Virtual Mode

by Piers Anthony

  I am no expert on the subject of suicide, and I can't say I ever properly understood even my daughters when they were teenagers. In this day of the revelation of fathers who abuse their daughters, I have been hyperconscious of the proprieties. When does a father stop playing with his little girl? Some it seems don't stop; they proceed into sexual molestation. But the other direction is not ideal either: isolation from one's children. We have been a close family, but I stopped physically touching my daughters early, and felt the gradual alienation. Would one of them tell me if she had a serious problem or felt suicidal? Maybe, and maybe not. I have always been there, and ready to help if asked, but they tend not to ask. I suffer the perhaps universal inadequacy of fathers. So I have had the nagging suspicion that the feelings expressed by the Ligeias, which they don't tell their parents, could also be felt by my daughters, and they wouldn't tell me. But mine have not been abused or neglected, and have suffered neither poverty nor family breakup. I hope that's enough. They are now going to college, and thence into the larger world. As has been said: a child is someone who passes through your life and disappears into an adult. Am I sublimating the distancing I regret in my own daughters by being more sensitive to these Ligeia girls? I don't know, but it is possible. I prefer to think that I am simply trying to do what is right, whatever the context.

  The first Ligeia was deeply disturbed. She believed that there had never been love in her home, and she was isolated and hurting. Cautious, I put in an indirect query via the school system, to see whether she could be helped by private counseling there. The school counselor went straight to her parents, putting her into deeper trouble. So much for the sensitivity of the system; no wonder girls prefer to keep the secret. "No one can be trusted," a later Ligeia told me, and I had to agree. You see that attitude in Colene. First Ligeia One wrote to me; then she phoned me. She declared that she loved me, and was upset when I demurred. She wanted to talk for an hour or more at a time, and on subjects I balked at, such as sex. Call me conservative if you will, but I feel it is not the proper business of a man who is not a doctor or counselor to talk to a girl just about young enough to be his granddaughter about the specifics of sex. There is too much potential for abuse. When she started calling on consecutive days, I had to put the brakes on, because she was sticking her family with horrendous phone bills and I was losing time from my work that was worth even more. In addition, my daughters were bothered. "She's trying to take more of your attention than we are!" one protested with some accuracy. I set a limit: one hour cumulative per month; I would hang up on her if she overreached it. This was no easy thing, because this girl wasn't kidding about suicide; once she was cutting her wrists as she talked to me. There was more, but let me digest it down to this: in due course her folks seem to have put her in some kind of institution, and her outside contacts were abruptly cut off. I do not know whether she is alive today. In fact, I do not know whether any of them are alive, other than those now in contact with me, and I hesitate to inquire.

  Perhaps my favorite was the first Ligeia Two, who was artistic and sensitive to her individuality. I think she could have made it professionally as an artist, and she wanted to pursue this career, but her folks had other plans for her. Later I saw the movie Dead Poets Society, which hit home to me on several levels. I attended such a school, and later I taught English at such a school. But in this case I'm thinking of the young man portrayed there who wanted to be an actor, and could have made it, but his father refused, and he committed suicide. Parents can do terrible harm to their talented children that way. I tried to help her by putting her in touch with another person—and this went wrong, and she overdosed on pills. They caught her in time and I heard from her in the hospital, and not thereafter. I could have killed her, just by trying to help her. It is foolish to speak of such emotion in such a connection, but there was that in me that could have loved her. She was a sweet and sensitive girl. Had she been my daughter, her art would have been allowed to flourish.

  Others wrote once or twice, and not thereafter. "Why is life so unfair?" one asked. In that case I had confirmation from a relative of a deeply disturbed girl. But what I said to her was limited; I had become too conscious of the danger of doing harm myself, without meaning to. I stopped trying to keep track of them; I don't know how many there have been. Some women have written, and only later revealed their suicidal tendencies. Others have only skirted the notion, for reason: they had been abused, or raped, or otherwise devastated. There is a lot of grief out there, and only a fraction of it ever goes on record. A number told how they made it through to successful marriage and family. As a general rule, based on my observation, if they make it through their teens, they are probably all right. But it is never certain.

