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InterText Vol 04 No 02
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InterText Vol. 4, No. 2 / March-April 1994
============================================
Contents
Departments
FirstText: The Information Explosion...............Jason Snell
SecondText: Life in the Fast Lane.................Geoff Duncan
Need to Know.......................................Jason Snell
Short Fiction
Motherless Child_..................................Eric Skjei_
Jeannie Might Know_................................Levi Asher_
Up In Smoke_.......................................John Sloan_
Reality Error_................................G.L. Eikenberry_
Still Life_.....................................Adam C. Engst_
...................................................................
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. 2. 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 and
the entire text of the issue remains intact. Copyright 1994,
authors. All further rights to stories belong to the authors.
InterText is produced using Aldus PageMaker 5.0, Microsoft Word
5.1, Alpha 5.65 and Adobe Illustrator 5.0 software on Apple
Macintosh computers. For back issue information, see our back
page. InterText is free, but if you enjoy reading it feel free
to make a $5 donation to help with the costs that go into
producing InterText. Send checks, payable to Jason Snell, to:
21645 Parrotts Ferry Road, Sonora, CA, USA, 95370.
...................................................................
FirstText: The Information Explosion by Jason Snell
========================================================
By just about any standard, three years isn't a long time.
But as we reach _InterText's_ third anniversary, I can say that
a lot has changed in the on-line world in that time. The
Internet, for example, was incredibly huge and growing
exponentially when _InterText_ first appeared in March of 1991.
But it's only really been in the last few months that the
Internet has become a "hot subject" in the American news media.
_NBC Nightly News_ did a series on the Internet, and included an
Internet e-mail address at the end of every broadcast. _Wired_
magazine, an Internet-hip technology and lifestyle magazine out
of San Francisco, is now one of the hottest magazines in
existence. A million books have been written on the Internet,
and no doubt a million more will come out by the end of 1994.
Now when we began _InterText_ three years ago, there were only a
_handful_ of regular electronic publications out there. David
"Orny" Liscomb's _FSFnet_ had led the way, and _DargonZine_
picked up where it left off. Jim McCabe's _Athene_ appeared, as
did Daniel Appelquist's _Quanta_. Adam Engst, one of the
contributors to this issue, began his Macintosh newsletter
_TidBITS_.
After Jim McCabe decided that he couldn't continue doing
_Athene_, I began planning _InterText_. Geoff Duncan also came
on board, and away we went. From the start we set out to
supplement the entertainment we provide with some useful
information for our on-line readership. That information came in
the form of our "page of ads," a listing of other on-line
publications that we thought our readers might find interesting.
In three years, a lot has changed. There are dozens of
electronic resources out there, ranging from the mainstream to
the very, very eclectic. Though for a while we tried to keep on
top of things, there's just no way to publish a complete listing
of on-line publications in _InterText_ anymore, if there ever
really was.
However, a complete list of such publications does exist,
compiled by John Labovitz (johnl@netcom.com) and available on
the Internet via FTP and on the World Wide Web. Rather than
produce a list that's inferior to John's, and inferior to the
listings in those many Internet books I mentioned, we've decided
to stop publishing our list altogether.
Rather than shirk from that commitment we made with the first
issue, the commitment to point our readers toward interesting
resources on the Internet, we've decided to fulfill that
commitment in a different way. Beginning with this issue, our
"page of ads" has been replaced by _Need to Know,_ a regular
column featuring an interesting on-line information source, or a
person doing something different in the on-line world.
In the future, the _Need to Know_ profiles will probably be
written by people other than the _InterText_ editorial staff,
but if you've found an interesting resource or person and think
we should know about it, please send mail to intertext@etext.org
with information about it. And as always, we'd love to receive
your comments and criticisms of _InterText._ You can send those
messages to the above address, as well.
While I'm on the subject of the explosion of on-line resources,
I should mention that there is now another electronic
publication in much the same "business" as _InterText_. It's a
journal named _Whirlwind_, edited by Sung J. Woo
(sw17@cornell.edu), whose "Bleeding Hearts" appeared in
_InterText_ last issue. _Whirlwind_ features contemporary
fiction, poetry and essays, and publishes in both PostScript and
ASCII formats. Those on the Internet can check out _Whirlwind_
by looking at ftp.etext.org in /pub/Zines/Whirlwind.
Yes, the on-line world sure is growing at a rapid pace, and the
next few years will probably bring us even more change than the
last few did. (For more on that, see Geoff Duncan's column in
this issue.) But we at _InterText_ are committed to be in the
game for the long haul. Next year, we all intend to be back here
again, waxing philosophic on the changes our fourth year of
publication has brought.
Before I conclude, I'd like to mention a few changes that have
happened to _InterText_ in the past few months. First, readers
of our ASCII version have no doubt noticed that we changed our
ASCII edition's format as of last issue. The new format is known
as setext. Setext allows the formatting of documents even though
they're in standard ASCII text. With a setext-compatible program
(such as Easy View, currently available for the Macintosh), our
plain text issues turn out formatted with headers and italics.
In addition, users of setext browsers will find it much easier
to navigate through issues of _InterText_.
With this issue, we also welcome onboard Susan Grossman as an
assistant editor. She'll be helping Geoff and me with the
evaluation and editing of _InterText_ stories. Not only will her
help keep both of us relatively sane, but her talents will no
doubt increase the readability of the magazine.
SecondText: Life in the Fast Lane by Geoff Duncan
======================================================
Welcome to the eighteenth issue of _InterText_! With this issue,
we enter our fourth year of publication, and--to our shock and
amazement-- _InterText_ continues to grow beyond expectations,
not only in terms of the number of subscribers and the range of
our distribution, but also in terms of the quality of the
magazine. We're quite proud of what we've been able to
accomplish so far and would like to thank everyone--the readers,
writers, and everyone involved--for making it possible. Without
your interest and generosity, something like _InterText_ could
never have succeeded, and we deeply appreciate your commitment
and support.
Readers of this sporadic column may note that it is often used
as a soapbox to espouse this writer's obtuse views on electronic
publishing. Responses to these columns have been intriguing.
Sometimes personalities from the early days of network
publishing--only about ten years ago--send a note out of the
ether to agree, disagree, or corroborate certain points. At
those times, I feel like an uncouth upstart talking back to my
elders. Sometimes I receive letters enthusiastically agreeing
with me, which does wonderful things for my ego. And of course,
sometimes I receive letters emphatically _disagreeing_ with
possibly every word I have written, which--while not as
gratifying as praise--causes me to rethink, reconsider, and
often revise my positions and opinions.
Overall, one thing strikes me about this correspondence: almost
without exception, it has been civil, considered, and
worthwhile. While the opinions and feelings expressed may be
strong and deeply personal, the process has been one of
_communication_ rather than the expression immutable dogma: a
surprising fact considering the diversity--geographic,
ideological, and cultural--between myself and many of these
respondents. Pretty amazing what technology can do.
Which brings me to today's topic: since we last spoke, something
terrible has happened.
I refer to the _information superhighway_. It snuck up on us.
There we were, innocent netters, minding our own business then
suddenly we were being viewed as part of an information culture
we didn't know existed. Now, on the front pages of newspapers,
in magazine articles, in television commercials and on the
evening news, we are being described as the current
info-literati--the elite group of technically-hip, wired and
inexplicably arcane individuals who represent the pimogenitors
of the future _uberculture_ of "digital convergence." Sure,
networks might be cryptic now, they say, but soon computers,
televisions, and telephones will merge into new species of
"information appliances." Imagine high bandwidth connections to
every home, every office, and--through a wireless,
satellite-linked cellular network--every vehicle and coat pocket
in the world. Imagine video phones, video conferencing, access
to limitless on-line information, voice recognition, on-line
medical records, wireless financial transactions, and other high
bandwidth, information applications _ad infinitum_. "Have you
ever tucked your child in from a phone?" asks one AT&T
television commercial. "You will." That is the future, they say,
and it's only a few years away.
I imagine some folks are quite excited about this. But I'm not.
Here's why.
Pause for a moment and think about _who_ is going to be provide
these services and applications for the information highway and
_why_ they're going to do it. The _who_ are today's media and
technology conglomerates: entertainment and publishing empires
such as Paramount, Columbia, Time-Warner and Fox; technology
companies such as AT&T, IBM, Apple and Microsoft; and service
providers like Viacom, Sprint, and (again) AT&T. The _why_ is
universal: money. The "digital convergence" allows these
companies a shot at all the money currently being spent on movie
rentals, cable television, telephone service, directory
information and all on-line services--and each of these
companies wants a cut of your monthly service charge, plus
additional per-hour costs for "premium" services. And they have
reason to believe even more people will use the information
highway than use these services today. They're probably right,
and that raises the financial stakes even higher.
They say the video store will be dead in 1998, and I tend to
believe that. I also believe telephone books, newspapers,
magazines, mail-order catalogs, reference works, the postal
system, ATMs and advertising will not survive until the year
2000 in their current forms. You won't have to go to an ATM to
conduct transactions with your bank, you won't have to use a
library or a reference book to look up information. Similarly,
you won't have to consult a thick, unwieldy newsprint tome to
get a phone number, or do much shopping since you can order and
pay for most things over your television. You won't have to rely
on physically acquiring a newspaper or magazine to keep up on
news, and you won't have to buy tickets to concerts or sporting
events, but can attend them on-line in full stereo and living
color. It will be simple, convenient, easy to use, and it will
all come to you over the infobahn. These companies want you to
believe this is the greatest thing since squeezable ketchup, and
there's no denying the idea is simple and powerful: _anything
you might desire comes to you through the wire._
But think for a second: there's nothing _new_ about any of these
applications. We've been shopping, we've used phone books, we've
dialed long distance, we've been to the bank, we've purchased
concert tickets and we've rented movies. That's the point: these
are all activities consumers are comfortable with! They're part
of our lives now, and the companies lining up to bring you the
info-highway understand that. They want to give you things you
already know how to do, and they want to charge you for it all
over again--in a sense, they're re-inventing the wheel. Why? So
they can charge you for roads (cable, connectivity and the
highway itself), new tires (upgrades), driver's licenses
(training on using your info-appliances), fees (a myriad of
small charges for that together add up a _lot_ of money), and,
of course, taxes (the information highway is not an unalienable
right, after all, and government _will_ want a piece of the
action). And you think commercials are thick on radio and
television now? Just wait. The information highway will open up
whole new ways to inundate you with advertising.
I'm among the many people who think that a highway is a poor
metaphor for the impending digital service networks, so I'm not
going stretch it much further. (After all, my oldest, slowest
computer is presently directly connected to the Internet: I
affectionately refer to it as my "speed bump" on the infobahn.)
But the basic point is that these new digital services aren't
going to provide much that we can't do already: they're simply
going to provide it in a new, slicker, somewhat faster and (at
least for the first few years) more costly manner. It's not that
there's anything precisely _wrong_ with these sorts of
commercial applications--they will without a doubt be very
successful and popular, thus being "good" for consumers and
businesses alike. Without getting into the multitude of privacy
and access issues raised by the info-highway, let me make it
clear I do not oppose the idea of high-speed access to a myriad
of services, as much as I may detest particular applications
that are likely to dominate such services. I think most of us
would like reliable, high-speed access to the Internet. Who
wouldn't?
Instead, let me return to the thoughts that began this column.
Simply put, the information highway we have now--a two lane
road, if you will, often confusing, cryptic and complicated--is
primarily a tool for _communication_. The information
superhighway--with all the glittery, attractive, futuristic
services to come with it--will be primarily a tool for
_consuming_. Instead of promoting active interaction between
individuals and groups using the networks, it will instead
devote much of its resources to corporate and business concerns
and one-way communication from provider to end-user. It's the
next generation of television, and no doubt one day there will
be studies showing how many hours the typical person spends each
day on the information highway. But, like television, it looks
like we'll be encouraged to spend most of that time in passive
receivership.
So keep those cards and letters coming, folks! Show the
engineers and schemers now out there building the onramps,
offramps, and twisted exchanges of the info-bahn that you want
more than _Gilligan's Island_ on demand 24 hours a day.
_InterText_ will do everything it can to make sure the
information highway isn't just a one-way street, but it's really
up to those of us out here now, in the digital frontier, to make
sure that what's special about the Internet now isn't lost in
the shuffle.
Motherless Child by Eric Skjei
===================================
..................................................................
* When things are tough, we're supposed to persevere--it
builds character. But there comes a point when it's best to
cut your losses. *
..................................................................
The Phone
---------
He stirs. That noise again. That ringing sound. The phone, of
course. He sits up; images continue to haunt him. It is not the
first time he has had that dream, and it will not be the last,
he knows. Not by a long shot. Over the years, it will come back
with new and dreadful variations. Never the same, yet always the
same.
The damned phone again. His machine clicks on. He hears his
voice announce that he isn't able to come to the phone right
now. He sounds slightly distracted.
It is a call from his wife. She's at the hospital. Her mother,
she says, her voice as strangely calm as his own, has decided to
stop fighting and accept that she's dying.
He looks up. Outside, a hawk appears, dropping out of the sky to
perch on a light pole at the edge of the freshly mown field next
door.
"Do you want to see her?" his wife asks, sounding like she
doesn't much care one way or the other.
_Yes_, he thinks, _I want to see her_. But he doesn't move. The
hawk lifts off from the light pole. _I want to see her and I
want to tell her that I know how sentimental people get at times
like these. But I don't care and I want to tell her how much I
admire her courage. How much she means to me._
The hawk pauses in midair, wings beating, then strikes, swooping
down to dance a deliberate, deadly step among the shorn grass
and stubble, wings raised, arcing high. Then with slow, easy
beats, it takes flight again, flapping heavily back to the same
pole, its prey, a long greenish snake, wriggling in its grasp.
_I want to tell her she'll live forever in my heart. Tell her
I'll never forget her. Tell her I'll always love her, always
miss her. Tell her all the things I didn't tell her when I had
the chance._
He will have memories of her, he knows. Will be seized, while
doing ordinary things, with sudden grief at her absence. While
walking along the beach, hiking through the hills. Will have
stabbing memories, sharp enough to stop him in his tracks,
staring blindly at the earth beneath his feet, remembering her.
Then looking up into the infinite blue like a child, he will
picture her overhead, in some Sunday school version of heaven,
looking down, watching him, watching over him.
