them
seems to be about drowning, or being strangled by hands of inhuman
strength, or having my head stuck inside a plastic bag. Trying to
scream, but without enough breath to give sound to my voice—
Perhaps that should be taken as a hopeful sign about the afterlife.
It must be lovely, if I was so reluctant to leave.
I suppose I’ll never know.
I’d like to keep this roughly chronological, if I can. It’s
not easy; there are connections here more subtle than simple
sequence. And I’m not always sure in what order everything
happened, and I’m not sure it’s always important.
Somebody wrote once that the direction of time is irrelevant to
physics. I’m sure this half-remembered physicist would be
pleased to know that my story only makes sense when it’s told
backwards.
That seems much more profound when you have a fever.
I sometimes catch myself thinking that life is a fever: that the
universe fell ill two or three billion years ago, and life in all its
fantastic improbability is the universe’s fever dream. That the
harsh intractability of the inanimate is the immune system of
reality, attempting to cure it of life. That when life is
extinguished, the universe will awaken, yawn and stretch, and shake
its metaphoric head at its bizarre imagination, to have produced such
an unlikely dream.
But I get over it when I cheer up.
It’s not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and
a bad mood.
One might suppose that I would now be immune to melancholy, but that
is not so; I seem to be immune only to senescence, and to death. It’s
better thus—to be eternally happy would deprive me of the bulk
of human experience. And, for all else, I am still human.
More or less.
But to give the story a moral before I recount its events will rob
the moral of meaning. Meaning is the goal. I sometimes think the
greatest danger of immortality is the infinite leisure to digress.
So:
I could write page after page on the process of waking up that very
first time in my new life. I could string together fading details of
dreams with the incredibly soft warmth of the wool-felt blankets and
the fine-woven linen of the sheets, and shuffle the bracing sting of
sunlight through closed eyelids with the faintly animal musk of the
goosedown that filled the feather bed on which I lay. It’s a
powerful urge to recount these things, because each individual
sensation of living has become indescribably precious to me; though
each breath is as sweet as the last, there comes always something
wistful, because I cannot forget that this breath is a single thing,
as discrete as I am, and no matter how wonderful the next will be,
this will never come again.
I was lucky, though: the antidote for such wistfulness was waiting
for me beside my bed, grinning like a wolf.
When I opened my eyes, he said, “Hey.â€
HEROES DIE
ALL ACTORS HAVE A PRECISELY DEFINED ROLE—
to risk their lives on Overworld
in interesting ways.
It’s
not personal; it’s just market share.
Caine has long been the best of the best.
A generation grew up
watching the
superstar’s every adventure.
Now he’s
chairman of the world’s largest
studio and he’s
making changes.
Higher powers of Overworld and Earth don’t
approve. It’s
just business.
But for Caine, it’s his wife, their daughter,
his invalid
father, his status, his home.
And it’s always personal.
HEROES DIE
by Matthew Woodring Stover
Denise Swanson
Heather Atkinson
Dan Gutman
Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Mia McKenzie
Sam Ferguson
Devon Monk
Ulf Wolf
Kristin Naca
Sylvie Fox