See Buffalo and Die!

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I didn't do much yesterday.  Nobody in Philadelphia did.  It was a hundred degrees on the front porch!  And that's the one in shade.

But, strong of character as I am, I did get up and write today's story.  It was commissioned by Daniel Francken, who said then when when he gets anxious he rips off his pinky toes' nails and that he hails from Buffalo, which he characterized as "the armpit of New York State."  I'm guessing that Daniel is feeling the heat too.

Anyway, here's the story.  I can only hope that John Kessel doesn't see it.

Your Streets, O Buffalo!  Your Streets Filled of Light!

by

Michael Swanwick

These are things that Daniel Francken never says about Buffalo:

All roads lead to Buffalo, New York.  Even the neediest citizen of that happy city would scorn to leave it for all of Ted Turner’s wealth.  In the spring, the fountains run with sparkling white wine.  In the autumn, they spout dark red ale.  The building spires are all topped with gems.  Though the suavest and most agile jewel thieves in the world live there, they scorn to defile their city’s skyline by taking them.

The winters are moderated by the proximity of Canada, which softens the winds, and of the lake which gently warms them.  The summers are so clement that nobody in Buffalo owns an air conditioner, and many don’t even know what one is. The white sand beaches of Lake Erie are one of the world’s greatest secrets.  Famous Brazilian beauties come to sunbathe topless by the crystalline waters, knowing that nobody there would be so ungentlemanly as to harass them.  So much like Paradise is this great city that if a unicorn were to materialize in Delaware Park, nobody would be surprised.

See Buffalo and die!  Its streets are paved with gold.  The hearts of its inhabitants are filled with song.  The police are incorruptible and the criminals are in it only for the sport; they give away their spoils to the poor – of whom, in Buffalo, there are almost none.  He who is tired of Buffalo is tired of life.

The sports teams there always win.

Those are but a few of the things that Daniel Francken never says about his home town.  When he first read this story, he did not rip off the nails of both his pinky toes in a fit of frustration.

With apologies to Alice Sheldon and Jamaica Kinkaid

*

Being Michael Walsh

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Eighteen days into the Clarion West Write-a-Thon and I've written eighteen stories!  Nobody appears to be impressed, but that's a pretty good accomplishment.  And it's only going to get better.

Here's the latest, and every word of it true:

Being Michael Walsh

by

Michael Swanwick

The next book that you published was Being Gardner Dozois.

Michael Walsh:  God help us all.

This was an interview conducted by Michael Swanwick covering every work of short fiction that Dozois had written to date, right?  It got glowing reviews, as I recall.

Michael Walsh:  Yes, rave reviews.  So far as I could tell, the reviewers were the only ones who actually read the book.  It was not a money-maker.

Chiefly, it was about – what?

Michael Walsh:  Swanwick interviewed Dozois about every story he’d ever written, in order of publication.  What worked , what didn’t, and why it did or didn’t work.  You can think of it as a sort of postgraduate course for authors.  One quick read would make anybody a significantly better writer.  A close study would be enough to win you a Pulitzer, maybe even a Nobel someday.  If the book had sold better, the field of imaginative fiction would be in much better shape today.

But that’s a moot point now, of course.

It also contained secret Tantric sex techniques, did it not?

Michael Walsh:  With diagrams!  Techniques for eight-hour-long orgasms, tireless sexual energy, the lot, and all of it so clearly laid out you’d have to be a moron not to be able to employ them that very night.  Gardner had to go into hiding for a few years, as a result.  The Dalai Lama ordered him taken out for revealing the techniques to the world at large.  But finally, I managed to get a copy of the sales figures to his holiness and he called off the assassins.

As well as a sure-fire method for picking up total strangers and convincing them to have hot sex with you on the spot?

Michael Walsh:  You wouldn’t think it, to look at either of them, but that method really worked.  All three people who bought the book came back the next day to thank me.  One of them hadn’t gotten laid in years and yet when I spoke to him he had a drop-dead beautiful woman on either arm.  There were tears in his eyes, he was so grateful.

Also techniques for calling up ifrits and binding them to your will?

