***
The Author and the Scientist got together after the experiment. They met at a public music machine event. The opening comedy act was so amazingly lifelike that some folks didn’t laugh when it began dismembering itself and making jokes about the pain. The performer then opened its chest, pulled out the pulsing equivalent of its heart, and pointed to a patron in the front circle who was laughing almost to the point of tears.
“Looks like you could use one these,” the act said, and tried to give the organ to the person in the front who was now convulsed with laughter.
But not everyone was laughing. There were, in fact, enough twinges of sadness throughout the crowd to register with Review Services. People actually tried to hack the names of the employees who had authored the creature. In fact, there were so many serious and sophisticated hacks into the system, the authorities had difficulty trying to fine people for illegal access.
Even the Scientist was tempted to look up the names of those employees, as he was so taken aback by the detailed “biology” of the stagecraft.
“It was almost like the mind meld of video work,” he said with as much admiration as his affectless voice would allow.
“No, no,” laughed the Author. “Video is just straight narcotic, opiate. This sort of stagecraft is way more psychedelic, like the Bliss Garden.”
“Bliss Garden?” he said, utterly puzzled.
It dawned on her, or actually hit her like a freight train, that he’d somehow experienced the psychedelics she’d slipped into his drink without realizing it was drugs that had altered his consciousness. When he’d first told her about seeing the wings on his back, she’d just smiled and he smiled and she put her head to his. They’d fallen into kissing and made love. Now, she realized how completely she understood him. She even knew his blind spots and had a hint of how large those blind spots had grown in the vacuum of his social interactions.
“Yes my dearest,” she almost cooed as she grasped his hand, “Where do you think your wings came from?”
He sat back without releasing her hand, but was lost in what was almost a full-blown flashback. The hallucinations had not been what occupied him at the time and, somehow, had not fully registered as having been chemically induced. It was the connection he’d felt most deeply. Her laughter at his wings had had no content or affect beyond the melody of her voice, and even that had been swallowed by the experience of being in another person’s mind and in his own all at once.
She mistook the look of wonder on his face as one of humiliation and, at that moment, decided the two of them would never do psychedelics together again. He was precious to her. There would be time enough later to shore up his fragilities.
They eventually got married and pregnant. The pregnancy started out fine, but the closer they came to delivery, the more anxious the Author became. Days before the due date, she contacted her old supplier and procured some psychedelics that had generally been good for relieving anxiety. She debated whether to take them before the delivery or to take them the day of. But the days before were filled with preparation, so she waited.
Most of the time, she had dropped acid in comfortable, controlled situations that had already gone a long way toward reducing anxiety. The new experience of birthing a child was one that made her feel acutely anxious—this despite all the encouragement and instruction she and the Scientist had received from the one midwife they could find, a kind but positively ancient (she still had a functioning phone and a driver’s license) woman.
The Author dropped the acid on the day she was sure she would deliver, taking slightly more than she had planned but a bit less than usual. It was the contractions that most concerned her and that she most meditated upon at first, despite herself. When the medical information says to anticipate pain, you know it’s going to hurt, but the actual experience of pain, the specifics of it, you may not know until the actual event, and so it was for her with childbirth.
The Midwife thought the Author’s breathing was quite shallow and encouraged her to take deeper breaths. The acid had begun to take hold and, to the Author, it seemed as though she was already inhaling and exhaling vast oceans of air, more than any human had a right to. For a moment, she feared there might not be enough air left for others in the room there to assist with the birth. Nonetheless, she had a great deal of trust in the very dark woman with the very deep folds of skin beneath her eyes, and if the woman requested hurricane strength breathing, then a hurricane it would be. The Midwife’s approval of the increased breathing gave the Author such a feeling of warmth and accomplishment that she almost forgot about the contractions and the fact that her body, the bones in her pelvis, would soon open wide enough to let another person, albeit a small one, through.
Imagining what the baby would be like, she found herself squatting in a pool of blue light. There with her in the blue was the Midwife, and her husband the Scientist, doing as they had done in the birthing room. In the darkness, she could see musical instruments.
This must be a stage, she thought, and had the sudden urge to look behind her to see if there were seats where the audience used to sit. That was wrong she thought. It was not where the audience used to be seated but would be seated. Clearly, a performance was about to take place. The instruments and the devices into which people would speak (sing?) were shiny and in place, ready to go. In fact, someone was already singing. Was she practicing? Yes, she was warming up, a woman’s voice but sometimes sounding like a girl.
“This is the first birth in thirty-five years where I haven’t known the gender and god knows what else about the child before it came,” said the Midwife, both happy and nostalgic. “But it feels like a girl. Anyway, it’s time to push.”
***
The pressure to create a normal story was very different from the pressure the Author had felt when it came time to give birth. There was no pleasure woven into the fear. The surges of anxiety around the story never came with unexplained laughter as they had when she carried the child.
