textfiles/magazines/INTERTEXT/ITv4n6.etx

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================================================
InterText Vol. 4, No. 6 / November-December 1994
================================================

  Contents

    FirstText: Disc of Doom...........................Jason Snell

    Need to Know: Fight Fan Mail with E-mail.........Geoff Duncan

  Short Fiction

    More Dark than Night_....................Christopher O'Kennon_

    How to Roll a Perfect Cigarette_................Jeffrey Osier_

    Porcelain Morning_...............................Martin Zurla_

    The Effort_.....................................Richard Cumyn_

    Sea Change_.......................................Susan Stern_

    Bad Sneakers_.......................................P.G. Hurh_

....................................................................
    Editor                                     Assistant Editor
    Jason Snell                                    Geoff Duncan
    jsnell@etext.org                       gaduncan@halcyon.com
....................................................................
    Assistant Editor          Send subscription requests, story
    Susan Grossman              submissions, and correspondence
    c/o intertext@etext.org              to intertext@etext.org
....................................................................
  InterText Vol. 4, No. 6. InterText (ISSN 1071-7676) is published 
  electronically on a bi-monthly basis. Reproduction of this 
  magazine is permitted as long as the magazine is not sold 
  (either by itself or as part of a collection) and the entire 
  text of the issue remains intact. Copyright 1994, Jason Snell. 
  Individual stories Copyright 1994 their original authors. 
  InterText is published Adobe PostScript, Setext (ASCII), Adobe 
  Acrobat PDF and World Wide Web/HTML formats.  
....................................................................


  FirstText: Disc of Doom  by Jason Snell
=========================================

  In the award-winning story "Press Enter" by John Varley, a man 
  cuts himself off from an increasingly threatening world by 
  severing his main connections with the world--not people, but 
  instead the electrical and telephone cables that run into his 
  house from the outside world. In the end, he's left wondering if 
  he's safe, because he's still hooked up to the sewer system.

  All of us, no matter where we live, are tied into the 
  infrastructure around us. The origins of that infrastructure are 
  in decisions by communities to work together so that everyone 
  could receive important services--fresh water, power, telephone, 
  even things like cable television and perhaps, in the future, 
  high-speed Internet access. But there's a trade-off--you get the 
  services, but you also have to pay. With simple services like 
  power and water, it may just be a financial transaction. But 
  with information services, you end up paying money _and_ 
  receiving unwanted information: junk mail, unsolicited phone 
  calls, junk faxes, even unsolicited junk e-mail. (If you haven't 
  gotten some of this, consider yourself lucky.)

  The marketeers who reach you do so because they've found out 
  _how_ to reach you. With a few exceptions, they've looked up 
  your phone number in a telephone directory or bought your 
  address from some company you do business with (be it your 
  credit card company or a magazine you subscribe to). Nowadays, 
  you can even buy a "white pages" of Internet e-mail addresses.

  I bring this all up because over the past few months, I've 
  discovered a frightening new product that anyone can buy: a 
  telephone book on CD-ROM. For less than $100, you can get the 
  names and phone numbers of just about everyone in the United 
  States. (One company also sells a product that provides all the 
  phone numbers in Australia, should I want to make some random 
  calls to my good pals Down Under.)

  Think about that for a second. Now _anyone_ can find anybody, 
  anywhere in America, as long as they have a listed telephone 
  number. On the positive side, you can track down long-lost 
  relatives and former significant others. On the negative side, 
  you might track them down and realize _why_ they're long-lost 
  and/or former. I can just imagine the nightmares such a resource 
  might cause--someone, long since married, might look up an 
  ex-boyfriend or girlfriend and give them a call. Who knows what 
  flames that might rekindle? Who knows what wicked temptations 
  that little shiny disc might lead to?

  But here's my favorite silly scenario, which has the added value 
  of being something that I've actually tried. With a CD-ROM 
  covering the western U.S. loaded, I type in the keywords "Round 
  Table." Up comes a list of every Round Table Pizza parlor in all 
  of the western U.S. I enter the city keyword "Anchorage," which 
  gives me five Round Tables in Anchorage, Alaska.

  Noting the three-digit prefix of one restaurant's phone number, 
  I perform a new search, finding _all_ the numbers in that prefix 
  area and their corresponding names and addresses. Now all I have 
  to do (and this part I _haven't_ done, I swear) is phone the 
  Round Table and order a couple large pies with pepperoni and 
  extra cheese and have it sent to an unsuspecting Alaskan. I have 
  seen the future of college pranks, and it's on CD.

  However, despite all the privacy concerns I have about such 
  products, these discs can really be valuable. Take this very 
  issue of InterText. Due to some problems with a service 
  provider, I was unable to reach one of our contributors, via 
  e-mail. So, knowing from a note in his story submission that he 
  lived in Los Angeles, I managed to look up his phone number (it 
  took me 30 seconds at most) and punch that number into my 
  telephone. Within a minute I was speaking personally to Martin 
  Zurla. Now _that's_ service.

  Still, the disturbing part of my CD-ROM phone book experience 
  was that I got to thinking about how there's very little I can 
  do to protect my privacy. My telephone number is unlisted (so no 
  pizzas, thanks), and I could theoretically call all my credit 
  card companies and all the magazines I subscribe to and ask them 
  to remove my name from the mailing list they sell to direct 
  marketers. But how could you be sure that you could eradicate 
  your name and personal information from every database? Not very 
  likely.

  And even if the sanctity of your mailbox and your telephone are 
  unmolested, here's another one: what about your personal 
  information? Here's an example for you: for a modest fee, anyone 
  on the Internet can connect to a site on the World-Wide Web, 
  enter in anybody's social security number, and get their 
  complete credit history.

  What's my point? Maybe just that as technology improves, it's up 
  to all of us to guard our personal information carefully. Since 
  we're all part of that community, all tied into the 
  infrastructure in one way or another, we're going to 
  fundamentally give up some of our privacy. The more conscious we 
  are about what information we're giving away and what people 
  might do with it once they've got it, the better off we'll all 
  be.

  But at least for this issue's sake, I'm sure glad Martin Zurla's 
  phone number was listed.

  Now, if you'll excuse me... someone's at the door. I sure hope 
  it's not the pizza guy.


  More Dark than Night   by Christopher O'Kennon
================================================
...................................................................
  * Morality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. But 
  can it transform a crime of opportunity into a crime of 
  compassion? *
...................................................................

  The smell hit me as I jimmied the window open. I climbed in 
  anyway, hoping I was wrong.

  It's funny how life can be broken down into a small series of 
  events, where a simple decision can alter the entire outcome. An 
  _if_ in the right place can change your perspective. _If_ I'd 
  been smart, I'd have immediately turned and left for parts 
  unknown. _If_ I'd gone for the living room window instead of the 
  kitchen window, I may never have known she was there. _If_ I'd 
  decided to burgle the house on either side of hers (or even one 
  halfway across the island in, say, Mililani Town), I could have 
  avoided the whole thing.

  As it happened, I found the woman in the kitchen, hanging from a 
  rope, bare feet dangling above the floor. It was a botched 
  hanging, common when folks try to kill themselves. In a proper 
  hanging, the drop breaks the neck and knocks the victim 
  unconscious--death is quick. But this woman hadn't given herself 
  enough height. She had choked slowly. It probably took her five 
  minutes.

  She was definitely dead. Her eyes bulged out like a cartoon 
  character and her face and neck were dark red. Her mouth was 
  open, the tongue hanging out like a sausage. Somehow, she swayed 
  slightly, her body making tiny circles in the air.

  She hadn't been dead long, probably no more than a few hours. 
  The smell I had noticed was from her bowels and bladder letting 
  go in those last moments of life. Some evolutionary throwback 
  designed to make our bodies as unappetizing as possible before 
  some saber-toothed tiger made a meal of them. Takes all the 
  glory out of dying, if you know what I mean.

  That's assuming there ever was any glory in dying.


  I made my way carefully around the body, not touching her and 
  being even more careful than usual about fingerprints. It 
  wouldn't do to give anyone the impression I was linked to this 
  mess. Good ol' Five-Oh found burglars merely annoying, but if 
  they thought a burglar was icing middle-class housewives things 
  could get uncomfortable very quickly.

  It was the refrigerator that stopped me. I'd seen these things 
  in a hundred houses before this one. Crude drawings of palm 
  trees, flowers and, most of all, horses. All done in crayon and 
  held to the fronts of refrigerators with magnets shaped like 
  fuzzy animals or cookies or other suburban bric-a-brac. The 
  difference this time was the woman hanging from the light 
  fixture behind me.

  With a chill I recognized the scenario. Single parent--for some 
  reason known only to Your Preferred Deity of Infinite 
  Greatness--offs herself, leaving a child behind. I'd been that 
  child once.

  Now there was another.

  I did something stupid. I turned to the dead woman, my stomach a 
  cold stone rising in my throat, and hit her with the crowbar I 
  had used on the window. I'm not sure how many times I hit her, 
  knocking her body around like a pinata, cracking bones and not 
  stopping until she struck the edge of the counter and jarred a 
  stack of plates. The plates didn't hit the floor; a few just 
  slid into the sink. But until then, the beating had been quiet 
  and she certainly hadn't complained. Silence returned; I watched 
  as the corpse swung, limp. My eyes were wet when I finally got 
  myself under control.

  _Business as usual_, I said to myself and crept into the living 
  room on shaky legs.

  No. Not quite. I was searching the house, not for the caches of 
  valuables people think they've so cleverly hidden, but for 
  people. I found a child's room, toys scattered around the floor 
  but the bed made. A doll house rested in the pale light coming 
  through the window, looking like a tenement cross-section with 
  miniature furniture spilling out the sides. A little girl lived 
  here, but judging from the bed, not tonight.

  The master bedroom had the double bed I expected, unmade, but 
  only half a closet of clothing, all female. The adjoining 
  bathroom was littered with woman's gear, the medicine cabinet 
  was lined with ointments, salves and pills. The pills were 
  arranged more neatly than anything else in the bathroom. They 
  were familiar. Valium. Xanax. Tranquilizers and sedatives.

  Aside from myself, there was no living person in the house. The 
  corpse was still spinning when I came back to the kitchen. I 
  wasn't sure why I returned. There was something that needed to 
  be done, something important. I stood there a long time, 
  watching the woman slowly rock to a halt, not thinking of 
  anything, until a red light caught my attention. An answering 
  machine. I pushed the button and waited for the tape to rewind.

  "Kini, this is Hal. Don't pick up if you don't feel like it, the 
  message is the same. Don't call me anymore. Don't write me 
  anymore. I have my own life to live and the two of you don't 
  figure into it. Just leave me alone."

  There was a brief pause and a beep before the second message 
  began. "Mommy, this is Keke. I'm at Amy's house now. Thanks for 
  letting me sleep over. We're going to have pizza. Bye!"

  The message ended with a final beep.

  So the girl was spending the night at a friend's. I turned, 
  looking at the woman again. The little girl will come home 
  tomorrow to find Mommy's little surprise waiting in the kitchen. 
  How _clever_ of you, Mommy. How _wise_ of you. To screw yourself 
  and her at the same time. What a wonderful, self-centered, 
  _vicious_ trick.

  I ran my hands through my hair, leaving trails in the black 
  grease I use. It wasn't fair. The little girl hadn't done 
  anything, any more than I had at her age. But now she'll find 
  her mother hanging from her neck like a goose and she won't 
  understand. No, that's not right--she'll understand too well. 
  She'll understand the woman she put all her trust in has let her 
  down. She'll understand her mother wanted to die more than she 
  loved her own daughter. And she'll remember that lesson above 
  all others.

  Unless someone changed the lesson.