In the sunny room, the phone rings again. He listens to his
voice declaiming its unchanging message. There is a loud click,
a clatter, then the dial tone, followed by the whir of the tape
rewinding itself. Someone decided not to leave a message, to
comply with his instructions, to speak after the tone.
Speak, he murmurs to himself, staring at the hawk picking
daintily at its still-struggling meal. After the tone. Woof.
Abruptly the hawk drops the limp snake and flaps away. He looks
at his wrist. Time to go.
As he's heading for the hospital, he notices again that feeling
on the finger where his ring used to be. Somewhere, he knows he
still has the receipts. Just that morning, stiffly, with
difficulty, feeling a strange urgency, he got up, threw on his
robe and rummaged in the closet, delving into boxes until he
found the small, orange and gold brocade sack, buried in a wad
of old tax records.
Taking it out to the living room, sitting down on the couch, he
is transported back to the day they went to the jeweler's
together. He remembers the friendly clerk explaining to them
that in China this kind of ring is an engagement ring. "But if
you want to use them for wedding rings," she smiled, "that's
OK." Her smile, he recalls, felt like a blessing.
Afterward they walked down the street to have lunch in the
Garden Court, under the ancient glass dome before it was cleaned
and refurbished. During lunch he leaned back and happened to
catch a glimpse of ancient dust hanging in long dark strings
over the lush buffet and bustling blackclad waiters. A few years
later the jade fell out of his ring. He sent it back to the
jeweler, who fixed it at no charge, and returned it promptly.
Across the room, the wedding album is sitting on the bookshelf.
He gets up, walks over, takes it down. As he flips through it,
he sees that the pictures have taken on the sad irony of
happiness before disaster.
He stops at a picture of them at the beach house, then moves on.
Here is one of the cake, here one of his wife in the wedding
dress her aunt bought for her. One of him, in his dark blue,
almost black Givenchy suit, which he still wears now and then.
He sees that she is today still the same slim, sloe-eyed beauty
she was then, with the same flowing dark hair, shot now with
streaks of gray. The same awkward winsomeness, same crooked jaw,
long upper lip.
And here, a picture of the priest who married them. One of the
groom toasting her family, his new in-laws. And his
second-favorite picture, the one of him and his four closest
friends, sitting on the front porch of their house, after the
reception, quaffing Dom Perignon out of a paper bag. Tired.
Elated. All of them, he realizes, gone. Dead, divorced, or just
plain disappeared. Gone from his life, inexplicably lost to him.
And there, finally, is his favorite picture. The newlyweds.
Heads together, smiling. Dazed, but happy. Captured at their
zenith, twinkling brightly for life's moment, together, before
their long, hard fall.
He stands beside the hospital bed, across from her, her dying
mother between them, emaciated, dwindling. The door to the outer
hallway opens. A short brunette in a crisp white nurse's uniform
bustles in. "Time to hang a bag of blood," she declares.
With a few brisk motions, she sends the thin red tendril snaking
down the tube. He watches against his will, fascinated by its
bright, oddly hypnotic and inexorably downward motion. He
mumbles something about sitting down, then sags at the knees,
feeling for a chair that isn't there. The next thing he
remembers he is coming back to consciousness, lying on his back
on the cold hard floor, looking up at a ring of bright faces
peering down at him, clinically scrutinizing his condition. In
the center of the circle, crouching beside him, hand raised to
slap him again, is that same nurse. "Can you hear me?" she is
saying, over and over again. He feels oddly elated.
A month later that he finds himself sitting in the back seat of
her brother's car, holding the cardboard box that contains all
that is left of her mother. As they drive to the memorial
service, he looks down, reading the label showing her name, date
of birth, date of death. Such finality, there on his lap.
What did she feel at her last, long breath, he wonders, as she
lay there, alone in the hospital, harried doctor stepping into
the room a moment too late to be with her as she slipped away?
Was it that same euphoria?
For months afterward, her remains move from drawer to closet to
mantel to drawer again as arguments rage about the best way to
lay her to rest. Periodically his brother-in-law calls. "Why
don't we just go up behind the city, into the mountains, and
scatter them up there?" he says to his wife. At that, she
invariably panics. "No, no," she replies, sharply, "I don't want
that, I don't want that." Later, she tells him that visions of
wild animals rooting around in her mother's bones haunt her for
days after those conversations.
Years later, when the phone rings, she will still for a split
second think it is her mother, calling to see how she's doing,
see if she needs help, make sure she's OK.
That night
----------
There is a fire in the fireplace the night she finally
confesses. They always had a fire back then, in the evenings,
during the winter months. That's one more thing he misses, the
primal sense of warmth and comfort, in a life shared with
someone else.
Every year, as summer came to an end, he ordered two cords of
wood, ponderosa and pinon, for a hundred dollars a cord. It was
a good idea to mix the two because the pinon, a harder, fragrant
wood, but more expensive, burned longer. The cheaper, softer
ponderosa burned hotter but faster.
Delivery day would come, then the appointed hour. The sagging
truck would pull into the drive, back up to the garage. Pulling
on his gloves, he would climb up and help the driver unload,
tossing the split chunks onto the floor in a great heap. Then,
after the truck left, he'd spend on hour or two stacking it up
along the walls. When he was done he would stand there for a
while, relishing the feeling he got from the neatly stacked
rows, the feeling of being prepared for the worst that winter
could bring.
Because the garage was detached, many yards from the house, they
had to haul wood in by hand, dumping it into a large basket near
the fireplace. As soon as he got home from work every night, he
built a fire. And for the next three or four hours, he would
tend it carefully, rearranging it, adding logs and paper as
needed to keep it burning and burning well.
So that's where he is when she comes home. He is sitting in
front of the fire, watching the news, when he hears the sound of
his wife stepping up onto the porch. He hears the the rattle of
her keys, then the familiar squeak as she turns the stiff
handle. His heart leaps up, and she is there again, in the same
room with him. He feels once more, for the millionth time but as
though for the first, the joy he always feels, still feels to
this day, the simple fact of her existence in the same world
with him.
But tonight something is wrong, he sees. Very wrong. Pale,
shaking, she says hello. Her voice is faint, hesitant, scared.
Setting her briefcase down next to the table, she drops her
purse, shrugs out of her coat, ignores the mail. She comes over
and sits down beside him, tells him she has something important
to tell him. Puts her hand on his knee. Her voice is trembling.
Her hand, too.
This, he recalls, is the night of her weekly visit to her
therapist. They always talk afterwards, about how it went, what
she said, what the therapist said, how she felt. She enjoys
confiding in him, hearing what he thinks, what he has to say.
"There's something I have to tell you," she says again.
He reaches out, turns off the television.
"I have a friend at work," her voice quavers. "We've been
friends for several months now. He's interested in Buddhism, and
I've been helping him learn about it."
There is a long pause. He can feel a pain begin in his sinuses.
"And, um, it's a friendship that has a sexual dimension to it."
"Take your hand off my knee" is the first thing out of his
mouth. He stands up, moves away, then turns, forcing himself to
look at her. How can he know that the pain will last the rest of
his life, will never get better? She is sitting on the couch,
stricken, crying.
He goes to the kitchen, soaps his finger, twists off the ring.
Taking it to the bedroom, he puts it away in its brocade bag.
Then, to his surprise, he finds himself uttering an atavistic
oath, one that condemns her to a life of misery and suffering,
one in which the pain she is causing will come back to haunt her
a thousandfold, nothing she wants ever comes to pass, in which
nothing she cares for will flourish, a life of frustration and
desperation, barren futility.
She doesn't notice the missing ring that night. In fact, she
doesn't notice it until some weeks later, when they are having
dinner in a Chinese restaurant. They are in the middle of their
mu-shu pork and pot stickers and kung pao chicken. He is lifting
a glass to his mouth. She is telling him something about her
job, her boss. They are imitating life, acting like a normal
married couple, posing as people whose hearts are not broken.
He sees her eyes go to his hand, to that finger, then widen in
shock. Her face crumples, tears spring to her eyes. Her mascara
starts to run, giving her raccoon eyes. He feels his lips draw
back from his teeth in an involuntary grimace. She thinks he is
smiling, and is hurt. The familiar impulse to soothe, to
reassure, rises up in him, but he deliberately puts it aside.
"I took it off because I don't feel married anymore."
He can see how frightened, how guilty she is. Her eyes dart here
and there, returning always to that empty place on his hand.
"I can always put it back on, when things are OK again, if we
want, when we really feel married again," he says.
If you need inpatient psychiatric care in that small midwestern
city, you only have two choices. The first is a ward on the top
floor of the city's acute care hospital. They start there. They
park, go inside, ride up in the elevator. When the doors open,
they step out a long straight hallway with doors on either side,
some locked, all with small square viewports at eye level. Black
and white linoleum, harsh fluorescent light.
In the small, cluttered office near the elevator two staff
members look up from their charts and say hello. During the
brief conversation, they are friendly, supportive, and
professional. But when a third staff member comes in and
interrupts to confirm a doctor's order to have a patient put in
restraints, she decides it's time to leave.
The second choice is more inviting, has an almost residential
air about it. Built around a renovated TB ward, it has a cluster
of half a dozen, contemporary, one-story, pentagonal buildings,
the kind that are filled with brightly painted walls, clean open
spaces, carpeted floors, and vaguely modern furniture.
There is a park-like area in the middle of the cluster, a quad
of sorts, a pleasant space, one that they will find themselves
in more than once over the next few weeks, taking slow walks,
sitting, having long talks.
On the appointed day, they pack a bag and drive down to the
office for her intake interview. He drives his car; she follows
in hers. Having her car there will help her feel less trapped,
he thinks. But he doesn't know that, car or no car, she will be
in a locked ward, will need permission to leave, something she
won't obtain for weeks.
The intake interview is extensive. Toward the end there comes
the inevitable question about her reason for doing this. After a
long silence, she answers vaguely. "I just haven't been feeling
very well lately." The plump, bearded young intern is plainly
nonplussed. He obviously feels her answer isn't adequate, but
isn't sure how to say so without seeming clumsy and
unprofessional. He fingers his beard.
After a prolonged silence, he speaks for his wife. "Depression.
Sleeplessness, lethargy, all the classic symptoms." It seems to
help. With obvious relief, the clerk fills in the blank, the
scratching of his pen sounding loud in the small, still room.
Accompanied by the intern, they walk over to the adult ward. He
is carrying his wife's bags. As they cross the grassy quad,
knots of adolescents flow around them, loud, defiant,
self-conscious.
The doors are kept locked; visitors must be buzzed in. Once
allowed inside, he is asked to hand over her bags for
safekeeping behind the front desk. They are shown to a small
private office, with a desk and a couple of chairs, to wait for
another interview.
The door is locked, offers the intern, because the patients
prefer it that way. They like the security of knowing that the
world can't get at them, he claims, can't walk in off the street
to accuse, attack, hurt them. But of course what he doesn't say
is that it also makes the hospital's job easier. It's harder to
hurt yourself when you are in an environment controlled by
others who are paid to remove sharp objects from your luggage,
paid to regulate your meds, paid to come by every hour on the
hour at night and shine a light into your room to make sure
you're still alive.
The nurse comes in, sit down, begins the interview. Not long
into it, she turns to him. "I'm sorry," she says, not at all
apologetically, "but you'll have to leave now." And so he does,
walking back out through the main door, hearing the firm click
as it closes behind him.
He's been home for less than an hour when the phone rings. It's
his wife.
"Would you bring me a blanket? It's really cold down here. They
went through my suitcase to see if it had anything sharp or
dangerous in it."
"Did it?"
"They took away my curling iron," she says. "And my scissors."
Later she introduces him to her roommate, a blond anorexic
toothpick. Stepping into the bathroom, he sees that the mirror
is festooned with yellow stickers, each with an affirmation
written on it in a childish, loopy hand. "The body is a machine
and food is its fuel." Every time he visits, the roommate is on
the exercycle, matchstick legs pumping furiously. His wife shows
him the small kitchen, the main room, the group meeting spaces,
the private offices. Then they sit down in one of the offices
and she begins to cry.
The next time she calls, it is to tell him that she has set up a
meeting with the chief psychiatrist. He gets in his car and
drives down to meet her. After a brief wait, he is buzzed into
the ward. She is standing just inside the door. They go into one
of the small conference rooms. Sitting down, he helplessly feels
the joy he always feels in her presence. As they talk, the
rapport between them is as strong and rich as ever. No matter
how bad things get, nothing seems to destroy it. Is that good or
bad? He doesn't know, and doesn't care. But it confuses him,
because he can't accept that this person would treat him badly.
"Our appointment isn't for a few minutes," she says. "I wanted
to talk with you first."
His sinuses begin to ache, and he suddenly knows what's coming.
Tears well up in her eyes, roll down her cheeks. "I need to be
honest with you," she says, face crumpling, voice breaking. "I
haven't ended the affair. It started up again a few months ago,
and I haven't been able to break it off."
"You said it was over."
"I know. That's why I've been so depressed the last couple of
months. That's why I'm here. I just don't seem to be able to
stop."
As she talks, he can tell that she is genuinely horrified by her
behavior. There isn't time to say anything else before their
appointment. They get up and walk across the ward to the
doctor's office.
"So we don't need to worry about you going out and getting a gun
and shooting someone?" The doctor smiles, but the question is
serious. At the end of the session, he stands and holds out his
hand. "You've stuck it out through a lot more than most couples
I see," he says. As they leave, he suggests a trial separation
and more counseling.
A week later, the hospital agrees that she is doing well enough
to go out for the evening. She can leave at 6, she tells him,
but has to be back by 8:30. He drives down and takes her to
dinner at the only four-star restaurant in the state. Two weeks
later, she checks herself out and drives home. To him, she seems
calmer, less frantic. But she's not so sure. The experience may
have been a mistake, she tells him, may have done more harm than
good.
They celebrate Christmas at the beach house. He has left his
job, and the plan is he will stay there for the three months of
their separation, then return home. She will stay only for
another day or two, then fly back. When the separation is over,
she will return and they will drive back home together.
When it is time for her to leave, he stands in the driveway
while friends bundle her into the car. They tell him later that
she weeps throughout the entire two-hour drive to the airport.
