In this period another venture saw fruition: the ElfQuest folk, Father Tree Press, published Return to Centaur, the first part of the graphic adaptation of my thirteenth Xanth novel, Isle of View, which was also published at this time. This is the one featuring Jenny Elf, the character made from the girl who was paralyzed by a drunken driver. I told her story and gave her address in the book, and letters poured in to her at the rate of ten a day. They were all nice letters too. At this writing about 350 have reached her, and I think they are like a lifeboat, buoying her, showing how people care.
Jenny herself managed to get in trouble in school. There was a stiff note from the principal. How does a girl who can’t get out of her wheelchair and can’t speak get in trouble at a special school for just such students? Well, it seems she wore a button in her cap. She had found the button when shopping. Now, why would the school officials get so upset about that? Well, possibly it was because of the nature of the message on it: I’M BAD WITH NAMES. MAY I CALL YOU S—HEAD? (I have edited out part of the original, in the interest of not getting a note from the principal.) Jenny may be paralyzed, but she’s full of mischief. She was the same age as Colene at this time, fourteen, which may explain it. But as I was editing this novel in NoRemember she won the school’s “Citizen of the Month” award. Right: they didn’t remember that button. She is now making a determined effort to walk again. She uses a walker, and has succeeded in making it across a room. There’s still a long way to go, but this is significant progress.
I also got into another experiment. Another correspondent—I have half a slew of them!—urged me to try a special line of health foods. These are Oriental herbs refined and concentrated to powders which can be used as supplements and foods. Theoretically great improvement can result. I am a skeptic, but I try not to condemn anything on the basis of ignorance. So I pondered a few weeks, and finally agreed to try it, cautiously. My expectation is nothing; I already have a healthful life, having no “vices. ” That is, I don’t smoke, drink coffee, or use drugs, and while I’m not a teetotaler, I touch alcohol only when social protocol requires, and then quite sparingly. I exercise and sleep regularly, have a consciously healthy diet, and always use a seat belt when riding in a car. I am a workaholic, though; nobody’s perfect. In short, I see little to be gained from Oriental powders. But sometimes I am surprised. For example, just before starting on this novel I read a book about the search for the so-called Dark Matter in the universe: The Fifth Essence, by Lawrence M. Krauss. The theory is that we are unable to perceive 99% of our universe. Ridiculous, of course; they probably just hadn’t thought to check for the amount of matter hidden inside the black holes in the center of the galaxies. But I checked, just to be sure. And that book converted me. I now believe in Dark Matter, and this novel offers a hint about its whereabouts. So I’m giving this diet the same fair trial, and will in due course form an informed opinion. Tune in, next Author’s Note, maybe.
I spoke of health. I do work at it, and am probably in the upper percentiles of healthiness for men my age, which at this writing is fifty-six. But there are annoying deficiencies. I remain diabetic—fortunately Type II, the mild type—and can not stand on my feet for more than a few minutes without getting tired. Thus it is true that I can run longer than I can stand; it is as if my engine lacks an idling jet. Every so often a change in weather can bring me a bad fit of allergy, so that I have to stuff tissue in my nose to stop it from dripping into the keyboard. My knees have improved slightly in the past decade, but I still can’t quite squat without pain. And remember my tongue? In the Note in Virtual I told how it was sore, and the dentist smoothed out a worn onlay. Well, that didn’t do it. In the end I had two onlays replaced with smooth new crowns, and still my tongue was sore. After fourteen visits to dentists, during which my mouth was seen by five different ones, I still have only a stop-gap solution: a plastic appliance, or stint, that I put in my mouth to cover the region that makes my tongue sore. It seems that I have an “ectopic” taste bud on the side of my tongue that has become sensitive to something in that part of my mouth. Stop that sniggering, you women; this is nothing like an ectopic pregnancy.
Last time I gave credits to several readers for contributions to the novel. This time there are fewer. In 1989 Hannah Blakeman sent me a package of articles on alcoholism and child abuse. I had intended to use it for Virtual but Colene’s family didn’t turn out that way. You may have heard it said that the characters of a novel sometimes dictate their own story lines. It’s true. Colene’s mother was alcoholic, but the girl was not directly abused by her family, though the problems of that family surely contributed to the insecurity that manifested as a flirtation with suicide. But this material on alcoholics was eye-opening, and I wanted to use it. It enabled me to recognize in retrospect a situation that had perplexed me in prior years: I had run afoul of an adult child of an alcoholic. That is, a person who had been a child of an alcoholic, and had grown up and left that family. In the ignorance I suspect I share with most folk, I thought that once a person gets out of such a situation, things are all right. That is not necessarily the case. The emotional scars can remain for life. To make a poor analogy: you can not amputate a child’s leg, and expect him to win foot races as an adult. You can’t abuse him in his formative years, and expect him to be without pain thereafter. You can’t force a little girl to have sex several times a day for years and expect her to grow up with a healthy sexual attitude. You can’t dedicate years to making children believe that they are worthless and expect them to have good self-esteem thereafter. So just as folk run afoul of me, because of the standards I set to correct the problems of my youth, so also I run afoul of others, who carry their problems out of sight. I am not the child of an alcoholic, and was never abused in that manner, but there are ways I can relate, as you can see by the tone of this Note. One thing you who had secure or happy childhoods should understand about those of us who did not: we who control our feelings, who avoid conflicts at all costs or seem to seek them, who are hypersensitive, self-critical, compulsive, workaholic, and above all, survivors—we are not that way from perversity, and we can not just relax and let it go. We have learned to cope in ways you never had to.
So I pondered the material for this novel, and crafted a bad case: Esta, a girl who had suffered all three types of abuse known in alcoholic families. Physical, sexual, and emotional. Not the skewed definitions sometimes seen, as if physical abuse means one spanking, sexual abuse means someone used a dirty word, and emotional abuse means setting an eleven P. M. curfew. The real things, so bad that we prefer not to believe they happen. Esta, thinking herself weak, was strong; she was surviving with minimal apparent damage. Exactly as an unconscionable number of others do. She, at least, will have a chance to recover completely, healed physically by magic and emotionally by the reversal of her life-memories. Those in real life do not have that option.
Rather than try to give a help number which might change by the time this sees print, for those who see themselves or friends in aspects of this discussion, I will try to see that HI PIERS has such information. If you call and say, “Please, I don’t want to be put on your mailing list, I just need the number of Sexual Abuse Anonymous,” or whatever, we will give you that number. This much I hope I can do to help. There is doubt, however: we are not at this point certain about liability. That is, if someone calls in, and we give a helpline number, and the folk there fail to help, are we liable for a lawsuit? Don’t laugh; such things happen. So we’ll help if we can safely do so. Actually other folk have problems too; as I wrote this Note I received a letter from a young man who had had intestinal surgery; several doctors had failed to diagnose his malady, and when one did he was dying; they saved him, but now he has $80,000 in medical bills not covered by insurance. Canada has a good system of medical coverage; the United States has deadly chaos. Will it ever change?