Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois (62 page)

Executive Clemency

Introduction to Executive Clemency

This is what’s known as a writer’s story, and if you want to know what I mean by that, go read the story first so you’ll understand what I say. I’ll wait right here for you.

Back? Okay, here’s how it works. If you’re primarily a reader, you reacted to the smooth and lovely prose, the slowly building mystery, the sudden twists and revelations of the plot. But if you’re a writer, a working writer, then right now you’re shaking your head in envy and admiration and muttering to yourself, “How the hell did he
do
that?”

It’s that opening, to begin with, that long and beautiful and suspenseful opening in which essentially nothing happens. No, worse than that! Gardner takes an almost static situation and then by degrees drains the heat out of it, slowing it down until, a mere breath away from motionlessness, something snaps and the protagonist falls back into the world of actions and consequences.

You’ve read the story. You know that once you began reading, you had no choice but to follow that compulsive flow of words wherever it went. That something which would sound in synopsis extremely boring, is in practice gripping in the extreme. A receptive reader could no more abandon this story a few sentences in than flap his arms and fly away.

But how the hell did Gardner
do
that?

Me, I like to begin a story somewhat less subtly, by (say) killing the protagonist in the very first sentence. That’s because the reader is a fickle beast, and can be extremely difficult to win over. To write an opening as aggressively contrarian as this one requires the writer to not only have what my teenage son, Sean, calls “mad skills,” but to know it. When Gardner was writing this story, he was able to follow the logic of the prose where it naturally led, because he knew he had the reader in his control. He knew the writing would pull the reader in after it.

What can it possibly feel to write like that? Incandescent.

As I understand the history of this story, it began with a sizeable fragment submitted at a Guilford writer’s workshop by Jay Haldeman, which Gardner, not realizing it was meant to be a
parody
of his style, latched onto with enormous excitement. Jay agreed to a collaboration and then (and I apologize to Jay if I’m getting this wrong and underplaying his contribution), Gardner took it home and worked on it, off and on again, for the next seven years. Seven years! I’ve got to tell you that, as a working writer myself, I’m amazed that it was done in so short a time.

Because the beginning is only . . . well, the beginning. To succeed, it has to open naturally into a larger story, one that the reader will feel is worthy of its extraordinary opening. It has to develop easily and by a series of small surprises into something satisfying. Something the reader can’t see coming and yet will accept as inevitable. Something that gives the reader some new insight into the human. And it all has to work together flawlessly, as a single organic mechanism.

You’ve read the story. You’ve seen it done. But
how?
This is the kind of work that drives other writers nuts. This is the kind of work that fills us with admiration for the guy who wrote it. Enormous skill went into this story, but something more than that happened as well. When a writer of Gardner’s caliber is at his absolute best, when he’s in the mental equivalent of what Castaneda would call his Spot of Power, he creates something that’s not only inimitable but unassailable. So here.

This is what a writer can do, if he’s got the chops.

Michael Swanwick

Executive Clemency

by Gardner Dozois and Jack C. Haldeman II

The President of the United States sat very still in his overstuffed chair on the third floor and watched early-morning sunlight sweep in a slow line across the faded rug.

He couldn’t remember getting out of bed or sitting down in the chair. He could dimly recall that he had been sitting there for a long time, watching the slow advent of dawn, but he was only just beginning to become fully aware of himself and his surroundings.

Only his eyes moved, yellow and wet, as the world seeped in.

This happened to him almost every morning now. Every morning he would return slowly to his body as if from an immense distance, from across appalling gulfs of time and space, to find himself sitting in the chair, or standing next to the window, or, more rarely, propped up in the corner against the wall. Sometimes he’d be in the middle of dressing when awareness returned, and he’d awake to find himself tying a shoelace or buttoning his pants. Sometimes, like this morning, he’d just be sitting and staring. Other times, he would awaken to the sound of his own voice, loud and cold in the bare wooden room, saying some strange and important things that he could never quite catch. If he could only hear the words he said at such times, just once, he knew that it would change everything, that he would understand everything. But he could never hear them.