Lucky
-----
At the horizon a tanker slips hull down, showing its
superstructure, then its stacks, then nothing at all. Rising
from the couch, he takes his hat and coat and heads for the
door. Far off in the distance, at the opposite horn of the sandy
crescent, he can just make out the cluster of rocks that mark
his daily destination. Out in the water there are the usual
black shapes of the surfers. At the far end of the beach, small
sticklike figures are moving in tiny ways.
Approaching the halfway point, he can see that a fishing boat
has run aground. He joins the small crowd that has gathered to
watch, perhaps to lend a hand. There it sits, in the surf, bow
inland, surging gently back and forth, small waves breaking over
its stern. A small group of Vietnamese, the crew, huddle on the
beach nearby. The ship's name is the _Lucky_. His friend Nick is
in the crowd.
"Did it spring a leak? Lose its engine, drag its anchor, drift
ashore?"
Nick shrugs. "No radio, no one speaks English, four families
depending on it for their livelihood."
The next morning, the first thing he does is take his binoculars
and go outside. The _Lucky_ is still there. Later that day, an
orange salvage barge steams up and takes station briefly
offshore.
When he checks again, just before sundown, the salvage barge is
gone and the _Lucky_ is still lolling drunkenly in the surf.
Planks have sprung from its sides, water is gushing through
them.
Two days later, a frontend loader snorts up the beach. Scuttling
back and forth, it unceremoniously smashing the _Lucky_ into
pieces, scoops them up, and hauls them off to be dropped into a
dumpster. He watches until the end, the scene blurring and
reforming in his lenses.
Months later he is still finding the odd shoe, jacket,
splintered piece of painted timber and metal plate as they
surface briefly before sinking back beneath the sand.
Six weeks later, she flies out for a visit. Holding her hand, he
takes her for a walk on the beach, makes an oblique, gentle
allusion to the end of her affair. She does not reply. At the
rocks marking the halfway point, they stop to rest. Sitting on
the sand, arms on her knees, she looks out to sea, blinking in
the late afternoon sun.
"Oh, sweetie," she says, voice hushed, turning her dark up to
him. "Actually..."
They stand and slowly continue their walk, tears still running
down her cheeks. Back at the house, they sit at the table. Her
tears are still falling, making a pattern of small dark dots on
the light fabric she is wearing. She sits without speaking,
staring at the floor.
"Please don't feel any guiltier than you already do."
"I don't know how to stop all this."
He says nothing. She looks down at her hands, clenched in her
lap. "You're in my heart," she says. "I do love you, and I want
us to recover from all this. But I don't know how. I need to get
some help."
"Sweetheart."
"I can't keep doing this."
"No."
"I can't seem to change it."
Two days later, she leaves again. And as she gets into the car
for the drive to the airport, she begins to weep, wondering
aloud if it might not be best for them to get divorced, since
she can't seem to make a commitment, but can't stand the pain
her ambivalence is causing.
Sadly, he agrees. If that is her choice, so be it. There is
nothing he can do about it. It takes two to make a relationship,
but only one to end it.
But then, as she closes the car door, still crying, she says,
"This doesn't feel right, this doesn't feel right," over and
over again. "I don't want this, I don't want this." And so no
more is said about it then, nothing is done to put the process
in motion. Instead, she continues to affirm her love for him and
her desire to have him back in her life. Again she tells him she
will end the affair. Again he believes her.
In early April, the separation ends. Relieved, ready to go home,
he packs his bags and heads for the airport. Pulling into the
parking lot, he feels optimistic, excited. Life is beginning to
seem worth living again.
After a short wait, he sees her plane settle down onto the
runway. It slowly taxies to the gate, begins to discharge its
passengers.
Only after everyone else has emerged does she appear. Strained,
taut, she is clearly under great pressure and looks miserable.
She does not emanate any hint of pleasure at seeing him again
after all these weeks.
Two days later, it is Easter Sunday. They are still a long day's
drive away from home, traveling fast through open country. The
town where they have spent the night is falling rapidly behind.
Having gotten up early to hit the road, they are looking for a
place to eat.
She breaks the silence, a note of desperation in her voice. "I
have to talk to you," she says.
"Whatever it is, it'll be OK. Just tell me the truth." Some dark
thing floats at the edge of his vision. The hair on his neck
stands up.
Hesitant, fearful, mustering up all her courage and strength,
she stammers, "Well, sweetie, the truth is I'm not quite ready
to have you come back yet. I wasn't able to stop seeing my lover
during our separation." Her voice is small, shaky. "I didn't
keep our agreement."
The all-too-familiar familiar emotions rush through him once
more. The trucks hurtling by are suddenly twice as big, three
times as fast, four times as loud, ten times as threatening. The
light and spacious landscape is filled with groaning wind and
scudding dark clouds.
He takes the next exit, heads for the truckstop there. They pull
in, get out, make their numb way inside. It is a flyblown cafe,
filled with men wearing cowboy hats, baseball caps, tractor
hats. Two tired waitresses wander up and down, slapping down
plates and shouting out orders. From somewhere in the back come
the sounds of sizzling and clattering. They sit down, order
pancakes and an English muffin, wait for the aftershocks to
subside. For the first and last time, the thought crosses his
mind that he could put her on a plane and let her fly back
without him. But no sooner has the thought occurred to him than
he dismisses it. After a while, they get up and leave, without
eating a bite. They drive onward into the gathering darkness,
stopping only for meals and gas. He hears her say the familiar
things, tells him how much he means to her, how much she has
missed him these long months. Driving hard, they make it home
just after nightfall.
Back in their own house, sitting on the couch, waiting for her
to return from an errand, he has a moment of eerie _deja vu_
when he hears the familiar thump of her step on the porch, the
key in the lock, the squeak of the handle as the door opens. She
walks into the room and, yes, he feels once again that same
immutable ecstasy at the very fact of her existence.
They settle into familiar routines, wash their clothes, fix
something to eat, laugh, play, relax, embrace, hold hands, hug,
kiss. But then she twists away from him. "I'm not ready yet,"
she says, tears forming in her eyes.
Hardly knowing how he does it, he says, in a flash of intuition,
"Let me guess. You're pregnant," knowing he's right and
strangely thrilled by that fact, even as it reveals yet another
level of horror to him.
Four months into her pregnancy, he picks her up outside her
therapist's office. For the dozenth time, she has decided to go
ahead with the procedure, now more complicated since she is in
her second trimester. He drives her to the doctor's office, one
that they have been to several times before. She has become
strangely proficient at calculating just how much time she has
left before a given procedure can no longer be performed safely.
He finds a place to park near the doctor's office, then turns
off the car and sits back. He looks over at her, sees she is
shaking. Her lover has told her that if she harms this baby, he
will hurt her and her family. He can tell she is terrified.
"I still think this is the right thing to do. But I know it's
your decision to make, and I will support you no matter what you
decide. Whatever you decide, I will support you," he repeats.
She sits, paralyzed.
Finally he says, "Look, you don't have to go through with this."
She looks at him in mute appeal. "In fact," he goes on, "the
more I look at you right now, the more I think it's probably a
bad idea to do this unless you're really sure about it. Going
ahead with it when you're not sure about it could be very
painful later. And none of us wants an even unhappier person on
our hands."
After a few seconds, staring out at the parked cars, she agrees,
her voice almost inaudible, that she isn't quite ready yet. He
starts the car and drives away, leaving his life behind on that
anonymous street of parked cars and ordinary houses, filled with
strangers living normal lives.
Five months into the pregnancy, she continues to put off the
need to buy some maternity clothes, instead wearing looser
clothing, larger sizes. Eventually, he convinces her to admit
the truth and tell her friends and co-workers. She can't quite
bring herself to call her family, so he does it for her. "I'm
glad you're there," is all his father-in-law can say to him,
over and over again. He takes her to several maternity shops. In
one, the proprietor, naturally assuming the baby is his, fawns
over them, making the usual fuss about new parents. He plays
along.
One month later he finds himself driving her to a clinic in a
city a few hours to the north, one of only two in the country
where she can get an induced stillbirth at that late stage of
pregnancy. And a few weeks after that, he find himself driving
her to the airport for a flight to the other clinic. As they
approach the offramp, he asks her again if she wants to do this.
"Tell me what you want, sweetie," he says, as they drive closer,
closer, closer. "Just tell me what you want, what's in your
heart, and it will be OK."
Tick, tock
----------
Entering the room, he notices again that the doctor's office is
full of strange junk. Old clocks. Shards of pottery. Random
chunks of cypress and pine. A stuffed quail. Ancient,
broken-spined books, splayed open from the pressure of the
expanding mass within. Fraying oriental carpets. On the wall, a
chart of the moon in all her phases. Couch, chairs, in one of
which sits the doctor himself, large, round, and bearded. Only
the glowing eyes, behind utterly drab glasses, are alive. _Tick,
tock, tick, tock, tick, tock,_ says one of the ancient clocks.
He sits, describes the dream again, for no particular reason.
Then it is the doctor's turn. He says the usual things. As he
drones on, his sharp, knowing eyes watch his patient, watch the
patient watching him back.
_Tick, tock, tick, tock_. The voice flows on like a river over
smooth, rounded stones, burbling, bubbling, murmuring, babbling.
The patient's attention wanders. _Tick, tock, tick, tock_. He
thinks about his wife's dying mother, the hawk, his wife. Tuning
into the conversation again, he hears the doctor say something
with repeated emphasis.
"So that's how it looks to me."
He hasn't been listening, has no idea what the doctor is
referring too. Watching him, the doctor realizes this, and
elaborates.
"It looks to me like she's got a gun to your head."
He's still not sure what to make of this. Then it comes back to
him, becomes clear what the doctor means. "You mean when she
says, 'I really love you and want you in my life'? That's the
gun?"
Silence. Has he gotten it wrong? He sits up straighter, wanting
to make sure he understands. "And you have an idea about what I
should say to her then. What I need to say to her then is..."
But now he can't remember what he's supposed to say, what the
doctor thinks he's supposed to say to her then.
The doctor takes pity, recites the litany. "What you need to say
then is, 'I can't stand this anymore. Either put the gun down or
pull the trigger.' "
_Oh,_ he thinks. _That's right. Maybe he's right. What's the
worst she can do?_ he asks himself, then answers his own
question. _Exactly what she has been doing._
"And that is?"
He's been talking out loud again, without knowing it. "Nothing,"
he says. "Make no decision at all." He wants to change the
subject. "What I wonder," he says, "is her doing nothing is
deliberate or not? Does she mean it, I mean?" _Does she mean to
be abusive?_ he wonders. How could she? She loves him. He loves
her. They love each other. They are in love. Have been, for
years.
"What do you think?"
Rhetorical question? Dizzy, he pulls back and tries again to
focus. What was the point? The doctor's question wasn't
rhetorical. Anything but. _I desperately want to answer that
question._
"What question is that?"
Damn.
After all their years together, what happened? How could she do
this to him? His beloved. Of all humankind, the one he loves
most truly, most dearly, trusts without reservation, the one
who, without doubt, loves him in return. Always has, always
will--so she says--just as dearly. His heart's companion, his
life's partner. _She's behaving like some kind of monster. But
not savage_ --
"That would be easier to comprehend. No, one of those sad,
miserable monsters instead, the kind that sobs and snuffles and
wails in self-pity as it tears your flesh and cracks your
bones."
He doesn't know how to respond to this. _Tick, tock, tick,
tock._
"So, since you understand the dynamic, and since you're choosing
this, there must be something you're getting out of it."
"Yes," he agrees.
The doctor blinks, waits. Then, prompting, says, "What?"
"I am getting something out of it."
"What? What is it you're getting?"
"I'm not sure."
"The satisfaction of knowing that you haven't walked away from
your commitments, even though they've put you in a terrible
bind?" The doctor's face is expressionless. "Is the satisfaction
worth the pain?"
_Tick, tock, tick, tock._
"The hope that she might change her mind?"
He shrugs. _Tick, tock, tick, tock._
The doctor shifts in his chair, clears his throat, puts down his
notes, looks at the clock and his watch. "We'll have to take
that up next time. Our time is up."
_Tick, tock, tick, tock._ He shifts uneasily in his chair,
assailed, obscurely implicated in something that is not his
doing, not his fault. Suddenly chilled, he gets to his feet,
coat clutched around him, notes the faint tensing of muscles in
the doctor's body, slight narrowing of his eyes. Stumbling a
little, he steps into the hall and turns up the thermostat.
Could it really be 68 degrees in here? _For $80 an hour, I
should at least get heat,_ he thinks. Then he turns, makes his
way back into the room, to the window behind his chair.
The day is dark, overcast. Under a weak sun, grass and trees
toss frantically, but there is no rain yet. Behind him the
heater groans and ticks in response to the higher setting.
In the reflection he can see the doctor behind him, see him pick
up the phone, punch in a number and, after a moment or two,
begin to murmur into the mouthpiece. He can also see his own
dark eyes, long nose, mustache. Tired, always so tired. Big
circles under the eyes. Already graying, gaunt. Tired and
getting more so, thin and getting thinner. Behind him, the
doctor puts the phone down.
It is almost completely dark outside. Only the dim streetlights
and the headlights of the occasional passing car can be seen.
Looking up, he can faintly make out the stars. For a moment, the
chaotic wash of lights forms an almost intelligible pattern, one
of those constellations whose name he can never remember.
The last time he felt like this was when he met her guru. But
then he had the presence of mind to spend a few minutes, before
stepping into the room, setting aside his defenses and lowering
his guard. It was a gesture of devotion, to the teacher and to
the student. A way of saying, _If he is a true teacher, he will
see me for what I am._
At the end of the meeting, as they stood to leave, the guru made
the effort, despite the brace on his leg, to rise to his feet as
well. Limping across the room, he reached out, embraced him,
declaring in an oddly high-pitched voice, "So, it seems you are
a true gentleman."
_Tick, tock, tick, tock._ The doctor says nothing at first, sits
quietly for a long moment, gazing into the middle distance, then
asks if it seems that inanimate objects are speaking to him.
"You mean, literally? Literally talking to me, asking me things,
literally?"
"Yes," replies the doctor, easing back in his chair, crossing
his legs. "That's what I mean."
That night he is awakened out of a profound sleep by the angry
screech of tires and bang of metal on metal from the highway.
Then there is nothing but ominous silence, followed, at length,
by the wailing of sirens. He gets up and goes to the window, but
can see nothing.
