Ditto

(This is the short short story I am submitting to the Transparent folks.)

I met James when I was thirty two years old.  I had long since given up hope that I would ever find someone to settle down with.  But then James showed up.  He was smart.  He was funny.  And he was …cute.  How could I not fall in love with him?

And he’s right…I mean, she’s right.  James did tell me about himself.  He said that he was a woman inside and that when we made love, I was making love to a woman.  I didn’t think anything of it.  I thought it was a silly little game he liked to play.  Believe me, some of my other boyfriends had fantasies that were much worse.  This one seemed …innocent.  So I played along.  And when it was Jimmye who proposed to me, I said, “Well, thank you for that, but I’m going to have to wait to see how James feels about this.  I’ll get back to you.” 

Our marriage was glorious.  After twenty years we still held hands and kissed each other…in public.  We were the epitome of PDA.  All of our friends kept looking at us as models of how things should be.   They said we gave them hope that two people could actually stay in love.  For twenty years, “Jamesanddelyla” was one word.  In those rare times that we were ever apart, we would call each other at least three times a day just to say, “I love you.”  

 You know that aging couple that made kids run away saying, “Ewww!  Old people are kissing?”   That was us.  It was one of our rituals.  We had a lot of rituals.  You remember in that movie Ghosts where Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore kept saying “ditto?”  We did that.  We did that before that movie came out.  One would say, “I want to go out for dinner tonight” and the other would say, “ditto.”  One would say, “you’re gorgeous” and the other would say, “ditto.”  One would say, “I love you” and the other would just say, “ditto.”   I loved that ritual. 

When James first told me that he just couldn’t live as a man anymore, I didn’t know what to think.  He couldn’t possibly be serious.  Why was he taking the game this far?  I only agreed to let him “transition” because I loved him and I knew he was very unhappy.  I thought he would come out of it just like he had always come out of his depressions before.  But he didn’t this time.

He started taking those damned pills and just became more and more female.  And the girlier he became, the more frightened I got.  Why was this happening?  What had I done to make my James want to leave me like this?  It was like I was watching my husband kill himself slowly. 

And I fought for James…because I knew that nobody else would.   I shouted and cursed at that bitch that was taking him away from me.   But it didn’t do any good.  She won.  I know this is the same person I married, but inside I can’t help feeling that this woman killed my husband.  

I miss James.

Sorry for crying.  I feel like an idiot.  The last time I saw James he had the gall to tell me that losing my love was the greatest tragedy of his life.  I just got up to leave and said, “ditto.”

I see stupid people

As I study history, I am struck by the number of truly stupid ideas that some people devote their lives to....sometimes to the point of martyrdom. In fact, the more stupid the idea, the more fervently its adherents will cling to it.

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Zombie Gundown and Other Tales

Steven Ringgenberg’s new short story anthology, “Zombie Gundown and Other Tales” is an entertaining, energetic, and very readable adventure into multiple genres.   The first (and eponymous) story is an apocalyptic tale with an interesting twist.   What would a zombie apocalypse be like in Arizona, the land of guns?  The answer is that you need guns, guns, and more guns, and if you think you have enough guns you are wrong and need to collect more guns. 

The story involves a group of lounge lizards in a local watering hole.  On the very first night of the living dead, their immediate response is to collect as much fire power as possible. I particularly liked the small detail of the narrator asking who had guns and discovering that nearly everyone in the bar had been packing….only in Arizona. 

The still-living spend the night gathering up the individual arsenals that everyone in Arizona apparently has and bringing to a central base…which should logically be the aforementioned watering hole.  It is a particularly telling comment on the Arizona mentality that on the very first night of the coming of the undead, when civilization has hardly broken down, the denizens of the Red Onion Lounge see nothing wrong with breaking into a gun shop and looting whatever they think they need.   It’s the logical thing to do.   

The story ends at sun up, when the Red Onioners now in possession of more arms than the Iraqi army and setting up on the roof of the bar, finally ready for the masses of undead that will surely come.

