Bagombo Snuff Box (2 page)

Ray missed the boat about how many screens would be required
for a successful people-transplant. One lousy little Sony can do the job, night
and day. All it takes besides that is actors and actresses, telling the news,
selling stuff, in soap operas or whatever, who treat whoever is watching, even
if nobody is watching, like family.

“Hell is other people,” said Jean-Paul Sartre. “Hell is
other real people,” is what he should have said.

You can’t fight progress. The best you can do is ignore it,
until it finally takes your livelihood and self-respect away. General Electric
itself was made to feel like a buggy whip factory for a time, as Bell Labs and
others cornered patents on transistors and their uses, while GE was still
shunting electrons this way and that with vacuum tubes.

Too big to fail, though, as I was not, GE recovered
sufficiently to lay off thousands and poison the Hudson River with PCBs.

By 1953, Jane and I had three kids. So I taught English in a
boarding school there on the Cape. Then I wrote ads for an industrial agency in
Boston. I wrote a couple of paperback originals, The Sirens of Titan and Mother
Night. They were never reviewed. I got for each of them what I used to get for
a short story.

I tried to sell some of the first Saab automobiles to come
into this country. The doors opened into the wind. There was a roller-blind
behind the front grille, which you could operate with a chain under the
dashboard. That was to keep your engine warm in the wintertime. You had to mix
oil with your gasoline every time you filled the tank of those early Saabs. If you
ever forgot to do that, the engine would revert to the ore state. One engine I
chipped away from a Saab chassis with a cold chisel and a sledge looked like a
meteor!

If you left a Saab parked for more than a day, the oil
settled like maple syrup to the bottom of the gas tank. When you started it up,
the exhaust would black out a whole neighborhood. One time I blacked out Woods
Hole that way. I was coughing like everybody else, I couldn’t imagine where all
that smoke had come from.

Then I took to teaching creative writing, first at Iowa,
then at Harvard, and then at City College in New York. Joseph Heller, author of
Catch-22
, was teaching at City College also. He said to me that if it
hadn’t been for the war, he would have been in the dry-cleaning business. I
said to him that if it hadn’t been for the war, I would have been garden editor
of
The Indianapolis Star
.

Now lend me your ears. Here is Creative Writing 101:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or
she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root
for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only
a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character
or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your
leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader
may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and
make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon
as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete
understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the
story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

The greatest American short story writer of my generation
was Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules
but the first. Great writers tend to do that.

Ms. O’Connor may or may not have broken my seventh rule, “Write
to please just one person.” There is no way for us to find out for sure,
unless, of course, there is a Heaven after all, and she’s there, and the rest
of us are going there, and we can ask her.

I’m almost sure she didn’t break rule seven. The late
American psychiatrist Dr. Edmund Bergler, who claimed to have treated more
professional writers than any other shrink, said in his book The Writer and
Psychoanalysis that most writers in his experience wrote to please one person
they knew well, even if they didn’t realize they were doing that. It wasn’t a
trick of the fiction trade. It was simply a natural human thing to do, whether
or not it could make a story better.

Dr. Bergler said it commonly required psychoanalysis before
his patients could know for whom they had been writing. But as soon as I finished
his book, and then thought for only a couple of minutes, I knew it was my
sister Allie I had been writing for. She is the person the stories in this book
were written for. Anything I knew Allie wouldn’t like I crossed out. Everything
I knew she would get a kick out of I left in.

Allie is up in Heaven now, with my first wife Jane and Sam
Lawrence and Flannery O’Connor and Dr. Bergler, but I still write to please
her. Allie was funny in real life. That gives me permission to be funny, too.
Allie and I were very close.

In my opinion, a story written for one person pleases a
reader, dear reader, because it makes him or her a part of the action. It makes
the reader feel, even though he or she doesn’t know it, as though he or she is
eavesdropping on a fascinating conversation between two people at the next
table, say, in a restaurant.

That’s my educated guess.

Here is another: A reader likes a story written for just one
person because the reader can sense, again without knowing it, that the story
has boundaries like a playing field. The story can’t go simply anywhere. This,
I feel, invites readers to come off the sidelines, to get into the game with
the author. Where is the story going next? Where should it go? No fair! Hopeless
situation! Touchdown!

Remember my rule number eight? “Give your readers as much
information as possible as soon as possible”? That’s so they can play along.
Where, outside the Groves of Academe, does anybody like a story where so much
information is withheld or arcane that there is no way for readers to play
along?

The boundaries to the playing fields of my short stories,
and my novels, too, were once the boundaries of the soul of my only sister. She
lives on that way.

Amen.

At noon, Wednesday, July 26th, windowpanes in the small
mountain towns of Sevier County, Tennessee, were rattled by the shock and faint
thunder of a distant explosion rolling down the northwest slopes of the Great
Smokies. The explosion came from the general direction of the closely guarded
Air Force experimental station in the forest ten miles northwest of Elkmont.

Said the Air Force Office of Public Information, “No comment.”
That evening, amateur astronomers in Omaha, Nebraska, and Glen-wood, Iowa,
reported independently that a speck had crossed the face of the full moon at
9:57 p.m. There was a flurry of excitement on the news wires. Astronomers at
the major North American observatories denied that they had seen it.

They lied.

In Boston, on the morning of Thursday, July 27th, an
enterprising newsman sought out Dr. Bernard Groszinger, youthful rocket
consultant for the Air Force. “Is it possible that what crossed the moon was a
spaceship?” the newsman asked.

