Time and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories (9 page)

“It's not a dreadful thing, Abby.”

“Can't you get rid of it?”

Herbert raised his head from the magnifying glass and stared at his wife thoughtfully. “You don't mean that, Abby.”

“I do.”

“Abby, this is the strangest damn thing that ever happened to us, possibly to anyone. I mean, there simply is no such thing as a human being half an inch tall.”

“Except on that flyswatter.”

“Exactly. We can't just throw him away. Who is he?”

“What is he?”

“Exactly,” Herbert agreed. “What is he? Where did he come from? Or where did it come from? I think you understand my point,” he said patiently and gently.

“What is your point?” she asked, a note of coldness coming into her voice.

“I'm a lawyer, Abby. I'm an officer of the court. That's my life, that's not something I forget.”

“And I'm your wife, which is something you appear to have forgotten.”

“Not at all. You have done nothing wrong. Nothing. I will stake my legal life on that.”

“Go on.”

“But we have a body here. It's only half an inch long, but it's still a body. We have to call the police.”

“Why? It's done. I killed the poor thing. I have to live with that. Isn't that enough?”

“My dear, let's not be dramatic. We don't know what it is. You swatted an insect. For all we know, it is some kind of an insect.”

“Let me look through that magnifying glass.”

“Are you sure you want to?”

“I'm perfectly all right now.”

He handed her the magnifying glass, and she peered through it. “It's not an insect,” she said.

“No.”

“What will the children say? You know how they are—when you wanted to put out poison for the rabbits that were eating the lettuce.”

“The children don't have to know anything about it. I'll call Chief Bradley. He owes me a favor.”

Herbert and Bradley sat in the chief's office and stared at the flyswatter. “Couldn't bring myself to take it off the flyswatter,” Herbert said. “But I forgot to bring the magnifying glass.”

The chief slowly and deliberately took a magnifying glass from his desk drawer and held it over the flyswatter. “I'll be damned,” he murmured. “Never thought I'd see one of them things. It's a man, sure enough, isn't it?”

“Men are not a half inch tall.”

“How about pygmies?”

“Four feet. That's forty-eight inches, just ninety-six times as tall.”

“Well—”

“What did you mean when you said you never thought you'd see one of them things? You don't seem one bit surprised.”

“Oh, I'm a little bit surprised, Herb.”

“Not enough.”

“Maybe it's harder for a cop to show surprise, Herb. You get to expect anything.”

“Not this.”

“All right, Herb. Truth is, Abigail ain't the first. I never saw one before, but we been getting the reports. Frightened kids, housewives, old Ezra Bean who still farms his place up in Newtown, a frightened old lady in Bethel—she said her dog ate a mess of them—another lady over in Ridgefield, said her dog sniffed some out and they shot his nose full of little arrows, quarter of an inch long, had to take them out with tweezers. Of course, none of them really believed what they saw, and nobody else believed it either.” He stared through the magnifying glass again. “Don't know what I believe myself.”

“Bows and arrows?”

“Little bugger has no clothes on. Kind of hard to believe.”

“Bows and arrows mean intelligence,” Herbert Cooke said wor riedly.

“Ahh, who knows? Might have poked his nose into a bramble bush.”

“Abigail's pretty upset. Says she killed a man.”

“Baloney.”

“Can I tell her she's clear, in a legal sense?”

“Of course. It was an accident anyway.”

“What are you going to do with that?” Cooke asked, nodding at the flyswatter.

“Pick it off and put it in formaldehyde. You want the flyswatter back?”

“I don't think Abby would welcome it. You can't just leave him swimming in formaldehyde?”

“No, I don't suppose so. Maybe it's a case for the FBI, although I ain't heard nothing about this outside of Connecticut. Maybe I'll run over and see Judge Billings. He might have some ideas on the subject. You tell Abby not to worry.”

