“Where are we?” I asked faintly.
“Toronto. They always use it for the New York shoots. The real New York is so expensive. It’s like American actors—no one can afford them any more. We use Canadians for everything.”
“So what was this?” I asked. “A movie or a game?”
“Both. It’s interactive TV. A few hired professionals like me and your mom, and then tons of paying customers. They do most of the minor characters, the extras and what not. Then the whole thing is broadcast live, with your thoughts picked up on an internal mike as a kind of voice-over. That’s what made the show—you were so innocent, so clueless. The show started when you were fifteen, which meant it took you twenty-two years to figure out what was going on. It’s a new record. And in the end we had to give you massive hints.”
“When I was fifteen?”
“Sure. All the rest was just recovered memory syndrome. Who wants to make a show about a kid? I mean except for all the shows within the show. Beaver Cleaver and so forth.”
“Beaver Cleaver?”
“No expense was spared,” said Barbara. “It’s the information superhighway. But you have to understand—this was a huge deal.”
She was right. By the time we hit Yonge Street a crowd had gathered. Old ladies, teenagers, men, women, all wanting to shake my hand and get my autograph. I was a celebrity, like O. J. Simpson or Woody Allen, except of course I really existed. I was a real person, and not just a collection of computer-generated film clips.
“Mr. Park,” somebody shouted. “When did you know for sure?”
“Show us the doubloon!” demanded another, and when I took it from my pocket, everyone laughed and clapped.
An old man grasped my hand. I recognized him as the super of the building next to mine. “I just wanted to say you’ve given my wife and me such pleasure over the years. Most of the shows should be banned from the airwaves, if it was up to me. But you never even raised your voice. No violence at all. Not that you weren’t tempted,” he said, giving Barbara a severe look.
Then the limo arrived, small and sleek. Inside I could hear a small hum, as if from a computer. No one was driving. We pulled out slowly into the wide street, and then we were heading downtown. “So what was the show’s name?” I asked.
“It was called Get a Grip,” said Barbara. And when she saw my face, she grinned. “Oh come on, don’t take it like that. Sure, you were kind of a wimp, but the guy was right. It was a wholesome show. Every day we found new ways to humiliate you, but you just soldiered on. Most of the time you didn’t even notice. I mean sure, you were a total moron, but that was all right. It was your dignity that people loved.”
We drove on through the unfamiliar streets. “I guess it didn’t keep me from being canceled,” I said.
“Well, to tell the truth, it was all a little dated. And you needed a good female lead. That fat tart in Stuyvesant Town just wasn’t doing it. People seemed to find your life less interesting as soon as I bailed out.”
“I guess I felt the same way.”
Barbara patted my hand. “But you were still popular among retirees. You have no idea how bad most of the competition is. Like the guy said, they gave over most of the twentieth century to war games. Vietnam, KKK, Holocaust, Cold War, Hiroshima. Those are all the American shows. Kids love them, even the minorities. But I can’t stand them.”
“Hiroshima?” I asked.
She smiled. “Meanwhile, we thought it was a stroke of genius to work all that into the background of Get a Grip. To show what life in America might have been like if it had all really happened. Of course we had to change the footage and the point of view—reshoot a lot of it. Most of those shows are ridiculously patriotic.”
“Ingenious,” I murmured.
“But that’s how we got into trouble. ABC claimed it was copyright infringement, and the American ambassador protested. But Get a Grip was a satire, for God’s sake. Even the US courts ruled in our favour.”
After a little while I said, “So what did really happen?”
“Well, that’s what I’m telling you. The Americans were furious for years. So ABC finally made a hostile bid for Ottawa Communication, which produced your show. The deal went through last week, and Get a Grip was canceled. But there had been rumors for months, which was why the writers brought back all that Russian stuff last fall. They wanted to take the show to its own end.”
“No. I mean, what really happened? In the world.”
She squeezed my arm. “Don’t worry. You’ll soon catch up. Besides, we’re here.”
