This idea seemed to appeal to everyone, and we spent the rest of the evening talking about the story, working out the details of the plot. The story seemed to call for a high-tech opening sequence, with a NASA mission orbiting Mars, and since we considered Michael to be our High-Tech Expert (he, after all, had actually written stories with spaceships in them, which was considerably more than Jack or I had ever done), he was tapped to take first crack at a draft of the story. By the weekend of Jack’s wedding to Jeanne Van Buren, the weekend of January 1,1983, Michael had produced a draft which took the story up to the initial landing sequence, and brought the draft with him to the wedding; at some decent interval after the wedding (the next day, I think), we had a quick story conference, and decided that Jack, as our Phenomenology Expert, should take it from there—which he did, roughing it out to a point just before the actual ending.
Michael may have taken a crack at another draft at this point, I’m not sure. At any rate, my work calendar shows that I started work on it myself on March 5,1983, worked on it pretty intensively during the middle of April, and finished the story on April 20,1983. I added an ending, and did an extensive coordinating and homogenizing draft, going back through the story from the beginning, adding new sections and injecting new material interstitially into existing sections throughout. It seems to me that my biggest contribution to the story was in deepening and intensifying the characterization of Thomas throughout, giving him a more complex personal background that increased his psychological motivation to actually do what he later does; in the process, I got to work in mention of an old Ron Cobb cartoon that I had been impressed by years before.
Shockingly, neither Jack nor Michael had ever read any of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Martian novels—so all the Barsoom Nostalgia here was supplied by me.
Our working title for this was “Sex Kings of Mars.” (It’s a joke, son.) We sent it out under the title “Storm Warning,” which Ellen Datlow talked us into changing to “The Gods of Mars.” We also did a cut at Ellen’s prompting, eliminating a couple of thousand words from the manuscript. Michael and I worked on making the cuts in a couple of sessions at the end of July and the beginning of August. The story was published in Omni, and showed up on that year’s final Nebula ballot, much to the disgust of Sue Denim in Cheap Truth.
SLOW DANCING WITH JESUS
GARDNER DOZOIS & JACK DANN
Jesus Christ appeared at Tess Kimbrough’s door dressed in a white tuxedo with a blue cummerbund and matching bow-tie. His chestnut-brown hair was parted in the middle and fell down past his shoulders, and his beard and mustache were close-cropped and neatly combed.
Tess’s mother answered the door. “Come right inside, Tess will be down in a jiffy.” She led Jesus into the front room. “Tess,” she called. “Your date is here.”
Upstairs, Tess checked the bobby pins that held her French Twist together, and smoothed imaginary wrinkles out of her dress. It was the emerald green one, with dyed-green shoes to match, that her urbane and sophisticated mother had helped her pick out, and she was somewhat nervous about it, but then she was so nervous anyway that her teeth were chattering. She told her image in the mirror that this was going to be the most perfect night of her life, but the image in the mirror didn’t look convinced. She practiced breathing evenly for a moment, flaring her nostrils. Then she walked down the stairs to meet Jesus, remembering not to look at her feet, and trying to maintain good posture.
Jesus stood up as she entered the room and presented her with a corsage, a small orchid on a wristlet. She thanked him, kissed her mother good-bye, promised that she’d be back at a reasonable hour, and then she was sitting beside Jesus in the leatherette seat of his Thunderbird convertible. Jesus refrained from laying rubber in front of Tess’s house, as most kids would have done; instead he shifted smoothly and skillfully through the gears. Tess momentarily forgot about being nervous as the wind rushed by against her face and she thought that she was actually—right now—going to the prom.
“How are you doing?” Jesus asked. “Do you want a cap or something so the wind won’t mess your hair?”
“No, thanks,” Tess said shyly. She was almost afraid to look at him, and kept stealing sidelong glances at him when she thought his attention was elsewhere.
“You nervous?”
Tess glanced at him again. “You mean, about the prom?”
“Uh, huh,” Jesus said, executing a high-speed turn with an easy, expert grace. The buildings were going by very fast now.
“Yeah . . . I guess so.”
“Don’t be,” Jesus said, and winked.
Tess felt herself blushing, but before she could think of something to say, Jesus was bringing the car to a smooth stop in the lower parking lot of the high school. A kid whose Vaseline-smeared hair was combed back into a duck’s tail opened the door for Tess, and then slid into the driver’s seat when Jesus got out. Jesus gave him a five-dollar tip.
“Jeez, thanks,” the boy said.
Cinders crunched under their feet as they crossed the parking lot toward the open fire door of the gym, which was now framed by paper lanterns that glowed in soft pastel colors. Tess walked hesitantly and slowly now that they were really here, already beginning to feel the first sick flutterings of panic. Most of the kids didn’t like her—she had long ago been classified as uncool, and, worse, a “brain”—and she didn’t see any reason why they’d start to like her now . . .
But then Jesus was surrendering their tickets at the door, and it was too late to flee.
