Not So Much, Said the Cat Read online

  I began work on a new novel the next day.

  But I didn’t turn away from short fiction, as so many of my friends had. “Remember how we used to spend months working on a single story back in the old days?” one of them asked me a few years ago. I didn’t tell him that I had never stopped doing that. Because then I’d have to explain that I kept writing short fiction out of love for the form and from fear of losing the ability to do so, as I was fairly certain my friend had. It would be a mad thing to surrender a skill acquired so painfully and at such great length.

  Somewhere along the line, I discovered that I had a particular aptitude for flash fiction. I wrote abecedaries. I wrote a story for every element in the Periodic Table. I wrote one for each etching of Goya’s Los Caprichos. I wrote flash fictions and sealed them in bottles that I signed with a diamond-tipped pen, and then I destroyed every other copy, physical or electronic, so they would be literally unique, and donated the bottles to various charities. I wrote stories on masks, lighting fixtures, clocks, carafes, and other physical objects scattered about my house. And when I had learned all I could from the form, I more or less stopped.

  I also taught. Weeklong gigs at Clarion, Clarion West, and Clarion South reassured me that I could be of actual use to at least some of the students. It is a holy and terrifying thing to be charged with helping new writers find their own voices. But by then I knew enough about fiction that it was easy to show them what their faltering efforts wanted to become, just as Jack and Gardner had done with mine. Later, I would marvel at how far I had come.

  More recently, I figured out at last how to write stories in series, both open-ended as in the Darger and Surplus stories, and following a plotted story arc, as in the Mongolian Wizard tales. For a Gene Wolfe festschrift, I took the first page of the master’s “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” and flipped directions, seasons, and genders, and then proceeded to write the story as it might have been told by James Tiptree Jr. This required a close study of the original novella, an exercise that taught me a great deal and could have taught me more had I the time to write the story longer. I based stories on places I had been—Russia, Sweden, Vermont—and things I’d experienced, such as the Easter Sunday in Dublin when Gerry Adams strolled past me on O’Connell Street. I asked myself what I would do if my wife died and then spent years looking for a way to resolve what ultimately became a love letter to her. I put in weeks poring over a dissection manual followed by, again, years looking for a way to end the story that hadn’t already been done to death. I thought long and hard about the obligations of a writer to his creations and wrote a story about that too. I wrote a story entirely in dialogue. I wrote a metafiction on von Grimmelshausen’s Simplicius Simplicissimus, with the goal of making it work as a surface narrative. I took several years’ worth of notes for a novel that never congealed and used them as backstory for a much smaller tale narrated by a woman who died before it began. A friend gave me a title and challenged me to write something for it; I placed the story in the Cretaceous and left out the dinosaurs. In memory of another friend, who once showed me her diary, I wrote about how hard being a teenage girl can be and gave it the conclusion she’d had in real life. I penned a tragic romance that required the advice of a physicist to set up.

  It is possible that I am the last writer to have come into the field having read every work of science fiction of any importance written to date. If not, that door closed soon thereafter. But in my formative years I read voraciously, and one by one all the greats fell before me—C. L. Moore, R. A. Lafferty, Philip K. Dick, Leigh Bracket—until finally I finished Theodore Sturgeon’s last collection and wept, like Alexander, for having no new worlds to conquer. Yet, though I valued each author individually, I read science fiction as if it had all been written by a single genius possessed of an impossible variety of styles and interests. This was a mad standard to set oneself. But that is the writer I have been trying, with varying success, to emulate ever since.

  On the side of the bookshelf by my writing desk are twenty or so Post-it notes with the names of stories and novels I am actively working on. In a Rolodex nearby are the titles of a great many more I hope to get around to soon. New ideas constantly swim up from the murky seas of the unconscious, demanding to be told. I scribble them down in my notebooks and the best of them are added to the queue. The only limits to the number of stories I might eventually write are time and mortality.

  Long, long ago, I ran off with the elves. I learned their ways and lived with them so long as to be indistinguishable from their tribe. That is, I suppose, a kind of success. But it would not satisfy my young unpublished self. Nor does it answer the question he would have posed me over a third of a century ago.

  In Siberia, a shaman, a dapper little man with neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and a three-piece suit, gave me a devil stone, which he told me would help to unlock my power. I keep it by my computer always. Lifting it up, savoring its weight, I cast my thoughts back in time to the nascent writer I once was, afire with ambition, impatiently waiting for the answer he knew would take all these years to reach him:

  No, Michael, I haven’t gotten there yet. But I haven’t given up trying. Someday, I hope, I will be as good a writer as it is possible for me to become. In the meantime, I’m learning just as hard and as fast as I can.

  So that is where I am now, I think. I hope the results please you.

  —Michael Swanwick

  THE MAN IN GREY

  There’s a rustling in the wings. Let the story begin.

  I was standing outside watching when sixteen-year-old Martha Geissler, pregnant, loveless, and unwed, stepped into the path of a Canadian National freight train traveling at the rate of forty-five miles per hour. The engineer saw her and simultaneously applied the brakes and hit the air horn. But since the train consisted of two 4,300-horsepower SD70M-2 locomotives hauling seventy-six loaded cars and seventy-three empty ones and weighed an aggregate 11,700 tons, it was a given that it wouldn’t stop in time. All that the engineer could hope for was that the crazy woman on the tracks would come to her senses.

