Approaching Oblivion

by Harlan Ellison

  Then I got scared.

  We was in a graveyard, for God’s sake, and Paulie was just as clear as anything asking a dead girl to come on out of her casket with the gold handles and love him, need him, hold him and talk look see him. It was the wrong thing to do, I knew that, and I’m not the least bit superstitious. There’s just some things you know ain’t proper. This was like that. A guy can be unhappy and want to get his girl back…but this was somethin’ God might not like.

  None of us could move. We was so scared I heard Skeets behind me and he was shivering so bad he had to put his hands in his pockets.

  Then we heard the noise outta that crypt.

  We heard her coming. I don’t think anyone screamed, but we all knew Ginny was coming back; and the way she had looked after that taxi ripped into her, none of us thought we could take it. But Paulie just kept laying it on, so sweet and charming and compelling that we knew Ginny couldn’t keep sleeping with all that goodness coming at her.

  Later, we got Paulie back over the fence, and into the car. We took him home, and I had three straight ryes before I could make my eyes shut.

  Paulie didn’t play much after that, a gig now and then, but it doesn’t matter. He has his ghosts.

  There aren’t no ghosts except the ones we buy with our guilty desires, you know that. But with Paulie, well, who knows which is better: a live emptiness or companionship with a dead memory that likes soundless music?

  I don’t know, I’m not that good, that great a musician.

  Chicago, Illinois/1961

  5.

  I’m Looking for Kadak

  You’ll pardon me but my name is Evsise and I’m standing here in the middle of sand, talking to a butterfly, and if I sound like I’m talking to myself, again you’ll pardon but what can I tell you? A grown person standing talking to a butterfly. In sand.

  So nu? What else can you expect? There are times you got to make adjustments, you got to let be a little. Just to get along. I’m not all that happy about this, if you want the specific truth. I’ve learned, God knows I’ve learned. I’m a Jew, and if there is a thing Jews have learned in a bissel more than six thousand years, it’s that you got to compromise if you want to make it to seven thousand. So, let be. I’ll talk to this butterfly, hey you butterfly, and I’ll pray for the best.

  You don’t understand. You got that look.

  Listen: I read once in a book that they found a tribe of Jewish Indians, somewhere deep in the heart of South America. That was on the Earth. The Earth, shtumie! It’s been in all the papers.

  *A glossary of Yiddish words and their meanings follows on Ellison’s Grammatical Guide and Glossary for the Goyim. Please refer to some if you are farblondjet.

  So. Jewish Indians. What a thing! And everyone wondered and yelled and made such a mishegoss that they had to send historians and sociologists and anthropologists and all manner of very learned types to establish if this was a true thing or maybe somebody was just lying.

  And what they found was that maybe what had happened was that some galus from Spain, fleeing the Inquisition, got on board with Cortez and came to The New World, Kayn-ahora, and when no one was looking, he ran away. So then he got farblondjet and wound up in some little place full of very suggestible native types, and being something of a tummeler he started teaching them about being Jewish—just to keep busy, you know what I mean? because Jews have never been missionaries, none of that “converting” crap other, I shouldn’t name names, religions need to keep going, unlike Judaism which does very cute thank you on its own—and by the time all the smart-alecks found the tribe, they were keeping kosher, and having brises when the sons were born, and observing the High Holy Days, and not doing any fishing on the Shabbes, and it was a very nice thing altogether.

  So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that there are Jews here on Zsouchmuhn. Zoochhhhhh-moooohn. With a chhhhh, not a kuh. You got a no-accent like a Litvak.

  It shouldn’t even surprise that I’m a Jew and I’m blue and I have eleven arms thereby defying the Law of Bilateral Symmetry and I am squat and round and move very close to the ground by a series of caterpillar feet set around the rim of ball joints and sockets on either side of my tuchis which obeys the Law of Bilateral Symmetry and when I’ve wound the feet tight I have to jump off the ground so they can unwind and then I move forward again which makes my movement very peculiar I’m told by tourists without very much class.

  In the Universal Ephemeris I am referred to as a native of Theta 996: VI, Cluster Messier 3 in Canes Venatici. The VI is Zsouchmuhn. A baedeker from some publisher in the Crab came here a few turns ago and wrote a travel pamphlet on Zsouchmuhn; he kept calling me a Zsouchmoid; he should grow in the ground, headfirst like a turnip. I am a Jew.

