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Pardon My Extremities
by Wayne Wightman
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I knew it was going to be a long day when... well, when I went into the bathroom and flushed the toilet and it filled up with... things. I wouldn't say they were snakes, exactly, because they had lots of little legs, and they weren't big centipedes either, because they had snapping mouths and needle-teeth and eyes that looked up at me with great hunger as I drained the tank trying to flush them away.
Now this kind of thing isn't as bad as it sounds at first because I've got used to it. I've been psychotic for almost a year and a half now, but, see, I know I'm psychotic. I keep a good attitude. I used to design catheters for Mega-Pharm Corp. - I was a big deal person - but when all those tubes started looking back at me and I found revolting creatures, shall we say, creeping around my house, I got put on disability. Someone still comes around once a month to check me out.
But since I see these revolting beasts all the time - some
days more than other days - by now I pretty much know what's real
and what isn't. Waking up in bed with slugs in your ears is a
lot worse than a few reptiles in the toilet, but none of it's
real, so I figure, why have a hemorrhage over it?
Take the paperboy, for instance. I know that he'll come to
the door with his ratty receipt pad and Black Death Resorts
baseball cap on and he'll say, "Collecting," and the pupils in
his eyes will narrow out horizontally like little black mouths,
and then long worms as brown as his irises will extrude from his
sockets and crawl around his neck or wave at me like they're
doing the hula.
It can be a bit attractive, actually, once you get over the
shock. But then I give him his money and his eyes suck back into
his head and he pedals off on his bent-wheeler. A person's got
to keep a good attitude about such things.
Lots of my hallucinations involve snakes or worms, so if you
want to throw your intuitions over with Freud, I'm a latent homo
or I'm afraid my hoofustereus is going to turn black and drop
down my pantleg. Or, more likely I think, I've got some bad
wiring; my brain's misconnected, and I'm all messed up. But I
try to keep a good attitude.
So, this morning, after the experience of the toilet snakes,
I want into the kitchen, dumped the trilobites out of a cup and
sent them through the garbage disposal, and then carefully poured
some coffee.
I make coffee very black, and on a bad day I can never tell
what's going to show up in it. Of course, it can look perfectly
good when it's being poured, but then when I get it in my
mouth... well, the less said the better. I eat and drink over
the sink for this reason. Little slick things whipping around
inside my mouth can make me a bit queasy if I'm not expecting it,
even though I know they're not real, but a hallucinated tapeworm
in your mouth is as bad as a real one, I would imagine. Of
course, the less said about that kind of thing, the better. Even
a catheter designer's got more class than to wash his dirty
psychosis in public.
But it was a rotten day for a rotten day. I'd made plans to
go next door and lay a few obvious moves on the single lady who'd
just moved in there - Madeline Vuong. I mean, this was supposed
to be the highlight of the month.
I couldn't believe my luck when Mr. and Mrs. Roscoe and
their little beetleheaded kid moved out and Ms. Vuong moved in.
The Roscoes would look like human beings for about fifteen
seconds, and then their hair would slick down into shiny chitin,
their eyes bubble out in multifaceted compound bee-eyes, and
through his scimitar mandibles, Mr. Beetlehead would say, "Dang,
it's hot this time a year, iddn it?"
But not so with Ms. Vuong - not too much, anyway. Her arms
started to look a little filmy once and I thought she might go
rodent on me, but she held together. As a human being, she was
tall, thin, black wavy hair, black eyes, and great epicanthic
folds. But it was her lips - full sensuous hot-damn lips that
were like rounded iris petals and had my name written all over
them.
A few days ago when I'd helped her start her lawnmower and
introduced myself, she told me she used to lead aerobic exercises
at several of the local bowling alleys for the teams.
"But now I d'not work for awhile."
"Too bad. Bowlers don't seem the aerobic type. You didn't
have any of them die on you or anything, did you?"
"I have disability," she said. "Thank you for starting
mower." Whatever her disability was, it wasn't in the muscle
department. When she stood there shifting her weight back and
forth from one leg to the other, her muscles danced.
"It just needs a new plug. Well, hope you get better soon."
