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Sunday, March 6, 2011

Chapter 11 (concluded)

Johnny glanced over at the “tub.” “This is ... somewhat unusual for us,” he said, trying not to look over at the increasingly naked Roger. “We typically don’t ... um, bathe in front of other people. Where we, ah, come from, I mean.”

Roger stepped in front of him. She wasn’t any taller than he was, but she was obviously older. Her breasts weren’t large, but they seemed to fill Johnny’s vision. He tried looking down, but that brought him to the dark patch of hair between her legs, so he turned his head and looked at the wall instead. “Suit yerselves,” Roger was saying. “I’ll wash up meself and then go find ye some fresh clothes. I reckon ye can fit into me own garb well enough ...” Johnny felt her grab him by the shoulders. “A bit broader across the blades than I, mayhap, but close enough. Ye, little lassie, on the other hand, ...” Johnny felt her let go of him, then out of the corner of his eye he saw her put her hand on top of Larissa’s head. Larissa continued to gaze up at the older woman. “Ye’ll be a bit of a challenge. But methinks I can scrounge up summat.”

A brief pause and then a splash, and Johnny finally dared look back around. Roger’s head popped up above the surface of the water, and she shook it, flinging her ponytail around and spraying water everywhere. Bones scolded her with a screech, but she paid him no mind. The tea-colored water did a good enough job of hiding her nudity that Johnny felt he could look at her now. She chatted on while she washed, using the hunk of soap to create a surprising amount of lather, which she used on both body and hair, although she didn’t undo her ponytail. By the time she was done washing, there was very little of the soap left, and Roger dropped it in the water. Johnny noticed that it quickly sank down and out of sight. Point one, he thought to himself: don’t drop the soap until you’re finished.

Most of Roger’s chatter was instructions on what to do (and what not to do) while on board the ship. She was quite excellent at this, and Johnny found himself wanting to do as she said, never doubting that she was in charge, but never feeling like her inferior. She had an easy air of command that was in no way diminished by being in the midst of taking a bath; no doubt she was born to be a ship’s captain. Suddenly something she was saying caught his ear. “Wait, what was that last bit?”

Roger had finished her washing by now and she began to lazily backstroke across the short length of the “tub.” (Johnny had to avert his eyes again.) “The Guide,” she repeated. “We’ll be off to pick up the Guide now.”

“Who’s the Guide?”

“Aidan de Tourneville.”

Johnny shook his head as if to clear it. “No, I meant ... what is he, or why do we need him, or ... something.”

Roger chuckled again. She had a very sexy chuckle; it was throaty, like her laugh, but even more seductive, somehow. “For where we’ll be heading, we’ll be needing a Water Guide.” Johnny could see the capital letters in “Water Guide” from the way she said it. “Aidan may not be the best of the best, but he’s the best of the ones we can get to right now, and he’ll see us through. And as to why we be needing him,” and here there was another splash, and her face appeared in his field of vision, staring up at him from the edge of the tub as he was trying to stare at the floor, “that’ll be on account of the monsters.” She heaved her body out of the water in one well-muscled push, and Johnny blushed and looked away yet again.

“Monsters?” he said, his voice cracking a bit.

“Now, now, nothing to worry yer pretty little head over. That’s what we’ll be having the Guide for, s’truth.” There were dripping footsteps, and then a click, and then a loud whoosh. It surprised Johnny so much that he forgot to look at the floor. Through the cloud of steam, he could barely make out Roger’s back; she was standing over where one of the fireglobe stands had been, holding her arms out to either side and using her foot to press a button on the floor. The steam seemed to be coming off her, somehow, and, sure enough, when it cleared, she seemed totally dry. She stepped over to the wooden box with its little round pot on top. Removing the lid, she scooped out a handful of some goopy substance and began to rub it on her body.

Johnny knew he was probably supposed to be looking away again, but this was too fascinating. “What is that stuff?” he asked.

“It’s allsalve. Ye’ll need to be putting it all over. Concentrate on the exposed skin, and don’t get it too near your eyes or your nethers, but get it on most of ye.”

Both Johnny and Larissa had come over to examine the stuff. It was white, and roughly the consistency of cocoa butter. There was a very distinctive, but not unpleasant, smell coming from it. Larissa stuck a finger in it and brought it to her nose. “Aloe vera base,” she pronounced. “Infused with zinc oxide and ... nepetalactone?” She gazed back up at Roger.

“Well, I don’t know what ye’re on about there, missy, but this stuff will keep you from burning in the sun, and it keeps the mosquitoes off ye, which is the main thing. As an added benefit, it keeps yer skin from drying out, and it can occasionally make the burrikits go loopy, rather than eating ye.”

“What’s a burrikit?” Johnny asked.

“Large orange cat,” Roger replied. “They waits up in the trees for ye to come along, and then they drop on ye.”

“Nepetalactone is the active ingredient in catnip,” Larissa told him.

“Ah,” Johnny said. “Wouldn’t that attract the ... um, burrikits?”

“Occasionally, ye’re right as rain, but not as often as it keeps ye from being drained bloodless by the mosquitoes. And the mosquitoes can get to you here on the ship, ye see, whereas the burrikits cannot. For the most part.” Roger applied some of the cream to her cheeks, chin, and forehead, and then wiped her hands on her hips. “There! That should do ‘er. Shall I go fetch ye some clothes then?” Without waiting for an answer, she turned and strode off. Johnny caught himself watching her walk away and immediately turned back to Larissa, who wasn’t bothering to avert her eyes. Her gaze lingered on the door for some time after Roger had disappeared through it. Finally she turned to meet Johnny’s eyes.

“So ...” Johnny said. “You want to go first?” Larissa didn’t answer. “I mean,” he stammered, “I mean, I’ll go wait outside and ...” Larissa’s gaze didn’t falter, and her blank expression didn’t change. Johnny thought he was probably blushing. Again.

“How about I just go first then? Can you guard the door for me and make sure she doesn’t come barging in?” Larissa nodded. Johnny exhaled, relieved. “Okay, cool, then I’ll do the same for you afterwards, right? I’ll just poke my arm out for the new clothes when I’m done, I guess.” Johnny looked around and saw that Bones was still in the room, perched up on a shelf across the room. “And take that thing out with you, if you can,” he said, gesturing.

Bones opened its beak and stuck out a small pink tongue at Johnny. Then it gave a short monkey cry and scampered out of the room.

>>next>>

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Chapter 11 (begun)

Preparations

For what seemed like hours, Roger had them carrying things onto the ship and stowing them away. She was bright and cheery, and had a curious approach of both treating them like they knew what they were doing and teaching them how to do it at the same time. “We’ll make sailors of ye yet!” she’d say. She gave the heavier crates to Johnny to lug onboard, and the smaller boxes and other small tasks went to Larissa. Roger oversaw everything, but she worked hard as well. Johnny didn’t know how she always knew when one of them was doing something incorrectly, or at a loss as to what to do next, but he suspected it had something to do with the weird parrot-monkey, which bounded and swooped around and called out stereotypical pirate phrases such as “Avast there!” and “Walk the plank!” It seemed it couldn’t actually fly, but there was some loose skin under its arms with long, stiff feathers attached, and it would scurry, monkey-like, up to the tops of things and then leap off, gliding amazingly long distances, its legs tucked up under it and its feathered tail streaming out behind like a rudder.

At last, the last crate was stowed and Johnny sat down, exhausted. He now knew how to tie three different types of knots and knew the proper terms for nearly everything on the boat. And it seemed the ship was finally ready to set sail ... or perhaps ready to embark might be more accurate, for of course there were no sails. “Jolly good, me buckos!” Roger called out, standing with her feet apart and her hands on her hips. “Ready to weigh anchor? How’re we lookin’, Bones?”

