by Sladek, John
‘Not enough, Rufus. God damn me, but I told you last night we want fourteen eggs for each lump.’
‘Next time, maybe. I don’t need your lot, you know. I got me enough here already. Been to a bombing and a riot. Tomorrow night I got a load of anarchists coming. Them what burned up the windmill, is who.’ He took the identity papers of Biron and the other, marking them in his book as bomb victims. The Secpol men gave a push, helping his mules start up the great creaking wagon.
Rufus tore a big piece of bread and mopped up the egg from his plate. ‘Johnson? Had a few of them lately. One young fellow last night, as I recall. Now let me see, three days ago …’
His thumb left grease-prints on the ledger sheets as he turned them. On the radio a bull was lowing. ‘Yes, here they are. Fertilizer, both of ’em. Or so I tell the busybodies down at the Town Hall.’ He snapped the ledger shut and went on eating.
‘Anyway, it’s none of their business, what I feed my pigs and chickens. They’re always glad to get the bones, for their darned houses. Any more bacon going, Margaret?’
‘Cheerio, Mrs Archer,’ said a voice on the radio.
‘Cheerio, Tom.’
THE SECRET OF THE OLD CUSTARD
Agnes had been wishing for a baby all day, so it was no surprise to her when she peeked through the glass door of the oven and found one. Bundled in clean flannel, it slept on the wire rack while she scrubbed out dusty bottles, fixed formula and dragged down the crib from the attic. By the time Glen came home from work, she was giving the baby its first bottle.
‘Look!’ she exclaimed. ‘A baby!’
‘0 my God, where did you get that?’ he said, his healthy pink face going white. ‘You know it’s illegal to have babies.’
‘I found it. Why illegal?’
‘Everything is illegal,’ he whispered, parting the curtains cautiously to peer out. ‘Damn near.’ The face upon Glen’s big, pink, cubical head looked somewhat drawn.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ he said testily. ‘We’re going to have a gas war, that’s all.’
Glen was a pathetic figure as he moved so as not to cast a shadow on the curtains. His bright, skin-tight plastic suit was far from skin-tight, and even his cape looked baggy.
‘Is it? Is that all?’
‘No. Say, that neighbour of ours has been raking leaves an awfully long time.’
‘Answer me. What’s wrong? Something at the office?’
‘Everything. The carbon paper and stamps and paper clips have begun to disappear. I’m afraid they’ll blame me. The boss is going to buy a computer to keep track of the loss. Someone stole my ration book on the train, and I found I had last week’s newspaper. IBM stock is falling, faintly falling. I have a cold, or something. And – and they’re doing away with the Dewey Decimal System.’
‘You’re just overwrought. Why don’t you just sit down and dandle our new baby on your knee, while I rustle up some supper.’
‘Stealing food! It’s indecent!’
‘Everyone does it, dear. Did you know I found the baby in the oven?’
‘No!’
‘Yes, the queerest thing. I had just been wishing for a baby, and there it was.’
‘How are the other appliances doing?’
‘The automatic washer tried to devour me. The dishwater is fading away; we must have missed a payment.’
‘Yes, and we’re overdrawn,’ he said, sighing.
‘The garbage disposal is hulking.’
‘Hulking?’
‘Over there.’
He did not look where she was pointing. He continued to peer out the window, where the weather situation was building up. A Welcome Wagon moved slowly down the street. He could not read the sign, but he recognized the armour plating and the blue snouts of machine-guns.
‘Yes, it just sits there hulking in the sink, and it won’t eat anything. It ate its guarantee, though.’
The neighbour, a ‘Mr Green’, paused in his raking to note down the Welcome Wagon’s licence number.
‘Not hulking, darling. Sulking,’ Glen said.
‘You have such a big vocabulary. And you don’t even read “How to Build Big Words”.’
‘I read Existential Digest, when I find the time,’ he confessed. ‘But last week I took their test and learned that I’m not alienated enough. That’s why I’m so damned proud of our kids.’
‘Jenny and Peter?’
‘The same.’
