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

by Jason Erik Lundberg

  But instead she heard, “Psst! Over here!”

  She eased up her right eyelid and saw a young girl poking her head out of a doorway in the shed, a doorway the rabbit was certain had not been there before. Within was dimness, but the rabbit skittered over and leapt inside onto a dirt floor. The girl slammed the door and the rabbit laid eyes on the motley assortment gathered there in the faint light: a tortoise, a cat, and two person-shaped things with spears.

  “We’re looking for the Green Empress,” the girl was saying. “Can you tell us how to find her?”

  “Do you mean to kill her?” asked the rabbit.

  “No! I just need her to send me back home. Why do you want to kill her?”

  “She did the same to my lifemate and my dozens of children. To her we’re pests to be exterminated.” Her one remaining bunny trembled and wept silently in her arms.

  The girl’s facial features went hard and angry. “Then I have another thing to discuss with her.”

  “And then afterward you will kill her?”

  The girl bent down and gently touched the rabbit on the arm. “No. But I will make her stop killing the other rabbits.”

  The maternal rabbit said not in a word in reply, but held out her precious baby to the strange girl, who cradled her gently. The rabbit closed her eyes again to concentrate, and despite her exhaustion both physical and mental, she touched her forepaws to the dirt floor and began to dig.

  Naturally, the group was caught.

  Anya knelt low in front of the Green Empress’ throne, pressed down by the shafts of the spears carried by Mister Shiftless and Mister Hopeless, whose loyalties had abruptly shifted back upon their subterranean inception into the fortress. Though they both had said, “Sorry,” she couldn’t really blame them for wanting to curry favor with their old employer.

  “Send you home?” said the Empress, eyes ablaze. “My dear girl, whyever would I want to do that?”

  “Because I am being nice,” Anya said, raising her eyes; with the weight on her shoulders, all she could see were the Empress’s knees. Anya’s father the cat miaowed softly behind her; she presumed he was also constrained in some way. She didn’t know where the rabbit and the Turtle had been taken. “And,” she said, “it’s the right thing to do.”

  The Empress leaned forward. “Do I look like the type of person who tends to do the right thing?” She sighed and continued. “For your kind of request, there is always a price. What can you give me in return for such a great entreaty?”

  “I don’t have any money, or any more scales or shark teeth,” Anya said with a sigh. “I guess I don’t have anything.”

  “Wrong, girl. You may not have obvious payment, but I can always extract the price in other ways. I could take your soft palette; you didn’t have one until the surgery when you were six months old, so I’d just be returning you to your original state.”

  Anya tongued the roof of her mouth and said nothing.

  “Or, even better, I could take your name. Not even your entire name, just one letter, that would suffice.” The Green Empress’s index finger reached down and lightly touched the center of Anya’s forehead, the third eye, the Ajna chakra, Anya-Ajna, and for a brief blinding moment the world flashed indigo and silent, and she felt something removed from her, a strange sensation of losing something she’d never known she’d had.

  The weights on her shoulders lifted, and the Green Empress said, “Rise, Ana.” In the Empress’ cupped right hand was a weak ball of bluish light that pulsed slowly; with her left hand, she performed a complicated series of gestures and a circular portal of hazy blackness opened in front of the young girl. “Step through, and you shall be home.”

  A high screeching yowl, and then a small cat, mottled and striped and blotched in patterns of grey, leapt from over Ana’s head and pounced on the Empress’s hand, biting and scratching, a blur of teeth and claws, then it snatched the pulsing bluishness in its teeth and bounded once again into Ana’s arms.

  The Empress screamed, “Kill them both!” Without thinking, Ana sprung forward with her father the cat into the fuliginous darkness, falling into the black hole, where sight, sound, and everything else was obliterated.

