Practicality rises from the ashes

I created this blog to encourage myself to just write, and not worry about the quality or the editing. Just write little things. But it pretty quickly turned into a rehashing of my writing life to date, involving snowball-like stories that get bigger and gather weight until I'm afraid to even approach them anymore. Or not like a snowball but a marble sculpture... once I realize it's looking nice I become too terrified to put my chisel against the stone any more, for fear I'll gouge some heinous irremovable dent in it.

Which is wrong on at least two counts, one being that my writing is looking all that nice, the other being that "dents" are permanent (what the heck is rewriting for)? but I still plan on weaning myself off the perfectionism with smaller pieces first.

I love Keith Wright. I need to finish that story, but no more of the "if you write, you have to write about that, you have to finish it" goading. So while I'm taking this breath I might as well say now (to the three or four spam-bots who are my only current readers) that the idea of not editing stuff sounds really romantic in theory, but is hideous in practice. What gets me most right now is the van. I'm not sure what kind of transportation we'll have 150 years in the future or whenever the hell I set the story, but it probably won't be vans.

I get myself into a trap with science fiction because I'm not really interested in writing about the science, I'm interested in writing about the people, and the wild possibilities of the future are just an excuse to explore little-taxed muscles of human nature. My story doesn't fit the definition of "real" science fiction, in which the story itself would be impossible without the precise inventuations of the setting. I meant to say "inventions and situations" there but what came out amused me.

My story wouldn't be impossible in the present. It happens every day. It's just a story about a person who bases a decision on the sorts of things you're not supposed to base a decision on. No Matchlinx or moon required. It's rather similar to the writer's decision about setting, now that I think about it... I chose the moon because it's so much more infatuating a metaphor than, say, Arkansas. But if you're choosing settings for your story out of infatuation you're probably going to end up the same way our narrator does: in a situation that reflects your lack of internal direction.

The way our space program is going I figured 150 years was a minimum estimate for civilians on the moon. 150 years is a long time. Long enough to require some dedicated thought on what kinds of society and technology we'd have around us. Dedicated thought that somebody trying to write a character piece really wasn't interested in thinking, and it shows. But what if I were to put in the effort and construct a solid, believable world of 150 years' hence? Would it then become a story about the world and not about the characters? I don't want to overshadow what the story's really about. If I end up rewriting it I expect I'll focus on one element to put detail in -- say, by beefing up the Matchlinx concept -- and say as little as possible about the rest.

The other thing that I noticed that bugs me is the terrible repetitiveness of the story. Some of that can be forgiven. I started out thinking it'd be like Kendlin where there'd be a break in between each installment, so readers would need to be "caught up" at the beginning and would need a dose of foreshadowing at the end. But all that looks very silly when the installments are sitting right next to each other. There's so much foreshadowing I think I have foreshadowing poisoning.

The Kendlin stories are all right. The character doesn't really grab me. Maybe I'll write more and maybe I won't.

The "heaven is full" stories are terrible. I still like the idea of heaven being full, but I think I'll take a different treatment of it.

Enough for now.

The Uncanny Influence of Keith Wright, Part 7

The beginning of an obsession never feels like an obsession. The beginning of an obsession is absorption so complete that the obsesser has no perspective on his or her own lack of perspective. The first week, I didn't worry about being infatuated with Keith. I simply was.

After he left my office for the first time, I was flush with energy; I was happy, excited, and warm. I recall that I had other appointments that day but I don't particularly remember them. I do know that I was reasonably focused on them and the day completed like basically any other day. But the flight home after work was lost to my memory, one of those commutes that never imprints itself due to some unusual flightiness of the mind, in which you arrive at your front door and realize you navigated the last hundred miles in apparent total unconsciousness. My thought as I stepped into the house was to find out if this fellow could really be a state representative. I didn't doubt his honesty on that count; my eyes simply hungered to see it in print, so I went straight for the goggles. I never ate dinner that night.

On the internet, there is always one more link to follow, and my greedy mind swallowed each shred of information about Keith's life in a five-hour binge. And as the feeding proceded, my sense that I knew the man grew, but so did my alienation from him. It was the very act of devoting all my energy into the search that night that accomplished this; in my striving to consume him I had as surely made an object out of him as I had made a man. Yet, looking back, I don't believe it could have happened any other way. I don't believe any of this could have happened another way, from the moment I signed into the Matchlinx. I couldn't have stopped myself because I had no desire to stop myself. It never would have occurred to me. It had to happen.

I was drunk on Keith. What a man! How devoted he was to the small farmer, how devoted he was to his wife, how brilliant, how funny he was when pressed for quotes. "The Committee for Business and the Environment is a five-legged giraffe with two heads, each of which controls two legs and vies for control of the fifth." "Politics is like a pomegranate orchard, only seedier and less useful." And handsome, of course. He had a sharp look to him that owed more to the expression in his eyes than to the actual lines of his face.

And I went to bed sated, for the time being. And I got up and went to work the next day, and the next, and he was little more than a pleasant tingle that stayed in the back of my mind throughout the week.

And I met with him again, delighted. It was the greatest good fortune that this man had come to my office. I was rapt, again. We spent almost all of that second visit telling stories... at least, he told stories, I smiled. I had the sense that the stories -- about drunken college nights, first jobs, his grandfather's death -- were no different in quality or substance from stories told by a hundred acquaintances over the years, and yet to hear the same from Keith was pure enjoyment. Maybe it was his silly and self-effacing jokes. Maybe it was that the whole time I was paying attention to him, I felt like he was the one paying attention to me. As if, instead of seeking therapy, he had come here just to chat with me, because he liked me.

And the reasons for his seeking therapy did dive below the surface for much of the time. Most weeks he seemed completely content to chat away the hour. Occasionally he'd swing into something more personal, and I was handed gems of some emotional clarity from somewhere inside him. And anytime he spoke about something he couldn't tell the other people in his life, I felt ridiculously privileged.

"Lysa has this friend, Jean, and when she comes over they'll huddle together snickering and give me a look when I come in the room. That just strikes me as juvenile. She makes me feel like I'm not welcome in my own home. I mean, come on. Right? It just annoys me." And then he'd be off and running into a story about skydiving. With every complaint delivered so naturally and generously, a little bit more of my professionalism peeled away. He liked me.

I have a special appreciation for the memories of that first month, before the shame set in, before the bitter discomfort set in. I was having great fun. I was having the time of my life and loving my job and not thinking about it. But then the leash began to grow taut, and the painful evidence of my attachment sprung to my attention.

Keith was changed in our fifth session. His essence, the him I thought of as him, was simply gone. His charm was absent. Suddenly we were therapist and client, not pals and confidants. He did tell stories -- many in the exact same vein as in weeks past -- but he no longer seemed to care about me the listener. Something warm in his eyes was missing when he glanced at me. Something in his body language was less engaging. I found myself scrabbling. There was a small panic stewing in my brain, a sensation I scarcely recognized. What was going on? Why wasn't I having fun? Why wasn't he paying attention to me?

None of these were questions I could ask. I couldn't even find a way to confront the change (What would I say? "Keith, is there a particular reason you're behaving more like a client than a a date today?"), though I did ask if anything was troubling him.

"No," he said.

I bit down on the "Are you sure?" Because I was suddenly not so sure myself. Why was I upset that he was behaving like a man meeting with his therapist? What had I thought his previous behavior meant? Why did I care more about his eyes crinkling when he looked at me than about what kind of a job I was doing as a psychiatrist? I wasn't falling for him, certainly. That had never happened to me. I hadn't even fallen for my husbands. Either of them.

The next week he was back to charm and animation, which my baser parts greeted with huge relief... and discomfort. I was now aware, barely. It was all downhill from here.

The Uncanny Influence of Keith Wright, Part 6

"When does your current term in office end?"

"Next Fall. Not this Fall, but Fall of next year," Keith said, watching my face.

"Are you going to finish it out?"

Now there was a pause. "Well, yes."

"Have any plans for when the term's through?" There was a trafficless moment outside and it became quiet in our room.

"No... look... I don't know, I don't know what I want. That's why I'm here." He gave me a plaintive grin. There was some self-effacing pain in his eyes, and I struggled to judge what part was a patient's distress and what part embarrassment at the appeal. We were most of the way through my first hour with him then, and I already felt I knew him, but simultaneously felt that I could never stop learning about him. I was already hungry for all the things that made this astonishing presence tick. Here was a representative of the state government in my office, here was a tall and contained and winningly vulnerable politician looking me in the eye. Keith was a new species to me, an impossible mix of intelligence and maturity and idealism -- a man as willing to trust a brand-new therapist as he was to trust the computer system that pointed him here in the first place. I was giddy. But but he was still a person, and like all people he had particular ideas about his own life -- and I was still a psychiatrist with 20 years of schooling and practice, and at the end of his story I flowed into my role without needing to think about it.

I heard what he thought about himself when he spoke about his college sweetheart, about his inability to write, about his job at Raleigh, about his wife's drive. When he spoke about his current job, the pauses said more than the words did. I already knew where I would lead the conversation. Maybe Keith already knew too. People often know what they have to do with their lives, on some level. Sometimes they also know they need a little push to get them there.

