The Early Stories: 1953-1975

by John Updike

  Suddenly fearful, fearing he had lost her forever, the cyclops searched for the water mite, and found her miserably crouching in a corner, quite drunk, her seventh and eighth legs almost sprouted. “What do you see?” he now dared ask.

  “Too much,” she answered swiftly. “Everything. Oh, it’s horrible, horrible.”

  Out of mercy as much as appetite, he ate her. She felt prickly inside him. Hurriedly—the rooms were almost depleted, it was late—he sought his hostess. She was by the doorway, her antennae frazzled from waving goodbye, but still magnificent, Daphnia, her carapace a liquid shimmer of psychedelic pastel. “Don’t go,” she commanded, expanding. “I have a minuscule favor to ask. Now that my children, all thirteen million of them, thank God, are off at school, I’ve taken a part-time editing job, and my first real break is this manuscript I’d be so grateful to have you read and comment on, whatever comes into your head; I admit it’s a little long, maybe you can skim the part where Napoleon invades Russia, but it’s the first effort by a perfectly delightful midge larva I know you’d enjoy meeting—”

  “I’d adore to, but I can’t,” he said, explaining, “my eye. I can’t afford to strain it, I have only this one.…” He trailed off, he felt, feebly. He was beginning to feel permeable.

  “You poor dear,” Daphnia solemnly pronounced, and ate him.

  And the next instant, a fairy shrimp, oaring by inverted, casually gathered her into the trough between his eleven pairs of undulating gill-feet and passed her toward his brazen mouth. Her scream, tinier than even the dot on this i, went unobserved.

  The Baluchitherium

  In 1911, C. Forster-Cooper of the British Museum unearthed in Baluchistan some extraordinary foot bones and a single provocative neck vertebra. Thus the baluchitherium first intruded upon modern consciousness. Eleven years later, in Mongolia, an almost complete skull of the creature was uncovered, and in 1925 the four legs and feet of another individual, evidently trapped and preserved in quicksand, came to light. From these unhappy fragments an image of the living baluchitherium was assembled. His skull was five feet long, his body twenty-seven. He stood eighteen feet high at the shoulders (where the North American titanothere measured a mere eight feet, the bull African elephant eleven). Though of the family Rhinocerotidae, the baluchitherium’s face was innocent of any horn; his neck was long and his upper lip prehensile, for seizing leaves twenty-five feet above the ground. He was the largest mammal that ever lived on land.

  Recently, I had the pleasure of an interview with the baluchitherium. The technical process would be tedious to describe; in brief, it involved feeding my body into a computer (each cell translates into approximately 120,000,000 electronic “bits”) and then transecting the tape with digitized data on the object and the coördinates of the moment in time-space to be “met.” The process proved painless; a sustained, rather dental humming tingled in every nerve, and a strange, unpopulous vista opened up around me. I knew I was in Asia, since the baluchitheres in the millions of years of their thriving never left this most amorphous of continents. The landscape was typical Oligocene: a glossy green mush of subtropical vegetation—palms, fig trees, ferns—yielded, on the distant pink hillsides of aeolian shale, to a scattering of conifers and deciduous hardwoods. Underfoot, the spread of the grasses was beginning.

  Venturing forward, I found the baluchitherium embowered in a grove of giant extinct gymnosperms. He was reading a document or missive printed on a huge sheet of what appeared to be rough-textured cardboard. When I expressed surprise at this, the baluchitherium laughed genially and explained, “We pulp it by mastication and then stamp it flat with our feet.” He held up for my admiration one of his extraordinary feet—columnar, ungulate, odd-toed. What I had also not been led by the fossil record to expect, his foot, leg, and entire body as far as my eye could reach were covered by a lovely fur, bristly yet lustrous, of an elusive color I can only call reddish-blue, with tips of white in the underparts. Such are the soft surprises with which reality pads the skeleton of hard facts.

  “How curious it is,” the baluchitherium said, “that you primates should blunder upon my five-foot skull without deducing my hundred-kilogram brain. True, our technology, foreseeing the horrors of industrialism, abjured the cruel minerals and concerned itself purely with vegetable artifacts—and these solely for our amusement and comfort.” He benignly indicated the immense chaise longue, carved from a single ginkgo trunk, that he reposed upon; the rug beside it, artfully braided of wisteria vines; the hardwood sculptures about him, most of them glorifying, more or less abstractly, the form of the female baluchitherium. “All, of course,” he said, “by your time sense, fallen into dust aeons ago.”

