Unpossible (46 page)

In silence we watched the tiny figure falling out of the sky, falling out of the light. Reentry. The figure drew closer, until finally the rock walls flashed up and Rocket Boy hit the ground.

The camera switched to a point just above the pit floor, tilted slightly down. The sheet—the parachute—settled over the ground and covered a man-shaped lump. Touch down.

Mrs. Spero looked at me.

"Just watch," I said. "He filmed this himself." Before the explosion, before the Death of Rocket Boy.

Nobody films in sequence.

William twisted around, looking for his mother. "Don’t worry," I said. "She’s right there. I got you." I jiggled him on my good knee, wondering at what frequency and duration his stomach became unstable.

The screen darkened. It was night, and the camera looked down from the top of the quarry. At the bottom, the sheet reflected the moonlight. It was too big to be our handkerchief, and the lump it covered too long to be G.I. Joe.

The camera switched to the floor of the pit, tripod level. The "parachute" glowed prettily, but it was obviously just an ordinary cotton sheet, with none of the sheen of silk.

The sheet moved, and a naked arm reached out, fingers twitching. I had to smile, imagining the melodramatic background music Stevie would have wanted. The arm was streaked with fake-looking blood. Too pale, too shiny. He should have used Karo.

William pulled at my T-shirt, trying to get his feet under him. On screen, Rocket Boy tossed back the sheet.

"Oh God," Mrs. Spero said.

Stevie was curled into a fetal position, naked. The blood described rivulets across his arms and neck. His back was covered with dark blotches—bruises. On film, they were too flat, too black, like holes through his pale skin, as unconvincing as the blood.

Stevie slowly got to his feet, facing the camera. Naked, pale skin shining. He looked up to the stars.

"The Return of Rocket Boy," I said to her.

Rocket Boy raised his arms in triumph, held them there. The screen went black.

Mrs. Spero sobbed almost silently, her shoulders jerking with ragged breaths.

The last of the film ejected. The reel continued to spin, the tail of film slapping the body of the projector. Mrs. Spero stared at the square of empty light.

William yanked at the collar of my shirt. I lifted him in the air, and his face cracked open into a wild grin. His eyes were bright.

I recognized that look.

I tilted him left, right, flying him in my arms, and he cackled. Hey there, little man. Can you see me in there? I’m waving at you.

Story Notes

T
his section of the book is for my friend Gary Delafield, who buys short story collections based almost solely on whether they include author introductions, front notes, end notes, or anecdotes about the writing life. Sometimes he even reads the stories.

I have to admit that I love story notes, too. Maybe it’s because when I was first trying to learn how to write, I thought these tidbits and asides would contain clues, the secrets to telling a story, or offer me some glimpse of the fabulous life of an author that awaited me. I was almost always disappointed—and if that’s what you’re looking for, you will be, too.

These remarks are tucked away at the back of the book because I hope you read the story before reading its corresponding note. I’ve not policed myself for spoilers, and I may very well ruin the story for you. But then again, if you’re like Gary, you may not be planning on reading the story unless the note gets you interested. In that case, have at it!

"
S
ECOND
P
ERSON,
P
RESENT
T
ENSE"

This story is about a weird neurological fact that has bothered me for years: experiments since the ’70s have proved that "consciousness" is in some cases a post-decision phenomena. Before you decide to, say, lift a finger, your unconscious brain has not only already decided to move that finger, but sent the command to the muscle, up to a half second before "you" decide to move it. Weird, eh? So, if consciousness is an add-on, what would a brain and body look like without consciousness? This is a thought experiment that philosophy of consciousness guys call the zombie problem—what, exactly, do we need consciousness for?

On my website I go into a lot more detail about the science behind the story, and list some of the books and articles I found helpful. But here I’d like to talk about two other things that went into the story. First is the family background. Like Theresa in the story, I grew up Southern Baptist. I even sang in a Gospel quartet through high school and into college. But at the same time I was reading a lot of science fiction, and raising questions that the kind folks in my church didn’t know how to handle. SF’s main message is, It could be different. The church’s message is, This is the one true way. The cognitive dissonance was extreme, and I often felt like two people, a teenage experience probably not unique to me.

But I was not interested in demonizing the parents. I once may have been an estranged teenager, but now I’m a parent, and I know what it’s like to fear for your children.

Another thing that guided the writing of this story was "The Runaway Bunny" by Margaret Wise Brown. When I was writing "Second Person ... " we were reading Brown’s book to our kids. It chokes me up every time. Because no matter what the child becomes—a fish, a crocus in a hidden garden—the mother changes too and goes after him. Finally, the bunny is exhausted by his mother’s persistence, and says, I might as well stay home and be your little bunny. And the mother says, Have a carrot.

"
U
NPOSSIBLE"

The first two fantasy books I ever read, not counting
Herbie the Love Bug
, were
The Phantom Tollbooth
and
The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles
. If I read other fantasies first, I can’t remember them, but these two books planted the virus that made me want to tell stories. They lit up my brain from the inside.

Fast forward a couple of decades, and my wife and I are reading those books aloud to our kids, along with
Where the Wild Things Are
and
My Father’s Dragon
and eventually the Harry Potter books. As an adult I was struck by all the similarities in the tales, as well as to stories like
The Wizard of Oz
and
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
: the plucky young heroes, the magical vehicles and doorways, and the inevitable return home, which always seemed kind of sad. Reading them again with my children, I felt grateful to be able to re-enter those worlds (though only halfway; I would never again be pulled all the way up to my eyeballs as I was when I was ten). But I couldn’t help wondering about the heroes themselves, who (with certain notable exceptions) were never able to return, and certainly not as an adult.

