In the Deadlands (3 page)

There was an actual physical joy in the
clickety-clickety-clack
of the keys on that anvil-heavy machine, feeling the words occur in real time. Sometimes I typed for the sheer joy of typing, not knowing where the words were leading, finding out where I had arrived only when the journey ended. It was like conducting a personal orchestra. Sometimes, caught up in the
magic of the moment—with Beethoven or the Beatles filling the room—I felt as if I was playing a joyous blues-riff on an infinite piano. (Additional purple prose removed here.)

So if a page needed correction, retyping wasn't a chore.

I'd retype a whole page just to fix one broken sentence. I'd go back and retype ten pages if necessary, repairing an awkward paragraph and then fixing everything that followed so I would have only clean pages—and every time I retyped, I
rewrote
. I would see what was missing and I'd add it. I'd see what was unnecessary and I'd cut it. I'd see what was clumsy and I'd change it. I'd see where thoughts were out of order and move whole paragraphs, whole sections. And sometimes I'd even see what was effective—and I'd leave it alone.

That little bit of OCD compelled me to learn, forced me to reexamine every sentence more than once, pushed me toward a better understanding of the limits of language as well as its power to evoke.

Today, I use a computer. (I know a few authors who don't.) But all these years later, I still miss the
clickety-clackety-clatter
of the Selectric. It made typing a physically satisfying experience, but I don't miss having to retype multiple pages to achieve a handsome-looking manuscript. The computer easily generates better pages than I could ever do by hand.

But the ease with which the computer allows a person to pour words onto the screen is also a trap. A quick stroll through the comment section on any web page reveals how little thought exists between the final exclamation point and the SEND button.

Good writing rarely occurs in the first draft—great books aren't written; they're
rewritten
. That the words look good on the page doesn't guarantee they're worth reading. The Selectric taught me that. Removing the need to retype a sloppy page can also deny the writer the
mandate, the opportunity, the possibility of learning from the second look, the third, and the fourth as well.

Learning to pay attention to the words, the sentences, the paragraphs—that personal self-awareness of the linguistic decision—that, I think, is the skill that good writers ultimately achieve and consistently demonstrate. It is what the skilled writer aspires to accomplish every time he sits down at the keyboard.

It is also a possibility that the computer can encourage. A good word processing program lets you skip easily through your text, lets you find occurrences of words and phrases, lets you revisit your work as many times as necessary. It's no longer a stack of finished pages—regardless of the length, the totality remains a work in progress
until
you hit the PRINT button. (In fact, you may never hit the PRINT button at all. A lot of text never hits paper until several editors have gone over it and
the publisher
hits the PRINT button.)

See, here's the thing. Writing can't be taught—it can only be learned. And it can only be learned by paying attention to what you write—by watching not only the words on the page, but the person who's typing them, looking to see where all those strange thoughts and uncomfortable experiences are coming from, and ultimately learning how to tap into that far-deeper source that fuels the passion.

The learning process isn't linear—it's a series of plateaus, a punctuated equilibrium of personal evolution. A writer's chronological history isn't a journey as much as it's a vertical cross section of his or her life. Like the rings of a tree, it's a measure of growth and pause, fertility and patience.

This book is one of the rings of my life.

Looking back from this perspective, it's clear that most of these stories are about relationships—mostly about how they break down. And that too is an accurate reflection of the time and the author.

Later on, however—

But that's a different collection.

—
David Gerrold

With a Finger in My I

For the record, I was not doing drugs before, during, or after I wrote this story.

It started as a dream—I dreamt I was looking in a mirror. I saw no pupil in my left eye. Or was it my right? Hard to tell. The mirror reversed everything.

When I woke up, the dream was still with me, so I sat down at my desk and started typing.

It wasn't a story. It wasn't even half a story. It had no meaning at all. It was just a stream of vaguely connected sentences where everything was taken so literally that all sense disappeared.

Then about six pages in, I got to a point where I didn't know what came next, so I put it in the drawer and forgot about it.

A year or two later, Harlan Ellison began assembling stories for
Again, Dangerous Visions,
a sequel to his landmark anthology,
Dangerous Visions
. He rejected the one I thought he should buy (more about that later), so I dug out my weird little dream and added a Lewis Carroll ending to it.

He bought it. This is it.

When I looked in the mirror this morning, the pupil was gone from my left eye. Most of the iris had disappeared too. There was just a blank white area and a greasy smudge to indicate where the iris had previously been.

At first I thought it had something to do with the contact lenses, but then I realized that I don't wear lenses. I never have.

It looked kind of odd, that one blank eye staring back at me, but the unsettling thing about it was that I could still see out of it. When I put my hand over my good right eye, I found that the eyesight in my left was as good as ever, and it concerned me.

If I hadn't been able to see out of it, I wouldn't have worried. It would have meant only that during the night I had gone blind in that eye. But for the pupil of the eye to just fade away without affecting my sight at all—well, it bothered me. It could be a symptom of something serious.

Of course, I thought about calling the doctor, but I didn't know any doctors, and I felt a little bit embarrassed about troubling a perfect stranger with my problems. But there was that eye and it kept staring at me, so finally I went looking for the phone book.

Only, the phone book seemed to have disappeared during the night. I had been using it to prop up one end of the bookshelf, and now it was gone. So was the bookshelf—I began to wonder if perhaps I had been robbed.

First my eye, then the phone book, now my bookshelf had all disappeared. If it had not been that today was Tuesday, I should have been worried. In fact, I was already worried, but Tuesday is my day to ponder all the might-have-beens that had become never-wases. Monday is my day to worry about personal effects (such as eyes and phone books) and Monday would not be back for six days. I was throwing myself off schedule by worrying on a Tuesday. When Monday returned, then I would worry about the phone book, if I didn't have something else of a more pressing nature to worry about first.

