The powers that be mulled the idea and gave me a qualified go-ahead; I submitted an outline; on September 10, 1991, we came to an agreement on the deal. Two days later the printer of my venerable computer, which I had been using for nearly a decade, declined to print a document upon receiving the usual command. Somehow I jollied it into going back to work, and, although the rainy season was nowhere in sight yet, I blithely got started on the story that was to become “The Way to Spook City” a day or two later, thinking to have the piece behind me before settling down to the upcoming winter novel. I promised to deliver it by mid-October so that it could be used in a space being reserved for it in the August, 1992 issue.
But the printer trouble returned, and worsened, and on September 27—when I was forty pages into the story—the printer died entirely and permanently. I was trying to print out my forty pages at the time, but what came out was this:
“Everyone had been astonished when Nick announced he was going LIa kciN disiruprus oo, that he should be setting himself up for such a crazy LKthguoht eh nruter ot brawny young man Tom had become but of the soft-eyed LJs’kciN fo lla nehgt dna ,n” and then silence, not another garbled word.
No problem, you say. Get a new printer, hook it up, do the printout. But there was a problem. I had been something of a pioneer, as writers go, in the use of a computer for word-processing, and the computer I had been using all those years was now obsolete—incompatible, in fact, with any existing brand. The company that had made it was out of business, and no one now alive knew how to connect a modern printer to it. I did, of course, have a backup of my forty pages on a floppy disk; but my computer was a pre-MS-DOS model and its operating system could not be made to speak to that of any machine now in use. Whatever texts were on my computer were trapped in it forever, all my business records and the first half of “Spook City” among them. They could be brought up on screen but they were inaccessible for purposes of printing.
I would need to buy one of the newfangled MS-DOS computers and learn how to use it. But now I contemplated the gloomy prospect of having to type “Spook City” and hundreds of other documents onto the new computer, one word at a time. It would take forever. What about my mid-October deadline?
It was possible, at least, to rescue the unfinished story from the old computer. The technician who had been servicing my old computer discovered that he still had one machine of that model in working order (more or less) in his San Francisco office. I gave him my backup disk; he printed out the forty pages of “Spook City” and faxed them to me that day; and later in the day I began keying the story into the only working computer in the house, which belonged to my wife Karen and was a perfectly standard DOS-based job. I also went out and bought a new computer myself, also, of course, a DOS machine compatible with hers.
For the next ten days or so, while waiting for the new computer to arrive, I continued writing “Spook City” using my prehistoric manual typewriter, which had served me nobly back in the 1960’s but which certainly seemed quaint now, and entering each day’s typewritten work on Karen’s computer after her work-day was over. By October 4 I had 59 pages on disk. By then, though, I saw the need for all sorts of revisions in the early pages, revisions that would be too complicated to make with a typewriter (how did we ever manage to write stories on the things?) and I decided on Sunday, October 6, to print out the 59 pages and halt further work until my own new machine was here.
Karen’s computer wouldn’t print it. I don’t know why. The text looked fine on screen, but when I gave the familiar print command I was told that the document was “corrupted” and couldn’t be sent on to the printer.
Again? Was there a curse on this story?
The backup disk was corrupted too. It began to look as though I had lost the nineteen pages I had written since the first computer glitch plus all the rewriting I had done on the original forty that the computer pro had rescued.
“I’m pretty much in shellshock now,” I wrote Alice Turner of Playboy, “but what I suppose I’ll do is wait for the new computer to arrive, maybe Wednesday, and then start putting the whole damn thing in once more, trying to reconstruct (though you never really can) the stuff I had been doing all this past week. I can see that I’m going to wind up earning about five cents an hour on this project even if everything goes perfectly the third time, which is by no means assured.
