Nested Scrolls

by Rudy Rucker

  Sheckley was touring the country in a camper van with his then-wife Jay Rothbel Sheckley. He knew where I lived because I’d recently sent a story, “The Last Einstein-Rosen Bridge,” to the slick magazine Omni, where he’d been the fiction editor. Although Sheckley had bought my story, his editor in chief, Ben Bova, wouldn’t print it. Bova said my story was too traditional—and then in the next issue of Omni, Bova published a story of his own that began with a countdown for a rocket ship blast-off! We writers never forget a slight.

  In any case the near-miss hadn’t been a complete loss for me. I’d gotten paid something, I’d refashioned the rejected story into a chapter of The Sex Sphere, and, most importantly, a connection with the Sheck-man had been made.

  Sheckley parked his van in our driveway for several days, plugging into our electricity and water. He said I should call him Bob. My mother was visiting as well, and it was fun to see the two of them together, almost flirting with each other. They were about the same age. But of course Bob’s young wife, Jay, was along.

  Jay was quite a character in her own right, very dramatic and volatile. She kept talking about an ant-farm that she wanted to mail to her son. In the end, she left the ant-farm at our house—really it was just a plastic box. If you wanted ants for the farm, you were supposed to send off to get them. And we already had plenty of ants to look at in our yard. So we threw the plastic box away.

  I took Bob on some walks around the town, showing him things that I’d looked at and that I wanted to write about. Sheckley was immensely cultured and cosmopolitan, with a slight stutter that made him all the more charming. He’d read White Light, and he said he liked it…exceedingly. How that word of praise thrilled me!

  It was great to discuss writing with him. I was trying to write a post-WW-III novel named Twinks, featuring ghosts that could see the past, the present, and the future. In order to give my ghosts—I called them “bolgies”—a suitably weird style of speech, I was using the cut-up technique that William Burroughs adopted in his later years. My idea was to write out some scenes that would appear later in the book, and then to use scissors to cut up these scenes into scraps of a few words each, and to shuffle these paper scraps together with similar scraps obtained from some earlier scenes, along with some scraps made up from a speech that the given bolgie-ghost was actually supposed to deliver.

  I had a wooden drawing board on the floor behind my office armchair with a reservoir of typed scraps lying on it, and when I needed a bolgie speech, I’d draw out some scraps at random, rearrange them till they made some kind of poetic sense, and then fasten them to a page with rubber cement, typing the results into my book.

  Bob loved this idea, he peered over the back of my armchair as happily as if he were looking at a basket of cheeping baby chicks. “I should try this,” he enthused. “I’m always looking for ways to give my prose a new texture.”

  As it happened, Twinks turned out to be the only novel of mine that I never finished. The problem was that I was so resentful about getting fired from Randolph-Macon that I lost control of the story. That’s a definite risk with transrealism—you can get onto a fantasy power-trip that’s overly self-serving. My Twinks villains were too bad, and the heroes were too good. I soon realized that I needed to move on. And so my use of the cut-up technique never really got a fair try.

  Be that as it may, I loved discussing the textures of prose with Sheckley. When you’re writing about aliens and talking robots, you need to find interesting ways to make their dialog sound different. The default (and brain-dead) technique for rendering the speech of extraterrestrials and supercomputers is to expand all the contractions, that is, to replace, for instance, “don’t” and “I’m” by “do not” and “I am.”

  But of course Sheckley was way past doing something that predictable and dumb. I’d say that I learned how to write robot and alien characters from him. Bob’s trick was to have the robots and aliens speak just as colloquially as humans, but to have them be working from odd-ball assumptions about how the world works.

  An interesting corollary to Sheckley’s approach is that you can turn it around. Aliens are like people, yes—but people are like aliens. It’s a useful way to think of the people you encounter every day. They’re aliens from other worlds.

  A few months before Sheckley visited us in Lynchburg, Sylvia and I got together with him and Jay in Manhattan. We smoked a joint and went out to dinner together. Crossing the street, deep in conversation, Bob and I were nearly run down by a cab—clearly piloted by an ornery Sheckley alien.

