Deke didn’t move. A muscle in one leg began to twitch, harbinger of the coming hype crash. The top of his head felt numb, and there was an awful taste in his mouth. For a second he had to hang onto the table with both hands to keep from falling down forever, into the living shadow beneath him, as he hung impaled by the prize buck’s dead eyes in the photo under the Dr. Pepper clock.
A little adrenaline would pull him out of this. He needed to celebrate. To get drunk or stoned and talk it up, going over the victory time and again, contradicting himself, making up details, laughing and bragging. A starry old night like this called for big talk.
But standing there with all of Jackman’s silent and vast and empty around him, he realized suddenly that he had nobody left to tell it to.
Nobody at all.
A Gift from the GrayLanders
by Michael Bishop
Introduction
I first met Michael Bishop by mail. I had read some of his fiction and admired it; I had also read a couple of installments of his column in Thrust magazine. He seemed intelligent and humane, and his fiction was interesting, though sometimes over-literary for my tastes.
He wrote to tell me that he had reviewed my first novel in a guest review column he had written for Fantasy & Science Fiction. He wanted to apologize for having criticized the fact that the cover of my novel called me a “Hugo Award winner,” when in fact I had never won a Hugo. He realized now that it was unfair to criticize a writer for what the publisher puts on the cover—writers have no control over that. As a bit of poetic justice, he said, he had just received copies of his new book; on the cover, the publisher had called him a “Nebula Award winner,” which at the time was not yet true.
All this was pleasant enough—writing that letter showed that Bishop had the sort of conscience Abraham Lincoln was famous for. He wasn’t content to say, “Oh, well, it’s just a review.” I have since learned that Bishop’s fastidiousness about ethical detail is rare almost to the point of uniqueness in our rather murky literary community. In retrospect I realize that I certainly don’t measure up; there are quite a few who wouldn’t dream of trying.
But it wasn’t this event that made Michael Bishop one of the most important people in the science fiction field to me, personally. It was the review he wrote of my first novel.
Let’s put it kindly. He hated it.
But he hated it intelligently. He had understood what I was trying to do with the book and explained exactly why I failed. I have read rave reviews of books of mine that left me in despair—if even my aficionados don’t get what I’m doing, what hope do I have? But in panning my book, Michael Bishop gave me an insight that made it possible for my second novel to be a quantum leap ahead of my first. Bishop does not read without understanding; he does not criticize without teaching.
He not only helped me in my fiction, he also set a standard for one thing that good criticism must achieve. It must illuminate, not smear; it must build, not destroy.
In years since then, Mike and I have become friends—after a fashion. We don’t always agree—far from it. He and I have been in conflict more than once over critical matters—once in print, more often in private letters. But our critical discussions are not as important to me as what he has given to me as a writer of fiction. Despite all our dissimilarities, one thing Bishop and I have in common is a refusal to deny the spiritual and religious side of human life. From his seventies masterwork “Death and Designation among the Asadi” to his triumphant novel Ancient of Days in the eighties, he has not been afraid to invite us to understand and sympathize with characters who are part of a religious community or who struggle with questions of faith. In a field that rarely touches religion except to ridicule it, this makes Bishop a rare bird indeed.
But this is only a small part of his accomplishment. Bishop’s pattern is to take small characters—quiet people, unnoticed people—and make them so important to us that we take them completely into our hearts, weeping for their pain, rejoicing in their accomplishments. The standard technique in our romantic genre is to make characters important by inflating them—giving them worlds to save. The standard literary technique, which has seduced almost as many, is to make characters important by burdening them with the unbearable weight of obvious symbolism. Bishop rarely uses either method. Instead he makes our experience of his characters’ inner life so real, so complete, so powerful, that they become important to us out of love.
“The Gift of the Graylanders” is a sad and beautiful story about the end of the world. Normally the phrase “end of the world” suggests universal cataclysm. Bishop reminds us that each of us lives in a world completely different from all others, because it is filtered through our own needs and perceptions and memories. The “end of the world” is a private experience for each of us, and even a holocaust does not make us identical. I love this story for the same reason that I love Mike Bishop—because he has the truth in him.