This all works well, with the one false note of having the governor of Arizona warning folks that the zombies are upon us.  It would be the role of the police to make these warnings, not the governor.  Nor can I imagine the current governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, would be so empathetic to the plight of the people. 

 

The second story, “Brides of the Wasteland,” is a more typical post-apocalyptic yarn.  Set in the far future, the story revolves around Synwulfe the bounty hunter, working on gaining his freedom by killing his quota of the hordes of mutants that ravage what is left of the earth.  It is an action packed story which exposes its comic book origin.  While the style is very visual and easy to read, the story begins with an overly detailed exposition.  That would have made sense as a sketch for a separate and longer piece but it is unnecessary for the story that follows it.  The salient details of the back story could have been incorporated inline. 

The final story, “The Lurker in the Shadows” is an old-fashioned science fiction bug hunt.  I’m told this was originally intended to be Star Trek fan fiction and it does indeed read like an episode of the show. 

While Mr. Ringgenberg does present us with three entertaining monster tales and has a breezy comic book like style, there is one affectation that just didn’t work for me.  In the two first-person stories, the narrators occasionally have internal conversations that are much more erudite than their spoken conversation.  Consider this passage from “Brides of the Wasteland”:

With practiced insouciance, I took a short pull off my drink and began speaking, “Ya see a lotta weird shit out in the wild zones o’ the Shattered Earth. Hell, I been at the center o’ plenty o’ bad craziness myself…”       

I thought this was an interesting character affectation the first time it appeared.  When it showed up in a second story, I realized that it was a voice error.

This is a minor problem however and does not take away from readability of the stories.  “Zombie Gundown and Other Tales” is not classic literature, but that is not its purpose.  It is meant to be an enjoyable and fast-paced read and on that it succeeds well.

Lucy

As wonderful as it is to see Scarlett Johansson's luscious tuchus in anything, Luc Besson’s Science Fiction Thriller “Lucy” has been heavily criticized as ridiculous pseudo-science wrapped around canyon-like plot gaps and strained logic.  If we are talking about the real world then yes.  All these criticisms are valid.  The idea that humans only use 10% of their brains is an urban myth, and Morgan Freeman’s explanatory lecture at the beginning of the film is a lame attempt to give that myth authenticity. 

In dream space, though, the movie makes complete sense.  The touchstone of the difference between real space and dream space is that in the real world you can’t do magic.  If you find yourself being able to fly or manipulate objects with your mind, you can be sure that you are in dream space.   The only thing that prevents people from doing God-like things in dream space is a lack of control.  That can come with control, practice, or in Lucy’s case, from consuming massive amounts of untested drugs. 
In dream space I have managed to do every phenomenal thing that Lucy winds up being able to do in her drugged dream.   My miracles and apotheosis are not nearly as violent as Lucy’s but it can be excused since her dream space was induced by violence and a very real death threat. 

 
Freeman’s nonsensical expositional lecture is exactly the kind of jumbled logic one finds in dreams.   Arguments like these, non-sequiturs wrapped around symbols instead of concrete concepts, make perfect sense while you are dreaming, but make you scratch your head and wonder “what the hell was I thinking?” when you awaken.

Lucy’s apotheosis revolves around a return to a primordial state.  As she becomes more god-like, she returns to confront the very first human.  She eventually witnesses the birth of the entire universe.  These scenes are dizzying and trance-like and exactly the sort of thing one experiences in the depth of profound meditation or in the throes of what Jung called an “Epic” dream, a dream so profound that it is life changing.  The feeling here is exactly the visceral feeling felt in the last ten minutes of the film 2001:A Space Odyssey.  That film, too, involved a primordial deification that transcended logic.  I had my first religious experience watching 2001.  The self-referential scene of the modern Lucy meeting the Australopithecine Lucy was just as dizzying and ineffable as Bowman’s final meeting with the black monolith.



The plot of Lucy therefore becomes: a woman is forced to act as a mule for untested drugs.  When the pouch carrying the drugs bursts and begins to empty the drugs into her system, she is thrown into a dream state in which she is able to control more and more of her reality.  As she slips ever closer to her overdose induced death, she experiences an apotheosis, resulting in her complete deification as she dies.