Captain’s Lament

Stephen Graham Jones

My name is Quincy Mueller, but since the merchant marines I’ve been known almost exclusively as Muley. It has nothing to do with my character, however. Far from being obstinate or contrary, I’m in fact liberal and engaging. A more enthusiastic conversationalist you’re not likely to find; sailors are lonely, I mean, and hungry for company. If anything, I suppose — and this just because I’m honest to a fault — I err toward the overbearing, as isolation is something I’ve had my fill of.

And yes, if you detect a hit of defensiveness in my voice, you’re not far from the mark. That so much should have come from a simple misunderstanding one night twenty years ago is so far beyond comprehension that it’s actually amusing, I think, or at least revealing of human nature.

But I get ahead of myself.

Never mind that you already know my story. That you more than likely grew up with it.

To begin, then, twenty years ago I was thirty-eight, salty and fully-bearded, recovering from a near-fatal accident which had left me convalescing for nearly fourteen months. During those weeks upon weeks in bed, the room uncomfortably still — I hadn’t been landlocked for more than two consecutive months since my twenty-second year, when I thought marriage was the cure for loneliness — I could feel my skin growing pale and translucent, my lips becoming tender without salt to rime them. Because of the injuries to my throat, too, the doctors wouldn’t allow me any tobacco; I couldn’t even chew upon my pipe.

I’ll spare you the fates I wished upon those doctors — curses I picked up in ports all over the world — but, looking back, I see of course that they more than likely wanted me out of their hospital as much as I wanted out myself.

Since the ninth month, I had said so little, even, that they called for a battery of tests to gauge my psychological health. Though I tried to tell them all I needed was a view of the sea, the smell of brine, still, they poked and prodded my mind until I did in fact shut down. I’m not proud of it, but, like the tarpon on the deck, his side still bleeding from the gaff, I’d flopped around as long as I could, and found that useless, so was now just staring, waiting for this ordeal to be over.

The nurses took turns rolling me from side to side to ministrate my sores and perform other indignities.

In my head, though, I was sailing. On the open sea, a boat pitching beneath me, I was beyond the reach of their needles and swabs and catheters and small, polite questions.

As the days passed, they came to my room less and less, content that my body would either heal itself in time or that I would, one day when they weren’t looking, simply stop trying.

To them, I mean, even twenty years ago I was already an antique, a throwback to another century, another way of life.

And, if I’m to be honest here, yes, I did indeed stop trying, finally. But the body breathes whether you want it to or not. The heart keeps beating. Perhaps because it knows more than you do — knows that, past this experience, a whole new life will open up, and whatever infirmities persist, they can be dealt with one by one.

That’s all in the future, though.

Right then, on my back in bed, miles from the shore, dose upon dose of antibiotic and painkiller pulsing through my veins, it was hard not to feel sorry for myself. To let that consume me.

It was finally a nurse by the name of Margaret whom I woke to one day. She was dabbing the wetness away from the corners of my eyes, and adjusting the various lines that went into and out of me.

“Does it hurt?” she said, her fingertips light on my right forearm.

I closed my eyes, made her disappear.

The next time I woke, however, she was there again. Evidently she’d been talking for some minutes, telling me about her social life, her family, her dreams and aspirations. I let her words flow over me like water and studied the cursive letters of her name, and watched as, in slow motion, like picture cards flipping one after the other, she pointed a syringe into one of the tubes that fed me.

How long this went on, I don’t know. If I’d first seen her on a Wednesday though, her badge still new enough to be hand printed, then this was at least a Monday.

What she talked about the most was a certain boy named Billy, I think. How he’d wronged her and was continuing to wrong her, but she was going to show him.

I opened my mouth to tell her something but only emitted a rusty creak, my voice broken from dis-use.

She smiled, pursed her lips, patted my tender right arm and asked if I wanted to see the ocean?

Though I couldn’t talk, still, she saw the answer in my eyes — I’ve always had expressive eyes — and, with the help of another nurse, maneuvered my atrophied body into a gleaming silver wheelchair, pushed me down hall after hall, my heart beating intentionally for the first time in months, the fingers of my left hand gripping the brown plastic armrest, her subdued laughter behind me tittering out between her closed lips.

If I could have spoken, I was going to tell her how, if she wanted, I might name my next ship the Margo, after her, and all the rest after that as well: Margo II, Margo III, Margo IV, a fleet of Margos fanned out across the shipping lanes from here to the South Pacific.

But of course that was just talk — I’d never owned my own ship before, and didn’t have one waiting for me when I got better.

And anyway, where she was taking me was a joke of sorts.

She finally stopped our perambulations in the waiting room, with my chair pushed up to a small aquarium with exotic fish, and, every ten seconds, a treasure chest that would burp air up to the surface.

I closed my eyes, woke again to Margaret’s hand on a syringe, then slept and slept and slept.

The next time I came to she was stroking the top of my left hand and talking about Billy again.

Evidently I was supposed to have forgotten about the waiting room, about the ocean.

I can remember ever shoal in every port I’ve ever drawn water in, though.

I shut my eyes and shut my ears and let her have my hand. Just that.

How long this cycle repeated itself, I don’t know. My guess would place it at two months; after a while Margaret became a practiced-enough nurse that she could haul me into my chair herself, just by leveraging me with her hips and the brakes on my bed, and I was a practiced-enough patient to believe that what she was shooting into me syringe by syringe was salt water, and that the dreams I had were just the ocean inside, bending itself to the moon.

Instead of going to the waiting room now, she was walking me outside, her voice drifting around me. The air was supposed to be good for me, I think. It was stale, though; there was no salt in it, no spray, and the horizon was forever blocked by trees and buildings, the sky empty of properly-winged birds.

One day, as had to happen, I suppose, Margaret asked her question again: Did I want to see the ocean?

I tried to move my left hand to indicate that I got this joke, yes, thank you, how nice, but I don’t think she was looking anyway.

Back in the room this time, instead of pushing the sharp nose of the syringe into the line that went into my injured arm, she instead emptied it an inch into my mattress.

“I don’t want you going to sleep just yet,” she said, winking.

It made my heart beat, not with fear, but, in spite of what I knew, hope.

That night — I could tell it was night by the window — she came back for me. Her shift was over; she had her overcoat on over her thin cotton uniform.

