Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes Read online

  Tales of Natural and

  Unnatural Catastrophes

  BOOKS BY

  PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

  NOVELS

  Strangers on a Train

  The Blunderer

  The Talented Mr. Ripley

  Deep Water

  A Game for the Living

  This Sweet Sickness

  The Cry of the Owl

  The Two Faces of January

  The Glass Cell

  A Suspension of Mercy

  Those Who Walk Away

  The Tremor of Forgery

  Ripley Under Ground

  A Dog’s Ransom

  Ripley’s Game

  Edith’s Diary

  The Boy Who Followed Ripley

  People Who Knock on the Door

  Found in the Street

  Ripley Under Water

  SHORT STORIES

  Eleven

  The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder

  Little Tales of Misogyny

  Slowly, Slowly in the Wind

  The Black House

  Mermaids on the Golf Course

  Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes

  Tales of Natural and

  Unnatural Catastrophes

  Patricia Highsmith

  Grove Press

  New York

  Copyright © 1987 by Patricia Highsmith

  Introduction copyright © 2011 by Wells Tower

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 or [email protected].

  Originally published in Great Britain in 1987 by Bloomsburg Publishing Ltd.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Highsmith, Patricia

  Tales of natural and unnatural catastrophes/by Patricia Highsmith.

  ISBN: 9780802194978

  I. Title.

  PS3558.1366735 1990

  813’54—dc20 89-15151

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  11 12 13 14 1510 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Wells Tower

  The Mysterious Cemetery

  Moby Dick II; or The Missile Whale

  Operation Balsam; or Touch-Me-Not

  Nabuti: Warm Welcome to a UN Committee

  Sweet Freedom! And a Picnic on the White House Lawn

  Trouble at the Jade Towers

  Rent-a-Womb vs. the Mighty Right

  No End in Sight

  Sixtus VI, Pope of the Red Slipper

  President Buck Jones Rallies and Waves the Flag

  Introduction

  by Wells Tower

  When this book first appeared in 1987, Patricia Highsmith laconically told an interviewer that the stories it contained were “fun to write.” That pert little adjective reveals much about an author, who, in these pages, brings us tales of nuclear holocaust, psychotic politicians, plagues of cockroaches, carcinogenic fungi, and roving hordes of the criminally insane—all unfolding amid enough merrily rendered slaughter and mayhem to disturb the sleep of the most hardened Highsmith fans.

  Highsmith published these stories while living abroad in Switzerland in the final decade of her frequently unhappy life. Their inspirational germs were items she came across in the American and international press, which offered, as Highsmith put it, “an embarras de richesse of ‘catastrophes’ that the human race has, almost, learned to live with at the end of the twentieth century.”

  The bent mirror Highsmith’s Tales holds up to history offers no moralistic reflections on the pathologies of the age. Her errand here is one of black amusement: to populate a world with fools and evildoers and devise thrillingly inventive methods of setting them aflame. The pleasures of the Tales aren’t as subtle or as rich in moral intricacy as the best Ripley books, yet the author’s pervasive spirit of naked morbid glee is as infectious as a noxious spore. You cannot help but break into unwholesome laughter reading “Nabuti: A Warm Welcome to A UN Committee,” a comedy of error P.G. Wodehouse might have written about Idi Amin. And one has to applaud the dauntless absurdity of a story like “President Buck Jones Rallies and Waves the Flag,” a satiric effigy-roasting of Ronald Reagan wherein the First Lady, in a drunken sulk, drops nuclear warheads on the USSR.

  Early critics of the Tales quibbled that they “lack sympathy,” an obtuse if accurate observation about one of twentieth century literature’s more famous misanthropes. Once, when asked why she didn’t write more likeable characters, Highsmith replied, “Perhaps it is because I don’t like anyone. My last books may be about animals.” Appropriately, the book’s lone heroic character arrives in the form of a vengeful sperm whale, who, girded an arsenal of mines, roams the seas eating sailors and blowing up whaling ships.

  Beneath the high, weird notes of the Tales morbid larking, you can hear, in places, the perhaps unintended subfrequency of Highsmith’s desolating estrangement from those closest to her. “No End in Sight” chronicles the long, bleak life of Naomi Markham, a mindlessly senile megageriatric who’s had the misfortune of living more than two hundred years. According to one biographer, Highsmith drew Naomi’s inspiration from the last years of her own mother, who attempted to induce miscarriage when Patricia was in utero by drinking turpentine. Highsmith’s brutal comic gloss of Naomi’s efforts to abort her child is breathtaking in its refusal to cede a hairsbreadth of sentimental ground. Reading this story, we grieve less for Naomi than for Highsmith, pondering her mother’s fictional counterpart in words of an emotional temperature close to absolute zero: “How does this incubus feel, lying on its back with a rubber ring under its rump to avoid bedsores? What does it think about? Does it go gubbah-gubbah-gubbah with toothless gums, as it did in babyhood, when it was also swathed at the loins in a diaper?”

