Writers of the Future, Volume 29 (24 page)

Again: “Damn!”

Her cell phone rang.

She looked at the screen. Her boss, Dr. Nicolson.

“Leon?”

“'Lo, Mole.” A Facebook friend-of-a-friend had let out her college
nickname, and it had belatedly followed her to her professional life.

She cringed more than usual upon hearing the non-endearment: excitement
and all.

“You have a John Doe received from the sheriff's office?”

“I.” She could not lie—

—
No! He is mine. I want this special magic day to
last and last! No!

“Yes. I'm starting the autopsy right now.” Were those sirens in the
distance?

“White male?” Nicolson said. “Tattoo on left bicep with inscription?
USIF?”

Damn sheriff's office!
The sheriff's
department had turned over the body to her office, but had first taken pictures of
it where it lay and had put that tattoo's text into some sort of report. That was
how they (
they
being whoever was “handling” the crisis)
had connected John Doe to Fort Benteen. There must be tons of strange machines
labeled USIF littering that site right now.

She gave the decedent a proprietary glance.

“Yes,” she had to say. “I have not yet made an incision.”

“Good!”

Those
were
sirens.

“Do not touch the body. Stay inside the facility. We're declaring a
quarantine.” He paused for a moment.

The sirens weren't just over the phone. She heard them faintly from
outside as well.

When he came back on the line, he said, “We fear that there has been a
terrorist incident involving smallpox. The body may be contaminated!”

She came within an ace of shouting “Bull!” into the receiver.

“That's what's going on at Fort Benteen. It's very serious.” He tried to
sound earnest. Leon Nicolson was a nice, soft-spoken boss, but she knew he was
acting as someone's puppet right now. “I'm on my way with a DHS biohazard response
team.”

She needed time to herself. Just a moment. But she had to have it. So
she cut the conversation short. “Okay. I sure hope I don't contract it. I'll wait
for you. Bye.”

“Uh, bye,” said Nicolson, sounding surprised, as she broke the
connection. It was as if he thought he was going to have to talk a blue streak to
convince her.

“Smallpox!” she spat. Was that the best they could come up with? Yeah,
probably, on such short notice.

She paced back to John Doe, stripped off her gloves again, and touched
the spaceship tattoo, and the girlfriend tattoo, and made them move. She soaked in
those images so they could last a lifetime.

Sirens were louder now. Coming down Dick Webster Drive, sounded
like.

“Oh, John, are you even born yet?” She stroked his yellow hair. As an
incredibly lapsed Catholic, she didn't really believe he could hear her, or was
looking down on her from somewhere. (And time travel made rather a hash of the
standard ideas of ghosts; could you go back in time, die there, and become a ghost,
or go to heaven, before you were born?) But that was the whole point. She had, at
some milepost in the past ten years, resigned herself to sleepwalking through life.
Refusing to be hurt. Refusing to be sad. Fighting the urge to brood. She had done
her best to surgically remove her
self
. Like a
zombie.

Now, she felt herself to be a lightning bolt connected to the future.
The government might be able to do scary things to you in that time (she
hoped
only the military had to get the circle tattoo). And
there would be wars of some kind that required young people to get prosthetic limbs.
But the future, with its spaceships that could climb out from under the sea, and its
animated tattoos, and its survival of love (she wondered what the woman's name was,
and if they still used the term “fiancée” 25 or 250 years from now)
. . .

Sirens. Omnipresent.

“I'll think about you every day!” She had to speak frantically. It was
all ending. Soon, they would whisk him away. “I wish I had met you in life. I hope
your death was painless, John. You've given me a new lease on life, a new hope that
will last forever.” Several sirens had stopped in front of the complex. Of course
they had.

She looked at the hand lying as rubble, at the delicate works inside
which had sprung apart.

There! Among all of that junk was the one metal bar. She lunged for
it.

She desperately turned it over in her hands. Apparently just plain
metal. Apparently solid. No labeling of any kind.

These men who were about to come in had no knowledge of how the hand was
designed.

She tugged the rubber band out of her hair and tossed it into a
bucket.

She could hear shouting upstairs; the skeleton crew of janitors,
security guards and receptionists was being rounded up.

She took the metal bar (really a thick metal pin), and began rolling her
hair up into it. Her phone rang again; she didn't need to glance at it to know she
wasn't answering.

The loud
ting
of the elevator announced that
it was opening; it was just outside the double doors.

Her fingers flew in their final bit of work, knotting pinches of hair
into a bun around the —

—proof—

—Geisha-style.

The doors did not fly open exactly; but the men who opened them strode
in rapidly. The four of them wore gas masks, but she recognized Dr. Nicolson's
trademark red plaid shirt.

“Dr. Boyle! Thank God you didn't open the body!”

Oddly, her brain accessed an old bit of trivia: that the commonplace
“magic” word
abracadabra
literally means “open corpse.”
She almost giggled as she remembered a song by the Steve Miller Band:
Abra, abra, cadabra. I'm gonna reach out and grab ya
.

“Doctor Boyle, I am Major Neal Moser, MD, United States Army,” said
another masked man. His slightly muffled voice made his perfectly reasonable title
sound faintly preposterous. “There has been a terrorist attack at Fort Benteen. And
we believe they have released weaponized smallpox. The young man was stationed
there.” He gestured toward John Doe.

Young indeed. As in, not born yet.

“They didn't realize that when they brought him here. A big mistake.
We're going to have to quarantine this entire facility. Please come with us.”

Please.
The two fellows lurking behind them
had not said anything. The pistols on their hips did all the talking for them.

