Are You There and Other Stories

by Jack Skillingstead

  I had been thinking about desert landscapes. I find them evocative, and they were on my mind because of Tempe. But the next thing that came to me in my rising column of warm air, after that first sentence, was the smell of cigarette smoke. My parents had both been smokers. My father eventually quit but my mother never did and she died young—younger than I am right now as I type these words. I think I got to the cigarette thing by way of a tough-talking clichéd picture of a hardened government agent. That was a conscious image, something no doubt received from the pop culture universe of movies. Certainly I didn’t know any government agents. I looked at the image and asked myself what was in it that I could relate to personally, and it was the cigarette, the way different people hold them, the whole ritual of tamping the tobacco and lighting up, the way my mother, who had only one arm, could light a match one-handed, the way she let me help her change the flint in her classic Zippo, replace the fibrous cloth wick and saturate it with lighter fluid. As a little kid I did that many times. It was fun. It was something I did with my mom.

  Now I had a desert landscape (conscious intention) and cigarettes (gift from the thermal). I made it night time under a nearly full moon—and suddenly there was a 7-11 store standing by itself in the middle of nowhere with its glaring bright fluorescent lights. The desert ran right up to the double glass doors. I got to the 7-11, probably, because I associate it with cigarettes, with customers asking for a “packa Marlboros” or whatever. I once worked in a 7-11 store in Portland, Maine. It was not a good experience.

  And by now I was rising rapidly in my little thermal and I knew what my story would be about. All I had to do was go into the cold room and see what was waiting for me.

  At the time of its writing I didn’t view this as a particularly personal story but re-reading it today, after a number of years, I was struck by a couple of obvious things. My narrator, Brian Kinney, is a guilt-stricken “extractor of information from reluctant sources.” He was hurt as a child, which drove him inward and estranged him from everyone, and this provided sufficient detachment so that, for a while, he was able to be a not very good guy. To say the least. Pretty simple character sketch. But guilt was the hot spot informing the whole thing. The world had gone all wrong, and Brian was part of that wrongness. And I remembered helping my mom with her cigarettes and lighter. As an adult I don’t see myself as culpable in any way for the havoc—for the wrongness—that my mother’s early death visited upon me and my family. But the child I had been felt plenty of guilt, and that child never really disappears. He lives down there in the unconscious and sends stuff up the thermals now and again.

  The other thing I noticed was how political the story is. The fearful climate of the times is reflected in almost every paragraph. No doubt, that’s why I saw the clichéd government agent, this caricature that represented my general unease. Suffice to say writers are creatures of their times, as much as anyone else, and are likely to express opinions, even when they don’t realize they are doing so.

  The collaboration, by the way, never panned out. But in the year or so it went on I learned a ton about being my own writer and trusting myself beyond my influences. Really, that was the best possible outcome. Life itself follows its own quirky story process for each individual. Tempe changed my writing life and, eventually, my real life. But that’s another story. Suffice to say, a thermal rose up, and I banked into it.

  *

  How to Stay Original

  Where do stories come from? One Famous Writer in our field used to say he got his ideas from a mail order service in Schenectady, NY. He was kidding, of course. But what’s the real answer?

  Way back in 2005 I was lying on the sofa reading a book. After a while I began to lose the sense of what I was reading, because something had appeared in my head—the image of an immense, emerald green dome covering the city of Seattle. The dome looked like thick, imperfect glass, and the buildings under it appeared wavy and dream-like. I knew that inside the dome time was running in a loop and the inhabitants were unaware of their situation. Then I saw a boy, a young teenager. He was pushing a stolen rowboat into the waters of Elliott Bay, launching from an island outside the rim of the dome, intending somehow to get inside. And that’s all I had. I fiddled around with it a little, then went back to the book I had been reading.

  This ‘idea’ didn’t come out of nowhere. A few nights before, I had watched the Bill Murray movie, Groundhog Day. It was funny, and kind of touching at times, but the main thing for me was the situation. A day that repeats endlessly, and one man who knows the truth. It reminded me of an X-Files episode about a bank robbery gone bad. The robber is wearing a bomb, which he decides to trigger. Everything is blown up, including Agent Mulder. Then Mulder’s day starts over, repeating again and again. He always walks by the same parked car on his way to the bank, and a woman with an exhausted, haunted face, stares at him. She’s the one who knows.