Agnes sighed. ‘I’d like to read a copy of the Irish Mail some time. By the way, the potatoes had poison again. Every eye.’ She went into the bedroom and laid the baby in its crib.
‘I’m going down and turn something on the lathe,’ Glen announced. ‘Something good.’
‘Take off your cape first. You remember the safety laws we learned at PTA.’
‘Lord, how could I forget? Snuff out all candles. Never stand in a canoe or bathtub. Give name, rank and serial number only. Accept cheques only if endorsed in your presence. Do not allow rats to chew on matches, should they so desire.’
He disappeared, and at the same time, Jenny and Peter came home from school, demanding a ‘snack’. Agnes gave them Hungarian goulash, bread and butter, coffee and apple pie. They paid 95 cents each, and each tipped her 15 cents. They were gruff, dour eight-year-olds who talked little while they ate. Agnes was a little afraid of them. After their snack, they belted on guns and went out to hunt other children, before it grew too dark to see them.
Agnes sighed and sat down to her secret transmitter.
‘AUNT ROSE EXPECTED BY NOON TRAIN,’ she sent. ‘HAVE MADE ARRGTS FOR HER GLADIOLI. SEE THAT FUDGE MEETS 0400 PARIS PLANE WITH CANDLES. THE GARDNER NEEDS TROWEL XPRESS.’
In a moment, the reply came. ‘TROWEL ARRGD. FUDGE HAS NO REPEAT NO CANDLES. WILL USE DDT. HOLD ROSE TILL VIOLET HEARD FROM.’
Always the same, tired, meaningless messages. Agnes hid her transmitter in the cookie jar as Glen came up the stairs. He had his own transmitter in the basement, she was sure of that. For all she could tell, it was him she was calling each evening.
‘Look at this!’ he said proudly, and displayed a newel post.
Outside, a plane dropped leaflets. The neighbour rushed about, raking them up and burning them.
‘Every night, the same damned thing,’ said Glen, grinding his teeth. ‘Every night they drop leaflets telling us to give up, and every night that bastard burns them all. At this rate, we’ll never even learn who “they” are.’
‘Is it really so important?’ she asked. He would not answer. ‘Come on, quit hulking. I’ll tell you what I want to do. I want to ride on a realway train.’
‘Railway,’ he corrected. ‘You can’t, the Public Health Department says that going more than thirty miles an hour contributes significantly to cancer.’
‘A lot you care what happens to me!’
Glen bowed his great cube of a head resignedly over the television set. ‘You’ll notice,’ he said, ‘that it looks like an innocent Army-Navy football game. And so it may be. Perhaps the ball won’t blow up when he kicks it. Perhaps that series of plays is only a coincidence.’
‘Number twenty-seven fades back to pass,’ she murmured. ‘What would that mean, I wonder?’
Glen felt her hand reach out to touch his. He held hands with his wife in the darkened living-room, after making sure she was not wearing her poison ring.
‘The common cold,’ he muttered. ‘They call it the “common cold”. By the way, have I told you we’re overdrawn?’
‘Yes. It’s that damned car. You would have to order all those special features.’
‘The bazooka in the trunk? The direction-finder radio? The gun turret? Everyone else had had them far years, Agnes. What am I supposed to do if the police start chasing me? Try to outrun them, me with all that armour plate weighing me down?’
‘I just don’t see what we’re going to live on,’ she said.
‘We can eat green stamps until –’
The children trooped in, smelling of mud and cordite. Jenny had scratched her knee on a barbed-wire barrier. Agnes applied a bandaid to it, and gave them coffee and doughnuts, 15 cents. Then she sent them upstairs to brush their teeth.
‘And don’t, for God’s sake, use the tap water,’ Glen shouted. ‘There’s something in it.’ He walked into the room where the baby slept and returned in a minute, shaking his head. ‘Could have sworn I heard him ticking.’
‘Oh, Glen, let’s get away for a few days. Let’s go to the country.’
‘Oh sure. Travel twenty miles over mined roads to look at a couple of cowpies. You wouldn’t dare get out of the car, for fear of the deadly snakes. And they’ve sowed the ground with poison ivy and giant viruses.’
