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InterText Vol. 4, No. 6 / November-December 1994
================================================
Contents
FirstText: Disc of Doom...........................Jason Snell
Need to Know: Fight Fan Mail with E-mail.........Geoff Duncan
Short Fiction
More Dark than Night_....................Christopher O'Kennon_
How to Roll a Perfect Cigarette_................Jeffrey Osier_
Porcelain Morning_...............................Martin Zurla_
The Effort_.....................................Richard Cumyn_
Sea Change_.......................................Susan Stern_
Bad Sneakers_.......................................P.G. Hurh_
....................................................................
Editor Assistant Editor
Jason Snell Geoff Duncan
jsnell@etext.org gaduncan@halcyon.com
....................................................................
Assistant Editor Send subscription requests, story
Susan Grossman submissions, and correspondence
c/o intertext@etext.org to intertext@etext.org
....................................................................
InterText Vol. 4, No. 6. InterText (ISSN 1071-7676) is published
electronically on a bi-monthly basis. Reproduction of this
magazine is permitted as long as the magazine is not sold
(either by itself or as part of a collection) and the entire
text of the issue remains intact. Copyright 1994, Jason Snell.
Individual stories Copyright 1994 their original authors.
InterText is published Adobe PostScript, Setext (ASCII), Adobe
Acrobat PDF and World Wide Web/HTML formats.
....................................................................
FirstText: Disc of Doom by Jason Snell
=========================================
In the award-winning story "Press Enter" by John Varley, a man
cuts himself off from an increasingly threatening world by
severing his main connections with the world--not people, but
instead the electrical and telephone cables that run into his
house from the outside world. In the end, he's left wondering if
he's safe, because he's still hooked up to the sewer system.
All of us, no matter where we live, are tied into the
infrastructure around us. The origins of that infrastructure are
in decisions by communities to work together so that everyone
could receive important services--fresh water, power, telephone,
even things like cable television and perhaps, in the future,
high-speed Internet access. But there's a trade-off--you get the
services, but you also have to pay. With simple services like
power and water, it may just be a financial transaction. But
with information services, you end up paying money _and_
receiving unwanted information: junk mail, unsolicited phone
calls, junk faxes, even unsolicited junk e-mail. (If you haven't
gotten some of this, consider yourself lucky.)
The marketeers who reach you do so because they've found out
_how_ to reach you. With a few exceptions, they've looked up
your phone number in a telephone directory or bought your
address from some company you do business with (be it your
credit card company or a magazine you subscribe to). Nowadays,
you can even buy a "white pages" of Internet e-mail addresses.
I bring this all up because over the past few months, I've
discovered a frightening new product that anyone can buy: a
telephone book on CD-ROM. For less than $100, you can get the
names and phone numbers of just about everyone in the United
States. (One company also sells a product that provides all the
phone numbers in Australia, should I want to make some random
calls to my good pals Down Under.)
Think about that for a second. Now _anyone_ can find anybody,
anywhere in America, as long as they have a listed telephone
number. On the positive side, you can track down long-lost
relatives and former significant others. On the negative side,
you might track them down and realize _why_ they're long-lost
and/or former. I can just imagine the nightmares such a resource
might cause--someone, long since married, might look up an
ex-boyfriend or girlfriend and give them a call. Who knows what
flames that might rekindle? Who knows what wicked temptations
that little shiny disc might lead to?
But here's my favorite silly scenario, which has the added value
of being something that I've actually tried. With a CD-ROM
covering the western U.S. loaded, I type in the keywords "Round
Table." Up comes a list of every Round Table Pizza parlor in all
of the western U.S. I enter the city keyword "Anchorage," which
gives me five Round Tables in Anchorage, Alaska.
Noting the three-digit prefix of one restaurant's phone number,
I perform a new search, finding _all_ the numbers in that prefix
area and their corresponding names and addresses. Now all I have
to do (and this part I _haven't_ done, I swear) is phone the
Round Table and order a couple large pies with pepperoni and
extra cheese and have it sent to an unsuspecting Alaskan. I have
seen the future of college pranks, and it's on CD.
However, despite all the privacy concerns I have about such
products, these discs can really be valuable. Take this very
issue of InterText. Due to some problems with a service
provider, I was unable to reach one of our contributors, via
e-mail. So, knowing from a note in his story submission that he
lived in Los Angeles, I managed to look up his phone number (it
took me 30 seconds at most) and punch that number into my
telephone. Within a minute I was speaking personally to Martin
Zurla. Now _that's_ service.
Still, the disturbing part of my CD-ROM phone book experience
was that I got to thinking about how there's very little I can
do to protect my privacy. My telephone number is unlisted (so no
pizzas, thanks), and I could theoretically call all my credit
card companies and all the magazines I subscribe to and ask them
to remove my name from the mailing list they sell to direct
marketers. But how could you be sure that you could eradicate
your name and personal information from every database? Not very
likely.
And even if the sanctity of your mailbox and your telephone are
unmolested, here's another one: what about your personal
information? Here's an example for you: for a modest fee, anyone
on the Internet can connect to a site on the World-Wide Web,
enter in anybody's social security number, and get their
complete credit history.
What's my point? Maybe just that as technology improves, it's up
to all of us to guard our personal information carefully. Since
we're all part of that community, all tied into the
infrastructure in one way or another, we're going to
fundamentally give up some of our privacy. The more conscious we
are about what information we're giving away and what people
might do with it once they've got it, the better off we'll all
be.
But at least for this issue's sake, I'm sure glad Martin Zurla's
phone number was listed.
Now, if you'll excuse me... someone's at the door. I sure hope
it's not the pizza guy.
More Dark than Night by Christopher O'Kennon
================================================
...................................................................
* Morality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. But
can it transform a crime of opportunity into a crime of
compassion? *
...................................................................
The smell hit me as I jimmied the window open. I climbed in
anyway, hoping I was wrong.
It's funny how life can be broken down into a small series of
events, where a simple decision can alter the entire outcome. An
_if_ in the right place can change your perspective. _If_ I'd
been smart, I'd have immediately turned and left for parts
unknown. _If_ I'd gone for the living room window instead of the
kitchen window, I may never have known she was there. _If_ I'd
decided to burgle the house on either side of hers (or even one
halfway across the island in, say, Mililani Town), I could have
avoided the whole thing.
As it happened, I found the woman in the kitchen, hanging from a
rope, bare feet dangling above the floor. It was a botched
hanging, common when folks try to kill themselves. In a proper
hanging, the drop breaks the neck and knocks the victim
unconscious--death is quick. But this woman hadn't given herself
enough height. She had choked slowly. It probably took her five
minutes.
She was definitely dead. Her eyes bulged out like a cartoon
character and her face and neck were dark red. Her mouth was
open, the tongue hanging out like a sausage. Somehow, she swayed
slightly, her body making tiny circles in the air.
She hadn't been dead long, probably no more than a few hours.
The smell I had noticed was from her bowels and bladder letting
go in those last moments of life. Some evolutionary throwback
designed to make our bodies as unappetizing as possible before
some saber-toothed tiger made a meal of them. Takes all the
glory out of dying, if you know what I mean.
That's assuming there ever was any glory in dying.
I made my way carefully around the body, not touching her and
being even more careful than usual about fingerprints. It
wouldn't do to give anyone the impression I was linked to this
mess. Good ol' Five-Oh found burglars merely annoying, but if
they thought a burglar was icing middle-class housewives things
could get uncomfortable very quickly.
It was the refrigerator that stopped me. I'd seen these things
in a hundred houses before this one. Crude drawings of palm
trees, flowers and, most of all, horses. All done in crayon and
held to the fronts of refrigerators with magnets shaped like
fuzzy animals or cookies or other suburban bric-a-brac. The
difference this time was the woman hanging from the light
fixture behind me.
With a chill I recognized the scenario. Single parent--for some
reason known only to Your Preferred Deity of Infinite
Greatness--offs herself, leaving a child behind. I'd been that
child once.
Now there was another.
I did something stupid. I turned to the dead woman, my stomach a
cold stone rising in my throat, and hit her with the crowbar I
had used on the window. I'm not sure how many times I hit her,
knocking her body around like a pinata, cracking bones and not
stopping until she struck the edge of the counter and jarred a
stack of plates. The plates didn't hit the floor; a few just
slid into the sink. But until then, the beating had been quiet
and she certainly hadn't complained. Silence returned; I watched
as the corpse swung, limp. My eyes were wet when I finally got
myself under control.
_Business as usual_, I said to myself and crept into the living
room on shaky legs.
No. Not quite. I was searching the house, not for the caches of
valuables people think they've so cleverly hidden, but for
people. I found a child's room, toys scattered around the floor
but the bed made. A doll house rested in the pale light coming
through the window, looking like a tenement cross-section with
miniature furniture spilling out the sides. A little girl lived
here, but judging from the bed, not tonight.
The master bedroom had the double bed I expected, unmade, but
only half a closet of clothing, all female. The adjoining
bathroom was littered with woman's gear, the medicine cabinet
was lined with ointments, salves and pills. The pills were
arranged more neatly than anything else in the bathroom. They
were familiar. Valium. Xanax. Tranquilizers and sedatives.
Aside from myself, there was no living person in the house. The
corpse was still spinning when I came back to the kitchen. I
wasn't sure why I returned. There was something that needed to
be done, something important. I stood there a long time,
watching the woman slowly rock to a halt, not thinking of
anything, until a red light caught my attention. An answering
machine. I pushed the button and waited for the tape to rewind.
"Kini, this is Hal. Don't pick up if you don't feel like it, the
message is the same. Don't call me anymore. Don't write me
anymore. I have my own life to live and the two of you don't
figure into it. Just leave me alone."
There was a brief pause and a beep before the second message
began. "Mommy, this is Keke. I'm at Amy's house now. Thanks for
letting me sleep over. We're going to have pizza. Bye!"
The message ended with a final beep.
So the girl was spending the night at a friend's. I turned,
looking at the woman again. The little girl will come home
tomorrow to find Mommy's little surprise waiting in the kitchen.
How _clever_ of you, Mommy. How _wise_ of you. To screw yourself
and her at the same time. What a wonderful, self-centered,
_vicious_ trick.
I ran my hands through my hair, leaving trails in the black
grease I use. It wasn't fair. The little girl hadn't done
anything, any more than I had at her age. But now she'll find
her mother hanging from her neck like a goose and she won't
understand. No, that's not right--she'll understand too well.
She'll understand the woman she put all her trust in has let her
down. She'll understand her mother wanted to die more than she
loved her own daughter. And she'll remember that lesson above
all others.
Unless someone changed the lesson.
Cutting her down was no trouble at all. I wouldn't be able to
make the rope burn look like a ligature strangulation--it
wouldn't have looked right. So I taped her hands and feet
together, careful not to bruise or break the skin. A wound
delivered after a person has died is different from one
delivered while the person is alive. While the damage I had done
when I first found her would be curious, it wasn't impossible.
