Casey Agonistes

Book 307: Gateway Essentials

by Richard M. Mckenna

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

This fascinating collection from the Nebula Award-wining author contains the stories: Casey Agonistes, Hunter Come Home, The Secret Place, Mine Own Ways, Fiddler's Green

Release date: December 7, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 160

Sample

by Damon Knight

IN PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN after he became prosperous you see him wearing well-tailored suits that slim him down, but in his everyday clothes he looked like what he was, a big mick who had worked with his hands all his life. Only when you listened to him talk did you realize that he was a scholar too. His speech was precise, a little diffident, literary—he almost never used slang or obscenity. (In The Sand Pebbles, a 597-page novel about American sailors, nobody uses any language stronger than “God-damn.”)

I first saw his name on a manuscript in 1958 when I was working on the magazine If. The previous editor, who was also the publisher, James L. Quinn, had bought the story only after McKenna, at Quinn’s request, had cut it from 14,000 words to 7,000. In his essay “Journey With a Little Man,” he describes how he rewrote this story again and again, cutting away paragraphs, then sentences, then individual words. Not many writers would or could have cut that story exactly in half, but McKenna did, and the experience of subjecting every word of it to a merciless criticism taught him something valuable about writing.

Judith Merril and I invited him to the Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop that year; he and his wife, Eva, showed up on the bus, and within two days we were all friends for life. Mac took the Milford workshops with absolute seriousness. He read every story twice, and always found something to praise in it, even if it were only the author’s conception which he had not successfully followed. In these workshops and in the correspondence round-robins that some of us organized afterward, his was the kind of criticism that not only discovered what was wrong with stories but invented ingenious ways of salvaging them.

Richard Milton McKenna grew up in a town in Idaho not unlike the setting of “The Secret Place,” and there is a touch of autobiography in the character of Owen in that story. The Depression forced him to leave college after a year and join the Navy at eighteen. There, a year or two later, he began trying to educate himself by reading. He found that he couldn’t do it; the will to understand was not enough.

In a 1962 speech, “New Eyes for Old,” he compared himself to the caged rats in a Hong Kong bar that were given an egg every night. The starved rats surrounded the egg, struggling in vain to bite through the shell. Somehow they always managed to break the egg and eat it—McKenna never could tell how—it usually took them at least half an hour.

I met books that I could not read. I spent months on some of them. I suspected that the treasure they withheld from me was proportional in richness to the difficulty of getting at it. I would start over again and again, trying to pinpoint the precise page and then paragraph and finally the single word at which my comprehension began to fail. I would squint and scratch my head and chew my pencil. I would writhe my feet and ankles in among the rungs of my chair and sometimes I would grip a book hard enough to tear it. …

At those times I would be irresistibly reminded of the Hong Kong rats so frantic to break their egg. Once I had laughed at them, and now by some transhuman justice I was in their predicament. No rats were present to laugh at me, so I laughed for them.

To begin with, I had thought a dictionary would be all the help I would need. I did not give up that notion easily. I don’t know how many times I looked up the word ontology and grasped at it as futilely as the Hong Kong rats would bite at their egg. I used to go into bookstores and look up that word in every dictionary they had, vowing to buy the first one in which I could understand the definition. I never found such a dictionary.

McKenna loved the machinery he worked with, but hated navy life and never felt himself a part of it. He stuck it out for twenty-two years, all the same. In 1953 he retired and enrolled in the University of North Carolina to get the education he could not give himself. How much and how well he learned there is abundantly evident in the stories he wrote, some of them published only after his death.

“Casey Agonistes” might be described as a study in the psychology of perception, but also, and much more deeply, it concerns itself with ontology—“the science of being” (American Heritage Dictionary); more specifically, the investigation of the nature of reality. In this story McKenna suggests that a recurring hallucination may have as much reality, although of a different sort, as a table or a chair. In “The Secret Place” and in “Fiddler’s Green,” he suggests that the table-and-chair reality is itself an illusion which we ourselves create.

These are not ideas that crop up very often in science fiction, and McKenna, although he conscientiously followed the forms of conventional science fiction, was no ordinary s.f. writer. Once he hit his stride, the trivial puzzles and adventures of science fiction stories were not for him: he tackled the basic problems of philosophy. “Mine Own Ways,” although the first few pages are unfortunately so compressed that they make heavy going, is an exciting attack on the fundamental problem of cultural anthropology; who invented the culture that turned hominids into men? In the process, he explains what ritual ordeals and mutilations are for, and offers a new partial explanation for the celebrated difference between men and women. In “Hunter, Come Home” he uses similar material in an altogether different way, and yet makes it equally believable.

