A Handful of Time (20 page)

This did not seem as impossible as it may at first sound to the layman, or even to the scientist. Bacteria, which grow inside of people, are fungi. Mushrooms are fungi. Both reproduce sexually, which means they can be bred for certain characteristics. (It has only recently been observed that bacteria reproduce sexually, but they have actually been doing it all along.)

There is much that is not understood about the relationships or possible relationships between fungi and people, since medicine and mycology are two different specialties, and physicians and mycologists do not always agree about what is a fungus.

Arthur therefore had a field pretty much uncluttered by previous experimentation and since he knew exactly what he wanted to do, he could go pretty much in a straight line.

(It is a curious psychological fact that Arthur did not spend any time wondering what Frances’ vision was under hallucination. He merely assumed, as he was God, that it was the same as his. Herself, improved.)

It took Arthur a year to breed
Frances Arthuriensis,
which will not be found in the C. M. I. for obvious reasons.

During this time it had been necessary for Arthur to make a few changes in his way of life. There were Frances’ ex-boy friends who were a constant nuisance. Arthur had no compunction about giving Frances drugs, but he couldn’t well keep her asleep twenty-four hours a day and he didn’t want to over use anything from his mushroom pharmacary. The chemistry of hallucinogenic mushrooms is ill understood, even by Arthur, and he did not want to take a chance on building up possible toxic reactions, or causing possible neurological changes, until he had the
Frances Arthuriensis
ready.

So he bought a cabin in the Ozarks. He had it equipped with all the modern conveniences except a paved road (it was necessary to bump over a pasture and up a wooded slope to get to it. Only his little foreign car could weave between the trees, and even so, one had to know which trees). He hired two idiot boys from one of the neighboring farms, two miles away, and bought a razor back hog, planning to indulge an old dream of raising truffles, which ordinarily are impossible to grow in America. (This is worthy of mention because it shows that Arthur was not a monomaniac. It is true that his zeal in regard to Frances implies a perhaps unusual degree of uxoriousness. But he maintained other interests, too.)

Once installed, Arthur proceeded with the breeding of
Francesa arthura
with almost daily success. He crossed the Patagonian Boletus with a more temperate North Carolina Boletus and with the help of air conditioning, at first achieved a mushroom that could survive an Arkansas summer. (A generation of mushrooms requires several days.) He then crossed it with a small Daedalea from Cade’s Cove. Meanwhile he was working upward with the largest
B. coli
he could find and filaments of myxomycete Plasmodium.

At the end of a year Arthur managed to mate a microscopic mushroom with a new parasitic slime mold. Applied to the skin of a shaved cat (there were those later who thought the most loathsome thing Arthur ever did was to shave a cat) it showed itself soon in fairy rings. This sounds delightful, but actually it is ring worm. The cat died, of course, not having Frances’ chemical make up. But the important thing was that the
Francesa arthura
lived.

It is not to be supposed that Arthur meant to
give
Frances a bad case of ring worm. Whether it would make a pleasant symbiosis for Frances or not, it would certainly be aesthetically unpleasing.

No,
Francesa arthura
was for internal use only, and as Arthur was too humane to give it to Frances without testing it, he fed it to one of the idiot farm boys.

The effect was noticeable the very next day. The boy became alert, his mouth no longer drooped open, he no longer slept half the day. In fact, Arthur learned upon questioning him, he had stopped sleeping altogether. It should be noted that the boy’s intelligence did not at any time increase, but he certainly looked better. It was almost as though (there were a little switch in him that had been pushed from “slow” to “fast.”

As it happened, the boy was dead six months later, but it must be remembered that
Francesa arthura
was not
his
mushroom, but Frances’, and also that nature had fashioned him perhaps to live slow for many years, and who is to say he was not happier living fast for a few months?

Anyhow, Arthur meanwhile decided that
Francesa arthura
was ready for Frances, and Frances was ready (indeed, long overdue) for
Francesa arthura.