But the rest had to look good. I taped the hands in a manner she
wouldn't have been able to do herself and put the body on the
master bed, wrapped it up in the sheets, and broke the lock on
the bedroom door.
I paused at the postmortem lividity in her feet. After she had
died, blood had pooled in the lowest portion of her body. Her
feet had turned deep purplish-red color. They gave away that she
had been moved after death, and I wondered if that was what I
wanted.
I tried to reconstruct what the evidence might show. Forced
entry into the bedroom. A struggle from the bedroom to the
kitchen. (I would have to knock things around to make it look
convincing.) She was taped up, and a poor job of hanging had
been forced on her. After death, she had been knocked around,
taken down, and left in the bedroom.
That might work. At least it was obvious someone else was
involved. And although there wouldn't be any defensive wounds
(there wasn't anything I could do about it), the scene did not
scream of suicide.
All that remained was to make sure there were no suicide notes,
take a few items of value, and make an anonymous phone call to
Five-Oh. Then let the cops figure it out.
I didn't have to do it. I could have let it go. What does one
girl's pain mean in the big scheme of things?
It just so happens it means a lot.
Christopher O'Kennon (psy3cho@cabell.vcu.edu)
-----------------------------------------------
Christopher O'Kennon is a graduate student in psychology at
Virginia Commonwealth University, after spending more than
enough time in Hawaii to lose all of his money. He works in a
psychiatric hospital, where he's found the main difference
between the staff and the patients is that the staff members are
the ones with the keys. His work has appeared in small press
magazines such as _Beyond_, _Neophyte's '92 Anthology_, and the
upcoming anthology _In Darkness Eternal_ (Stygian Vortex
Publications).
How to Roll a Perfect Cigarette by Jeffrey Osier
====================================================
...................................................................
* Practice, they say, makes perfect. Or does it? *
...................................................................
One.
------
You have to start slowly. You can't just go out and buy some
tobacco and practice. Tobacco doesn't come with instructions.
Even gummed papers will elude you forever.
The technique comes very slowly, more slowly than you can
imagine. You have to begin by admitting that you know nothing,
and you have to realize that cigarette rolling is an art form.
Like painting, it's something that takes a little concentration
and a lot of willpower. Each cigarette is different. Few of your
peers will recognize the care and practice that have gone into
rolling a perfect cigarette. Expect no compliments. Do this for
yourself and yourself alone.
You must begin much earlier than you originally intended. It
must start when you're very young, much too young to appreciate
even rudimentary artwork, much too young to smoke. Possibly
during a holiday. Your parents will have given up smoking years
before, never having learned this art at all but always having
relied on the pre-rolled, machine-produced variety, most likely
with synthetic filters, that are to real smoking what lawn
flamingoes are to real artwork. As in a modern Christian Mass,
there are hints and shadows of real mysteries, but in the end
it's just habit. This is not smoking. This is dying.
At the holiday feasts that usually take place at your house,
your parents' guests include relatives who haven't given up the
habit. What you notice is the graceful way your uncle's
blue-gray cigarette smoke wafts and clouds in the living-room
air above your head. You exhale slowly, face upward, watching
your breath mix with his and watching them swirl together. You
glimpse something intangible. You play with his lighter, amazed
at the way the spark begets the flame, and the intense control
you have over the length and size of this flame. By adjusting
the tiny lever on the side, you can make the flame so tiny you'd
swear it wasn't there at all, or large enough to dance with your
breath. You practice this in front of the foyer mirror until
your mother discovers you.
Or perhaps it's your aunt's Zippo that catches your fancy, with
its satisfying clicking and scratching and the final _whomp_
when she closes it. You notice the smell from the Zippo even
more than the smell from the tobacco she lights with it, a smell
that will always remind you of Christmas or Thanksgiving, even
more than the smell of the turkey roasting in the oven or the
chink of poker chips after dinner while the cranberry sauce
dries on the plates and you watch the same animated specials
you've watched year after year on the same television. Smoke, of
course, drifts in from the other room, tainting your sleepy
visions with mysterious mists. You wonder why candles are so
much less provocative.
These visions and smells and sounds will mark your growing years
as much as anything else. When you're a gangly teenager you get
a job sweeping out the shop where your father is a manager, a
sheet-metal shop filled with raucous men and racks of sheared
steel. These men make giant, dirty messes at their labor, and it
takes a good portion of every weekend to sweep and wipe the
floors and machinery clean. You wonder why anyone even bothers
to clean, so quickly and thoroughly dirty the place gets. You go
in on Saturdays with the shop foreman's son, who has grown up
around a different crowd than you have and listens to a
different sort of music. He's a few months older than you, and
the two of you drive in together and work all day Saturday in
the shop. You go in early. You and he divide the huge shop in
two and each sweeps a different section. Sixteen months before
you get the job, your father will have moved out of the house
and the yard will have gone to the dogs, along with your
generally happy mood and inquisitive turn of mind. You'll be 15,
a freshman in a Catholic high school an hour's bus ride from
home, entirely unsure of most things. Your hands will often be
dirty.
But you only work on weekends, for now. Your workmate will prove
to be an interesting companion, and as a school-year's worth of
Saturdays progresses you have many conversations while unloading
bins of scrap metal into large containers. You start going in a
little later, and once you get to work you end up sitting in the
foreman's office eating candy bars for breakfast and talking
about cars, which you've taken a sudden interest in, and girls.
This will be much more interesting than work. You try to take as
few Butterfingers and Baby Ruths from the stockpile as possible
(the boss usually charges for such things, and discreetly, while
his son isn't looking, you drop money into the bin). As you
physical shape improves you do your work faster, and so does
your companion, until you both can finish in five hours what
used to take eight and you spend the remaining time lounging in
the office.
At some point you discover that many of the cigarette butts you
sweep up have a considerable amount of tobacco in them. Your
morbid curiosity is piqued. You know that cigarettes are bad.
The surgeon general's warning on the packages proves that, even
if Mom didn't also say a lot. Besides, the folks you know who
smoke are either sheet-metal workers, a lascivious breed, or
relatives, neither of which you (consciously) wish to resemble.
Still, tobacco is made even more attractive by its bad
reputation. An idea forms in your mind like mothball shavings in
an old suit jacket. There are matches in the welders' boxes. You
don't see your companion for a good percentage of the day
anyway, and so one day your curiosity gets the better of you.
You find one of the cleaner specimens of used cigarette, and
rather than suck on it at the same time you're lighting it you
first light the ragged edges and then bring the
inch-and-a-half-long butt to your mouth. It smells nothing like
your uncle. Indeed, it smells nothing like tobacco; it smells
like dirt and the oil-based sawdust you spread on each section
of the shop before you sweep it, to keep the dust down. You curl
your lips inward, touching only the filter to your dry peach
fuzz, and attempt to inhale the smoldering stuff.
Nothing happens. The cigarette has gone out while you
contemplated your wicked deed. You're left with a vague feeling
of guilt and paranoia, and you peek around the corner to see if
your wanton behavior has been discovered. You decide that this
is too dangerous, and you quickly resume sweeping.
A week or two later you find half a pack of cigarettes on
someone's worktable. Marlboros. Irresistible. You've just got to
know. So you heist one and put it into your mouth, just to try
it out. It barely weighs anything, you notice, and its round,
smooth end feels good on your tongue. Natural. For fun you
measure it with a small calibrating tool in the shop. You find
that it's roughly eight millimeters thick. If it were wire it'd
be about 10 or 12 gauge, you reckon. Naturally as can be, you
attempt to light the small tube in your mouth, bravely inhaling
the flame this time, and it lights, just as it's supposed to.
Inhaling the smoke, you cough; no one has told you that you're
supposed to inhale air as well. Your eyes water. When they
clear, you see T., the foreman's son, standing across the shop
from you, laughing. You laugh as well. Saying nothing, he lights
a cigarette as if he'd been doing it all his life.
That summer, the two of you work side by side 40 hours a week.
You've given up on experimenting with old butts left by dirty
union workers, especially since those union workers are there
most of the time now as you work. Only on Saturdays do you and
T. work alone, still eating Butterfingers washed down with Dr
Pepper for breakfast, shooting the breeze in his dad's office,
cranking up the old stereo.
One Saturday at lunchtime the two of you have been discussing
the relative merits of drugs at parties and Ozzy Osbourne. You
drive out to a local taco shop for food, and then you go up to
explore a new housing project a few miles away. While you're
parked he brings out a small length of tube, the likes of which
you've not seen before. He pokes some gray-green shavings into
one end and lights it, breathing in. He's explained this to you
before and you've heard about it from others, but you've never
seen it. Curious, you ask him what it feels like. His eyes are
glazed, just a little bit. He hands you the pipe, and you, very
afraid but unwilling to admit this, take a small breath from it.
It tastes like nothing. You wonder if you've breathed any at
all, but when you exhale you see a thin stream of smoke issuing
from your mouth. Then you notice the taste, somewhere between
oil and lawn mulch, rather sweet and filthy. You hand the pipe
back to T. and wait to feel high, but you feel nothing. Not even
disappointment. Numbness, perhaps. Many things make you numb
these days, however, and you reflect that maybe this is how
you're affected by drugs. Aspirin never seemed to do much,
either.
Disillusionment is relative. Sometimes it's just not believable.
When you're 16 you decide to try again. You and your buddy C.
bravely purchase a package of Marlboros. You drive fast on the
freeway, both of you with lit cigarettes in hand and feeling
giddy, taking occasional puffs but not inhaling (you've made
that mistake before). Well, maybe a little bit. When C. isn't
watching, you breathe in at the same time the smoke is lying in
your mouth, and exhale immediately. You feel your throat
tighten, but you don't choke. This, you reflect, is an
experiment. For fun you pull off the freeway and enter a
drive-through car wash, and you and C. fill the car with smoke
as you pass through the sprays and brushes. At the end you open
the doors and let the smoke billow out, and you both stand
outside and laugh until tears form in your eyes. The car-wash
attendant looks at you suspiciously.
From then on you keep a few cigarettes in your car. You don't
smoke them, but they're there in case you want to. Once when
you're going to pick up your girlfriend, B., your dashboard
decides to fall apart and a dozen of the little white tubes fall
out from the back of your glove box and onto the floor. You stop
a block from her house and clean up every trace. You hide the
cigarettes in the trunk only to throw them away a few days
later, ashamed. At 16, you're ashamed of most things.
Nearly two years later, close to graduation, you trek up into
the mountains for a weekend. You've been doing this often
lately, always alone. You love the campfires, the solitude, the
unending quiet. You visit observatories and canyons and meadows
and write in your journal about things you find mysterious and
painful and unsettling. You play guitar softly in the
wilderness.
