I Sing the Body Electric

“My dear Mrs. Horn, I don’t want to excite you continually. When we have our mechs ready we’ll let you know. We’re working every day. There’ll be an experiment soon. Take those pills now and shut that nice mouth.” He chucked Py under the “chin.” “Good healthy baby, by God! Twenty pounds if he’s an ounce!”

Baby was conscious of the goings and comings of the two nice White Cubes who were with him during all of his waking hours. There was another cube, a gray one, who visited on certain days. But mostly it was the two White Cubes who cared for and loved him. He looked up at the one warm, rounder, softer White Cube and made the low warbling soft sound of contentment. The White Cube fed him. He was content. He grew. All was familiar and good.

The New Year, the year 1989, arrived.

Rocket ships flashed on the sky, and helicopters whirred and flourished the warm California winds.

Peter Horn carted home large plates of specially poured blue and gray polarized glass, secretly. Through these, he peered at his “child.” Nothing. The pyramid remained a pyramid, no matter if he viewed it through X-ray or yellow cellophane. The barrier was unbreakable. Horn returned quietly to his drinking.

The big thing happened early in February. Horn, arriving home in his helicopter, was appalled to see a crowd of neighbors gathered on the lawn of his home. Some of them were sitting, others were standing, still others were moving away, with frightened expressions on their faces.

Polly was walking the “child” in the yard.

Polly was quite drunk. She held the small blue pyramid by the hand and walked him up and down. She did not see the helicopter land, nor did she pay much attention as Horn came running up.

One of the neighbors turned. “Oh, Mr. Horn, it’s the cutest thing. Where’d you find it?”

One of the others cried, “Hey, you’re quite the traveler, Horn. Pick it up in South America?”

Polly held the pyramid up. “Say Father!” she cried, trying to focus on her husband.

“Wheel!” cried the pyramid.

“Polly!” Peter Horn said.

“He’s friendly as a dog or a cat,” said Polly moving the child with her. “Oh, no, he’s not dangerous. He’s friendly as a baby. My husband brought him from Afghanistan.”

The neighbors began to move off.

“Come back!” Polly waved at them. “Don’t you want to see my baby? Isn’t he simply beautiful!”

He slapped her face.

“My baby,” she said, brokenly.

He slapped her again and again until she quit saying it and collapsed. He picked her up and took her into the house. Then he came out and took Py in and then he sat down and phoned the Institute.

“Dr. Wolcott, this is Horn. You’d better have your stuff ready. It’s tonight or not at all.”

There was a hesitation. Finally Wolcott sighed. “All right. Bring your wife and the child. We’ll try to have things in shape.”

They hung up.

Horn sat there studying the pyramid.

“The neighbors thought he was grand,” said his wife, lying on the couch, her eyes shut, her lips trembling…

The Institute hall smelled clean, neat, sterile. Dr. Wolcott walked along it, followed by Peter Horn and his wife Polly, who was holding Py in her arms. They turned in at a doorway and stood in a large room. In the center of the room were two tables with large black hoods suspended over them.

Behind the tables were a number of machines with dials and levers on them. There was the faintest perceptible hum in the room. Pete Horn looked at Polly for a moment.

Wolcott gave her a glass of liquid. “Drink this.” She drank it. “Now. Sit down.” They both sat. The doctor put his hands together and looked at them for a moment.

“I want to tell you what I’ve been doing in the last few months,” he said. “I’ve tried to bring the baby out of whatever hell dimension, fourth, fifth, or sixth, that it is in. Each time you left the baby for a checkup we worked on the problem. Now, we have a solution, but it has nothing to do with bringing the baby out of the dimension in which it exists.”

Polly sank back. Horn simply watched the doctor carefully for anything he might say. Wolcott leaned forward.

“I can’t bring Py out, but I can put you people in. That’s it.” He spread his hands.

Horn looked at the machine in the corner. “You mean you can send us into Py’s dimension?”

“If you want to go badly enough.”

Polly said nothing. She held Py quietly and looked at him.