Slipping back into the bed, pulling up the sheets, he falls
deeply asleep again and finds himself lying on the hard
blacktop, unable to move, blood running from his mouth and nose,
terribly, terribly cold. Both of his shoes and a sock have come
off. The exposed foot is freezing. The rain is turning to snow.
Moving his head to one side, he sees something moving in the
distance, but has lost his glasses and can't tell what it is.
Slowly the image swims into focus. Several figures stand
silently on the shoulder, watching him, saying nothing, doing
nothing. He tries to wave, to gesture, but fails and can only
lie helplessly on the rough wet surface.
Then he recognizes one of them. It is his wife. Again he
struggles to wave. She sees him, but does nothing, just stands
there, mute, unmoving, staring in silence. Trying once again to
raise his hand, he can see his own blood freezing on his
fingertips.
The day is warm and bright. When he walks into the room, she is
sitting up in bed, nursing the baby.
"Oh, sweetie," she says.
"What, sweetheart?"
"I just feel so scared."
"What are you afraid of?"
"I feel like I've been caught up in this whole big thing. And
all that's going to come out of it is going to reveal me to be a
worm. And all that resolving it will do is show how deluded I've
been, how much I've hurt everybody."
He helps her give the baby a shower. Placing a folded towel on
the floor of the bathroom, he puts the infant down on it and
quickly undresses him. Then he undresses himself and steps into
the shower. First making sure his footing is secure and the
water is warm but not too hot and the flow not too strong, he
calls out to her, tells her he was ready. She gently hands him
the curious baby. Holding the child carefully, he moves him
under the stream of water, a little at a time. First his back
and legs, then his chest and belly, then the back and top of his
head. Then, very, very gently, his face, letting the water wash
over it, making sure it doesn't get in his eyes.
The infant is alert and excited. He doesn't cry or struggle. He
seems to enjoy the experience, though he's slightly uncertain
about it. It must be comforting to feel the warmth of his body
and the water, he thinks, but a little disconcerting too. In any
event, the baby handles it well, with an endearing sense of
wonder and openness. After five, ten minutes, he hands the clean
little body back to her, and she dries him off and dresses him.
Then they have go for a walk in the stroller and return to the
house, to sit on the front steps in the sun, enjoying the
warmth. The phone rings. He picks it up. "Hello," he says. No
one answers. He hangs up. A few minutes later, it rings again.
She answers it, goes inside to talk. The baby carries on,
babbling and crowing in that noisy, nonsensical way babies have,
that seems to carry the rhythms of speech. He listens,
enchanted. When the baby stops, he responds, making similar
noises in a similar way, as a kind of benign echolalia, moving
his head around in visual emphasis. The baby watches and
listens, plainly fascinated, and waits until he stops. Then he
replies, with a good five seconds or more of highly convincing
baby talk. Then he stops again and looks up, clearly waiting for
a response. They go on like this, back and forth, for some time,
15 minutes or so, just as though they are having a real
conversation.
She comes to the door. "You have to leave," she says. He reaches
for her, sees something in her eyes, draws back. "He's on his
way here. He says he's had it and that I have to choose between
you and the baby, once and for all. If I choose you, he'll fight
me for custody. I can't let anyone take my baby away."
He stands up, kisses her. The baby watches, eyes wide with hurt
and surprise, as he walks away.
Eric Skjei (75270.1221@compuserve.com)
----------------------------------------
Eric Skjei is a senior writer at Autodesk in Marin County,
California. He lives in Stinson Beach with his laptop and his
kayak.
Jeannie Might Know by Levi Asher
====================================
..................................................................
* When you start to think "business culture" may not be all
bad, you know you're in real trouble... *
..................................................................
I hated Jeannie Barish the first time I met her. She was a
consultant with a productivity-management firm, and at first I
tried to avoid her. But then my boss, Lew Parker, made me attend
her presentation on how to conduct solution-oriented meetings.
This was a new methodology wherein a sheet about twice as
complicated as a dental insurance form had to be filled out
before, during and after every meeting. It actually had a
beneficial effect on our department, because for about three
weeks after Jeannie's presentation everybody was afraid to have
meetings, and we got a lot of work done.
But Lew Parker lived for meetings, and finally he couldn't stand
it anymore. He called us into Room C and said, "Did anybody tell
Jeannie we were here? No? Good, let's just talk quick before
somebody catches us."
He was there to tell us about the transition. Recently our bank
had been bought by another, larger bank, and departments were
being shuffled. As of today, Lew Parker told us, the head of
Management Information Systems would report to the Vice
President of Commercial Markets Quality Assurance, whose boss,
the head of Global Systems Development, was being transferred to
Network Integration, where he would report to the Director of
System Administration's next door neighbor's piano teacher. Or
something like that. Whatever it was, none of us knew what it
meant, except that Lew Parker was clearly upset about it.
Some people get real mean and scary when they're upset. Other
people just get cool, and sinister looks creep onto their faces,
and you know they're plotting revenge and it's going to be great
when it happens. But Lew Parker didn't get upset in either of
these two ways. He just started coming unglued. His collar
button would pop open, he'd sweat, his eyes would bulge, and
we'd all sit there feeling sorry for him.
Two days after the meeting Lew called me into his office, shut
the door and said, "Jim, I can't figure out how to get the new
word processor program working."
All of the programs we'd been using had just been replaced,
because the company that had created our desktop software had
recently merged with another company. Now instead of MaxWord and
MegaSpread and WonderGraph we had SuperWord and CalcPad and
PresentStar. Everybody was a bit on edge about this. "I guess I
can help you figure it out," I said, reaching for the keyboard.
He blocked my path. "Well, it wouldn't help me very much if you
did figure it out. Because I also need to import a graph from
PresentStar into CalcPad, and I can't even get CalcPad to come
up on my screen."
"Okay, I'll take a look at it," I said.
"How is that going to help me?"
"Well, it's what you asked for."
"That may be so, but it isn't going to help me, is it? Because
the fact is, all our goddam software is completely
incomprehensible to me now, and Chuck Harrison has been
expecting me to hand in my Third Quarter Strategic Direction
document for three days now and I don't have a damned thing to
show him, because I can't get PresentShit to talk to fucking
MaxiPad, and so I can't do a goddamned thing at all now, can I?"
At least I knew now why he'd been so upset lately. He was
terrified of his desktop software. This was ironic because he'd
always been very proud, almost to the point of bragging, about
his proficiency with the old programs. But he'd never even
developed more than a superficial understanding of them. He was
like somebody who learns how to play "Three Blind
Mice" on the
piano really fast, but can't play anything else.
"If you want," I said, "I can look through your manuals--"
"No, no. It's beyond that, Jim." He started to get a misty look
and I got a scared feeling that he was about to pour his heart
out to me. "It's just that, sometimes... it's like we run and
run just to keep up, and we're running faster and faster, but
are we producing any more? Why are we going faster? Who does it
help? I mean... sometimes I just don't understand what's going
on."
Nobody wants to hear his boss blubbering like a drunk on a bar
stool. It's demoralizing. "Wait," I said. "I'll find someone who
can teach you this stuff. Let me ask around. I'll be right
back."
"No," he said. "I don't want you walking through the halls
announcing that Lew Parker is a technical moron. I'm supposed to
be the manager here."
"I'll be discreet," I said. "Please. I'll find someone quick." I
escaped and walked down the halls asking who could help Lew
Parker with the desktop software--in effect, announcing that he
was a technical moron, but what he doesn't know won't hurt him.
The problem was, everybody I asked suggested I talk to Jeannie
Barish. All I heard was, "Jeannie might know," "Jeannie's great
with that stuff," "The only one who knows is Jeannie."
Who was this Jeannie, anyway? I knew she worked incredible
hours, until eight or nine o'clock at night on a typical day,
Saturdays and Sundays a few times a month. But she wasn't
assigned to any project and nobody knew exactly what she did
with her time. She was no older than the rest of us, but she
wore expensive clothes, which made me think she was making more
money than I was. She always had a smile on her face, and kept
asking people to go on ski trips or join the 'group' for Friday
lunches at T.J.'s. For all these reasons I always tried to steer
clear of her, but now but I had no choice but to go to her
cubicle and ask for help.
I hadn't seen her cubicle before. It was bigger than mine and
had real oak furniture. In terms of decoration, it was a
veritable shrine to skiing. I'd had no idea she was so
ski-obsessed. There were ski calendars, ski posters, ski trail
diagrams. "Hi!" she said. "How's it going?"
"Okay," I said. "Can you help Lew Parker figure out the new
desktop software?"
"Sure! Hey, I've been meaning to ask you, how come you didn't
answer my e-mail about the ski trip?"
"I don't like skiing."
"It was just a questionnaire. I wrote that it was for everybody
to answer, whether you like skiing or not. I was thinking that
if some other winter sports are popular we might try to put
together a different kind of trip. Like bobsledding, maybe."
"I don't like winter sports," I said. "Winter sports are the
opiate of the masses."
She didn't seem to understand what I'd said, but clearly didn't
like it. "Now why would you say something like that?" she asked,
knitting her eyebrows with concern and disapproval.
I shrugged. "Can you please go help Lew Parker before he has a
nervous breakdown?"
Two hours later, Lew Parker called me into his office. He was
sitting at his desk with Jeannie at his side and a broad,
idiotic smile on his face. He looked deeply relaxed, happier
than he'd appeared in months. "This woman is a gem!" he told me.
He turned to her. "Jeannie, I only wish we had three of you. No,
ten of you. Thank you so much."
"No problem!" she said. "Glad I could be of help."
She began to leave. "Hey," Lew Parker called after her. "Maybe
I'll even put together one of those Solution-Meeting things
soon!"
"Great!" she said.
She left the office and a serious look came over his face.
"Jim," he said, folding his arms. "Jeannie tells me you seem
troubled."
"What?"
"Something or other about you not going on ski trips or joining
the group for lunch at T.J.'s."
"I'm not required to go to T.J.'s!" I said. "I hate places like
that. The last time I went I ordered the pepper steak and they
put cheese on it!"
"Jim, relax," he said. "You've been nervous lately. A ski trip
or a nice leisurely lunch would do you good. Get with the crowd
a little more."
I left his office in a state of shock. Now I really hated
Jeannie. I started asking around about what she did. Nobody
knew. I saw a pamphlet for her consulting firm, and it said that
their mission was to help companies provide solutions. What did
that mean? It's like saying your job is to go around doing good
things. What the hell did she do? I kept asking around, but
nobody had ever worked with her on a project. And yet she was
famous for working incredible hours, sixty to seventy a week.
One morning I found a piece of e-mail waiting for me:
To: jimg
From: jeannieb
Subject: :^)
Have a great day !!! :^) :^) :^)
Perhaps figuring that we were now friends, she stuck her head
over my cubicle wall that afternoon and asked if I wanted to
join the crowd for lunch at T.J.'s.
"I'd like to," I said. "But I just heard a rumor that the
original T.J. was a Satan worshipper, so I can't."
She frowned and left me alone. Three days later I found a troll
with blue hair and a sign reading "Thanks for all your hard
work" sitting on my keyboard. The cute little imp found a nice
home at the bottom of my garbage receptacle.
All this coincided with some other problems I'd been having. I'd
applied for a raise a few months ago, because my bank had been
reporting record profits since being acquired by the larger
bank, and yet whenever I talked to the head of Human Resources
about my salary I was made to feel that the immense burden of my
measly paycheck was already so devestating to the Board of
Directors that the bank was hardly able to continue to do
business and pay me at the same time. I lived in a slum
apartment in one of the worst areas of Manhattan, where I ate
spaghetti for dinner and watched cable TV because I couldn't
afford to go out. There was never any movie I'd heard of on
cable, and I was starting to suspect that Jeannie had something
to do with that, too.
Since my raise request had been turned down, my mood at work had
been getting worse and worse. I worked on the 18th floor, and it
was starting to drive me crazy the way the elevator stopped on
every floor before mine and all the people who came in were
friendly and happy. Sometimes they stopped the door for each
other, or held it open while they chatted brainlessly about
their plans for the weekend. It had also been driving me insane
that people called pastries 'Danish' in our coffee boutique.
Danish what? It's a nationality, not a fucking food.
Everything made me feel poisonous. Xeroxing some papers, I saw
one of my co-workers had left his phone bill, sealed and
stamped, in the box for outgoing mail. It made me so mad I
didn't know what to do. It scared me that things like this
brought me close to boiling. I was afraid I'd boil over and do
something I didn't want to do.
One morning I read in the _Times_ business section that
Jeannie's consulting firm had been bought by another consulting
firm. That day Jeannie appeared slightly disoriented. She
blinked more often than usual, and spilled her coffee at a
meeting. A few weeks later she arrived in the morning with the
tails of her blouse sticking out from the hem of her skirt.
Soon I heard that her stay at the bank was ending and that she'd
be moving on to her next client. She wasn't allowed to tell us
who her next client was, but she seemed to be very upset about
something. She'd always worn her hair moussed up high in front,
but one morning she showed up with a big thick clump of hair
pointing straight out of her scalp like an asparagus stalk,
dried white mousse caked between the hairs. There was clearly
something wrong. One day she was in my cubicle because she
needed to write a summary document about her work with us, and I
had to describe to her the Commercial Trading Interface, which
was the program I'd been writing. The word 'commercial' referred
to commercial loans, but we just called them 'commercials' as a
bit of trading systems jargon. When Jeannie tried to come up
with an example to help her understand what I was explaining,
she said, "Okay, so like somebody would enter 'Star-Kist Tuna'
here and somebody else would ask for 'Energizer Bunny' here..."
"Wait a minute," I said. "What the hell are you talking about?"
She looked at me, frightened.
"Jeannie," I said. "We're not talking about TV commercials here.
It's commercial _loans_."
"I know," she said, her face red. "I was just trying to give a
different kind of example."
"That wasn't a different kind of example. That was a stupid kind
of example. Goddammit, you've been here for six months--don't
you know what we do?"
Suddenly she burst out in tears. "Okay!" she yelled. "Everybody
hates me here!"
My phone rang. I moved to pick it up. "I don't want to go to
Azerbaijan!" Jeannie cried, apropos of nothing.
