Midnight in the garden of ice and plenty

The cold made pins and needles on her skin. And there was a lot of skin. It was the rage that year. There were clots of young men dressed in clear plastic, their rosy cheeks... all of them... bare to the snowy night. There were women in ermine, old ladies with diamond teeth. When they opened their mouths, the light sparkled even through the cloud of their breath.

Vitelina needed more cream towers. The first batch of fifty had been consumed within minutes. The patrons were crowding around the ice table, rending the edges of it slick with melt. All the food was white or clear. The spun sugar goblets dissolved when pale punch was dribbled in, leaving hands sticky. The white cygnet meat sweated with crystals of ice.

It was the first party of 2157. Madame Faurme was entertaining one hundred fifty-seven guests in her garden outside of the city. It was one of those affairs. It would have to be memorable.

Vitelina had served at many of Madame Faurme's parties, but never one this demanding. The temperature of the spouting mermaid fountain had to be constantly checked as the night went on, lest the water fail to seize into ice as it touched the growing stalagmite at the base of the flow. Likewise the mischievous cherub fountain.

The night was growing colder; the stars were painfully close. Above the garden a wet mist began to hang, risen from the fountains and sugar-goods and breath and trampled snow. And sweat. As Vitelina pushed toward the house, she came upon a tangle of youths in sharp rustly plastic, stuffing snow into whatever warm folds appealed to them. Their hair was plastered to their bodies. Their grunts and laughs were muffled in the hovering fog that reached to obscure the stars.

By the time Vitelina had returned with a triple-deck platter of cream towers and radish flakes, she could scarcely see where she was going. She led herself through the garden by sound. The greatest mass of guests was there by the food, and when she unloaded her platter, they fell around her with gleaming eyes. The wireless lights were floating in a soup of white above their heads now, but the light was enough to show their teeth, their white and glittering teeth, and the still-rosy glow on their cheeks.

The vodka moat would have to be replenished.

Vitelina stepped slowly to the faucet beyond the bleachedberry hedge. The snow was wet and pasty and clung to the sides of her glistening plastic shoes. Her toes throbbed in their cold cage. She would make more money working eight months for Madame Faurme than she would in the next ten years. But the toes, the toes. And her hands... the handle of the vodka faucet was slick. She lifted it and beyond her vision, a silver glissando tickled the air.

And was it colder when she returned to the food-heaped ice tables than when she had first passed that way? Vitelina pulled her polar bear hood around her tighter. She watched the guests warily. The sugar goblets dipped into the vodka moat, over and over. Shards dissolved, fell steaming in the white slush below. Tongues appeared to do their pink work. Everything was wet. No one was shivering but Vitelina. She turned and the flush on the cheeks of the woman behind her frightened her. Vitelina hurried to the garden's edge.

She would do rounds. She would look for something to clean. There, ten steps through the fog along the outer hedge, where the sounds of the eating and drinking were almost too muffled to be heard, she found something. It was a woman, her legs wrapped around the translucent body of an ice stallion, her blonde hair long and lank, sufficing for a mane on the unmoving beast. The strange woman did not shiver. She was already cold. White.

Vitelina wanted first to go back, but she decided to go on. Twelve steps more into the fog, she came upon lovers, lying blankly in the snow, which did for clothing on them. Their ermine wraps were tossed aside. They had been pushing snow atop each other in smooth mounds when they lay down to close their eyes. The sweat on their cheeks had already frozen to crystal. The vodka reddened their skin no longer.

Five steps onward, there was a circle of trillionaire septuagenarians, their riches now in faux diamonds that hung at their lips from imagined confections of snow. They lay now where they had consumed, on a round bench of ice three feet thick. All Vitelina could hear was the chattering of her own small teeth. The warmth had been sucked out of the night from above, and the air seemed so sharp she feared for the coverless skin of her arms and her thighs.

Madame Faurme would be in her drawing room, where she spent every party. She would be watching through the windows. She would be disappointed, of course, that she could not see her guests through the fog. She would want to know at once if anything had happened that would reflect unfavorably upon her reputation. If the cooks had botched a dish, Vitelina must report it. If the ice sculptures were melting badly, Vitelina must report it. If guests were behaving in a rude fashion, she must report it all the quicker.

Vitelina hung in the air, her feet lost to her as the miasma thickened. She could not feel them. They were gone.

Tremblingly she turned, feeling her way along the pale hedge until she reached at last the black door to the kitchens. She walked as if on stilts. She could scarcely tell with her numb fingers, but she felt the black door must be warmer than the outside. Some heat existed here, from the world of the house. The garden was dead silent.

Vitelina slid her hand to the right, along the brick of the house, pushing her numb feet through the snow, which was freezing up in an uneven mess. Her steps began to crackle and squeak. The sound seemed to follow her, unnerving her until by the time she reached the door to the undergarage her heart was racing. She yanked open the door and thumped onto the dark stairs, pulling the door closed behind her, fearing the skin of her palm might be left behind on the slick metal knob. She reached in against her fluttering chest, fumbling for her key. When she clenched it, she saw a light wink on hazily on in the concrete distance, and she made for it.

Rehousing it

So I went to write for a bit, as you will see below, hoping it would perk up my mood, but it was rather heavy going, especially toward the end. I just didn't know where to take the story. I forced an ending and then randomly clicked on a link to my own archives, landing on this:

"The book I'd been reading (until I had to return it to the library, anyway) was very heavy on the inseparability of plot and character. Plot, it averred, is what characters do next -- asserting that plot problems can be solved by changing the nature of your character. Now I see that. Stories get a lot easier to write when you have a character who really wants something. And would do just about anything to get it."

Well, jeez. I have no idea what my character wants. I went into the story thinking about setting, and that was about it.

Warehousing it

It was in her first year after college that she got the job. After graduation, there had been a period of a few months where she pretended she could get a better one; it felt like the pretense was necessary, the way saying "bless you" was necessary after somebody sneezed. Nobody believed they were really able to prevent illness and catastrophe by inducing God's blessing after a sneeze. But it would have been wrong not to say it.

And when she applied for the job, it had the inevitability of a flu coming on. All her friends were already warehousing it. Nikkita had a degree in physics. She was twenty-two.

"You can take this one," her supervisor said, steering her to a desk about three-quarters of the way down the right-hand wall of the dimly flourescent space. The computer was already on, the log-in screen already set up. Taped to the top of the monitor was a card:

Account: MXFR5609
Password: yesterday718

"Go ahead and log in..." said Boyd. "I'll hang out and make sure things are working all right."

Nikkita put in the account name and password and the game opened up. She was on top of a mountain somewhere, with a blue wyvern in front of her--

"Whoops," said Boyd, as claws flashed and the screen turned red. "The last guy didn't log out right." He leaned in front of Nikkita where she sat, reaching for the mouse. "We had to let him go. He was a little too interested in doing his own thing."

"Right," said Nikkita. "Do you want to sit here?"

"No," said Boyd. He blocked her whole view with his big body, stretching both hands in to use the keyboard. Finally he leaned back. "There you go." Her avatar was in town now, safe and sound. "Wait, let's see. You're..."

He clicked on a few info bars. The screen angle changed to show her avatar now: a leggy female with a blond ponytail and two breasts like Norman helmets. She was a fur-clad valkyrie of slaying. She had a war hammer with a massive head the size of both breasts put together with her butt thrown in. Her name was Heidihammer.

"You're a level 89 warrior. Can you do that?" asked Boyd.

"Give me a couple days, I'll figure it out," said Nikkita.

"Cool," said Boyd. "Call me if you have any issues."

Nikkita didn't break for lunch until two o'clock. She'd spent the first fifteen minutes of the morning trying to find her way back to wyvern mountain and the next four and a half hours trying to kill one. She didn't even realize she was hungry until the latest wyvern to get a kill on her began to rip open her bare valkyrie belly and stuff red strips of her flesh into its mouth in a pixellated feeding frenzy that was vastly appealing in its artificially intelligent way.

She returned from the cafe with two slices of pizza and ate with one hand while her other lazed over the mouse. She felt sufficient only to exploring the town while she ate: there was the inn, there the armorer's, there the bordello, there the punishment square...

That would be entertaining enough. She wandered closer, checking out the characters in the stocks. People were hurling tomatoes at them. "If anybody can hurl something other than a tomato," said the character on the right, "I'll give you a million gold pieces."

But there was nothing other than tomatoes. That was the way punishment square was coded.

"I can hurl insults," she said, typing with one hand.

"Do it!" said the character in the stocks. His name was Marfalcon.

Nikkita was at a loss. She took another bite of pizza and walked around the character, examining him. "Your momma dress you?" she said.

"My momma was killed by a troll! You witch! I hate you!" said Marfalcon. Nikkita had to swallow fast to let the laugh come out. Then came a private message from Marfalcon at the bottom of her screen: Are you Rubicant?

She typed back: No, I'm Procosys.

Said Marfalcon: Me too.

So he worked for Procosys too. He was somewhere in the warehouse. Typing. Nikkita resisted the urge to turn around and look. She could only see a portion of the workspace, anyway. Beyond her first row against the wall there were sixteen more double rows till the next wall. There were hundreds of players.

She typed: Know anything about hunting wyverns?

And he said: I'll let you know when I get out of this thing.

By five that evening, she had made her first gold pieces and deposited them in the Procosys account at the town bank. The players around her were logging out, some heading to the lounge where they could log in again on their own private characters. Nikkita was exhausted. It was her first day.

What we do to our friends, Part 2

"You're like this guy I've been IMing with all year," she said to me, and I knew immediately who she was talking about. And I knew she was mentioning it because she just wanted to talk about him, not about me. Because I am nothing like Preston.

I had to play it cool over the alarm bells in my ears. "What am I doing?"

"You keep changing the subject. Just like him, he refuses to talk about anything that might have anything to do with any kind of issues he's having."

