Wonders of the Invisible World (43 page)
Read Wonders of the Invisible World Online
Authors: Patricia A. McKillip
Tags: #Fantasy, #Fiction, #Fairy Tales, #Folk Tales, #Legends & Mythology, #Short Stories
In a crying need to get out of those mountains for a bit, I registered for a music class offered at Julliard to the community at large. To this day I wonder if Julliard realized that the Catskills was part of its local community. The subject was World Music, which I didn’t know much about. It was held every Thursday evening from seven to nine, from late September to early December. To get to it, I would drive for an hour and a quarter out of the Catskills, across the Hudson River, to another tiny village called Rhinecliff, which boasted a little train station with two tracks. I would board an Amtrak train there. After an hour and forty minutes, the train would pull into Grand Central Station, and I would step into an entirely different planet. The huge buildings, the noise, the smells, the languages, the music, as varied as the languages, offered at every street corner were mind-boggling, intoxicating. By day, I explored the city; in the evening I sat in a classroom listening to weird instruments, exotic music. Afterwards, I would reverse the journey, moving farther and farther out of the enormous, intense hothouse of civilization until the roads became narrow and solitary, mountains hid the river and the city lights, and I reached the strange point in my drive home where I felt that I had somehow traveled so far that I had left the real world, real time behind. I had passed into the realm of Sleepy Hollow, the Otherworld, which was just a little farther than anyone should go.
The final class was held in the Indonesian Consulate so that we could learn about the Gamelan. I had also learned, on those Thursday explorations, enough about the subway system to find my way there and back again, which gave me no end of satisfaction. Later, I would put that journey from one tiny world into a huge, complex and noisy world, those details of bar and classroom and my amateur efforts at music, into a fantasy novel:
Song for the Basilisk
.
A Looming Deadline can also be a galvanizing source of inspiration. I got married for the first time at age fifty-three, which is statistically highly improbable or maybe even impossible, but what the hey. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and still does. Because it was easier for me to plan a wedding 3000 miles from where I lived than it was for my mother, in a wheelchair with Parkinson’s, to get on a plane, and because both our families were for the most part scattered between San Francisco and Puget Sound, Dave and I got married in a small town on the Oregon coast. Over the internet I found the only department store in the town of Bandon that hadn’t burned down in the devastating fire of 1936, and which had been turned into a charming guest house, with five bedrooms, a hot tub that didn’t leak into the living room unless you filled it too high, a potbellied stove for an altar, a big kitchen, and enough space for seventy-five chairs. Since JPs don’t travel in Oregon, I commandeered a good-natured Presbyterian minister to marry us, and asked my dearest friend along to cater. Meanwhile, Dave started to dismantle his own life of thirty-four years in New York, pack up the house and the memories for our trek west. This was the summer of 2001.
We flew out a week before the wedding to prepare. Preparation involved things like cleaning the scales with a garden hose off five huge salmon a fisherman friend of my mother’s had given us, driving the byways to gather wild sweet pea vines along the roadside for decoration, peeling enormous quantities of potatoes while my siblings, who came from Puget Sound, and Reno, and Coos Bay, unpacked guitars and flutes and tried to remember the words to “The Wedding Song” which they had played for one another’s weddings way back when we were all young.
The day itself was quite delightful. During the month after the wedding, we spent a week looking for a house to rent, flew back to the Catskills to close up my house and say goodbye to friends, get Dave’s possessions into a moving van, and then took off back across country in separate cars—Dave in his sleek black jet-propelled Talon, and me in my gerbil-driven Chevy Metro, with two cats in the back who were so totally not amused. We couldn’t dawdle; the moving van was somewhere on the road with us, making for the rental house. As with the wedding, most memories are blurred. Others are indelible. The rear end of the Talon. The tornado in Iowa. The rear end of the Talon. The eerie badlands of South Dakota, full of ancient, sleeping gods. Losing sight of the rear end of the Talon on the empty, rainy highway across Wyoming. Realizing that I had been married for scarcely three weeks and I’d already misplaced my husband. The devious places the cats found to hide themselves every morning in motels—under blankets, under beds that seemed riveted to the floor—to avoid being put back into the cat-carrier. Driving up a gentle slope in Montana and finding myself at the top of a dizzying mountain in Idaho, with nowhere to go but down, and the rear end of the Talon so far ahead of me I thought it would be in Oregon a day before I got there. Driving from the gentle, tangled woods of the Catskills, with their modest slopes of 3000 feet, into the spectacular vastness of the west, where mountains look down at you from 10,000 or 14,000 feet, shrug a few boulders, and ask, “What did you expect?” A friend, visiting me once in the Catskills, commented of them: “Mountains higher than these are unnatural.” But I’m half-Swiss; my forebears came down out of the Alps to settle in Oregon, and I knew why: they felt at home.
Another indelible memory: waking very early on the last morning of our journey, our first morning in Oregon, turning on the news while the coffee brewed, and watching the twin towers fall.
Later that day, stunned and groggy, we reached the town where we would live, tracked down the key to the rental house, and settled in to wait for the moving van, which we had managed to outrace. I’m not sure how long it was afterwards—I think it was after we finally got a bed and pots and pans—when I began to consider seriously the Looming Deadline.
It had been a year away when I began searching for a place to get married. It had been over six months away when we got married. When I looked again, it was four months and small change away. I had thirty-nine typed pages and a contract stating I would send the completed manuscript in by February 1, 2002. I knew where I wanted the novel to go, but I couldn’t seem to shove it past page 39. I couldn’t find the point of view I needed to examine the life and motives of a man who wanted to conquer the world. I did the usual: sacrificed small rodents to the moon, offered my soul to demons in exchange for inspiration, did some research. Nobody wanted the rodents or my soul, and the research into ancient conquerors seemed barren. Finally, out of the blue, a young girl stepped into my head, opened her mouth and told me where that part of the story began. I finished
Alphabet of Thorn
in three and a half months, the fastest book I’d written in thirty years.
Certainly the Looming Deadline provided the crucible in which inspiration and imagination fused to give me what I needed. But none of these things—money, experience, deadlines—answers the question I was asked, because the question was not about inspiration or ideas at all.
The question was about drive, motivation: What possessed you to write eight or ten entirely different fantasies in ten or twelve years? What compels you? How could you? Why would you want to? Ever since I was young, the imagination, like the raw stuff of magic, has seemed to me a kind of formless, fluid pool of enormous possibility, both good and bad, dangerous and powerful, very like the magma in a volcano. And I envisioned myself sitting on top of this mountain of magma, spinning it into endless words, visions, imagery, controlled and useful, to keep it from bursting out in its primitive shape to devastate the landscape. At first, I felt very precariously balanced on top of my private volcano, spinning word and image into tales as quickly as I could to keep up with the unstable forces I was trying to harness. Lately, I’ve been feeling rather at home there. The magma level has gone down a bit; I’ve done some satisfying work. I can slow down, maybe, take a longer time to think what I want to make now. What I set out to do about fifteen years ago was to write a series of novels that were like paintings in a gallery by the same artist. Each work is different, but they are all related to one another by two things: they are all fantasy, and they are all by the same person. That’s all I wanted to do. And now I’m reaching the end of that series.
I have no idea what will come next.
Table of Contents
Introduction by Charles de Lint