It was my mother on the phone. She was upset because she'd just
gotten a letter from the hospital where my father had recently
had heart surgery. Their insurance company had recently been
bought by another insurance company. They hadn't read the fine
print on the new policy, and now they owed the hospital four
million dollars. My father was in a state of shock and had been
watching SportsChannel for the past seven hours.
I was about to say something to my mother when the mail boy
rolled his cart into my office and I looked up and saw that it
was Lew Parker. I'd heard a rumor about more management
shuffles, and now I knew it was true.
"Hi," I said weakly.
"Hi," he said.
What with Jeannie crying next to me, my mother waiting for me to
talk on the phone and Lew Parker trying to hand me my mail, I
suddenly saw a horrific vision. I can't exactly describe it
except to say that I suddenly realized that human existence is
spinning crazily out of control, that everything is worse than
it seems, that we go to work each day and eat Danish and pay
phone bills because we don't want to face the truth that is
closing in on us, the truth that all mankind is heading for a
disaster like none that has ever been seen before.
The vision ended. I told my mother I'd call her back, I thanked
my former boss for my mail, and I told Jeannie I was sorry for
calling her stupid. After that day I tried to mellow out a bit.
Now Jeannie's gone and I realize we were better off with her
here. I hated her when she was around, but after she was gone I
realized that she symbolized something important, something we
all need.
Now I sometimes go to T.J.'s alone and eat Thai Chicken with
mozzarella or some similarly ghastly concoction. Sometimes I
even think I might learn to ski. Racing toward the bottom of a
hill, going down, down, down, trying to keep your balance...
somehow it strikes me this is a skill that it might be smart to
practice.
Levi Asher (ek938@cleveland.freenet.edu)
------------------------------------------
Levi Asher works as a consultant to Wall Street banks eerily
similar to the one depicted in this story. He is married and
lives in Queens. He spends his time eating Mexican food and
teaching his eight year old daughter and three year old son how
to do _Beavis and Butt-head_ impressions.
Up In Smoke by John Sloan
==============================
..................................................................
* Wait a second--doesn't our editor have a degree from this
university? *
..................................................................
"That will be all for today."
Professor Thomas Bentley Hawthorn's digitally-enhanced voice
boomed from the speakers like a battery of heavy field
artillery. His towering high-resolution features hung before the
audience in the jammed lecture hall. The Professor's every
grease-pot pore and bristling nose hair were faithfully rendered
in Olympian 3-D by the holo-projector. At the back of the huge
hall, a much smaller and positively ungodlike Thomas Bentley
Hawthorn shuddered. He was particularly unnerved by the nose
hairs.
"Have a pleasant weekend," thundered Hawthorn's virtual self.
Row upon row of blank faces took in the final remark. As the
image faded, the class began the ritual of closing their
portacomps and packing up their things. Like a massive herd of
fresh-faced zombies they would stumble to the next class, the
library, the lunch hall, or wherever fresh-faced zombies went at
the end of the day. Hawthorn beat a hasty retreat. It was
foolish of him to be there in the first place. Professors never
attended their own lectures anymore. One cry of recognition,
perhaps a desperately-shouted question, had the potential of
shaking the other 13,000 shuffling undergraduates out of their
daze. The thought made Hawthorn shiver: 13,000 students with
their inquiring minds suddenly awakened and a real-life
professor in their midst. That was how poor Kitsworth had met
his end, trampled and crushed by his own Early American History
class shortly before the midterm examination.
A rushing torrent of student bodies poured into the university's
great underground concourse. Hawthorn ducked through a side exit
and bounded up a short flight of stairs into the
melanoma-causing overlight of day. There were crowds here too,
trampling over the trash-strewn waste that had once been a
rather pleasantly green university commons. At least outside
there was more air to breathe, though its freshness was
questionable.
"Hey, watch it!" a bag lady said, giving Hawthorn a little
shove. She was fat and filthy, with a round flabby face
lacerated with sores from being outside too long. The route to
Hawthorn's office made it necessary to cut through the throng
lined up outside the Student Services Building. The tired and
bedraggled line of students and tramps snaked for half a mile.
The woman was one of those who subsisted around campus in a
great parasitic hobo camp. If anybody ever wondered why so many
students would cram the university to receive so little in the
way of an education, they only had to look beyond its gates at
what was simply called the Camp. The Camp was populated by those
left in the dust by the economic shift of the 1990's. The
well-off students had taken to paying residents of the Camp to
stand in line for them.
"I am very sorry, Madam," Hawthorn said with a guilty little
bow.
"How sorry?" She crossed arms that would be thick even without
the battered old winter coat she was wearing. Hawthorn began to
fish in his pockets. Suddenly, a huge broken-toothed smile
spread across her face.
"Hey! I remember you!" she said. "History 257. Great course. I
always liked the stories about back when people had stuff,
y'know."
"Yes, yes, good to see you again," Hawthorn said hurriedly. He
pressed what coins he had found into her chubby, dirt-crusted
hand and fled.
Beyond the Student Services Building was the B. G. Dingle Animal
Medical Research Building. Its great brick smokestack was
belching the remains of that day's batch of animal research
subjects. A single activist had deposited himself resolutely in
the doorway. Two campus security guards were beating him with
their crowd control bars.
"Murder is not progress!" the young man shouted just before a
club came down and obliged him to choke on his own teeth. Nobody
in the rushing crowds seemed to notice.
Hawthorn came to the century-old Hampstead Humanities Building.
Bless its narrow windows, hardwood paneling, and gray stone
heart! Unlike the gray behemoths built on university campuses in
the final quarter of the previous century, old Hampstead was
what a university building should be. It even smelled right:
chalk dust, old wood, and stone. Stone has a smell completely
unlike concrete. His office, a tiny island of peace and solitude
away from the throng, was in Hampstead's basement level. It had
one high window through which one could see the constant
shuffling of thousands of feet.
"Lights on, computer on," Hawthorn said wearily as he peeled off
his overcoat. The computer sprang to life with a list of
questions distilled from a thousand student queries filed
through University net. As Hawthorn sat down, he noticed that
the questions had already been answered. He scrolled through the
answers on the screen. Each ended with his trademark closing
"Cheers! TBH."
"Funny," he muttered to himself. "I don't remember doing those."
There was a knock at the door. This made him jump because nobody
ever knocked on his door. It was a feeble knock and for a moment
Hawthorn even suspected that a student had found his office. He
shivered. Others had been trapped for days bereft of food or
facilities when the student hordes had found their hiding
places. Reluctantly, Hawthorn cracked open the door. What he saw
on the other side outdid even the wild possibility that a
student had found his refuge.
"President Throckmorton!" The president of the university was an
ancient woman, probably in her nineties. Hawthorn hadn't seen
Throckmorton in years. He had never seen her outside the
administration building. Tiny and frail, with frizzy gray hair
and a heavy knit shawl, she was leaning on a simple wooden cane.
When she spoke there was still authority and assurance in her
voice.
"Professor Hawthorn," she said. "May I come in?"
"Of course," Hawthorn stumbled backward to get out of her way.
"Can I get you anything? There is a coffee machine down the
hall. I think it still works."
"Do you have tea?"
"I think it just has coffee. It's just down the hall. I can--"
"Sit down, Professor Hawthorn."
"Yes, Madam President."
She eased herself into a chair that nobody had sat in for at
least a decade. The leather and wood groaned a little but,
thankfully, the chair did not collapse under the president. Even
while seated she stooped forward on her cane as if the enormous
weight of responsibility for the university never left her
shoulders. The president examined him for a long time with a
curiously sad expression.
"I am assuming you have tenure here at the university," she said
in a weary tone.
"Yes, of course, Madam President. As you know, there were no
non-tenured positions left in the department after the last
budget cut," he said.
"I just wanted to be sure. It's important that I am sure on
that," she said shaking her head and casting about as if she was
looking for something. Then her eyes came back to Hawthorn's.
"It's important because of what I have to tell you."
It was all quite unreal. The president of all the university in
his little office, apparently about to confide some great
secret.
"Have you ever wondered what it was like to be President of all
of this for the past dozen years?"
"Not really, Madam President. I suppose it has been a remarkable
challenge--"
"It's been hell!" she interjected. "Funding perpetually cut
back, mandated admissions increased, and most years tuition has
been frozen or cut. No qualified university professors since the
shortage began in '96."
"Well, you did institute some very creative measures to deal
with _that_."
"Yes, you could say that." For some reason she seemed to almost
smile.
"Yes, I remember," he said eagerly. "Cut mandatory retirement.
Bloody bold move."
The president looked morose again and gazed at the passing feet
outside the window. "That's how it started."
"I don't understand."
"Smithers was the first. Do you remember Smithers?"
"Oh yes, French literature. Fine old fellow."
"It was weeks before anybody noticed him missing. They found him
at his desk, just down the hall from here, all stiff and dried
up. Quite a mess with all the dust and cobwebs."
"Good Lord! It must have been terrible."
"It was. But not as terrible as what followed," she said in a
distant voice. Her gaze shifted from the window to the floor.
"We couldn't lose Smithers."
"He was good."
"No, I mean he really was irreplaceable. We had several thousand
students in his class. Nobody to replace him, nobody we could
afford anyway. So..."
"Yes?"
"So we didn't replace him." She looked hard into his eyes. What
Hawthorn saw there made him go cold inside. "He's still
teaching, at least on vidi. All his lectures were on vidi.
Nobody ever found out he's dead, nobody that matters anyway. His
salary has been rolled back into the general operating budget."
"What? That's preposterous. What about the body?"
"Well, you may recall that we completed the new medical
incinerator that year."
"My God!" Hawthorn cried. He started to say something and then
pull up short when a thought stopped him like a baseball bat to
the kneecaps.
_Smithers was the first._
It suddenly occurred to him that the Faculty Club had become
decidedly less populated in recent years. Hawthorn's mouth
dropped open and his eyes slowly widened with realization.
"There were others?" he asked with dawning horror. "Johnson?
Willoughby? Stevenson? The entire old guard?"
"Up the stack, every one. Of course, they were all in the arts,
the humanities, and the softer social sciences. Technological
research and development must carry on for the good of society,
not to mention the directed research grants we get out of it.
Fortunately, there isn't nearly the teaching load in the
sciences since we have consistently failed to interest
undergraduate students in hard science for the past thirty
years."
"It's diabolical! You're speaking about respected faculty! They
deserved a better end than that."
"But they were already dead," said the president. "They just
would have gone into the ground."
"So they ended their illustrious careers as alternate energy
sources for the university!"
"Please, you have to understand." She leaned further forward on
her cane. "We couldn't just cut their courses. That would be a
violation of the government's student accessibility policy. We
couldn't just write them off. There was nobody to replace them.
Many of them were in externally-funded chairs."
"No, I don't understand," said Hawthorn sternly, forgetting all
pretense of honoring the old hag. A whiff of panic was also
beginning to enter his voice. "How could they not be missed?" he
asked, casting his eyes furtively around the room as if to check
that some of them weren't hiding under the dusty furniture.
"Certainly we are more than an automated, degree-granting
factory. My God, woman! The interaction between professor and
student, the challenging of young minds with new ideas and old
wisdom, is what sparks critical thought. How can we have
progress? How can we have civilization without--"
The president closed her eyes and was still for so long that
Hawthorn was beginning to suspect she might have blown a
cerebral artery. But then she took a deep breath, held it, and
let it out slowly. She shook her head and regarded him
sympathetically.
"The essay component in all courses was cut in '98, the students
see you only through a holo-projector, and nobody has office
time for inquiries any more," she said softly. "Where is this
critical interaction?"
Triumphantly, he pointed at his computer. "There! I still have
an important interactive link with my students through net."
"Ah, that was a tricky problem," she admitted. "But our
programmers were able to construct expert systems based on
thousands of the deceased professors' previous answers. We are
quite sure the students can't tell the difference. I don't even
know if they would care."
Again Hawthorn started to say something but was brought up short
by the recollection of the answers that had mysteriously
appeared on his own computer screen.
"Cheers . . . TBH," he muttered and gave the president a
quizzical look. As his eyes began to widen with realization and
horror she looked away in embarrassment and fumbled with her
shawl. There was a knock at his door, stronger and more
insistent this time. "Come!" called the president. Two brawny
Campus Security officers burst into the office. One of the
guards held a great black bag, made of a rugged plastic
material, with a long zipper down the front.
"In order to maintain the quality of education at this
institution we have had to institute another series of resource
modifications," the president was saying in formal monotone.
"Unfortunately, we have had to move to a new more active phase
in our budget curtailment strategy. You may proceed, gentlemen."
As the two burly men lunged forward, Hawthorn could clearly see
the words "Medical Waste" emblazoned on the big black bag.
Before he could even think of reacting they had grabbed him by
the arms. The President rose slowly and turned to leave the
room.
"Wait!" he begged, struggling. "You can't do this!"
"It's the only way, Professor Hawthorn. We simply can't afford
to lose you. Unfortunately, we can't afford to support you
either."
"But this is completely unnecessary," he said trying to sound
reasonable though his voice was growing shrill with fear. "I
could just leave. I'll never tell. I promise."
"Too risky," said the president as she left the room shaking her
head. "If the resignation became public, it would raise all
kinds of questions. We might be accused of violating your
tenure. Besides, you're better off this way. Where in the world
would you go?"
"Help!" One of the president's expressionless goons produced a
large syringe filled with a pinkish liquid. "My God! Somebody
help me!"
"Don't bother," the president's voice echoed in the hallway.
"There isn't anybody left in the building. You're the last.
We're closing it up to save on maintenance."
She turned to give him one last sad and lonely look.
"It's too bad you don't know anything about biochemistry," she
said with a sigh. "We can always afford a few more scientists."
John Sloan (jsloan@julian.uwo.ca)
-----------------------------------
John Sloan writes for _Western News_, a campus newspaper
published by the University of Western Ontario. He also
contributes a weekly newspaper column on microcomputers to the
_London Free Press_. John lives with his wife and daughter in
neither a cozy flat nor a rambling old house. He does not own a
cat.
Reality Error by G.L. Eikenberry
=====================================
..................................................................
* If we're not responsible for our own reality, who is? *
..................................................................
"Forget it, Ray. You know I don't beg."
"Yeah, sure. You got a better idea, Einstein? We happen to be
fresh out of mutual funds to sell off, so we either go hungry or
we troll the mall for spare change."
