by Sladek, John
He stood up and reached in his pocket.
‘Your money’s no good,’ said the druggist.
Count the Number of Beans in this Jar
I’ll kill him, thought Jeanne, painting her toenails Kotton Kandy. The right foot smeared on the bed. Going on and leaving me without anything to read.
When the polish had dried, she slipped on her sandals and the peasant skirt and the acetate blouse, and went next door to the Sof-Top Ice Cream stand. The rays of the setting sun made her white blouse glow pink. She drank a cup of coffee at the picnic table and watched the sunset. Mosquitoes clung to the warmth of her arms. The girl behind the counter read The New Liz, wetting her thumb to turn the pages. A motorcycle went by, and the rider waved to the girl behind the counter. She did not look up. It was dark enough for Jeanne to remove the sunglasses she’d bought in Paris, but she left them in place. Fritz is at Nola’s, she assured herself. Nothing can possibly happen.
Astonishing and Unbelievable!
The parade came by the bunting-draped platform slowly at first; a file of doll-buggies draped in bunting. Little girls dressed in white pushed bunting-draped buggies containing plastic dolls past the platform of wood, draped in bunting. Some of the little girls cried, and their mothers removed them from the parade. Others glided smoothly past, walking to an invisible rhythm, pushing buggies past the mayor, the grinning sheriff, the grinning wife of the mayor, the sheriff’s wife, Bud Goslin, and the Astronaut.
The Astronaut wore a dress uniform and saluted when the flag went by. The Millgrove High School band went by, playing ‘Them Bases’. The Astronaut, seeing his country’s flag, saluted it, and the flag was carried by, along with the flag of Millgrove High School, green and red. A woman across the Street wore Jeanne’s french sunglasses, the Astronaut saw.
A series of antique cars passed, each one exactly like the one before. Then came a float depicting the Harvest Festival: corn and pumpkins spilling out of a cornucopia held by Betty Mason, queen of the Harvest Festival. The American Legion followed, marching to some invisible, inaudible rhythm of their own, and the Astronaut saluted his country’s flag.
The crowd gathered around the bunting-draped platform, while the mayor raised and lowered the adjustable microphone several times.
‘Testing,’ he breathed cautiously into it, and an unearthly howl went up from the loudspeakers. Bud Goslin dropped to one knee beside the amplifier box. Light blazed from his glasses. He stood up.
‘Testing,’ said the mayor once more, and his amplified voice shouted from the speakers. Chuckling, he added, ‘Five, four, three, two, one.’ The crowd laughed.
‘Well, I hope everyone is having a good time, here,’ said the mayor. ‘I know I am.’
A hundred pairs of silver sunglasses tilted to look at him. ‘Yes, we’re here to celebrate our tenth annual Harvest Festival, and if you ain’t having a good time, I say it’s your own darned fault!’ The crowd smiled.
‘We have with us a young man I’m sure all of you know. A boy who was born right here in Millgrove, a real down-to-earth fella –’ He paused, while the crowd laughed very hard.
‘– seriously though, a boy who represents all that is fine about our town, a boy who has done more, seen more, and I guess travelled more than any of us ever will: Our Astronaut!’
The crowd clapped.
‘Bud Goslin here – Bud Goslin – ’ said the mayor over their noise, ‘– Bud has written a little poem in Our Astronaut’s honour. Bud?’
The druggist stood up, looking ashamed, and read rapidly from a paper:
Our Astronaut
He soars far upward in the night,
He comes back safe, to our greatest delight.
He’s the finest boy that Millgrove has got,
So let’s give a big cheer for our Astronaut!
Bud sat down amid mild applause.
‘And now, Mr Fenner, Hal Fenner of the High School English Department, has another poem for our boy,’ said the mayor. Mr Fenner was quite young, but had a moustache. His poem was untitled.
‘Hail to thee, blithe astronaut,’ it began. After a number of puzzling references to the Confederate dead, it finished, ‘… blazing a heavenly trail!’
‘And now a word from our guest of honour,’ the mayor announced. The Astronaut walked militarily to the microphone and waited until the applause died.