"Tell me what you like about being a state representative."

"What do I like about it? I like that... I'm making the system of democracy real, I'm doing my part. I like that I have an excuse to meet and talk to so many different people every day. I like that sometimes I have a hand in actually helping out the little guy."

"And what don't you like?"

"And what don't I like." He rubbed a hand over the stubble of his jaw in a classic gesture of thought, yet the motion itself was thoughtless. "I don't like the phoniness. There's a stereotype of politicians being phony. Well, it's true. At first I swore I'd never fall into it. I saw all the other representatives changing their masks; they'd have sweet words for an old lady one moment and then turn around and tell a reporter something completely different. I didn't see how they could do that in good conscience. Now, what do you think I do?"

He stopped to take in an audible breath before he continued. "Of course I've gotten some good done. Every time I wrestle price controls on one more commodity back into the state's hands, I feel like I'm in the right place. But there's too little of that, and too much buttering up guys who are already filthy rich. But that's how you get things done here! And the sad part is, I'm good at it! And sure I enjoy it when I can talk my way into a deal. I'd rather win people over than force them into something. I want to please people. I've just gotten to feel so two-faced. Maybe it'd be different if I were more like Lysa." He'd stopped looking at me and was all eyes for the wall behind me now. "I had this one woman call me the greasiest thing in Sacramento. Another environmental activist. She saw how I'd have the agribusiness execs over for dinner and she'd also watched me pulling farmers aside and asking about their lives and their families. And she knew who Lysa was, and all it meant for her was that I'd go so far as to marry an activist for show. Like I'd conned Lysa too. As if everything I did and was was all for show, just so I could keep getting elected." And he looked back at me, his voice flattening. "Because state reps make big money, you know."

"The greasiest thing in Sacramento? Maybe I should have put a towel down on the chair."

"I know, right?" And he laughed, which made a splinter of warmth poke up in my chest. "Well, what do you think?" He leaned in over the table between us, focusing, the gaze of his blue eyes bolted to mine like iron. "If you... can bear to give up water rights for the next... two years..." And there was a heavy pause in which all he did was look in my eyes, and in which I had the time to notice that his hand was on my arm. I felt pinned to the chair. Whatever he'd said was only the background to his body language. I didn't even breathe, just watched him for a long second as he held his face in the most perfect representation of concerned earnestness I've ever seen a man wear. I was afraid I was going to blush again, entirely against my will. Then like a current a crackle of animation ran into his gaze, an impish squint took his eyes and he wiggled his eyebrows lewdly, pushing himself back into his seat. "Well, the state could be prepared to give you a tax deduction in the order of point-oh-five percent." He spread his hands. "If that's not sexy, I don't know what is." He smiled.

I was left to stare for another few seconds. I felt a lightning pang of confusion, a sense of intellectual deja-vu that brought back the harsh discovery of my limitations at reading people. What part of the man before me was real, after all? That was the first moment I felt a sense of powerlessness with Keith, a sense almost of being a child again, unable to grasp more than token control over the events in my life. Yet quickly my instincts remembered who I was and what I was here for -- and for perhaps the last time, a part of me considered my client's needs independently of their relation to my own, and I saw him as a stranger and a man who needed a reaction.

I smiled back at him. "Now how could anyone refuse?" The confusion had vanished; I still trusted myself, and his apparent ability to assume earnestness didn't dilute the aura of vulnerability that still, somehow, hung about him, even as the architecture that separated my identity as a psychiatrist from the heated inner parts of me began to dissipate. More than ever I wanted to help him. "But self-hatred hasn't led to too many benefits, generally, over the course of history."

He bit his lower lip before he spoke. "That's why I decided to call in the big guns. I feel trapped. Sometimes I think about just taking off, flying to Europe, screw democracy and responsibility and everything else."

"Have you thought about quitting before your term is up?"

That made him raise his eyebrows. "I'd feel too guilty." He thought about it, his gaze roaming the ceiling. "I'd think the people deserve to have the man they actually elected in office. Besides, what would I do? I can't just hang around the house all day. In my bathrobe, eating Twinkies."

He made me laugh, though his voice held all the pessimism that remains the default for any new consumer of therapy. It's a tone some clients never shake. But I wagered Keith was a man of action. "Tell me again why you used to want to be a writer."

"I can't be a writer. I tried, I just don't have the patience for it."

"Yes, but remind me why you wanted to."

He twisted in his chair, scratched at his sock, a slight grimace slipping over his features. "I was a kid. I thought it was romantic. Visit interesting places, write stories to inspire people. The idea of someone reading something I wrote and having it change their life. Of course, now I know the life of a writer isn't quite that romantic."

"I know it was a long time ago, but it's not easy -- or even the right thing -- to brush off the dreams we had of who we'd turn out to be. You say you feel trapped and I think you're right. Part of being stuck in an unhappy place is that we lose the ability to realistically imagine life outside it." He watched me with a slightly furrowed brow. "You may not be able to imagine yourself as a writer, or as anything else other than a politician. But from an outside perspective... you have a lot of experience with business, and politics, and the environmental movement. You're also older than you were in college and you've probably developed a good deal more discipline. Somewhere like a news magazine or nature journal could be the perfect place for you."

And he laughed. All he said was, "I wish! I'll never have the discipline for that" and then he was off into a story about a chem exam in college. The last minutes of the session ticked away. I told him to think about the changes he might like to make in his life. And he set up another appointment.

But he seemed happy when he left, and later he told me he'd known I was right the moment I spoke, but it took him five months to believe it. And I told him it takes most people a lot longer than five months to work up the courage for that sort of a change in their life. And it does. He is remarkable. But Keith averred, and may still, that I was a genius -- for seeing his true character and what he was capable of, and for knowing so soon, and having the guts to tell him. He used the word more often than I prefer to admit. He even once told a friend that I made his dreams come true.

And I never, not once, told a soul of his effect on me. The year that followed that day spun itself out like a dream, and from where I am now, it may as well have existed just as completely inside my mind. I would become very familiar with the impossibility of knowing how much of Keith was "real" -- and, by the end, how much of myself.

The Uncanny Influence of Keith Wright, Part 5

My first weeks on the moon were flush with activity, a whirlwind that only quietly and subtly tapered into the doldrums of real life on the moon. I don't remember everything -- I didn't get much sleep, and some of it was repetitious. The press conferences. I got a lot of interviews. I came up with a crew of other professionals -- some scientists on board with NASA, Bret and Gina Trine, who were the other psychology representatives, and Kirsten Dorazio from the Yale school of medicine. The Trines and I must have held about ten conferences together, and I did the interviews on my own. Most of them were the same. A couple took a charming twist. Here's the gist of my teleview with Neve Bolton:

"Would you tell us what you're going to be doing on this mission?"

"It's not really a mission, more of an ongoing experiment. The colony was built to be permanent. Whether all the occupants become permanent too is what we're going to find out, but consider that some of us could spend the rest of our lives here. The first generation to truly live on the moon."

"You're one of three psychiatrists chosen for the project, right?"

"That's correct. The others are Bret and Gina Trine from the University of Texas."

"And you're here to do research, or to fulfill the psychiatric needs of the colony?"

"Both, actually. We'll be engaged in monitoring the colony from a mental health perspective, and of course we'll also be available for counseling should anyone need it. That's an important service for any community."

"Anything you're hoping to discover?"

"The main things we're concerned about -- that researchers have always been concerned about since the dawn of exploration, whether it involved sailing ships or arctic shelters or space stations -- are the effects of isolation and lack of stimulation. We already have two hundred years of good research on these in all kinds of environments. The studies done on Deep Immersion One were especially helpful, and had a strong influence in the design of this project; but remember, the ocean floor is a lot closer to 'civilization' than the moon is. We don't know yet what kind of effect the internal concept of that incredible distance is going to have on participants, especially when a person's under stress. We also have an interest in what kind of culture will develop here. Whether people will stick closely to the routines and conventions they were used to on Earth, perhaps for security, or whether they go the opposite way, into something individualized or unregimented. We belong to the U.S. and the E.U. and India but we're also a long way from our respective governments."

"There's been a lot of talk about Deep Home lately and how the lunar colony project chose participants in basically the same way. Are you worried about a repeat of Deep Home?"

"Deep Home was a fundamentally flawed project. They did use basically the same selection standards as the lunar project has. Remember, this colony is for posterity, not for astronauts with nerves of steel and decades of training. If Joe Normal can hope to live in space someday we'd better start finding out what the average citizen can tolerate. It wasn't Deep Home's selection standards that were the issue. It was their inability to address deteriorating mental health issues before they became a problem."

"But you've also screened for serious psychiatric problems."

"Not me myself, but yes, the committee conducted thorough evaluations on each participant. It's not one of the aims of science to knowingly station someone somewhere we know they may suffer, or have to be removed prematurely. The committee chose as close as they could to average people while keeping those aims in mind."

"Now, it's been well-publicized that this is a joint venture between the nations of UNEX and the commercial conglomerate Century Quest. The colony members are not just participants in a scientific project but consumers of a product. The price of a ticket to the colony is stated at two million dollars. Does this muddy the waters of research? Are we really studying the average citizen on the moon, or just the well-connected and well-to-do?"