"It's just a thing I have, okay? I'm kind of down-and-out right
now, but I don't beg. Maybe I'll go down to Dorchester Street
and see if I can scrounge some bottles I can cash in or
something. I'll catch you later at Mercy House, okay?"
It's getting dark. The familiar beast is gnawing at his stomach
again. Kind of looks like rain. Rotten luck. He's been bashing
around for a long time and has just one small pop bottle and
three beer bottles to show for it. He'll have to hitch back
downtown if he's going to make the Mercy House soup line before
they shut down for the night.
Red Firebird. Snob car number 37. Nobody stops for a bum. He
might as well give up on Mercy House for tonight. At this rate
he won't even make the 10 o'clock curfew for a cot in the old
convent school gym. He's better off hiking over to the
dry-cleaning plant. It's only a few blocks. He can sleep under a
dryer vent if he can stand the smell.
One more car. Maybe he'll get lucky. Black Volvo. Hey, it's
stopping!
"Rio. Come on, man. Get in."
"Ray? Hey, wait--no way I'm getting into a hot car."
"Aw, come on, man. I'll give you a lift down to the House. Come
on. It's not hot, I swear to God. Honest, man, I didn't steal
nothing. I was hanging around the mall, right? The rent-a-cop
gave me the boot for loitering or soliciting or something. Jeez,
I scored all of 85 cents, right? Come on, asshole, get in. It's
starting to rain. So anyway--are you getting in or what? So
anyway, I was hanging around outside the mall--like they kicked
me out, so I figured I'd try the sidewalk. So I put the humble
lean on this guy in trendy threads, and he says, 'Fresh out of
change, pal, do you think you could settle for this?' So he
hands me a bill, right? I mean Jesus Christ, it's a goddam
twenty! Blow me right away, eh? So I go to stuff it in my pocket
and get scarce before he realizes he's made a mistake and tries
to take it back, and what do I find rolled up in the bill? A
key, right? A goddam car key. I swear to God, Rio, a key to a
Volvo. I checked it out--there was a Volvo parked right there in
the handicap space, so I try the key and, hey, here I am. I
mean, did this guy win the lottery or what?"
"He probably ripped it off. Or did you look in the trunk? It's
probably full of dope or something."
"Where were you heading, anyway?"
"I was going over to the dry-cleaning plant. I figured a spot
under a vent--"
"So we'll go together. I picked up a six of beer with the
twenty."
REALITY ERROR: Abort, Retry, Fail? Fail
"Forget it, Ray. I don't do malls, and I don't beg."
"Yeah, sure. You got a better idea, Rockefeller? In case you
hadn't noticed, we're fresh out of blue-chip stocks and bearer
bonds, so we either troll the mall for spare change or we go to
bed hungry."
"It's just a thing I have, okay? I happen to be a little
down-and-out, but I'll have to be a whole lot worse off before I
beg. Maybe I'll go down to Dorchester Street and see if I can
scrounge some bottles or something. I'll catch you later at
Mercy House." The familiar beast is gnawing at his stomach
again. A couple dozen beer bottles almost buys a burger.
It's getting dark. It looks like it could rain. Typical. He's
been bashing around yuppie territory for two or three hours and
all he has to show for it is one small pop bottle and a couple
of beer bottles. Nothing. He'll have to hitch back downtown if
he's going to have any chance to make the Mercy House soup line
before they shut down for the night.
This is getting to be a real drag. Maroon Trans-Am goes by. Snob
car number 38. Nobody stops for abandoned,
drummed-out-of-business pharmacists cleverly disguised as
middle-aged hippies. He might as well write off Mercy House for
the night. At this rate he won't even make the ten o'clock
curfew for a cot in the old convent school gym. A fluid, racking
cough erupts from the depths of his chest. He'll hike to the
dry-cleaning plant. It's only a few blocks. Sleeping under the
dryer vents can't be too bad. It might even beat the human
bacterial culture medium that is the hostel.
He walks. The rain has started. He quickens his pace. One foot
lifted, swung forward on the double fulcrum of knee and hip a
short distance through immediate space--a momentary,
subconscious defiance of the laws of gravity, but a minor one--a
mere misdemeanor--levitation--a strobing through space and
perhaps even time--steps--miracles--strung together--propelling
him toward warmth.
Black Volvo. Snob car number 39. It brakes out of its more
disciplined trajectory, skids, lurches, insinuates mastery over
its driver's intentions, sweeps broadside toward the shell that
has relabelled itself Rio.
A somewhat longer step--a wider swing--a full fledged felony
against the laws of space and time. Oblivious to how he may or
may not have arrived there, he gathers himself into the hot air
blowing down from the dryer vent. There are worse ways to spend
a night.
REALITY ERROR: Abort, Retry, Fail? Retry
"Forget it, Ray. I realize that--at least according to the
self-righteous bitch that threw me out on the street--I am the
lowest of the low, but there are two things I refuse to do. I
don't beg, and I don't set foot inside shopping malls."
"Yeah, sure, Socrates--you've got a more fulfilling idea? Check
your pockets. I don't know about you, but I'm fresh out of oil
wells, yachts and VCRs, so it's either troll the mall or learn
to live with hunger."
"Suit yourself. It's a thing I have, okay? I may be in a
low-liquidity mode right now, but I'll have to be a whole lot
worse off before I resort to begging. I think I'll head down to
Dorchester Street to see if I can scare up a few empties I can
cash in for some edibles. Mercy House gruel is beginning to wear
a little thin. I'll catch you later in the bedtime lineup."
What he really wants is a pizza, but he'll be lucky if
scrounging bottles turns up enough for a greasy burger.
It's getting dark. It looks and feels like the rain's going to
start any minute. Just his luck. He's been bashing around
yuppie-land for half an eternity and all he has to show for it
is a beat-up grocery bag with a couple of dirty pop bottles
rattling around inside. They might earn a bag of chips, but that
won't feed the beast in his belly. Better hitch back downtown
and try to make the Mercy House soup line before they shut down
for the night.
Okay--42nd time lucky, right? Brown Jaguar. Face full of exhaust
number 42. Nobody stops for an involuntarily-retired
designer-drug entrepreneur, declared persona non grata by any
friends once worth knowing. Must be the clever over-the-hill
hippie disguise. At this rate he won't even make the 10 o'clock
curfew for a pissy cot in Mercy House's old convent school gym.
A fluid, racking cough erupts from the depths of his chest,
asserting his vulnerability. He'll hike to the dry-cleaning
plant. It's not far--maybe four or five blocks. Those with more
experience in this sort of thing claimed that sleeping under a
dryer vent was almost tolerable on a chilly, wet night. It might
even be a welcome change from the human compost-heap of the
Mercy House hostel.
He walks. The rain has started. The shock waves from another
spasm of coughing reach his brain. He's not dressed for this.
He's going to have to do something pretty fast--some money, some
clothes, a place to go. She wouldn't let him in even if he did
go back. But he won't go back. Anyway, she'd probably follow
through on her threat to turn him in. Talk about a
self-righteous bitch. She never had any problem spending the
money when she thought he was the best paid assistant pharmacist
in the Western World. What about the Mediterranean holiday they
almost took? He was supposed to pick up the tickets the day the
phone rang.
It's pouring now. He ought to get to the plant before he's
completely soaked. He lengthens out his stride. Left foot lifts,
swings forward on the double fulcrum of knee and hip--a miracle
of practical physics propels him a short distance through
immediate space, suspended from his center of gravity--a
momentary, subconscious defiance of the laws of gravity, but a
minor infraction--a mere misdemeanor--levitation--they'll never
catch him--strobing through space--through time--long, floating
steps--minor miracles--strung together--propelling him towards
warmth.
One last try with the old magic thumb. Hell, it always used to
work in his student days. Black Volvo. Snob car number 43. It
brakes, departs from its planned, more disciplined trajectory,
skids, lurches, insinuates mastery over its driver, sweeps
broadside toward the impenetrable collection of molecules that
never quite worked out as Brian--that aren't doing a hell of a
lot better as Rio.
A longer step--a wider, more radical swing--more than a simple
mid-course adjustment along a space/time continuum. A bona fide
felony. This is no minor deviation from the laws of physics.
This is the real thing. Violations of this magnitude can carry a
heavy penalty.
Brian basks in the sun's warmth. When he first becomes aware of
the sound, he is tugging absentmindedly at the hair in his left
ear, trying to discern meaningful patterns in the waves of the
receding tide.
Margaret rolls over, wrapping herself tightly in her robe. "Did
you hear that? It sounded like something ripping." She searches
up and down the beach. "Brian, it's getting chilly. Let's go
back to the hotel."
"Aw, this is our last day. We can sit inside back home."
The sound again. It snags on the sculpted sandstone above them.
Margaret looks towards the cliff, but sees nothing to explain
it. She looks back over to Brian, but he doesn't seem to notice.
To him it sounds more like a muffled pop followed by sand
shifting with preordained precision, perhaps under carefully
placed feet. He sends his gaze up and down the beach, but there
is nothing out of the ordinary to see.
The improbable beast approaches with surprising stealth for a
minotaur. It studies the man carefully. He is tall and thin, not
particularly muscular even by modern standards--not likely to
pose any threat to a mythical beast. The man's otherwise evenly
tanned skin glows slightly red from too much sun. His face is
not visible.
The woman is not so easy to discern. She is wrapped in a white
robe. Her hair shimmers, long and dark. The sun has given it an
enticing sheen. And the backs of her calves and the soles of her
feet are precisely and delicately rounded, cast from a mold
tracing back to another age.
A great aching swells in the beast's groin. Although it sees
nothing to suggest significant resistance, something more
visceral than sight or smell tells him the ache will grow before
it can be relieved.
The creature positions itself a short distance behind them. It
announces its presence with a contemptuous snort.
The skinny male scrambles to his feet. He motions backwards with
his left hand as if to push his mate back, away from whatever is
about to happen.
She either doesn't notice or chooses to ignore him. She rises,
with one arm extended, to face the creature squarely. The white
robe falls open, but as she feels the eyes of the beast upon her
she gathers it in tightly and clutches her arms across her
breasts.
The minotaur grows in stature. The man would probably surrender
the woman without a struggle but it's better if she is won.
Three quick steps take the minotaur to the flimsy male. It
stoops and thrashes its head, lifts him on its horns with ease.
It flings him far out into the surf.
The man hurts, gasps for air--but he refuses to cry out. He
swims--forever he swims against the receding tide until he
heaves his exhausted body onto the beach.
His heart lurches against his rib cage, plotting frantic escape.
The sun pours molten rays over him, joining forces with his
fatigue, bakes fate into a hard, impenetrable ceramic shell.
And yet he must coalesce the vestiges of his will, he must defy
the fatigue, the sun, the pain, the impossibility. He must rise
to accept the truth of this monstrosity just long enough to
vanquish it.
REALITY ERROR: Abort, Retry, Fail? Abort
"Forget it, Ray. There are some things I just can't--just
_won't_ do--"
"You got a better idea, Schroedinger? No way out, Rio, my
man--if you don't mend the tear in the continuum, who will?"
G.L. Eikenberry (aa353@freenet.carleton.ca)
---------------------------------------------
G.L. Eikenberry: On a bad day he's unemployed. On a good one
he's a self-employed consultant. On almost every day he's a
freelance writer and martial arts instructor in Gloucester,
Ontario, just down the road from Ottawa.
Still Life by Adam C. Engst
==================================
..................................................................
* When you go to the desert on a horse with no name, be sure
to get out of the rain. *
..................................................................
Gone Fishing
------------
I was walking through the north end of town the other day and no
one much was about but the tumbleweeds and the whores by
Miller's place. I saw a white rock on the road so I picked it up
since I've always done that and now I've got quite a collection.
My grandfather always used to tell me that they were quartz
rocks long after I knew that fact but I never got irritated
enough with him to stop picking them up.
As I was bending back up, a shadow of a man whipped across my
path, said his name was Jake Snake and that he was a desert rat
searching for truth. I gave him a light before he burned himself
on the mirror he flashed around, trying to catch the sun on the
tip of his mangled cigarette.
"What are you really doing here, Jake?" I asked to find out why
a sneak like him was braving the light of day.
"Well, I's just out for a breath of air before it becomes too
hot to breathe," he said, nice and polite like. The thermometer
was at a hundred and eight that day and breathing wasn't none
too easy as it was, so I pressed him a bit.
"Jake, you're full of shit," I said, and slowly walked away,
waiting for him to follow like he always done before. Well, he
didn't follow me, but ambled off into the distance muttering
about fireballs and salvation in the salt mines. That in itself
wasn't too strange, but when I saw a whole line of people
heading south in front of Jake it certainly seemed that
something was up. They were already too far away for me to catch
them and ask them, though I could see the fire engines being
driven that way, too. That explained why no one much was about,
since they all seemed to be heading south.
I figured that there had to be someone left in town who knew
what was happening, so I looked around a bit for someone to talk
to. I wasn't really the sort to just follow a mass of people for
no real reason, and even if there is a reason I don't much like
to do it just for the principles involved. I've found that it
usually pays off to avoid the crowds, something I learned when I
was visiting the city, where there were and probably still are a
lot of crowds and not all that much else, except a few doormen
who live outside the biggest buildings. I think the doormen were
a kind of crowd parasite, since they always lived outside the
largest buildings, and the biggest crowds come out of the
biggest buildings.
I decided that the first place to ask was by Miller's, since the
whores didn't ever leave town and usually knew more about
current events than anyone else. I guess they were usually in a
good position to find out about that sorta thing. The whores
didn't know nothing, but told me to go talk to Miller.
Miller was the priest, and found living next to the whores fit
his temperament just fine. He saved them and they him, though I
think personally that they came out ahead in the deal--messing
with a priest probably helped their case when they came before a
judge that made Kenesaw Mountain Landis look like a two-bit DA
with diarrhea. Miller lived what used to be the church. He
wasn't real neat, and had taken to throwing his garbage
downstairs rather than take it to the town dump. The garbage
didn't smell since it dried out real quickly, our town being
smack-dab in the middle of the desert.
Miller weren't of much comfort. He was moving around kinda
nervous-like, but it wasn't because Canyon Carol was there. One
of 'em was usually there. All he'd say was that something big
was going down, far as he could tell, and he was going to get
his living in while it were still much of a possibility.