  ~

  Chapter Nine

  At 2 a.m. in the very early morning of 15 October 2009, seven years after we had first met, my wife Janet woke me up, saying that her water had just broken. I asked if she was sure, hoping that it might be something other than the first indication of labor, but she insistently repeatedly herself as she rolled her very pregnant self out of bed and stepped into the bathroom. I had pre-packed a bag for this very eventuality, and began shoving in the last-minute things that we would need at the hospital, including my final exam marking; I had selfishly wished that our baby girl would wait at least another week before making her grand entrance into the world, so as to provide me sufficient time and energy to finish marking the massive stacks of English and Literature exam essays on my desk at home, but she had plans of her own.

  Janet called Mount Alvernia Hospital, who informed her that if her water had broken, she needed to come in as soon as possible. We hurriedly dressed, double-checked our hospital bag, then called for a taxi. Fifteen hours later, at 5:53 p.m., our daughter, Anya Sophia Lundberg, was born.

  For those young men sitting here, who may go through this yourself one day, I’ll give just a brief description of the labor process from the father’s point of view: an inordinate amount of tedium and trepidation, brief snatches of sleep on uncomfortable hospital furniture, a plethora of time spent watching television of no consequence, followed by a very quick period where everything happens at once, with pushing, and yelling, and anxious encouragement, and then fluids and smells and one final push, and then a tiny little person squirming in the doctor’s arms and a pair of scissors is being pushed into your hand to cut the umbilical cord, and then the tiny person is carried over to be placed underneath a heat lamp like an order-ready Big Mac, and the doctor is doing some more things with the poor exhausted mother, but you are transfixed by the brand new life breathing and crying and being swaddled in a blanket, her tiny head shaped a bit like a bullet from her brave passage through the birth canal (don’t worry, this will slowly round out over the course of a week, although you’ll perversely wish the alien bullet shape would remain because it just looks so freaking cool), and her eyes are a shade of grey like the sky just before a violent Singaporean thunderstorm, and you can’t get over the idea that this squalling little blob exists because of you.

  It seems to me now that it wasn’t until that exact moment that fatherhood became real. I’d had nine months to become accustomed to the idea, watching my wife’s belly grow bigger and bigger, doing all the physical preparations necessary for our daughter’s arrival (which largely concerned converting my home office into the baby’s bedroom). What I hadn’t realized was that I’d needed more psychological preparation as well. Put in such a life-changing situation, I had been almost in a state of denial that my life and my wife’s would change forever with this new addition to our family unit, and so I’d carried on pretty much as usual until, all of a sudden, my squalling squirming baby girl was placed in my arms. My biggest hope in that moment was that I wouldn’t drop her, followed closely by the desire to not screw up her life.

  Before Anya was born, I’d written a short-short piece of fiction about a man vaguely analogous to myself, waiting at the bus stop one day when he is approached by a young woman claiming she is his daughter and has traveled from the future to warn him away from being a bad father. The man responds with incredulity and tells her to return to the mental hospital from which she must have escaped; her response, in the last line of the story, is to push him into the path of a speeding bus. The piece was a totemic response to my anxieties about becoming a father, as a reminder of the ways that I should and should not treat my own daughter in the ensuing years, as well as the superstitious belief that since I had written it down, such behavior on my part would no longer co
me to pass. (The story, called “Dragging the Frame,” was greatly expanded at the request of my publishers for my story collection Red Dot Irreal, although I have provided the original version of it here as a postscript.)

  Anya is currently almost three years old, and I like to think that I’ve been the best father I can be so far with her. She continually surprises me with how similar we are, especially including her quirky sense of humor. I may not think about the fictional character in “Dragging the Frame” every single day, but I do think about him often enough to help me avoid the pitfalls into which I might normally fall with her. Writing that story functioned both as a catharsis and as a cautionary warning that has, I hope, helped me to be a better father.

  The night of the 15th, after Anya had made her entrance and was being kept in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) for observation, her mother had just fallen into a fitful sleep, her body a mass of aches and pains after the epidural painkillers had worn off. I sat in a chair next to my wife’s hospital bed, marveling at the strength and endurance she had just shown, feeling, at the same time, inadequate that I could never have done the same thing were I in her place. To those same young men here I say: treat the ladies in your life with the utmost respect and care, for they are far stronger and resilient than we can ever hope to be.

