The Sheep Look Up (39 page)

Place to aim for would be site of ulcer reputed doctor, friend of family, warned yesterday will perforate and cause marked physiological mishap within short time.

In company of ancestors conceivably not burdened with ulcerable intestines.

Arriegas! That name is one in our minds with those of Guevara, Uñil, and other great heroes of the continuing revolution, struck down by the foul agents of the imperialist conspiracy!

OWING TO THE INDISPOSITION OF PROFESSOR DUVAL THE FOLLOWING CLASSES WILL NOT BE HELD, VIZ ...

“Yes, this is Moses Greenbriar ... Oh, how is she? ... Cystitis? Is that serious?”

... ascribed to the continuing shortage of manpower. Many local police forces...

(The sound of creaking, as when a tree grows old and can no longer endure the thrashing of the gale.)

Of all the damned silly things, Carl thought, lying out on a hillside under bushes to wait for dark and his chance to elude the Colorado border patrols. Hiccoughs! And he couldn’t stop them. They must have been going on for hours.

After being angry he had started to be afraid. They were making him so tired.

Name of patient:
YOUNG Sylvia June (Miss)

Address:
c/o UN

Ward:
B

Diagnosis:
Alcoholic poisoning

“Doug?”

“Yes, honey?”

“I don’t want to worry you, but I’ve tried to get through to Millicent at least a dozen times, and there’s no reply. Do you think I ought to run over there and see how she is?”

DURING THE INDISPOSITION OF MR. BOLLINGER THE FOLLOWING TEMPORARY RE-ALLOCATION OF RESPONSIBILITIES ...

“This will clear it up in a few days, Mr. Cowper. It’s a very effective vermifuge, this. I imagine it must have been badly-cured pork that caused the trouble. I’ve had a number of cases of trichinosomiasis lately.”

Owing to the indisposition of the Reverend Horace Kirk, joint services will be held at...

“Where the hell is that black bastard? He should have been here two hours ago! I can’t hang around all night!”

“He called in to say his wife’s died.”

“Oh, Christ. Who’s going to let people in the building, then? I can’t do his tour as well as my own!”

“Mom?” And then, louder: “Mom!”

The kid advanced slowly on the still dark form in the untidy bed. A fly was buzzing against the shut window, trying to get in, against its own interests because there was a fly-strip hanging right over the bed. Also on the seat of the chair that doubled for a bedside table, there were the usual sleeping pills.

The boy said again, “Mom!” This time the word peaked into a cry.

Who takes advice from a garbage-man?

“Sorry, Mr. President, Mr. Penwarren isn’t in today. His doctor told him to take the rest of the week off ... No, nothing serious, I understand. Something he ate disagreed with him.”

FOR SALE: A
substantial holding of 3241½ acres down to vegetables between Bockville and Candida, formerly operated by Mr. Lem Walbridge, together with the farmhouse (18 rooms, 2 baths, good structural condition), various outbuildings, all necessary plant and equipment including late-model tractors (6), cultivating and spraying machinery ...

In a back room at a friend’s pad: Ossie. He was making bombs. Now and then he paused to scratch his crotch. He had urticaria, and so did the friend, and so did everybody around here this month. It was the in disease. But those mothers mustn’t be allowed to get away with arresting Austin Train on a false charge in plain sight of sixty million people.

NOTICE OF POSTING
: Col. Rollo B. Saddler

From:
Wickens Army Base, Col.

To:
Active service in Honduras.

WITH IMMEDIATE EFFECT your unit is reassigned to...

Fritz and his friends were among the Sixty-Three. (One capitalizes the number now. Martyrs.)

“Mr. Steinitz? Sorry, he’s not in the office. He’s unwell. So’s his deputy. We had this leak in the ventilating pipes, you know, and some of these here spores got loose and they breathed them in. Kind of nasty!”

To all patients of Dr. David Halpern:

Please note that until further notice your physician will be Dr. Monty B. Murray, at the Flowerwood Memorial Hospital.

Shivering and coughing, Cindy allowed them to undress her. When they found the skull and crossbones on her body they told her to get out of the clinic before she was thrown out.

