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“It’s like the gay Super Bowl,” Gary said. He set the parking brake and checked his hair in the rear-view mirror. “How is it like that?” I asked. “All the men are gathered around yelling at the television set, and most of the women are hanging out in the kitchen,” he said. “Oscar Night is a very, very big deal for our people.” I leaned in to grab the grocery bag from behind the passenger seat. I had to jump back to avoid the convertible top …more He was in that state where you’re not quite asleep and not quite awake, where sometimes you wake yourself by shouting a word that isn’t quite a word. Then he sat upright in the bed and called out, “Sarah?” He remembered that she was gone. He struggled with the feeling that there was a dream he should be able to recall. He stared at the glowing numerals on the alarm clock, fumbled for his glasses on the bedside table, then looked again, and a third time. He pulled out the drawer. Nothing there to explain this disquiet, but it was somewhere to place his attention. He crossed the braided rug to the bathroom. He splashed water on his face, half-dried it on the crusty towel he’d left on the edge of the basin. When was that? Thursday? Times and days had become muddled as soon as he boarded the first trans-Atlantic flight. Back in bed, it took him several minutes to remember that he’d taken off his glasses to wash his face. Note: This is a fragment that I wrote in today’s Spectrum Center workshop, “10,000 First Drafts.” The exercise was to reuse something from an older piece of work. This began with the first sentence, which I salvaged from a story that never went anywhere beyond the first couple of paragraphs. I’m not sure where this is going next, but it felt like a good start. March 17, 2008—I’ve added something more to this story. March 25, 2008—See also Exercise #49. It occurred to me today that I’m not as far along as I thought. I remember a time when I dreamed of what I could do with an extra hundred years, or two hundred, or three. I would become the world’s foremost authority on nineteenth-century French literature. I would develop the patience to cook a soufflé. I would speak flawless Spanish with a perfect Castellaño accent…or with the accent of the aristocrats of Mexico City or Lima, or of the marketplace in San Juan. I would learn to ski. I would win trophies at singles tennis—in my age bracket, of course, but that’s still a worthy accomplishment at 250. I imagined that with so much time …more I knew it was broken when she bolted upright and blinked a couple of times. She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, looked at it, looked at me, and asked, “Who the hell are you?” Before I could answer, she shouted, “Goddamn! I have such a headache!” I struggled to rise from my kneeling posture by her side. “Your highness, I come—” “Is there nothing to eat around here? Can’t someone bring me something to eat?” The servants I’d seen posed around the edges of the room …more “I don’t know whether I would have made the choice to enter the treatment trial.” Listen to you! There’s that word again, always coming up. The idea of “choice” became a defining feature of our lives in the early years of the twenty-first century. As medical knowledge—especially in the field of gerontology—moved forward in quantum leaps, we came to understand better the role that certain choices play in our destinies. To quit smoking, to enter a treatment program for addiction, to seek an optimal weight, to enroll in the clinical trial for a radical new anti-aging therapy…but I’m getting ahead of myself. These aren’t the choices I wanted to talk about. It’s easy to see …more I played my usual game in the bank drive-through. I pulled into the lot to get out of the street, but hung back a moment to size up the traffic flow. In Lane One was a late-model Cadillac with a wisp of white hair barely visible above the headrest, followed by a panel truck decorated with cheap magnetic signs for “Hernandez Bros. Electrician.” In Lane Two, a soccer mom waited behind a PT Cruiser. Lane Three started with six or seven construction workers piled into an old Ford pickup, then a pretty blonde in a convertible bimmer. Lane Two seemed like the obvious choice, so it had to be wrong. I flipped a mental coin and nosed my rust-bucket into Lane Three. From my vantage point at the tail end of Lane Three, …more Dear Dad, I have about 30 minutes left to tell you everything I need to say, and there’s no way it’s enough. God, I don’t even know where to start, so I’ll just dive in with a couple of minutes of background information, how I got to be typing this letter right now, and then I’d better get straight to the message I’m supposed to deliver. That’s the important part, but it also seems pretty important (to me, anyway), that you have some reason to believe that I haven’t gone completely out of my mind and run off to Belize like I always talked about doing.
No time for the whole story, so here it is in a nutshell: I was sitting on the picnic table on the patio, and I heard a noise down in the woods, a kind of crackling sound. …more Dr. Everett Clinton Raines, Jub.D., couldn’t find a single soul who enjoyed cleaning toilets. So 156 years after taking his doctorate and 27 years after playing a substantial role in the establishment of the Freude Three colony, where he remained a thought leader and a sort of elder-among-elders, he returned to academia, this time to pursue a degree—or rather to acquire practical expertise, if you asked him—in robotic engineering. This wasn’t the first time that Dr. Raines had reinvented himself, but the stakes had never been higher. At risk—the very founding principle of Freude Three: the premise that in a sufficiently large closed system of fully actualized human beings, if every citizen were free to follow his or her joy, all discord would disappear, and a utopia—a heaven-on-earth—would naturally evolve into being. In the early days, …more By the time I got to Angie’s neighborhood, I didn’t see any ambulance or highway patrol cars. I looked for signs of an accident, a mark on the pavement or something out of place. But what she’d said on the phone had been real sketchy on details, so I wasn’t even sure I was searching in the right spot. There, in front of the Diamond Shamrock, where the road makes a lazy s—were those skid marks on the wet asphalt? Had that light pole always tilted a little to the right? Maybe it had. I’d driven to Angie’s house a thousand times, but not usually in the early hours of the morning, and not after being woken up from a hangover sleep by a hysterical phone call. And I hadn’t made this trip very often in the rain …more When I am 18, I will go up on the surface to fight beside my brothers. My mother says that she needs me too much to let me go sooner. She says that she cannot tend the plot of hydroponics beds by herself. Every day she tells me what a good worker I am. She wants me to believe that she could not produce our quota without my help. I know what she is afraid of. She knows that most of our people who go out there never come back down below. I cannot wait until I am 18, so I fight in the ways that I have found to fight. It is not much. …more |
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