‘I don’t know what you came out here to hear,’ he said. ‘Let me start like this:
‘All this pigshit you hear about astronauts is so much fucking – uh – shit. What the fuck, a guy goes up inside this little metal room, see, it don’t mean a fuck of a lot. Any fucking body could do it, you see what I mean?’
‘Look out, mister,’ said a hoarse voice at his feet. ‘There’s a lot of women here.’
‘They put you through a lot of fucking tests and all, but what the fuck. Any fucking asshole with two eyes and two hands could operate the cocksucker. Fucking A. All you got is this fucking little –’
‘You tell ’em, captain,’ said a young man in a motorcycle jacket. He had his arm around the woman in the french sunglasses. The grinning sheriff was no longer grinning.
‘– this fucking little board with some motherfucking little red and green lights on it, see? And you just throw switches to keep the green lights on. Christ-all-fucking-mighty, even this cocksucking fairy teacher, with his blithe fucking spirit, could operate the fucker.’
The sheriff stood up, as a man in mirror sunglasses yelled, ‘We don’t talk that way in front of ladies, Mister.’ The entire crowd was murmuring, not listening now, but only trying to see what was going to happen to him.
‘He’s drunk!’ a woman screamed.
The sheriff got a hammer lock on the Astronaut and eased him away from the microphone. The mayor came forward and adjusted it several times, saying, ‘Well, folks, I guess our boy was still flying too high, heheh.’ He was preparing to entertain them with a few imitations, when he discovered he still held the large, wooden, gold-painted key. He walked back to drop it disgustedly on the empty seat, and stood for a moment, watching the Astronaut and the sheriff descend from the platform. The mayor returned to the microphone, saying, ‘Speaking of high flyers, have you ever heard a chicken hawk? I guess most of you have, and he sounds something like this:’
Then the mayor screamed.
THE COMMENTARIES
1. The Lost Wind, by Stefan Berg
Reviewed by Lionel Eps
Berg loved word-play. As his diary shows, he fiddled with intricate word-games through his last days at San Esteban prison. The diary itself remains to be published; perhaps when it is, some light will be shed upon the ‘conspiracy’ theory so beloved of Mr Grice.
The Lost Wind plays not only with words, but with itself. Joycean paronomasia is one thing, but what are we to make of lines like these:
shine handy donor fucks, halters,
coarsely talls
A Mr Oops laminates set animal spoor,
Ma.
No authory tease are so convincting as
the evidunce of I’s i’s.
The decipherment effort is often not worth the result, the games not worth the tangle.
We are in no better luck in understanding the story. Presumably it is someone’s journal (whose?) though we never learn whose (mine?). The narrator is imprisoned, or waiting to be born, or locked in a mental ward, or one of the other tiresome excuses for a long, boring ‘experiment’, and he is of course a novelist. This is supposed to be his diary (and how much more to the point it would have been to have given us Berg’s actual diary!), and it contains several scrappy novel plots and even plots within plots.
One loses the whole thread amid surreal nonsense, anecdotes about some pre-posthumous tribe called the Iructu, fake ‘reviews’ of unwritten works, and of course a dream. Nowhere is it explained what the title zephyr is, if anything. The whole is so filled with empty puns, misprints and weak jokes that finally one is tempted to call the lost wind a sp
arrow fart an afflatus to retitle it a Breaking Wind not to care if it is a hurricaine or a sparrow fart.
2. The Lost Wind, by Steven Burg
Reviewed – by H. Truice
It is surprising that so eminent a critic as Mr Eps cannot understand this novel, and that he pretends to be perplexed even by simple palindromes and lines such as
thine sandy honor ducks, falters,
hoarsely calls
The Lost Wind is a chinese box of a novel, a tidy though intricate palimpsest, a cry of hope and despair, mouthed by a man condemned, as are we all. The wind that blows through this thinking reed can make it sing. Far from a bit of literary self-abuse, this is a darksome mirror, a foil-etched overview of mankind – here symbolized by the Iructu tribe. As we all know, the Iructu have no word for ‘man’, but use a native vegetable word in its place.