The red and blue streak shot up out of the hold and landed nimbly on a webbing of ropes on the side of the deckhouse. “Red sky at dawn!” it screeched.

Johnny looked up, surprised. “You actually have dawn here?” he asked.

Roger chuckled. “It’s just an expression. Means he thinks it may rain.”

Larissa spoke up. “Why would you have a word for a phenomenon you never experience?”

Roger ignored this, looking out over the water behind the ship’s stern. “Might rain, at that. Shouldn’t be much to it though ... bit of a hig, I’d say.”

Johnny had no idea what a “hig” was, but he assumed it implied a light rain shower.

“Anyhow, we’ll need to get cleaned up afore we do too much else, so let’s get ‘er out in the deep.”

They followed Roger back to the wheelhouse (she called it that despite there not actually being a wheel, or a house, for that matter), where she grabbed a rubber handle attached to a cord and yanked it hard, just like starting an old lawnmower. Immediately the fan roared to life and the ship began to sway gently back and forth. Roger grabbed a large pole which stuck out horizontally. “Here y’are Johnny. Hold that there for me.” Johnny obliged. “Don’t let go, now, even if she bucks ye.” Roger grinned at him, then strode off to the front of the boat. Johnny heard a loud clanking, like huge chains being rattled, then there was a brief tug, and the back of the ship dropped precipitously, then the entire ship shot forward. Johnny managed to hold on, but he was glad of the warning Roger had given him.

Roger reappeared and took hold of the pole, which she insisted on calling the “wheel” despite there being nothing wheel-like about it. Johnny got close to her ear to be heard over the roar of the fan, and half-shouted “Why not just pull up the anchor, then start the fan?”

Roger kept her smile, but managed to convey the impression that this was a silly question. “Not worth the risk!” she half-shouted back.

Johnny was fast coming to the conclusion that talking to Roger was somewhat like talking to Larissa. That was okay; he was used to that by now.

“So,” he continued, changing tacks, “this thing run on gasoline?”

Roger gave him a quizzical look.

“Gasoline!” he said, louder.

She laughed. “No petrol!” she called back.

Before Johnny could pursue this further, Roger flipped a switch and the roaring of the fan puttered out. Johnny looked around.

They hadn’t come that far; he could still see the tall palm, perhaps a football field’s length away. Perhaps they were in the middle of the lake, or river, or whatever this waterway was, but that was impossible to tell, because the water’s surface was still covered with floating plants, although there was a cleared out trail that marked their passage. As Johnny looked, the trail started to disappear as the plants drifted back into the open space.

“Why’d we stop?” Johnny asked.

“Time to wash up,” Roger answered. “Come along, me hearties.”

They followed her to the front of the deckhouse, where she pulled open a door and led them through a warren of rooms. Finally they took three steps down into a windowless room which Johnny assumed must be in the very center of the structure. It was lit only by a skylight. The center of the floor consisted of a large square of wood which was somehow not part of the rest of the floor. Roger strode over to a crank on the far wall and began to turn it; the middle of the floor slid smoothly back, like the sunroof of one of Johnny’s father’s cars, revealing the dark water beneath.

“Light ’em up, Bones,” Roger instructed. Johnny noticed that, at each corner of what was now a large square hole in the floor, there was a short stand, with a round thing on top that looked vaguely like the decorative, glass-globed candles his mother used to buy. And, indeed, Roger and Bones were lighting them as if they were just that, creating a spark by striking two objects together (Johnny supposed it must be a flint and steel). The spark created was larger than any spark he’d ever seen before, and it flew unerringly to the blackened wicks, which started burning immediately. Johnny didn’t think that making fire with a flint and steel was that easy in the real world, but it was a minor point considering he was traveling on a wooden airboat the size of a small yacht. And it was about to get even more minor ...

Once all four globes were lit, Roger walked over to the wall where the crank was, and took down a small mallet. She then went to the first stand and smacked the candle thing hard. The fiery globe shot down, collapsing its wooden stand, passed through the floor of the boat and down into the depths of the water, leaving a trail behind it so that it formed a pillar of fire which stretched from the underside of the boat to the waterbed. It didn’t really light up the water much, but there was enough glow that Johnny could see the shadows of fish, and maybe reptiles, scurrying away from the source of the underwater flames. Roger repeated this three more times, until there was a sort of cage underneath the boat. The water below the boat was still brown—the color of strong tea—but it was obviously clear of aquatic life.

“The brown color comes from the dissolved peat tannins,” Larissa said.

Roger was bent over, rooting around in a wooden box. After a moment she gave a satisfied grunt and stood up, closing the box and placing a ceramic pot on top of it. She brought three off-white, shapeless lumps over and handed one each to Johnny and Larissa. “What’s this?” Johnny asked.

“Soap,” Roger replied, her tone stating that this should have been obvious.

Johnny nodded, staring at the hard lump in his hand. “Sure, soap. Of course. Now what are we supposed to be ...”

He looked up and found that Roger was unbuttoning her shirt. Quickly he looked away, back at Larissa. The younger girl was watching Roger with her normal detachment, holding her own lump of soap in both hands. From behind him, Johnny heard a briefly muffled “We are supposed to be sluicing off the sweat and grime we’ve worked up. Now strip off and get in the tub, swabbies!”

>>next>>

Sunday, February 20, 2011

The Uncertainty of Literature

Last week, I posted some gibberish in which I suggested that art was a dialectic, a conversation between writer and reader (or, more generally, between artist and audience). Well, most of it was gibberish, but that part was pretty decent. If you are willing to accept that premise, we can extrapolate a few even more interesting bits of philosophical remains if we carry it through to some logical conclusions.

First allow me a couple of tangents. In Stephen King’s novel It, there is a character named Bill Denbrough, who is, like King himself, a horror writer. King is fond of putting writers in his stories, presumably as a concrete manifestation of the age-old writer’s dictum to “write what you know.” And, while of course these are fictional characters, it’s not unreasonable to assume that King takes advantage of them to insert some of his own views on writing. I was particularly struck by one passage that describes an English class that Bill takes in college, and I’ve never forgotten it.

... he says, “I don’t understand this at all. I don’t understand any of this. Why does a story have to be socio-anything? Politics ... culture ... history ... aren’t those natural ingredients in any story, if it’s told well? I mean ...” He looks around, sees hostile eyes, and realizes dimly that they see this as some sort of attack. Maybe it even is. They are thinking, he realizes, that maybe there is a sexist death merchant in their midst. “I mean ... can’t you guys just let a story be a story?”

No one replies. Silence spins out. He stands there looking from one cool set of eyes to the next. The sallow girl chuffs out smoke and snubs her cigarette in an ashtray she has brought along in her backpack.

Finally the instructor says softly, as if to a child having an inexplicable tantrum, “Do you believe William Faulkner was just telling stories? Do you believe Shakespeare was just interested in making a buck? Come now, Bill. Tell us what you think.”

“I think that’s pretty close to the truth,” Bill says after a long moment in which he honestly considers the question, and in their eyes he reads a kind of damnation.

“I suggest,” the instructor says, toying with his pen and smiling at Bill with half-lidded eyes, “that you have a great deal to learn.”

I can imagine this, or something strikingly similar to it, actually happening to King himself, especially given his long-standing attitude that he is “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.” What he seems to be exploring, both in the passage and in the quote, is the dichotomy between literary-as-a-quality, and popularity: that is, the difference between what is truly superior writing and what’s just cool to read. Indeed, Bill Denbrough’s response in the novel is to go out and write a pulp story which he promptly sells for $200, thus proving to himself that he doesn’t need the pretentious approval of soi-disant academics to validate his self-worth. It seems, on some level, to be cheering on the popular over the literary.