McKenna’s intent from the beginning was to work his way through science fiction into the “mainstream,” because the science fiction audience was limited, and he wanted to reach as many readers as he could. He succeeded a year after his first professional appearance, when the stories that later were integrated into The Sand Pebbles began to sell to The Saturday Evening Post and elsewhere. Yet he never turned his back on science fiction; he only cast it in a form which he thought would have the greatest popular appeal. The Sand Pebbles, he maintained, is science fiction—the science is cultural anthropology. He was one of the first to realize that science fiction is not a category but a way of looking at the universe. More than a decade after these stories were written, they seem more relevant than ever.

YOU CAN’T JUST plain die. You got to do it by the book.

That’s how come I’m here in this TB ward with nine other recruits. Basic training to die.

You do it by stages. First a big ward, you walk around and go out and they call you mister. Then, if you got what it takes, a promotion to this isolation ward and they call you charles. You can’t go nowhere, you meet the masks, and you get the feel of being dead.

Being dead is being weak and walled off. You hear car noises and see little doll-people down on the sidewalks, but when they come to visit you they wear white masks and nightgowns and talk past you in the wrong voices. They’re scared you’ll rub some off on them. You would, too, if you knew how.

Nobody ever visits me. I had practice being dead before I come here. Maybe that’s how I got to be charles so quick.

It’s easy, playing dead here. You eat your pills, make out to sleep in the quiet hours and drink your milk like a good little charles. You grin at their phony joshing about how healthy you look and feel. You all know better, but them’s the rules.

Sick call is when they really make you know it. It’s a parade—the head doctor and nurse, the floor nurse Mary Howard and two interns, all in masks and nightgowns. Mary pushes the wheeled rack with our fever charts on it. The doc is a tall skinhead with wooden eyes and pinchnose glasses. The head nurse is fat, with little pig eyes and a deep voice.

The doc can’t see, hear, smell or touch you. He looks at your reflection in the chart and talks about you like you was real, but it’s Mary that pulls down the cover and opens your pajama coat, and the interns poke and look and listen and tell the doc what they see and hear. He asks them questions for you to answer. You tell them how good you feel and they tell him. He ain’t supposed to get contaminated.

Mary’s small, dark and sweet and the head nurse gives her a bad time. One intern is small and dark like Mary, but with soft black eyes and very gentle. The other one is pink and chubby.

The doc’s voice is high and thin, like he ain’t all there below decks. The head nurse snaps at Mary, snips at the interns, and puts a kind of dog wiggle in her voice when she talks to the doc.

I’m glad not to know what’s under any of their masks, except maybe Mary’s, because I can likely imagine better faces for them then God did. The head nurse makes rounds, writing the book. When she catches us out of line, like smoking or being up in a quiet hour, she gives Mary hell.

She gives us hell too, like we was babies. She kind of hints that if we ain’t respectful to her and obey her rules maybe she won’t let us die after all.

Christ, how I hate this hag! I hope I meet her in hell.

That’s how it struck me, first day or two in isolation. I’d looked around for old shipmates, like a guy does, but didn’t see any. On the third day one recognized me. I thought I knew that gravel voice, but even after he told me I couldn’t hardly believe it was old Slop Chute Hewitt.

He was skin and bones and his blue eyes had a kind of puzzled look like I saw in them once years ago when a big limey sucker punched him in Nagasaki Joe’s. When I remembered that, it made me know, all right.

He said glad to see me there and we both laughed. Some of the others shuffled over in striped bathrobes and all of a sudden I was in like Flynn, knowing Slop Chute. I found out they called the head doc Uncle Death. The fat nurse was Mama Death. The blond intern was Pink Waldo, the dark one Curly Waldo, and Mary was Mary. Knowing things like that is a kind of password.

They said Curly Waldo was sweet on Mary, but he was a poor Italian. Pink Waldo come of good family and was trying to beat him out. They were pulling for Curly Waldo.

