Always present yourself like a pro or be prepared to be dismissed as an amateur. Keep your message simple and positive. Don’t be overwhelming, needy, angry, or defensive. If you get criticism from an agent or editor, consider yourself lucky. If they really thought you sucked, you’d have gotten a form rejection. If they think enough of your work to give you a tip or two, consider it carefully. Editors can be mistaken, but if you have access to someone’s experience and expertise, take advantage of it.
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PART IV
HUGO MANN’S PERFECT SOUL
R. A. Salvatore was kind enough to contribute the following short story, which has never been published before. It is an excellent example of a genre story that is about something, as you’ll see from Salvatore’s comments following the story. Look at it as a good example of the possible range of the genre and for some of Salvatore’s tricks of characterization and plotting. Anyone who thinks the fantasy and science fiction genres are all about swords and ray guns hasn’t read …
HUGO MANN’S PERFECT SOUL
A SHORT STORY BY R. A. SALVATORE
FROM THE DESK OF HUGO MANN
By the time you read this, I might be dead.
I say “might,” but it’s only a question of courage now. I’m certainly convinced that I’d rather be dead, that I’d rather let some unfortunate corporeal entity (or entities, if it gets portioned) take on this perfect soul of mine and face the future that I do not wish to face.
I guess you could call this a suicide note. I prefer to call it an explanation, and if you come to view things the way I have come to view them, and if you are a human being, then you’ll not begrudge me the bullet I put in my head. Of course, if you’re one of the majority now, one of those who was not so fortunate in the soul-picking game as Hugo Mann, then you’ll probably have a good laugh.
I remember looking into the mirror on that morning when all this began, on that first occasion when Richard suggested that I go to see him professionally. I don’t often look into the mirror anymore. I like to say that it’s because I’m completely comfortable with my appearance, but I suspect that it’s more a matter of fearing what I might see. I’m closer to fifty than forty and a million years removed from the playing fields reserved for younger men, but it isn’t vanity that keeps me from the mirror. I have little care that my chest seems to have fallen into my waist, even less care for the salt that has invaded my pepper-black hair. I fear what’s on the inside, what might be reflected in my blue eyes. They were bluer when I was a kid—hell, my nickname was “Husky Dog”—but the color, the luster, has been slipping away.
I looked that morning, though, brushing a hand through my hair and rubbing it over my face, deciding that the mirror was wrong and I really didn’t need a shave.
Vanity.
I was going to college, you see, between jobs and wondering if I could rediscover some of the impossible hopes of youth. There was something exciting about sitting in a classroom again, especially surrounded by beautiful (or at least perky) young, bright-eyed ladies. Someone once told me that the only positive thing about getting older was that more women looked good to you. I’ll buy that.
I don’t know why I chose to take a class on Mark Twain. Something about that old coot tugs at me, some sense of reality in his writing that always made me think he knew what other people should but didn’t. And don’t. I understand Mark Twain better now, and I know why he died in bitter misery.
That morning I took my usual seat beside Dr. Richard Hilgedick, a fellow student nearly twice my age, and he gave me his usual smirk and wink. I had been immediately drawn to this guy, on the first day of class—as soon as I realized that he wasn’t the professor. The initial attraction, of course, was that he was the only one in the room older than me, which gave me a weird sense of power over the guy, like I could understand the dynamics of the classroom experience better than he.
That lasted until he looked my way and flashed me that disarming grin, that smug—not bad smug, just perfectly content—grin, his properly trimmed gray beard and moustache forming sharp angles around the corners of his mouth. Perfectly content and perfectly proper; the guy had posture that rated eleven on a scale of ten.
The professor, a tired gent maybe ten years older than me, came in soon after. He looked as bored with life as I felt. His hairline started halfway up the front of his head, as though constant stroking by that nervous hand of his had pushed it back to there. He read the attendance right off, pausing, his eyes going wide, before he chanted, “Richard Hilgedick?”
“Right here,” Richard answered easily.
Some jock from the back, who should have been out banging rivets with his forehead and not in a college classroom, snickered, and the young lady on the opposite side of Richard couldn’t bite back her nervous chuckle. He looked at her, right at her, right through her brown eyes, and calmly said, “ ‘Hilge’ means ‘huge.’ ”
Then he looked back to the front, still perfectly content, while the girl—and she seemed a girl, a lost, little girl, at that moment—turned the color of a McIntosh apple. There had been no malice, no foreplay, in Richard’s answer. And while he hadn’t said it in a condescending way, I knew that he didn’t give a shit about little Miss Perky. It was as if he had looked at her, uttered three words, and let her know in no uncertain terms that she was a puppet, and he held the strings.
It was curious how the girl’s clothes no longer seemed to fit her so fashionably, how she suddenly seemed a frightened child in the dressing, make-up, and perfect nails of a college woman.
I was too impressed to laugh at the joke, and Richard soon turned to me, nodding his approval of my approval. He didn’t look through me, as he had the girl, and I got the distinct feeling that he saw some substance within me that prevented such a superior scan. I thought it was my age.