In the house where Mommy took him several months after she and Daddy stopped living together, Cory had a cot downstairs. The house belong to Mommy’s sister and her sister’s husband Martin, a pair of unhappy people who already had four kids of their own. Aunt Clara’s kids had real bedrooms upstairs, but Mommy told Cory that he was lucky to have a place to sleep at all and that anyway a basement was certainly a lot better than a hot-air grate on a Denver street or a dirty stable like the one that the Baby Jesus had been born in.
Cory hated the way the basement looked and smelled. It had walls like concrete slabs on the graves in cemeteries. Looking at them, you could almost see those kinds of slabs turned on their ends and pushed up against one another to make this small square prison underground. The slabs oozed wetness. You could make a handprint on the walls just by holding your palm to the concrete. When you took your hand away, it smelled gray. Cory knew that dead people smelled gray too, especially when they had been dead a long time—like the people who were only bones and whom he had seen grinning out of magazine photographs without any lips or eyeballs or hair. Cory sometimes lay down on his cot wondering if maybe an army of those gray-smelling skeletons clustered on the other side of the basement walls, working with oddly silent picks and shovels to break through the concrete and carry him away to the GrayLands where their deadness made them live.
Maybe, though, the gray-smelling creatures beyond the basement walls were not really skeletons. Maybe they were Clay People. On his cousins’ black-and-white TV set, Cory had seen an old movie serial about a strange planet. Some of the planet’s people lived underground, and they could step into or out of the walls of rock that tied together a maze of tunnels beneath the planet’s surface. They moved through dirt and rock the way that a little boy like Cory could move through water in summer or loose snow in winter. The brave, blond hero of the serial called these creatures the Clay People, a name that fit them almost perfectly, because they looked like monsters slapped together out of wet mud and then put out into the sun to dry. Every time they came limping into view with that tinny movie-serial music rum-tum-tumping away in the background, they gave Cory a bad case of the shivers.
Later, lying on his cot, he would think about them trying to come through the oozy walls to take him away from that motel in Ratón, New Mexico. For a long time that day, Daddy had hidden in the room with the vending machines. Going in there for a Coke, Cory had at first thought that Daddy was a monster. His screams had brought Mommy running and also the motel manager and a security guard; and the “kidnap plot”—as Mommy had called it later—had ended in an embarrassing way for Daddy, Daddy hightailing it out of Ratón in his beat-up Impala like a drug dealer making a getaway in a TV cop show. But what if the Clay People were better kidnappers than Daddy? What if they came through the walls and grabbed him before he could awake and scream for help? They would surely take him back through the clammy grayness to a place where dirt would fill his mouth and stop his ears and press against his eyeballs, and he would be as good as dead with them forever and ever.
So Cory hated the basement. Because his cousins disliked the windowless damp of the place as much as he did, they seldom came downstairs to bother him. Although that was okay when he wanted to be by himself, he never really wanted to be by himself in the basement. Smelling its mustiness, touching its greasy walls, feeling like a bad guy in solitary, Cory could not help but imagine unnamable danger and deadness surrounding him. Skeletons. Clay People. Monsters from the earthen dark. It was okay to be alone on a mountain trail or even in a classroom at school, but to be alone in this basement was to be punished for not having a daddy who came home every evening the way that daddies were supposed to. Daddy himself, who had once tried to kidnap Cory, would have never made him spend his nights in this kind of prison. Or, if for some reason Daddy could not have prevented the arrangement, he would have stayed downstairs with Cory to protect him from the creatures burrowing toward him from the GrayLands.
“Cory, there’s nothing down here to be afraid of,” Mommy said. “And you don’t want your mother to share your bedroom with you, do you? A big seven-year-old like you?”
“No,” he admitted. “I want my daddy.”