  You may wonder whether some are just making it up, to get my attention. I don't think so. Some send me pieces they have written, or sketches they have made, and I think I am experienced enough as a writer and as an adult depressive to have a notion whether they are faking it. Some of this material horrifies me. Some is presented as fiction, but I know that a person that young would not write that kind of fiction or poetry if she didn't have a basis. The details are too real, the material rings true. They are not fooling about death. They are obsessed with it. I believe, I believe.

  Why does it seem to be exclusively female? This is a matter of natural selection. There are suicidal boys, but a boy is likely to try to kill himself with a gun, while a girl is more apt to try it with pills or wrist slashing. The gun is more effective. I understand that twice as many girls try suicide as do boys, but that twice as many boys succeed as do girls. So the main reason I heard from relatively few suicidal boys may be that those who might have written were already dead. At least my own depression is mild. One might expect the author of funny fantasy to be light-hearted, but professional comics may be quite otherwise privately, and my affinity may be closer to Colene and Ligeia than to the happy folk.

  Now I have some credits for elements of this novel. All of them relate to the characterization of Colene, but to protect privacy I will not identify the actual items here. Some of the contributors may have felt suicidal at some time; some have not. Some are young; some are not. What they have in common is that they happened to mention things in letters which I asked to use. They can not in any other way be classified. I list them in alphabetical order by first name:

  Amanda Wagner

  Frances Wagner

  Kimberly Adams

  Ligeias—anonymous group

  Margaret McGinnis

  Yvonne Johnston

  And a sketch titled "Someday" sent by Oria Tripp: a young woman walking through shallow water toward distant mountains, her hair and dress blown out by the wind. She reminds me of Colene, and of the one to come in the next novel, Nona: girls with more hope than prospects. Then there's Emily Ivie, with a literary project: "It is a waste of paper to speak of it." Colene would have said that too.

  But not all the women I hear from are related to such things. Let me tell you about another kind.

  Some years back I had one or two fan letters from a young woman in America, unremarkable. Then she sent me a newspaper clipping describing her work with raptors, which are birds of prey. She would take care of injured ones and nurse them back to health and set them free. Folk would bring them to her. She did not get paid for this; she just did it to help the birds. Suddenly this young woman came alive for me, and I dubbed her the Bird Maiden. I mentioned her in the Author's Note in the reprint of my Arabian Nights fantasy tale adaptation, Hasan. In that novel, the Bird Maiden had a feather suit which she could put on so that she could fly; Hasan captured her by hiding her feather suit. He married her and took her home. But later she recovered the suit and flew away, with her two children. After a fabulous adventure, Hasan won her back. So there's really not much connection between that Bird Maiden and the one who cared for raptors, but I was satisfied with the designation and so was she. Indeed, she flew overseas (today it is done by airplan
e) and was captured by a modern-day Hasan in Germany, fulfilling the romance.

  So did she live happily ever after? Well, it's too soon to tell, but she had a scary moment in this period of my writing this novel. At this time the Bird Maiden has a daughter, Ales-sandra, eighteen months old, cute as only that age can be. After the Christmas holiday, with her husband back at work, Maiden decided to catch up on some postponed housework. She got a bucket of water, a sponge, and a squeegee and started cleaning the windows of their upstairs apartment. She squeezed out past the heavy glass door, onto the balcony, into the just-above-freezing outer air and started scrubbing from outside while Alessandra watched from the warm inside. Maiden pretended to scrub the little girl's face through the glass: fun.

  Then Maiden heard a familiar thud. Alessandra was clasping her hands with pride at her accomplishment. She had managed to operate the lever that effectively sealed the door back in place from inside. She was too small to work the lever the other way. Maiden was locked out on the balcony with the temperature in the thirties with no shoes, just a sweater and sweatpants. She had not expected to stay out long. The apartment's front door was locked from the inside with the key still in the lock; no one could enter that way. What was she to do?

