This page has been validated against XHTML Strict and viewed under Konqueror, Firefox, Opera, and Internet
Explorer at a screen resolution of 1024 × 768. If you find any bugs, please contact me at the
e-mail address on the home page.
I knew I was in trouble as soon as I woke up Saturday. A kind of buzzing, not a sound but a feeling, filled my head. It extended out beyond my head, in fact, about a foot. I sat up in alarm, and the room spun around me. I felt no nausea, but everything kept spinning.
"David? Are you all right?" Kristen's voice seemed to come from half a mile away, though she was in bed beside me. I didn't answer at once. It was hard to do so, because I wasn't really there; I wasn't operating in the present tense at all. Where people in a normal state of mind are observing what goes on around them, and reacting to that, I was in a detached state where I watched myself acting and reacting. I don't know how to explain it any better than that, and God knows I've tried often enough. A friend of mine on drugs once said that he was in the world, but not of it. I could agree with that, though I don't know what it conveys of what I was feeling.
I dragged myself away from watching the dust motes in the shaft of sunlight coming in a window and considered my wife's question. Was I all right? It helped that I had been here before, and recognized the situation. After a few hundred years (actually, only a little longer than a normal person would take) I managed to say, "I've got an aura, love."
While I flexed my hand and watched the knuckles move under the skin, Kristen came around to my side of the bed and knelt down beside it. Intellectually, I knew that I was worrying her, and that I should try to act as normally as possible. But the thought had no force; it was hard to attach any importance to anything. It crossed my mind how unfair it was that most people had to take drugs to enter a state like this. My aura swelled and receded, swelled and receded. Kristen's voice drew my wandering attention.
"David? David, how bad is it? Does it feel like a seizure's coming?" Kristen the doctor was asking the necessary questions, while Kristen the wife looked at me with worried eyes. I listened to the buzzing. After a few mountain ranges had formed and eroded away, I remembered to reply, "It's pretty strong, but not getting worse."
"Can you stand up?"
I felt the buzzing bloom and subside, bloom and subside, like a slow-motion picture of a bud unfolding, turned into a sound effect. "I can try." I made the effort. "Whoops! Dizzy," I muttered. Kristen was there to help me balance. I got lost in the blue of her eyes for geological time. "You're so beautiful," I said.
"I love you, too," she said with glistening eyes. She held up pants and shirt. I blinked in slow surprise; where had they come from? "Come on, put these on, and let's get some breakfast in you."
Halfway through bacon and eggs, toast, hash browns, and a big glass of orange juice, I reconnected with human time scales. I looked around me, aware all at once that I was seeing each moment as it came, as a person immersed in the moment, instead of watching each one go by without me. For a moment, as always, I regretted the loss of that strange perspective. Then I leaned across the patio table and kissed Kristen. "I'm back," I said.
She kissed me back hard. "Good! Still dizzy?"
"No, just a little shaky. And the aura's faded to a whisper, too. I think all this protein is helping. Give me a quiet day and more sleep, and we can still make the reunion tonight."
"Are you sure? We don't have to go."
"Hey, I'm sure. I want to strut into the school tonight with you on my arm, so all the football heroes can wonder how I got so lucky."
"Let them wonder," Kristen smiled. "None of the women will be wondering, and I may have to rescue you from Christine Delacruz or Robin MacBride."
I love my wife, no matter how silly she gets trying to convince me I'm handsome.
Spokane was a little town in eastern Washington, far from the booming aeronautics and astronautics industries in Seattle and other coastal cities. Because of that, Dad's Air Force paycheck went farther than anywhere else we'd been. Instead of living on post at Fairchild Air Force Base, he bought a two-lot property in town with a two-story house on one of the lots. This gave each of us kids his or her own bedroom, for the first time ever, and a huge yard that was all ours. By the time JFK ran for and won re-election, we were all settled in.
Of course, since it was our house, and off-post, we couldn't expect base housing to come around and fix things, nor ask a landlord to do so. We all put in time mowing the lawn, weeding Mom's flower beds, and painting the outside from the scaffolding Dad build out of pipes and boards. We grumbled, but Dad told us it built character, and kept us at it.
Funny how every time we built character, he saved money hiring gardeners and painters.
In Spokane we attended Catholic school for the first time, one of the opportunities of living in the civilian world. I became an altar boy, and thought about becoming a priest, but Catholic priests had to be celibate, and I was starting to notice girls (I was 11). Mom had always been my favorite person, but I had dreams at night about one of the girls at school.