Inside the gym, the bleachers had been pulled back from the dance floor, and the basketball nets had been folded up. Paper streamers hung from rafters and waterpipes, herds of slowly jostling balloons bumped gently against the ceiling, and crepe-paper roses were everywhere. The band—five sullen young men in dark red jackets that had “The Teen-Tones” written on them in sequins—had set up in the free-throw zone and were aggressively but unskillfully playing “Yakety Yak.” Kids in greasy pompadours, crew cuts, and elephant trunks milled listlessly around the dance floor, looking stiff and uncomfortable in their rented suits. Only a few couples were dancing, and they jerked and twitched in lethargic slow-motion, like people slowly drowning on the bottom of the sea.
Most of the girls were still standing by the refreshment tables on the other side of the room, where the punch bowls were, and Tess made her way toward them, feeling her stomach slowly knot with dread. Already she could see some of the kids smirking at her and whispering, and she heard a girl say loudly “Just look at that dress! What a nerd.” One of the class clowns made a yipping, doggy noise as she passed, and someone else broke up into high-pitched asthmatic laughter. Blindly, she kept walking. As she came up to the group around the punch bowls, her friend Carol gave her an unenthusiastic smile and said “Hey, lookin’ good” in an insincere voice. Vinnie, Carol’s bullet-headed boyfriend, made a snorting sound of derision. “I just don’t understand why you have anything to do with that dog,” he said to Carol, not even making a pretense of caring whether Tess could hear him or not. Carol looked embarrassed; she glanced at Tess, smiled weakly, and then looked uneasily away—she genuinely liked Tess, and sometimes hung out with her after school (in the classic teen configuration, encountered everywhere, of one pretty girl and one “dog” doing things together), but as a captain of cheerleaders she had her own status to worry about, and under the circumstances she’d lose face with the cool kids if she stuck up too vigorously for Tess. “I mean, look at her,” Vinnie complained, still speaking to Carol as if Tess wasn’t there. “She’s so uncool, you know?”
Tess stood frozen, flushing, smiling a frozen smile, feeling herself go hot and freezing cold by turns. Should she pretend that she hadn’t heard? What else could she do? The clown had drifted over, and was making yipping noises again . . .
Jesus had been a few steps behind her coming through the crowd, but now he stepped up beside her and took her arm, and all the other kids suddenly fell silent. “Leave her al
one,” Jesus said. His voice was rich, strong, resonant, and it rang like a mellow iron bell in the big empty hall. “She’s here with me.” Vinnie’s mouth dropped open, and Carol gasped. All the kids were gaping at them, their faces soft with awe. Tess was intensely aware of Jesus’s strong warm fingers on the bare flesh of her arm. Jesus seemed to have grown larger, to have become huge and puissant, a giant, and his rugged, handsome face had become stern and commanding. He radiated strength and warmth and authority, and an almost tangible light—a clear and terrible light that seemed to reveal every zit and pimple and blackhead in the sallow, shallow faces of her tormentors, each slack mouth and weak chin and watery eye, a light that dwindled them to a petty and insignificant group of grimy children. “She’s here with me,” Jesus repeated, and then he smiled, suavely, jauntily, almost rakishly, and winked. “And if I say she’s cool, believe it, she’s cool.”
Then, before anyone could speak, Jesus had taken Tess’s hand and led her onto the dance floor, and they were dancing, slow dancing, while the band played “A Million to One.” She had never been able to dance before, but now she danced with effortless skill, swirling around and around the floor, following Jesus’s lead, moving with beauty and flowing silken grace, shreds of torn paper roses whispering around her feet. One by one the other couples stopped dancing and stood silently to watch them, until they were surrounded by a ring of pale, gaping, awed faces, small as thumbnails and distant as stars, and they drifted and danced within that watching ring as the band played “Goodnight, My Love” and “Twilight Time” and “It’s All in the Game,” moving through the night together like silk and fire and warm spring rain.
After the dance, Jesus drove her home and kissed her goodnight at her door, gently but with authority, and with just the slightest sweet hint of tongue.
Tess let herself in and went upstairs to her room, moving quietly so that her mother wouldn’t realize that she was back. She switched on a soft light and stared at herself in the mirror; her flesh was tingling, and she was sure that she must be glowing in the darkness like freshly hammered steel, but her face looked the same as always, except perhaps for the expression around the eyes. She sat down at her night-table and took her diary out from the locked, secret drawer. She sat there silently for a long while, near the open window, feeling the warm night breeze caress her face and smelling the heavy sweet perfume of the mimosa trees outside. A dog was barking out there somewhere, far away, at long intervals, and cars whined by on the highway, leaving a vibrant silence in their wake. At last she opened her diary, and in a bold neat hand wrote
Dear Diary,
Tonight I met—Him . . .
AFTERWORD TO SLOW DANCING WITH JESUS
My friend Tess Kissinger has the most wonderful dreams.
Get her to tell you the dream she had about the diner on Jupiter, or the one about the centaur in the driveway, or the one about the inflatable bull, or the one about how the aliens land and insist that we change the way we’ve been spelling the word “Mexico.” Or any of a dozen others. Tess has one of the most fertile imaginations of anyone I know, and it works all the time—even when she’s asleep.
