The Alchemy of Happiness: Three Stories and a Hybrid-Essay

by Jason Erik Lundberg

  Blue opened the passenger door of the Fleetline, reached inside, extracted Julian’s duffel, then handed it to him. As he slung it onto his back, she said, “I’m still coming with my armies one day. That has not changed. My sister will be free.”

  “And it appears that I will be forced to fight you, with everything that I have. When you win, and strike me down, you will free the love of my life. Or, rather, lives. I look forward to that day, Lady Blue.”

  She smiled briefly, her cheeks pulling upward for only the briefest of moments at the thought of battling the man whom she still loved. Edging her way around him, she moved as if to climb once again onto the car, and Julian suddenly touched her elbow.

  “Wait,” he said, reaching into his pocket with his other hand. From it, he withdrew the jade elephant. “I still owe you payment for the ride.”

  “Keep it,” she said. “Use it to decorate your new home. And maybe to remember me by.”

  Julian stepped back as she mounted the bonnet, settled into position, and began chanting once again, her fingers fluidly progressing from one mudra to another. The wind gusted, and both Blue and the Fleetline quickly began to fade out of existence; Julian could view the ocean waves lapping against the shore through the now translucent body of the automobile. Blue turned to him one last time, then said a word that was inaudible over the roaring wind, and then both she and the car disappeared with a crack of inrushing air.

  Julian shifted the duffel higher onto his shoulder, took a careful look at the purple ocean waves, breathed deeply of the salt air, then yanked the bamboo staff out of the ground (his staff now), turned and walked lightly back to Leifeng Pagoda, each footstep taking him closer and closer to eternity with his love. With quiet determination and a smile on his lips, he entered the gate and made his way toward his sentry position in the center of the packed earth floor next to the iron grille that separated him from the source of all his happiness, and not once looked behind him as the thick wooden doors groaned and closed and swung shut with definitive finality.

  Embracing the Strange

  The Transformative Impact of Speculative Fiction

  For the real Anya Sophia—

  May you wisely embrace your own inexhaustible strange

  and never, ever stop.

  Preface (September 2012)

  The odd-numbered chapters of this essay were delivered (in edited form) as a plenary lecture for the Creative Arts Seminar (May) and Literature Seminar (August) run by the Singapore Ministry of Education’s Gifted Education Branch earlier this year. Previously, I had taught writing workshops focusing on speculative fiction at both of these seminars, and was honored, and more than a little anxious, to be invited to deliver a talk at these wonderful events in 2012. I am comfortable in the classroom, and especially with student interaction, but I am not a natural lecturer.

  I am, however, passionate about speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, and their associated subgenres), and have made it my mission to spread this fervor to Singapore’s reading public, first through my fiction collection, Red Dot Irreal (2011), and then with my edited anthology of original Singaporean SF, Fish Eats Lion (2012), and lastly, but not leastly, with the founding of LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction, all published (or to be published soon) by the wonderful folks at Math Paper Press. I was also tremendously inspired by Michael Chabon’s lecture titled “That’s Poe-biz,” delivered with humor and insight at the 2011 Singapore Writers Festival, which provided the “chapter” framework that I have ruthlessly appropriated for my own ends in the essay to follow, with generous apologies to Mr. Chabon.

  However, it struck me as I prepared this piece for publication that the plenary address only told half of the story. Read aloud, it took around 45 minutes to complete, which allowed time for Q&A from the students in attendance, but I felt as if something were missing. I’d initially asked Ms. Lim Siew Yea, the GEB coordinator for both seminars, if I might also read a bit of my fiction as an example of what I wanted to cover in the lecture; she heartily assented, yet I was unable to fit a story into the allotted time. Since the published version of this essay would be unencumbered by such limits, I decided to incorporate the sections of a multi-part short story called “Looking Downward,” which had been serialized monthly (in slightly different form) from October 2009 to July 2010 at The Daily Cabal; also included are two postscripts in the guise of flash fiction which, it is hoped, are thematically connected to the content of the essay that precedes them.

