The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories (33 page)

He had taught Benji to write, had taught him archaic words like “tree” and “grass,” and had discovered for himself that for Benji the dirty wall of a room could be as kind as the sweaty face of his mother, that an old woman’s cough in the night could be as assuring as a box of dried fish. “As” was the other key word for similes, for the poetry of similes. 

He had also explained Wordsworth’s words to the boy. Actually it had taken almost eight years for that explanation—all that talking about everything Maxwell could think of. More than the brief discussion of word-meanings that had followed the first reading of the poet’s prediction, what had been the real explanation of meaning was Maxwell’s persistent teaching. The fruit: the growth of Benji’s mind’s eye. 

He had also made a present of twenty pencils to Benji. The Introducer had granted Maxwell the instruments as a last request, before the old man’s visit to the perfumed chamber where he would “sleep,” but not have to face the agony of waiting for sleep to end and warmth to begin again. 

Maxwell had worried for a long time about paper for the boy’s pencils, until he found that there were other things Benji could write on. More permanent things. 

A man who looked a little like the Introducer opened the door to the chamber and motioned to Maxwell. The old man rose and entered the death-room, only to smile when the perfume—meant to disguise the odors of gas and human sweat—made Maxwell think of flowers, perfumed petals stretching along the green hills of a river region where frogs sang of green water-lilies and green and green and green. . . . 

Benji-tom’s father returned to the market, leaving the boy happy to know that the Super at the market would be willing to hire him the next year. A job was very important. There were fifteen people to feed; and soon Benji would have a wife. 

Benji sat down on his blanket in the room and took a pencil out from under it. Staring at the wall, pencil raised in his hand, the boy remembered what the Introducer had told him that morning. The boy had made the long walk to the hospital only for an answer to a question, but a question that had been voicing itself in his mind every day since his great-father’s visit to the chamber. The Introducer had answered the question well. 

“I don’t understand,” Benji had whispered, “why my great-father always said that he had only a little time left to live and do things. He lived ten years, and that’s a long time.” 

“It’s only a minute, really,” the Introducer said, “for a man who slept two hundred and twenty-three years.” 

Benji raised his pencil to the wall, and began slowly to write large printed letters. When he finished one line, he cocked his head and smiled, then read aloud to himself: “Walking and walking on the streets down there is like half-sleeping on my blanket with the running of cockroaches across my legs.” 

The words would remain on the wall, the boy knew. His mother didn’t care if there was writing on the walls. The walls were as dirty as rat-tails anyway. 

Benji’s Pencil 

Story Notes 

Like so many writers, painters, filmmakers, and others of artistic (rather than Phi Beta Kappa) persuasion, I lived for my “art” in college. In fact, nothing else seemed real; and had I not been a writer and been able to write, I would have had no idea who I was and probably stopped breathing. I stumbled through majors in International Relations, Biology, Psychology, and a couple of other disciplines—all fields that I would years later get back to in research for novels and short stories and for the interdisciplinary teaching and consulting I would do in university (which shows of course that I was indeed interested in those fields even if I had no idea how to grapple with them as a young man)—before landing in Literature, which, because it was the English language plus literary works, was easier for me. But mainly back in my student days I was a writer—a fiction writer—
a science fiction writer
—not a scholar, and so I (1) was always terribly inspired to write fiction at finals time, (2) nearly flunked out in my sophomore year, (3) was kicked out of college for reasons other than grades the next year, (4) was invited back by a compassionate faculty and administration a year later, (5) graduated a year late, (6) graduated with a GPA of 2.6, but, irony of ironies, (7) was admitted to UC Irvine’s MFA program in Creative Writing not on the basis of grades (which I didn’t have) but on my portfolio of short stories—which I’d written when, had I been a good student, I’d have been attending to my grades and studies.
 