Though, the economic anxiety and pressure of her husband being out of work did not worry her as much or concern her in the same way as the lack of anything between the two of them. It wasn’t uncommon for couples to feel a bit at sea once a child came along. But this was more troubling.
She’d first noticed it right after the birth. He had been talking enthusiastically about what it would be like to be at home with the baby. But her mind drifted to what she’d seen and where she’d been for a good chunk of her labor. Pieces of what he’d said “on stage” began to replace what he was saying at the moment, and she couldn’t untangle the sentences he was speaking now from what he’d said while she was high and delivering.
He noticed the sad and frustrated look on her face and his enthusiasm flagged. She hadn’t seen that look on his face since he’d entered the room to fix the interview device. She hoped he would not ask her to react in any way to what he’d just said because she had no idea what he’d just said.
He grasped her hand, but his expression was blank, and she realized that affectless mask was what he wore to hide the hurt of almost never being heard. She swore to herself then that she would never take another hit of acid no matter how anxious she became. She kept her promise she made to herself, even though there were times when she was certain that a good dose of something psychoactive would have helped the story and or the marriage. Then she would realize there was no potion for either.
Whenever she tried to focus on creating a story that could sell and, thereby, lift them from the poverty that seemed otherwise certain, she drifted inexorably to thinking about ways to get back to where she and the Scientist had been when he had taken over the interview. Time was not on her side, but she could not help returning to videos with discussions about modifications one could make that would recapture what had been lost in a relationship or that would at least alter your perception of the other person in your relationship.
Naturally, some of these modifications were fa
ilures. The Author stumbled upon a piece from an anonymous woman who claimed that she had been a singing star, that screeners would recognize her singing voice even coming from a cheap device.
This singing star had tried to alter her perception of her husband, who happened to be in business with her. She had gotten into the habit of perception-alterations because her husband was abusive, so abusive, in fact, that he had forbidden her to change the way she perceived him. In short, he wanted her to be fully and utterly aware of what he was doing, who was “in charge.”
None of this was apparent to the fan base or even the patrons. The singer noted the pain and solace she experienced from the isolation of her private life and the exhilaration of her “stage” life, seeing people go wild over the group’s holograms with her voice and image at the tip of the spear.
Somehow, she managed to get away long enough to get to a clinic where she could have the alterations to her perceptions done. It was doubly difficult to find a place that would be discreet. The “bad” publicity would have added to their fan base, but it would also have made her personal life worse. Things got worse anyway.
Perhaps the practitioners were quacks. Perhaps the sort of alterations she sought didn’t really exist. Whatever the case, her perceptions of her husband were in no way softened by the alterations, but rather intensified. His jokes about her looks, her “mistakes” during the act, how she owed all of her fame to his management—all of these things seemed both more petty and more vicious. Worse, she could feel the threats coming, sometimes long before he actually spoke. This sensitivity gave time a hallucinatory feel that made it drag and yet, somehow, seemed to shorten the periods between insults and threats.
Her reaction, fueled by the feelings of disappointment and betrayal, was a disgust she could not hide. He took it as a sign of defiance and became more violent until the physical alterations wouldn’t hold and, finally, her voice failed her. The Author had found her story.
There was a woman who loved to sing and dance whose parents left her to grow up with her grandmother in a quiet town where her singing and dancing drew attention, good and bad. People who liked and disliked the dancing said it reminded them of what they’d seen and heard or what other people had said they’d seen and heard in the much bigger city of Strummale, or Mailstrumville, depending on how you pronounce it, where things were much wilder.
The woman made plans to leave for the bigger city. Perhaps she would find fame and fortune there. Perhaps one of her parents would show up and she could ask where the hell they’d been. The grandmother was lukewarm on the woman going to the city. She thought the woman had extraordinary talent but also knew show business was a tough nut to crack.
The grandmother had in fact once tried to make it singing and dancing and had ended up being the “Singing Weather Girl,” on local radio, and then the “All Singing, All Dancing Weather Girl,” on the old screens you could hold or set on the table. She was a bit stiff and hoarse from all the singing and dancing, but the grandmother still paid what some would call an inordinate amount of attention to weather patterns and forecast and had taken to warning people whenever she could about how the temperature of the planet was rising and the problems that would follow as night follows day.
But, every time she brought it up, the older people couldn’t help but remember how beautiful her voice had been on the radio and screen, and the content of what she said was crowded out by their memories. The younger people who had no knowledge or memory of radios or the earlier plain, flat, external screens were confused by the dissonance between the memories as described by others and what the Grandmother said. Thus the content of her warnings sank like a stone in the ocean at night.
The woman as a girl was the only person who ever really heard what the Grandmother said, and even that was for a particular and short-lived time. They talked about simple things when the woman was younger and deeper things as she grew.