  Cutting her down was no trouble at all. I wouldn't be able to 
  make the rope burn look like a ligature strangulation--it 
  wouldn't have looked right. So I taped her hands and feet 
  together, careful not to bruise or break the skin. A wound 
  delivered after a person has died is different from one 
  delivered while the person is alive. While the damage I had done 
  when I first found her would be curious, it wasn't impossible. 
  But the rest had to look good. I taped the hands in a manner she 
  wouldn't have been able to do herself and put the body on the 
  master bed, wrapped it up in the sheets, and broke the lock on 
  the bedroom door.

  I paused at the postmortem lividity in her feet. After she had 
  died, blood had pooled in the lowest portion of her body. Her 
  feet had turned deep purplish-red color. They gave away that she 
  had been moved after death, and I wondered if that was what I 
  wanted.

  I tried to reconstruct what the evidence might show. Forced 
  entry into the bedroom. A struggle from the bedroom to the 
  kitchen. (I would have to knock things around to make it look 
  convincing.) She was taped up, and a poor job of hanging had 
  been forced on her. After death, she had been knocked around, 
  taken down, and left in the bedroom.

  That might work. At least it was obvious someone else was 
  involved. And although there wouldn't be any defensive wounds 
  (there wasn't anything I could do about it), the scene did not 
  scream of suicide.

  All that remained was to make sure there were no suicide notes, 
  take a few items of value, and make an anonymous phone call to 
  Five-Oh. Then let the cops figure it out.

  I didn't have to do it. I could have let it go. What does one 
  girl's pain mean in the big scheme of things?

  It just so happens it means a lot.
  

  Christopher O'Kennon (psy3cho@cabell.vcu.edu)
-----------------------------------------------

  Christopher O'Kennon is a graduate student in psychology at 
  Virginia Commonwealth University, after spending more than 
  enough time in Hawaii to lose all of his money. He works in a 
  psychiatric hospital, where he's found the main difference 
  between the staff and the patients is that the staff members are 
  the ones with the keys. His work has appeared in small press 
  magazines such as _Beyond_, _Neophyte's '92 Anthology_, and the 
  upcoming anthology _In Darkness Eternal_ (Stygian Vortex 
  Publications).


  How to Roll a Perfect Cigarette   by Jeffrey Osier
====================================================
...................................................................
  * Practice, they say, makes perfect. Or does it? *
...................................................................

  One.
------

  You have to start slowly. You can't just go out and buy some 
  tobacco and practice. Tobacco doesn't come with instructions. 
  Even gummed papers will elude you forever.

  The technique comes very slowly, more slowly than you can 
  imagine. You have to begin by admitting that you know nothing, 
  and you have to realize that cigarette rolling is an art form. 
  Like painting, it's something that takes a little concentration 
  and a lot of willpower. Each cigarette is different. Few of your 
  peers will recognize the care and practice that have gone into 
  rolling a perfect cigarette. Expect no compliments. Do this for 
  yourself and yourself alone.

  You must begin much earlier than you originally intended. It 
  must start when you're very young, much too young to appreciate 
  even rudimentary artwork, much too young to smoke. Possibly 
  during a holiday. Your parents will have given up smoking years 
  before, never having learned this art at all but always having 
  relied on the pre-rolled, machine-produced variety, most likely 
  with synthetic filters, that are to real smoking what lawn 
  flamingoes are to real artwork. As in a modern Christian Mass, 
  there are hints and shadows of real mysteries, but in the end 
  it's just habit. This is not smoking. This is dying.

  At the holiday feasts that usually take place at your house, 
  your parents' guests include relatives who haven't given up the 
  habit. What you notice is the graceful way your uncle's 
  blue-gray cigarette smoke wafts and clouds in the living-room 
  air above your head. You exhale slowly, face upward, watching 
  your breath mix with his and watching them swirl together. You 
  glimpse something intangible. You play with his lighter, amazed 
  at the way the spark begets the flame, and the intense control 
  you have over the length and size of this flame. By adjusting 
  the tiny lever on the side, you can make the flame so tiny you'd 
  swear it wasn't there at all, or large enough to dance with your 
  breath. You practice this in front of the foyer mirror until 
  your mother discovers you.

  Or perhaps it's your aunt's Zippo that catches your fancy, with 
  its satisfying clicking and scratching and the final _whomp_ 
  when she closes it. You notice the smell from the Zippo even 
  more than the smell from the tobacco she lights with it, a smell 
  that will always remind you of Christmas or Thanksgiving, even 
  more than the smell of the turkey roasting in the oven or the 
  chink of poker chips after dinner while the cranberry sauce 
  dries on the plates and you watch the same animated specials 
  you've watched year after year on the same television. Smoke, of 
  course, drifts in from the other room, tainting your sleepy 
  visions with mysterious mists. You wonder why candles are so 
  much less provocative.

  These visions and smells and sounds will mark your growing years 
  as much as anything else. When you're a gangly teenager you get 
  a job sweeping out the shop where your father is a manager, a 
  sheet-metal shop filled with raucous men and racks of sheared 
  steel. These men make giant, dirty messes at their labor, and it 
  takes a good portion of every weekend to sweep and wipe the 
  floors and machinery clean. You wonder why anyone even bothers 
  to clean, so quickly and thoroughly dirty the place gets. You go 
  in on Saturdays with the shop foreman's son, who has grown up 
  around a different crowd than you have and listens to a 
  different sort of music. He's a few months older than you, and 
  the two of you drive in together and work all day Saturday in 
  the shop. You go in early. You and he divide the huge shop in 
  two and each sweeps a different section. Sixteen months before 
  you get the job, your father will have moved out of the house 
  and the yard will have gone to the dogs, along with your 
  generally happy mood and inquisitive turn of mind. You'll be 15, 
  a freshman in a Catholic high school an hour's bus ride from 
  home, entirely unsure of most things. Your hands will often be 
  dirty.

  But you only work on weekends, for now. Your workmate will prove 
  to be an interesting companion, and as a school-year's worth of 
  Saturdays progresses you have many conversations while unloading 
  bins of scrap metal into large containers. You start going in a 
  little later, and once you get to work you end up sitting in the 
  foreman's office eating candy bars for breakfast and talking 
  about cars, which you've taken a sudden interest in, and girls. 
  This will be much more interesting than work. You try to take as 
  few Butterfingers and Baby Ruths from the stockpile as possible 
  (the boss usually charges for such things, and discreetly, while 
  his son isn't looking, you drop money into the bin). As you 
  physical shape improves you do your work faster, and so does 
  your companion, until you both can finish in five hours what 
  used to take eight and you spend the remaining time lounging in 
  the office.

  At some point you discover that many of the cigarette butts you 
  sweep up have a considerable amount of tobacco in them. Your 
  morbid curiosity is piqued. You know that cigarettes are bad. 
  The surgeon general's warning on the packages proves that, even 
  if Mom didn't also say a lot. Besides, the folks you know who 
  smoke are either sheet-metal workers, a lascivious breed, or 
  relatives, neither of which you (consciously) wish to resemble. 
  Still, tobacco is made even more attractive by its bad 
  reputation. An idea forms in your mind like mothball shavings in 
  an old suit jacket. There are matches in the welders' boxes. You 
  don't see your companion for a good percentage of the day 
  anyway, and so one day your curiosity gets the better of you. 
  You find one of the cleaner specimens of used cigarette, and 
  rather than suck on it at the same time you're lighting it you 
  first light the ragged edges and then bring the 
  inch-and-a-half-long butt to your mouth. It smells nothing like 
  your uncle. Indeed, it smells nothing like tobacco; it smells 
  like dirt and the oil-based sawdust you spread on each section 
  of the shop before you sweep it, to keep the dust down. You curl 
  your lips inward, touching only the filter to your dry peach 
  fuzz, and attempt to inhale the smoldering stuff.

  Nothing happens. The cigarette has gone out while you 
  contemplated your wicked deed. You're left with a vague feeling 
  of guilt and paranoia, and you peek around the corner to see if 
  your wanton behavior has been discovered. You decide that this 
  is too dangerous, and you quickly resume sweeping.

  A week or two later you find half a pack of cigarettes on 
  someone's worktable. Marlboros. Irresistible. You've just got to 
  know. So you heist one and put it into your mouth, just to try 
  it out. It barely weighs anything, you notice, and its round, 
  smooth end feels good on your tongue. Natural. For fun you 
  measure it with a small calibrating tool in the shop. You find 
  that it's roughly eight millimeters thick. If it were wire it'd 
  be about 10 or 12 gauge, you reckon. Naturally as can be, you 
  attempt to light the small tube in your mouth, bravely inhaling 
  the flame this time, and it lights, just as it's supposed to. 
  Inhaling the smoke, you cough; no one has told you that you're 
  supposed to inhale air as well. Your eyes water. When they 
  clear, you see T., the foreman's son, standing across the shop 
  from you, laughing. You laugh as well. Saying nothing, he lights 
  a cigarette as if he'd been doing it all his life.

  That summer, the two of you work side by side 40 hours a week. 
  You've given up on experimenting with old butts left by dirty 
  union workers, especially since those union workers are there 
  most of the time now as you work. Only on Saturdays do you and 
  T. work alone, still eating Butterfingers washed down with Dr 
  Pepper for breakfast, shooting the breeze in his dad's office, 
  cranking up the old stereo.

  One Saturday at lunchtime the two of you have been discussing 
  the relative merits of drugs at parties and Ozzy Osbourne. You 
  drive out to a local taco shop for food, and then you go up to 
  explore a new housing project a few miles away. While you're 
  parked he brings out a small length of tube, the likes of which 
  you've not seen before. He pokes some gray-green shavings into 
  one end and lights it, breathing in. He's explained this to you 
  before and you've heard about it from others, but you've never 
  seen it. Curious, you ask him what it feels like. His eyes are 
  glazed, just a little bit. He hands you the pipe, and you, very 
  afraid but unwilling to admit this, take a small breath from it. 
  It tastes like nothing. You wonder if you've breathed any at 
  all, but when you exhale you see a thin stream of smoke issuing 
  from your mouth. Then you notice the taste, somewhere between 
  oil and lawn mulch, rather sweet and filthy. You hand the pipe 
  back to T. and wait to feel high, but you feel nothing. Not even 
  disappointment. Numbness, perhaps. Many things make you numb 
  these days, however, and you reflect that maybe this is how 
  you're affected by drugs. Aspirin never seemed to do much, 
  either.

  Disillusionment is relative. Sometimes it's just not believable. 
  When you're 16 you decide to try again. You and your buddy C. 
  bravely purchase a package of Marlboros. You drive fast on the 
  freeway, both of you with lit cigarettes in hand and feeling 
  giddy, taking occasional puffs but not inhaling (you've made 
  that mistake before). Well, maybe a little bit. When C. isn't 
  watching, you breathe in at the same time the smoke is lying in 
  your mouth, and exhale immediately. You feel your throat 
  tighten, but you don't choke. This, you reflect, is an 
  experiment. For fun you pull off the freeway and enter a 
  drive-through car wash, and you and C. fill the car with smoke 
  as you pass through the sprays and brushes. At the end you open 
  the doors and let the smoke billow out, and you both stand 
  outside and laugh until tears form in your eyes. The car-wash 
  attendant looks at you suspiciously.

  From then on you keep a few cigarettes in your car. You don't 
  smoke them, but they're there in case you want to. Once when 
  you're going to pick up your girlfriend, B., your dashboard 
  decides to fall apart and a dozen of the little white tubes fall 
  out from the back of your glove box and onto the floor. You stop 
  a block from her house and clean up every trace. You hide the 
  cigarettes in the trunk only to throw them away a few days 
  later, ashamed. At 16, you're ashamed of most things.