The story behind “Benji’s Pencil” illustrates perfectly, I think, the temperament, heart, and soul of creative types, modern-day bohemians: In my junior year I was one of eight Literature majors out of twenty-four in the class who failed a major-core course called “English Writers.” I have no idea why my seven fellow travelers failed, but I know why I did: Young as I was, the classic literary works we studied held no interest for me; they seemed long and turgid (after all, it was archaic English, not laconic, economical, contemporary American English, the kind I used in my own fiction). Many of these classic works had also been written to deliver conscious allegory, which of course held no interest for me. What did fascinate me, however, were the
lives
of the writers: Alexander Pope would sit in a stained-glass grotto to get his ideas; Milton, as he grew blind, started writing less visually, much more musically and abstractly; John Ruskin had actually written, nearly a century before, an essay telling people not to leave their chicken wrappers out in the forest because it littered Nature and littering was bad; and William Wordsworth had so loved Nature and poetry that he could not imagine a time in the future where human beings would be so inhuman they would not love both of these things, too. As a young science fiction writer, but also as the son of a behavioral scientist—one who’d grown up seeing the degree to which, despite cultural differences, human beings insisted on being human in every environment imaginable—I had to agree. I was inspired by Wordsworth’s prediction, and the quote that appears in “Benji’s Pencil” was one of the handful of heartfelt items I took with me from that Literature class. In fact, that quote became the story only a few months later; and a few years later, after the story had been published in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction,
reprinted in that magazine’s “year’s best” volume, and also reprinted in two college readers, I met with my old instructor in that course and we amicably exchanged autographed publications: “Benji’s Pencil” for a journal article he had written on one of the English writers we had studied that semester. To this day the scene in his office—the exchange of autographed creations—his a scholar’s, mine a creative writer’s—embodies both what is shared (a love of good writing) and what isn’t (a scholar’s love for a literary work by another and a writer’s love of human story, the process of writing and the page-by-page techniques needed for good writing—his own).
 

Postscript: This story began as a 20,000-word monstrosity—a kind of “thought experiment” (how would it feel to be a boy in an overpopulated future who’d lived only in one room and knew nothing else)—and went through six drafts and ten editors before I could admit what an abject failure it was. Then, one night on Yale Street in Claremont, California, 1968—in a house where I lived the way we all lived in those days, college kids in the ’60s, one of them my girlfriend (and future wife and mother of my future kids)—I saw the story as it needed to be: short and fast because the old man’s time in Benji’s world would indeed be fast, and through a lens we could understand—the old man’s. I also knew that someday I wanted a son named Benjamin, and so the boy in the story received that name. Fourteen years later, I would indeed have a son named Benjamin; and, in the way that lives lived long enough reveal the symmetries and synchronies that bind us all in the larger truth of the universe, I learned just yesterday that Benjamin has, by sheer coincidence, moved into a house only a couple blocks away from that one . . . on Yale Street . . . forty years later. He’s the same son who returned on my behalf to Italy a few years ago and brought back for me the tiniest piece of the castle on whose steps I played as a child. He’s never read this story—a wise decision, I think—but I may give him a copy the next time I see him to thank him for the author’s “photo” he created (poet-of-the-eye and lover of Nature that he has turned out to be) for this collection’s dust jacket. 

Spell 

When his grandmother died without telling him she would, the boy was twelve and tried not to think about it. When he thought about it, he saw how alone he was, and how thinking about it helped make it so. And if he was alone, who was there to protect him from what wanted to kill him, what could not stand the idea that he existed—the idea that he was, as his grandmother had believed, a boy who deserved to exist? 

It was better not to think of her at all; or if he had to, to think only about the four times she had saved him from the evil, and not the night she’d died in her bed two rooms away without his knowing it, dying not because, as the doctors said, “Her heart just stopped—it happens,” but because what wished to kill him wished her dead, too, and so her heart had stopped. 

So he tried, but it was difficult because his mother—his grandmother’s daughter—reminded him every day that she was dead. 

Your grandmother is dead, John
. 

I hope you have not forgotten her
. 

I hope you remember how much she loved you
. 

It was as if his mother knew that by forgetting what he had lost—the one who could save him—he might feel
safer;
and this, he knew, his mother did not want. 

