Maybe the next time she’ll listen to me. After all, she still has plenty of dreams left . . .
IT DOESN’T GET ANY BETTER
MICHAEL SWANWICK
There we were: Gardner Dozois and myself in the back of a rented Japanese subcompact, and Jack and Jeanne Dann in the front, Jack driving. Gardner and I sat stiffly in that way you do when you’re crammed into far too small a space with someone you like, but have no aspirations for physical intimacy with. It was a drearily overcast day and we were all on our way to a small science fiction convention in mid-state New York. We’d been on the turnpike for hours, and still had a long way to go. We had the windows rolled up and the air conditioning straining against the muggy heat, and Jack and Jeanne were arguing because Jack insisted on smoking a cigar anyway. Meanwhile, because it was the first day of the hunting season, cars kept passing us on either side, with large dead animals tied to their hoods, blood oozing from stiffened mouths and nostrils.
Suddenly Jack interrupted himself to throw an arm over the top of the seat, lean back and, grinning around his cigar, expansively observe, “You know—it doesn’t get any better than this!”
“It doesn’t?” I said, horrified.
###
What would we do without our friends? Life would be a lot grayer without them. That goes double if you happen to be a writer. Because writing is for the most part deadly dull work, and when my wife, Marianne, comes home of an evening to ask how the day went, there isn’t much to say. “Three pages,” or maybe even, “Five pages,” and that’s about it. It’s different with collaborations. Gardner and Jack are larger-than-life characters, full of wild ideas and loud notions and a rowdy sense of fun. You hang around with these guys and you have to be able to give and take with the best of ‘em. You learn things, some of which change your thinking forever. You come away with stories to tell.
There’s a serious side to collaboration, artistic depth and insight, challenge, and that shock of delight when exactly the right phrasing has been applied to our thought by someone else. I’m not going to discuss that. Right now I want to tell a few, just the merest fraction, of the funny things that happened to me on the way to this book. Because literature, as Ezra Pound observed, we have with us always. But good stories are rare.
###
I want it down on record that the dreadful pun contained in the title “Golden Apples of the Sun” was my own. I don’t make all that many dreadful puns, and when I manage to come up with one that makes Gardner Dozois himself wince with disgust and admiration, I demand full credit.
The story itself began during a late-night creative session with the boys. These sessions have been an irregular tradition over the years. I’ll get a phone call from Gardner saying, “Jack has just breezed into town, and everyone is going out to Chinatown for dinner, do I want to come along?” When we finally get back to Gardner and Susan’s digs, we’ll go into a jumbled confusion of creative endeavor, casual insults, and joking wordplay. Great things have come out of these evenings, both high and low art, grandiose projects that collapsed in daylight, and stories that went on to place on the Nebula ballot. Novels are plotted and critiqued, stories begun, and straight-faced lies told. This is Literature with the hooves and horns attached.
On this particular evening, an old friend and former Philadelphian, Don Keller, had just recently visited his old stomping grounds with daughter Deirdre and wife Tatiana. Gardner and I were quoting various things that Tatiana had said, without bothering to explain exactly who she was. “Who’s Tatiana?” Jack asked. Gardner continued, expounding on Tatiana’s observations. “Who’s Tatiana?” Jack insisted. I went into the possible application of Tatiana’s thoughts to one of our prospective stories. “Who’s Tatiana?” Jack asked for the fifth time.
Gardner, who had somehow confused the name with Titania, jokingly said, “She’s the Queen of the Fairies.”
Trying to be helpful, I added, “She’s also Don Keller’s wife.”
“Jeez,” Jack said. “That’s a bit of a comedown, isn’t it?”
“I used ta be da Queen a da Fairies,” Gardner said, “and now I’m selling computers in Poith Amboy.”
We were off and running.
Later, we sold the story to Penthouse. The editors there didn’t like our title and with exquisite good taste changed it to “Virgin Territory.” They also thought that ten thousand words was a trifle long, and wanted us to cut it. By five thousand.