My big brother Owen started piano lessons in Spokane, I took up the violin, and Matt started learning the clarinet. Mom played the accordion, and we all sang, so we were a pretty musical bunch. We all got pets, too. We'd always had a dog or cat or both, but in Spokane we had a family dog, I had a cat and a guinea pig, Owen had a cage of finches, and Matt had a guinea pig. I think there was a rabbit in there, too, but it was too long ago for me to be sure.
It was a happy time. It wasn't California ("California, Here I Come" was the family theme song), and it got really cold in the winter, and snowed. But nothing kept us down for long — not Owen falling off the roof while painting and breaking his arm, not Matt getting pneumonia and spending a week in the hospital, and not my eighth seizure in 1965.
The real importance of 1965 was that Dad had joined the Army in 1940, on his 18th birthday. When you added his Army enlistment, his Army Air Corps enlistment, and his Air Force enlistment, you had 25 years of continuous service. Five more years wouldn't add much to his retirement check, and Dad was itching to try something different; he was 43 in 1965. (Mom was 39, Owen was 15 and in the 9th grade, I was 13 and in the 7th grade, Matt was in 6th grade and 12 years old, Suzanne was 4.) "If we move now," Dad said to Mom, "Owen can go to High School in California."
So Dad retired from the Air Force with an impressive ceremony and a nice monthly check, and we sold the house and land for a huge chunk of money. Then we packed all our goods into a moving truck, and headed south with Dad driving the truck and Mom driving the family car. Boeing in Seattle was one of the biggest names in aeronautics, but Convair in San Diego was just as big in missiles and rockets.
"My god, what have they done to the place?"
When Kristen and I went to Herbert Hoover High School, the architecture had been standard Southern California High School. It had been built like a mock hacienda, complete with red tiles on the roof. Two stories tall, the main building was square, with a central courtyard much beloved of yearbook club photographs, and a bell tower.
A few years after we graduated, an engineering survey was taken of San Diego city schools to see how earthquake-resistant they were. Hoover flunked. Classes were held in temporary "bungalows" and the new gym, the only permanent structure that passed muster, while a new main building went up. Saturday evening, before the reunion banquet and dance, we were given a tour. It was great, but I missed the brick building I'd studied in.
Dinner was fun. I never thought I was especially handsome, certainly not compared with the pictures of my Dad in his twenties, but I "cleaned up nice" when I wore a suit and tie, and the clunky black-framed Air Force glasses were gone forever, thanks to modern gene therapy. At 43 I looked little different from 18, except I'd filled out from 110 to 160 pounds, and had a decent beard. Kristen at 43 was, if possible, even more lovely than she'd been in high school, a stunning vision in a gown that matched her blue eyes and complemented her pale gold hair.
I had only to look about me to see how fortunate I was. After only 25 years, an awful lot of my classmates had deteriorated badly, with early grey hair, wrinkles, flab or even outright fat. The jocks who'd bullied me so badly in junior high school, before I went into the Honors Program in high school and shared no more classes with them, were in the worst shape of all.
Getting back to dinner, the good was really good! It must have been catered. The banquet was in the "new" cafeteria, but if cafeteria food was like this now, today's high-schoolers would roll, not walk, to class.
After the banquet the party moved to the gym for talking and dancing. Now I'm a nerd, and when I dance, it looks like I'm having another seizure. I do much better with dances with prescribed steps, like the Renaissance dances I learned from the SCA in college. But I'll dance on social occasions, "only please, darling, let me digest a bit first, OK?"
So we circulated, together at first, until Kristen ran into her friend Mary Doull. Mary promptly pulled out baby pictures. That whole topic gives me hives; I never wanted kids in the first place, and I'm not about to risk passing on my curse. So I made my excuses and fled the scene, leaving them to catch up.
Presently I met Steve Brand. Steve was a tall, good-looking, popular blond guy in high school, class president at least one year, and one of the fourteen people in our class of 625 who got a higher final GPA than I did. He did it by getting A's in gym as well as academic subjects, which made me jealous as hell.
Steve was much as he'd been, a little flabby and overweight, hair receding a little in front, but the same nice guy he'd always been. He and Norma were divorced, but Steve was making more money in a month than I did in a year by selling equipment to asteroid miners and the companies building the Childe starship in orbit. You had better believe I wanted details of all that for future stories! We exchanged net addresses and promised to stay in touch.
Then Rex Odom and Mark Nabor joined us, and I was gratified when they said they had some of my books, too. We got to talking about science fiction and fantasy. I mostly write the former, but some of my most popular books are set in Avalon, among elves. Not realizing it was a sore point with me, Rex asked me why I hadn't written any werewolf stories.
