The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories (7 page)

Do I believe in ESP? As a fiction writer, I don’t need to believe in ESP; I simply need to write stories, and if those stories use ESP, that is fine. But I do, so many years later, happen to believe in it now because of the “anecdotal spontaneous data” that exist from those who’ve experienced it as well as the hard core of skeptical and rigorous studies that suggest its existence; but also because of the synchronicities that happened during the research and writing of the novel, which turned out, after all, to be but a kind of “channeling,” as one New Agey friend put it in the ’80s, of the voices and experiences of the many vets for whom the novel speaks and who cared so much about the novel as it was being written. A section of the book received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and the novel itself was reviewed as sf, fantasy, horror, psychological thriller, and pure war novel. The novel has been called “one of the most collaborative war novels ever written,” and also “one of the most memorable chronicles of the Vietnam war.” The former, of course, explains the latter, since I was never in that war. But a novel like that one doesn’t take shape overnight and from the author’s isolated vanity; and I’d like to share a couple of things about its evolution if for no other reason than that new novelists may find in the following a crucial lesson: Never throw away anything you’ve written, no matter how embarrassing you may feel it is. 

About seven years into those fifteen years of research and interviews, and because I was a great Robert Ludlum fan at the time, I wrote a proto-
Dream Baby
novel. It was godawful. I’m not Ludlum and never will be (there’s a lesson in that too), and the manuscript, except for about 10,000 words of its 80K bulk, wasn’t even a good parody. I wrote one draft, then turned on it and set it aside. But something whispered from it—the spirit of it, the vets I’d interviewed so far, the human suffering of war and its redemptions, too—and about a year later I picked it up again. There, in the middle of the manuscript—in a third-person, international-thriller-mimicking failure of a novel—was a strange thing: a first-person account—inspired by the “oral histories” of Vietnam, oral histories whose voices weren’t elegant literary prose but whose very
failures
to be so captured war and the human soul much more beautifully, I thought, than literary prose could—of a nurse in Vietnam who dreamed the deaths of her patients and couldn’t save them. What in the hell was this doing in the middle of the novel? It had no function, no reason, made no sense, and yet it—along with some of the more lyrical passages about a vet with ESP now living in Orange County, California (6000 words worth—see the story notes on “Little Boy Blue” later in this collection)—held, I realized, the entire heart of the novel. While the Ludlum imitation was what I, the candy-assed armchair civilian, would do with such material, the Army-nurse voice had come from the vets I’d been interviewing. I’d almost thrown—literally thrown—the Terrible Ludlumesque Novel away, and with it this Army nurse. I took that section and ran with it, as writers do, and when it was finally a realized short story—the one you see in this collection—my friend and mentor Barry Malzberg directed it toward the Danns and their anthology,
In the Field of Fire.
From there it was reprinted by Gardner Dozois in
Asimov’s
and his “year’s best” volume, reached the finalist ballots for the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and as a consequence I received a contract for a novel-length expansion from Beth Meacham at Tor Books. But all of this was the world of publishing, and the short story and novel belonged—and do so to this day—to the vets themselves. Just after the short story was published, I found an oral history of nurses in Vietnam entitled
A Piece of My Heart;
one particular chapter was by a nurse named Jill Mishkel, and she sounded just like my story’s heroine, Mary Damico. I wrote to Jill saying so and enclosed the story. She wrote back: “Yes, it does sound like me. Exactly. And by the way, Bruce, I’m a science fiction fan. Would you like me to be a consultant on your novel?” That began the strange and marvelous journey the novel would take as it gathered, through one synchronicity or another—some of them (like the vet who found himself standing on the Red Dikes taking pictures for me when my intelligence community contacts couldn’t get those pictures) truly astonishing—the thirty consultants that would make it the collaborative miracle it turned out to be.
 

The Man Inside 

I am ten and a half years old, and I must be important because I’m the only one they let into this laboratory of the hospital. My father is in the other room of this laboratory. He’s what Dr. Plankt calls a “catatonic” because Dad just sits in one position all the time like he can’t make up his mind what to do. And that makes Dr. Plankt sad, but today Dr. Plankt is happy because of his new machine and what it will do with Dad. 

Dr. Plankt said, “This is the first time a computer will be able to articulate a man’s thoughts.” That means that when they put the “electrodes” (those are wires) on Dad’s head, and the “electrodes” are somehow attached to Dr. Plankt’s big machine with the spinning tapes on it, that machine will tell us what’s in Dad’s head. Dr. Plankt also said, “Today we dredge the virgin silence of an in-state catatonic for the first time in history.” So Dr. Plankt is happy today. 

I am, too, for Dad, because he will be helped by this “experiment” (everything that’s happening today) and for Dr. Plankt, who is good to me. He helps me make my “ulcer” (a hurting sore inside me) feel better, and he also gives me pills for my “hypertension” (what’s wrong with my body). He told me, “Your father has an ulcer like yours, Keith, and hypertension, too, so we’ve got to take care of you. You’re much too young to be carrying an ulcer around in you. Look at your father now. We don’t want what happened to your father to happen . . .” 

He didn’t finish what he was saying, so I didn’t understand all of it. Just that I should keep healthy and calm and not worry. I’m a lot like Dad, I know that much. Even if Dad worried a lot before he became a “catatonic” and I don’t worry much because I don’t have many things to worry about. “Yet,” Dr. Plankt told me. 

We’re waiting for the big “computer” to tell us what’s in Dad’s head! A few minutes ago Dr. Plankt said that his machine might help his “theory” (a bunch of thoughts) about “personality symmetry in correlation with schizophrenia.” He didn’t tell me what he meant by that because he wasn’t talking to me when he said it. He was talking to another doctor, and I was just listening. I think what he said has to do with Dad’s personality, which Mom says is rotten because he’s always so grouchy and nervous and picky. Mom says I shouldn’t
ever
be like Dad. She’s always telling me that, and she shouts a lot. 

