[CT] A Faster Darkness

[Daniel Moran]

I wrote this a while ago. I don't believe I've posted it before -- I hadn't 
forgotten about it, exactly, but I just ran across it earlier today -- it 
holds up, I think.

~~~~~

A FASTER DARKNESS

AS A WRITER I am a fan of the dash.

I used to use ellipses, and I thought in those days that what writers 
needed was a two-dot ellipse: ..

Four dots means a sentence has been completed and left to trail off, three 
dots that a thought has been left incomplete; one dot means the sentence is 
over. You can pause with commas, a small pause, or pause with semi-colons, 
a larger pause. I used to think that in between a semi-colon and a 
three-dot ellipse we needed an in-between pause, a two-dot pause, a pause 
that is .. that long.

Perhaps we do need one. Precision is a virtue. But even if we had it, I 
probably wouldn’t use it. I no longer have time for it.

I’ve grown fond of dashes. A dash is the swiftest of stops. “Zooming to a 
stop,” I told my first wife once -- though I was talking about driving my 
car, a Grand National with a great engine and merely adequate brakes. 
Dashes zoom. They are very modern and exactly what you require when what 
you want is to pull the reader through your story without pausing and 
without letting the reader pause.

Life is fast and writing about it requires strict measures.

Something interesting happened to us all almost without our noticing it. 
When the world changes fast enough, the world ceases to be the background 
against which our lives are played out. The condition of change becomes the 
background. Change ceases to be change as we once knew it, and the only 
change worthy of note would be if the changes were to stop -- if things 
were to revert to being always the same, that would be a change worth 
noticing. The idea that change will always be with us is in some ways 
comforting.


WHEN I MOVED to New York there was no sense of discovery, no sense of the 
strange. I was born in a large city, Los Angeles, and raised there. New 
York was just another large city -- dirtier and with worse weather and the 
people there have accents.

In March of my first year in New York a girl called my name on the street, 
Second Avenue around 68th Street, at three in the morning. It was clear and 
direct: “Danny,” which is a name only my sisters and other immediate family 
call me by, and I thought she spoke in my sister Jodi’s voice -- that 
California accent -- though Jodi was three thousand miles away. When I 
looked across the street there was nobody there. I wanted to rush home and 
call my sister and see that she was all right, for we are taught that such 
messages are warnings. Instead I went to my coffee shop as I’d planned, and 
wrote for a few hours. I didn’t write this account that you’re reading -- I 
worked on a screenplay about a time traveler and the woman he almost falls 
in love with.

I think it’s a good screenplay, though what I think is unimportant. What is 
certain is that if it were as good as Terms of Endearment or Ordinary 
People it would not be as good as Terms of Endearment or Ordinary People -- 
the audience would not approach it the same way, with the same 
expectations; they would pay attention to the special effects and the 
costumes and the sets instead, and the producers would worry about the 
effects budget instead of the dialogue.

Sometimes I hate writing science fiction.

I called Jodi in the morning. She was fine.


IT'S A CLICHÉ that we are most truly alive in the presence of death. And 
like many clichés --

One hundred and twenty miles an hour, down the dark freeway. It's three 
A.M. on the 10 Freeway, East, toward San Bernardino, California. The 
motorcycle shudders underneath me, low rumbles that crawl up slowly through 
the frame. I feel them start in the tires, harmonics that work their way 
through the bike and into me.

At that speed your tires barely touch the road beneath you and the 
freeway's slow gentle curves, designed for cars moving at seventy miles an 
hour, come at you with terrifying speed. The inside of my helmet is 
slightly fogged but I'm afraid to use either of my hands to crack the vent.

You make speed slowly -- one hundred and twenty-five, one hundred and 
thirty -- and the bikes shudders up against its limits, spedometer 
twitching up above 135, twitching up toward 140, falling back --


YOU WALK A lot in New York. It makes no sense to have a car in Manhattan, 
unless you’re extremely well-off, or for some reason must have one; it 
costs $300 or more just to rent a parking space for a month -- more than 
that, to get a good parking space, for a car worth having. The subway is 
cheap and cabs aren’t expensive, and while I was there I learned to enjoy 
walking. I did a lot of it, hundreds of miles of it in the daylight and the 
dark, but that girl only called my name once.

Toward the end of his life Philip K. Dick started talking to beams of pink 
light -- God, you know. This has not happened to me yet. I am not convinced 
that girl was real, or unreal, and probably she was not God -- at least 
there was no beam of pink light in the vicinity either before she called my 
name, or after. If she was God I am not impressed. I would hope God could 
get up a better effect than that.

I can’t shake this unpleasant feeling -- and I’ve tried -- that the girl’s 
name is Lita Germain. If it is she came out of one of my stories.

While my first marriage was ending I outlined a story called Heat and Love, 
where I took a good, virtuous man, James Camber, and in a black Irish rage 
had him kill a woman he loved. I read it in public several times thereafter 
-- at the end of the first section, every time I've read it, one or more of 
the women in the audience has cried:

Lita stares back at Camber, shaking, and then out of some depth of her own 
anger slaps Camber once.

