Approaching Oblivion

by Harlan Ellison

Yes.

  Why? Do you like being pointless?

  It isn’t pointless.

  Why not, you said it was. Why?

  Because if I do it forever, maybe at the end of forever they’ll let me die.

  (The Black-headed Gonolek is the most predatory of the African bush shrikes. Ornithologically, the vangashrikes occupy somewhat the same position among the passerines that the hawks and owls do among the nonpasserines. Because they impale their prey on thorns, they have earned the ruthless name “butcherbird.” Like many predators, shrikes often kill more than they can eat, and when opportunity presents itself seem to kill for the joy of killing.)

  All was golden light and awareness.

  (It is not uncommon to find a thorn tree or barbedwire fence decorated with a dozen or more grasshoppers, locusts, mice or small birds. That the shrike establish such larders in times of plenty against future need has been questioned. They often fail to return, and the carcasses slowly shrivel or rot.)

  Joe Bob Hickey, prey of his world, impaled on a thorn of light by the shrike, and brother to the shrike himself.

  (Most bush shrikes have loud, melodious voices and reveal their presence by distinctive calls.)

  He turned back to the street, putting the bullhorn to his mouth and, alone as always, he screamed, “Jefferson said—”

  From the golden street came the sounds of insect wailing.

  Los Angeles, California/1971

  Very little is needed to destroy a man. He needs only the conviction that his work is useless.

  —ANTONIN ARTAUD

  7.

  Erotophobia

  It began with my mother, Nate Kleiser said, hating every word of it. The ignominy of it, oh. Not only here in a psychiatrist’s office, not only lying on a forest green Naugahyde chaise, not only suffering every literate man’s embarrassment at speaking lines Roth had portnoyzed into the ground, but to be speaking those lines to a female shrink, to be speaking them with choked-up emotion, to have started with mother…

  Do you play with yourself much? asked Herr Doktor Felica Bremmer, graduate of the Spitzbergen Kopfschmerzenklinik, 38–21–35.

  I don’t have to, Doctor, that’s the trouble, Nate said. His head was beginning to ache, just behind the right eye. He heard the fingers of his left hand, quite independent of the directions of his brain, scrabbling at the forest green Naugahyde.

  Perhaps you’d better go over that part again, Mr. Kleiser, Dr. Bremmer urged him. I’m not entirely sure I have the problem.

  Okay, look, it’s like this, for instance. He tried to sit up and she placed a soft but firm hand on his chest and he lay still. Your reputation for handling uh, well, sex-oriented problems like mine is widespread, right? Right. So I get on a plane in Toronto, and I fly down here to Chicago to see you. So on the plane there’re these two stewardesses, nice girls, and first this one, Chrissy Something, she offers me pillows and little bootie-socks, and then her partner, Jora Lee, she brings me a big glass of champagne—before anybody else gets served anything—and when she leans down to put it on the tray-table, she bites me on the ear. So in about ten minutes the two of them are fighting over me in the galley, and everybody’s pushing those service buttons to call the stewardesses, and they aren’t coming out of there except every few minutes to ask me do I like my steak well-done or rare, or offering me little cocktail mints…it really gets embarrassing.

  And it goes on like that all through the damned flight, and they’re just about on the verge of using those demonstration oxygen masks with the plastic air hoses to strangle one another, just to see which one will layover with me in Chicago, and I don’t think I’m going to get off the goddam plane in one piece, when we come in to land and they still haven’t served anybody, and the whole plane wants to kill me except they love me too much, and I know I’m going to have to fight my way down the ramp, and the only thing that saved me was a little black kid who was with his mother—who kept winking at me—puked all over the seat and the aisle and everything else, and I slipped past while they were trying to pour coffee grounds on it to kill the smell, and I got away.

  Dr. Bremmer shook her head slowly. That’s just terrible. Terrible.

  Terrible? Hell, it’s frightening. If you want to know the simple truth, Doctor, I’m scared out of my mind I’m going to be loved to death!

  Well…Dr. Bremmer said. Isn’t that a bit, just a bit overdramatic?

  What are you doing, Doctor?