Dr. Wolcott explained. “We know what series of malfunctions, mechanical and electrical, forced Py into his present state. We can reproduce those accidents and stresses. But bringing him back is something else. It might take a million trials and failures before we got the combination. The combination that jammed him into another space was an accident, but luckily we saw, observed, and recorded it. There are no records for bringing one back. We have to work in the dark. Therefore, it will be easier to put you in the fourth dimension than to bring Py into ours.”

Polly asked, simply and earnestly, “Will I see my baby as he really is, if I go into his dimension?”

Wolcott nodded.

Polly said, “Then, I want to go.”

“Hold on,” said Peter Horn. “We’ve only been in this office five minutes and already you’re promising away the rest of your life.”

“I’ll be with my real baby. I won’t care.”

“Dr. Wolcott, what will it be like, in that dimension on the other side?”

“There will be no change that you will notice. You will both seem the same size and shape to one another. The pyramid will become a baby, however. You will have added an extra sense, you will be able to interpret what you see differently.”

“But won’t we turn into oblongs or pyramids ourselves? And won’t you, doctor, look like some geometrical form instead of a human?”

“Does a blind man who sees for the first time give up his ability to hear or taste?”

“No.”

“All right, then. Stop thinking in terms of subtraction. Think in terms of addition. You’re gaining something. You lose nothing. You know what a human looks like, which is an advantage Py doesn’t have, looking out from his dimension. When you arrive ‘over there’ you can see Dr. Wolcott as both things, a geometrical abstract or a human, as you choose. It will probably make quite a philosopher out of you. There’s one other thing, however.”

“And that?”

“To everyone else in the world you, your wife and the child will look like abstract forms. The baby a triangle. Your wife an oblong perhaps. Yourself a hexagonal solid. The world will be shocked, not you.”

“We’ll be freaks.”

“You’ll be freaks. But you won’t know it. You’ll have to lead a secluded life.”

“Until you find a way to bring all three of us out together.”

“That’s right. It may be ten years, twenty. I won’t recommend it to you, you may both go quite mad as a result of feeling apart, different. If there’s a grain of paranoia in you, it’ll come out. It’s up to you, naturally.”

Peter Horn looked at his wife, she looked back gravely.

“We’ll go,” said Peter Horn.

“Into Py’s dimension?” said Wolcott.

“Into Py’s dimension.”

They stood up from their chairs. “We’ll lose no other sense, you’re certain, doctor? Will you be able to understand us when we talk to you? Py’s talk is incomprehensible.”

“Py talks that way because that’s what he thinks we sound like when our talk comes through the dimensions to him. He imitates the sound. When you are over there and talk to me, you’ll be talking perfect English, because you know how. Dimensions have to do with senses and time and knowledge.”

“And what about Py? When we come into his strata of existence. Will he see us as humans, immediately, and won’t that be a shock to him? Won’t it be dangerous?”

“He’s awfully young. Things haven’t got too set for him. There’ll be a slight shock, but your odors will be the same, and your voices will have the same timber and pitch and you’ll be just as warm and loving, which is most important of all. You’ll get on with him well.”

Horn scratched his head slowly. “This seems such a long way around to where we want to go.” He sighed. “I wish we could have another kid and forget all about this one.”

“This baby is the one that counts. I dare say Polly here wouldn’t want any other, would you, Polly?”

“This baby, this baby,” said Polly.

Wolcott gave Peter Horn a meaningful look. Horn interpreted it correctly. This baby or no more Polly ever again. This baby or Polly would be in a quiet room somewhere staring into space for the rest of her life.

They moved toward the machine together. “I guess I can stand it, if she can,” said Horn, taking her hand. “I’ve worked hard for a good many years now, it might be fun retiring and being an abstract for a change.”

“I envy you the journey, to be honest with you,” said Wolcott, making adjustments on the large dark machine. “I don’t mind telling you that as a result of your being ‘over there’ you may very well write a volume of philosophy that will set Dewey, Bergson, Hegel, or any of the others on their ears. I might ‘come over’ to visit you one day.”

“You’ll be welcome. What do we need for the trip?”

“Nothing. Just lie on these tables and be still.”

A humming filled the room. A sound of power and energy and warmth.