I got to play sensitive friend. I gave her exactly what she wanted. (Which, it could be argued, is what I was doing all along.) "Who is this guy? Is he bothering you?"

"No! Well... he's this guy in my psychology lecture. I can tell he really likes me, but the year's almost over and he won't even tell me who he is."

What the hell? "How do you know he's in your psych class?"

"He said that much. And it's obvious he likes me. But he has some major issues."

I had to rein myself in there because I was suddenly angry with her. What the hell was she talking about, psychology lecture? Preston wouldn't have said anything about where he knew Rachel from. I should know. I programmed him. So what was she talking about? This was going to make it particularly annoying to find out the truth without giving myself away.

I tried to refocus on the goal. "Do you like him? that's the real question."

Rachel looked away. "I don't know. Maybe if I got to meet him. But he's insanely shy or something." Her voice got louder. "I don't know why you guys are so shy. If a girl tells you like thirteen times that she wants to meet you, why would you still think she must just be pitying you?"

I desperately wanted to ask what "the guy's" name was but I was suddenly paralyzed with doubt. Did guys ask about the names of other guys their female pals were dating, or was that something only chicks did? Would I sound weird?

"Guys are assholes," I said instead.

"Still, he's really... interesting. He's very smart, and he's nice to me, and... I don't know if you'd like him or not. He'll always talk about music with me, I mean, but he's not a big fan of liberals... I don't know if you guys would really get along... he is interesting though."

And she had some interesting opinions of Preston. I was very slightly horrified. Mostly by the idea that she'd been talking with a chat bot for six months. That who knows how many hours of her life had been spent on this. But it was Rachel, so the horror was only slight.

The horror did not deepen to moderate, and then abject, horror until I was dropping something off at Rachel's dorm one day and he IMed her while I was standing there, trying to get Rachel to "lend" me some of her Tide with Bleach.

It wasn't that I had exactly forgot about Preston again, but damn it near made me jump out of my shoes to see his name come up on the screen, where Rachel had just been downloading something. It was like I felt I was IMing her somehow. Then I felt like I imagined I'd feel if my vacuum cleaner had just achieved sentience and was vacuuming the room by itself.

"It's him," said Rachel, with a particular nervous excitement to her voice.

"Who?" I said, playing dumb. I leaned over her shoulder.

It was an IM from pton008, and as I watched in silence, the conversation spun out:

pton008: Hey, what's up?
vinylnites: Hey, haven't talked with you for a long time.
pton008: I suck at talking.
vinylnites: You're good at talking! You're like a thousand times better at it than most boys are! You even use punctuation!
pton008: What's up with the concert?
vinylnites: I already went... that was on friday... I told you you could come!!
pton008: What did you think?
vinylnites: It was okay... I would have liked it better if more people than Lynn had been able to go.

At this point there was a wickedly long pause. I was going to say something when I realized Rachel was more focused on the computer screen than anything else. She was tapping her heel on the floor and fidgeting with the mouse. So I didn't say anything, but as the seconds dragged on, my stomach sank and sank. Finally, after about two minutes:

pton008: What are you doing this weekend?
vinylnites: Nothing... why?
pton008: Just thinking.
vinylnites: You could come over and look at my car, if you want. It would probably only take a few minutes. You don't have to hang out long, if you're busy.
pton008: I'm sometimes pretty busy.
vinylnites: I know. I'm glad you stopped to talk with me though.
pton008: I kind of like talking with you.
vinylnites: You know, you could call me. If you ever needed to talk about something. I don't mind.
pton008: I was wondering what you thought about the playoffs.
vinylnites: Random! In basketball? I don't know, I'm flattered though, I've never had a guy ask me for my opinion about sports.
pton008: Sports can be important.
vinylnites: I guess so.
pton008: Well, I gotta go. Nice talking with you though!
vinylnites: Okay, don't study too hard.

I suddenly hated that bastard.

Rachel turned around to face me. She was drooping. "See what I mean? What's going on there? Does he like me, or not? Why would he keep IMing me if he wasn't interested? God. I want him to talk to me more than I've wanted any guy in my life."

Jesus Christ.

I tried to hate Rachel too, for her girly idiocy, like good old times, but it was too terrible. The whole thing was too horrifying. It wasn't even like a science fiction story in the year 3000 where a chick falls in love with an android that's been programmed for love. It was 2006 and Preston was a fucking IM chat bot. That I pretty much made myself. That I made that way for a reason. It was that last bit that was too much. I had no idea what I felt about it, other than horror. I didn't want to think about it.

"Guys are assholes," I said again, feebly.

Then, "I certainly am."

Rachel ignored me. "If I could only get to know him," she whimpered.

I shut down the program when I went home. Preston never IMed anybody again, and Rachel eventually found a guy (named Anders) who could treat her like a second-class citizen in person. And I never mentioned what I did to Rachel or to anybody else.

I did do one thing, though: I asked a girl out myself, for the first time in a year. Her name is Allison and she has amazing hair and likes backrubs and gifts for no reason. I used to have no confidence. Now I know it was stupid to doubt myself. I mean, who knows more about what women want than me?

What we do to our friends, Part 1

I never could resist a challenge. So when I heard Rachel mention offhand that she'd always be able to tell the difference between a person and a computer, the wheels were set into motion of their own accord.

Rachel was talking out her ass, of course. She didn't know anything about AI. She had a perception of computers and a perception of people, and never the twain shall meet. And I'm sure she never realized that the best way to tell if somebody was for real or not wasn't to know them, but to know yourself.

I knew some things about Rachel that she didn't.

When I downloaded the open-source Jack*bot, I already knew what I had in mind. I wasn't going to play this thing strictly on the level; I wanted to be certain of success. I wanted to modify Jack so that he engaged Rachel's emotions. She'd be too busy feeling whatever... guilt, alarm... lust... to even stop and think about thinking he might not be for real.

So the first thing I did was change Jack's name, of course, to Preston, because it sounded rich and stuck-up. Rachel has this thing about rich boys: she assumes one will never fall for her. I've always taken this to mean she desperately wants one to fall for her.

The second thing I did was drastically increase the lag time for some of Preston's responses. By which I mean I made it random. Totally random. I also made the amount of time after which Preston chose to close the conversation random.

The third thing I did was to program in a bunch of conversational dead ends. Now, the people who made Jack*bot were pretty bright people. They put a lot of work into it. When you discussed something with Jack, he remembered exactly what was being discussed, and would continue with it until the topic seemed to shift to something else. A conversation with Jack might run something like this:

You: Hello Jack.
Jack: Hey, Mike. What's up?
You: Dude, I'm so stressed. I've been studying for this final forever.
Jack: How long have you been studying?
You: I feel like I've been studying all week.
Jack: Dude, all week is a lot like forever.
You: I know.
Jack: I'm not a big fan of studying.
You: I know. I'd rather be out on the slopes.
Jack: Imagine if you'd been out on the slopes all week instead!

Incredibly vapid, but also incredibly coherent -- and most male conversations are incredibly vapid from my perspective anyway. Homework, chicks, sports and video games only have so many essential themes.

Well, that was exactly the opposite of what I wanted from Preston. Rather than vapid and coherent, I wanted, you might say, deep and incoherent. Jack*bot wasn't exactly designed with a personality; he was capable of random mild likes and dislikes, and had at least a couple hundred topics he could introduce given a lull in the conversation, but was mostly designed to pick up on what you said and turn it back to you. Preston had a personality.

A deeply repressed one.

Preston did not like himself. This would have mysterious causes, however, because of the number of times he kept changing the subject. And let's not forget, he was also rich. So I programmed in the chance for a few random "I suck at " and "my BMW" and "my mom's wedding business"s in the conversation.

After a few weeks of testing, I let him loose on Rachel. I had him programmed to get in touch with her again at totally random intervals, and to remember conversation topics between sessions. I programmed him to IM Rachel for the first time with a very simple opening line: "I suck at this... are you Rachel?"

I had my fingers crossed. When I didn't hear anything from Rachel for a few days, I was pretty damn disappointed. But I sure as hell wasn't going to ask if she'd had any new guys IMing her lately. I wasn't going to do a thing to jeopardize this. She was not going to suspect it was my doing. So I just waited.

Until I forgot about it.

Six MONTHS later, she finally mentions Preston to me.

Night of the cassowaries

Geoff dreamed about lucid dreaming before he actually did it. It was exhilarating within the dream and frustrating once he woke up. But after the initial disappointment, he decided to focus on the exhilarating aspect.

He was on a beach, in the dark. It was night. The beach wasn't exactly a beach entire; it was edged somehow in the upper reaches of his mind by walls, as if it were in fact a very large exhibit space. A space in a museum designed to look like a beach. But it was definitely night. The stars were out.

He saw a number of birds stalking the beach. They were great grey birds, elegant in their humble feathers, with long necks and legs. They were tending their chicks, which peeped out of holes in the ground.

"We're cassowaries," said a dignified bird to him.

It's remarkable... do I even know that word? thought Geoff within the dream. It's amazing that I'd dream about cassowaries.

There was a turtle at the beach, too. An anthropomorphic turtle, or turtle-man, that walked on its hind legs and turned to bite him with a long turtle beak--

This is too strange, thought Geoff on the instant. I'm lucid dreaming! And he knew then that he should be able to control the dream.

The turtle didn't bite him.

"No, I'd rather ride you," he told the turtle.

"Where do you want to ride me?" asked the turtle, suddenly a friend to man.

"I want to fly on you," said Geoff, because he knew that people were supposed to take advantage of the ability to fly in lucid dreams. He felt he had scarcely any time to think, but that that would be a good choice -- and before he knew it, it was happening. He felt a whoosh of liftoff, which he reflected was indeed pleasurable... but then the scene became hazy. He was not, it seemed, flying anywhere at all.

