"Hugs and kisses."
"G'night. No more talking."
"I love you."
"I love you too. Now no more talking."
"Dad?
"What?"
"I have to tell you something."
«What?"
"I love you."
"I love you too. Now, shhh. No more talking, Dennis."
"G'night."
"Sleep tight —"
Finally, I got smart. I stopped answering. Control freaks. We each wanted to have the last word.
I padded barefoot down the hall. I stopped in the living room long enough to turn off the television set, the VCR, and the surround-sound system. I continued on through the dining room and finally to my office. Two computers sat on my desk, both showing me that it was 9:47. The monster-child had manipulated an extra seventeen minutes tonight.
I sat down in my chair, leaned back, put my feet up on my desk, and stared out at the dark waters of the swimming pool in the back yard. The pool glowed with soft blue light. The night was… silent. Somewhere, a dog, barked.
Somewhere — that was his name, yes; he was a writer's dog — lived under my desk. Whenever I said," Let's go to work," wherever he was in the house, Somewhere would pick himself up and laboriously pad-pad-pad into my office where he'd squelch himself flat and scrooch his way under the desk, with a great impassioned Jewish sigh of, "I hope you appreciate what I do for you. '
He'd stay there all day — as long as the computer was on. Somewhere would only come out for two things: cookies and the doorbell…and the doorbell was broken. It had been broken for as long as I'd lived in this house. I'd never had the need to get it fixed. If someone came to the door, the dog barked.
Somewhere, the dog, barked.
That was why I loved him so much. He was a living clich‚. He was the only possible justification for one of the most infamous sentences in bad writing. It was just a matter of placing the commas correctly.
Somewhere had just enough intelligence to keep out of the way and more than enough intelligence to find his dinner dish — as long as no one moved it. He spent his mornings resting under my desk, his afternoons snoozing behind the couch, his evenings snoring next to Dennis; he spent the hours before dawn in the dark space underneath the headboard of my bed, dreaming about the refrigerator.
Almost every night, just as Dennis began saying his prayers, Somewhere would come sighing down the hall, a shaggy, absent-minded canine-American. He'd step over everything that was in his way, uncaring if he knocked over a day's worth of Lego construction. He'd climb onto the bed, over my lap, over Dennis, grumbling softly as he found his position next to Dennis. With his prehensile tongue, he could slurp the inside of Dennis's right ear from the left side of his head, taking either the internal or external route.
Tonight, though, he knew I wasn't finished working. I had some serious thinking to do. He remained under the desk, sighing about the overtime. "You're in super-golden hours," I said to him; he shut up.
Whenever I'm in doubt about something, I sit down and start writing. I write down everything I'm feeling or thinking or worrying about. I say everything there is to say until there's nothing left to say. The first time I did this was the day after my dad died. I sat and wrote for two days. When I was finished, I had a Nebula nominated story, In the Deadlands. To this day I still don't fully understand what the story was about, but the emotional impact of it is undeniable. It still gives me the shudders.
But the lesson I learned from that experience was the most important thing I've ever learned about storytelling. Effective writing isn't in the mechanics. Anyone can master the mechanical act of stringing together words and sentences and paragraphs to make a character move from A to B. The bookstores are full of evidence. But that's not writing. Writing isn't about the words, it's about the experience. It's about the feeling that the story creates inside of you. If there's no feeling, there's no story.
But sometimes, there's only the feeling without any meaning or understanding. And that's not a story either. What I was feeling about Dennis was so confusing and troubling and uncertain that I couldn't even begin to sort it out. I needed to write down all the separate pieces — as if in the act of telling, it would sort itself out. Sometimes the process worked.
When I looked up again, three hours had passed. My back and shoulders ached. The dog had gone to bed, and I felt I had accomplished nothing at all except to delineate the scale of my frustration.
Why would an alien species come to this planet? The last time I spent that much time on this question, I came up with giant pink man-eating slugs in search of new flavors. Why would Martians send their children to Earth?
The most logical idea that I came up with was that they were here as observers. Spies.
Haven't you ever been pulling on your underwear and realized that your dog or your cat is watching you? Haven't you ever considered the possibility that the creature is sharing your secrets with some secret network of dogs and cats? "Oh, you think that's weird? My human wears underwear with pictures of Rocky and Bullwinkle on them."
But dogs and cats are limited in what they can observe. If you really want to know a culture, you have to be a member of it. But an alien couldn't step in and pretend to be a member of this culture, could he? He'd have to learn. He'd have to be taught….
Where could a Martian go to get lessons in being a human? Who gives lessons in human beingness?
Mommies and Daddies. That's right.
"You're too paranoid," my sane friend said. He asked me to leave his name out of this narrative, so I'll just call him my sane friend.
"What do you mean?"
"You think that aliens are all motivated by evil intentions. You've written four novels about evil aliens eating our children, and you're working on a fifth. Isn't it possible that you're wrong?"
"Moi? Wrong?"
"Do you ever think about the cuckoo?" my sane friend asked.
"No," I said.
"Well, think about the cuckoo for a moment."
"Okay."
"How do you feel about the cuckoo?" he asked.
"It's an evil bird," I said. "It lays its egg in the sparrow's nest. The cuckoo chick pushes the other babies out of the nest. The sparrow ends up raising it — even at the expense of her own young. It's a parasite."
"See, that's your judgment talking —"
"That's the truth — " I started to object.
"Is it? Is that what you tell Dennis about his birth-mother?"
"Uh — I tell him that his birth-mom couldn't take care of him. And that she loves him and misses him. And that's the truth. Sort of… whitewashed."
My sane friend grinned at me.
"Okay," I admitted. "I'm protective of my son. So what?"
My sane friend shrugged. "How do you think the cuckoo feels?"
"Birds don't feel."
"If it could feel, how do you think it would feel?"
I thought about it. The first image that came to mind was the silly little bird from the Dr. Seuss story; the one who flew off, leaving Horton the elephant to hatch her egg. I shook my head. "I'm not getting anything useful — ~}