Gardner and I got together and did the dirty deed over one long, hideous day. We began by cutting scenes. Then we went through the manuscript and out paragraphs. Then sentences. Then words. Then we changed every “can not” to “can’t.” Then we began rephrasing things, from three words down to two words, from seven to six. By the eighth time through the story, Gardner had lost not only the willingness to make the required cuts, but much of his will to live. The manuscript was drenched with blood. But I needed the money. I was ruthless. We cut it down to four thousand nine hundred and ninety nine words. Exactly.
In a weird way, though, that was a good experience. I learned a lot, cutting that piece down in such a way as to retain its coherence as a story despite being compressed far below its natural length. And it’s an experience I could only have had on a collaborative work. Because I would never cut down a solo work like that, no more than would Gardner or Jack. The secret, should you ever find yourself in a similar situation, is to tell yourself that you’re not cutting your own words, but theirs.
###
“Afternoon at Schrafft’s” was, I am proud to say, all my fault.
Jack and Jeanne were in town, so Marianne and I invited them, Gardner, and Susan to dinner. After cocktails, wine, and dinner (in honor of Jack, Marianne created Metaphysically Referential Chicken, a boned chicken stuffed with vegetables, served whole and then sliced like a loaf of bread), we retired to the library for conversation and brandy.
“Let’s write a story,” I said.
Jack, always easily misled, agreed at once. Gardner, however, disapproved of the project on principle. He felt strongly that we shouldn’t write a story without some idea to base it on.
“My idea is that it should be very short,” I said with drunken cunning, “because our attention spans aren’t terribly long at the moment.”
Gardner remained unconvinced, so Jack and I started without him. I proposed that the story should include a wizard, a cat, and a dinosaur so we could sell reprints to each of three anthologies Jack and Gardner were planning. Jack contributed the observation that he’d always wanted to set a story in Schrafft’s. It was enough.
(I should interpose here that we did later sell reprint rights to one of the anthologies—MagiCats! by name—and that My Pals paid me all of nine dollars for my share. It happened that the Virginia Kidd Agency sent me its payment on the same check as the payment Penthouse made for one-third of another collaborative story. For a long time, I stood unmoving, staring at the amazingly lopsided figure of eleven hundred and nine dollars. “This is a funny way to make a living,” I told Marianne.)
So Jack and I started the story. Gardner wanted to stay out of it, wanted to have nothing to do with a story so cynically begun, wanted to stay morally aloof from the whole wretched mess. But he couldn’t resist making a comment here, offering an idea there, and soon we were all enthusiastically working out the plot. I took notes and a week later typed up the first draft.
“Afternoon at Schrafft’s” is a pleasant little soufflé of a story, but it will always have a special place in my heart because it gave me that evening: laughing, joking, slinging ideas about, drinking and arguing in the library, all six of us (because of course we took Marianne’s, Jeanne’s, and Susan’s comments and ideas and incorporated them into our story, without offering them credit or recompense, according to the iron law of literature: that anything said in front of writers is Their Property), building a story out of nothing, jiggering the plot, playing a game that only true writers can. Making stone soup.
It didn’t always work out so well for me.
I am thinking of course of another wonderfully crowded evening when Jack came to town. We three sat around Gardner’s kitchen table, working on a dozen projects all at once. Jack had a novel nearly completed, and wanted Gardner’s advice on rewriting major portions as stand-alone stories. The two of them had the usual round of anthologies to put together. We all three were eager to plot a batch more collaborations. And Gardner had a new typewriter.