  She watched the street below, and hailed a little old lady on her bicycle. The lady tried not to laugh as she went to ring the bell of the folk in the apartment immediately below. The downstairs lady came out and threw Maiden a coat and pair of shoes, which she donned. Alessandra noted that, so she dashed to the coatrack and brought her own jacket and boots. Maiden tried to keep her occupied, but the little girl tired of that and ran to the kitchen, out of sight. What was she getting into?

  The locksmith arrived and drilled out the lock. Alessandra reappeared and put her fingers into the new giant-sized keyhole. The locksmith had to coax her to the side so he could finish. The door opened, and Maiden was rescued. Oh, sweet warmth; she had been sooo cold! She hugged Alessandra—and the little girl was disappointed. She knew that the excitement was over. But what a grand adventure it had been!

  The Bird Maiden wondered how many more days like this there would be before her marvelous little girl turned eighteen. "So, how was your Christmas?!" she inquired.

  Meanwhile, the world continued. Panama was invaded, and the Communist Empire crumbled. The United States population reached 250 million. Robert Adams, author of the Horse-clans series and a Florida resident, died. He was just under a year older than I. TV personality Andy Rooney was suspended because someone else claimed he had made a racist remark, though he denied it and has no record of racism. Apparently the TV executives have minds like fanzine editors. Then the program he was on dropped twenty per cent in the ratings, and suddenly the execs had a change of heart and brought him back. I think those execs should have been suspended, not Rooney.

  There is worse. At this time the child of Dr. Elizabeth Morgan was discovered with grandparents in New Zealand.

  Dr. Morgan had ascertained to her satisfaction that her daughter was being sexually molested by the father, but the court had decreed that unsupervised visits be allowed. Maybe I'm no expert, but too many correspondents have told me how they were molested as children; a man who does this takes any opportunity he can get, and an unsupervised visit is folly. I feel that Dr. Morgan's caution was reasonable. So she hid her child rather than accede to this—and spent two years in jail for defying the will of the court. It took, literally, an act of Congress to get her out. So much for trying to protect a child: the innocent get punished instead of the guilty.

  What happens when the mother does not try to protect her child? The book Dark Obsession, published at this time, showed how Bobby Sessions admitted in court to having sex five hundred times with his teenage stepdaughter. She finally blew the whistle on him, and he spent six months in a luxury hospital and was released. She was shipped to a fundamentalist home for troubled children where girls were regularly beaten. But sometimes the worm does turn: she sued her stepfather and won $10 million.

  Let's return to more positive business. I had mixed news on my ongoing projects. My erotic novel Pornucopia, published in America only in expensive hardcover and forbidden to readers under age twenty-one, was selling well, and there was a flurry of interest by foreign publishers. I don't object to sex, you see, just to sexual abuse. My collaboration with a teenage boy who was killed by a reckless driver before completing his novel, Through the Ice, was published at the same time, and reports indicate it is also doing well. My 200,000-word historical novel about the American Indians who encountered Hernando de Soto, Tatham Mound, was taken by Morrow/Avon. The collaboration with Robert Margroff, Orc's Opal, was taken by Tor. I took time off Virtual Mode to do a chapter in my collaborative novel with Philip Jose Farmer, not yet titled, and a segment of 49,000 words was put on the market. The main female character there is Tappy, a blind thirteen-year-old girl, a bit like Colene in her isolation and the drama of her changing situation. I had started it as a story in 1963; a complicated situation and a quarter century had brought it to this point. The galleys for my provocative mainstream novel Firefly arrived, and I broke to proofread them. In that novel I show voluntary underage sex, the girl being five years old. More of this happens than we care to advertise.