"Thanks anyway," I said, and left. A few minutes later he and
Carol disappeared in the direction that Jake Snake had gone.
Doc was out, and his sign said that he'd gone fishing. I hate it
when he puts up that sign, because there ain't much running
water within a hundred miles of here, let alone fish. That sign
just means the Doc's over fishing for the Widow Fultin just like
he been since her old man died having his appendix out. Mighty
fishy, dying while having your appendix out. A few people
complained that they didn't want no doctor who might blow a
simple appendix operation, especially if he were interested in
the patient's wife. They was all for true love and that stuff,
but puncturing a man's appendix was certainly close to the belt
and perhaps a little bit below it, despite what that saying says
about everything being fair in love and war.
But Mayor Dreed said that not many towns our size were so
blessed by having a sawbones, and even if he weren't too
accurate, he's still better than letting Jones the crazy dentist
at the sick people. No one wanted to be put under while he was
around, just 'cause you never really knew what he would do with
you, like sew your hands together. Through your fingers. Behind
your back.
So Doc stayed on, and spent every day trying to get the Widow
Fultin to marry him or, barring that, at least to sleep with
him, since he knew what the prostitutes had and he was a little
too wary of dosing up on the penicillin all the time like Miller
had to.
The Doc wasn't real good about sticking to the rules about
courting and all that. The Widow was an eyeful, to be sure, what
with her long blond hair, and the old wives in the town said
that she had been a loose woman in California before she met
Fultin on some trip and they got married real quick like.
The saloon seemed like a good place to find out what in
tarnation, what in hell that is, was going on around town. I
strolled in and the regulars were clustered around the bar
grumping about something, and when I went over to ask what was
up they clammed right up. That was kind of funny since the
barkeep, Little Richard, was giving his stuff out to them like
there was no tomorrow.
Normally when those boys have had anywhere near that much in
them they'll talk about anything, whether or not they know what
they're saying. I remember once when Richard himself was so far
gone he started telling us when everyone in his family had
birthdays and what size clothes they all wore. This is from a
man who can't normally remember what day it is and probably
wouldn't tell you anyway, unless he was feeling in a good mood
and happened to like you. But today no one was saying anything
about anything at all.
The mayor is the type of person who ought to know what kind of
things are happening in his town, so I went to visit him. Mayor
Dreed was in his office, which was mighty nice seeing as
everyone else had been out, worthless, or leaving when I got
there. I began to think that perhaps I should've taken a bath
last month like I'd planned before the boys in the saloon threw
me in the barrel of old wash water outside the store and soaked
me to the skin. But the mayor was downright hospitable and
offered me some of them oyster crackers which he always had
lying around whenever visitors showed up in his office. The
crackers were pretty stale, since no one visited the Mayor very
often, so he hadn't bought new oyster crackers for a few years
or so.
When I asked him about why everyone was either drunker than a
skunk or leaving town like a cowardly armadillo, he gave me the
lecture for the fifth grade on the executive branch of
government which he'd been practicing for weeks. He said the
schoolmarm had canceled on him just today, which confused him
since he had been working on this speech for so long that he
didn't really know what needed to be done governing-wise. I said
that I was sorry, but if he didn't find out what was happening
he'd be mayor of a town of drunks and ghosts since everyone else
was heading out towards the salt mines. He didn't hear me and
moved right on to the legislative branch of government, so I
left.
I went to look for the Widow Fultin. She lived a ways out of
town, but it wasn't too bad of a walk since I had other things
on my mind, trying to figure out where everyone was going and
why. When I got out to her place, Doc's horse was there, tied to
the fence with a piece of twine since Doc wasn't much for buying
saddles and proper ropes and things. I knocked and went in when
no one answered the door. It's a nice town like that, where no
one much cares if you let yourself in when they're too busy to
open the door for you. I did just that, figuring that the Widow
Fultin was out back messing with the livestock or something.
She wasn't much with the animals, but she did try, and once
every couple of days Doc paid a man to come over late at night
and take care of them so they didn't die. The Widow Fultin had
said a bunch of times that she was going to live on old man
Fultin's farm as long as everything lived and Doc didn't want to
lose his chance at her just because she couldn't keep weeds
alive long enough to choke the flowers that Doc's man planted
late at night. The Widow Fultin sure noticed that everything
looked a lot better every few days. Guess she attributed it to
cycles or something that she heard about in California.
I don't know too much about California, since the city I went to
was in Kansas, but I hear that you have to have your head pretty
far gone to get along there what with the men sleeping together
and more rich people than you can count. Most towns get along
fine with a single rich man around, but from what people have
told me there's lots of them all over in California. Gotta be a
weird place if you get too many rich people all running around
all the time. One's healthy 'cause it gives little kids
something to look up to, but what use could you possibly have
for more'n that? Some places just aren't worth keeping these
days, I tell you.
After I'd caught my breath and sat a while in the Widow's
parlor, I started wondering where the Widow was at since it
wasn't like her not to show up after a while. I went back out
and looked in the barn and out back, but she wasn't anywhere to
be seen. So I went back in and sat down again for a while. Then
I decided to check upstairs. That's taking hospitality a tad far
even in this town, but I really did want to talk to the Widow
and I figured that she didn't have a live husband to want to put
some lead in me for my cheek. I tiptoed upstairs, half expecting
to see the Doc and the Widow deep in a feather bed, but I know
that's got about as much chance as Hell melting. Hell froze over
several years ago and it just ain't been the same since. Look at
Miller: A perfectly good priest put out of a cushy job just
because some damn fool said that something wouldn't happen until
Hell froze over and Lucifer just couldn't resist.
I was part right when I thought that the Doc and the Widow might
be enjoying themselves in a big feather bed since the Widow was
certainly enjoying something in that feather bed. There was a
low humming noise coming from the bed, so I coughed so as not to
surprise her. I've heard it's bad luck to surprise a widow, sort
of like walking under a falling ladder or having a panther cross
your path.
The Widow was still a little surprised when I walked in on her
like that but I'll give her credit 'cause she didn't so much as
bat an eyelash but asked me in right polite like. I went over
and sat on the bed next to her as she went on enjoying herself.
It was a kinda hard to concentrate with the Widow tossing and
turning in the bed the way she was, but I managed to say what
I'd been planning on saying.
"Widow Fultin," I said, "something strange is happening in town.
Most of the people seems to have up and left, mainly for the
salt mines, and the rest are drowning their sorrows in the
deepest bottle I've ever seen."
The Widow just moaned softly, so I went on after shifting my
position to make it a little bit more comfortable and perhaps to
improve the view too.
"Widow," I said, "I thought maybe Doc would know what's
happening since he's generally a learned man. I saw his horse
out front, I said, but I haven't seen him around."
Widow Fultin gasped. "Oh, he's been gone for a while. Went out
walking, I think."
I had been sitting down for a while when I first got there, and
then I waited for a while longer before coming up here, so Doc
had been gone for at least two whiles, and that's a long time.
"Widow," I said, "Doc didn't take his horse so he doesn't have
any water with him. Did he say which way he was going?"
"He said he was going to something to do with salt, towers or
flowers or bowers, I can't remember."
I was getting pretty uncomfortable by now, because even in this
town we have some conventions about what you can do to make
yourself comfortable in someone else's house.
"Did he say why he was going there?" I asked, curious to find
out what the deal was with Doc, who didn't normally leave the
Widow's place until someone had a baby and the Mayor made him
go. He slept in the barn since she wouldn't let him come past
the entryway in the house unless he took his boots off and he
always said that he was going to die with his boots on. I guess
he was worried that he was gonna die in his sleep. Everyone in
the saloon thought he'd die if he ever really made it with a
woman and that was why he wouldn't take his boots off.
I sat and thought about all of this for a while while I was
watching the Widow. Suddenly the humming noise stopped and the
Widow threw something against the wall.
"Goddammit," she exclaimed. "That thing was supposed to last
until the end of the world." I went over and picked it up,
taking advantage of the opportunity to adjust my clothing to a
looser position.
"No," I said, "it specifically says that it is only guaranteed
for life where the life in question is that of the appliance." I
put it down and wiped off my hands on my pants.
"Damn," she said. "Well then, will you replace it?"
I've never been much able to resist feminine wiles and let me
tell you, she had a lot of them and they were right out there
for me to see, every last one of them clamoring for attention.
So I didn't resist. I sprang right out of my recently-adjusted
pants and jumped into that feather bed and we rolled around for
quite some time as I tried to fill the shoes of her broken
appliance. After a while, when we were both tired out, I said
that I was going to head back to town to see if I could find the
sheriff and see if he knew what was going on. The Widow Fultin
said she was coming so we rolled around a little more before I
got up to go.
"Widow," I said as I got out of the bed and staggered over to
where I was sure I'd left my pants, "Widow, let's get going."
"Stop calling me Widow," she said. "It's morbid. Call me Lil."
It didn't fit so I decided to call her Kari, since she was
probably from California where they spelt things funny. She
liked it and said that no one ever called her Lil anyway and
asked what my name was, so I told her, and she said that it was
a nice name but not to worry if she forgot it 'cause she forgot
names all the time. While we were doing all this name calling, I
still couldn't find my pants, so she lent me a pair of her dead
husband's which he had never worn because they were too small
for him. I could understand that since I weigh about a hundred
and fifty pounds but old man Fultin had been pushing three
hundred or so for the last ten years of his life. Borrowing some
pants was alright by me since mine were a bit dirty anyway. The
pants looked remarkably like my own and when I found a white
stone in the pocket I knew something strange was going on, but
since Kari was probably from California I decided to let it go
for the moment.
We both managed to get dressed after some more rolling on the
floor, which was pretty hard, although not too bad considering
it wasn't carpeted. Kari put on a leather bodysuit thing and I
asked her if she would be hot since she certainly looked hot.
She said, "How could I be hot when I look so cool?"
She was definitely from California, I decided, but the logic was
too much for me to handle after all that rolling around. We went
downstairs and outside but it had gotten so hot out that we had
to sit on the porch and help each other breathe for a while,
after which we took Doc's horse and trotted back to town.
The sheriff's office was right on the edge of town, so we
stopped in. The sheriff and the deputy were both sitting there
playing rummy and the deputy was winning big from what I could
tell.
"Afternoon, Sheriff," I said, trying to be friendly like, since
our sheriff isn't known for his good humor and here he was
losing at cards to our deputy who isn't known for his brains.
"Afternoon," he replied sourly.
"Cheer up, Sheriff," I said, hoping to get him to stop playing
cards and talk to us. "It isn't the end of the world."
"Boy," he said, because our sheriff talked like that, "Boy, I've
just gone and lost two thousand greenbacks to this nitwit here."
I gasped because that was a lot of money in this town,
especially since the sheriff wasn't our token rich man and also
since he cheated at cards. No one had beaten him for more than
two hands in a row since anyone could remember and only our
deputy was stupid enough to keep playing, which was a good part
of the reason he was the deputy 'cause he didn't know too much
about being a deputy.
Our deputy grinned at us and offered to buy us new suits but we
declined because Kari was still confused about whether she
looked hot or cool and me because I'd just gotten a new pair of
pants which fit perfectly and hadn't ever been worn by old man
Fultin 'cause they were too small.
Finally the sheriff said that as far as he was concerned, it was
the end of the world because that was the money that he'd been
putting by for a rainy day.
"Sheriff," I said, not trying to make him look stupid, "we live
in the desert and we haven't had a rainy day in a god awful long
time and even when we do it's not such a big deal as far as
money goes unless you've got a bet on with Crazy Cat." Crazy Cat
was the local Indian, shopkeeper, and designated representative
of the United States Postal Service.
"Git out and leave me alone with this nitwit until I get my
money back," the sheriff said.
I said as we were leaving, "Sheriff, with the kind of luck
you've been having you're gonna die before you win that money
back."
He drew his gun and put a hole in the door next to us for my
advice then he sat down and trained the gun on our deputy. "Deal
'em," he said to our deputy, who was busy trying to shuffle the
cards without dropping them on the floor.
"Something's definitely wrong here," I said to Kari as we
crossed the street to the store. "Everyone's acting weird and I
don't know why but I'll bet that someone from California's got
something to do with it, probably some damned politician."
"I'll put twenty bucks on that," said a voice from inside the
store. Crazy Cat came out of the store looking like an Indian
with feathers and leather and the whole getup.
"What're you all dressed up for?" I asked, since he was normally
pretty mild as far as clothes go. He just stared at Kari and
asked me what I was doing going around in old man Fultin's pants
with the Widow Fultin on my arm looking like that.
"Recent Personal Secret," I replied mysteriously and squeezed
Kari in a soft spot. "And besides," I said, "she's not the Widow
Fultin. Her name's Kari now."
"Oh," he said, and went back inside. We followed him from lack
of anything better to do and sat down on musty pickle barrels
under a sign that had the Post Office motto on it, or at least
as far as Crazy Cat could remember it, and as far as he had
changed it to make it more appropriate for the desert because we
didn't get much snow in these parts. It read something like:
_neither rain nor heat nor dark nights shall make me not deliver
the mail._ Kari muttered something that sounded like _herodotus_
and _appointed rounds_, but I wrote it off as something you said
if you were from California.
All of a sudden Crazy Cat started complaining in this loud voice
that he was bored since no one had gotten a real letter since
he'd been in charge of this branch of the United States Postal
Service. I told him that that wasn't true, since I knew for a
fact that the schoolmarm got letters regular-like. Crazy Cat
said that she got 'em because she sent 'em to herself, it being
in her contract that she had to prove her reading and writing
skills to the rest of the town by sending and receiving mail and
since she didn't know nobody out of town, like the rest of the
people who live here, she had to send letters to herself. I
didn't believe him, so he said to go look for myself since she
just got a letter without no return address on it, just like
hers always were.
I went back the mailboxes and found the one marked _Schoolmarm_
in the _S_ section, since Crazy Cat was pretty proud of the fact
that he knew the entire alphabet and could usually get the
letters in the right order so he put a lot of time into
alphabetizing all the mailboxes one year. The only problem was
that most of the people in the town were a bit like cows--they
could always find their box, but once it moved they were
completely confused and needed Crazy Cat's expert help and since
he didn't know the alphabet quite as well on some days as he did
on others he wasn't always much help.