They lay on the tables, holding hands, Polly and Peter Horn. A double black hood came down over them. They were both in darkness. From somewhere far off in the hospital, a voice-clock sang, “Tick tock, seven o’clock. Tick tock, seven o’clock…” fading away in a little soft gong.

The low humming grew louder. The machine glittered with hidden, shifting, compressed power.

“Is there any danger?” cried Peter Horn.

“None!”

The power screamed. The very atoms of the room divided against each other, into alien and enemy camps. The two sides fought for supremacy. Horn gaped his mouth to shout. His insides became pyramidal, oblong with terrific electric seizures. He felt a pulling, sucking, demanding power claw at his body. The power yearned and nuzzled and pressed through the room. The dimensions of the black hood over his torso were stretched, pulled into wild planes of incomprehension. Sweat, pouring down his face, was not sweat, but a pure dimensional essence! His limbs were wrenched, flung, jabbed, suddenly caught. He began to melt like running wax.

A clicking sliding noise.

Horn thought swiftly, but calmly. How will it be in the future with Polly and me and Py at home and people coming over for a cocktail party? How will it be?

Suddenly he knew how it would be and the thought of it filled him with a great awe and a sense of credulous faith and time. They would live in the same white house on the same quiet, green hill, with a high fence around it to keep out the merely curious. And Dr. Wolcott would come to visit, park his beetle in the yard below, come up the steps and at the door would be a tall slim White Rectangle to meet him with a dry martini in its snakelike hand.

And in an easy chair across the room would sit a Salt White Oblong with a copy of Nietzsche open, reading, smoking a pipe. And on the floor would be Py, running about. And there would be talk and more friends would come in and the White Oblong and the White Rectangle would laugh and joke and offer little finger sandwiches and more drinks and it would be a good evening of talk and laughter.

That’s how it would be.

Click.

The humming noise stopped.

The hood lifted from Horn.

It was all over.

They were in another dimension.

He heard Polly cry out. There was much light. Then he slipped from the table, stood blinking. Polly was running. She stooped and picked up something from the floor.

It was Peter Horn’s son. A living, pink-faced, blue-eyed boy, lying in her arms, gasping and blinking and crying.

The pyramidal shape was gone. Polly was crying with happiness.

Peter Horn walked across the room, trembling, trying to smile himself, to hold on to Polly and the child, both at the same time, and weep with them.

“Well!” said Wolcott, standing back. He did not move for a long while. He only watched the White Oblong and the slim White Rectangle holding the Blue Pyramid on the opposite side of the room. An assistant came in the door.

“Shhh,” said Wolcott, hand to his lips. “They’ll want to be alone awhile. Come along.” He took the assistant by the arm and tiptoed across the room. The White Rectangle and the White Oblong didn’t even look up when the door closed.

The Women

It was as if a light came on in a green room.

The ocean burned. A white phosphorescence stirred like a breath of steam through the autumn morning sea, rising. Bubbles rose from the throat of some hidden sea ravine.

Like lightning in the reversed green sky of the sea it was aware. It was old and beautiful. Out of the deeps it came, indolently. A shell, a wisp, a bubble, a weed, a glitter, a whisper, a gill. Suspended in its depths were brainlike trees of frosted coral, eyelike pips of yellow kelp, hairlike fluids of weed. Growing with the tides, growing with the ages, collecting and hoarding and saving unto itself identities and ancient dusts, octopus-inks and all the trivia of the sea.

Until now—it was aware.

It was a shining green intelligence, breathing in the autumn sea. Eyeless but seeing, earless but hearing, bodyless but feeling. It was of the sea. And being of the sea it was—feminine.

It in no way resembled man or woman. But it had a woman’s ways, the silken, sly, and hidden ways. It moved with a woman’s grace. It was all the evil things of vain women.

Dark waters flowed through and by and mingled with strange memory on its way to the gulf streams. In the water were carnival caps, horns, serpentine, confetti. They passed through this blossoming mass of long green hair like wind through an ancient tree. Orange peels, napkins, papers, eggshells, and burnt kindling from night fires on the beaches; all the flotsam of the gaunt high people who stalked on the lone sands of the continental islands, people from brick cities, people who shrieked in metal demons down concrete highways, gone.

It rose softly, shimmering, foaming, into cool morning airs.

