The answer came to her many years later, after she had planted Ruby in the mountain earth like a sweet potato. Those books were just what they aspired to be, nothing more and nothing less. They achieved their ambitions and fulfilled their purpose. Against all stylistic, narrative, and technical odds, they performed the function of fiction and imitated a certain delicate reality perfectly. Not the reality of Ruby and Gudrun and Murray and the Secretary of Agriculture and the Uptown Grand Cinema, but something better, a cohesive universe of total generosity, of events occurring in perfect order and quick succession, want expressed and immediately satisfied, all else besides want jettisoned, unnecessary, left far behind.
7. Does She Do It On the First Date?
Published 1961, Fig Leaf Press, 171 pages
Gudrun didn’t want a child for the reasons she presumed other people did. She didn’t want company because she couldn’t ever remember having any to begin with and she didn’t think babies were cute because they really fell pretty low in the hierarchy of adorable young animals and she didn’t need anyone to take care of her when she got old because she had Murray. She didn’t have any faith in future generations. She didn’t think her genes were anything special. She didn’t even think she’d be a particularly good mother, though she felt pretty confident she could best the local record without much effort.
Gudrun wanted a child because 57.9% of Jack Oskander’s books ended that way. You wouldn’t think so, but they did. Maybe Old Jack just liked those stories better than others. Maybe the ratio would hold even if you had the whole of the publishing world packed into a four-bedroom bungalow. A pregnancy, a return to a happy family after erotic adventuring, an orphan adopted, a runaway un-runnedaway. The statistics were overwhelming and undeniable. No other ending had those numbers, not weddings, not tragic death, not even simple orgasm and breakfast after. A child was the ending. The Platonic. The ideal. The good art.
The requirement of another person irritated Gudrun profoundly. There had never been anyone else but her and Ruby. The Adoratron Mark 5’s Reproduction Chamber seemed so much easier and more sensical. Why should she have to track down somebody and convince them she wasn’t weird, which she was, and let him, a total stranger who had once been one of those germ-infested children Ruby so feared, who couldn’t hold a candle to Chet Hardtree or Sir Quicktongue and probably had never so much as glanced at The Sword of Lust in the library, invade her body and infect her with his alien DNA? She couldn’t think how it could possibly happen. If a nice man took her out to dinner, all she’d be able to manage would be to order the soup and then bellow Murray’s broken-drum scream/belch mating cry in his face.
It happened once, of course. Everything does. Eventually. But there was no child.
Instead, Gudrun split in half a month before Snow Day.
6. The Sinner and the Nun
Published 1956, Harem House Press, 203 pages
Mr. Abalone died in March, 1976. His son took over the general store and Gudrun would probably never have known one way or the other except that a little while afterward, a tin of Cold Palace Brand No. 1 Silver Needle Tea turned up in her monthly delivery, snuggled in between the bag of sugar and the toilet paper. Gudrun screamed in joy. Six years down the hole in a tealess purgatory. Her scream echoed around the jungle hills. Murray fretted and pulled out a tail feather in his distress.
Inside the tin, with its etched peonies and elegant cursive logo lay a note:
I found a crate in the warehouse after Dad passed. I thought I remembered you like this stuff. Tea doesn’t go bad, does it?
—Johnny Abalone
Johnny Abalone was a ridiculous name, that much was clear. Not even the Oskander Collection would tolerate a hero with a name like that. Not even The Pearl Diver Dives for More, and that was easily the worst of the lot. Gudrun meant to make her tea last this time, horde it against the Silver Needle-less future. But she was weak, when you added her up. She drank it all in a day, cup after cup, until she was sick, and kept drinking anyway. She drank in a delirium of plenty, grabbing a new mug from the cabinet every time, so that none of them would feel left out. When she went to bed, the counter was a riot of crockery, red and blue and white and black scattered everywhere, with no pattern, like summer flowers. She’d fix it up in the morning. No problem. Gudrun’s sleeping stomach distended as if she’d conceived from fine leaves and hot water, but she wasn’t sorry.
Every month, a new tin arrived with a new note.