Dr. Groszinger laughed at the question. “My own opinion is
that we’re beginning another cycle of flying-saucer scares,” he said. “This
time everyone’s seeing spaceships between us and the moon. You can tell your
readers this, my friend: No rocket ship will leave the earth for at least another
twenty years.”

He lied.

He knew a great deal more than he was saying, but somewhat
less than he himself thought. He did not believe in ghosts, for instance—and
had yet to learn of the Thanasphere.

Dr. Groszinger rested his long legs on his cluttered
desktop, and watched his secretary conduct the disappointed newsman through the
locked door, past the armed guards. He lit a cigarette and tried to relax before
going back into the stale air and tension of the radio room. IS YOUR SAFE
LOCKED? asked a sign on the wall, tacked there by a diligent security officer.
The sign annoyed him. Security officers, security regulations only served to
slow his work, to make him think about things he had no time to think about.

The secret papers in the safe weren’t secrets. They said
what had been known for centuries: Given fundamental physics, it follows that a
projectile fired into space in direction x, at y miles per hour, will travel
in the arc z. Dr. Groszinger modified the equation: Given fundamental physics
and one billion dollars.

Impending war had offered him the opportunity to try the experiment.
The threat of war was an incident, the military men about him an irritating
condition of work—the experiment was the heart of the matter.

There were no unknowns, he reflected, finding contentment in
the dependability of the physical world. Young Dr. Groszinger smiled, thinking
of Christopher Columbus and his crew, who hadn’t known what lay ahead of them,
who had been scared stiff by sea monsters that didn’t exist. Maybe the average
person of today felt the same way about space. The Age of Superstition still
had a few years to run.

But the man in the spaceship two thousand miles from earth
had no unknowns to fear. The sullen Major Allen Rice would have nothing surprising
to report in his radio messages. He could only confirm what reason had already
revealed about outer space.

The major American observatories, working closely with the
project, reported that the ship was now moving around the earth in the
predicted orbit at the predicted velocity. Soon, anytime now, the first message
in history from outer space would be received in the radio room. The broadcast
could be on an ultra-high-frequency band where no one had ever sent or received
messages before.

The first message was overdue, but nothing had gone wrong—nothing
could go wrong, Dr. Groszinger assured himself again. Machines, not men, were
guiding the flight. The man was a mere observer, piloted to his lonely vantage
point by infallible electronic brains, swifter than his own. He had controls in
his ship, but only for gliding down through the atmosphere, when and if they
brought him back from space. He was equipped to stay for several years.

Even the man was as much like a machine as possible, Dr.
Groszinger thought with satisfaction. He was quick, strong, unemotional. Psychiatrists
had picked Major Rice from a hundred volunteers, and predicted that he would
function as perfectly as the rocket motors, the metal hull, and the electronic
controls. His specifications: Husky, twenty-nine years of age, fifty-five
missions over Europe during the Second World War without a sign of fatigue, a
childless widower, melancholy and solitary, a career soldier, a demon for
work.

The Major’s mission? Simple: To report weather conditions
over enemy territory, and to observe the accuracy of guided atomic missiles in
the event of war.

Major Rice was fixed in the solar system, two thousand miles
above the earth now—close by, really—the distance from New York to Salt Lake
City, not far enough away to see much of the polar icecaps, even. With a telescope,
Rice could pick out small towns and the wakes of ships without green ball, to
see night creeping around it, and clouds and storms growing and swirling over
its face.

Dr. Groszinger tamped out his cigarette, absently lit
another almost at once, and strode down the corridor to the small laboratory
where the radio equipment had been set up.

Lieutenant General Franklin Dane, head of Project Cyclops,
sat next to the radio operator, his uniform rumpled, his collar open. The
General stared expectantly at the loudspeaker before him. The floor was
littered with sandwich wrappings and cigarette butts. Coffee-filled paper cups
stood before the General and the radio operator, and beside the canvas chair
where Groszinger had spent the night waiting.

General Dane nodded to Groszinger and motioned with his hand
for silence.

“Able Baker Fox, this is Dog Easy Charley. Able Baker Fox,
this is Dog Easy Charley . . .” droned the radio operator wearily, using the
code names. “Can you hear me. Able Baker Fox? Can you—”

The loudspeaker crackled, then, tuned to its peak volume,
boomed: “This is Able Baker Fox. Come in, Dog Easy Charley. Over.”

General Dane jumped to his feet and embraced Groszinger.
They laughed idiotically and pounded each other on the back. The General
snatched the microphone from the radio operator. “You made it. Able Baker Fox!
Right on course! What’s it like, boy? What’s it feel like? Over.” Groszinger,
his arm draped around the General’s shoulders, leaned forward eagerly, his ear
a few inches from the speaker. The radio operator turned the volume down, so
that they could hear something of the quality of Major Rice’s voice.

The voice came through again, soft, hesitant. The tone disturbed
Groszinger—he had wanted it to be crisp, sharp, efficient.

“This side of the earth’s dark, very dark just now. And I
feel like I’m falling—the way you said I would. Over.”

“Is anything the matter?” asked the General anxiously. “You
sound as though something—”

The Major cut in before he could finish: “There! Did you hear
that?”

“Able Baker Fox, we can’t hear anything,” said the General,
looking perplexed at Groszinger. “What is it—some kind of noise in your
receiver? Over”

“A child,” said the Major. “I hear a child crying. Don’t you
hear it? And now—listen!—now an old man is trying to comfort it.” His voice
seemed farther away, as though he were no longer speaking directly into his
microphone.

“That’s impossible, ridiculous!” said Groszinger. “Check
your set, Able Baker Fox, check your set. Over.”