  Nearly two years later, close to graduation, you trek up into 
  the mountains for a weekend. You've been doing this often 
  lately, always alone. You love the campfires, the solitude, the 
  unending quiet. You visit observatories and canyons and meadows 
  and write in your journal about things you find mysterious and 
  painful and unsettling. You play guitar softly in the 
  wilderness.

  This time you've stopped and bought a small package of cheap 
  cigars. To see what the ruckus is about. These are a brand 
  labeled Backwoods, and in your flannel mood you decide that you 
  have a Backwoods sentiment. You unpack one before the campfire, 
  reading, and make an attempt at naturalness (your heart beating 
  faster), you light it with a stick from the campfire. It tastes 
  horrible. You settle back in your lawn chair with it anyway, 
  sipping good stony mountain well water from your canteen and 
  puffing on your Backwoods stogie, leaning just so for the 
  imaginary camera you've sensed behind you since you were a pup. 
  Another few puffs and you're ready for the real experiment. You 
  take a small toke and inhale slightly, and suddenly your world 
  becomes cloudy. Not at all what you expected. Coughing and 
  looking for something to change the taste in your mouth, you 
  chuckle at yourself and toss the lot of them into the fire. 
  Yuck. Like sucking on a forest fire, you think, and you go back 
  to reading, hoping the invisible cameraman ran out of film just 
  then.

  Two.
------

  Pipe smoking has always fascinated you. It smells so wonderful, 
  and the people who smoke pipes seem so very different from those 
  who smoke cigarettes and from those who smoke nothing at all. 
  Over time you realize that perhaps they don't smoke from habit, 
  the way cigarette smokers do, and that's a good thing. They 
  smoke for some other reason. Maybe this reason you could 
  understand, for the habit alone just never appealed to you.

  You're 18 years old, and you've arrived home for the first time. 
  Home is a campus apartment room, a double that you share with K. 
  You and K., in your short relationship, have shared much. He's 
  very much like you in many ways and very dissimilar in others. 
  You're in Santa Cruz, California, walking through the Pacific 
  Garden Mall one day when you chance upon a tobacco store and 
  decide that you want to start smoking a pipe. K. shudders and 
  follows you inside, grumbling that you won't be smoking it in 
  _his_ room, even though a weekend previous he had filled the 
  place with friends and marijuana oxide. Just an experiment, you 
  tell him, a mind opener. Everything in college is supposed to be 
  a mind opener. Having no choice, he consents.

  The experiment doesn't last long, however, as you simply can't 
  keep the damned thing lit. It eventually goes the way of dryer 
  socks and is lost in the shuffle, a good three-dollar pipe 
  that's just simply disappeared. No matter. Once or twice you 
  join your next-door neighbors in a cigarette while watching old 
  Clint Eastwood movies, but not often. The smoke buzzes around in 
  your head for a while, making things look strange, but coffee 
  does pretty much the same thing. And besides, you've discovered 
  alcohol.

  Eventually, you discover love as well, and tobacco and alcohol 
  fall by the wayside. At 19 you realize many things. You realize 
  you've never dealt with your parents' divorce. You realize you 
  don't know the first thing about sex. And you realize that being 
  in love is very, very trying, a struggle that promises to take 
  many years. And so you give up the experiment for a while and 
  breathe a different intoxicant, one called _relationship._

  Two years and a lifetime later, things are quite different. You 
  have a job driving a bus on campus, and it is springtime. Your 
  relationship is waning, after lots of hard labor, and you're 
  driving the last shift of the year, a Friday night after finals. 
  Only two people ride your bus between five and ten P.M., and you 
  and the other two drivers give up the ghost and park by the 
  library and talk. This is the first time you have talked to 
  someone other than your fiancee in a long, long time, and it is 
  refreshing. One of the drivers has a pack of cigarettes, Camel 
  Filters, and the three of you smoke cigarettes and talk for two 
  hours about various things, and you feel good. You don't share 
  your uncomfortable thoughts about your girlfriend. It never 
  really seems like the right time.

  A summer later, you finally break up with her. You move into an 
  1888 Victorian (Queen Anne, actually) in Capitola with D. and 
  L., and things feel very strange. You haven't been honestly 
  alone or had your own space in two years. This frightens you to 
  death. You learn many things very quickly, you take on a third 
  job, and you learn how to cook. Your apple pies are a cementing 
  factor in your friendship with your roommates. You buy another 
  pipe.

  Many nights you spend walking around Capitola Village, sipping 
  coffee with Irish Cream and trying to keep your pipe lit. You 
  buy an old corduroy jacket with patched sleeves, and you feel 
  years older. When you turn 21 in December, a friend from home 
  comes up and gets you very drunk in a bar in the Village, and 
  when you stagger back to the house he passes out while you empty 
  your gut in the bathroom and try to keep the tile from spinning.

  But mostly you just wander. You have been a computer-software 
  major for two years by now, but it doesn't seem as fulfilling or 
  exciting as it did when you began. Things have changed, you 
  reflect. You're not the person you were. On New Year's Eve, with 
  all your roommates gone, you wander down to the Village and get 
  mildly drunk on excellent wine and talk to the bartender about 
  science fiction and wonder quietly why you never became a writer 
  like you'd always dreamed you would. You walk back home in the 
  freezing night, determined to make solid, practical New Years' 
  resolutions in the morning, and shiver all night. The cold seeps 
  into the house through cracks in the walls, and you awaken with 
  frost on your beard.

  Three months later you decide to be a musician. You're working 
  three jobs and taking 18 units at school, but no matter; music 
  sets your heart to pumping and your feet to tapping, and you 
  reason that you may as well have a major in which you can enjoy 
  the homework. You talk often with your ex-fiancee, who will have 
  dated several men in your absence and will have chosen one to 
  get engaged to. You feel a little left behind.

  You get back in touch with an old friend from high school, H. 
  (you call her E. sometimes, but that's a long story), who's been 
  living an hour north in San Francisco for years but with whom 
  you never really kept in contact. You realize that you love her, 
  and that you have since you were 17. You dated her briefly then, 
  but you never realized how strongly you felt about her. She's 
  been engaged to another old friend from high school for as long 
  as you've been at college, but they've broken up and she's moved 
  to a tiny apartment in the Mission District with a friend from 
  work. In addition to being a poetry student, she's a dispatcher 
  for the San Francisco State University Police Department. You'll 
  come to know a few of the police officers rather well during 
  this summer, as you spend as much time in San Francisco as 
  possible, waiting for her to decide that she loves you as much 
  as you love her. Meanwhile, you work 80-hour weeks at two jobs 
  and live in a dump on the Westside in Santa Cruz, your Capitola 
  house being unavailable for the summer. You dream about her 
  incessantly, obsessively. Of course, you puff on your pipe 
  occasionally, and walk down to the beach with a glass of 
  Highland single-malt whiskey, puffing and dreaming and 
  agonizing. You realize that love is a many-splendored thing but 
  difficult to deal with at times.

  Also, you meet G. She is a roommate and sometime-friend of M., 
  one of your truest friends. M. had to break the news to G. that 
  he was gay while they were still a couple. After that they lived 
  together, in the same room, for a year, neither of them dating 
  anyone, she hating him, he hating himself. You realize that you 
  have strange friends.

  G. comes to visit you in your run-down Westside shack. She 
  hasn't dated anyone since M., and the two of you decide to 
  explore the possibility of your mutual attraction. This works 
  out rather well, in a sense, as G. lives in Los Angeles, 400 
  miles away. You tell her about H., of course, wanting everything 
  to be out in the open, wanting no illusions. She doesn't know 
  that you smoke a pipe occasionally, or if she does it doesn't 
  matter. You make beautiful love together on the floor and cook 
  pasta afterward. This continues for much of the summer.

  On September 15, a few days before school starts, you're at a 
  James Taylor concert with H. You're old friends, after all, and 
  she's appreciated your companionship this summer, what with the 
  breakup and all. You sip hot chocolate and listen to "Fire and 
  Rain," holding hands. You wonder if your heart is going to break 
  open. She rubs your shoulders at intermission. You both laugh 
  about a hole in your pants. You turn around to say something to 
  her and look into her green eyes instead, speechless. Does she 
  know what you're thinking? Will this finally be the time? You 
  wonder, did you say that out loud? She leans toward your face, 
  and her lips touch yours. Time stops. The world disappears, and 
  all that exists is the young woman kissing you. James starts to 
  sing again, but you don't notice. All you can see are her eyes, 
  looking at you in wonder.

  Her roommate has gone out of town for the weekend. You walk 
  through the door to her tiny apartment and close it, following 
  her into her bedroom. You've spent a summer's worth of sleepless 
  nights here, pacing in your mind as she's slept next to you, 
  getting up when your mind failed to find quiet, and drinking 
  good San Francisco tap water sitting in your underwear in the 
  kitchen, watching the city night from three floors up, waiting 
  for the sun to rise. Those lonely mornings when you tried at 
  poetry and failed at simple language have coalesced and built to 
  this one moment, standing in her bedroom doorway, the cat 
  rubbing your ankles. You kiss her neck and she moans softly. You 
  take her in your arms. She pulls you to the bed and unbuttons 
  your shirt. You can hear your heart echoing off the walls, you 
  can feel a cloud deep inside you about to burst into "Fire and 
  Rain" as you remove her shoes. You spend another sleepless night 
  in her apartment, but you never go to the kitchen.

  Two days later you're back at work, back at home, sipping your 
  whiskey and puffing occasionally on your pipe, staring at the 
  wall with a profound sense of doom and destiny. You realize you 
  live 78.4 miles from her house. You realize you have to break 
  off whatever it is you have with G. You realize this won't be 
  easy, but then, you reason, fate rarely is. You're getting 
  better at keeping your pipe lit, however.

  Three.
--------

  It's been 22 years and you still haven't learned to roll a 
  decent cigarette; indeed, up to now you've never rolled one. You 
  barely realize it. Your life is quite full these days. You 
  practically give up pipe smoking. In fact, by December you've 
  decided to give up school for a while. Music classes have been 
  disillusioning and strenuous, and with H. living so far away you 
  just don't have the energy for them any more. It's time for a 
  break. You arrange to take a leave of absence from the 
  university. Your academic advisor has seen this coming. He's 
  seen you switch to three different majors, work as many as four 
  jobs at once, and he understands your need for respite. _Come 
  back when you're ready_, he says, signing a slip of paper.
  _Just make sure you come back._

  You spend January finishing your jobs. Then you pack your car 
  and move to San Francisco. H.'s roommate had been wanting to 
  move out anyway, to get closer to campus, so you and H. decide 
  to make his room into a living room. You move your futon in. 
  Your things are arranged in boxes all over the apartment.

  You have three stacks of books as high as the ceiling. You have 
  no job. You have no bookshelf. You have little money. Things are 
  very strained. H. finally draws a line, and you're on the other 
  side. You have been blind. You realize you've been living in a 
  dream world with her, and the two of you share some very nasty 
  words. For a week you retreat to the roof with a cigar in the 
  evenings, waiting for a job to appear, wondering how things 
  really are if they're not how they seem. You know that this is 
  the end. So much for fate, you say to yourself. You try to 
  reason out what has happened but get nowhere. The feeling of 
  doom is very great.

  You finally get a temporary job at the Pacific Stock Exchange. 
  You come home one day to find her moving out. You lamely offer 
  to help, and you hug her good-bye when she leaves dry-eyed. You 
  go up to the roof and stare at nothing. As you sit in the window 
  over the street three floors below and watch her drive away, you 
  realize that _this_ is fate.

