Keeper of Dreams (20 page)

“There was a day,” Ryan said, “when people expected science to work miracles, and cursed us when we failed. Now they curse us for the miracles we did give them.”

Todd hunched his shoulders. Scientists hell. Who were scientists? People with blue security cards.

The old man’s voice echoed even out in the parking lot. “The earth gets even! The violated virgins will have their revenge!”

Todd got in his car and drove home alone. Shaking.

When he got home he found all as he had left it. The student from the university had come in and fed Sandy—there were dishes in the sink that the boy apparently hadn’t thought of cleaning up.

Sandy was where Todd had left her. Lying on the bed. Breathing. Her eyes were closed.

Todd lay on the bed beside her. He had carried despair with him to the meeting, and carried it as a burden multiplied many times over when he came back. With a gentle finger he traced the wrinkles that radiated from Sandy’s eyes, followed the folds of skin down her neck, twisted the brown hair now showing grey roots, pressed his lips against her closed eyes. He could remember when the skin was smooth, not cracked and hard as parchment, not thin and vein-lined.

“I’m sorry,” he said again and again, unsure who he was apologizing to or what for. “I’m so sorry.”

And then he told his wife’s unhearing ears about the conference. They had found nothing. And finding nothing, they could find no cure. You’re going to die, he said softly into her ear. “You’re going to die, I’d stop it if I could, but I can’t, you’re going to die.”

He got up and sat at his desk. He wrote by hand on the blank envelope sitting there, because he felt too tired to type, too tired to reach up to the shelf above the desk and pick up the sheets of paper. The ink scrawled:

“Our senility is not just age. In the books it is possible to age gracefully. Let us age with grace and strength, please, not madly and with terror and in the darkness and clinging to our pillows and our blankets calling names of parents we never knew, names of soft friends who never answered us.”

He stopped writing for as little reason as he had begun. He wondered who he had been writing to. He leaned back and touched the mattress. It was soft. He buried his hand in the blanket. It was soft.

On his knees by the bed, he clung to the blanket saying quietly, “Dappa,” and then, “Coopie. Dappa, you’re back.”

Lying naked on the bed, curled up with a pillow tucked under his arm, he knew somewhere back in his mind that he was not quite what he should be, not quite thinking and acting as he ought. But it was too good to have Dappa and Coopie back.

He fell asleep with tears of comfort and relief spotting the sheets.

He woke with blood pumping upward out of his heart. His wife Sandy knelt on the bed, straddling him, the letter opener still in her hand, her face splotched red with his blood.

“Poogy,” she said angrily, her face contorted. “You’ve got Poogy and I want him.”

She stabbed him again, and Todd felt the letter opener in his chest. It fit as snugly and comfortably as a new organ that had long been missing from his body. It was, however, cold.

Sandy pulled out the letter opener and a new spout erupted and spattered. She stuck out her lower lip. “I’m taking Poogy now,” she said. Then she reached down and pulled the bloody pillow from under his arm.

“Dappa,” Todd said in feeble protest. But as the pillow moved away, cradled in his wife’s arms, he saw clearly again, he recognized what was happening, and as his arms and legs got colder and the bloodspout weakened, he longed to cry out for help. But his voice did not work. There was no rescue.

Death and madness, he thought in the last moment left to him. They are the only rescuers. And where madness fails, death will do.

And it did.

When I was just gearing up to begin my writing career, one of the writers who was teaching me was Harlan Ellison.

He didn’t
know
he was teaching me. We hadn’t met. I was just reading his anthologies—and, most importantly, the notes he included with the stories. His
Partners in Wonder, Dangerous Visions
, and
Again, Dangerous Visions
anthologies were a virtual writing course, especially since I had just finished reading all through the
Science Fiction Hall of Fame
and
Hugo Winners
volumes.

It was like having the entire history of science fiction laid out before me, and then when I got to the most recent generation of science fiction there was the added bonus of Ellison’s essays and introductions. I got a sense of how he thought about stories, and how other writers thought about them—what they meant to do, the process they went through. I felt as if I’d been given a glimpse behind the curtain. I’ve tried to follow Ellison’s example ever since—that’s why there are notes accompanying all the stories in
Maps in a Mirror
and in this book as well.

My only regret was that I came on the scene too late to be part of
Ellison’s
Dangerous Visions
project. I read about how
The Last Dangerous Visions
or
Final Dangerous Visions
—I heard both titles bandied about—was already closed, with multiple volumes’ worth of stories just waiting for Ellison to write his introductions. Too late for me.

And then I got a phone call from Harlan—about something else, but in the process he invited me to submit a story. There was still room! I could make it in!

The trouble was, I’m not exactly a dangerous kind of guy. Oh, my fiction is revolutionary all right, but not in the traditional ways. Nobody has called me “edgy”—not lately—and even though I defy a lot of literary conventions, I don’t do it in the recognizable ways so nobody notices it. When Harlan called me, I hadn’t had enough published for anybody to detect just what I was doing that made me radically different (and quite a few bright lights in the field of sci-fi
still
don’t have a clue), and so I thought I needed to come up with something that would be dazzling and dangerous in terms that would be recognizably so.

I thought and thought and thought . . .

And got nowhere.

Finally it occurred to me: If I write a story that is “dangerous” in exactly the way that the stories in the first two anthologies had been “dangerous,” then I’m not being dangerous at all, am I? I’m actually being quite safe. A follower.

Instead of trying to live up to the
Dangerous Visions
tradition, I needed to simply find a story I cared about and believed in, write it as best I could, and send it off to Harlan Ellison to see if he thought I was worthy to be in the book.