"I can't speak too much about the commercial end of it. I do believe that any sustainable future in exploration is going to involve capitalism. And if you look at some of the people who will be coming up to the colony, they're entrepreneurs -- people who've successfully started up small businesses in the past. The key word is sustainable. The project is part of an economy and it's going to have its own economy. There's already a small privately-run garden in the base."

"Back to psychology. You come from a background of private practice... Bret and Gina Trine are both from an academic background. Are you going to bring different things to the project?"

"I hope so. I have fifteen years of experience with counseling work. They, as you might know, have published a lot more than I have. They're more from a theoretical background. We'll be working together. I also have experience with small business psychology, which is something that's going to be important in terms of developing a sustainable economy here."

"Why did you apply for the project?"

"This is an unprecedented opportunity for research. We're doing something no one's ever done before."

"Do you have an interest in space exploration?"

"Well, yes, I think it's our future."

"This is the second time we've seen you now on Mindwatch. Your star has really risen since your name came up on the committee. Did you ever think you'd one day be going to the moon?"

"I assumed that one day we'd be seeing private citizens living on the moon, but if I saw myself there it wasn't as one of the first people to be involved. I never dreamed that."

"You managed to beat out thousands of other qualified psychologists and psychiatrists for your spot, even operating at a disadvantage -- as you say, you'd published very little, so your name wasn't well known before this."

"Yes. I'd spent all my time counseling or consulting."

"But you're certainly very well-thought-of in California, where you've had the West Coast Psychology Report's top ranking for all private psychiatrists six out of the past ten years."

"Their exit surveys are self-selecting, so I wouldn't put too much stock in that ranking, but I have been fortunate to enjoy a certain amount of success in my practice."

"That might be putting it mildly... I have a quote here from Keith Wright, the former California State Representative, and I'll read that: 'The woman is a genius. Her understanding of human nature makes her an intellectual colleage of Jung and Gupatrayan. She is a model for the profession of psychiatry, in which she operates at the highest level of skill.' That's high praise."

"Keith's very kind. He was also a politician, remember. We worked together briefly at the journal Monsoon."

"Well, it's refreshing to talk to someone so modest. We're almost at the end here. Do you have any advice you'd share with our young psychologists, or with those hoping to go somewhere to study like the moon?"

"Let's see. Advice is a dangerous commodity. How about... don't let anyone else choose your path for you. Be open to what comes along. You never know where you might end up. You might end up on the moon."

"We'll take that to heart. I wish you good luck with the new research, and I hope we'll have you back in a few months to share what you're learning!"

"Thank you."

The Uncanny Influence of Keith Wright, Part 4

Those hours spent in my office with him were the fullest of my life. My every sense was engaged and my mind immersed; I never noticed the ticking clock, or the grinding of cars coming in and taking off in the lot outside the window.

Keith told me about his life. He'd grown up sheltered -- private school, England in the summers, piano lessons, rich girlfriends. Yet the pasty consistency of his activities didn't dull his imagination. He loved Steinbeck and California, and had no desire other than to go West to stay at the first opportunity. He majored in English at UCLA. He wanted to be a writer.

"A couple things got in the way," he told me. "One was that I could never sit still long enough to write more than half a page or so a day. Not unless one of my professors was breathing down my neck." He gave me a lively grin, and his eyes told me he'd been friends with his teachers all the same. "The other was that my girlfriend at the time managed to convince me it'd be a good idea to get my M.B.A. She said that way I'd always have a backup. She made it sound so reasonable."

Halfway through the session Keith had sprawled himself back in the chair, unkinking his long legs to stretch beneath the table. His hands were alternately running through the hair on the back of his head and resting on top of it. He was at ease in his storytelling. I only wanted to listen.

"This was a girl I liked a lot. I thought I might marry her. I was already thinking about kids. I had all these visions... a big house in a cul-de-sac, some woods behind it, a treehouse, trips to Yosemite with the dog. So I thought, why the hell not. It's only a couple more years. And I hated it but I made it through, for us. But by the end of it I was so empty, and everything had begun to feel empty -- the relationship, everything. She was still wanting to go out to the same clubs we went to in college and I was already in that house with the dog and the kids. And it took me six months but I eventually got around to telling her I needed to move on. Broke my heart."

All I did was nod.

"You know how it is when you love somebody. Even if you know it's not going to work." His eyes were on mine, watching for a response. I resisted the urge to nod again or make an encouraging comment; I noticed I had his total attention, for an intense second, as he sought out some resonance in my eyes for what he'd said. Finally I broke.

"Two divorces," I said.

And he went smoothly on. "It took me another half a year to get it through my head, once and for all, that I didn't have the patience to sit down and write all day. I was pretty down by that point and I ended up taking a job that -- for the life of me -- I'm still not sure why I even applied for. A junior management position at Raleigh Farms in the Imperial Valley. I guess I had this idea that I'd be out in the country... farms and all... and it'd be a good way for me to get away from it all. And it worked, sort of. I was so busy for the next couple years I barely had time to think about writing or relationships. I ended up being promoted twice and had a bunch of other managers under me. It was kind of fun."

I scanned the developing crinkles around his eyes, pondering his age. Mid-forties? Forty-four, as I was to find out. But he might as well still have been in his late twenties. He had a loopy grin now and his posture had changed again. He was leaning dramatically over one arm of the chair, his whole body near ready to flow over onto the floor. He was right. He couldn't sit still. I caught myself grinning too, and didn't mind. I only wanted him to continue.

"But of course, the emptiness caught up to me there too." He toyed with a fraying part of the upholstery for a moment, then returned his blue gaze to my face. "Business. I had all these great ideas, about making a great place for people to work, a humane corporation that meshed with the community... reward programs, and ballgames, you know... and my superiors were into that, they really were. They were great people. But nothing ever got done! And I kept thinking, if only I had the willpower to figure out all the details, I could fuck the need for approval and just start implementing things myself. But I never did."

I watched his face. While the part of me that knows those things knew his improbable idealism wasn't a sham, the fist of habit was still holding onto the need for proof. But the proof had been in his tone if it was anywhere; he was angry, even now, after a decade and a half. And more. "You're cursing the business machine, but you blamed yourself too."

Keith shrugged weakly. The chair took a little more of his weight. "I was in a position to make things happen. I could have made life better for a lot of people."

My psychiatrist's mind was making the connections. The girl in me, however, was rapt in his mixed-up aura of middle-aged male responsibility and plain human vulnerability. His suit fit him perfectly. But here he was with his melodrama collapsing him over the arm of the chair, cursing the system. I started to feel more than keen interest. I started to like him, irrationally.

"That was when I met my wife," he said, and another grin broke over his face. He didn't pause to look to me for comment this time -- he was off like a river, noisy and unstoppable. "We had a series of meetings one month with an environmental group called FarmSmart that I had to attend. They were a little boring at first. I already thought of myself as an environmentalist. But these were real environmentalists. They had a tiny budget they used to travel around California and pressure agribusinesses into updating their practices. Lysa was one of the organizers. My first impression of her was that she was difficult. She had a habit of interrupting my boss whenever he was waffling, and once she walked out of a meeting when she thought we weren't taking them seriously. The more I listened, though, the more I developed this bizarre admiration for her. I heard rumors that she'd followed uncooperative industry execs and lobbed their own tomatoes at their cars, for media attention. She'd spent a few nights in jail. When I heard that, I had to get to know her. I had to know who this woman was." He finally paused a moment. "It didn't hurt that she was beautiful."

Keith went back to reclining in his chair, taking up half the space in the office. "I started talking more in the meetings, pushing harder for a compromise. She knew I was interested in her. Women know. My mother says I'm a charmer. I think I just get this dopey look on my face and women take pity on me." Absurdly, he winked at me then, and I was too caught off guard to make any response. "But I can't help flirting. I would be talking about the cost of deep irrigation and looking right in her eyes. I think I made her blush." His blue eyes were off mine now as he spoke of the past, but his presence in the room wasn't any fainter. I couldn't keep my own gaze off him. "It turned out well, since the more I got into the negotiations, the more things started to warm up and pretty soon we reached a deal. No tomato-throwing. And she asked me out first! In a roundabout way. I was head over heels. After we'd wrapped up she invited me back to the van to see some of the other stuff they did. My God. Just being around her was like... electricity. I couldn't even stop finding excuses to touch her, either. I was terrible. I had my hand on her back when we left the van for the office. And I asked her out for lunch. And she accepted!"

And I was smitten. Whoever the man was, he had the heart of a teenager and the ideals of a saint. And he'd made it half through his forties without flagging. There was no room left in me for my thoughts to run around, catch up to and capture his predicament, solve his problems. I only felt warm.