‘I wouldn’t care! Just a breath of fresh air –’
‘Sure. Nerve gas. Mustard gas. Tear gas. Pollen. Even if we survived, we’d be arrested. No one ever goes into the country any more but dope peddlers, looking for wild tobacco.’
Agnes began to cry. Everyone was someone else. No one was who they were. The garbageman scrutinized her messages to the milkman. In the park, the pigeons all wore metal capsules taped to their legs. There were cowpies in the country, but no cows. Even at the supermarket you had to be careful. If you picked out items that seemed to form any sort of pattern …
‘Are there any popsicles left?’ Glen asked.
‘No. There’s nothing in the icebox but some leftover custard. We can’t eat that, it has a map in it. Glen, what are we going to eat?’
‘I don’t know. How about … the baby? Well, don’t look at me like that! You found him in the oven, didn’t you? Suppose you’d just lit the oven without looking inside?’
‘No! I will not give up my baby for a – casserole!’
‘All right, all right! I was merely making a suggestion, that’s all.’
It was dark now, throughout the lead-walled house, except in the kitchen. Out the quartz picture window, dusk was falling on the lawn, on the lifeless body of ‘Mr Green’. The television showed a panel discussion of eminent doctors, who wondered if eating were not the major cause of insanity.
Agnes went to answer the front door, while Glen went back to the kitchen.
‘Excuse me,’ the priest said to Agnes. ‘I’m on a sick call. Someone was good enough to loan me his Diaper Service tuck, but I’m afraid it has broken down. I wonder if I might use your phone?’
‘Certainly, Father. It’s bugged, of course.’
‘Of course.’
She stood aside to let him pass, and just then Glen shouted, ‘The baby! He’s at the custard!’
Agnes and the priest dashed out to see. In the clean, well-lighted kitchen, Glen stood gaping at the open refrigerator. Somehow the baby had got it open, for now Agnes could see his diapered bottom and pink toes sticking out from a lower shelf.
‘He’s hungry,’ she said.
‘Take another look,’ grated Glen.
Leaning closer she saw the child had pulled the map from the custard. He was taking photos of it with a tiny, baby-sized camera.
‘Microfilm!’ she gasped.
‘Who are you?’ Glen asked the priest.
‘I’m –’
‘Wait a minute. You don’t look like a man of the cloth to me.’
It was true, Agnes saw in the light. The breeze rustled the carbon-paper cassock, and she saw it was held together with paper clips. His stole was, on closer examination, a strip of purple stamps.
‘If you’re a priest,’ Glen continued, ‘why do I see on your Roman collar the letterhead of my office?’
‘Very clever of you,’ said the man, drawing a pistol from his sleeve. ‘I’m sorry you saw through our little ruse. Sorry for you, that is.’
‘Our?’ Glen looked at the baby. ‘Hold on. Agnes, what kind of a vehicle did he drive up in?’
‘A diaper truck.’
‘Aha! I’ve been waiting a long time to catch up with you – Diaper Man. Your chequered career has gone on far too long.’
‘Ah, so you’ve recognized me and my dimple-kneed assistant, have you? But I’m afraid it won’t do you much good. You see, we already have the photos, and there is a bullet here for each of you. Don’t try to stop us!’
Watching them, the false priest scooped up the baby. ‘I think I had better kill the two of you in any case,’ he said. ‘You already know too much about my modus operandi.’ The baby in his arms waved the camera gleefully and gooed its derision.
‘All right,’ said Diaper Man. ‘Face the wall, please.’
‘Now!’ said Glen. He leaped for the gun, while Agnes deftly kicked the camera from the baby’s chubby fist.
The infant spy looked startled, but he acted fast, a tiny blur of motion. Scooping up two fistfuls of custard, he flung them in Glen’s eyes. Gasping, Glen dropped the gun, as the infamous pair made their dash for freedom.
‘You’ll never take me alive!’ snarled the false priest, vaulting into his truck.
‘Let them go,’ said Glen. He tasted the custard. ‘I should have realized earlier the baby wasn’t ticking, he was clicking. But let them go; they won’t get far anyway, and we’ve saved the map. For whatever it’s worth.’