I drank some of this stuff. Figured if you like it so much, it must be something grand. Tastes like licking nickels to me, but I guess nothing tastes the same to two people at a time. Maybe the pipes are going. Can’t make good tea without clean water and the stuff out of the faucet looks a little yellow these days. I guess you’re on well water up there. I bet that’s nice.
—Johnny Abalone
I remember you came down to the shop that one time and I said you should just drink Lipton instead. That was stupid of me. I know how sometimes you just want what you want and fuck everything else. I know how sometimes what you want is gone and it feels like you’re not allowed to be as upset as you need to be about it.
Hey, do you have a generator up there? I hate to think of you stuck in the blackouts. Pretty bad this year, huh? Last longer and longer. I have a spare if you need it.
—Johnny Abalone
Do you take your tea with milk or lemon or sugar or what? The little white bits look like hair to me. Like an old man’s hair.
It’s pretty quiet in the shop these days. I think people liked Dad and got used to him but now it’s just me and it’s weird for them. They just want what they want, right? You could come and pick up your delivery and you wouldn’t see another soul. Except me. I wouldn’t say anything if you didn’t want me to.
—Johnny A
If you need gas, you should probably come down and fill up sooner rather than later. It’s real pricey and the Chevron usually sells out by Tuesday afternoon. Then everybody has to wait all week for another tanker to refill the pumps. Come early, though. The line gets long as hell.
When I was a kid, I knew the guy who had your place before you. Funny dude. We used to have a whole magazine section but after he bugged out we dumped them and put the beer freezer in. Turns out he was keeping the whole rag rack going one-handed. He didn’t talk to anyone much. Just like you. Maybe that house takes your talk.
I like writing these notes. Do you like reading them? I could come visit sometimes, if you wanted. I don’t have to. But if you wanted.
—Johnny
And then one day when Johnny Abalone’s busted old truck came meandering and misfiring up the mountain, he didn’t just leave the wooden mango crates at the property line. He knocked on the door and suffered Murray’s cold, furious glare and when Gudrun answered, she wasn’t really surprised, except that Johnny Abalone was older than she thought. He had a little grey in his shaggy black hair and a bad leg with tiny shards of bullet still floating around in it like the white hairs in silver needle tea, bullets he took on another mountain very far away, which, even as he bled into the infinite forest filth, even so far away from Ko’olau and the beer freezer at the Abalone General Store, had smelled so much like home.
“Full thrusters engaged, Commander Hardtree,” Gudrun whispered.
“What?”
With one enormous muscled arm, Sir Quicktongue seized the elven shieldmaiden Nymphoria round the waist and lifted her toward his hungry kiss, crushing her glorious breasts against his broad, smooth chest as his famous tongue sought hers.
The other hand he plunged into her golden curls, pulling brutally just to hear her gasp, a gasp that never failed to bring his throbbing member to full attention. She wrapped her powerful thighs around him, moaning his name into the smoky air of the battlefield.
“It is you,” he whispered in her perfect ear. “You alone, Nymphoria, can reforge my sword and make it new.”
“But I will not, Sir Knight,” answered the she-elf,
her immortal eyes glittering cruelly.
Sir Quicktongue roared his fury into the sapphire sky. “Why? My god, woman, why?”
“Because I do not wish to,” came the elf-queen’s answer.
But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t any of that. It was very quiet and careful and the whole time Gudrun thought about Minnesota, the long flat plains and the thousands and thousands of lakes shining under a strange, cold moon.
5. Nympho Twins on the French Riviera
Published 1950, Blue Fairy Books, 177 pages
It happened in her sleep. The night throbbed with heat. A long black vein pulsed up the side of Gudrun’s body: a join, a wound, a fault line. From her heels to the cap of her skull. It swelled, wider and thicker and wider and thicker until it was a road, a chasm, a furrow, a black nebula expanding inside her, and then it was just empty space and there were two Gudruns lying on Ruby’s old king size bed. Neither of them woke. It was a gentler process than you might expect. They slept identically, hands clasped against their chests, bent inward like little dinosaur claws, until seven in the morning, an hour past which Gudrun, in all her life, had never been able to sleep.