“You’ll be up and about in a day or two, Hector my boy! And then we’ll fix that devil Austin Train for good and all.”

Chuck in prison hospital; his forged ID let him down at last. The male nurses making a lot of jokes about his being yellow.

Jaundice.

Dear Mrs. Barleyman: It is my sad duty to inform you that your husband is unlikely to be well enough to return home in the foreseeable future.

“Kitty Walsh? Sit down. I have bad news, but I’m afraid it’s your own fault. You should never have let it go on so long. You have acute salpingitis—that’s inflammation of the Fallopian tubes, from the ovaries to the womb. You’ll never be able to have a baby.”

“What you mean, bad news? Who’d want to bring a baby into this filthy world?”

MEMORANDUM

From:
Dr. Elijah Prentiss

To:
Hospital director Owing to this damned fibrositis, I shall not be able to ...

Drew Henker and Ralph Henderson, like the majority of Trainites, had willed their bodies for medical teaching purposes. But they turned out not to be required by any hospital in the state. All of them had as many gunshot wounds as they needed.

“Harold? Harold, where are you? ... Oh, there.” Painkillers had helped Denise’s migraine, a little, and she’d dozed off. Waking in alarm she wondered what had become of the children. But it was okay; Josie was lying down, and Harold was sitting in the corner of his bedroom, quite quiet, his bad leg tucked under him as usual.

“Harold darling, it’s about time you ... Harold?”

He just sat there, staring at nothing.

He was the first.

THE IMAGE

is of a house: large, old, once very beautiful, built by someone whose imagination matched his skills. But he squandered his substance and fell on evil times. Sublet and then again sublet, the house became infested as though by vermin with occupants who felt no sense of attachment to its fabric, and were prepared to complain forever without themselves accepting responsibility for its upkeep.

Thus from a distance it may be seen that the roof is swaybacked like a standard whale. Certain of the slates were cracked in a long-ago hurricane and not repaired; under them wood has warped and split. A footstep, be it never so light—as of a toddling child—will cause the boards anywhere on any floor to shift on their joists, uttering creaks.

Also the basement is noisome. It has been flooded more than once. The foundations have settled. A stench permeates the air, testimony to generations of drunks who pissed where the need overtook them. There is much woodworm. Closets and cupboards have been shut for years because inside there are the fruiting bodies of the dry-rot fungus, and they stink. The grand staircase is missing a tread about halfway to the noble gallery encircling the entrance hall. One or two of the ancestral portraits remain, but not many; the majority have been sold off, along with the marble statues that once graced the front steps. The coach-house is dank and affords crowded lodging for a family of mentally sub-normal children, orphaned, half-clad, filthy and incestuous. There are fleas.

The lawn is covered with wind-blown rubbish. The goldfish that used to dart among the lily-pads in the ornamental pond were seen to float, belly-up and bloated, one spring following a winter of hard frosts; now they are gone. The graveled driveway is obscured with dandelions and docks. The gates at the end of it have been adrift from their hinges for far longer than anyone can remember, half rusted through. So too the doors within the house, if they haven’t been chopped into firewood.

More than half the windows have been broken, and hardly any have been made good. The rest are blocked with rags, or have had bits of cardboard tacked over them.

In the least damaged wing the owner, in an alcoholic haze, conducts delightful conversations with imaginary ambassadors and dukes. Meantime, those of the other inhabitants who know how to write pen endless letters to the government, demanding that someone come and fix the drains.

SPASM

Later, they mapped the earliest cases on the western side of Denver, around Arvada, Wheatridge, Lakewood and other districts which had exploded during the past few years. To meet an almost doubled demand for water, which Denver was already sucking from a vast area of thousands of square miles by a piping system as complex and random-seeming as the taproots of a tree, the lakes and reservoirs were no longer adequate: Ralston, Gross, Granby, Carter, Lonetree, Horsetooth ...

So they had drilled, and sunk pipes to deep porous strata, and moreover carved great gashes into the rock of the mountains to expose the edges of those strata. The principle was this: when the snow melts, vast quantities of water run off and go to waste. If we draw on the water-table under the mountains, thus making room for more, we must arrange that every spring melting snow will soak into the porous rock and replenish the supply.