  As I sat there, tired myself from lack of sleep, I recalled the words of my friend Tim Pratt, also a recent first-time father. The night his son River was born, he set for himself a test of whether he could still write fiction in such an exhausted state, in preparation for the coming months when taking care of a baby would diminish his and his wife’s levels of restful sleep and, therefore, his cognitive capacity. He wrote a complete short story that night, one that he was later able to sell, and thus became reassured that he would be able to cope, in a small way, with his new child’s impact on his writing life.

  Unlike Tim, I was not making a living on my writing when Anya was born, but I also felt compelled toward the same assurance. From our hospital bag, I extracted my Moleskine notebook and a reliable pen, and wrote the second and third sections of a mosaic story I had already begun earlier that month, called “Looking Downward,” in which a young girl called Anya encounters a mythical creature called a catoblepas, and is accidentally transported to the Land of Grey Dusk, and must utilize her intelligence, bravery, and compassion in order to find her way back home. I wrote about her encounter with a large intelligent spider, and a majestic elephant-that-is-more-than-an-elephant, and felt as if I knew where the rest of the story was heading.

  As I closed my notebook and twisted shut my pen, I looked up. Standing there in front of me, backlit by the bright fluorescent light filtering through the small window in the hospital room’s door, was a seven-year-old Eurasian girl, dressed in a purple shirt featuring dinosaurs and robots, and blue jeans with knees scuffed into white. Her long unruly brown hair was gathered in a ponytail, and she just stood there, hands in her pockets, not saying a word, staring at me. I hadn’t even heard her enter the room. She must have been there for the woman sharing the room with my wife, I thought, or maybe she’d gotten lost.

  I leaned forward, in the process of getting up out of my chair, when she moved toward me; her motion caused me to stop, so that I hovered above the seat, neither up nor down. My arms quivered, and the girl still hadn’t said a thing, so I sat back onto the chair. She edged over to the side of my wife’s bed, peering at her sleeping form, then slowly brushed a strand of hair away from Janet’s face, the action gentle, making sure not to wake her up. Then after a moment, she turned back to me and patted me lightly on the hand.

  “It’ll be okay,” she whispered.

  “It will?” I said.

  She nodded. “Things might be bad for a few years. Sometimes really bad. But it will get better; it’ll be okay. Just remember that.”

  I wanted to ask her to elaborate, but my mouth had abruptly gone dry and I seemed to have some trouble breathing. I found myself unable to move from the chair, as if I had been fixed in place by cement.

  The corners of the girl’s mouth twitched upward, and then she stepped lightly back across the room, her tennis shoes making no sound on the speckled floor tiles. She turned one last time to look at me, nodded, then opened the door and stepped out into the hospital hallway, letting it swing shut with a soft click behind her.

  Feeling returned to my limbs and breath to my lungs, and I lurched out of the chair, a hundred questions on my lips as I hurriedly crossed the room, threw the door open, and burst into the hallway. I turned left toward the nurse’s station and then right toward the NICU, but the entire corridor was empty.

  ~

  Chapter Ten

  The young girl opened her eyes and sat up. The ground beneath her was spongy and damp, and the wet had seeped into the seat of her jeans and the back of her purple tee shirt. The sky hurt her eyes with its brilliant blueness, and though the sun beat down in its harshness, she half-shut her eyelids and bathed in its warmth. How long had she slept?

  “Ow,” said a voice next to her.

  She turned, and sitting there was a man wearing her father’s face and her father’s clothes, but was not, could not possibly have been her father, because her father had been dead since she was four years old. But there he sat, rubbing the back of his head and squinting in the sun.

  “Daddy?”

  “Hey, monkey. You okay?”

  “What? But how?”

  “You brought me back, remember? Your sacrifice to the Green Empress. I didn’t mean to keep it, but it appears I didn’t have much choice.”