This time you've stopped and bought a small package of cheap
cigars. To see what the ruckus is about. These are a brand
labeled Backwoods, and in your flannel mood you decide that you
have a Backwoods sentiment. You unpack one before the campfire,
reading, and make an attempt at naturalness (your heart beating
faster), you light it with a stick from the campfire. It tastes
horrible. You settle back in your lawn chair with it anyway,
sipping good stony mountain well water from your canteen and
puffing on your Backwoods stogie, leaning just so for the
imaginary camera you've sensed behind you since you were a pup.
Another few puffs and you're ready for the real experiment. You
take a small toke and inhale slightly, and suddenly your world
becomes cloudy. Not at all what you expected. Coughing and
looking for something to change the taste in your mouth, you
chuckle at yourself and toss the lot of them into the fire.
Yuck. Like sucking on a forest fire, you think, and you go back
to reading, hoping the invisible cameraman ran out of film just
then.
Two.
------
Pipe smoking has always fascinated you. It smells so wonderful,
and the people who smoke pipes seem so very different from those
who smoke cigarettes and from those who smoke nothing at all.
Over time you realize that perhaps they don't smoke from habit,
the way cigarette smokers do, and that's a good thing. They
smoke for some other reason. Maybe this reason you could
understand, for the habit alone just never appealed to you.
You're 18 years old, and you've arrived home for the first time.
Home is a campus apartment room, a double that you share with K.
You and K., in your short relationship, have shared much. He's
very much like you in many ways and very dissimilar in others.
You're in Santa Cruz, California, walking through the Pacific
Garden Mall one day when you chance upon a tobacco store and
decide that you want to start smoking a pipe. K. shudders and
follows you inside, grumbling that you won't be smoking it in
_his_ room, even though a weekend previous he had filled the
place with friends and marijuana oxide. Just an experiment, you
tell him, a mind opener. Everything in college is supposed to be
a mind opener. Having no choice, he consents.
The experiment doesn't last long, however, as you simply can't
keep the damned thing lit. It eventually goes the way of dryer
socks and is lost in the shuffle, a good three-dollar pipe
that's just simply disappeared. No matter. Once or twice you
join your next-door neighbors in a cigarette while watching old
Clint Eastwood movies, but not often. The smoke buzzes around in
your head for a while, making things look strange, but coffee
does pretty much the same thing. And besides, you've discovered
alcohol.
Eventually, you discover love as well, and tobacco and alcohol
fall by the wayside. At 19 you realize many things. You realize
you've never dealt with your parents' divorce. You realize you
don't know the first thing about sex. And you realize that being
in love is very, very trying, a struggle that promises to take
many years. And so you give up the experiment for a while and
breathe a different intoxicant, one called _relationship._
Two years and a lifetime later, things are quite different. You
have a job driving a bus on campus, and it is springtime. Your
relationship is waning, after lots of hard labor, and you're
driving the last shift of the year, a Friday night after finals.
Only two people ride your bus between five and ten P.M., and you
and the other two drivers give up the ghost and park by the
library and talk. This is the first time you have talked to
someone other than your fiancee in a long, long time, and it is
refreshing. One of the drivers has a pack of cigarettes, Camel
Filters, and the three of you smoke cigarettes and talk for two
hours about various things, and you feel good. You don't share
your uncomfortable thoughts about your girlfriend. It never
really seems like the right time.
A summer later, you finally break up with her. You move into an
1888 Victorian (Queen Anne, actually) in Capitola with D. and
L., and things feel very strange. You haven't been honestly
alone or had your own space in two years. This frightens you to
death. You learn many things very quickly, you take on a third
job, and you learn how to cook. Your apple pies are a cementing
factor in your friendship with your roommates. You buy another
pipe.
Many nights you spend walking around Capitola Village, sipping
coffee with Irish Cream and trying to keep your pipe lit. You
buy an old corduroy jacket with patched sleeves, and you feel
years older. When you turn 21 in December, a friend from home
comes up and gets you very drunk in a bar in the Village, and
when you stagger back to the house he passes out while you empty
your gut in the bathroom and try to keep the tile from spinning.
But mostly you just wander. You have been a computer-software
major for two years by now, but it doesn't seem as fulfilling or
exciting as it did when you began. Things have changed, you
reflect. You're not the person you were. On New Year's Eve, with
all your roommates gone, you wander down to the Village and get
mildly drunk on excellent wine and talk to the bartender about
science fiction and wonder quietly why you never became a writer
like you'd always dreamed you would. You walk back home in the
freezing night, determined to make solid, practical New Years'
resolutions in the morning, and shiver all night. The cold seeps
into the house through cracks in the walls, and you awaken with
frost on your beard.
Three months later you decide to be a musician. You're working
three jobs and taking 18 units at school, but no matter; music
sets your heart to pumping and your feet to tapping, and you
reason that you may as well have a major in which you can enjoy
the homework. You talk often with your ex-fiancee, who will have
dated several men in your absence and will have chosen one to
get engaged to. You feel a little left behind.
You get back in touch with an old friend from high school, H.
(you call her E. sometimes, but that's a long story), who's been
living an hour north in San Francisco for years but with whom
you never really kept in contact. You realize that you love her,
and that you have since you were 17. You dated her briefly then,
but you never realized how strongly you felt about her. She's
been engaged to another old friend from high school for as long
as you've been at college, but they've broken up and she's moved
to a tiny apartment in the Mission District with a friend from
work. In addition to being a poetry student, she's a dispatcher
for the San Francisco State University Police Department. You'll
come to know a few of the police officers rather well during
this summer, as you spend as much time in San Francisco as
possible, waiting for her to decide that she loves you as much
as you love her. Meanwhile, you work 80-hour weeks at two jobs
and live in a dump on the Westside in Santa Cruz, your Capitola
house being unavailable for the summer. You dream about her
incessantly, obsessively. Of course, you puff on your pipe
occasionally, and walk down to the beach with a glass of
Highland single-malt whiskey, puffing and dreaming and
agonizing. You realize that love is a many-splendored thing but
difficult to deal with at times.
Also, you meet G. She is a roommate and sometime-friend of M.,
one of your truest friends. M. had to break the news to G. that
he was gay while they were still a couple. After that they lived
together, in the same room, for a year, neither of them dating
anyone, she hating him, he hating himself. You realize that you
have strange friends.
G. comes to visit you in your run-down Westside shack. She
hasn't dated anyone since M., and the two of you decide to
explore the possibility of your mutual attraction. This works
out rather well, in a sense, as G. lives in Los Angeles, 400
miles away. You tell her about H., of course, wanting everything
to be out in the open, wanting no illusions. She doesn't know
that you smoke a pipe occasionally, or if she does it doesn't
matter. You make beautiful love together on the floor and cook
pasta afterward. This continues for much of the summer.
On September 15, a few days before school starts, you're at a
James Taylor concert with H. You're old friends, after all, and
she's appreciated your companionship this summer, what with the
breakup and all. You sip hot chocolate and listen to "Fire and
Rain," holding hands. You wonder if your heart is going to break
open. She rubs your shoulders at intermission. You both laugh
about a hole in your pants. You turn around to say something to
her and look into her green eyes instead, speechless. Does she
know what you're thinking? Will this finally be the time? You
wonder, did you say that out loud? She leans toward your face,
and her lips touch yours. Time stops. The world disappears, and
all that exists is the young woman kissing you. James starts to
sing again, but you don't notice. All you can see are her eyes,
looking at you in wonder.
Her roommate has gone out of town for the weekend. You walk
through the door to her tiny apartment and close it, following
her into her bedroom. You've spent a summer's worth of sleepless
nights here, pacing in your mind as she's slept next to you,
getting up when your mind failed to find quiet, and drinking
good San Francisco tap water sitting in your underwear in the
kitchen, watching the city night from three floors up, waiting
for the sun to rise. Those lonely mornings when you tried at
poetry and failed at simple language have coalesced and built to
this one moment, standing in her bedroom doorway, the cat
rubbing your ankles. You kiss her neck and she moans softly. You
take her in your arms. She pulls you to the bed and unbuttons
your shirt. You can hear your heart echoing off the walls, you
can feel a cloud deep inside you about to burst into "Fire and
Rain" as you remove her shoes. You spend another sleepless night
in her apartment, but you never go to the kitchen.
Two days later you're back at work, back at home, sipping your
whiskey and puffing occasionally on your pipe, staring at the
wall with a profound sense of doom and destiny. You realize you
live 78.4 miles from her house. You realize you have to break
off whatever it is you have with G. You realize this won't be
easy, but then, you reason, fate rarely is. You're getting
better at keeping your pipe lit, however.
Three.
--------
It's been 22 years and you still haven't learned to roll a
decent cigarette; indeed, up to now you've never rolled one. You
barely realize it. Your life is quite full these days. You
practically give up pipe smoking. In fact, by December you've
decided to give up school for a while. Music classes have been
disillusioning and strenuous, and with H. living so far away you
just don't have the energy for them any more. It's time for a
break. You arrange to take a leave of absence from the
university. Your academic advisor has seen this coming. He's
seen you switch to three different majors, work as many as four
jobs at once, and he understands your need for respite. _Come
back when you're ready_, he says, signing a slip of paper.
_Just make sure you come back._
You spend January finishing your jobs. Then you pack your car
and move to San Francisco. H.'s roommate had been wanting to
move out anyway, to get closer to campus, so you and H. decide
to make his room into a living room. You move your futon in.
Your things are arranged in boxes all over the apartment.
You have three stacks of books as high as the ceiling. You have
no job. You have no bookshelf. You have little money. Things are
very strained. H. finally draws a line, and you're on the other
side. You have been blind. You realize you've been living in a
dream world with her, and the two of you share some very nasty
words. For a week you retreat to the roof with a cigar in the
evenings, waiting for a job to appear, wondering how things
really are if they're not how they seem. You know that this is
the end. So much for fate, you say to yourself. You try to
reason out what has happened but get nowhere. The feeling of
doom is very great.
You finally get a temporary job at the Pacific Stock Exchange.
You come home one day to find her moving out. You lamely offer
to help, and you hug her good-bye when she leaves dry-eyed. You
go up to the roof and stare at nothing. As you sit in the window
over the street three floors below and watch her drive away, you
realize that _this_ is fate.
You talk to her twice in the next week, and then not again for a
long time. Things seem not black, but gray, lifeless as the
pavement under your feet, lifeless as the gray people you travel
to work with every morning on the subway. You begin to like the
subway and the way it affects your mood. You resolve to stay
single for a while.
You find a roommate. You interview several whose numbers you've
gotten through a rental agency on Fillmore. You finally decide
on one, M., and in March he moves in. He's a bartender on Union
Street. A workmate of his, S., moves in a day later, needing a
place to stay for a day or two while he finds a place to live.