“The one consolation I have is that I didn’t write the final scene yet, and so I didn’t lose the final scene. The rest of it exists in my head and in all sorts of fragmentary drafts, which I suppose I can piece together, but the problem is that the second time around I had tidied up all the problems that I had created in the first draft, and I will never be confident in the next version that I’ve rewritten the dialog properly. Hurts too much to laugh, said Adlai Stevenson, but I’m too old to cry, so I guess I’ll have a couple of drinks instead. Tomorrow, as Tolstoy said, is another day.”
Enter a second savior that grim Sunday evening, though: our friend and neighbor Carol Carr, who showed up equipped with some program that allowed us to bring up on screen, page by page, the whole corrupted document, and print it from the screen. What came out, alas, was mostly babble: a Martian mix, miscellaneous random consonants (not vowels!) and numbers and keyboard symbols with an occasional intelligible phrase glaring out of the welter of nonsense. But that was better than nothing. The next day I told Alice Turner what Carol had achieved: “She spent hours waving magic wands in front of Karen’s computer and was able to coax out pages and pages of gibberish printout, which I am now reassembling, jigsaw-puzzle fashion, by locating recognizable passages, putting them into the proper order, and transcribing them by hand onto the old first draft that the last bunch of computer wizards coaxed out of my old computer last week. So far I’ve reached page 28 of the original 40-page draft and have pretty much reconstructed all the revisions. Unfortunately a lot of the really good stuff in the climactic scenes didn’t emerge yesterday, but at least I have typed rough drafts of that and I ought to be able to put them back together in something approximating the level of yesterday’s destroyed version.”
New computer came, finally. I learned how to use it by entering poor garbled “Spook City” in something like proper form. I rewrote as I went, and cautiously produced a new printout every afternoon. On Friday, October 18, I finally finished what looked like a complete draft of the story, though it still needed some trimming and polishing. Two days later—a furiously hot summer day—my part of California caught fire and three thousand houses all about me were destroyed. It looked as though our house might go as well. Karen and I were forced to flee, taking with us our cats, a handful of household treasures, and a backup disk of the accursed “Spook City.” Whatever else happened, I didn’t want to have to write that thing a third time.
We were able to return home after eighteen hours. The fire had stopped a mile north of us. (Carol Carr had had an even closer singe; all the houses across the street from hers were burned, but hers went unharmed.) After a couple of shaky days I got back to work and on October 25, only two weeks beyond deadline, I sent it to Playboy, telling Alice:
“Here, thank God, is the goddamned story, and what a weird experience it has been. Written on four different machines—my old computer, Karen’s computer, my ancient manual typewriter, and my jazzy new computer—and lost twice by computers and both times recovered with the aid of technical wizardry, and typed over and over from one machine to the other, and interrupted by a natural disaster that makes our earthquake of a few years ago seem trivial—I feel as though I’ve been writing it forever. I wake up mumbling it to myself. I never dreamed I was embarking on such an epic struggle when I proposed the story; I thought it would simply be a few weeks of the usual tough work, a nice payday, and on to the next job…Anyway, here’s the story. I hope you like it. You must be starting to feel as though you’ve been writing it forever too.” She did like it, and published it in the August, 1992 Playboy, just as had been planned when w
e first started talking about my doing a novella for her a year before.
And, with some trepidation, I will herewith instruct my computer to copy its text from my 1991 story file into this present collection. If you don’t find it here, you’ll know why.
——————
The air was shining up ahead, a cold white pulsing glow bursting imperiously out of the hard blue desert sky. That sudden dazzle told Demeris that he was at the border; he was finally getting his first glimpse of the place where human territory ended and the alien-held lands began.
He halted and stood staring for a moment, half expecting to see monsters flying around overhead on the far side of the line; and right on cue, something weird went flapping by, a blotch of darkness against the brilliant icy sheen over there in the Occupied Zone. It was a heavy thing the size of a hawk and a half, with a lumpy greenish body and narrow wings like sawblades and a long snaky back that had a little globular purple head at the end of it. The bird, if that was what it was, flew on past, heading north, dropping a line of bright turquoise turds behind it. A little burst of flame sprang up in the dry grass where each one fell.