But, as a baladocian, I reject this choice. There’s no reason it can’t be both. Let’s take Mr. Shakespeare as an excellent example. The man was wildly popular in his time; there is every reason to believe that he really did work to maintain that. That he may have been, if not just out to make a buck, at least telling stories for the sheer joy of it. Now, does that invalidate the centuries of literary analysis that have been done on his plays?

But let’s make the question more concrete. In any class on English literature in the country—most likely in the world—you’re bound to hear many statements that start thus: “In this instance, Shakespeare was trying to say ...” Indeed, much modern literary criticism is bound up in authorial intent: either desperate to determine it, or desperate to ignore it. But my question is this: if you had a time machine, and you could go back and visit Shakespeare, and you could ask him: did you really intend this interpretation? were you actually trying to say thus and so? And, if Shakespeare were to respond, “why, no, not at all” ... would that invalidate the interpretation?

I attended George Mason University, which is one of the few colleges (or at least it was at the time) to offer an English degree with a concentration in writing (most Bachelors of Arts in English concentrate on literature by default). I took five courses in writing, above and beyond the two in composition that are required of all B.A. candidates. In my very first one, I had the great fortune to be taught by Ellen Nunnally. She was a fantastic teacher on the craft of writing, and one of the two people who probably most influenced my development as a writer (the other being Mark Farrington). I learned many things in that first class. Here’s the one I remember most clearly:

All my writing, throughout my life, has been influenced by what I think of as my literary pentagram of idols: Stephen King, Peter Straub, Dean Koontz, Clive Barker, and Neil Gaiman (in order of my discovery of them). So naturally most of my short stories have fallen into the category of horror fiction, and that’s mostly what I wrote for this class. Ellen didn’t care for it, but she always looked beyond that to comment on the writing itself. Now, when I wrote a story back in those days (and not a whole lot has changed, to be honest), I just sort of wrote whatever came into my head: I got an idea which was hopefully a decent one, then I just ran with it, expanded on it, let it flow, wrestled it down, formulated it into a story. There wasn’t a lot of thinking involved: just writing. I turned in one such story and Ellen apparently liked it, and wanted to read it aloud to the class (she often did this with students’ work). I can’t recall if she read it or I did, but I remember what she said afterward.

She pointed out to the class all the elements of my story: the rising action, the climax, the falling action, the denouement. She pointed out how the main character changed (for the protagonist must always grow or change in some way). She pointed out several other things about my story and its structure and its themes and what it had to say, and I had one simple reaction: Wow, who knew all that stuff was in there? What a genius I must be!

This is when I realized what the passage from It really meant. Because I knew that I had not intended all those things that Professor Nunnally found in my story. Perhaps I put them in through some sort of instinct, or perhaps it really was just a bizarre fluke, but the important thing was that it didn’t matter. Because, once she pointed them out, I could see them too. They were there; they were valid. I had never intended them, and yet there they were.

And ever since then I’ve been very careful not to assume that I know everything there is to know about what I write.

You see, the reader draws forth the interpretation from the work. In a certain sense, when you read something, whatever you get out of it, no matter what it is, that’s valid ... for you. Don’t come ask me if that’s what I meant to say, because it just doesn’t matter. If you got it, it’s true, in some fundamental sense. Of course, we have to take the bad with the good: taking this view means that when you have a situation like religious nutjobs lining up to boycott Harry Potter or somesuch, you can’t really tell them they’re wrong—no matter how badly you may want to. Because it’s valid for them. (Assuming they’re being sincere; oftentimes people participating in such protests have never even read the work in question, in which case nothing is valid for them, because their interpretations don’t even exist yet.)

And of course this isn’t limited to writing. I have some friends who have a band, and I really like their music. They’re hardly punk, or even what you might call hard rock, but they are quite energetic, and they have a few songs that are quite dandy to mosh to (such as ”Jump in the Water,” which, gosh darn it, has “jump” right there in the title). Now, it has been brought to my attention that Todd (lead singer of the band and, as I say, a friend of mine) doesn’t really dig people moshing to his tunes. I have been told that I am somehow being disrespectful of his wishes if I choose to express myself in this way. But, to me, this is the same thing again: he may not have intended his song to instill in me a desire to pogo around and crash into other people, but that’s what I got out of it, and that’s valid for me (and obviously other folks as well, ’cause you can’t really mosh by yourself).

As the artist, you’re the parent, and your work is your child. You try to mold it, and polish it up and make it presentable, and you hope it reflects well on you, but, at some point, it has to go off on its own and you just have to hope for the best. The impression that other people get from your children does say something about you, of course, but you can neither take all the credit, nor all the blame. In the end, each child is its own person.

Werner Heisenberg is the guy who formulated the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. If you’re not familiar with that, it says that certain pairs of measurements (say, position and momentum) of quantum particles can’t be simultaneously known. Or, to put it another way, you can’t meausure both where a particle is and how fast it’s going, because the very act of measuring its speed impacts its location, and vice versa. Or, to put it even more simply (and, yes, I’m aware that some pedantic types may find this formulation entirely too simple): when you measure something, it changes.

Now, all the Heisenberg uncertainty principle really talks about is quantum particles. But it is often extrapolated to much larger contexts. For instance, I’m a programmer, and sometimes my software has bugs in it (hey, I’m not perfect). One way I can find a bug is to run my program through a “debugger,” which is a program that modifies my program to have all sorts of hooks and connections in it, so that, for each thing my program does, the debugger can show me exactly where in my source code I told it to do that. Unfortunately, sometimes the modification that the debugger does to my program causes the bug to move, or disappear entirely, and, when that happens, we call it a “Heisenbug” (this also explains my well-known love/hate relationship with debuggers). Other cultural references abound.

But note how primly the pedants try to disparage these. “A lot of people get the Uncertainty Principle confused with the observer effect,” they tell us, but “the two are not actually related.” Why are they unrelated? Well, it turns out that clever physicists don’t actually have to observe quantum particles in order to measure them. So the observer effect tells us that we can’t measure things when we observe them, and the uncertainty principle tells us that we can’t measure them even when we don’t. Nope, those aren’t related at all.

Someone told me once that Heisenberg himself was quite adamant about the uncertainty principle not being applied to anything other than quantum particles. I don’t know if that’s true, but even if it is we’re back to the same issue: it doesn’t much matter what Heisenberg thought. He was an artist, in his own way. He created the uncertainty principle, and he tossed it out into the world for us to chew on, and we’ve run with it. So, we’ve repurposed it to apply to not only to larger physical things, but to entirely non-physical things ... so, we’ve combined it with the observer effect to make one giant misguided scientific principle ... so what? I sometimes think the pedagogues believe that by proving that such things don’t logically follow from the original, they are therefore proving those things wrong (which of course would be argumentum ad ignorantiam). But it is precisely because such things contain a measure of truth that we don’t overly concern ourselves with exact derivations. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle ceases to be a mathematical proof and just becomes a convenient frame of reference.

So, whether you attribute it to Heisenberg or not, we have this principle that tells us that measuring things changes them (regardless of whether it involves observation or not). And, to me, this is very similar to what happens when you read a book, or watch a movie, or listen to a song: the act of experiencing the thing changes the thing. The art is no longer what it once was ... it has become something new, something which only has meaning in the context of you, the audience. That’s what it means for art to exist only as a dialectic between artist and patron: the artist as sender and the patron as receiver; the noise, the imperfect medium of word or image or melody; and the message constantly changing, constantly evolving as the reader/viewer/listener tries one mental picture, gains new information from the next chapter/scene/verse, then tries another. The feedback is not in the form of comments made by the audience to the artist: such comments are rarely heard, because the audience is potentially infinite and the artist merely singular. No, the feedback comes from the art itself, because even after you’ve exhausted the entirety of it, if it was truly inspiring or moving or thought provoking, you will go back and read it/watch it/listen to it again, and perhaps again and again, and each time it will say something new to you, and you will find something new in it, and your understanding will evolve a little more.