Two weeks later he's still there, and you and M. usher him into
the household officially over beer and burritos in the Mission
District. It's a little sticky, with three in so small an
apartment, but you're all good natured, and it promises to keep
the rent down.
Both M. and S. smoke heavily. S. sticks mainly to Camel Lights,
while M. vacillates between Marlboros and a creative imported
smoke called Death Cigarettes. They come in a black package with
a skull-and-crossbones on the front and a large warning on the
side: "If you smoke, stop. If you don't smoke, don't start." You
find yourself borrowing cigarettes from them and loaning them
your furniture. First a sleeping bag disappears, then a beanbag
chair. The three of you live the raucous life of bachelors in
San Francisco.
You take to hanging out in the restaurant/bar they both work in.
In fact, after working as a cab driver for a short period of
time, you find a job as a bartender back at a posh Italian place
on Union Square, and suddenly you have fewer money problems. You
don't make a lot, not enough to cover school debts nor pay off
the Visa card you inflated on a road trip the previous year and
never managed to deflate, but you make enough to buy your new
friends drinks and tip them heavily when they work. You give
them rides home at two o'clock in the morning, and eventually
you get to know everyone in the bar on Union Street. It's a
happy, social place. When you walk in, they find you a drink
before you sit down. You realize slowly that you like this. As
the months give way to summer, you find that you like working in
your bar downtown, and that you like the crowd in the bar on
Union Street.
You still only smoke occasionally, but with increasing
frequency. You find you enjoy it. You find you meet many new
people, even if just for a moment, when they ask you for a
light. You find that habits can make people brave, and while you
don't want the habit you wonder if maybe you could learn the
bravado.
Your first chance to practice comes when you meet D. She's a
cocktail waitress at the bar and a nursing student. She has
captivating eyes, a punchy attitude, and a fascinating swirl as
she walks. She's neither dainty nor insincere. You get the
feeling that she likes you, but you're not sure. S. would dearly
love to set you up with her and tries, to no avail. Late one
night, D. is complaining about a paper that is due soon (this is
June), and you offer to give her a hand with it. It suddenly
seems you were once a writing tutor. She offers to buy you
coffee for your help, and a few mornings later the two of you
spend six hours drinking one cup of coffee and talking about
everything in the world except writing.
Something about D. amazes you. You don't feel obsessed with her,
you don't feel lost, you just feel--attracted. You like her very
much. A few nights later the two of you discuss this, and you
express your mutual attraction for seven hours until sunlight
begins to show behind her window shades and you're both too
tired to move. You're busy exploring the intricate details of
the tattoo she has on her shoulder when the alarm goes off, and
you both giggle at the rising sun.
Work simply flies by. Most evenings you spend working behind the
bar, making cappuccinos and martinis and running out of ice, and
then after work you maybe give someone a ride home and then head
out to Union Street to visit M. and S. and, of course, D. You
feel happy. Life is in balance.
D. smokes Marlboros or Camel Lights, but she wants to teach you
how to roll your own cigarettes, just because she thinks you'd
like it. It's that kind of thinking that makes you feel giddy.
You wonder where all this is going to lead, you wonder when the
fun will run out and the hard work begin. It doesn't.
When D.'s not around, S. takes over your training, though you
just can't seem to get it. Pipes are so much easier, you
explain. S. points out that you can't smoke a pipe in a bar and
tries again to teach you. S. says that pipes make you look
pretentious. He says _trust me, this'll make you look cool_. You
compromise by rolling pipe tobacco into cigarettes.
Rule number 1: When you're learning something new, make things
easy on yourself. Pipe tobacco is not the same as cigarette
tobacco. S. explains this in great detail. You enjoy being
difficult. You practice occasionally but not energetically.
You're too much at peace for this.
Well, almost at peace. You're anxious to get back to school, to
graduate. Your academic advisor's words come back to you. After
careful consideration, you realize you could graduate with a
degree in creative writing in a single year more. You decide to
get away from the city, to go back to school in September. D.
just smiles. She knew you were leaving. Her happiness for you
makes you hate leaving. You are quietly torn.
But leave you do. You go to Utah for a week before school
starts. You arrive in Moab, Gateway to Canyonlands, and realize
that you're thinking more and more about D. You've talked to H.
twice over the entire summer, and you realize how quickly things
can change. H. is dating a married cop now. You wonder how many
mistakes you've made living in the city and how many you made by
leaving.
The waitress in the pub in Moab where you scrounge dinner looks
a lot like D. You watch her for hours, half expecting her to
come over with D.'s "Hey, how are ya" and sit down next to you.
She never does. You stay until one in the morning, and then you
wander to bed and sleep restlessly.
The next day you make cappuccino on a mountaintop and try to
forget things, try to blend into the Utah wilderness. It doesn't
work. You drive northwest and make camp at Green River and
discover that you are being eaten alive by mosquitoes. They
avoid the smoke from your campfire, however, and in a sudden fit
of creative logic you light an unfiltered Camel. The mosquitoes
shy away. You watch a thunderstorm move in with the coming
evening. You dream all night with thunder in your ears and rain
palpitating your tent, and you wake refreshed.
School begins uneventfully. You move in with old roommates, D.
and S., and, interestingly enough, K., your friend from freshman
year. This will be a good year, you mutter to yourself. You
decide to smoke a lot less, even though you never smoked much.
You try calling D., but the conversations seem stale. She never
once calls you back. Eventually, you quit calling.
Then you meet J., who dated K. for a while. You and J. get to
talking. She's 19, a soccer player, and nothing like you. You
find this attractive. She keeps half a pack of Marlboro Lights
in her car, in case she gets to feeling rebellious. You begin to
get a familiar feeling of doom. She reminds you very much of a
fiancee you had a lifetime or two ago. Before you realize it,
you get heavily involved with J. You begin to puff your pipe on
the side. You still don't know how to roll a decent cigarette.
The fall and winter play themselves through, and things with J.
get volatile. Explosive. They finally end in February, and you
realize that you feel like hell. You've got your bus-driving job
back, but you're quite broke and your Visa is maxed out. Your
self-image is maxed out. You haven't talked with anyone from San
Francisco in months. You're wondering what life is going to be
like after you graduate. You decide to move out of California
then.
You've gotten to be quite close with B., another bus driver. B.
is a fascinating guy. He smokes more than you ever have or will.
He's sailed from Hawaii to California and spent a season in
Thailand, and you begin to realize that that hardly describes
him. He teaches you how to roll a decent cigarette.
This is when you finally learn. You don't realize it now, but it
has taken the previous lifetime to get to this point. You have
to be ready. You have to open your mind, or else that point
never comes. You're out of money, about to graduate, incredibly
burnt on relationships and life, but at least you can now roll a
decent cigarette.
You take the paper gently in your hands, concentrating, and
place a few pinches of tobacco inside, loosely, just enough to
fill the paper. You realize that you always tried too hard
before, and that you always used much more tobacco than you
really needed to. Place your fingertips on the edges of the
paper, and roll the ends of the paper together, gently now, and
you can feel the mass inside beginning to take shape. Quietly
fold the paper over with your thumbs, don't worry about the bits
sticking out the ends, and roll the whole thing up. It's simple
if you let it be. Touch the opposite side with your tongue,
don't slobber, and hold it tight against the roll. If it's meant
to stick, it'll stick. Remember that. If it doesn't, you can
always start over. _Right on, man,_ B. will say. _Good deal_.
And practice. Try doing it one-handed. And when you've graduated
from college and haven't moved out of California, when you've
gotten a job that doesn't pay enough and you're working too much
and still bouncing checks to your landlord, when all your
closest friends are a long-distance phone call away (except B.,
who's traveling through the South Pacific), and you just don't
have the energy to get it together, remember that once in a
while, given adequate concentration and practice and a little
caring, you can roll a perfect cigarette. It's that simple. You
were just making it difficult before.
Jeffrey Osier (jeffrey@cygnus.com)
------------------------------------
Jeffrey Osier is a senior editor and technical writer for Cygnus
Support in Mountain View, California, in addition to being vice
president of the Zen Internet Group. He has been writing without
rest for 11 years; this is his first major non-technical
publication. He says no one will ever find out how much of this
story is true and how much is fiction.
Porcelain Morning by Martin Zurla
=====================================
...................................................................
* Not all go gently into that good night. *
...................................................................
I can see the gray sun sliding softly though the kitchen window,
through the curtains, a gray, delicate sun hiding from the close
morning hours. The table is covered with that same orange-brown
cloth dotted with yellow daisies. The house is damp inside and
the cloth is wet from spilled coffee and cream.
It wasn't so long, not so very long ago that we'd talk, make
plans for vacations, for rides to the mountains and crystal
beaches. We were gay, important with strong wishes and fancy
schemes. And all the while we'd fool the whole world by sleeping
late and drinking coffee mixed with cinnamon.
But there were phantoms then too. They'd creep out of the rotted
woodwork and cracked, peeling enamel. I could see them. It was
always in the early mornings as I sat at this kitchen table
watching shadows dissolve and merge, rearranging themselves
against the draped dishrag and hanging pot holders. I see them
now.
Do you remember those mornings?
Wasn't it as if those early mornings were pressed tightly
against our chests, sealed somewhere behind our most fragile
flesh?
But the sun is hazy, almost crazy now.
Notice the difference?
Even death and damnation are phantoms, furtive branches knocking
hard against our bedroom window blowing the lace curtains to the
side, painting fairies and mysteries on the blank wall.
But like I said, I haven't had those dreams in such a long, very
long time; not since the crows started raging like tigers. Can
you imagine crows; those black alabaster crows in such a city as
this? Can you imagine other things too?
See the curtains, the ones I hung over the kitchen windows. You
laughed when they fell down.
You laughed all the time.
Did I tell who's here? It's as if there is a small, delicate,
very fragile child sitting on the outside windowsill gently
pushing both his tiny white hands against the yellow-cream
curtains; the curtains with the doily trim and rose-petaled
borders. He almost speaks, or rather whispers, about his aging.
He's saying to me and the loud smashing traffic that he's not a
child at all, but a very old--no, _ancient _man, a circus
oddity, a freak of Nature's whims and a victim of self-imposed
despair. He tells me he's an Egyptian hieroglyphic image with
webbed feet and snorting nostrils carved into eternity, almost
timeless, bottomless. Do you hear his heart beating inside his
hollow chest, rattling beside his seashell bones, shaking,
pounding desperately inside his small, frail self? Listen as he
whimpers against the irreligious morning.
Do you remember those oh so white mornings?
And you used to be so white, so clean from our early-morning
showers with the soap dish overflowing from the dripping faucet
with the leaking metal tubes; those chrome-covered snakes that
wound themselves out of the green porcelain tub. How they would
snidely slide and sneak up the pink tiled wall spouting steam
and heated holy water, water turning to venom, turning to haze
that dissolved itself into the glass drain flowing down to the
ocean and coming back again through the copper skins spewing
forth crystal seaweed and monsters.
