The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2020 Edition

by Rich Horton

  • • •

  In his first semester at Central John C. began to visit the Student Counseling office for help with his post-high school plans. It’s possible that there had been some sort of student counseling at St. Joseph’s, but he had never asked about it, nor even considered the possibility.

  He already had an offer from Notre Dame, via his father and his father’s associates there, to attend the college tuition-free; and since he could easily live at home and commute, he’d save himself and his family a lot of money that way. Though he hadn’t yet explicitly rejected it, in no world past or future was this an invitation he would accept, and he believed he would never have to. He could certainly go instead to Indiana University, which by law had to admit any person who graduated from high school in the state, but that also was not in his plans. He would instead do what no teacher in his former high school had suggested and no one at home knew how to do: he would apply to universities elsewhere, and in his applications give his reasons for selecting each of them, listing his interests, his achievements, his honors and his publications. At the Office of Student Counseling he got the addresses of the universities he’d selected, so that he could send away for their particular forms and requirements, which upon receipt (“What’s all this?” his father asked, starting a brief but touchy conversation) he filled out, with advice from Counseling; and with the application fee of two or four dollars of his own money in the form of a postal money order, he put them in envelopes, addressed them in his new grownup hand, and lastly added multiple 4¢ First Class stamps (some commemorating the Boy Scouts, some the VIII Winter Olympics) plus one plain blue 1¢ Abe Lincoln after another until the postmistress nodded assent. When he received letters of acceptance from those schools, including their offers of decreased tuition or other inducements, he would choose among them.

  The University of Southern California. The University of California at Los Angeles. The Universty of California, Berkeley. Not Harvard, nor Yale, universities where (like Notre Dame) only boys were admitted; he hadn’t applied to those. John C. had a general aversion to boys. He liked girls. It was something that had long been noted by his father, who had of course surrounded him with sisters.

  When the acceptances began to come in, and the colorful brochures showing happy students and wide lawns and earnest professors, he decided after brief study (his sisters leaning over his shoulder and marveling and choosing for him) on the University of Southern California.

  And the worlds he would occupy and the world he had occupied began to divide irremediably.

  In that world he had never played sports of any kind. Though he certainly could have taken one up, track or tennis, but not football or basketball (the ones that mattered), he did nothing about it, and only at his father’s insistence would he go with him to the golf course to caddy, or at least pull the golf-bag trolley behind him from hole to hole.

  In this world he asked his father to take him golfing, teach him the basics, and he took up the game his father was devoted to, and proved to be at least basically competent; he was a good putter but his long game was weak. He asked his father for pointers.

  In that world he had found himself often unable to sit alone comfortably in the same room as his father, though he could never understand why he felt that way. If the rest of the family or his siblings or his mother were there, he could share the space, but not alone with his father (feet up, reading the paper; watching television; leafing through a medical journal). He’d work to overcome it but mostly he’d just leave.

  In this world he sat contentedly with his father, asked him questions, tried to elicit his opinions or his history, just by the way; they talked about McCarthy and the Communists, about Ike and Nixon, about his father’s father and his grandfather. John C. talked about himself too: what he hoped to do—make movies, direct plays, write poetry—and his father had to assent to listen. Sometimes he’d bring his sewing—capes and vestments and robes for his tall rod puppets.

  Don’t worry, Dad, he said one evening as his father observed the work. I’m not queer. Just artsy.

  • • •

  La Brea Medical Transcription Service • 1419 La Brea Avenue • Los Angeles CA 90019

  For: Dr. Carla Young PhD

  10/06/92

  Subject: John C.

  Second Session

  CY Notes. Second session, the presenting problem was set aside and at my suggestion a general life story was begun. In the course of that session a string of odd beliefs or magical thinking influencing behavior appeared. Unusual perceptual experiences, including bodily illusions. Inappropriate or constricted affect. This is a very odd duck.