Her neural tone improved almost immediately and she presented a problem Arthur had not planned on, though he knew from the farm boy. She no longer slept. Never. But at the same time, she grew to resemble more closely the Frances of his hallucinogenic dream. Her movements became more fluid and graceful. She began to enjoy long walks in the woods. She listened and smiled as he explained his interests to her. (The fascinating varieties of fungi housed in cow patties, for instance, and the interesting habits of lichen.) There was never the least reason to think she understood or cared, but she had learned how to listen, which is a mannerism, not an intellectual attainment.

Furthermore, she displayed, for the first time, a marked affection for Arthur. He no longer felt he was the object of her passion solely because he kept everybody else locked out. Now she followed him around, she took his word as law, she obeyed his every whim, even to the extent of doing simple housework.

Within a week, Arthur felt secure enough to sleep soundly at night without locking Frances in her cage, though he had to warn her severely about going for long walks in the woods, moon or no moon.

“Stay close to the house,” he’d say, and she did. He sometimes waked at night and saw her out of the window, white and beautiful under the moon, just standing there enjoying the wind in her hair.

If Arthur thought he was God, he soon had Frances to back him up. And as she drew closer to him she became, in a sense, more distant from the world. She grew more spiritual, more distant in the eyes, whiter, even almost luminous.

The initial alertness supplied by
Francesa arthura
began to change a little. She did not droop in languor, but she became more inward, supplying something to
Francesa arthura
as it was supplying her with its intoxicants.

Soon she gave up her long walks, her dancing about the house. She did nothing, but it was a different sort of nothing from what she had done before. It was a happy, purposeful nothing.

She just stood around outside, mostly.

She… vegetated.

One morning, several days after Frances stopped eating, Arthur found her leaning against a tree, sending rhizomorphs into it.

He was horrified.

He cut them off. (It was not painful as they were naturally vegetative rhizomorphs.)

He brought her inside, forced her to eat, increased the nitrogen in her diet. “You’ve got to fight back,” he said. “It’s a symbiote, not a parasite.”

But Frances wasn’t interested in fighting back. She ate, as Arthur instructed her to, and for a while there were no more rhizomorphs. The rhizomorphs became merely something to remember about, not to fear.

Until this matter of fate came up. Fate has little literary validity, but is very important in life.

Arthur got sick.

It was only pneumonia, which nobody gets very excited about any more, but it necessitated Arthur’s being in the hospital for two days and there was absolutely nothing he could do about Frances except instruct her to eat regularly. After the two days, the doctor insisted on two more, and you know you can’t leave without a release.

Arthur drove back, expertly jockeying his little foreign car through the trees, and he had the feeling you always have when you know something awful has happened. “In five minutes I’ll be laughing at myself,” he said, and tried to laugh without having to wait the five minutes.

He rounded a stand of trees and saw her, a yard or two from the cabin’s clearing, sitting by a rotten tree stump, her arm resting on the stump, her beautiful white head resting on her arm.

“Frances!” he cried and bumped the car to a stop beside her.

She smiled at him dreamily, recognizing him faintly somewhere beyond the grey smoke of her eyes.

“No!” he cried, because she seemed so immobile, despite the fact that she drew her legs under her a little and moved her head.

“You didn’t eat?” he asked.

She roused a little, took a breath, so that he noticed she hadn’t
been
breathing. That was what had made her look so immobile. “I wasn’t hungry,” she said.

“But I
told
you.”

“I forgot,” she said, and stopped breathing, smiling to herself.

Arthur began to pull at the rotten wood and found it threaded with rhizomorphs.

“Bring me a drink of water,” Frances said, as Arthur went into the house after his knife. “It hasn’t rained since I started rooting.”

“Mushrooms don’t root,” Arthur said, and this added to his irritation, because he had explained to her a thousand times that a rhizomorph is not a tree root.

“You’ve got to learn to be more self-sufficient,” Arthur said as he cut away at the thousand tiny tendrils that extended through her pores and into the rotten wood. Frances held the glass in her hand and drank the water.

