The Early Stories (126 page)

Her husband, though even longer, was more slenderly built, and perhaps weighed less than twenty-five tons. His very manner was attenuated and tabescent. He had recently abandoned a conventional career in finance to enter an Episcopalian seminary. This regression—as the iguanodon felt it—seemed to make his wife more prominent, less supported, more accessible.

How splendid she was! For all the lavish solidity of her hips and legs, the modelling of her little flat diapsid skull was exquisite. Her facial essence appeared to narrow, along the diagrammatic points of her auricles and eyes and nostrils, toward a single point, located in the air, of impermutable refinement and calm. This irreducible point was, he realized, in some sense her mind: the focus of the minimal interest she brought to play upon the inchoate and edible green world flowing all about her, buoying her, bathing her. The iguanodon felt himself as an upright speckled stain in this world. He felt himself, under her distant dim smile, to be impossibly ugly: his mouth a sardonic chasm, his throat a pulsing curtain of scaly folds, his body a blotched bulb. His feet were heavy and horny and three-toed and his thumbs—strange adaptation!—were erect rigidities of pointed bone. Wounded by her presence, he savagely turned on her husband.

“Comment va le bon Dieu?”

“Ah?” The diplodocus was maddeningly good-humored. Seconds elapsed as stimuli and reactions travelled back and forth across his length.

The iguanodon insisted. “How are things in the supernatural?”

“The supernatural? I don't think that category exists in the new theology.”

“
N'est-ce pas?
What
does
exist in the new theology?”

“Love. Immanence as opposed to transcendence. Works as opposed to faith.”

“Work? I had thought you had quit work.”

“That's an unkind way of putting it. I prefer to think that I've changed employers.”

The iguanodon felt in the other's politeness a detestable aristocracy, the unappealable oppression of superior size. He said gnashingly, “The Void pays wages?”

“Ah?”

“You mean there's a living in nonsense? I said nonsense. Dead, fetid nonsense.”

“Call it that if it makes it easier for you. Myself, I'm not a fast learner. Intellectual humility came rather natural to me. In the seminary, for the first time in my life, I feel on the verge of finding myself.”

“Yourself? That little thing?
Cette petite chose?
That's all you're looking for? Have you tried pain? Myself, I have found pain to be a great illuminator.
Permettez-moi
.” The iguanodon essayed to bite the veined base of the serpentine throat lazily upheld before him; but his teeth were too specialized and could not tear flesh. He abraded his lips and tasted his own salt blood. Disoriented, crazed, he thrust one thumb deep into a yielding gray flank that hove through the smoke and chatter of the party like a dull wave. But the nerves of his victim lagged in reporting the pain, and by the time the distant head of the diplodocus was notified, the wound was already healing.

The drinks were flowing freely. The mammal crept up to the iguanodon and murmured that the dry vermouth was running out. He was told to use the sweet, or else substitute white wine. Behind the sofa the stegosauri were Indian-wrestling; each time one went over, his spinal plates raked the recently papered wall. The hypsilophodon, tipsy, perched on a banister; the allosaurus darted forward suddenly and ceremoniously nibbled her tail. On the far side of the room, by the great slack-stringed harp, the compsognathus and the brontosaurus were talking. The iguanodon was drawn to the pair, surprised that his wife would presume to engage the much larger creature—would presume to insert herself, with her scrabbling nervous motions and chattering leaf-shaped teeth, into the crevices of that queenly presence. As he drew closer to them, music began. His wife confided to him, “The salad is running out.”

“Amid all this greenery?” he responded, incredulous, and turned to the brontosaurus.
“Chère madame, voulez-vous danser avec moi?”

Her dancing was awkward, but even in this awkwardness, this ponderous stiffness, he felt the charm of her abundance. “I've been talking to your husband about religion,” he told her, as they settled into the steps they could do.

“I've given up,” she said. “It's such a deprivation for me and the children.”

“He says he's looking for himself.”

“It's so selfish,” she blurted. “The children are teased at school.”

“Come live with me.”

“Can you support me?”

“No, but I would gladly sink under you.”

“You're sweet.”

“Je t'aime.”

“Don't. Not here.”

“Somewhere, then?”

“No. Nowhere. Never.” With what delightful precision did her miniature mouth encompass these infinitesimal concepts!

“But I,” he said, “but I lo—”

“Stop it. You embarrass me. Deliberately.”

“You know what I wish? I wish all these beasts would disappear. What do we see in each other? Why do we keep getting together?”

She shrugged. “If they disappear, we will too.”

“I'm not so sure. There's something about us that would survive. It's not in you and not in me but between us, where we almost meet. Some vibration, some enduring cosmic factor. Don't you feel it?”

“Let's stop. It's too painful.”

“Stop dancing?”

“Stop being.”

“That is a beautiful idea.
Une belle idée
. I will if you will.”

“In time,” she said, and her fine little face precisely fitted this laconic promise; and as the summer night yielded warmth to the multiplying stars—fresher, closer, bigger then—he felt his blood sympathetically cool, and grow thunderously, fruitfully slow.