The armchair suffered another abuse as he wrestled himself around to pull one leg up to his knee. His foot was tapping. He was full of energy. "Lysa changed everything. At first my work suffered because I was spending all my time with her, sneaking out at lunch, always calling her. Then it began to suffer because in between all the dinners and the cuddling she was teaching me about her side of life, where she'd been alternately fighting or working with agribusiness since she was fifteen. It was who she was. At first I thought I'd be overwhelmed but I only came to have more and more respect for her. She's the strongest woman I've ever known. The strongest person I know. And about ten times smarter than I am, too. She had an answer for every protest about how much things cost in business or what the impact would be. She knew more about business than I did and I was the one with the M.B.A. I was already chafing at work from not being able to get human resource reforms passed, and now it began to seem like a prison. I truly liked the guys above me but more and more I saw us all as pawns of the system. I didn't want to participate in something that was damaging the environment or small businesses, and while I used to see Raleigh as a pretty good company... again, it began to look more and more like a system that had its own interests.

"Lysa taught me to care about the working lives of more than the people I was manager over. Not just the people in my office but the people out there running the farms that contributed to Raleigh. What we were giving them and what they were able to do with it. Did you know that you won't find a single small farm in California that's not at least eightteen thousand in debt? Never mind that we're still pumping enough nitrogen and phosphates into the ground to turn the Pacific into a solid mat of algae by the end of the century. The bigwigs at Raleigh knew all that, of course, but they liked to assure me there was no good answer. Something had to change. I felt like I couldn't keep up with Lysa. She has so much drive, she never takes no for an answer. But she inspired me. I ended up joining the town zoning board and a few months later switched to the town council." Keith looked at me once more. "That's how I got into politics. It all starts so innocently." His white-toothed smile flashed out again at me, but I was caught up at the crinkling by his eyes. Something in him was laughing, though he was quiet. I knew he wanted me to laugh. And I was. I couldn't help it. All he did was give me that dopey look, and I was mush.

It's a long way to fall. I'd worked my way up too, and nobody needs to know my story to know I thought nothing would take it away from me. Nobody could reduce again me to that homeless girl. I built myself up brick by brick. Where are the bricks now?

Keith was leaning in across the table. His eyes were so warm, I knew I'd met the meaning of the idea of basking in someone's presence. And I felt a blush around my ears. But he was lost in his own story. "I have that side of my life." His voice was soft. "My marriage was the happiest day of my life. Every day I go home to her is the happiest day of my life. She's the most amazing woman in the world. And my job?" He kept his voice quiet, but his intimate gaze chilled instantly to a serious intensity. "My job sucks. The further away you get from the grassroots, the more bullshit there is. Some days I eat so much shit even I don't believe what comes out of my mouth anymore. Even Lysa doesn't like to listen to me when I come home. I'm making her miserable. I'm miserable. I'm starting to hate myself."

That was when I opened my mouth. That was when I started to play psychiatrist, and that was when they should have put me away. Because I already had an inappropriate relationship with my client, before I ever gave him my first counsel. I would have done anything for Keith. I would still do anything for Keith. He told me he was a pawn; I say he was not. He never knew his own power. That, of course, was half the reason I loved him.

The Uncanny Influence of Keith Wright, Part 3

Wake up.

I'm on the moon. Sit up in bed. Stars are piped through the ceiling screen, the same stars I see if I climb up to one of the colony's few real windows. The room is utterly silent. No creaks. No hum of motors, fans. No whir of skycars faintly through the concrete walls. No birds. And it is still. Stiller than a summer night back on Earth, somehow. As if the Earth rotates, but the moon just hangs there in the sky. Perhaps my body knows I'm underground, here. Or maybe it's come to think there's nothing outside at all. No Earth, no sun, no laws of physics. Nothing but silent squares.

I flip the switch by my bed, and sunlight now streams through the panel of fibers above me. The room is a square of yellow white. I roll to the edge of the bed, slide off and grope for the robe hanging from the door. I haven't put on any real clothing in three days. It seems fitting, somehow. I will wander the colony in my robe. If there were children here, maybe they'd stare. None of the adults will give me a second glance.

The kitchen clock is a handsome wooden analog one, but it doesn't make a sound. The narrow hands sweep around without ticking. Ten after seven, Pacific Standard Time. As if there were a Pacific. As if there were Time. The living room lies flatly under the streaming light of the sun. The low couch and coffee table are dusty. Where does the dust come from? When I lock the door behind me and step into the hall, still barefoot, I may as well be a dust mote too. Drifting. Where did I come from?

I was halfway through college when I decided I wanted to be a psychiatrist. It seemed a natural option given my growing talents for figuring people out and my growing conviction that I'd enjoy having a lot of money. The conviction that I'd enjoy having a lot of money was something I forged for myself. I thought long and hard about it and decided that, all things being equal, I'd be better off rich. The ability to read people, though, that was something that was pointed out to me.

I had always thought everyone had this ability -- that it wasn't an ability at all, in particular, but something natural to the human species. I figured (or I would have, if I'd ever thought about it) that anyone could look at someone else and divine their precise mood from their facial expression. Could tell if someone liked them or not by the orientation of their body in conversation. Could hear the lie in the half-second pause before someone answered a question. I never questioned my ability to do so. Likewise, I assumed everyone could read what I was thinking and feeling, and often as not chose to ignore the pain, boredom or raw lust I put up a workmanlike struggle to hide... just as I ignored the messy trappings of emotion I saw around me. I wasn't stripped of my illusions until I participated in one of the graduate-run studies we had to enlist in to get credit for Psych 103.

The study was fairly plain. Once we'd logged in and submitted some personal information we were given a series of images to view, films to watch and recordings to listen to. We then had to select the relevant emotion, say whether a smile was fake, tell if someone was lying, et cetera. It was an enjoyable forty-five minutes and I punched in the answers easily between mouthfuls of Chinese. I got a call the next week to verify my identity. I'd gotten a perfect score; the average among college sophomores on that test was around 20% for men, 25% for women. At first my mood was simply self-congratulatory. But soon my curiosity touched off a research binge into the science of reading people. Over the next few weeks I tore through fifty sites and thirty research papers on facial expression, body language, and vocal tone. Then I knew the science of communication was a muddy art to most. Then I knew I had a singular gift.

I take the stairs around the atrium today, slowly. My neck soon aches as I keep my head turned to the right for the whole climb, peering down into the jungle, the trees and scattered lawns shifting under a few shafts of piped-in sun. There are people down there. Siraman is cross-legged in the grass, hunched over his ebook. He's not comfortable but he's too lost in the action to move. Ben and Elise are passing an earbud back and forth. Whatever's playing, he likes it; she doesn't. The sharing is sweet but routine; she barely looks at his face when she passes it back. Then they're under the canopy and I can't see them. I'm going up and up and up.

Punching myself into the Matchlinx was oddly enjoyable too. I was rapt for all three hours. One part of my mind leapt to wonder, Why? What part of Me am I revealing by choosing the upper-left quadrant of the portrait as the most appealing? while the other part was lost in the choosing. There's something addictive about revealing yourself. I'm loath to do it to my fellow humans. Why do I want my secrets traveling around in their heads? But that relentless program had all of me, and I gave eagerly.

That was how Keith made me feel: known. And I came to see he made most everyone feel that way. I even knew how he did it. It was the look in his eyes when he was listening to you, the way he would lean forward, the way he had of putting his other hand on yours in a handshake, or touching your arm to get your attention without any hesitation or awkwardness, like he knew you wouldn't mind. It was the way he'd respond not to what you said but to what you were trying to say, picking up on where you were heading and smoothly taking you there, as if that was what he'd been about to mention too. I was conscious of all these things. And yet somehow the science is still an art. Somehow he was more than the sum of his parts, more than the smile, the easy personal revelation, the offhand compliment. Because I could tell you exactly what made that man likeable -- I could write a dissertation on it -- and yet somehow it doesn't add up to the end, the avalanche, the crushing squeeze he put in my chest that went on to steamroll my job and my life.

It's quiet in the lounge on top of the atrium. Not quiet; silent. Not everyone keeps the hours they kept back home, and not everyone was from the U.S. anyway, but it's seven-thirty and most, still, are in bed. I pad over the thick carpet in my bare feet. I know the sunlight is streaming beneath me, crawling through the fibers in the walls to spill out over the little park, but it might as well be flowing through me; from the sun above, somewhere, through these concrete walls, and me, and the floor. I may as well be transparent.

I paid the $200 to contact Keith Wright after the Matchlinx delivered him. And he accepted the contact and set up an appointment. He had no questions for me. Keith had not a blind, but certainly an enthused, faith in technology; at the least, he's what they've always called an early adopter. The newness of a thing and the soundness of a theory was enough to gain his participation, forget the actual implementation of it. He was ready to jump in. I didn't know all this at the time, of course, but I would learn.

I felt transparent at that moment I met him in the waiting room. I felt sure he would see something in my gaze, know he stirred something in me when I saw him. I was a hair embarrassed. But he was a stranger meeting his therapist for the first time. He pushed himself up from his chair and dropped his newspaper on the seat next to him. The look on his face was blank and open, prepared to smile.

"Nice to meet you," he said, his hands enveloping mine. I remember. I was a tad off guard still, some inner part of me still a half-second behind, believing I was already known. His gaze was right on mine like he didn't have a fear in the world. I had an uncommon instinct then to look down at my feet, but I caught it in time.

"Come into my office," I said.

And that was that. My first schoolgirl crush, at thirty-eight. Except there he was then on the plush chair across from me, and there was the door that was closed, and the white-noise whoosher, and there were he and I in our chrysalis alone to probe all the man's most closely-shepherded secrets, for an hour a week those five months.