  Time loops in science fiction have been around forever. I think they appeal to our sense, sometimes, that we really have been here before. There is no “idea service” in Schenectady, but there is one inside the head of every writer. Let’s call it Humptulips, which is the name of a small town in Washington State. Humptulips is the unconscious mind. We post stuff to it all the time: books, movies, comics, broken hearts, first kisses, depressed low-land gorillas dozing behind thick glass at the zoo, the smell of your father’s cologne, and so on. Everything. The Humptulips Post Office workers than take this stuff and mess with it. If a writer is looking for an idea, which is something writers do constantly, Humptulips will post something back to you. It won’t always look like what you expected, but it will be something. Like a giant green dome, for instance. The point is, you must not only inundate the Humptulips Post Office with stuff, you must also drop a postcard when you are ready to receive something back—a postcard, because when dealing with the Humptulips Post Office it is best to keep things simple. The postcard that resulted in my receiving a giant green dome said something like, “Seattle has one day and it repeats endlessly. Help.” An email or text message won’t work, by the way. They’re too fast. The Humptulips Post Office operates outside Time and Space. It doesn’t care how fast you want a reply.

  I let the dome, the time loop, and the boy in the rowboat nag at the back of my mind for a couple of weeks, then I sat down to write. And immediately the Humptulips Post Office sent me a story. There was no boy on an island, no rowboat. There was a stormy sky filled with acid rain and electrical bursts, and there was a flying vehicle, and a sixteen year old girl on a mission of destruction. The story wrote itself out over the next few days. I did some minor revisions, sold it to Asimov’s and kind of forgot about it.

  Or so I thought.

  Around 2007 I decided to expand the short story into a novel. I needed to write a novel, and “Life on the Preservation” seemed to be a premise tailor-made for expansion. I would develop the survivor society outside the dome, and then a bunch of stuff would happen followed by a big explosion! In short, my expansion “idea” sounded exactly like something ten thousand other hacks could have produced with their left hand while watching Independence Day and drinking a case of Red Hook.

  Thank God the Humptulips Post Office had other ideas.

  First of all, I made the mistake of not using a postcard. Far from it. I wrote the Humptulips Post Office a long, detailed email, which pretty much spelled out the kind of book I expected to get back ASAP. My email, addressed To Whom It May Concern, detailed the big science fiction adventure story I expected. It had to guarantee to be “successful,” a certain sale in the marketplace. Because what the stupid Humptulips Post Office didn’t understand was that I absolutely needed a commercially viable book and I needed it now, before I disappeared off the face of science fiction.

  Of course, the Humptulips Post Office does not check its email. Ever.

  So I spent two years writing terrible novel-length versions of my successful little short story, powering through the Blasted
Lands of my deliberately planned prose, until, in despair, I all but gave up hope. Then sitting at my desk late one night, searching through the drawers for my lucky Scotch glass, I found a blank postcard with a picture of the Space Needle on the front. On the back of the postcard I printed, “Seattle has one day and it repeats endlessly and I need 90,000 words. Help.”

  After quite a while the Humptulips Post Office started sending me packages containing some very odd items. It was up to me to figure out what to do with the items. I did figure it out, and the result is Life On The Preservation, published by Solaris Books on May 28, 2013. At the time of this writing, February 2014, the book is a nominee for the Philip K. Dick Award.

  And that’s how you stay original in a wilderness of post-apocalyptic novels: Humptulips.

  Oh, one more thing. That giant green dome that first interrupted my couch reading way back in 2005? I know where it came from. I remembered while I was writing this essay. A very long time ago my junior high school science teacher, Mrs. Goto, used to spend Friday class time reading science fiction books out loud to us. She was wonderful, obviously. One of the books she read to us was The City of Gold And Lead, by John Christopher, which is the middle book in a series about aliens who take over the Earth. Here is the description of the alien Master’s city: “It rose beyond the edge of the ruins, a ring of dull gold standing against the gray of the horizon, surmounted and roofed in by an enormous bubble of green tinged crystal.”

  I was thirteen years old when I posted that description to Humptulips, and past fifty when Humptulips posted back to me Seattle’s Preservation dome.

  Thanks, Mrs. Goto.

  About the Author

  Jack Skillingstead is the critically acclaimed author of two novels and more than thirty short stories. He has been nominated for both The Theodore Sturgeon Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. His work has been translated into multiple languages and reprinted in various Year’s Best volumes. He lives in Seattle with his wife, writer Nancy Kress.