  I don’t know what a turnip is.

  Now I’m raving. What it’ll do to you, talking to a butterfly. I have a mission, and it’s making me crazy, giving me shpilkess, you could die from a mission like this. I’m looking for Kadak.

  Hey you butterfly! A blink, a flutter, a movement it wouldn’t hurt, you should make an indication you can hear me, I shouldn’t stand like a schlemiel telling you all this.

  Nothing. You wouldn’t give me a break.

  Listen: if it wasn’t for that oysvorf, that bum, Snodle, I wouldn’t be here. I would be with my family and my lust-nest concubines on Theta 996: III, what the Ephemeris calls Bromios, what we Jews call Kasrilevka. There is historical precedent for our naming Bromios another name, Kasrilevka. You’ll read Sholom Aleichem, you’ll understand. A planet for schlimazels. I don’t want to discuss it. That’s where they’re moving us. Everyone went. A few crazy ones stayed, there are always a few. But mostly, everyone went: who would want to stay? They’re moving Zsouchmuhn. God knows where. Every time you look around they’re dragging a place off and putting it somewhere else. I don’t want to go into that. Terrible people, they got no hearts in them.

  So we were sitting in the yeshiva, the last ten of us, a proper minyan, getting ready to sit shivah for the whole planet, for the last days we would be here, when that oysvorf Snodle had a seizure and up and died. Oh, a look: a question, maybe? Why were we sitting shivah in the rabbinical college when everybody else was running like a thief to get off the planet before those gonifs from the Relocation Center came with their skyhooks, a glitch if ever I saw one, shady, disreputable, to give a yank and drag a place out of orbit and give a shove and jam in big meshiginah magnets to float around where a nice, cute world was, just to keep the Cluster running smooth, when they pull out a world everything shouldn’t go bump together…? Why, you ask me. So, I’ll tell you why.

  Because, Mr. I-Won’t-Talk-Or-Even-Flap-My-Wings Butterfly, shivah is the holiest of the holies. Because the Talmud says when you mourn the dead you get ten Jewish men who come to the home of the deceased, not eight or seven or four, but ten men, and you sit and you pray, and you hold services, and you light the yorzeit candles, and you recite the Kaddish which as every intelligent life-form in the Cluster except maybe a nut butterfly knows, is the prayer for the dead, in honor and praise of God and the deceased.

  And why do we want to sit shivah for a world that was such a good home for us for so many turns? Because, and it strikes me foolishness to expect a farchachdah butterfly to grasp what I’m trying to say here, because God has been good to us here, and we’ve property (which now is gone) and we’ve got families (which now are gone) and we’ve got our health (which, if I continue talking to you I’ll be losing shortly) and God’s name can be hallowed by word of mouth only in the presence of others—the community of worshippers—the congregation—the minyan of ten, and that’s why.

  You know, even for a butterfly, you don’t look Jewish.

  So nu, now you understand a little maybe? Zsouchmuhn was the goldeneh medina for us, the golden country; it was good here, we were happy here, now we have to move to Kasrilevka, a world for schlimazels. Not even a Red Sea to be parted, it isn’t slavery, it’s just a world that’s not enough,
you know what I mean? So we wanted to pay last respects. It’s not so crazy. And everyone went, and only the ten of us left to sit the seven turns till we went away and Zsouchmuhn was goniffed out of the sky to go God-knows-where. It would have been fine, except for that Snodle, that crazy. Who seized up and died on us.

  So where would we get a tenth man for the minyan?

  There were only nine Jews on the whole planet.

  Then Snodle said, “There’s always Kadak.”

  “Shut up, you’re dead,” Reb Jeshaia said, but it didn’t do any good. Snodle kept suggesting Kadak.

  You should understand, one of the drawbacks of my species, which maybe a butterfly wouldn’t know, is that when we die, and pass on, there’s still talking. Nuhdzhing. Oh. You want to know how that can be. How a dead Jew can talk, through the veil, from the other side. What am I, a science authority, I should know how that works? I wouldn’t lie on you: I don’t know. Always it’s been the same. One of us seizes up and dies, and the body squats there and doesn’t decay the way the tourists’ do when they get shikker in a blind pig bar in downtown Houmitz and stagger out in the gutter and get knocked over by a tumbrel on the way to the casinos.

  But the voice starts up. Nuhdzhing!