He didn’t move. When the lines of sunlight reached the chair, it would be time to go downstairs. Not before, no matter how late it sometimes made him as the sunlight changed with the seasons, no matter if he sometimes missed breakfast or, on cloudy winter days, didn’t move at all until Mrs. Hamlin came upstairs to chase him out. It was one of the rituals with which he tried to hold his life together.

The east-facing window was washed over with pale, fragile blue, and the slow-moving patch of direct sunlight was a raw, hot gold. Dust motes danced in the beam. Except for those dust motes, everything was stillness and suspension. Except for his own spidery breathing, everything was profoundly silent. The room smelled of dust and heat and old wood. It was the best part of the day. Naturally it couldn’t last.

Very far away, floating on the edge of hearing, there came the mellow, mossy bronze voice of a bell, ringing in the village of Fairfield behind the ridge, and at that precise moment, as though the faint tintinnabulation were its cue, the house itself began to speak. It was a rambling wooden house, more than a hundred years old, and it talked to itself at dawn and dusk, creaking, groaning, whispering, muttering like a crotchety old eccentric as its wooden bones expanded with the sun or contracted with the frost. This petulant, arthritic monologue ran on for a few minutes, and then the tenants themselves joined in, one by one: Seth in the bathroom early, spluttering as he washed up; Mr. Thompkins, clearing his throat interminably in the room below, coughing and hacking and spitting as though he were drowning in a sea of phlegm; Sadie’s baby, crying in a vain attempt to wake her sluggard mother; Mrs. Hamlin, slamming the kitchen door; Mr. Samuels’ loud nasal voice in the courtyard outside.

The sunlight swept across his chair.

The President of the United States stirred and sighed, lifting his arms and setting them down again, stamping his feet to restore circulation. Creakily, he got up. He stood for a moment, blinking in the sudden warmth, willing life back into his bones. His arms were gnarled and thin, covered, like his chest, with fine white hair that polarized in the sunlight. He rubbed his hands over his arms to smooth out gooseflesh, pinched the bridge of his nose, and stepped across to the gable window for a look outside. It seemed wrong somehow to see the neat, tree-lined streets of Northview, the old wooden houses, the tiled roofs, the lines of smoke going up black and fine from mortar-chinked chimneys. It seemed especially wrong that there were no automobiles in the streets, no roar and clatter of traffic, no reek of gasoline, no airplanes in the sky—

He turned away from the window. For a moment everything was sick and wrong, and he blinked at the homey, familiar room as though he’d never seen it before, as though it were an unutterably alien place. Everything became hot and tight and terrifying, closing
down
on him.
What’s happening?
he asked himself blindly. He leaned against a crossbeam, dazed and baffled, until the distant sound of Mrs. Hamlin’s voice—she was scolding Tessie in the kitchen, and the ruckus rose all the way up through three floors of pine and plaster and fine old tenpenny nails—woke him again to his surroundings, with something like pleasure, with something like pain.

Jamie, they called him. Crazy Jamie.

Shaking his head and muttering to himself, Jamie collected his robe and his shaving kit and walked down the narrow, peeling corridor to the small upstairs bathroom. The polished hardwood floor was cold under his feet.

The bathroom was cold, too. It was only the beginning of July, but already the weather was starting to turn nippy late at night and early in the morning. It got colder every year, seemed like. Maybe the glaciers were coming back, as some folks said. Or maybe it was just that he himself was worn a little thinner every year, a little closer to the ultimate cold of the grave. Grunting, he wedged himself into the narrow space between the sink and the downslant of the roof, bumping his head, as usual, against the latch of the skylight window. There was just enough room for him if he stood hunch-shouldered with the toilet bumping up against his thigh. The toilet was an old porcelain monstrosity, worn smooth as glass, that gurgled constantly and comfortably and emitted a mellow breath of earth. It was almost company. The yard boy had already brought up a big basin of “hot” water, although by now, after three or four other people had already used it, it was gray and cold; after the last person used it, it would be dumped down the toilet to help flush out the system. He opened his shaving kit and took out a shapeless cake of lye soap, a worn hand towel, a straight razor.

