Keep The Giraffe Burning

by Sladek, John

  a. darkly tanned

  b. athletic socks

  c. boring

  6. one night stand

  7. not applicable

  8. n/a

  9. M: a rich third

  a. needed to get drunk for it

  b. eventually, so did I

  10. O.n.s.

  11. O.n.s.

  12. S: a beautiful fourth

  a. almond eyes

  (1) ophidian eyes

  (2) parenthetical

  (A) made me think of parenthood

  (B) made me wonder about her other, multiple parentheses

  13. O.n.s.

  14. R: a seductive fifth

  a. passionate

  b. intelligent

  c. well-made

  d. but

  (1) error

  (2) stillborn son changed things

  e. suicide

  (1) I made her nervous and sleepless

  (2) the doctors gave her pills to make her sleep

  (3) she slept

  (4) with the TV on

  (A) I thought she was watching the Big Picture

  (B) Battle of the Bulge

  (C) I watched it through, not knowing

  (D) then called the doctor

  (E) but she was dead when I got there

  (F) really

  f. parenthesis closed

  g. all she wrote

  15. Suggested designation: MIL-W-84007/3)

  ‘I chose to destroy him with heart disease; he chose cancer for me. Thus far it seemed a stalemate again; each of us is drawn off against a new enemy, part of our energy and cognitive ability is thus diverted, and the significant changes in national strategic policy could now be examined.

  ‘But The Enemy loses! Though he has established a salient within my brain, my REAL soul is intact. He is at my back, but my back is protected. He is at my window, behind me at the mirror when I shave, within my blood and soul – yet it is my soul which will subsume him entirely!’

  The Master Plan has been given the above ‘tall tale’ and queried as to the nature of The Enemy. We are now awaiting significant results.

  (Seven divisions wiped out on paper! He leaned against the bar, sick with defeat. The other Junior officers at the NATO mess tactfully avoided his eye. Those who had seen the printout and the plotting board grinned, or seemed to grin.

  He had forgotten that Leap Year gives February 29 days. It was that simple: him sitting helplessly watching the plotting board, while a clerk erased his seven immobilized divisions: The Enemy leapt on Leap Day.

  (His teeth were on fire. He ran down the streets of Avalon laughing with pain. They began to pull the burning roots, and as his jaw came crumbling away they drew him into the Avalon Theatre.

  The movie was in special code. He put on the strange cardboard glasses everyone else wore and these made him invisible. ‘Gentlemen, Ruth is like the seven seas. I will translate her for you right now, if you please: Earth on earth, dust to dust. Get it?’ Her cornsilk hair rattled across his face where it was burned.)

  The razor blade cut through the silk-threads of the balsa sheet and skipped into his finger and out again. The blood was the colour of dirty bricks. He watched it drip down on the razor-nicked edge of the table. (watched the water-jug fling out a bouquet of water that hung there, shimmering. The movie was stuck or something; he got out of bed and went into the hall.

  In the barracks, he found them frozen as the dawn had taken them, in a grotesque game of ‘Statue’. One airman field-stripping a cigarette had just exposed the wet tobacco wound. Another, in the middle of shining one shoe, had tilted it to get the morning light.

  The light continued, for the sun was stopped just above the horizon – with motes frozen in the stationary beams – to permit The Enemy an extra day of battle. The General screamed out at them as the grindstone began to sing. And the God who stopped the sun over Gibeon was our own The map –

  The map showed the cancer clearly, and Captain Savage walked a pair of dividers across it. ‘The Ruth,’ he explained, ‘is right here.’ The Avalon parents association was meeting to discuss what to do about the burned boy. ‘He’s blocking up Courthouse Square!’ ‘Yes, and that hideous “face” – or whatever you call it.’

  The briefing was over, and he was up into the cockpit, off on Mission Ruth. Even on a contour map, he thought, her body was beautiful … the lines enfolding it like parentheses)

  That last night – if it were the last – he allowed Miss Nylon to turn on the TV. It began as a family comedy, and he dozed (the albino butcher). The room was dark when he woke, and Miss Nylon was nearer. Machine-guns clattered in the corridor. No, in the flickering window. ‘It’s about Guadalcanal.’ There was a strange look in Miss Nylon’s eyes. ‘If you like I can trim it off …’

  ‘No, it’s all right.’

