Unknown, p.19
Unknown, page 19
"I told you, Joe; I told you he'd jump!" Pete was yelling, not looking away from the figure perched on the high rail." It's your damn fault, Joe; it's your goddam fault."
"It ain't my fuckin' fault!"
"You called him a Chinaman."
"So did you, so did everyone. Don't go blaming me, man."
" Yeah, but you started it. Come on, we got to get somebody."
"Hold it; we ain't gettin' no help," Joe answered." That's what the fuckin' Chinaman wants. As soon as we leave he'll come down. We'll get fired if we bring everyone running down here and the Chinaman is alive.
That tucker!"
"You think so, Joe?" inaman jumps?
Joe did not answer, but called out to the Filipino,
"All right, Chinaman, jump. I'll catch you. Come on. What's the matter, Chinaman, you scared?" He held out his arms.
It was then, while Joe was holding out his arms, that the figure pushed itself off, and the black and part of the white ripped from the picture, fell gracefully, slowly, arms and legs outstretched.
For a moment both caddies were stunned, then Pete jumped away and ran.
It was Joe who couldn't move. His hands outstretched, he kept waiting for the falling white figure. Then at the last moment, he turned away, frightened to look, and the body hit the ground, bounced up again higher than him, and hit a second time, jerking once, and lay still.
Pete was screaming: "I told you he'd jump! I told you!"
Joe stared at the body, at the way the blood pumped from the Filipino's gaping mouth, then he ran to the man, yelling at him,
"Why did you jump? Why did you jump, you crazy Chinaman?"
The Filipino did not answer. He only rolled to his feet and climbed the tower again.
Pete screamed.
Joe stayed where he was, arms helplessly outstretched.
The Filipino jumped, and Joe missed again. And a third time, a fourth, until Pete broke and raced away, not wanting to be there when Joe finally caught him.
11 - Michael Bishop - Gravid Babies
Carrion City, Colorado, once a boisterous gold-mining town guyed to a windy upland meadow in the Sangre de Christo Mountains, is today a ramshackle shadow of its former sell Two cafds, a feed store, a garage, a grocery, an elementary school, and three or four businesses catering to the seasonal tourist trade provide jobs for some of the locals, but since its founding in 1934, at the height of the Great Depression, the Helen Hidalgo Hutton Hospital for Advanced Lycanthropic Hebephrenia has kept Carrion City from becoming just another ghost town. Employing twenty-two of the town's residents (nearly a fifth of the entire population), this forbidding prisonlike structure attracts patients and sightseers from the world over. By late 1981, for instance, three 6migrd former victims of LH had achieved such spectacular cures that they were permitted to meet their monthly checkups on an outpatient basis, one of them commuting all the way from Silistra, Bulgaria.
Another twelve patients live right on the premises, padding the flagstone corridors barefoot, curling up together to sleep, and, during thunderstorms or blizzards, raising their eerie voices in plangent harmony with the wind. Although an important state official elected on Ronald Reagan's coattails repeatedly points out that the staff of this facility outnumbers the patients, the hospital weathers these fashionable political attacks because the contributions of cured alumni (many of whom are titled Europeans of awesome longevity and no little wealth) make it virtually self-supporting. Besides, no one-not even the perfervid Reaganite-really wants to extinguish the final raison d'itre of Carrion City.
Mary Smithson, nde Sylvester, works the night-shift at the hospital as chief psychiatric resident, a position to which she rose in only eight years. A product of Carrion City elementary, between 1968 and 1972 Mary Sylvester attended a semiprestigious medical college and psychiatric institute in Denver on a full scholarship furnished by the Helen Hidalgo Hutton Benevolent Foundation. The terms of this grant demanded that she intersperse her professional studies with a close textual scrutiny of all thirty-seven of Mrs. Hutton's published novels, at the rate of approximately a novel a month (excluding summers and preholiday examination periods). Afterward, of course, Mary was required to work at the hospital for no less than four years and to spend her free time diligently promoting the Hutton canon among the literate citizenry of the American Southwest. This latter stipulation did not fret or demoralize Mary because with the exception of My Friend Freckles, a maudlin dog story, she liked the novels-most of them nape-tickling gothics or suspenseful romances, all with a strong regional flavor-of her deceased benefactress. Her favorites, which she read over and over, were Rebecca Random Remembers and The Wolves of West Elk Springs.