Appropriately enough, the novel ends in the prison cafeteria, where everyone is eating dessert.
3. The Lost Wind, by S. Burke
Reviewed by C. Grice
Through the lens of a handful of comic reviews, Burke reveals his well-wrought and deep-running novel, the story of an imprisoned writer known only as G.
G, condemned to death, plans a last novel, though there will be no time to write it. The story is that of a disturbed man, a writer named Garber. The significance of this name becomes apparent at once; Garber dotes his fantasies as a dream from which he awakens and begins to write. We are not told what the dream is until the end.
Garber’s novel, The Conspiracy, concerns three writers who meet at a seaside convention: Eps, Griver and Barge. Griver is very old and very famous, yet somehow unsatisfied. He has long dreamt of creating an artificial historical event, a ‘history within the interstices of History’. Eps is a middle-aged hack and amateur anthropologist who wishes to someday write a book about a fictitious tribe called the Iructu. Barge is a young poet with a correspondingly larger dream: the invention of an undiscovered land, complete with flora and fauna (‘he could see bowers of red frimsia, fragrant parson’s shoe, and the ancient ground-clinging bridesblood’).
The three agree to collaborate on a mammoth scheme: Each will write his dream book, and each will allude directly and indirectly to those of the others. Together they will create a new world.
Griver expresses misgivings; at 96 he has not long to live, and there is some doubt he will complete his part of the project.
Here there is a compound hiatus in the manuscript(s). Garber’s telephone rings and continues ringing as he tries to ignore it. G’s guard comes to tell him his last appeal has failed. The story of Garber ducks, falters, hoarsely calls to him, and then is swept on. Here too there is a hiatus in the
as G’s head is being shaved, he has Garber answer the phone. Long-distance from Porlock, Maine. The three in The Conspiracy appear to have succeeded, for the public is beginning to speculate about the reality of the Iructu, their land, their history. It is unclear how Garber wrote all this while the phone went on ringing – perhaps this is a different time – but he answers it:
‘A person from Porlock!’ Garber carved; ‘Self!’
‘I’m kidding, it’s me, Hannah.’ Otto Hannah was his publisher, a man fond of literary indicates. ‘I want you to drop around to my office sometime next berg. I have something to discuss with you.’
‘I’m going to an execution Mon. How about Tues?’
But when he arrived at the imposturing office, Hannah was out. A manuscript lay on the familiarly desk, and, with an afflatus of dread, Garber turned it around and began reading.
SOLITAIRE
a novel by H. Truice
And on page 4 was Garber’s own dream, ‘Jelly Days’.
Hannah comes in. He has forgotten, or pretends to forget, the purpose of the appointment. Reluctant to talk about the novel or its author, he tries to brush off Garber. They quarrel. Finally Garber leaves, having surreptitiously pocketed the first few pages of the manuscript. He flings out of the office at 11:59 a.m., July 2, 1961, gets into an elevator and goes into a day-dream:
All over the city, businessmen begin rummaging through their files. What is it they are looking for? Their secretaries stand by, asking if they can help, but the bosses cannot describe the object.
G is taken to be executed. In his last few minutes, he thinks of Garber writing of the conspirators writing of the friendly Iructu:
Death is never referred to by name among the Iructu. Instead they use ‘potato’ imagery. Dying is called ‘eating your potatoes’, burial is ‘planting the potatoes’, a stillborn child is a ‘new potato’, and so on.
Garber reaches the ground floor, crosses the lobby, steps out into the sunshine and sees the bleeding corpse of Hannah. G recalls striking out a frivolous line about the publisher’s having ‘finally achieved an editorial miracle: going over forty stories in two minutes.’
Garber’s defence counsel is a young cousin named Barker. He encourages him to plead guilty: a fatal mistake. Barker tries to make much of the symmetry of the situation – the murder of a man with two palindromic names exactly halfway through one of those rare years readable upside-down – all this is used as evidence of obsession.