I opened my mouth to ask a question but she just patted my shoulder and swung me down into my chair.

As you’ve by now of course guessed, we weren’t going to the waiting room and we weren’t going to the paved walking path, but the back door, and, past that, Margaret’s large car.

She folded me into the passenger seat, my chair in the trunk.

“Wher — ?” I tried to get out, but she guided my hand back down to my lap, eased her car down the slope of the parking lot.

Across the road there were sirens, and, walking through a pool of light, a police officer with a dog on a leash.

Margaret tensed and smiled at the same time.

“One of the slobbering maniacs, Mr. Mueller,” she said, nodding to the woods. “Probably just wanted to see the ocean, right?”

“Muley,” I tried to tell her.

Even though the road we took was more downhill than up, which is to say we were heading generally closer to sea-level, I had no illusions. After the aquarium in the waiting room, I knew I was going to be lucky to even smell the salt through her air conditioner vents, much less feel any spray on my face.

At the same time, however, if this was to be an end to my suffering, then so be it.

I pushed my back into the cup of her passenger seat and waited for whatever was to come.

As I’d expected, instead of following signs to the marina or some other place of portage, she instead wound us through a maze of residential streets I could never retrace. Billy wasn’t down any of them, though, in spite of her muttering his name. Vaguely, I had the idea that her intent was to induce pity in him by pretending I was her war-addled uncle; that, for a few minutes, he was going to have to pretend to be who I was supposed to be expecting him to be. Which is to say Margaret’s.

The profanity seeping over from the driver’s side of the car, too, though vituperative and heartfelt, still it was light, amateurish. I’d heard worse in Morocco at fourteen years of age, and just over a bow line tied improperly. How that Moroccan sailor might have cursed had his intended been with someone else, it burns my ears just to think about it, and makes me smile a little too. Other people’s suffering can be comical, I mean, when seen from a distance. Even mine, I suppose.

That’s not to say I can’t still remember the fear that rattled up through me, however, when Margaret took her car from asphalt to gravel, and then from gravel to dirt. The trees crowded around us, made the sky small. I started breathing faster, so that she had to look over, narrow her eyes.

“This isn’t a good time for this,” she said.

I closed my eyes.

Under her thigh was a hunting knife, the kind with a rosewood handle and a brass finger guard.

At a certain point on the dirt road, she turned the lights of her car off, and, when we saw the tail lights she evidently knew, she turned her car off as well, coasted into a slot between two large trees.

For a long time then we just sat there, the two of us, and, slowly, I tuned into a new set of sounds: the woods. And, unless as I was mistaken — as it turned out, I wasn’t — the taste of salt in the now-still, un-air-conditioned air.

The sea. She was close.

I tried not to let this knowledge flash across my face.

In her lap now, Margaret had a rope. She was trying to tie a knot but making a complicated job of it. My left hand floundered over almost on its own, guided the end of the rope up and under and back on itself. She appreciated this, pulled the knot tight, nodded a reluctant thank you to me and then would no longer meet my eye. Such is the way we treat the rabbit we’re about to carve for dinner, I suppose.

It had felt good though, the rope against my skin again.

Margaret patted the noose she now had and stood from the car, locking all four doors before walking away into the darkness.

What did she need me for then? The knot?

I stared at the spot she’d disappeared into but couldn’t figure it out, and finally consoled myself trying to roll my window down to bring the sea nearer. It was electric, though, and I had no keys.

How long I sat there after she left, I have no idea. If I slept, it was only for minutes, and if I hummed, it was only to hear my own voice. In the absence of monitors and pumps and footsteps, the world was rushingly quiet, and not close enough.

At some point, anyway, Margaret strode across a bare place between the trees. The rope was no longer across her shoulder, and the knife was held in her fist, low.

I tried rolling my window down again, and was still clattering away at the button when she was suddenly at my door with the car keys.

“Your turn,” she said, smiling.

Sprayed across her shirt was blood that had dried almost black.

I nodded, gave my weight to her, let her heave me into my chair, pull me backwards through the trees, tump me into a clearing behind the car I was pretty sure was Billy’s.

The reason I say this is that, hanging from a thick limb above the car was a man of no more than twenty-two. A boy, really. His hands had been tied behind his back, and his throat had been carved out. From years of handling knives, I instantly understood the angles: someone had sat on his chest and worked on his neck with a blade. Calmly, deliberately.

And then he’d been strung up, with a knot only a sailor would know.

Which was of course what she needed me for.

She pulled the empty wheelchair back into the darkness and I looked where she was looking: to Billy’s car, its vinyl roof pattered with blood.

Through the foggy glass, facing forward — away — there was a girl.

I shook my head no, no, and, because the sea was close and because it didn’t matter anymore, I found the strength to pull myself forward with my left hand. It was torturously slow, however, and filled my loose pants with twigs and dirt which nettled my bed sores. But the girl. I had to tell her, had to get her to leave, to live.

Because I couldn’t stand, I of course latched onto her bumper with my left hand, and then on the fourth try was able to hook my right under her wheel well, pull myself forward by inches.

By this time she was aware of the sound I was, had locked the door, had, even though it wouldn’t help her see, turned on the dome light and started grinding the starter.

She was saying her boyfriend’s name louder and louder, and then shrieking a little.

It didn’t matter, though. All I had to do was pull myself up level with her window and tell her about Margaret, that we had to go now, that, that —

I didn’t even know what. But something.

With my left hand I gripped the ledge of her back door, and with my right, the large functional hook the doctors were trying to teach me to use, I pulled hard on her door latch, my head rising even as the car started, pulling me up, up.

I couldn’t hold the car there, though.

It dragged me for maybe ten feet, and then the straps on the hook let go of the stump my forearm had become and I was rolling in the dirt, Billy swinging above me, Margaret in the darkness all around, and this is how stories begin, yes.