Although the terms of her scholarship caused her to be graduated in the lower tenth of her class, no particular stigma attached to this poor showing, as her rapid and well-deserved rise at the hospital itself vividly attests.
Russell Smithson, Mary's husband, is another case. Mary met Russell in Denver, not at school but in a grim counter-culture bistro nestled beneath a noisy overpass of I-25. This solitary young man was poring over a paperback book by candlelight, heedless of the honkytonk plonking of a piano and the unsyncopated caterwauling of the bearded musician diddling it. Taking frill advantage of the new interpersonal permissiveness, Mary sat down at the loner's table. (The book in front of Russell turned out to be Erich Segal's Love Story.
Mary herself was carrying copies of The Pathologic Basis of Disease and the original 1922 edition of The Allegiance ofalamosa Allie.) Soon these two people, strangers only a moment past, were engaged in spirited debates about the war in Southeast Asia, abortion, the legaliz ry ation of marijuana, nuclear disarmament, and the poet of Rod McKuen.
Disagreeing on almost everything, they struck sparks off each other. That Russell was an aspiring writer bowled Mary over. It excused not only his tastes in contemporary literature but also an inbred bourgeois sensibility that seemed to harken back to Calvin Coolidge. As a kind of test, Mary loaned him The Allegiance of Alamosa Allie, Mrs. Hutton's most impassioned fern inist tract in novel form; indeed, her only one. When the couple met again a week later, but unquestionably sincere regard for Russell expressed a qualified the old gal's prose style and narrative skills. Even the "suffragettist rant and deck-stacking"-his harshest criticism of the book-had not really put him off. This news relieved and delighted Mary. Three months later they were wed, and the sacramental photographs taken in Red Rocks amphitheater show the happy couple clad from head to foot in hand-stitched leather and Indian beads.
Today, in Carrion City, Russell is a househusband. Eighteenmonth-old Tiffany, whose gestation and birth did not long remove Mary from her duties as a psychiatric resident at the hospital, occupies most of Russell's time, particularly since she sleeps during the day when Mary sleeps. Russell must adhere to this same schedule or else rely on cat naps and interstitial snoozes to purge his system of the poisons of wakefulness. At night while Mary works and Tiffany toddles about the Smithsons' tiny stucco house, Russell prepares his daughter's special soybean-based formula, washes diapers, dusts and cuums, plays with the child, and plans that day's principal meal, va which the Smithsons will eat when nearly everyone else in Carrion City is sitting down to breakfast. This arrangement does not displease Russell for the telling reason that it gives him an excuse-an excuse unavailable to him between 1972 and 1980-for the conspicuous unsuccessfulness of his writing career. Moreover, it keeps him indoors sleeping when most of the inhabitants of Carrion City are maliciously abroad, ready to spring upon him, should he chance their way, a host of excruciating questions about his perennial lack of "gainful employment." Even the derelict old men and callow make-believe prospectors at the feed store have chided him about his idleness, able-bodied buck that he is. Tiffany, bless her, has put a stop to their insufferable ragging. She has allayed Russell's guilt without yet forcing him to renounce the last of his writerly hopes. The pursuit of literary riches, after all, is not finally incommensurate with the mundane responsibilities of househusbandry.
For the past eight months Russell has been taking a corresponurse from the Wealthy Ghostwriters School, Inc., of Baltidence co m ore, Maryland. (Ads for this curriculum, featuring endorsements from sought-after mercenaries who have ghosted the life stories of Hollywood celebrities, indicted politicians, and famous role-model drug addicts, regularly appear as inserts in women's magazines and weekly TV viewing guides.) Between his many household chores Russell manfully squeezes in time to work on his assignments from the school. His reading list includes the autobiographies of Benvenuto Cellini, Benjamin Franklin, Ulysses S. Grant, Vera Brittain, and Malcolm X. According to the prospectus supplied with his introductory assignments packet, the essence of good ghostwriting is the convincing simulation of genuine autobiography. In fact, his first task as a coffespondent student required him to copy out in painstaking longhand three chapters from Rousseau's Confessions. Later he must pretend to be, and frame an appropriate style for, popular personalities as diverse as Mickey Mouse, Mickey Spfllane, David Stockman, Yogi Berra, Paul "Bear" Bryant, Anita Bryant, Ron Ely, Ronald McDonald, and so on and so on. This is not easy. On two or three occasions Mary has come home to find Russell neglecting the preparation of dinner or even Tiffany's unchanged diaper in a manic attempt to complete one of these infuriating assignments.