Michael Walsh:  I don’t know what Swanwick was thinking of when he asked those questions.  And Dozois should never have answered them.

You seem to have had an extraordinary run of bad luck with that book.

Michael Walsh:  I did.  I just couldn’t catch a break with it.

Finally, there’s a piece of urban legendry going around about diamonds in the binding.  Can you clarify that for us?

Michael Walsh:  Oh, that wasn’t an urban legend.  It turned out that there was a Japanese smuggling ring which had a member in the bindery I used.  They chose my book, pretty much at random, and hid several diamonds of the first water in the spines of roughly half the volumes.  The plan was to place a foreign order for the books and then launder the diamonds via Tokyo rare book stores.  But then through a series of bizarre coincidences, the books got shipped to me instead of to Japan, and the Yakuza involved were all arrested before they could recover them.  The details of the plan came out during the trial.  I read about it in the Washington Post.

That must have been an astonishing moment for you.

Michael Walsh:  Yeah.  Especially since one week before that I’d given up on the book and sent every copy I had to be pulped.

*

Above:  More chickens.  The one in the forefront is Lipstick, so named not only after the red at the tip of her beak but also because her owner suspects she may be a lesbian.  Chicken sexuality is a mysterious business.

Urban Chickens and Survival Kit

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Ah, this glitterati life!  Marianne and I went out to dinner last night in the backyard of a friend who keeps chickens.  I'll bet you thought it was illegal to keep chickens in Philadelphia.  Well, yes, it is, but there's a loophole.  It's perfectly legal, provided only that none of your neighbors care enough to complain to the authorities.

Above:  There I am with Elvira.  She's a perfectly charming dinner companion, actually.


And the story du jour is . . .

Survival Kit

by

Michael Swanwick

Three days after the end of the world, Nicholas Young’s French bulldog, Spud, dropped a rat at his feet.  Horrified, he stared down at it, repulsed not so much by the vermin itself as by the sure knowledge that he was going to eat it.  He was too hungry not to.

So Young got out his survival kit and dug out some spices, the flint and steel, and the Rodents and Road Kill Cook Book.  The result wasn’t bad, if you were starving, though Spud still got most of it.

In the morning, Young slung his knapsack over his shoulder and hiked onward.  He came to a river.  There was just enough rope in his kit to build a raft.  He went with the flow.  There were hooks and monofilament line in his kit so he had no trouble catching a few fish.  When there was enough for lunch, he made for the shore and built a fire.

Halfway through lunch, there was a rustling in the bushes.  Six ragged people – two of them women and three children – came into Young’s campsite.  They all had pointed sticks aimed right at him.

Young smiled.  “Hey, there’s no need for that.”  He pointed to the untouched fish cooking slowly over the campfire coals.  “Take ‘em all.”  Then, when they were snatched up avidly, he said, “Let me get you some plates and napkins.”

He reached into his survival kit and came out with a gun.  “The apocalypse probably caught you guys by surprise.  Me, I’ve spent years working on my survival kit.”

“We’ll go quietly,” one of the women said.  “Just don’t hurt any of the children.”

“Sit.  Eat,” Young said.  “We can always catch more.”  And, suiting word to deed, he got out the fishing gear and taught the children how to use it.  Then he made them a frog gig.  By the end of the day, they were all friends.  By the end of the week, there was a flourishing village of thirty.  When predators moved into the area, he dipped into his survival kit for wolf repellent.  When a child got sick, he doled out antibiotics.

One evening, though, after the corn harvest, the tribe was sitting around the communal fire when they started talking about things they missed most:  breakfast cereals, reality television, romance novels, and the like.  “I miss civilization,” somebody plaintively summed it all up.  There was a universal murmur of agreement.

“Well, heck,” Young said.  “Why didn’t you say so earlier?”  And digging deep into his kit, he hauled out Robert’s Rules of Order,  Fundamentals of Democracy, Water and Sewage System Design Made Simple, Civilization for Dummies, a fist-sized fusion reactor, and a gavel for whoever they named head of the Supreme Court.

The tribe gawked.  “How come you got all that stuff in your knapsack?” a teenager asked.

