Read Online Strange Wine by Harlan Ellison - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Harlan Ellison
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Killing Bernstein
BERENGER: (to JEAN) Life is an abnormal business.
JEAN: On the contrary. Nothing could be more natural, and the proof is that people go on living.
BERENGER: There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.
JEAN: The dead don’t exist, there’s no getting away from that!…Ah! Ah…! ( He gives a huge laugh .) Yet you’re oppressed by them, too? How can you be oppressed by something that doesn’t exist?
BERENGER: I sometimes wonder if I exist myself.
JEAN: You don’t exist, my dear Berenger, because you don’t think. Start thinking, then you will.
LOGICIAN: (to the OLD GENTLEMAN) Another syllogism. All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat.
Eugene Ionesco, Rhinoceros
If God (or Whoever’s in charge) had wanted Dr. Netta Bernstein to continue living, He (or She) wouldn’t have made it so easy for me to kill her.
The night before, she had said again, do it again, we can do it once more, can’t we; and her thick, auburn hair smelled fresh and clean and it flowed across the pillows like the sunsets we get these days. The kind that burn the eyes they’re so beautiful. Our grandparents never saw such wonders of melting copper, flickering at the edges, sliding into darkness at the horizon. Exquisite beyond belief, created by pollution. Smog produces that kind of gorgeous sunset. Grandeur, created by imminent destruction. Her hair burned and slid into darkness and I buried my face in it and we made love and I didn’t make any mistakes.
And the next day she acted as if she didn’t know me.
Talked to me as though I were one of the test children she had in for her perception analyses. I felt waves of actual dislike coming from her. “Netta,” I said, “what’s the matter? Did I say something?”
She looked back at me with the expression of someone who has been asked for her driver’s license or other identification at a bank where she has had an account for sixteen years. I was a troublesome new teller, a trainee, an upstart stealing her time, impertinent and callow. “Duncaster,” she said, calling me by my last name, “I have work to do. Why don’t you go on about your business.” The night before she had called me Jimmy a hundred times in a minute.
She pretended not to know what I was talking about. I tried to be polite referring to what had happened between us. I didn’t want to use the wrong words, but there were no words she responded to. It was as if that bed, and the two of us on it, had never existed. I couldn’t believe she could be that brutal. I left the office early that day.
And the next day she hung me out to dry. It was even more brutal than the day before. The day before, it had only been obvious dislike, go on about your business, Duncaster. But the next day we were mortal enemies. Like ancient antagonists from some primordial swamp, she was after me, and I knew it. I can’t explain how I knew, I simply understood somewhere deep in the blood and bones that this woman was determined to rip out my throat.
Or perhaps I can explain it.
Take the film they made of Jaws . That is a terrifying film. It collapses entire audiences, and not merely because of the cinematic tricks. People in the middle of Kansas, people who’ve never even seen an ocean or a shark, go into cardiac arrest. Why should that be? There are terrors much closer to us–muggers on the streets, a positive biopsy report, being smashed to pudding in a freeway accident–terrors that can reach us; why should we be so petrified by that shark? I reject abstractions: the vagina dentatus , that paranoid hobgoblin of Freudian shadow-myth; the simplicity of our recoiling from something filled with teeth, an eating machine. I have another
Killing Bernstein
BERENGER: (to JEAN) Life is an abnormal business.
JEAN: On the contrary. Nothing could be more natural, and the proof is that people go on living.
BERENGER: There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.
JEAN: The dead don’t exist, there’s no getting away from that!…Ah! Ah…! ( He gives a huge laugh .) Yet you’re oppressed by them, too? How can you be oppressed by something that doesn’t exist?
BERENGER: I sometimes wonder if I exist myself.
JEAN: You don’t exist, my dear Berenger, because you don’t think. Start thinking, then you will.
LOGICIAN: (to the OLD GENTLEMAN) Another syllogism. All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat.
Eugene Ionesco, Rhinoceros
If God (or Whoever’s in charge) had wanted Dr. Netta Bernstein to continue living, He (or She) wouldn’t have made it so easy for me to kill her.
The night before, she had said again, do it again, we can do it once more, can’t we; and her thick, auburn hair smelled fresh and clean and it flowed across the pillows like the sunsets we get these days. The kind that burn the eyes they’re so beautiful. Our grandparents never saw such wonders of melting copper, flickering at the edges, sliding into darkness at the horizon. Exquisite beyond belief, created by pollution. Smog produces that kind of gorgeous sunset. Grandeur, created by imminent destruction. Her hair burned and slid into darkness and I buried my face in it and we made love and I didn’t make any mistakes.
And the next day she acted as if she didn’t know me.
Talked to me as though I were one of the test children she had in for her perception analyses. I felt waves of actual dislike coming from her. “Netta,” I said, “what’s the matter? Did I say something?”
She looked back at me with the expression of someone who has been asked for her driver’s license or other identification at a bank where she has had an account for sixteen years. I was a troublesome new teller, a trainee, an upstart stealing her time, impertinent and callow. “Duncaster,” she said, calling me by my last name, “I have work to do. Why don’t you go on about your business.” The night before she had called me Jimmy a hundred times in a minute.
She pretended not to know what I was talking about. I tried to be polite referring to what had happened between us. I didn’t want to use the wrong words, but there were no words she responded to. It was as if that bed, and the two of us on it, had never existed. I couldn’t believe she could be that brutal. I left the office early that day.
And the next day she hung me out to dry. It was even more brutal than the day before. The day before, it had only been obvious dislike, go on about your business, Duncaster. But the next day we were mortal enemies. Like ancient antagonists from some primordial swamp, she was after me, and I knew it. I can’t explain how I knew, I simply understood somewhere deep in the blood and bones that this woman was determined to rip out my throat.
Or perhaps I can explain it.
Take the film they made of Jaws . That is a terrifying film. It collapses entire audiences, and not merely because of the cinematic tricks. People in the middle of Kansas, people who’ve never even seen an ocean or a shark, go into cardiac arrest. Why should that be? There are terrors much closer to us–muggers on the streets, a positive biopsy report, being smashed to pudding in a freeway accident–terrors that can reach us; why should we be so petrified by that shark? I reject abstractions: the vagina dentatus , that paranoid hobgoblin of Freudian shadow-myth; the simplicity of our recoiling from something filled with teeth, an eating machine. I have another
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