When the Girl had been very young, the Grandmother would sing and recite things she had learned from her father who had learned the songs from his great-great grandfather who had been a Gandy Dancer, back in the days when transports ran on tracks.
Up and down the road I go
Skippin’ and a dodgin’ forty fo’
Hey man, can’t you line it
Hey man, won’t you line it
The Girl laughed herself silly and it took awhile for the Grandmother to realize that the mere sound of her voice in recitation was what caused the infant to laugh. By the time the Girl learned to speak, she and the Grandmother sang.
If you were lost to me would I cry
Enough to roll the deepest river
Drown a mountain in the sky
As the Girl grew, she learned that everyone has a mother and father and began to ask about hers. Why weren’t they around? The Grandmother had no good answers or produced different slices of answers for the same question no matter how many times it was asked. The parents had to go away. They didn’t get along. They had only small things in common. They broke up shortly after the Girl was born. They were singers whose voices brought them together and then took them in opposite directions when money entered the equation.
This frustrated the Girl. The Grandmother would begin singing when she saw the Girl’s frustration, singing deeper, singing as though the Girl was not there or not there alone but listening along with the whole world, and the presence or seeming presence of so many enraptured souls soothed the Girl’s frustration and made the grandmother’s voice seem like the biggest, softest place that could ever be.
On the day the woman was scheduled to leave for the big city, the Grandmother became aware of an approaching storm and begged the woman to stay and ride it out in the shelter she and her now dead partner had built. The woman almost relented. But her bags were packed and it was a gorgeous, though amazingly humid, day and the thought of riding the transport in air-conditioned comfort (her grandmother had air conditioning but rarely used it and never set it any lower than 80 Fahrenheit) proved too big a temptation, and so the woman took off.
The storm didn’t strike as you might have expected, at the point in the story where the woman got on the transport and was waving goodbye to her sadly quiet Grandmother who sang to her even though she could not be heard through the transport glass and certainly thought it would be the last time she’d see her granddaughter. The storm did hit just as the woman reached Strummale or Mailstrumville.
She was dismayed and confused to see huge swaths of vacant land and half repaired damage all over the city from what must have been previous storms as she gazed out the transport window. The past and present storms merged in her mind with the rubble and the half repairs.
Thunder rattled windows and shook the ground. Multiple bolts of lightning struck near and far and the already nervous driver leapt screaming from the vehicle as it plunged into a crater that may have been a sinkhole or the site of a controlled exploded ordinance or the basement of a very small illegally constructed building. Whatever it was, it was big enough to consume the entire section of transport with the rest of the people who were going to, near, or past the cheap hotel she had booked for herself.
The wind piled debris above them, closing them off from the storm and daylight such as it was. The darker it got, the more frightened and panicked everyone became, including the woman. She could see almost nothing now but her Grandmother standing near the transport, singing as it pulled away, and though she could not hear her Grandmother, she knew what she was singing.
and like a river it’s gonna flow
like love in sunlight can’t help but grow
It had seemed sad but mostly quaint to see her Grandmother singing out loud to someone who could not hear her through the thick glass of the transport. It had brought a strange smile to the woman’s face as the Grandmother and the town disappeared. But now, with the daylight being swallowed, the full weight of that moment felt like another storm.
Oxygen was becoming a precious commo
dity in the sunken transport. Nonetheless, the woman’s sadness propelled her singing voice so that the sheer volume of it brought a level of discomfort that caused others onboard to try to wrestle her to the ground and cover her mouth. But they were weak from the rising heat and diminished air and were not fired with memories of a Grandmother singing and disappearing in the distance. So the woman was able to wrestle free and continued to belt out the song like someone possessed of the Holy Ghost or Orishas (depending on how you pronounce it), drawing the oxygen out of the small darkening space.
Enough to roll the deepest river
Drown a mountain in the sky
***
Weaker, twenty-first century-type storms were still rocking the area when the first rescue flights were sent. The machines were, of course, flown by inmates who could be persuaded to do so. One prisoner pilot who had gotten his privileges by singing and playing guitar thought he might have been hallucinating (could it have been the pain from the device strapped to his head to control the machine?) when his listening device fed him what sounded like singing. Did he know that song or was it just one of those songs that sounded like a song you thought you knew even though you’d never heard it before?
A probe confirmed there was life at the site of the singing. He sent for machines to probe the area. They were flown in quickly. Crews drilled air holes into the debris and began to remove it layer by layer. Nat thought the rescue of one person would surely move up his release date. When he discovered a transport full of people and got the lowdown on the singing, he could see total freedom on the horizon.
Acting against the orders issued during his training, Nat, the musical prisoner pilot, landed the flying device. The other crew member inmates were taken aback by Nat’s presence, by his going against orders to land the vehicle. Some, mostly the white people, thought he was another crazy black inmate and gave him lots of personal space.
The Official Report on Human Activity Page 11