The Chronotope and Other Speculative Fictions

by Michael Hemmingson

  There was about three thousand words of explanation of a ghastly war fought among dead elves resurrected by a dark lord of mystic origins and the fisherfolk of the Isle of Jura, who joined forces with the simple townsfolk of Sell and Mull, who opposed this travesty; they were aided by the fairyfolk of Crinan Woods in this struggle, yet despite their valor and pureness of heart, they were no match for zombie elves who, when struck down, merely rose again, for the dead cannot die twice. Only a being of similar enchanted proportions could defeat such foul creatures; so the good folk with the aid of ferries made a request to The Great Tree of Gaia, found in the center of the woods, for an army that could take care of the job. Their prayers were answered, but they did not get an army; from the ether of neverwhere came a tall and mighty man who was part tree, part flora and fauna, and part blood and bone, who single-handedly defeated the zombified elves and killed the dark lord who created them. This entity was named Gweydelthoth Mywar, who then resided in the woods and forests, and let it be known that whenever he was needed to defeat evil, he would come.

  It was quite a story; I wanted to know more. I fixed the grammar and spelling, broke the narrative into paragraphs, and started to believe in the possibilities.…

  VI.

  As promised, the green man returned that evening. I was opening a bottle of white wine when I heard the three notes from the flute; I quickly turned around and there he was again, sitting at the desk and looking at the laptop.

  “So what do you think?” he asked.

  “I was wondering if you were real,” I said, “or if I wrote all that in a drunken sleepy stupor.”

  “Of course.”

  Of course what?

  “Are you Gweydelthoth Mywar?” I asked.

  “That’s one of my names, but you can call me Mr. Green. Can I have some of that wine?”

  He picked up the wooden mug and tossed it my way. I almost didn’t catch it, my hands were shaking. I poured some wine in the cup, approached and sat down across from him. His eyes and lips were green and he had a rich forest aroma about him.

  “You like the story so far,” he said, slugging the wine back.

  “Yes, very much. Is there more?”

  “There is a lot more, lad.”

  “Will you write it down?”

  He pushed the laptop my way. “I will tell you, and you write it down as you see fit. I can speak a good saga, but I don’t have the gift of story structure and dramatic turns.”

  VII.

  And so Mr. Green told me how after that battle, there were many more to be fought and won around the world: cultures and tribes on this very continent prayed and beseeched the earth mother and the ground that was her essence for a variety of needs, and from the plants and dirt and roots he arose. He was not alone, for soon his brothers and sisters were required; they resided in every corner of the earth.

  “Our image has been drawn in caves and on rocks,” he told me. “One can view our likeness on the doors of churches where, while the worship is of Christ, the old ways of the woodlands is not completely forgotten.”

  He came to visit every night for a week, staying until an hour before sunrise when he would use his flute to disappear. I asked him how that worked and he shrugged and said, “Does it matter how? It simply does. The problem with you modern men of this world of science and gadgets is you want to take the magic apart and find an answer that is not magic.”

  VIII.

  His stories began to form into a book, and after one month of visits and long tales of vast wonder, I had 110,000 words that did not take long to break down into chapters and three main sections. I titled it Rise of the Green Man.

  My British publisher was delighted with it, as was my U.S. publisher. Half a dozen translation rights were sold before the book came out. It was rushed into production and on the shelves in hardcover nine months after completion. While not a bestseller, it did well in the genre market and my publishers contracted me for two sequels.

  I returned to the cottage the next year to work on the second book. I went into the woods and called for him and that night, he showed up as he did the year before, and once again we sat together and he told me the adventures of his life, which went back six thousand years or more, he was not quite sure. “Maybe seven or eight,” he said with a sigh.

  The second book was titled Path of the Green Man, and the third Interview with the Green Man.

  When the third book was nearly done, he told me I did not have to keep coming back to Scotland, he could find me anywhere on the earth, all I had to do was ask. “I am not keen on the big cities,” he said, “but I can do it.”

  From then on, he showed up at my New York condo on Park Avenue; the fourth book, Wars of the Green Man, had hit the bestseller lists, the first had been made into a Hollywood film, there were TV shows and comic books in the works; I was doing quite well.

  We had a nice arrangement: I kept his story alive in the imaginations of mankind and he kept me alive with material for consumer consumption.

  IX.

  Romancing the Green Man was a breakthrough title, attracting the lucrative paranormal romance audience and developed into a three-season series by the BBC, which was adapted for a five-season series by Showtime. There was a primal drive in the notion of sexual encounters between human women and leafy men. The Green Man vs. the Martians caused some friction with fans, who did not care for the science-fiction element of devious space invaders wanting to strip the earth of its resources and being stopped by the Green Man Family. Kingdoms of the Green Man, the first in a ten-book cycle I called The Greenman Chronicles, won my fans back, and the International Fantasy Society gave the Best Novel Award to the second title, Nights of the Green Man.

  X.

  Returning home from the awards banquet, Mr. Green appears in the back of the towncar again, still wearing that ridiculous tux.