At some point in 1981, she told me about a dream she’d had years before, in high school—about how Jesus was taking her to her school prom, much to the amazement and consternation of the snooty cool kids, who disliked her because she was “uncool” and “a brain.”
I thought this was wonderful. I saw fictional possibilities in it at once, and suggested that she should write it up into a story. But although Tess is a highly skilled graphic artist and illustrator, she was uncertain at that point of her ability as a writer—she later wrote and illustrated several marvelously imaginative and funny children’s books, none of which, puzzlingly, have sold to anyone as yet—and this lack of confidence made her shrug this suggestion off. On a couple of later occasions, I nagged her again about writing the story, without result, and even once—Michael is my witness here—hinted gently that I would be willing to work on it with her as a collaboration, but that suggestion bounced off her too; she just wasn’t taking the idea that she could write a story seriously enough to actually try to do so, often a problem with beginning writers.
Then Jack came down for a visit, and on the night of March 1, 1982, Jack and Susan and I went out to dinner in Chinatown with Tess and her boyfriend, artist Bob Walters. Toward the end of dinner, at my prompting, Tess related her Jesus At The Prom dream.
Jack’s eyes bugged out. “Wow!” he said. “What a great idea for a story! Hey!” He lunged at Tess across the pineapple chunks and shattered fortune cookies. “Hey! Can we write that? It’ll make a great story. Can we write it? Can we?” Tess blinked at him, startled and bemused. “Well, yeah, I guess so,” she said dazedly. “Yeah, sure. Go ahead.”
We paid up, and Jack hurried us out of the restaurant at record speed, afire with enthusiasm. In the cab on the way home, the thought of the subtle technical difficulties that would have to be overcome to actually get the story effectively down on paper daunted me, and I began to get cold feet, but Jack was made of sterner stuff—a writer of intense energy and fierce ambition, he would fearlessly attack any project, no matter how technically difficult the material was, or how great the creative challenges to be overcome; who else would calmly sit down and start writing a 1,000-page historical fantasy novel about Leonardo Da Vinci?
So when we got home, Jack rushed to the typewriter, sat down, and at once began working furiously on the story. By the time he left, a day or so later, he’d carried the story through the opening scenes to the scene where Jesus and Tess arrive at the parking lot outside the building where the prom is being held. I started work on the story on March 8th. I carried the storyline through to the end, then went back and did a light unifying draft on Jack’s opening sequences. The story was finished on March 10, 1982.
In some ways, I think that this was the most technically difficult to write of any of the collaborations, because the mood that needed to be maintained throughout the story if it was going to work at all was so fragile that one false step, one sour note, one wrongly executed sentence, would shatter it, and ruin the spell we were attempting to weave around the reader. It was a story full of potentially fatal pitfalls. I didn’t want it to be just a sacrilegious joke, like a Monty Python routine—I wanted it to be simultaneously funny and sad, bittersweet and strange and driftingly wistful, arising as it had from a young girl’s longing dreams. It called for the creation of a special and very fragile mood, and to maintain that mood it was necessary to tiptoe through the writing of the story as carefully as a soldier negotiating a minefield. I was even very careful in my selection of the songs the characters dance to, for instance, and the order in which they are played, and listened to them all—and others—many times before making up my mind. The flower symbology is also carefully worked out. The physical details of the prom setting are an amalgamation of details from proms that Jack, Tess, Susan, and I had been to at one time or another when we were in school. Much of Jesus’s dialogue at the prom is verbatim from Tess’s dream, including Jesus’s great line, “She’s here with me. And if I say she’s cool, she’s cool.” I alone am responsible for the appalling joke at the story’s end.
Everyone—including my agent—told us that we would never sell this story. To some obscure little literary magazine, maybe, but never to a commercial market. Certainly we would never sell it to the slicks. It broke every rule for selling to the slicks—it had a female protagonist, it was about grungy high-school kids instead of affluent Brand-Name-product-consuming yuppies, it was blasphemous, it was short, it was weird.
It sold on the second attempt, to Penthouse, and I really must salute Kathy Green for her courage in buying it, especially at a time when Christian Fundamentalist TV evangelists and Moral Majority-ites were howling to have Penthouse and Playboy driven off the newsstands altogether, and the government seemed all too eager to cooperate. I’m not sure where we would have sold it if Kathy had turn
ed it down; certainly not inside the genre, not at the time, anyway. Penthouse also had enough guts to publish my even riskier solo story “Disciples,” and I think that this willingness to take a chance with “dangerous” material is something to keep in mind when people say—as I’ve heard self-proclaimed liberals say, with a sniff of pious, prudish disapproval—that it wouldn’t bother them at all if the men’s magazines were banned from publication . . . and that, of course, is just the way we lose our freedom, step by step.
After the check came in, Jack and I took Tess and Bob out to dinner at my favorite Hungarian restaurant, Dave Shore’s (now defunct, alas). It was a good meal, but Tess still looked a bit bemused, and I think that she was thinking that she should have written the story herself after all.
Slow Dancing Through Time Page 8