRANGE WINE [1978]
SHATTERDAY [1980]
STALKING THE NIGHTMARE [1982]
ANGRY CANDY [1988]
ENSAMVÄRK (Swedish publication only) [1992]
JOKES WITHOUT PUNCHLINES [1995]
BCE 3BYKN CTPAXA (ALL FEARFUL SOUNDS) (Unauthorized Russian publication only) [1997]
THE WORLDS OF HARLAN ELLISON (Authorized Russian publication only) [1997]
SLIPPAGE: Precariously Poised, Previously Uncollected Stories [1997]
KOLETIS, KES KUULUTAS ARMASTUST MAAILMA SLIDAMES (Estonian publication only) [1999]
LA MACHINE AUX YEUX BLEUS (French publication only) [2001]
TROUBLEMAKERS [2001]
PTAK OEMIERCI (THE BEST OF HARLAN ELLISON) (Polish publication only) [2003]
DEATHBIRD STORIES (expanded edition) [2011]
PULLING A TRAIN [2012]
GETTING IN THE WIND [2012]
Coffin Nails [2015]
Pebbles from the Mountain [2015]
Can & Can’tankerous [2015]
NON-FICTION & ESSAYS:
MEMOS FROM PURGATORY [1961]
THE GLASS TEAT: Essays of Opinion on Television [1970]
THE OTHER GLASS TEAT: Further Essays of Opinion on Television [1975]
THE BOOK OF ELLISON (Edited by Andrew Porter) [1978]
SLEEPLESS NIGHTS IN THE PROCRUSTEAN BED (Edited by Marty Clark) [1984]
AN EDGE IN MY VOICE [1985]
HARLAN ELLISON’S WATCHING [1989]
THE HARLAN ELLISON HORNBOOK [1990]
BUGF#CK! T
he Useless Wit & Wisdom of Harlan Ellison (Edited by Arnie Fenner) [2011]
LI’L HARLAN AND HIS SIDEKICK CARL THE COMET [2013]
SCREENPLAYS & SUCHLIKE:
THE ILLUSTRATED HARLAN ELLISON (Edited by Byron Preiss) [1978]
HARLAN ELLISON’S MOVIE [1990]
I, ROBOT: THE ILLUSTRATED SCREENPLAY (based on Isaac Asimov’s story-cycle) [1994]
THE CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER [1996]
FLINTLOCK [2014]
MOTION PICTURE (DOCUMENTARY):
DREAMS WITH SHARP TEETH (A Film About Harlan Ellison produced and directed by Erik Nelson) [2009]
ON THE ROAD WITH HARLAN ELLISON:
ON THE ROAD WITH HARLAN ELLISON (Vol. One) [1983/2001]
ON THE ROAD WITH HARLAN ELLISON (Vol. Two) [2004]
ON THE ROAD WITH HARLAN ELLISON (Vol. Three) [2007]
ON THE ROAD WITH HARLAN ELLISON: HIS LAST BIG CON (Vol. Five) [2011]
ON THE ROAD WITH HARLAN ELLISON: THE GRAND MASTER EDITION (Vol. Six) [2012]
AUDIOBOOKS:
THE VOICE FROM THE EDGE: I HAVE NO MOUTH, AND I MUST SCREAM (Vol. One) [1999]
THE VOICE FROM THE EDGE: MIDNIGHT IN THE SUNKEN CATHEDRAL (Vol. Two) [2001]
RUN FOR THE STARS [2005]
THE VOICE FROM THE EDGE: PRETTY MAGGIE MONEYEYES (Vol. Three) [2009]
THE VOICE FROM THE EDGE: THE DEATHBIRD & OTHER STORIES (Vol. Four) [2011]
THE VOICE FROM THE EDGE: SHATTERDAY & OTHER STORIES (Vol. Five) [2011]
Ellison Wonderland [2015]