  By now, I had adjusted my tape recorder to the immense volume and curious woofing timbre of his voice, so his remaining statements are not at the mercy of my memory. His accent, I should say, was Oxonian, though his specialized upper lip and modified incisors played havoc with some of our labials and fricatives, and he quaintly pronounced all silent consonants and even the terminal e of words. To my natural query as to his own time sense, he replied, with a blithe wave, “If you are able from a few crusty chips of calcium to posit an entire phylum of creature, why should not I, with a brain so much greater, be able, by a glance at my surroundings, to reconstruct, as it were, the future? The formation of your pelvis, the manner of your speech, even the moment of your visit are transparent in the anatomy of yon single scuttling insectivore.” He gestured toward what my lower perspective would have missed—a tiny gray plesiadipid miserably cowering high in a primitive magnolia.

  The baluchitherium brandished the printed sheet in his hand; it rattled like thunder. “In here, for instance,” he said, “one may read of numerous future events—the mammoth’s epic circumambulation of the globe, the drastic shrinkage of the Tethys Sea, the impudent and hapless attempt of the bird kingdom, in the person of the running giant diatryma, to forsake the air and compete on land. Hah! One may even find”—he turned the sheet, to what seemed to be its lesser side—“news of Homo sapiens. I see here, for example, that your wheat-growing cultures will make war upon your rice-growers, having earlier defeated the maize-growers. And one also finds,” he continued, “horoscopes and comic strips and a lively correspondence discussing whether God is, as I firmly believe, odd-toed or, as the artiodactyls vainly hold, even-toed.”

  “B-but,” I said, stammering in my anxiety to utter this, the crucial question, “given, then, such a height of prescience and civilized feeling, why did you make the evolutionary error—the gross, if I may so put it, miscalculation—of brute size? That is, with the catastrophic example of the dinosaurs still echoing down the silted corridors of geologic time—”

  Imperiously he cut me short. “The past,” he said, “is bunk. The future”—and he trumpeted—“is our element.”

  “But,” I protested, “the very grasses under my feet spell doom for large leaf-browsers, presaging an epoch of mobile plains-grazers.” As if to illustrate my point, a rabbit darted from the underbrush, chased by a dainty eohippus. “As you must know,” I said, “the artiodactyls, in the form of swine, camels, deer, cattle, sheep, goats, and hippopotami, will flourish, whereas the perissodactyls, dwindled to a few tapirs and myopic rhinoceri in my own era, will meet extinct—”

  “Size,” he bellowed, pronouncing it “siz-eh,” “is not a matter of choice but of destiny. Largeness was thrust upon us. We bear it—bore it, bear it, will bear it—as our share of the universal heaviness. We bear it gratefully, and gratefully will restore it to the heaviness of the earth.” And he fixed me with a squint so rhinoceroid I involuntarily backed a step, tripping the computer’s reverse mechanism. All my nerves began humming. The baluchitherium, as he faded, stretched himself toward the leaf-clouded sky; the reddish-blue fur on his throat shimmered white. Ravenously he resumed what I saw to be, under one form or another, an endless, unthinkable meal.

  The Invention of the Horse Collar

  In the darke
st Dark Ages, the horse collar appeared. A Frankish manuscript of the tenth century first depicts it, along with the concomitantly epochal shafts and traces attached to the middle of the collar. In antiquity, from primitive Egypt to decadent Rome, horse harness consisted of a yoke attached at the withers by a double girth passing under the chest and around the throat of the animal. When the horse pulled at his load, the throat girth rode up, cutting into his windpipe, compressing his vein walls, and slowing his heartbeat. The loss of tractive power was three- or fourfold. Yet antiquity, which sentimental humanism so much encourages us to admire, did little to remedy this strangling, but for ineffectual measures like passing a strap between the forelegs to keep the throat band low (observable on a Greek vase c. 500 B.C.) or tying the two bands at the horse’s sides, as illustrated in a bone carving of a war chariot on the side of a Byzantine casket.