  I placed two of the last three novels which remained unsold from the days of my blacklisting in the 1970s, and set up to rework the third with a publisher interested. I had built up a total of eight unsold novels while weathering the blacklist—you can read about that too in my autobiography, but the essence is that I got in trouble for being right, somewhat in the manner of a whistle-blower—and it was good to eliminate the last tangible vestige of it. This campaign of mine to get all my novels into print is one reason I may seem more prolific than I am; I've been writing novels steadily for twenty-five years, and by the end of 1990 the number of books I have had published may come to eighty-two. That's about three and a quarter a year, average.

  I read the finalists for a story contest and decided on the winner. I reviewed revisions for the novel Total Recall, necessary to bring the paperback edition into conformance with late changes in the motion picture.

  The ladies of Putnam/Berkley visited and brought me a print of the cover for Phaze Doubt: the editors had finally taken one of my suggestions, and got a beautiful cover painting of a little girl playing hopscotch with a BEM (Bug-Eyed Monster). At last we would see whether the author's notion of a good cover works to sell copies. You see, at this writing I have made the New York Times best-seller list with eighteen different titles, which may be the record for this genre, but all have been in paperback, none in hardcover. Other fantasy writers make the list in hardcover; why can't I? Grumble. But in this period I did crack the Publishers Weekly hardcover list with the final Incarnations novel, And Eternity. Barely. I always was a slow starter.

  I wrote a letter to a parole officer on behalf of a prisoner with AIDS, urging compassionate release, as he will otherwise be dead before he gets to see his folks outside. I had corresponded with him for two years, finding him to be a pleasant and principled person; I doubt he would be a menace to society.

  My laser printer broke down shortly after the warranty expired: a counter which could not be reset, evidently defective when delivered. Twenty-dollar part, $560 repair bill. Par for that course. Which brings me to my present computer setup, for those who are interested: Acer 900 AT-clone, 73M hard disk, 5.25- and 3.5-inch drives, VGA monitor, laser printer; Fansi-Console for my Dvorak keyboard, Sprint for word processing, XTreeGold for file handling. I got that last program in this period, and had a time-wasting ball playing with its nice features, such as the ability to set up parallel windows, with different directories in each, or to show and work with the files of several drives simultaneously. I had changed from Dec Rainbow with reluctance, but it was the readiest way to get Sprint, which looked like the ultimate word processor for me, and now I am quite satisfied with it. I set up the Piers Anthony Interface, which is in effect
my own word processor, following my rules, like no others.

  I started exploring the literature on computer games, playing with the notion of Grafting a Xanth game that would be superior to what else exists. I know nothing about such games; naturally I figure I can do a better job than the experts, just as ignorant reviewers figure they could be better writers than I am. We shall see.

  A reader advised me that the main thing at issue in her divorce settlement was custody of the collection of Anthony novels. Well, that seems reasonable to me.

  And my daughter's horse, Blue: at this writing she is thirty-two years old, and still spry though her head is turning gray. When Blue came into our lives, horses galloped into my fiction, as you may have noticed. Unlike Seqiro, Blue can not read minds—I think.

  I had a sore tongue during this novel. Finally, on the last day of editing, I figured it out: there was a roughness on a tooth, and my tongue was rubbing against it as I read my text to myself—I do that to hear it as well as see it, because I relate to it with more than one sense. That chafing was awful. So my wife hauled me in to see the dentist the same day. Sure enough: a gold onlay (not inlay) had worn through, and there was an edge. Maybe now my tongue will heal.

  Meanwhile the problems of the world accelerate and population runs out of control and the environment degrades apace. We are headed pell-mell for end-of-the-world disaster. About the only saving grace I see is the dawning awareness of increasing numbers of people that this has to stop. My daughter Penny brought home a book titled How to Make the World a Better Place—A Guide for Doing Good, which tackles questions of the environment, hunger, socially responsible investment and consumerism in a realistic manner. Many other good books are appearing, and I am getting them as I do preliminary research for a major novel relating to this subject. I feel obliged to turn my resources increasingly to the service of the universe rather than merely to rny own well-being, and the talent I have for writing is my chief instrument. I try not to proselytize unduly in my fiction, but this is the Author's Note where I do speak my mind.