Letters to Jenny (32 page)

What else? Nothing as significant, I’m afraid. Tomorrow I start writing
Virtual Mode
, which novel I conceived on OctOgre 14, 1987—yes, I have my computer printout notes with that date, and in 1988 I signed a contract to write it for PUTNAM/BERKLEY Books—and I have a problem. That wouldn’t interest you. What? You say you’ll decide what interests you? Sigh. Must we go through this every single letter? I have all these heavy significant things to say, and here you are demanding to hear about—oh, all right, all
right
!

I have this vision of the very beginning of the novel. Fourteen year old Colene is coming home from school—will you stop interrupting, girl?! What do you mean, that’s misspelled? I just changed the spelling, is all. I looked it up to see whether it had two L’s or one, and discovered that either will do, but that there’s a third variant with “ene,” so I decided I liked that better. So it’s correct because I’m writing this novel and what I say goes. That’s just the way it is. And don’t bring up that business about my calling you Kathy again; I’ve been trying to forget that for a month. You’re acting just the way Cheryl does when I call her Penny. You girls are all alike. Any little inconsequential thing, and you—no, don’t you dare start calling
me
by the wrong name! Anyway, Colene is coming home from school with her armful of books, and she’s an absolutely typical ninth grade girl, sort of cute and popular and happy with many friends and an active imagination. Then something happens to change her life forever. No, there’s no reckless driver. Only in real life does it get that bad. She sees something, and investigates, and it’s a man in a ditch. He’s face down, in funny clothing, and just sort of groaning. Now she knows she should go on home and call the police or something; her house is the next one down. He’s probably a drunk. But instead she does something almost suicidally crazy: she puts down her books and hauls the man into her sort of dollhouse cabin in the back yard. You know, her place, where she can shut the world out and listen to records or read fantasy novels or whatever. It’s all she can do to get him there, because she weighs something like a hundred pounds, and the man is at least 150 pounds. But she drags him in and shuts the door, so he’s hidden. Then she gets water and some food and takes care of him.

So why did she do this? Is she really crazy or suicidal? Yes she is. The truth is, her happy normalcy is but a front; underneath she is a deeply unhappy girl, and when alone her favorite pursuit is to slice open her wrists. She would have committed suicide before this, but her nerve always fails when she sees the blood flowing. Both her wrists are bound in cloth; others think this is just an innocent style she affects, but it’s really to cover the scars. So it is entirely in character for her to haul this dangerous man in here. He may recover and rape her or kill her; she knows she is flirting with this. The edge of such danger fascinates her. She’s not like you. What? Did I say that? Where? Back at the foot of page one? Oops, I see it now: “You girls are all alike.” So how can she be not like you, if—okay, okay, I apologize. You girls are
not
all alike! Now are you satisfied? (Brother!)

Actually, this is no drunken bum. He is Darius, Cyng of Hlahtar, from a far different realm where magic works and science doesn’t. No, this is not the Adept series; you haven’t read that, have you? This is a different setup. Anyway, he got separated from his native land, and here in this realm where magic doesn’t work he is pretty much helpless, because science is not something he understands. He normally conjures food, for example; the idea of buying it in a store for money is beyond his grasp. So he is starving. Colene fetches him food, and blankets to sleep under, and yes, she warms him by embracing him, because this place doesn’t have heat and he has the chills. She is taking a phenomenal risk. But look, I can’t do the whole novel here; that’s for tomorrow. I’ll just say that Colene nurses him back to health, and begins to learn his alien language, and he begins to learn hers, so they start to communicate. He is a good and decent man, just different. He tells her of his world, where he is the—loosely translated—King of Laughter, and though she hardly believes about the magic, he is good at making her laugh. He appreciates her help; she did after all save his life. She helps hira figure out how to get home. She’s smart with things like computers, and it is a computer analogy that accounts for the title. So in the course of maybe a couple of weeks, not only is he well enough to travel, but he knows how to get home.

