“Ariel,” says Sycorax, “have you been up to your tricks again?”
“But he,” splutters your sister, “he …”
“He never ceases with his tricks,” your mother pronounces. “Running home to Mama, leaving me with the mess he’s made.” She looks at you, and your watery legs weaken. “Caliban,” she says, “I’m getting too old to play surrogate mother to your spawn. That last school of your offspring all had poisonous stings.”
“I know, Mother. I’m sorry.”
“How did that happen?” she asks.
You risk a glance at the woman you’ve dragged into this, the golden girl. She’s standing now, a look of interest and curiosity on her face. “It’s your fault,” you say to her. “If you had kissed me, told me what you wanted me to be, she and Ariel couldn’t have found us.”
She looks at you, measuring. “First tell me about the poison babies,” she says. She’s got more iron in her than you’d thought, this one. The last fairy-tale princess who’d met your family hadn’t stopped screaming for two days.
Ariel sniggers. “That was from his last ooman,” she says. “The two of them always quarreling. For her, Caliban had a poison tongue.”
“And spat out biting words, no doubt,” Sycorax says. “He became what she saw, and it affected the children they made. Of course she didn’t want them, of course she left; so Grannie gets to do the honors. He has brought me frog children and dog children, baby mack daddies and crack babies. Brings his offspring to me, then runs away again. And I’m getting tired of it.” Sycorax’s shawl whirls itself up into a waterspout. “And I’m more than tired of his sister’s tale tattling.”
“But Mama … !” Ariel says.
“‘But Mama’ nothing. I want you to stop pestering your brother.”
Ariel puffs up till it looks as though she might burst. Her face goes anvil-cloud dark, but she says nothing.
“And you,” says Sycorax, pointing at you with a suckered tentacle, “you need to stop bringing me the fallout from your sorry love life.”
“I can’t help it, Mama,” you say. “That’s how women see me.”
Sycorax towers forward, her voice crashing upon your ears. “Do you want to know how I see you?” A cluster of her tentacle tails whips around your shoulders, immobilizes you. That is a moray eel under there, its fanged mouth hanging hungrily open. You are frozen in Sycorax’s gaze, a hapless, irresponsible little boy. You feel the sickening metamorphosis begin. You are changing, shrinking. The last time Sycorax did this to you, it took you forever to become man enough again to escape. You try to twist in her arms, to look away from her eyes. She pulls you forward, puckering her mouth for the kiss she will give you.
“Well, yeah, I’m beginning to get a picture here,” says a voice. It’s the golden girl, shivering in her flower-print dress that’s plastered to her skinny body. She steps closer. Her boots squelch. She points at Ariel. “You says he’s color-struck. You’re his sister, you should know. And yeah, I can see that in him. You’d think I was the sun itself, the way he looks at me.”
She takes your face in her hands, turns your eyes away from your mother’s. Finally, she kisses you full on the mouth. In her eyes, you become a sunflower, helplessly turning wherever she goes. You stand rooted, waiting for her direction.
She looks at your terrible mother. “You get to clean up the messes he makes.” And now you’re a baby, soiling your diapers and waiting for Mama to come and fix it. Oh, please, end this.
She looks down at you, wriggling and helpless on the ground. “And I guess all those other women saw big, black dick.”
So familiar, the change that wreaks on you. You’re an adult again, heavy-muscled and horny with a thick, swelling erection. You reach for her. She backs away. “But,” she says, “there’s one thing I don’t see.”
You don’t care. She smells like vanilla and her skin is smooth and cool as ice cream and you want to push your tongue inside. You grab her thin, unresisting arms. She’s shaking, but she looks into your eyes. And hers are empty. You aren’t there. Shocked, you let her go. In a trembling voice, she says, “Who do you think you are?”
It could be an accusation: Who do you think you are? It might be a question: Who do you think you are? You search her face for the answer. Nothing. Your mother and your sib both look as shocked as you feel.