Gudrun opened her eyes and saw herself, naked, awake, watching. The other Gudrun looked exactly like her in every possible way. Haircut, palm lines, gold molar in her mouth, smallpox vaccination scar like a withered star on her skin, the pattern of bites on the edges of her fingernails.
“Is this because I drank the tap water?” Gudrun said, with an early morning gentleness and acceptance of all things in her voice. “I thought if I boiled it it would be okay.”
But the other Gudrun didn’t say anything back.
“Is it because I left the mugs out that one time?” she whispered.
The other Gudrun blinked sleepily. She couldn’t answer. When she tried to imitate the very interesting way the original Gudrun moved her mouth and made sounds come out, she could only go slack and poke out her tongue a little, a pink, weak tongue slicked in saliva. She waved her hands in front of her face, amazed at the thick sunlight pouring between her fingers, at the dancing dust in the air, at the colors of Pemberley seeping all around the edges of those brand-new hands dappled already with scars earned by forty years of good primate work: the N-shaped brand where Gudrun had burned herself on the toaster oven when she was four, the slightly bulging knuckles satisfyingly cracked for decades, the faded white ladder where she had cut herself just after they moved to Pemberley, just to control something, anything completely.
She couldn’t walk, either. Gudrun tried to coax her twin out of bed, but her muscles were as soft as warm mango, her bones delicate and elastic and unready for the slightest weight. The other Gudrun giggled and grabbed one of her clean red feet with one hand. Murray squawked from the garden. The new woman cringed in terror. She began to cry softly, a frightened, trembling, uncertain wail that made all the hair stand up on Gudrun’s skin and her nipples contract and her stomach clench. Slowly, Gudrun pulled herself into her arms and kissed her own hair until the little wails stopped. Her breasts began to ache with a heavy, dancing pain the color of the little stars that come up out of the dark when you press your fists against your eyes, but, having no experience to draw on, she could not put any name to the feeling of her milk coming in.
Gudrun got up, pulled on a pair of fuzzy mustard-colored socks, closed a blue robe over her tender breasts, and padded into the kitchen to put the kettle on. She dug a spoon out of the drawer and began to scoop out some passionfruits for breakfast. You didn’t have to chew passionfruit too much. Not if you took the seeds out. What else could she do? She took two bowls and two mugs out of the cupboard.
One red mug, one blue mug.
4. Innocence for Sale—Cheap!
Published 1944, Adonis Editions, 100 pages
A veteran of many years in the trenches of Ruby, the core of Gudrun was as adaptable as water. Besides, she only had a month to go before the end of everything, and parthenogenesis wasn’t something you could fight against. You could only take it in to your house and give it a place to sleep. A spot in the sun. A bowl of mashed passionfruit.
You can do anything for a month. Get used to anything. Get attached.
The new Gudrun laughed constantly, was hungry all the time, cried when startled as though the great tragedies of mankind had all landed on her at once, could rarely sleep through the night, and had a terror of the dark. Murray adored her. He slept crushed up against the door waiting for the morning when he might see her again.
The old Gudrun named the new one Pemberley. She had to name her something else. No one deserved Gudrun. But all she knew of naming people was that the name should be a family one, should come from a father who never existed in any concrete way, and Pemberley was the best she could build out of such requirements.
Pemberley loved for Gudrun to sing her Elvis songs until she fell asleep and smelled like hot lilacs when her hair was freshly washed. The bones of her skull had not quite fused together yet, and that smell came from the secret, silken place on the top of her head. Pemberley was just as tall and thin as Gudrun, far too big to rock her to sleep, but she tried anyway. She remembered how nice that felt when Ruby did it, a hundred million years ago. She sat out in the warm dark while the hibiscus bloomed and held herself, this great ungainly instant just-add-water person, to her breast. A thin, bitter milk that came from nowhere, except perhaps from the place in the cabinet between the red mugs and the blue mugs, the cold palace dividing the universe into two irreconcilable towers, drained out of herself, into herself, while both of them listened to the bats beat black against black. How had she done this thing? Was it the tins of spam she should never have eaten? The corn syrup in the ketchup? Lead in the Studebaker’s crumbling paint? The radiation from the atolls, from the sea, from the broken sky? Did it matter, with the end so near? Everything came apart at the end. Even Gudrun. That’s how you knew it was the end.