"Werewolves are bunk," I said. "Look, Rex, it made a certain social sense to write about monsters way back when —Frankenstein, Mr. Hyde— and the wolf is a European figure of terror back to the Brothers Grimm and beyond."
"But I prefer science fiction to fantasy. If you're talking magic, a man can turn into anything: a dragon, a seal, a whale, a winged horse. But if we're talking science, surely a man won't turn into a wolf. Wolves, bears, tigers are all Carnivora, a completely different order from the Primates. Surely if a man changed, he'd be most likely to change into animals most closely related to him."
"Chimps?" said Steve.
"Chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, men," I said, nodding. "All the surviving African apes are closely related. The genetic difference between any two species of that group is between one and two percent."
"So forget werewolves and think wereapes," Mark Nabor said. Mark had been notable for his involvement in choir, acting, and barbershop-quartet singing, and for his long, flowing, shiny blond hair. Now his hair was clipped very short. The neatly-trimmed goatee and mustache framing his mouth may have been grown the month after graduation, for all I knew, but it looked strange to me.
"But wouldn't a weregorilla or a werechimp look pretty much like a werewolf to a frightened villager?" Mark asked. "After all, when you've seen one man-sized hairy monster, you've seen them all."
"They might look the same in the moonlight," I said, "but would they act the same? Gorillas are vegetarians, and pretty shy. If someone in your village turns into a manwolf and starts killing people and livestock, you're going to catch him and kill him. Pretty soon everyone with those genes has been wiped out. But if someone turns into a gorilla and peacefully chews up his own garden, what are the odds the neighbors will even know? A curse like that could linger on for uncounted generations."
"Babe alert!" Rex said in a low voice. "Take a long look at what's coming this way."
Steve whistled. "Now I remember why going to school in the Sixties was so great!"
"Quick," Mark said. "What's her name? I can't place it, and I don't want to look like a complete idiot."
"That's Kristen Collier," Steve said. "She was in several of the same civics clubs that I was. She lived up in the rich part of town, and wanted to become a doctor."
"She did become a doctor," I confirmed as Kristen came up. "Darling, you remember Steve and Rex and Mark, don't you?"
"Hello," she smiled. "Will you guys excuse us for a little while? I'd love to catch up with you later, but David hasn't danced with me yet tonight."
The expression on my friends' faces was priceless. I'm afraid that I was feeling very smug as I walked with Kristen towards the dancing.
"What?" Kristen said; she knows me.
"Ah, love, you should have seen the sharks circling. As soon as they saw you were coming our way, the little wheels started going around. They thought they were going to have a chance at the prettiest woman here, and then you just scooped me up and walked off."
"Men! Didn't you guys even talk about your wives?"
The first house we rented in San Diego was in the area called Linda Vista. It was cheap. Mom and Dad grew up during the Depression, and weren't going to spend a lot on rent until Dad had a job we could count on. The 1965-1966 school year was the only one when Owen, Matt, and I were all in junior high school at the same time. Montgomery Junior High had Owen in its senior class that year, I was a sophomore, and Matt was a freshman. Suzanne was 5, and not in school yet.
With his experience and performance reviews from the Air Force, Dad got a job at Convair, and was soon as comfortable with missiles and booster rockets as he'd been with planes. Things were more expensive in San Diego than Spokane, but no worse than they would have been in Seattle. We bought a house in East San Diego, on 42nd Street just south of El Cajon Boulevard. That changed what school districts we were in. In the 1966-1967 school year, Owen was a freshman (10th grade) at Hoover High School, Matt was a sophomore (8th grade) at Wilson Junior High, and I was a senior (9th grade) at Wilson.
That was a big year for me. I made a lot of new friends, some of whom I'd be seeing in high school. I made enemies, too. The San Diego Unified School District had an advanced students program for high school, but that was next year. My teachers recommended me for it, and I easily passed the tests for it, but in the meantime, every time I raised my hand in class, got an A on my homework, or otherwise did my job as a student, I earned more hate from the average and below-average students who hated school. A gang of them began laying for me after school, hitting me from behind during lunch hours, opening my briefcase when they passed me in the hall so that everything fell out, et endless cetera. They only did these things when no adult was around, and my avoiding them only made them "braver." I was afraid, not of them, but of my own temper. I inherited the Mackie temper at its worst, and I was afraid I'd kill someone if I ever let go.
Near the end of the school year, after taking more crap than any kid my age should ever have to take, frustrated and angry that no person in authority would do anything, I lost control. During gym the gang surrounded me and started whipping me with their wet towels. I turned on the nearest one, a kid named Higgins, and punched him just as hard as I could. I did my level best to smash his face in for real.