We pulled up in front of a hotel. “You’ll love it,” she said. “Czar Nicholas III stayed here last time he was in town.”
So I got out and followed her up the steps. In through the revolving doors. The lobby was all ormolu and velvet and gilt mantelpieces. The elevator ran in a cage up through the middle of the spiral staircase. “What am I doing now?” I asked as we got in.
“God damn it, Pogo, don’t be such a dope.” I hated when she called me “Pogo.” It was a nickname left over from my earliest childhood, and she only used it to annoy me. But as I rode up in the elevator, it occurred to me that maybe no one had ever really called me that. Maybe all those painful memories had been induced when I was fifteen. Maybe they had all been covered in a flashback, when Get a Grip first went on the air.
My eyes filled with tears. “What’s the matter now?” said Barbara. “Honest to God, you’d think you were being boiled over a slow fire. It’s the best hotel in town. I thought you might want to rest for a few hours, take a shower, change your clothes before the reception at the President’s house tonight. The Russian ambassador will be there—I tell you, you’re a star. A symbol of Canadian pride. Come on, is that so terrible?”
Then, when we were alone together in the jewel-box room, she said, “Besides, I’ve missed you.”
But I wasn’t listening. I was looking at my face in the mirror above the dresser. The same curly hair and gullible eyes, as if nothing had happened. “My whole life has been a parody,” I said, watching my lips move. But then I had to smile, because it was exactly what I might have said back in America, back during the salad days of Get a Grip.
Barbara was behind me. In the mirror I saw her undo the first few buttons of her blouse, and then slip it off her shoulders. “Let me make it okay for you,” she said. Then it was like a dream come true, because she was leading me to the bed and pulling off my clothes. I had thought about this moment so many times since we split up, directing us as if we were the actors in a scene. In my mind, sometimes she was harsh and fast, sometimes passive and accommodating. Sometimes it took hours, and sometimes it was over right away. But none of my fantasizing prepared me for this moment, which was not sublime so much as strange. During two years of marriage, I thought I had got to know her well. But I had never done anything of the things she required of me in that hotel room; I had never heard of anybody doing them. But, “Things are different here,” she whispered. “Let me teach you how to make it in the real world,” she said, before I lost consciousness.
Then I came to, and I was lying on the bed. Barbara was in the shower. I could hear the water running. I sat naked on the side of the bed, staring at the television. It was in a lacquer cabinet on top of a marble table, and the remote was on the floor near my foot. There were hundreds of buttons on it.
Then suddenly I was seized with a new suspicion, and I flicked it on. I flicked through several channels, seeing nothing but football games. But there I was on channel 599xtc, butt-naked, staring at myself. Behind me: the hotel room, the ripped sheets and soggy pillows. And on the bottom corner of the screen, a blinking panel which said:
PRESS ANY KEY TO CONTINUE.
Then Barbara was there, toweling her neck, looking over my shoulder. “Okay, so it’s not quite over yet,” she said. “There are still some things you ought to know.”
© 1997 by Paul Park.
Originally published in Omni Online.
; Reprinted by permission of the author.
Paul Park has published a dozen novels and two dozen short stories in a variety of genres. He lives in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children, and teaches in the English and Art History departments at Williams College.
Alive, Alive Oh
Sylvia Spruck Wrigley
The waves crash onto the blood-red shore, sounding just like the surf on Earth: a dark rumbling full of power. It’s been seventeen years since we left.
Owen and I got married at the register office in Cardiff. We took a flat near the University, a tiny bedsit. I felt very cosmopolitan, living in the capital city, and only a little bit homesick for Swansea. Then Owen came home one night and asked me what I thought about going into space. I laughed because I thought he must be joking, but he wasn’t: They’d offered him a position in a new terraforming colony on G851.5.32 and of course he wanted to go. I was frightened, but it’s not the kind of opportunity you can say no to, is it? And it was only for ten years; afterward we could come back to a full pension. Fame and fortune, he said. I did like the thought of telling my friends. Oooh, hello Emma, how have you been? Yes, it has been quite some time, hasn’t it? You’ve moved to Mumbles Road, have you? That’s nice. We moved to an exoplanet eighteen light-years away. Oh well, we’re back now, of course …
That was back when I thought we’d return to Wales one day.