  ‘Al! I’m hit, Al!’

  Takatakataka. ‘This is it, kid!’

  ‘You’ve certainly been grouchy, today. Is the pain …?

  ‘Al, I can’t make it! Better – unh! – better go on without me. Leave me here.’

  ‘Old Grouchy. Why, you haven’t even made a pass today, you old goat.’ Her eyes were glazed in death. She came nearer. She stood by the bed.

  ‘Leave me here, I can hold ’em off. That’s an order, soldier!’

  ‘You old, oversexed goat.’

  The rain outside was machine-gunning on the wide window. She turned to draw the curtain, and he saw the glitter of wet red lower lip.

  ‘Hey Joe! Hey Yankee pig! I coming cut your throat plitty soon now!’

  Takataka.

  ‘Sweet old grouchy goat.’) He is simply Old Grouchy to them now, the fear is over. Every once in a while there comes a mad bull to the slaughterhouse – routine. Give him the usual sedative, drag him back to the numbered room, slip him between the mitred sheets. The day he dies they will cover him with the same sheet. Then they will walk down to the clean cafeteria, and eat meat and gravy, mashed potatoes with a dab of butter, and frozen peas. Miss Nylon will leave her potatoes, and Al the intern will tell her she needn’t worry about her figure, it looks just fine …

  (Pretty Miss Nylon was taking off her white nylon uniform. The Zero came in low over the beach, probing for them with tines of fire budda-budda-budda.

  ‘Sweet.’

  ‘Christ!’

  (End of report.

  (something tells me I’ve been here before

  (‘Hi-yo, Silver! Away!’

  (all she wrote

  (The albino butcher stood there, waiting, silent. White hair and skin, white apron and shirt, white hands holding the cleaver against the grindstone. Inscrutable in his white Oriental mourning. Unfathomable.

  Chunk! ‘Full fathom five my finger lies …’

  Chunk! It didn’t hurt at all! ‘My face!’

  (Within the dreamwork, a map of Littleworld is being plotted. The General leans over it, easing wind from a good dinner. His cigar taste accents the lingering flavour of the port.

  Now he can see into it, the roofless hospital room, as a tiny Savage leans forward, ferret-eager over the dying feast.

  ‘I begin to have bloody thoughts. The blood is leaking in my brain. I am changing into something rich and strange. This is all so real the General cannot help holding his cigar well away, lest he drop ash on the tiny figures,’ says the doll in bed. ‘My marriage has failed, and now my health. It would be pleasant, very pleasant …’

  ‘Absolutely senseless at the last,’ says little Savage to little Dr

  Godden. ‘It’s a great pity. I ought really to destroy his final ruminations, to protect his reputation. But – well, regulations.’

  Smiling, the General muses that tiny Savage has his own miniature cancer. He, Cancer, has won. He finishes the inert replica’s sentence:

  ‘… to imagine that The Enemy destroyed Ruth and fed cancer to my brain. But ultimately, the responsibility is mine.’

  The face of the doll has become the colour of the fine
ash on his Extramaduro.)

  Chunk! ‘The dying man pays all debts … this is three …’

  The five senses leave him by five wounds. A solid fifth, sweet numbness of the razor-nicked wooden block.

  And it is Ruth who takes his carcass over her shoulder and carries him down to the snowy freezer. His cloven stomach enfolds her; he covers her again …)

  Anticipating his command, slime is drooling down his leg, as he drops the knife. And this is) IT!

  FLATLAND

  Dave and George sat in their cell playing checkers. The rough sunlight shone in through bars, illuminating their striped uniforms, the checkerboard, the ranks of parallel scratches on the wall that made a Crusoe calendar.

  ‘My wife sent me this cake,’ said George. ‘Want some?’

  ‘Why not?’

  Clanking the chain that bound his ankle to a large cast-iron ball, George moved to the table. He began cutting the cake, then stopped. His fingers probed, crumbling.