"Thank you."
"There's a lot of weird stuff in your body that can get
debilitated."
"Yes true."
"I mean, really weird stuff can happen to you."
"I know." She was starting to look uncomfortable.
"I mean, intensely very strange and peculiar things.
Freakish, bizarre things."
"Yes."
"I mean, like some people, they might get a little virus or
something, and the next day, zang!, they start seeing aliens
fooling around with the tomatoes in their gardens."
She glanced nervously toward the back of her house where she
had a tomato garden.
"Thank you so much for fixing spark plug," she said. She
grabbed the handle, maxxed the throttle, and plowed away through
her lawn in a cloud of blue smoke and green clippings and pulsing
muscles that just for the briefest of moments made me want to
chew on my hand.
So this morning, see, I had a new platinum-tipped plug for
her, and then the figments started acting up. But I figured, so
what? If she turns into a fly-headed python with scrambled
carrion leaking through her mandibles, I'll be cool. Just
because I'm crazy doesn't mean I have to be irrational about this
stuff.
And besides, I might get lucky. I mean, not only did she
apparently reside in a body of startling healthiness, I had seen
her reading books. Am I amazed? Can you sense my wonder?
But speaking of fly-headed pythons with scrambled carrion,
etcetera, the last woman I went out with, six or seven months
ago, well... let us just say she gave me some good practice of
acting normal in public. There we were in this swank joint,
everyone keeping both feet on the floor, and she was the only one
who went weird on me.
Everytime she stuck another forkful of chateaubriand between
her mandibles, she grew another tentacle. Before she finished
eating, she ended up having suckers in amazing places, but the
less said of that, the more I can retain my self-respect. I
mean, when I say I've been in the sack with beasts, it's no small
joke, and even though there may be some elements of thrill in it,
you do have to remember it the rest of your life.
So here I was with my sparkplug, ringing Madeline Vuong's
doorbell. She opened the door and looked at me like I might have
been dead and had been lying in the sun for a week.
"Hi there," I said. "I'm you next door neighbor - Sam Lake -
remember me? I have a new plug for your mower." I held it up
between our faces.
"Of course. Mr. Lake," she said, highly relieved. She
smiled, almost laughing. "I thought you were someone else."
"Just a human being. Just like you."
The smile flickered off and then on again. "American humor
sometimes...." She nodded deeply and waved a finger at me. Those
iris-petal lips of hers puckered. "Sometimes very mysterious
what people laugh at."
Behind her, I could see her naked livingroom. That was the
clencher: bare walls and empty floors, just like mine. I was
convinced. When things transmutate into geegy revulsodroids at a
moment's notice, you tend to want to have as few things around as
possible.
"Ms. Vuong," I said, trying to sound trustworthy, decent and
honest, "Ms. Vuong, I don't want to pry into your personal
private business, but I think you and I should have a little chat
about... things, if you know what I mean. My livingroom looks a
lot like yours - and I think probably for the same reasons."
She started fluttering her hands and getting very nervous.
"Is only my Oriental preference - open floor, you know, clear
walls, for peace of mind and clarity."
"Yeah yeah, and to keep the monsters away. Go ahead - you
can tell me I'm wrong."
She gulped. Her narrow eyes opened as wide as mine and she
didn't say anything.
"When you answered the door, what did I look like? How
many eyes did I have?"
"Only two," she whispered, still looking a bit terrified.
"How many teeth?"
She tried to swallow again and her throat clicked. "Lots,"
she said softly. "With points. And things on teeth."
"Like what kind of things?"
"Meat kind of things."
"So you're crazy too."
She stepped back inside her entryway. "Come in, Mr. Lake."
So I went in and we sat in the corner of the empty livingroom and
talked. It turned out I went bats about six months before she
did, and we had the same kinds of problems with people and things
changing into disgusting creatures. She had to give up her
bowling alley aerobics because of the bowling balls. For the
most part, she could handle the people glumping into sea slugs or
twitching into gross-out bristle-headed insects, but she said it
was the bowling balls that convinced her to call it quits.