  Transcript begins at tape count 2:07:00

  CY: John, we haven’t got a lot of time left in this hour. I want to be very clear as to how you yourself understand this story you are telling me.

  CY: The story I’m telling?

  CY: Well, your account. I meant it in no prejudicial sense.

  CY: Though of course you have in fact prejudged it.

  CY: I try not to prejudge. I may make tentative hypotheses.

  CY: It’s okay that you prejudge. I would completely understand.

  CY: Let’s continue with the account of your past you began with, and see where that leads us, from then to now.

  CY: All right. But which account?

  CY: John, you’re the one who believes there is more than a single account. I can only accept the one that brings you here to this office in this city in this year. The other is what you want to relate, which is fine, but it doesn’t have the same . . .

  CY: The same ontological standing.

  CY: That’s a rather chilly way to describe it. It doesn’t have the same claims, not in this room. I’d call it something more like a doppelganger, or perhaps it’s a sort of incubus, a creature and creator of dreams who rides you.

  CY: There’s your prejudgment.

  CY: Very well. Tell me whatever you like, and perhaps my judgment will surprise you by changing too.

  CY: And what’s your judgment now? At this moment?

  CY: What I think is that you have developed a sort of private mythology. A mythology in which you have become entrapped. One that limits you as a person even though it seems to you to be an enlargement.

  CY: For a long time it did feel like an enlargement. An enormous, an indescribable enlargement. It doesn’t now.

  CY: Exactly. Now you wish to escape from it, to free yourself to be . . . well, ordinary. To join the rest of us, from whom you’ve become so estranged.

  CY: Doctor. I want help. But escape isn’t possible at all. Even the choice I face, which can change everything, doesn’t have escape in it as a component.

  CY: Of course it does. I’d use the word “freedom” instead of “escape,” because there’s nothing to escape from. There is no actual evidence for it but your own fabulation. This idea that you alone can actually, physically, remake the past and make other choices . . .

  CY: But what if, Dr. Young, I’m not alone? If the universe can divide once, it can divide many times. There may be vast populations by now that have done what I did, learned what I learned . . . You’re laughing.

  CY: I can’t conceive what evidence could be collected that it’s possible, much less that it’s the case, that it’s common.

  CY: Well there couldn’t actually be any evidence except for the stories people tell. And just because no one before has ever told you theirs—

  CY: No. I have heard stories in many, many forms. I have heard about worlds that people believe they inhabit but that can’t be found in the physical universe. I’ve also helped to uncover stories that I came to believe are true—stories of abuse and trauma—that persons in deep travail refused to allow themselves to know, and who were freed to some degree by coming to know them as true. All of it without physical evidence. Stories are your business. Mine too.

  CY: Of course.

  CY: And were you so unhappy in that supposed other life that you we
re able to conceive of this radical remaking? So desperate that you needed to believe this strongly in the possibility?

  CY: No, no. I wasn’t desperate. I was living a pretty good life.

  CY: But it wasn’t enough.

  CY: It was enough, but the whole range of alternate possibilities haunted me, haunted me day and night. Haunted is wrong. Intrigued and tempted.

  CY: How can you be tempted by something impossible? That’s harmless daydreaming; everybody does it. What was it you felt you didn’t have that made this daydreaming so . . . importunate, I guess? Did you feel you hadn’t got recognition enough, or fame enough?

  CY: I would have liked more recognition. It wasn’t that I’d had none.

  CY: For your screenwriting and film-making.

  CY: No. I wasn’t making films. I was writing novels. I was living in New England and I had a family and I wrote novels and stories. I wasn’t dissatisfied. I just wanted to know what would have happened to me if I had made different choices. Choices that I couldn’t have made because I didn’t know they were possible, and I wouldn’t have known how to make them possible.

  CY: So you returned from maturity—age what now, fifty? . . .

  CY: Forty-nine.

