The doorbell wasn’t supposed to ring. Cableguy wasn’t supposed to show up.
She went to the door, stood on bare tiptoes, and peered through the peephole. It might, after all, have been a random attacker. Sometimes, especially if dignitaries were on-site, Admin might budget in a little extra realism.
It was Cableguy. He had the truck. He had the uniform. She didn’t recognize the researcher playing him — a newbie.
Last thing she needed was a newbie to mess up the historical accuracy of her H&H shift. At least he had the hat and toolbox. He was, all-in-all, a great Cableguy: tall and lean; dark, short hair. His sharp jaw-line worked on chewing gum, and practiced glances at his watch and side-to-side made him look impatient.
He rang the doorbell again.
She opened the door.
“Sweet meet,” he said. “Cableguy.”
She caught the name on his uniform tag. “Aaron.” She almost broke character. She almost told him to go away, to get out of the dome and the preserve before he got arrested. Almost, but not quite. Breaking character would only draw criticism no matter how screwy things got. Criticism meant more training, less research, less time alone in her hard suit, less time pacing — less time to herself. Someone might be watching. No matter what, she had to look good, look her period LA part.
She flipped her hair, giggled, and said, “Come in. The sets are over there.” She gestured to her requisite five TV sets — one for each room of the house. They sat in a row on an altar at the far end of her tile-and-plush living room. At the end of the row, they even had a palm-sized, waterproof watchman for the bathroom. In addition to room support, each set represented one of the five major uses: gaming, webbing, dissemination of dissatisfaction, news obsession, and babysitting.
The watchman ran a constant loop of Mouse illusions.
“What’s the problem, ma’am?” he asked.
“Two hundred and fifty-six channels and nothing on.” At least he knew the Cableguy script. He might even make her look good.
“I’ll see what I can do.” He headed to the sets. Tools settled on the carpet, he pulled his pants down far enough to show his butt crack, then he bent and fiddled with the sets.
She began to think maybe Aaron was a professional, an actual historian. He seemed to know what he was doing.
“Can I get you something to drink?” she asked.
“Bottled water would be nice.” He stayed focused on the sets. “Universal remote?”
“Yeah-huh.” She went to the kitchen for a bottle of water. When she came back, he acted like he had fixed the cable feeds. The sets flickered, each with their own representation of life in LA.
She handed him the water.
He smiled.
Fingers touched. He was definitely on script.
During their sex scene, she got her lips up to his ear. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? You can get recycled for this.”
“Research,” he said. “Grad school.”
She gasped and moaned slightly out of time, doing her breathless best to stay in character.
Afterward, nestled up against him, waiting for the five minutes before he would play out the “Got more homes to service” end to their scene, she whispered, “You aren’t authorized, are you?”
“Not.” He pulled her closer to him, tighter and warmer.
Two days later, on First, Argos told Lori she had a special assignment, but she hadn’t been given a script. She’d been told authenticity would depend on surprise. She was coming off shift and stripping out of her hard suit when a camera crew arrived. It was a full-on truck and uplink unit with roving cameramen and a blue-suited Talentbimbo replica. Lori was surprised. A Warhol Moment with a full-unit vid crew meant serious funding. Somebody had pulled strings.
Talentbimbo, a Sino-Hispanic homogenized, accent-free woman with silky, shiny, bouncy-flow hair stepped up and said, “Action.” Talentbimbo pushed a long-handled mike between them. “Lori Welder,” she said, “Do you have any comment on the capture of the Cableguy Rapist?”
She finished racking her suit. She hoped someone was watching, someone could see how cool she was, how authentic, how well she played for the crew.
This wasn’t planned history, but it was sure as hell funded. Good work could mean bigger things for her. More solitude. “No comment,” she said.
“Our sources suggest you had secret communications with him.”
She froze, suppressing a grin. Somebody had been watching.
“Who are your sources?” Lori asked.
