Orbit 9 Read online

  “Are you out of bed right now?” asks Marc sleepily.

  “Yes, I was too hot to sleep tonight anyway so I stayed in my apartment with a lot of friends.”

  “Have they any ideas on how to get the bed into the apartment?”

  “I daren’t ask them, I’m not intimate enough with them to approach the question of beds in apartments.” Together they laugh at the joke. It is like when Tom and I saw two old negroes in the Bowery fighting desperately with their crutches. Tom just about broke up laughing, a strange, high, utterly delighted and slightly diabolical laugh. I felt very schmaltzy in my amusement by comparison. Which only goes to show that one must not compare oneself with writers like Tom, especially as one hardly knows who they are, you have to be careful whom you mix with, psychosis is more contagious than German measles and can also cause a woman to give birth to blind monsters. I know how easily caught are curses and psychoses, I can remove such things from people by begging an article of their clothing and wearing it in public. I have a cupboard full of old clothes and a closet full of succubi in alcohol and people tell me that I am uncommunicative these days. They ask me why I have had the phone taken out. To save expense and interruption, I reply. Interruption? Yes, I’m hibernating.

  Who said Tom was psychotic, I didn’t, I only said he might be, anyone might be, these days you never know what you are talking to, do you? Just because he did not invite you to dinner, will not discuss things with you, does not exert himself to make your weird little existence more fabulous whenever he gets the opportunity? Don’t talk to me like that, the truth is, I’m jealous as hell of his magnificent tattoos and his capacity for riding a powerful motorbike. I can’t ride a motorbike, I have tried but I fall off. Too unstable you see. It’s going round bends that’s dangerous, and you also have to know your way back.

  “Do you think you would like it in Africa?” asks David who is Tom’s friend from way back. No, he did not ask me that, nobody asked me that, they don’t care whether I would like it in Africa or not, it doesn’t affect them at all. But Marc had a dream of Mombasa once, and that seemed like a sparkling coincidence if ever there was one. As a student of Jung I am interested in synchronicity, being unable to explain certain series of coincidences. I turned to Jung as always, for he is The Philosopher for the Next Hundred Years, and I do not like to be left behind. It was a hell of a coincidence that Marc was visiting England and I lived there. It could be nothing but synchronicity at work that Marc was going to Paris and so was I. It could be nothing but a complete balls-up on Jung’s part that my trip was canceled and Marc went traipsing around the Bois de Something-or-other taking photographs of American exiles who used the slang of fifteen years ago.

  It must be synchronicity that I live here and now, have just lighted a fire of coals in preparation for a cozy evening and am about to cook sausages and eggs and bacon for tea, it being Monday and no cold meat in the fridge. A friend came yesterday and stayed for dinner even though it was the middle of the afternoon—”Well if it really is only four you have time to stay,” I said and between us we ate all the roast lamb except for some scraps which Colin made into sandwiches. I hate making sandwiches, the fillings always elude the bread.

  I CANNOT KEEP MY BREAD STRAIGHT

  I lay in bed the night before last and I started to swell. I gradually expanded until I filled all the bed and Colin began to moan and snore in his sleep and I heaved to accommodate my newly enormous body, and he would have fallen onto the floor except the covers must have been well tucked in. My tongue got enormous, it grew at first at a greater rate than my mouth so I had to open my jaws, back and back they creaked and grew slowly big enough and squared-off at the front, my top lip and my nose became all one huge mound of flesh. I knew that if I sneezed I would blast the bedcovers right off. My great stumpy arms and legs rested heavily across my vast belly and my little fat ears twitched. My insides began to rumble like a distant volcano. I was almost too heavy to move and everything was incredibly awkward, but somehow I managed to get a hoof under the mattress and scoop out some salted peanuts. Most of them rolled onto the floor but I managed to throw a few into my gaping maw onto the domed tongue and slowly close my hps over them before they rolled into my throat. I chomped noisily, slurp slurp in the otherwise silent night. I thought of creeping downstairs and opening the bottle of champagne but I knew that champagne is meant to be shared amongst friends and I was the only hippopotamus for miles around, and besides it had all been drunk. I called Tom, long distance to New York at a cost of three pounds per minute.

  “Tom?”

  “Hullo, who’s that?”

  “This is Josephine. Tom, can you help me, I have a problem.”

  “A problem—you’ve got a problem?” He laughs delightedly, I am pleased to have made contact so easily, perhaps he is telepathic?

  “Yes, listen. I can’t get through the door to the toilet and I think I have dysentery.” I listen to his wonderful trilling amusement until I reckon I have spent about twenty pounds sterling and ring off feeling better already. I make the whole room tremble with a wonderful bassoonlike stale-peanut-smelling fart which reaches an impossible vibrating nadir and then rises crescendo like a Swanee whistle and dies away on a series of staccato squeaks and a final flabby silent gust. I am small again, about a hundred and eight pounds, most of that ossified brain cell. I turn over in bed and Colin struggles for air dreaming of Africa. In his sleep he speaks. “Jesus Christ how these native women snore!”