The green hair rose softly, shimmering, foaming, into cool morning airs. It lay in the swell after the long time of forming through darkness.

It perceived the shore.

The man was there.

He was a sun-darkened man with strong legs and a cow body.

Each day he should have come down to the water, to bathe, to swim. But he had never moved. There was a woman on the sand with him, a woman in a black bathing suit who lay next to him talking quietly, laughing. Sometimes they held hands, sometimes they listened to a little sounding machine that they dialed and out of which music came.

The phosphorescence hung quietly in the waves. It was the end of the season. September. Things were shutting down.

Any day now he might go away and never return.

Today he must come in the water.

They lay on the sand with the heat in them. The radio played softly and the woman in the black bathing suit stirred fitfully, eyes closed.

The man did not lift his head from where he cushioned it on his muscled left arm. He drank the sun with his face, his open mouth, his nostrils. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“A bad dream,” said the woman in the black suit.

“Dreams in the daytime?”

“Don’t you ever dream in the afternoon?”

“I never dream. I’ve never had a dream in my life.”

She lay there, fingers twitching. “God, I had a horrible dream.”

“What about?”

“I don’t know,” she said, as if she really didn’t. It was so bad she had forgotten. Now, eyes shut, she tried to remember.

“It was about me,” he said, lazily, stretching.

“No,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, smiling to himself. “I was off with another woman, that’s what.”

“No.”

“I insist,” he said. “There I was, off with another woman, and you discovered us, and somehow, in all the mix-up, I got shot or something.”

She winced involuntarily. “Don’t talk that way.”

“Let’s see now,” he said. “What sort of woman was I with? Gentlemen prefer blondes, don’t they?”

“Please don’t joke,” she said. “I don’t feel well.”

He opened his eyes. “Did it affect you that much?”

She nodded. “Whenever I dream in the daytime this way, it depresses me something terrible.”

“I’m sorry.” He took her hand. “Anything I can get you?”

“No.”

“Ice-cream cone? Eskimo pie? A Coke?”

“You’re a dear, but no. I’ll be all right. It’s just that, the last four days haven’t been right. This isn’t like it used to be early in the summer. Something’s happened.”

“Not between us,” he said.

“Oh, no, of course not,” she said quickly. “But don’t you feel that sometimes places change? Even a thing like a pier changes, and the merry-go-rounds, and all that. Even the hot dogs taste different this week.”

“How do you mean?”

“They taste old. It’s hard to explain, but I’ve lost my appetite, and I wish this vacation were over. Really, what I want to do most of all is go home.”

“Tomorrow’s our last day. You know how much this extra week means to me.”

“I’ll try,” she said. “If only this place didn’t feel so funny and changed. I don’t know. But all of a sudden I just had a feeling I wanted to get up and run.”

“Because of your dream? Me and my blonde and me dead all of a sudden.”

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t talk about dying that way!”

She lay there very close to him. “If I only knew what it was.”

“There.” He stroked her. “I’ll protect you.”

“It’s not me, it’s you,” her breath whispered in his ear. “I had the feeling that you were tired of me and went away.”

“I wouldn’t do that; I love you.”

“I’m silly.” She forced a laugh. “God, what a silly thing I am.”

They lay quietly, the sun and sky over them like a lid.

“You know,” he said, thoughtfully, “I get a little of that feeling you’re talking about. This place has changed. There is something different.”

“I’m glad you feel it, too.”

He shook his head, drowsily, smiling softly, shutting his eyes, drinking the sun. “Both crazy. Both crazy.” Murmuring. “Both.”

The sea came in on the shore three times, softly.

The afternoon came on. The sun struck the skies a grazing blow. The yachts bobbed hot and shining white in the harbor swells. The smells of fried meat and burnt onion filled the wind. The sand whispered and stirred like an image in a vast, melting mirror.

The radio at their elbow murmured discreetly. They lay like dark arrows on the white sand. They did not move. Only their eyelids flickered with awareness, only their ears were alert. Now and again their tongues might slide along their baking lips. Sly prickles of moisture appeared on their brows to be burned away by the sun.

He lifted his head, blindly, listening to the heat.

The radio sighed.