But none of you were there for the part after the girl left, my hook clattering in her door latch, the part where I crawled arm over arm through the trees until first light delivered to me a beach, a surf, which I rolled in for hours, and have never really left since. Not longer than overnight, anyway. And, no, the name I had then, it’s not the same I have now — the world is the world, after all — but my ship, my lady, she is the Margo. Not in honor either, but in defiance: six years after my escape from dry-dock, I read the account of that night, and found that the authorities had managed not only to scrub any reference of Margaret from the public records, but, because of the violent, infectious nature of her crime perhaps, they’d also erased the very hospital I’d convalesced in, so that all that was left for the newspaper to report was that a patient, deeply disturbed by having had to cut off his own arm off with the neck of a bottle to escape drowning, had escaped the mental hospital the town was built around, and succeeded in killing and hanging a young boy named William Jackson before disappearing, presumably, into the sea.

I’ll admit to that last part anyway.

About the Author

Stephen Graham Jones’ latest novel is Demon Theory. His next is Ledfeather. His short fiction is in textbooks and anthologies and annuals and everywhere else, times two.

The Human Moments

Alexander Lumans

12:12. “We will glorify war — the world’s only hygiene.”

There are too many dead from the new flu pandemic, and the earth-movers bring bodies by the tons. One never thinks to consider a human population in tons: the weight of geological formations, of the Huns, the Visigoths, the Million Man March, the weight of knowledge that bears down on the shoulders of Western gods.

Every hundredth body that arrives to be broken down in this Cryogenics Lab, the video monitors change lenses and take slow-motion thermal video of the sonic ruin. I must review these videos as my position requirements dictate, no matter the level of inadequacy.

This time the video runs even slower. Frame after frame I watch the still-life body of a woman become crystals in space, and I am reminded of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Notice the fracturing of time, how the person has been smeared across the staircase; she doesn’t really exist in one place at any one time, just like quantum mechanics describes the electron. Clothed Standing until Detonation.

I stand, walk to the room’s one bare wall and press the one green button. On a tray, hot chocolate pours out into a Styrofoam cup. It’s the little things, the human moments. Bewildered Drinking His Spirits.

12:41. “We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.”

It’s Tuesday. Work on the dead continues. This lab is below the world’s surface and I have not seen the sun for eight months. But in this small sanctuary there is a cot and an instant hot chocolate dispenser and an over-the-shoulder sense that someone else is taking stock of the situation. The city of Drammen, the University of Oslo, Norway’s President Gunvar Haldor, der Fuerher, they spare no expense for the Cryogenics Lab. I am a division of a division in Sector Quad of the Jotne/SB Verksted, additional funding provided by the ATLAS Organization — bald, birthmarked men who fear how they will die more than Death itself. They do not want their pale skin to sag off, their eyes to go agape. But I hunt Death here, I the young lion, Death in black fur and pale crosses, running before me under the violet sky ceiling, palpable and living. Death’s cold sense comes from the blast chamber I monitor through the one window and into the control panel that whirrs awake in my hands. LEDs flash in coded patterns, tell the time in green, and catalog the laser’s diamond cells. Every two-stage He-3 Cryostat cools radiation shields, heat switches, and the superconducting magnet system connected by OFHC thermal copper wire. All for the love of the engine. I have been culling this love for years, ever since Uni and my studies in comparative mythology, art and technology, the history of contemporary Father Italy.

From my chair, I freeze the dead and shatter their frost bones with high frequency waves, searing enough to make dogs bleed from the ears. I redistribute radiation and sound sensor orbits. I match temperature gauge readings in the WRONGSCAN handbook to Kelvins sensitivity: absolute zero. Another body comes and I take comfort when I press the “Commence to Atomize” button. The laser looks phallic. I name it ADAM. Private Ansgar, out.

10:58. “Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.”

By dumb waiter, meals always arrive on a wax plate with plastic forks and knives. It is always green beans, sauerkraut and pan-fried moose on Wednesdays. Fridays are surprises, but surprises imply security breaches. They use plastic because they are afraid of exposing the metal to beta particle radiation.

Today, a telegram comes on its own wax plate. The yellow paper resembles crude library cards (if there are any left in the world) and it reads: “Ansgar. Position: redundant. Humanoid Robot LIO-7 Prometheus to resume control of Cryostats for absence of error. Replacement: effective immediately.” The telegram means human error — the kind is that expendable.

Your odds of dying in a fireworks discharge: 1 in 340,733; in accidental electrocution: 1 in 9,968; in an air/space incident: 1 in 5,051. By falling: 1 in 218. Suicide: 1 in 121. Down here, the odds are equal: 1 in 1. My own death is certain, and so my name is no longer vital. Names are traceable. Out.

4:17. “We intend to sing the love of danger.”

Ancient life was all silence; sounds were attributed to gods. Here, the Liquid Argon and Nitrogen tanks sing to me. I do not speak, but follow the erratic strike of keyboard keys, blips on a radar module. Words in the manifestoes I read between deliveries: F. T. Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla. And when my brain tells me my retinas are burning up the way particles do on re-entry to the atmosphere, even I, the futurist, must break down and find beauty in the speed of a pencil tip.

I take out an old E.T. lunchtin from under the counter and place it in my lap. (I salvaged it from the stiff hands of a young American lad.) Inside the tin: 4 X 4 foot sheet of high-resolution, professionally bleached paper folded into squares of 1 X 1, a Number 3 Pencil (tip sharpened with ADAM — an after-hours success), a planchette of cedar set on casters, and the forthcoming hours. Between atomization of a Ukrainian nationalist with no legs below the knees and an Indian woman whose belly is swollen with twins, I take readings from the crude wooden tool shaped like a heart. I slide the pencil down into the center hole, unfold the paper, and place the planchette on top. Even this simple machine has a sound. The cedar creaks, the unoiled ball bearings whine, and the graphite drags.

Step 1: Close your eyes.

Step 2: Place both hands on opposite sides of the planchette.

Step 3: Receive a Question from the back of your brain and do not speak it. The medium is aware.

Step 4: Open your eyes.

I sometimes do not remember the question. Words it has provided before: “Aleph,” “Nadir,” “Extra Fine,” and “Vituperation.” I look down at the paper now and the word “Break” stares back at me. The pencil’s graphite is cracked and I cannot breathe with that word in my head. Reset ultra-low-noise IF amplifiers to ultra-low DC Power. The secondary air purification system for the primary air purification system kicks on with the chug of a man choking on salt water. 76.5% Nitrogen, 22.4% Oxygen, 0.00433% Carbon Dioxide, 0.0018% Neon, 1.09387% Lime Scent. Death is domestication; someday I will die and something new will steal my carbon; “Prometheus” is the word I am inundated by in this No Man’s Land. Prior to his arrival, will I program this installation to freeze my bones and shock me into shards?