  No, it fell to some obscure fellow in the Dark Ages, a villein no doubt, to invent the horse collar. His name, I imagine, was Canus—an odd name, meaning “gray,” though our hero is young; but name-giving, like everything else in this ill-lit and anarchic period, is in a muddled, transitive condition. Canus sits in his thatched hut pondering. Beside him, on a bench of hewn planks and dowels, lies a sheaf of sketches, an array of crude tools both blunt and sharp, an ox yoke for purposes of comparison, and a whitened fragment of equine scapula with the stress lines marked in charcoal. Outside, darkness reigns unrelieved; even noon, in this year of (say) 906, has about it something murky, something slanting and askew. Roman ruins dot the landscape. Blind eyes gaze from the gargantuan heads of marble emperors half buried in the earth. Aqueducts begin and halt in midair. Forested valleys seclude mazelike monasteries where quill-wielding clerics copy Vergil over and over, having mistaken him for a magician. Slit-windowed castles perch fantastically on unscalable outcroppings and lift villages upward toward themselves like ladies gathering their skirts while crossing a stretch of mud. In the spaces between these tentative islands of order, guttural chieftains, thugs not yet knights, thunder back and forth, bellowing in a corrupt Latin not yet French, trampling underfoot the delicate stripwork of a creeping agriculture. Canus is one of those who work these precarious fields, urging forward the gagging, staggering plow-horse. He has been troubled, piqued. There must be … something better.… Now, under his hands, the mock-up of the first horse collar, executed in straw and flour paste, has taken shape!

  The door of the hut wrenches open. Enter Ablatus, Canus’s brother. Though they are twins, born in the last year of the nonexistent reign of Charles the Fat, they are not identical. Canus in his eyes and hair shows the scaly brilliance of burnished metal and of the hardened peat called coal; Ablatus, the more elusive lambency of clouds, of water running over quartz, of fire sinking in the hearth. Canus tends toward the swarthy, Ablatus toward the fair. Both are clad in the era’s style of shapelessness, between toga and cloak, bunches of colorless cloth such as a poor child would use to wrap a doll of sticks. On his head Ablatus wears a hat like a beanbag. He takes it off. He stares at the bright hoop of straw. “What is that?” he asks, in a language whose archaic music is forever lost to human ears.

  Triumphantly Canus explains his invention. He describes new worlds: the fourfold tractive increase, the improved deep plowing, the more rapid transportation, the ever more tightly knit and well-fed Christendom. Cathedrals shall arise; the Viking and the Mohammedan will be repulsed. Crusades can be financed. Out of prosperity will arise city-states, usury, and a middle class—all these blessings pouring from this coarse circlet of glued straw. He concludes, “The real collars, of course, will be leather, padded, with increasing ingenuity, to eliminate chafing and to render the horse’s pulling all the more pleasurable.”

  Toward the end of his twin’s long recital, Ablatus betrays agitation. He flings down his scythe, scarcely changed in design since the Egyptians first lopped maize. His pallid eyes throw sparks. “My own brother,” he utters at last, “a devil!”

  “Nay,” says Canus, rising from his bench in surprise, “an angel, rather, to relieve both beasts and men by the means of an insensate and efficient”—and here, groping for the Latin “mechina,” he slurs into creation a new word—“machine. I have created”—and again he must coin the word—“horsepower.”

  “You would bind up the anarchy that has set us free,” Ablatus pursues, pacing the rectangle of dirt floor in his visionary distress. “You would bring back the ponderous order of Rome, that crazed even emperors, ere the sea of slaves dried up and like a galleon of millstones the Empire sank. Oh, Canus, frater meus, reflect! With the great flail of bishops and barbarians God broke Rome into a thousand fragments so that men might breathe. In the subsequent darkness, in this our confusion, men have found their souls, have fallen into right relation with one another—the lords protecting the vassals, the vassals supporting the lord, on all sides love and enlightened self-interest. True, there is brutality and waste, but they stem from our natures; they are true to our image, which is God’s. The seal of the divine sits upon the organic. Out of Eden, Adam groaned at toil and Eve screamed in the travail of birth so that men might know their sin. Wisely the ancients took up the first poor tools and disdained to improve them. You would presume to forge a second Nature—better the hellish blackness of midnight than a blasphemous Paradise! Better impede the windpipes of beasts than strangle the souls of men! From this impudent seed of invention, what iron vines will flourish! With interconnection comes restriction; with organization, oppression. This device of yours, so beneficent in its apparent effects, is Satan’s stalking horse, wherewith to conquer again the kingdom so dearly redeemed by Christ’s blood! You call it a blessing, I call it a curse! I call it a—pollution!” And, inspired, fair Ablatus seizes one of the candles that in this dark age burn even at midday, and hurls it upon the artifact of straw, and it becomes a hoop of flame.