He found himself in a hallway with his academic advisor, discovering that he had asked her for a massage. A good idea for a lucid dream, he thought as she began to rub his arm pleasurably, there where they stood in the hallway. Then he wondered why, if he could do anything he wanted, he bothered to ask his academic advisor when he could, for instance, ask Halle Berry. He went to go find her, and the dream dissolved.

When Geoff woke, he knew instantly that he hadn't had a lucid dream at all. He hadn't been a bit conscious. He was intrigued on two counts though--

"I amazed I even know the word cassowary," as he told roommate Paul, and

If I'm dreaming that I'm having a lucid dream, it's at least in my consciousness... and I must be getting closer.

It came to me in a dream

I've written a number of things based on dreams I had, and it's a compelling source of inspiration for me, though maybe not for the usual reason. It's not so much that my dreams are beautiful or otherworldly or creative as much as they often proceed in story format, which so much of my writing doesn't. My dreams often have a beginning and a middle, even if I wake up before the end, and that's a lot more than my waking story ideas have.

So here's a piece based on one of the strange dreams I dreamed early this morning.

The City of New Orleans

They were called "Essence polarizers" and when they came out, it turned the tourist industry on its head. Even when the patented process was only being performed by one lonely lab in West Virginia, in 2037 the glasses and camera filters had spread all over the country. Some owned their own; most folks looking for a cheap(er) thrill rented them when visiting Gettysburg, old Salem, the local inn. But the most impressive application I ever saw was when I visited old New Orleans in the fall of that year.

Every window on the train was made out of EP glass. I remembered wandering through with a friend, trying to choose a place to sit. There were EP picture windows and EP portholes; all the tables were decked with white cloth. I slipped into a chair on the edge of one of the big windows, wondering if they really meant to serve us dinner in front of this show. The inside of all the cars was papered burgundy, with polished wood trim. It was very fine; someone had spent a lot of money; but what I remember most was the white tablecloths.

My friend sat across the table from me as the train began to pull forward. It rode into old New Orleans, and we began to see the ruins of houses... the walls were half gone, and we could see the kitchens and living rooms and bedrooms, their lines, as if they were cross-sections of houses cut for viewing, which perhaps they were... and I could see the ghosts. They looked just like people. If I hadn't known they were ghosts, the show would have been boring. Perhaps once every ten houses, we would see one or two. An old man or grandmother, or a young couple. They were walking through the rooms of their homes; they were taking out the trash, mowing the lawn. Occasionally I would see a shifting or wavering as a spirit faded in and out within my view; sometimes one would disappear mid-chore, or another appear.

The effect was little more than mundane at first, but as the train rode on, I began to feel more and not less affected. It was in part the sheer numbers. The tour went on. This is real, I thought; all these people were real. I put my face closer to the window and peered as the twilight began to come on. The grimy and white gaping interiors of houses flashed by. We were surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses.

By its grace

It was Catholicism's greatest battle of the 23rd century. Petula Peters seemed to stand alone against the Pope and all his adherents, but she did not. There were thousands of silent watchers who had a very strong interest in how she'd fare.

They were silent because it wasn't in their genes to want what she wanted, do what she did. Not yet. Petula was an anomaly. And though she'd been checked out by a dozen specialists already, mostly at the request of the press, no one quite knew why or how the android had found religion.

There were certainly theories. That she was a good early example of true sentience; that something had gone haywire in the code governing her desire to fit in; that Petula wasn't an android at all, just a robot programmed by mischievous creators to parrot the same religious platitudes the human masses had been parroting for years.

The "just a robot" hypothesis would be discarded by anyone who met her. The lithe, steely-jawed android was deft and nuanced in her interviews. "I don't think I could give you a better answer than any human could," she'd say. "I'm doing this because it just feels right."

"When you say 'feels,' what do you mean?" asked a reporter.

Her shoulders shrugged with a click. "It is beyond thought. I sense something in me that isn't thought, and I call it feeling."

As for why the Catholic Church in particular, Petula was more certain. "The tradition," she said without pause. "The rites. The Latin. The incense."

"Can you smell?" asked another reporter.

"Yes. I can smell incense."

Someone started to ask what incense smelled like to a robot, but was interrupted by a question more pressing: "What do you think of the Church's refusal to allow an android to join its ranks?"

Petula Peters took a long pause, her silvery eyelids sheathing down. "They think that to admit me would be to undermine Catholicism, to mock it, to profane its sacredness. It is hard for me to understand. Surely true sacredness cannot be brought low; but I might by its grace be lifted up."

Save the sea turtles

Harriet wished she could do something about sea turtles. That was the kind of woman she was. The line at the grocery store didn't bother her, but the lack of sea turtles did. She was standing beside the latest copy of L.A. Expose thinking about whether they couldn't put embargos on countries who didn't protect sea turtle nesting grounds.

She heard there were only a hundred mating pairs of Kemp's Ridley sea turtles left in the world. She imagined them; slow, their shells worn and marred, hauling themselves onto a sandy Mexican beach in the middle of the night, a male and a female turtle. She imagined them going up together, as a pair. Old. Worn out in a way the rest of the world was just beginning to show.

The woman two in front of her was trying to pay by check. It was always a woman who tried to pay by check. Did men even use checks? Maybe men were more likely to pay with a wad of cash. She had known a man who got his rent money when he paid for groceries, asking for $600 cash back. He never went to the bank.

The woman directly in front of her looked back, and Harriet moved her eyes down the the racks of gum.

She felt like if people would just put a little bit of effort into caring more about the environment, her own life would be better. She felt like maybe the woman in front of her wouldn't wear so much make-up if she were more in touch with the Earth. That, Harriet thought, would improve her life in itself. There were children the next row over who were whining. It was horrible. They wanted candy. If they spent less time in front of the television, Harriet thought, they wouldn't be so tempted by candy. They'd have seen fewer commercials. Kids should spend as much time outdoors as possible.

It was chilly in the store. The air was cooled but unmoving somehow. She could smell the ground beef she picked up. Should she be able to smell that? Through the packaging? Should she take it back? She pulled her cart behind her as she came up to the belt, sliding the plastic divider behind the other woman's jumbo box of diapers.

There was a couple behind her. She kept catching them in her field of view as she loaded her bananas, yogurts, boxes of cereal and cans of soup onto the belt. They were impatient. Not with her; just impatient. The pimply young man kept starting new sentences that began with "Well I'm gonna go--" get the car started, exchange the bag of chips for a less smashed one, cash a check. The woman kept cutting him short. "Jesus," she said twice. "It's almost seven."

Harriet was deciding that the couple should use the opportunity of being in line at the grocery store to practice patience (which should surely improve their relationship too) when she noticed that her six-pack of cola was being bagged by a teenager who was lifting it up with her fingers between the cans, by the webbing of plastic that Harriet had somehow been oblivious to but now knew must be there.

"Wait!" she blurted, but no one noticed in the clinking and thumping evening bustle. She froze as she watched the colas go into the plastic bag. She felt, absurdly, like she was watching it in slow motion. The young bagger put her blue corn chips in on top. The cola was buried. Harriet felt a lump congeal in her abdomen. Those plastic things killed thousands of animals a year! Weren't they outlawed? She hadn't seen one in years. She had to do something.

"That's it?" the cashier was asking.

Harriet turned back to the cashier, open-mouthed. She was about to ask if it was possible to un-scan items when she saw the poster by the cashier's head; the little pull-off cards allowing shoppers to donate one, five or ten dollars to hunger relief. She ripped off the biggest one and handed it over.

The cashier smiled.

Harriet would cut up the plastic webbing when she got home.

The day Mini-teki came to Fruholm

For the 50th annual Mini-teki tournament, they emptied the streets of Fruholm, Denmark. In fact, they emptied the buildings too. The entire town was made into a ghost town. They were calling it Major-teki, as if they were inventing a new game. But the game was the same.

A bit like life itself, the game had survived in popularity so long by creating the most complex situations from the simplest rules. With each piece captured by one player, the conditions changed for the others, always according to the rules. The game was no more random than chess. But the depth of its rules, or "genes," would have made the game hell to play with wooden pieces on a board, without a chip to do the calculations. But Mini-teki was perfect for Fruholm; or perhaps Fruholm was perfect for Mini-teki.

The town of Fruholm never had a traffic jam. Not one. The town was not the ant colony the century had made out of most urban concentrations; its tiny cars lacked the sensors that let cars in America or Britain or Japan confer with overhead cams to make decisions about which streets were to best take during rush hour. These cars made no decisions at all. They were every one a slave to Fruholm Traffic Control.

That was the finest but not the only centralization of Fruholm's business. Every pedestrian crossing on the blind, narrow European streets was handled by the Traffic Control as well. Fibers laid in the road changed color when it was safe for pedestrians to cross; red swaths turned to green ones whenever the cars were diverted around that stretch of street. To an aircar hovering above, the town on a busy day already appeared like nothing so much as a giant game board.

But there was one final cap to that delightful symmetry. The cars that peppered Fruholm's streets were not privately owned; they were held and maintained by the city, nearly every one a silver subcompact handy for running errands and visiting friends. Anyone could swipe his card by the door, disengage the car from the charging post and rent it for as long as it took to return to another charger. The cars were shiny and immaculate. (The citizens were, of course, Danes.) The cars were also identical; but in a fit of practical whimsy, the planners had installed a bright plastic LED box on the top of each one, rather like the signature of a taxi cab. What colors and patterns the box displayed could be chosen by the driver, allowing townsfolk with imperfect memories to find their car again in the cinema parking lot. They might program a car with their names, with patterns, with pictograms of turtles and cats.

The display could also be chosen by Traffic Control. This made a handy way to alert police in the rare instance a wanted notable used his card to rent a car; this day, however, as the cars were remotely disengaged from their posts, each wore on its roof a cap of solid red, blue, yellow or green. The streets were silent. The citizens of Fruholm were at the houses of friends or enjoying the free lunch at the soccer stadium two towns over. On the stadium's giant screen was the view from one of the aircars stationed above the town: the town's organically laid streets curved and looped about each other, the intersections blinking red and green as the crosswalks were tested, the colors reversed now to indicate whether or not game pieces, rather than people, could pass.