  “How you feelin’ now, lad?”

  “As always, the fraud,” I confess.

  “You have money, fame, happiness, what more could you ask for?”

  Happiness? Really? Every time I tried to have a relationship with a woman, they were either fans who thought I was something I was not or gold-diggers who wanted me to help them get their own fantasy and romance novels published, so they could get rich and famous. And there was that one who left me, claiming I was insane, when I told her the truth.…

  “You won’t have to feel like a fraud any longer,” Mr. Green says. “’Tis time for you to get creative, lad. I have no more stories for you. I’ve told you all. You’re on your own. I know you can do it.”

  The blood leaves my face. “What do you mean, you have no more stories?”

  “I’ve given you all I got, sir,” he says with spread hands, sounding like Scotty on Star Trek.

  “But…but…I’m contracted for eight more titles in this series! Ten million advance, one million per book!”

  “I have faith in you,” he says.

  “That’s good, because I don’t. Look, Mr. Green, please,” I say helplessly, “for nine years now I have not had to use my imagination. I’m simply an editor shaping your words into commercialized product. I don’t have a creative, original bone in my body. I’m worse than a hack.”

  For the first time since I have known him, Mr. Green appears troubled. “I see this is true, Danny boy.”

  “Don’t leave me out to dry,” I say.

  “I need to ponder this new quagmire,” he says, lifting the flute to his mouth.

  “Wait!” I try to grab the flute but he plays the three notes and he’s gone, leaving that damn mug behind like he always does.

  XI.

  Mr. Green says he has faith in me; maybe I can prove him right. But for three nights I sit behind the computer and nothing comes out after typing Book Three of the Green Man Chronicles.

  “I give up,” I say aloud, and that is when I hear the wonderful, lovely notes of his flute…except this time there are six of them, not three.

  He is not alone
; next to him is a female of his kind, lovely green skin with longer braches and leaves on her head, thicker green lips and saucer-shaped green eyes.

  “Allow me to introduce you to Mrs. Green,” he says, “my wife of two thousand years.”

  “You never told me you were married,” I say.

  “You never asked. Say, lad, have any wine around here?”

  The three of us sit down with two bottles of white wine. Mr. Green says he knows how to fix my problem. “I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before,” he says, “the noggin is getting’ mossy with age. My wife will tell you her stories, how she came to me, the events we shared, good for at least three books. After that, her sisters and my brothers and our cousins will come to tell you their yarns. From all over the world! Lad, your grandchildren will have to pick up where we leave off!”

  “I need to work on getting some children first,” I say.

  “I know a few good human women I can introduce you to,” says Mrs. Green.

  I think I blush.

  “So where do we begin?” she asks. “The battle with the winged giraffes of Mount Vosto or the invading horde of the uni-dolphins on the French coast?”

  “Either is keen,” says Mr. Green.

  “I need to open a third bottle,” I say.

  “Make it four or five,” says Mrs. Green.

  “My wife can outdrink me any hour of day,” says Mr. Green. “Been doin’ it for fifteen hundred years at least.”

  “It was you who introduced me to the barley and hops,” she says, kissing him on the cheek. To me: “I think we can begin with how my husband caused me to become an inebriated branch wench and we…well, we made love. It was a chase, and I was his catch.”

  Sex? I can see the reviews now…and the fan response…and the new TV series.…

  “Wine coming up,” I say.

  I have not felt this giddy in quite a while.

  —November, 2012

  Portland, Oregon

  THE LAST BUSHEL OF GRAPES

  I.

  When Armageddon came, and the people of the world suffered greatly, trembling in fear, praying to various gods, I was doing five-to-ten for bank robbery at Hawthorne State Prison in California. My cellmate was doing twenty-five-to-life for second-degree murder: he had beheaded his wife.

  “The funny thing is,” said my cellmate, Greg, “I have ended the world at least three times, maybe four.” Greg was a former film and TV producer in Los Angeles.

  I was a former con man and heel.

  But we got along well.

  “This sucks,” he said about the end of the world.

  The warden and guards had abandoned the prison—they all went home to be with their families and they were either dead or waiting to die, just as they had left the incarcerated to die.

  But when you got several hundred hardcore criminals in racial gangs, murderers, rapists, terrorists alike, facing end times, you’re not going to find very many frightened human beings; in fact, most of the inmates at Hawthorne Prison welcomed this change in history, because the end meant freedom.

  First, they went after each other: the Aryans and the blacks, the Hispanics and the Asians, the Christians and the Muslims—pent-up hatreds, old scores and debts. You might think the last days would be cause for harmony and peace, but you’d think differently if you witnessed how these men butchered each other.

  Greg and I hid in the shadows, not wanting to be a part of it. We were both Caucasian middle-aged men and we didn’t run with any gangs or religious creed, but that didn’t mean some crazed maniac wouldn’t hesitate to take us out just for the hell of it. No one ever thought that when Armageddon came, a lot of dangerous and insane people would be released onto what was left of the world.