Now here is the problem: From the time Colene meets Darius, she never slashes her wrists. He absorbs her whole attention. In fact, she falls in love with him; it’s very fast, but she was sort of in love with death already, and this is a much better alternative. By day she’s in school, unchanged to external appearances, but now her private moments are spent thinking of him rather than in slicing her wrists. But you see, I wanted to show her slicing her wrists. I wanted that stark contrast: happy girl, suicidal girl. How can I show that if she never slashes her wrists? Well, I could go back a few hours, before she finds Darius. But then I couldn’t begin with this typical ninth-grader (or so she seems) discovering the body in the ditch. It seems I can’t have it both ways. D*mn! I
want
it both ways! So how do I begin this novel, Jenny? Don’t answer that; by the time you get this letter, I’ll have begun the novel; in fact I’ll have begun it by the time this letter gets mailed out. I guess I’ll just have to go back those few hours, growr.

So now on to the main letter. What? You want more of the novel? Look, I can’t tell you the whole thing! I haven’t even figured it out yet! Okay, I’ll tell you just about this section. Darius gets interested in Colene, then realizes how young she is. No, this isn’t “Tappy”; Darius immediately backs off, being an honorable man. Colene is heartbroken, but helps him complete his return to his fantasy frame. He goes, and she remains behind, though she would have given anything to go with him. Her thoughts of suicide return with doubled force.

Once home, Darius thinks things over, and realizes that he has made a mistake. He owes his life to Colene, and now realizes that he loves her. She’s not too young by his realm’s standards. But he doesn’t know how to find her.

Travel between realms is extremely tricky; he can’t just go back. What is he to do? Meanwhile Colene realizes that her choice is between Darius and death; she will either find him and be with him, or she will kill herself. She can suppress the almost overpowering urge to commit suicide only by fashioning a desperate plan to follow Darius to his home. And—the rest of the novel concerns this effort on the part of the two of them to get back together. There’s a telepathic horse named Seqiro, and an alien super-science conqueror, and a woman who remembers the future instead of the past, and—but why bore you with all that? On with this letter.

Hm—I have notes for all manner of significant things, but here you kept me talking about the novel for two pages, and I can’t afford to do a six page letter. You’d just fall asleep. Okay, I’d better postpone the book reports until next time. No, don’t you dare sigh with relief! I have some books about trees and nature and the reclassification of the Burgess Shale, and if you think that’s dull, you’ll have to listen anyway. I’m worried about your education; I’m afraid they aren’t covering things of importance, such as the Burgess Shale and the daily comics. So here are a couple of Hagar the Horrible and Bent Offerings, and an item about a person being charged $35 for not eating any food at the hospital—you say you’re on that diet too?—and a dingus to help folk like you walk, and Curtis and Alligator Express with a fantasy princess story, I tried to copy a couple of atheist folk songs, but it was black on red and I guess God wouldn’t let it be copied. They are part of an atheist Christmas card a correspondent sent me, with songs like “O Come Ye unfaithful” and “Bad King Wenceslas.” I’m agnostic, which means I don’t choose to make an issue of my lack of belief in the supernatural, but the truth is my private belief is essentially atheistic. Well, here, I’ll quote some: “Bad King Wenceslas looked out/ On the Christmas season/ Where the peasants lay about / Hungry, poor and freezin'.” I like both the original song and this bitter parody. I also like the old Pogo parody: “Good King Sauerkraut looked out/ On his feets uneven/ Where the snow lay round about/ Gee, his feets was freezin'!”

Through the Ice
has now been published, and I am receiving letters of appreciation from the friends and family of Robert Kornwise. What does this have to do with you? Robert Kornwise was killed just about a year before you were hit, by another reckless driver. I completed his unfinished novel, that his memory might live to that extent. You and he are linked in my mind. He died, you survived, and I became involved. I think you would have liked each other. Your mother will read you the novel, when you get home, if you ask her. More next week, Jenny—

Dismember 22, 1989

Dear Jenny
,

The big news this week is Penny’s cat. Penny, my elder daughter, adopts stray animals. Do you know anyone like that? Yes, I thought you did. Well, there was this stray cat in her neighborhood a couple months ago, and then it disappeared, and then in the past month it reappeared and she adopted it, took it to the vet for shots, and brought it into her apartment. Now he is named O Neku Sama, which is Japanese for Honorable Mister Cat. He is nine months old, brown/orange with tiger stripes, and fairly lively. Yes I know: up until that last, you thought I was describing a relative of Sammy’s. Well, maybe a distant relative.