  Nothing, Mr. Kleiser, not a thing. Just concentrate on the problem.

  Concentrate? You’ve got to be kidding, Doctor; I can’t think of anything else! Thank God I make my living as a cartoonist. I can mail my work in; if I had to actually go out and mix with people, it’d be all over for me in ten minutes.

  I think you may be overstating, Mr. Kleiser.

  Sure, easy enough for you to say, you aren’t me. But it’s been like this since I was a kid. I was always the most popular one in the class, the first one picked at dances when it was ladies’ choice, the one both teams wanted when we played choose-up baseball or red rover, most likely to succeed, straight A’s the teachers all wanted my body…

  In college, added Dr. Bremmer.

  College, hell: in kindergarten! I’m the only male I know who was forcibly raped in a girl’s locker room before he was out of the fourth grade! You just don’t understand, dammit! I’m going to be loved…to…death!

  Dr. Bremmer tried to quiet him. Nate’s voice had grown frantic, strident.

  Fear of being watched, of people wanting to hurt you, even—in extreme cases of advanced paranoia—people plotting to kill you…yes, that problem I know quite well, Mr. Kleiser. Paranoia. It’s terribly common, particularly these days. But what you’re telling me, well, that’s something different, something exactly opposite. I’ve never encountered it. I wouldn’t even know what to call it.

  Nate closed his eyes.

  Neither do I, he said.

  Perhaps Erotophobia, fear of being loved, she said.

  Dynamite. Now we have a name for it. A lot of good that does me. Nomenclature isn’t my problem, sex is!

  Mr. Kleiser, she said softly, you can’t expect results instantaneously. You’ll have to cooperate with me.

  Cooperate? Hell, I shouldn’t even be lying on this sofa with you!

  Now, please, take it easy, Mr. Kleiser.

  What are you doing?

  Nothing.

  You’re unbuttoning your blouse. I can hear the fabric. I know that sound!

  Nate sat straight up on the sofa, throwing the psychiatrist’s leg off his lower body. She was half undressed; had, in fact, cleverly managed to rid herself of miniskirt, half-slip, shoes, panty hose and bikini briefs without his knowing it. Nate knew instantly that he had met a master of the art. In a pitched panic he bolted from the forest green Naugahyde chaise, and lurched toward the door.

  Dr. Bremmer hurled herself sidewise, hanging half off the chaise. Her arm swept the desk, knocked files of Psychology Today to the floor. She grabbed and connected.

  Jeeezus! screamed Nate, doubling over.

  Oops, sorry, darling, Dr. Bremmer murmured, scrabbling for him. He was in flight. She crawled after him, got her arms locked around one ankle. Take me with you, please, please, do with me what you will, hurt me, use me, abuse me, I love you, I love you! Hopelessly, desperately, completely.

  Oh my God oh my God…mumbled Nate, clinging to the doorknob in an effort to keep his balance. Then the office door opened inward, catching Nate in the shoulder, knocking him off-balance so he stepped on the psychiatrist’s back. Yes, yes, she said huskily, yes, dominate me, hurt me, I’ve denied myself all these years, I never knew what it was to love a man like you, take me, the Story of O, yes…yes…

  The open door now admitted Dr. Bremmer’s nurse, a pimply woman of fifty who had watched Nate when he had waited in the reception room for the psychiatrist to see him. Her eyes widened as she saw the supine Dr. Bremmer and in a moment she was pulling the half-naked
psychiatrist’s arms from around Nate’s ankle.

  Before she could join in, before her astonishment could turn to lust, Nate hurtled through the door, caromed off two walls, hit the outer office door at a dead run and barely managed to get through before shattering the glass panel.

  He was down the hall, into the self-service elevator, and safe before the two women could get to their feet. Nate Kleiser knew what fate befell those who were not fleet of foot.

  As he ran down the street toward Michigan Avenue, he heard screaming and, looking up, saw Dr. Bremmer, her breasts now bare, hanging from the eighteenth storey window. He could barely make out what she was yelling.

  If you leave me I’ll kill myself!

  Some people have alternatives, Nate thought, and ran.