Except when she brings people home from her meetings. 

I don’t think Dr. Plankt likes Mom. Once Dr. Plankt came over to our house, which is on Cypress Street, and Mom was at one of her meetings, and Dr. Plankt and I sat in the living room and talked. I said, “It’s funny how Dad and me have ulcers and hypertension. ‘Like father, like son.’ Mom says that. It’s kind of funny.” Dr. Plankt got mad at something then and said to me, “It’s not funny, Keith! With what she’s doing to you both, your
mother,
not your father, is the one who should be in a mental inst—” He didn’t finish his last word, and I don’t know what it was and what he was mad about. Maybe he was mad at me. 

Many times Dr. Plankt says that he wants to take me away from Cypress Street and put me in a better— 

Wait! The computer just typed something! It works just like a typewriter but without anyone’s hands on it. The words it is typing are from Dad’s head! Dr. Plankt has the piece of paper in his hands now. He’s showing it to three doctors. Now he’s showing it to Mom. Mom is starting to cry! I’ve never seen her cry before. I want to see the words from Dad’s head! 

Another doctor is looking at me, and he has the paper now. I say, “Can I see it! Can I see it?” He looks at me again, and I think he knows who I am because Dr. Plankt talks about me a lot to everyone. I must be important. I don’t like the look on this other doctor’s face. It’s like the look Uncle Josh gets when he’s feeling sad about something. This other doctor closes his eyes for a minute and comes over to me with the paper. The paper, the paper! The words from Dad’s head. The words are: 

OH OH 

MY MY 

WIFE! SON! 

I I 

CERTAINLY CERTAINLY 

DO DO 

NOT NOT 

WANT WANT 

TO TO 

LIVE! DIE! 

When I squint my eyes and look at these words from Dad’s head, they look like a man in a hat with his arms out, kind of like Dad—except that there’s a split down the middle of this man. 

It’s funny, but I know just how Dad feels. 

The Man Inside 

Story Notes 

I’ve always been a great fan of what in the ’70s was called “intermedia”—the ways graphic elements and text can be brought together on the page for synergistic impact. When I wrote this story as a junior in college, I hadn’t yet been exposed to experimental writing—the “intermedia,” “found poetry,” “concrete poetry” of the ’70s—though I would be a few years later through good friend, poet, and fellow Claremont alum, William L. Fox (
Driving to Mars, Terra Antarctica,
many others). Bill would go on to win Guggenheims and grants from NASA and become one the country’s major writers on how human beings perceive and interact with their environments—but his
West Coast Poetry Review
and WCPR Press, in the meantime,
I’d be involved with editorially for a number of years (publishing, as we did, people like Richard Kostelanetz, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Raymond Federman, and other major experimental poets). That interest in “intermedia” I dragged with me to graduate school, to that MFA program, where I tried at one point (since we were required to take a class in “a second art form”) to see if fiction could indeed be combined with graphics—“text with visuals” in an integrated storyline way. It would be tricky, I knew, because the human brain experiences the semantic symbolism of language very differently from visual images—that is, “suspension of disbelief” would be different for the two media—but what I hadn’t expected was the reactions the proposal got from the two different departments. The novelist I suggested the project to, showing him an example of what I had in mind (“This is the house that Jack built: [show house]. This is the house Jack should have built: [show other house].”), grimaced and said, “Why in God’s name would you want to put pictures in a text? It’s distracting.” The painter I then proposed it to said, of course, “That font is ugly.” As I said, it’s a tricky thing to combine media—or to combine them well—but the best intermedia artists/writers, like the best experimental novelists and performance artists and conceptual artists, do pull it off. Compared to their efforts, this little story—a tiny thing by a very young man—isn’t much; but, hey, it does prove I had that “concrete poetry” impulse in me long before graduate school or I wouldn’t, on that cloudy, forlorn day in Claremont, California, have seen “The Man Inside” as the very visual thing it is. The indebtedness of this story in other ways to Daniel Keyes’s
Flowers for Algernon
—a short story and novel that showed me at an early age the power of first-person fiction, especially “naïve” first-person-voiced fiction should be obvious. “The Man Inside” was not my first story and it wouldn’t be my last using such a voice. This story appeared originally in Fred Pohl’s
Galaxy
in 1969, and went on to see reprinting, thanks to Harry Harrison, in the Harrison/Aldiss “year’s best” volume, the Asimov/Greenberg/Olander
100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories,
and two college readers.
 

Kin 

The alien and the boy, who was twelve, sat in the windowless room high above the city that afternoon. The boy talked and the alien listened. 

The boy was ordinary—the genes of three continents in his features, his clothes cut in the style of all boys in the vast housing project called LAX. The alien was something else, awful to behold; and though the boy knew it was rude, he did not look up as he talked. 

He wanted the alien to kill a man, he said. It was that simple. 

As the boy spoke, the alien sat upright and still on the one piece of furniture that could hold him. Eyes averted, the boy sat on the stool, the one by the terminal where he did his schoolwork each day. It made him uneasy that the alien was on his bed, though he understood why. It made him uneasy that the creature’s strange knee was so near his in the tiny room, and he was glad when the creature, as if aware, too, shifted its leg away. 

He did not have to look up to see the Antalou’s features. That one glance in the doorway had been enough, and it came back to him whether he wanted it to or not. It was not that he was scared, the boy told himself. It was just the idea—that such a thing could stand in a doorway built for humans, in a human housing project where generations had been born and died, and probably would forever. It did not seem possible. 

He wondered how it seemed to the Antalou.