Shiva and Other Stories Read online

  “—and so to the ravening beast,” my companion concludes, “and to the last spaces under the earth.”

  “I heard that!” Tom says. He pushes away from Mary Flannery (who has gripped the crucifix) and lumbers toward us, hand extended. “That’s my kind of talk; that’s my earth you see, its lost and gleaming colors, intermingled—” And he continues on in this vein for an active and considerable period while I put my hands carefully on the gleaming shelf, haul myself upright, finish off the new jigger that has been placed before me, and look in the corners and crevices, abscissas and junctions of light for some new companionship, some new conversation. There is this utter sameness, of course, but there is also the illusion of difference; between these possibilities, of course, we must exist as best we can. “If you’ll excuse me,” I say, “I’ll be back in a little while—”

  “Wait,” Tom says, “I haven’t clarified—” But of course he has; he has clarified everything. We exist in terms of unsparing, if only partial, clarification, as I would like to point out to him if it were not all too much trouble; and I lurch away from the handle, cutting a small swath for myself through the anomalous and seeking crowd. There are more, more of them than one could possibly imagine at an easy glance, and still coming in all the time—but still, with the debatable exception of the author of Colour Out of Space, whom I had hardly expected to see here, there is not a science fiction writer. Perhaps not even a magical realist. I think at times that this may be part of my punishment, may be the seal to my peculiar and diffident fate; but then again, this may not be the case, and I have misapprehended its totality. One wavers; one always wavers—there are poles of possibility here, and somewhere in that center, we must live.

  It is worth retiring to think about; it is worth long and solitary walks along the back rim of this sullen and clangorous enclosure where questions give way only to the sound of those voices—but before I can reach the swinging doors that will carry me past Ernest and to that roadway which I (the perceptive, the far-ranging, the outward-seeking science fiction writer) may have been the only one to find, I am straightened by the imprint of Mary Flannery’s small and determined fist in my chest; and then I find myself scrambling against a wall, held by the rigorous, unblinking purchase of her gaze. I know that this must not be the first time she has so accosted me—we have all been here for much longer than we would like to admit; memory carries through only imperfectly; each cycle is partially a new cycle—but surely I have never felt such determination in her grasp before. Rigor glints from her eye, rigorousness from the set of her jaw, Catholic grandeur and reparation from her spavined fingers. “It’s not a myth,” she says.

  “I know that.”

  “It’s not a metaphor; it’s not an example; it’s not a way of explaining things that is a simpler way of explaining other things. It’s none of that at all. It is full and final; it is absolute.”

  “I know that, too.” Really, what else is there to say? We must humor one another; if we do not admit one another’s obsessions or selective agenda, we will have—well, what will we have? It is nothing to consider. “I accept that.”

  “You have to accept everything,” Mary Flannery says dangerously. Her hand, holding me against the wall, has enormous strength and confidence; it is not lupus but the Holy Ghost that must accomplish this passage. “That’s their mistake,” she says, pointing with the other hand toward the enclosure where dimly now I can see Tom Wolfe and the acromegalic gent embracing one another with one arm, pouring drinks over each other’s heads with their free hands. “They’re trying to make it real, trying to call it grace. But it isn’t even a prayer.”

  “All right,” I say. “I understand that.” I write science fiction, or at least I think I used to before I came to this condition. If I don’t know about the absence of prayer, the absence of conversion, then who does? But this is not a point that I dare make in these circumstances. “It’s just a condition.”

  “Exactly,” she says. “Working there in a shed, watching the peafowl, feeling the lupus move inside, turn me into a cross, make me the very nails that put me there, I thought of that. You can learn a lot being sick, you know. Nothing will teach you better than being sick, if you’re a smart person.”

  “Or old,” I say. “You can learn from being old.”

  “Not like being sick. Of course, sick and old is best for learning. If you’re still smart. If you have your brain. Otherwise, it’s just purgatory and purgatory and never knowledge. But you’re not listening, are you? You’re already gone from here. Your eyes are lit for a higher path; you are on your way out. I am an interruption, a distraction.” Indeed, it is Flannery’s eyes that seem alight with some grievous and perceptive demon; caught in that glance, I can feel myself slowly impaled by my own resistance. “It isn’t that—”

  “It’s everything,” she says. “That and the drinking, too—” And there is a thundering in the distance, a series of squawks and cries, as if not archangels but peafowl were massing; and then, in the sudden rolling and flickering light, I feel myself fall from Flannery’s grasp. “Again,” she says. “They’re coming again.” Ernest screams curses; there is a battery of curses coming from the enclosure. But I seem to be very much alone.