  Writing a piece of this length, hybridized as it is, was a concerted challenge. I am used to my thoughts and speculations and grievances coming through filtered largely in my fiction. Proudly an introvert, I prefer to say what I mean indirectly, but I was profoundly grateful to Siew Yea for giving me the opportunity to try something new. It is up to you, dear reader, to decide if I succeeded.

  ~

  Chapter One

  “The following is a true story.”

  These words can almost always be found bubbling from the lips of inveterate liars. What exactly is a “true story” anyway? No matter who we are, where we come from, or how clever we may be, we are always only telling one side of any story. My side of the story. Oh but, you say, but I know what really happened. And my question in response is always: are you sure? Can you ever be definitively positive that what you experienced was the “truth”? Is there even such a thing as objective truth, or is it more likely that there are seven billion individual subjective truths in the world?

  The opening line of the remarkable 2006 film The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan, and adapted by him and his brother Jonathan from the 1995 novel of the same title by Christopher Priest, is spoken by Christian Bale’s character Alfred Borden, a character, which we learn from the hundred and thirty minutes to follow, who lives in a world of misdirection and false perception as a stage magician in 19th Century London, and this opening line only consists of four words: “Are you watching closely?”

  It is the job of the stage magician to earn the trust of the audience, while at the same time providing just the smallest hope that if they watch closely enough, they may be able to discover the secret behind the trick. The job of the stage magician is not, in actual fact, to perform magic. As Borden’s rival in the film, Hugh Jackman’s character Robert Angier says, “If anybody really believed the things I did onstage, they wouldn’t clap, they’d scream.” Both the magician and the audience know that the illusions, no matter how elaborate, are very clever tricks that can be logically explained, and yet people will line up round the block, even today, for tickets to a show by contemporary magicians like Penn and Teller or David Blaine or Cyril Takayama; they want to be fooled, just a little bit, because in the fooling comes both wonder and estrangement.

  Fiction is a form of stage magic that requires only black squiggles on white paper. The author makes the marks, the reader looks at the marks, and a wonderful form of alchemy blooms in the brain. We can read the works of Shakespeare, a man who lived four hundred years ago, and, barring contextual foreknowledge and changing social mores, it is almost the same experience as someone reading the text during Shakespeare’s own time. This goes for any form of writing, of course, but with fiction, we are given the added layer of knowing that we are about to be fooled, that the story to unfold in our eyes and our minds did not actually, in point of fact, happen, but that we are still willing put this knowledge aside so as to experience the world and the characters of the story. Even more remarkable than this is the experience of reading speculative fiction, where not only are we given the experience of something that did not happen, but in fact could not happen; yet, if we are patient and open enough to willingly suspend our disbelief even further, we find that we gain great benefits from ingesting such works of the imagination.

  The great graphic novel writer Alan Moore, who has penned such important works as V for Vendetta, Watchmen, and From Hell, goes one step further and equates writing literally with magic. He
says, in the documentary film The Mindscape of Alan Moore (DeZ Vylenz [Director] [30 September 2008]. The Mindscape of Alan Moore [Documentary]. Shadowsnake Films.), “I believe that magic is art, and that art, whether that be music, writing, sculpture, or any other form, is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images, to achieve changes in consciousness ... Indeed to cast a spell is simply to spell, to manipulate words, and this is why I believe that an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world to a shaman” [emphasis mine]. Now, whether or not writers are intermediaries to the spirit world remains debatable, but what is not is the transformative experience that writing and reading can bring to anyone, anyone, with the tools and experience to use them.

  So, everyone seated here today, I’ll ask you those same four magical words:

  Are you watching closely?

  ~

  Chapter Two

  “What are you?” the seven-year-old girl asked.

  “I am a catoblepas,” the strange animal said. “And a quadruped. And a lonely soul.”

