Читать книгу The Great Jones Coop Ten Gigasoul Party (and Other Lost Celebrations) - Paul Di Filippo - Страница 7

THE MAN WHOM THINGS HATED

Hours ago, the snow had been an icy mattress beneath his parka-clad back. Now it merely felt warm and comforting, a down-filled hollow he would never leave. Hours ago, the pain in his mangled right leg had been excruciating, causing him to cycle through a personal season consisting of periods of hellish awareness followed by merciful blackouts. Now the agony was simply an old friend, part of his very essence.

Harry Strang, dying, possessed of a curious lucidity, considered his life.

* * * *

They called him a clumsy child, and he believed them. At least for a time.

How else to explain the incredible misfortunes that dogged him, like the Furies plaguing Orestes?

Little Harry was totally maladroit among the modern appurtences of everyday life. The artifacts which everyone else dealt with so easily were intractable with him. Any significant encounter between Harry and a manmade object—and naturally such encounters were innumerable and unavoidable—ended in humiliating and painful defeat for him. His life, till age ten or so, was an unending succession of minor and major disasters.

There had been, for instance, the time he was leaning out the window at school to shout to a playmate below. Inside the old-fashioned frame at that instant, the frayed rope holding the cigar-shaped sashweight had given way, and the massive window had come crashing down on Harry’s back. He had been in the hospital nearly a month following that. And somehow, he had gotten all the blame, as if he could have known the condition of the hidden mechanism, and had deliberately taunted it, by placing his frail body beneath it.

When the emergency brake in his father’s ’59 Chevy Bel Air chose to fail, he had tried desperately to steer the rolling auto down the hill and onto a grassy median. Instead, all his best efforts brought on a collision with telephone pole at ten miles per hour. Harry took away a sickle-shaped scar on his forehead from his “clumsiness” that time.

When an aerosol can of Endust accidently fell off its closet shelf and into the bag of paper trash—the very trash which it was Harry’s job to incinerate in the backyard burner—the resulting explosion peppered Harry’s left arm with hot metal shards. His father called him a “damn clumsy kid without the sense he was born with,” and told him he was lucky not to have lost his eyes.

Dramatic and potentially fatal accidents such as these were interspersed with a hundred other lesser daily humiliations. Tripping over extension cords around the house; reaching into a toolbox and stabbing himself with an icepick; breaking the dinner glasses he was assigned to dry; stepping on rusty nails with bare summer feet; dropping a pan that held boiling water and scalding himself.

Harry’s body always bore a dozen black-and-blue marks, shifting like sunspots from week to week. Islands of permanent scar-tissue were more stable features of his topography.

Harry’s despair and sense of helplessness would have been total, had it not been for the time he spent in the woods, which he loved.

Living in a brand-new suburban tract during the ’fifties, Harry had easy access to the countryside that bordered the development. Acres of oaks and pines, birches and elms, ledges and streams, lay just beyond the last cracker-box cottage. There, Harry discovered—slowly, against all evidence—that he was not really clumsy.

He never fell from the trees he climbed, nor the rocky outcrops he scaled. He could leap from stone to slippery stone across a chilly stream without once getting wet. He never bumbled into the nests of yellowjackets. Lightning-blasted branches never fell on his head. In short, he navigated through forest and meadow with a growing confidence and surety utterly lacking in his home life.

Each time he returned from a sojourn among the trees, he would strive to convince himself that his competence would persist, that this time he would be transformed, all his awkwardness magicked into grace.

It never happened that way, though. Each re-entry into society with all its devices was like the expulsion from Eden replayed, all celestial harmony decaying into earthly strife.

Harry fantasized about simply fleeing to the woods for good, so disheartening was his mundane, catastrophe-filled life. But he was no true loner—although forced to be one, since his peers jeered him for his misfortunes—and he realized with a child’s clarity that even if he could survive physically in the wild, he would soon grow lonely and sad.

So Harry lived till roughly age ten with a curious dichotomy he could not rationalize, but only endure. At home and at school, anywhere in fact among the trappings of modern life, he was an utter incompetent, prone to seemingly inescapable collisions with everyday innocent objects. In the woods, he was simply a normal, well-coordinated boy who did not suffer at all.

One night, the split in his perception of himself was healed. As he lay abed, drifting into sleep, all his half-formed intuitions, those vague and inchoate night-thoughts of childhood, assumed a definite shape and substance, became a clear and coherent theory that could explain everything, a theory which he would alter or refine only slightly over the next twenty years. At the instant his suspicions crystallized, he felt two simultaneous strong emotions.

Immense relief and justification, since his theory allowed the belief that there was nothing wrong with his physical self.

Equally overpowering fear and dismay, since there had to be something very wrong with the world he was forced to inhabit, despite all the teachings of science and religion to the contrary.

Harry’s theory was simply this: manmade objects possessed a certain vitality, a shadowy kind of life allowing desires and the will to enact them, in whatever limited way they could. One of their desires was “to get him.” It was as straightforward as that, and the only possible explanation. Since his body did not betray him among natural things, but only among artifacts, then it must be the fault of the artifacts, and not his body.

