“I’m sorry about the eggplant,” she said to him, just then glancing up from her book. She squinted at the sight of him, looking unhappily surprised, and he grinned back at her like a drunken man. “That awful suit of clothes,” she said. “You look rather like a dirty sausage in them, don’t you? I’ve seen those before…
“I’m just getting set to burn them,” St. Ives said hurriedly. “They’re a relic, from the future. A sort of…costume.”
“Well,” she said. “The trousers might look better if you hadn’t waded across the river in them. But I am sorry about the eggplant. I don’t mean to make you eat it every night, but Janet’s cook, Pierre, is apparently fixing it for us this evening. Will you be ready to leave in a half hour? You looked wonderful just moments ago.”
“Eggplant? Janet?” His mind fumbled with the words. Then through the parlor window he saw Alice’s garden, laid out in neat rows. Purple-green eggplants hung like lunar eggs from a half-dozen plants.
“Oh, Janet,” he said, nodding broadly. “From the Harrogate Women’s Literary League!”
“What on earth is wrong with you? Of course that Janet, unless you’ve got another one hidden somewhere. And don’t go on about the eggplant this time, will you?”
Suddenly he could taste the horrible sour stuff. He had eaten it last night mixed up with ground lamb. And the night before, too, stewed up with Middle Eastern spices. He had been on a sort of eggplant diet, a slave to the vegetable garden.
“You could use a bath, too, couldn’t you? At least a wash up. And your hair looks as if you’ve been out in the wind for three days. What have you been up to?”
“I…old Ben,” he began. “Mud. Up to his blinkers.”
But then he was interrupted by a sort of banshee wail from somewhere off in the house. It rose to a crescendo and then turned into a series of squalling hoots.
He stood up, looking down at Alice in alarm. “What…”
“It’s not all that bad,” she said, nearly laughing. “Look at you! Anyone would think you hadn’t ever changed his nappies before. They can’t be a tremendous lot dirtier than your trouser cuffs, can they?”
The baby’s crying had very nearly inundated him with fresh memories. Little Eddie, his son. He smiled broadly. It was his turn to change the nappies. They had agreed against a nanny, were bringing up the child themselves, spoon-feeding it with stuff mashed up out of the garden. Eddie wouldn’t eat eggplant either, wouldn’t touch it on a bet. “Good old Eddie!” he said out loud.
“That’s the right attitude,” Alice said.
And now in the shuffle of the old being washed out by the new, he saw it all clearly for one last long moment. His fears for the future had come to nothing. Alice was safe. They had a son. The garden was growing again. They were happy now. He was happy, nearly delirious. He found that he couldn’t think in terms of future-time selves and past-time selves any longer. None of his other selves mattered to him at all.
There was only he and Alice and Eddie and…rows and rows of eggplant. He nearly started to whistle, but then the baby squalled again and Alice widened her eyes, inviting him to do something about it.
“I’ve changed my mind,” he said, heading for the stairs. “I love eggplant.” And he very nearly meant it, too.