  It probably has something to do with the soul, but I wouldn’t put a bet on that; all I can say is thank God we don’t worship ancestors here on Zsouchmuhn, because we’d have such a sky full of nuhdzhing old farts telling us how to run our lives, it wouldn’t be worth it to keep on this side of the veil. Bless the name of Abraham, after a while they shut up and go off somewhere.

  Probably to nuhdz each other, they should rest in peace already and stop talking.

  But Snodle wasn’t going away. He died, and now he was demanding we not only sit shivah out of courtesy for having lived here so prosperously, but we should also, you shouldn’t take it as an imposition, sit shiva for him! An oysvorf, that Snodle.

  “There’s always Kadak,” he said. His voice came from a nowhere spot in the air about a foot above his body, which was dumped upside-down on a table in the yeshiva.

  “Snodle, if you don’t mind,” said Shmuel with the one good antenna, “would you kindly shut your face and let us handle this?” Then seeing, I suppose for the first time, that Snodle was upside-down, he added, but softly he shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, “I always said he talked through his tuchis.”

  “I’ll turn him over,” said Chaim with the defective unwind in his hop.

  “Let be,” said Shmuel. “I like this end better than the other.”

  “This is getting us nowhere,” said Yitzchak. “The gonifs come in a little while to take away the planet, we can’t stay, we can’t go, and I have lust-nest concubines lubricating and lactating on Bromios this very minute.”

  “Kasrilevka,” said Avram.

  “Kasrilevka,” Yitzchak agreed, his prop-arm, the one in the back, curling an ungrammatical apology.

  “A plent of ten million Snodles,” said Yankel.

  “There’s always Kadak,” said Snodle.

  “Who is this Kadak the oysvorf’s babbling about?” asked Meyer Kahaha. The rest of us rolled our eyes at the remark. Ninety-six tsuris-filled eyes rolled. Meyer Kahaha was always the town schlemiel; if there was a bigger oysvorf than Snodle, it was Meyer Kahaha.

  Yankel stuck the tip of his pointing arm in Meyer Kahaha’s ninth eye, the one with the cataract. “Quiet!”

  We sat and stared at each other. Finally, Moishe said, “He’s right. It’s another tragedy we can mourn on Tisha B’ab (if they have enough turns on Kasrilevka for Tisha B’ab to fall in the right month), but the oysvorf and the schlemiel are right. Our only hope is Kadak, lightning shouldn’t strike me for saying it.”

  “Someone will have to go find him,” said Avram.

  “Not me,” said Yankel. “A mission for a fool.”

  Then Reb Jeshaia, who was the wisest of all the blue Jews on Zsouchmuhn, even before the great exodus, one or two of them it wouldn’t have hurt if they’d stayed behind to give a little help so we shouldn’t find out too late we were in this miserable state of things because Snodle seized up and died, Reb Jeshaia nodded that it was a mission for a fool and he said, “We’ll send Evsise.”

  “Thanks a lot for that,” I said.

  He looked at me with the six eyes on the front, and he said, “Evsise. Should we send Shmuel with one good antenna? Should we send Chaim with a defective hop? Should we send Yitzchak who is so crippled with lust he gets cramps? Maybe we should send Yankel who is older than even Snodle and would die from the journey then we’d have to find two Jews? Moishe? Moishe argues with everyone. Some cooperation he’d get.”

  “What about Avram?” I asked. Avram looked away.

  “You want I should talk about Avram’s problem here in front of an open Talmud, here in front of the dead, right here in front of God and everyone?” Reb Jeshaia looked stern.

  “Forget it. I’m sorry I mentioned,” I said.

  “Maybe I should go myself, the Rabbi should go? Or maybe you’d prefer we sent Meyer Kahaha?”

  “You made your point,” I said. “I’ll go. I’m far from a happy person about this, and you should know it before I go. But I’ll do it. You’ll never see me again, I’ll die out there looking for that Kadak, but I’ll go.”

  I started for the burrow exit of the yeshiva. I passed Yitzchak, who looked sheepsih. “Cramps,” I muttered. “It should only wither up and fall off like a dead leaf.”

  Then I rolled, hopped and unwound my way up the tunnel to the street, and went looking for Kadak.

  The last time I saw Kadak was seventeen years ago. He was squatting in the synagogue during Purim, and suddenly he rolled into the aisle, tore off his yarmulkah, his tallis and his t’fillin, all at once with his top three arms on each side, threw them into the aisle, yelled he had had it with Judaism, and was converting to the Church of the Apostates.