  Having gone straight from O’Hare Airport to Dr. Bremmer’s office, Nate had no hotel in which to hide. If was, in fact, the first time in six years he had been out of his isolated Toronto house for more than two hours. He needed a drink desperately. Imps of Hell prodded the soft optic chiasma with fondue forks.

  A neon Budweiser sign and a dark-thick doorway presented themselves, and he slipped inside. He was lucky. It was eye-of-the-hurricane hour between the closet alcoholics who needed three swift ones straight up before they could face the crabgrass and waiting ladies in Wilmette, and the bar vampires who hung by their curled toes from the bar-rail till closing time. The bar was deserted, nearly deserted.

  He slid into a shadowed booth, blew out the candle in its metal shell, and waited for the waiter, hoping it would not be a waitress. It was a waitress. Pouf skirt, net-mesh opera hose, spike heels, quiet good taste.

  He hid his face and ordered three doubles of McCormick bourbon, no water, no rocks, no glass if possible, just pour them in my hands. She stared at him for a long moment, started to say Don’t I know you from some—

  And Nate croaked in a frog-like, hideous voice, You couldn’t possibly, I just got out of Dannemora, serving eighteen-to-life for raping, killing and eating a choir boy, not necessarily in that order.

  She fled, and the bartender brought the drinks, standing well back from the booth as Nate slid the bills across the table.

  It went that way for the next three and a half hours, till Nate’s buzz was sufficiently nestled-in to permit conversation with the odd little man whose yogurt-soft eyes preceded him into the booth. Nate found himself unburdening his woes, and the little man, who matched him drink for drink, offered various unworkable solutions.

  Look, I like you, said the little man, so I’ll try and help you out. See, I’m something of a lay analyst myself. I’ve done just a whole lot of reading. Fromm, Freud, Bettelheim, Kahlil Gibran, that whole crowd. Now what I’d say is this: see, everybody has both male and female in him, you know what I mean? I think the female part of you is trying to assert itself. Have you ever thought of having sloppy sex with a man? Nate felt a hand crawling up his thigh. It was impossible. Nobody had arms that long, to reach across a booth, under a table. He yelped and looked down. The waitress was crawling around down there on hands and knees.

  Nate bolted from the bar and didn’t stop till he’d reached a crowded intersection.

  When the light changed, and Nate stopped on the curb, he knew he was in trouble. It was State Street, and the clubs were letting out.

  They chased him fifteen blocks and he lost the last two women—a gorgeous black girl with an enormous natural and a fiftyish matron who kept trying to use her Emba Cerulean mink stole to lasso him—in a pitfall-riddled construction site. He heard their shrieks as they dropped from sight, but he didn’t slow down.

  There was a motor hotel on the corner of Ohio and the Shore Drive and he pulled the tattered remnants of his clothing around him, making sure his wallet with the credit cards had not been lost when the Girl Scouts—Girl Scouts!?!—had ripped the arms off his jacket.

  Inside, safe for the moment, he registered. The desk clerk, a whispery young man with white-on-white shirt, white-on-white tie, white-on-white face, looked at him with undisguised affection and offered the key to the bridal suite.

  A single, away from everything, Nate insisted, and went up in the elevator, leaving the desk clerk breathing heavily.

  The room was quiet and small. Nate pulled the drapes, locked the door, wedged a chair under the doorknob, and slumped on the edge of the bed. After a while he felt moderately sober, moderately relaxed, and thoroughly sick to his stomach. He undressed slowly and took a hot shower.

  Soaping himself, he thought. It was a good place to think, in the shower.

  Life had been at least supportable in Toronto. He’d devised a way to live. It was a ghastly way to live, but it was at least, well, supportable. But after Lois and the three bottles of Dexamils, he knew he had to do something, to try and arrest this hideous condition that had been getting worse and worse as he’d grown older. Only twenty-seven years old, and my life is hopeless, he thought. He’d thought that every year since he had reached puberty.

  Then he’d heard of Dr. Bremmer and he’d been dubious. She was a woman, after all. But desperation knows no rationalizing deterrents, and he’d long distanced an appointment. Now that had gone bananas, and he was thoroughly peeled. It was getting worse. The trip to Chicago had been a lousy idea. Now what will I do? How the hell will I get safely out of this enemy territory?