“We have transcripts of your cell phone sex addiction extra-polyamorous affair.” Talentbimbo twisted her perfect, plastic face into a smirk. “Lori Welder, do you care to comment now?”
She squared off with Talentbimbo. “He isn’t a rapist.”
“He used a scanner to listen to dispatch calls, wore the Cableguy uniform, made a replica of a Cableguy truck, and used the public trust in Cableguy to gain access to the homes of young women like yourself.”
“Aaron would never rape anyone,” she said. “He’s a good man and a great Cableguy.”
“Now you admit that you knew him?”
She remembered a political axiom from her period polisci class. Denial causes downfall. If caught, become the victim to gain public sympathy. “Of course,” she said. “I knew him. I love him.”
“Well.” Talentbimbo pulled the mike back. “There it is. Another victim of this monster, but this one claims she loved him.”
Lori grabbed the mike. “Aaron!” she exclaimed. “Baby, if you can hear me, I’ll wait for you. I swear it. I’ll write. I’ll visit! I love you, Baby.”
Talentbimbo made a show of wrestling for the mike. She made the cut sign several times, then the lights went dim. Talentbimbo gave Lori a very real dirty look.
Lori realized she had adlibbed right off the map of her colleague’s education and experience. She squared her shoulders, made a show of standing up straight, then strode past the news crew. Passing Talentbimbo, she whispered, “Good girls who love bad boys.”
The news lady lit up. She had a new line of research, and she knew it. Lori had a new stage and likely some better diorama work coming up. No doubt, Aaron would get his degrees, and if she played things right they’d pull a grant for conjugal visits, letter reproduction, and maybe even an escape and helicopter chase.
She hoped someone was watching. History didn’t get more real than this.
About the Author
Eric Witchey’s fiction has appeared nationally and internationally in magazines and anthologies. He has published in multiple genres under several names. His how-to articles have appeared in The Writer Magazine, Writer’s Digest Magazine, Writer’s Northwest Magazine, Northwest Ink, and in a number of on-line publications. His fiction has won recognition from Writers of The Future, New Century Writers, Writer’s Digest, and www.ralan.com. When not teaching or writing, he restores antique HO locomotives or tosses bits of feather and pointy wire at laughing trout.
“White Girl”
by Alethea Kontis
Back in the heyday of the science classes I adored, I learned something very important about the color white: it isn’t actually a color. It’s the combination of all the colors in the visible light spectrum. Now I’m talking light here, not pigment. Mix all your paints together and you get that green army sludge of frogs’ legs and primordial soups. The color — if one can even call it a color — of a six-year-old prodigy’s disappointment that her Crayola army, thus united, produces such a disgusting mess.
I used a slightly less-eloquent version of that same analogy in the tenth grade for my paper on A Separate Peace. I made a D. My mom took me to the bookstore the next week to buy Cliff Notes, in an attempt to force my brain to think the way my English teachers wanted me to think, to translate my thoughts in a world where no one cared that Army dress uniforms were the disappointing color of primordial soup, especially if a fourteen-year-old pointed it out to them.
But wh
at did it matter what “they” thought? In the privacy of my home, my room, my mind, my words were my own. They were always the right words for me, if not for everyone else. And eventually, if I wrote enough of them, maybe some would accidentally get published. Some did. There was a picture book, an anthology, some short stories, some essays. Whenever I got an offer to do a strange and exciting project, I had the freedom to say “yes!”
And then at the ripe-old age of thirty-one events conspired to bring me something I hadn’t planned for: hitting the New York Times bestseller list with Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark-Hunter Companion. It spent two weeks in the same position, at number thirty-one, appropriately enough.
I don’t doubt that I deserved it; I had gone through a huge learning curve, a year’s worth of work, and several boatloads of stress. What puzzled me was why I couldn’t appreciate it. I’ve always been The Writer, as if I was born with a pen in my hand and an Elvish tattoo on the back of my neck. But I’ve never written for “them.”