"They hatched," she said. "Man would hold ball, you know,
like when to swing it, and ball would hatch and little mouth-
monster all teeth and lips, you know, would eat up arm and man's
head. Very horrible. I thought aliens here."
"All the time I see what could be aliens. For a while I
thought we were being invaded, but I decided I was just insane."
"I take medicine for a while," she said through those lips
of hers, "and it make me all stupid and slow, but still I see
things in yard and people get ugly. So I quit."
As if on cue, she developed banded segments on her arms and
her fingers turned into sticky pads. No big deal.
"I used to think people were ugly before all this happened,"
I said. "Like when I had this wife once - the more I liked her,
the more she hated me. This was when I was normal. If I treated
her like garbage, she thought I was a great guy. Ugly business.
And when I used to go out in public, I'd see a lot of normal
people have fun seeing how bad they can make somebody else feel.
Lots of my normal friends did that. These beasts, they just look
bad. And make me think I gotta be nuts."
Her segments creaked when she nodded. The transformation
had got to her head now. She had goggle-eyes and barbles hung
from the corners of her glistening mouth. So what, I thought.
It was still Madeline Vuong and I remembered what her mouth
really looked like. And there was no telling what she saw when
she looked at me.
"I remember bad time too," she said, "when father and sister
went to re-education camp. He d'not come back. Sister have one
... one part cut off. And on boat when I escape, get raped three
times by pirates. So madness not so bad."
I didn't want to embarrass her by looking at her, but I put
one of my hands on hers. It felt normal.
"Now," she said more brightly, "when monsters everywhere, is
not realistically too horrible, you know? They not hurt
anything - just make difficult times like going to grocery store
when lettuce flap its wings or all food turn to foam-creatures in
bags."
"I never had any foam-creatures," I said. I looked at her
now and she was back to Madeline Vuong with her great epicanthic
folds and those magic lips. I took my hand off her and she
reverted to a segmented fish-head.
"Look at me," I said. "What do you see?"
She turned her head and scanned me from head to foot.
"Bad news," she said.
I put my hand on hers. "How about now?"
She turned into herself and her lips parted and she laughed.
"It is you again!"
It was like a toggle switch. Touching each other, we were
normal. Hands apart, it was reunion at the Black Lagoon.
"Mr. Lake," she said through her lips, "don't go home."
I got lucky. Dang. When I dropped my shirt, the sparkplug
in the pocket thumped on the bare floor. Platinum tipped, extra
hard, long-lasting, sure-fire performance. I could have been an
advertisement.
We lay in her bed all night, talking some of the time, and
watching the walls bulge and run and glop, and out the window in
the moonlight, sometimes we saw bizarre freak-headed geegs
trotting back and forth or rooting around in her tomato garden.
It didn't bother us. Even when the leather-winged things crawled
out from beneath the bed, tottered up the walls, hung on the
ceiling and turned their pimply eyes down to watch us, it was no
big deal.
But when the sky began to turn pink, Madeline said, "You
have to go soon. Today my doctor come by, to check me." Her
hand rested on my chest with her finger tracing around one
nipple.
"Every month you get checked?"
"Yes," she said, almost as a question.
"And he shows you a few pictures and asks you what you see,
and then he just sits there and makes you chitchat for about half
an hour, right?"
"This happens to you?"
"Every month. My guy is from Mega-Pharm's insurance
company. At least I assumed he was from their insurance company.
They check to see if I'm still wacked out."
We looked at each other. She was thinking, This is very
coincidental, and I was thinking, Here we are with similar
hallucinations, and she was thinking, Living next door to each
other, in bed together, and I was thinking, If her inspector
comes by today....
"We could test him," she said.
"Right. We could design me up as some creature - and if he
pretends he doesn't see me, we'll know he's doing some kind of
perverted number on us. I'm going to like this."
I hurried out of bed and started dressing.
"I got some ideas," I said. "I'll have to go to the grocery
store and make a couple of other stops to pick up some equipment.
What's the earliest he's ever come by?"
"Ten o'clock."