  You talk to her twice in the next week, and then not again for a 
  long time. Things seem not black, but gray, lifeless as the 
  pavement under your feet, lifeless as the gray people you travel 
  to work with every morning on the subway. You begin to like the 
  subway and the way it affects your mood. You resolve to stay 
  single for a while.

  You find a roommate. You interview several whose numbers you've 
  gotten through a rental agency on Fillmore. You finally decide 
  on one, M., and in March he moves in. He's a bartender on Union 
  Street. A workmate of his, S., moves in a day later, needing a 
  place to stay for a day or two while he finds a place to live. 
  Two weeks later he's still there, and you and M. usher him into 
  the household officially over beer and burritos in the Mission 
  District. It's a little sticky, with three in so small an 
  apartment, but you're all good natured, and it promises to keep 
  the rent down.

  Both M. and S. smoke heavily. S. sticks mainly to Camel Lights, 
  while M. vacillates between Marlboros and a creative imported 
  smoke called Death Cigarettes. They come in a black package with 
  a skull-and-crossbones on the front and a large warning on the 
  side: "If you smoke, stop. If you don't smoke, don't start." You 
  find yourself borrowing cigarettes from them and loaning them 
  your furniture. First a sleeping bag disappears, then a beanbag 
  chair. The three of you live the raucous life of bachelors in 
  San Francisco.

  You take to hanging out in the restaurant/bar they both work in. 
  In fact, after working as a cab driver for a short period of 
  time, you find a job as a bartender back at a posh Italian place 
  on Union Square, and suddenly you have fewer money problems. You 
  don't make a lot, not enough to cover school debts nor pay off 
  the Visa card you inflated on a road trip the previous year and 
  never managed to deflate, but you make enough to buy your new 
  friends drinks and tip them heavily when they work. You give 
  them rides home at two o'clock in the morning, and eventually 
  you get to know everyone in the bar on Union Street. It's a 
  happy, social place. When you walk in, they find you a drink 
  before you sit down. You realize slowly that you like this. As 
  the months give way to summer, you find that you like working in 
  your bar downtown, and that you like the crowd in the bar on 
  Union Street.

  You still only smoke occasionally, but with increasing 
  frequency. You find you enjoy it. You find you meet many new 
  people, even if just for a moment, when they ask you for a 
  light. You find that habits can make people brave, and while you 
  don't want the habit you wonder if maybe you could learn the 
  bravado.

  Your first chance to practice comes when you meet D. She's a 
  cocktail waitress at the bar and a nursing student. She has 
  captivating eyes, a punchy attitude, and a fascinating swirl as 
  she walks. She's neither dainty nor insincere. You get the 
  feeling that she likes you, but you're not sure. S. would dearly 
  love to set you up with her and tries, to no avail. Late one 
  night, D. is complaining about a paper that is due soon (this is 
  June), and you offer to give her a hand with it. It suddenly 
  seems you were once a writing tutor. She offers to buy you 
  coffee for your help, and a few mornings later the two of you 
  spend six hours drinking one cup of coffee and talking about 
  everything in the world except writing.

  Something about D. amazes you. You don't feel obsessed with her, 
  you don't feel lost, you just feel--attracted. You like her very 
  much. A few nights later the two of you discuss this, and you 
  express your mutual attraction for seven hours until sunlight 
  begins to show behind her window shades and you're both too 
  tired to move. You're busy exploring the intricate details of 
  the tattoo she has on her shoulder when the alarm goes off, and 
  you both giggle at the rising sun.

  Work simply flies by. Most evenings you spend working behind the 
  bar, making cappuccinos and martinis and running out of ice, and 
  then after work you maybe give someone a ride home and then head 
  out to Union Street to visit M. and S. and, of course, D. You 
  feel happy. Life is in balance.

  D. smokes Marlboros or Camel Lights, but she wants to teach you 
  how to roll your own cigarettes, just because she thinks you'd 
  like it. It's that kind of thinking that makes you feel giddy. 
  You wonder where all this is going to lead, you wonder when the 
  fun will run out and the hard work begin. It doesn't.

  When D.'s not around, S. takes over your training, though you 
  just can't seem to get it. Pipes are so much easier, you 
  explain. S. points out that you can't smoke a pipe in a bar and 
  tries again to teach you. S. says that pipes make you look 
  pretentious. He says _trust me, this'll make you look cool_. You 
  compromise by rolling pipe tobacco into cigarettes.

  Rule number 1: When you're learning something new, make things 
  easy on yourself. Pipe tobacco is not the same as cigarette 
  tobacco. S. explains this in great detail. You enjoy being 
  difficult. You practice occasionally but not energetically. 
  You're too much at peace for this.

  Well, almost at peace. You're anxious to get back to school, to 
  graduate. Your academic advisor's words come back to you. After 
  careful consideration, you realize you could graduate with a 
  degree in creative writing in a single year more. You decide to 
  get away from the city, to go back to school in September. D. 
  just smiles. She knew you were leaving. Her happiness for you 
  makes you hate leaving. You are quietly torn.

  But leave you do. You go to Utah for a week before school 
  starts. You arrive in Moab, Gateway to Canyonlands, and realize 
  that you're thinking more and more about D. You've talked to H. 
  twice over the entire summer, and you realize how quickly things 
  can change. H. is dating a married cop now. You wonder how many 
  mistakes you've made living in the city and how many you made by 
  leaving.

  The waitress in the pub in Moab where you scrounge dinner looks 
  a lot like D. You watch her for hours, half expecting her to 
  come over with D.'s "Hey, how are ya" and sit down next to you. 
  She never does. You stay until one in the morning, and then you 
  wander to bed and sleep restlessly.

  The next day you make cappuccino on a mountaintop and try to 
  forget things, try to blend into the Utah wilderness. It doesn't 
  work. You drive northwest and make camp at Green River and 
  discover that you are being eaten alive by mosquitoes. They 
  avoid the smoke from your campfire, however, and in a sudden fit 
  of creative logic you light an unfiltered Camel. The mosquitoes 
  shy away. You watch a thunderstorm move in with the coming 
  evening. You dream all night with thunder in your ears and rain 
  palpitating your tent, and you wake refreshed.

  School begins uneventfully. You move in with old roommates, D. 
  and S., and, interestingly enough, K., your friend from freshman 
  year. This will be a good year, you mutter to yourself. You 
  decide to smoke a lot less, even though you never smoked much. 
  You try calling D., but the conversations seem stale. She never 
  once calls you back. Eventually, you quit calling.

  Then you meet J., who dated K. for a while. You and J. get to 
  talking. She's 19, a soccer player, and nothing like you. You 
  find this attractive. She keeps half a pack of Marlboro Lights 
  in her car, in case she gets to feeling rebellious. You begin to 
  get a familiar feeling of doom. She reminds you very much of a 
  fiancee you had a lifetime or two ago. Before you realize it, 
  you get heavily involved with J. You begin to puff your pipe on 
  the side. You still don't know how to roll a decent cigarette. 
  The fall and winter play themselves through, and things with J. 
  get volatile. Explosive. They finally end in February, and you 
  realize that you feel like hell. You've got your bus-driving job 
  back, but you're quite broke and your Visa is maxed out. Your 
  self-image is maxed out. You haven't talked with anyone from San 
  Francisco in months. You're wondering what life is going to be 
  like after you graduate. You decide to move out of California 
  then.

  You've gotten to be quite close with B., another bus driver. B. 
  is a fascinating guy. He smokes more than you ever have or will. 
  He's sailed from Hawaii to California and spent a season in 
  Thailand, and you begin to realize that that hardly describes 
  him. He teaches you how to roll a decent cigarette.

  This is when you finally learn. You don't realize it now, but it 
  has taken the previous lifetime to get to this point. You have 
  to be ready. You have to open your mind, or else that point 
  never comes. You're out of money, about to graduate, incredibly 
  burnt on relationships and life, but at least you can now roll a 
  decent cigarette.

  You take the paper gently in your hands, concentrating, and 
  place a few pinches of tobacco inside, loosely, just enough to 
  fill the paper. You realize that you always tried too hard 
  before, and that you always used much more tobacco than you 
  really needed to. Place your fingertips on the edges of the 
  paper, and roll the ends of the paper together, gently now, and 
  you can feel the mass inside beginning to take shape. Quietly 
  fold the paper over with your thumbs, don't worry about the bits 
  sticking out the ends, and roll the whole thing up. It's simple 
  if you let it be. Touch the opposite side with your tongue, 
  don't slobber, and hold it tight against the roll. If it's meant 
  to stick, it'll stick. Remember that. If it doesn't, you can 
  always start over. _Right on, man,_ B. will say. _Good deal_.

  And practice. Try doing it one-handed. And when you've graduated 
  from college and haven't moved out of California, when you've 
  gotten a job that doesn't pay enough and you're working too much 
  and still bouncing checks to your landlord, when all your 
  closest friends are a long-distance phone call away (except B., 
  who's traveling through the South Pacific), and you just don't 
  have the energy to get it together, remember that once in a 
  while, given adequate concentration and practice and a little 
  caring, you can roll a perfect cigarette. It's that simple. You 
  were just making it difficult before.


  Jeffrey Osier (jeffrey@cygnus.com)
------------------------------------

  Jeffrey Osier is a senior editor and technical writer for Cygnus 
  Support in Mountain View, California, in addition to being vice 
  president of the Zen Internet Group. He has been writing without 
  rest for 11 years; this is his first major non-technical 
  publication. He says no one will ever find out how much of this 
  story is true and how much is fiction.


  Porcelain Morning   by Martin Zurla
=====================================
...................................................................
  * Not all go gently into that good night. *
...................................................................

  I can see the gray sun sliding softly though the kitchen window, 
  through the curtains, a gray, delicate sun hiding from the close 
  morning hours. The table is covered with that same orange-brown 
  cloth dotted with yellow daisies. The house is damp inside and 
  the cloth is wet from spilled coffee and cream.

  It wasn't so long, not so very long ago that we'd talk, make 
  plans for vacations, for rides to the mountains and crystal 
  beaches. We were gay, important with strong wishes and fancy 
  schemes. And all the while we'd fool the whole world by sleeping 
  late and drinking coffee mixed with cinnamon.

  But there were phantoms then too. They'd creep out of the rotted 
  woodwork and cracked, peeling enamel. I could see them. It was 
  always in the early mornings as I sat at this kitchen table 
  watching shadows dissolve and merge, rearranging themselves 
  against the draped dishrag and hanging pot holders. I see them 
  now.

  Do you remember those mornings?

  Wasn't it as if those early mornings were pressed tightly 
  against our chests, sealed somewhere behind our most fragile 
  flesh?

  But the sun is hazy, almost crazy now.

  Notice the difference?

  Even death and damnation are phantoms, furtive branches knocking 
  hard against our bedroom window blowing the lace curtains to the 
  side, painting fairies and mysteries on the blank wall.

  But like I said, I haven't had those dreams in such a long, very 
  long time; not since the crows started raging like tigers. Can 
  you imagine crows; those black alabaster crows in such a city as 
  this? Can you imagine other things too?

  See the curtains, the ones I hung over the kitchen windows. You 
  laughed when they fell down.

  You laughed all the time.

  Did I tell who's here? It's as if there is a small, delicate, 
  very fragile child sitting on the outside windowsill gently 
  pushing both his tiny white hands against the yellow-cream 
  curtains; the curtains with the doily trim and rose-petaled 
  borders. He almost speaks, or rather whispers, about his aging. 
  He's saying to me and the loud smashing traffic that he's not a 
  child at all, but a very old--no, _ancient _man, a circus 
  oddity, a freak of Nature's whims and a victim of self-imposed 
  despair. He tells me he's an Egyptian hieroglyphic image with 
  webbed feet and snorting nostrils carved into eternity, almost 
  timeless, bottomless. Do you hear his heart beating inside his 
  hollow chest, rattling beside his seashell bones, shaking, 
  pounding desperately inside his small, frail self? Listen as he 
  whimpers against the irreligious morning.