  Outré and inconceivable though many of the stories may be, what elevates the Tales from mere divertissements or “spoofs” as Highsmith called them, is their abiding and disquieting pertinence. A quarter century later, we’re still beset by all of Highsmith’s pet menaces—nuclear debacles, environmental calamites, the homicidal madnesses of church and state—perils invincible to every plea, prayer, and talisman except a good sense of the absurd.

  Tales of Natural and

  Unnatural Catastrophes

  The Mysterious Cemetery

  On the outskirts of the small town of G— in eastern Austria lies a mysterious cemetery hardly an acre in size, filled with the remains of paupers for the most part, their places marked by nothing at all, or at best by tombstone fragments now all in the wrong spots. Yet the cemetery became famous for its odd excrescences, bulbous figurines of bluish-green and off-white color, which eerily rose above the surface of the soil and grew, som
e, to a height of two meters or so. Others of these mushroom-like growths attained only fifty centimeters, some were even smaller, and all were bizarre, like nothing else in nature, even coral. When several such small ones had manifested themselves above the grassy and muddy earth, the cemetery caretaker called it to the attention of one of the nurses in the adjacent National Hospital. The cemetery lay to the rear of the red-brick hospital building, so one did not easily see the cemetery when approaching the hospital on the one road that went past it with a turn-off toward the hospital’s front doors.

  The caretaker, Andreas Silzer, explained that he had knocked down a couple of these growths with his hoe, taken them to the compost heap expecting them to rot, but they hadn’t.

  “Just a fungus, but there’s more coming,” said Andreas. “I’ve put fungicide down, but I don’t want to kill off the flowers with anything stronger.” Andreas faithfully cared for pansies, rosebushes and the like which a few relatives of the deceased had planted. Occasionally he was tipped for his services.

  The nurse did not answer for several seconds. “I’ll speak to Dr Muller. Thank you, Andreas.”

  Nurse Susanne Richter did not report what Andreas had said. She had her reasons, or rationalizations. The first was that Andreas was probably exaggerating, and that he had seen a few big mushrooms on the tombstones because of all the rain lately; secondly, she knew her place, which wasn’t a bad one and she wanted to keep it and not become known as a busybody meddling on territory not assigned to her, namely the cemetery.

  Almost no one set foot in the dark field behind the National Hospital except Andreas, who was about sixty-five and lived with his wife in town. He bicycled to work three days a week. Andreas was semi-retired, and received a stipend for his cemetery and hospital ground-tending in addition to his state pension. The approximately three-a-month funerals were usually attended by the local priest who said a few words, by the gravediggers who stood by to do the filling in, and only about half the time by a member of the deceased’s family. Some of the elderly men and women who died were quite alone in the world, or their children lived far away. It was a sad place, the National Hospital Number Thirty-six.

  It was not sad, however, to a young medical student of the University of G— named Oktavian Ziegler. He was twenty-two, tall and thin, but possessed of an energy and sense of humor that made him popular with girls. He was also a brilliant student, and rather favored by his teachers. Oktavian—he was so called because his father, an oboist, worshipped the music of Richard Strauss and had hoped his son might become a composer—had been invited, in fact, to be present at some experiments that doctors of the hospital and a couple of his doctor teachers were making on terminal cancer patients at the National Hospital. These experiments took place in a large room on the top storey of the hospital, where there were long tables, several sinks and good lighting. Sanitary conditions were not of the essence, as on this floor the experiments were done on corpses, or else upon bits of cancerous tissue excised from a living patient or from a corpse before it was buried in the cemetery. The doctors were trying to learn more about causes and cures and the reasons for the growth of cancer once it got started. In that same year, scientists in America had discovered that a particular quirk in one gene was a stepping stone toward cancer, but the dread disease needed a second stepping stone to start the malignant cells forming. Carcinogenic agents was the blanket term for the elements which when introduced into guinea pigs or any organism might initiate cancer if the host organism had by nature the first stepping stone. So much was now common knowledge. The doctors and scientists at the National Hospital wanted to learn more, the rate and the reasons for growth, the response of the cancer when massive doses of carcinogens were injected into already cancerous tissue, experiments that could not easily be performed upon living humans, but could upon an organ or a lump of tissue being nourished independently by a blood supply from a small pump, for instance. There was no way of purifying an amount of blood save by recycling the blood through cleansers or by constant supplies of fresh blood, but none of the doctors wanted to carry on an experiment for weeks on end. What the doctors and Oktavian did observe in regard to a cancerous liver section (from a dead patient) was that the diseased tissue, having been given carcinogenic agents, continued to grow even after the blood supply was halted and drained off. The doctors did not think it of any purpose to try to find out how large it would become, though they kept some of it to look at under their microscopes in case it could yield any new information. The disposal of these finally unwanted remnants took place in the cellar of the hospital where there was a good-sized furnace, separate from the heating system and used exclusively for the burning of bandages and soiled material of all kinds.