  Yes, it had to be synchronicity that made me small and active again by the time my little girl called out in the night.

  “Mummy, mummy, the curtains are coming out at me!”

  I stagger quickly into her room and growl at the curtains.

  “Back, back you rose-patterned poltroons, back I tell you! How dare you frighten my little girl!” She is already asleep, secure in the knowledge that I can deal with anything supernatural. With curtains like ours how could I ever leave her behind, who else has the power to subdue them when they try to attack in the night? A child needs a nice stable mother in this crazy world, someone to reassure her and help

  TO KEEP HER HEAD STRAIGHT

  So I shan’t be setting off with a rucksack to the wilds of Greenwich Village alone just yet, and if we get to Africa it will be as a family, because in Africa there will not only be a plethora of curses and witches and bogies and so on, there will be snakes and spiders under the pillow, things I can’t deal with but Colin can—you should see him hunt with a slipper—and elephants on the road and crocodiles in the only decent swimming water for miles, I shall be needed to warn and nag and exorcise. We shall go on weekend trips to the Mountains of the Moon and see the shimmering leopards from the safety of our Land Rover, and see the Blixen-type coffee farms and see hippos in their habitat. If we went to America we should go to look at bears I expect. Family trips are like that. In Africa I shall get a magnificent tan and seek out African writers and ask them questions and with luck they might even ask me questions too. I might even write an African novel!

  Excuse me, the telephone is ringing.

  “Hello, who’s that?”

  “This is Marc in New York.”

  “Oh how lovely to hear from you, how are you, are you quite better?”

  “Oh yes, lots and lots better thankyou Josephine, I’ve been eating avocados and they seem to have an—ah—curative property you know?”

  “Oh yes indeed, I’m sure, I have one eight feet tall in my sitting room.”

  “You do? I never noticed it! But listen Josephine, I ah—seem to have a problem.”

  “You’ve got a problem?” I can hardly stop laughing, I know it is costing him about eight dollars a minute but my laughter is not to be contained by such a consideration. I can dimly make out what he is saying over my noisy mirth.

  His bed is full of Rhinestones, he can’t understand it, he cleared them all up only the other night and took them out and gave them away to Chinese people on the street. But he
re, the bed is full of the damn things again, they are terribly sharp and they are ruining his hibernation.

  “Send me your red scarf, I’ll hex them for you,” I say, but the distance between us seems to spoil our usual instant understanding. I cannot seem to communicate properly. And besides I am laughing so much. It is very amusing to be called like this in the middle of the night, especially as we haven’t got a phone.

  <>

  * * * *

  Leon E. Stover

  WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS TOO

  MUCH COMMUNICATION

  The jagged edge of construction showed against the sky. It was lunch time. Thousands of workmen were squatting in the narrow noontime shadow of the wall. Wagon tracks narrowed to infinity in all directions, bringing horse-drawn loads of stone and rice to this dry grassland barren of both. Men in this country can win no living without abandoning their crops and turning to animal breeding. So the First Emperor of China, Ch’in Shih Huang Ti, built the Great Wall at this divide between the steppe and the sown: to keep the sedentary cultivator in, captive to taxation, unfree to join the horsemen of the north.

  On signal the men arose and swarmed back to work. As they toiled all along the line, filling the masonry sandwich with rubble, a vibrant shape formed on the distant horizon and instantly expanded in its headlong drive to the foreground: a great white flying charger, ridden by a fierce man in black, who scourged the backs of his trembling vassals as he passed over them. The Emperor at his magic work!

  Then suddenly . . . inside a Japanese house . . . people kneeling on the floor . . . bowing to each other . . . kneeling on tatami mats and bowing to each other in a stiff display of lacquered punctilios. . . .

  Mane blazing in the wind, the horse landed his imperial Chinese majesty smack in the middle of the departing guests where he dismounted and took up the place of the host standing at the door, hands on his knees, bowing frantically, bowing good-bye, and the film rush flipped to the end and the projection room bloomed bright white.

  “Did you see that?”

  “Yes, I saw.”

  “Well, what do you make of it?”

  “What about the others?”

  Two reports from Dr. Mochizuki’s hands and a flickering of film again darkened the screen with chiaroscuro movement along the Great Wall. Here and there the image fell apart, revealing flashing vignettes of dainty ceremony: people dressed in kimono, bowing, pouring tea, passing things to each other at forehead level with both hands. The lights came on again at the end of the rush.

  “All the recent takes are like that. Ito-san doesn’t keep his mind on his work. Quite literally not!”

  “Could be the effect of his removal from the hospital to your laboratory,” ventured Dr. Iwahashi.

  “It could be so. I suppose that is why an anthropologist like yourself has been asked to inspect this project.”

  “The human element,” explained Iwahashi.