  Maybe she would. Maybe she wouldn’t. The forces that brought Martha here were absolutely predictable. What she would do in the actual event was not. One way or another, it was an instant of perfect, even miraculous, free will.

  Martha stared at the oncoming train with neither fear nor exaltation, but with great clarity of mind. She thought things that were hers alone to know, came to a decision, and then stepped deliberately backwards from the track.

  There was a collective sigh of relief from the shadows. Never let it be said that those of us who have no lives of our own don’t care.

  Then she slipped.

  It shouldn’t have happened. It couldn’t have happened. But it did. The script said that if she stepped backwards, away from the oncoming locomotive, the ground behind her would be flat and solid. Given the choice she had made, Martha was supposed to stand, half stunned, as the train slammed past inches from her face. She would be given the gift of a moment of absolute calm in which she would realize things that might well help her to understand exactly who she was now and who she might turn out to be years in the future.

  But a stagehand had somehow, inexplicably, left behind a chilled bottle of a brand of cola not even available on Martha’s ostensible continent, when he was setting up the scene. It rolled under Martha’s foot. She lost her balance.

  With a little shriek, she fell forward, into the path of the train.

  With that, I stepped out of the grey, grabbed her arm, and hauled her back.

  Still wailing, the train rushed by and the engineer—enormously relieved and himself beginning to change as a result of the incident— released the brake and carefully accelerated out of the long bend and into somebody else’s area of responsibility.

  Martha clutched me as tightly as if she were drowning. Slowly I pried her loose. She stared into my face, white with shock. “I . . .” she said. “You. . . .”

&nbs
p; “It’s a goddamned lucky thing I was passing by, young lady,” I said gruffly. “You oughtta be more careful.” I turned to leave.

  Martha looked up and down the tracks. We were at the outskirts of town, where the land was flat and empty. The nearest building was a warehouse a full city block away. There was nowhere I could possibly have come from. She could see that at a glance.

  Inwardly I cursed.

  “Who are you?” she said, hurrying after me. Then, “What are you?”

  “Nobody. I just happened to see you.” I was almost running now, with Martha plucking at my coat sleeve and trotting to keep up. “Listen, Sis, I don’t want to be rude, but I’ve got things to do, okay? I got places to be. I can’t—” I was sweating. I belonged in the grey, not out on stage with the talent. I wasn’t used to extemporaneous speech. All this improv was beyond me.

  I broke into an out-and-out run. Coat flying, I made for the warehouse. If I could only get out of sight for a second—assuming there was some local action scheduled for the other side of the building before this scenario ended and that the stage was properly set—I could slip back into the grey without Martha seeing it. She’d know that something strange had happened, but what could she do about it? Who could she complain to? Who would listen to her if she did?

  I reached the warehouse and flew around the corner.

  And into the streets of Hong Kong.

  The stagehands had, of course, only put up as much stage dressing as was needed for the scenario. It was just my bad luck that we were back-to-back with an Asian set. Behind the warehouse facade it was all skyscrapers and Chinese-language advertising. Plus, it was night and it had just rained, so the streets were smudged black mirrors reflecting streetlights and neon. I said a bad word.

  Martha plowed into my back. She rebounded, almost fell, and caught herself. Then, horn blaring, a taxicab almost ran us down. She clutched my arm so hard it hurt. “What—what is this?” she asked, eyes wide with existential terror.

  “There are a few things you should know.” I gently turned her back toward the city she had grown up in. “There’s a diner not far from here. Why don’t I buy you a cup of coffee and we can talk?”

  In the diner, I tried to explain. “The world is maybe not the way you picture it to be,” I said. “In its mechanics, anyway. We don’t have the resources to maintain every possible setup twenty-four hours a day. Also, there aren’t as many real people in it—folks you might actually meet, as opposed to those you see at a distance or hear about on TV—as you were led to believe. Maybe forty-five or fifty thousand all told. But other than that, everything’s just like you’ve always thought it was. Go back to your life and you’ll be fine.”

  Martha clutched her coffee cup as if it were all that was keeping her from falling off the face of the earth. But she looked at me steadily. Her eyes were clear and focused. “So this is all—what?—a play, you’re telling me? I’m nothing but a puppet and you’re the guy who pulls my strings? You’re in charge of things and I’m the entertainment?”

  “No, no, no. Your life is your own. You have absolute free will. I’m just here to make sure that when you step out of the shower, the bath mat is always there for you.”

  “You’ve seen me naked?”

  I sighed. “Martha, either I or somebody like me has been with you for every waking or sleeping moment of your life. Every time your mother changed your diapers or you squeezed a zit in the mirror or you hid under the blankets with a flashlight and a romance manga after you were supposed to be asleep, there were people there, working hard to ensure that the world behaved in a comprehensible and consistent fashion for you.”