  Do you remember those oh so white mornings?

  And you used to be so white, so clean from our early-morning 
  showers with the soap dish overflowing from the dripping faucet 
  with the leaking metal tubes; those chrome-covered snakes that 
  wound themselves out of the green porcelain tub. How they would 
  snidely slide and sneak up the pink tiled wall spouting steam 
  and heated holy water, water turning to venom, turning to haze 
  that dissolved itself into the glass drain flowing down to the 
  ocean and coming back again through the copper skins spewing 
  forth crystal seaweed and monsters.

  And you used to be so white.

  Our lives battered together beside the morning rains each 
  Saturday as we sat perched beneath the coffee-colored plastic 
  tea shade. That's when our memories were cast in pale-blue 
  consistency and marshmallow sailing ships. Oh, we were most 
  irreverent then, in our memories; back then when pushcarts sang 
  along Delancey Street as my steel-wool knickers knocked against 
  the nicks and cuts from yesterday's very unholy stickball game. 
  Oh, how we'd shout, "We shoulda won but didn't 'cause Michael 
  Maloney is a lousy first baseman and Augie Augustus can't hit 
  the broad side'a Sullivan Street."

  When the Bowery played itself like a tuba and bass drum and 
  Mulberry Street filled the wet afternoon with Italian ices piled 
  thick like my mama's breasts; with vendors of all sorts selling 
  this and that; and there was always Mister Silverman's tiny 
  tailor shop where, if you got there early enough on Monday 
  mornings to be his first customer, me and my father could 
  bargain a suit or knickers down to a livable, most believable 
  price. But what was a buck and a quarter back then, anyway?

  Fifty years ago when there were lions and tigers in the streets; 
  he-wolves and she-wolves marching through the sewers and hiding 
  behind trash cans and garden walls; when everyone smelled of 
  onions and roses; when grandmothers would breathe heavily into 
  our faces filling the air with freshly-cut peppers and staining 
  our souls with crushed garlic; when we'd laugh and sing.

  And you were so white.

  But now the coffee is cold, cold from sitting unattended. It's 
  black this morning as the sun's haze pushes, tugs aside the 
  billowing curtains painting itself against the kitchen walls and 
  smog-stained window panes.

  And I am old now.

  Desperate we were then; knocking ourselves against each other; 
  entrapped in constant contact; chest beating beside each other 
  until our brains fell out and our souls collided. Desperate, oh 
  so damn desperate we were about each other; so connected in our 
  frail lovemaking, in our childhood imaginations, our endless 
  procrastination about ourselves.

  Yes, you use to be so white in the mornings.

  But I am old now; missing you more than my youth, more than my 
  pale, frigid self pressed against my aching bones.

  Oh, why did you go, your cancer taking you too, much too early 
  in our timelessness. It crept through your body tearing your 
  soul to shreds, my heart to pieces.

  I am old now in time, in years, an old man that can no longer 
  live this life without you.

  And I watched as you lay, years and years decaying before my 
  eyes, drifting away in front of my heart; your lungs rasping, 
  grasping for breath. And then they covered you yesterday and 
  took you away. And I am an old man now, have seen too much. For 
  50 years, we spun together, fastened together as no other king 
  and queen. And your going wasn't your fault, not really. Yet I 
  hate you, damn you for it as I now damn this cold, hard, 
  porcelain morning; and your cancer, your cheeks melting with age 
  and death; your frail, sweet flesh flying from your loins.

  And I am an old man now anyway, and that in itself is a sin, a 
  desperate mistake. My head lies here on our kitchen table 
  banging itself against the soiled tablecloth, against the angels 
  that sang at your funeral, at your grave still warm, at your 
  moisture wet against my sighs, my promises, all those promises 
  never really kept, only wished for deep in the bottom of the 
  evening.

  Will we pass in our deaths, you going your way, and me mine? 
  Fifty years a twosome, a gruesome together memory never 
  forgiving our separate ways.

  And now I take myself up into the winter lightening, out into 
  the blazing fires of my constant damnation. Down, diving deep 
  inside the rotted graves and marble headstones I see your eyes 
  forever fled past my heartbeat, my life that will be no more.


  Martin Zurla (pecado@netcom.com)
----------------------------------

  Martin Zurla is the founder and Artistic Director of the Raft 
  Theatre in New York City. His play _Old Friends_ won the Forest 
  A. Roberts Playwrights Award; his play _February, The Present_ 
  won the Stanley Drama Award. He has twice received the Theater 
  of Renewal Award, and twice won the Colorado University 
  Playwrights Competition. He recently published a series of 
  one-act plays titled _Aftermath: The Vietnam Experience_ (Open 
  Passages).


  The Effort   by Richard Cumyn
===============================
...................................................................
  * Humanity may find that nearly anything can be recycled,
  if it tries hard enough. However, hope must be made fresh
  every time. *
...................................................................

  The woman felt the meager heat draining up past her through the 
  hole cut in the ceiling of the corroded tank. She crouched as 
  she called, cocking her head to one side to see.

  "Ian, I know you're up there with him! You get yourself down 
  here. Father, let the boy come down--he'll catch his death up in 
  that place with you."

  The dirty soles of two bare feet appeared in the hole and the 
  boy dropped like a cat.

  "It's not cold at all," he said. "I put a tarp over me and we 
  lit a real fire lamp. The air up there feels good inside me when 
  I breathe."

  She did not reply, but took him by the hand and guided him out 
  of the chamber ahead of her through a crawl space. Doubled over, 
  they hurried down a short sloping tunnel that opened into a room 
  with floor and walls of gray concrete.

  "You missed the scavenger pack again," she said as she drew a 
  curtain across the tunnel entrance. "Your group left without 
  you."

  "He was telling me about the different smells. I could feel them 
  on my tongue, even."

  "You hush now. They're going to seal off that silly hole of his 
  and put in nutrispores. He'll have to sleep down here again 
  where it's safe."

  "Spores. I'm sick of spores." His grandfather had been telling 
  him about meat with names like _chicken_ and _beef_. 
  Grandfather's favorites were roast pork and bacon that sizzled 
  and spat on the fire. Fire was hot.

  "He's filling your head with nonsense. You pick up your gear and 
  get along. They took Getty Passage to where the hot spring comes 
  up at Exxon Hub. They're working at the new site."

  The boy ducked his head into a large cardboard box that was 
  lined up on its side with a dozen others. They were each 
  reinforced with wood frames and insulated with hair cuttings 
  rolled in newsprint. He pulled out an army-green canvas duffle 
  bag with a shoulder strap held by a thick metal clasp. The bag 
  was only slightly smaller than he was. His mother smoothed his 
  hair.

  "Why can't I stay with him today?" he said halfheartedly.

  "You may be sick of them, but spores is all we got left. You got 
  to get along now and do your bit for the Effort. Go find us a 
  mine."

  Ian shouldered his bag and crossed the hard floor to a dry stone 
  cistern with a ladder lying across its mouth. A fragile light 
  emanated from within.

  "Be careful," she said. "Stay where it's lit. There've been 
  sightings down that way recently."

  He lowered the ladder, gave his mother an unsmiling marionette's 
  wave, and disappeared.

  Recessed in the walls of the ancient storm sewer, pots of 
  phosphorescent nutrispores lit Ian's way. He stopped to pluck 
  three tendrils off one of the plants that grew in a thick bed of 
  lime-green moss. The tiny lights at their ends, weaker than 
  fireflies, diminished as he sucked the moisture from the 
  colorless tubes, then chewed them as he might straw, each 
  tendril in turn hanging from the corner of his mouth. He 
  pictured Huckleberry Finn drifting free on the Mississippi, his 
  straw hat shading his head from the sun like his grandfather had 
  told him.

  "Now Jim," he said aloud, "I don't see that you being a 
  flesh-eating savage prevents us from traveling together on this 
  here raft. You just mind your manners."

  He found his work group where a new dump had been unearthed near 
  the junction of three tunnels. He saw burly Sedge and bookish 
  Morrison, his best friends at school, and Mr. Dowser, the pack 
  leader, who had been his teacher two years before in the fifth 
  grade. Nine boys in all were spaced along a curving wall of 
  compacted refuse. The contents of plastic bags seeped from the 
  green, orange, and white skins. Newspaper stacks, rusted metal 
  cans, and flattened soft-drink bottles made synthetic strata.

  "Helmet and mask, Ian, come on. The Effort is impoverished by 
  your tardiness," said Dowser, skeletal and translucent in short 
  sleeves and tartan kilt.

  Ian knew the spiel by heart. The Effort depended on the labor of 
  every person to scavenge enough synthetic or petroleum-derived 
  plastics each day to keep the nutrispores alive. The spores had 
  been adapted from marine environments at the end of the '40s; 
  the hybrid nutrispore was found to live symbiotically with an 
  edible moss. Its bacteria decomposed complex polymers into a 
  fertile mulch for the moss, while its light triggered 
  photosynthesis. In return, the spores sucked sustenance from 
  decaying moss culture.

  In the beginning, after fossil fuels were outlawed and before 
  reserves were exhausted, crude petroleum products were fed 
  directly to the nutrispores. Like birch bark on a campfire, the 
  spores had consumed these voraciously, giving off short-lived, 
  garish light and oxygen-rich breath. Plastic decomposed slower, 
  giving weaker light, thinner air and tasteless greens. But it 
  was all that was left.

  Dowser strode to the end of the line, where a boy had just 
  thrown a handful of disposable diaper wadding onto his discard 
  pile. A fat rat scurried between the man's planted boots.

  "American Express, you blind bat. Look!" He pushed the back of 
  the boy's head down until his green surgical mask touched the 
  corner of a credit card poking out of the shredded clot.

  "Dowser's dick glows in the dark," Sedge whispered to Ian beside 
  him.

  "He promised us tomorrow after school off if we bring in 70 
  kilos," said Morrison. "He said the girls' pack is bringing in 
  that much every day."

  "Is that you talking, Morrison? You know it wastes oxygen," said 
  Mr. Dowser loud enough for all to hear. "Find your calm center, 
  boys, and concentrate. Slow, even breathing. Heart rate down to 
  50. Your culling and sorting must be controlled. Conserve, boys, 
  conserve."

  "Waste not, want not," Sedge mocked under his breath.

  Ian shivered as he picked out pieces of green garbage bag and 
  diaper lining and added them to his duffle bag. The smaller the 
  pieces, the better; bulky soft drink bottles would have to be 
  cut into mulch by hand.

  As he culled, Sedge whispered conspiratorially about the various 
  transgressions he had committed that day. He had, for example, 
  urinated freely on a nutrispore bush, its glow brightening 
  briefly with the added fuel. Ian thought the blatant waste of 
  recyclable water was outrageous.

  "Geraldine was picking at the other end of the tunnel. You 
  should've seen her face when she got an eyeful."

  Ian's face reddened at the sound of her name.

  "I told her you were still a _hunka-hunka burning love_ for 
  her," said Sedge. Morrison and another boy snickered at the 
  ancient expression, from Ian's grandfather's time. Ian pushed 
  the leering Sedge away from him and walked away from the 
  excavation.

  "I have to down-respirate, Mr. Dowser," he said and rolled onto 
  a cot set up beside a portable water purifier.

  "Ducking again, Ian?"

  "No, sir, I was hyperventilating. You said--"

  "I said to find your meditative center and concentrate on 
  holding it. You're avoiding work detail and you know it. If you 
  aren't devoted to the Effort..."