  “I’ll show you some of the earlier, good stuff,” Mochizuki offered.

  His secretary, ever sensitive to the punctuation of human events, brought in fresh tea and set the cups on the tea poy between the two armchairs.

  The earlier film clips poured smoothly onto the screen from the glancing light beams and Mochizuki talked.

  “As you can see,” he indicated Ch’in Shih Huang Ti’s enormous, gaudy palace buildings, “there is no limit to the scale we can achieve. That’s why we decided on redoing The Great Wall for a starter.”

  The palace buildings stretched out with the infinitude of the wall itself, one for each day of the year, so that the Emperor might keep his enemies guessing his whereabouts.

  “Anything Ito-san can imagine we can film. But we discovered another advantage as well,” Mochizuki continued at his nervous pitch. “The human eye selects for more detail in the focus of its attention, omitting structure and even color at the periphery. But the camera lens takes in everything impartially. Tricks of soft focusing or masking with a dynamic frame don’t even begin to approximate the different degrees of visual refinement experienced by the human retina—sharpest on the fovea, loss so on the surrounding macular area, and still less on the peripheral areas.

  “Look at this.” Mochizuki wagged a skinny hand at the panorama on the screen. “Photographic realism when we want it. Spectacular enough. But when our dreamer dreams with his inner eye ...”

  Mochizuki waited silently until one of the marvels appeared.

  “Here now, the mountain scenery. See that? Even when panning. Why, it is like the painting of Gyokudo Kawai in motion!”

  “So it is,” breathed Iwahashi respectfully.

  There indeed was the style of Japan’s greatest modern painter come to life. As in Kawai’s nature studies, the center of interest glowed with full richness, the rest dropping off to skeletal sketches in black and white. The foveal, macular, and peripheral areas of the dreamer’s vision passed a stand of woods in review. Trees, trunks, and branches slipped in and out of detail and color with natural ease.

  “The eyes of the audience are led where our dreamer chooses to lead them,” Mochizuki concluded. Iwahashi was reminded of the offstage benshi that used to explain silent films when he was a boy.

  Mochizuki stood up. “Let us please now go to my laboratory.”

  * * * *

  “Well, there he is. That’s Ito-san,” said Dr. Mochizuki, chairman of Tokyo University’s new Department of Bionic Engineering.

  Ito-san, a young catatonic lately released into Mochizuki’s custody from Tokyo Metropolitan Psychiatric Hospital after a year’s confinement, sat cross-legged in one corner of the laboratory, eating his breakfast. His personal nurse, a short dumpy creature, sat on the raised mat-covered platform with him, reading aloud from the day’s shooting script. From time to time she guided her patient’s sluggish chopsticks to his mouth.

  A body servant to cook Ito-san’s rice, bathe him, change his clothes, and put him to bed at night was an added expense his family had saved by installing their housemaid in the hospital with him instead of hiring a tsukisoi there.

  “They just sent her along when he went rigid,” Dr. Mochizuki said, continuing to brief his visitor. “And that’s the way my talent scouts found him. What do I care what’s wrong with him so long as he sticks to his dreaming?”

  Dr. Iwahashi, professor of cultural anthropology, also of Tokyo University, stood admiring ancient Chinese armor and costumes fitted on startlingly lifelike mannequins which were ranged around the laboratory. He stopped revolving his head and cocked it at thetsukisoi.

  “So she’s the only one who can get through to him?”

  “Hai! The more she read to him the sicker he got.”

  “Ah so,” murmured Iwahashi, slightly bowing his portly figure. “Interesting.”

  “You are too kind. Sit here, please.”

  Mochizuki indicated another pair of overstuffed armchairs. They clashed with the straight metallic lines of the bionic device which stood in the center of the laboratory.

  “We’ve rigged up a slave screen to monitor the takes directly,” said Mochizuki.

  The two professors sank into their cushions and waited for the televisor in front of them to light up.

  The cameraman climbed his stool and focused the camera, the great drums of Fuji Color film arching over his head, on the bioescent screen hidden in the cool depths of the hooded machine. There, the mysterious images would soon flicker into life.

  A student assistant brought Dr. Mochizuki a copy of the script attached to a clipboard.

  “Today,” he leaned sidewise, “we are founding empire in China—the great battle of 222 B.C. between Ch’in and the last of the undefeated feudal states. Ch’in strikes down the Yangtze and finishes Ch’u—over a million men fielded on both sides.”

  “About the time of the Second Punic Wars in the Roman world,” put in Iwahashi.

  “I am instructed,” replied Mochizuki, nodding his body forward in his chair. But he added, “I’ve never had the
chance to live outside Japan and study foreign things as you have done.” This concealed a barb of sanctimonious aggression flicked at a man set apart by his colleagues for his recent visiting professorship at Harvard.

  “Anyway,” Mochizuki went on, “we are attempting to film that big scene. I suppose that’s why you are here.”