“Thank you kindly for that pretty welcome,” Demeris called out after it, sounding jauntier than he felt.
He went closer to the barrier. It sprang straight up out of the ground like an actual wall, but one that was intangible and more or less transparent: He could make out vague outlines of what lay beyond that dizzying shield of light, a blurry landscape that should have been basically the same on the Spook side of the line as it was over here, low sandy hills, gray splotches of sagebrush, sprawling clumps of prickly pear, but that was in fact mysteriously touched by strangeness—unfamiliar serrated buttes, angular chasms with metallic blue-green walls, black-trunked leafless trees with rigid branches jutting out like horizontal crossbars. Everything was veiled by the glow of the barrier that separated the Occupied Zone from the fragment of the former United States that lay to the west of it, and he couldn’t be sure how much he was actually seeing and how much was simply the product of his expectant imagination.
A shiver of distaste ran through him. Demeris’ father, who was dead now, had always regarded the Spooks as his personal enemy. “They’re just biding their time, Nick,” his father would say. “One of these days they’ll come across the line and grab our land the way they grabbed what they’ve got already. And there won’t be a goddamned thing we can do about it.” Demeris had dedicated himself to maintaining the order and prosperity of the little ranch near the eastern border of Free Country that was his family heritage. He loathed the Spooks, not just for what they had done but simply because they were hateful—unknown, strange, unimaginable, alien. Not us. Others were able to take the aliens and the regime they had imposed on the old U.S.A. for granted: It had happened long ago, ancient history. There had never been a hint that the elder Demeris’ fears were likely to be realized. In 150 years, the Spooks had shown no interest in expanding beyond the territory they had seized at the beginning, the Occupied Zone.
He took another step forward, and another, and waited for things to come into better focus. But they didn’t.
Demeris had made the first part of the journey from Albuquerque to Spook Land on muleback, with his brother Bud accompanying him as far as the west bank of the Pecos. But when they reached the river, Demeris had sent Bud back with the mules. Bud was five years younger than Demeris, but he had three kids already. Men who had kids had no business going into Spook territory. You were supposed to go across when you were a kid yourself, for a lark, for a stunt.
Demeris had had no time for larks and stunts. His parents had died when he was a boy, leaving him to raise his two small sisters and three younger brothers. By the time they were grown, he was too old to be very interested in adventures in the Occupied Zone. But this last June his youngest brother, Tom, an unpredictable kid whose head seemed stuffed with fantasies and incoherent yearnings, had turned 18 and gone to make his entrada. That was what New Mexicans called someone’s first crossing of the border—a rite of passage, the thing you did to show that you had become an adult. Demeris had never seen anything particularly adult about going to Spook Land, but he saw such things differently from most people. So Tom had gone in.
He hadn’t come out, though.
The traditional length of time for an entrada was 30 days. Tom had been gone three months now. Worry over Tom nagged at Demeris like an aching tooth. Tom was his reckless baby. Always had been, always would be. And so Demeris had decided to go in after him. Someone had to fetch Tom out of that place. The head of the family, the one who sought responsibility the way other people looked for shade on a sunny day, had appointed himself the one to do it. Demeris was the only family member, besides Tom himself, who had never married, who had no kids, who could afford to take a risk.
And now he was at the barrier zone itself.
The moment he stepped through the fringes of the field he felt it starting. It came on in undulating waves, shaking him as an earthquake would, making him slip and slide and struggle to stay upright. The air around him turned thick and yellow so that he couldn’t see more than a couple of yards in any direction. Just in front of him was a blood-hued blur that abruptly resolved itself into an army of scarlet caterpillars looping swiftly toward him over the ground, millions of them, a blazing carpet. They spread out all around him. Little teeth were gnashing in their pop-eyed heads, and they made angry muttering sounds as they advanced. He walked on, trying to avoid them, but it was like walking on a sea of slime. A growling thunder rose from them as he crushed them underfoot. “Bad dreams,” Bud was saying, in his ear, in his brain. “All they are is a bunch of bad dreams.” Sure. Demeris forged onward. How deep was the boundary strip, anyway? Twenty yards? Fifty? His eyes were stinging, his teeth seemed to be coming loose.