“Hey,” Young said.  “This isn’t just any survival kit – it’s the ultimate survival kit.

*

Shopping With Ellen Datlow

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It's been a busy social weekend.  Parties everywhere.  And, this being America, they all celebrated our Second Amendment rights.  First we went quail hunting.  Then we rode to the hounds.  Mountain goats in the Rockies.  Bears in the Appalachians.  All topped off with a spot of fishing with dynamite -- the only efficient way to fish, in my opinion.  And of course we went to the Pen & Pencil Club on Friday., where I potted a vicar.  I wanted to mount his head, big flat hat and all, in the den, but Marianne was having none of it.

Can you tell that I'm suffering from an excess of whimsy this morning?  Maybe I should skip straight to the story . . .

Shopping With Ellen Datlow

by

Michael Swanwick

How did she find these places?  And how the hell had she talked me into coming along with her?  I hate shopping.  It’s my idea of no fun at all.  Yet there I was when, rummaging through a box of handbags in a thrift shop, Ellen Datlow emerged with a lambskin purse.  “It’s a Chanel 2.55 Classic Flap!” she cried.  “And only thirty dollars.”

“That’s nice Ellen.”

Then we were off to a shoe store that was having an overstock sale.  There she found a pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes in her size and favorite color for fifteen bucks.  “Aren’t they lovely?” she said.

“They’re shoes, Ellen.”

So it went.  In a sidewalk bin of costume jewelry, Ellen found a rhinestone necklace the green stones of which, when she rubbed off the grime, turned out to be emeralds, and the red rubies.  In a print shop, she found an original Charles Addams cartoon, autographed, for seven dollars, though she talked the seller down to three because the frame was ugly.  On the way out, she found a small Odd Nerdrum oil that must have been mistaken for a print because she was able to pick it up for a few loose bills.  “I don’t really have the wall space for it,” she said.  “But it’s just so lovely – look at how he handles light!”

“Yeah, yeah, very wintry,” I said.  Thinking to myself that there was no end to the crap she was willing to buy.

I followed Ellen into a used book store where, under a pile of old magazines, she found a brown envelope stuffed with the typescript of “Johnny Mnemonic.  “This was the first story I ever bought from William Gibson!” she exclaimed.  “It’s got my notes on it.  Look – there’s where I wrote ‘Buy This.’”

“Fifty cents,” the proprietor grunted, without looking up.

“Do you want it?” Ellen asked, afterwards.

“As if I don’t have enough paper in the house already,” I said.

“I’ll give it to Bill, then.”

“Ellen, we’ve been shopping all day,” I said once we were out on the sidewalk.  “Please.  No more.”

But she didn’t hear me because she’d rushed to the nearest store window.  It belonged to one of those Manhattan showrooms where they display antique cars as if they were sculptures by Michelangelo, and charged just about as much for them.  A sign in the window said, BLOWOUT SALE.  “Let’s go see!” Ellen cried and, groaning, I followed in her wake.

I found her standing in front of the most beautiful machine I had ever seen.  It looked like the kind of car that God would drive.  “It’s gorgeous!” Ellen said.  “What is it?”

A very elegantly dressed man smiled gently and said, “It’s a 1928 Dusenberg J-101, one of the most desirable cars ever made.  Only a few hundred were ever built and ordinarily the price of one in mint condition, as is this one, would be astronomical.  But I’ve decided to renounce all worldly goods and become a monk.  So, just for today, I’ll let you have it for two thousand dollars.”

“I wouldn’t have anywhere to keep it,” Ellen said.  “But you’ve got a garage, don’t you, Michael?  You should get it.”

“Oh, all right,” I replied.  “I’ll buy it.  But only to be nice to you.”

*

WWKVD?

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Remember the 6000 Salad Bowls scene in The Return of the Secaucus Seven?  Every town in America has that one odd or distinctive place that serves as a local landmark.

I live in Philadelphia.  Here's ours.  We call it Independence Hall.


And for Independence Day, a story featuring a great American writer . . .