Now I pad across the lounge and let myself fall into a chair by the center table, the one below the window. The real window, two by two feet square. The view is into the night of the universe, and my unconscious eye counts more stars, adding the half-seen specks into an internal picture of eternity, than my conscious eye can see or understand. I slide my feet onto the table, letting myself lie parallel to the view. If I lie here long enough I feel as though I could fall upward into it. I try not to think at all. I try to remember without thinking, and let the drifting feeling quietly separate the atoms of me until I can feel only what's in between.

I don't remember every session of therapy, but I have a clear memory of that day. He sat forward on his chair, half out of it, sharp elbows on his knees and his hands free to work the air in front of him. His height was compressed into a slightly hunched angle of restless energy. He'd come from the capitol and he had on a suit, expensive wool, grey, big black shoes for his long feet. The ring on his left hand caught the light slanting through the window. He had a grey tie that wasn't on very tightly, and a hint of careless stubble that was out of place on his boyish face. His hair was brown and almost curly and it was falling over his ears. No one would mistake him for a conservative.

I noticed he was finishing up a mint.

I opened my lips, and habit took over. "Tell me a little about yourself, Keith," I heard my voice say.

He grinned out of one side of his mouth, the faintest shrug threatening under the shoulders of the grey suit. "I feel like I'm losing myself." His voice had become small, and I felt my ears tune in of their own accord. "I'm not sure who I am anymore... that's why I'm here. I'm a politician," he finished. He leaned back a hair in his seat and let his hands clasp in front of him. And I was taken suddenly by a surge of something tender under my ribs. The rational side of my brain noted his lack of pretense and also the lack of apparent anxiety over the minute disclosure. And the other side, whatever side that is, felt like a stone somewhere had been turned and the earth beneath had a momentary taste of the sun's heat radiating from its surface. No one is a liar, deep down. No matter what passes our lips, none of us can help being who we are at every moment. The truth will out, whether in accent or timing or tic. Yet there was something about this man that was so flowingly genuine, even in his complaint of lost identity, that the cruder parts of me literally could not help but stir in response. I wanted to help him.

I felt my head nod. I heard my voice coming out of my throat. "A noble calling," it said. "But not the easiest one to keep your head in. I could understand losing yourself."

But I wasn't thinking about that. I was thinking about the lines of his face and wondering why I hadn't heard of him before. Keith Wright, Keith Wright... but nothing is ever new, and no relation is ever new, since in the moment of introduction the newness passes out of it. Now there was never a time when he was not in my life. There are only degrees of me, and him.

The Uncanny Influence of Keith Wright, Part 2

The day I read his name on the Matchlinx, I'd never heard of Keith Wright before. Three weeks after our first appointment, I could probably reel you off more facts about his life than his own mother could. I could certainly tell you more about him than his wife.

Born in 2178 in Annapolis. Well-to-do family. Went west at 18 to attend UCLA in person, at the same time I had my little girl head lost in the Bombay Schlox, seeing the swirling heaves of animation on the insides of my eyelids when I lay down for bed each night. I had graduated to real-life drama and a near pregnancy at the same time he was graduating with a degree in business. On to Stanford, on to the agriculture juggernaut -- where he married Lysa D'Agostino, who had the gall to be a far-left agrobusiness protester (and still does, come to think of it) -- and on to politics and Sacramento and my office.

But first there was the Matchlinx. The personal survey I'd spent three numbing hours completing to get listed supposedly knew the measure of me as a woman, and could theoretically and for a low fee hook me up with any client whose personal style of disclosure happened to suit my personal style as therapist, as surely as it'd been hooking up man and wife, or adulterer and adulteree, for years. The fact that nobody knew how it worked... that even now, nobody knows how it works... was and is immaterial. Over two thousand questions, inquiries, and prompts to choose between random shapes, colors and suggestions, each selection to be returned in five seconds or less. No time to think. The computer does the thinking. The computer came up with it. With a little raw material from the human researchers, of course. But there's no system like an evolving system, and there's no evolution like the one a big mass of circuits can run in a billionth of a second -- and move on to the next.

You would think it would be the death knell for true romance the day they proved a computer could predict more than compatibility -- that it could predict chemistry, pheromones, black magic, animal passion, je ne sais quoi, whatever it is that's in the air when two people click. But to call that the death of romance or intrigue would be to forget the frailty of our kind. Since when did chemistry ever predict happiness? When did the course of true love ever run smooth? (And when there have been breakups, when has there not been a whole industry to step in and patch things up... or soothe your pain, tell you what a jerk he was, and find you somebody new?) In the end, the system that promised an end to our groping in the dark became one more weapon in our arsenal of self-inflicted woe. If that's not romantic, what is?

I finally ponied up and got on the system because I'd been burned. My last client had turned sour on me, becoming ever bitterer about how the psychoanalysis was going until by winter he abruptly cut off contact and decided to sue me for irreparable damage to his mental health. He'd decided he'd been abused, and my continuing effort to get him to paint his family with a brush less dark caused him untold pain and suffering. The abuse was a new idea to me. I still don't know what to make of it. Either way, the suit was dropped a week later, and that was the last I heard of him. But the experience left me with gaps in the previously rock-solid faith I had, the belief that I could pretty much read anyone, on anything, given enough time.

Maybe I just wasn't given enough time.

I have all the time in the world up here. Yet I haven't sat in an office chair or picked up a secure headset since I got here, and I won't. It helps that no one here could pay me for a session. If I were so inclined, I could hand out therapy for free, but who would I be to counsel any of them? My counseling days are over. Now, I don't even give out advice. And what kind of a psychiatrist would give it away for free, anyway? How would you trust them?

The Matchlinx was happy to dispense advice in the newly developing area of therapist-client relations, for $200 a match. A fair price, presuming the therapist gets along well with her client. I knew the system was still gathering data on the dynamics of that particular relationship. I wasn't sure it mattered, then. I'm not sure it matters now. The system is larger than the design. It brought me Keith. After that first visit, all I wanted to say was, "I'll take him."

But the decisions are all in the past. My decision to enter psychology. My decision to use the Matchlinx. His decision to find a therapist, to use the Matchlinx. I didn't think much on it when I did it. Now I think about it all the time. Like I said, there's not much else to do up here. When the program returned his name and my eyes scanned the shape of those letters for the first time, that was the first note. When I got myself sunk into five hours under the goggles that night after our first session, the curiosity and reward centers of my brain pulsing with every scrap the engines turned up about him, that was the first chord. The reality of our interaction was only the page this requiem is written on. And here we are In Paradisum, and the moon with its starkness is only the page.

My mind is full of memory. That night I followed link after link, chasing his name through all the ether, I wasn't yet conscious of myself in my obsession. I was simply enjoying myself. I was reading the fascinating stories from Leftly and the Journal and learning about the very nice man who was my new client, who needed help because despite his position in the thick of the fight against agronopoly, he felt he was losing his soul. I remember my favorite story. It was a snippet from the Times, written after he became a state representative, looking back at his first year in office. It was one of those stories that points out a trait of character and purports to prove that it was there all along, able to be seen by anyone with the eyes for it. It was a sort of a silly story. The uncanny influence of Keith Wright, it said, was such that he not only managed to get both Luke Mead of Mead Monsanto and Jerry Carter of Agripath to come to Sacramento for lunch at his house with him, but that by all reports they all three, joined by Lysa, stayed into the night and up till past four AM. Just talking. Both men missed their flight. It's true that some time later, checks were forthcoming from both men for development of nitrogen reclamation processes. But the thing that got me was the missed flights.

Keith was just Keith; he wasn't a negotiator of especial skill, or he would have been more than state representative. He was, and probably remains, a very nice man. He was, and probably remains, a reasonably good-looking man, and one who happened to smell like soap the night I gave in and threw my arms around his surprised and lightly warm self.

Tonight I think I'll take a long bath. We don't have water for baths here, per se, but we do have soap, of a sort. In paradisum.

The Uncanny Influence of Keith Wright

It's a long story how I got here, but mostly it's because of him. I shouldn't be saying this. It's supposed to be embarrassing. But it's hard to care anymore. There isn't much of anything up here... no scenery, no cities, no culture, no air. It's hard to hide. There's not much left now in the way of pretense or shame. And sometimes a person gets to wishing for a little intimacy, even if it only comes through the sharing of suspect thoughts.

We all don't have much to do up here. The two million dollars tossed into a governmental black hole in order to come here could have started me my own consulting company back home. Or it could have gotten me a nice house and a few boats. Although most likely it would have stayed in that savings account until I died, accumulating. Now it's nothing. And I have no house at all, just my square apartment. And I have no job at all, and I have no assets at all, but I do have my food, clothing and shelter taken care of by my government. And I have nothing to do now but surf the web, walk the perimeter, and lie down in bed and look out at the stars.

I could talk to the others, I could keep going to the chess games in the hall. But my motor's running out of steam. Most everyone here is in the same straits as me. Almost everybody's getting taken care of by the government. Either they're legitimate scientists doing legitimate research, or they're the colonists, the ones who paid big to be guinea pigs, the embarrassments, the forgotten, gathering lunar dust up here with no hope for an honest wage. We're on hold. They can't stop meeting our basic needs but they don't seem interested in sending us more resources or colonists either. There is no money going into the marketing of the thing. We're a book that only sold a thousand copies, and the publisher's giving up.