“That's not easy,” Herbert said. He himself was far from satisfied. Like several million other Americans, he had been brooding over the question of war and murder and Vietnam, and he had even thought seriously of switching his affiliation from the Congregational Church to the Quakers. It would be harder for Abigail, who came from many generations of Congregationalists, but they had discussed it, and he felt secure in his position as a man of conscience.

“Well, you tell her not to worry, and I'll have a talk with Judge Billings.”

When Herbert Cooke returned to his home the following day, he was met by a wife whose face was set and whose eyes were bleak.

“I want to sell the house and move,” she announced.

“Oh, come on, come on, Abby. You know you don't mean that. Not our house.”

“Our house.”

“You're upset again.”

“Not again. Still. I didn't sleep all night. Today Billy got a splinter in his toe.”

“It happens. The kids run around barefoot.”

“I want to show you the splinter. I saved it.” She led him to his desk, unfolded a piece of paper, and handed him the magnifying glass. “Look at it.”

He peered through the glass at a tiny sliver of wood, less than a quarter of an inch long.

“Good heavens!”

“Yes.”

“Incredible.”

“Yes,” his wife repeated.

“Barbed head—it could be metal. Looks like it.”

“I don't care whether it's metal. I don't care what it looks like. I want to sell the house and get out of here.”

“That's simply an emotional response,” he assured her in his calmest and most legalistic tone of voice.

“I'm emotional.”

“You're reacting to an unprecedented event. Outside of
Gulliver's Travels
, this has never happened to anyone before, and if I am not mistaken, Gulliver's people were three or four inches tall. A half inch is very disturbing.”

“It's also very disturbing to live with the fact that you've killed a man with a flyswatter.”

A few days after this conversation, Abigail read an editorial in the Danbury paper. In properly light and mocking tones, it said: “Is it true, as the song puts it, that there are fairies at the bottom of our gardens? A number of otherwise sober citizens have been muttering that they have seen very small people. How small? Anywhere from half an inch to three-quarters of an inch, a diminution of size that puts Gulliver to shame. We ourselves have not encountered any of the little fellows, but we have an Irish grandmother who reports numerous such encounters in the Old Country. We might say that Irish Dew, taken in sufficient quantities, will produce the same effect in any locale.”

Since the children were present, Abigail passed the paper to her husband without comment. He read it, and then he said:

“I asked Reverend Somers to stop by.”

“Oh?”

“It's a moral question, isn't it? I thought it might put your mind to rest.”

The daughter watched them curiously. There are no secrets from children. “Why can't I play in the woods?” Billy wanted to know.

“Because I say so,” Abigail answered, a tack she had never taken before.

“Effie Jones says there are little people in the woods,” Billy continued. “Effie Jones says she squashed one of them.”

“Effie Jones is a liar, which everyone knows,” his sister said,

“I don't like to hear you call anyone a liar,” Herbert said uncomfortably. “It's not very nice.”

“We're such nice people,” Abigail told herself. Yet she was relieved when Reverend Somers appeared later that evening. Somers was an eminently sensible man who looked upon the world without jaundice or disgust, not at all an easy task in the 1970s.

Somers tasted his sherry, praised it, and said that he was delighted to be with nice people, some of the nicest people. “But like a doctor,” Herbert said, “your hosts are never very happy.”

“I don't know of any place in the Bible where happiness is specified as a normal condition of mankind.”

“Last week I was happy,” Abigail said.

“Let me plunge into some theology,” Herbert said bluntly. “Do you believe that God made man in His own image?”

“Anthropomorphically—no. In a larger sense, yes. What is it, Herbert? The little people?”

“You know about them?”

“Know. Heard. It's all over the place, Herbert.”

“Do you believe it?”

“I don't know what to believe.”

“Believe it, Reverend. Abby swatted one. With the flyswatter. Killed it. I brought it over to Chief Bradley.”

“No.”

“Yes,” Abigail interjected bitterly.

“What was it?” the Reverend asked.

“I don't know,” Herbert replied unhappily. “Under the magnifying glass, it was a man. A complete man about as big as a large ant. A white man.”