  II.

  When things settled down, we walked over the dead and mutilated bodies and left the prison grounds. It was so easy. No guards in the towers, no locked gates.

  In the distance, the remnants of a mushroom cloud loomed like Goliath in a bad mood and made the sky purple and orange.

  “What do you think they hit? San Francisco?” Greg asked.

  “Or Sacramento,” I said.

  “There’s the Alameda military base. My bet is on San Fran.”

  Los Angeles and San Diego had been taken out, this much we knew and was evident when looking at the skies south.

  “How long you think before the fallout hits here?”

  I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to know. We already knew we were dead, as did everyone else.

  III.

  The California prison system creates economic communities wherever a prison facility is located; outside the prison are small towns populated by the guards and other employees needed to maintain the stir, along with the families of these employees. Stores, gas stations, bars, and restaurants are needed to maintain American town life. The first store Greg and I found was completely empty, having been looted from the first bomb. The only item we found was a lone bushel of grapes in the large storage refrigerator in the back of the store.

  “Grapes,” Greg said, amused. “If we could only make wine. You think they’re radioactive?”

  I ate one of the grapes. “Sure tastes good.”

  “One bushel and two of us.”

  “50/50?”

  “All the way, buddy.”

  IV.

  Greg wanted to head east and I wanted to go north. We shook hands. There were plenty of cars around to take. I passed on the ones with dead drivers in the seats. Some of them looked like they committed suicide instead of murdered. We both wound up with SUVs, his black, mine white. “It’s fitting,” Greg said, “all the irony left in the world: I’m the wife-killer and you’re the bank robber, so who’s evil and who’s good?” We shook hands and with our grapes, we went our separate ways. There were many days when I hated sharing that small cell with the guy, and many times I wish he would go away forever, but I knew I would miss him: I had no one to talk to now.

  V.

  There were no radio stations broadcasting. No surprise there. The CDs left in the vehicle were all rap. I listened to lyrics about thug lives, homies, killing the enemy, rape, and urban mayhem.

  The drive to Santa Barbara took three hours. The city was abandoned, or people were hiding and waiting for the end. Several people walked the streets in a daze and looked like zombies.

  I went to the bank.

  The bank I had robbed.

  The robbery that had put me in Hawthorne for five-to-ten.

  VI.

  They say criminals always return to the scene of their crime and here I was: I wanted to get one last look at the place that symbolized my downfall. The doors were locked but the glass windows had been shattered. All the tills were emptied; twenty and fifty dollar bills lay scattered on the floor. Either the bank employees or citizens had taken the bombings as an opportunity to do what I had done—this made me smirk, because what value or good would money do now?

  Still, money is nice to hold and look at. I picked up a few bills and smelled them; they were new. I even put them in my pocket like I would have use for them.

  I went to the vault, thinking I should have emptied that during the robbery, instead of the $6,000 I acquired from the tellers; at least the conviction would have been worth it, if I had walked out with, say, $250,000. A quarter million or five bucks, I would’ve gotten the same sentence.

  I could have had a lot of fun with a big take, maybe buying some invisibility, erasing my tracks, moving to Venezuela where there’s no extradition treaty. It took the feds two months to find me and by that time the six grand was long spent; with $250,000 or more, I could’ve been a Vegas high roller or lived like royalty in a third world country.

  A lot of what ifs went through my head: what if I had been more careful, what if I had left Santa Barbara, what if I had not robbed the bank at all?

  I was desperate at the time. The sinking economy meant no jobs for a regular guy like me with only a high school education; I needed to
eat and keep a roof over my head, and my sick mother needed some help too: that’s where most that money went, and it was she who gave me up to the FBI.

  She lived in San Diego and I figured she was dead, as the whole city was dead.

  As I would be soon.

  As for the vault, it was empty. Again I wondered what anyone would do with useless currency. The government was vaporized, and I’d bet the money I had in my pocket that Fort Knox was a crater.

  A criminal will sometimes return to the scene of his crime, the moment that changed his life.

  It was time to go.

  VII.

  A noise startled me, Behind me. A bang on one of the metal desks. Probably an animal, but I went to look anyway.

  A young woman was squeezed under the desk. She wore jeans and a sweater and had short blonde hair.

  “Don’t hurt me,” she said.

  “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “Don’t rape me, please.”

  “I’m not going to do that either. Come out from under there.”

  Slowly, cautiously, she stood up, keeping her eye on me, looking at my hands to see if I had a weapon.

  “A gentlemen, how nice,” she said.

  “What were you doing under there?”

  “Hiding from you.”

  “I mean, what are you doing in here?” I asked.

  She looked at me hard. “I know you,” she said, “I remember you. You robbed us two years ago.”

  I didn’t recognize her.

  “My hair was longer then,” she said, “and dyed black.”

  “You’re a teller here?”

  “I was,” she said.

  “So what are you doing here?”

  “I could ask the same.”

  “You look hungry,” I said.