  ‘Hey, look!’

  George held up a crumb-flecked hacksaw blade.

  Bill read the paper at breakfast, while Mary, who had arranged her hair in curlers, poured coffee. She was opposed to capital punishment, though not unconditionally. She could not easily oppose, for example, putting to death as painlessly and humanely as possible, people who are shown to be absolute murderers, whose murderousness is invincible.

  The question continued to occupy her long after Bill had run for his bus, until a vacuum cleaner salesman, braving the BEWARE THE DOG sign,

  rang the bell. While he demonstrated an inferior machine, Mary asked if he believed in capital punishment.

  ‘I think it all depends,’ he said, sprinkling dirt on the carpet. ‘You could say that we’re begging the question already, in even calling it “punishment”. I think we should be perfectly aware of our own motives. Do we mean it to be a kind of euthanasia, do we mean it “to encourage the others”, or is it to be just simple vengeance?’ He left without finishing the cleaning operation. Mary meant to ask the postman, but this time Fido showed his advertised ferocity, driving him away.

  Trixi and Mitzi, two chorus cuties, sat before their dressing-table mirrors discussing, as usual, men. Mitzi felt that men owed much of their character to operant conditioning, a technique that worked best on rodents. She pointed out men who fawned, panted, retrieved, shook hands and wet themselves, on command. Trixi, on the other hand, felt that free will and heredity, which she referred to as racial will-to-become, were major factors, conditioning only a novel side-effect of will-to-learn. The great herd of men were, she explained, simply built upon shifting genetic sands.

  ‘You must meet Horace,’ Mitzi said. ‘He’s a funny little bald man with a big white moustache. But he’s rich.’

  ‘That sounds like Major X!’

  ‘Call me Hector, my dear,’ said the major, sweeping off his silk hat as he came in. He presented Trixi with a dozen long-stemmed roses (one is pressed in her Self-Book still) and a diamond-encrusted manacle.

  Mary and Barbara drove into the city to do a little shopping. The roads seemed crowded, and Mary noticed that most of the other drivers were women. They drove badly, making mainly mistakes of indecision, as though the whole region had been buried in existentialist snow. Mary had vivid memories of putting accordion pleats in the car’s fender herself, against the garage door. She’d been afraid to confess to Bill.

  When the two chums had finished their shopping, they took in a movie and then had tea at a Gypsy Tea Room. Just for fun, Mary had her fortune told by an old woman with gold earrings. Gazing into her crystal ball, the old woman muttered that the fate of the world was of course uncertain, but not impossible. With judicious population controls, agricultural improvements, and large-scale planning along recycling lines, the balance might yet be tipped in a positive direction. She advised Mary to have no more children, to eat less meat, to collect paper and scrap metals, and not to flush her toilet quite so often.

  Driving home, Mary and Barbara were struck by how many motorcycle police were hidden behind billboards.

  Bill seemed slightly shocked by the price Mary’d paid for her new hat. ‘I guess it’s due to the old wage-price inflation spiral, though,’ he said, lifting his feet for her passing with the vacuum cleaner. She swept away the last of the odious salesman’s dirt, and the price tag of her hat.

  Walter and Dave stood meditating upon the sales graph on the office wall. It showed a clearly declining jagged line. The Acme Vacuum Cleaner Company was entering, as Dave put it, a dark night of the soul. The question remained whether it would emerge purified and purged of its baser nature, and fit to serve its creator.

  ‘Shall we go see Mr Gordon?’

  Walter shrugged. ‘Why bother? He’ll only be sitting there with his blonde secretary Doreen on his lap, “dictating”.’

  Walter was wrong. At that moment, Doreen and Mr Gordon sat in separate chairs, to which they had been bound. Mr Gordon was tying to work his gag loose enough to use the telephone. Doreen could only stare horrified at the empty shallowness of the modern office safe, which stood open.

  Not a week later, Mitzi was implicated in a serious crime. The judge was on her side – so much could be inferred from the way he leaned over the bench to watch her cross her legs – but the jury needed more persuading. Luckily she could count upon Major X to provide a well-known and eloquent lawyer, Bill Grass.