(I find that pigeonholing my worrying like that helps me to keep an orderly mind—by allotting only so much time to each problem I am able to keep the world in its proper
perspective.) But there was still the matter of the eye, and that was upsetting me. Moreover, it was
distorting
my perspective.

I resolved to do something about it immediately. I set out in search of the phone, but somewhere along the way that too had disappeared, so I was forced to abandon that exploration.

It was very frustrating—this distressing habit of disappearing that the inanimate objects had picked up. Every time I started to look for something, I found that it had vanished, as if daring me to find it. It was like playing hide-and-go-seek, and since I had long ago given up such childish pastimes, I resolved not to encourage them any further and refused to look for them anymore. (Let them come to me.)

I decided that I would walk to the doctor. (I would have put on my cap, but that would have meant looking for it, and I was afraid that it too would have disappeared by the time I found it.)

Once outside, I noticed that people were staring at me in a strange way as they passed. I realized that it must be my eye. I had forgotten about it, not realizing that it might look a bit strange to others.

I started to turn around to go back for my sunglasses, but I knew that if I started to look for them, they too would surely disappear. So I turned around and headed once again for the doctor's.

“Let them come to me,” I muttered, thinking of the sunglasses. I must have startled the old lady I was passing at the time because she turned to stare at me in a most peculiar manner.

I shoved my hands into my coat pockets and pushed onward. Almost immediately I felt something hard and flat in my left-hand pocket. It was my sunglasses in their case. They had
indeed come to me. It was rewarding to see that I was still the master of the inanimate objects in my life.

I took the glasses out and put them on, only to find that the left lens of the glasses had faded to a milky white. It matched my eye perfectly, but I found that, unlike my eye, I was quite unable to see through the opaqued lens. I would just have to ignore the stares of passersby and proceed directly on to the doctor's office.

After a bit, however, I realized that I did not know where I was going—as I noted earlier, I did not know any doctors. And I most certainly knew that if I started to search for the office of one, I would probably never find if at all. So I stood on the sidewalk and muttered to myself, “Let them come to me.”

I must confess that I was a little bit leery of this procedure—remembering what had happened with the sunglasses—but in truth, I had no alternative. When I turned around, I saw a sign on the building behind me. It said, “Medical Center.” So I went in.

I walked up to the receptionist, and I looked at her. She looked at me. She looked me right in the eye (the left one) and said, “Yes, what can we do for you?”

I said, “I would like to see a doctor.”

“Certainly,” she said. “There goes one down the hall now. If you look quickly, you can catch a glimpse of him. See! There he goes!”

I looked and she was right—there
was
a doctor going down the hall. I could see him myself. I knew he was a doctor because he was wearing golf shoes and a sweater; then he disappeared around a bend in the corridor. I turned back to the girl. “That wasn't exactly what I meant, I said.

“Well, what was it you meant?”

I said, “I would like for a doctor to look at me.”

“Oh,” she said. “Why didn't you say so in the first place?”

“I thought I did,” I said, but very softly.

“No, you didn't,” she said. “And speak up. I can hardly hear you.” She picked up her microphone and spoke into it. “Dr. Gibbon, puh-lease come to reception….” Then she put down her microphone and looked at me expectantly.

I did not say anything. I waited. After a moment, another man in golf shoes and sweater came out of one of the nearby doors and walked over to us. He looked at the girl behind the desk, and she said to him, “This gentleman would like a doctor to look at him.”

The doctor took a step back and looked at me. He looked me up and down, then asked me to turn around and he looked at me some more. Then he said, “Okay,” and walked back into his office.

I asked, “Is that all?”

She said, “Of course that's all. That's all you asked for. That will be ten dollars please.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I wanted him to look at my eye.”

“Well,” she said, “you should have said so in the first place. You know we're very busy here. We haven't got time to keep calling doctors down here to look at just anyone who wanders in. If you had wanted him to look at your eye in particular, you should have said so.”

“But I don't want someone to just look at my eye.” I said. “I want someone to cure it.”

“Why?” she said. “Is there something wrong with it?”

I said, “Can't you see? The pupil has disappeared.”

“Oh,” she said. “So it has. Did you look for it?”

“Yes, I did. I looked all over for it—that's probably why I can't find it.”

“Maybe you left it somewhere,” she cooed softly. “Where was the last place you were?”

“I wasn't anywhere,” I said.

“Well, maybe that's your trouble.”

“I meant that I stayed home last night. I didn't go anywhere! And I don't feel very well.”

“You don't look very well,” she said. “You should see a doctor.”

“I already have,” I said. “He went down that hall.”

“Oh, that's right I remember now.”

“Look,” I said. I was starting to get a little angry. “Will you please get me an appointment with a doctor?”

“Is that what you want an
appointment?”

“Yes, that is what I want.”

“You're sure that's
all
you want now? You're not going to come back later and complain that we didn't give you what you want?”

“I'm sure,” I said. “I'm not going to come back.”

“Good. That's what we want to be sure of.”

By now, everything seemed to be all wrong. The whole world seemed to be slipping off sideways—all squished together and stretched out and tilted so that everything was sliding down towards the edge. So far, nothing had gone over, but I thought I could see tiny cracks appearing in the surface.

I shook my head to clear it, but all that did was produce a very distinct rattling noise—like a very small walnut in a very large shell.

I sat down on the couch to wait—I was still unable to think clearly. The fog swirled in thicker than ever, obscuring everything. Visibility had been reduced to zero and the controllers
were threatening to close down all operations until the ceiling lifted. I protested, no—wasn't the ceiling all right where it was?—but they just ignored me.