The water here is nothing like the salty sea of home. It’s acidic and eats into the flesh. I shouldn’t even be this close to the shore, in case the spray splashes across and burns me. Everything about G851.5.32 is toxic; I’ve been here so long, even I am.
Megan was born after we’d been here five years. My best friend Jeanine (my only friend) was present for the birth. Owen started off holding my hand, but he couldn’t stand to see me in such pain. In the end, he paced outside until Jeanine went out to tell him that it was all over, that he was the father of a baby girl.
“She looks so fragile,” he said. “I’m afraid to touch her in case she breaks.” It’s true: Megan was a tiny little thing, ice-blue eyes peering at everything, curious.
I worried about her growing up in the colony dome; it was such a sterile environment. “Children need to get muddy,” I said. “They need to be able to explore and get out from under everyone’s feet and just burn up energy.”
“She’ll be running down the sandbars of Swansea Bay before long,” he promised, tickling under her chin. She stared back at him with a serious face.
When she was a baby, I sang Suo Gân to her, the Welsh lullaby. As she got older, I made her laugh with songs about a world she’d never seen: “Oranges and Lemons,” “The Bishop of Bangor’s Jig,” “Sweet Molly Malone.” I told her stories about day-to-day life in Swansea: the covered market, the sandy beach of the bay, Blackpill Lido, the rain. These were as fantastical to her as gold spun from straw.
Once Megan could walk, Owen had protective goggles made for her small face and we took to taking long strolls outside, around the edges of the dome. We went as far as the craggy coastline, where the dark waves crashed against red silt. She sang “Molly Malone” while I told her about making sandcastles and the mewling cries of the seagulls. She gazed at everything with curious eyes.
“Didn’t you get dirty, Mummy?” The colony has very strict rules about sterile conditions. The idea of playing in the sand was as alien to Megan as life in space would be to my school friends. She grew up with constant warnings, having to wear three layers of protective clothing just to open a window. That afternoon, she clutched her favourite toy—a stuffed octopus I made from scraps of synthetic fabric—in one hand and held my hand tightly with the other. She was four years old and she had never been free. I did what I could, kept telling her the stories she loved, tried to explain what a child’s life should be like. It wasn’t the same. She knew it wasn’t.
“Yes,” I told her, “we got very dirty. And then we’d go home and our mummies would make us wash and we’d be clean again.” Megan looked dubious. “It was a different type of dirty, child,” I admitted eventually. “Dirt on Earth doesn’t hurt. In fact, sometimes pregnant women even eat soil.” She laughed at me, the idea so ludicrous, she couldn’t imagine it. When we returned to the dome, we left all our outerwear in the entry bay, where it would be collected and sterilised. The commanders weren’t very pleased with me taking Megan out of the base for walks, but once I found out they weren’t letting us return to Earth, I didn’t much care what they thought.
Owen and I were in the third wave of researchers to come to the colony; there were a few thousand of us at the peak. It was a long trip: five months’ travel and then ten years on the base and another five months home. Still, it seemed reasonable until a few years after Megan was born. The first return mission to California was a disaster. The initial researchers—including my friend Jeanine Davies—were so excited about going home. Jeanine stayed up all night in anticipation. She told me she was going to gorge herself on fresh fruit and vegetables and then go outside and enjoy the feel of the wind against her face. We made plans to meet in Cardiff once Owen’s time was finished. Her only regret was that she wouldn’t see Megan for a few years. She was full of energy, the picture of health. She was going home.