  And when we went into the restaurant that night, our waiter behaved like an AAA Ace Glaxxon Model robot with a malfunctioning super-heterodyne unit. The waiter flirted shamelessly with Jay, allowing her to feed him bits of her food—and then spilled half a pitcher of ice-water across our table.

  Being with Sheckley was like transrealism in reverse. Regular life took on the aura of a satirical SF adventure.

  Freelance Writer

  School’s out for summer—school’s out forever. Or so I thought. I was ready to be a freelance writer.

  In the fall of 1982, Sylvia and I began making new friends around Lynchburg, quickly meeting a bunch of local entrepreneurs our age. It was nice to get away from the professors.

  Our entree to a broader social life came through Wendy Watson, an arty, waifish woman whom we met at our church. This didn’t necessarily mean that any of us was particularly pious. It was almost like meeting someone at a restaurant or a museum. In Lynchburg, church was just a place that a lot of people went to band together for an hour or two on Sundays. If you stayed home alone, Jerry Falwell’s vans might get you!

  Wendy was a partner in a local graphics business called the Design Group. She was divorced, with a handsome and rebellious son, Tyler, who was Georgia’s age. We had them over for cookouts a couple of times. Georgia developed a crush on Tyler, and later that year, Tyler would in fact take Georgia to a Christmas dance.

  “Tyler said my dress was soft,” Georgia told us after the date. She was thrilled and almost unbelieving that this uncouth boy had managed to say something nice to her.

  One evening after a few drinks at our house, Wendy got Sylvia and I to walk over to the house of some other friends of hers, Henry and Diana Vaughan. We left our kids on their own.

  The Vaughans lived a block away from us, on a street running along the crest of a ridge. Lynchburg was a hilly city—the richer neighborhoods were on the tops of the hills and the less affluent ones in the valleys between. The Vaughans’ big house even had fluted Ionic columns on the inside, separating one living-room from the other.

  As soon as we walked in there, it was a party. Henry and Diana were playing Neil Young and drinking quality wine. I spilled my second glass onto a silk-covered couch—fortunately for me the wine was white and not red.

  Diana was a savage gossip and a pitch-perfect mimic, a party girl, a fashion-plate, a jaded flapper. Henry was a tall, willful guy, never tense, frequently stoned. His favorite words were uh and damn, as in, “Uh, uh, where’s the damn key, Diana?”

  They ran two women’s clothing stores, one in Roanoke, and one in Lynchburg. Henry handled the business end of things, while Diana picked out the clothes, charmed or insulted the customers, and dominated her sales staff. Sylvia and I saw a lot of them over the next few years, often going out together.

  The Design Group—that is, the graphic design business Wendy was involved in—owned two whipped old houses next to each other on a hill in downtown Lynchburg. First they’d had their offices in the uphill house, and then, for some reason that I never grasped, they’d moved everything into the downhill house. The uphill house was standing more or less empty, cluttered with graphics debris like color chips, obsolete computer hardware, patterned stickers, stencils, rulers, and mounds of sample print runs.

  I was looking for an office outside our home where I could write—so I suggested to Wendy that I rent a room in the Design Group’s uphill building. It seeme
d like a perfect spot for clandestine creative activity—a rundown, abandoned building in a sleepy Southern town.

  We talked over the rental with Wendy’s business partner Nancy Blackwell Marion, and Nancy said it was fine. Nancy was a small, friendly woman with curly hair. She looked much primmer than she really was. She and Wendy thought it would be cool to rent space to a writer. I agreed to pay them fifty dollars a month.

  I spent four years in that office, from 1982 to 1986, and I’d end up writing quite a few short stories and science articles, as well as six books—that is, three novels, a memoir, and two nonfiction books. These were among the most intensely creative years of my life, the blazing forge within which I mastered my craft.

  It was an exhilarating time, but stressful. Sometimes I’d feel like a piano with its wires tightened to the point where the surrounding frame is about to snap. Exquisitely overwrought. Bursting with beautiful music.

