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

by Jason Erik Lundberg

  The name Asimov especially caught my eye; sometime in the weeks or months before I stood in that souvenir shop, I had seen a television program on PBS about science and outer space—it’s entirely possible that it could have been the Carl Sagan miniseries Cosmos, although the exactitude of this detail has dropped through the sieve of my memory—and in this context, Asimov’s name was used as an example of a writer optimistic about humanity’s ultimate fate, as he often set his stories far in the future. And indeed, according to the back cover copy, Prelude to Foundation takes place in the year 12,020 of the Galactic Era; I wasn’t sure if this corresponded to our current usage of the Gregorian calendar’s conventions, but if so, the setting of the book would thence be ten thousand years from now, when human beings have spread throughout the stars. The copy also indicated that Seldon’s brand of prediction makes him a wanted man by several powerful parties, including Emperor Cleon I, and that the action to unfold would do so in the vein of an exciting thriller not unlike the Hardy Boys adventures of my slightly younger days.

  I pestered my father into buying the book, somehow convincing him that Asimov was a brilliant writer (an assertion I absolutely could not have proven at that point), and that it was vitally important to my sanity, my sense of self, and my continued existence to read this particular novel (I exaggerate, but not by much). While we were comfortably middle-class, I’d been brought up to be financially accountable, to think about whether I really needed a particular action figure (He-Man and the Masters of the Universe being my favorite toy line) or music cassette (“Weird Al” Yankovic and Michael Jackson were in heavy rotation on my tape deck), etc. But when it came to books, my parents encouraged both my sister and me to develop our own personal libraries.

  And so on that bright afternoon, surrounded by lamps encrusted with sea shells, rainbow-striped sand in decorative glass cylinders, and tee shirts proclaiming in bright neon colors (and unironically, I might add) “Life’s a Beach!”, my father saw something in my eyes and in my insistent begging that this might very well be a keystone moment, that this could be a book which would profoundly change the way I approached both literature and life, that I had been destined to encounter Prelude to Foundation on this particular day in this particular damp-smelling tourist shop on Wrightsville Beach. Or maybe he just wanted to stop my aggravating harassment because he had a headache and wanted to go home. Either way, my father forked over the money to the cashier, and we left the shop.

  I devoured the novel over the next few days, and then immediately read it again. It was like a slow-motion explosion in my brain, opening me up to a sophisticated reading experience that I hadn’t known I was craving. I now remember only few specifics of the plot, but what I cannot forget is that incredible feeling of excitement at discovering a meaningful work of art all on my own, without having it assigned as a required classroom text or foisted upon me by well-meaning adults as something that was “good for me”; this was also in the dark ages before the Internet and the recommendation algorithms of websites like Amazon and Goodreads. I had opened myself up to trying something new, and as much as the groundwork had been previously laid by the exposure to media science fiction, I felt like this book was something entirely mine.

  I had found my strange.

  Since then, I have sought to replicate this joy, through willingly exposing myself to the further curiosity of literature, movies, video games, works of visual art, and dramatic performances both on the stage and on the small screen, which has led to my all-consuming embrace of (just to name a few examples): the fantastical writing of Neil Gaiman (both in prose and in comics), the industrial music of Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails, the short-lived Joss Whedon televisual space western Firefly and its big-budget film sequel Serenity, each iteration of the video game series SPORE, the incredibly goofy and self-aware cartoon series The Tick (for which my uncle, Doug Katsaros, provided the musical score), the atmospherically quirky films of French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet like Amélie and The City of Lost Children, and the monochrome metal-etched prints of Ukranian graphic artist Georgiy Rybin. There are, of course, many many other things over which I geek out, but I’ll stop here.

  Weeks after that fateful beach trip, my mother happened to bring me to The Intimate Bookshop, a Raleigh landmark and only one of maybe two or three other independent bookstores that I knew of in the city (a store that sadly closed down about a decade later), and as I wandered through the science fiction section, I discovered that Prelude to Foundation was but a precursor (what today we would likely call a “prequel”) to an entire series of novels that Asimov had originally started writing nearly four decades earlier, published in uniform editions so that the cover art and design of each book was consistent throughout the set. I gathered the five paperbacks in the Foundation series clumsily in my arms, found my mother among the giant coffee-table art books with works by Monet and Renoir, and, stumbling to a stop in front of her said, breathlessly, “We have to get these!”

  Please understand, persuading my parents to buy one book for me was not an overwhelming ordeal; mass-market paperbacks in those days were only four or five US dollars, and my folks knew the money was going to a good cause. But five books? At the same time? That was a request at least an order of magnitude higher in terms of difficulty. I was thirteen years old then, and only received my allowance of seven dollars at the end of each week, in exchange for the completion of my chores; I don’t remember how much money I might have had with me in The Intimate Bookshop on that day, but in any case, it would have only been enough for one book; what if I finished that book and came back to get the next one, and someone else had bought it? Or even worse, bought the other four books as well, right from under me? How could I possibly be expected to live in such a world where I had no access to the rest of the story? (Of course, it never occurred to me that other bookstores might have the same books.)

  mom: But why do you need all of these books right now? What if you don’t like the first one? Then you won’t want to read the rest and it will have been just a waste of money.

  me: I swear that won’t happen! I love Prelude to Foundation, so I’ll love the rest of these too!

  mom: Can’t you just find these at the library? Five books is a lot to buy at once.

  me: I’ll pay you back later with my allowance money!

  mom: You realize it will take you a month to pay me back? A month where you won’t be able to buy anything else? No comics? No candy? No popsicles from the ice cream man?

  me (with the most serious face I can make): These books are more important than all of that.

  mom (laughing): Okay, then. Let’s go pay for them.