And you used to be so white.
Our lives battered together beside the morning rains each
Saturday as we sat perched beneath the coffee-colored plastic
tea shade. That's when our memories were cast in pale-blue
consistency and marshmallow sailing ships. Oh, we were most
irreverent then, in our memories; back then when pushcarts sang
along Delancey Street as my steel-wool knickers knocked against
the nicks and cuts from yesterday's very unholy stickball game.
Oh, how we'd shout, "We shoulda won but didn't 'cause Michael
Maloney is a lousy first baseman and Augie Augustus can't hit
the broad side'a Sullivan Street."
When the Bowery played itself like a tuba and bass drum and
Mulberry Street filled the wet afternoon with Italian ices piled
thick like my mama's breasts; with vendors of all sorts selling
this and that; and there was always Mister Silverman's tiny
tailor shop where, if you got there early enough on Monday
mornings to be his first customer, me and my father could
bargain a suit or knickers down to a livable, most believable
price. But what was a buck and a quarter back then, anyway?
Fifty years ago when there were lions and tigers in the streets;
he-wolves and she-wolves marching through the sewers and hiding
behind trash cans and garden walls; when everyone smelled of
onions and roses; when grandmothers would breathe heavily into
our faces filling the air with freshly-cut peppers and staining
our souls with crushed garlic; when we'd laugh and sing.
And you were so white.
But now the coffee is cold, cold from sitting unattended. It's
black this morning as the sun's haze pushes, tugs aside the
billowing curtains painting itself against the kitchen walls and
smog-stained window panes.
And I am old now.
Desperate we were then; knocking ourselves against each other;
entrapped in constant contact; chest beating beside each other
until our brains fell out and our souls collided. Desperate, oh
so damn desperate we were about each other; so connected in our
frail lovemaking, in our childhood imaginations, our endless
procrastination about ourselves.
Yes, you use to be so white in the mornings.
But I am old now; missing you more than my youth, more than my
pale, frigid self pressed against my aching bones.
Oh, why did you go, your cancer taking you too, much too early
in our timelessness. It crept through your body tearing your
soul to shreds, my heart to pieces.
I am old now in time, in years, an old man that can no longer
live this life without you.
And I watched as you lay, years and years decaying before my
eyes, drifting away in front of my heart; your lungs rasping,
grasping for breath. And then they covered you yesterday and
took you away. And I am an old man now, have seen too much. For
50 years, we spun together, fastened together as no other king
and queen. And your going wasn't your fault, not really. Yet I
hate you, damn you for it as I now damn this cold, hard,
porcelain morning; and your cancer, your cheeks melting with age
and death; your frail, sweet flesh flying from your loins.
And I am an old man now anyway, and that in itself is a sin, a
desperate mistake. My head lies here on our kitchen table
banging itself against the soiled tablecloth, against the angels
that sang at your funeral, at your grave still warm, at your
moisture wet against my sighs, my promises, all those promises
never really kept, only wished for deep in the bottom of the
evening.
Will we pass in our deaths, you going your way, and me mine?
Fifty years a twosome, a gruesome together memory never
forgiving our separate ways.
And now I take myself up into the winter lightening, out into
the blazing fires of my constant damnation. Down, diving deep
inside the rotted graves and marble headstones I see your eyes
forever fled past my heartbeat, my life that will be no more.
Martin Zurla (pecado@netcom.com)
----------------------------------
Martin Zurla is the founder and Artistic Director of the Raft
Theatre in New York City. His play _Old Friends_ won the Forest
A. Roberts Playwrights Award; his play _February, The Present_
won the Stanley Drama Award. He has twice received the Theater
of Renewal Award, and twice won the Colorado University
Playwrights Competition. He recently published a series of
one-act plays titled _Aftermath: The Vietnam Experience_ (Open
Passages).
The Effort by Richard Cumyn
===============================
...................................................................
* Humanity may find that nearly anything can be recycled,
if it tries hard enough. However, hope must be made fresh
every time. *
...................................................................
The woman felt the meager heat draining up past her through the
hole cut in the ceiling of the corroded tank. She crouched as
she called, cocking her head to one side to see.
"Ian, I know you're up there with him! You get yourself down
here. Father, let the boy come down--he'll catch his death up in
that place with you."
The dirty soles of two bare feet appeared in the hole and the
boy dropped like a cat.
"It's not cold at all," he said. "I put a tarp over me and we
lit a real fire lamp. The air up there feels good inside me when
I breathe."
She did not reply, but took him by the hand and guided him out
of the chamber ahead of her through a crawl space. Doubled over,
they hurried down a short sloping tunnel that opened into a room
with floor and walls of gray concrete.
"You missed the scavenger pack again," she said as she drew a
curtain across the tunnel entrance. "Your group left without
you."
"He was telling me about the different smells. I could feel them
on my tongue, even."
"You hush now. They're going to seal off that silly hole of his
and put in nutrispores. He'll have to sleep down here again
where it's safe."
"Spores. I'm sick of spores." His grandfather had been telling
him about meat with names like _chicken_ and _beef_.
Grandfather's favorites were roast pork and bacon that sizzled
and spat on the fire. Fire was hot.
"He's filling your head with nonsense. You pick up your gear and
get along. They took Getty Passage to where the hot spring comes
up at Exxon Hub. They're working at the new site."
The boy ducked his head into a large cardboard box that was
lined up on its side with a dozen others. They were each
reinforced with wood frames and insulated with hair cuttings
rolled in newsprint. He pulled out an army-green canvas duffle
bag with a shoulder strap held by a thick metal clasp. The bag
was only slightly smaller than he was. His mother smoothed his
hair.
"Why can't I stay with him today?" he said halfheartedly.
"You may be sick of them, but spores is all we got left. You got
to get along now and do your bit for the Effort. Go find us a
mine."
Ian shouldered his bag and crossed the hard floor to a dry stone
cistern with a ladder lying across its mouth. A fragile light
emanated from within.
"Be careful," she said. "Stay where it's lit. There've been
sightings down that way recently."
He lowered the ladder, gave his mother an unsmiling marionette's
wave, and disappeared.
Recessed in the walls of the ancient storm sewer, pots of
phosphorescent nutrispores lit Ian's way. He stopped to pluck
three tendrils off one of the plants that grew in a thick bed of
lime-green moss. The tiny lights at their ends, weaker than
fireflies, diminished as he sucked the moisture from the
colorless tubes, then chewed them as he might straw, each
tendril in turn hanging from the corner of his mouth. He
pictured Huckleberry Finn drifting free on the Mississippi, his
straw hat shading his head from the sun like his grandfather had
told him.
"Now Jim," he said aloud, "I don't see that you being a
flesh-eating savage prevents us from traveling together on this
here raft. You just mind your manners."
He found his work group where a new dump had been unearthed near
the junction of three tunnels. He saw burly Sedge and bookish
Morrison, his best friends at school, and Mr. Dowser, the pack
leader, who had been his teacher two years before in the fifth
grade. Nine boys in all were spaced along a curving wall of
compacted refuse. The contents of plastic bags seeped from the
green, orange, and white skins. Newspaper stacks, rusted metal
cans, and flattened soft-drink bottles made synthetic strata.
"Helmet and mask, Ian, come on. The Effort is impoverished by
your tardiness," said Dowser, skeletal and translucent in short
sleeves and tartan kilt.
Ian knew the spiel by heart. The Effort depended on the labor of
every person to scavenge enough synthetic or petroleum-derived
plastics each day to keep the nutrispores alive. The spores had
been adapted from marine environments at the end of the '40s;
the hybrid nutrispore was found to live symbiotically with an
edible moss. Its bacteria decomposed complex polymers into a
fertile mulch for the moss, while its light triggered
photosynthesis. In return, the spores sucked sustenance from
decaying moss culture.
In the beginning, after fossil fuels were outlawed and before
reserves were exhausted, crude petroleum products were fed
directly to the nutrispores. Like birch bark on a campfire, the
spores had consumed these voraciously, giving off short-lived,
garish light and oxygen-rich breath. Plastic decomposed slower,
giving weaker light, thinner air and tasteless greens. But it
was all that was left.
Dowser strode to the end of the line, where a boy had just
thrown a handful of disposable diaper wadding onto his discard
pile. A fat rat scurried between the man's planted boots.
"American Express, you blind bat. Look!" He pushed the back of
the boy's head down until his green surgical mask touched the
corner of a credit card poking out of the shredded clot.
"Dowser's dick glows in the dark," Sedge whispered to Ian beside
him.
"He promised us tomorrow after school off if we bring in 70
kilos," said Morrison. "He said the girls' pack is bringing in
that much every day."
"Is that you talking, Morrison? You know it wastes oxygen," said
Mr. Dowser loud enough for all to hear. "Find your calm center,
boys, and concentrate. Slow, even breathing. Heart rate down to
50. Your culling and sorting must be controlled. Conserve, boys,
conserve."
"Waste not, want not," Sedge mocked under his breath.
Ian shivered as he picked out pieces of green garbage bag and
diaper lining and added them to his duffle bag. The smaller the
pieces, the better; bulky soft drink bottles would have to be
cut into mulch by hand.
As he culled, Sedge whispered conspiratorially about the various
transgressions he had committed that day. He had, for example,
urinated freely on a nutrispore bush, its glow brightening
briefly with the added fuel. Ian thought the blatant waste of
recyclable water was outrageous.
"Geraldine was picking at the other end of the tunnel. You
should've seen her face when she got an eyeful."
Ian's face reddened at the sound of her name.
"I told her you were still a _hunka-hunka burning love_ for
her," said Sedge. Morrison and another boy snickered at the
ancient expression, from Ian's grandfather's time. Ian pushed
the leering Sedge away from him and walked away from the
excavation.
"I have to down-respirate, Mr. Dowser," he said and rolled onto
a cot set up beside a portable water purifier.
"Ducking again, Ian?"
"No, sir, I was hyperventilating. You said--"
"I said to find your meditative center and concentrate on
holding it. You're avoiding work detail and you know it. If you
aren't devoted to the Effort..."
"But I am, sir. I am. Sometimes, I don't know, I lose touch."
"Would you rather fend for yourself at Surface where it's 60
below and nothing grows?"
"No."
"It's that grandfather of yours," Dowser continued. "He has
poisoned your sense of responsibility to the Effort. After all,
he was alive back then. The decadence of his generation is as
much to blame for this as anyone's. His people lost the sun."
"That's not true," said Ian angrily, sitting up. "My grandfather
was a Green. He fought in the Counterdoom Movement against the
Industrial Bloc. Just because he's old doesn't mean--"
"Quiet, boy. You've said enough. You're using my air."