  With no monthly paycheck coming in, I had to sell a lot of my writing. I started with The Fourth Dimension—for me, nonfiction tends to pay more than novels. Even though I’d written about the fourth dimension in my very first book, I’d accumulated a lot more ideas and information. I was eager to engage with hyperspace again.

  I still didn’t have a literary agent—I couldn’t quite figure out how to get one, and I wasn’t sure that I really needed one. I wrote letters of inquiry to a number of publishers on my own, proposing a popular book on higher dimensions. Houghton Mifflin went for it. They offered me a decent advance, the equivalent of half a year’s teaching salary. So that was cool.

  At the same time, I was selling some articles to a popular science magazine that was then called Science 82—they had this silly thing of repeatedly changing their name to match the year.

  The beloved popular mathematics writer Martin Gardner had just retired from his post at Scientific American. I’d worshipped Martin’s columns as a boy, and over the years I’d corresponded with him a little bit—he was great about answering his fan letters. So in the summer of 1982 I got Science 82 to send me to interview him at his house in North Carolina.

  This was the first truly journalistic outing of mine, and I enjoyed it a lot. Martin was a kindly old guy, very sharp, and a wizard at sleight of hand. He showed me a trick where he made a coin move right through a sheet of latex rubber that he stretched tight over a shot-glass. He claimed he’d made the coin move through the fourth dimension.

  “Please tell me the secret!” I cried. “I’ll give you half the money I’m being paid for this interview!” I’ve always been a sucker for the fourth dimension.

  Martin waved off my foolish offer. Not only did he show me how to work the trick, but he gave the requisite supplies so that I could mystify my family and friends. They appreciated the trick, not that any of them ever offered to pay me for the secret!

  Rather than using a tape recorder, I just jotted down notes on Martin’s answers to my questions, and that was enough to help me later on when I had to write out the full answers on my typewriter. I have a good memory.

  Something that impressed me about Martin was that he’d been a freelance writer his whole life. He’d even sold some mathematics-based science fiction stories when he’d been starting out. Up near the ceiling of his basement office, he had a very long bookshelf with all the books he’d published, each title in numerous editions and translations. I dreamed that someday my books could fill a shelf like that.

  Before dinner Martin made martinis for his wife, himself and me, using a special eyedropper to measure out the vermouth. I went to my motel and smoked a joint, then met Martin and his wife at a local restaurant for dinner. At the table, I excitedly rattled on about infinite dimensional space and parallel worlds. Martin and his wife gave each other a look. They had sons. They knew exactly where I was at.

  The next morning, before I left, Martin lent me a box of rare books on the fourth dimension. And eventually he even wrote a preface for my book, The Fourth Dimension, even though he had a philosophical disagreement with my mystical notion of an overarching One Mind. Martin was a pluralist, believing that there are many higher forces at work, rather than just one. He loved pondering arcane metaphysics, indeed he wrote a little-known novel about theology called The Flight of Peter Fromm. A fascinating and warm-hearted man.

  Another benefit from working with Science 82 was that I made contact with an artist, David Povilaitis, who illustrated one of my articles for them. I arranged with Povilaitis to redraw the illustrations I was creating for The Fourth Dimension—my feeling was that under Povilaitis’s ministrations, my pictures would take on a more fanciful and professional look. I didn’t have enough money to pay him at his usual level, at least not in advance. So we made an unusual arrangement: I’d give him an ongoing cut of the royalties for my book as the checks came in.

  The Fourth Dimension got good reviews and sold pretty well. I was in the writing business for real.

  During the summer and fall of 1982, Sylvia and I were arguing a lot and I was drinking too much. Partly it was the stress of me losing my job, partly it was a midlife crisis. We were in our mid-thirties, and wondering if we really wanted to spend the rest of our lives together.

  That fall was when Sylvia switched over to teaching at Seven Hills School in Lynchburg, not so far from our house. She ended up teaching French and Latin, which was a challenge, as she didn’t actually know Latin. But, with her facility at languages, she didn’t have a problem staying a few lessons ahead. Georgia was still going to Seven Hills as a student, and she was in Sylvia’s Latin class, chattering and passing notes to her friends the whole time.