  And so, Isaac Asimov, that brilliant bespectacled Jew with mutton-chop sideburns and a thick Brooklyn accent, became my entry point into the world of literary speculative fiction. From the Foundation series I moved to the Robot novels, then to The End of Eternity and Azazel and Nemesis and a dozen others, and from Asimov I discovered Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke. I took out a subscription to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (now known as Asimov’s SF), mistakenly thinking that it would contain nothing but Isaac Asimov stories, and discovering to my delight a cornucopia of high-quality fiction by dozens of other writers, the effect of which was to expand my knowledge of and experience with the field of speculative fiction, a genie that could never again be forced back into the bottle.

  ~

  Chapter Four

  The young girl Anya awoke, unbound, aware of a great rolling movement of musculature beneath her. Shapes and curves resolved into the structure of an enormous pachyderm. She’d been sleeping on the back of an elephant.

  She looked over one side; its ponderous strolling brought them across a frighteningly narrow tree branch hundreds of feet above the ground. She let out out a small squeak; the elephant’s trunk periscoped over its head and seemed to peer at her.

  “You are awake.” Its low rumbling voice sent vibrations through Anya’s legs and up into h
er teeth. The beast did not halt in its ambulation.

  “Yes,” Anya said. “Where am I?”

  “My realm. I am the Olifanz.”

  “Don’t you mean elephant?”

  “Did I misspeak?” the Olifanz said.

  The young girl was quiet.

  “Madame Spider delivered you to me.”

  “Will you show me the way home?”

  “No. But I will bring you to the Turtle, who will. Now be silent, or I will change my mind and eat you up.”

  “But elephants are herbivores. I learned it at school.”

  “As I said before,” the creature boomed, turning its massive head and fixing Anya with one harsh green eye, “I am not an elephant. I. Am. The. Olifanz.”

  “But why are you so grouchy?”

  “Because I must deal with incessant questions from little girls who do not belong here. In addition, something behind my right ear has been causing me irritation and pain for months.”

  Anya gently lifted the flap of the Olifanz’s right ear, and discovered a wickedly sharp-looking black object lodged in the skin. Tri-cornered, a bit like a shark tooth, and the darkest fuliginous black she had ever seen. Without a further thought, Anya reached down, gripped the tooth in her hand, and gave two quick tugs. The tooth came free, and in the process, one acuminate corner shallowly bisected the fate line on her palm; both she and the Olifanz cried out in unison.

  “O! O!” trumpeted the Olifanz, then sprinted forward. Anya stuffed the tooth in the pocket of her jumper and held on, hand stinging. The Olifanz abruptly leapt forward into thin air. Anya screamed as they soared through the spaces between space, a lateral dimensional shift, vibrant colors blazing past her eyes, until, just as suddenly, they stopped, surrounded by a dense bamboo forest.

  Before them stood an ancient tortoise, its skin unfathomably wrinkled, its shell swirled with rune-like arabesques.

  “As promised,” said the Olifanz, reaching up to snare Anya with its powerful trunk and then deposit her on the ground, “this is the Turtle.”

  “How did we get here?”

  “A moment of pure joy,” the Olifanz said. “We would have gotten here eventually, but your way was much, much faster.” Then the great beast lumbered away without another word.

  Anya climbed aboard the ancient whorled back of the Turtle, who, without protest or any other utterance, set off in a straight line in a direction of its choosing, seeming to know where to go without being told. The ride lasted for years, eons, forever, time stretched to infinity. Or, at least, that was how it seemed to her seven-year-old mind. The cut in her palm gradually healed, but she existed in a daze of near-catatonic boredom. Bamboo forest gave way to grassland, then veldt, then coastal wetlands, then spruce and pine and fir. The Turtle refused to respond to her questions and attempts at conversation, barely acknowledging her existence. It plodded ever onward, toward what she hoped was the way back to her home and family.

  When they reached familiar bamboo once again, Anya realized that a cat was sitting next to her on the Turtle’s shell, mottled and striped and blotched in patterns of grey, with blue eyes the color of sorrow.

  “Hello,” said the young girl. “Where did you come from?”

  “Your father,” intoned the Turtle in a withered old voice like crackling leaves. The first words it had spoken to her during the long journey.

  “I don’t understand. The cat came from my father?”

  “No. It is your father.”

  Anya’s eyes hardened and her stomach clenched into a ball of fury. She pushed off and slid down the Turtle’s shell to the ground. The cat stared at her impassively.

  “Shut up! You just shut up! My father’s dead!”

  “There is no such thing as death. We are all just varying states of energy and consciousness. Your father was once in one form. Now he is in another. Look into its eyes if you do not believe me.”