  “But that was a dream. Right?”

  “No, sweetie, it happened, all of it.”

  Her father suddenly reached over and squeezed Ana in one of his bear hugs, and although she was too startled at first to reciprocate, she breathed in the low smells of his shampoo and perspiration, and something in her let go. She grasped him tightly and didn’t even try to stop the tears from flowing.

  “Thanks, sweetie,” he said softly. “I’ll never forget this.”

  “So what happened to the rest of them?” she asked when she could regain her thoughts and breath. “The Turtle and the two Misters and the white rabbit?”

  “I don’t know. They’re still there, in the Land of Grey Dusk. Maybe we’ll see them again someday, but not, I hope, for a while.”

  Ana’s father stood, his knees cracking loudly, and he helped his brave girl to her feet. Daughter and daddy grinned knowingly at each other, and then they proceeded out of the mangrove swamp to find her mother and give her the surprise of her life.

  ~

  Epilogue

  Speculative fiction has power. Repressive governments around the world have at one time or another banned it from being read or written for the simple fact that it allows for the possibility of other realities, of better worlds. The science fiction dystopia We by Yevgeny Zamyatin and the fantastical social satire The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov were both the victims of Goskomizdat (the Soviet Union’s censorship bureau) in the 1920s and 30s. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), and then afterward from 1984 to 1990, speculative fiction as a literary genre was banned from being published in China. Any fiction-writing that did not glorify the Party’s “great Socialist future” was denigrated as “spiritual pollution” (source: “A Bull in a China Shop on the Moon: An Interview With Wu Yan,” Lavie Tidhar, The Internet Review of Science Fiction, February 2006, http://irosf.com/q/zine/article/10241). Since the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, science fiction has been more widely promoted within China, but those old impulses remain to this day, as evidenced by the proclamation made just last year prohibiting the trope of time travel in Chinese television shows because of its possible subversive element.

  Science fiction in particular has often been the vehicle to discuss societal anxieties during the time in which it is written, by placing the narrative in another time or place. In the 1960s and 1970s, a brilliant writer named Samuel R.
Delany was able to explore racial and sexual politics and to couch his investigations in ways that would not offend the easily offendable reader. Just as one requires knowledge of the codes and conventions of speculative fiction in order to properly understand it, one needed a further critical interpretation to gain the true meaning of his stories and novels. Delany, often called the world’s first gay, black science fiction writer, went on to more explicitly examine these issues in his fiction, most notably in his Joycean masterpiece Dhalgren.

  Similarly, in the 1980s, a young Scottish lad named Alasdair Duncan happened upon Delany’s work in the small town in which he lived, and was changed forever by a short story called “Aye, And Gomorrah” (which had won the 1967 Nebula Award). According to Duncan, the story “managed to articulate in a way I couldn’t the disjunction at the zero-spot of my queer adolescent sexuality (Hal Duncan. “‘Aye, And Gomorrah’ by Samuel R. Delany: An Appreciation.” The ED SF Project. “ This work of fiction reached out to a young man grappling with issues of identity and self, and helped him to recognize himself in the loneliness and need for understanding in the story’s characters, and in the othering nature of being a sexual outsider. This comforted him as he endured relentless bullying in school, and enabled the sense that things would one day get better. It would also lead to him shortening his first name to Hal and becoming a major force in speculative fiction himself, publishing the modernist mythic Book of All Hours duology (Vellum and Ink) to great acclaim in the mid-2000s.

  On a personal note, without that first encounter with Isaac Asimov’s Prelude to Foundation twenty-three years ago, my incredible daughter Anya might very well not exist. If every choice that we make spawns an infinitude of alternate realities, then that means there are many worlds out there in the multiverse where she was never born, where any one of the major choices that I have made throughout my life has diverged from this existence. But in this world, speculative fiction directly led to the birth of a remarkable little girl; now that’s power, more real than any kind of stage magic.