It was a perfect day; overcast, but not raining, allowing the LED boxes and the road strips to stand out through the gloom. It was almost noon. In a booth at the top of the stadium, the four contestants waited.

The marathon tourists

I was confused.

All I knew for right now was that I was riding in a rickshaw, a bicycle rickshaw, going up a very large hill, and it was about a hundred and fifteen degrees out. In the back of my mind I was making plans for what to do when the driver collapsed of a heart attack. I'd been up for three days now, and I didn't feel tired at all. I just felt incapable of remembering the smallest things.

"Are we going back to the hotel?" I asked Bart.

"Honey, we don't have a hotel, remember?" he said. I swear Bart was as bad off as me, but his inability to tolerate not being a know-it-all gave him the extra motivation necessary to get his lump of gray matter working. "We're going to the temple."

"Is the temple open right now?"

"He says it is." Bart nodded at the driver, whose hair was as wet as if he'd just stepped out of the ocean.

"Remind me what we did today."

Bart struggled for a moment, then pulled out his camera and flipped through the images. Us at a street market... I suppose I remembered that... us at the beach, us next to an unsmiling monk, me on a hill in front of the sunrise. I had no memory of that sunrise.

"It's almost eight o'clock," he said. "Let's take the pills." And I washed the tiny white thing down with his bottle of water because this was how we planned it. You had to jump through a lot of hoops to get these pills in the United States. But in Thailand? Heck, they wanted you to have them. Developed for the military fifteen years ago, they were now ready for the consumer: sleep in a bottle, or sort of. Not only would they keep you awake, they sidled around many of the inconvenient side effects of sleep deprivation: poor judgment, depression, hallucinations. Whatever the body did with itself while you were asleep, the pills allowed it to happen while you were awake. Except for one thing.

"Honey," I laughed, "I have no idea where the hell you took that picture."

I stared at my own image. It might as well have been someone else. My brain's ability to preserve new memories was operating at a severe handicap. Yet that was part of the plan too. It was all part of the plan. Skip the hotels, stay awake for a week, see everything we could and never go back to Thailand again. And the memories? What memories? Live for the moment, we said.

"Neither do I," he said, as the rickshaw began to coast down the other side of the hill. "Isn't it great?"

Whoops

So I tried to make the latter part of the story jive with what had gone before, even after I'd decided earlier bits of it didn't make much sense. I thought it'd be a good exercise to practice internal consistency. But some of it's still incongruous. Note the amazing vanishing $2 million.

I put that in there to show that Anita had given up "everything" in her quest for Keith; not just her time and all her emotional energy, but also the funds she might have used to start her own business someday. And then I had to stick a section in later to justify why someone'd have to give up their life savings to participate in a government project. I also wondered a bit whether $2 million would seem a bit paltry to be a psychiatrist's life savings 150 years from now. Anyway, as I approached the end of the story, I just couldn't find a graceful way to bring the money back up, so I let it be. Now I'm thinking that I might want to bring it back in in rewrites, but less as a lump sum than as a continuous investiture in getting close to Keith. Kind of like the woman who invests in a gym membership in order to meet men.

The story also took a final turn I didn't expect. I'd always had it in my head that she was going to the moon out of a desire to be close to him, even while I'd always also known he wouldn't be there, that he'd never be selected. When I actually got to writing the part where he reveals he's not going, I realized it just didn't make sense for her to stay on the list out of some kind of loyalty to his unrealized dreams, or even out of a sense of feeling trapped in some way by her commitment. Suddenly the moon presented a convenient escape from her failure, a nicely despairing self-banishment, and also partly her first act of taking a step in the right direction, even if she's doing it for the wrong reasons. I think in the next version I'll write in a scene in which she thinks it over and decides to stay in the running.

I'm not sure what's next up for me... I had been wanting to write a story about a hotel developer about 30 years in the future, though that one might be for the "wrong" reasons too... that is, it's the only idea with anything like a plot that I've thought up in a long time. There's a somewhat faulty reasoning there. Something like "He's the only man who's called me in the past year, so why don't I just marry him." But I think help is in sight.

The book I'd been reading (until I had to return it to the library, anyway) was very heavy on the inseparability of plot and character. Plot, it averred, is what characters do next -- asserting that plot problems can be solved by changing the nature of your character. Now I see that. Stories get a lot easier to write when you have a character who really wants something. And would do just about anything to get it. Woe is the writer who writes what she knows when she knows more about suppressing desires than living them out.

On the library bulletin board is a sheet advertising the Random House 20by20 essay contest. That is, they're selecting 20 essays by 20-somethings for some collection or other. Essays meant to give some kind of interesting insights into what it's like to be a 20-something these days. I recognize that in one sense I ought to submit something, because of my ability to put a sentence together, and my ability to appreciate money. But I'm not sure I have the kind of subject matter they're looking for. I recognize the basic passivity of most of my life. It's more amusing to me now than depressing, but it's not particularly good fodder for stories.

Anyway... this story idea came to me when I was reading an essay about SF writing that said "Imagine a future invention, then imagine who would be hurt by it." And the news provides plenty of ideas about future inventions. I read a story about developments by the military in the field of keeping people awake for longer, without significant side effects. And it seemed to me that we were not so very far from being able to negate the need for sleep for a week at a time. Now supposing people could just pop a pill and stay up all night, no problems. Who'd be hurt? Which industries depend on our need to sleep? (Besides the pharmaceutical industry itself, that is.)

The Uncanny Influence of Keith Wright, Part 10

My reaction to Lysa took me totally by surprise. After she let me in and disappeared to mind the stove, I stood huddled in the foyer a long moment. I had known it was her even before she introduced herself, and the introduction at least was nothing special; she had heard of me, she waved me in. Her looks were nothing very special; I had seen them before in pictures; she was tall, nearly as tall as Keith, lean, her hair cropped a bit severely, looking all the world like the no-nonsense activist he had described her as. And she was perfectly cordial.

And I was thrown. Somehow when she materialized, the dim reality I'd kept bundled inside me took on a new wonder. This was the real woman, the recipient of his sunny attentions -- and I was the shadow, an absence, a dark and blurry image of her. I had always expected that when I finally met his wife I'd feel jealous. I didn't feel jealous at all. From the start I felt a certain comfort and admiration... to know, I suppose, that this negative space I occupied had its genesis not in a void, but in a cooperation. Because truly it's not the sun who casts the shade, or the willow who casts the shade, but both of them together. I didn't think I would find room for Lysa in my pinched world, but I did. She was a part of him.

Keith's house was not terribly large, and within five steps I had already found my way to a chair in the corner of the living room, where Rich and some sandal-clad fellows I didn't know were discussing fishing regulations. I coasted through introductions and then dutifully tuned them out. I am no activist. I could hear Keith's voice from somewhere beyond the walls. He was speaking with his wife. They were making drinks. While Rich talked, I began to study the walls. I hadn't been in someone else's home since I'd found my last ex's class ring, and duty necessitated my trekking down to Santa Barbara to return it to him. In fact, Keith's living room bore a certain resemblance to my ex's -- it was stuffed to the ceiling with books on every wall, from ancient college texts to current bestsellers. In this case I was able to imagine the inhabitants actually having read them.

When Keith appeared with the drinks, he halted before my little chair with a great grin on his face. "Hey! Glad you could come! You want something to drink?" he asked, and I had half a mind to blurt out a yes, but I had to decline -- "No, I don't drink, thank you though" and let him think of it what he would.

"How about juice?"

"Sure, thank you."

"How about a man?"

"What?"

"You're single, right?"

"I'm unencumbered."

"Connor is single. You guys should get together." He pointed to with his chin to a stocky chap in sandals who was leaning against the opposite bookcase, then he left. I looked at Connor. Connor wasn't paying attention. I was, as we know, taken, in the worst way; it just didn't seem polite to mention it. Then I laughed.

I spent the first part of the evening in my chair, but as the night wore on I felt it right to get up and spend some time chatting with Keith's friends. It was a bit more of a party now, at least, noisy and hot in the crowded kitchen, which for some reason had become the center point of the interaction, leaving the unloved chairs to sulk beneath the bookcases. The election results were in, and the crowing was petering out, so the talk had turned to other things.

"Yes!" said Keith, flushed in his college T-shirt. The drink had made him even more himself, and his words bounced breathless from his throat. "While you all are miserable in the weather, we're going to be... eating hydroponic asparagus and having wonderfully witty dinner parties with the best minds on the globe. That were on the globe."

"When you signed up, were you as drunk as you are now?"

"No... nonsense. I was nearly only half as drunk as I am now."

I stood on tiptoes to try to get a better view of him. The man was being deliberately silly. He was sticking the point of a cocktail umbrella between his lips. And all eyes were on him, though it seemed less for the cocktail umbrella than for something I'd missed.

"How'd you get your name on the list?"

"We're both on it. I made a few calls after lunch today."

I was getting tense as a bowstring, and I couldn't stand it. What the hell was he talking about? I lunged past the woman in front of me, smacking my hip against the corner of the kitchen countertop. "What are you on?" I blurted. My voice sounded loud even in the clamor of two dozen drunk thirty- and forty-somethings.

He drew the toothpick from his lips and grinned. "The list of candidates for the lunar colony. Baby."

I felt the wrinkles creep onto my brow. I hadn't had a single drink but I felt fuzzy as a wool blanket. "What?" I was embarrassing myself.

Keith laughed out loud. "You work too hard. You need to veg out in front of a screen more often. The colony! First citizen colony! You know? The moon?"

I supposed I had heard something about that, though it must have placed itself only dimly in my mind at the time. Keith was going on obnoxiously, "...that big white thing in the sky? Made of cheese... turns women into raving lunatics... wait, that's all of the time..." as my mind scrabbled at the crumbling slope. Why was Keith on a list of candidates for a lunar colony? And why hadn't he mentioned this before? Pain stabbed at the insides of my ribs. My throat was constricting. What was going on?