"We can be ready." Some kind of moose-headed weasel the
size of a collie waddled out of the bathroom and started sniffing
around my shoes. "Jeez. Get the hell out of my way!" I yelled
at it. "Don't you things ever give it a rest?"
"That thing in my tub every morning," Madeline said. "Very
tiring to be insane first moment every day."
"Isn't that the truth."
When I asked the butcher for nine pounds of liver, he
thought I was crazy, but then I didn't have purple gill-fans or a
head like a shaved weasel. He did, however, have a few good
pieces of tripe and he referred me to a nearby meat market.
And since my background was in pharmaceutical supply, with
some slick talk, I was able to get the rest of the stuff out of
the mis-filled orders dump at Mega-Pharm's local distributor.
And it was still a little before 9:30.
By ten, I had all the meat and latex out on Madeline's back
porch and was madly tying stuff on my body.
"Can you puree this liver?" I asked her.
"Certainly."
I handed her about three pounds. "Whip it thin enough that
you can get it sucked up in this bulb."
When she came back and saw what I'd wrapped around my head,
the bouquet of surgical tubing sticking out from under my arms
and the brown mailing tape I sheathed my arms and chest up in for
an interesting segmented effect, she paused. She gulped. "Sam?"
"Yeah, it's me. I need to cut the eyeholes in the tripe a
little bigger. You got the liver?"
She handed me the squeeze bulb with about a quart and a half
of liquified liver in it. This I attached to my hastily
fashioned mandibular dribble tubes.
"You scary," she said. "You look like the worst kind
alien."
"Great. If all this crap just doesn't slide off me now, and
if the quote doctor end-quote shows up before the tripe gets
stiff, we'll have an interesting display."
"I be very normal with him."
"Right. And when I come dribbling in, look at me once and
pretend I'm not there."
"And if he pretend you not be there, then what?"
I hadn't really thought that far ahead. "I'll get extreme."
"What if he see you and scream and call police?"
The doorbell rang.
"We're consenting adults," I whispered. "I'll tell him I
was looking for the rubber sheet."
She looked toward the front door and then back at me. I
knew I was psychotic, but at the moment I felt stupid too. I
don't like to feel stupid, and the tripe was starting to slip.
"Answer the door," I whispered. "Be normal."
She looked at me a couple seconds longer and then turned and
went through the livingroom.
"Good day, Dr. Fenner," I heard her say.
"Good morning, Madeline," he answered. "How are we getting
along these days? Still no furniture, I see."
I recognized the voice - it was that same reedy condescending
voice that I heard when the Mega-Pharm insurance nyerk came to
check me out.
I could hear him opening his briefcase and shuffling out
the pictures for Madeline to look at and comment on. It had to
be the same guy and the same deal she and I were involved in - and
at that point I just wanted to cut the masquerade and go in and
body-slam the guy till he talked.
"Warm weather for this time of year," he said.
I could imagine him holding up the first picture.
"Sea monster," Madeline said desolately. "With thing like
on top of rooster head around face."
"Pretty scary, hmm?" the nyerk suggested.
I heard no sound from Madeline. She probably shrugged.
More shuffling of paper.
"This thing in my bathtub every morning," she said.
The tripe around my head start to slide down my face, so I
only waited through a couple more pictures and decided it was
time to do the scene. I lumbered out into the doorway.
They were sitting on the floor in the middle of the room
with their sides to me. Madeline looked up and I started pumping
the pureed liver out through my mandible tubes. It was thick and
cold and glopped down the mailing tape around my chest.
Madeline's eyes went wide in real revulsion, but then she
turned back to her visitor.
He looked up at me, no trace of expression, and held up the
next picture for her description. He didn't look a bit like the
Mega-Pharm man, but the voice and the routine were identical.
"And this one?" he said.
I waddled within three or four feet of them, squirting liver
down myself, both of them pretending like crazy that I wasn't
there. When I got close enough, I whipped the tripe off my head
and threw it in his face and grabbed him by his pinstriped vest
and gave him a North Borneo body slam.
"You malignant nixonoid zipperhead!" I was screaming. I
don't know what came over me.