  "But I am, sir. I am. Sometimes, I don't know, I lose touch."

  "Would you rather fend for yourself at Surface where it's 60 
  below and nothing grows?"

  "No."

  "It's that grandfather of yours," Dowser continued. "He has 
  poisoned your sense of responsibility to the Effort. After all, 
  he was alive back then. The decadence of his generation is as 
  much to blame for this as anyone's. His people lost the sun."

  "That's not true," said Ian angrily, sitting up. "My grandfather 
  was a Green. He fought in the Counterdoom Movement against the 
  Industrial Bloc. Just because he's old doesn't mean--"

  "Quiet, boy. You've said enough. You're using my air."

  Ian glared at the man for a moment, then stood up, looking past 
  him to the wall of centuries-old garbage. The other boys, their 
  gray faces shiny with perspiration, had turned to watch. In 
  their eyes, Ian saw defeat and the bloodless, phosphorous hatred 
  for Dowser, for the layers of trash that had once been warmed by 
  the sun, for the ever-expanding labyrinth that led nowhere.

  "Now get back to work, slacker."

  "Leave him alone," said Sedge. "He was only resting to conserve 
  oxygen."

  "You shut your trap, you little weasel, or I'll have you both on 
  report for wasting air! Don't you realize how close we are to 
  extinction? Don't you know that _you_ are putting the whole 
  colony in jeopardy? You boys are the survivors. In your hands 
  lies the continuation of humanity. Think of it!"

  Dowser paused to gauge the effect of his words on the group. 
  Their eyes on him were wary.

  "Back to culling, lads. For the Effort."

  "Why?" asked Morrison in a voice like shattering glass.

  "Why? _Why?!_" Color rose in Dowser's face. "I don't have to 
  tell you why!"

  "Why?" echoed Sedge who triggered a childish chant in the rest 
  of them. "Why? Why?"

  "Be quiet!" cried Dowser.

  The chant careened crazily in the low dirt passage. The boys 
  began to circle Dowser, raising their voices each time they 
  asked the question in unison, intensely pleased with themselves. 
  Suddenly Dowser grabbed Morrison by the hair and flung him into 
  the garbage wall where he fell stunned. The boys stopped and 
  were silent.

  "Worthless lot! I should leave you all here for the cannib--"

  Dowser dropped face-down as Sedge clubbed him at the base of the 
  skull with a length of metal pipe. Still as statues, the boys 
  watched his naked, blue-veined haunches twitch, exposed where 
  the tartan had ridden up around his waist, until a boy's scream 
  sent them scattering down the dark passages. Ian stopped when he 
  thought he had gone a safe distance--he looked behind him to see 
  Dowser and Morrison's bodies being dragged away into the 
  blackness.

  Sedge ran up to him. "They're supper now. Come on!"

  "People will ask questions," said Ian.

  "We'll tell them the truth. We'll say the cannibals got them. 
  You know that bodies are never found."

  "You killed him."

  "It was him or us."

  Sedge looked triumphant in the nutrispore light. The sound of 
  fleeing feet receded. At once Ian's mind was large and dark and 
  resonant with sadness. The answer filled him.

  "We shouldn't have done it," he said. "There was no call for 
  it."

  "You're going to snitch, aren't you?" said Sedge.

  "No," said Ian, feeling the air grow thin.

  "Just the same, how do I know I can trust you?"

  "Just leave me alone," Ian said and he began to walk away, 
  feeling Sedge's eyes on him.

  "We're all fresh meat, Ian! We're all just biding our time!" he 
  heard Sedge call after him. "It was him or us!"

  The other boys knew also, but they wouldn't tell. And Ian 
  couldn't make Sedge believe he wouldn't tell. His stomach 
  clenched with the knowledge that he might not be able to stop 
  himself.

  Ian called to his mother for the ladder and climbed back up 
  through the cistern. Seated at the communal table was a woman 
  dressed in a green jumpsuit.

  "You're back early," said his mother. "This is my son, Ian."

  "He let us go early," said Ian.

  "Where is your duffle bag?" asked the officer.

  "We're not finished at that site. We'll be back tomorrow."

  "It should have been locked up. Every gram of plastic translates 
  into another 20 minutes of survival."

  Ian turned to his mother. "Where's grandfather?"

  "Where do you think?" she said, glancing upward. As her son 
  turned toward the septic tank passage, she added, "Did you bring 
  anything back?" The officer glanced at Ian's mother 
  suspiciously. "For the household spores. You won't find 
  contraband here, Miss. Ever since his father disappeared, Ian's 
  been the provider."

  "I'm sorry. I forgot," said the boy. "May I go up?"

  "This officer has come to inspect for heat seepage. I've told 
  her all about his idiotic hole. You get the old fool to come 
  down, Ian."

  "You'll be held accountable for excessive loss, of course," said 
  the woman.

  Ian left the women making arrangements for the hole to be 
  sealed. He scrambled along the tunnel to the tank and called up 
  for his grandfather. A rope ladder dropped down. As he pulled 
  himself into the igloo, the cold startled his lungs and he 
  ducked quickly under the pile of fabric and canvas surrounding 
  the old man. His hat, eyebrows, and beard were encrusted with 
  frost. The blocks of the round snow house were outlined in the 
  light.

  "Full moon tonight, Ian."

  His grandfather had told him about the natural satellite, but 
  whenever he had searched for it at night through the igloo's air 
  hole, the cloud cover had made it impossible to detect.

  "How can you tell?"

  "I can feel it, boy, in the blood."

  "I want to live up here with you. I hate it down there. You 
  can't breathe."

  "But I don't live here. This is just the place where I have 
  chosen to die."

  "No," said the boy without passion, unimpressed by his denial. 
  Ian knew that the old man was feeble. "I'll die with you, then. 
  It's right. They're going to cover the hole."

  "It can't be right, Ian. We don't put aside life before it is 
  time."

  "But I'll never see the sun. I'll never swim in the blue-green 
  ocean at Lauderdale. My skin will never turn brown." He rolled 
  up his sleeve and slapped his forearm. The outline of his palm 
  remained pink on fish-belly white for a few seconds.

  "Bundle yourself well and help me outside. I want to show you 
  something."

  Ian put on the clothing that had been saved so carefully for so 
  long: fur-lined boots, seal skin pants, thick mittens, a long 
  hooded coat fringed in fur, and a leather mask that had a thin 
  slit for the eyes. He followed his grandfather at a crawl 
  through the narrow snow entrance. Outside in a silvery dusk he 
  helped the old man to stand. Ian squinted to adjust to the 
  brighter light and inhaled shallow, painful breaths through his 
  mask. Although his fingers and toes began to tingle with warning 
  of the intense cold, the open space all around him made him 
  giddy. He opened his arms wide and spun in place until he fell 
  backwards in the snow. His grandfather laughed along with him.

  "This is not the end, Ian. Feel it. Feel the far-off pulse of 
  the earth. Its lungs and heart are not stopped forever."

  Ian pressed his rabbit skin mittens palm-down on the crust. It 
  was true. It was there. He could feel the throb, so different 
  from the scurrying of human rats under the ground.

  "We killed someone today, grandfather. I don't want to go back."

  No answer came. "Grandfather?" he repeated.

  The old man had dropped to a cross-legged sitting position 
  facing him. His eyes were closed.

  "I can feel the sun, Ian," he whispered. "It's time."

  Ian ran and embraced him, stretched out to cover his whole 
  length, frantic to revive him with his own body heat. He 
  struggled to his feet and began to haul his grandfather 
  backwards, mukluk heels dragging, toward the igloo. When he 
  slipped and fell, he opened the old man's mouth and blew warmed 
  air into his lungs. Exhausted after only a few minutes, he 
  stopped.

  "I will stay with you," he vowed.

  As he said this the cloud cover parted and the full icy light of 
  the moon flooded the ground. He held up his hand against it, 
  squinting. His body began to shake with cold. His feet and hands 
  were useless blocks. In the moonlight, his grandfather's face 
  was ghastly. Then, as quickly as the light had come, it was dark 
  again.

  He heard his mother's voice, that tired, resigned whine honed to 
  an argumentative edge. She alternated between calling for him 
  and demanding something of someone near her. A flickering blue 
  light came from inside the igloo where Ian heard the clanging of 
  metal on metal. Through the shelter's hole he saw a shower of 
  red sparks. It must be serious, he thought, for them to use a 
  combustion torch like that. There was still time, then, if they 
  were using fire.

  Slowly, with the light of the awful, enduring moon still filling 
  his head and the feeling draining from his extremities, Ian 
  crawled on hands and knees back toward the igloo.


  Richard Cumyn (aa038@cfn.cs.dal.ca)
-------------------------------------

  Richard Cumyn is the author of the short story collection
  _The Limit of Delta Y Over Delta X_ (Goose Lane Editions, 1994). 
  He lives and writes in Halifax, Nova Scotia.


  Sea Change   by Susan Stern
=============================
...................................................................
  * "I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
     I do not think that they will sing to me."
     --T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" *
...................................................................

  They say around here that drowned men are stolen by water 
  spirits who take them to dwell in underwater castles forever. 
  They say manatees have the souls of mermaids. They say that a 
  woman's blood, dropped into water, summons selkie boys who beget 
  children on human women, leaving mother bereft and child of 
  neither earth nor sea. They say many things. Some of them are 
  true.

  They say around here that once a year, on Midsummer Night's Eve, 
  selkies who are seals the rest of the time come up out of the 
  water and take the form of women. And they sit on the rocks, 
  combing their hair. And if you find one of their discarded seal 
  skins and take it home with you and hide it, then the selkie is 
  bound to you until she finds her skin. And she may even love you 
  a little, but she never stops looking for her skin. And she 
  always finds it. It may take her a hundred years, but she finds 
  it, and returns to the sea. Always.

  Tonight I have a human body. Tonight I have human legs, human 
  hands. Tonight I will walk on my human feet to the place I lived 
  as a human, and I will leave a gift for my child. A gift from 
  the sea, for my child.

  Words are a human thing. I never needed to call anything by a 
  word until I was human. When I saw my child, and they lay her on 
  my breast, I had a word. I called her beautiful. And perfect. 
  But the midwife said to my husband, _That child will never 
  belong to you. Look at her hands._ So we looked, and he saw that 
  they were strung, finger to finger, with webs so thin that the 
  light shone through. _Cut them_, he said. 
  _I want my child to be perfect_. So they cut them. I cried when 
  they cut the webs.

  _Perfect_, he said. And she grows more perfectly beautiful every 
  day, in her human body. But I have swum along the margin of the 
  shore and listened to him walking and talking, and seen into the 
  child's mind, and her mind is as empty of thoughts as a seal's. 
  She rocks in the fireplace with her hands over her face, and she 
  cries to be let outside into the rain. She yearns for the water. 
  He won't let her near the sea. Because he's convinced himself 
  that I drowned. I watch him walking up and down the beach, 
  grieving, looking out over the water--for what, he does not 
  know. Yet he knows. Deep down, outside what he's willing to 
  remember, he knows.

  These four years since I walked back into the sea, since I found 
  my skin and walked back into it, I have felt like a cord 
  stretched between that house and the sea, neither of sea nor 
  land anymore. My people don't hold on to their children, and 
  never was a selkie born who knew the meaning of the word _love_. 
  But my child is back there and I feel her all the time, until I 
  am stretched so thin I know I will break.

  I should have hated my husband. He hid my skin and wouldn't tell 
  me where it was, because he didn't want me to go. So I was 
  trapped inside this human body, with my animal mind and my human 
  mind slowly coming together until I had no idea what I was 
  anymore.