Was I wrong.
***
Richard and I became friends right there in that first class, and during the semester we had some of the most outstanding, outrageous discussions of Mark Twain. Often we would linger on the campus hours after the class, talking and arguing, sometimes with the professor, sometimes alone. My wife, to her great credit, accepted my excuses, understood how important this intellectual relationship had become to me. Hell, I think she was just glad to see me excited again, excited about anything.
And it was exciting. Richard was a psychotherapist and had an answer for every question about Twain’s ultimate depression, the escalating cynical attitude that haunted and consumed the man until he died.
“I could have shown him the truth of his despair,” Richard boasted.
“And that would have made him happier?” I asked with open sarcasm.
“No.” It was among the most profound statements I have ever heard, coupled by a look in Richard’s brown eyes that broke my heart.
It was at that moment that Richard invited me to come in and see him professionally. I was taken aback—I never thought I needed therapy and wondered what the hell this guy had noticed about me.
“I can show you things that you never expected to see,” he said.
“About myself?”
His nod was full of … “gravity” is the only word I can think of to properly describe that nod, and the penetrating look in his brown eyes. “And about the others,” he finished, as solemnly as a priest at a graveside service.
“The others,” he’d said. What others? Richard flustered me, scared me even, but I liked him anyway, and I trusted him, so I agreed to go.
I looked in the mirror again on the morning of my appointment with Richard, but I didn’t suspect it would be the last time I would see myself in quite the same way.
***
“Past Life Regression Experience.” That’s what Richard called it, and when he spoke the words, his expression was as straight and as serious as I had ever seen.
“Past life?” I hadn’t meant it as a question, really. I was just mulling over the words, trying to decide how far my pat
ience with Richard would go.
I’ve never been an overly religious man, more concerned with the here and now than with the hereafter and then, and always considered reincarnation as the stuff of bad Shirley MacLaine jokes. I’d never given it a second thought, actually, but Richard had, as was obvious from his trembling hands as he set the single candlestick on the small table between us.
“You can’t really expect me—” I began to protest, but he cut me off with a knowing look. He had heard it all before, I realized, countless times.
“What are you afraid of?” he asked, again with that professional calm, that supreme confidence. Suddenly, I knew how the little girl with the perfect clothes in class had felt.
I stammered over the question for some time, not really having an answer.
“If I’m wrong or if I’m right,” Richard said easily, “either way, you’ve learned something about yourself, and about the truth.”
“What truth?”
“The truth.”
I remember bringing my hands up and scratching hard at the back of my neck. I didn’t usually do that; there was something very different about this nervous reaction, something tingling. Why was I so anxious?
Richard lit the candle and took out a pocket watch. A pocket watch! I remember thinking how cliché this whole thing was, like a bad movie. I also remember my silent insistence that I was one of those strong-willed people who couldn’t possibly be hypnotized. I had seen nightclub hypnotists, and whenever my date suggested I go up to the stage and try it, I would only shrug and say there was no way I could be hypnotized.
I think I was afraid.
I don’t remember anything Richard said; I don’t remember going out.
Later in Richard’s office, he questioned me about my experience. I was lighthearted about the whole thing. I believed that I had dreamed a fairly unremarkable dream. I was a young kid again, running for some reason or another along streets, looking up at the street signs and asking directions. I was frantic, desperate almost, though for the life of me I couldn’t remember why.
“Oh, one more thing,” I told Richard. “I skidded to a stop at a corner and nearly slipped into the street. You should have seen the face of the driver.”
“What driver?”
“The driver of the truck that almost ran me down!” I explained with a light-hearted laugh. I didn’t understand.
“What did the truck look like?” Richard asked, and his intensity was amazing.
I shrugged. It was just a truck. “Old,” I said. I had a distinct feeling the truck was old.
Richard nodded, again with that smug smile.
“Is there something significant in that?” I asked, and I was quickly growing impatient.
“What was the name of the street?”
I closed my eyes and tried to conjure the memory, but the dream was fast slipping away. Finally I visualized the sign and answered. Richard chuckled.
“Is there something significant?” I asked him again, though I knew by his expression that I had indeed hit on something.
“Was this a memory or a dream?” he asked me.
It was the first time I had thought about it in that manner, and after a moment I just shrugged, at first not understanding what the difference might be. And then it hit me. I understood why Richard had been so interested in the truck, in the street sign. He was thinking that my dream had not been a dream at all and not really a memory either. He was thinking that I had just experienced a moment from a past life.
“When have you been to Germany?” Richard asked in all seriousness.
I had never been out of the country. I started to tell him that—then I realized the street sign was in German.
My wide-eyed expression came as no shock to cool Richard. He reached over and pushed “rewind” on his recorder, stopped it a couple of times, looking for a specific spot in our previous conversation.