Addendum: Who else waits for technology to take their place? Do birds?

3:49. “Time and Space died yesterday.”

Friday. The phrase “Abysmal Water” will not leave my mind. It glows in bright blue neon strips; electricity is a blue thing. My ears have begun to bleed on the hour, every hour, to the extent that I use my government-issued nylon sleeve to soak up the streams. Another telegram arrives by way of dumb waiter and it reads the same as the previous message, except that my position has now been downgraded to: “inadequate.”

I am Sysphysian in dexterity and Dionysian in gall.

I watch the video monitors. Three are trained on the body in the blast chamber. One monitor looks on me. I cannot see my eyes and that instills a fever in me. Most dead we receive here in Drammen still have their eyeballs, and I am reminded of how I once saw the photo of a young hibakusha onto whose iris an infinite image of the Father Bomb had been burned, grafted, cut and sealed like a newly minted coin from the planchet, a coin meant to commemorate the outnumbered survivors.

7:48. “Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible?”

Twenty-six separate ice ages have occurred on Earth and I am ushering in the twenty-seventh with the repeated press of a button. Today is the day I lose count of how many times I press that button and it is the same day I begin counting how many times I blink. The average man blinks at five second intervals and each blink lasts one-third of a second; the eyes are closed for four seconds every minute. I do not like that I neglect the monitors for a total of ninety-six minutes every twenty-four hours. That’s ninety-six minutes during which Prometheus may arrive, and I cannot afford to even blink when he comes through the one locked door and bleeds dry what human moments are left. Prometheus, I assure you, finds a certain salvation in firm number averages. My survival is as unlikely as Heracles passing by Mount Caucasus on a second course. Prometheus is coming and he has no liver upon which I may set an eagle to devour.

I take out the lunchtin again and use the pencil’s broken end to write a number on the bleached paper. The digit looks strange when made by a human hand, even one that is surely my own, so strange that I cannot discern where it sits on a number line. The Egyptians once used a decimal system of seven symbols. One is a single line. Ten is the drawing of a hobble for cattle. One hundred, coil of rope. Ten thousand, a finger. One million is the figure of a god with arms raised above his head. Perhaps I have not drawn a number here on the white paper, but rather an arm, an arm whose fingers are so tiny that they escape the sharpest eye. I crush the paper into a ball before putting it back in the lunchtin. This many-fingered god is what I imagine Prometheus to be, and man has not yet eaten god.

11:11. “A typewriter is more architectural.”

The overhead fluorescent bulbs have turned off. I miss their humming that once sounded so much grander than a field of crickets. The lights in the blast chamber, the tracking stroboscopic patterns around the Argon Tanks remain on; I must continue the work. Another fine mist of ice falls to the chamber floor like snowflakes which science has discovered are not all atypical, but there must be some flaw in the prismatic rainbow that arcs across the room, a pattern which tells me more about Prometheus’ arrival and my departure.

I cannot recall what letters make up my name — I will sign with three coils of rope and a dove’s tail over a broken window.

Also: my ears have stopped bleeding, but that means I have finally been hemorrhaged dry. The dumb waiter dings. The third telegram I read by barium glow:

“Do not drink the hot chocolate. Continue Atomization as needed. LIO-7 en route, en masse. Prepare for transportation.”

The dumb waiter door shuts and I swear laughter echoes from the ceiling, though it is only the conveyor belts’ hydraulic engines high up in the facility.

The first thing I do is press the one green button on the one blank wall for a fresh Styrofoam cup of hot chocolate. This is my third since midnight. Even the most human of moments become mechanistic in sequence. I look up at the dark ceiling and drink. I have outlived a use, and it occurs to me, with hot chocolate in my mouth, that we do not have an initial use. We exist to make more exist, to one day transport ourselves away from ourselves. I swallow. I order a fourth cup.

Of special note: other definitions of “transport” that appeal to me more: to send to a penal colony overseas, or a state of overwhelming usually pleasurable emotion.

0:00. “Injustice, strong and sane, will break out radiantly in their eyes.”

The lights have not turned back on and the green digital clock has reset and not begun again. A man in corduroy pants and a leather jacket torn at the shoulder stands in the focal array zone of ADAM, and I refuse to press the “Commence to Atomize” key. His clothes are too familiar to disintegrate. I’m afraid the man looks like me, pallid and hopeless, though I have not seen a mirror’s reflection in over one year. At one point in his life, he too wrote down a number he did not recognize and threw it all away.

Abysmal Water. The Great Possession. The Cauldron. The Clinging.

These phrases boom through me. For the last time, I open the lunchtin and place the planchette on the control panel. I make a fist, hold it down against the wooden tool, and then raise my arm above my head and smash the heart-shaped implement into pieces.

The splinters I pull from my hand grab at the wrinkles and pull the inside out before all feeling slips away. Pain is an adaptation that keeps us alive through nerve stimulation: mildness, localization, distress, debilitation, agony. This is a good kind of hurt, a human hurt, as if more is learned about the body and soul by the reaction to acute mortality. I do not want Prometheus to find me in this injured state, so I uncrumple the wad of paper and wrap it around my hand like dressing a wound. The frozen man in the chamber assures me that someone is definitely watching.

0:00. “We want to hymn the man at the wheel.”

My own desperate mission to build a Prometheus. Fourteen Styrofoam cups stacked on top of each other to make a Styrofoam figure, the removed splinters hold the arms and antennae together, a stiff old cosmonaut. The white pile of rounded ribs glows in the dark. They make brittle bones, but bones nonetheless.

Again, I turn around to face the camera that once captured the back of my head. I pause the monitor’s feed and return to the front screen: my features I can only describe as humanoid, no longer flesh and blood. The laugh lines are ninety-degree angles. The broad forehead is a solar panel. The intersection of royal nose, pencil-thin eyebrows, and ridged skull in pale crosshairs follow the limits of the Golden Mean. All beauty is mathematics, the Greeks pronounced, and all beauty has been reduced to a ratio: 1.618 to 1. The Man Alive to Dead and Frozen and Dusted: 1 to Omega. Even the dimensions of my clenching teeth are based on Phi, not even a whole digit. By fundamental laws, we are base equations, and as perfection comes at the highest price, my squinted eyes tell me the cost is not worth the vastness. I turn the monitor off, shiver in my seat, and slowly pick at the holes in my hand. This is a quiet room.

