David Gerrold - [SS] The Strange Disappearance of David Gerrold

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2024-11-24 0 0 34.75KB 15 页 5.9玖币

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THE STRANGE DISAPPEARANCE OF DAVID GERROLD

by David Gerrold

Now that we have a message board online, we’ve stopped flirting with the

notion of adding a letter column to the magazine. So when this long letter

arrived, it went in the manuscript pile ... which turns out to be something of

a fortuitous mistake after all.

Should the map that accompanied the letter ever be needed, it can be

found pinned to the board over the editor’s desk, between the Danny

Shanahan cartoon and the postcard from Harlan Ellison.

* * * *

Dear Gordon,

I apologize in advance, but this is the only way I can think to tell anyone about

this. After that last weird experience, trying to convince people that my kid really was

a Martian, I’ve learned that the only safe way to report stuff like this and have people

take it seriously is to present it as fiction.

Right, the irony of that doesn’t escape me. The only way to get people to

believe the truth is first tell them it’s a lie. What is it about human beings

anyway—that we only believe the opposite of what we’re told? (Remember when

people used to tell me, “You’re not as big a jerk as I heard”? Except most of the

time, they didn’t use the word jerk. Wow, what a terrific acknowledgment. That’s

why I love people so much. So, okay, thanks. I got the message. That’s when I

started announcing at the beginning of every speech, “I am not a nice man. Don’t

expect it of me.” And that’s when they started coming up to me afterward to

whisper, “You are too a nice man.” See what I mean? People are always looking for

the hidden agenda, the conspiracy, the real truth.)

Never mind. I digress. That’s why there are editors. (Thank you.) But, here’s

the timeline, follow this:

End of February, right on schedule, I’m finally coming out of my usual

post-Christmas depression. Don’t ask. Every year the Capitalist Feeding Frenzy gets

worse than the year before—or maybe, every year I get ground down a little more.

So here I am, with life piled up at the front door in big uncollected piles and I need a

shovel just to get out to the car. So I climb out a window, throw some stuff into the

back of the camper and start driving north. I figure I’ll find some little cabin

somewhere, hide out for a few days, and just sit and type and type and type until I

was physically and emotionally exhausted. Maybe I’ll even write a story. Some

people meditate. I type until it flows and then I type until it stops flowing and I know

when I’m done, because I’ll have a post-orgasmic smile on my face so peaceful it

could make Buddha jealous. Kind of like what you see on the face of a really

well-carved chocolate bunny. (Pope Dan says “hi,” by the way.)

I turn on the music, the player is set for random, and I get Hubert Laws doing

jazz variations on traditional Bach pieces; I don’t even remember when I ripped the

disc, but it’s the perfect sonic wallpaper, it doesn’t demand your attention until

you’re ready to listen, and then once you fall into it you don’t want to climb out

again, which is just fine for the mood I’m in. While I’m waiting for the grunge of Los

Angeles to clear itself out of my head, I follow roads I’ve never been on before.

That means getting off the freeway and taking that forgotten little turnoff that curves

suggestively away into the hills. Next thing I know, I’m north of Palmdale, passing

through places I didn’t believe were still possible in California. Look up Green

Valley, for instance.

Eventually, the road unwinds itself out onto Route 395, which should be

renamed Desolation Boulevard. Almost no traffic, no towns, and nothing on either

side except empty flatlands and the southernmost spine of the Sierras. I follow the

road until my blood sugar finally crashes. I pull off the highway onto what would

have been a dirt road if anybody had actually driven on it recently, crawl into the

back of the camper, roll an old blanket around myself and snore until dawn, when a

uniformed officer of the California State Highway Patrol bangs on the door and tells

me to stop scaring the cow. Singular. Maybe someday this place will be able to

afford a second one.

One half-cup of paint thinner sold from a coffee urn and a BLT later, found in

a place called Lone Pine, with no pine trees at all, but still big enough to attract a

location company from Desperate Pictures Inc., my blood sugar is rising again, and

less than an hour after that, I’m wandering through the frightening emptiness of a

place called Manzanar. There’s a guard tower, maybe a reconstruction, it looks too

new, and a museum, and a dirt road that winds around the places where barracks

used to be. I don’t know why I’m here, or why it’s important to be here, but the

whole time, I can feel ghosts whispering in my ear. I just can’t hear what they’re

saying. (And if I could, I wouldn’t understand it. It’s in Japanese.)

I find where the music player has fallen off the dashboard and under the

passenger seat and plug it back in and let it play tracks at random, scrambling

Coltrane and Copland, Mozart and Morrison, and more than a few

surprises—unremembered tracks from Ray Lynch and Deep Forest and the Penguin

Caf Orchestra. Then it finds Terry Riley’s “In C,” and the battery dies somewhere

between the fifth and seventh chord change, leaving me hanging unfinished and

unresolved.

The timing is perfect.

I arrive at Mono Lake—a place so quiet and remote that you can hear your

own blood rushing through your veins. You can hear the blood rushing through the

veins of the person standing next to you.

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