I watch the maelstrom a little longer, then go to my desk and make a phone call. A rumpled hairy man answers, rubbing at a sleep-puffy face. I apologize for the late hour, and then pepper him with questions while I record the interview.
He is silly looking and wild-eyed. He has spent his life living as if he were Thoreau, thinking deeply on the forest monk and following the man’s careful paths through what woods remain, walking amongst birch and maple and bluets. He is a fool, but an earnest one.
“I can’t find a single one,” he tells me. “Thoreau could find thousands at this time of year; there were so many he didn’t even have to look for them.”
He says, “I’m so glad you called. I tried sending out press releases, but…” He shrugs. “I’m glad you’ll cover it. Otherwise, it’s just us hobbyists talking to each other.”
I smile and nod and take notes of his sincerity, this strange wild creature, the sort that everyone will dismiss. His image is bad for video; his words are not good for text. He has no quotes that encapsulate what he sees. It is all couched in the jargon of naturalists and biology. With time, I could find another, someone who looks attractive or who can speak well, but all I have is this one hairy man, disheveled and foolish, senile with passion over a flower that no longer exists.
I work through the night, polishing the story. When my colleagues pour through the door at 8 A.M. it is almost done. Before I can even tell Janice about it, she comes to me. She fingers my clothing and grins. “Nice suit.” She pulls up a chair and sits beside me. “We all saw you with Kulaap. Your hits went way up.” She nods at my screen. “Writing up what happened?”
“No. It was a private conversation.”
“But everyone wants to know why you got out of the car. I had someone from the Financial Times call me about splitting the hits for a tell-all, if you’ll be interviewed. You wouldn’t even need to write up the piece.”
It’s a tempting thought. Easy hits. Many click-throughs. Ad-revenue bonuses. Still, I shake my head. “We did not talk about things that are important for others to hear.”
Janice stares at me as if I am crazy. “You’re not in the position to bargain, Ong. Something happened between the two of you. Something people want to know about. And you need the clicks. Just tell us what happened on your date.”
“I was not on a date. It was an interview.”
“Well then publish the fucking interview and get your average up!”
“No. That is for Kulaap to post, if she wishes. I have something else.”
I show Janice my screen. She leans forward. Her mouth tightens as she reads. For once, her anger is cold. Not the explosion of noise and rage that I expect. “Bluets.” She looks at me. “You need hits and you give them flowers and Walden Pond.”
“I would like to publish this story.”
“No! Hell, no! This is just another story like your butterfly story, and your road contracts story, and your congressional bud get story. You won’t get a damn click. It’s pointless. No one will even read it.”
“This is news.”
“Marty went out on a limb for you—” She presses her lips together, reining in her anger. “Fine. It’s up to you, Ong. If you want to destroy your life over Thoreau and flowers, it’s your funeral. We can’t help you if you won’t help yourself. Bottom line, you need fifty thousand readers or I’m sending you back to the Third World.”
We look at each other. Two gamblers evaluating one another. Deciding who is betting, and who is bluffing.
I click the “publish” button.
The story launches itself onto the net, announcing itself to the feeds. A minute later a tiny new sun glows in the maelstrom.
Together, Janice and I watch the green spark as it flickers on the screen. Readers turn to the story. Start to ping it and share it amongst themselves, start to register hits on the page. The post grows slightly.
My father gambled on Thoreau. I am my father’s son.
Paolo Bacigalupi’s writing has appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, High Country News, and Salon.com. It has been anthologized in various Year’s Best collections, nominated for three Nebula and four Hugo Awards, and won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best SF short story of the year. His short story collection, Pump Six and Other Stories, was a 2008 Locus Award winner for Best Collection, and his debut novel, The Windup Girl, was named by Time magazine as one of the ten best novels of 2009. Ship Breaker, his first young adult novel, was released in May 2010 from Little, Brown.
VINEGAR PEACE
(or, The Wrong-Way, Used-Adult Orphanage)
Michael Bishop
FROM THE AUTHOR: I wrote “Vinegar Peace” — in August of 2007 — because I had to. Our thirty-five-year-old son, Jamie, died on the morning of April 16, 2007, as one of thirty-two victims of a disturbed shooter on the campus of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. Jamie, an accomplished digital artist who did lovely covers for four or five of my books, was holding forth in Room 2007 of Norris Hall in his German class more than two hours after his eventual murderer had slain two students in a dormitory on another part of campus. The administration failed to issue a warning — a warning that might well have saved many lives — in a timely fashion. However, some of its members secured their own offices and notified family members of this initial event; and so the worst school shooting in the history of the United States claimed our son, four other faculty members (including a man, Dr. Librescu, who had survived the Holocaust and who held a table against his classroom door until all his own students could escape), four of Jamie’s students, and twenty-one other young people in Norris Hall, not to mention the first two victims in West Ambler-Johnston dorm. Another twenty-eight students were wounded by bullets or injured leaping from upper-story windows. Some of them will live with their injuries the rest of their lives.
“Vinegar Peace” grew from this disaster and from a grief that I cannot imagine ever laying totally aside. Jeri and I mourn Jamie’s loss every day in some private way, and we think continually of all the other parents and loved ones of the slain and injured who will carry a similar burden with them until they die. We think, too, of the parents and loved ones of the dead and wounded from the United States’ optional war in Iraq, who long for their dead and who pray for their injured with an intensity not a whit different from our own. How ironic that our son died on American soil. How sad the wasted potential and the disfigured lives resulting from violence everywhere. And forgive me the inadequacy of these remarks. Clearly, I wrote this story because I could not address either my outrage or my grief in any other way. Finally, allow me to thank Sheila Williams for accepting the story for Asimov’s, Tony Smith for featuring it both on a podcast on StarShipSofa and in an anthology of StarShipSofa stories, and Diane Severson for a moving, heartfelt reading of the piece.
ON THURSDAY EVENING, your doorbell rings. Two small men in off-white shirts and black trousers, like missionaries of a dubious religious sect, stand outside your threshold giving you scary pitying looks.
Are you Ms. K—? they ask.
When you assent, they say they’ve come to transport you to the Vinegar Peace Wrong-Way, Used-Adult Orphanage thirty minutes north of your current residence in a life-help cottage of the Sour Thicket Sanatorium, where your father died seven years ago. But you don’t wish to be transported anywhere.