  “Theatrics,” Flannery says. “They don’t trust us to find grace on our own; they have to give us flowers and trumpets.” And indeed, there seems to be much more to say; that seems to be the point, flowers and trumpets—but before I can exchange assent with Flannery or be reminded that this, too, is not a symbol but merely evidence, the very roof of the establishment seems to depart, and I find myself along with the others, always the others, to be overcome by breezes and the cooler scents of night. Their enormous figures begin to materialize.

  “Courage,” Tom says. He has come by me most unostentatiously, no sense of passage; he is simply standing there. “Some of us will be lost, and others will be found, but in that final and everlasting morning, we will stand together—” He continues in this incantatory vein for a while as the figures, ever more substantial, mass before us—their huge arms and shoulders becoming definite in the mist, then their hats, their cloaks, their staffs, only their features indistinct, merely to be inferred from the hollows of their posture. “Forever in the light that arcs,” Tom says. He throws a companionable hand around my shoulders. “If we are of good courage, we have nothing to fear,” he says. “For here we stand.”

  And so we do. Here we stand. But waiting then, waiting in the difficult and faintly malodorous mist for their latest and most statutory judgment, the sense of their earlier judgments now coming over me through the chinks and crevices of partially recovered memory, I find myself trembling. “Are we standing firm?” Tom says. “Or did we lose the morning?”

  “I have to tell the truth,” I say hesitantly. “I must face them in truth.”

  “Yes,” Tom says, “there is a certain purity in that.” And I look at him, at his angular and honest features, seeing at last the honesty that must have always been there. I think of Mary Flannery’s own advisement and the simpler declarations of the man from Providence, and it is in my throat, it is on my lips, it is to be spoken—“I am a science fiction writer! I am a science fiction writer!” I am about to shout, “I wrote it all my life, and even when I didn’t write it, I was thinking about it; it’s the only thing I ever did well, even though I did plenty of it badly!” I want to add, And so on and so forth, but before the words can burst forth, before this last and greatest of true confessions pours through, it is already too late; it is beyond me, for the cloaked figures have begun to speak, pound their staffs, render their undramatic and final judgment; and as their word goes forth, as their word pours from this time and place to any other time and place that may come, I can only quail against Tom and submit. And resubmit. Will there be release, or is it indeed of wandering and the earth again? “In the corner,” I hear it said. “In the corner—”

  In the corner—

  On the Heath

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nbsp; IN A SMALL CLEARING, ALADDIN STUMBLES TO A HALT, then stops, squatting on the sand. Around him the wind stirs, silt coming into his face, but it is at least bearable here, the storm is not as fierce, he seems to have found a little haven, although, of course, one cannot be sure of this. Everything is treacherous: the weather, his abominable daughters, the exile, the footing on the sand. “Hand me the lamp now,” he says to his Fool.

  His Fool—the only member of Aladdin’s court who has stayed with him through all of this exile, who has continued on with him against all reason—shrugs and produces the magic ornament which Kent had passed on to them before he had deserted. “I can’t take any more of this, Aladdin,” Kent had said. “But I can at least give you a magic lamp. Call on it when you have nowhere else to turn.” Well, that was Kent, never reliable but full of promises. The Fool had taken the lamp when Aladdin had refused, putting it under his cloak. “You never know,” the Fool had said. “It might just come in useful.” Now was the time to find out. Aladdin had run out of ideas, not a new condition for him in this period of exile, but at last he was willing to admit it.

  “The lamp,” he says to the Fool. “Give it here.”

  The little man shrugs, holding out the contrivance to him. It glows mysteriously in the moonlight, although this may merely be a condition of Aladdin’s failing vision. First, the humiliation. Then, the exile. Then, too, the rationalizations with which the harpies had sent him out into this miserable storm. “You’re unreasonable,” Regan had said. “You’re a sad, cruel old man,” Goneril had added. “Be gone from our sight,” Goneril had said. “That goes for me, too,” Regan had said. Who would have judged such an outcome? It came from first giving your kingdom away, then putting yourself at the mercy of faithless daughters. He had certainly never envisioned such a situation in old Arabia. Well, that was a long time ago and before he had accumulated all of that corrupting wealth. Which he had shortsightedly given away.