Under the Microscope
 

It was not his kind of pond; the water tasted slightly acid. He was a cyclops, the commonest of copepods, and this crowd seemed exotically cladoceran—stylish water-fleas with transparent carapaces, all shimmer and bubbles and twitch. His hostess, a magnificent daphnia fully an eighth of an inch tall, her heart and cephalic ganglion visibly pulsing, welcomed him with a lavish gesture of her ciliate, branching antennae; for a moment he feared she would eat him. Instead she offered him a platter of living desmids. They were bright green in color and shaped like crescents, hourglasses, omens. “Who do you know here?” Her voice was a distinct constant above the din. “Everybody knows
you
, of course. They've read your books.” His books, taken all together, with generous margins, would easily have fitted on the period that ends this sentence.

The cyclops modestly grimaced, answered “No one,” and turned to a young specimen of water mite, probably
Hydrachna geographica
, still bearing ruddy traces of the larval stage. “Have you been here long?” he asked, meaning less the party than the pond.

“Long enough.” Her answer came as swiftly as a reflex. “I go back to the surface now and then; we breathe air, you know.”

“Oh, I know. I envy you.” He noticed she had only six legs. She was newly hatched, then. Between her eyes, arranged in two pairs, he counted a fifth, in the middle, and wondered if in her he might find his own central single optic amplified and confirmed. His antennules yearned to touch her red spots; he wanted to ask her,
What do you see?
Young as she was, partially formed, she appeared, alerted by his abrupt confession of envy, ready to respond to any question, however presuming.

But at that moment a monstrous fairy shrimp, nearly an inch in length and extravagantly tinted blue, green, and bronze, swam by on its back,
and the water shuddered. Furious, the cyclops asked the water mite, “Who invites
them?
They're not even in our scale.”

She shrugged permissively, showing that indeed she had been here, in this tainted pond, long enough. “They're entomostracans,” she said, “just like Daphnia. They amuse her.”

“They're going to eat her up,” the cyclops predicted.

Though she laughed, her fifth eye gazed steadily into his wide lone one. “But isn't that what we all want? Subconsciously, of course.”

“Of course.”

An elegant, melancholy flatworm was passing hors d'oeuvres. The cyclops took some diatoms, cracked their delicate shells of silica, and ate them. They tasted golden brown. Growing hungrier, he pushed through to the serving table and had a volvox in algae dip. A shrill little rotifer, his head cilia whirling, his three-toothed mastax chattering, leaped up before him, saying, with the mixture of put-on and pleading characteristic of this environment, “I wead all your wunnaful books, and I have a wittle bag of pomes I wote myself, and I would wove it,
wove
it if you would wead them and wecommend them to a big bad pubwisher!” At a loss for a civil answer, the cyclops considered the rotifer silently, then ate him. He tasted slightly acid.

The party was thickening. A host of protozoans drifted in on a raft of sphagnum moss: a trumpet-shaped stentor, apparently famous and interlocked with a lanky, bleached spirostomum; a claque of paramecia, swishing back and forth, tickling the crustacea on the backs of their knees; an old vorticella, a plantlike animalcule as dreary, the cyclops thought, as the batch of puffs rooted to the flap of last year's
succès d'estime
. The kitchen was crammed with ostracods and flagellates engaged in mutually consuming conversation, and over in a corner, beneath an African mask, a great brown hydra, the real thing, attached by its sticky foot to the hissing steam radiator, rhythmically swung its tentacles here and there until one of them touched, in the circle of admirers, something appetizing; then the poison sacs exploded, the other tentacles contracted, and the prey was stuffed into the hydra's swollen coelenteron, which gluttony had stretched to a transparency that veiled the preceding meals like polyethylene film protecting a rack of dry-cleaned suits. Hairy with bacteria, a simocephalus was munching a rapt nematode. The fairy shrimps, having multiplied, their crimson tails glowing with hemoglobin, came cruising in from the empty bedrooms. The party was thinning.

Suddenly fearful, fearing he had lost her forever, the cyclops searched for the water mite, and found her miserably crouching in a corner, quite
drunk, her seventh and eighth legs almost sprouted. “What do you see?” he now dared ask.

“Too much,” she answered swiftly. “Everything. Oh, it's horrible, horrible.”

Out of mercy as much as appetite, he ate her. She felt prickly inside him. Hurriedly—the rooms were almost depleted, it was late—he sought his hostess. She was by the doorway, her antennae frazzled from waving goodbye, but still magnificent, Daphnia, her carapace a liquid shimmer of psychedelic pastel. “Don't go,” she commanded, expanding. “I have a
minus
cule favor to ask. Now that my children, all thirteen million of them, thank God, are off at school, I've taken a part-time editing job, and my first real break is this manuscript I'd be
so
grateful to have you read and comment on, whatever comes into your head; I admit it's a little long, maybe you can skim the part where Napoleon invades Russia, but it's the first effort by a perfectly delightful midge larva I know you'd enjoy meeting—”

“I'd adore to, but I can't,” he said, explaining, “my eye. I can't afford to strain it, I have only this one.…” He trailed off, he felt, feebly. He was beginning to feel permeable.

“You poor dear,” Daphnia solemnly pronounced, and ate him.

And the next instant, a fairy shrimp, oaring by inverted, casually gathered her into the trough between his eleven pairs of undulating gill-feet and passed her toward his brazen mouth. Her scream, tinier than even the dot on this
i
, went unobserved.

The Baluchitherium