I swallowed. "You never mentioned anything about wanting to go to the moon," I said, the words so feeble I hated myself the instant they were out. He laughed again, making my heart reel. I was losing my grip on something, so completely I even felt the betraying pricks of tears start in my eyes. His arm was around his silent wife; he was leaning against the sink, away from me. "Well, contrary to popular belief, I don't talk about everything!" he said in great mirth; and then:

"You should apply too. They need a psychologist. I'll make sure you get on."

His eyes were bluer than the din in the tiny house was loud. I heard myself say, with the utmost control, "Yes, I'd like that," and I slipped back to the outskirt of the room, on the edge of the cool hallway, to half-listen to him ramble about the selection process. I felt like I'd just stepped away from a railless observation post on a thousand-foot skyscraper, and was still jittery with fear and drained exhilaration. I didn't know anything about the lunar colony, but the very words assured me it'd be a tight environment in which the inhabitants would be forced to depend on and interact with each other. Intensively. Even if the endeavor were large, even if there were several hundred people... my mind did the math. And what if it were small... what if it were rapturously tiny? What if it were a colony of just, say, thirty people? Who would surely get to know each other very well indeed... I felt as though I might be on the doorstep to heaven.

My heart was still trembling an hour later when Keith's guests began to drift home. The party thinned to the point where I began to feel visible, and so I got up to leave. Keith himself, waxing sober, jumped up to walk me to the door, which stood all of ten feet away.

"Thanks for coming!" he said, cheery and tired, his lean hand on the doorknob. He smiled at me. The light from the living room left some of the planes of his aging face in shadow, lending him a particularly thoughtful and attractive look. And when I couldn't find a single thing to say, I found myself pushing suddenly up on tiptoe and throwing my arms about his neck, so hard I heard my own palms thump against his back.

Keith grunted unintelligibly.

I could feel the muscles of his shoulders through his thin shirt. I was shocked at how warm his skin was. I had forgotten how warm other people were. I couldn't see anything but the smooth wood of the door in front of me, but the smell of his soap was in my nose. I felt him shift slightly, and when for another fraction of a second he hesistated to return the embrace, I let go. "Good night," I said, and escaped out the door.

Two days later, in the office, he said that he had "been dropped from the list, of course... I know way too many people." He was painfully blithe. "Lysa told me the only reason she let me sign us up was because she knew we wouldn't get on anyway. She said she's only moving to the moon if my mother moves next door to us. Those two are like cats and dogs. Lysa's funny though. She never says anything bad about my mother. She just... won't be around her."

I was still processing the events of the party. My mind couldn't take this precarious irregularity. For a moment, I nearly lost it -- by which I mean I nearly snapped at him, shouted, said something insulting. I could have chosen from any of a dozen avenues of attack. His undependability, his irrationality, his inappropriateness, his cluelessness... his carelessness with money... his insistence on making editorial changes that "felt right" but didn't make any sense... but I grabbed the controls back in time, and then again just before my madness convinced me to kiss him square on the lips.

After I backed off the hair's edge I let a sadness seep over me. I was not winning this. I had been losing since the day I saw him. Nothing about a relationship with Keith was going to make my life more certain.

"You're still in the running, though, you know." He'd come to half-sit on the edge of my desk, cradling the handful of pretzels he'd chosen for lunch. "Mara Xavier says they've already started investigating your credentials and they're very impressed. Because you're brilliant, and you're obviously not some kind of hot-shot glory hog." He quietly crunched a pretzel in his mouth, watching me.

I didn't ask who Mara Xavier was. I didn't think I had anything left to say. When he offered me one of his pretzels, I took it.

The rest is not exactly history, but maybe it should be. Keith was bizarrely excited about my remarkable endurance with the selection committee. Every time he introduced me to someone new, he'd mention it. His damned eyes would light up. "She's one of the top contenders for a spot in the colony," he'd say, and I'd mumble something self-effacing, though where he got the idea that I was at the top was a mystery to me. I found out much later that Keith had been up till midnight some nights making calls and pulling strings to get people to read whatever the psychology boards had sent over on me. Some senator from California told me. I don't even remember his name. A national senator, not a state one. "I always found that boy a bit slimy," he said, "but god damn if he didn't know how to make you feel good about doing something that was originally his idea. In the end he turned us on to a good thing." I was near to reflexively rebutting him on "slimy" until I remembered my manners.

Interestingly, he never asked me why I'd want to go to the moon. Sometimes Keith assumed everybody thought like he did. I was grateful that he didn't ask.

The day the final selections were announced, Keith was out of town, but he gave me a call, or tried. The receptors in his hotel room weren't working, and no visual transfer was possible, which was fine, he said, "because I can't find my razor anyway." I had already put on my goggles and didn't bother to take them off. Everything was dark, except his voice.

"Congratulations, doctor," he said.

I chuckled. It was strange hearing his voice in my ears, and nothing else. He might have been right next to me. "Thank you," I said.

"You excited?"

"I'm excited about not having to pay rent anymore," I quipped.

"Do me a favor, all right?"

"What's that?"

"You gotta write a story for me. That's what I would have done. Something romantic. Very wild west." His voice had a little bit of a cheerful hoarseness to it, around the edges. I'd never noticed that before. It tickled my ears.

"You say the strangest things. You don't want me to shoot anybody, I hope?"

"Whoops -- Lysa says if I don't shave soon she's going to divorce me. Gotta go. Listen, congratulations, don't do anything I wouldn't do, don't talk to any little green men, uh, keep your chin up, keep everybody sane, and have fun!"

I was wondering how to reply to his mouthful of excited banalities when I realized he'd already hung up. I never saw him or spoke with him again.

Now I'm all alone. The square window above me shows a sky desperate with blackness and stars, the opposite of consolation. There is something perfect about the emptiness, above and below. There is an ache, but no sadness in it. Even the ache is wanting.

Then I hear the scratch of the big door behind me opening. I jerk upright in my chair. It's Siraman.

"Anita?"

Something in me pricks up involuntarily at my name, but I don't answer.

"I followed you up the stairs... I hope it's okay... I was wondering if I could talk with you."

I'm waiting for him to incriminate himself, make up his own reason to leave. Do the work for me. My empty mind is touched briefly by a dot of thought. Does he not see I'm in my bathrobe?

Siraman is sitting down across from me, and I feel a rising urge to flee. What is wrong with him? The man is oblivious to body language. He's obviously taken my silence as assent. "Things haven't been so good for me," he blurts suddenly, his voice actually cracking halfway through the sentence.

"What's going on?" It comes out before I can stop it.

"It's this place... I think..." the quiet writer's face is crunched, damp. "I don't know, I just feel so lonely. It's so empty here. Is that crazy?"

"Do you remember when you first started to feel that way?" I'm leaning toward him now. I had no idea how conditioned I was.

Siraman's face uncrunches slightly and he looks up at the wall behind me, as if something interesting had come to him. "I... yeah. It was after it got quiet. After the press stopped buzzing all the time for stories." He takes in half a breath, then lets out a rush of words in wonderment: "I liked it when things were exciting. I loved having something to talk about. It got so quiet after that. You know, I didn't really think about what it'd be like up here. I didn't realize it'd be so everyday. Maybe I'm just not cut out for this. Maybe I should have them send me home."

My gut guides me. "Why did you sign up for the project?"

Another half-breath pause. "Oh, because I thought it'd be exciting. Because I knew I'd be in the press, because there'd be articles, because my name would get out there." He speaks quickly now. "I knew it would help me out. I knew that whatever I wrote after this, I'd at least have a chance. I thought somehow this would get me a steady paycheck, that I wouldn't have to worry anymore about money all the time. I thought things would finally be all right. No wonder I'm miserable. I don't care about the moon at all."

I nod, gratified in advance by the sigh of relief about to come. But it doesn't come. Siraman is hunched; the corners of his mouth drag down. "I took somebody else's spot because I wanted the paycheck it'd give me. I might have taken this away from somebody who really deserved it, who'd been dying to go to the moon since they were a kid."

I barely know the man, and I can't bear to see him like this, twisted up by self-hatred. "No," I say. Even as I open my mouth I feel what's happening, but I do it anyway. "No, don't think of things in terms of 'deserve' or 'don't deserve.' You were picked to be here. You're here now--"

He's cut me off. "You don't think my motivation was totally selfish?"

"I think it was totally human," I hear myself say -- and I'm grateful now for my own competence, because though I hear no tremor in my voice, inside I'm finally breaking. I feel it falling apart. I can't cry in front of this man, whoever he is, but I am dissolving inside, in such a hot rush I'm grateful not just for the strength in my limbs but for this chair that holds me up. The sadness is like a hot river in flood, sweeping away each grain of sediment before I even know what it is. The feeling is rich and deep, poignant past any remembrance of emptiness. I am in it; I am it.

I'm surprised I still have the ears to hear him speak. "I've felt so bad about it... about everything... it's been so hard. I don't believe it. All this time."

The thoughts come to me with the tide. You think money is bad? I fell for a client, so hard I didn't know which way was up.

"They were right. You're good. You're a godsend, Anita. I should have talked to you sooner. I should have done something sooner..."

I fell for a man; now I'm just a woman. And I'm free. I wrap the unnoticed bathrobe a little tighter around my drowning, surging, singing grief. My own voice, when I hear it, would be lost in my ears but for sudden peal of my own certainty.

"No," I tell him. "It's all right."

Past time

So I'm reading my little book about story structure and it's mostly stuff I've read before, but I guess I never really paid attention to it. It is hitting with more impact now.

There's a neat section of the book that talks about the reasons why people are drawn to bad story ideas. "Truth" is one of them. People are drawn to write about stuff that's true.