Camber is still for just a moment, and then he hits her, hard, the way he 
would hit a man. It snaps her head straight back and slams it against the 
wall, and afterward, trying to remember, he is never certain whether he 
might have killed her with that blow, or with one of the blows that 
followed; she never makes a sound, never makes a move to defend herself, 
and he hits her over and over again, holding her upright with the force of 
the blows, until suddenly something simply stops inside him, the rage 
vanishing as suddenly as it came, the realization of what he is doing 
coming home to him. He takes a single step backward and Lita folds to the 
floor like a rag doll, and Camber stands over her limp form, looking down 
on her, staring at her with a sudden and immense horror, a horror so 
profound he literally ceases to breathe. He takes a step toward her, and 
then kneels next to her, lifts her from the floor and sees that her head is 
bent over to the side, that her neck is cleanly broken, that Lita is dead. 
He sinks down on the floor next to her, lifting her up into his lap -- as 
he had once held her in the afternoons when she came home from work. He 
sits with her, cradling her in his arms. He does not notice when the tears 
begin, realizing that he is crying only when he cannot see Lita clearly any 
longer; and then something breaks within him, and he sobs like a child, 
crying helplessly through the long night. The morning finds him that way, 
still sobbing with the dead girl as the sun rises over Los Angeles.


IT HELPS, in all this, to understand that there are two kinds of reality. 
The first one is trivial and obvious -- water is wet, stones are hard, 
don’t step in front of the bus. Call it Engineer Reality, Problem-Solving 
Reality, they wrote stories about Engineer Reality in Astounding in 1955 
when they weren’t conquering the universe and making it safe for white 
Americans of a certain social class.

The second kind of reality is internal -- our thoughts as influenced by our 
perceptions. Our perceptions are bandwidth. Yes, there is an external 
reality -- but that’s not the world you and I live in. We live in a world 
defined for us by the data we receive over a limited bandwidth, from senses 
that are terribly crude. We can see only a tiny part of the electromagnetic 
spectrum; we can hear only a tiny part of the range of sounds. Our sense of 
touch is useless at extremes of cold and heat, and our senses of taste and 
smell are crude mechanisms for analyzing chemicals.

So we live in a very imprecise world, a virtual reality of our own making, 
a world where our perceptions of reality are far more important than our 
Engineer Reality -- the problem isn’t that the world doesn’t make sense, 
it’s that we don’t make sense:

I read once in the paper a story about some psychologists who were doing a 
study to discover why people feared murderers.


WE ALREADY LIVE in a virtual reality, or else “virtual reality” could never 
be made to work. We’re easy to fool -- designed that way.


THE EAST RIVER has a real beauty to it. It’s a piece of the wild that’s 
been enclosed by concrete where it runs between Queens and Manhattan. The 
concrete won’t last -- maybe two hundred years or a thousand; but the river 
is old and it will be here when Central Park has grown out to enclose 
Manhattan again, in two hundred years or a thousand, and the concrete that 
now encloses it has crumbled and worn away. There is a sense of the river’s 
power, of its capacity for violence, that the concrete does nothing to allay.

Corpses end up in the river in the winter -- suicides, murder victims -- 
and the people we used to call bums before we decided that sounded too 
harsh. Today homeless people end up in the river. In the cold the corpses 
sink to the bottom of the river, into the dark water. They stay there until 
spring when it gets warm and the gases of corruption start bubbling up 
inside them and then they come popping up to the surface like balloons, 
sometimes carrying concrete blocks up with them. I saw one in early April 
and it made me wonder, for the first time, what my character Camber had 
done with Lita’s body after killing her. The river patrol came and hauled 
the body out of the water and I felt an intense surge of nausea. The body 
was a shapeless gray mass and I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. 
It could have been a woman --

The scene from Heat and Love came to me while I watched them pull her up 
out of the water. It was a waking dream, more vivid than the sight of the 
body being pulled from the river or the smell of river with its hints of 
sea salt and sewage, sharper than any real memory I have ever experienced 
in my life. The world blinked --

and then he hits her, hard, the way he would hit a man. It snaps her head 
straight back and slams it against the wall


NOTHING LIKE THIS ever happened to me before. I don’t have hallucinations 
and I don’t have waking dreams. And I’ve never hit a woman in my life.


TWO OR THREE years ago I was up late, reading. I don’t remember the book, 
just the phrase -- it described someone as the sort of person who would 
read another person’s diary.

Suddenly I was shaking with a rage, a black fury I hadn’t known was in me. 
My father did that. I kept a diary once, when I was a teenager. I didn’t do 
it for long -- maybe a month. He found it and he read it and then commented 
on what he’d read. It did not occur to me until years later that this was 
not simply a thoughtless piece of rudeness from a man without tact -- he 
had tact when he wanted to use it -- but a ruthless attempt at control from 
a man who had never trusted anyone in his life, not my mother, not his 
brothers or sisters, not even his own children.

