Mrs Caliban and other stories Read online

  ‘I love it‚’ she said. ‘But a friend of mine from school used to get hay fever. She couldn’t get near any grass or trees or plants without coughing and sneezing – every year. I suppose by now she must be taking pills or getting injections for it.’

  ‘For me, it’s like food.’

  ‘Me too, especially flowers.’ She wondered if he would like perfume. Fred hated it. He couldn’t even stand any scented soap other than Palmolive.

  She drove until they reached a stretch containing relatively few houses. The air was darker now, the leaves of the trees almost black by the sides of the road and hanging down from above.

  ‘I think it’s all right now, Larry. But be ready to duck down if I tell you.’ She saw his face coming up in the driving mirror. He looked ahead, and to either side. After a while, he said, ‘If I had a hat, do you think I would be noticed at night?’

  ‘It would need more than a hat. I think with make-up and sunglasses you might just get away with it. If you drove fast.’

  ‘Could you teach me to make the car go?’

  ‘Oh, yes. That part would be easy.’

  She headed for the beach. On the highways he stayed crouched down in the seat again, until they emerged into a quiet, slightly run-down neighbourhood full of old clapboard houses and tattered palm trees. Here the buildings were closer to the sidewalks and there were few flowers. In many of the front yards there was just a square of sandy ground instead of grass. Faintly from the background, like the swish of traffic on a main road, Dorothy heard the sea. From the back seat Larry gave forth a soft moan of pleasure or pain. He had heard it, too.

  ‘I brought some towels. We could go swimming, if you like.’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  She turned off, along a sandy road. No one was around. She branched off again on to a narrow, bumpy path and stopped the car. The sea was loud and near.

  He climbed over the back seat and sat next to her. He put his arm around her. She leaned her head on his shoulder. They sat still, listening.

  She thought: all during my teens, when I kept wishing so hard for this – to be out in a car on the beach with a boy – and it never happened. But now it’s happened.

  He said, ‘You hear?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve always loved the sound of the sea. I think everybody does.’

  ‘For me, it’s the sound of where I live. That’s hard to explain. It’s always there, like your heartbeats. Always, for our whole lives, we have music. We have wonderful music. The sea speaks to us. And it’s our home that speaks. Can you understand?’

  ‘You must be lonely.’

  ‘More than anything. More than hunger. Even hunger sometimes goes away, but this doesn’t.’

  She stroked his face with her hand. She tried to imagine what his world could be like. Perhaps it was like a child floating in its mother’s womb and hearing her voice all around him.

  She asked, ‘What was it like?’

  ‘So many things are different. Colour is different. Everything that you see tells you something. At the Institute, they told me there are some people who are colour-blind. When you show them, they don’t believe it at first. They can’t believe they suffer from this thing, because they have never known any other way. That’s how difficult it would be to explain the difference in the way my world looks.’

  ‘And the sound.’

  ‘And the way it feels. When you move, the place you live in moves too.’

  ‘Your eyes are specially developed for seeing underwater, aren’t they? I mean, I’m not sure that I’d see what you see, even if I could go down there in a diving suit.’

  ‘Yes, they were very interested in my eyes.’

  ‘When you escaped, did the light hurt your eyes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then the idea about sunglasses was a good one after all. I’ll have to get you a pair, just in case.’

  ‘I took a hat to begin with. It cut off some of the light.’

  An ordinary pair of dark glasses wouldn’t work, of course. His head was much too big. She’d have to take off the earpieces and widen the central frame somehow, and then put everything back together. And would the two lenses be far enough apart, anyway? There was also the problem of where to rest the nosebridge, since the space between his eyes was flat and his eyes swelled outwards; it would hurt to have the glass lenses bumping right up against his eyes.

  ‘If you swam out into the sea now, could you get back to your home?’

  ‘No,’ he said sadly. ‘They showed me on a map where it was that they captured me, and it’s far away.’

  ‘Could you show me on a map?’

  ‘Yes. It’s called the Gulf of Mexico.’

  ‘I see what you mean. You’d have to swim all the way down the coast and get through the Panama Canal.’

  ‘You know it’s wonderful to see another world. It’s entirely unlike anything that has ever come to your thoughts. And everything in it fits. You couldn’t have dreamed it up yourself, but somehow it all seems to work, and each tiny part is related. Everything except me. If I had known I was only going to stay a short while, this would have been the most exciting thing I could imagine – a marvel in my life. But to know that it’s for ever, that I’ll always be here where I’m not able to belong, and that I’ll never be able to get back home, never …’

  He bowed his head. She embraced him.

  ‘I don’t know how I could bear to give you up now‚’ she told him. ‘Now that you’ve come, everything’s all right.’ She talked about her marriage and about her children. ‘But I understand. If I could manage to get you to the coastline on the nearest point to your home, could you swim from there?’

  ‘Yes‚’ he said, raising his head.

  ‘Then we can get you back. We’d have to work it so that you swim down the shore while I drive the car across the Mexican border, and then once I was over, I’d pick you up.’