WWKVD?

by

Michael Swanwick

Listen:  Stephanie Barnes has come unstuck in time.  One minute she’s a teenager just starting her first summer job.  The next she’s a very old woman lying in a hospital bed, dying.  Small wonder her favorite author is Kurt Vonnegut.  She buys copy after copy of Slaughterhouse Five and then reads them to pieces, looking for clues to how to handler her predicament.

The breath catches in her throat.  This is it, she realizes, I’m dying.  Then suddenly she’s a senior in college, taking her final exam in philosophy.

Kill me now, she thinks. 

Hours later, she staggers out of the classroom, determined to finally do something about her predicament.  But what?

Well . . . what would Kurt Vonnegut do?

He’d ask advice from the wisest person he knew of.  Walking across campus, hands clasped behind her back, scowling with concentration, Barnes plots out how to do this.  First she has to learn all she can about Vonnegut’s public appearances, their exact dates and locales.  When she’s old, she can look up all the information on the Web and memorize it.  Then, when she’s young . . .

Thus it is that a ten-year-old girl, playing hooky from school to attend one of his readings, stands up during the question-and-answer period and carefully recites the titles of all of Vonnegut’s future books, including the one he is currently writing, says, “Remember me,” and quickly slips away.  Years later, a young woman at a similar event, says, “Last time I saw you, I told you what books you would write.  This time . . .”  And she tells him events that will happen to him in the next ten years.  A decade later, a woman stops him as he’s leaving the venue for yet another appearance and says, “This is the third time I’ve seen you.”

He recognizes instantly.  “Why are you doing this?” he asks.  “Who are you?”

“Someone who needs your help.”

They go to a coffee house, where Barnes tells him her story.  When she is done, Vonnegut is silent for a very long time.  Then he says, “I’m only a writer, you know.  I have no special insight into the laws that run the universe.  Only, perhaps, a stronger awareness than most of their absurdity.  Life can be a painful business, and there’s no Complaint Department where you can go to register your discontent.  So it seems to me that the most you can do is to try to live it with as much dignity and integrity as you’re allowed.”  He spreads his arms helplessly.  “That’s all I got.”

Barnes goes away.  It’s not the answer she was looking for.  But it makes her feel oddly better.

Shortly before Vonnegut’s death, she shows up at what might well be his last public appearance.  Vonnegut, seeing her, climbs down from the dais.  He can see in her eyes that she’s used up all of her life, and that from here-and-now it’s but a quick jump forward to her final and very real death.  He takes her hands in his and, leaning close so no one will overhear, he says, “Tell me.  What have you learned from all this?”

Barnes thinks seriously, trying to condense a strange lifetime of experience into a few brief words.  Finally she says, “We live, we do the best that we can – and then we die.”

Vonnegut smiles sadly and then kisses her on the cheek.  “Well,” he says, “at least we’re on the same page.”

*

Visiting Great-Great-Great-Great-Great Granddad

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Nothing to say today.  So here's my story:

Visiting Great-Great-Great-Great-Great Granddad

By

Michael Swanwick

           

Michael Cullinan led a long and happy life and then . . . well, then nothing really.  He just kept on living it.  The decades went by, and eventually the centuries.  There were birthdays and great-grandchildren, and then great-great-great grandchildren, and then great-great-great-great-great grandchildren.  The days were filled with things to do.  Time just flew by.

One day, an uninvited group of scientists came to examine him.  “How’d you do it?” one of them asked, after they’d taken innumerable measurements and tests, to no discernable result.

“Good genes, I guess.”

“Sir,” the scientist said testily, “this is the twenty-third century.  We no longer believe in such Medieval nonsense as ‘good genes.’”

“Sorry.  Chalk it up to luck, then.”

“That either.”

“Well, if you know so much more than I do, then why don’t you answer your questions for me?”

“Mr. Cullinan, your living to such an extreme old age is contrary to natural law.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in Medieval nonsense like ‘natural law.’”

At which point the conversation got ugly.  Eventually, Cullinan had to throw the whole batch of them out physically.  Very few men closing in on three hundred years of age could have done as much.  But Cullinan kept active.  He always took a long walk after dinner.