Ian glared at the man for a moment, then stood up, looking past
him to the wall of centuries-old garbage. The other boys, their
gray faces shiny with perspiration, had turned to watch. In
their eyes, Ian saw defeat and the bloodless, phosphorous hatred
for Dowser, for the layers of trash that had once been warmed by
the sun, for the ever-expanding labyrinth that led nowhere.
"Now get back to work, slacker."
"Leave him alone," said Sedge. "He was only resting to conserve
oxygen."
"You shut your trap, you little weasel, or I'll have you both on
report for wasting air! Don't you realize how close we are to
extinction? Don't you know that _you_ are putting the whole
colony in jeopardy? You boys are the survivors. In your hands
lies the continuation of humanity. Think of it!"
Dowser paused to gauge the effect of his words on the group.
Their eyes on him were wary.
"Back to culling, lads. For the Effort."
"Why?" asked Morrison in a voice like shattering glass.
"Why? _Why?!_" Color rose in Dowser's face. "I don't have to
tell you why!"
"Why?" echoed Sedge who triggered a childish chant in the rest
of them. "Why? Why?"
"Be quiet!" cried Dowser.
The chant careened crazily in the low dirt passage. The boys
began to circle Dowser, raising their voices each time they
asked the question in unison, intensely pleased with themselves.
Suddenly Dowser grabbed Morrison by the hair and flung him into
the garbage wall where he fell stunned. The boys stopped and
were silent.
"Worthless lot! I should leave you all here for the cannib--"
Dowser dropped face-down as Sedge clubbed him at the base of the
skull with a length of metal pipe. Still as statues, the boys
watched his naked, blue-veined haunches twitch, exposed where
the tartan had ridden up around his waist, until a boy's scream
sent them scattering down the dark passages. Ian stopped when he
thought he had gone a safe distance--he looked behind him to see
Dowser and Morrison's bodies being dragged away into the
blackness.
Sedge ran up to him. "They're supper now. Come on!"
"People will ask questions," said Ian.
"We'll tell them the truth. We'll say the cannibals got them.
You know that bodies are never found."
"You killed him."
"It was him or us."
Sedge looked triumphant in the nutrispore light. The sound of
fleeing feet receded. At once Ian's mind was large and dark and
resonant with sadness. The answer filled him.
"We shouldn't have done it," he said. "There was no call for
it."
"You're going to snitch, aren't you?" said Sedge.
"No," said Ian, feeling the air grow thin.
"Just the same, how do I know I can trust you?"
"Just leave me alone," Ian said and he began to walk away,
feeling Sedge's eyes on him.
"We're all fresh meat, Ian! We're all just biding our time!" he
heard Sedge call after him. "It was him or us!"
The other boys knew also, but they wouldn't tell. And Ian
couldn't make Sedge believe he wouldn't tell. His stomach
clenched with the knowledge that he might not be able to stop
himself.
Ian called to his mother for the ladder and climbed back up
through the cistern. Seated at the communal table was a woman
dressed in a green jumpsuit.
"You're back early," said his mother. "This is my son, Ian."
"He let us go early," said Ian.
"Where is your duffle bag?" asked the officer.
"We're not finished at that site. We'll be back tomorrow."
"It should have been locked up. Every gram of plastic translates
into another 20 minutes of survival."
Ian turned to his mother. "Where's grandfather?"
"Where do you think?" she said, glancing upward. As her son
turned toward the septic tank passage, she added, "Did you bring
anything back?" The officer glanced at Ian's mother
suspiciously. "For the household spores. You won't find
contraband here, Miss. Ever since his father disappeared, Ian's
been the provider."
"I'm sorry. I forgot," said the boy. "May I go up?"
"This officer has come to inspect for heat seepage. I've told
her all about his idiotic hole. You get the old fool to come
down, Ian."
"You'll be held accountable for excessive loss, of course," said
the woman.
Ian left the women making arrangements for the hole to be
sealed. He scrambled along the tunnel to the tank and called up
for his grandfather. A rope ladder dropped down. As he pulled
himself into the igloo, the cold startled his lungs and he
ducked quickly under the pile of fabric and canvas surrounding
the old man. His hat, eyebrows, and beard were encrusted with
frost. The blocks of the round snow house were outlined in the
light.
"Full moon tonight, Ian."
His grandfather had told him about the natural satellite, but
whenever he had searched for it at night through the igloo's air
hole, the cloud cover had made it impossible to detect.
"How can you tell?"
"I can feel it, boy, in the blood."
"I want to live up here with you. I hate it down there. You
can't breathe."
"But I don't live here. This is just the place where I have
chosen to die."
"No," said the boy without passion, unimpressed by his denial.
Ian knew that the old man was feeble. "I'll die with you, then.
It's right. They're going to cover the hole."
"It can't be right, Ian. We don't put aside life before it is
time."
"But I'll never see the sun. I'll never swim in the blue-green
ocean at Lauderdale. My skin will never turn brown." He rolled
up his sleeve and slapped his forearm. The outline of his palm
remained pink on fish-belly white for a few seconds.
"Bundle yourself well and help me outside. I want to show you
something."
Ian put on the clothing that had been saved so carefully for so
long: fur-lined boots, seal skin pants, thick mittens, a long
hooded coat fringed in fur, and a leather mask that had a thin
slit for the eyes. He followed his grandfather at a crawl
through the narrow snow entrance. Outside in a silvery dusk he
helped the old man to stand. Ian squinted to adjust to the
brighter light and inhaled shallow, painful breaths through his
mask. Although his fingers and toes began to tingle with warning
of the intense cold, the open space all around him made him
giddy. He opened his arms wide and spun in place until he fell
backwards in the snow. His grandfather laughed along with him.
"This is not the end, Ian. Feel it. Feel the far-off pulse of
the earth. Its lungs and heart are not stopped forever."
Ian pressed his rabbit skin mittens palm-down on the crust. It
was true. It was there. He could feel the throb, so different
from the scurrying of human rats under the ground.
"We killed someone today, grandfather. I don't want to go back."
No answer came. "Grandfather?" he repeated.
The old man had dropped to a cross-legged sitting position
facing him. His eyes were closed.
"I can feel the sun, Ian," he whispered. "It's time."
Ian ran and embraced him, stretched out to cover his whole
length, frantic to revive him with his own body heat. He
struggled to his feet and began to haul his grandfather
backwards, mukluk heels dragging, toward the igloo. When he
slipped and fell, he opened the old man's mouth and blew warmed
air into his lungs. Exhausted after only a few minutes, he
stopped.
"I will stay with you," he vowed.
As he said this the cloud cover parted and the full icy light of
the moon flooded the ground. He held up his hand against it,
squinting. His body began to shake with cold. His feet and hands
were useless blocks. In the moonlight, his grandfather's face
was ghastly. Then, as quickly as the light had come, it was dark
again.
He heard his mother's voice, that tired, resigned whine honed to
an argumentative edge. She alternated between calling for him
and demanding something of someone near her. A flickering blue
light came from inside the igloo where Ian heard the clanging of
metal on metal. Through the shelter's hole he saw a shower of
red sparks. It must be serious, he thought, for them to use a
combustion torch like that. There was still time, then, if they
were using fire.
Slowly, with the light of the awful, enduring moon still filling
his head and the feeling draining from his extremities, Ian
crawled on hands and knees back toward the igloo.
Richard Cumyn (aa038@cfn.cs.dal.ca)
-------------------------------------
Richard Cumyn is the author of the short story collection
_The Limit of Delta Y Over Delta X_ (Goose Lane Editions, 1994).
He lives and writes in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Sea Change by Susan Stern
=============================
...................................................................
* "I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me."
--T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" *
...................................................................
They say around here that drowned men are stolen by water
spirits who take them to dwell in underwater castles forever.
They say manatees have the souls of mermaids. They say that a
woman's blood, dropped into water, summons selkie boys who beget
children on human women, leaving mother bereft and child of
neither earth nor sea. They say many things. Some of them are
true.
They say around here that once a year, on Midsummer Night's Eve,
selkies who are seals the rest of the time come up out of the
water and take the form of women. And they sit on the rocks,
combing their hair. And if you find one of their discarded seal
skins and take it home with you and hide it, then the selkie is
bound to you until she finds her skin. And she may even love you
a little, but she never stops looking for her skin. And she
always finds it. It may take her a hundred years, but she finds
it, and returns to the sea. Always.
Tonight I have a human body. Tonight I have human legs, human
hands. Tonight I will walk on my human feet to the place I lived
as a human, and I will leave a gift for my child. A gift from
the sea, for my child.
Words are a human thing. I never needed to call anything by a
word until I was human. When I saw my child, and they lay her on
my breast, I had a word. I called her beautiful. And perfect.
But the midwife said to my husband, _That child will never
belong to you. Look at her hands._ So we looked, and he saw that
they were strung, finger to finger, with webs so thin that the
light shone through. _Cut them_, he said.
_I want my child to be perfect_. So they cut them. I cried when
they cut the webs.
_Perfect_, he said. And she grows more perfectly beautiful every
day, in her human body. But I have swum along the margin of the
shore and listened to him walking and talking, and seen into the
child's mind, and her mind is as empty of thoughts as a seal's.
She rocks in the fireplace with her hands over her face, and she
cries to be let outside into the rain. She yearns for the water.
He won't let her near the sea. Because he's convinced himself
that I drowned. I watch him walking up and down the beach,
grieving, looking out over the water--for what, he does not
know. Yet he knows. Deep down, outside what he's willing to
remember, he knows.
These four years since I walked back into the sea, since I found
my skin and walked back into it, I have felt like a cord
stretched between that house and the sea, neither of sea nor
land anymore. My people don't hold on to their children, and
never was a selkie born who knew the meaning of the word _love_.
But my child is back there and I feel her all the time, until I
am stretched so thin I know I will break.
I should have hated my husband. He hid my skin and wouldn't tell
me where it was, because he didn't want me to go. So I was
trapped inside this human body, with my animal mind and my human
mind slowly coming together until I had no idea what I was
anymore.
He had a word. A human word. Love. And at first my mind was an
animal's mind, empty except for instinct, to eat, to sleep, to
_escape_, but he filled it slowly with this word, this love,
until the word took shape and became a soul.
We used to make love on the beach, out here in the summer. This
human thing, this making love--how can you make love if it isn't
there? How can you unmake it if it is?
Regret. Regret is a human thing. Never was a selkie born who
could regret, but I am no longer...