  He had a word. A human word. Love. And at first my mind was an 
  animal's mind, empty except for instinct, to eat, to sleep, to 
  _escape_, but he filled it slowly with this word, this love, 
  until the word took shape and became a soul.

  We used to make love on the beach, out here in the summer. This 
  human thing, this making love--how can you make love if it isn't 
  there? How can you unmake it if it is?

  Regret. Regret is a human thing. Never was a selkie born who 
  could regret, but I am no longer...

  One day he walked into the beach house, and I was sitting with 
  my hands against the fireplace. Listening. I could almost hear 
  it calling me--my skin--until he walked in here with his big, 
  clumsy human feet. He took me in his arms and said,
  _Why, my love? Why do you want to leave?_

  I couldn't answer him; not then. But later there were three 
  stones missing from the fireplace, and I at the door with two 
  sealskins in my arms... I slapped him. He tried to take them 
  from me and I slapped him. And while he stood there, hardly able 
  to believe it, I snatched up the skins and ran. But I stopped at 
  the gate and I said a cruel thing to him. _I almost loved you,_ 
  I told him. _I would have stayed, if only you'd have let me leave._

  Four summers ago tonight I walked into the sea, and the child I 
  left him is five. Five, and she has no human words, no human 
  thoughts. They have a word.

  They have given him a choice, and tomorrow he must make a 
  decision. You can't keep that child at home, they said. She's 
  barely human. And he walks up and down the beach, agonizing over 
  the decision he's already made, because he doesn't want her to 
  go. Because he knows, deep down, that she is no human thing. 
  That she has no words because she never had them. That her mind 
  is filled with the sound of the sea and the voices of seals, and 
  that her soul is tearing itself to pieces like the white waves 
  breaking on the black rocks. But I have seen that the webbing 
  has grown back on her hands. Her perfect hands.

  Tonight, this midsummer night's eve, I will walk on my human 
  legs up to the house where I lived as a human, and I will leave 
  the gift that confirms his decision, what he knows he must do, 
  what I should have done.

  The second skin.


  Susan Stern
-------------

  Susan Stern lives at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, where she 
  collaborates in the creation of CD-ROM products about animals. 
  She's sure she'll find the other sealskin one day soon.


  Bad Sneakers   by P.G. Hurh
=============================
...................................................................
  * It's 11 o'clock. Do you know where your souls are? *
...................................................................

  I look down at my new shoes while I absently finger the 
  transistor radio in the breast pocket of my army jacket. The 
  shoes are new, but they're cheap--red canvas with white rubber 
  soles. I push off my toes and bob up and down a couple of times. 
  I can hear the shoes squeak slightly on the wet pavement. 
  They're bad sneakers, but they're the best I've had in a long 
  time.

  The rain's coming down in a light drizzle, pulling smog out of 
  the sky and sprinkling it on my back in little patters. It feels 
  good.

  I look up Canal Street and see a few others like me shambling 
  toward the station. I sigh and start on my way again, still 
  fiddling with the radio. It won't do any good, I know. I sold 
  the battery--that's how I could afford these shoes. Twenty 
  dollars for a nine-volt battery. Seems like a lot to me.

  The New Lifers gave me the radio this morning. I was sitting in 
  front of the Hancock, legs spread out in front of me with the 
  heating sun just beginning to make it uncomfortable. The rich 
  couple walked toward me, arms around each other. I would have 
  said they were strolling, but they also had a purpose in their 
  stride, like they had someplace to go but were in no hurry to 
  get there. The woman was gazing around as they walked, looking 
  at the tops of buildings, window awnings, deserted storefronts, 
  even out toward the lake. She was taking it all in.

  Her partner was smiling too, but instead of looking around at 
  the city, he was watching her face. It was like they were out 
  for a walk in the park, instead of slogging along through 
  deserted city streets on a hot Sunday. Both of them were dressed 
  all in white, the man sweating in a crisp suit with turned up 
  collar and the woman floating in a gauze-like dress.

  I remember the way the man flipped the antique plastic radio 
  over in his hand. He looked at it with fondness and tossed it 
  back into the air. It turned over slowly and smacked back into 
  his hand. They were close enough for me to hear what the man 
  said then. He said, "I don't think they'll ever reproduce that 
  feeling in the AbovePlane."

  "What feeling is that?" his companion asked.

  "That feeling I get when I flip Uncle John's radio in the air, 
  watch it turn over and then snap back into my hand." He flipped 
  the radio again, emphasizing the snap. "You just can't reproduce 
  that."

  "Have faith, dear. The Lord works in mysterious ways."

  I thought that they hadn't even noticed me laying there even 
  though they had to step out of their way to avoid me. That's the 
  way it is with New Lifers. I've seen them before, headed towards 
  the new pier out on Lake Michigan, the AbovePlane Odeon. 
  Especially about a week ago--they came in droves. All wearing 
  their white outfits and strolling along looking out above 
  everything and everyone. They were determined, it seemed, to 
  only see the pleasant things in life. They looked right over us 
  street folk.

  I was wrong about this couple, though. As they passed me, the 
  man turned around and looked down. "Here," he said, offering the 
  small brown radio. "I won't be needing this where we're going." 
  He waved it around a little in front of my face and finally 
  dropped it onto my lap. It bounced off my leg and clattered to 
  the sidewalk. I stared up at the white-suited figure, and he 
  spoke again. "Guess _you've_ already given up all your material 
  possessions."

  He turned and quickly trotted to catch up with the woman.

  I snorted, trying to find humor in his condescension. "Hey!" I 
  yelled after them. But they disappeared around the corner, and I 
  laughed to myself.

  It started to rain then.


  I'm walking along the side of the old North Western train 
  station now, my bad sneakers squeaking me forward. I picture the 
  image of the front doors even before I turn the corner. In my 
  mind they're as they used to be: panes of flat glass and flashy 
  windows, two sets of revolving doors on either side.

  My feet stutter to a halt when I see the piles of junk jammed in 
  the doors. Cardboard and cold plastic sheets have turned them 
  into a pair of grimy hutches, homes for the homeless. But the 
  homes are empty, builders and occupants perhaps the promise of a 
  better place, as I am.

  I pass on by the mess and push through one of the flat glass 
  doors. Cool air hits my wet clothes and a chill runs through me. 
  I shiver like a wet dog and let go of the door handle. Ahead of 
  me are two escalators. It is impossible to tell which is going 
  up and which is headed down, since neither is moving. Several 
  people, wet and tattered like me, climb the steep corrugated 
  stairs. Some are clutching possessions close to their bodies, 
  others empty-handed.

  As I watch, an older woman with a green scarf pulled about her 
  head stumbles. The man behind her hesitates for a moment and 
  sets his wrinkled brown paper bag on the escalator handrail. He 
  steadies the woman with his arms. They both begin to move up 
  together.

  The bag slides down the handrail for a couple of feet and then 
  falls off the edge. When it hits the floor, the helping man 
  doesn't even look behind him.

  Around the base of the escalators are gathered various junk 
  vehicles. Shopping carts, small wagons, and even a gardening 
  wheelbarrow clutter the floor. I pick a route around these and 
  start up the unmoving stairs. As I climb, I look over the 
  handrail to see how far the paper bag had dropped. Pretty far.

  My hand goes for the radio in my pocket. I look at it and give 
  it a flip. Without the battery, it doesn't quite have the same 
  snap. I place it on the handrail, expecting it to slide but it 
  doesn't. I almost leave it behind, but then, on second thought, 
  I slip it back into my pocket. Maybe it will be of some use in 
  the suburbs. I give the silent dial a turn and wonder if I 
  really should have sold the battery at Jack's.

  The owner of the pawn shop was an acquaintance of mine--he had 
  given me a good price for my wedding ring. But when I entered 
  the shop this morning, radio in hand, he just glared at me and 
  walked quickly behind his fenced in counter.

  "Hey, Jack!" I grinned.

  "What is it, Charlie?" he growled as he stretched to jam some 
  package he was carrying to a higher shelf.

  "Got an antique radio for you, if you want it."

  Jack turned and peered out through the chain-link. "What? That?" 
  he exclaimed roughly. "That ain't worth nothin'. Ain't nothin' 
  worth nothin' anymore."

  "Jack, man. This thing must be 40 years old, and listen." I 
  switched on the unit. "It still works!" The radio put out a weak 
  fizzle of static and then latched onto a transmitting frequency. 
  The excited words of an evangelist jockey backed by the 
  vibrating notes of a pipe organ sprang forth, loud in the dusty 
  shop.

  "...believe it. The one true Word of our Lord. Give up your 
  earthly possessions, let go of your devilish greed and jealousy! 
  Come join the AbovePlane, the New Lifers! All are equal in the 
  eyes of God..."

  I flicked the radio off. Jack had turned his back on me and 
  returned to his inventory. "Not even a couple of bucks, Jack?"

  "Nope, not for that--" Jack hesitated, and then he turned around 
  slowly. "Hey," he said. "That thing got a battery?"

  I turned the radio over in my hand. "Course it does. I told you 
  it was ancient, didn't I?" I snapped open the battery 
  compartment and pulled out the small nine-volt rechargeable. I 
  let the battery dangle by its leads so Jack could take a look.

  "How much you want for it?"

  "Twenty bucks."

  "You got it." He slid a 20-dollar bill under the security fence.

  "You don't even want the radio?"

  "Nope, just this." Jack waved the battery at me and then turned 
  to store it away in a drawer behind him.

  "Why, Jack?"

  "Don't know. Just a hunch I got, Charlie."

  Maybe I should have held out for more. But then, I didn't have 
  the slightest clue that he'd even want that lousy battery. It's 
  always been like that all my life. I'm not a stupid guy. I just 
  can't make people out. I can't figure out what makes them do 
  what they do. Generally, I just follow along and do what 
  everyone else is doing. I figure they must have a pretty good 
  reason.

  Not Jack, though. He always did his own thing. Maybe that's why 
  he still runs his shop here, in the middle of an empty city.

  I turned to leave, but a thought struck me and I walked back to 
  the counter. "Hey, Jack? You ever think about this AbovePlane 
  stuff?"

  "What, Charlie?" Jack let out a sigh and stuck his pen behind 
  his ear. "What now?"

  "You know. All this New Lifer stuff... do you buy it?"

  "Fuck, Charlie. That's just a bunch of bullshit to get us to 
  migrate out of the city." Jack leaned back and slid a skinny leg 
  over the seat of a high stool. "Way I see it, Charlie, all that 
  talk about leaving your possessions behind? It don't make any 
  sense. In that AbovePlane place, they're supposed to reproduce 
  the world in its entirety, only 'lectronically. You don't really 
  even have a body, I guess. Seems to me, Charlie, any world, 
  'lectronic or not, is going to have possessions of some kind. 
  There'll still be the rich and the poor, the know-alls and 
  know-nots, the pretty and the ugly. Thing is, son, human is 
  human."

  I thought about what he said for a moment, but before I could 
  reply he lifted his leg off the stool and made like he was going 
  to walk into the darkness of his back office. He hesitated 
  though and half turned to me.

  "My wife joined the New Lifers," Jack said without emotion. "She 
  went in on the first Wave. Haven't heard from her since. Maybe 
  she's in some kind of automatic heaven, maybe not. All I know is 
  that all that talk about whole suburbs joining up and leaving 
  their homes has got to be hogwash. Some political media shit 
  just to push all of us out to some government project or 
  something..." Jack turned to face me completely. "You heading 
  out to the 'burbs too, Charlie?"

  He must have read the hesitation on my face because, without me 
  even saying anything, he screwed up his face and said, "Can't 
  you see the hole they're digging just for you?"