This was a major event in Gardner’s life. Before this he had written virtually every story he had ever sold on a battered old Royal, and he was not perfectly assured that he could write on another typewriter. There was something wrong with the platen of the Royal, so that the line of print did not go straight across the page but up and down in a sinuous flow, as if the prose were the surface of the ocean, endlessly rocking. Nor was it a regular flow; at the crest of its wave, a word from one line might bump against a word from the line above that was hitting the bottom of its trough. Gardner wrote on onionskin paper (he denies this, however), and the gray quality of the print leads me to suspect he had a lucky ribbon as well, perhaps given to him at birth, which he could never bring himself to change.
The overall effect of a classic Dozois manuscript was a worrying sense of impending seasickness. It is a measure of the high regard with which he was held in the field that editors were actually eager to see his stories.
The new typewriter, however, wrote straight across the page in clear black letters. The keys didn’t stick, either, the way a proper typewriter’s should. Gardner was dubious about the whole affair. Periodically, throughout the evening, one of us would wander over to the machine and type out a sentence or two, sometimes a paragraph, to try out the action.
At one point when Jack and Gardner were plotting hot and heavy some story or novel or anthology that did not involve me, I sat down at the typewriter. There was a sheet of paper in it on which Jack had written an opening sentence about an old man sitting on a park bench. This was for a story Jack wanted to work up about a man growing young again. He was so excited about the idea that he could not manage to explain to us what it was. “I think this could be really sensitive,” he’d say. “Yes, but what’s it about?” Gardner would ask, exasperated. “I picture it as a kind of life-affirming exploration into death as a metaphor for failure.”
In reaction to Jack’s elaborate artistic theorizing (Jack is hands down the intellectual of the group, the kind of guy who reads Faulkner in the original Greek), and in that heightened kind of silliness that comes late in an evening of creative endeavor, I pecked out a couple of lines about dinosaurs lumbering by and pterodactyls nipping at bits of trash in the gutter.
“What’s he doing?” Jack asked. He looked at what I’d written. “My God! He’s writing our story for us! This is terrific! This is exactly the way I pictured it!”
“No it’s not,” I said. “I’m making fun of you.”
“This could be very sensitive!”
“It’s a joke, Jack.”
Eventually, I left. I came back the next day to find they’d taken my paragraph and expanded it into a short-short entitled “A Change in the Weather.” It was a light, charming little nothing, and Gardner and Jack offered to put my name on it and cut me in for a third of the take as my reward for kicking off the whole thing.
But I, as a serious littérateur, wanted no part of it. Anyway, I reasoned, how much money were they going to get for that thing?
A lot, as it turned out. About a month later Gardner called me up to break the news gently. “You stupid putz!” he said. “We just sold that story to Playboy!”
In the long run, the lesson I learned then (something about professionalism, I think, or maybe about respecting one’s own work; I forget exactly) may well have been worth the money it cost me. But I think back every now and then to that little story and I regret not the money itself, but the fact that had I kept my big mouth shut, I could now legitimately brag that I had once been paid (I worked it out) thirty dollars a word.
###
Finally, there was the time I dropped by Gardner’s old apartment on Quince Street. This was midway in his evolution from poverty to bourgeois affluence, and while the apartment lacked the dismaying squalor of his old place on South Street, it had a certain funky, cluttered charm to it yet. “Let me finish writing something,” he said, “I’ll be done in a minute.”
So I sat on the edge of a gutsprung sofa, while Gardner typed a final half-page, added it to a pile on the table alongside his typewriter, and evened up the edges to make a neat manuscript.
“So what’s up?” I asked.
“Congratulations, Michael.” He handed me the manuscript. “You’ve just completed a story.”
Of course I thought he was joking. It had been a while since our last collaboration, and we had no projects going, no irons in the fire, not even an unfinished work gathering dust in the corner. But to my absolute, slack-jawed astonishment, he was right. There in my hands was a complete, polished collaborative story, and it was half mine. It was called “Snow Job.”
To explain, I must go back a year to an abortive attempt I had made at a first novel. It was going to be about con men (I read everything I can on confidence games, and do my best to apply it to my work) jumping between parallel universes, and I had written an entire first chapter before realizing it was not to be and going on to other things. Now, long assured that the novel was dead, Gardner had removed the first and last pages from my chapter, and substituted his own beginning and end.
