Gardner all but stopped writing.
But not quite. Above all else, Gardner valued being a writer. His two Nebula Awards for short fiction meant much more to him than the Hugos ever did. An editor could not channel the Promethean fire; he could only search for it in the slush pile and buy it when it appeared. Writers were the real thing. Somehow, though his stories would be rare as unicorns, they still appeared.
More years passed.
At the end of a visit to his new Society Hill apartment—a far cry from the Quince Street digs, with a fireplace and a Jacuzzi tub—Gardner saw me to the front stoop and then said, “Wait a second.” He went inside and returned with a familiar cardboard box.
“I’m never going to write the Digger Novel,” he said. “So you might as well take it and see if you can turn it into a novella.”
I took the box from him. “I know exactly how to do this,” I lied. “I’m not going to tell you now because I want it to be a surprise!” (Remember, I’d long ago given up on Gardner ever finishing it on his own.) I clutched the box to my chest and began to edge away, afraid that Gardner would come to his senses and snatch it back.
“It’s clear to me this isn’t going anywhere,” he said unhappily. “So you might as well make something of it.”
I was down to the sidewalk. “Wait until you see what I have in mind! You’ll love it!”
Gardner wasn’t listening. In his heart of hearts, he was mourning the necessity to hand over the child of his imagination to me. “But I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Make the conclusion open-ended. Just in case we decide to make a novel of it.”
“You must be reading my mind!” I chirped.
Miraculously, in that instant, even as I was saying those words, the solution entered my mind: Hanson would enter the City of God and find it abandoned. The people are gone, following the consequences of their decadence into unknown realms. But their toys remain.
And those toys are dangerous.
I made the City as menacing and hallucinatory as I could. Gardner and I swapped the manuscript back and forth, improving it with every pass, and when the story was done to both our satisfactions, he made the polish draft. Because Gardner was a master stylist, he always did the final draft on all the collaborations, whether with me or with others. We all agreed he was the best.
After a great deal of to-and-froing, we agreed to name the story “The City of God.” It appeared in Omni Online, edited by Ellen Datlow, and, months later, in Asimov’s Science Fiction. (Gardner recused himself and Sheila Williams made the decision to buy it.) We couldn’t have been happier with how it had turned out.
Still. Gardner had put the idea of a novel into our heads. We often talked over the possibility of writing two more novellas, “The City of Angels” and “The City of Man,” which could be combined with the first, continuing Hanson’s saga. Each novella would be published independently and then we would merge all three into one continuous narrative and sell it as a novel. It was a solid plan. But we kept putting it off.
Years passed.
Both Gardner and I had things to do. Pressing matters of magazines to put out and anthologies to compile and stories and novels and essays to write. Gardner and Susan got married and bought a house. Their son, Christopher, and his wife, Nicole, had two children, Tyler and Isabella, whom the newly minted grandparents loved without reservation. A taxi accident put Gardner in the hospital, and since neither the cab company nor his insurance wanted to pay for it, he had to deal with lawyers for what seemed forever and was literally years. Some time after that, Susan’s health, never good to begin with, took a severe turn for the worse. She was in and out of physical rehab for years.
Because Susan could no longer handle the stairs, they rented out their house and moved into an apartment. Gardner sold his enormous collection of books, about which Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda once exclaimed, “These are the most delightfully read books I’ve ever seen!”, to a fan. His papers went to the University of California, Riverside, and Gardner threw in several of the uglier of his many Hugos as a lagniappe. When he was moving from the one location to the other, somebody asked what he wanted done with a box of the remaining Hugos. “You want one? Take it!” he said. “Take as many as you like.”
He meant it.
Through all of this, Gardner and I continued, off and on, to talk about the City of God Novel (its name changed with the first novella) and where it might go. “It’s hard to talk about a novel that hasn’t been written yet, that may never be,” Gardner said when we were in the early stages of working out the final plot. “But I dimly see Hanson as ultimately being left with some sort of gatekeeper or overseer responsibility for the rest of humanity that he didn’t really want and didn’t really think he was doing a good job at.” Then he came to what, to him, was the heart of the noveclass="underline" “The only thing that keeps him from becoming as corrupt as everybody else is the knowledge of how bad it looks from the lower depths when you allow yourself to be transformed into a boss, and sort of a determination not to have that happen to him.” It was important to Gardner that Hanson remain, now and forever, a blue-collar guy, a worker, a decent man of simple tastes who had no desire whatsoever to make others suffer.
Gardner made a start on “The City of Angels,” chronicling Hanson’s imprisonment. I thought it was brilliant and extended the plot, returning Hanson to the City of God. Susan Casper’s health, meanwhile, worsened precipitously. Marianne and I visited her at their apartment one day, bringing with us Samuel Delany, who was an old friend and whose visit cheered her enormously. Chip (as Delany is known to his friends) took a picture of the three of us that was to be her last. That night, in her sleep, she passed peacefully away. Gardner kept the box with her ashes on the windowsill of their apartment. “It’s silly,” he said, “because I know that she’s not there or anywhere else and can’t hear me, but sometimes I’ll still talk to her as if she were.”
He said that at the Pen and Pencil, America’s oldest journalists’ club, on Latimer Street, where he was a member. The widowed women among our cronies told Gardner how he was going to feel now and in the future and he listened to them with attentive respect, prepping himself for life alone. His old friend Pat Cadigan flew in from London to do her bit to comfort him. Her original intent had been to visit Susan, but mortality descended before the flight could be arranged. I’ll carry with me forever the memory of Pat and Gardner sitting on his couch together, holding hands and smiling through their sadness, saying nothing because there was nothing that needed to be said.
It was in the lead-up to this difficult time, while Susan was still alive, that Gardner and I finally got serious about the City of God Novel, talked out the plot, and started working steadily on the second novella.
There is a sentimental notion, among many of Gardner’s friends, that without Susan he had lost the will to live. This makes Marianne mad enough to spit. He had not. Our son, Sean, who was working for him at the time, reported that Gardner was constantly busy assembling anthologies, coaxing new stories out of writers, and, of course, actively at work on the novel he and I had intended for decades. He had plans for the future and things he wanted to do. He had begun and abandoned a sequel to Strangers, and I am convinced that, given time, he could have been coaxed into finishing it. Alas, he was not given time.