  That was the last any of us saw of him. Good riddance to bad rubbish, you ask me. Kadak, to begin with, was never my favorite person, if you want the truth. He snuffled.

  Oh, that isn’t such an averah, I can see you think I’m making a big something out of a big nothing. Listen, Mr. Terrific-I-Flap-My-Wings-And-You-Should-Notice-Me, I’m a person who says what’s on his mind, I don’t make no moofky-foofky with anyone. You want someone who beats around the bushes you should talk to that Avram. Me, I’ll tell you I couldn’t stand that Kadak’s snuffling, all the time snuffling. You sit in the shul and right in the middle of the Shema, right in the direct absolute center of “Hear O Israel, the Lord, Our God, the Lord is One,” comes a snuffle that sounds like a double-snouted peggalomer in a mud-wallow.

  He had a snuffle made you want to go take a bath.

  A terrible snuffle, if you’ll listen to me for a minute. He was the kind, that Kadak, he wouldn’t care when he’d snuffle. When you were sleeping, eating, shtupping, making a ka-ka, he didn’t care…would come a blast, a snort, a rotten snuffle could make you want to get rid of your last three or four meals. And forget talking to him: how can you talk to a person who punctuates with a snuffle?

  So when he went off to convert to the Apostates, sure there was a scandal…there weren’t that many Jews on Zsouchmuhn…anything was a scandal…but to be absolutely frank with you, I’ll speak my mind no matter what, we were very relieved. To be free of that snuffle was already a naches, like getting one free. Or seven for five.

  So now I had to go all over there and back, looking for that terrible snuffle. It was an ugliness I could live without, you should pardon my frankness.

  But I went through downtown Houmitz and went over to the Holy Cathedral of the Church of the Apostates. The city was in a very bad way. When everyone had gone to Kasrilevka, they took everything that wasn’t bolted down. They also took everything that was bolted down. They also took the bolts. Not to mention a lot of the soil it was all bolted down into. Big holes, everywhere. Zsouchmuhn was not, at this point in time I’m telling you about,
such a cute little world anymore. It looked like an old man with a krenk. Like a pisher with acne. Very unpleasant, it wasn’t a trip I care to talk about.

  But there was a little left of that crazy farchachdah Cathedral still standing. Why shouldn’t they let it stand: how much does it cost to make a new one? String. The dummies, they make a holy place from string and spit and bits of dried crap off the streets and their bodies, I don’t even want to think about what a sacrilege.

  I rolled inside. The smell, you could die from the smell. On Zsouchmuhn here, we got a groundworm, this filthy little segmented thing everyone calls a pincercrusher. Lumbricus rubellus Venaticus my Uncle Beppo, the lunatic zoologist, calls it. It isn’t at all peculiar why I remember a foreign name like that—Latin is what it is, I’m a bissel scholar, too, you know, not such a dummy as you might think, and it’s no wonder Reb Jeshaia sent me on this it-could-kill-a-lesser-Jew mission to find Kadak. I remember because once I had one of them bite me in the tuchis when I went swimming, and you learn these things, believe you me, you learn them. This rotten little worm it’s got pinching things in the front and on the sides, and it lies in wait for a juicy tuchis and when you’re just ready to relax in a swim, or maybe to take a nap on a picnic, chomp!, it goes right for the tuchis. And it hangs on with those triple-damned the entire species should go straight to Gehenna pinch-things, and it makes me sick to remember, but it sucks the blood right out of you, right through your tuchis. And you couldn’t get one off, medical science as hootsy-tootsy as it is, you could varf from the size of a doctor’s bill, even the hootsie-tootsies can’t get one off you. The only thing that does it, is you get a musician and he bangs together a pair of cymbals, and it falls off. All bloated up with your blood, leáving a bunch of little pinch-marks on your tuchis you’re ashamed to let your lust-mates see it. And don’t ask why the doctors don’t carry cymbals with them for such occasions. You wouldn’t believe the union problems here on Zsouchmuhm, which includes musicians and doctors both, so you’d better be near a band and not a hospital when a pincercrusher bites you in the tuchis, otherwise forget it. And when the terrible thing falls off, it goes pop! and it bursts, and all the awful crap it had in it makes a stink you shouldn’t even think about it, the eyes, all twelve of them could roll up in your head, with the smell of all that feh! and blood and crap.