And I resist going back. The Trines, who used to come over every other night and made me laugh until I felt like I'd done a hundred sit-ups, left a couple weeks ago. They were visibly distraught about my not going with them. They worry about me. I don't tend to worry. I just want to stay.

It's very quiet here. Lots of time to think. Most of the time, I think about Keith. Not in the present terms -- I don't think about where he is right now anymore, whether he's at work or at dinner or with his wife. I don't think about him in future terms either -- not whether he'd ever leave her, or what I'll say to him when the party's over. I think in terms of the past. That's all that holds my interest now. Present, future, who cares? Look out the window to see the present and the future. There's one word for it.

One of my favorite memories is of the day I met him. I've never liked anyone so fast in my life. I've never felt that way about a client. When I saw him in the waiting room my first thought -- I remember explicitly, not just like it was yesterday, but like it was happening again right now -- was that he already knew me. Not that I knew him, not that I'd known him all my life, not that he was my soul mate... none of that... just the eerie feeling that I was familiar to him. It was in the pit of my stomach and the back of my head simultaneously, and it was something instinctual. So without thinking, in another split second I was introducing myself to settle the score.

And I expected him to return the handshake with warmth in his eye and a smile, but to see his expression, you'd think he'd never seen me before a day in his life. And he hadn't.

I feel like a baby up here, or an invalid, all my needs taken care of, no undue demands on my stamina or intellect. Maybe that's why I stay; he made me feel the same way. Not taken care of, and not unchallenged, or not usually -- but a peculiar type of infant or a cripple, next to him. I was always the hungry one. And he was Keith Wright, a client and an infatuation, and a stranger. He was very good at not meeting my needs. And what can I say, considering those needs were overwhelming, immoral and possibly criminal? He was healthy. I was not. A forevermore tragic turn of events, considering I was the therapist.

Now I have all my needs taken care of. I'm back in the amniotic sac. Where is he now? In the past, that's where, that's all. Where am I? I'm on the fucking moon. Right now.

And I'm sitting here with my one-button remote. Make that two buttons: Pause. Rewind.

Kendlin the Cold

Kendlin woke up with a good, deep ache in his muscles. He was pleased. The air was cold, and where his breath steamed out of the hole he'd made in the haystack it had frosted the hay all around with shiny specks. He didn't want to move just yet. He wasn't entirely warm, but warm enough. It was deep winter. He could see some of the field around him, the grass heavy with frost. No snow had fallen during the night. The sky above the trees was a blinding white.

He toyed with the idea of spending the whole day inside the pile of hay. What does it look like, where I crushed the grass in the dark last night? Are there tracks? Is it obvious? Where did they make camp? Is the weather holding them down? Did they get drunk in an inn last night?

He squirmed around in his wool blankets in the hay, letting the errant straws tease fresh skin. His thighs were the sorest, the muscles hot and heavy. He squinted out at the sky. What if it snows today?

It was the 246th day. He had not spoken with anyone in at least a fortnight, not since the man lying in the road, but he saw the blood outside the farmhouse from a recent slaughter. It was feast-time, he knew. His own stomach was starting to wake up. He fished around in his bag for the dried beef he'd filched a few miles back. It was eaten before he remembered to taste it. His mind was elsewhere.

Where would they be? Making themselves at home in the farmhouse? Malech has a way with people. They could be eating feast-time mutton right now. What is it now? Three hours past dawn? Look at the sky.

He settled further into the tumbled pile of hay, only half warm and half comfortable. Still half hungry. He determined to wait out the day here. His breath slinked out into the cold. He felt around for another strip of meat and shoved it in his mouth.

Ten minutes later he was on his feet, shaking straw out of his hair and resettling the hay pile. His pack was on his back in a moment and he was off across the field, trying to get the blood pumping into his cold-shocked limbs. He kept on walking for three hours before he stopped by a mostly frozen stream to have a drink and another bite. The woods were completely silent and there was no sign of any animal, not even a bird. The only motion was the water beneath the ice and Kendlin's hand moving from his bag to his mouth.

The sun seemed already to be on its way to setting by the time he was done. He pulled his pack back on and hopped the stream, pushing his way through the brush up the slope opposite. The light disappeared steadily as he walked. It was the deep grey twilight of a thickly clouded afternoon that released the first snowflakes, spinning into the trees and settling, at first to melt, on the sodden leaf litter around him.

The wind picked up as evening came on. Now he was walking up and up, now he was pushing across a ridge, maple and oak rubbing their branches in the air above his head. The snowflakes were fat and slothful. Kendlin got to a cleared place on the ridgeline as night came on, and looked out over the valley to see no sign of life but a few drifts of chimney smoke that barely stood out against the dim horizon. Frozen lakes glowed blankly pale as if lit from below. One spindly thread of road bisected the scene.

His feet were numb and the fronts of his thighs stung with the wind. The snow was beginning to stick, and now every step he took left sign enough for a good huntsman to follow. Soon he'd be leaving tracks plain to anyone. He'd already forgotten the haystack and the morning. All that remained of the day was to move fast and let the white balm cover over and smooth what it would. He set himself a faster rhythym and kept his cold legs pumping. It was dinnertime and dark. Let them try to catch him now.

Jeff Plotnik and the Visitation

Reverend Henley was not impressed by the angels.

"Very impressive," he said flatly. "Lovely. I don't know what the hell is going on, but whoever you are you're making a travesty of the Church and all the saints."

Gabriel smiled. "Your concern is noted. As of old, we bring you a message from our Lord." The light of his presence flickered over the twelve faces in the conference room, giving each expression its own spotlight. Wonder, confusion, curiosity... disgust.

"What is it?" Henley's voice came out strained. He was standing now, his heavy hands on the back of the folding chair. The others were silent.

Gabriel inclined his golden head. "It pains me to be the bearer of this news, good men. But the Lord never has a thought which is not holy, or does a thing which has not purpose. I bring sad tidings. The gates to Heaven have been closed."

The silence was electric. The angels were the only ones moving. Gabriel lifted his head and crossed his arms in their flowing sleeves. The others, the androgynous pair flanking him, looked inscrutably at each other. Every time they breathed, the light in the room shifted a little.

"Who are you?"

"I regret your lack of faith, you who stand at the head of this priesthood. Do you think me an illusion? Are men grown so distant from God that they cannot recognize divinity when it stands in front of them? I ask you, could an illusion do this?"

The Reverend gasped. Gabriel lifted an eyebrow. Young Reverend Plotnik stood up, clearing his throat, and took Reverend Henley by the arm. He urged the older man back into his seat, watched his face for a moment, then turned to the angels.

"What have you done to him?"

"Faith, good men. I know not what else to tell you. I am the message-bearer, that is all."

Plotnik felt a tickle stirring around his heart, and a pricking under his eyelids. He squinted through the glare surrounding Gabriel's face. When he spoke again, his voice was thin.

"The gates of Heaven have been closed?"

Gabriel nodded his head.

"Why? What is our sin?"

Gabriel glanced at the twin to his right, then leveled his blue gaze once again on Plotnik's narrow face. "Your sins are many, as every man knows. But it was not for sin that this was done. It was for necessity." In the corner of the room, by the folding table set with pitchers of water, Reverend Brown had slid to his knees, his eyes closed. "Heaven is full."

Plotnik's tingling heart skipped a beat. "Heaven is full?" Behind him, Reverend Holloway had stood and slipped out the door, closing it silently. Plotnik could hear his pulse pounding in his ears. His eyes were beginning to hurt.

"It cannot hold a single soul more. I am but the messenger." Gabriel's light seemed to dim for a half second. "None, not even I, may question the plans of the divine Lord."

"This doesn't make any sense..."

"It is not for us to question. If it is fit, I will come again." And then they went. There was a wildness in the air and a burst of light, and the eleven remaining priests were left blinking in the sudden dimness of the yellowy overhead flourescent lights.

Reverend Henley got up and went over to the water table.

Plotnik followed him with his eyes. "Do we believe this?" he whispered.

Henley was swallowing a glass of water. His throat worked noisily. When he was finished, he set the cup on the wet tablecloth. He turned to his colleagues. "I believe..."

As he trailed off, Brown pulled himself to his feet, and the door clicked open again to let Holloway back in. The trim senior took his seat as smoothly as usual, but his silence piled on top of the weight already in the room.

Finally Henley shrugged. "I believe something happened. I believe..." he glanced where Gabriel had appeared five minutes before. "...something happened that man cannot explain."

"What did you feel, Father?" asked Plotnik.

"I believe this incident deserves further investigation." Henley turned his head, and they all followed, to Brown's folding chair and past that, where the camera on its tripod stood, little red LED aglare. It was still there. It was still on.

"Faith--" began Brown. That was as far as he got. The little room suddenly seemed tiny. In another moment, all the men except Plotnik were on their feet. Jeff Plotnik had sat down again. He'd opened his notebook, but his eyes were closed.