0:00. “There was nothing to make us wish for death, unless the wish to be free at last from the weight of our courage!”

The bell chimes, the door opens, the fluorescent lights turn back on. But there is no man nor humanoid nor even a complete thing:

1. scalene triangle for hat

2. blue pipe of a nose

3. a head no more than a large washer turned on its edge — the hole facing me

4. a barrel body of faded red wood and a waist carved into a bulky skirt — three holes bored through the chest like lobotomies gone awry

5. a vague avian nature to every angle — the albatross around my neck

6. this machine stands seven feet tall on one peg leg

No Golden Ratio commands this creation. I cannot look away. With two arms that have no hands, it carries a 200-watt flashlight and a green toolbox.

“Are you Prometheus?” I ask.

He says nothing. He blocks the one way out.

“Are you my replacement?”

In a motion that is anything but fluid, a mouth opens in its chest with the sound of small gears turning, this pale jaw lowering like a drawbridge at the helm of a thousand tiny fingers. The hole in its head is cold, black. Its blank stare is far worse than any frozen man’s face. This, of all things, is my surrogate, and I am desperate to shrink and disappear. But instead of reciting a preprogrammed command or a string of Euclidean distances or an inventory of spare parts and services, the chest’s electrolarynx reads vibrations from its internal systems and speaks in low pitch: “Beat.”

“Beat?”

“Beat.” And this is all it can say. “Beat.” The one phrase that booms through that head, body, and heart. Seventy-two in one minute. This is how it keeps its heart rhythm constant, and the same as counting blinks, blinking every time I count the next one. But where the number of blinks may vary in a minute, this machine’s consistency is inhuman and perfect and beautiful, and I do not know whether to throw myself at its feet or slam the door on its lowered jaw.

I say, “You cannot count any faster or slower.”

“Beat.”

“And you have one task to fulfill.”

“Beat.”

“And you cannot swerve from that task.”

“Beat.”

I face the maker, Codename: Cloak and Dagger, and realize that the only important pattern is the lack of pattern. Not even the dumb waiter or the cups of hot chocolate fit into a meaningful sequence. The lights go off again and Prometheus turns the flashlight on. The light is jarring, as if it indicates an oncoming train, and so what Fascism did to Italy’s rail system, Prometheus will do to our cryogenics facility by flashlight. Perfect time keeps my atomization process on schedule. I remember how my face looked in the video monitor, how my name is now distant, and I feel the eagle at my own liver. I babble to the idol:

“Weather balloon. Dual currents. Pitchfork. Water fountain. Caldera. Speaker magnet. Cutlass. Kanji dictionary. Hair trigger. Phase diagram. Wand. Convolution integral. Camera. Harpie. Flywheel. Tower crane. Turntable. Scylla and Charybdis. Follicle. Resonant frequency. 3/8 inch drill bit. Oslo. Carabiner. Abstract. Dynamic. Extremely transparent. Brightly colored and extremely luminous. Autonomous. Transformable. Dramatic. Volatile. Odorous. Noise-creating. Explosive.”

On impulse I say these words and even then, I find myself describing Prometheus as a god. We futurists give skeleton and flesh to the invisible, the impalpable and the imperceptible. We find abstract equivalents for every element, and combine them to make our world more pleasurable.  These dissimilar words, these are the human moments I’ve been looking for, and in this once dull white room, I find comfort in speaking because my voice is my own, still full of lifts, drops, and errors.

“Beat,” says Prometheus.

“Camelia blossom. Disguise. Atomic mass,” I say. Via ADAM, Prometheus and I have already scattered a thousand treasures of force, astuteness, and raw will-power; with fury, we’ve thrown them impatiently away, carelessly, unhesitatingly, breathless. Let it be proclaimed that the word “Norway” shall prevail over the word “Freedom.” Look at us! We are still untired because we do not ever stop.

About the Author

Alexander Lumans is originally from Aiken, South Carolina. He has fiction forthcoming from StoryQuarterly. He has also been nominated for the anthology Best New American Voices 2009 as well as for a 2008 AWP Intro Award. Currently, he is enrolled in the MFA Program at Southern Illinois University of Carbondale.

I Like Writing but Hate Being a Writer

Richard Bowes

I said that aloud as I sat stone cold sober at the World Fantasy convention in Saratoga Springs last fall. All over the lobby, bright faced young writers fresh out of workshops gazed covertly at editors and agents who passed them by with that blank eye that acknowledges no one. Desperate older writers without publishers circled endlessly like raptors over a barren landscape, while a well-oiled horror writer strode within an entourage comprised of his smiling wife and adoring groupies.

Nick Mamatas of Clarkesworld, who was present when I spoke, said he’d buy an essay on liking to write while hating being a writer, were I to write it. Maybe moments like that are why speculative fiction writers go to conventions.

It was after the thoroughbred racing season and before the first snow, but Saratoga Springs, that aristocratic old resort in upstate New York, was still beautiful. Locations favored by the rich tend to be. The air was crisp, the foliage still turning. For a long weekend this fall, the streets of the tiny, picturesque town were flooded with what I’ve come to think of as The Blob, that floating spec fiction community that assembles, breaks down into component parts, and then reassembles at the next preordained spot.

I’d been nearly as one with The Blob some months before at an awards ceremony and would be again in Manhattan a few weeks after World Fantasy. Is there something special about seeing The Blob in cold foothill air? Does it do something special to the noise and gossip, rumor and self promotion — and the booze? Sober, I don’t believe it is possible to entirely participate in a convention.

I came late to being a writer, or at least the kind who wrote stories and books of the sort one could publish under one’s own name. The first SF novel I wrote was acquired when I was forty. Though I’d read SF and fantasy for most of my life, I’d never belonged to any fan organization or attended a convention until I sold my first book. It was much too late for me to fully enjoy being a writer because I’d stopped drinking.

Probably it’s only because I stopped that I was able to write or, for that matter, that I’m still alive, but sobriety has its drawbacks. When I first attended a certain quite wonderful Midwestern convention, everyone talked about, “its spirit” My discovery was that for many the spirit was vodka.