The coach showed up as we were going at it, and sent us both to the principal's office, ignoring all that had gone before. I hadn't been in the principal's office, in trouble, since first grade. He kept us waiting, and a funny thing happened.
I was sucking on a knuckle, where the skin had been torn on one of Higgins' teeth (I have the scar to this day), when Higgins started talking to me as if we were friends! He said he'd thought I was a sissy because I'd tried to avoid him and the others, and stay out of fights, but when I hit him the first time, the punch was so hard he almost blacked out. He actually apologized for picking on me, and said he'd never do it again, and we shook hands.
The principal, useless as always, suspended us both for a day. My grades were so good, and Higgins' so bad, that this made no difference except we got a day off school. But the rest of the school year, though the rest of the gang still gave me trouble, Higgins didn't.
But the most important thing that happened to me that year — indeed, one of the most important things that ever happened to me — came out of nowhere. My class was "voting" one day on a set of categories for the yearbook: Best Smile, Prettiest Eyes, Most Winning Personality, etc. I was ignoring the whole thing, reading the instructions that came with my slide rule on some of the more rarely used scales, I think. Then someone asked me if I would vote for Mary Doull for Prettiest Hair. I looked up and was blinded by a pair of blue eyes.
"Your name is Mary?" I think I said.
"No, I'm Kristen. Kristen Collier. But don't you think Mary Doull has the prettiest hair of any senior girl?"
No, I said to myself, looking at Kristen's. I had no idea who Mary Doull was. "All right," I said out loud, and reached for the form I'd been ignoring. I'd planned to turn it in blank, and didn't even know what the categories were. "I'm David Mackie," I told her.
"I know," she said.
15-year-old kids didn't go on dates in 1967. But Kristen was weak on math. So for the rest of that year, and all through high school, we'd meet in the library before or after classes and I'd help her with her homework. I was also answering questions from others and helping anyone else who asked, but the reason I was sitting there to be asked was the hope of seeing Kristen. Looking back, I think a couple of girls had crushes on me and were asking for help they didn't really need. But from the moment I first saw her, Kristen was the center of my world. Even when I had a bad seizure in 1967, my ninth, my only concern was whether Kristen would think I was a freak or a cripple.
Instead I found my school books next to my bed one of the times I woke up, short notes from my teachers, and a get-well card signed by the members of the Science Club. Kristen had gone around to my classes and collected it all. No one had ever done that for me before, not even my Mom.
Traditionally everyone hates high school except the jocks and the cheerleaders. Well, I was neither of those, and I despised "pep rallies" and "school spirit" events. But I loved high school.
I treated high school as if I were already in college. I was in the honors program, and I had two goals: to take the toughest courses I could, and to get straight A's. Except for gym, I succeeded. In my three years at Hoover I took second-year, third-year, and fourth-year Latin, and conversational modern Latin. I took every science course they offered and all the math courses. Any empty spaces got filled with history classes and art classes, in that order.
I had no more trouble with bullies. All my classes were in the advanced track; I never saw them, and they never saw me. I suppose they were still there, but you couldn't prove it by me.
In classes I acted as a teacher's aide, my specialty being to see when a teacher's answer didn't fit a student's questions, and explaining what the student was asking so that the teacher could answer to the point. Before and after school I was answering questions and helping people with their homework in the library.
I attended every meeting of the Latin, Science, and Chess clubs, entered the Science Fair every year, and wrote my first poems and short stories good enough not to throw away immediately. In the summer of 1968 I attended a special class held by the San Diego Aerospace Museum every year, and met other kids in the advanced program from all over the city. We formed a club and met once a month for a couple of years after that. Two of the guys built their own computer, a homemade scaled-down mainframe. It was the first computer I ever saw that someone built themselves, the first one I ever saw that didn't need an air-conditioned room to run, and the first I ever saw that was American rather than German.
In 1967 new drugs began to come out for controlling seizures, and I started taking Dilantin three times a day. On Christmas Day 1969 it had been over two years since my last seizure, and I dared to hope there would be no more.
Kristen and I started dating. We weren't "going steady" by any means; I was too shy, or to call its by its right name, too damned scared of how strongly I felt about her. Also, there were lots of other guys hanging around her all the time, who were a lot more confident about asking her out. One in particular, John Madking, made me crazy jealous.
Still, Kristen and I went to the movies a few times, dropped off and picked up either by her mother or by mine; high-school students didn't have cars of their own, the gasoline burners of the day were expensive. We exchanged Valentine and Christmas gifts, and we even kissed, very tentatively, a few times. The future looked bright.