Thus literature—all art—is uncertain: we can never know exactly what it means, because it never means only one thing. What the author intended it to mean is perhaps vaguely interesting, but in the end irrelevant. What it means to me and what it means to you are always different—sometimes only slightly so, sometimes vastly so. Even what it means to me today and what it means to me tomorrow are different. The only thing that is certain is that it will mean something ... if it is truly art.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Nothing to Say

I have nothing to say this week.

Of course, even on those weeks when I have something to say, I don’t have much to say, which is why I feel compelled to remind you that you really should not be reading this blog (I’m telling you, people: it’s exactly what it says on the tin). But this week I have even less to say than usual. If you manage to stick around after this week, you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din. I mean, hell: I can’t even stand to listen to me half the time, and I am me. What chance do you have?

Usually when I don’t make a post it’s because of lack of time. I do have a life, you know. Well, okay, sometimes. But, this week, I have the time, I just don’t have anything to say. I’ve been trying to think of something to say, but nothing has sprung to mind. Or nothing that I really want to talk about, anyway. I have a few topics that I could probably expound on, but my heart isn’t in it, so it would come out lame. Lamer than usual, even.

I remember in Freshman Comp they told us what to do if we couldn’t think of what to write. Brainstorming, and cubing, and free writing ... at no point did they tell us what you really ought to do if you can’t think of what to write, which is to shut the hell up. It is far better to be silent than merely to increase the quantity of bad books. Supposedly, Voltaire said that, although who knows ... anything that sounds cool and snarky is attributed to Voltaire, unless Mark Twain grabs it first. But, you know, it can be true even without being famous.

So I’ve decided I just won’t write anything. Nope, nothing at all.

You know, I did this once for English class. I had to write a paper, and I couldn’t think of anything to write about, so I wrote a paper about not being able to write a paper. It was called “Scaling the Blank Page” or somesuch twaddle, and it was pretentious crap. I still run across it every now and again, generally when I unpack stuff after a move (or pack stuff in preparation for a move). For some reason, I have every paper I wrote for that class, in a folder. It’s vaguely amusing to break out stuff that you wrote 20 years ago and laugh at yourself. If you can’t laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?

So I shan’t increase the quantity of bad books—or bad blog posts—any further than I have already. Which, looking back ... man, I have 44 posts. We’re coming up on a year’s worth. And, of course, some of them are like this one—i.e. utterly useless and very short—but most are around 1,500 words long. Let’s see ... there’s actually 9 interstitials, which leaves 35 actual posts (and, yes, I did just pop to another window and have my computer do that math for me) and that makes, very roughly (popping to that other window again) ... over 52,000 words. Such logorrhoea! (You know, I threw in that link just because this is the web and you’re expected to do that sort of thing, but I bet you could tell what it meant just from the shape of the word, couldn’t you? There ought to be a word for that: a word that means a word whose meaning is obvious from way the word sounds. You know what I mean? Or maybe there is and it’s just non-obvious. But I digress.) So ... yeah. Lotta words. And, if you’ve read even a portion of that half-hundred-K, are you any better for it? Probably not. So there’s proof positive that I need to keep it to myself unless I have something worth saying.

Except I don’t, do I? It’s a good thing I believe in paradox, because this entire blog sure is one. On the one hand, I keep telling you how blogs suck, and on the other I keep posting to the blog. I tell you not to read, but I pump out 50 thousands words for your perusal. Man, am I confused or what? I suppose I could tell you that I’m just writing for me, and it doesn’t matter whether or not anyone reads it. But that’s not entirely true. Writing is an art form, and art requires an audience. A tree falling in a forest may or may not make a sound; it really depends on your definition of “sound.” But my definition of “art” absolutely requires an audience. Art is a dialogue, a dialectic. Without interpretation, art is lifeless. The act of experiencing it allows it to speak; before that, it is sterile and silent.

So there’s a perfectly good excuse gone. And I can’t think of any others. I certainly will continue to write whether or not you continue to read, and I will perversely continue to insist that you do not continue to read, and I will stubbornly continue to insist on believeing that you do continue to read, else there would be no point. Both are true; all are true. And all are false. It doesn’t matter, and it does. I’m okay with that. Hopefully you are as well. Certainly it’s difficult to imagine that you could have made it this far if you weren’t. Clearly you have either already found something worth your while, or you are hopelessly optimistic; either way, I welcome your continued participation even as I advise against it (because I could not in good conscience do otherwise).

So carry on with your regularly scheduled life. Because, just for this one week, I have nothing to say.

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Parental Myth #2

Children are people.

Perhaps you are non-plussed. This is an obvious statement, right? Not much to argue with. And where’s the myth? Everyone knows that children are people.

Except that they don’t. Many parents, in my experience, don’t actually treat children as people, and very few non-parents do. How do they treat them? Generally, as pets, projects, plants, or peeves.

Now, you may recall that I don’t even treat my pets like pets. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know how it works: you bring the thing home, you make sure it gets fed, you clean up after it, and, every now and again, you play with it. If it poops on the carpet, you smack its nose. If it jumps up on the guests, you scold it. Basic stuff. To many parents, this is how you should treat your pets. And small humans aren’t really that different from small dogs.

Alternatively, some parents take that cliché about achieving immortality through their children to new heights. They live vicariously through them, construct careful realities for them, attempt to mold them into exactly what they want them to be (or, occasionally, what they wish they themselves were). These are the parents who are constantly telling you how gifted their children are, and how much they will be achieving, and what wonderful schools they’ll be attending. When you hear such picture-perfect stories, you often wonder if there isn’t something seething below the surface. Often there is.

Now the main thing to remember about people who treat their children like pets or projects is that these are not bad parents. They’re still trying to do the best they can for their children. Of course, not all parents are good parents. Sometimes all a parent is prepared to do is feed and water—maybe they’ll talk to the things every now and again because some people claim that makes a difference. And there are, very occasionally, parents who are mainly just annoyed that they have to constantly deal with these needy little things, and that society frowns on putting them into a sack and tossing them into the river, ’cause, honestly, that would be much easier. Happily, that last one is rare.

Thus: pets, projects, plants, and peeves. But, rarely people. Think about it: Do you ignore other people? Lie to them? Pretend you’re listening just to get them to shut up? Demand that they do exactly as you say? Tell them that they may not speak unless spoken to? Limit their freedoms? Discount their opinions? Ignore their dreams and impose your own? Generally, you do not. And at least if you do, you know you’re being rude. But people do these things to children, every day, in vast quantities.

I wonder if in some cases people don’t deal with children because they don’t want to be reminded of their own childhoods. Maybe it was such a crappy time for them that they just don’t want to think about it. Although often I feel like most people treat childhood as some sort of bizarre fraternity hazing: I survived this awfulness, now it’s your turn!

Well, my goal was to take what I didn’t like about my own childhood and never do that to anyone else. Ever. My kids, other people’s kids, doesn’t matter. I don’t treat people in ways I wouldn’t want to be treated, and kids aren’t some sort of special exception to that rule.

Some people formulate this idea as “treat your children like adults.” Well, actually, most often you hear it expressed in the past tense: “my parents always treated me like an adult.” That makes it an interesting tidbit about the past, rather than a frightening precept for the future. Because anyone who has children, or deals with them on a regular basis, knows that you can’t actually treat children like adults: that way lies madness.