  “Do you have a name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “Mini-Buddha-Jump-Over-the-Wall.”

  “That’s a strange name.”

  “I am a strange animal.”

  “Why are you looking at the ground?”

  “Catoblepasi are cursed. Were you to look into my eyes, you would drop stone dead to the ground.”

  “But why would you do that to me?”

  “It is neither my choice nor intention, little girl. I am a pacifist, and wish harm to none, and so to prevent unnecessary loss of life, I am forced to forever look downward.”

  The girl touched his flank and he shivered.

  “You have pretty scales,” she said.

  “Thank you. It is kind of you to say.”

  “And I like the way you smell. Like the flowers Mum buys for our Kwan Yin altar.”

  “I am pleased you approve.”

  A sound of shuffling and the whispering of grass blades. The catoblepas could not tell what the young girl was doing. He did not know how she had found him in this isolated place; Southeast Asian mangrove swamps were not usually known for human habitation.

  “My name is Anya,” she said, her face popping into view below him. “And your eyes—”

  He shut them quickly, but was it fast enough? He had warned her, had he not?

  “Little girl?”

  No response. Eyes still tight, the catoblepas nudged around in the grass with a hoof, but could feel no body. Had she merely wandered away? Could she have just rolled from under him? He could not stand the idea of causing her death.

  “Little girl? Anya?”

  Mini-Buddha-Jump-Over-the-Wall waited a moment more, then let out a long breath and continued along his previous path, knowing that either way, he was once more alone.

  Meanwhile: dark and constrictive and wet, cacophony of noise, the yelling, the pushing, vague sense of ejection, and then the little Eurasian girl with the Sanskrit name emerged into the world under, whispers of the world she knew still clinging to her purple Robots vs. Dinosaurs tee shirt and blue jeans.

  Bewildered, she gazed wide-eyed at the surrounding forest of sere arbor, the slate-colored skies, the ashen soil and the cinereal sun, and tried to block from her ears the faint staticky background hum of the place, as if a myriad radios were tuned to dead air. Her equilibrium slightly unsettled, as though the ground was quaking beneath her feet. The air tasted faintly of charcoal.

  From a tree branch above descended a Corgi-sized spider on a silken line, landing gracefully at the young girl’s feet. Eight crimson eyelids blinked in unison as the spider took in her face.

  “Such pretty eyes,” said the spider with a husky feminine tenor. “They match the color of this place. And who might you be?”

  “My name is Anya,” said Anya. “Where am I?”

  “You are in the Land of Grey Dusk. Are you lost?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Could you show me the way home?” The girl rooted in the pocket of her uniform shorts for something with which to barter, and produced two greenish iridescent scales, vaguely fish-like, which shimmered in the low light. She didn’t remember how the scales had gotten into her pocket, but they were pretty enough. “I can give you these in return for your help.”

  The spider scrutinized the scales for a moment, passing two of its forelegs lightly over them, then nodded.

  “Indeed. Quite unusual. I wonder how you came across them. Catoblepasi are very rare in any realm, and their scales tend to stay on.”

  Anya said nothing, protective of the scales’ origin and slightly embarrassed by her unintentional theft. Though the spider seemed friendly enough, Anya knew about not giving away too much information to strangers.

  “Fine,” said the spider, taking the scales in two of its arms. “I will show you the way.”

  Abruptly, the spider cast out its filaments and ensnared the little girl in a cocoon of white fiber. Snug tight in her swaddled capture, the little girl closed her eyes and lost consciousness. Then, without another word, the spider pulled her effortlessly upward, into the treetops.

  ~

  Chapter Three

  The following is a true story.