“Hey,” says the golden girl, opening her hands wide. Her voice is getting less shaky. “Clearly, this is family business, and I know better than to mess with that.” She gathers her little picky plaits together, squeezes water out of them. “It’s been really … interesting, meeting you all.” She looks at you, and her eyes are empty, open, friendly. You don’t know what to make of them. “Um,” she says, “maybe you can give me a call sometime.” She starts walking away. Turns back. “It’s not a brush-off; I mean it. But only call when you can tell me who you really are. Who you think you’re going to become.”
And she leaves you standing there. In the silence, there’s only a faint sound of whispering water and wind in the trees. You turn to look at your mother and sister. “I,” you say.
The Dystopianist, Thinking of His Rival, Is Interrupted by a Knock on the Door
Jonathan Lethem
THE DYSTOPIANIST DESTROYED world again that morning, before making any phone calls or checking his mail, before even breakfast. He destroyed it by cabbages. The Dystopianist’s scribbling fingers pushed notes onto the page: a protagonist, someone, a tousle-haired, well-intentioned geneticist, had designed a new kind of cabbage for use as a safety device—the “air bag cabbage.” The air bag cabbage mimicked those decorative cabbages planted by the sides of roads to spell names of towns, or arranged by color—red, white, and that eerie, iridescent cabbage indigo—to create American flags. It looked like any other cabbage. But underground was a network of gas-bag roots, vast inflatable roots, filled with pressurized air. So, at the slightest tap, no, more than a tap, or vandals would set them off for fun, right, given a serious blow such as only a car traveling at thirty miles or more per hour could deliver, the heads of the air bag cabbages would instantly inflate, drawing air from the root system, to cushion the impact of the crash, saving lives, preventing costly property loss. Only—
The Dystopianist pushed away from his desk, and squinted through the blinds at the sun-splashed street below. School buses lined his block every morning, like vast tipped orange juice cartons spilling out the human vitamin of youthful lunacy, that chaos of jeering voices and dancing tangled shadows in the morning light. The Dystopianist was hungry for breakfast. He didn’t know yet how the misguided safety cabbages fucked up the world. He couldn’t say what grievous chain of circumstance led from the innocuous genetic novelty to another crushing totalitarian regime. He didn’t know what light the cabbages shed on the death urge in human societies. He’d work it out, though. That was his job. First Monday of each month the Dystopianist came up with his idea, the green poison fog or dehumanizing fractal download or alienating architectural fad which would open the way to another ruined or oppressed reality. Tuesday he began making his extrapolations, and he had the rest of the month to get it right. Today was Monday, so the cabbages were enough.
The Dystopianist moved into the kitchen, poured a second cup of coffee, and pushed slices of bread into the toaster. The Times “Metro” section headline spoke of the capture of a celebrated villain, an addict and killer who’d crushed a pedestrian’s skull with a cobblestone. The Dystopianist read his paper while scraping his toast with shreds of ginger marmalade, knife rushing a little surf of butter ahead of the crystalline goo. He read intently to the end of the account, taking pleasure in the story.
The Dystopianist hated bullies. He tried to picture himself standing behind darkened glass, fingering perps in a lineup, couldn’t. He tried to picture himself standing in the glare, head flinched in arrogant dejection, waiting to be fingered, but this was even more impossible. He stared at the photo of the apprehended man and unexpectedly the Dy
stopianist found himself thinking vengefully, hatefully, of his rival.
Once the Dystopianist had had the entire Dystopian field to himself. There was just him and the Utopianists. The Dystopianist loved reading the Utopianists’ stories, their dim, hopeful scenarios, which were published in magazines like Expectant and Encouraging. The Dystopianist routinely purchased them newly minted from the newsstands and perverted them the very next day in his own work, plundering the Utopianists’ motifs for dark inspiration. Even the garishly sunny illustrated covers of the magazines were fuel. The Dystopianist stripped them from the magazines’ spines and pinned them up over his desk, then raised his pen like Death’s sickle and plunged those dreamily ineffectual worlds into ruin.