Two weeks before Snow Day, Gudrun stood at one end of the living room, in the Schoolgirls section of the Oskander Special Collection. Pemberley stood, wobbly and afraid, on the other end, in the Military and Other Uniforms section, unsure even of this new thing called standing, reaching out for Gudrun, for comfort, her hands opening and closing helplessly.
“Come on, Pem,” Gudrun said sweetly. “You can do it, baby.”
Murray trilled reassuringly. Pemberley whimpered, tottered, and finally took a tumbling step that was really more of a purposeful fall. Gudrun rushed forward to catch her and Pem collapsed laughing into her arms.
A week before Snow Day, Pemberley said her first word.
Gudrun was cooking soft porridge for their supper while Pemberley lay swaddled in a huge old quilt on the couch, propped up so she could see everything. Gudrun hummed Heartbreak Hotel and her humming broke into singing, unguarded and easy for once, her voice loud and bright in the close green humidity of the forest, the color, at last, strong and warm in her cheeks. She sipped Cold Palace Brand No. 1 Silver Needle Tea from a red mug between verses.
“Ruby!” shouted Pemberley suddenly.
Gudrun dropped the red mug. It shattered on the floor like a supernova.
3. Slumber Party Sweet Sixteen
Published 1962, Belladonna Classics, 119 pages
Johnny Abalone lived alone above his father’s store. He’d always meant to get somewhere in life, but somewhere ended up being right back where he started. He’d come around to being more or less okay with that. Old Jack Oskander once told him, as he bought another massive stack of dirty magazines: kid, nobody really gets anywhere in this life. Everybody just picks someplace to hunker down and barricade themselves in. Some of us just got better bricks than others.
And Johnny thought that was pretty much on the mark.
The envelope arrived with the afternoon mail run. He almost didn’t notice it in the small hurricane of invoices and junk ads. It just said Johnny on it. No address. But everyone knew who he was. It wouldn’t have been any puzzle, even for a new
mailman, which Sam Frisk was not. Johnny Abalone pulled out an old, faded Christmas card. It had a snowman on it. Corn cob pipe and everything.
If you wanted to come and see me on Thursday, that would be fine. It’s my birthday. Here is $400. I think that’s enough for a color TV. If you could bring it when you come that would be as good as a present. Only you have to promise not to freak out if you see something that would be hard to explain if anyone asked you about it. But probably no one ever will.
I drink my tea straight. Silver needle doesn’t need anything extra.
P.S. Bring cake. Lots of frosting.
—Gudrun
2. The Girl Next Door
Published 1950, Fig Leaf Press, 104 pages
Pemberley learned words quickly. After Ruby came Murray, water, potato, book, tea, want, moon. And others less predictable, less simple, less clear where she found them. Dirty. Formaldehyde. Fallout. Radon. Military industrial complex. Poison. Death.
Snow.
Gudrun didn’t know what she expected. She supposed she ought to stop expecting entirely at this point. She had only just managed to adjust to the reality of having been cut in two like an orange. She didn’t much feel like dealing with this new problem. Because Pemberley was her in every way, just the same, by definition, by ontological necessity. But those hadn’t been Gudrun’s first words. She’d said Mama, like most children. Then hello, bottle, help, up, outside, kiss, and Minnesota.
Once, at night, while Pem snored softly next to her with her fists balled up under her chin, Gudrun wondered if, having been bisected so cleanly, she was missing something now. If she was no longer whole. If she was still 100% Gudrun and not diluted somehow, alloyed with some new substance. 90% Gudrun and 10% radon, fallout, formaldehyde, snow. Or 50% Gudrun, and 50% of her now lived in a completely unattached body that she could never glue back together with the rest, a new warm body put away gently on the other side of the cabinet from her old cool one, divided by spoons and sugar and the inevitable separateness of everything, sucking its thumb vigorously when it had bad dreams.