  He turned and looked in the full-length mirror.

  He saw himself naked.

  He did have a good body.

  And he did have a pleasant face, really quite a handsome and compelling face.

  As he watched, his image began to shimmer and flow. His hair grew longer, more blond, even blonde, and breasts began to bulge as the hair vanished from his body. The image altered, as he stared, into the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. The words of the little man in the bar skimmed across his mind and were gone in an instant, lost in the adoration he felt for the fantastic creature in the mirror.

  I love you, he said, finding it difficult to speak coherently.

  He reached for her, and she drew back. Don’t you put a hand on me you lecher, she said.

  But I love you…I really love you!

  I’m not that kind of a girl, she said.

  But I don’t just want your body, Nate said. There was an imploring note in his voice. I want to love you, to have you with me all my life. I can make a good home for you. I’ve been waiting for you all my life.

  Well…she said, maybe we can just talk a while. But keep your hands to yourself.

  I will, Nate promised, I will. I’ll keep my hands to myself.

  And they lived happily ever after.

  Los Angeles, California; New York City/1971

  8.

  One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty

  And so it was—strangely, strangely—that I found myself standing in the backyard of the house I had lived in when I was seven years old. At thirteen minutes till midnight on no special magical winter’s night, in a town that had held me only till I was physically able to run away. In Ohio, in winter, near midnight—certain I could go back.

  Back to a time when what was now…was then.

  Not truly knowing why I even wanted to go back. But certain that I could. Without magic, without science, without alchemy, without supernatural assistance; just go back. Because I had to, I needed to…go back.

  Back; thirty-five years and more. To find myself at the age of seven, before any of it had begun; before any of the directions had been taken; to find out what turning point in my life it had been that had wrenched me from the course all little boys took to adulthood; that had set me on the road of loneliness and success ending here, back where I’d begun, in a backyard at now-twelve minutes to midnight.

  At forty-two I had come to that point in my life toward which I’d struggled since I’d been a child: a place of security, importance, recognition. The only one from this town who had made it. The ones who had had the most promise in school were now milkmen, used car salesmen, married t
o fat, stupid dead women who had, themselves, been girls of exceeding promise in high school. They had been trapped in this little Ohio town, never to break free. To die there, unknown. I had broken free, had done all the wonderful things I’d said I would do.

  Why should it all depress me now?

  Perhaps it was because Christmas was nearing and I was alone, with bad marriages and lost friendships behind me.

  I walked out of the studio, away from the wet-ink-new fifty thousand dollar contract, got in my car and drove to International Airport. It was a straight line made up of inflight meals and jet airliners and rental cars and hastily-purchased winter clothing. A straight line to a backyard I had not seen in over thirty years.

  I had to find the dragoon to go back.

  Crossing the rime-frosted grass that crackled like cellophane, I walked under the shadow of the lightning-blasted pear tree. I had climbed in that tree endlessly when I was seven years old. In summer, its branches hung far over and scraped the roof of the garage. I could shinny out across the limb and drop onto the garage roof. I had once pushed Johnny Mummy off that garage roof…not out of meanness, but simply because I had jumped from it many times and I could not understand anyone’s not finding it a wonderful thing to do. He had sprained his ankle, and his father, a fireman, had come looking for me. I’d hidden on the garage roof.

  I walked around the side of the garage, and there was the barely-visible path. To one side of the path I had always buried my toy soldiers. For no other reason than to bury them, know I had a secret place, and later dig them up again, as if finding treasure.

  (It came to me that even now, as an adult, I did the same thing. Dining in a Japanese restaurant, I would hide small pieces of pakkai or pineapple or teriyaki in my rice bowl, and pretend to be delighted when, later in the meal, my chopsticks encountered the tiny treasures down in among the rice grains.)

  I knew the spot, of course. I got down on my hands and knees and began digging with the silver pen-knife on my watch chain. It had been my father’s pen-knife—almost the only thing he had left me when he’d died.