Harry fell asleep eventually that night, his mind torn by elation and despair. In the morning, his theory stood clear in his eyes as fact. While he had slept, it had assumed a weight of reality beyond anything his conscious mind could have deliberately conferred. Only two unresolved things were to trouble him over the next few years: where did artifacts derive their energy and malignity from; why had they singled him out of everyone he knew as their victim?

The answer to the first question he deduced himself after a few years. The second he had revealed to him by a dead man.

Harry was a great reader. Thrust into his own company, he was forced to be. In early adolescence, he came, by a combination of chance and research, upon the writings of all the great believers in animism, whether as metaphor or reality. Thoreau, Emerson, Wordsworth, Eisley, Muir, Burroughs (John, not E. R.). Their accounts of their perceptions of Nature dovetailed neatly with his own experiences, and he came to see the very soil beneath his feet, every particle of living and “inanimate” matter as imbued with some fractional charge of Nature’s great life, forming a unified whole. This belief explained rather neatly where manmade things drew their energy from. They had simply always had it. All the refining and forging, shaping and annealing that Man applied to ores and hydrocarbons and plant byproducts had no effect on their connection with Nature. If the veins of iron below the ground carried any intrinsic force, then so did the alloy head of the hammer which had cruelly smashed his thumb the other day. Man’s intervention had no effect on the true preternatural qualities of the materials.

Of course, this did not explain the enmity of artifacts, which Harry began to feel more and more as a palpable scheming aura. Nature in the raw imparted no such sensation, either in his own experience or in the works of the authors he had read. Even when Nature killed, as by avalanche or flood, there seemed no overt hatred or revenge involved. The violent, sadistic personality of manmade objects was not readily explicable, but Harry—through pain and misery—was forced to accept it.

And to believe that he was its sole object within his ken.

All this intellectualizing about his condition allowed Harry to fare a little better through adolescence and into adulthood. Before, he had had no reason to approach objects suspiciously, believing that if he only exerted the utmost conscious control over his muscles and will, then he would not suffer any “accident.” The failure of such a policy had not been enough to induce a thorough wariness in him. He had always felt that the problem was ultimately under his control, amenable to some heightened carefulness on his part.

Now, however, knowing that all things sought to entrap and hurt him, he was able to avoid their worst efforts. Realizing that skillets were liable to twitch out of his grip, he held them with two hands. Because electrical appliances were likely to short out when he touched them, he always made a point of flicking light switches, for instance, with nonconducting pencils.

This was not to say that Harry passed the succeeding years unscathed. Locker doors left bruises on his shin. Guitar strings snapped under his touch and whipped across his cheek. Toilets flooded if he so much as flushed a cigarette down. And naturally, he never dared to drive, all cars qualifying as the epitome of human-contrived complexity.

On the whole, Harry lived a halfway normal life, as long as he kept his vigilance up. His long walks in the woods allowed him to recover a semblance of dignity after the traumas of the day. He sought while afield to commune wordlessly with Nature, to ask it why its man-warped offspring hated him so.

He received nothing but a subliminal susurrus of alien contentment in reply.

When Harry discovered psychiatry and its easy labelling of complex mental states—especially that one termed “paranoid”—he became a bit unsettled and unsure of himself.

But a quick slice with Occam’s razor soon pared away his doubts. His solution was the simplest. These things happened to him. He had to be right.

By the end of high school, Harry was a quiet, well-adjusted, cautious and slow-moving young man. His parents remarked occasionally how he had outgrown “that clumsy young colt stage.” (Harry managed to keep the most outrageous of his continuing accidents secret from them.) They wanted Harry to continue his education, but he refused. He knew that simply to enter a college chemistry lab would be to seal his doom. Instead, he informed them that he was moving away. He said it was “to find himself.” (It was that decade.) Really, it was because his parents’ house was too full of hostile things, and because the town they lived in had over the years become an urbanized eyesore where one such as Harry could feel the weight of artifice like a brewing oppressive storm.

Amid many tears and gruff handshakes, Harry departed. He found a small rural village and landed the least mechanical job he could find: tending horses at a riding stable. There the only instruments he had to deal with were curry-brush and shovel. Even so, more than once he found the horses’ tackle inexplicably wrapped around his neck.

He lived in a single room that was almost bare. His mattress rested on the floor, since the slats in a conventional bed tended to break quite often. His single lamp he turned on with a pair of insulated pliers. He did not cook, but ate all his meals out. Briefly, he had a girlfriend named Mary Lynne. Until the night they decided to make love, when five condoms in a row shredded away in his fingers, and Mary Lynne’s waterbed burst. She never answered his calls after that.

At times, Harry still wondered, Why me? He briefly identified with Jonah, and those people who, science claimed, could stop computers and other devices dead merely by approaching them. But his case was not precisely like theirs. He did not usually bring misfortune on anyone else (despite the soaking Mary Lynne had suffered). And he did not have the ability to hurt gadgets. Quite the opposite: gadgets hurt him.