“In your recounting, you only related one piece of actual dialogue,” he explained. “When you stopped to ask the woman for directions. Do you remember that now?”
I vaguely remembered the incident, but the words escaped me, lost in the fuzz of the fading dream. I was a bit embarrassed, thinking I should make a conscious effort to try to remember some of my dreams in future, maybe even begin writing them down.
Richard started the tape, and for a moment I was truly confused. It was my voice, no doubt about that, but I couldn’t understand a damned word I was saying!
The dialogue was in German.
“What does this mean?” I asked Richard, and believe me it was hard for pragmatic Hugo Mann to get those words out of his suddenly dry mouth.
“Go home and think about that question,” Richard answered. “I’m not going to try to convince you of anything. But you’re going to convince yourself.”
***
Richard sent me back several times over the next few weeks. Twice I returned to that youthful time in Germany and learned from a newspaper lying in a gutter that the year was 1938. Also, from a World War II book Richard had, we were able to trace some of the street names I recalled, and we came to believe I was in Berlin.
The whole thing was merely an adventure for me, a game, a play, and while I eagerly fell in with Richard’s research, I didn’t really believe any of it—at least not any of Richard’s claims that I was having a past-life experience. After all, I was born only seven years after the date on the newspaper, and in the dream I was just a kid.
In all seriousness, more grim perhaps than I had ever seen him, Richard reminded me that many kids in Germany in 1938 did not survive the next seven years.
Running through the Berlin streets was only one of my experiences. I was in Italy during the Renaissance. Richard was not the least surprised by that. I sailed the Mediterranean—on a pilgrimage, I believed for some reason I couldn’t pinpoint. I hunted a seal in the Arctic along with my Eskimo tribesmen. I worked a field, maybe in the Scottish highlands.
I was a woman that last time, Wordsworth’s proverbial “solitary highland lass,” and the play was grander indeed. I coyly asked Richard if I might try to get back there, see if I could find a mirror …The dirty-minded old lout got a laugh out of that.
Through it all, I was continually amazed at the playback of the tapes. I was speaking languages I had no knowledge of. Hell, when Richard brought the Eskimo tape to a professor at the college who was supposedly versed in Native American languages, he couldn’t make out a word of it. He did say, though, that it sounded correct, that the accent and inflections closely corresponded to some of the older tribal Eskimo tongues.
It was starting to get scary, but it was also fun. An adventure, a bit of spice in a settled life. My wife thought I was crazy; my kid thought I was cool.
I thought … hell, I didn’t even know what I thought at that point. I was in a movie, and Richard was running the projector.
***
“You’re going a long way today,” he announced on one visit. I was in a good mood that day; we had just received our grades. I remember telling Richard about my A, and he waved it away without regard, as though my announcement was no news to him.
“The only way you couldn’t get an A in a Mark Twain class would be if the professor was completely devoid of a soul,” he explained. “I looked into our professor’s eyes, and I can assure you that he’s fairly well-souled.”
What the hell was this guy talking about? I shrugged an agreement and let the matter drop, not even wanting to know.
“A long way today,” Richard said again as he set the candle on the table, his brown eyes sparkling eagerly in the flickering light. His hand was trembling again, more than I had seen it shake since our very first try.
“How long?” I asked. For some reason, Richard was scaring me.
He shrugged. “I don’t think any specific date is important this time,” he replied.
I started to question him about that cryptic answer, but he put a finger over pursed lips and promised me that I would come
to understand.
***
“The world was bright, the colors vivid. I stretched in front of the rising sun, basking in its glory, absorbing its warmth and energy. I was naked—we were all naked, men and women and children, but we were not even conscious of that fact. It didn’t matter.
“All that mattered now was the tall savannah grass and the warm sun.
“And then the world changed.”
So did my breathing on the tape. Richard stopped the recorder and looked at me directly.
“How did it change?” he asked. He had never before interrupted a tape playback after a session, but this time it was as if he realized that my memory of the past-life experience remained strong in my mind.
I stumbled for words then shook my head in frustration. I couldn’t explain it.
Richard lifted a hand to calm me and started the tape again.
“The sun was gone—like an … eclipse, but not an eclipse. We were afraid. I was afraid, but … shit, I don’t know. It was like something warm came down and touched me, touched all of us.”
“Then what happened?” Richard’s voice on the tape prompted after a long pause.
“It was different. Just … different. The sun came back, and we were still in the grass, still ….
“But it was different. Better. Everyone was closer together, and I remember … damn, there was more energy between the lot of us than from the sun. We were ….”
Richard shut off the recorder and looked at me again.
“What did I see?” I asked.
Richard’s wistful smile brought me a great degree of comfort, and I needed it when he gave me his answer.
“Genesis.”
“Genesis?” I probably don’t need to tell you that my tone showed me to be less than convinced—and I’m sure that you’re less than convinced as you read this. And yet, there was a nagging truth to Richard’s explanation. A part of me could not deny that I believed him.
The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction Page 17