I took a sample class during my audition for the Governor’s School for the Arts — a summer school of “intensive arts training” in South Carolina — where the instructor had gone on for an hour about “truth” and “slice of life.” (Whenever I hear that term I think of pie.) I will forever remember the sneers at the interview, as they looked down their noses at my writing sample — a ten-page section of the climax of my fantasy novel — and said, “Is this indicative of all you write?”
Would that a moth-winged fairy had descended from the clouds at that moment and bestowed upon me a sparkling tiara with “GENRE FICTION WRITER” written in pink rhinestones across the front. Alas, there were no luminescent bubbles or tinkling bells or showers of magic dust, only the bitter taste of failure in the back of my throat and the compulsion to continue doing something at which I was doomed to never be successful. I imagined myself a twenty-first century Emily Dickinson, ahead of my time, destined to be posthumously famous after the trunks filled with my scribblings were discovered by a distant relative who miraculously cared enough to unlock them. And I was okay with that.
When I got the Governor’s School rejection, I took it out in the side yard and burned it. “If the writing doesn’t pan out,” I told my parents, “I can always go back to acting.” They were not okay with that. So I turned to science.
In physics, despite its own dependence on certain self-evident principles and impossible optimal conditions, the answers to most questions were pretty non-negotiable. The speed of light was always c. Diamonds were just trumped-up graphite. A mole was simply a mole, and it was far easier to assume a vacuum than to assume Thoreau was right and you were wrong. There was no “they;” there were just numbers. Best of all, the rainbow was different here. Wavelengths ran from infrared to ultraviolet; there were slow colors and fast colors. Red and blue and green made up the primary palette. Green and red mixed to make yellow. The world reflected what it didn’t absorb. It all made perfect sense. And the entire spectrum, unified, created pure, blinding, perfect white. My little heart soared, and I was over the moon.
It was like scientists had always had this hidden, alternative, acceptable vision of the universe, and I had just learned their secret handshake. It intensified my fascination with the world. I questioned everything, because it was put on this earth to be questioned, and we were put on this earth to ask. I majored in Chemistry. My parents were happy. There was only one problem. I was a writer.
My father — in an effort to help me find a “real job” — got me in to see a friend of his at the environmental labs of South Carolina Electric and Gas. It was a beautiful trek through the woods, and the office was situated smack dab in the middle of a dam. I paid rapt attention when Dad’s friend explained to me the types of analysis they were doing, and their large-scale implications. And the second he brought me in to tour the lab, I was struck dumb. His voice faded to nothing as the whiteness of it all screamed in my ears. The walls were white; the ceilings were white; the countertops were white. The labcoats were white. White is important in a lab, because lives can depend on the second a liquid changes hue, or the location one drop of a highly reactive solvent is spilled. But it wasn’t beautiful white; it was industrial white. It was the white of a job that never changed, a white that bleached brains into zombification, a white that meant one pipette after another and another and another until your fingers blistered and your mind assumed that vacuum. The only thought in my head was: How long would it be before I snuck in at night and painted the walls rainbow colors? It wasn’t an if, it was a when.
I moved out of the house and never considered a career in Chemistry again. And a little over a decade later, I was scrolling down once again to see my name on that magical list that tells everyone in the publishing industry how fabulous you are. How successful.
The interesting thing about hitting the list was not what happened directly afterward, but what didn’t happen. There was no fanfare or choir of angels. There were no dump trucks full of money on my doorstep (and there wouldn’t be, since I was paid a flat fee for the project). My closest friends lived forty-five minutes away. Not that I was even in the mood to party, having been hit with a major personal trauma the very morning before. But I had paid my dues; I deserved my celebration. I had thrown my heart and soul into this wonderful thing.