When the capsule delivered them to the space centre in the California desert, the occupants became violently ill. It took a while to get the news. Jeanine was dead. All of them, dead. They carried some unknown bacteria in their gut, which went malignant once they arrived in Earth’s atmosphere. Not just the homecomers, everyone: The bacteria spread with a virulence that hadn’t been seen since the plague. So G851.5.32 was put under quarantine and all further trips to Mother Earth cancelled with no clue as to when we could return.
“It’s autumn on the Gower right now,” I told Megan. “We’d be picking blackberries if we were home. The skies are grey and rain falls from the sky. The wind is crisp and the roads full of puddles.”
“Did you really go outside without goggles or anything?” Megan had never felt the air against her bare skin. We walked along the high end of the beach, safely away from the acid water. She begged me to tell her more about “the past,” as she called it: Wales was an unobtainable world that only existed in stories. I stopped correcting her after a few years went by. There seemed no point.
“Just an umbrella and sturdy shoes. Mind, we got flu and colds that lasted all winter long as well. You’re lucky in that respect.”
Illness is not common here on our sterilised colony and the medical centre is quick to treat any symptoms. They’ve spent thousands of hours trying to find the bacterium that killed our homecomers, but it appears to be inactive here, mutating to a malicious killer only in the Earth’s atmosphere. And they can’t just send people to Earth to die, even if the scientists on the ground were willing to risk themselves trying to do the research. They isolated the plague in California by cordoning off the entire desert, leaving the carriers to die alone.
“The sea was always cold, but by October it would be freezing. We would walk along the beach on the way home from school. We dared each other to run in and brave it. The water was so cold it felt as if it burned.” Sometimes it took a couple of sips of vodka to get the nerve. The cold would make your heart stop.
I wish I had a bottle of vodka now. The sun’s low in the sky. If I squint, I can almost pretend it’s a brilliant Swansea sunset, rays reflecting off the low clouds to turn the landscape red. I can almost pretend I’m at Oystermouth Road, standing at the long stretch of beach, Jacquelyn daring me to take my togs off and run into the waves.
Megan had the same enthusiastic curiosity about the world as her father the scientist. The dome was stifling to a young girl’s spirit. We explored the local area, but I didn’t dare go very far. Megan complained bitterly when it was time to return. It came to a head when she was caught sneaking out in the middle of the night, without authorisation, without the proper gear. Owen was furious, but I couldn’t blame her for
rebelling against the rules and regulations.
“How can we learn more if we lock ourselves away?” she complained. “When I grow up, I’m going to live outdoors and I’m going to see the entire planet. I’m going to study the Homecoming Plague until I find a solution and we can travel again.”
“If you do, I’ll be on the first ship home. I’ll take you to the pier for ice cream.”
Ice cream was one of the few traditional treats that Megan recognized. She never had food except from a container: synthesised vitamins and American processed meat. “You could really just go someplace and get food? You didn’t have a canteen?”
“No. Well, we had restaurants, where we could meet up and have a meal together. It was a social thing. It was a choice.” She was bemused by the concept of choice. Our food is doled out in scoops. If you don’t go to the canteen, you don’t eat.
By her twelfth birthday, food was tightly restricted. We lived on carbohydrate dishes that tasted of cotton, with the tinned goods tightly rationed. Two unmanned ships had successfully reached us with supplies since the quarantine began. Many others failed. We had no idea when the next might come. I fought off the hunger pangs by telling Megan about my favourite dinners when I was her age.
“The beaches of the Gower are full of treasure,” I told her. “We’d go to the beach after school and fish for our supper. Mum would peel a couple of potatoes and fry our catch in butter and that would be dinner.” Mostly Mum heated up frozen dinners from Tesco, but I didn’t like to tell Megan that. Besides, when Mum was sober, she was a pretty good cook. She would always have a go at preparing anything we brought home. “I didn’t have the patience for fishing. My line was always getting tangled up and I hated touching the lugworms. But you could collect all kinds of shellfish at the changing of the tides. Nan used to take us out in the middle of the night with a thermos of whisky and coffee. We’d collect what we could find: oysters, mussels, even crabs.”
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 37 Page 15