PARENTHETICALLY SPEAKING
by James P. Blaylock
Titles have never been easy for me, but they were a special problem twenty or thirty years ago when I was writing my Steampunk stories. Chekhov once stated that he could write a story about anything — that if a person asked him to write a story about a bottle, he’d do it, and he’d call it “The Bottle.” I, on the other hand, would set out to write a story about a bottle, and before it was done it would also be about apes and severed heads and doughnut-eating skeletons, and the simple title wouldn’t work. One day a couple of lifetimes ago I was sitting around at Fullerton College, where I was teaching at the time, and I happened to be holding a copy of Homunculus, which had just recently been published — a novel that had come dangerously close to being titled (on Tim Powers’s recommendation) And Your Winged Crocodiles, a phrase that Tim had found in a poem by Byron. A woman sitting nearby tried unsuccessfully to puzzle out the pronunciation. “What’s it mean”? she asked. “It means ‘little man,’” I told her. “In Latin.” She nodded and asked if I’d written any other books, and I told her that my previous book had been titled The Digging Leviathan. “And what does that mean,” she asked (unimpressed), “big man?” “Pretty much,” I said, and it came into my mind that if I combined the two into a third novel I could call it Little Big Digging Man, except that it might be confused with the Thomas Berger novel unless it was rendered into Latin. Maybe a novel about a time-traveling beatnik: Little Man Digging Big…
It was about then that Susan Allison, my editor at Ace, began to have serious second thoughts about allowing me to title my own books. Probably she was right. Almost certainly she was. I was awash, however, with wild ideas for titles, including my favorite — one that I had borrowed from Tim: “Uncle Hinky Beards Fat Billy Winger in his Den.” My idea was to write a 20-page chapter under this title and mail it off to Susan as a sort of joke, assuring her that I was hard at work on further chapters. The nifty thing was that throughout those 20 pages Uncle Hinky would be asleep in his armchair. Proust, after all, had taken 60 pages to have his man turn over in bed. I saw no reason at all for my character to wake up — ever. There was something stunningly postmodern in the idea. I killed two days writing the 20 pages, and then called Tim, laughing like an idiot, to tell him my “plan.” Tim convinced me not to mail the 20 pages to Ace, for which I almost certainly owe him my career.
None of that actually has much to do with Steampunk, but neither did I, really — not at the time, at least. Homunculus was simply a variety of historical novel that I had written largely because I was crazy for The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and because I had grown up reading Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and my idea of science fiction had always had to do with backyard scientists and fabulous submarines and spacecraft that housed onboard greenhouses. And of course no one had heard the word “Steampunk” (or Cyberpunk, either) back when Tim, K.W. Jeter, and I were first writing our Victoriana. The term hadn’t been coined yet, and wouldn’t be for years. And certainly we had no idea that we were inventing a sub-genre of science fiction. We were merely writing stories that amused us, and we often had an equally amusing time recounting to each other aspects of the amusing stories that we intended to write.
I remember a fairly typical afternoon involving popcorn and beer at O’Hara’s Pub in Orange sometime in 1977. (I’ve written about this particular afternoon before, and I wonder now whether it’s particular at all, but is instead a sort of archetypal afternoon that lingers in my mind, a couple of dozen afternoons run together.) I was working back then as a finish carpenter for a room addition contractor and had recently begun teaching composition classes in the evening. Tim was employed at a Tinderbox tobacco store and had sold his first novels to Laser Books, as had K.W., who, if I remember correctly, was working nights at the local Juvenile Hall. I had already written ‘The Ape-box Affair” (which I’m going to insist was the first published Steampunk story. If there’s evidence to the contrary, let me know.) I had it in my mind that Langdon St. Ives would be a series character, although I hadn’t given much thought to his further adventures, because I was spending most of my literary time rewriting a novel that I had been working on for a couple of years by then, currently titled Sanctity of Moontide (which title, according to Phil Dick, was the worst ever conceived). Previously I had called it The Chinese Circus (which ranks pretty high on the worst title list). The unfinished (and unfinishable) novel was to be a modern Tristram Shandy, narrated by a man who might or might not be a lunatic and who had certain knowledge of a pending cataclysm that would be triggered when a mechanical mole burrowed through the earth’s crust. I had recently finished reading all of Proust, winding up with his letters and his early novel, Jean Santieul, and my head was full of Proustian language as well as characters who slept too much. Why not, I wondered with a thrill of artistic anticipation, revise the novel so that it was a hybrid of Proust and Laurence Sterne, but was set in Glendale and Eagle Rock and involved Bulgarian acrobats, the mechanical mole, and a dairy that was manufacturing faux milk out of plaster of Paris? (I’ve read that deranged people are sometimes fundamentally happy, because they’re utterly certain that they’re correct in all aspects of their thinking, whereas the rest of us are unhappily certain that we’re very often wrong. In that sense the inspired lunacy of early artistic insight is a lot like madness, because a writer in the grip of the muses is often certain that he or she is engaged in an endeavor of great genius.)