  CY: . . . to the point in time when it seemed you had the greatest chance to make a wholly different life. You were in the body you then possessed but with a consciousness that had been created later, in a different life. Is that right? How did you bring that off? I mean by what mechanism, what . . .

  CY: Well, by no mechanism. I guess . . . I just understood that I could.

  CY: And did the whole of this new-to-you other West Coast world come to be around you as you lived in it? The one I’d call “this world”? Did it day by day replace the one you had lived in all your life, begin to be changed for you, and not only for you but for everyone?

  CY: Of course not. It’s a world that has existed from the beginning. At least now it does. All I did was to enter it.

  CY: And what became of the world you departed from, the one where you went to the state school, lived in New York, wrote novels, all that?

  CY: Here’s what I know: Both those states of the world exist until one is chosen. When one is chosen the other ceases to be. Ceases to have ever been. I don’t want to bring up the name Heisenberg here. It might be an utter misdirection.

  CY: From what I’m hearing, John, this is all misdirection. Your task should be to learn that. Do you know the term “anosognosia”?

  CY: Of course. A condition where a person is incapable of recognizing an illness, even a paralysis that seems impossible to ignore or deny. It might be you are thinking I am such a person.

  CY: Well?

  CY: If I am, of course, I wouldn’t be able to know it. And if I’m delusional—as I know you believe me to be—I’d deny it even if I was anosognosic.

  CY: Yes, well. How anyway do you come to know about this condition? It’s quite rare.

  CY: The first film I wrote and directed was about it. A short film. It’s actually called Anosognosia, a title that was almost designed to keep people from wanting to see it. But it also won awards. You’ve heard of it?

  CY: No.

  CY: It actually turns on two neurological conditions: that one, and one I heard about from a professor of neurology at USC: one where certain kinds of brain damage can cause people to fail to recognize common objects, including the alphabet. My film was about a viral plague that causes this condition, spreading among the story’s characters, eventually including an investigator of the plague, who continues to write his accounts though he can no longer read what he has written.

  CY: I see.

  CY: It was all done in still photographs, with his narration over. He can increasingly not recognize the various items he is studying as possible disease vectors but he continies to make his notes. A sort of fruit I cannot put a name to—perhaps its foreign or tropical—I seem to recognize the shape—totally unknown to me though . . . We can see it’s an apple.

  CY: And because of his anosognosia he can’t realize that he is suffering from the condition of being unable to recognize common things, the condition he’s seeking to find a cure for.

  CY: Exactly.

  CY: That is unbelievably cruel.

  CY: Yes. It was also very funny. I was sort of unable to make such distinctions back then. It was . . . witty, and a few people still remember it for being witty. It’s on cassette, if you’d like to see it. A good transfer.

  CY: Maybe. I think we have enough levels of illusion here to deal with already.

  CY: In that regard. There’s something I haven’t explained clearly why I have come to you, something about this . . . story.

  CY: Not about a writing block.

  CY: I came because the terms of my . . . good fortune, superpower, mad illusion, whatever it is, are very specific and have become urgent. I have to make the choice I must make—whether to stay in this world or return to the world I began in—before the end of my fiftieth year. On my fiftieth birthday, in effect.

  CY: And that would be when?

  CY: The first day of December of this year. A month from now.

  CY: Well, John. Let’s hope that we can relieve you of the anxiety that must come with that rule, or condition. Let’s assume that we can—together—help you to see it as it really is.

  CY: And to choose correctly.

  CY: Not to choose at all, and stay in the real world with the rest of us.