One day he walked into the beach house, and I was sitting with
my hands against the fireplace. Listening. I could almost hear
it calling me--my skin--until he walked in here with his big,
clumsy human feet. He took me in his arms and said,
_Why, my love? Why do you want to leave?_
I couldn't answer him; not then. But later there were three
stones missing from the fireplace, and I at the door with two
sealskins in my arms... I slapped him. He tried to take them
from me and I slapped him. And while he stood there, hardly able
to believe it, I snatched up the skins and ran. But I stopped at
the gate and I said a cruel thing to him. _I almost loved you,_
I told him. _I would have stayed, if only you'd have let me leave._
Four summers ago tonight I walked into the sea, and the child I
left him is five. Five, and she has no human words, no human
thoughts. They have a word.
They have given him a choice, and tomorrow he must make a
decision. You can't keep that child at home, they said. She's
barely human. And he walks up and down the beach, agonizing over
the decision he's already made, because he doesn't want her to
go. Because he knows, deep down, that she is no human thing.
That she has no words because she never had them. That her mind
is filled with the sound of the sea and the voices of seals, and
that her soul is tearing itself to pieces like the white waves
breaking on the black rocks. But I have seen that the webbing
has grown back on her hands. Her perfect hands.
Tonight, this midsummer night's eve, I will walk on my human
legs up to the house where I lived as a human, and I will leave
the gift that confirms his decision, what he knows he must do,
what I should have done.
The second skin.
Susan Stern
-------------
Susan Stern lives at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, where she
collaborates in the creation of CD-ROM products about animals.
She's sure she'll find the other sealskin one day soon.
Bad Sneakers by P.G. Hurh
=============================
...................................................................
* It's 11 o'clock. Do you know where your souls are? *
...................................................................
I look down at my new shoes while I absently finger the
transistor radio in the breast pocket of my army jacket. The
shoes are new, but they're cheap--red canvas with white rubber
soles. I push off my toes and bob up and down a couple of times.
I can hear the shoes squeak slightly on the wet pavement.
They're bad sneakers, but they're the best I've had in a long
time.
The rain's coming down in a light drizzle, pulling smog out of
the sky and sprinkling it on my back in little patters. It feels
good.
I look up Canal Street and see a few others like me shambling
toward the station. I sigh and start on my way again, still
fiddling with the radio. It won't do any good, I know. I sold
the battery--that's how I could afford these shoes. Twenty
dollars for a nine-volt battery. Seems like a lot to me.
The New Lifers gave me the radio this morning. I was sitting in
front of the Hancock, legs spread out in front of me with the
heating sun just beginning to make it uncomfortable. The rich
couple walked toward me, arms around each other. I would have
said they were strolling, but they also had a purpose in their
stride, like they had someplace to go but were in no hurry to
get there. The woman was gazing around as they walked, looking
at the tops of buildings, window awnings, deserted storefronts,
even out toward the lake. She was taking it all in.
Her partner was smiling too, but instead of looking around at
the city, he was watching her face. It was like they were out
for a walk in the park, instead of slogging along through
deserted city streets on a hot Sunday. Both of them were dressed
all in white, the man sweating in a crisp suit with turned up
collar and the woman floating in a gauze-like dress.
I remember the way the man flipped the antique plastic radio
over in his hand. He looked at it with fondness and tossed it
back into the air. It turned over slowly and smacked back into
his hand. They were close enough for me to hear what the man
said then. He said, "I don't think they'll ever reproduce that
feeling in the AbovePlane."
"What feeling is that?" his companion asked.
"That feeling I get when I flip Uncle John's radio in the air,
watch it turn over and then snap back into my hand." He flipped
the radio again, emphasizing the snap. "You just can't reproduce
that."
"Have faith, dear. The Lord works in mysterious ways."
I thought that they hadn't even noticed me laying there even
though they had to step out of their way to avoid me. That's the
way it is with New Lifers. I've seen them before, headed towards
the new pier out on Lake Michigan, the AbovePlane Odeon.
Especially about a week ago--they came in droves. All wearing
their white outfits and strolling along looking out above
everything and everyone. They were determined, it seemed, to
only see the pleasant things in life. They looked right over us
street folk.
I was wrong about this couple, though. As they passed me, the
man turned around and looked down. "Here," he said, offering the
small brown radio. "I won't be needing this where we're going."
He waved it around a little in front of my face and finally
dropped it onto my lap. It bounced off my leg and clattered to
the sidewalk. I stared up at the white-suited figure, and he
spoke again. "Guess _you've_ already given up all your material
possessions."
He turned and quickly trotted to catch up with the woman.
I snorted, trying to find humor in his condescension. "Hey!" I
yelled after them. But they disappeared around the corner, and I
laughed to myself.
It started to rain then.
I'm walking along the side of the old North Western train
station now, my bad sneakers squeaking me forward. I picture the
image of the front doors even before I turn the corner. In my
mind they're as they used to be: panes of flat glass and flashy
windows, two sets of revolving doors on either side.
My feet stutter to a halt when I see the piles of junk jammed in
the doors. Cardboard and cold plastic sheets have turned them
into a pair of grimy hutches, homes for the homeless. But the
homes are empty, builders and occupants perhaps the promise of a
better place, as I am.
I pass on by the mess and push through one of the flat glass
doors. Cool air hits my wet clothes and a chill runs through me.
I shiver like a wet dog and let go of the door handle. Ahead of
me are two escalators. It is impossible to tell which is going
up and which is headed down, since neither is moving. Several
people, wet and tattered like me, climb the steep corrugated
stairs. Some are clutching possessions close to their bodies,
others empty-handed.
As I watch, an older woman with a green scarf pulled about her
head stumbles. The man behind her hesitates for a moment and
sets his wrinkled brown paper bag on the escalator handrail. He
steadies the woman with his arms. They both begin to move up
together.
The bag slides down the handrail for a couple of feet and then
falls off the edge. When it hits the floor, the helping man
doesn't even look behind him.
Around the base of the escalators are gathered various junk
vehicles. Shopping carts, small wagons, and even a gardening
wheelbarrow clutter the floor. I pick a route around these and
start up the unmoving stairs. As I climb, I look over the
handrail to see how far the paper bag had dropped. Pretty far.
My hand goes for the radio in my pocket. I look at it and give
it a flip. Without the battery, it doesn't quite have the same
snap. I place it on the handrail, expecting it to slide but it
doesn't. I almost leave it behind, but then, on second thought,
I slip it back into my pocket. Maybe it will be of some use in
the suburbs. I give the silent dial a turn and wonder if I
really should have sold the battery at Jack's.
The owner of the pawn shop was an acquaintance of mine--he had
given me a good price for my wedding ring. But when I entered
the shop this morning, radio in hand, he just glared at me and
walked quickly behind his fenced in counter.
"Hey, Jack!" I grinned.
"What is it, Charlie?" he growled as he stretched to jam some
package he was carrying to a higher shelf.
"Got an antique radio for you, if you want it."
Jack turned and peered out through the chain-link. "What? That?"
he exclaimed roughly. "That ain't worth nothin'. Ain't nothin'
worth nothin' anymore."
"Jack, man. This thing must be 40 years old, and listen." I
switched on the unit. "It still works!" The radio put out a weak
fizzle of static and then latched onto a transmitting frequency.
The excited words of an evangelist jockey backed by the
vibrating notes of a pipe organ sprang forth, loud in the dusty
shop.
"...believe it. The one true Word of our Lord. Give up your
earthly possessions, let go of your devilish greed and jealousy!
Come join the AbovePlane, the New Lifers! All are equal in the
eyes of God..."
I flicked the radio off. Jack had turned his back on me and
returned to his inventory. "Not even a couple of bucks, Jack?"
"Nope, not for that--" Jack hesitated, and then he turned around
slowly. "Hey," he said. "That thing got a battery?"
I turned the radio over in my hand. "Course it does. I told you
it was ancient, didn't I?" I snapped open the battery
compartment and pulled out the small nine-volt rechargeable. I
let the battery dangle by its leads so Jack could take a look.
"How much you want for it?"
"Twenty bucks."
"You got it." He slid a 20-dollar bill under the security fence.
"You don't even want the radio?"
"Nope, just this." Jack waved the battery at me and then turned
to store it away in a drawer behind him.
"Why, Jack?"
"Don't know. Just a hunch I got, Charlie."
Maybe I should have held out for more. But then, I didn't have
the slightest clue that he'd even want that lousy battery. It's
always been like that all my life. I'm not a stupid guy. I just
can't make people out. I can't figure out what makes them do
what they do. Generally, I just follow along and do what
everyone else is doing. I figure they must have a pretty good
reason.
Not Jack, though. He always did his own thing. Maybe that's why
he still runs his shop here, in the middle of an empty city.
I turned to leave, but a thought struck me and I walked back to
the counter. "Hey, Jack? You ever think about this AbovePlane
stuff?"
"What, Charlie?" Jack let out a sigh and stuck his pen behind
his ear. "What now?"
"You know. All this New Lifer stuff... do you buy it?"
"Fuck, Charlie. That's just a bunch of bullshit to get us to
migrate out of the city." Jack leaned back and slid a skinny leg
over the seat of a high stool. "Way I see it, Charlie, all that
talk about leaving your possessions behind? It don't make any
sense. In that AbovePlane place, they're supposed to reproduce
the world in its entirety, only 'lectronically. You don't really
even have a body, I guess. Seems to me, Charlie, any world,
'lectronic or not, is going to have possessions of some kind.
There'll still be the rich and the poor, the know-alls and
know-nots, the pretty and the ugly. Thing is, son, human is
human."
I thought about what he said for a moment, but before I could
reply he lifted his leg off the stool and made like he was going
to walk into the darkness of his back office. He hesitated
though and half turned to me.
"My wife joined the New Lifers," Jack said without emotion. "She
went in on the first Wave. Haven't heard from her since. Maybe
she's in some kind of automatic heaven, maybe not. All I know is
that all that talk about whole suburbs joining up and leaving
their homes has got to be hogwash. Some political media shit
just to push all of us out to some government project or
something..." Jack turned to face me completely. "You heading
out to the 'burbs too, Charlie?"
He must have read the hesitation on my face because, without me
even saying anything, he screwed up his face and said, "Can't
you see the hole they're digging just for you?"
When I didn't reply, he just turned back around and disappeared
into his dingy office. I wanted to ask him who _they_ were, but
I didn't want to upset him further. I quickly shoved the twenty
in one of my pockets and headed for the front door. _That Jack_,
I thought. _He sure does his own thing._
There's only two trains in the entire station. From far away,
they look like toys. But as I near, they fill my vision and I
can't see more than one car without turning my head. The train
doors are wide open and warm yellow light spills out of each
one. In several doorways I can see dark human figures.
I hurry to the nearest train door and step up. Inside, I press
past two people and climb up the stairs. I find an empty seat
and then look down at the people on the lower level.
For the most part, they're like me. Clothes layered on, stain
over stain. Skin patchy with dust. Faces somber, yet proud. But
as I look closer, I also see the differences. The woman with a
nervous tic at the corner of her eye. A young man in sandals
reading a thick and torn book. Two children in a shoving match
for the window seat. Me in an orange stocking knit cap and a
green army jacket fiddling with a defunct transistor radio.