Beyond the caterpillars, he found himself at the edge of an abyss of pale quivering jelly. He compelled himself into it. A wave of pain swept upward from the scrotum to the back of his neck: He pivoted and twisted and then felt his backbone bending as if it was going to pop out of his flesh the way the fishbone comes away from the filleted meat. Stinking rain swept horizontally, and then hot sleet that raked his forehead till he howled with rage. No wonder you couldn’t get a mule to cross this barrier.
Head down, gasping for breath, he pushed himself forward another few steps. Something like a crab with wings came fluttering up out of a steaming mudhole and seized his arm, biting it just below the elbow on the inside. A stream of black blood spurted out. He yelled and flapped his arm until he shook off the thing. The pain lit a track of fire all along his arm, up to the shoulder and doubling back to his twitching fingers. He stared at his hand and saw just a knob of raw meat with blackened sticks jutting from it. Then it flickered and looked whole again.
He felt tears on his cheeks and that amazed him: The last time he had wept was when his father died, years ago. Suddenly the urge arose in him to give up and turn back while he still could. That surprised him too. It had always been his way to plug ahead, even when others were telling him, Demeris, don’t be an asshole. Now, here, in this place where he absolutely could not yield, he felt the temptation to slough off and go back. But he knew it was only the barrier playing devil tricks with him. So he encapsulated the desire to turn back into a hard shell and hurled it from him and watched it burn up in a puff of flame. And he went onward.
Three suns blazed overhead, a red one, a green one, a blue. The air seemed to be melting. He heard chattering voices like demonic static, and then disembodied faces were hovering all around him, jittering and shimmering in the soupy murk, the faces of people he knew, his sisters, Ellie and Netta, his nieces and nephews, his friends. He cried out to them. But everyone was horridly distorted, blobby-cheeked and bug-eyed, grotesque fun-house images. They pointed at him and laughed. Then he saw his father and mother pointing and laughing too, which had to be impossible, and he understood. Bud was right: These were nothing but illusions or ma
ybe delusions. Things that he carried within him. Part of him. Harmless.
He began to run, plunging on through a tangle of slippery threads, a soft, spongy curtain. It yielded as he ripped at it and he fell face down onto a bank of dry sandy soil that was unremarkable in every way: desert dirt, real-world stuff, no fancy colors, no crazy textures. The extra suns were gone and the one that remained was the yellow one he had always known. A wind blew against his face. He was across. He had made it through the barrier.
He lay still for a minute or two, catching his breath.
Hot stabs of pain were coming from his arm, and he looked down at a jagged bloody cut near the inside of the elbow, where he had imagined the crab thing had bitten him. But the crab thing had been only a dream, only an illusion. Can an illusion bite? he wondered. The pain was no illusion. A nasty pulsation ran through the whole arm, making his hand quiver rhythmically, dribbling fresh blood from the cut in time with his heartbeat. He wiped some of the blood away and examined it: maybe two inches long and deep enough to see into. Fine, he thought, I’ll bleed to death from an imaginary cut before I’m ten feet inside the Occupied Zone. But after a moment, the wound began to clot and the bleeding stopped, though the pain remained.
Shakily, he stood and glanced about.
Behind him was the vertical column of the barrier field, looking no more menacing than a searchlight beam. Dimly, he saw the desert flatlands of Free Country beyond it, the scrubby ordinary place from which he had come.
On this side was a realm of magic and mysteries.
Hot Times in Magma City, 1990-95 Page 23