Somewhere in New Jersey, Martin Sachs was tuning his guitar, with no one to hear but an oversized Chihuahua trailing its leash through the parking lot. The evening came down softly around the white Honda and he was singing.

When I'ma done with the wind and rain
Jesus carry me home
When I'ma done with this iron chain
Jesus carry me home
When the heat o' the day can't burn no more
Jesus carry me home
And the cold o' the night can't chill the core
Jesus carry me home

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus carry me home
I'm poor and a drunk, and I never had luck,
But Jesus will carry me home.

He leaned back into the beat-up vehicle to reach for his bottle of cabernet, and sat for a while. Then the stars came out up above. It was a night like any other.

Beans and Men

Today I read that Plato thought you could find men's souls inside beans. This statement was accompanied by no explanation. I don't know whether it's true, but I was immediately intrigued. What kind of beans? Pinto beans? Garbanzo beans? Did the soul enter the bean upon the bean's creation, or was it added afterward? What happens when you cook and eat the bean?

What if our souls really did end up in beans? I imagine my death at 80, my soul lifting away and flitting to the grocery store where it inserts itself into a dried black bean in a package of black beans high up on a shelf. There it will stay until we're purchased. Perhaps I share the bag with the souls of truck drivers and Chinese immigrants. Will I be conscious? What is a soul, anyway? What is it like inside a bean? Perhaps it's like being a genie in a bottle. Perhaps I am only distantly aware of a confining presence about me, the fiber of the bean, and of time passing. Then I am purchased and sit on a new shelf for months, dimly aware. Then I'm dropped into a pot of water.

Will I drift up to heaven when my bean confinement softens? Perhaps I will become soft as well, the toughened edges of my soul weakening and disintegrating in the heat. Then I will be eaten.

The others will be eaten too. Whole mouthfuls of souls being chewed and swallowed, sliding pulpily to the stomach. There we will be digested.

On further looking into this beans thing, well, the idea was more popular than we might have suspected. I quote this site:

"Considerable credit for an aversion to beans may be given to Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher who lived towards the end of the 6th century BC. It was Pythagoras, before both Socrates and Plato (who documented Socrates’ pedagogy,) who taught that knowledge should never be written down as it may only truly evolve through the oral tradition."

Though I didn't find any evidence that it was Plato who thought the thing about the souls, apparently someone did. Perhaps Pliny. No mention of the specifics, though. Our elders weren't very taken with quantification, were they? But I shouldn't be too hard on them. We haven't yet developed the equipment to detect when a soul is about. Unless you accept that you can detect a soul by exactingly monitoring the weight of the body in question. Or, presumably, the weight of a bean.

Martin and the New Flock

Martin Sachs, on the face of it, wasn't the likeliest choice to lead the movement. This was due in large part to the fact that he had no designs on leadership whatsoever.

"I thought it was funny," he told Hannah Young of the Times. "But I wasn't going to stop them. People want to follow me around, they can follow me around. It's a free country."

But it was just that outlook that the Times extolled. And in successive newspapers and magazines across the country, Martin Sachs was nailed with such glowing terms as "patriotic visionary," "ambassador of grace" and "postmodern messiah."

"Well, what I really wanted was to be a folk singer," said Martin, speaking of the ambition he'd had at eighteen. "I didn't feel I would be one until I'd lived a certain amount, wrote a certain number of songs, found some resonance with regular folks." The Times reported that Martin Sachs's greatest goal in life was "authenticity." When asked by Young whether he thought he'd managed to achieve that, Martin replied, "To some degree."

But to whatever degree his other goals had been achieved, by the summer of 2031 there was no doubt about one of them; his songs had gone above and beyond in resonating with his audience. On the dusty night of June 17th, Martin could be found with his feet on the asphalt of a Hoboken parking lot and his narrow butt enthroned in the passenger's seat of his white 2008 Honda Civic. The duct-tape-wrapped Fender guitar he'd picked out of twelve at a pawnshop when he first hit the road was angled into the passenger compartment, and Martin was hunched over it as usual, his brown face invisible in the shadow cast by the door of the vehicle.

And spread out in amphitheater style around him was an arc of ninety to a hundred other cars, all makes and models, dusty, rusty and gleaming-new. Some also had their doors open. Some were empty, their owners now seated on the asphalt in front of Martin. One of Martin's faithful, a fat white man from North Carolina named Jackson, careened into the parking lot in a dented Ford and met the commencement of the night's music session with a throaty "Hallelujah!" The young couple in the Lexus... who weren't regulars, at least not yet... glanced at each other and grinned.

This was the new flock, and Martin was the new shepherd. This was the man Reverend Henley called "the false prophet," the artist the Village Voice decreed was "significant, but not necessarily good" and the subject Hannah Young ultimately concluded was a "just another fortysomething American male, caught in the right place at the wrong time."

Who was Martin Sachs? If religion is the opiate of the masses, then Martin was the methadone. And in those years, when God and all the saints above turned their backs on mankind, no sermon could heal the agony of the withdrawl... but some of the new shepherds could alleviate it, a little. Martin was one.

Kendlin and the Cascade

He woke up next to a waterfall. It was the fifth day. He woke as if nothing had happened, no knot of doom in his stomach, and sat up and looked at the waterfall. The spray was making the rocks wet for ten feet in either direction. By the light it was already nine o'clock. All he could hear was the pounding of the water.

Dimly and slowly now he remembered urgency. He didn't want it to be so. Some part of his brain was very loud in insisting that it wanted none of this to be true, nothing except the waterfall, its normalcy, its wetness, the sense of eternity in the endless cascade. His body hurt as he rolled up and looked around. The spot where he'd lain was hollowed out in the grass and damp. The bag he'd made out of a bedsheet was translucent with wet. The candlesticks showed their form in the thin cotton, jumbled with his knife and the little leather bag. His boots were still on his feet. His coat was still on his body. Sweat stained his shirt beneath his arms and his hair was limp and wet.

He stared hard at the ground, trying to remember whether he was looking for something else. Then he remembered the urgency again. Where was his mind? Why had he slept next to a waterfall? All he could hear was the pounding. If they'd caught up to him in the night, nothing would have woken him. And yet he almost felt as if he'd had a full night's sleep. He almost felt as if he'd dreamed. Why did he wake up, after all? Was he simply rested? Something was tickling at his ear. He stared at the ground harder, until he convinced himself he heard the dog. He was still too stunned by sleep to feel the jolt of fear he'd felt the first time he heard that sound. Now his body was creaking; he stiffly pulled the sack onto his shoulder; now he was jumping heavily into the pool at the bottom of the waterfall, stumbling over the slick rocks; the icy water making his muscles jerk, getting in his boots and icing his blistered feet. He felt drunk.

He stared at the muddy bank opposite him. He stared down the thinning, rocky stream. He held for a moment, the thick confusion and indecision holding the door on his thoughts closed for another two seconds, three seconds. There was a great pain creeping up his ankles from the cold of the water. Finally he turned around and lurched at the white wall of water, letting the shock of it all over his body take his attention away from the whole world. That he liked. Then he was in it and thrusting up against rock, and he was in pain. He was waking up.

Why, why was he here? How could the last week be real? When the hunters came into view, he barely had the interest to watch them. Nothing they could do to him could be worse than what he already felt. That was what he thought. His head banged back against rock, the cold sheets of meltwater drove knives into all his skin, and he rocked a little in complete absorption.

There's nothing left. There is no pain worse than this. There is no place other than this. There is no loss other than this. This is all my life. This will be my life. Why? Where are you? Where did you go? What is there left but this?

Outside, the spotted dog was half-jumping through the pool, sniffing over the water. It sniffed at the falls. Kendlin nearly jerked out a hand to grab its collar, pull it under with him... see if he could wring its neck with all the force of everything inside him... but he didn't care. On the fifth day, he didn't care. The dog glanced at the huntsmen, who peered at the cascade. The eternal roar turned everything into theater for the eyes only. One of the hunters, the rangy one, reached in a hand and felt about the rock by Kendlin's side. His fingers were long and fine-boned, white in the odd light. He withdrew his hand and shook it, grimacing. Then he jerked the dog and they were off downstream. The dog half-loped, half-jumped, distracted.

All over was agony, cold and hot-cold. The water coursed down Kendlin and he held it in, didn't scream, didn't cry. This was his. This was all there was of the world now. His mind contracted in a savage painful cramp, the way his muscles were squeezing themselves tight under the freeze of the falls: Why? Why? How could this happen? My love, my love... how could you leave me? Where did you go?

He lasted another two minutes before he became weak, and stumbled out, enervated as though he'd cried for days. He shook like a leaf in spring. Once he sobbed aloud, a wet sound, and then spat into the cold pool. He stumbled up the muddy bank, shivering, hating, bitter on a hundred counts, angry that he didn't even care what prints he left. Angry that he had to go somewhere, that it had to be somewhere other than back. He wanted the falls. He wanted the tears, to be alone with his misery, to have that moment for a whole year and five years. And then in another step he only wanted her back again, and so he stopped and sank to his knees.

The tears reminded his cheeks of heat, and they reminded him of humanity, of the last time he held her. His heart was hot again and the sorrow washed every part of him. He was all by himself. He was Kendlin alone.