  “So what are you? You operate a camera, right? Or maybe you are the camera. Like you’re a robot, or you’ve got cameras implanted in your eyes.” She was still stuck on the entertainment metaphor. It had been a mistake telling her that the whole thing had been caused by a careless stagehand.

  “I am not a camera. I’m just the man who stands in grey, making things happen.” I did not tell her that all the necessary misery and suffering in the world is caused by people like me. Not because I’m ashamed of what I do—I make no apologies; it’s important work—but because Martha wasn’t ready to hear, much less understand, it. “What you’ve discovered is analogous to somebody in the Middle Ages learning that the world is not made up of fire, water, air, and earth, but rather by unimaginably small bundles of quarks underlain by strata of quantum uncertainty. It might feel shocking to you at first. But the world’s the same as it’s always been. It’s only your understanding of it that’s changed.”

  Martha looked at me with huge, wounded eyes. “But . . . why?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” I said. “If you forced me to speculate, I’d say that there are two possibilities. One is that Somebody decided that things should be like this. The other is that it’s simply the way things are. But which is true is anybody’s guess.”

  That’s when Martha began to cry.

  So I got up and walked around the table and put my arms about her. She was still only a child, after all.

  When Martha calmed down, I took her back to her mother’s place in the Northern Liberties. It was a long trek—she’d been wandering about blindly ever since the pregnancy test turned blue—and so I ordered up a taxi. Martha flinched a little when it appeared before her, right out of thin air. But she got in and I gave the cabbie her address. The cabbie wasn’t real, of course. But he was good work. You’d have to talk to him for an hour to realize he was only a prop.

  As we rode, Martha kept trying to work things through. She was like a kid picking at a scab. “So you do all the work, I get that. What’s in it for you?”

  I shrugged. “A transient taste of being, every now and again.” I looked out the window at the passing city. Even knowing that it was all metaphysical canvas and paint, it looked convincing. “This is pretty nice. I like it. Mostly, though, it’s just my job. I’m not like you—I don’t have any say over what I do and don’t do.”

  “You think any of this is my choice?”

  “More of it than you’d suspect. Okay, yes, you dropped out of school, you don’t have a job, and you’re pregnant by a boy you don’t particularly like, and that limits your options. You’re still living with your mother and the two of you fight constantly. It’s been years since you’ve seen your father and sometimes you wonder if he’s still alive. You have health issues. None of that is under your control. But your response to it is. That’s an extraordinary privilege and it’s one I don’t have. Given the current situation, I could no more get out of this cab and walk away from you than you could flap your arms and fly to the Moon.

  “You, however, have the freedom to think anything, say anything, do anything. Your every instant is unpredictable. Right here, right now, it may be that what I’m saying will reach you and you’ll smile and ask how you can get back on script. Maybe you’ll scream and call me names. Maybe you’ll retreat into silence. Maybe you’ll slap me. Anything could happen.”

  She slapped me.

  I looked at her. “What did that prove?”

  “It made me feel better,” she lied. Martha crossed her arms and pushed herself back into the cushions, making herself as small as she could. Fleetingly, I thought she was going to keep retreating, deeper and deeper into herself, until nothing showed on the outside but dull, lifeless eyes. She could decide to do that. It was her right.

  But then the cab pulled up before a nondescript row house on Leithgow Street and she got out.

  “Act like you’ve gotten a big tip,” I told the cabbie.

  “Hey, thanks, buddy!” he said, and drove off.

  Martha was unlocking the door. “Mom’s visiting her sister in Baltimore for a couple days. We have the house to ourselves.”

  “I know.”

  She went straight to the kitchen and got out a bottle of her mother’s vodka from the freezer.

  “It’s a little early for that, isn’t it?” I said.
>
  “Then make it later.”

  “As you will.” I signaled the gaffer and the sun slid down the sky. The world outside the window grew dark. I didn’t bother ordering up stars. “Is that late enough?”

  “What the fuck do I care?” Martha sat down at the kitchen table and I followed suit. She filled two tumblers, thrust one in my hands. “Drink.”

  I did, though not being talent, the alcohol had no effect on me.

  After a while, she said, “Which of my friends are real and which aren’t?”

  “They’re all real, Martha. Tomika, Jeanne, Siouxie, Ben, your teachers, your parents, your cousins, the boy you thought was cute but too immature to go out with—everyone you have an emotional relationship with, positive or negative, is as real as you are. Anything else would be cheating.”

  “How about Kevin?” Her boyfriend, of course.

  “Him too.”

  “Shit.” Martha stared down into her glass, swirling the vodka around and around, creating a miniature whirlpool. “What about rappers and movie stars?”

  “That’s a different story. Your feelings toward them aren’t terribly complex; nor are they reciprocated. Real people aren’t needed to fill the roles.”

  “Thought so.” She drank deeply.

  If she kept on in this vein, sooner or later she was going to ask about her father. In which case, I would have to tell her that Carl Geissler was in Graterford, where prison life was teaching him things about his essential nature that would take him decades to assimilate. Then that her mother clandestinely visited him there every month and, for reasons she only imperfectly understood, kept this fact to herself. So I touched Martha’s glass and said, “Do you really think this is a wise course of action?”

  “What do people normally do in this situation?” she asked sarcastically.