  As my relationship with Sylvia see-sawed up and down, we’d sometimes reach the point of conversing with each other by writing letters back and forth between my office and her workplace. We were trying hard to piece things together. If we talked face to face about our problems, we tended to start fighting. The letters were a more chilled-out communication channel. In her letters, Sylvia was level-headed, loving and sensible—I could tell she was doing her best to hang onto me. And I wrote back as charmingly as I could. I didn’t want to lose her either.

  But sometimes our passions would flare. We reached a low point after a Halloween party in 1982, a huge party in the house of an aging libertine who lived near the R-MWC campus. The Dead Pigs regrouped for the party—this would be our last gig ever. We improvised a version of Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Goin’ On,” that lasted about an hour. It got crazy, with broken bottles. When Sylvia and I got home, we had a terrible argument about my increasingly erratic behavior. She wanted me to move out, at least for a few days.

  The next morning I got on a plane to stay with my old friend Greg Gibson in Gloucester, Massachusetts. I was in terrible state, I barely knew what I was doing. I packed my suitcase with vinyl Clash records and with my faithful red Selectric typewriter.

  Greg talked sense to me. “You think you have an idiosyncrasy credit,” he said. “Since you’re a writer, you think you can do anything you like. But you’re not a character in a story. You’re a suffering human being.”

  I realized that all my books, all my great ideas and my valued contacts—they didn’t mean anything if I couldn’t live my life. I didn’t have to rip my guts out to be a writer. Nobody wanted me to. It wasn’t going to make my work any hipper or any better if I destroyed myself like Kerouac or Poe. I’d just be dead.

  “We’re young men in search of answers,” mused Greg on the last evening of my visit. “Except we’re not young anymore…and there aren’t any answers.”

  When I got back home, I pulled myself together and things settled down. I reawakened to the knowledge that Sylvia was a warm fellow human who needed affection, a person with her own dreams and disappointments, the smartest woman I’d ever met—and the love of my life.

  We had more friends in Lynchburg all the time. I was getting to like the Southerners—their accents, and the casual way they behaved.

  The manager of the
local movie theater turned out to be a science fiction fan, and he gave me a full family pass so we could see as many movies as we liked for free. As chance would have it, the kid selling popcorn at that theater had in fact been the lead guitarist for the Dead Pigs. Even though he was only a high-schooler, we’d brought him in as a ringer because he could play so well.

  “Those were the best times of my life,” he told me.

  He was talking about the camaraderie of our rehearsal sessions, the satisfaction at hearing our songs come together, the intoxication of hearing the cheers of a crowd, and the cachet of being in a disreputable band. I missed all that too—but for me it had come at too stiff a cost to my personal life. I didn’t want to go back. I was happy to be moving forward with my writing and my family.

  While I was working on The Fourth Dimension in the fall of 1982, Ace Books bought my old novel Spacetime Donuts, also The Sex Sphere and a story anthology called The 57th Franz Kafka, thus bringing my published SF output to five books. I was getting paid very little for these books—I think the advances were five thousand dollars or less—and the books weren’t selling well enough to earn further royalties.

  My Ace editor, Susan Allison, remarked, “Your books seem to be disappearing into the fourth dimension.” But she continued supporting my work. By way of building up my reputation, she mailed copies of The 57th Franz Kafka to all the influential writers she knew. The SF editor/writer/gadfly Charles Platt helped her with this.

  I’d see Charles off and on every few years for the rest of my life. In the early years, he was a favorite drinking companion of mine at SF cons. Charles had an low tolerance for alcohol and would very quickly begin saying outrageous things—which suited me very well. And when sober—as he more commonly was—he was also fun to be around. He knew a lot of gossip, and had an unkind word for everyone. And he was interested in computer graphics. Most endearingly, he liked my work, although he also enjoyed scolding me about what he regarded as bad habits of mine that were preventing me from living up to my potential. I appreciated that he cared.