John Domini - Bedlam and Other Stories

“Ul ‘Lyu, why do you stay with me?”

Stay with me: oh was I a cripple. I still lacked the strength to ask straight out whether she loved me.

“Don’t be silly,” she’d say. “I stay with you because you’re different.”

But that wasn’t an answer. In fact Ul ‘Lyu, for all your ability to talk, it wasn’t you who gave me the answer.

Lost in a romantic vertigo as I was, I didn’t notice just when the faraway roar of overlapping heavens stopped. Only, as I dreamed along to the calliope hum of her belly, during one flight or another, I noticed the familiar noise was gone. Ul ‘Lyu’s world had broken clear of my own. I had become, in short, truly dead. Then began the visits by other dead worlds.

I couldn’t say just how many visits there were. Ul ‘Lyu and I remained capable of entertaining ourselves, despite my doubts. We didn’t tour every last one of these traveling cemeteries. But unquestionably the number of dead worlds passing through hers was high. Two destroyed ways of living, it seems, emit compatible fields of magnetic despair. When Ul ‘Lyu’s stony place ran into mine, that was an accident. But actual dead worlds mingle often. For myself, the numbers alone told the story: awesome numbers, sobering numbers, deeply upsetting stuff. Far more universes had collapsed and been set free than I would have thought possible. And now to feel repeatedly the form of their sadness, to blink as clouds of ghosts darkened our sunstruck flights, to watch the hammered shapes of catastrophe pass again and yet again over the badlands below…. Let me describe only one.

Out of nowhere, once, a seeming warehouse-full of colored streamers, party streamers, started to pass “upwards” through the white rock. They kept rising, past Ul ‘Lyu and myself, till they disappeared into the sky. Unfortunately, however, we couldn’t communicate with whatever creatures gave life to this swiveling forest of celebration. They didn’t speak. But after a while I discovered I could tear off strips of their souls for myself. In my hands the bits of green or gold or orange streamers still made no sound, gave no word. But they wriggled and flipped over comically. When I let them go these strips of color again leapt into the sky, and again took up their rising, even as they continued to wriggle and twist. So we passed the time, in a never-ending New Year’s Eve. For those rare days I enjoyed a superiority over Ul ‘Lyu, simply because I had fingers and a thumb. But then came the moment when the first streamer finished passing through. Then we saw the way it tapered off into an elongated wet tip. Then we recalled how, at the start of their visit, the “upper” ends of these creatures’ bodies had been bulbous, permeable like a sponge, and also wet. Wet beginning, wet end. At last we understood. Ul ‘Lyu’s world had been penetrated by a universe of enormously long tears.

“ No !” I cried after the discovery. I buried my hands deeper than ever in Ul’Lyu’s jelly. “No no no. What have I done ?”

“You were cruel,” my mysterious lover said. Mysteriously neutral again and yet mysteriously forgiving me. “Destructive and cruel, Baby.”

But that one case isn’t enough. That one case provides only the woeful melody of these passersby; it lacks the startling coloration added by the mind’s orchestra at each new visit. Let me describe another.

We saw also a type of dead which came not from somewhere in deep space but from out of a history I recognized. Not from dead worlds, that is, but from dead civilizations on my own world. One such group crossed the landscape here in the form of statues, statues of men only, half-rising from chambers of marble or alabaster. My own history, dead and wandering! Now all right, yes, I could understand the theory involved — or I could after I’d done with my shameful screaming and carrying on round and round the top of another small butte. In time, I could understand how these statues represented a philosophy, a system of gods, that had passed out of existence. Yet I thought further. Might I not once have worshipped these marble gods myself? And, stranger still: since the intense worship of a given principle creates its own heaven, then the number of heavens could go on forever. There could be a heaven for one soul alone.