The 1968-1969 school year was memorable because it was the only year all three Mackie boys were in high school at the same time: Owen a senior, me in 11th grade, Matt in 10th (Suzanne was in third grade). When the next year began, Matt was in 11th grade, I was a senior, and Owen had decided to follow in Dad's footsteps; he'd joined the Air Force. The first moon landing was in 1969; when the U.N. began building a permanent base, Owen wanted to be part of the U.S. detachment.
My senior year was a more intense version of the previous two. I had two college classes, physics and calculus, taught by teachers from San Diego City College. I had letters and brochures from colleges all over the planet, but the real question was, did I want to go to CalTech or M.I.T.? Kristen and I danced around each other, then John Madking cut in; he and Kristen started going steady, which would have driven me nuts if I'd allowed myself to think about it. Astrophysics, computers (the integrated circuit chip was announced in 1967), and genetics were all looking interesting enough to make a career of; and I was scribbling verse and stories every free moment.
In February students from all over San Diego picked countries to represent in an annual role-playing exercise called the Model U.N., held at San Diego State on Valentines Day. The delegation from Chad that year was me, my brother Matt, Kristen and a couple of other girls from the Hoover Science Club, and Rick, Bill, and Mark from our aerospace club.
For some reason I got really excited about the whole thing. Role-playing was a new thing, and I'd never been much interested in politics. But I was too keyed up to sleep the night before, and skipped breakfast because anticipation had my stomach in knots. Then I had a very successful morning, using oratory powers I'd never been aware of to break up resistance and get bills passed. So I was riding high. At lunch time, instead of eating, I was catching up on things with the rest of my delegation, and talking with other delegates from other countries.
No sleep, no breakfast, no lunch. I became aware that I was having trouble understanding what this other student was saying. I asked him to repeat. "Oh," I said, and started to reply. Wait, what had I been saying? Then I got really dizzy, so I leaned against a table. I asked him again what he'd said —and then I was gone.
The next thing I remember, I was sitting in a hospital emergency room, with my mom and a cop. Mom kept glaring at the cop. She asked me how I felt. "Thirsty," I said muzzily, and she gave me water in a paper cup. "My elbow hurts," I complained. I don't recall anything more after that.
The next time I was awake, I was lying on the couch in the living room, covered with a blanket. Mom came in and said, "Are you awake?"
"I'm awake," I said. "What happened?"
"You had a seizure," Mom said. "The people at State called an ambulance, but before it got there, a cop showed up, decided you were having an LSD flashback, and tried to hold you down."
"LSD?" I said. "I don't do drugs!"
"That's what everyone told him," Mom said, "but he knew better, even when the ambulance got there. How's your shoulder?"
I shifted, and winced. "Hurts," I admitted.
"He dislocated it," Mom said. "Instead of holding your head and keeping you from swallowing your tongue, he tried to pin you down. Between the two of you, you popped it right out of the joint."
"God," I said. "How long has it been?"
"A few days," Mom said. "You have a visitor, if you feel well enough to see her."
Her? "Sure," I said.
Mom kissed me on the forehead and left the room. Kristen came in, walked around a couple of my sister's Barbie dolls on the floor, and came over to the couch. "Hi," she said.
"Hi," I said. "Sorry about the stink. My folks just won't quit smoking." The air in our house was always blue with smoke.
"What can you do?" she said, shrugging.
"Have a seat," I said. I scrooched over against the back of the couch so there was room in front. She smiled, and sat, a bit gingerly; between the couch being in the living-room smoke all the time, and my own sick body, it was pretty ripe in those parts. But she did sit, and then she picked up my hand and held it while we talked a little bit. I'd lost Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday completely, and it was after school hours on Wednesday. She passed on good wishes from classmates and teachers, talked about a movie she'd seen; just small talk, but very precious to me. When she got up to leave, I said, "Kristen."
"Yes," she said, looking down at me.
"I love you," I told her.
"I know," she said, and left.
Because of the shoulder dislocation during my tenth seizure, I was excused from gym the rest of the year. I had to wear my left arm in a sling until the end of March. The doctors warned that the shoulder might end up weak, with a tendency to dislocate easily. Just the opposite happened; it healed tighter than it had been originally, and I never regained the full range of motion I'd had with it.
| Table of Contents | Friday | Saturday | Sunday | Monday |
This page has been validated against XHTML Strict and viewed under Konqueror, Firefox, Opera, and Internet
Explorer at a screen resolution of 1024 × 768. If you find any bugs, please contact me at the
e-mail address on the home page.