Except ... maybe the problem we have with that concept is only semantic. Do you treat all adults the same? Do you have some friends or co-workers who are absolutely brilliant, and others who are just a bit behind the curve? Do you treat those folks the same? Do you know anyone who’s developmentally disabled? Do you know anyone who has serious problems making good moral judgements? Do you know anyone who’s still struggling to learn your language and your culture? Do you treat all these myriad of people the same?

No, of course you don’t. Different people require different approaches: this is something you know instinctively. It’s not that you treat some people “specially”; it’s that everyone is special. Sure, some are “specialer” than others. But you modify your behavior for different people. How you talk to your mother, your drinking buddy, your priest, and your best friend from when you were six, are all going to be very different, regardless of whether they all happen to be “adults.” Whatever that word means.

So treating your children like people doesn’t mean treating them like adults: it means recognizing that they may have special needs, and sometimes they require special handling, but that they still deserve the same respect and recognition that all sentient beings deserve. You must give them moral guidance, but that doesn’t give you the right to beat it into them, either physically or verbally. You are required to keep them safe from physical harm, but that doesn’t mean controlling their every action in order to prevent them making a mistake. And you must teach them—the amount you must teach them is overwhelming, because they come to you knowing literally nothing—but that doesn’t make you superior to them. Your greater knowledge is not the same as having a greater intelligence. And, you know what? even if it were, you still wouldn’t get to treat them like they’re stupid. That’s just disrespectful.

Now, I chose to start my parental myths with the concept of treating your children as your friends. Probably I should have started here; if you can get your brain around being friends with your kids, you probably already got to the point of thinking of them as people. But if that earlier post went flying over your head, maybe this is an easier place to start. Just allow yourself to listen to your children, not just hear them. To think about what they’re saying instead of cursing the interruption to your day. To respond to them not as if they’re a cat who’s just scratched up your sofa, or a stubborn piece of clay which refuses to take the shape you’ve decided on, or a Boston fern with browning leaves that you’ll get around to watering tomorrow, or a frustration that causes you to count to 10 to avoid throwing things. And children are very good at invoking those responses in you, and you will not always be successful in avoiding those responses, and there’s no point being pissed off at yourself if you respond that way every once in a while. But never let that be your default response. Because that’s not how you treat people.

You know what might be the coolest part of treating your kids like people? My twelve-year-old is only about a month away from being twelve-and-a-half, and, as far as he’s concerned, that’s close enough to 13 that he can consider himself a teenager. He sleeps a lot these days, and he eats a lot these days, and he spends a buttload of time in his room with the door shut. But where he’s not a “typical” teenager (as if there could be such a thing) is in the sullen, emotionally withdrawn, acting out stereotype that we’ve come to associate with the teenage years. If anything, he’s actually more loving and easy to get along with than he was two or three years ago.

This morning he says to me, “You know, I think I already went through my rebellious phase.”

I responded: “Yeah, you did. I nearly killed you.” (But I smiled.)

He thought for a second and then said, “Well, I guess we won’t have to worry about that then.” Then he grinned and ran off back to his room. And shut his door.

Now, you can say all you like that different children are different, and that’s true. But I honestly believe that it’s made a huge difference, treating him like a person, letting him make mistakes, letting him have freedom, but at the same time teaching him that actions have consequences, and making him work out for himself how to control his own behavior so that everyone around him responds positively rather than negatively. He’s not a dumb kid (they so rarely are). He figured it out within the first ten years or so. So I honestly think it’s smooth sailing from here on out.

Of course, I could be wrong. Perhaps I’ll receive a rude awakening in a few years. But I can tell that you right now, I feel excited to see what the future brings. And I’ve known many a parent with a preteen on the verge of leaping into the great teenage unknown who was a lot more scared than I feel today.

I’ll take that.

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Another long week ...

There's a little too much going this week for my tastes, so I don't think I'll subject you to any crazy ranting this time around. Count your blessings.

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Inconstant Contact

When it comes to staying in touch with people, I really suck. I have often wondered why this is. When it comes to friends in the here and now, I’m generally quite enthusiastic. Oh, sure, I’m slowing down in my old age: not so many concerts any more, not so many parties (not that I even get invited to as many parties these days, but you know what I mean), and very few games of Asshole. I do miss playing Asshole. Sigh.

Sorry ... where was I? Oh, right: slowing down. A bit, yeah, but I still like to hang out with my friends here in California. I was just at a poker game on Friday night, in fact. It was a lovely way to lose $30. And we do lunches and things of that sort. I like spending time with my friends.

In fact, friends are probably the single most important thing to me. Some people might value “family” over “friends,” but my family are friends of mine, so that’s a bit of a false dichotomy. I’ve certainly no love for possessions, and I’m not much of a believer in solitude. A good book is good, a good joke is great, a good song is sublime, but a good friend is priceless. There are very specific reasons why I put friends at the top of the list, and perhaps one day I shall explore those in this venue, but for now let’s just take it as read.

So, if friends are so important, whyever is it then that when one of them moves away from me, or as has happened relatively recently, I move away from a whole flock of them, I become positively awful about contacting them? Not only do I tend not to initiate contact, I don’t even regularly respond to it when initiated from the other side. Let’s ignore letters—who writes letters any more?—and even phone calls, which, after all, require a commitment of a contiguous block of time. No, let’s jump straight to email. ‘Cause I’m a geek, right? I should love email. And, in fact, I do. I even get pissed off when other people don’t respond to my emails. And, yet, here I am, sucking just as hard as any doctor, lawyer or accountant, as if I were equally incapable of electronic communication.

So I’ve got no excuses. Not even to myself. It’s not like I know why and I just can’t explain it to you. Nope, I have absolutely no clue. There are no good reasons that I can see.

Of course, I’m a procrastinator by nature, so maybe that feeds into it somehow. When I receive an email from someone I know, I often “mark” it somehow (in Thunderbird, turn it red, or in Gmail, put a little star beside it), to remind me that here’s an important email that I really need to respond to. In a day or so, I think, I’ll find the time to sit down and put together a cogent, heartfelt response. Generally speaking, I find these marked emails lying around in my inbox after six months, or a year, or two years even, and by that point I’m just too embarrassed to send a response. (Actually, sometimes I do anyway. I also often wonder what people think when they get a reply to their email from last year. Probably think I’m a looney.) So, procrastination is probably playing a bit part.

Now, it makes sense to me why I don’t respond immediately to emails. After all, I check my email several times a day, and many of my potential correspondents do the same. Let’s stay in touch, sure, but do we really need to be sending four or five emails a day back and forth? No, probably not. Back in the olden times, two letters a month was probably considered a rapid-fire conversation. Of course, they were hefty letters, but, as I’m sure anyone who has continued to read this blog despite repeated warnings to the contrary has long ago sorted out, I don’t have a problem producing a significant word count. No, a fairly lengthy email once a week—even twice a week—seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable rate of speed for electronic communication between absent friends.

So all I really need to do is set aside some time over the weekend, seemingly, to produce one or more of these emails. Realistically, if I composed one email—one single email!—every Saturday, I could easily keep pace with all the folks who email me to see what I’ve been up to lately, and still have time left over to reach and touch a few people on my own initiative. But I don’t do that. And I really, seriously, cannot work out why that is.

I can come up with a few reasons why it is not. The first and foremost one being that it’s not because I don’t care. Because I do, quite deeply. Many of these people are folks for whom I would gladly sacrifice any amount of time, money, or comfort. So if you send me an email asking me to leave work immediately and wire you a thousand bucks because of some family emergency, that’s likely to get you a response. But for some reason if all you’re looking for is a reply to how I’ve been recently, you can expect me to ignore you for months at a time, if I ever get back to you at all? What kind of sense does that make?