No. No those two cases together also fall way short of the whole effect, the percussive attack of surprise after surprising visit, the counterpoint of horror and lunacy. And the numbers . Let me describe them all. In my memory, clustered around Ul ‘Lyu and myself, these dead souls appear like nothing so much as an overbearingly lit-up bar-&-grill at sundown. Among the slick stains of spilled brew and the rotating advertisements, I can identify, glumly, the workaholic commuters and city types, the skanks and nerds and the ones merely bent out of shape, and I watch them all getting a buzz on during Happy Hour. Happy, oh yes, happy. For not only did Ul ‘Lyu waltz through these visitors with her customary light step — that much I’d expected, that much I loved her for. Also, strangest and worst of all, these blasted cinders of a former belief claimed to be more or less happy . If they could talk, their tune was always more or less the same.

The death of their way of life? — I would ask, sadly.

Oh, no big thing — They’d come back.

Over and over, up down and sideways, they denied carrying any leftover ideals.

“It became an injurious doctrine,” the marble men told us, in their profound marble voices, “continuously striving to be pure.”

“There’s only so much light a body can put up with,” an aluminum creature told us, with a rattle in its vowels. “Light, light, light. Do you think the rocks noticed while I was there trying to shine my brightest?”

“One realizes after a while that the concept, funny , covers too large a spectrum of related ideas.” This was an unusually delicate group of beings, made of what appeared to be nylon and rotted fruit. “One tried, but one never understood all the complexities.”

These creatures could communicate only by inserting a kind of appendage, an olive-colored nylon filament, inside each of their listeners. When the point had gone in, just below my diaphragm, there’d been no more than a moment’s pain. But now, as the creature began explaining itself, I suffered a pang of jealousy from head to toe. Ul ‘Lyu, at the nylon touch, had started to warble.

“One realizes after a while,” my filament spoke just before I violently jerked free, “that life goes on.”

Life goes on ! Those last words in my belly meant more to me than all our other loose talk with the dead put together. For in that one simple shock of jealousy, after the uncounted arousals and depressions brought on by these visitors, I’d perceived at last the unique hold I had on Ul ‘Lyu. Now I kicked and tugged like the worst spoiled brat of a child. I hauled her away. Behind us, the freed points of the nylon people waved feebly. But I wouldn’t allow Ul ‘Lyu to watch; I shrieked and yanked with both wrists….

Really, it embarrasses me to recall the scene, these days. Even after all that’s gone on since. But with more weeping, more low opera, more hysterics than ever before, once I got Ul ‘Lyu away from the nylon people I made it clear all over again that I loved her.

“Don’t be silly, Baby,” she said many times. “Oh, you are silly.”

But no, Ul ‘Lyu, no I wouldn’t stop. I knew what I’d just at last perceived. Because you remained always yourself, my winking, motley darling. During a thousand visitations from dead worlds everywhere, we’d met no one so irrepressible as you, so uncaring as you. Yes. While the other ruined creatures looked on amazed, you would make pleasant conversation about, say for example, waking at night in a barracks to hear two soldiers buttfucking a third. Any ghost in earshot was struck dumb. Meantime I would stand there, or hang there, smiling knowledgeably. That’s nothing , my look would say; what you just heard was nothing for my Ul ‘Lyu . So what if these other dead worlds had learned to put on a thick skin? Not one of them, Ul ‘Lyu, not one that we’d come across yet could match your range. Monster girl, what did you know about caring? You asked the aluminum people what it felt like to be torn apart. You asked the men in their alabaster chambers whether, as their world collapsed, any of them had slashed their wrists. Innumerable times, in fact, I’d watched you poking and prodding, drilling for any new sensation. And now that the nylon filament had poked you, now that for once your guts had been converted to mere talk, now I understood. What you saw in me was precisely that thing I’d feared made me bad company. For you, I was the one grip on true feeling. Among the cool talk of destruction, the flick-of-the-wrist way these people could dismiss hopes they’d once believed they would live off forever, I alone offered genuine caring. Ul ‘Lyu, I was your touchstone.