A bit later on, the book mentions one of the most important things in a story, which is an active character.

I have written a story about a passive character. Why'd I do that? Because it's True. There've been plenty of times in my life where I just let stuff happen to me, so I thought, what if? and hell yeah, the fact that if you just let stuff happen you end up somewhere you don't want to be is one of the truths of life.

It just didn't occur to me -- and I guess it doesn't occur to many -- that a truth so powerful isn't a good candidate for a story.

The whole Keith Wright story is about the narrator's passivity. That's the bone and muscle of it. Which means that to make the story into something salable, I'll have to completely change it, make it about something else. Change the character and I change the plot. Instead of the narrator being a repressed, mostly harmless intellectual frozen by consuming passion, make her a repressed, Machiavellian intellectual spurred into action by consuming passion.

Which, incidentally, makes me less passive a writer. I will choose the story to tell, rather than just letting it happen.

But I'm still going to finish up the final part as I originally planned, so you [who?] will see how, exactly, someone could shoot for a man and hit the moon instead.

I'm still stuck with the fact that I chose the moon as a metaphor rather than a natural offshoot of the story. But I may as well stick with it, since SF is easier to sell than regular fiction. Write it as "the story of the first psychologist on the moon."

I must put this passive saga to bed.

The Uncanny Influence of Keith Wright, Part 9

"You don't need a secretary," I told him.

Keith grunted through a mouthful of doughnut. "I want a secretary. It made things so much easier when I was a senator."

"You're not a senator. You're an editor. Of sixteen pages a month."

"Cheryl was a huge help. Just having someone around to bounce ideas off of. She was psychic, too, she always knew when to go out and get me a sandwich."

"Think like a businessman. You answer the calls yourself, not only do you have more money for things like marketing, but you're more hands on, you have a better handle of what's coming and going."

"And who am I supposed to flirt with?"

I wondered if he was playing with me. "Rich."

"You really don't think I need a secretary?"

"No. And I think you'd enjoy doing that work yourself anyway."

He sighed. "You're the boss." He was sitting in the office's only chair, beside the only table, which currently supported only a console, a picture of Lysa on top of a mountain and a box of doughnuts. I was standing. Keith and Rich had moved the table and the chair in this morning, offering repeated assurances that I'd have my own space as long as I was helping them. But Rich had disappeared and there I was with Keith in the echoing, chair-deprived room. It was three weeks after what had turned out to be our final session. The ink on his exit survey, fluttering anonymously off to the West Coast Psychology Report offices, was barely dry. If they knew what I was doing now, my license would be gone before another three weeks was up.

Keith had no idea. It had clearly never occurred to him -- or maybe he assumed that if I wasn't allowed to hire myself out to a client, I'd have said something. He had a trust in my professionalism that bordered on religious faith.

"Well, you're the boss. It's really up to you."

"No, no." He waved me off. "If you think I don't need one..." He flicked a finger at the console screen. "Marketing, do it in-house or outsource it?"

"You and Rich need to decide who you want to market this thing to, first. Universities? Armchair environmentalists? Are you going to support it with ads, or just subscription costs?"

"Subscription costs, subscription costs. We already talked about that. We don't want any corporate influence."

"Are you sure? A lack of incoming ad money can have its own influence."

"Yeah. Listen, do you think I need a better chair? I am the editor. And this thing is... crap."

Now I was pretty sure he was playing with me. He was rocking, watching me, fidgety.

"Would a better chair help you focus on defining your market?"

"Yes... absolutely, yes, doctor." Keith grinned.

I caught a pained smile on my own face. "I'm curious... what did you tell Rich about who I was?"

Keith let the front legs of the chair hit the carpet. He leaned forward and I tensed. "I told him you were a business consultant I knew."

I didn't say a thing.

"I thought it might be a bit awkward. Right?" His voice was quiet and I felt it even in my nervous abdomen. "Not that there's anything wrong with therapy. But people don't always know how to take it. Well, I could bring some other people onto the project and make it okay. Hey, Rich, here's Fred, he does accounting but he was also my dental hygienist. And Gloria, she does filing, but I met her back when she was my yoga instructor."

His smile was gentle and at that moment I became powerfully aware of my surroundings, the white walls around us, the air in the room and his presence, which was, to me, so full and vivid that I was literally afraid. He was Keith Wright, in the flesh. We were outside of my office, we were in the world, and he hadn't dissipated to a phantom. He was real. My heart was pounding. "Wait, I forgot, we don't need a secretary... forget Gloria... screw Gloria" he was saying, and I was thinking that he must know, any second now. He would see it in my eyes and know I was forfeit to dissolute processes, that when I went home to my apartment I could not think of anything but him. That last night I'd dreamed he kissed me, so real I felt the breath from his nose tickling my cheek, and I woke up in hot fear.

He finished by saying his head hurt from thinking about business, that Rich had obviously abandoned us and we should go out to lunch.

So I finally had Keith, after a fashion. I had what I wanted. It's funny how when he told me he'd left office, finally and before his term was up, I was angry. It took me a moment to remember that was what I'd wanted him to do -- to leave, to follow his dream, to be happy and healthy and a contributing member of society like every psychiatrist should want her patient to be. But when he told me, I was angry he could be so irresponsible. I barely even noticed I felt it, but I did catch it, just before Keith changed the subject again.

And I was about to accept his offer to lunch when Rich finally burst back in, an office chair in his arms, and Keith sprung into action as between the two of them they moved all the furniture in and spent an hour arranging it to their liking. Lunch was forgotten. I clicked through catalogs of office supplies while they worked, hollow with the loss.

By now I knew everything. Infatuation may be blind, but I had still had seven years of education in psychology, and by this point was quite capable of self-diagnosis. I was under the influence of animus, as they say -- or perhaps I should after all say anima in my case, considering my particular attributes. Keith was everything I lacked: he was effusive where I was restrained, emotional where I was reserved, trusting where I was skeptical, spontaneous where I was careful.

I was aware of projecting... at least, I say this now. The truth was that, as I thought: How wrong can I be? How far off can I be? If I'm seeing and responding to nothing more than an image projected from my unconsciousness, how far off yet can it be? when the man is a Boy Scout senator, environmental activist, devoted monogamist, nice guy? How far off from perfect can he really be? In short, how could I really go wrong by getting closer to someone of such moral fiber and harmless good cheer?

Paradoxically, the twin obstacles of my being his former therapist and his being utterly, incontrovertibly married only spurred me on. That having me around apparently meant enough to him to ignore not only legal but social convention struck my heart with special poignancy, precisely because it was the opposite of how I'd lived my whole life. I could not think of a time I had put a friend in front of a rule, and now began to rue myself for it. And Lysa? She was the icing on the cake, the balm that let everything roll forward smoothly. Keith was safe. I might pine for him to the depths of my soul, but he would never leave his wife. My feelings would have no consequence. No one would be hurt.

He did take me out to lunch, of course. Many times. I say with satisfaction that many of those times, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Keith loved tacos but hated mess. He was almost prissy in that respect. He would eat with his face practically against the plate, trying not to get the tiniest spot of hot sauce on his expensive wool. Yet he still talked through his food. He couldn't stop talking. He made me laugh. I remember getting up one morning feeling as though I was twenty again and had been up all night doing sit-ups, trying to get in shape for track season. He was oddly generous as well as amusing. Sometimes when we were out purchasing something or visiting a printing company he would get an urge and put the car down somewhere unfamiliar, saying he wanted to show me "this great spot." I stood with Keith in the middle of a garden of orchids, listening to him overflow with everything he loved about the flowers. He was not courting me. It was just how he was.

I let my practice tail off over the next year until I was seeing just a handful of clients. There was something oddly fulfilling about my life now, going into the city a couple days a week to help with the journal. Keith was especially grateful to me on one account: I had provided the name. I was talking about marketing. I said "The California Nature Review" would appeal to one kind of audience, and a more poetic name to another. I chose "Monsoon" as an example, not thinking much about it until Keith asked me why Monsoon. I struggled for a moment, then I remembered a movie by that name I'd seen as a young girl -- about an Indian meteorologist who fights the powers that be over global warming. For some reason that idea tickled him and he became besotted with the word. Or maybe he was tickled by the idea of my having been a young girl. I couldn't be sure. In any case we figured the connotations were fine, and it let him feel a poet, so we kept it.

So my life became richer with enjoyment. But it simultaneously became threadbare of purpose -- I had come so that I wanted nothing other than to know that man, and while I increasingly got it, there was an empty sort of tension in it. I had achieved much of what I wanted, yet I felt more than before as if I were waiting for something, that there was something about me that had become forever imminent.

And so I waited. But I would be remiss to say that the waiting was the last of it. There was also the pain. The times he conversed with Rich, and though I tried to join the conversation, Keith waving me off or ignoring me, and Rich unwittingly following his irresistible lead. I felt vanished. Some days Keith would be in a black mood, and though it never lasted long, his moods provoked special hurt, partly because of the things he said and partly because I could not figure them out. There in the Monsoon office, with Rich and the newly hired staffers running in and out, I couldn't play therapist anymore:

"Just go home. I need to get this done. Why do you always have to take issue with every little aspect of how we run this thing? You're acting like my mother-in-law."

The sudden ugliness and unfairness in his words would hit me like a punch, out of left field. And more than one part of me would head straight for why... why do you say that? Why are you in a bad mood today? Why won't you talk to me? but I would bite down hard. "Keith, it's just a few paragraphs. You have all day to finish it. You told me you wanted to know if your intro ever sounded pedantic, right?"

"I'm not the one who's pedantic, all right? Let me write or there won't be an intro for this issue."

My mind reeled. Where was this coming from? Who had swapped my smooth politician with an indecipherable fourteen-year-old punk? What was he thinking? That was the very worst; not the behavior, but the randomness of it; to know that after all this, I could still be blindsided. My gut would twist and I'd go home eventually, and stew until I saw him again. Until I could make things clear. This happened every few weeks.