Diligently, Harry searched through mountains of literature for a life similar to his own. When he finally found it, he almost refused to believe it.

The volume was a thin hardcover, bound in black cloth and privately printed by a regional press. Entitled Confessions of a Hater of Civilization, it was owned by the village library, and had been written by one Alden Winship. The book was mostly a tirade against modern (First Printing: 1921) life. Spurious enjoyments, creeping commercialization, disappearing morality, all the immemorial complaints that had filled books since Ur. Harry nearly stopped reading a dozen times. But something kept him going. On page 97, he found this passage:

It is impossible to overstress the discomforts and dangers to which a sensitive soul in these debased times is subject. So far from being an harmonious Golden Age, like that of ancient Greece or Rome, when Mankind lived in unison with Nature, respectful of and not injurious to Her, demanding not overmuch of Her bounty, this modern era is a Time of Lead, in which Nature is continually affronted, one might almost say raped, if one cared for stronger language. I myself have suffered continuously from the impediments, the very “improvements” of modern life, to which clings a nearly visible miasma of ill will. Every newfangled device I have ever attempted to incorporate into my life—through the mistaken desire to seem au courant—has rebelled and turned on me, drowning me in a sea of misfortune. My life has literally been almost forfeit on a number of occasions too bizarre to recount. Even the simple implements of an earlier age seem to possess a positive hatred of my touch.

I do not consider myself to be an overly ham-handed fellow, and was long at a loss to explain why I, seemingly alone of my contemporaries, had to suffer these indignities. At last, after much laborious cogitation, I have formulated a theory as to my misfortunes.

I have always, since my days in knee-pants, been a sensitive soul who found the abode of Nature a cheerful, comforting place. Amidst Nature, I always felt I could discern her proud and sovereign peacefulness. If we posit that the spirit I intuited has some external reality—as the best classical minds assure us—and further, that those portions of Nature which are ripped from Her bosom and hammered and pounded by Man into submission, soon learn to hate humans as the agents of their separation, why should they not seek to strike back? Unfortunately for Nature, however, Mankind is armored in his ignorance and contemporary cynicism. Just as a witch doctor can harm only those who credit him with power, so can Nature take revenge only on those who—paradoxically—believe in her rightness and primacy. It is as if a goddess spurned by armored unbelievers were to take out her anger on her faithful priests.

Perhaps she even hates us, her visionary followers, a bit more than others, since only we perceive the full magnitude of her degradation…

Harry laid the book down on the scarred, initial-carved table. The one-room library suddenly seemed to shrink down around him like a coffin, and he was forced to flee.

Weeks later, through research at the state historical society, he learned further details of Alden Winship’s life. His death had come in the belts of a threshing machine, as he stood talking with a neighbor. An eyewitness had recounted in the weekly paper of the time how the humming, slapping belts “seemed to reach right out for his coattails.”

* * * *

Alaska was far from Harry’s village. But it was safer, he hoped. As a frontier and periphery of civilization, it could not be beat. Harry’s cabin was a log affair distant from all others. He lived a simple life, trapping small animals such as rabbit and otter with snares (he dared not carry a gun) and trading their furs for his meager needs. A garden in summer supplemented his diet. He used candles for light and wood for heat. He was very careful with the axe. Most of the time, he tried not to think, or to miss people, and was content.

One winter’s day, after a fresh snowfall, he was tramping along the path of his snares. He wore boots but not snowshoes, since the winter had barely begun. Under the dense pines, he welcomed the sun on his face.

One certain step was his last. The jaws of the hidden bear-trap snapped shut on his right leg above the ankle, biting through flesh to bone, and he went down.

Before losing consciousness for the first time, he wondered who had intruded on his territory. But he could not bring himself to blame the unknown human, for he was not really the agent at all.

* * * *

Harry’s strength was almost at an end. He felt peaceful for perhaps the first time in his life, knowing he would never have to worry about the implacable hostility of Nature again. He studied the glittery snow on the branches above him, considered the red patch beneath his leg. He was reminded of the winters of his youth, when he had found such solace amid the silence.

Suddenly, a gigantic figure materialized before him, hovering in the frosty air. Its head was a massive block of anthracite coal, with pool’s of gas-blue fire for eyes and mouth. Tears of petroleum dripped from its sockets. Its torso was rusty iron, its arms and legs huge tree trunks with the bark still on them. Here was Nature, then, he thought, Winship’s vengeful goddess, if only as Harry’s faltering mind conceived of it, come to witness his demise.

The deity seemed to communicate directly with his mind. Its message did not come in words, But Harry Strang grasped its import.

It reminded him that Man, rebellious and independent as he was, constituted part of the web of life. Soon Harry’s molecules would meld with the earth. It would reclaim him as its own, and he would share its mode of being. There would no longer be enmity between them.

And someday, the atoms that had been Harry Strang, incorporated into leather or wood or some more exotic substance, would wreak their own revenge.