  She did so, gazing deep into the cat’s blue unblinking orbs, at once recognizing them as the kind eyes from her infancy, her childhood, watching over her as she slept, ate, learned, fussed, experienced the world. The eyes an extension of his wide smile, his generous laugh, his strong arms, the man she’d yearned to amuse and be amused by, who had taught her the value of curiosity and optimism and open-mindedness.

  “Daddy?”

  The cat said nothing. It blinked once, slowly.

  “Why did you leave me?”

  “He cannot answer,” rasped the Turtle. “And the why is unimportant. He is here with you now, this is all that matters.”

  She reached out and hesitantly scratched her father behind the ears. He smiled and purred and Anya felt something in her release.

  ~

  Chapter Five

  In 1994, during my second undergraduate year at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, I took my first class with science fiction author John Kessel. My mother had found out about Kessel’s presence on the NC State faculty the previous year, and had urged me to go talk to him. I had found his short story collection Meeting In Infinity in the campus bookstore, and read it cover to cover over the interval of a weekend, but I was nervous about just going up to his office in the English Department and introducing myself, especially since I wasn’t an English major (I started off majoring in Physics, and switched once to Mechanical Engineering and then again to Graphic Communications throughout the course of my baccalaureate career). Also, I was (and still am) sometimes painfully introverted, which may explain why I have spent so much time throughout my life with my nose in a book, and the thought of initiating contact with an actual published (and celebrated) writer put a queasy rumble in my stomach and caused me to break out in a sweat.

  However, I could sign up for his classes. He taught American literature and graduate-level fiction-writing workshops, as well as a survey class on science fiction. Until that point, my pleasure reading was still largely confined to Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke, as well as anything written by Stephen King. I had thoroughly enjoyed Animal Farm and 1984 by George Orwell when they were assigned as high school texts, but for whatever reason did not feel the compulsion to seek out his other writing. I had tried the high fantasy of David Eddings and Terry Brooks and found it lacking, not even bothering to finish the books; the same with CS Lewis’s Narnia series, with which I just could not connect. During a visit with my godmother in Georgia, I had picked up J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Fellowship of the Ring, thinking that it might be like The Hobbit (which I had read as a kid), and was so bored by the expositional nature of the book’s prologue that I never even arrived at the shire and the appearance of Frodo Baggins; to this day, it shames me to admit that I still have not read the Lord of the Rings trilogy, even though I’ve seen all three films in their extended editions. It was as if I felt no need to venture beyond the A.B.C. of science fiction (and the K. of horror), since, between them, they had written hundreds of books, which had kept me plenty busy as a reader.

  John Kessel’s class changed all that. Using around half a dozen novels, as well as the short fiction anthologized in The Norton Book of Science Fiction (a massive hardcover book which I still possess), Kessel provided the chronological context I’d been so desperately needing in order to make sense of the field of science fiction, and introduced me to a number of new writers who soon became favorites. Covering thirty years of SF, from 1960-1990, the class was like a second cerebral supernova, of the kind experienced when I’d encountered Asimov for the first time. I welcomed the cyberpunk fiction of the 1980s by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, Rudy Rucker, and others, which integrated flesh with technology and revealed a worldly skepticism and critique of science fiction as a genre, and without which the Matrix films could never have been made. Similarly, I found myself sympathizing with the so-called “humanist” science fiction of Kessel’s contemporaries, like James Patrick Kelly (although he was sometimes lumped into the cyberpunk camp as well), Connie Willis, Karen Joy Fowler, and Kim Stanley Robinson, who were more con
cerned with the effects on human beings of massive sociological change.

  One of the required texts was Philip K. Dick’s novel UBIK, by far my favorite in the class. A story of espionage, psychic abilities, cryonic suspension called “half-life” that allows the dead to communicate, and the breakdown of reality. The book’s central mystery concerns an enigmatic and progressive regression of technology, such as a car seamlessly transforming into earlier and earlier models each time the protagonist views it, as well as the decay of ordinary objects such as a carton of milk, which spoils immediately after opening. People who step outside the sight of the main group turn up moments later as skeletons. Reality itself is presented as highly unstable and dangerously malevolent, and even by the end of the story, the idea of “what is real?” (a theme to which Dick would often return in his fiction) is never properly resolved, so that the impression bleeds into the reader’s life afterward, an experience that was both thrilling and deeply unsettling; I spent the week after finishing the book double-checking that my small television remained a television, and my roommate’s cubical dorm fridge remained a fridge.

  The next semester, I enrolled in Kessel’s survey class in fantasy literature for more of the same, discovering writers like Gene Wolfe, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gabriel García Márquez, Franz Kafka, and Geoff Ryman. Those two classes were essential in my understanding of both sides of speculative fiction, and showed me the breadth of the field. They also allowed me the pretense of finally visiting Kessel in his office at Tompkins Hall to talk about the class texts, as well as about SF in general, and publication. At some point, I mentioned that I enjoyed writing, having received some praise, and an award, for the narratives I’d crafted in high school, and that I’d even tried sending out my fiction to magazines several times, with no success.