Ketchup

“Pattern Masters” is one of two stories I wrote before my wife Diana and I went digital. Because I’m a disturbed monkey, I constantly wondered what would prevent me from taking an envelope full of pictures that weren’t mine. The drawers where the photo department keeps the finished envelopes are self-serve. They alphabetize them. You’re supposed to find your own, then bring it to the register with the rest of your shopping.

The cashier never bothers to check whose name is on the envelope. He just rings it up.

So… Would other people’s photos be more interesting than mine? Were they having better vacations, bigger homes, crazy sex on camera, or training ninja dogs able to walk a high wire above gasoline-soaked flaming metal spikes?

All writers are voyeurs. We like to get into other lives and times, or we wouldn’t be writing, and most artists I know are the same. Whether they paint, sculpt, act, or sing, we share that urge capture some aspect of the human experience.

Eventually I got to know the girl in the photo department enough to ask what she saw. “This must be an interesting job,” I said.

“Sometimes,” she said. But mostly she just sat by the same machine, wearing the same white gloves, looking at almost-the-same groups of people standing in almost-the-same groups and smiling.

I thought that was interesting, too. There were patterns in our lives that most of us didn’t see — only the girl at the photo counter. Mundane or not, the pattern was there.

One of my childhood friends is a sculptor. He’s gone on to design artwork, statues, and other structures in city parks, inside libraries, in front of Target stores, and at the tram station outside the Denver Broncos’ stadium, but first he suffered through a long stretch of poverty as he developed his portfolio and his reputation.

As a wedding present to Diana and I, he presented us with a four foot salmon left over from a fountain he developed for a sidewalk near California’s state capital buildings.

“This is cool,” I said. “Can we put it in our yard? I mean, is it weather-proof?”

“It’s cement mixed with epoxy,” he explained. “If it was bigger, you could use it for a shield against a nuclear blast.”

This bleak future was the offspring of a very simple chore combined with yard work. We live on a good-sized lot with mature mulberry trees, which I trim myself, partly to save the money, partly because I enjoy the exercise and working with my hands, and mostly because — at least in California — the most prevalent philosophy toward mulberry care is to cut them back every fall. I mean all the way back.

Personally I think this is a scam invented by pruners in order to generate more work for themselves. Yes, mulberries are fast-growing trees, but I see mulberries that have never been trimmed, and they look like trees. That’s nice. Alas, the original owners of our home bought into this scam. For decades, they had their trees shaved year after year. By the time we moved in, the mulberries were barely more than thick, six-foot stumps. Of course they grew in a bushy mess! No one ever allowed them to shape into trees, and there was nothing left on top but scar tissue.

Over ten years, I’ve encouraged the trees to become trees again and reach for the sky, but it’s involved some careful work, sort of like banzai training, except with the judicious application of a chainsaw. Occasionally I’ve had to clear out large parts of their branches in order to make room for the larger upward growths.

Then I hauled truckloads of biomass to the dump.

The dump was a fascinating place. It was miles wide, like a strange, endless prairie where the bulldozers roam and seldom was heard a living sound except the scavenger birds. Maybe more interesting, there are no prairies on the California coastline. We live near the eastern, inland shores of the San Francisco Bay Area, where the waterline is surrounded by dry, rolling hills, gullies, and watersheds.

So where did this prairie come from? I started to do some research. Back in the 1950s, when the region really began to boom after World War II, guess where the city and state governments realized would be the easiest, cheapest places to use as landfills?

The low spots.

See, what you do is find a good hill where you can bring trucks and throw the garbage down the hill. Keep doing this until the low spot fills in. Bulldoze it to pack it down. Keep filling. Then move on to the next low spot.

And those watersheds that happen to be downstream of the gullies you’ve just filled? Heck, those birds, fish, frogs, raccoons, and squirrels won’t care! Oh, wait, the watersheds flow into the ocean next. And the toxins that leak into the Bay will swirl around and end up on the beach where the people go with their children…

The blind stupidity of the situation bothered me. Yes, a technological civilization will generate refuse. Understood. You can’t recycle or burn it all. But you don’t shit where you eat, especially not when that old saying can be meant literally.

The dumps aren’t only full of inert junk like plastic. They also become the home of everything we throw into our household garbage — cadmium, copper, nano silver, mercury — and the feces of our babies and our elderly. Yes, there’s a small, growing movement toward cloth diapers, which have their own problems with increased electrical and water use, not to mention adding to water treatment demands, but do you realize how many disposable diapers a child goes through from birth to two- or three-years-old? Have one. You’ll find yourself up to your elbows in poo on an hourly basis, my friend.

First of all, I’m a light sleeper and sometime insomniac. Maybe worse, in the middle of the night I often think I’m awake when I’m really asleep. Then I wake up. There’s a weird transition from worrying about things that only make sense in the dream state to realizing I wasn’t consciously brooding about my projects, chores, and bills, I was analyzing problems and situations that aren’t mine and don’t actually exist.

What I brought out of this nightmare was the impression of being lost and horribly disfigured. I remembered fighting through my confusion, but I couldn’t quite recall the reason for the machines that had been inserted into my face.

At the time, I had a minor head cold, so my sinuses felt raw and weird. Because I’m a light sleeper, I wear ear plugs. Because I was working a clerical job while writing my first novel in my spare hours, my wrists were shot, so I wore braces, too. Because I grind my teeth, I also pop a night guard between my teeth.

My subconscious is a war zone, man!

The head cold combined with various levels of body armor tricked my brain into imagining I was an altered man in a dark place. Changed how? Why? That sense of fear and chaos became the opening paragraphs of the story, and over the next few days I developed it more.

Here’s a final secret. You probably noticed some similarity in the climatic decisions of the heroes of “Long Eyes” and “Pressure.” They both choose to seek out their individual destinies instead of helping or rejoining their own kind. Partly that’s because I’m not much of a joiner myself. All writers are loners to one degree or another. That’s a necessary part of sitting with your thoughts hour after hour, day after day.

But in the original version of “Pressure,” Carlos Garcia opted out to the Aro Corp. program long before his contract was up, forfeiting all payment in exchange for the necessary surgeries to restore him. The big reveal at the end was Andrea opening the door of their home to find him pledging to dedicate himself to their marriage and their family even if they were poor, in debt, out of work, and unfulfilled.

The story wouldn’t sell. I felt like this was the only commercial ending, but editors kept rejecting it.

One of my pre-readers finally convinced me that the problem was the sheer falsehood of forcing the plot in the direction he called the “Disneyland ending.” It wasn’t true to the character. So I tried rewriting the story the way my friend suggested, and Jed Hartman at Strange Horizons bought the piece. Since then, it’s been translated into four languages and has played twice on the popular podcasts Escape Pod and Starshipsofa, so that was a lesson learned.