  “I warned you about that, sire,” the Fool says. “I told you you should have held onto it, at least some. For a disbursement, that is to say. You should never have given it to all of them and those ungrateful sons-in-law.”

  Aladdin realizes that he has once again been muttering his thoughts. Privacy and dignity seem to be going although continence, at least so far, has remained. It is truly abominable, all of this, and yet who is to blame for the situation? “Give it here,” he says. He takes the lamp roughly from the Fool’s embrace, stares at its ruddy surfaces, the smooth wick, the little island of wax in which the wick has been embedded. The wind kicks and tosses a little sand into his face. “Now what?” Aladdin grumbles. “I mean, do I light it or what?”

  “You don’t light it, sire,” the Fool says. “Remember what the Lord told you? You rub it, back and forth on the bottom, several times. I remember that the touch is very important. It must be light yet firm.”

  “And then what?” Aladdin says. He had never trusted that Goneril. He had had a bad feeling about that one from the earliest years. But Regan, Regan had his hair, his eyes, his talent for a bargain, and a merchant’s shrewdness. Who would have thought that she would have proven as cruel as her sister? Well, there was nothing to be done about any of this now; it was too late to withdraw that foolish, grandiose moment when he had with a flourish given them his riches. “All right,” Aladdin says, “I’m rubbing. I’m rubbing the thing.” The surfaces feel peculiarly warm under his fingers but then again what can you expect in this desert country? Perhaps Aladdin himself has a fever. “Now what?” Aladdin says.

  “Well, I don’t know,” the Fool says. “I guess we wait a bit.”

  They wait a bit, barely shielded by the small wall of stones behind which they have clambered. A thin golden haze steams from the lamp, shimmers before them; from the haze Aladdin then thinks that he sees a shape become manifest. It is difficult to tell in the moonlight and his eyes, along with the rest of him, are rapidly going bad. But the shape resolves itself and stands before him, looking very much like Gloucester, reminding Aladdin of that wretched old Earl just before he was taken away in chains. “Yes?” the shape says, in an inquisitive tone. “I was summoned? I am desired?”

  “I don’t know,” Aladdin says. Truly, the situation seems to be overtaking him rapidly. Kent had given no instructions beyond rubbing. Still, there is no question but that Aladdin is in extremity and having gone this far, he can only go ahead. “Yes,” he says, “I summoned you.”

  “And he, too?” the shape says, pointing toward the Fool. “What is his mission?”

  “He is my Fool,” Aladdin says.

  “Your Fool? What does he do?”

  “Well, sire,” the Fool says, after a pause. “I am here to amuse him and make him laugh. As much as the situation will permit, that is.”

  “Oh,” says the shape. “I don’t see much laughter.”

  “There is nothing to laugh about,” Aladdin says. The dialogue seems baroque, pointless, as elaborate and yet meaningless as the fine curvature of the shape in the mist which has now congealed into something very much like the appearance of boy slaves in old Arabia, long before he had met the mother of Regan and Goneril and eased himself toward this terrible situation. “There is only pain and darkness.”

  “That is surely distressing,” the now-Arabian shape says. “But you are not being specific. My instructions, according to the old agreement, are to grant you three wishes upon the emergence of the charm. I suggest that you make those wishes rapidly; I can remain only for a little while in this state. Then I will evanesce.”

  “You will what?”

  “He said ‘evanesce,’ ” the Fool says, “Evanesce we talk, he will in the wind and the rain.”

  Aladdin says nothing. Really, what is there to say? “Three wishes,” he says, “and quickly?”

  “I hate puns,” the Arabian boy says. He has now assumed a credible shape and posture and Aladdin can see old memories cast in that fiery mist. “I don’t magic either, or troth. I suggest that you make these wishes very quickly. I cannot be held much longer, nor do I appreciate this discussion.”