He had just slammed the door and thrown himself down into his favorite easy chair, when a voice came from the back of the house.  “Isaak says he’s coming over for dinner.  And he’s bringing the kids’ kids’ kids’ kids.”  Cullinin’s wife of he forgot how many centuries came into the room.  “Who was that?”

“Just some more investigators,” he said.  “Nobody of any consequence.”

The scientists were pests, but he didn’t really mind them.  In his experience, all you had to do was wait fifty or eighty years and they inevitably died.

*

Above:  Like, I said, nothing to say.

Thai Food and Swiss Army Hair

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Gardner Dozois is one of the nicest guys in the world, and a good and true friend for something like thirty-five years.  But he does have his quirks.  One of which is that he's convinced that I live in the suburbs.  My house is half of a duplex, it has no front yard, and it's deep within the boundaries of Philadelphia.  No matter.  I don't live in Center City and that means I'm out in the 'burbs.  As far as Gardner's concerned, South Philly, the Greater Northeast, Chestnut Hill, Fishtown, the Liberties . . .  anything that isn't Center City is the suburbs.

Well, I now have proof that I do so live in the city.  The Tang Thai Restaurant just opened up on the corner yesterday, and Marianne and I were among the first to order take-out.  It was all excellent and the spring rolls were a revelation -- light and crisp on the outside, delicious on the inside.  They made me realize that I'd never had decent spring rolls before this.

And it goes without saying that it would be a very strange suburb indeed that had a Thai restaurant just four or five houses down the block from you.

And today's story . . .

is . . .

Swiss Army Hair

By

Michael Swanwick

           

– It’s a wig, it’s a hat, it’s a sun visor!  It keeps off rain, it cushions the skull, it deflects dust and dandruff!  It’s . . .  Swiss Army Hair!  Here to tell us about it is Andy Burton.

           

– Thanks, Jim.  As you know, the first Swiss Army Knife was made in 1897 and Konrad Zuse’s Z3, the world’s first electronic fully programmable computer, was created in 1941.  Yet it wasn’t until this very year that somebody thought to combine the two innovations with modern grooming technology.  It looks natural, too!  In fact, I’m wearing one right now.

           

– I thought that was your real hair.

           

– I wish, Jim!  Now tell me what color my hair is.

           

– It’s brown, Andy.

           

– And now?

           

– Wow!  Look at that – it’s bright orange!  No, it’s blue!  I mean red!  It’s cycling through all the colors of the rainbow.  I’m guessing that ought to come in handy when you want to change hair color.

           

– You bet it will.  But that’s not all that Swiss Army Hair can do.  It’ll serve as a burglar alarm while you sleep.  It can get you up in the morning by gently tickling your nose.   It can also – here, let me lift up this plate of food – do this.

           

– It’s actually feeding you!  If you didn’t have to hold up the plate for it, that would save you a lot of effort.  I’m guessing that those tendrils can also wield gardening tools every bit as deftly as it does knife and fork.

           

– Yes, although you’ll need itty-bitty shovels and hoes and of course you’ll need to be limber enough to bend close to the earth.  So I’m thinking there’s not a great deal of market there.  However, with these clip-in hair extensions you can actually add new skill sets to your Swiss Army Hair.  This one combines martial arts and commando skills.

           

– That’s actually kind of scary, Andy.  It looks like that thing could do real damage.

           

– Yes, it knows seventeen different ways to kill a man.  Which would turn out to be pretty darn useful if you were attacked by ninjas – a possibility that grows stronger every day that the government delays building that wall along the Canadian border.  Now watch what happens when I add a second extension which gives it what we call “leadership initiative.”

           

–  It’s patting me down.  Now it’s removing my pocket knife from my trousers pocket.  That’s absolutely terrifying, Andy.

           

–  No, that’s synergy.  Incidentally, I wouldn’t make any sudden motions if I were you.  It sees you glancing toward the studio door.  I promise you, you wouldn’t get very far if you tried to make a break for it.  It’s best you simply do what it wants you to do.

           

– What . . . what does it want me to do, Andy?

           

– It wants you to wear Swiss Army Hair.  It wants everybody to.

*

 Above:  The Tang Thai from the inside.  I'm thinking we'll be eating Thai food once a week far into the foreseeable future.