Harlan Ellison - Shatterday

This story, intended as fifth column warfare against the medium of television, to be read on television, says simply that if the Real World isn’t interesting enough to command the attention of the lives it contains, then maybe the Real World will alter itself magically to keep us away from Taco Bell and Laverne & Shirley.

This moment of softness has been brought to you by Zee Toilet Tissue.

Anne Marie Stebner placed the tip of the double-edged razor blade against her left wrist, just below the place in her palm where the life line turned toward the thumb on the Mount of Venus. At the precise spot where the life line ended, she slid the blade into the skin, and began drawing it deeply down the length of her arm toward the inside of her elbow. She had heard that if one really wanted to slash her wrists, she should open the arm lengthwise, not across the veins. It was too easy for them to hold it together and tape it up if one cut across. Up the arms was the way to do it, if one was serious about suicide.

File clerk in a large recording company, what blind dates would call “really plain, but does it like a rabbit,” thirty-one years old without even the usual range of dull prospects, she had wakened several hours earlier to find the grad student she had met at the party last night already cleared out. He had not, thoughtfully, used her lipstick to write his name and phone number on the bathroom mirror. But he had left a pile of wet towels, corpselike, draped over the tub.

She was quite serious about the double-edged razor blade. As she pulled the blade up her arm, encountering only minor resistance, she looked out the front window of her duplex. On the front lawn, at least five of the Seven Dwarfs were planting a beautiful bonsai tree.

She smiled at the way they worked so industriously, scooping out the dirt and placing it neatly on a tarpaulin, how Grumpy removed the wrappings around the roots, and how Dopey clapped his hands as the hole was dug. She knew she was hallucinating, possibly shock, probably from loss of blood, but she felt she would like to go out there to die, out where the sun was shining. It had not been shining when she’d crawled out of bed. In fact, it had been raining.

She walked to the door, leaving dark stains on the cheap carpet, and opened the door to the front yard. The razor blade lay on the coffee table. If necessary, she could do the other arm later. She didn’t think it would be necessary.

As she approached them, they looked up at her.

“Good morning!” Doc said, giving her a big smile. “Do you like it? I think it’s about a hundred years old.”

“It’s really lovely,” Anne Marie said. “But why are you planting it here, on Sunday morning?”

Bashful came up to her, and took her by her right arm, the arm that was not bleeding. “Brightening up the real world for you, Miss Stebner,” he said.

She was startled: she could feel his tiny hand in hers. She could smell the faint, not unpleasant odor of their work-sweat. She could hear the ratchety sound of their spades in the dirt. Was this the way it was when one was on the way out?

She was led by the dwarf to a place right beside the bonsai, which Sleepy and Grumpy had put in the hole. Dopey was packing in the earth around the bole. She reached out and touched the tree. It was real.

“Have a nice day,” Doc said, and began gathering up the planting tools.

“You’ve wasted your time,” she said. “I’m dying; can’t you see that?”

One by one they came to her and hugged her, as she sat there, and then they went away. In a few moments, with the intricate hieroglyphics of the bonsai’s branches before her eyes, she felt faint, lay back, and became unconscious.

She sat up in the hospital bed, her arm taped to the elbow, and listened to the young intern. The married couple who had just moved into the other side of the duplex had found her on the front lawn, as they emerged to go for Sunday brunch. She had not seen them yet, so she had not been able to ask how they had saved her; she had been certain it was impossible to save someone who had cut lengthwise rather than across. But they had saved her, and she sat up in the hospital bed, and the intern tried to be supportive.

“Everybody wants to get away from the world,” he said. “Whether it’s dope or booze or religion or television or quick sex or trashy novels, everybody wants to run away. We all want to be entertained all the time. And when it doesn’t work, when none of it is enough, we try to kill ourselves to escape.”

She didn’t think he understood just how lonely she was.

“The real world is terrific,” the young intern said. “I promise you, Anne Marie, it’s wonderful. People are always complaining, ‘Oh, I need to get away, I need to relax, I don’t want to think about it.’ If they turn on the tube and it’s some program about current events they rush to change the channel to get some silly rerun of a sitcom. We spend ninety percent of our lives escaping. If you really, truly, completely deal with the real world… it’s fascinating!”

She asked him to go away. She said she wanted to sleep, to get away from it all. So he left, but she didn’t sleep. She started to turn on the television set high on the wall across from her bed, but a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye claimed her attention. Out there in the sky, turning in tight maneuvers, a Sopwith Camel was having a dogfight with a large green and gray pterodactyl.,

She knew it was really happening out there, because from the angle at which she lay she could see other windows in the wing of the hospital to her right, and there were people leaning out and pointing at the sky.

For a long time she watched the marvelous ballet of wood-and-fabric airplane and Cretaceous flying reptile.

She was waiting on the sidewalk outside the recording company for the married executive to pick her up for their date. He had called it their “illegal tryst” and she had not liked the way his face pulled up on one side when he smiled like that; but she had been empty of plans for that night, and it was something to do not to be alone. The married executive had, promised her dinner and a movie. They were going to see a very popular space war movie that everyone said was the return of entertainment. It was something to do.

As she stood there at the curb, a 1941 Packard pulled up and a woman rolled down the window. It was a green Packard, highly polished, as though someone who loved it had waxed it endlessly. “Anne Marie,” the woman called from the car.

She walked over. It was her mother.

Her father was driving. The scent of pipe tobacco came from inside the car. “We thought we might have a picnic, like the old times, just the three of us,” her mother said. “Would you like to come along?”

She began to cry, even as she nodded and her mother reached back to unlock the rear door. She got inside and sat very quietly beside the picnic basket. The Packard thrummed to life, and pulled away.

Anne Marie Stebner’s mother and father had been dead for eleven years. It was a wonderful picnic.

Sailing the catamaran through the reefs of sapphire rocks, she made for the island. The wind smelled of freshly mowed grass and carried with it the faint tinkling of wind chimes.

“If it gets too lonely out here,” she said aloud, “perhaps I’ll start a fast-food franchise. Something with Lebanese food, maybe.”

As she spoke, a group of golden-tanned men and women emerged from behind a dune on the island, and waved at her, waved her in through the precious reefs.

“Or I can always rent a television set somewhere,” she said, smiling broadly. Several of the golden people produced oddly shaped musical instruments and began playing Hoagy Carmichael’s “Skylark.” It had always been her favorite tune.