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.