When they left, Slop Chute and me talked over old times in China. I kept seeing him like he was on the John D. Edwards, sitting with a cup of coffee topside by the after fireroom hatch, while his snipes turned to down below. He wore bleached dungarees and shined shoes and he looked like a lord of the earth. His broad face and big belly. The way he stoked chow into himself in the guinea pullman—that’s what give him his name. The way he took aboard beer and samshu in the Kongmoon Happiness Garden. The way he swung the little ne-sans dancing in the hotels on Skibby Hill. Now … God almighty! It made me know.

But he still had the big jack-lantern grin.

“Remember little Connie that danced at the Palais?” he asked.

I remember her, half Portygee, cute as hell.

“You know, Charley, now I’m headed for scrap, the onliest one damn thing I’m sorry for is I didn’t shack with her when I had the chance.”

“She was nice,” I said.

“She was green fire in the velvet, Charley. I had her a few times when I was on the Monocacy. She wanted to shack and I wouldn’t never do it. Christ, Christ, I wish I did, now!”

“I ain’t sorry for anything, that I can think of.”

“You’ll come to it, sailor. For every guy there’s some one thing. Remember how Connie used to put her finger on her nose like a Jap girl?”

“Now, Mr. Noble, you mustn’t keep arthur awake in quiet hour. Lie down yourself, please.”

It was Mama Death, sneaked up on us.

“Now rest like a good boy, charles, and we’ll have you home before you know it,” she told me on her way out.

I thought a thought at her.

The ward had green-gray linoleum, high, narrow windows, a sparcolor overhead, and five bunks on a side. My bunk was at one end next to the solarium. Slop Chute was across from me in the middle. Six of us was sailors, three soldiers, and there was one marine.

We got mucho sack time, training for the long sleep. The marine bunked next to me and I saw a lot of him.

He was a strange guy. Name of Carnahan, with a pointed nose and a short upper lip and a go-to-hell stare. He most always wore his radio earphones and he was all the time grinning and chuckling like he was in a private world from the rest of us.

It wasn’t the program that made him grin, either, like I thought first. He’d do it even if some housewife was yapping about how to didify the dumplings. He carried on worst during sick call. Sometimes Uncle Death looked across almost like he could hear it direct.

I asked him about it and he put me off, but finally he told me. Seems he could hypnotize himself to see a big ape and then make the ape clown around. He told me I might could get to see it too. I wanted to try, so we did.

“He’s there,” Carnahan would say. “Sag your eyes, look out the corners. He won’t be plain at first.”

“Just expect him, he’ll come. Don’t want him to do anything. You just feel. He’ll do what’s natural,” he kept telling me.

I got where I could see the ape—Casey, Carnahan called him—in flashes. Then one day Mama Death was chewing out Mary and I saw him plain. He come up behind Mama and—I busted right out laughing.

He looked like a bowlegged man in an ape suit covered with red-brown hair. He grinned and made faces with a mouth full of big yellow teeth and he was furnished like John Keeno himself. I roared.

“Put on your phones so you’ll have an excuse for laughing,” Carnahan whispered. “Only you and me can see him, you know.”

Fixing to be dead, you’re ready for God knows what, but Casey was sure something.

“Hell, no he ain’t real,” Carnahan said. “We ain’t so real ourselves any more. That’s why we can see him.”

Carnahan told me okay to try and let Slop Chute in on it. It ended we cut the whole gang in, going slow so the masks wouldn’t get suspicious.

It bothered Casey at first, us all looking at him. It was like we all had a string on him and he didn’t know who to mind. He backed and filled and tacked and yawed all over the ward not able to steer himself. Only when Mama Death was there and Casey went after her, then it was like all the strings pulled the same way.

The more we watched him the plainer and stronger he got till finally he started being his own man. He came and went as he pleased and we never knew what he’d do next except that there’d be a laugh in it. Casey got more and more there for us, but he never made a sound.

He made a big difference. We all wore our earphones and giggled like idiots. Slop Chute wore his big sideways grin more often. Old Webster almost stopped griping.

There was a man filling in for a padre came to visitate us every week. Casey would sit on his knee and wiggle and drool, with one finger between those strong, yellow teeth. The man said the radio was a Godsend to us patient spirits in our hour of trial. He stopped coming.

Casey made a real show out of sick call. He kissed Mama Death smack on her mask, danced with her and bit her on the rump. He rode piggy back on Uncle Death. He even took a hand in Mary’s romance.

One Waldo always went in on each side of a bunk to look, . . .