"Wait! Wait!" he was squeaking, holding his hands up to
keep the liver from pouring down in his face. I snatched up the
sheet of tripe and whacked him a couple of times across the head
with it.
"Mr. Lake! Wait! Don't kill me!"
"I don't want to kill you - I just wanta give you a little
brain damage. Madeline, get the drill!" I just made that up,
but it sounded good, and I wanted to emphasize my discontent with
whatever this scrud had been doing to us.
But apparently I'd said the wrong thing. He reached up and
gave me a little whack that knocked me rolling into the wall. My
head popped into the baseboard and for a moment I thought I'd
split my brainpan.
When my vision returned, the guy was standing up wiping
liver out of his eyes and Madeline was trying to edge sideways
out toward the backporch.
"I can explain," he said, wiping his hands on a
handkerchief.
"Sure you can," I said from my place on the floor. "I'll
bet you tell that to all the people you drive crazy." I sat up
and looked at him. He had been pretty normal looking before I'd
worked him over - hair like the evening weatherman, polyester
suit, and big flat-bottomed wingtip shoes. But something about
him was starting to change.
Madeline was poised at the doorway, ready to run, when the
man peeled off his wig and dropped it on the floor.
"This will just take a moment," he said, starting to
undress, "if you will just bear with me."
I glanced at Madeline, she glanced back, and we bore with
him.
When he got his shirt off, I figured, Oh well, here we go
again into a standard hallucination of ugliness and depravity.
It seemed our friend the doctor/insurance investigator was some
kind of... thing. His yellow body was a patchwork of palm-sized
rectangles, each with a dimple in its middle.
"Pardon my extremities," it said, shucking off one leg-skin.
When he peeled down the skin from his arms, what was inside
blossomed out like a frayed rope into a dozen multijointed
spider-leg appendages.
"I'm really frightened," I said tiredly. "What I flushed
down the toilet this morning was scarier than you."
"Must be crazy-time again," Madeline said.
"Not so, not so," the thing said. "The two of you did very
well with your 'disabilities.' You adjusted. You're a very
healthy pair."
The second leg-skin splatted on the floor.
Actually, this had suddenly become very interesting: none
of my monsters had ever talked to me before.
"The things you saw in public were hallucinations, true - but
most of what you saw in your homes was real."
"Just... what are you?" I asked.
It pulled off its facial skin and its "head" slumped around
its upper "body", shall we say. I thought my tripe mask was
awful, but what it had under there was worse than a catheter full
of pureed liver and its mouth looked like lips on a stick. It
was amazing it could talk at all.
"I'm someone - " (It snickered at that.) " - someone looking
for people who like a little adventure in their work."
So now Madeline and I work for the nyerk. I guess for a
former catheter designer and an aerobics teacher, we've done
pretty well, but when the nyerk said "adventure", he was real.
We travel around to the homes of various alien types, stroll
through their livingrooms two or three times, make them think
they're nuts, and then zip off to some other place and do it
again. If they adjust and come to terms with it, the nyerk makes
an appearance and recruits them.
Basically, his scheme is this: If enough "people" can get
used to what they'd otherwise think was weird or disgusting, then
we'll all come out of the woodwork and say howdy, like one big
happy, diverse, and rather strange family.
The job's got its moments. The other night, Madeline and I
were out wandering around outside this thing's burrow, and we
could see the its scared little eyes peering out at us, and for
some reason we started pulling some soft fruit off a tree and
throwing it at each other and laughing like maniacs. Then we
tried to get the pulp off each other without using our hands.
Now I'd never heard a centipede laugh before, but I heard it
that night, and while we were standing out there under the light
of six silvery moons with juice running down our legs, I figured
that, you know, even if you're just a monster in a centipede's
nightmare, there's no reason you have to be an alien about it.
For a couple of hallucinations, dang, we have fun!
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"Pardon My Extremities" is one of ten great stories
collected in Wayne Wightman's Ganglion and Other Stories,
now available from Tachyon Publications.
This story is copyright © 1990 by Mercury Press, Inc. and was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science fiction in January 1990.
It may not be reproduced without permission.
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