As I scan the passengers, I catch the eye of another rider. His
eyes seem to light up as he recognizes me. It's Eddie from over
by the stadium. He nods his head towards me and a clump of
greasy black hair shifts, revealing a widening bald spot. He
smooths it over and grins up at me. Then he turns to the window
as the train shudders and starts to move.
I spent a whole night under the northeast ramp of the Loop with
Eddie once. It had been raining and neither of us wanted to get
wet, plus we had a bottle of Tickle Pink. We spent the night
getting drunk and as we got drunk, we talked about what it was
like. It was Eddie's idea that as you got drunk, you went into
your own little world just a little bit different than everyone
else's. That way you saw the same things except differently than
you did when you were sober. He called this creating your own
reality. He also said that when you got drunk with another
person you both could talk yourselves into the same little
reality. Eddie seemed really sure of this and it seemed to make
sense to me, so I told him to go ahead and create our own little
reality just for us, just for that night... and he said he
already had.
_The train is going straight through to the end_, I think to
myself after about 15 minutes. Train stations rush right by and
the train never slows.
_Shouldn't take much longer to get to the end of the line._
_Probably only another 15 minutes or so._
I feel like I should be nervous, not knowing what's waiting
for me once we get there. But I'm not. I look around at the
other passengers and they seem to give me strength.
_We're all in this rushing metal cylinder together_, their faces
seem to say. Even Tourettes Tommy over in the balcony seat
across from me has silenced his ravings for this ride, his lips
just barely moving.
The train slows after a time and I get up from my seat and move
toward the exit with the others. Someone shoves me from behind
just as the train groans to a stop and my nose pushes up into
the sweaty neck of a large woman in front of me. I turn to yell
at the person who shoved me, but when I see it's just a kid I
smile and move forward with the others.
By the time I'm off the train most of the passengers have
scattered from the Geneva station and are wandering toward the
dusky outlines of frame houses and trees. The air blows clear
and cool on me and I find that my jacket has dried during the
trip. I step out off the concrete platform and walk briskly to
the glow of a corner street light. Others pass me, looking at
the large houses that line the wide avenue. Trees hang their
branches low over us and rustle in the wind.
I see Eddie on the porch of an old, majestic house. He knocks
tentatively and, when no one answers, opens the door and
disappears inside. The glow of an electric lamp flickers on from
inside and shines out onto the porch. I look away and head
further up the avenue. Others are approaching the silent homes,
some in groups of four or five. The light rattle of knuckles on
wood joins the surrounding chorus of crickets as they knock and
enter. No one is here to protest this mass immigration.
I walk away from the others and eventually turn down a few side
streets until I'm walking in a more middle-class neighborhood.
Small, older houses line both sides of the street and just
beyond the houses on my right is a wide river with trees along
its bank. I can hear it gurgle up against its banks softly.
A few of the houses are occupied, or at least I think they are.
Some of the windows are lit up and I can even hear a few voices
floating from off the front porches. The voices sound content.
I stop walking and look around me. The house on my right seems
empty, lawn grass long with river weeds sticking up even higher.
Its windows are dark and small. I can barely see them in the
evening's dim light. It seems like a nice place. Perhaps a
little damp so near the river.
I walk up to the front door and knock. It seems I can tell from
the hollow echo that no one is home. I enter, my hand searching
for a light switch on the immediate right. I find one and flip
it up. The room lights up with a yellow glow from the hanging
light in the small foyer.
I step through the foyer and find a small living room with brown
furniture. Covering half of the near wall is a telescreen. Over
it are two interlocked silver crosses and a small engraved sign
reading "We can only become one on the AbovePlane." And
underneath the screen, "Ascension to the New Life is only
assured by the Departure of the Old Life."
I quickly check through the other rooms, finding some signs of
stale life in each one--a smear of bluish toothpaste on a white
towel, a black, shiny slipper peaking out from under the bed. In
each room hangs the interlocked crosses and a small blank
telescreen.
The refrigerator has a few items in it, including three bottles
of expensive-looking beer. I pick one out, grab the magnetized
bottle opener from the front of the fridge, and walk back out to
the living room.
The remote control is a complex arrangement of colored buttons.
Someone has painted silver interlocking crosses on its back. I
pick a large red button on the front and the wide telescreen
across from me blares to life. I sit down on the couch and open
the beer.
The screen displays a pair of gargantuan locked crosses. They
rotate slowly in three dimensions. Under the symbol is a rapidly
increasing nine digit number followed by the words "Souls Saved
By The New Life." I take a sip of my beer and watch the number
click over to the one billion soul mark. When it does, the
screen glows white for an instant and an ominously deep and
mechanical voice speaks from the screen.
"Maximum capacity of the AbovePlane World Odeon reached."
The screen then blinks a series of words at me. They illuminate
the room with a strobing glow:
Admittance Now Restricted
To Authorized Souls Only
Only
_Only_
Suddenly the telescreen flicks to a field of static snow. The
screen's pixels flutter through a random pattern of grays and
whites. I think I see a face imaged there. Maybe my wife's...
maybe my own.
Then, abruptly, the power fails. The screen darkens and the
lights go out. I hear the refrigerator in the kitchen wind down
to a clicking halt.
I take another sip of beer and put my feet up on the end of the
couch. I look at my pair of bad sneakers in the afterimage glow
of the telescreen and pull the transistor radio out from my
pocket. I remember the man dressed in white that gave it to me
and wonder if this is his house... if this is his old life. I
smile and thumb the volume dial back and forth. I wonder if they
finally got rid of us or if we got rid of them.
I flip the radio up into the air and feel it smack back into my
hand. I close my fingers over it in the darkness and swallow a
mouthful of warming beer. Through an open window I can hear the
raised voices of my new neighborhood as people gather outside in
the street. Some sound scared, others are just angry at the
power loss. Someone suggests building a bonfire. I smile again
and get up to join them. As I walk out onto the porch, I hear a
woman's voice ask if anyone's got a radio. I raise my little
brown transistor up in one hand and come off the porch, bad
sneakers squeaking loudly. No one seems to notice me, so I cough
noisily. Bodies turn to look at me, faces bright in the
moonlight. Somebody shines a flashlight on my face. I smile at
them and ask if anyone's got a battery.
P.G. Hurh (hurh@admail.fnal.gov)
----------------------------------
P.G. Hurh is a mechanical design engineer at Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. In his spare time,
he likes to sample good beer, play his bass guitar, ride his
bike, and design instrumentation and beam-feedback devices for
high-energy particle accelerators.
Need to Know: Fight Fan Mail With E-Mail
==========================================
In a world where the line between creator and consumer has
always been clear, especially when it comes to such items as
newspapers, magazines, books, and television shows, perhaps the
way that electronic publications like InterText handle feedback
is different. In this magazine you'll find the electronic mail
addresses of most of our editors and contributors. Readers feel
free to comment on every aspect of the magazine, and of course,
this issue's readers will often become _next_ issue's
contributors.
In traditional media, however, the only real means of feedback
has been traditional postal mail or the occasional irate
telephone call. But as creators become more on-line savvy,
they're beginning to actively discuss their creations with their
audience electronically.
Perhaps the best example of this new dialogue is J. Michael
Straczynski, the executive producer and creator of the
syndicated science fiction drama _Babylon 5_. A veteran of
on-line services and BBSes, Straczynski relates to fans of his
show in GEnie's Science Fiction & Fantasy Roundtable #2,
CompuServe's Science Fiction & Fantasy Forum, and USENET's
rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5. While many of the responses Straczynski
gives are simple "thank yous" to electronic fan letters, he also
tries to explain alleged plot holes and give hints on where his
series' overarching story might be leading.
While tantalizing information on the future of a TV series might
be reason enough for fans to log on, what Straczynski gets out
of his interaction with fans (including wading through hundreds
of messages every day) is less tangible. But he says his on-line
fans help keep him honest.
"The best thing about the net is that it forces you to ask
questions," he wrote on USENET. "The job of the writer is to
come up with every possible question about your character and
your world, and answer it, giving both greater verisimilitude.
Nobody can come up with _every_ conceivable question, but on the
nets, you get questions you never _dreamed_ of. Which helps."
Straczynski may be the best example of a creator appearing
regularly on-line to exchange information with his audience
(though one-time-only live chats on commercial on-line services
are becoming a chic phenomenon), but he's hardly the only one
out there. While musician Richard Thompson isn't a reader of the
Internet mailing list devoted to him ("They're worse than
critics," Thompson said of the list. "They're _amateur_
critics."), musician Suzanne Vega _is_ a subscriber to her own
discussion list. Bob Mould, leader of the rock band Sugar,
e-mails messages to his fans on an irregular basis from an
e-mail address listed prominently in the liner notes of Sugar's
latest album. Mould's an on-line veteran, too--when asked about
rumors that Husker Du, his previous band, had broken up because
of a failed relationship between him and drummer Grant Hart,
Mould's response was that the rumor was so bizarre he "hadn't
even heard that one on the Internet before."
Bizarre rumors and strange characters are, of course, part of
the trouble with going public on-line. Straczynski has had
several run-ins with on-line antagonists; some creators solve
that problem by "lurking"--listening to the talk without making
their appearance known.
But for those who can stand the heat--and that number seems to
be growing every day--the in-depth discussions with consumers of
their art can be valuable for the creators, too.
--Jason Snell
FYI
=====
...................................................................
InterText's next issue will be released January 15, 1995.
...................................................................
Back Issues of InterText
--------------------------
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> ftp://ftp.etext.org/pub/Zines/InterText/
and
> ftp://network.ucsd.edu/intertext/
You may request back issues from us directly, but we must handle
such requests manually, a time-consuming process.
On the World-Wide Web, point your WWW browser to:
> http://www.etext.org/Zines/InterText/
If you have CompuServe, you can read InterText in the Electronic
Frontier Foundation Forum, accessible by typing GO EFFSIG. We're
located in the "Zines from the Net" section of the EFFSIG forum.
On GEnie, we're located in the file area of SFRT3, the Science
Fiction and Fantasy Roundtable.
On America Online, issues are available in Keyword: PDA, in
Palmtop Paperbacks/Electronic Articles & Newsletters, or via
Internet FTP (see above) at keyword FTP.
Gopher Users: find our issues at
> gopher.etext.org in /pub/Zines/InterText
Submissions to InterText
--------------------------
InterText's stories are made up _entirely_ of electronic
submissions. If you would like to submit a story, send e-mail to
intertext@etext.org and request a copy of our writers
guidelines.
....................................................................
No, the man with the overbite and Neolithic tattoo is _not_ our
employee.
..
This issue is wrapped as a setext. For more information send
email with the single word "setext" (no quotes) in the Subject:
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