So Penny drove up two days ago, and Neku has been exploring our premises. We can’t let him out, because he might get lost in the forest and perish, but he’s had a ball exploring the house. The first evening Cam and Penny went off to a cocktail party put on by the local bank—we do a lot of business with the bank, so we’re on their list, but I don’t have a lot of use for either cocktails or parties, while Penny, now 22, can drink if she chooses, and maybe she just wanted to demonstrate she could do it, though I don’t think she has much taste for it either—and Neku remained here with me. He disappeared. I looked all over the house, fearing what my daughter would say if her cat had vanished forever when in my charge. I mean, what would you say to your daddy if—yes, that’s why daddies are careful. When Penny returned, Neku reappeared. Where had he been? That bugged me. So I kept an eye out thereafter, and I believe I know, because he’s there now: in the living room there’s a TV set in the corner, and there’s some space behind it, right
in
the corner, and that space is in shadow. But if you look carefully, you can see that some of the shadow has tiger stripes. Neku sleeps when Penny is away, so as to have plenty of energy for her return. Yes, I see you nodding your head; you knew it all the time.

Yesterday I was typing Chapter 3 of
Virtual Mode
and Neku was up with me in the study when they left. Women are always off shopping, especially at this time of year. What interests a man is the sight of a beautiful young woman without much clothing; what interests a woman is the sight of a big department store without much limit on the credit card. If department stores had nude young women as clerks, men would get more interested in shopping. But cats aren’t much interested in shopping. So Neku explored the study. He came to sit on the desk beside the computer monitor, neat your Rose, and then went down behind to play with the wiring, I was a little worried about that, but I did manage to have a good day, typing 4,000 words. Colene, the heroine, is trying to recover the key to alternate realities, that muggers took from Darius. If she can get it back, he can return, and maybe take her with him. But getting anything back from gang-type punks is tricky, especially when you’re a fourteen year old girl without much money. But Neku wasn’t much interested in this, and wandered away. I think he finds me sort of boring. What, you do too? Oh, you want to know exactly how Colene gets that signal back? I don’t know; the Adult Conspiracy—how old did you say you were? If your mother found out I told you—Okay, you promise not to tell her? Remember, Colene is a gutsy girl, and suicidal. So she makes a deal: she’ll play the punk who has the key a game, and if she wins, she gets the key, and if he wins, he gets her. No, of course this isn’t a legal deal, but she’s desperate, and he’s a tough fence—that is, someone who makes illegal deals for cash, or whatever. He likes the idea of whatever, with a young, clean, non-addicted girl. So he agrees to play the game, provided that his friends are the judge of who wins. And her game turns out to be a contest to see who can bleed the most before fainting. She starts, slicing open her arm with a big knife. She’s suicidal, remember. Now he realizes that he has more blood than she does, and can probably outbleed her, but he’s about to faint even, before cutting himself, and he decides to forfeit, and she wins. Never get into a bleeding contest with a suicidal girl! His tough friends think it’s a great ploy; they admire her for it, and honor the deal. So that’s the scene I’m. in upstairs. But today, downstairs, I’ve got to type letters to confounded fans—oops, no, I didn’t mean you! Why do you have to jump to conclusions? Then who
did
I mean? Well, there was this girl who hasn’t read any of my books, but she wrote me an angry letter, calling me ignorant and sarcastic, because one of her friends had asked me how I felt about fan letters, and I said I’d rather be typing my novel. So I—no, I didn’t burn her letter. I wrote her a thoughtful missive asking her to consider how she would feel if she was required to answer 100–160 letters a month, squeezing out all her free time and some of her working time, and someone asked her how she felt about it, and she said she’d rather have more time for herself, so then she was accused of being ignorant and sarcastic? In short, I wrote her a pretty nice, sensible letter, that will make her feel like last months' uncleaned litter-box. Moral: don’t take off on a writer unless you are awful sure of your point. So anyway, this morning Neku wanted something to eat, so I poured him some milk, and he wouldn’t touch it. Only he and I were up at 6:15
A.M.
, you see. Sigh. Now he’s back behind the TV set, and I’m typing this letter.