The mirror above the sink was cracked and tarnished—no help for it, nobody made mirrors anymore. It seemed an appropriate background for the reflection of his face, which was also, in its way, tarnished and dusty and cracked with age. He didn’t know how old he was; that was one of the many things Doc Norton had warned him not to think about, so long ago. He couldn’t even remember how long he’d been living here in Northview. Ten years? Fifteen? He studied himself in the mirror, the blotched, earth-colored skin, the eyes sunk deep under a shelf of brow, the network of fine wrinkles. A well-preserved seventy? Memory was dim; the years were misty and fell away before he could number them. He shied away from trying to remember. Didn’t matter.

He covered the face with lathered soap.

By the time he finished dressing, the other tenants had already gone downstairs. He could hear them talking down there, muffled and distant, like water bugs whispering at the mossy bottom of a deep old well. Cautiously, Jamie went back into the hall. The wood floors and paneling up here were not as nicely finished as those in the rest of the house. He thought of all the hidden splinters in all that wood, waiting to catch his flesh. He descended the stairs. The banister swayed as he clutched it, groaning softly to remind him that it, too, was old.

As he came into the dining room, conversation died. The other tenants looked up at him, looked away again. People fiddled with their tableware, adjusted their napkins, pulled their chairs closer to the table or pushed them farther away. Someone coughed self-consciously.

He crossed the room to his chair and stood behind it.

“Morning, Jamie,” Mrs. Hamlin said crossly.

“Ma’m,” he replied politely, trying to ignore her grumpiness. He was late again.

He sat down. Mrs. Hamlin stared at him disapprovingly, shook her head, and then turned her attention pointedly back to her plate. As if this were a signal, conversation started up again, gradually swelling to its normal level. The awkward moment passed. Jamie concentrated on filling his plate, intercepting the big platters of country ham and eggs and corn bread as they passed up and down the table. It was always like this at meals: the embarrassed pauses, the uneasy sidelong glances, the faces that tried to be friendly but could not entirely conceal distaste. Crazy Jamie, Crazy Jamie. Conversation flowed in ripples around him, never involving him, although the others would smile dutifully at him if he caught their eyes, and occasionally Seth or Tom would nod at him with tolerably unforced cordiality. This morning it wasn’t enough. He wanted to talk, too, for the first time in months. He wasn’t a child, he was a man, an old man! He paid less attention to his food and began to strain to hear what was being said, looking for a chance to get into the conversation.

Finally the chance came. Seth asked Mr. Samuels a question. It was a point of fact, not opinion, and Jamie knew the answer.

“Yes,” Jamie said, “at one time New York City did indeed have a larger population than Augusta.”

Abruptly everyone stopped talking. Mr. Samuels’ lips closed up tight, and he grimaced as though he had tasted something foul. Seth shook his head wearily, looking sad and disappointed. Jamie lowered his head to avoid Seth’s eyes. He could sense Mrs. Hamlin swelling and glowering beside him, but he wouldn’t look at her, either.

Damn it, that wasn’t what he’d meant to say! They hadn’t been talking about that at all. He’d said the wrong thing.

He’d done it again.

People were talking about him around the table, he knew, but he could no longer understand them. He could still hear their voices, but the words had been leached away, and all that remained was noise and hissing static. He concentrated on buttering a slice of corn bread, trying to hang on to that simple mechanical act while the world pulled away from him in all directions, retreating to the very edge of his perception, like a tide that has gone miles out from the beach.