So that was where we were when I was finally invited into his home, for the big party he threw election night. Everyone in the office was invited, and I was tingling as I knocked on his door, my heart pounding again as it had the first time we stepped out from my office. This is real. I'm getting what I want. But it was his wife who opened the door, and my reaction to her presence hit me with the surprise of an entire firehose of cold water.

That was the November everyone thought the Greens finally had a chance -- in fact, it was to be the year they finally won the presidency. But that is not the political development I remember most from that night.

Of course, it would not be -- in fact -- what any of us here remembers most from that night.

The most overdue Middle ever

Wow, ten months and I feel like I'm finally getting to the story. You know the idea about how the first thing you do when rewriting a story should be to go back to the beginning and delete the first page... I think in my case if I went back and deleted parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 I'd be doing pretty well. But I'm relieved to discover there IS a story waiting to be told, rather than just endless foreplay. Well, I knew there was. For once I had some idea of where I was going and how I was going to get there. I just seemed to have forgotten about it for about thirty pages.

I have a thing for dialogue, I love to write dialogue. And I always feel like I'm indulging it too much. I can go on for pages with just dialogue. So I always feel like I need to be breaking it up with some exposition. I'm not sure whether to be pleased or chagrined seeing that a major issue with the story as it is is that I keep interrupting perfectly reasonable dialogue with ridiculous comments about who shifted which way in what chair.

I was at the library the other day looking for new books to read about writing. I'm very picky about self-help books. I'm chauvinistic. I am biased toward action. I don't really want to read about how to write. I just want to do it. At least, I like to think I want to do it. That's the really chauvinistic part. The point is that I tend to disregard any book that sounds wishy-washy. I don't want to discover my true inner self. I just want to be reminded of what order the basic story elements come in.

I have no problem telling a story when I'm not thinking about it. I sometimes do this at parties. Not at parties where I'm trying to impress anyone, though. My ability to tell a story decreases in proportion to the amount I think about it, to the point that most of the stuff I write has about as much plot energy as a typical hour of C-span. Maybe I do need to discover my inner self. She's probably an accountant.

The Keith Wright story makes a surprising amount of sense for something that came from my keyboard. One thing leads to another (just like in real life!) and things happen that basically make sense. I'm not sure to what I should attribute this. The mermaid thing is also surprisingly coherent, and I attribute that to the fact that it's not the first time I wrote it. The first time I wrote it was when I was doing the exercise of making myself write a story in two pages every night. This put pressure on me to consider such important things as Beginning, Middle, and End. Lawdy. Maybe I should do that again.

The Uncanny Influence of Keith Wright, Part 8

The week he failed to show up for an appointment was the week I crashed my car. I had passed through the waiting room at about a quarter of, half to go to the bathroom and half just to see if he was there yet. And again a few minutes before the hour I stuck my head out, and no Keith. And then five minutes after the hour. That was more like him, though. He was more lateness than earliness, and more unpredictability than he was either of those in particular.

At quarter after I left him a message.

When the hour was up I left him another message, which isn't something I do. It wasn't until halfway through that I realized I had nothing to say. "Just calling again to make sure... just checking up, give me a call and we can reschedule." I was a damn fool. And the next day, I ran my car straight into a postal service van hovering blatantly in front of me. I had never seen it.

And Keith never called me back. Instead he simply showed up a week later, at his usual time. And of course I had the hour open. He bustled himself into my office. "Sorry about last week," he said with a grin. "I was thinking maybe we could talk some more about career issues..." he had already closed the door and was sitting down. "...I feel like I need to get stuff done. You know?"

So I didn't ask him about what had happened the week before. The hook set out -- to have another conversation about something significant to him -- was too tantalizing to pass up, in any case.

"Tell me what you've been thinking," I said.

And we spoke about his career for a good ten minutes. He had decided, he said, that it was his career after all that was making him unhappy. "I know that was why I came here in the first place," he interrupted me partway through, "and that it's what you've been telling me all along. But I didn't really see it until now."

"Sounds like good news... what happened?"

Keith was wearing a yellow tie that day, I remember, one that would only have looked good on him. He loosened and re-loosened it probably three times while he was talking. "This morning was a great morning, I had eggs... Lysa made me breakfast... I had a record commute... spent the first half hour going over stuff with a new intern, she was brilliant... then Bob Ricci came in with some stuff they wanted me to sign onto and I felt my stomach drop, I felt my mood just go ten times worse." His hands dangled between his knees, having illustrated the drop in dramatic style. "It's not coming from nowhere. It is the job. It's this crap I have to do. Being fake and signing stuff I don't want to sign."

His eyes shone with eagerness to reenact the eureka moment for me. When I asked him what he was going to do, he immediately went flat.

"What would I do? I can't quit. What do you want? I'll wait until my term's up, then I'll be free to move on."

I ignored the rhetorical questions. "How are you feeling right now?"

He opened his mouth, then -- uncharacteristically -- paused, took a couple breaths, then spoke. "I feel a little better."

I nodded.

"The world makes more sense."

I remember maintaining a thoughtful silence.

"Thank you."

"Me? You're the one doing all the work."

He was impish. "Oh no, Frau Doktor, it's you with the..." he paused to tap his skull. "Vit ze shmartzhaben."

I sniggered.

"Any old jamoke can run his mouth for fifty-five minutes, it takes a true professional to make sense of it all. No, really, this is doing amazing things with my life. What, stop laughing. Did you know, the other day I actually capered? I did. Like this. Lysa thinks I'm crazy."

And on my word, the senator thrust himself from his chair and skipped a short skip to the window, making the floor tremble a little, where finding himself already out of room he turned around and looked at me, straightening his tie. "Do you ever do a little walking therapy? Get out of the office, take a client around the block? I had a teacher who used to like to do that with us. Maybe next week, if it's this nice." A grin stretched his face. "It'd be criminal not to take advantage of this mood. Or this April."

So that was the first time I met Keith outside the office, in a manner of speaking.

He lacked the particular bounce he'd had the previous week, an energy that had continued through the rest of a session devoted mostly to discussions of other teachers and mentors he'd taken particular liking to. This week he was calm in a cheerful way. When I caught up with him in the waiting room he stood and said, "Well?" so I opened the door onto the street, my heart pounding between ribs of jelly.

I had never, in fact, conducted therapy anywhere but in an office -- the office worked, so why trouble myself? But I could not have refused Keith's suggestion if I'd wanted to. The idea of being with him in the real world -- a place apart from the dim sanctum where all my transactions were usually performed -- aroused a greed so mammoth that my power of decision was not only overthrown, but forgotten. Why in the world would I want anything else but to spend more time with this man, in more places? To let him bleed into a little more of my life, if he so desired... and he apparently did!

In my first steps I was afraid I would not be able to concentrate on the conversation, would not even be able to draw a normal breath. I was suddenly afraid he would know. Surely there was some glazed look to my eye, or some hateful audibility to my swallow that would tell him not all was right in the world that walked beside him. But nothing happened. And as he began to talk about the usual things, a strange feeling came over me. I was happy. I was walking down a street lined with cherry trees on a beautiful April day, gifted with the company of a rather handsome, zanily charming man -- in a bright green tie with tiny turtles on it -- whose attention in its full force was like an industrial heat lamp. I found myself smiling for no reason at every other point in the conversation. I was enjoying myself!

"Dad really wanted me to get into a profession where I could make some money," Keith was saying. "But it wasn't like he was a distant or particularly hard-driving man. He cared a lot about me." His tone became wistful and he stopped for a moment, then jerked a flower up from the sidewalk border and stuck it behind his own ear. "I didn't think he'd be happy with me as a writer. Though I obviously should have been."

"You've been thinking about this some more."

"I've been more than thinking. I've been talking to some people. Every time I started rambling about maybe leaving office to write full-time for magazines, they'd get excited."

"People like who?"

"Oh... people like my brother-in-law. The other secretary who works in our office. My hairdresser."

Keith didn't look particularly like he'd had a haircut recently. "People who know you, you mean?"

"They'd have a reaction like this--" He grabbed both my hands in his and let his eyes light up. "Really? That's great! Keith, that's wonderful!" His high-pitched rendition made me laugh. When he stopped squeezing my hands I slipped them into my pockets without thinking, warm.

"So... I see."

"So it's like everybody's been just waiting for me to come to this decision. Like it was obvious for everyone but me. Don't be a politician, stupid!"

"What are you going to--"

"Everyone's been really supportive. It left me with a huge smile on my face."

"Have you talked to your wife about it?"

"No... well... I didn't want to worry her until I got a better feel for what I wanted to do. She's been busy with a big case they're bringing to court. I've barely even seen her lately. I feel like I see you more than I see her. So... what am I going to do... My brother-in-law said he knew a guy who wanted to start up a new nature journal, something more balanced than the usual left-wing radical proselytizing. Rich Wegman, do you know him? He's a meteorologist."

My ears were buzzing. "No, I don't think so."

"So I talked to Rich--" All this in the past week? "--who's a brilliant guy, and he says he was just going to make it a local thing, but if I wanted to join he says he'd push to try to make it statewide coverage, statewide readership. He said with my experience and reputation that... not only would my name sell copies, but that he'd be crazy not to offer me the lead editorial position. If I was available."

"Are you available?"

"Can you imagine? The California Nature Review, edited by Keith Wright. He says it's just going to be a monthly, about fourteen, sixteen pages per issue. Still."

Keith strolled nearly as fast as he talked, and we'd come most of the way around the block by now, turning the last corner. I let my overfilled mind struggle through the last few sentences to sit at a point of vague irritation. Did he not hear my question? I realized he'd slowed down as we headed back toward my office building. The light breeze was tugging some of his hair over his eyes.

"Rich said I was welcome to bring anybody else on board... we really hit it off. This is going to be a true collaboration. He said he trusted me to bring in anybody else who knows anything about business, or science, or writing. So I was wondering... how'd you like to do a little consulting?"