I can also say that it really isn’t a lack of time. Oh, I’m busy, no doubt. But so’s everyone. I’m not so important that I can realistically claim to be busier than you are. And, honestly, I spend a fair amount of time laying on the couch doing jack all. Now, I’m not the sort of type-A personality to convince myself that any second not spent being 100% productive is a wasted chunk of life that I can never get back. I firmly believe that everyone needs to take some time and just chill out and do much of nothing. I’m just saying that I probably accumulate more such time than I can strictly claim as requisite for proper mental health. Certainly enough that I would feel guilty trying to toss off the excuse that I couldn’t return your email due to all the extremely important reruns of Good Eats that I’ve been watching. (Even though I occasionally try.)

So, other than my procrastination theory (which is pretty damned weak), I don’t have much in the way of explanation as to why I’m so bad at staying in contact with old friends. And it bothers me. Partly it’s a bit of guilt for not responding to emails, but, honestly, guilt’s not my thing. I don’t really regret too many things in life, and, when I do, it rarely lasts very long. So the bigger part of the concern is that I am perceived as apathetic. I don’t much care what other people think of me, for the most part, but then my friends aren’t exactly “other people.” As Seuss#Misattributed">some famous fellow once said, “those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind”: well, my friends are certainly the ones who matter, and I _hope they don’t mind, but I suspect their patience is not infinite.

I often tell myself I’m going to do better about this. Of course, I often tell myself I’m going to do better about a lot of things. So far, limited success. Now, another thing I firmly believe is that no one is perfect, and that it logically follows that we cannot expect ourselves to be perfect, and that therefore we must admit that we have faults, and we must occasionally just accept our faults, and give ourselves permission to be imperfect, rather than trying to correct them all. Which is not to say that we should never try to fix our defects, only that we have to pick the worst of the lot to concentrate on, and let the others ride. So far I suppose I’ve been letting this one ride. But I’m not sure that’s too good an idea any more.

I hope that any old friends of mine who happen to stumble across this meandering self-exploration will understand (at least vaguely) where I’m coming from, and perhaps be comforted that I wasn’t ignoring them on purpose. I suspect, though, that many of them have already worked this out about me, and they probably just shake their heads (with any luck, fondly) and put it up alongside my tendency to be too loud, or my fondness for the word “fuck” at often inappropriate times, or my inclination towards ranting about mostly trivial matters. At least I hope they do. And, if any of you are reading this, I would just like to say:

I love you guys. Seriously.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Chapter 10 (concluded)

The Ship, and her Captain

Since the light never changed, it was impossible to tell how long it took them to reach the place where the trees met the water. The dragonflies continued to divebomb them, and the mosquitoes continued to try to drain them of their blood. More birds flew overhead, and they saw wading birds as well, hunting in the scattered pools that were so covered in floating vegetation that they were practically indistinguishable from the marshy land. Some of the birds were white, a couple were a bright red, and one was an electric shade of violet. None of them seemed inclined to abandon their work for the trivial circumstance of passing primates.

Traveling became easier as Johnny learned how to recognize the transitions from solid ground to mud or outright shallow water. The wading birds were a giveaway, of course, but not every pool had those. There were large, black insects that skated along the surface of the water in nearly every pool, but those were hard to spot until you were practically on top of them. The various rushes and reeds were the best indicators. Gradually Johnny learned to lead them in a twisty, staggering path that kept them mostly dry. As they drew closer to the trees, they also began to hear evidence of life from the close-set woody jumble: cries that might have been monkeys or jungle birds, larger things crashing through the thick bushes, and a strange noise that Johnny could only describe to himself as reminiscent of the noise Tigger made in the Winnie the Pooh movies of his childhood, if Tigger had been less of a cuddly stuffed animal and more of a vicious carnivore.

As they walked, Johnny snacked a bit on Sandra’s food from his vest, but mainly he was too excited to care much about eating. This was utterly insane, sure, but also galvanizing in a weird way. At this point, he was anxious to see what would happen next.

When they finally reached the tip of the treeline, it was obvious this was a much bigger body of water than the small pools they’d encountered thus far. There was still no sign of the water itself, buried under layers of floating plants, but the wading birds were here in flocks, and Johnny could make out bright blue water snakes, no bigger around than his finger but as long as his forearm. The trees at the water’s edge were mangroves with thick, intertwined trunks that transitioned seamlessly to thick, intertwined roots, and shadowy forms lurked in the cages they formed, both above and below the waterline. The bushes and shrubs and Larissa-sized ferns were thicker here too. Across the water they could see more trees and bushes that might indicate islands, or a far shore, or anything in between.

The mangroves effectively blocked any hope of turning left. To the right, it was mostly bushes and ferns, with some smaller, scrubby trees that might have been some form of willow, and one hugely tall specimen some way off that was obviously a palm tree. Johnny stared at the palm for a moment, then looked back at Larissa. He wanted to ask if palm trees grew in swamps, but perhaps he ought not point out any more anomalies today.

“Let’s go this way,” he said, indicating the general direction of the solitary tree. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a machete in your jacket somewhere?” He felt sure he was still smiling, and thought it was probably inappropriate, but there was no use fighting it.

Larissa didn’t answer, but then he didn’t really expect her to.

They pushed through the thick vegetation as best they could, though it got thicker as they went along. By the time they reached the copse of stunted trees that surrounded the signpost palm, they could no longer see their feet, and there was only blind optimism between their lower extremeties and any poisonous reptiles or arachnids that might inhabit the area.

When they emerged from the screen of trees, the first thing they saw was the ship. Technically, he supposed it was an airboat, although it didn’t look like any airboat he’d ever seen. Of course, his experience of airboats was primarily limited to miscellanous movies set in the Louisiana bayou and reruns of “Gentle Ben,” but he was pretty sure airboats weren’t generally that big. Or made of wood. Or had figureheads.

It looked mostly like a smallish 17th century sailing vessel—perhaps 20 to 30 feet long—but, instead of sails, it had the flat bottom and huge rearward-facing fan that would make it swampworthy. The fanblades were made of a metal that looked like brass, but the cage that held it in place was some sort of bamboo, and Johnny couldn’t see any engine at all. The ship had a structure on it that perhaps housed two or three rooms, and there was a cabin on top of that, as well as what Johnny knew from his father’s brief yachting stint was called a flying deck. The whole thing looked impossibly heavy, even for that monster of a fan, but it perched on the surface of the water like a bathtub toy. At first Johnny could see no signs of life, but then he spotted a man with his back towards them, on the shore. He appeared to be rearranging some crates.

Johnny and Larissa stepped cautiously toward this surreal scene. Johnny wondered if it would be safe to approach this stranger, but he couldn’t see they had much choice in the matter. Perhaps this fellow would know where they were, what the purpose of this swamp was, what had drawn him here. An answer to any one of these questions would be worth the risk. They drew closer, the sound of their approach masked by the shuffling of the boxes, and finally Johnny, not wishing to startle the man, said “Excuse me?”

The young man turned towards them then, flinging his dark blonde ponytail over his frilly white blouse, and suddenly Johnny wasn’t so sure it was a “he” at all. It may have been a young man, but then again it might have been a young woman. Johnny was reminded of those anime-style video game characters where you were never sure what gender it was supposed to be. Plus they always had non-gender-specific names that were no help at all.

“Hi,” he or she said brightly. “I’m Roger.”

And yet, thought Johnny, that makes me feel more than ever that she’s a woman.

Larissa stepped up and eyed Roger critically. “Historical pirates didn’t wear shirts with ruffs on them, being for the most part too poor to afford such things, in addition to them being completely impractical at sea. As would be those boots; seawater would collect in the tops, and the soles would slip on the decks of the ships.” She gazed up with wide eyes. “And Roger is an unusual name for a woman.”