He was right this time, and there was a letter in the
schoolmarm's box. Kari put down whatever she'd been messing with
and came back to look at the letter. It wasn't even in a
envelope, but was just a folded sheet of paper, so when I picked
it up it opened right up. We looked at it since no one much
cares about things like that in our town anyway, and we were
sure that if anyone had gotten a real letter they would've read
it to the whole town at the town m
eeting which we had on the
first Tuesday of March whether or not there was outstanding
business to take care of.
It looked as though the letter had to do with messing around,
but Kari said we should go and that she would explain everything
in it to me later. She read faster than I do, though I'm one of
the faster readers in this town, not that that says too much
about me. We walked back up front where Crazy Cat was still
complaining, so we told him to go pretend he was a real Indian
and do a rain dance or something. He liked the idea, and
disappeared behind the counter to look for something he needed
for a good rain dance, or so he said. He didn't come out for a
while, so we decided to head south for the salt mines and see
what was happening out there.
The Desert
----------
We got on Doc's horse again and started out of town, leaving
Crazy Cat whooping it up and jumping up and down in a circle. We
hadn't gotten more than a mile or two out when Doc's horse just
stopped. Plain and simple. Stopped dead in his tracks and
refused to move.
"Horse," I said, "you got some mule in you?" Then I asked Kari
if she knew what the horse's name was, 'cause horses don't
respond to being called _Horse_ too often. She said that Doc had
never given it a name since he wasn't much into talking to
animals anyhow.
"Great," I said. "We're stuck in the middle of the desert and
this horse isn't going nowhere."
We got off the horse and started walking, since there didn't
seem to be much else to do given the particular circumstances
that we were in at the moment. The sand and dust was real hot
and sorta mushy that far out in the desert and Kari started to
look a little green, but she said that she was far too cool to
possibly take off some of her clothes. Well, she only stayed
that cool for about another ten minutes and then off came the
top of that leather thingamabob and she perked right up when the
wind hit her skin. I perked right up too, but managed to
convince myself that the desert wasn't really a very good place
to roll around for a while.
As we walked the sky started to cloud over which was mighty
strange since the weather forecaster guy hadn't said nothing
about no rain coming any time soon. We started up a pretty steep
hill when the rain started. First there were these little drops
which hurt when they hit your skin and which made little puffs
of steam when they hit the red-hot sand. Kari pulled her top
back on and I pushed myself down again as we reached the middle
of the hill. Then the big drops started, and while I don't
'specially mind getting wet, I was already wetter than I'd been
in a couple a years. It was that sorta rain that just soaks
inside of you and keeps soaking in until you feel all juicy like
the underside of a rotten tomato. The dust had turned into mud
pretty quickly and it was hard going but we figured that we
couldn't really go back, since the salt mines were closer than
the town and weren't many people left back there anyway. That
leather thing had turned out to be sorta waterproof or water
resistant anyway, so mainly Kari's hair had gotten soaked by the
rain. It musta reached a foot past her rear and mighta been
stretching out even more but I couldn't see real well past all
those big drops.
We was trudging along, moving slower and slower as the wet sand
got worse, when all of a sudden we ran into a brick wall. It was
a wall to a little house, and we stumbled inside pretty quickly
since the salt mines were still a piece away and we figured we'd
try to wait out the rain since it didn't never rain for real
long in this part of the country. It was also starting to get a
little dark and we thought that it was probably getting late.
The house was kinda cozy, actually, and had been set up real
nice by someone, maybe Fred the Hermit. He was something of a
tall tale that you heard about a lot around midnight on Friday
nights down at the saloon when the boys had calmed down from the
week and were starting the serious drinking. Someone always
brought up Fred the Hermit and though no one really knew much of
anything about the man, he sure did get a lot of air time. Some
said he was a rich eccentric, down from the city 'cause his
relatives were trying to gouge him outa his money. Relatives
were always trying to do that in the stories in the saloon, so I
never gave that theory much in the way of thought.
The one I liked was the one some guy who never showed up again
told us. He was a sorry looking man, with long hair and a long
beard who mighta been Fred the Hermit for all we knew. He said
that Fred the Hermit was a normal guy who had been rejected by
the gal he loved and it had broken his heart so completely that
he decided to just go out into the desert and live out the rest
of his days alone and miserable. He would have killed himself,
this guy said, but he was a member of the Church of the Holy
Lady of the Sorrows of the Second Coming of Christ or something
like that so he just moved out in the middle of the desert to
live alone for the rest of his life. I never could keep those
churches straight and once Miller quit, I gave up even trying
since he was the only one who ever knew the difference between
them.
We all sat and listened to the guy and when he finished he paid
his tab and just up and left without another word. It were
pretty late by that time so I decided to head out and ask Miller
about the Church of the Holy Lady of the Sorrows of the Second
Coming of Christ, since it sounded a bit weird to me and I was
in a questioning sort of mood anyway. I ambled on up to Miller's
place and, knocking on the door, went right in 'cause it's that
sorta town where we don't worry about it much.
There was some thumping coming from upstairs, so I set my hat
down on a tall pile of garbage and sat for a while, figuring
that Miller heard me and would come down any second now. A few
little whimpers and final thumps came, which meant that Miller
had Sexy Sally over for company since she always sounded like
that at the end. And sure enough, a few seconds later Miller
clumped down the stairs, sat down on a broken dresser and asked
me what was happening.
I said that I wanted his expertise on a certain matter and he
said that it was probably too late for me to convert and I
replied that that was all right because all I wanted to know was
what was the deal with the Church of the Holy Lady of the
Sorrows of the Second Coming of Christ or something like that.
He thought a minute and then said, "Oh yeah, them. They's crazy
types who thinks that the world's gonna burn up soon but Christ
is gonna come down from Heaven or somewhere in a spaceship and
save all of them while everyone else burns to a crisp."
I said that they sounded pretty weird, but was there any reason
that they couldn't kill themselves like everyone else who could
get away from the law long enough since it's actually illegal to
try to kill yourself 'round here and you can be arrested for
trying it.
Miller said, "Yeah, 'cause if you kill yourself then you can't
be around when Christ comes to save everyone and he"--Miller
didn't much capitalize correctly late at night, especially after
Hell froze over and there wasn't any reason to worry about
it--"also might not be real pleased if his chosen ones were
going and killing themselves over women."
Right about then Sally stuck her head downstairs and told Miller
to get back to bed so he said goodnight and went back upstairs.
No matter whose house it were, they weren't there. I suppose
that did kinda point the finger of suspicion at Fred the Hermit.
Kari started to get out of her bodysuit 'cause she said that
there wasn't much that was more uncomfortable than wet leather
but since it was wet leather it was real hard to pull off so I
tried to help and with a lot of pulling we finally got it off.
Since it seemed like a better place than out in the desert we
rolled around for a while and fell asleep from all the exercise
we'd gotten during the day. It musta been pretty late when we
fell asleep, because by the time we woke up and Kari explained
some of the things in the schoolmarm's letter to me it was light
again out even though it was still raining rats and frogs out
there so we stayed in for the whole day and the rain never let
up.
Sometime in the afternoon there was a knocking on the door and
we went to open it, half expecting Fred the Hermit. But it was
only the horse with no name who had decided that he wanted to
come with us and stay dry rather than stand out in the middle of
nowhere pretending to be an ass. We let him in and made him
stand in the corner and behave himself. There was only one room
in the little house, but it was big enough for the horse to
stand on one side of the fireplace and for us to spread out some
blankets we found on shelves on the other side. There were a lot
of shelves with provisions on them, as if Fred the Hermit had
been expecting something to prevent him from getting more food
any time soon. I could see why he left when we had some of the
food he'd canned and dried since it wasn't very tasty but Kari
managed to make it into something funny sounding that was
downright good. After we had explored everything inside we found
a little door that led out back, where there was a lean-to with
a buncha wood in it, which was surprising since there wasn't
that much wood in these parts anytime, but I guess Fred the
Hermit had found some somewhere around.
The rain went on for a long time, but we had plenty of food in
that house and when we looked around some more we even found a
bin of oats which the horse refused to eat at first but after a
few days started to like. I was worried at first that the mud
bricks in the walls would fall apart in all the rain, but Fred
musta been better at building houses than he was at canning food
since the walls were fine and there was only one leak in the
roof. That leak worked out pretty well since we just put a pot
under it and got clean water whenever we wanted it.
We didn't do too much since neither of us were real big on doing
things all the time but we did spend a lot time rolling around
that little house and after a while Kari said that she was
probably expecting sometime. It made sense that she would be and
I was pretty fond of her by now so we were both happy and she
still wanted to roll around all day even if she was expecting so
we didn't bother with much else. The rain was getting kind of
boring, but there wasn't much we could do about it and Kari said
that she had a sister who lived in Seattle where it was like
this all the time but people there didn't even notice it but
just put on waterproof clothes and just walked about as though
there was nothing happening at all. I couldn't really see how
anyone could not notice rain like this all the time but I
figured that Kari ought to know since it was her sister and all.
One day we woke up and got out of bed, if you could call it that
since all it really was was a pile of blankets we'd put on the
floor on the other side of the house from the horse, who snorted
in his sleep and would keep us awake if we were next to him. The
sun was shining in real bright and since we hadn't seen that in
a long time we immediately went outside to see what had changed.
We hadn't been outside for quite a while 'cause there was an
outhouse attached to the back of the house next to the lean-to
and there just hadn't been any other reason to bother. But
anyway it was sure a sight to see and smell 'cause there was
water as far as we could see. Kari said that it smelled like the
sea and then she tasted it and said that it tasted just like the
sea and then I knew she had to be from California, but it didn't
matter any more I guess our house was on about the highest point
around and our town was pretty high too, so everything else
around had filled up with water.
Kari muttered something that sounded like _baucis_ and said that
she thought it was salty 'cause of the salt mines nearby and she
was glad we had stopped to check the mail 'cause otherwise we
might have made it to the salt mines and drowned with the rest
of 'em. I said it was probably the horse that had saved us by
acting like a mule and that drowning in the desert had to be a
bad way to go. She said that Fred the Hermit might've gotten
picked up by Christ but he sure was wrong about the fire since
there weren't too many fires that lasted through that kinda
rain.
Then she threw off her clothes since she'd gotten better at
getting the leather thing off and it had loosed up too and she
jumped right in before I could grab her and started swimming
around. She tried to get me in but I never did learn how to swim
from lack of water and wasn't gonna just jump in without getting
at least a couple of pointers. She came back out and we rolled
around for a while until we were tired and then we just sat for
a bit and looked out over the sea we'd suddenly gotten.
I said that I thought everything was gonna turn out just fine
since we had each other and the horse and a hell of a lot of
oats left over, and it probably wasn't salt water everywhere and
everyone was being weird anyway, and Kari said that she always
knew it was gonna be all right.
Adam C. Engst (ace@tidbits.com)
---------------------------------
Adam C. Engst is the editor of _TidBITS_, a free weekly
newsletter focusing on the Macintosh and electronic
communications. He lives in Renton, Washington, with his wife
Tonya and cats Tasha and Cubbins. Not content to be mildy busy,
he writes books about the Internet, including _Internet Starter
Kit for Macintosh_ (Hayden Books, 1993).
Need to Know: A Real-Life Movie Murder Mystery
================================================
At the age of 49, William Desmond Taylor was at the top. It was
1922, and Taylor was one of Paramount Pictures' best directors.
He had been president of the Motion Picture Directors
Association for three years. And then, one night in February,
Taylor was dead--shot to death in his home.
The killers were never found, though the newspapers of the time
were certainly filled with possible suspects, from Irish
nationalists to drug gangsters to the Ku Klux Klan. But even
though the case was never solved, Taylor's murder and the
resulting spotlight that was shined on Hollywood changed the
image of the film industry forever.
Seventy-two years later, the mystery of Taylor's death isn't a
dead issue. The study of Taylor's life and death is alive and
well on the Internet, through a year-old electronic newsletter
appropriately titled _Taylorology_.
The creator and editor of _Taylorology_, Bruce Long, isn't a
motion picture historian. In fact, he's not a historian at
all--he's a computer programmer at Arizona State University.
Long became interested in Taylor by watching silent films on his
8mm movie camera. Fascinated by the films produced by early
Hollywood, he began reading about the history of the film
industry.
Looming large was the Taylor murder, a crime that rocked
Hollywood. Anti-Hollywood sentiment was never higher than in the
months after the Taylor murder, as the papers exposed the
private lives of the stars, directors and producers who brought
entertainment to the world.
Long's research into Taylor's murder resulted in a book,
_William Desmond Taylor: A Dossier_ (Scarecrow Press, 1991). He
also wrote another book-length manuscript on the world of
Taylor, _The Humor of a Hollywood Murder_, but couldn't find a
publisher. Enter the Internet and _Taylorology_.
"Serializing that book in _Taylorology_ was a way for me to
publish that book for free," Long says. "Of course I get no
money from it, but the main thing is to put the information out
there and make it available to the public."
Long's goal is to provide as much material about the case as
possible, so that when a future historian is researching the
Taylor case, that person won't just have the
conventionally-published books on the subject as resources.
They'll also have _Taylorology_.
_Taylorology_ doesn't spend much time on the fundamentals of the
Taylor case, a must for new readers who are interested in the
material. Within the first 11 issues of the e-zine (894K of
ASCII text), there should've been room for a brief primer on
Taylor and the basics of the case. But even without such a
primer, _Taylorology_ is both a history lesson and a fun read.
The serialized _Humor of a Hollywood Murder_, which takes up
issues 4-11 of _Taylorology_ (issues 1-3 were printed by Long a
decade ago), is a funny collection of press accounts of the
Taylor case and of '20s Hollywood. ("The leprous colony at
Hollywood will not be reformed and consequently will have to be
destroyed," wrote one paper.) It's a fascinating look at early
20th century film and journalism, and sometimes it's painfully
obvious that we haven't changed very much in all this time.
--Jason Snell
Where to find _Taylorology_
-----------------------------
The electronic issues of _Taylorology_ can be accesed via FTP or
Gopher at ftp.etext.org in /pub/Zines/Taylorology. New issues
also appear on the Usenet newsgroup alt.true-crime.
Bruce Long can be reached at bruce@asu.edu.
FYI
=====
..................................................................
InterText's next issue will be released in May 1994.
..................................................................
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--------------------------
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Contribute to InterText!
--------------------------
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