"What?"

"You know, help us get things set up, figure out a business plan, see what we need for staff. You said you used to do consulting for small businesses. I only worked for a giant corporation. Not the same. Plus, you're smarter than me and Rich put together. Don't tell Rich I said that, though," he laughed.

My chest and face felt hot, my stomach icy. The California regulations on fraternization never had a chance; it was too late; the words were already vaulting from my mouth. "Of course. If you think I'd have something to add--"

"You're way too modest. Please, five months ago I was a miserable political lackey. With a bad case of melodrama. Now, look at me! I'm almost the editor of a monthly journal! with a bad case of melodrama." He pulled the flower out from behind his ear and tossed it over his shoulder.

My cheeks were still burning. I wanted to ask him again, What about your job? What did you decide? It's the therapist's role to get a client thinking clearly about his life. It was all too late though. As we ascended the steps to the office, one of his restless hands seized me at the elbow and he turned me bodily to point out how the full moon hung above a blooming cherry tree. "I love April," he said, and I felt myself nod in agreement; then we were inside.

The Inopportune Moment

I had just left a party at my friend Jeff's and was walking home, because I was drunk. I had only gone a few steps when I sort of hazily became aware of a presence next to me. At the time it felt natural to only sort of hazily be aware of someone being next to me, because I'd been that way since about nine o'clock in the evening, but then I started to wonder if it was more because it was Jesus.

My mind was too sluggish to be really startled. I had kind of a delayed startled reaction. By the time I realized I was startled I had already moved on to not caring that the guy next to me had a beard and robes. In fact I knew right away that he must be Jesus. Pretty right away.

"Hello, Ben," He said.

"Hi," I said.

"How have you been doing?"

"All right, I guess." I pushed against a telephone pole for balance as I walked past it and wondered if I'd been doing that with all the telephone poles, because I couldn't remember.

"Things have been difficult lately, haven't they."

I looked at Jesus. I wondered what to say. I was still wondering this when I noticed I was already talking. "I'm sad about Mom," I said.

"I know." He walked quietly with me for a while and I was upset because I was trying to focus on Jesus but frankly it was requiring a lot of my concentration to make sure I kept my balance. I thought about apologizing to Him for being so sloshed but I wondered if that was stupid. Then a car turned into the road in front of me, which I hate. I was upset at the car.

"Ben?"

"Yeah?" I couldn't believe Jesus was still talking with me.

"It will be all right. There will be a place for her. And there will be a place for you." He laid His hand on my arm.

"I know," I said. And God I really wanted to say something nice to the guy but it was hard to push it through the question of whether this was weird or not. Then after that He was gone, and I fished around in my pockets for half a minute before realizing I'd already forgotten why I wanted to do that.

"Shit," I said.

Experiment; Googlism.com: The Bird

the bird is starting to boss you
the bird is orphaned
the bird is the word the wild turkey didn't return to illinois until the late 1950s
the bird is
the bird is no longer there
the bird is transferred to a new keeper the registration document is returned to us with the transfer details filled in at the base of the form and a new
the bird is treated correctly
the bird is tame
the bird is chaotic in the sense that its dippy behavior is regular but not predictable
the bird is under anesthesia
the bird is eating approximately the same amount every day
the bird is held firmly between the index and middle fingers of the hand
the bird is spotted some tens of times every year
the bird is repeating some of the gossipy conversations he learned when he eavesdropped on the customers
the bird is in a box
the bird is a substance with a low vaporization point; it evaporates easily
the bird is truly orphaned or is it a fledgling who is fine where it is
the bird is sent out to a lab for identification
the bird is like a rudder
the bird is called the quetzal
the bird is rescued
the bird is in the cage or box then it should be removed to a warm place
the bird is a warm

In the Tissue Box

The bird is eating approximately the same amount every day. This was fine when it was just brought in, bleary in a tissue box, but now it's starting to worry me. Well, worry is a strong word. I take note. Jamie would be worried. Little girls are easily attached to little birds. When I was her age and found a dying baby bird under a hedge, I picked it up and put it in the woods to see if a wild animal would come eat it.

A part of me wants this little robin to die, just so Jamie and I can have a "teachable moment." It seems a horrible thing to admit. But both my parents are likely to pass on within the next year, and how could a four-year-old understand? How could I even hope to do the job I'll need to do? I've been waiting for the question, "Daddy, will you die?"

"Not for a long time" is what a magazine article counseled me to say.

That isn't really what I want to say, though. I vacillate between the truth in my heart, which is "No, I'll always be with you" and "Yes," flat-out Yes, which is also the truth. Is it selfish of me to feel unable to dilute the truth? What is it that makes me want to raise my hatred of equivocation over the needs of a preschool girl?

Selfishness lingers. Sometimes I feel I don't have the strength to slay it, or the nobility to transcend it. Sometimes I only hover beside it, and watch it breathe.

The Future of Sportfishing

The coast of Ireland wasn't the same as when Rory was a boy. He was eighty now, and he could remember all the way back to when they used to haul in five fish a day. Now people were lucky to get one in a month of sportfishing, and that too little to keep.

This was an observation that escaped most of the fishermen these days. They were ecstatic whenever they did get a fish. That's what ignorance did to you. Lowered expectations had brought the joy back into being a sportsman. It had also kept the objective situation from improving. This was the way it was! One fish a month. The young things out there on their foils, sixteen, eighteen, twenty years old, that's what they'd grown up with. Plus, there were other things out there, unnatural things in the water that didn't belong there. Stuff that was taken for granted now.

Rory didn't use a hydrofoil. They were ungodly noisy. If you want to catch fish, you need to be quiet. Rory still used an old wooden rowboat, with carbon muffler oars. He and Willis went out every Sunday morning to catch fish. Willis was also eighty, or thereabouts.

"Bad weather today," said Willis that morning.

Rory nodded.

They pushed the boat into the water and rowed out on the pewter bay. The sun hadn't come up yet and what light there was seemed to come from nowhere, no source, but there was enough for them to find their way all the same. They got out far enough into the bay that the little boat began to rock slightly. Willis unscrewed his thermos of coffee.

Rory looked out at the ocean. "Let's head out a ways."

"Storms, they said."

"When?"

"In the morning."

"It's not stormy now."

Willis shrugged.

"We want to catch fish, we've got to get out of this bay. The only thing we're going to catch in this bay is plastic."

Willis took his time drinking half the thermos of coffee, screwed the top back on and picked up the oars again, and they rowed out into the sea. By the time they got there the water already had more chop on it. The little boat bobbed up and down. The sun had risen but couldn't be seen; the sky was all cloud, from north to south.

Rory set his pole up and slid his fingers into the bag of bait. The squid was still cold, half-frozen, squid from Japan, shipped in just for crazy sportsmen like them who just had to keep fishing, damn the drain on their bank accounts. He pierced the squid with the hook and dropped his line in the water. Willis put on a lure.

"What are you doing that for?" Willis was stupid with lures. Anything Willis thought was pretty, he figured the fish would too. He figured the fish thought like he did. Rory didn't give either of them that much credit.

Willis shrugged. "I bought it, might as well use it."

"You've never caught anything here with a lure. Here, use my bait."

"I have too. There's plenty of stuff in here'll go after a lure."

"Have it your way." Rory leaned back in the boat and looked up at the sky. The storm was coming up, sure enough. The breeze that hit his face was wet, and stronger than when they'd set out. He sat there while Willis jerked his line about, reeled it in, cast it again. He looked like a fool.

When the chop got high enough to rock him back and forth in the boat, Rory wedged himself in and gripped the gunwales. He figured the sun was high by now, but the day was no lighter. Willis had given up jiggling the lure around and had wedged himself in the bow with his coffee. Fishing was being out on the water as much as it was catching a fish, but even the prettiest storm, wild and real like a black and white photograph brought to life, could leave you feeling a little green. When the rain started Willis looked about ready to head in.

"Not yet," said Rory. "Wife'll be after me about why didn't I stop in at the store if I come home early."

After twenty minutes the storm was starting to come into its own, blowing cold rain in their faces from all directions, so of course it was then that one of them finally got a bite on the line.

"I'll be damned, Willis," said Rory. "There IS something that'll go after those lures."

Willis was already cranking on the reel. The pole was bent nearly double. Rory grabbed the oars.

The big fish began pulling them out to sea, hauling the boat through the heavy chop, and Rory didn't dare slow them down too much for fear of snapping Willis's line. He knew Willis wouldn't let it go. The old fool had too many years of experience in him to mishandle a big catch like this. The fish zigged and zagged, but kept them on a course away from land, which Rory noted. Still, even if they wasted hours rowing back through the wind and chop, it'd be worth it for their first catch in weeks.

"This is a good one," shouted Willis over the wind, his old fingers working like lightning to let out slack then crank on the reel again.

"You bastard," said Rory.

It was ten or fifteen minutes until their catch slowed at all. Its course became more meandering, at times drifting back toward shallow water. Rory was glad. The cold and wet was seeping in, and the row in would be wearisome. The wind made it hard to keep his hood up.

As Willis reeled in the final yards of line it was apparent that the fish would outrank most of the rare beauties they'd caught so far. His pole was still doubled, even though the struggle had stopped. Rory got the net ready. The boat was bucking on the waves as Willis's catch came up in the soupy water high enough for Rory to see its pale bulk. It was huge.

"Get it over the side! Don't pull us both in now!"

But as Willis reeled in the last of the line, he stopped, scowling. Then he reached for his knife.

Rory tried to stand up high enough to see, gripping the gunwales in the howling wind. Willis cut the line and Rory saw through the murk the pale outline, the seeping blood where the hooks of the shiny lure had pierced flesh, before it sank down again unseen. He collapsed back down into the back of the boat in disgust, glancing at the shoreline that now lay darkly distant through the worsening storm. That was it.

"Bloody mermaids," said Rory.