She ate two coddled eggs he gave her after he brought her in and cleaned her up. (It had been dusty out there, and there were insects and what not.) But she threw them right up. She did a little better with the consommé and Arthur let it go at that.

“It’s a matter of habit,” he told her. “We’ll start working up to solid food again tomorrow.”

He had missed her badly those four days, and held her close to him while he slept. She still didn’t sleep, but he had given her stern instructions not to get up and wander during the night.

He waked the next morning with a Jetstream of sunshine in his face and a heaviness of Frances’ head on his right shoulder. He felt weak and convalescent. He’d done too much, after spending four days in a hospital bed.

He leaned up and Frances’ gaze shifted from the window to his face and she smiled with her coral mouth. “I’m attached to you,” she said.

“Yes, but you’re hurting my shoulder.” And as he went to turn over he saw what she meant.

She
was
attached to him.

He got his knife again, an awkward procedure as Frances was attached at his shoulder and hip, but it wasn’t as easy as hacking away at a rotten log.

It didn’t hurt when he cut the hyphae, but blood began seeping out and it soon became evident that it was
his
blood.

And for the first time he felt a wave of disgust for his wife. “You’re a parasite,” he said. “You’re no better than anybody else. At least most of them are willing to settle for money.”

It was then that Arthur decided to divorce his wife.

You will wonder, perhaps, why Arthur did not simply murder her. That is safe only in stories. Murder is illegal, and particularly unsafe among married couples, where the motive is obvious.

But divorce takes a long time and there had to be an immediate separation.

Arthur therefore called a doctor (partly to do this minor surgery safely, partly to serve as a witness that his wife had become a dangerous parasite).

Dr. Beeker had never (Good Heavens!) seen a case of this kind before and recommended (strongly!) that the two of them be brought immediately to a hospital to have the separation made.

But Arthur said No, it might be dangerous to wait, his wife had been acting very peculiar and he didn’t know what she had that he might catch and furthermore he had just been ill himself and was feeling weak from loss of blood. (Though, indeed, she wasn’t stealing his blood, only the nutrients from it.)

“I don’t know,” Dr. Beeker said, slicing unhappily at the rhizomorphs with a scalpel, “what effect this is going to have on Mrs. Kelsing. I really feel she should be seen by a specialist. Ah… well, tropical diseases, maybe.”

“A botanist,” Arthur suggested. “My wife needs a good going over by a competent botanist, and although we will be separated, I intend to pay for it.”

But by the time Dr. Beeker had given Arthur a coagulant and an antibiotic and written a prescription, Frances had slipped out and attached herself to the tree stump again.

Dr. Beeker could not bring himself to cut her rhizomorphs again.

Arthur drove into Fayetteville, had a botanist and the police sent out to his cabin, and consulted a lawyer.

As it turned out Frances was considered non compos (or non compost, as a cartoonist later put it). But Arthur had to retain the lawyer in any case, because the botanist became suspicious and called in a mycologist and the general conclusion was that Frances was not a natural phenomenon and Arthur in fact was accused of attempted murder.

Arthur’s lawyer was pleased no end as there were fascinating legal problems involved, one of which was that the Frances upon whom the attempted murder had allegedly been perpetrated could not be produced. She did not exist. (Not any more.) On the other hand, a most important element of the crime of murder was missing. No evidence of a dead body of Frances could be produced. The D.A., being in his right mind, would not accept the charge. As Arthur had figured, there were no existing statutes covering the situation. Or at least none except one most people had forgotten about.

By the time the scientists had finished their studies, Frances’ condition had proceeded to the state that it was not safe to separate her from the stump and indeed, she had no desire to do anything except be watered during dry seasons.

Eventually Frances became one of the eighth wonders
of-
the world (it has been years, of course, since she has moved or spoken) and considerably enriched the state of Arkansas via the tourist trade, including a large number of artists, poets, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists and general aesthetes. And she remains‌—‌perhaps will remain forever‌—‌happy and famous and beautiful.