Writers tend to be shy, antisocial people who require various amounts of lubrication to function in crowds. Being sober at any of their gatherings after a certain hour in the evening gives me the sensation of walking through a world where everyone else operates at either a slightly faster or a slightly slower pace than I do.

My discomfort is my problem, not theirs. Mostly these are just people uneasy in strange company, people who drink more at cons than they do otherwise. That I find many of them such boring drunks is doubtless also my own failing.

Once long ago after some panel at some convention a bunch of us were talking about mainstream fiction and a very young writer said, “I wonder what they say about science fiction at the mainstream conventions.” I cracked up and a couple of other people were amused. Some didn’t get the absurdity.

There isn’t anything quite like the spec fiction convention in any other field of endeavor — not with the frequency or regularity of SF cons at least. It’s said that every weekend there is at least one convention somewhere in the United States, sometimes several. And plenty more occur abroad.

There are legends. In her anecdotage years ago, an old mid-list writer driven to bitterness at never having won an award (there are almost as many awards as conventions) told me about a well-known and well-respected writer (and winner of some major awards) who had, for a period of several years, lived entirely at conventions. He had no permanent home; his domestic life was in turmoil and he wasn’t writing. So he went from convention to convention, arriving a day or two early and crashing with fellow writers or fans, staying a day or two after the convention and then scrambled for transportation to the next town.

“It only worked because so many people considered him sexy,” she said. I thought it was too bad he wasn’t still active, that people couldn’t point him out to me. “Just missed him. He’s crashing in someone’s room right now.”

A legend redeems so much. Saratoga Springs is in Washington Irving country. At times that weekend I wondered if it was possible to stand outdoors at sunset and hear Henry Hudson and his crew playing at ninepins.

One morning as I set out early from the hotel to get something to eat before I was supposed to moderate a panel, I encountered groups returning bleary-eyed and with their name tags askew from the breakfast that follows the binge.

“Like a Shriners convention,” I said to a companion. Now all I remembered about Shriners was that they wore red fezzes with tassels on them, got drunk and, as I recalled from my youth, behaved like assholes in various cities around the nation. I considered them kind of minor-league Masons without the Knights Templar and Mozart connections.

“We have conventions like the Shriners but we don’t have the hats,” I said. “Maybe propeller beanies.” When I was very small - four or five years old — I saw an older kid (maybe seven) wearing one. It was a windy day in Boston and his props were spinning. I thought it was a glorious sight and told my father I wanted one. “Maybe when you grow up,” he said.

A tourist unconnected to the convention who overheard me running on about the Shriners leaned over and told me that an uncle whom she loved was a Shriner and that they actually did worthwhile charitable and community work. I was amazed to find out they still existed.

Aside from the panel I spent the afternoon with Mark Rich talking about a story we’re writing together. We discussed the thought processes and motivations of a renegade orc suffering from amnesia who finds himself on a crossroads world that is nothing but an enormous flea market. Maybe, despite my unease and alienation, speculative fiction conventions are the only place for someone who believes he can make a good guess at the inner working of an orc’s mind but has never knowingly met a Shriner.

One morning in Saratoga I awoke to discover that while falling asleep the night before, I must have grabbed a pen and scribbled on a pad, “Name her Ethel like the horse.” Then I spent the day trying to figure out why that seemed like a revelation worth preserving.

Finally I remembered that I’d once heard that Hubert Humphrey, Vice President of the United States and perennial presidential candidate, had called Ethel Kennedy, the wife of Bobby, “the brood mare” because of the immense number of children she produced. But even after that discovery I could find no clue as to who or what it had been my intention to name Ethel like the horse.

Sometime after World Fantasy, at dinner in Manhattan, a British editor talking about the convention said something about the lack of style sense amongst the convention goers and their lack of personal hygiene. He put it a bit more bluntly and it took me by surprise since that hadn’t been something I really noticed. I wondered if that said something about me.

In fact, though, his complaint seemed old-fashioned and beside the point. There’s photographic evidence that things were a bit different in the old days, but a distinctive feature of The Blob now is a general lack of personal neglect. The writer in the Hawaiian shirts and the editor who dresses as Nathan Detroit from Guys and Dolls are showing their flags, not displaying anti-social tendencies.

The prevailing clothing style is campus wear. The genre and academia exist in the kind of proximity that they did not have twenty-five years ago. The number of spec fiction writers who support themselves on their writing is tiny and getting smaller. Many young writers now pursue academic careers. Older writers are often part-time or full-time teachers.

A common path for an aspiring genre writer starts in the lower minor league workshops and often proceeds to Clarion or one of the other Triple-A clubs. Along the way she will have had professional writers, often members of SFWA, as teachers. The networking opportunities are one of the attractions.

With skill, persistence, and luck the student will begin to get published. Usually it’s stories at first, then novels. She can hope if all goes really well to perhaps teach workshops herself. The career path illustrated strikes me as having about it certain aspects of a pyramid scheme.

A generation of writers has learned they need to play well with others from preschool on.  They honor the work of eccentric loners like James Tiptree and Philip K. Dick, but would those two fit in on a play date?

The atmosphere of The Blob has changed in the twenty-five years I’ve been around. The scandal at the major award event the year before last when a much-honored famous writer on the podium grabbed the person of another famous much-honored writer was all about that. It was the dirty, guy-centered, commercial, legendary past on exhibition in front of an audience used to environments where sexual harassment brings about official reprimands and stints in compulsory re-education classes.

That viewpoint is one I share. But in my youth I internalized a narrative of the writer’s life reminiscent of the one that grips the scary photographers, bare survivors of the Summer of Love and birth of punk, in Elizabeth Hand’s novel Generation Loss.

These are the artists who came of age struggling to unlock a vision and found something that froze them, who touched glory and saw the truth out the corner of their eye once, maybe even twice, and maybe never again.

World Fantasy did carry a hint or two of that past. One night I found myself out in the freezing cold visiting with those modern social outcasts, tobacco smokers. We sat in the dark bullshitting. Further out in the night was what looked at first like a raven in a dark suit. It was a well-known writer from abroad, and every once in a while he interjected into the conversation some slurred sentences in an accent no one could understand. Everyone would pause for a few moments, the smokers would exhale pensively, and then talk would resume. It was great. For a little while, it was forty years ago and I was back hanging with the hip outsiders at some lousy college.