He seemed a big man when I was a boy, and that was not my imagination; he 
was, as I became. He was handsome as a movie star, black Irish, charming, 
and I loved and hated him with a terrible passion. He didn’t hit me often; 
he’d have killed me, when I was a child, if he’d ever hit me with his full 
strength. When he was forty-four and I was eleven he had a heart attack. By 
the time I was old enough to even think about hitting him back -- surely by 
the time I was old enough to know that I wanted to -- he had a heart 
condition that might kill him if he got angry.

I sat in bed at two in the morning, sixteen or seventeen years later, 
trembling with an anger that knotted my stomach, dying for someone to hit, 
while my girlfriend slept at my side.


I LOVE SPEED. Faster, faster, faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes 
the fear of death. It’s the best thing about Los Angeles, though nobody 
ever called out my name as I drove or rode along the darkened freeways late 
at night, at a hundred or a hundred and twenty miles an hour, with the 
windows down and the radio up. I had to go to New York for that.

It seems strange with all the science fiction I’ve written, much of it set 
in New York, that a dead girl from a story in present-day Los Angeles 
should have followed me there. Lita Germain seems very real to me; too 
real, in a way, to be put down on paper. Speech and its extension, writing, 
are the manipulation of symbols that we pretend have common meaning. But 
they don’t and the subtleties are always different -- sometimes the broad 
strokes, too. We don’t mean the same things with the same words, so putting 
Lita down on paper is just another way of killing her; we won’t see the 
same person when I’m done, you and I.


AUGUST 24, 1996. The 101 freeway, South. Friday afternoon at about 3:30.

It's a bitch of a day. Temperatures hovering around 105. I'm on the bike 
and not wearing leathers because it's so damned hot I'm afraid I'll have 
heat stroke. I'm wearing a backpack, jeans, boots, and a long-sleeved pink 
shirt. Riding through the air is like riding through a furnace -- the wind 
heats you as you cut through it.

Friday afternoon, and people are leaving work early, to get a jump on the 
weekend. Traffic is bunching up already and speeds are down to a tightly 
clustered 55 miles an hour.

I've got Bruce Springsteen in my head --

Sometimes it's like someone took a knife baby edgy and dull
And cut a six inch valley through the middle of my soul
Oh, oh, oh, I'm on fire

I'm in the far left land and there's a van about five feet behind me. A car 
about five feet in front of me, another twenty feet in front of him. A semi 
back and to the right. I know these things without thinking about them; 
350,000 miles of driving L.A. freeways will teach you to map; to know where 
things are even when you aren't looking at them. It's the same spatial 
wiring you use on the basketball court, flying down court with teammates 
you haven't looked at, knowing where they are without seeing -- all of that 
probably comes out of the time we spent in the trees, living in three 
dimensions. So when the guy in front of me hits his brakes for no apparent 
reason, I know instantly I'm in bad trouble. I hit back brakes and then 
front to no avail. My front wheel rides up on the guy's back fender. The 
bike flips out from under me and I go down doing 55 or close to it.

The memory of the moment is clear. I hit on my back and tumble once and I 
feel my right leg snap the moment I hit and then I'm sliding down the 
freeway backward, the backpack shredding beneath me, watching the van and 
semi come up on me, hitting their brakes and swerving to miss the sliding 
projectile. The van goes by me first, inches away, and I slap at the 
pavement exactly as you would do the backstroke in a swimming pool, trying 
to swim across the pavement and away from first the van and then the semi. 
(The next day there are bruises on the tips of all ten of my fingers.) I 
slow and slow, flip once and tumble --

I looked good. I slowed and came to my feet almost in one motion, weight up 
and off the broken leg and lifted my hands, palms outward, to the 
hundred-odd cars that had just braked to avoid hitting me. Grinning. Alive.


I BELIEVE in free will.

Isn't that a ridiculous statement? If quantum mechanics is an accurate 
model of reality, then we are biochemical machines, and underlying the 
biochemistry is the reality of neurons that fire for no fucking reason 
other than that an atom chose to jump one way rather than another, because 
a wave function collapsed in one direction rather than another, all just 
because --

And yet there appears to be a connection between what I decide to do, and 
what I do; between how I plan and the results I achieve.

If free will is anything, it's the mechanism by which we navigate the 
collapse of the eigenstates.


I GOT MARRIED the second time while I was in New York.

My sister Jodi called me late from California only three days before the 
wedding, with Heather this time, five years after divorcing Holly after 
seven years with her --

Jodi mentioned -- in passing -- that Holly had had a baby, a boy, with that 
tall guy she’s married to now:  Baby Donovan, named after that singer from 
the ’60s she always liked.

I hung up and sat that night, rushing into the future, motionless in the 
dark quiet with the sleeping stranger in my bed, my fiancee, three thousand 
miles from home.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.ralf.org/pipermail/ct-announce/attachments/20020515/55232f05/attachment.html>