When the world tide came back in, he found himself outside on the porch—the veranda; some of the older folks still called it—with Mrs. Hamlin fussing at him, straightening his clothes, patting his wiry white hair into place, getting him ready to be sent off to work. She was still annoyed with him, but it had no real bite to it, and the exasperated fondness underneath kept showing through even as she scolded him. “You go straight to work now, you hear? No dawdling and mooning around.” He nodded his head sheepishly. She was a tall, aristocratic lady with a beak nose, a lined, craggy face, and a tight bun of snowy white hair. She was actually a year or two younger than he was, but he thought of her as much, much older. “And mind you come right straight back here after work, too. Tonight’s the big Fourthday dinner, and you’ve got to help in the kitchen, hear? Jamie, are you listening to me?”

He ducked his head and said “Yes’m,” his feet already fidgeting to be gone.

Mrs. Hamlin gave him a little push, saying, “Shoo now!” and then, her grim face softening, adding, “Try to be a good boy.” He scooted across the veranda and out into the raw, hot brightness of the morning.

He shuffled along, head down, still infused with dull embarrassment from the scolding he’d received. Mr. Samuels went cantering by him, up on his big roan horse, carbine sheathed in a saddle holster, horseshoes ringing against the pavement; off to patrol with the Outriders for the day. Mr. Samuels waved at him as he passed, looking enormously tall and important and adult up on the high saddle, and Jamie answered with the shy, wide, loose-lipped grin that sometimes seemed vacuous even to him. He ducked his head again when Mr. Samuels was out of sight and frowned at the dusty tops of his shoes. The sun was up above the trees and the rooftops now, and it was getting warm.

The five-story brick school building was the tallest building in Northview—now that the bank had burned down—and it cast a cool, blue shadow across his path as he turned onto Main Street. It was still used as a school in the winter and on summer afternoons after the children had come back from the fields, but it was also filled with stockpiles of vital supplies so that it could be used as a stronghold in case of a siege—something that had happened only once, fifteen years ago, when a strong raiding party had come up out of the south. Two fifty-caliber machine guns—salvaged from an Army jeep that had been abandoned on the old state highway a few weeks after the War—were mounted on top of the school’s roof, where their field of fire would cover most of the town. They had not been fired in earnest for years, but they were protected from the weather and kept in good repair, and a sentry was still posted up there at all times, although by now the sentry was likely to smuggle a girl up to the roof with him on warm summer nights. Times had become more settled, almost sleepy now. Similarly, the Outriders who patrolled Northview’s farthest borders and watched over the flocks and the outlying farms had been reduced from thirty to ten, and it had been three or four years since they’d had a skirmish with anyone; the flow of hungry refugees and marauders and aimless migrants had mostly stopped by now—dead, or else they’d found a place of their own. These days the Outriders were more concerned with animals. The black bears were back in the mountains and the nearby hills, and for the past four or five years there had been wolves again, coming back from who-knew-where, increasing steadily in numbers and becoming more of a threat as the winters hardened. Visitors down from Jackman Station, in Maine, brought a story that a mountain lion had recently been sighted on the slopes of White Cap, in the unsettled country “north of the Moosehead,” although before the War there couldn’t have been any pumas left closer than Colorado or British Columbia. It had taken only twenty years.

There was a strange wagon in front of the old warehouse that was now the Outriders’ station, a rig Jamie had never seen before. It was an ordinary enough wagon, but it was
painted.
It was painted in mad streaks and strips and random patchwork splotches of a dozen different colors—deep royal blue, vivid yellow, scarlet, purple, earth brown, light forest-green, black, burnt orange—as if a hundred children from prewar days had been at it with finger paint. To Jamie’s eyes, accustomed to the dull and faded tones of Northview’s weather-beaten old buildings, the streaks of color were so brilliant that they seemed to vibrate and stand out in raised contrast from the wagon’s surface. He was not used to seeing bright colors anymore; except those in the natural world around him, and this paint was
fresh,
something he also hadn’t seen in more years than he could remember. Even the big horse, which stood patiently in the wagon’s traces—and which now rolled an incurious eye up at, Jamie and blew out its lips with a blubbery snorting sound—even the
horse
was painted, blue on one side, bright green on the other, with orange streaks up its flanks.