That was the fifth day.

Mahele and the Muddy Dystopia

The fire had become so dim that the fireflies surrounding them could be seen, winking green in the trees. There was a coolness on their backs and their calves that was only barely balanced by the heat lingering on their chests and their shins. There were no stars. The clouds hung low, rumbling with hot impotent thunder. There was no rain.

This was when the young ones asked Mahele to tell his story. The old ones protested.

"Mahele's stories are nonsense. You should not be filling your minds with these thoughts. The stories we must listen to are the stories of the past. No man can know the future. To pretend to know the future is an insult to the gods."

But their protests were feeble, made quiet by the corn alcohol and the late hour. They had to be made, for the sake of protesting. But none of the elders had the will anymore to let the hard edge come into his voice. Soon they would go to bed.

"Do you want to hear the story?" asked Mahele. He grinned, the winding tattoos turning his face ugly in the firelight. He was a tall snaking stork of a man, all knobby throat and elbows. His voice was quiet and rough.

"Yes, tell it, before the fire dies," said the young boys.

"It is two hundred and two hundred and two hundred years from today," Mahele said. "On this day, the turtle-men come from within the lake. Only on this day. They have slumbered in the lake for many lives of men. But this day they are awakened. On this day there are bad deeds in the world."

The air crackled with snaps of insects seeking each other in the dark. The clouds crowded heavily above. The children were silent.

"In the hundreds of years, man has changed. This is much time. Your grandchildren's grandchildren will be dust in the earth. No man that walks in this time so far from now will remember you. This is much time for evil to occur. In this time, men have forgotten their gods. They have forgotten the seasons. They plant the corn in the winter, and it rises in the spring with three ears on a stalk and hair that falls to the ground as if it is weeping. They slaughter the buffalo in the spring, and dry the meat for summer, but leave the hides and bones and the hides and bones get up and walk. The land has become flat where it was in hills and has grown hills where it was flat. The lakes have become black and thick like pitch.

"This is when the turtle-men come. They are slow and thick, and drag themselves over the ground like a turtle, the sun drying the caked mud on their backs. They speak a language that is the sound a man makes when his lungs are wet with death and he coughs. Our people of this future time do not know how to greet the turtle-men. They try to trade. They offer the turtle-men the three-eared corn, but the turtle-men tear down the corn plants and gnaw at the roots. They offer the turtle-men the dry and salted summer meat, but the turtle-men crawl into the camps of our people and gnaw upon the legs and arms of the old ones instead. Finally they offer the turtle-men the youngest children of the village, and the turtle-men take them back to the lake. But the turtle-men return.

"At last it is the last night of our people. The children have been given. The old have grown older and died. One elder is left who is planting the three-eared corn. It is autumn. He plants for hope, but he will sow none. Through the rustling of the orange leaves the turtle-men come, silent and slow, their backs thick and caked, and when the elder has no more strength and lies down, they are the last thing he sees. So comes the end of our people."

A wind set the branches high above them to lifting and sighing. The elders of the tribe had gone to their tents. Only Mahele and the young ones were left.

"Then what?" said one.

Mahele shrugged. The story was over. "I don't know," he said.

"Will this really happen to us?"

Mahele grinned again. They could barely see his face at all. The light of the fire had retired to red outlines among the charcoal. "What do you think?"

Paleomythology

As a geek, I am drawn to science fiction and fantasy. No, wait. As someone who's drawn to science fiction and fantasy, I am a geek. Well. There's no doubt that it's usually a certain type of person who's drawn to those genres over others. Yet I resist the genrefication of sci-fi (or SF, to the SF faithful) and fantasy. I think they're types of literature essential to how we wrestle with the basic questions of life and the universe, where we came from and where we're going, and what it means to be human. In fact in some ways, books like 1984 and the Lord of the Rings have become more firmly enmeshed into our idea of ourselves as a species and a culture than all the great books devoted to a realistic portrayal of our world. It's the indefinable power of myth.

C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were obsessed with the nature of myth and thought a great deal of its power. In fact, I believe they... Lewis at least... held myth to be higher and more important than truth. I have no particular romantic notions about myth. But I do believe it has its own place of importance, separate from the place of a good story or allegory or regular old noble literature. There's something in us that wants to believe in good and evil, in the seductive drama of archetypes, in things having meaning beyond what we can see.

But back to the geeks. I've been pondering the nature of geekhood. Specifically, what did computer geeks do before there were computers? Lock themselves in towers and invent, I suppose. Looms and millworks and things. What about before there were looms and millworks? What about before mathematics and written language? Did the chronically technical and analytic and dreamy exist? What did we do? Was there science fiction before there was science?

Walking <= Preaching

St. Francis of Assisi said: "It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching."

My vocational fantasy involves my taking on the role of a latter-day Carl Sagan, using writing to bring the awe and wonder of science to the masses, with a strong conservation message thrown in. I'm a long way from realizing this fantasy. I don't have a solid background in science and my writing could stand some improvement. I am not sure I'm well suited to bring awe and wonder to anyone. I am good at bringing long, theoretical diatribes to the masses, but there's plenty of that in the world already.

It's difficult sometimes to look at how far I am from meeting my life's goals. And I am goal-oriented. I pay lip service to respecting the journey but I only have eyes for the destination. I suspect I'll always have some difficulty stopping to smell the roses. Yet St. Francis's quote reminds me that the journey and the destination are, at heart, the same... or if they aren't, they should be.

I give speeches and tours at the Mystic Aquarium. There's a lot I like about the job, but I've always tended to look at it as a stepping stone. Something I'm doing for now until I can do what I really want to do. It wasn't until I stumbled on that quote that I realized how much of what I wanted to do... that is, preaching about conservation... was something I was already getting paid to do. Yet I don't tend to terribly value it or take advantage of it. I have a lot of complaints. It's hard to give a good speech to a mixed crowd of adults and children. It's hard when you don't have a captive audience. It's hard when people have come to be entertained and not to learn. It's hard to be extemporaneous when my strength is writing. What arises from my day of speeches is like a jumble of rocks compared with what could be sculpted with time and paper and a self-selecting audience who actively wanted to learn about the matter at hand.

It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching. Why is it no use? St. Francis would have to answer that, but I'll give it my best student's guess. In the end, it's not logic or rhetoric that moves people, but passion and enthusiasm, awe and wonder. And love. If the sermon is something to be commuted to, something we take a long drive to while our mind wanders, does it differ much from "just a job"? Likewise if I let my attention wander on what I see as a long commute to a writing career and happiness, am I just commuting to work? And will my writing be no more than work?

I am good at bringing long, theoretical diatribes to the masses (thus the blog). I'm not always so good at finding practical applications for theory. I am not going to go in to work tomorrow and find the job suddenly fulfilling. All my old complaints will go on. But perhaps it is a thing that can be viewed as both 100% journey and destination, rather than say... 50% journey, 0% destination as I tend to view it now. As if it's only half-helping me get to somewhere I haven't even begun to approach.

Well, eschewing idealism for practicality, maybe I'll just aim to see it as, say, 75% journey, 10% destination. Mostly helping me to get somewhere that is already a little bit realized.

Maybe that makes it 10% more than just a job. Wouldn't that be nice?

The Paving of America

The light coming through the pines was orange. Chris thought it was a five o'clock light, even though it was summer now; now it was eight o'clock. But six months ago it would have been a five o'clock light, bringing on the sharp evening of January. Despite the summer softness of the air it might as well have been five o'clock. Time to come home, time for supper. Time to begin the gathering-in.

But it was July and the evening kept stretching, like Eliot's patient on a table. The trees seemed in a constant exhale, breathing skin-temperature air at her as the hovercar whooshed past. She turned her head and her hair dragged over her face, painting over the view: hundreds of dandelions bobbing back up, righting themselves after the brushing thrum of the passing car bowed them under. The whip of air under the car seemed wild, but once it passed, everything unfolded and sat back up as if untouched. She lay down in the seat, her head on the armrest. The car followed the relays buried beneath the dandelions. The sun followed the car. Here and there its warm fingers touched a chunk of old asphalt, some crumbling piece of the empire that had been pulled low by the flowers. They were just chunks. They were grown upon. They fit in.

She was thinking about Jeremy. Jeremy in Portland, Jeremy at a business meeting, Jeremy making strained conversation over drinks with his boss. Jeremy Jeremy. So far away. When he came back he'd be tired. He'd want to wait until later. He'd want it to go on as it was. He'd want supper and a drink. He'd want to be alone. Chris wanted things badly to work; she knew it. She knew it'd go on until she felt worse, and worse, and then. But she couldn't leave him this summer. Not while she was still thinking about him every day. Not when all she really wanted was to have him in the seat next to her, her feet in his lap. He'd sat here only once with her, on an evening like this, but it had been enough.

She let herself fall asleep thinking about that. The car whooshed on, its fans serious, quiet. The sunlight began to touch only the tops of trees. The car was taking her home to her quiet apartment. It was the gathering-in. The patient on the table was yawning and sitting back up. The sun that warmed Portland in the West was setting on New England. For twenty miles behind her the dandelions bobbed up and stood, golden to the last.