Around the same time, I started thinking about writing a story about Mr. Rogers. I’d watched him growing up, and he was still on the air when my kids were born. He was a kind of hero, a man who from all accounts was as kind and thoughtful in real life as he was on TV, and who genuinely cared about children. When he died, I thought about writing some kind of an homage, a story in which the children come to lift the old man onto the Magic Trolley, and bear him off to the Land of Make Believe. "Unpossible" was as close as I got.

"
D
AMASCUS"

This story came from the intersection of three ideas.

First, Temporal Lobe Epilepsy: After "Second Person, Present Tense," I’d built up a small library of books on consciousness and neurology, and I became interested in temporal lobe epilepsy—TLE. In V.S. Ramachandran’s book,
Phantoms in the Brain
, he talks about TLE, and I later saw a television documentary in which we meet one of Ramachandran’s patients (search on YouTube for Ramachandran and temporal lobe epilepsy and you should find it). What struck me is that the patient’s hallucinations were accompanied by the certainty that he really was in contact with God. Certainty itself was a symptom.

Any talk of TLE eventually gets around to Michael Persinger, the Canadian researcher mentioned in the story. His "God Helmet," which he used to induce a feeling of "a presence" in his patients has failed to be replicated consistently (Richard Dawkins tried it, and said he felt only a sensation of relaxation), and may be a scientific dead end, but it was too good a detail not to use.

Second, "Your Own Personal Jesus": I knew the Depeche Mode original, but it was Johnny Cash’s cover of the song that I listened to over and over while I wrote this story. From the Persinger experiments I’d decided that everyone’s Jesus would appear differently, but I think it was because of this song that I decided that Paula’s savior would take the form of a rock star beloved by her husband.

Third: Prions. In high school I read
Dream Park
, by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes, which mentioned Kuru, the laughing disease. Then along came Mad Cow disease, and the discovery that it and Kuru were both prion diseases, and I had my vector for a neurological disorder that could be passed on—and passed on through ritual. There must be plenty of horror stories that link holy communion with cannibalism—body of Christ for dinner, anyone?—but when I read about the sacramental aspect of cannibalism in Papua New Guinea tribes, I had found the foundation of my religion.

I wanted to tell the entire story of a religion, from its ecstatic, revelatory beginning, to the secret sharing among a small core of believers, to evangelization and mass conversion. The most difficult part of the story was working out the structure. I wanted to cover several years, so that meant flashbacks, but I wanted each track to have its own momentum and tension. I beat that outline like a dog until I had the shape I needed, and then I regularly broke the outline whenever I thought of something new I wanted to add, forcing me to start over again. I no longer remember how long it took me to write the story, and I don’t think I want to know.

"
T
HE
I
LLUSTRATED
B
IOGRAPHY OF
L
ORD
G
RIMM"

This is probably my angriest, most political story. I know, I know, it seems odd that a story about supervillains and superheroes could be so angry, but the war in Iraq was pissing me off. Remember "shock and awe"? The arrogance of the phrase, a marketing tagline for bombing the living shit out of human beings. During the early stages of the Iraq war, we were told that we "had to fight the terrorists over there, so we didn’t have to fight them here." That strategy, unfortunately, depended on there being a finite number of terrorists, who were either buying plane tickets for the USA or staying home, depending on where the action was. We’d somehow lost track of the fact that the quickest way to turn a moderate into a radical was to kill their friends and relatives.

I wanted to tell the story of someone caught at ground level during one of these wars, watching a superpower flex its muscles. As a comic book geek, the metaphor was obvious. And I took as inspiration books like
Marvels
, by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross, who told stories from the point of view of mere mortals caught in the crossfire.

I love comic books. I now write comics. But in Iraq, our government tried to turn a real war into a superhero tale, complete with swaggering good guys blithely leveling city blocks, irredeemable bad guys cowering in their palaces, and all but invisible bystanders.

Mission fucking accomplished.

See? I told you I was angry.

"
G
ARDENING AT
N
IGHT"

Here’s a tip for you beginning writers out there: If you want to write a short story, don’t start by writing a 400-page novel first. However, if you find yourself with a 400-page novel that just doesn’t work, there are worse things to do than cutting it up for parts and selling what you can.

This is one of two stories in this collection (the other is "Dead Horse Point") that had its genesis in my first, unsold novel,
The Rust Jungle
. The novel had multiple point of view characters and alternating storylines that only gradually converged. One of those plotlines was about a down-on-his-luck temp worker named Reg, who fell in with a crazy homeless ex-scientist growing his own autonomous robots. I’d gotten interested in artificial life back in the ’90s when I stumbled across a collection of science and technology articles called
The Reality Club
, and one of those articles was on artificial evolution. I soon hunted up everything I could find on the latest research, digging up terms like cellular automata, emergent behaviors, and "fast, cheap, and out of control." Some researchers were demonstrating evolutionary principles in virtual environments, and other folks were building modular robots. I think I was one of the first people to combine the two ideas. And as a boy who was raised up Southern Baptist, the link between software and hardware sounded a lot like those opening verses in John: "In the beginning was the Word ... and the Word was made flesh." (Notice that in the story, Reg, that benighted atheist, attributes the verse to Genesis. This is not at all because the author forgot that the verses were in John. Nope.)

While I was writing the novel, New York and a few other cities were experiencing an outbreak of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. As I read about the mechanisms of TB, I began to see all kinds of links between bacteria and robots, and how intelligent-seeming behavior—downright trickiness and what looked like
strategy
—could evolve from simple initial conditions.