God! Joey had fallen from the chair and hit the floor already curled up, knees to chin, eyes shut, as if stunned and dead. Maybe he would be all right. Tomorrow, casual inquiry to the nurses ... The nurses might blame him for Joey. How many other mistakes did they blame him for already?
Why was he sitting like this with his face in his hands?
I'm tired, he thought. Just tired.
Doctor Armstrong leaned his face more heavily into his hands, his elbows braced on the desk as though they were tired. Tears trickled down between his spread fingers and splashed on the psychiatric journal on his desk.
It is not I who is weeping, he thought. I am the cool and logical student, the observer of human actions. I can observe myself also, which proves that my body weeps. This wastes time I could use to study and to think.
Tears trickled down between his spread fingers and splashed on the psychiatric journal.
It is not I who is weeping, he thought. It is that other, the childish feeling in me, who can be wounded by love and hope, a pity and confusion, and being alone. I am an adult, a scientist. It is the other who weeps, the ungrownup one we must conceal from the world.
"No one sees you," he said to the Other. "You can weep for five minutes. This spasm will pass."
We can see other people's behaviour, but not their experience. This has led some people to insist that psychology has nothing to do with the other person's experience but only with his behaviour.
The other person's behaviour is an experience of mine. My behaviour is an experience of the other. The task of social phenomenology is to relate my experience of the other's behaviour to the other's experience of my behaviour. Its study is the relation between experience and experience; its true field is inter-experience.
(R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise)
Carol Emshwiller is the wife of the experimental moviemaker, and s-f illustrator, Ed Emshwiller. Like Katherine MacLean, she began as a writer of (outstanding but) conventional science-fiction — then stopped publishing for several years, while her work underwent an extraordinary development. In the last two years, new series of distinctive individual character have appeared in Transatlantic Review, City, Cavalier, and the anthology Dangerous Visions.
Chicken Icarus
Carol Emshwiller
I keep thinking there must be some place for me somewhere. I keep thinking of some kind of gelatin land, some puddingly spot all viscous, muculent, where the air is thick and wet as water. I wouldn't even ask to be able to fly around in it. I'd be happy just to ooze along the bottom as long as it was nothing like floors or mattresses or pillows. But the way it is around here you can get pretty bored with gravity.
"Down with downness," I say.
I keep thinking about this sticky-slippery kind of land but I think about legs too, a lot more than I think about arms. I don't know why. Maybe because I always hear walking sounds. Around the house I hear the floors creak and thump, accepting feet. Outside, the lady's heels tick-tock, tick-tock, measuring out time in distance covered. Steps per minute about sixty-five, breaths twenty, heartbeats seventy-two. It takes me ten heartbeats to cross my mattress. Rolling. Well, more like five heartbeats or four. Four little bird heartbeats. (I exaggerate myself, but sometimes I feel pretty exaggerated.) Doorknobs, on/off switches, buttons, zippers, drawer pulls, toe-nail scissors, the little thumb screws that hold my reading stand, the handles on the sides of my mattress, the armholes of my shirt, even birds ... When they sit along the wires they remind me of feet, robins-red-breasted feet cut off just above the ankle; flying, they remind me of feather fingered hands flip-flopping themselves into the sky, palms down. For them the air is thick enough.
But I have one thing.
When I was young I felt the world two ways, by mouth and by that one impetuous finger (I cannot say between my legs) that would rise up in curiosity at any interesting texture or temperature. Now it seems not so inquisitive. But then, it has already tested cotton, wool, wood, paper, the wall, the floor, the reading stand and so forth. It has ventured, (omnivorous can one say?) into holes in the sheet. It has examined the interior of a velvet purse (silk lined). It has pushed a toy car. It has entered a shoe. All this in its younger days.
There is, in my world also — well, it isn't really my world. As I said, mine would have to be a lot slushier. Anyway, I've got balance, rolling, flopping and the arching of the back. Balance I have never completely mastered. I suppose I should mention other small diversions such as defecating, urinating, the blinking of eyes, the wiggling of ears and watching TV, And I've got drama too. Down the hall at five o'clock or so comes Mrs. Number One all dressed up like a nurse. I think I must, at some time, have been bought outright, else why does she keep me on like this? She doesn't get paid any more. Who would pay her? And what do I give in exchange for the emptying of bed pans or a lift into the bathroom, for food so considerately cut up so I can feed myself? Why, only what I can give. She likes it with brute force. "Rape, rape," she says, but not loud enough to attract attention outside of my little room.
I bounce her on the point of my one and only (or she makes me believe I do). Actually, I couldn't rape an. old glove. At the time I think I would not trade this one for any other protuberance, but afterwards I think two legs are well worth one of these.
However, the price is too high. If I had three of them it might be possible to come to some terms, but one, even as well functioning as this ... No sale!
Rape, rape, to me was Run, run.
That day (the day she locked the door and said, "If you ever tell ... " But there wasn't anybody to tell. I think I was forgotten the moment I was born.) — that day I thought I knew what running felt like. This was skimming over the earth, rampant, halfway to the ceiling with only the soles of the feet touching bottom. This was one foot, lightly, before the other, the swing of the leg underneath, the body riding smoothly on top of it all (amazing), the counter-balancing arms, back and forth, the toes giving a last pushoff, the knee raised, bent, the foot circling upward, pivoting out, falling ahead to catch the ground, then pushing off again, and so on. Hundreds of take-offs, and that's what this was too, a hundred take-offs until I flew into the air, but I came to rest again, flat upon the mattress.
I suppose she was grateful. One of us was.
She has been my nurse since God-knows-when, since before I knew what a calendar was or that time was anything but fresh sheets now and then. I must have been about ten, a backward, slobbery ten when she came, squashing about on her nursing shoes. She squeaks when she turns. She bites into the floor, squashily saw-toothed, as if she felt as I do about the surfaces of things. Maybe she wanted me to have a better view of those aqueous soles of hers because the first thing she did was to have my mattress put upon the floor. I admit I gained in freedom and that my distances could then be measured. I learned that the wearing down at the heel was a long time.
But Mrs. Number One isn't the only person in my life. There is a Miss Number Two, oh yes, and quite beautiful, too. Miss Spanish eyes, Miss — I wonder if it would make any difference if Mrs. Number One were beautiful — Miss White Gloves (the white gloves just in case she might, by some mistake, touch me). She came to me fresh from racing cars, mountain tops, airplanes, at least it seemed so to me, but I see things from a floorish point of view. Everything may look like that from here.