Understanding her husband's motivations and needs, Mary does not rebuke him. However, it pains her to discover that Russell is not above plagiarizing from Rolling Stone or The National Enquirer when a deadline draws near and one of these unhappy tabloids contains material marginally applicable to his purposes. What a bounder he sometimes is.
To be truthful, though, Mary's mind is usually on her own work.
The night-shift personnel at the Hutton Hospital bear an extremely taxing responsibility. As even casual students of the disease must know, victims of lycanthropic hebephrenia-especially those in its later stages-almost invariably succumb to their most radical transmogrifications between twelve midnight and an hour or so before dawn. Physicians, orderlies, nurses, and custodial help working these critical hours must frequently confront in actual fact that dread aspect of LH so persistently, and inaccurately, exploited by film makers, noyests, and the popular press. Mary Smithson has been eyeball to eyeball with the reality. As a result, she understands that, exactly like persons susceptible to epileptic seizures or hives, the victims of Chaney's Syndrome (as it is sometimes called in the literature) have a capacity for life, vocational fulfillment, and spiritual growth equal to that of any nonafflicted human being. Sensationalized images of hirsute men and women, slavering like beasts as they lope along on all fours under a full or a grossly gibbous moon, do not reflect the reality of the disease or improve the prognosis for its unfortunate sufferers.
Instead such images reinforce scientifically discredited prejudices and destroy the self-esteem of the victim at a time when high self-esteem may lead to a complete recovery. Contrariwise, a poor self-image may cause an irreversible descent into a lycanthropy with no psychological dimension whatsoever. True werewolves are made rather than born, Mary often tells visiting medical personnel, and it is the greed and insensitivity of society at large that makes them. Lycanthropy in its hebephrenic manifestations, meanwhile, responds exceptionally well to professional treatment.
Mary has proof of this observation in the person of Amadeus Howell, a young Englishman who has resided in the hospital since its founding. (Records on file in the administrative offices indicate that Howell was born in London, England, on August 12, 1914, but in his human guise, to which he nowadays clings with cheering tenacity, he still looks no older than twenty.) Perhaps twice a month sudden physical lapses testify to Howell's continuing thralldom to the disease; further, his behavior in periods relatively free of lupine shapeshifting still displays a frivolous or juvenile quality owing to the persistence of his hebephrenia. Nevertheless, Mary is hopeful that judicious doses of sulfur, asafetida (vulgarly known as devil's dung), castor, and hypericum (St.-John's-wort), along with sympathetic nightly counseling, will soon enable young Howell to take advantage of the hospital's outpatient program. That he has stopped asking famous questions like "Can't you use a child-proof bottle-cap as a contraceptive?" and "Isn't Morley Safer?" in favor of such formidable quodlibets as "Whence does evil come?" and "Wouldn't it be better for the world not to exist than for one innocent child to suffer?" strikes Mary as undeniable evidence of Howell's release-oriented improvement. That he frames these puzzlers while sniffing the gum stuck to his heel or playing a game of Donkey Kong on the Curtis Mathes in the third-floor dayroom, she reflects, simply underscores the need for a concentrated staff effort to exorcise the last vestiges of his lingering puerility. They are very close, though. Mary can almost taste their impending triumph.