“Why must you keep harping on the fact that it was a white man?” Abigail said.

“Well, it's just a matter of fact. It was a white man.”

“You appear quite satisfied that it was a man.”

“I thought it was a fly,” Abigail interjected. “For heaven's sake, the thing was not much bigger than a fly.”

“Absolutely,” Herbert agreed.

“What you both mean,” Somers said slowly, “is that it looked like a man.”

“Well—yes.”

“Where is it now?”

“Chief Bradley put it into formaldehyde.”

“I should like to have a look at it. We say it looks like a man. But what makes man? Is it not above all things the possession of a soul?”

“That's debatable,” said Abby.

“Is it, my dear? We know man in two ways, as he is and as he is divinely revealed to us. Those two aspects add up to man. All else is of the animal and vegetable kingdom. We know man as a creature of our size. Divinely revealed, he is still a creature of our size.”

“Not from outer space,” Abby said.

“What does that mean?” her husband demanded.

“It means that from one of those wretched spaceships, the earth is the size of an orange, and that doesn't make man very big, does it?”

“For heaven's sake,” Herbert said, “you are really blowing things out of proportion. You're talking about perspective, point of view. A man remains the same size no matter how far out into space you get.”

“How do you know?” she asked with the reasonable unreasonableness of an intelligent woman.

“My dear, my dear,” Somers said, “you are upset, we all are upset, and probably we shall be a good deal more upset before this matter is done with. But I think you must keep a sense of proportion. Man is what God made him to be and what we know him to be. I am not an insensitive person. You know I have never wavered in my views of this wretched war in Vietnam—in spite of the difficulties in holding my congregation together. I speak to you, not as some Bible Belt fundamentalist, but as a person who believes in God in an indefinable sense.”

“If He's indefinable, He's still rather large, isn't He? If He goes out into space a million light-years, how big are we to Him?”

“Abby, you're being contentious for no reason at all.”

“Am I?” She unfolded a piece of paper and held it out to Somers with a magnifying glass. He peered at it through the glass and said words to the effect that the sliver of wood that it contained looked like an arrow.

“It is an arrow. I took it out of Billy's toe. No, he didn't see what shot at him, but how long before he does? How long before he steps on one?”

“Surely there's some explanation for this—some new insect that appears remarkably manlike. Monkeys do, apes do, but one doesn't leap to the conclusion that they are men.”

“Insects with blond hair and white skin and two arms and two legs who shoot arrows—really, Reverend Somers.”

“Whatever it is, Abby, it is a part of the natural world, and we must accept it as such. If some of them are killed, well, that too is a part of our existence and their existence, not more or less than the natural calamities that overtake man—floods, earthquakes, the death of cities like ancient Pompeii.”

“You mean that since they are very small, a flyswatter becomes a natural calamity.”

“If you choose to put it that way—yes, yes, indeed.”

Aside from a small squib in
The New York Times
about the strange behavior of some of the citizens of upper Fairfield County, the matter of the little people was not taken very seriously, and most of the local residents tended to dismiss the stories as the understandable result of a very hot summer. The Cookes did not sell their house, but Abigail Cooke gave up her habit of walking in the woods, and even high grass gave her pause. She found that she was looking at the ground more and more frequently and sleeping less well. Herbert Cooke picked up a field mouse that fairly bristled with the tiny arrows. He did not tell his wife.

Judge Billings telephoned him. “Drop by about four, Herb,” he said. “A few people in my chambers. You'll be interested.”

Billings had already indicated to Herbert Cooke that he considered him an excellent candidate for Congress when the present incumbent—in his middle seventies—stepped aside. It pleased Cooke that Billings called him Herb, and he expected that the summons to his chambers would have something to do with the coming elections. Whereby he was rather surprised to find Chief Bradley already there, as well as two other men, one of them a Dobson of the FBI and the other a Professor Channing of Yale, who was introduced as an entomologist.