  Transcript ends 51.36.00

  • • •

  At USC John C. was a theater and art major, though many of his classes were in the film department. The making of student films at that time was so constrained by the equipment that John C. felt that he could get more experience in the things most important to a director from theater work—directing actors, conceiving approaches to plays, building and slowing tension in a scene. He had used to believe that he couldn’t succeed as an auteur in film or theater because the real medium of both those arts was the same: not words, or actors, or camera movement, or “light,” or anything but other people. The medium of theater and film is other people: people who have to be cajoled, encouraged, bullied, subjected to the demands of the project. The contributions of these others—actors, designers, lighting technicians, animators, editors, costume designers, musicians and composers—have to be all put in service of an overarching vision, the director’s. That vision can be modified and even upended by brilliant work contributed by others, but only as the director perceives that work; the director has to be able to refuse any work that doesn’t meet what he sees in his head or heart. John C., who had never been assertive, who was small, easygoing, open, and afraid of hurting others, even the inadequate and the clueless—he could, he had believed, never be that imperial central point around which everything moved.

  At USC he aimed to be. And learned that he could be. All that stood in his way was the past he had departed from.

  His mode had to be soft-spoken; it had to depend the projection of a calm certitude, as though resulting from a long career in collaborative creation, though of course it couldn’t and didn’t. When he took modern-dance classes, when he did animation projects in art, he entered into them and spoke about them to others as though these were simply parts of a mastery he aimed for and in some sense therefore already possessed, and the others who must be his medium accepted and acknowledged that. By the time he was a senior he had taken on several independent projects, some with fairly large casts. His senior piece in directing was a chamber Hamlet, the text reduced to an hour’s playing time. A woman who had taken two acting classes with him was his inspiration: she was lean, fierce, disputatious, always challenging her teachers, constantly pissed off in a deep part of her; she wore her thick black hair in a boyish mop, she had a single thick eyebrow above her deep black eyes and a nose like a predator’s beak. She dressed in beatnik jeans and sloppy T-shirts and it was clear to everyone—certainly to John C.—that she was what was called in those days,
without censure in the circles in which she and John C. moved, a dyke. He wanted her for his Hamlet. Her first response to the invitation was swift and angry, as at an insult. Oh yeah right. He kept after her. It had long seemed to John C. that rage was what possesses Hamlet, fury, fury at his own inadequacy, at his opposers and the clueless: and few actors ever got that, not the ones John C. had seen. He and she tussled and argued over scenes and speeches, she yelled at him and he coldly demanded more and she mocked him and her obdurate lines and gave more, as though devouring herself to feed her Hamlet.

  He staged the play on a small platform, the whole cast on stage all the time, getting up from their chairs or stools or the floor to enter the action. The characters were afraid of this Hamlet, and so were the actors. She was exalted at moments, face fuliginous, wrath unleashed and purified in beautiful sense: and it showed. No one had ever seen a Hamlet like this. They played the play in schools, in the park, in the rain, got into the papers, the news shows. Of course it was sensational that a woman, or a girl as most of the notices called her, was playing Hamlet; there were mentions of Bernhardt and Asta Nielsen (John C. had taken her to the film archive and retrieved a silent reel of Nielsen’s performance, which she watched with supernatural intensity and then said Bullshit) but whatever anyone imagined a woman playing Hamlet would be like, it wasn’t this. When Horatio challenged her actions—Why, what a king is this?—she rounded on him, the only loyal friend she has, grasping his lapel, almost unable to spit out the lines:

  Does it not, think’st thee, stand me now upon—

  He that hath kill’d my king and whored my mother,

  Popp’d in between the election and my hopes,

  Thrown out his angle for my proper life,

  And with such cozenage—is’t not perfect conscience,

  To quit him with this arm? and is’t not to be damn’d,

  To let this canker of our nature come

  In further evil?

  For her, it proved to be a one-time thing, as though in doing it she’d spent her lifetime’s store of black energy. John C. couldn’t get her to do more work, take on different things, some he’d written himself for her. His desire for her, the impossibility of it, how he and she had transmuted impossibility and need into shared power in art, made it seem she would have to go on giving and getting with him, but after graduation she went into biology, got a degree, set off on months-long collecting trips to the Costa Rican rain forest, sent him postcards and curt letters almost indecipherable, and then stopped.