“Your daddy can’t protect you. He can’t or won’t provide for you. That’s why we had to leave him. He only tried to grab you back, Cory, to hurt me. Don’t you understand?”
Daddy hurt Mommy? Cory shook his head.
“I’m sorry it’s a basement,” Mommy said. “I’m sorry it’s not a chalet with a big picture window overlooking a mountain pass, but things just haven’t been going that way for us lately.”
Cory rolled over on his cot so that the tip of his nose brushed the slablike wall.
“Tell me what you’re afraid of,” Mommy said. “If you tell me, maybe we can handle it together—whatever it is.”
After some more coaxing, but without turning back to face her, Cory began to talk about the skeletons and the Clay People from the GrayLands beyond the sweating concrete.
“The GrayLands?” Mommy said. “There aren’t any Gray Lands, Cory. There may be skeletons, but they don’t get up and walk. They certainly don’t use picks and shovels to dig their way into basements. And the Clay People, well, they’re just television monsters, make-believe, nothing at all for a big boy like you to worry about in real life.”
“I want to sleep on the couch upstairs.”
“You can’t, Cory. You’ve got your own bathroom down here, and when you wake up and have to use it, well, you don’t disturb Uncle Martin or Aunt Clara or any of the kids. We’ve been through all this before, haven’t we? You know how important it is that Marty gets his sleep. He has to get up at four in order to make his shift at the fire station.”
“I won’t use the bathroom upstairs. I won’t even drink nothin’ before I go to bed.”
“Cory, hush.”
The boy rolled over and pulled himself up onto his elbows so that he could look right into Mommy’s eyes. “I’m scared of the GrayLands. I’m scared of the gray-smellin’ monsters that’re gonna come pushin’ through the walls from over there.”
Playfully, Mommy mussed his hair. “You’re impossible, you know that? Really impossible.”
It was as if she could not wholeheartedly believe in his fear. In fact, she seemed to think that he had mentioned the GrayLands and the monsters who would come forth from them only as a boy’s cute way of prompting adult sympathy. He did not like the basement (Mommy was willing to concede that point), but this business of a nearby subterranean country of death and its weird gray-smelling inhabitants was only so much childish malarky. The boy missed his father, and Mommy could not assume Daddy’s role as protector—as bad as Clinton himself had been at it—because in a young boy’s eyes a woman was not a man. And so she mussed his hair again and abandoned him to his delusive demons.
Cory never again spoke to anyone of the GrayLands. But each night, hating the wet clayey smell of the basement and its gummy linoleum floor and the foil-wrapped heating ducts bracketed to the ceiling and the naked light bulb hanging like a tiny dried gourd from a bracket near the unfinished stairs, he would huddle under the blankets on his cot and talk to the queer creatures tunneling stealthily toward him from the GrayLands—the Clay People, or Earth Zombies, or Bone Puppets, that only he of all the members of this mixed-up household actually believed in.
“Stay where you are,” Cory would whisper at the wall. “Don’t come over here. Stay where you are.”
The monsters—whatever they were—obeyed. They did not break through the concrete to grab him. Of course, maybe the concrete was too thick and hard to let them reach him without a lot more work. They could still be going at it, picking away. The Clay People on that movie planet had been able to walk through earth without even using tools to clear a path for themselves, but maybe Earth’s earth was packed tighter. Maybe good old-fashioned Colorado concrete could hold off such single-minded creatures for months. Cory hoped that it could. For safety’s sake, he would keep talking to them, begging them to stay put, pleading with them not to undermine the foundations of his uncle’s house with their secret digging.