  They talked about the idea. The actual plan seemed simple enough. It was only the timing that might be difficult. Fred’s vacation was coming up and there was also the question of his sister, Suzanne, whom he didn’t much care for himself, but had always pushed on to Dorothy whenever Suzanne had felt the need to see him again. Suzanne was supposed to be visiting them sometime during the next two months.

  There had been a few years when they had taken separate vacations, or when he had gone on his and she stayed at home. Sometimes she went to see her parents, who were old now and occasionally irritating to be with; first one of them more than the other, then the order reversed, often nowadays both equally peevish. Could she just take the car and say she was off for a break?

  Larry removed his sandals and stepped out of the car. She followed, bringing the keys and the basket holding the towels.

  At first they swam together. She was amazed at the difference in his mood. It was like being in the water with a beachball, but also a powerful animal or machine. The way he looked had not convinced her of his difference, but this did: the way he moved in the water, which was his element. He came rocketing up from the deep water and picked her up in his arms, driving across the waves with her. They seemed to be going as fast as a motorboat.

  After a while, Dorothy said that she wanted to get out and get dry. Larry asked her to wait while he explored.

  ‘Be careful,’ she told him. ‘The coast around here has a narrow shelf under the water and then it drops right down deep. There’s no gradual sloping.’

  She walked up the beach, dried herself off and put on her clothes. Then she sat down and waited, and tried to think out a plan. For so many years there had been nothing. She had taken jobs to keep herself busy, but that was all they were. She had no interests, no marriage to speak of, no children. Now, at last, she had something.

  What they ought to do was tell the world. There was only one word for what those terrible people at the Institute had done to him: torture. They could take it to the newspapers. Especially the part about those two men forcing him to join them in th
eir sex games. I Killed Defending My Manhood. You could take it to the Supreme Court. You could plead disorientation. It would cause a sensation. It would be a test case. They’d have to define the nature of the term human being. If Larry wasn’t human, he couldn’t commit murder, only kill like an animal and not be punished for it. On the other hand, if he were to be considered human, he had killed in a self-protective anger brought on by pain caused through torture by two sadists, who had taken away his human rights and wrongfully imprisoned him in the first place just because he was of a different race. She could imagine the headlines: These cruel and barbaric practices are not consistent with the teachings of our religion, says frogman. Is this the spirit of American Democracy, we ask?

  But he had told her that all he wanted to do was go back home. He wouldn’t want to go to the newspapers. He was right, of course. It wasn’t just the crowds and the bright lights and the fast-talking media men and the people who ran forward to spit at you. It was also possible – as the announcer had said on the radio – that a simple disease, even a cold, could kill a creature who had never developed a resistance to it. Even worse, perhaps he might already be carrying a germ which would not declare itself to be fatal until after he returned home, so innocently bringing with him the means of destroying his whole people. Better not think about that.

  She ought to try to get him away soon, but she couldn’t leave just like that. She’d have to have some excuse. She’d have to wait till the vacation.

  He was gone a long time, it seemed. The warm wind had blown the skies clear so that she could see the stars. She wondered what he was doing, how far out he had swum, how deep. She thought of him swimming among the wonderful colours, in surroundings which would be different from his home, but familiar – as though a man from Connecticut had been kidnapped to a foreign planet and then set down again in Norway or Japan; it wouldn’t be home, yet it would be recognizable.

  But down there it would be dark now, and not the lovely lighted aquarium she imagined it to be during the daylight hours, eddying with schools of tiny, delicate animals floating and dancing slowly to their own serene currents and creating the look of a living painting. That was wrong, in any case. The ocean was different from an aquarium, which was an artificial environment. The ocean was a world. And a world is not art. Dorothy thought about the living things that moved in that world: large, ruthless and hungry. Like us up here.

  She was just beginning to convince herself that down at the bottom of the sea he was hurt or dying, when she saw his shape moving up out of the water. In that light and at a distance, he looked exactly like the statues of gods, except that his head was slightly larger and rounder than it should be. And he walked with a rounded, swimming motion from hip to knee, holding his large powerful shoulders and arms easily.

  She handed him a towel and he dried himself off.

  ‘Shall I start teaching you how to drive, or would you rather leave it for tomorrow? It’s a little late now. I didn’t know you’d be so long.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘Are you cold?’

  ‘No.’

  He climbed into the back seat again. Dorothy started the car. ‘This would be a good place to learn,’ she said. ‘There doesn’t seem to be anyone around and that path over there runs for a long way, just a straight stretch.’

  She told him about her plan. Could he wait that long? He said yes. She asked him what it had been like in the water. He answered that it was not like his home; he had felt almost as foreign there as above the surface.

  ‘But down there, I know how to defend myself. Down there no one attacks you for thinking. They attack if you hurt them or invade their home, or if they want to eat you.’

  ‘And if you’re different. They do that here, too.’

  ‘But in the sea, it’s not just because you’re different.’

  ‘I thought everywhere everyone had to fit in, or other people began to feel worried and threatened. And then if there are more of them than of you, they jump on you.’

  ‘That happens here?’

  ‘More or less. It’s true that what happens first is they let you know how they think and then you’ve got to make them believe you think that. Something else happened. You’re sad.’