And I hadn’t written a word in almost a year. Sometimes, when bad things happen to writers, they don’t write. Lacking that outlet for spontaneous catharsis, all that emotion builds up inside. It grows mold and starts to smell. I hadn’t lost the love for writing or the need to do it, but I had most certainly lost the romance. The motivation. What that bestseller list should have been was a confirmation of my talents, a reminder of how wonderful and special I was. I tried to see it that way. Oh, how I tried. Eleven months into a depression, no one expects to just snap out of it. I had been born with all this contagious enthusiasm — couldn’t I use it on myself? Surely my friends and family would cheer me on. I’d be out of this funk in no time.
My parents popped open a bottle of champagne and emailed me a picture of themselves toasting my achievement. I made them my desktop wallpaper, because they looked as happy as I knew I should feel. Then I bought myself a bottle of sparkling pear cider and went to bed early.
I didn’t expect much at work — a major book distributor — but seeing as our department rolls out the full court press for everything from wedding announcements to thesis delivery, I kept one subtle eye on the congregational “snack shack.” It remained quiet and sheet-cake free. Perhaps people didn’t know? I just can’t assume that everyone in the book industry checks the New York Times list every week.
On Friday I printed out an 8×10 cover of Dark-Hunter Companion and pinned it to the wall outside my cubicle, with a little starburst that said, “New York Times # 31″ in happy pink highlighter. I announced it as a postscript in Monday’s staff meeting, to which someone responded acerbically, “Just in case you haven’t walked by her office and noticed yet.”
I took down the poster that afternoon.
I have done the con circuit for years. I was used to performing to large groups, answering questions and fan mail, receiving gifts, embracing complete strangers, and signing for hours on end, but I was passed up for promotion because I was “just not there yet.” I threw myself into my work, as if I might somehow prove that I was good enough. I wished there was a Cliff Notes of the corporate world — not so I could think like “them,” but so I could assimilate just enough to be left alone. Unfortunately, I had left that possibility behind a long time ago.
A few weeks ago, I was in a small meeting where I thought myself in safe enough company to make a self-deprecating remark regarding my copious use of the word “thingy” and that status on the New York Times. Five people laughed, but one said, “Aren’t you ever going to let that go?” I wasn’t aware that I was supposed to. It’s part of who I am now, like every Oscar Award winner on the planet. What do I have left to motivate myself to do great t
hings if I let that go?
Joe Lansdale scolded me this summer on a panel for muttering “newyorktimesbestseller” in the middle of my introduction; I am supposed to sit up straight and say, “Hi. I’m New York Times bestselling author Alethea Kontis.” The crowd laughed, and made me say it again for practice. Ellen Datlow later reminded me that everyone in that room wanted to be me — including Joe. It was a humbling thought.
It’s a surreal double life that I lead, but it’s mine, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. A psychic once told me that I was destined for greatness, and that I had an aura that shone like a rainbow. I am not a color; I am a combination of all the colors. Only…it seems that one half of me lives in pigment, and the other half in light. Forty hours a week I hike up my waders and make my way through the primordial muck I’ve created around me. The rest of the time, my soul reflects the pure, blinding, perfect white of an empty document or a blank piece of paper, begging me to refract it into stories. And you can bet your ass that the next time I hit that bestseller list, there will be fireworks.
About the Author
A New York Times bestselling author and self-proclaimed Genre Chick, Alethea Kontis is responsible for a couple of picture books, an SF anthology, a paranormal romance encyclopedia, several short stories, dozens of interviews, and copious essays. She lives in Tennessee, where she works as a buyer for Ingram Book Company, a contributing editor for Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest, and a freelance editor for Solaris Books UK. Find out more about Alethea’s plans to be princess of the world on her website.
“An Interview with Richard K. Morgan”
by Jason B. Jones
Richard K. Morgan is the bestselling author of Altered Carbon (2002, 2006), Broken Angels (2003, 2007), Market Forces (2005), Woken Furies (2005, 2007), Black Man (UK) / Thirteen (US, 2007), and The Steel Remains (UK 2008). In 2008, Black Man received the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction.
Clarkesworld Magazine - Issue 24 Page 2