Summer came, and they still had not reached him. The walls still stood against them, smooth to the touch here, rough there. Some of the scratches in the ever-glistening grayness were like unreadable foreign writing. These scratches troubled Cory. He wondered if they had always been there. Maybe the tunneling creatures had scribbled them on the concrete from the other side, not quite getting the tips of their strange writing instruments to push through the walls but by great effort and persistence just managing to press marks into the outer surface where a real human being like him could see them. The boy traced these marks with his finger. He tried to spell them out. But he had gone through only his first year in school, and the task of decipherment was not one he could accomplish without help. Unfortunately, he could not apply for help without breaking the promise that he had made to himself never to speak of the GrayLanders to anyone in Aunt Clara’s family. If Mommy could muster no belief in them, how could he hope to convince his hard-headed cousins, who liked him best when he was either running errands for them or hiding from them in the doubtful sanctuary of the basement?
Then Cory realized that maybe he was having so much trouble reading the GrayLanders’ damp scratches not because he was slow or the scratches stood for characters in a foreign tongue, but because his tormentors’ painstaking method of pressing them outward onto the visible portions of the walls made the characters arrive there backwards. Cory was proud of himself for figuring this out. He filched a pocket mirror from the handbag of the oldest girl and brought it down the creaking stairs to test his theory.
This girl, fifteen-year-old Gina Lynn, caught him holding the mirror against one of the rougher sections of wall, squinting back and forth between the concrete and the oval glass. Meanwhile, with the nub of a broken pencil, he was struggling to copy the reversed scratches onto a tatter of paper bag. Cory did not hear Gina Lynn come down the stairs because he was concentrating so hard on this work. He was also beginning to understand that his wonderful theory was not really proving out. The mysterious calligraphy of the GrayLanders continued to make no sense.
“You’re just about the weirdest little twerp I’ve ever seen,” Gina Lynn said matter-of-factly. “Give me back my mirror.”
Startled and then shamefaced, Cory turned around. He yielded the mirror. Gina Lynn asked him no questions, knowing from past experience that he would respond with monosyllables if at all, but began to bruit it around the house that he could read the marks in concrete the way that some people could read cloud formations or chicken entrails. Uncle Martin, who was home for a long weekend, thought this discovery about his sister-in-law’s son hilarious. He called Cory into the living room to rag him about taking the mirror but especially about holding it up to the shallow striations in the otherwise blank gray face of a basement wall.
“Out with it,” he said. “What’d that stupid wall tell you? No secrets, now. I want me a tip
straight from the Cee-ment itself. What’s a rock-solid investment for a fella like Uncle Marty with only so much cash to spare?”
Cory could feel his face burning.
“Come on, cuz. This is a relative talkin’, kid. Let me in—let us all in—on what’s going down, basement-wise.”
“Who’s gonna take the World Series this year?” twelve-year-old David promptly asked.
“Is Hank Danforth gonna ask Gina Lynn to his pool party?” Faye, disturbingly precocious for nine, wondered aloud.
(“Shut up,” Gina Lynn cautioned her.)
And thirteen-year old Deborah said, “Is war gonna break out? Ask your stupid wall if the Russians’re gonna bomb us.”
“Maybe the wall was askin’ him for some cold cream,” Uncle Martin said. “You know, to put on its wrinkles.” All four of Uncle Martin’s bratty kids laughed. “You were just writin’ down the brand, weren’t you Cory? Don’t wanna bring home the wrong brand of cold cream to smear on your favorite wall. After all, you’re the fella who’s gotta face the damn thing every morning, aren’t you?”
“Silica Lotion,” Gina Lynn said. “Oil of Grah-velle.”
Mommy had a job as a cash-register clerk somewhere. She was not at home. Cory fixed his eyes on Uncle Martin’s belt buckle, a miniature brass racing car, and waited for their silly game to end. When it did, without his once having opened his mouth to reply to their jackass taunts, he strode with wounded dignity back down to the corner of the basement sheltering his cot. Alone again, he peered for a time at the marks that Gina Lynn’s mirror had not enabled him to read. The scratches began to terrify him. They coded a language that he had not yet learned. They probably contained taunts—threats, in fact—crueler and much more dangerous than any that his uncle and cousins had just shied off him for sport.
Future on Fire Page 9