Roger threw her head back and laughed, and it was that more than anything that told Johnny that Larissa was right about her gender. It was a rich, throaty laugh: definitely the laugh of a woman. “Well, my little lassie, whoever said I was an ’istorical pirate? I’ve never seen the sea in me life. And as for me name, how do ye know all the women of me clan aren’t named such?” She winked, theoretically at Larissa, to whom she was talking, but Johnny couldn’t help but feel the wink was only for him. “But I won’t pull your leg. Me da’ always wanted a boy, he did, so Roger I am.” Of course, that didn’t explain why she looked as if she’d stepped out of a pirate movie, but by this point Johnny had seen so much weird shit that this was nothing. In fact, compared to stumbling upon a swamp in the sewers underneath DC, finding a woman who looked as if she’d stepped out of Cutthroat Island was practically normal.

Suddenly there was a red and blue flash streaking through the ferny undergrowth, and something shot up Roger’s leg, ran up her back, and perched on her shoulder. It was feathered and beaked, with the colors that Johnny associated with a macaw, but with the arms, long-fingered hands, and prehensile tail of a small monkey. The eyes were not bird eyes, definitely, but the way it cocked its head and clicked its beak was certainly ... well, parroty.

Johnny looked over at Larissa, fascinated to get her reaction on this new development. She had her head cocked to one side as well ... the opposite way as the creature on Roger’s shoulder, Johnny noticed. They stared at each other, patrons at a zoo sizing up unfamiliar creatures.

Suddenly the creature screeched: it was mostly a monkey noise, with just a hint of squawk. To Johnny’s surprise, Larissa hissed like a scalded cat. Roger still wore an inscrutable smile. “Now, Bones,” she said, apparently speaking to the creature on her shoulder, “these are friends.”

Johnny looked at her in surprise. “Are we?”

Roger flashed pearly white teeth at him. “Well of course ye are! Ye’re here to help.”

Johnny’s eyebrows drew together. “Uhh ... okay. If you say so.” He shrugged and turned to Larissa, but she was now studiously ignoring the impossible feathered primate and seemed to be waiting for further developments.

Johnny looked back at “Bones.” “So ... what is that thing?” He supposed this sounded vaguely impolite, but at this point, he felt beyond caring about social niceties.

Roger raised a leather-gloved hand. “This? This is Bones.”

“Yeah, I ... I got that. What is it?”

“It’s me companion. Say hello to the nice people, Bones.”

The parrot-monkey turned its attention to Johnny now, and squawked “Mangy cur!”

Roger laughed her throaty laugh again. “Never mind him,” she said to Johnny. “That’s just his way of saying ‘ahoy!’.”

“Ummm ... right. Well, good to know. Say, do you have any clue what the hell we’re doing here?”

Roger studied him closely for a moment. “Ye’re here to help me find it, unless I miss me guess.”

Johnny blinked. “Sure,” he said, throwing up his hands and giving up on having things make sense, not for the first time this week. “Sure, why not?” He felt the unwarranted grin return to his face.

>>next>>

Sunday, January 9, 2011

Chapter 10 (begun)

In the Swamp

When he woke up, Johnny felt he ought to feel disoriented, but he didn’t. In fact, it was practically disorienting how utterly oriented he felt, despite the fact that he was waking up in what might be the strangest place he’d ever woken.

Forget the fact that he’d arrived by means of an impossible black door in the side of a sewer pipe he’d phased into while fleeing from a mythological creature and a lycanthrope. He was, at present, in the middle of a swamp. There was just no other way to describe it. The ground just here wasn’t too mushy, but his boots bore the muddy battle scars of what they’d had to trudge through to get here. Larissa, in her much thinner black and white sneakers, had been reduced to riding on his back a couple of times. Now they were surrounded by grass, and bushes, and reeds and bulrushes and cattails and what Larissa identified as papyrus. The surface of all the water they’d seen so far was green with duckweed and water lillies. There were lots of ferns. And moss ... everywhere moss. There were no trees nearby, but he could see some in the distance, and he knew they were willows and cypresses and mangroves. The only animals they’d seen so far were dragonflies—huge blue and green dragonflies that were beautiful but also frightening in the way they divebombed you—and mosquitoes. The mosquitoes were ferocious. Johnny had thought he was used to mosquitoes by this point—after all, much of the greater metropolitan area where he’d spent his entire life had originally been wetlands of some sort or other—but these were a whole different sort. In fact, the bugs were the only reason they’d built the fire, whose guttering remains were still glowing closeby; it certainly hadn’t been for the heat. Heat they had plenty of, and humidity as well.

So he was waking up in a swamp that somehow existed underneath the nation’s capital, attached to its sewer system, and it was hot as July there despite it being September, and it was populated with plants that did not, as far as he knew, geographically co-exist in what he still persisted in thinking of as the real world. But none of this was the strangest part. The strangest part was the light. It was exactly the quality of fading daylight, when the sun is perhaps halfway down below the horizon. Perhaps there was a mildly greenish cast to it, but that could have just been from the overwhelming quantity of green vegetation. No, the problem with the light wasn’t its quantity or its character. The problem was that it had been this light when they had arrived, it had been this light when they had tired of walking and built their fire, it had been this light when they had drifted off to sleep, and it was still this light now that Johnny was awake again. And he could tell himself all he liked that the sun must just be out of sight behind those trees off in the distance, but somehow he knew the truth: there was no sun. Not here. Light, yes, but no sun.

So all in all Johnny should have been more than disoriented. He should have been downright freaked out. But he wasn’t. He was, in fact, smiling. His pants were dry, for the most part, although at this point all his clothes were sticky with sweat. He knew there was food to be had—quite good food at that—and fire to be made if it was necessary. And he knew beyond doubt, although he couldn’t say how, that if anyone else were to lay their hand on that door, it wouldn’t open. And that’s assuming that anyone else could even see the door, which Johnny wasn’t sure they could. So, lost in an impossible swamp they might be, but at least they were safe from whatever had been chasing them.

And, wasn’t this some sort of adventure? Wasn’t this, if nothing else, something ... different?

There was a weird bird-like cry, and a large bat shape soared overhead.

Johnny was still staring at the fading shadowy form when he heard Larissa speak. “Bats can’t soar.” He looked back down at her; she was now sitting up, looking in the same direction as he.

“Looked like a bat,” he said, still smiling for no discernable reason.

“Probably a frigatebird. Their silhouettes can look very batlike.”

It occurred to Johnny that he couldn’t remember Larissa ever using the word “probably.”

“So!” he said cheerfully. “What do you think we should do now?”

Larissa stared at him.

“Yeah, good point: this was my idea, wasn’t it?” He turned around and looked. The insects were getting braver as the fire sputtered out. The mosquitoes, of course, had never entirely given up, but they were starting to come back in force, and a yellow and red dragonfly longer than his hand buzzed his head. “Interesting colors on the dragonflies here, eh?” He waited for her to comment that the common Indonesian dragonfly or somesuch had coloring like that, but she said nothing. “And these damned mosquitoes ...” He punctuated this by slapping one on his forearm. To his surprise (and mild disquiet), the mosquito picked itself up and shook out its crushed wings. It was colored almost exactly like a tiger, with the orange and black motif extending down its arched legs. As Johnny stared, it took off and made a beeline for the trees.

He half-chuckled, half-gulped. “Well, that one won’t be bothering us again, eh?”

Larissa said nothing.

“Um ... yeah. So, hey, let’s just walk and see where we get to, eh?”

Larissa looked around for a moment. “Which way?” she asked.