  I unequivocally have my parents to thank for my lifelong love of science fiction and fantasy. They brought me to one of the first Star Trek conventions ever held, driving from our small house near the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York to the Manhattan hotel in which it was to take place. This was in 1976, when I was only six months old. Though I remember nothing of this experience, it is endemic of my parents’—although largely my father’s—excitement for science fiction. My dad was seventeen when the original Star Trek series aired ten years earlier, and something in that short-lived television show spoke to him, whether it was the racial and economic optimism that came through Gene Roddenberry’s conception of his multi-ethnic bridge crew, or whether it was the social issues that the show’s writers frequently tackled throughout its three-year run, or whether it was the sense of adventure that resulted from Captain James T. Kirk’s pledge to “explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

  Whatever the reason, my father was an enthusiastic presence for media science fiction throughout my childhood. He and my mother apparently brought me along to watch the first Star Wars film when it was released in movie theaters in 1977. I would have been around two years old at that point, and this decision boggles my mind nearly thirty-five years later. I am currently the father of an almost three-year-old myself, and I cannot fathom taking my daughter to see a movie in the theater right now because 1) the immersive and often noisy experience (especially in an action-adventure film like Star Wars) would put her intensely ill at ease, to the point of tear-stained upset, and 2) I wouldn’t be able to pay attention to the film because she’d be climbing on the seats and dropping popcorn on the floor and asking, “Who’s that?” about every single character every single time they made an appearance on the screen. I can’t imagine how this fraught undertaking could have gone for my own parents.

  Years later, when I was around ten, I was taken to see Back to the Future, and utterly fell in love with the concept of time travel, to the point where I meticulously related the entire plot of the movie during show-and-tell in class the following day. When 2001: A Space Odyssey aired on HBO, my parents videotaped it so that we could watch it again and again, although at that age I was not quite ready for Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece; the ending left me particularly grasping for meaning, and although it would take some years until I could begin to understand it, this exposure to such cerebral and interpretive science fiction helped to prepare me for the textual stuff.

  As a kid, just as now, I was a voracious reader. On any given outing to the local library, I would load up with almost a dozen books from the children’s section, blasting thr
ough the titles with a focused intensity that I envy so many years later, and then return them on our next visit, sometimes as early as only a week later, when I would once again check out the same amount of books. I loved the adventure stories of Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain, the fun interactivity of the Choose Your Own Adventure series, the bravery and curiosity and intelligence of the Hardy Boys, and Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet that begins with A Wrinkle in Time. I gravitated toward imaginative fiction, like many children and young adults did then and still do today; the recent box-office-smashing attendance records of the first Hunger Games film, and the rabid fan base for the book trilogy (which can also be applied to the Harry Potter books and the Twilight series) can attest to this continuing trend.

  And so it was that I had been prepared for my first work of grown-up, adult science fiction in written form.

  We were living in Raleigh, North Carolina at that point, and at least one or two times during summer vacation, my parents, my sister, and I would all pile into our GM van, and drive the two hours to Wrightsville Beach for a day trip. We’d lay out on the sugary sand, splash around in the ocean, read books, browse the seaside shops, and top off the day with she-crab soup and broiled scallops at The Oceanic Restaurant before loading everything back in the van and heading home. It was a tradition that I cherished, and continued with my friends once I got to university. That particular beach on the North Carolina coast contained the perfect balance of isolation and population; it was never too crowded, so we could just take things easy and relax.

  On one of these trips in 1989, we were exploring one of the more touristy shops in the area. I remember a whole row of tee shirts featuring Bart Simpson on a skateboard, shouting “Don’t Have a Cow, Man!” and me taking immense 13-year-old pride in being able to point out to my mother how, based on the art style alone, they were all knock-offs (although I got the distinct impression she didn’t quite believe me). At some point, I wandered over to a section displaying rows of faced-out mass-market paperbacks, and became transfixed by a thickish book called Prelude to Foundation by Isaac Asimov. The front cover displayed the anxious and slightly constipated face of the book’s protagonist, a genius mathematician by the name of Hari Seldon, an outsider living in a vast galactic empire who invents a scientific form of future prediction called psychohistory.