He put his head down for a minute.

She felt him lift himself again. She opened one eye and he rested on one elbow looking around, at the pier, at the sky, at the water, at the sand.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said, lying down again.

“Something,” she said.

“I thought I heard something.”

“The radio.”

“No, not the radio. Something else.”

“Somebody else’s radio.”

He didn’t answer. She felt his arm tense and relax, tense and relax. “Dammit,” he said. “There it is, again.”

They both lay listening.

“I don’t hear anything—”

“Shh!” he cried. “For God’s sake—”

The waves broke on the shore, silent mirrors, heaps of melting, whispering glass.

“Somebody singing.”

“What?”

“I’d swear it was someone singing.”

“Nonsense.”

“No, listen.”

They did that for a while.

“I don’t hear a thing,” she said, turning very cold.

He was on his feet. There was nothing in the sky, nothing on the pier, nothing on the sand, nothing in the hot-dog stands. There was a staring silence, the wind blowing over his ears, the wind preening along the light, blowing hairs of his arms and legs.

He took a step toward the sea.

“Don’t!” she said.

He looked down at her, oddly, as if she were not there. He was still listening.

She turned the portable radio up full, loud. It exploded words and rhythm and melody:

“—I found a million-dollar baby—”

He made a wry face, raising his open palm violently. “Turn it off.”

“No, I like it!” She turned it louder. She snapped her fingers, rocking her body vaguely, trying to smile.

It was two o’clock.

The sun steamed the waters. The ancient pier expanded with a loud groan in the heat. The birds were held in the hot sky, unable to move. The sun struck through the green liquors that poured about the pier; struck, caught and burnished an idle whiteness that drifted in the offshore ripples.

The white foam, the frosted coral brain, the kelp pip, the tide dust lay in the water, spreading.

The dark man still lay on the sand, the woman in the black suit beside him.

Music drifted up like mist from the water. It was a whispering music of deep tides and passed years, of salt and travel, of accepted and familiar strangenesses. The music sounded not unlike water on the shore, rain falling, the turn of soft limbs in the depths. It was a singing of a time-lost voice in a caverned seashell. The hissing and sighing of tides in deserted holds of treasure ships. The sound the wind makes in an empty skull thrown out on the baked sand.

But the radio on the blanket on the beach played louder.

The phosphorescence, light as a woman, sank down, tired, from sight. Only a few more hours. They might leave at any time. If only he would come in, for an instant, just an instant. The mists stirred silently, aware of his face and his body in the water, deep under. Aware of him caught, held, as they sank ten fathoms down, on a sluice that bore them twisting and turning in frantic gesticulations, to the depths of a hidden gulf in the sea.

The heat of his body, the water taking fire from his warmth, and the frosted coral brain, the jeweled dusts, the salted mists feeding on his hot breath from his open lips.

The waves moved the soft and changing thoughts into the shallows which were tepid as bath waters from the two o’clock sun.

He mustn’t go away. If he goes now, he’ll not return.

Now. The cold coral brain drifted, drifted. Now. Calling across the hot spaces of windless air in the early afternoon. Come down to the water. Now, said the music. Now.

The woman in the black bathing suit twisted the radio dial.

“Attention!” cried the radio. “Now, today, you can buy a new car at—”

“Jesus!” The man reached over and tuned the scream down. “Must you have it so loud!”

“I like it loud,” said the woman in the black bathing suit, looking over her shoulder at the sea.

It was three o’clock. The sky was all sun.

Sweating, he stood up. “I’m going in,” he said.

“Get me a hot dog first?” she said.

“Can’t you wait until I come out?”

“Please.” She pouted. “Now.”

“Everything on it?”

“Yes, and bring three of them.”

“Three? God, what an appetite!” He ran off to the small café.

She waited until he was gone. Then she turned the radio off. She lay listening a long time. She heard nothing. She looked at the water until the glints and shatters of sun stabbed through her eyes like needles.

The sea had quieted. There was only a faint, far and fine net of ripples giving off sunlight in infinite repetition. She squinted again and again at the water, scowling.

He bounded back. “Damn, but the sand’s hot; burns my feet off!” He flung himself on the blanket. “Eat ’em up!”