The result was “Geriatric Ward,” and Harlan took the story forthwith.

A year later. Two years. Five.
Locus
would report from time to time that Ellison was “working on” the book. That he would be “finished by . . .”

Then came a letter from Harlan—the same one he was sending all the other contributors. Sorry I’m so slow, I’ll understand if you withdraw your story and publish it elsewhere, but let me know if you still want me to hold on to it.

By then I was making my living from novels, so the money wasn’t an issue. I wanted to be in Harlan’s book. So I told him to hang on to it.

Now it has been twenty years. Nobody’s expecting to see
Final Dangerous Visions
, ever. And that’s fine. Ellison already changed the world of sci-fi. He already helped teach me how to write.

So here is “Geriatric Ward,” like a fossil suddenly brought to life. It represents the work I was doing in the first two years of my sci-fi writing career. I didn’t keep it in my trunk, I kept it in Harlan’s. To me it’s as if it were written by a stranger. I don’t even
know
that kid. And who does he think he is, writing about old age? What did
he
know?

There’s a limit to how much you can shield your children from the harsh realities of life. But you can’t blame parents who try. Especially when it’s something you have to go out of your way to discuss.

My parents assure me that they would have talked about it someday, but it’s not like the birds and the bees—there’s not a certain age when you have to know. They were letting it slide. I was a curious kid. I had already asked questions that could have led there. They dodged. They waffled. I understand.

But then my childhood friend, Elizio, died of complications from his leukemia vaccination. I had been given mine on the same day, right after him, after jostling in line for twenty minutes with the rest of our class of ten-year-olds. Nobody else got sick. We didn’t know anything was wrong with Elizio, either, not for months. And then the radiation and the chemotherapy, primitive holdovers from an era when medicine was almost indistinguishable from the tortures of the Inquisition. Nothing worked. Elizio died. He was eleven by then. A slow passage into the grave. And I demanded to know why.

They started to talk about God, but I told them I knew about heaven and I wasn’t worried about Elizio’s soul, I wanted to know why there wasn’t some better way to prevent diseases than infecting us with semi-killed pseudo-viruses mixed with antigen stimulants. Was this the best the human race could do? Didn’t God give us brains so we could solve these things? Oh, I was full of righteous wrath.

That was when they told me that it was time for me to take a trip to
the North American Wild Animal Park. What did that have to do with my question? It will all become clear, they said. But I should see with my own eyes. Thus they turned from telling me nothing to telling me everything. Were they wise? I know this much: I was angry at the universe, a deep anger that was born of fear. My dear friend Elizio had been taken from me because our medicine was so primitive. Therefore anyone could die. My parents. My little sisters. My own children someday. Nothing was secure. And it pissed me off. The way I felt, the way I was acting, I think they felt that nothing but a complete answer, a visual experience, could restore my sense that this was, if not a perfect world, then at least the best one possible.

We left Saltillo that weekend, taking the high-speed train that connected Monterrey to Los Angeles. We got off in El Paso, the southern gateway to the Park. During the half-hour trip, I tried to make sense of the brochures about the Park, all the pictures, the guidebooks. But it was clear to me, even at the age of eleven, that something was being left out. That I was getting the child’s version of what the Park contained. For all that the brochures described was a vast tract of savannahs, filled with wild animals living in their natural habitat, though it was an odd mixture of African, South American, European, and American fauna that they pictured. Of course, to protect the animals against the dangers of straying and the far greater menace of poaching, the Park was fenced about with an impenetrable barrier—
not
illustrated—of fences, ditches, wires, walls. The thing that made no sense at all, however, was the warning about absolute bio-security. All observations of the Park inside the boundaries were to take place from within completely bio-sealed buses, and anyone who tried to circumvent the bio-seal would be ejected from the Park and prosecuted. They did not say what would happen to anyone who succeeded in getting out into the open air.

Bio-sealed buses suggested a serious biohazard. And yet there was nothing in the brochures to suggest what that biohazard might be. It’s not as if herds of bison could sneak onto the buses if you cracked the seal.

The answer to this mystery was no doubt the answer to my question about why Elizio died, and I impatiently demanded that my parents explain.

They urged me to be patient, and then took me right past the regular
buses and on to a nondescript door with the words—in small letters—“Special Tours.”

“What’s so special?” I asked.

They ignored me. The clerk seemed to know without explanation exactly what it was my parents wanted. Then I understood that my parents must have called ahead.

It was a private tour. And not on a bus. We were taken down an elevator into a deep basement, and then put aboard a train on which we rode for more than an hour—longer than the trip from Saltillo to El Paso, though I suspect we were going much slower. Underground, who can tell?

We came up another elevator, and like the underground train, this one had no trappings of tourism. This was a place where people worked; gawking was only a secondary concern.

We were led by a slightly impatient-looking woman to a smallish room with windows on four sides and dozens of sets of binoculars in a couple of boxes. There were also chairs, some stacked, some scattered about almost randomly. As if someone hadn’t bothered to straighten up after a meeting.

“Are they close?” asked Mother.

“We’re here because the water is nearby,” said the woman. “If they aren’t close now, they will be soon.”

“Where’s the water?” asked Father.

The woman pointed vaguely in a direction. It was clear she didn’t want us there. But Mother and Father had the gift of patience. They were here for me, and bore the disdain of the scientist. If that’s what she was.

The woman went away.

My parents picked up binoculars and searched. I also picked out a set and tried to figure out how to focus it.