The Utopianists were older men who’d come into the field from the sciences or from academia: Professor this or that, like Dutch Burghers from a cigar box. The Dystopianist had appeared in print like a rat among them, a burrowing animal laying turds on their never-to-be-realized blueprints. He liked his role. Every once in a blue moon the Dystopianist agreed to appear in public alongside the Utopianists, on a panel at a university or conference. They loved to gather, the fools, in fluorescent-lit halls behind tables decorated with sweating pitchers of ice water. They were always eager to praise him in public by calling him one of their own. The Dystopianist ignored them, refusing even the water from their pitchers. He played directly to the audience members who’d come to see him, who shared his low opinion of the Utopianists. The Dystopianist could always spot his readers by their black trench coats, their acne, their greasily teased hair, their earphones, resting around their collars, trailing to Walkmans secreted in coat pockets.
The Dystopianist’s rival was a Utopianist, but he wasn’t like the others.
The Dystopianist had known his rival, the man he privately called the Dire One, since they were children like those streaming in the schoolyard below. Eeny-meeny-miney-moe! they’d chanted together, each trembling in fear of being permanently “It,” of never casting off their permanent case of cooties. They weren’t quite friends, but the Dystopianist and the Dire One had been bullied together by the older boys, quarantined in their shared nerdishness, forced to pool their resentments. In glum resignation they’d swapped Wacky Packages stickers and algebra homework answers, offered sticks of Juicy Fruit and squares of Now-N-Later, forging a loser’s deal of consolation.
Then they were separated after junior high school, and the Dystopianist forgot his uneasy schoolmate.
It was nearly a year now since the Dire Utopianist had first arrived in print. The Dystopianist had trundled home with the latest issue of Heartening, expecting the usual laughs, and been blind-sided instead by the Dire Utopianist’s first story. The Dystopianist didn’t recognize his rival by name, but he knew him for a rival instantly.
The Dire Utopianist’s trick was to write in a style which was nominally Utopian. His fantasies were nearly as credible as everyday experience, but bathed in a radiance of glory. They glowed with wishfulness. The other Utopianists’ stories were crude candy floss by comparison. The Dire Utopianist’s stories weren’t blunt or ideological. He’d invented an aesthetics of Utopia.
Fair enough. If he’d stopped at this burnished, closely observed dream of human life, the Dire Utopianist would be no threat. Sure, heck, let there be one genius among the Utopianists, all the better. It raised the bar. The Dystopianist took the Dire One’s mimetic brilliance as a spur of inspiration: Look closer! Make it real!
But the Dire Utopianist didn’t play fair. He didn’t stop at utopianism, no. He poached on the Dystopianist’s turf, he encroached. By limning a world so subtly transformed, so barely nudged into the ideal, the Dire One’s fictions cast a shadow back onto the everyday. They induced a despair of inadequacy in the real. Turning the last page of one of the Dire Utopianist’s stories, the reader felt a mortal pang at slipping back into his own daily life, which had been proved morbid, crushed, unfair.
This was the Dire One’s pitiless art: his Utopias wrote reality itself into the most persuasive dystopia imaginable. At the Dystopianist’s weak moments he knew his stories were by comparison contrived and crotchety, their darkness forced.
It was six weeks ago that Vivifying had published the Dire One’s photograph, and the Dystopianist had recognized his childhood acquaintance.
The Dire Utopianist never appeared in public. There was no clamor for him to appear. In fact, he wasn’t even particularly esteemed among the Utopianists, an irony which rankled the Dystopianist. It was as though the Dire One didn’t mind seeing his work buried in the insipid Utopian magazines. He didn’t seem to crave recognition of any kind, let alone the hard-won oppositional stance the Dystopianist treasured. It was almost as though the Dire One’s stories, posted in public, were really private messages of reproach from one man to the other. Sometimes the Dystopianist wondered if he were in fact the only reader the Dire Utopianist had, and the only one he wanted.
The cabbages were hopeless, he saw now.
Gazing out the window over his coffee’s last plume of steam at the humming, pencil-colored school buses, he suddenly understood the gross implausibility: a rapidly inflating cabbage could never have the stopping power to alter the fatal trajectory of a careening steel egg carton full of young lives. A cabbage might halt a Hyundai, maybe a Volvo. Never a school bus. Anyway, the cabbages as an image had no implications, no reach. They said nothing about mankind. They were, finally, completely stupid and lame. He gulped the last of his coffee, angrily.
