Harlan Ellison - Shatterday

And each person, as he walked away leaving them to their secret thoughts, flickered for a moment with life in the eyes, and then the lights died and they were once again alone.

He came to a table where a thin, plain-looking young woman sat alone, biting her thumbnail.

“I’d like to sit down and discuss something with you,” he said. She shrugged as if she didn’t care, and he sat.

“I’ve come to realize we’re all alone,” he said.

She did not reply. Merely stared at him.

“No matter how many people love us or care for us or want to ease our burden in this life,” Moth said, “we are all, all of us, always alone. Something Aldous Huxley once said, I’m not sure I know it exactly. I’ve looked and looked and can’t find the quote, but I remember part of it. He said: ‘We are, each of us, an island universe in a sea of space.’ I think that was it.”

She looked at him without expression. Her face was thin and without remarkable features. No engaging smile, no intricate intriguing bone structure, no sudden dimple or angle that revealed her as even momentarily attractive. The look she gave him was the one she had perfected. Neutral.

“My life has always been sad music,” Moth said, with enormous sincerity. “Like a long symphony played all in minors. Wind in trees and conversations heard through walls at night. No one looked at me, no one wanted to know. But I maintained; that’s all there is. There’s one day, and the end of it, and night, and sleep that comes slowly, and then another day. Until there are as many behind as there are ahead. No questions, no answers, alone. But I maintain. I don’t let it bend me. And the song continues.”

The unprepossessing young woman smiled faintly.

She reached across and touched his hand.

Moth’s eyes sparkled for a moment.

Then the gigantic vessel began to slow.

They sat that way, her hand on his, until the tambour windows rolled up and they were encysted totally. And soon the gigantic vessel ceased its movement. They had arrived at the edge, at the point of debarkation.

Everyone rose to leave.

Moth stood and walked away from them. He walked back through the lounge and no one spoke to him, no one touched him. He came to the door to his stateroom and he turned.

“Excuse me,” he said. They watched, silently.

“Is there anyone here who will change places with me, please? Anyone who will take my place for the rest of the voyage?” He looked out at them from his white makeup, and he waited a decent time.

No one answered, though the unremarkable young woman seemed to want to say something. But she didn’t.

Moth smiled. “I thought not,” he said softly.

Then he turned and the door to his stateroom rolled up and he went inside. The door rolled down and everyone left the gigantic vessel quietly.

After a moment the debarkation port irised shut, and the gigantic vessel began to move again. On into final darkness, from which there was no return.

In twenty-five years as a professional writer, I’ve had the kind of Olympian, enriching experience with an editor, mythologized by the career of Maxwell Perkins in relation to Wolfe, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Ring Lardner and James Jones… only twice. What I mean to say is that I have worked hard at learning my craft; there is a continuity in the material; a stance that is my own, a voice I hope is singular: I know more about what I do than anyone else in the world.

Most of the editors with whom I’ve had liaisons have had salient points to make, valid suggestiorls for tightening up this or that, directions they thought I might take. But only twice have I been lifted beyond my abilities by the direct intervention of an editor.

This story is the most significant example, and speaks to a deep sense of loss in me.

“All the Birds Come Home to Roost” took many years to write. I had the idea back in the early seventies. It came to me because a number of women with whom I’d had relationships, which relationships had broken up and the women vanished from my world, suddenly began reappearing. Nothing mysterious about it: when I’d known them they were young and they’d gone off to begin careers, to get married, to discover themselves. Now, eight, nine, ten years later they were going through transition. Marriages dissolved, career changes, youthful escapades having palled on them, they were returning to the scenes of happier times. And they were getting back in touch with those they knew in those brighter days.

But with the mind of the fantasist I made the leap into a fictional construct: what if some guy found his life being run in reverse but only in terms of the women he’d known?

And that meant something ominous had to be at the end of the chain.

Since the story paralleled my own experiences in many ways, experiences shared by so many of us, I decided to take one of those tours through others’ lives by taking one through mine. I used as the focus of the story the fact that the protagonist had had a disastrous first marriage that had haunted him across the years, that had blighted his subsequent relations with women.

Before I proceed, let me reiterate: I do not write diary. A writer cannibalizes his own life and memories, yes, that is true. All we have to work with is what we know and what we dream. But nothing is more boring than kvetching in fiction. Thinly disguised personal reminiscence is not fiction. Those who, in the past, have identified me with everything that goes down in my stories have assumed I am a murderer, a transvestite, a cannibal, a sexist, a feminist, a racist, an egalitarian, an elitist, a vegetarian, an esthete, a commoner, a psychopath, a pacifist, a pederast, a womanizer, a layabout and a workaholic. Despite the fact that I have never used drugs, there is a large segment of my readership that swears I’m a heavy doper.

Why is he telling us all this?

I’m telling you all this because the protagonist of the story before you speaks of his first wife as having been in an insane asylum for many years, and my first wife also went through many years of emotional disorder. But though I have drawn on my own experiences, I am not the Michael Kirxby of this story.

I tell you this to explain why the intervention of my editor at Playboy, Victoria Chen Haider, was so important to the story, and to me. I tell you this because her wisdom is so rare in editorial circles that it must not be forgotten.

After I’d written the story and sent it to Vicky Haider, she called and said she was very high on it, wanted to use it in Playboy,. and had only one reservation. I asked her what that might be.

She made reference to the section in the story where Kirxby is talking about how terrible his marriage had been, how it had damned near driven him crazy, and how he knew if he ever got into his ex-wife’s clutches again it would end in his confinement to a madhouse. Vicky Haider said there was something missing at that point.

“What was so awful about the marriage?” she wanted to know.

My blood ran cold.

Vicky Haider knew nothing of my background, had no awareness of the terror that lurked back there in my past, the four deadly years with Charlotte.

She had no way of knowing that I was only now, twenty-some years later, able to speak of that monstrous period in my life. Oh, I wasn’t paralyzed by it. Not that extreme. I had relegated all those awful memories to a dark cell at the farthest point at the rear of a dank, chill subterranean cavern in my mind. And from time to time I would descend the slippery stone stairs to that cavern, pass between the moist evil-smelling walls and shine a dim light into the cell. I could take quick, short glimpses in there when I had to; but it wasn’t anything I wanted to spend a lot of time examining.