Shatterday

and wonderful. We talked from time to time, occasionally had dinner together.

I meant her no harm.

“There’s no sense to this!” I said, pleading with Jerry Olander. “There’s no sense to any of this. Please let me alone, let me kill myself if that’ll give you some satisfaction! But don’t try to make me do this!”

“It all makes sense,” he said, getting nastily quiet. “Everything you do is colored by those memories. How many nights have you lain awake in pain from a toothache, rather than going to a dentist because the family sent you to Cousin Franklyn to save a few dollars on dental bills? How many of your teeth that might have been saved did he pull because he was no damned good, should have been a butcher instead of a dentist? You’re afraid of dentists to this day because of Cousin Franklyn. And how many women who might have loved you have you walked away from, picked fights with, ignored, considered better or worse than you, not your ‘type,’ because of Peggy Mantle and the way she laughed at you when you were fifteen? How many times have you walked past a store where you needed to buy something, because you remembered the way old man Clareborne threw you out of his department store when you were a little boy? How much of what you think is free will is just a programmed reaction to things you’ve buried, memories you don’t want to remember, pains and slights and affronts you suffered as a child? How many, chum? How goddam many? Oh, there’s sense here!”

Jerry Olander had me walk across the room. To the telephone.

“But I’m all alone now. I have no one. No wife, no children, no mother, no father, not even too many people I can call friends. I’m all alone; won’t you leave me Nancy!”

I began to dial a number.

The phone began to ring.

“You’re not alone, chum,” Jerry Olander said softly. “I’m right here with you. And I’ve got a long, long memory.”

The receiver was picked up at the other end and a voice said, “Hello.”

Zombie things from the quicklime pit began emerging, one after another of them; dozens of them, summoned by Jerry Olander’s long, long memory. I wanted to shout, to make a terrible dying sound, to clarion a warning, and found I could not even do that. In the fourth year of our war, Jerry Olander had even gained control of my words, and I had lost, I had lost, I had lost!

“Hi, Nancy,” I heard myself saying, “what are you doing for dinner tonight?”

Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once.

THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY, c. 1861

Alive and Well and on a Friendless Voyage

Introduction

In recent years—and you’ve probably heard me bitching about this elsewhere—writers of contemporary fantasy have come in for considerable attention from Academe. I’ve been spared more of that kind of literary disembowelment than, say, Bradbury or Heinlein or Le Guin, mostly because I tend to move too fast and too shiftily for any publish-or-perish professor to get a handle on me. (There are those who contend I’m unworthy of serious attention, and to them a tip of the hat. I have this paranoid belief that the more acceptable one becomes to the Establishment, the less dangerous and troublesome is one’s work.)

Notwithstanding these baseless canards, there have been essays and monographs and even treatises published in learned journals about the rampant symbolism in my stories, my preoccupation with the Machine As God, the deeply religious anti-religiousness in Deathbird Stories, obvious uses of the Jungian archetypes, the crucifixion and resurrection symbology peppered through my stories, and the frequency of the use of the word “ka-ka.”

I am always startled at the depths revealed in my stories by these erudite critics. I try not to argue with them. I just smile knowingly and respond, “You little devil, you. You found me out!”

The more profound they think they are, the more they require their students to read you; and that means the poor kids have to buy the books containing my stories. And that means a fat and happy life of work, free from the horrors of maybe having to write television scripts. So who am I to say nay, who am I to suggest they’re stuffed topfull of wild blueberry muffins?

What is beginning to unman me is that this plague seems to be spreading to my readers. Now I conceive of all of you as the noblest, wittiest, most intelligent audience in the world. Otherwise you’d be off reading ka-ka like that proffered by Judith Krantz and Sidney Sheldon, to name only two of the creative typists masquerading as writers.

Well, sir. You can imagine my horror and surprise when I received a letter last February from a reader that went like this: [Letter reprinted by permission of James Griffin, Philadelphia, Pa.]

Dear Mr. Ellison:

Last summer I found, by accident, your story “Croatoan” and was disturbed and excited by the resemblances to the sixth book of Vergil’s Aeneid. There were too many to be accidental, but I still couldn’t imagine you following Vergil intentionally, even to the meeting with the man with no hands. I was afraid I had stumbled on something out of the universal subconscious, and felt responsible for doing something about it.

Tonight I browsed through Strange Wine and noticed the references to Isak Dinesen and [Cyril Connolly’s book of essays] The Unquiet Grave. I read the story again and wondered why the comparison of the child to a lemur hadn’t tipped me off. I’m relieved to think you knew what you were doing.

Thanks for giving us, along with a good story, new ways to think about Vergil.

Sincerely yours, James Griffin

What can I say? Humbly, I bow my head and dimple winsomely. Paw the dirt with my hoof, tug my forelock, suck my thumb and murmur aw, shucks. You’re very perceptive. That’s exactly what I was doing. You little devil, you. You found me out!

There’s just one small glitch in the smooth flow.

I’ve never read Vergil’s Aeneid.

The story you are about to read is stuffed full of very conscious symbolism. Catch it now, friends; I don’t do it that often; maybe three times in twenty-five years.

This story was written in direct response to the killing pain of my last wife taking off with another guy. The pain lasted at least twelve minutes, which is the actually recorded duration of genuine’ pain. Everything over twelve minutes is self-indulgence and pointless attempts to make the first twelve minutes seem more important. We are a vainglorious species, and if we were able to cop to the fact that even the most sauvage of what the French call la grande passion commands only twelve true minutes of intense pain before it begins to mellow, we would all dash to the cliffs and do a lemming. So we justify it by enhancing it, by making it seem more important, more consuming. We wander around for twenty years after the affair has broken up, beating our breasts and wailing at the sky.

No nobler than you, I wandered for several months after my last marriage broke up, beating my breast and wailing at the sky, not to mention my friends, who (with uncommon good sense) told me to shut up already. And one night, during a performance of Jacques Brei Is Alive and Well in Paris, a line from one of his wonderful songs struck right to the core of my lost love, and I wrote this story.