In the aftermath of any genre event are the bad online pictures (Is my bald spot that big?), the mentions of one’s name in blog accounts of the affair, and the jumbled notes about the Orc story to keep the memory alive.

A few times I’ve set scenes from stories at conventions and award ceremonies. But that’s probably just a sign that I don’t really fit into the genre. It’s rarely done in spec fiction maybe because the genre’s writers are rather proud of the fact that they do not draw on personal experience.

Or perhaps it’s because spec fiction is devoted to the fantastic, the creepy, and the undiscovered. And The Blob is the default mode, something too ordinary to be commented on.

The last day of World Fantasy, a friend was leaving early and I saw him off on the shuttle bus to the airport. It was a bright and bracing day. The driver had a red, open Hudson Valley Dutch face right out of a Franz Hal painting. This was the face of the townsman amused by the flight of Ichabod Crane, not above lifting a stein in memory of Rip Van Winkle. It’s that face which I thought about on my way back to the city.

About the Author

Richard Bowes has published five novels, the most recent of which is From the Files of the Time Rangers (Golden Gryphon). His most recent short fiction collection is Streetcar Dreams and Other Midnight Fancies (PS Publications). He has won the World Fantasy, Lambda, International Horror Guild and Million Writers Awards. Recent and forthcoming stories are in F&SF, Subterranean Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Sybil’s Garage and The Coyote Road, Beastly Bride,  Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy and So Fey anthologies.

An Interview with Catherynne M. Valente

Tobias S. Buckell

Catherynne Valente was born in Seattle and spent time up and down the West Coast of the U.S. while growing up, and then struck out for Japan where she spent a great deal of time before coming to reside in Ohio. Catherynne’s story is not dissimilar from my own, living abroad before moving to Ohio, so I was intrigued not too long ago to have gotten to read the first book in her Orphan’s Tales fantasy series.

It turns out Catherynne has a reputation for sensuous, rich sentences, and even richer structure in her writing. Not surprisingly, Catherynne was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for her work, and ended up winning the Tiptree. I’ve had my own suspicions about the impact and inspiration for her amazing work, so it was a treat to get a chance to interview her.

I have to say your book The Orphan’s Tales: In The Night Garden is an amazing work. I never thought I’d be handing a book to friends that I would describe as a ‘mix between 101 Arabian Nights and a Russian nesting doll.’ How challenging was this complex structure to write and what inspired you to use it?

Well, you nailed the inspiration right there: about five years ago I read a new translation of Arabian Nights and was struck by the structure, how interesting and unique it was, and it seemed so natural to take it to the next level, to close the frame and link all the tales within it together. I wanted to create one gigantic folkloric system, and at the same time to touch the core of so many fairy tales: a simple story about a lost little girl.

It is and extraordinarily difficult structure to work with. It requires a great deal of fact-checking—how are these five timelines jiving together? Do they all make sense, is the causality intact? I could have saved myself a lot of time just writing A to Z, but I don’t think I could have told this story that way. To me, it works because of the structure, and is impossible without it. Without the other tales, any one tale on its own falls down, or at least becomes less, becomes thinner.

I never kept any notes or outlines, nor did I diagram the structure. I kept it all in my head. That tends to be how I work in general, somewhat messily, organically, but when I look back on the whole process, it makes me happy that I did it that way. It feels like in some small measure I echoed the work of oral storytellers — I kept it all inside, and told it from memory, full of kennings and epithets and tricks both flashy and subtle, and in the end, it all fit together, and the stories ended just as the fire went out.

One of the most amazing things about The Orphan’s Tales is that your books really veer away from the typical European, post-Tolkein fantasy, and yet they don’t turn their back on the mythic, the great storytelling, and feel of legend. Why are these such important qualities for you, and where do you feel your work stands in the greater map of Fantasy?

Let me begin by saying that I love Tolkien — I was an enormous LOTR-geek when I was in high school, and I think his work is amazing.

And the funny thing is, I love it so much I don’t feel the smallest need to rewrite it. How could I possibly equal what JRR did? I mean, the man wrote the dictionary. I dropped out of my MA program. There isn’t much comparison to be made.

But folklore, myth, these belong to everyone. They are important to me because I love the world in a mad, sloppy, passionate way. It’s my fandom, all of it, Maori and Greek and American and Japanese and Aztec and Serbian and Palestinian and the back porch and the corner cafe. We, as humans, tell stories compulsively, like an addiction, like a divine commandment, and I want to hear them, all of them. I always have. I am a fantasy writer because I love the world and I want there to be more of it. I want there to be so much more than meets the eye. I want every story ever told to be true. If there is any moral core to the books I’ve written, it’s that: every story is true. Every single one.

As for my little push-pin in the map of fantasy, I don’t have the first idea. That’s what we have graduate students for, right? I missed the New Weird, both New Waves, and all the canon -punks. I’m too young for any of the cool movements to take my applications. I like thinking of myself as a postmodern fabulist, but that’s pretty fancy and I think technically that’s another club that sparked and flamed and got bored with the title long before I came along. I’m Post, I suppose. Post-postmodern, post-Tolkien, post-Rowling, post-New, post-punk, post-graduate, post-tech bubble, post-distribution network, post-classical, post-golden age, post-9/11, post-20th century, post-everything. Until someone says being post-everything is so passe.

The Post Office. Something like that.

As a follow up, I was recently at a convention where you mentioned to an audience that you thought your rich sentence style was going to change in upcoming novels as you grew into experimenting with some new approaches. Can you talk more about your upcoming transition?

It’s been a slow and steady one, I think easily chartable through my books. I’ll never stop writing rich and imagistic books, that’s who I am and I could probably change the number of my limbs before I could change that. But I already wrote The Labyrinth, and The Book of Dreams. I don’t need to write those books again. When I started out, in the ancient world of 2004, I was writing mainly confessional books cloaked in fantasy and dense language. I ran out of things I needed to purge. Now, I want to tell other stories, in other ways. I want to evolve as a writer, I want to level up, as the kids say. I’m fascinated by structure and by the combination of language and genre, and what each has to say about the other. I don’t think there’s a single one of my upcoming books that doesn’t comment internally on the conventions of realism and genre literature. I can’t imagine not trying to mess about with structure in some way. But I want to find a balance between lushness and precision, and that what I’m questing after at this point.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to remain a writer until I fall down and die. And if there’s any answer to how to do that, I think it has to be constant evolution. I have to stay interested in my own work, and keep writing books I find it difficult to write, or what’s the point? I don’t find it remotely difficult to write stream-of-consciousness surrealist extravaganzas anymore. Time to run face-first into the wall of trying something new, or I might as well quit and start working at the actual post office.