When he was little and his grandmother first came to live with them in Florida, where his father was stationed with the Navy, the boy would go to the beach with her. She liked to paint seascapes, and he would play at her feet while she painted. She gave him his own easel—a little one just his size, which she herself had bought—and brushes, water cup, and paint; but before long he would tip the cup over, get sand in the paint or on the brush, and wander away to play with his bucket at sea’s edge, collecting seashells, stones, and tiny pieces of driftwood that looked like animals. 

One day he picked up a purple balloon someone had left on the wet sand, and within seconds he was crying from the pain, running to his grandmother, who held him in her big lap and told him what the purple balloon was, how even when they die the man-of-war jellyfish can sting you. 

Another morning, as he sat in the shade of her umbrella—with no one else on the beach—he looked up to find the sea rushing out like a draining bathtub and, far beyond it, a wall of water so high it looked like a mountain coming toward them—a mountain with a face, one he knew. This would be the first time his grandmother would save him. 

As the great wave approached, his grandmother, though her knee hurt her, made a quick pattern in the air, grunted something that sounded like “Wind and Sea and You and Me,” and picked him up—brushes, buckets, and sand flying around them in a little whirlwind—lifting him high into the sky, high as the gulls, high above the wall of water as if she had wings he could not see, coming down again, the two of them, upright and dry, only when the wall and its face had passed and the beach was covered with little pools of water and the gulls were starting to return, looking for stranded fish, dead crabs, and whatever else the wave had left. 

As she drove them home in her Pontiac—which always made him think of a big pale-green frog—she pretended nothing had happened, that she hadn’t flown up higher than two houses and saved him from the evil that wanted to take him. “What wave, Johnny?” she said, but there was a twinkle in her eye, one that told him she knew and that he didn’t need to ask again. They wouldn’t tell his mother, of course. 

When they got home, his mother, a big woman, looked at them and said, “So where have you two been? John looks sunburned.” 

“You know where, Dorothy,” his grandmother said with a smile. “Where we always go.” 

His mother didn’t like the answer, the boy could tell. 

“For so long?” his mother said. 

“Painting the sea takes time, Dorothy.” 

When the boy looked at his mother’s eyes, he saw them flash, saw something dark and glittering coil for an instant in them. 

“Well,” she said, with a smile that wasn’t really a smile, “I hope the sea wasn’t too rough to paint.” 

His grandmother laughed. “It never holds still—but nothing worth painting ever does.” 

The boy watched the thing coil again, and then, as if afraid of being seen, slip away into darkness. 

When the boy was eight and his family lived outside the capital, their apartment was by a creek, and here he hunted red-eared turtles, box turtles, frogs, and guppies, putting them in mayonnaise jars with holes poked in the tops or plastic bowls or little wire cages his father made for him. Carrying them in his red wagon, which he pulled behind him down the sidewalks, he sold them to whoever would buy them. The families that had children bought them, while the apartments with only old people did not; and this made sense.
Amphibians,
he knew, were not easy for an old person to take care of. 

The creek he liked best was the one at home. It fed into a big swamp that hadn’t yet been drained for homes or stores. But there were other creeks, too—one by the bus stop, another at the
cul-de-sac
at the end of the street, and three or four in the woods by his school. All drained into that swamp. Before school and after, in the creeks and ponds around it, he would hunt for turtles and frogs, and sometimes he would get to school with his pants legs wet from creek water. Once his teacher made him go home to change, but this made him happy. It meant he could go through the woods again twice when everyone else was in school. This was the day he found, halfway home, a pond full of what his favorite book called “painted turtles,” and for a moment could only stare. The pond wasn’t large, but it was perfectly round, like one of the marvelous circles his grandmother sewed or painted, and on its bank the turtles made a circle, too, the red markings of their skin and shells flashing like fire in the sunlight. It was like a dream, and he wanted to tell his grandmother about it—he wanted her to see it because she would understand—but he couldn’t. She was at home cleaning, doing laundry, maybe starting to cook food for dinner.