He had to go deeper, find something resonant, something to crawl beneath the skin of reality and render it monstrous from within. He paced to the sink, began rinsing his coffee mug. A tiny pod of silt had settled at the bottom and now, under a jet of cold tap water, the grains rose and spread and danced, a model of Chaos. The Dystopianist retraced his seed of inspiration: well-intentioned, bumbling geneticist, good. Good enough. The geneticist needed to stumble onto something better, though.
One day, when the Dystopianist and the Dire Utopianist had been in the sixth grade at Intermediate School 293, cowering together in a corner of the schoolyard to duck sports and fights and girls in one deft multipurpose cower, they had arrived at one safe island of mutual interest: comic books, Marvel brand, which anyone who read them understood weren’t comic at all but deadly, breathtakingly serious. Marvel constructed worlds of splendid complexity, full of chilling, ancient villains and tormented heroes, in richly unfinished storylines. There in the schoolyard, wedged for cover behind the girls’ lunch hour game of hopscotch, the Dystopianist declared his favorite character: Doctor Doom, antagonist of the Fantastic Four. Doctor Doom wore a forest green cloak and hood over a metallic, slitted mask and armor. He was a dark king who from his gnarled castle ruled a city of hapless serfs. An imperial, self-righteous monster. The Dire Utopianist murmured his consent. Indeed, Doctor Doom was awesome, an honorable choice. The Dystopianist waited for the Dire Utopianist to declare his favorite.
“Black Bolt,” said the Dire Utopianist.
The Dystopianist was confused. Black Bolt wasn’t a villain or a hero. Black Bolt was part of an outcast band of mutant characters known as The Inhumans, the noblest among them. He was their leader, but he never spoke. His only demonstrated power was flight, but the whole point of Black Bolt was the power he restrained himself from using: speech. The sound of his voice was cataclysmic, an unusable weapon, like an Atomic Bomb. If Black Bolt ever uttered a syllable the world would crack in two. Black Bolt was leader in absentia much of the time—he had a tendency to exile himself from the scene, to wander distant mountaintops contemplating—what? His curse? The things he would say if he could safely speak?
It was an unsettling choice there, amidst the feral shrieks of the schoolyard. The Dystopianist changed the subject, and never raised the question of Marvel Comics with the Dire Utopianist again. Alone behind the locked door of his bedroom the Dystopianist studied Black Bolt’s behavior, seeking hints of the character’s appeal to
his schoolmate. Perhaps the answer lay in a storyline elsewhere in the Marvel universe, one where Black Bolt shucked off his pensiveness to function as an unrestrained hero or villain. If so, the Dystopianist never found the comic book in question.
Suicide, the Dystopianist concluded now. The geneticist should be studying suicide, seeking to isolate it as a factor in the human genome. The Sylvia Plath Code, that might be the title of the story. The geneticist could be trying to reproduce it in a nonhuman species. Right, good. To breed for suicide in animals, to produce a creature with the impulse to take its own life. That had the relevance the Dystopianist was looking for. What animals? Something poignant and pathetic, something pure. Sheep. The Sylvia Plath Sheep, that was it.
A variant of sheep had been bred for the study of suicide. The Sylvia Plath Sheep had to be kept on close watch, like a prisoner stripped of sharp implements, shoelaces and belt. And the Plath Sheep escapes, right, of course, a Frankenstein creature always escapes, but the twist is that the Plath Sheep is dangerous only to itself. So what? What harm if a single sheep quietly, discreetly offs itself? But the Plath Sheep, scribbling fingers racing now, the Dystopianist was on fire, the Plath Sheep turns out to have the gift of communicating its despair. Like the monkeys on that island, who learned from one another to wash clams, or break them open with coconuts, whatever it was the monkeys had learned, look into it later, the Plath Sheep evoked suicide in other creatures, all up and down the food chain. Not humans, but anything else which crossed its path. Cats, dogs, cows, beetles, clams. Each creature would spread suicide to another, to five or six others, before searching out a promontory from which to plunge to its death. The human species would be powerless to reverse the craze, the epidemic of suicide among the nonhuman species of the planet.
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