  This was not so with the approximately three-a-month corpses which were buried without embalming and sometimes in a shroud instead of a wooden coffin in the cemetery. In some cancerous patients in their last days, when morphine had dulled their senses and local anaesthesia could do the rest, doctors injected carcinogenic agents, hoping for an explosive breakthrough, as journalists might say, though the doctors never would have used such a term. The cancers did enlarge, the patients being terminal did die, and not always any sooner because of these tests. Sometimes the enlarged growths were excised, mostly not.

  Oktavian was given the chore, considered a menial one suitable for a student, of seeing that the “test corpses” got down by the big old back elevator from the top storey lab to the cemetery, after a brief tales of natural and unnatural catastrophes stop in the basement morgue for coffin or shroud. The gravediggers were part-time workers with other jobs. Oktavian had to telephone the two or three of them, sometimes on short notice, and they all did the best they could. One of the men was usually a little drunk, but Oktavian stuck with it, joked with the men, and made sure the grave was deep enough. Sometimes they had to inter a corpse on top of or right beside another. Lime was sometimes put down. This of course was for the poorer dead, who had no relatives attending. It was on one of these inhumations in autumn that Oktavian noticed the rounded excrescences that Andreas had reported to the nurse just days before. Oktavian noticed them as he puffed a rare cigarette and stomped his feet against the cold. He knew at once what they were and what had caused them, and he said not a word to the shoveling workmen near him. He did investigate one (he saw at least ten) near him, tripping over a fallen tombstone as he went, as it was rather a dark night. The thing looked bluish-white, was about fifteen centimeters high, rounded at the top with what looked like a convolution or crease halfway down it that disappeared in the earth. Oktavian was surprised, amused, anxious all at once. By comparison with what he and his seniors had produced in the lab, these growths were huge. And how big were they underneath the soil to have poked their way nearly two meters to the surface?

  Oktavian returned to the gravediggers, and realized that he had been holding his breath. He supposed, he was almost sure, that the growths out there in the darkness were highly contaminous. They would combine the carcinogens injected by the doctors as well as the original berserk cells that had caused the cancer. How large would they become? And what was nourishing them? Terrifying questions! Oktavian, like most medical students, sent chums an odd part of the human anatomy once in a while. It was almost a token of affection when a fellow received such a present in the post from a girl student, but something like this? No.

  “Let’s tread it down!” Oktavian said to the laborers, setting an example by starting to stomp on the rise of earth that marked the new grave. Stomp, stomp, stomp, all four of them together. And how long would it be before a pale curve pushed through the soil, Oktavian wondered?

  The young man saved his secret until the following Saturday night when he had a date with Marianne, the girl he had considered for about a month now his favorite girl.

  Marianne wasn’t very pretty, she studied like a demon, seldom took the time to put on lipstick and barely combed her light brown hair for their dates, but Oktavian a
dored her for her ability to laugh. After all her grinding away at her books, she could explode with joy and freedom after she closed the books, and Oktavian liked to think, though he was too realistic to believe it, that he was the sole agent of her transformation.

  “Something special tonight,” Oktavian said when he picked her up in the downstairs hall of her dorm. He had asked her to wear galoshes, and she had. Oktavian had a two-seat motorcycle.

  “You don’t mean we’re going hiking in the dark!”

  “Wait!” Oktavian zoomed off.

  It was raining slightly, there were gusts of cold wind. A wretched night, but it was Saturday night, Marianne clung to Oktavian’s waist, ducked her helmeted head and laughed as Oktavian sped into the countryside.

  “Here!” he said finally, stopping.

  “The hospital?”

  “No, the cemetery,” he whispered, and took her hand. “Come with me.”

  He held her hand all the way. The ghostly pale growths were higher, Oktavian thought, or was he imagining? Marianne was speechless with astonishment. She couldn’t laugh. She gasped, puzzled. Oktavian explained to her what the growths were. He had brought a torch. One bulbous thing was nearly a meter high! It looked rather like a foetus, Marianne remarked, at that stage when fish and mammal show their rudimentary gills under the head-to-be. Marianne was artistic; Oktavian might never have remarked that.

  “What’re they going to do?” she whispered. “Don’t the doctors know about this?”

  “I dunno,” Oktavian replied. “Somebody’ll report it.”

  Oktavian had been trying to draw her toward the center of the dark field. Beyond and to their left, the five-storey hospital building loomed, with half its windows illuminated. The top floor was alight. “Just look at that!” cried Oktavian, his wandering torch having touched on something.

  This was a double growth, rather like a pair of Siamese twins with joined hips, two separate heads, and with two arms that showed fingers—not five fingers on each hand, but something like a few fingers—at the ends of both arms. An accident, to be sure, but weird. Oktavian smiled crookedly, but could not laugh. Marianne tugged at him. “Okay,” he said. “I swear—I think I just saw one of ’em grow!”