  When I didn't reply, he just turned back around and disappeared 
  into his dingy office. I wanted to ask him who _they_ were, but 
  I didn't want to upset him further. I quickly shoved the twenty 
  in one of my pockets and headed for the front door. _That Jack_, 
  I thought. _He sure does his own thing._


  There's only two trains in the entire station. From far away, 
  they look like toys. But as I near, they fill my vision and I 
  can't see more than one car without turning my head. The train 
  doors are wide open and warm yellow light spills out of each 
  one. In several doorways I can see dark human figures.

  I hurry to the nearest train door and step up. Inside, I press 
  past two people and climb up the stairs. I find an empty seat 
  and then look down at the people on the lower level.

  For the most part, they're like me. Clothes layered on, stain 
  over stain. Skin patchy with dust. Faces somber, yet proud. But 
  as I look closer, I also see the differences. The woman with a 
  nervous tic at the corner of her eye. A young man in sandals 
  reading a thick and torn book. Two children in a shoving match 
  for the window seat. Me in an orange stocking knit cap and a 
  green army jacket fiddling with a defunct transistor radio.

  As I scan the passengers, I catch the eye of another rider. His 
  eyes seem to light up as he recognizes me. It's Eddie from over 
  by the stadium. He nods his head towards me and a clump of 
  greasy black hair shifts, revealing a widening bald spot. He 
  smooths it over and grins up at me. Then he turns to the window 
  as the train shudders and starts to move.

  I spent a whole night under the northeast ramp of the Loop with 
  Eddie once. It had been raining and neither of us wanted to get 
  wet, plus we had a bottle of Tickle Pink. We spent the night 
  getting drunk and as we got drunk, we talked about what it was 
  like. It was Eddie's idea that as you got drunk, you went into 
  your own little world just a little bit different than everyone 
  else's. That way you saw the same things except differently than 
  you did when you were sober. He called this creating your own 
  reality. He also said that when you got drunk with another 
  person you both could talk yourselves into the same little 
  reality. Eddie seemed really sure of this and it seemed to make 
  sense to me, so I told him to go ahead and create our own little 
  reality just for us, just for that night... and he said he 
  already had.

  _The train is going straight through to the end_, I think to 
  myself after about 15 minutes. Train stations rush right by and 
  the train never slows.
  
  _Shouldn't take much longer to get to the end of the line._ 
  _Probably only another 15 minutes or so._

  I feel like I should be nervous, not knowing what's waiting 
  for me once we get there. But I'm not. I look around at the 
  other passengers and they seem to give me strength.
  _We're all in this rushing metal cylinder together_, their faces 
  seem to say. Even Tourettes Tommy over in the balcony seat 
  across from me has silenced his ravings for this ride, his lips 
  just barely moving.

  The train slows after a time and I get up from my seat and move 
  toward the exit with the others. Someone shoves me from behind 
  just as the train groans to a stop and my nose pushes up into 
  the sweaty neck of a large woman in front of me. I turn to yell 
  at the person who shoved me, but when I see it's just a kid I 
  smile and move forward with the others.

  By the time I'm off the train most of the passengers have 
  scattered from the Geneva station and are wandering toward the 
  dusky outlines of frame houses and trees. The air blows clear 
  and cool on me and I find that my jacket has dried during the 
  trip. I step out off the concrete platform and walk briskly to 
  the glow of a corner street light. Others pass me, looking at 
  the large houses that line the wide avenue. Trees hang their 
  branches low over us and rustle in the wind.

  I see Eddie on the porch of an old, majestic house. He knocks 
  tentatively and, when no one answers, opens the door and 
  disappears inside. The glow of an electric lamp flickers on from 
  inside and shines out onto the porch. I look away and head 
  further up the avenue. Others are approaching the silent homes, 
  some in groups of four or five. The light rattle of knuckles on 
  wood joins the surrounding chorus of crickets as they knock and 
  enter. No one is here to protest this mass immigration.

  I walk away from the others and eventually turn down a few side 
  streets until I'm walking in a more middle-class neighborhood. 
  Small, older houses line both sides of the street and just 
  beyond the houses on my right is a wide river with trees along 
  its bank. I can hear it gurgle up against its banks softly.

  A few of the houses are occupied, or at least I think they are. 
  Some of the windows are lit up and I can even hear a few voices 
  floating from off the front porches. The voices sound content.

  I stop walking and look around me. The house on my right seems 
  empty, lawn grass long with river weeds sticking up even higher. 
  Its windows are dark and small. I can barely see them in the 
  evening's dim light. It seems like a nice place. Perhaps a 
  little damp so near the river.

  I walk up to the front door and knock. It seems I can tell from 
  the hollow echo that no one is home. I enter, my hand searching 
  for a light switch on the immediate right. I find one and flip 
  it up. The room lights up with a yellow glow from the hanging 
  light in the small foyer.

  I step through the foyer and find a small living room with brown 
  furniture. Covering half of the near wall is a telescreen. Over 
  it are two interlocked silver crosses and a small engraved sign 
  reading "We can only become one on the AbovePlane." And 
  underneath the screen, "Ascension to the New Life is only 
  assured by the Departure of the Old Life."

  I quickly check through the other rooms, finding some signs of 
  stale life in each one--a smear of bluish toothpaste on a white 
  towel, a black, shiny slipper peaking out from under the bed. In 
  each room hangs the interlocked crosses and a small blank 
  telescreen.

  The refrigerator has a few items in it, including three bottles 
  of expensive-looking beer. I pick one out, grab the magnetized 
  bottle opener from the front of the fridge, and walk back out to 
  the living room.

  The remote control is a complex arrangement of colored buttons. 
  Someone has painted silver interlocking crosses on its back. I 
  pick a large red button on the front and the wide telescreen 
  across from me blares to life. I sit down on the couch and open 
  the beer.

  The screen displays a pair of gargantuan locked crosses. They 
  rotate slowly in three dimensions. Under the symbol is a rapidly 
  increasing nine digit number followed by the words "Souls Saved 
  By The New Life." I take a sip of my beer and watch the number 
  click over to the one billion soul mark. When it does, the 
  screen glows white for an instant and an ominously deep and 
  mechanical voice speaks from the screen.

  "Maximum capacity of the AbovePlane World Odeon reached."

  The screen then blinks a series of words at me. They illuminate 
  the room with a strobing glow:

  Admittance Now Restricted
  To Authorized Souls Only
  Only
  _Only_

  Suddenly the telescreen flicks to a field of static snow. The 
  screen's pixels flutter through a random pattern of grays and 
  whites. I think I see a face imaged there. Maybe my wife's... 
  maybe my own.

  Then, abruptly, the power fails. The screen darkens and the 
  lights go out. I hear the refrigerator in the kitchen wind down 
  to a clicking halt.

  I take another sip of beer and put my feet up on the end of the 
  couch. I look at my pair of bad sneakers in the afterimage glow 
  of the telescreen and pull the transistor radio out from my 
  pocket. I remember the man dressed in white that gave it to me 
  and wonder if this is his house... if this is his old life. I 
  smile and thumb the volume dial back and forth. I wonder if they 
  finally got rid of us or if we got rid of them.

  I flip the radio up into the air and feel it smack back into my 
  hand. I close my fingers over it in the darkness and swallow a 
  mouthful of warming beer. Through an open window I can hear the 
  raised voices of my new neighborhood as people gather outside in 
  the street. Some sound scared, others are just angry at the 
  power loss. Someone suggests building a bonfire. I smile again 
  and get up to join them. As I walk out onto the porch, I hear a 
  woman's voice ask if anyone's got a radio. I raise my little 
  brown transistor up in one hand and come off the porch, bad 
  sneakers squeaking loudly. No one seems to notice me, so I cough 
  noisily. Bodies turn to look at me, faces bright in the 
  moonlight. Somebody shines a flashlight on my face. I smile at 
  them and ask if anyone's got a battery.

  P.G. Hurh (hurh@admail.fnal.gov)
----------------------------------

  P.G. Hurh is a mechanical design engineer at Fermi National 
  Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. In his spare time, 
  he likes to sample good beer, play his bass guitar, ride his 
  bike, and design instrumentation and beam-feedback devices for 
  high-energy particle accelerators.

  
  Need to Know: Fight Fan Mail With E-Mail
==========================================

  In a world where the line between creator and consumer has 
  always been clear, especially when it comes to such items as 
  newspapers, magazines, books, and television shows, perhaps the 
  way that electronic publications like InterText handle feedback 
  is different. In this magazine you'll find the electronic mail 
  addresses of most of our editors and contributors. Readers feel 
  free to comment on every aspect of the magazine, and of course, 
  this issue's readers will often become _next_ issue's 
  contributors.

  In traditional media, however, the only real means of feedback 
  has been traditional postal mail or the occasional irate 
  telephone call. But as creators become more on-line savvy, 
  they're beginning to actively discuss their creations with their 
  audience electronically.

  Perhaps the best example of this new dialogue is J. Michael 
  Straczynski, the executive producer and creator of the 
  syndicated science fiction drama _Babylon 5_. A veteran of 
  on-line services and BBSes, Straczynski relates to fans of his 
  show in GEnie's Science Fiction & Fantasy Roundtable #2, 
  CompuServe's Science Fiction & Fantasy Forum, and USENET's 
  rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5. While many of the responses Straczynski 
  gives are simple "thank yous" to electronic fan letters, he also 
  tries to explain alleged plot holes and give hints on where his 
  series' overarching story might be leading.

  While tantalizing information on the future of a TV series might 
  be reason enough for fans to log on, what Straczynski gets out 
  of his interaction with fans (including wading through hundreds 
  of messages every day) is less tangible. But he says his on-line 
  fans help keep him honest.

  "The best thing about the net is that it forces you to ask 
  questions," he wrote on USENET. "The job of the writer is to 
  come up with every possible question about your character and 
  your world, and answer it, giving both greater verisimilitude. 
  Nobody can come up with _every_ conceivable question, but on the 
  nets, you get questions you never _dreamed_ of. Which helps."

  Straczynski may be the best example of a creator appearing 
  regularly on-line to exchange information with his audience 
  (though one-time-only live chats on commercial on-line services 
  are becoming a chic phenomenon), but he's hardly the only one 
  out there. While musician Richard Thompson isn't a reader of the 
  Internet mailing list devoted to him ("They're worse than 
  critics," Thompson said of the list. "They're _amateur_ 
  critics."), musician Suzanne Vega _is_ a subscriber to her own 
  discussion list. Bob Mould, leader of the rock band Sugar, 
  e-mails messages to his fans on an irregular basis from an 
  e-mail address listed prominently in the liner notes of Sugar's 
  latest album. Mould's an on-line veteran, too--when asked about 
  rumors that Husker Du, his previous band, had broken up because 
  of a failed relationship between him and drummer Grant Hart, 
  Mould's response was that the rumor was so bizarre he "hadn't 
  even heard that one on the Internet before."

  Bizarre rumors and strange characters are, of course, part of 
  the trouble with going public on-line. Straczynski has had 
  several run-ins with on-line antagonists; some creators solve 
  that problem by "lurking"--listening to the talk without making 
  their appearance known.

  But for those who can stand the heat--and that number seems to 
  be growing every day--the in-depth discussions with consumers of 
  their art can be valuable for the creators, too.

  --Jason Snell


  FYI
=====

...................................................................
   InterText's next issue will be released January 15, 1995.
...................................................................


  Back Issues of InterText
--------------------------

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  On America Online, issues are available in Keyword: PDA, in
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  Gopher Users: find our issues at
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  Submissions to InterText
--------------------------

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....................................................................

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..

  This issue is wrapped as a setext. For more information send 
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