Johnny considered. The door was long out of sight, of course, but he knew he could find it again if they needed to. With no sun and no stars, there was no hope of figuring out which direction was north. If “north” was even a concept that applied here. There were the distant trees on one side, and in the other directions just bushes and more plants, and some intermittent mist. He tried feeling with his strange new sense, but, other than the rough direction where the door lay, it told him nothing. He listened: there were chirpings and chitterings, but almost all were far away, perhaps past the treeline. Most sounded like birds, or maybe rodents. He sniffed: generally it was loamy and damp and reminiscent of a compost, but in a pleasant way. There was something else though ... was it water? He thought it might be. Toward the place where the treeline curved around to get in front of them and then just stopped.

“That way,” he said, pointing. He turned back around. “You want to eat first?”

She shook her head.

“Nah, me neither. Let’s just snack on the way.” He was still grinning slightly.

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Sunday, January 2, 2011

Chapter 9

Into the Sewers

In books and movies, people are constantly going down into sewers. In fact, to judge from popular entertainment, one might think that there were more people living under the streets than on them. Johnny had learned that this was a silly concept. There were many reasons for this. Sewers are hard to get into, first of all: they’re dangerous, so cities make them difficult to enter. Secondly, they’re dangerous, and also disgusting, so there’s no good reason why anyone would want to get into them. Finally, they’re redundant. If you have a burning desire to be underground in the city, there are basements, and there are culverts, and there are subway maintenance tunnels (that particular cinematic image has more truth to it), all of which are much nicer places to hang out than a sewer. Assuming you want to be underground at all, that is, and the only season that you might want that is winter, when being underground might be warmer. Maybe.

So, all in all, nobody lived in the sewers, or traveled through them, or even went there for a quick visit. In all his years on the streets, Johnny had never once been in a sewer, nor ever known anyone who had. And yet, here he was.

The water was lower here, only up to their mid-shins, and the area of Johnny’s body between the previous waterline and the new one was starting to get very cold. The smell wasn’t pleasant, but it wasn’t really noxious yet: Johnny figured that this was mostly just runoff, although it hadn’t rained in almost two weeks. But Johnny tried not to think too hard about that.

The noises behind them were getting fainter, although no less frenzied. They were walking up a slight uphill grade against a mild current, and trudging through a foot or so of water made that all the more difficult, so they weren’t moving very fast. Johnny was half-supporting Larissa, and trying to place his feet very carefully—he didn’t relish the thought of falling down in this muck—so he wasn’t paying attention to how fast the light from the end of the pipe was fading until he abruptly realized he couldn’t see anything. Larissa straightened up a bit and Johnny heard a small click. The light from the trusty Zippo was small, but welcome. Johnny stopped walking and looked around them.

The surface of the water was dark, and broken occasionally by bits of wood and stray pieces of trash. The pipe itself was huge—Johnny might be able to touch the top of it if he were to stand on tiptoe, but then again maybe not—and perfectly round. Its concrete sides were covered in gunk that Johnny fervently hoped was vegetable matter. The primary sound he could hear was the rushing of the water, on its way down to The Creek. Tuning out the animal screams that still floated up from the channel below, he thought he could make out some smaller skittering noises closer by. For a moment this put him on the edge of panic, but Larissa’s calm voice rang out in the stillness.

“Just rats. They won’t bother us if we don’t bother them. Especially if we keep the lighter lit.”

Johnny looked doubtful. “We can’t run the lighter forever though! We’ll run out of fluid ...”

Larissa gave him her calm, studying look again, and Johnny suddenly realized that the panic he had been on the verge of was less about rats and more just a delayed reaction, but now suddenly everything seemed okay again. “I have extra,” she said. Johnny took a deep breath and tried to still his shaking muscles.

Larissa’s look turned questioning, and Johnny was suddenly sure she was going to ask him how they had gotten through the grate. Instead, she said: “Why did you bring us in here?”

Already trying to come up with an answer to the question he had thought she was going to ask, Johnny was caught unprepared. “I, um ... it was ... we couldn’t just flounder down The Creek, right?” Larissa continued to look at him. Johnny thought back to the confusion at the metal grating. “I think I ... felt something ...”

And now, freed from having to think about keeping Larissa safe or not slipping in the pipe-muck, he found that he could feel it again. It was a curious sensation, not a tugging like with the mist, but a heat. Which wasn’t really right either, but he could feel some sort of brightness up ahead, and his mind automatically translated that to the sensation of feeling the heat coming off a powerful light such as a spotlight. But it wasn’t actually hot on his skin, and it wasn’t even his skin that was feeling it. It was just a knowledge that up ahead, on the right-hand side, there was a beacon of sorts. It didn’t draw him in the way the mist had, but it had piqued his curiosity and drawn him into the pipe. It didn’t feel like a refuge per se, but then it didn’t need to feel very safe to feel safer than what they were leaving behind.

He realized he was looking up ahead, towards where he knew the thing was, and Larissa was following his gaze. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go find it then.”

section break

Twenty mintues later they were sweating and exhausted, and dirty from bits of goop falling on them. The pipe had mostly leveled off, but there was still the current and the depth to fight against. Johnny’s nerves were on edge from the occasional squeaking and splashing of the invisible rats, although this didn’t seem to bother Larissa. There was absolutely no light at this point other than the small, flickering circle provided by the Zippo, which had already had to be refilled once (and that was a harrowing experience, since obviously you can’t keep a lighter lit while you’re refilling it, and sewers give a whole new meaning to the word “dark”). Johnny imagined that the lighter must be getting hot by this point, but Larissa didn’t seem concerned. All in all, the situation ought to be discouraging, but it wasn’t. Johnny knew that the thing, whatever it was, was up there, and by now he knew it was much closer. Larissa just seemed to believe he knew what he was doing. Johnny hoped he did.

And then, out of nowhere, the door. Right where Johnny knew it would be, even though he hadn’t known it was a door. How could he have? There are no doors in the sides of sewer pipes. Besides the completely ridiculous aspect of having a door that opens onto a sewer, there were physical impossibilities to deal with. The pipe was round, which meant the “wall” of the pipe was curved. And the door was not. It was utterly flat, made of a black substance that seemed to be wood, with white markings on it that might have been some sort of faded symbol or might have been random scratches made by giant claws. And it was circular, and its ragged edges glowed with a faint greenish cast, obscuring the impossible join of vertical to concave.

Johnny stood, staring at it. Larissa held the lighter aloft and stared as well.

After a moment, Johnny shrugged. “I suppose this isn’t any weirder than anything else that’s happened lately,” he finally said with a sigh. “Shall we go in?”

Larissa was silent for a long moment. “Is it better in there?” she asked finally.

Johnny wondered what her definition of “better” might encompass at this point. “Well, if you mean is it safer, then I think so. There won’t be any rats, and we won’t run into any actual sewage, and whatever those things were back there with the claws and the teeth won’t be able to get in. If you mean, is it saner, then I suspect absolutely not.”

Larissa considered this. After a time, she nodded. Johnny put his hand on the door.

There was no doorknob, no knocker, no bell pull ... no obvious way that Johnny could see to either open the door or request it be opened by something on the other side. But he knew how to go through it. He just laid his hand flat on the door, felt the skin of his palm adhere to the strange wood, which felt both slick and tacky at the same time, then pulled. The door opened smoothly, swinging outward as if it had hinges on the leftmost edge of its circular form, which it definitely did not. The inside wasn’t dark, but it was so full of that dim green glow that had been leaking out around the edges that it might as well have been. Larissa poked at the strange light with the Zippo, but it just made the flame, and even the whole lighter, turn green. She shrugged and turned to Johnny.

“After me, eh?” he said. Weirdly, he felt a grin on his face. There was something about this new, otherworldly sense that just made him unreasonably happy. “No worries,” he said, which had been a favorite expression of Amiira’s, but which Johnny hadn’t said in years. Just now, though, it felt right. He plunged through the green glow that filled the circular doorway and disappeared.

After a moment, Larissa followed.

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