‘Are you all right, darling?’
‘Fine. Mmmm. This is pretty good, Agnes.’
She blushed at the compliment. There was a muffled explosion, and in the distance they could see flames shooting high in the air.
‘Esso bombing the Shell station,’ said Glen. The gas war had begun.
UNDECEMBER
Besides being the 11th (or 13th) month, Undecember is meant to correct the more serious errors of our calendar:
THE CYCLIC ERROR. We expect every Saturday to be followed by a Sunday, every twelve by a one o’clock, and every December by a January. Yet our only evidence for these cycles comes from the clocks and calendars we have ourselves made to mark these cycles.
This circular reasoning began before the second century of our era, when Marcus Manilius wrote:
‘Thrones have perished, peoples passed from domination to slavery, from captivity to empire, but the same months of the year have always brought up on the horizon the same stars.’
This assertion contains the seeds of its own refutation: A slave cannot see the same stars as a free man, while a dead man (Manilius is now dead) cannot see stars at all. Without continual observations made by men who remain alive over the aeons, we cannot be sure that the bright points of light in the sky are what Manilius called ‘stars’.
Others have carried the cyclic error to its two possible extremes: In A.D. 628, Brahmagupta declared that the world is destroyed by fire and recreated once every 4,320,000,000 years. On the other hand, Buddhist writers have seen a different cycle, in which the world is destroyed and created anew 75,000 times each second. But we fall into the same abyss in saying that Winter has returned, or that it’s March again.
THE RIVER ERROR. The numbering of days in each month, or of years, supposes that time flows on in an orderly progression, like a series of numbers. Mr L. Sterne, among others, has proved that it does not.
THE TORTOISE ERROR. This, the most serious fault in our calendar system, assumes that time moves at all. It is self-evident that time is as motionless as the tortoise.
The simplest solution is not to abandon our calendar, but to introduce an unexpected month: Undecember. It may be shuffled in among other calendar pages, to break the predictable pattern of flow. Or it may be ignored entirely; the very knowledge of its existence is enough to demonstrate that time has no revolution, no progression, no movement and in fact no qualities whatever.
Undecember records days wasted in waiting, spent in dreaming, gathered up in trivial memories.
It records days which somehow get away from us, or come upon us without warning.
It records days looked forward to, which never arrive; days we wish were over or wish would n
ever end; days we must recall but cannot; and days of which we can say nothing.
It records the déjà vu moment; the entire life of the amnesiac; the tomorrows of the improvident; and all the anniversaries of time.
Some Notable Anniversaries:
17TH: Anniversary of Heraclitus’ river-error: ‘One cannot go down to the river twice.’ We still speak of time as a river, flowing out of the tributaries of the future, down through the present, and on down to the delta of the past, where it deposits all the shit and silt we call History. But there’s something wrong with this image: All that flows flows at some speed. Time, then, must also flow at some speed (measured in hours per hour) which we could find out. Using some meta-clock, or time-speedometer, we could then time time, to decide whether an hour really passes as slowly as it seems.
What’s wrong with it all, is that time would then be measured against some other time which could itself flow … and could in turn be measured … so on to an infinite series. This seems unfair.
11TH: Next Sunday, a Tuesday a few weeks ago, or today (Thursday). There is no contradiction in holding all three times in one’s mind at the same time. Perhaps all are the anniversary of some impending, long-forgotten event.
16TH: Unbirthday of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who invented the unbirthday. He was born on January 27th and died 13 days earlier.
8TH: Bank Computer Holiday, England and Wales. Computers, operating in what is called ‘real time’, are considered real entities.
8TH: Might also be written the 1/8th of the month. Notice that days in this month are not numbered serially, because any series 1, 2, 3, … implies a future and a past which may or may not exist. In the same way, our method of numbering the years promises that a year ‘1984’ will arrive, and that a year ‘1884’ has passed. For this reason, Undecember is numbered randomly.
23RD: On January 22nd, 1932, the USSR began its second Five-Year Plan, again demonstrating the fallibility of number as a means of measuring and controlling time.