  Canus, inspired in his swarthier fashion, takes up one of the blunt tools from his bench and strikes his brother a firm blow.

  “Devil!” exclaims Ablatus, sinking.

  “Fool,” replies Canus, and, with one of the sharp tools from the same set, deftly finishes his brother off.

  Ablatus abolitus est. It does not arouse remorse in us when we slay a twin; it is too much like suppressing an aspect of ourselves. Serenely Canus carries off the body (Ablatus ablatus est) and digs the grave. The earth is heavy, Northern soil—more resistant and more rewarding than the earth the ancients scratched. In the distance, a scrimmage of nobility reverberates. A monastery bell—a silver thread thrown across a chasm—sounds from a muffling valley. The Dark Ages begin to fade. As Canus leans on the shovel, a breeze of evening caresses his face, and he idly reflects that here is power too, to be harnessed. He imagines sails, gears, driveshafts. Inside the hut, he composes himself for sleep. His muscles agreeably ache from useful labor performed. The prototypical horse collar lies consumed beside the bench, but the ashes preserve the design. Tomorrow he will reconstruct it. The slippery little half-dreams that augur sleep begin to visit him. And tomorrow, he thinks, he will invent the horizontal-shafted windmill … and the next day, Deus volens, the wheelbarrow.…

  Jesus on Honshu

  Japanese Legend Says

  Jesus Escaped to Orient

  —Headline, and passages in italics below, from the New York Times.

  TOKYO—A Japanese legend has excited some curiosity here, that Jesus did not die on the cross outside Jerusalem, but lived in a remote village on the northern part of the Japanese island of Honshu until his death at 106 years of age.

  The distances within His blue eyes used to frighten the children. Though toward the end, when His age had passed eighty, His stoop and careful movements within the kimono approximated the manner of an elderly Japanese, His face, up close, never conformed—the olive skin, the tilted nostrils sprouting hair, the lips excessive in flesh and snarling humor, the eyelids very strange, purplish and wrinkled like the armpits of a salamander. There was never much doubt
in the village that He was some sort of god. Even had His eyes given on less immensity, had their celestial blue been flawed by one fleck of amber or rust, He would have been revered and abhorred by the children. His skin was abnormally porous. His voice came from too deep in His body.

  Jesus, so the legend runs, first arrived in Japan at the age of 21 during the reign of the emperor Suinin in what would have been the year 27 B.C. He remained for 11 years under the tutorship of a sage of Etchu Province, the modern Toyama prefecture, from whom he learned much about the country and its customs.

  Strangely, the distances had melted within Him, leaving little more trace than the ice cakes along the northern shore leave in spring. What a man does when young becomes a legend to himself when he is old. The straight roads through drifting deserts, the goat paths winding through mauve mountains, the silver rivers whose surfaces He discovered He could walk, the distant herds like wandering lakes, the clouds of birds darkening the sun, the delegations of brown people, of yellow people, the green forests where sunlight fell in tiger stripes, the purple forests (tree trunks shaggy as bears, star-blue butterflies fluttering in glades no man had entered before), emerald meadows sparkling with springs and freshets, sheets of snow a month of walking did not dismiss, and in the distance always more mountains, more deserts, the whole world then tasting of vastness as of nectar, glistening, men huddling in mud nests like wasps, the spaces innocent. He had walked because, obscurely, His Father had told Him to. His Father was an imperious restlessness within Him. At last He came to the land of Wa, beyond which extended only an enamelled sea without a nether edge. The sage of Etchu took Him in and taught Him many things. He taught the young Jesus that dual consciousness was not to be avoided but desired: only duality reflected the universe. That the eight hundred myriads of daemons (yao-yorodzu-no-kami) are false save in that they stand guard against an even more false monism. That the huntsman must bend his thought upon the prey and not upon the bow. That a faith containing fear is an imperfect faith. That the mountains wait to be moved by the touch of a child. That the motions of the mind are full of kami (holy force). That the ways of the gods (shintō) are the ways of plants. That a seed must die to live. That the weak are the strong, the supple outlast the stiff, the child speaks truer than the man. And many more such things He later preached, and forgot, as the ice cake deposits pebbles and straw in melting. After eleven years, the restlessness seized Him again, and He returned. The trip returning, strangely, was the more difficult of the two; He kept searching for familiar landmarks, and there were none.