You’ve written a lot of poetry, and even published some books of it. How do you feel the poetry builds synergy with your writing?

I started with poetry. I didn’t even try to write fiction until I was something like 21, and only then because a professor made me. I tried a novel at 23, and that was The Labyrinth, which some might argue isn’t a novel but a prose-poem, anyway. Poetry is the root of whatever style I have — I still want to make every word count, to make every phrase carry the weight of the whole. Sometimes I’m better at that than others.

I find, sadly, that I write less and less poetry as I write more prose. In part that’s because I get paid a lot more for poetic prose than poetic poetry, and in part it’s because while the SF poetry scene is pretty bustling, the fantasy poetry folks still struggle for respect and attention. And in part it’s for no reason I can tell, and I just trust these things come and go in waves. I don’t find that poetry turns into novels the way short stories do, but they move and evolve on a parallel line with my novels, and what I learn about language and feeling as a poet is automatically transferred to the novelist-brain, no customs officials, no waiting. The synergy moves one way these days, I find novel-lessons don’t transfer well, they make my poems too wordy and expositional.

I think my newest collection, A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects, will be the last for awhile.

I’ve seen that you spent time in Japan. Can you talk about how this traveling has impacted your writing?

Oh, boy. First, I suppose, it gave me time to write. My ex-husband was out of the country for 19 of the 25 months we spent there, and I was alone, without friends or family or any real human contact. That made me a little crazy, but it also got the books done.

The mythology of Japan will always be with me — the Shinto faith, the syncretic culture, the jungle right up close to the urban sprawl. Some part of me will always be there, always looking for fox-statues in the forest, watching the jellyfish suck at the sides of boats in the harbor. I will never stop being fascinated by it, and processing what it means in relation to me and my work and my internal landscape. It was a hermitage, and I learned all the things good hermits are supposed to learn: how to be alone, how to quiet demons, how to sweep the halls and keep the wolves at the door.

But now you’re living in Ohio. How’s that for an adjustment? And do you think it has impacted your work?

Ohio is a mythic landscape, too! The American Midwest is literally PLANET MARS for a girl like me, raised on the West Coast. I bet you know exactly what I mean. You ain’t from around here neither, Toby. The colors on the leaves, the snow in the winter, the viciously huge icicles, the Waffle Houses, the cornfields, the beige food! I find it fascinating here, and being adjacent to a Great Lake is wonderful. There are islands there that are completely deserted, and water that goes past the horizon. There is a strange wizardly grace to Ohio, I swear it. And when I leave, like Japan, it will stay with me, all its myth and folklore and endless fields.

I think it has made me look more closely at America as a source of fantasy, as a source of myth. It has made me look at plain things differently and taught me that every place longs to have wonderful things written about it. Even Cleveland, Ohio.

I think I’ll probably give every place I live a giant hug in the form of a book. I can’t help it. They ask so nicely.

Like a lot of writers you’ve been leveraging the internet to build your readership and you’re certainly one of them. You have a well-read LiveJournal, and have mentioned that you owe your career to this tool in some ways. How did that work?

Well, I had a blog back on Diaryland since about 2000. I used it for writing practice for years and predictably, no one cared much. I sat in my corner of the internet and played with my ball. After awhile it gained a bit of a following, but nothing we wouldn’t laugh at in today’s blogosphere. But when I moved to Japan, I was pretty intensely lonely, and figured I’d get on Livejournal and see if I could make a couple of friends — it snowballed and by the time I had any kind of book contract I had a sizable readership, and it’s grown since then, as have my books, and they very much feed off of each other now. Most of the things in my life were provided by Mother Internet: my partner, my home, my job, my friends, even some of the food in my pantry and art on my walls. I didn’t ever have a mercenary plan to sell books, I just wanted to reach out and find something genuine in the ether.

It turns out, if you send away for a life, the internet will send you one. It doesn’t even cost anything.

Who are some of the writers that have really had an impact on your writing?

Sylvia Plath, Lorca, Diane Wakoski, Anna Ahkmatova are all huge influences in poetry, which is, as referenced, the beast who made my brain. In fiction there is Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Clarice Lispector, Milorad Pavic, Italo Calvino, Jeanette Winterson, John Crowley, Jeff Vandermeer, Theodora Goss, Borges, Lewis Carroll, Sonya Taaffe, Paul Verhelst, and Dylan Thomas (Under Milk Wood was an enormous formative influence.)

I did my undergraduate degree in classics, so I have to point out that reading endless pages of ancient Greek was probably not helpful to ever writing like a normal kid.

When you write, what kind of schedule do you keep? Any rituals or methods you use to get into the right headspace?

I am ashamed. I must confess that when I need to get a novel done, I go to Starbucks, where they do not have free wireless, and I work from 9-6 every day until it is done. It isn’t sexy. It’s not a garret. Old men stare at my chest and baristas make jokes about how much World of Warcraft I must be playing. But it gets it done.

I basically require a hard deadline to function at all. I am a fundamentally lazy person who is so determined to get things done that I’ve built workarounds into my psyche so that I can appear not-lazy. It’s a long and stupid process, but the books get written. On deadline. They get turned in at midnight like a student slipping a paper under a professor’s door, but I’ve never missed one. The key is fear and shame, I find. Fear you won’t get to keep being a writer if you don’t put out, and shame at being anything less than punk rock. It works. Somehow.

I wish I had rituals. I keep thinking I should invent some. But mostly I sit down and write until someone says I have to eat. Lather, rinse, repeat.

About the Author

Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born speculative fiction writer who grew up in Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. His latest novel, Sly Moongoose, a Caribbean Space Opera, is currently out from Tor and his first short story collection, Tides from the New Worlds, was published by Wyrm Publishing in 2009.