G dies:
To break wind is considered a frightening event, and cause for mourning among one’s relatives. The Iructu believe the soul may accidentally leave the body through the anus, giving a ghastly cry as it goes. Chronic flatulence is looked on as a serious disease, and the Iructu understood only too well when I described to them the death of Athanasius, the theologian who exploded in his privy.
Reviewers begin to argue over the meaning of G’s posthumously published novel. Sections of it seem to be plagiarized from Plague of Chance, by Steve Bragg, in particular the final portion, the ‘Jelly Days’ dream.
Garber appeals, and a curious arrangement of circumstances defeats him. His lawyer loses several pages of the brief he is to lay before the judge. The judge is old and hard of hearing. The district attorney is suffering from piles and inclined to be vindictive. Scanning the partial brief, the judge believes he is presiding over a plagiarism case. He misses much of young Barker’s eloquence and finds for the piles.
‘A travesty of justice!’ Barker called out, but the judge had already turned away and was descending. There was no one to hear but the DA, who, with a beatific smile, was sitting very straight and sliding back and forth in his chair. This motion is called among the Iructu ‘duck-calling’; it is used in wind-easing ceremonies.
4. Plague of Chance, by Steve Bragg
Reviewed by H. Carver
Bragg makes use of trivial word-games (‘So many dynamos!’ ‘She bears each cross patiently’), the device of a set of reviews and a set of novels to convey an unnecessary and false vision of rebirth. Lie pretends the frimsia is not a flower and the Iructu not a South American tribe, while ample references to these can be found in the works of Eps and Hannah. Dotted with improbable names, plotless and humourless, Plague of Chance is scarcely workable. The ending dream is nice, though by the time it arrives no one cares.
5. The Commentaries, by H. Otto
Reviewed by Hannah Berg
I have been asked to review this work – though I can hardly do so fairly – because of the controversy that has arisen regarding the dream sequence. I will not cry ‘plagiarism’ or attack Otto – poor mad condemned soul – but simply reproduce here the version of ‘Jelly Days’ which appeared in my own earlier novel. No authorities are so convincing as the evidence of one’s eyes.
A mixture of Castle of Otranto and Turn of the Screw, at first. There are two secretive children and some mysterious (not always gigantic) manifestations: Someone in the house reaches into a cupboard to pick up something, and a giant hand reaches in the window and snatches someone away, or almost. The giant hand is that of the children’s dead brother. Once a peculiar rocket-plane zooms in. It is painted in childish toy colours: red/white striped wings, yellow wheels, blue fuselage. Flapping its wings (in imitation of a vis
ible gull) it skims low over the great interior fields.
Of the children’s whispered conversations, the only words which can be distinguished are ‘jelly days’. I leave the house to return to my childhood. Ed Hand is still running the Teeny Weeny Grocery store. Looking in the window, I see he is discussing some historical event with someone.
I am projected back to the event. A sign carries a book club advertisement I recently saw:
accept as a GIFT
Lucretia Borgia
An Italian political quarrel: One man is to be put to death in the restaurant kitchen, in this way: His body has been marked with horizontal lines into ten zones. He is to be shot in one zone, allowed to heal, then shot in the next zone (head, then neck, then chest …). The waiters deny this plot, and even the victim tries to cover it up.
I discover that I am dead. I do not know how I came to die, or how I know I’m dead. Perhaps I am talking to someone and realize they are not listening.
Deathland is very pleasant and ordinary. Everyone has to work at their former job, more or less. Sociologists are very much in demand, the place seems like a kibbutz, very jolly and industrious, equipped with many wall charts.
It seems one can only communicate with the living through accidents and imitation. At last I understand what ‘jelly day’ means. It is of course just the day one leaves one’s mortal jelly.
We gather in the cafeteria in the evening to watch a TV play about the end of the world. In the play, the actors tune in to Radio 4 to catch the end-of-the-world news.
On a hunch, I tune in to Radio 4 myself. But there is nothing unusual on, just the same bouncy Muzak tunes I expected.