It had been new last year. It had worked fairly well, bar the teething troubles which occurred when one of the newly-tapped aquifers proved to be contaminated with sewage. That led to the issuing of don’t-drink notices now and then. There had been a few complaints, too, that Boulder Creek and the Thompson and Bear Creek had been even lower this summer than they should have been—but those came only from people with long memories, not from the wealthy new arrivals who had abandoned the old boom state of California for the new boom state of Colorado.

Now, today ...

Black Hawk:
Giddy, the owner of a newly-built house with a magnificent view fumbled out a cigarette, felt for his lighter, couldn’t find it, used a match instead. It fell from his shaking hand onto the day’s newspaper. He watched the flame take to the edge of the paper, fascinated. It spread—beautiful, how beautiful! All yellow and gold and orange, centered with black, like a moving flower!

He started to laugh. It was so lovely. He picked up the paper and threw it at a rug to see if that would burn too, and it did, and so, not long afterwards, did he.

Towerhill
: “Mom,” the little boy said in a serious tone, “I hate you.”

And pushed the butcher-knife he’d brought into her belly.

US 72:
“The more we are together, together, together!” sang the driver of the Thunderbird howling at ninety toward Denver, to the air of
Ach Du Lieber Augustin,
“the more we are together the happier we’ll be! For your friends are my friends and—”

Caught sight of a pretty girl in the next car ahead and jammed on the brakes as he drew alongside and crowded her off the road so he could say hello and kiss her and share his ecstatic happiness.

There was a culvert. Concrete. Crash.

Golden:
Luxuriating in the deep warm bath, she sipped and sipped at the tall julep she’d brought with her, the ice-cubes making a melodious jingle as they melted. She was there about an hour and a half, listening to the radio, humming, and at one point masturbating because she had a very special date this afternoon. Eventually, when the glass was empty, she lay back and let the water close over her face.

Wheatridge:
He struggled and struggled with the faulty TV, and still the picture wouldn’t come right. It was all wavy and the colors bled into one another.

As time passed, though, he realized that in fact this was much prettier than regular TV. He sat down before the set and stared at it, sometimes chuckling when one of the faces turned green or bright blue. Unthinking, he put his hand to his mouth, meaning childlike to suck his thumb. He happened to be holding a test lead connected to the power.

Sss ...

Thump.

Arvada:
Time to start dinner, damn it, or my stinking husband will—and the kid bawling again, and ...

Absently, her mind on the TV she’d spent the afternoon watching, she bundled up the baby and put him in the oven and set the thermostat, and went back to her chair cradling the chicken.

That stopped his racket. Sure did!

Westminster:
“You stinking white bastard,” the black man said, and swung his wrench at the man behind the counter. After that, he sat down and began to stuff his mouth with odds and ends: candy, aspirin, chocolate bars, indigestion tablets. Sometimes he dipped them in the blood from the clerk’s head, to improve the color.

Lakewood:
Hey, man, wowowow! I never had pot like this before. This is a high—I mean °H°I°I°I°G°H°!!! Ho-ho! I feel light, like I could fly, I mean like I am flying I mean like I’m not even on the floor already just bobbing around in the draught from that fan there WOW! But these four lousy walls in the way—get in the open, enjoy it more, they keep coming and banging up against me, where’s the door? Door. Window closer. Open it. Fall out on the wind and just blow away across the mountains, wow.

Four stories from the street, which was hard.

Denver ...

FIT

“Alan-n-n-n!”

It was Pete’s voice, from the warehouse. Philip broke off in mid-sentence and looked at Alan and Dorothy. They were having a kind of council of war to review the firm’s financial situation. It wasn’t good. Replacements under guarantee had wiped out about a third of their expected income and screwed up most of the regular plumbing business they were still carrying on. The only good news was bad: Bamberley in California had hit the same trouble and they expected to mount a joint suit against Mitsuyama. Outcome, in about eighteen months with luck ...

It was another close, clammy, hot day with dense overcast, so the door was open for what breeze might be around and they’d heard shouts and banging noises from the warehouse, but paid no attention. People’s tempers always frayed in weather like this.