Which, I must emphasize, had nothing at all to do with my old plot. Gone were the parallel universes, gone were the sinister otherworldly villains, gone were all the clanking huggermugger that had soured me on the project in the first place. In their place was a light and sprightly tale about coke-dealing time-travelers. And yet it had all been written so skillfully that I defy anyone to determine where Gardner’s prose leaves off and mine begins.
“We’ve got to do more collaborations like this!” I said.
Beaming with justifiable satisfaction, Gardner shook his head. “Sorry, only one to a customer.”
###
I’m not exactly Pangloss reincarnate, and I’d certainly think long and hard before voicing the proposition that ours is the best of all possible worlds. But let’s be honest. A universe where smack dab out of nowhere and for no discernible good reason at all, a man can find himself suddenly given a complete story, suitable for publication and payment, with absolutely no effort on his own part, and that story co-written with as fine a writer and stylist as Gardner Dozois . . . Well, I hate to admit it, but Jack may be right. It doesn’t get any better than this.
EXECUTIVE CLEMENCY
GARDNER DOZOIS & JACK C. HALDEMAN II
The President of the United States sat very still in his overstuffed chair on the third floor and watched early morning sunlight sweep in a slow line across the faded rug.
He couldn’t remember getting out of bed or sitting down in the chair. He could dimly recall that he had been sitting there for a long time, watching the slow advent of dawn, but he was only just beginning to become fully aware of himself and his surroundings.
Only his eyes moved, yellow and wet, as the world seeped in.
This happened to him almost every morning now. Every morning he would return slowly to his body as if from an immense distance, from across appalling gulfs of time and space, to find himself sitting in the chair, or standing next to the window, or, more rarely, propped up in the corner against the wall. Sometimes he’d be in the middle of dressing when awareness returned, and he’d awake to find himself tying a shoelace or buttoning his pants. Sometimes, like this morning, he’d just be sitting and staring. Other times he would awaken to the sound of his own voice, loud and cold in the bare wooden room, saying some strange and important things that he could never quite catch. If he could only hear the words he said at such times, just once, he knew th
at it would change everything, that he would understand everything. But he could never hear them.
He didn’t move. When the lines of sunlight reached the chair, it would be time to go downstairs. Not before, no matter how late it sometimes made him as the sunlight changed with the seasons, no matter if he sometimes missed breakfast or, on cloudy winter days, didn’t move at all until Mrs. Hamlin came upstairs to chase him out. It was one of the rituals with which he tried to hold his life together.
The east-facing window was washed over with pale, fragile blue, and the slow-moving patch of direct sunlight was a raw, hot gold. Dust motes danced in the beam. Except for those dust motes, everything was stillness and suspension. Except for his own spidery breathing, everything was profoundly silent. The room smelled of dust and heat and old wood. It was the best part of the day. Naturally it couldn’t last.
Very far away, floating on the edge of hearing, there came the mellow, mossy bronze voice of a bell, ringing in the village of Fairfield behind the ridge, and at that precise moment, as though the faint tintinnabulation were its cue, the house itself began to speak. It was a rambling wooden house, more than a hundred years old, and it talked to itself at dawn and dusk, creaking, groaning, whispering, muttering like a crotchety old eccentric as its wooden bones expanded with the sun or contracted with the frost. This petulant, arthritic monologue ran on for a few minutes, and then the tenants themselves joined in, one by one: Seth in the bathroom early, spluttering as he washed up; Mr. Thompkins, clearing his throat interminably in the room below, coughing and hacking and spitting as though he were drowning in a sea of phlegm; Sadie’s baby, crying in a vain attempt to wake her sluggard mother; Mrs. Hamlin, slamming the kitchen door; Mr. Samuels’s loud nasal voice in the courtyard outside.
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