  Summing up for the defence, Bill explained that, just as the Copernican revolution had displaced man from the centre of the universe, just as the Darwinian revolution displaced man from his privileged position in the Great Chain of Being, so too had the Einsteinian revolution destroyed man’s last assurances that size, duration and speed were real, absolute values. Bill showed how, cut loose from faith and tradition, adrift in modem anomie, Mitzi had faltered. As they moved to acquit her, many of the jury were not ashamed to weep.

  Dr Penn, wearing his white jacket and speculum, explained to Hector Gordon just what a heart attack was. Mr Gordon scarcely listened. At length he interrupted:

  ‘Listen, doctor, the important thing is, life has become intensely real. The most ordinary objects have taken on a gloss of newness, a translucency of gem mystery. For the first time, I see what the business of life really is. That speculum of yours might be a monocle, for example. The stethoscope in your hand might be a glass of pink gin. Yes, and the eye chart on the wall behind you might be a wall of trophy animal heads, arranged in order of size, beginning with the great E elephant …’

  That weekend began with Al Cullenor, the new neighbour, borrowing the lawn mower. Bill and Mary decided to take the kids to the beach. On the way, they discussed sex education quite freely in front of the children, by using a form of ‘pig latin’ Bill had learned at Law School. ‘Atureobnay ovidesobpray omanobway ithobway a uilt-inobbay atorobindicay of the imeobtay eobshay is ulatingobovay, onsistingobcay of ightobslay ampsobcray ompaniedobaccay by a inobthay aginalobvay ecretionobsay faintly coloured with oodobblay,’ Bill opined. ‘German scientists long ago learned to call this phenomenon Mittelschmerz,’ Bill opined.

  They were lost, driving in the wrong direction.

  Major X knew there must be more to life than standing here in his trophy room, drinking pink gin. Somehow the elephant and the rhino had lost their freshness; looking at the musk ox, he no longer felt the crisp thrill born when his charge slammed home …

  ‘The city, too, has its wild pulse of jungle noises,’ he told himself, ‘its secret struggles, its heart of dankness.’

  He went out into it, strolling in the noonday sum without his helmet. High on a girder, he could see steelworkers eating lunch.

  Al Cullenor straddled a girder and opened his lunch box. What he found there was so shocking that …

  Major X passed on into the park. He passed ragged George, asleep under a copy of the Wall Street Journal, and he passed the bench where N. Decting was proposing to Lida Norse. The Major found a bench of his own. It was not until he
rose from it that he realized it was freshly painted: His coat was tigered.

  ‘Marked!’ he cried, and fled. Past a blind beggar selling pencils. Past a bearded prophet whose sign advised him to Repent. Past a street vendor selling tiny wind-up dolls. On into a department-store, to the Complaint Department.

  On his way home, the Major stopped to watch a fire. A fireman made his way down a ladder, carrying a blonde named Darlene.

  They finally admitted they were lost and asked directions of a rustic in bib overalls. Leaning over a rail fence and chewing a blade of grass, he explained to them that in the ultimate sense, all directions were one. Bill and Mary Grass drove on into the desert, past the bleached skulls of cattle. A few miles from the road, though they did not know it, George was crawling in the sand, dying of thirst.

  Now and then Pa and Ma Norse looked into the living room to watch the young couple on the sofa. It was in much the same spirit that Dave had looked in, one day, on the waiting room of the patent office. A dozen men sat waiting, each holding a package of unusual shape on his lap. To Barbara, it was much the same as the other waiting room, in which Dave had waited until the nurse told him it was triplets. It was in that very hospital that Al lay recovering from his twenty-storey fall: a mass of bandages, with all four limbs held up in traction splint, to an elaborate arrangement of wires, pulleys and weights. Thus gravity would cure, he reflected, what it had caused. Walter had a table alone, in a corner of the hotel restaurant near a placard: WATCH YOUR HAT AND COAT. There was an unusual object in his soup, and Walter called the waiter’s attention to it.