  “Very well,” Aladdin says. He realizes that he must think quickly, three wishes at once or nothing at all, but it has been so long since he has felt fully in control of himself or free of the storm that his internal logic seems to be blocked, as thick and congealed as the mist which had sprung from the lamp. “I wish for the restoration of my riches. I wish for a daughter who was not an ungrateful harpie, who loved me as I deserve to be loved. I wish pain upon Regan and Goneril who have done this terrible thing to me. I wish comfort for the Fool, my Fool who has so loyally stayed—”

  “Sorry,” the Arabian boy says, “Only three wishes, not four. The daughter who loves you I can take care of. The restoration of the riches is a little bit of a problem but might be managed. The pain on Regan and Goneril is a state of mind and that is notoriously difficult.”

  “All right,” Aladdin says, “Forget that part. Give my Fool comfort.”

  “Sorry,” the Arabian says. “The first three are what count. I will do what I can.” The boy shakes a remonstrative finger at Aladdin. “I do want to tell you, however, that you are a vain, foolish old man and you have brought this trouble upon yourself. Nor are you likely to avoid repeating it. Wishes to the contrary, we make our own fate.”

  “That is true,” the Fool says. “That is spoken very truly.”

  “Nonetheless,” the boy says, “I will spring beyond judgment; I will do what I can.” The form trembles, then begins to decompose. “You will sleep,” he says to Aladdin, “and then you will awaken. Unconsciousness is part of the passage here.”

  “But wait!” says Aladdin, already seeing the boy begin to slide from his sight. “How will I know? I mean, how will I know that this is real, that it is indeed something which has happened, that it is a real thing which you have done?”

  “You will know that,” a voice says faintly from the now unidentifiable mist, “because you will carry the word ‘rea
l’ within you, as part of you, as a badge and emblem of shame and reminiscence forever. Your name will be real—” the mist says faintly and departs, leaving Aladdin and the Fool alone again on the heath, with the bare and broken lamp lying by Aladdin’s foot. In the air is incense and then nothing at all.

  “Real,” Aladdin says. “It cannot be real.” He stares at the Fool for a while.

  “And I,” the Fool says at length, “I will go to bed then at noon.”

  And the darkness closes upon them. For a while and as if spewed from the lamp.

  * * *

  Later, much later, understanding all of it at last but too late and with the Fool departed, Lear clutches Cordelia in her despair, lifts her dead light swaying toward the Moon, cries, “Break, heart, break!”—but all the curses and powers of Araby itself will not permit this. Cordelia lies spent in his embrace. He has done such things, has the old King now, as would be the terror of the earth.

  Grand Tour

  First slide, please

  HERE’S STANFORD. FORTY-FIVE, FORTY-SIX, definitely past his prime but still in the game, still pitching. In the depths of the night, touching the abyss of sleep, he thinks or dreams: I’d like to give this up, it’s all too much, there’s too little left for me to justify this endless, shriveled hoping . . . but daylight casts such thoughts to the west wind. Stanford hobbles to the shower, his head full of plans, possibilities, detached from all of this post-adolescent tritesse, or so he calls it. Five foot eleven, two hundred and seven pounds (this bothers him quite a bit, but he tells himself that it is not grossly excess, most of it is in his upper body and he will begin an exercise program very soon anyway), light beard, haunted eyes, fifty-seven thousand dollars in a money market account, eighty-six thousand in stocks and treasury accounts and (his ex-wife Irene knows nothing of this) four thousand dollars in silver quarters and dimes, smuggled away during that period when the pre-1965 coins were soaring on the collector’s or meltdown market. The separation agreement provided considerable alimony and child support, making such a joke of his income that it seemed ridiculous not to just keep the hundred and a half in easy reach since it was going out to Irene anyway almost as fast as he could shovel it in, but the four thousand dollars was his, his little sinking fund, Stanford liked to think, to hold out against eternity. Stunned eyes, sardonic face, hollow, interesting features, the face of a twentieth century man (late century, late millennium, on the cusp of grand and inexpressible change, except he could not quite say what) possessed of the paradigmatic American middle class plight but still trying to come to grips with it, that is Stanford’s self-conception. Middle age, isolation, divorce, alimony, disengaged cautious relations with a late-adolescent son and daughter who in those strange moments on the cusp of sleep Stanford cannot quite apprehend, cannot see, is not even sure of their names.