In March, snow resting like cake icing on the hospital's turrets and crenelations, Russell informs Mary that the Wealthy Ghostwriters School, Inc., wants two chapters of "the autobiography of an unforgettable character"-he shows her this phrase on the assignment sheetby the end of April. Students who fail to submit at least ten thousand words of acceptable material risk either outright termination or a tuition increase, probably the latter. The Smithsons cannot afford another jump in Russell's tuition. His most recent correspondence work has prompted not only riotous blue-penciling from the graders in Baltimore but also a deluge of interdelineated sarcasm. Russell has tried to console himself with the fact that worst hit by these criticisms are the passages cribbed verbatim from tabloids, but his morale continues to sink and Mary fears for his mental and emotional stability." How am I going to do this assignment when even finger exercises like impersonating Alexander Haig throw me for a loop?" Russell wants to know. A loup-garou, thinks Mary, unable to divorce her husband's tiresome crisis from her own professional considerations; this thought, in turn, brings to mind the case and countenance of Amadeus Howell When Russell asks,
"Where am I going to find an unforgettable character whose autobiography I can ghost?" Mary cannot prevent herself from suggesting her premier patient as a likely subject. Russell oozes gratitude and enthusiasm in approximately equal measures. Like Studs Terkel, he intends to tape-record his subject's testimony. Then he will conscientiously transcribe Asmodeus's story 'for immediate mailing to Baltimore. Once again, he confesses, his wife has saved him from almost certain failure ." It's not Asmodeus," she replies, nervously second-guessing herself."
It's Amadeus."
The interviews at the hospital begin well enough. While Mary selflessly diverts her energies to other patients, Amadeus speaks into her husband's recorder at encouraging length. Unfortunately, Mary has neglected to tell Russell that Amadeus suffers not only from Chaney's Syndrome but also from a variety of sporadic alexithymia that sometimes renders his verbal narratives tedious in the extreme; where other people would color their recountings of formative episodes with remembered angst or joy, Amadeus merely enumerates and drones.
One night, in fact, he avoids any discussion of his past to relate in painful, repetitive detail the plot of a Helen Hidalgo Hutton novel entitled The Valiant Vargamors of Tall Pine Valley, the book in which Mrs. Hutton found a cathartic outlet for some of her own recurring experiences with LH. Russell squirms. Mary has always circumvented the problem of young Howell's alexithymia by recourse to insult-confrontation techniques, but, ignorant of these, Russell later accuses her of attempting to sabotage his correspondence work by setting him up with a congenital bore. Worse, he must take Tiffany along to the interviews, and the child is growing increasingly restive sitting on the flagstones stacking her plastic doughnuts on their plastic obelisk. Mary soothes her husband with explanations and a heartfelt appeal to try again. Two nights later, while pacing back and forth reciting the utterly fascinating particulars of his early years in Soho, Amadeus begins to undergo the startling change quintessentially characteristic of Chaney's Syndrome. Hollywood special effects cannot hold a candle to the sweat-inducing actuality of this transformation. Tiffany's eyes bulge like burn blisters, and Russell hurriedly scribbles notes even as he attempts to watch every evanescent flicker of this rare anatomical phenomenon. Tonight the physical as well as the psychic dam has burst, and Russell believes that The Autobiography ofamadeus Howell is going to catapult him to the very top of his correspondence class.
"Nice doggy," says Tiffany as Amadeus strides past her stack of plastic doughnuts. The werewolf is mouthing what Russell assumes to be a continuation of his life story. Whines and vaguely quizzical growls must now carry the major burden of this account, however, and these are pretty much unintelligible." Nice doggy," Tim reiterates, touching the man-animal's silver-gray shoulder. Amadeus does indeed appear to be a nice doggy; the movements of his syelte but powerful body reassure rather than threaten, and the caterpillar patches of shocking white fur above his opalescent eyes give him a look of comical bewil derment, rather like a scholarly gentleman with his eyebrows raised. (His clothes lie in rumpled piles about the room. How he shed them without rending them or revealing a delinquent patch of human skin Russell does not know.) As Amadeus playfully nuzzles Tiffany, Russell shuts off the tape recorder to watch. Apparently the hebephrenic aspects of the disease become more pronounced in its manifest lupine phase, for the man-animal has begun to leap about like a puppy. He snatches up one of Tiffany's plastic doughnuts and flings it high into the air. For some unaccountable reason this trick so distresses the child that when her playmate lunges to seize another of her toys, she takes two handsful of his luxuriant fur and administers a vicious bite to his flank. (Even two floors away Mary can hear Amadeus howl.) The werewolf spins, nips Tim on the bottom lip, and rushes toward Russell as if to knock him to the floor. Instead he bolts down the corridor and into the concealing bowels of the building, the child's outraged wall pursuing him like one of the Eumenides. Mary, stricken with contradictory varieties of remorse, puts an end to Russell's visitation privileges. At least, she consoles herself, their baby's werewolf bite is nothing much to remark, a mere pale hickey.