  ‘Yes. Something is going on.’

  ‘The Institute does a lot of underwater research around here. You mean that?’

  ‘No. I don’t know. It didn’t feel right.’

  ‘It isn’t where you come from.’

  ‘Do you suppose I’ve changed? Maybe they did something to me in the experiments, which I didn’t know about at the time, to make it so I can never go back and be at peace. They injected me a lot, you know, so I fell asleep.’

  Dorothy stopped the car at the side of the road, leaned over into the back seat and put her arms around his neck. She kissed him and patted him on the back.

  ‘Don’t worry. It’ll work out somehow.’ She was about to turn back to the wheel, when he said, ‘Could we walk?’

  They were not very far from the house, but in a richer neighbourhood, in a street of large houses standing in gardens, with trees lining the sidewalks. She got out, telling him to be careful closing the door.

  They walked hand in hand. At one point Larry stood still, breathing deeply. He said that there was a flower he could smell. He took off his sandals and prowled across a large grass lawn to a flowerbed. Dorothy followed, hoping that the owners of the houses would keep any dogs inside rather than outside. When she caught up with him, he had his face in some white flowers which she identified as the blossoms of a tobacco plant. They walked through the gardens for twenty minutes or so before deciding to go home.

  *

  During the next few days, they settled down into a routine. At night they drove out. They swam, never for such a long time as that first night, and then she gave him driving lessons. He was very quick to learn. She bought him a hat which she enlarged, sunglasses, which she altered specially for him, and some make-up, with which they experimented until he said that he thought he’d like different colours. Dorothy had made him up in a beige colour. But when he got hold of the box himself, he made himself up in three different shades: yellow-brown, red-brown and a dark brown.

  ‘The hands,’ Dorothy said.

  ‘Gloves. Which one do you think is best?’

  ‘The Indian colour looks the best, but it’s too unusual. I think maybe the Chinese one.’

  ‘I thought it was more Japanese. You don’t like the black one?’

  ‘It doesn’t look natural. I don’t know why.’

  ‘They don’t any of them look natural, but under those lights on the highway nobody looks natural.’

  ‘Still people would notice a man with a green head. I guess I should get you a wig.’

  ‘Good. I think I’ll try a different colour every night.’

  When Dorothy went out shopping, Larry generally listened to music or watched television. It was from a crime story serial on television that he got the idea of starting a car without any keys by pulling the leads out and sparking them off. The first Dorothy knew of it was when she went to his room to tell him she would be ready in ten minutes, and found that he had gone.

  All the rest of that evening she waited up in the kitchen. He hadn’t taken the car, but his hat was missing, and the glasses, sandals, suit, socks and gloves. She was so worried that when he finally came back she was ready to hit him out of relief and fury.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she hissed, bundling him through the hall and into his room. ‘Walking around town as free as you please. I’ve told you, you’ve got to be careful.’

  ‘I was driving.’

  ‘The car was in all night. I checked.’

  ‘I took a different car. Just in case I was caught and they traced me back to you. You might get into trouble, you know, for protecting a dangerous criminal. Knowledge after the event – that’s it, isn’t it?’

  She made him sit down on the bed. He told her where h
e had gone and what he had seen. After he’d convinced her that no one had recognized him or followed him, he admitted that he had gotten out of the car and walked. He had walked through crowds, where many of the men were drunk and no one would want to pick a fight with someone of his size in any case. ‘And I’ve figured out the make-up. The secret is to wear a colour that’s different from most of the people who live in the area.’

  ‘I still don’t understand how you started the car.’

  ‘I’ll show you tomorrow. It was easy, but I was a little nervous at first. You know I don’t like electricity.’

  ‘Would you rather go out alone at night?’ Dorothy asked. ‘I mean, I’d worry, but you see so much of me during the day – would it help to make you feel you have some independence?

  Larry removed his gloves and took her hand in his. ‘You understand,’ he said.

  ‘What I’d really like would be if we could be free to walk around anywhere, go out for a meal together in a restaurant, and so on.’

  ‘I thought people were supposed to enjoy what they call “a secret vice”,’ he said, and made her laugh so hard that she nearly ripped the wig which she had started to put back in its box. She had sewn and cut his wig herself, making it from two she had bought, since a single one would not have been big enough.

  ‘And am I your secret vice?’ she asked.

  ‘No, my secret vice is avocados.’

  Dorothy laughed even harder. She had to bury her face in the bedclothes to hide the noise.

  *

  Two days after Larry began his independent nightly drives, Dorothy went to see Estelle in the afternoon.

  ‘You look different‚’ Estelle said. ‘You’ve gotten Suzanne off your back.’

  Dorothy said no, Suzanne had given them four different sets of detailed instructions concerning her plans for the coming three months. Dorothy sat down. ‘And I bet there’ll be a new set in the mail soon. She used to call up, till I pretended the phone was out of order.’

  She had great difficulty in controlling herself. Estelle would understand; but, she would also tell. She wouldn’t be able to resist it. And would that be strange, when Dorothy herself was having so much trouble trying to keep herself from speaking? Better not even think about it. The thought was compelling. It was a like people who looked down from a height.