“Okay,” she said. “I had just gotten started on the external. Then this
artificial limb fell off of the subject, as you can see. Probably served in Iraq or
Afghanistan.” The metal rod seemed to tug down her hair at an unnatural angle—it
felt
like that—but no one appeared to notice.

If any of them had been gay, she knew, she'd have been sunk.

“Well, we'll gather up all of that,” said the major who was a doctor.
Bet you will
.

She stifled any visible sign of contempt or rage. She was a doctor. And
they were seriously attempting to pass off their hasty Rube Goldberg-style cover
story on her? There were
two
extant smallpox samples in
the world. It would have been easier for terrorists to steal a hydrogen bomb, as
there were more than two floating around.

And their “protective masks” had only small carbon-filter canisters;
rated for use against chemical fumes, in other words. She could tell at a glance
that they weren't adequate to protect against biotoxins; the best of those had a
closed-loop rebreathing apparatus.

The masks were nothing but props grabbed from some storage locker, to go
along with the cover story.

But I'll pretend I am fooled. Whatever hoops they
have me jump through in the next several days—unnecessary tests, unnecessary
antibiotics—are nothing compared to what I have now and will always have from
now on. The knowledge of magic
.

T
hey kept her and the others in
a special wing of Raytown Memorial, until the “quarantine” ran its course: people
who had touched the disaster in a peripheral way, such as the sheriff's deputies who
had taken first control of the body. They were really trying to determine what she
and the others knew. And of course, plant the cover story in the guise of
questioning them.

H
orse manure. But horse manure
with very high production values. Even the President had a cameo in it, looking
grave and concerned in an Oval Office TV address and vowing to “strike back.”

Finally, they were all let go.

Every night, for the rest of her life, Molly took a nondescript metal
bar, no more than two inches long, out of a junk drawer in her kitchen. She touched
it, held it close, cradled it to remember that she had touched the future. No matter
that she had not found any in the drab present; in the future, there would be
magic.

“Abracadabra,” she would murmur, with a sweet smile.
“Abracadabra.”

The Sport of Writing

BY NNEDI OKORAFOR

Nnedi Okorafor is a speculative fiction novelist of Nigerian descent. Her novels include
Who Fears Death
(winner of the 2011 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel),
Akata Witch
(an Amazon.com Best Book of the Year),
Zahrah the Windseeker (
winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for African Literature), and
The Shadow Speaker
(winner of the Parallax Award). Her novel
Akata Witch 2: Breaking Kola
and her compilation of short stories
Kabu Kabu
are scheduled for release in 2014. Her children's book
Long Juju Man
won the Macmillan Writer's Prize for Africa. Nnedi's short story “Windseekers” was a Writers of the Future Contest finalist in 2001 and published in volume 18. Nnedi holds a PhD in literature and is a professor of creative writing at Chicago State University.

Visit Nnedi at
nnedi.com
.

The Sport of Writing

W
hen I was sixteen years old, I learned
one of the greatest lessons I could learn as a writer. This was four years before I
wrote my first creative work, so I didn't know this at the time. I was barely paying
attention, really. I was too busy trying to win. I was in San Diego, California on
the hot tennis court, Wilson tennis racquet in hand, Reebok tennis shoes on my feet.
These were from my corporate sponsors, but I loved their products, too.

I was playing in one of the United States Tennis Association (USTA)
junior national tournaments. These were where the top young players in the country
battled it out. I wasn't a top seed. Neither was my opponent. I don't even remember
her name. However, she and I were evenly matched and for this reason, our match was
long. Where most tennis matches took about an hour, ours had stretched to five and a
half.

I'd lost the first set 6-7, won the second set 7- 6 and because of this
we had to play a third. The score was 6-6 and we were playing a tiebreaker. There
wasn't a cloud in the sky or a person on the sidelines. We had no audience. Both of
us had flown to California alone, so neither of us had parents there to watch.
Regardless, we were two teenagers at war, slugging that ball back and forth, diving
for drop-shots, acing serves, really digging into the root of the sport.

All the other girls had finished playing their matches. Everyone but the
officials at the front desk had gone home for the day. Finally, after about five
hours and forty-five minutes, I won the match. There was no burst of applause. I
hadn't advanced to any namable position like the finals or the semifinals. I didn't
scream or fall to my knees with elation. And if I had, there was no photographer to
catch that moment.

Nevertheless, I felt I'd reached the top of Mount Kilimanjaro; I
experienced the purest form of success. This had nothing to do with winning and
everything to do with loving the game and playing it well after being blessed with a
formidable opponent. She and I shook hands and then sat in the shade and drank lots
of water. We didn't talk. We had nothing to say. We went to the front desk and
reported our score. That was it.

Nearly a decade passed before I realized the lesson in this experience.
Just as in sports, when writing creatively, if you don't love the craft and art of
it, you'll never experience this pure form of success. Yet when you do have this
love, you realize that pure success does not come from fame or fortune, it grows
from that love.

Too often athletes and writers are seen as being on opposite sides of
the spectrum, culturally, socially and in practice. The seed of this separation is
planted early. In elementary and high school, there are “the jocks” who are the
athletes and “the nerds” who are the academics (this group more often than not
includes those who seek to and will become creative writers). Writers are
stereotyped as sedentary people who loathe exercise; their movement is in their
heads. Athletes are stereotyped as being anything but academics and thinkers. It is
brains versus brawn.

Both groups miss out on valuable lessons by being so separated. The fact
is that there are many parallels between the worlds of sports and creative writing.
In my experience, they are nearly interchangeable. They are both forms of craft and
art. Since I am speaking to writers, I'd like to share some of the lessons I learned
from sports that are perfectly applicable to writing.

One of the greatest lessons is how to gracefully, bravely face fear. I
remember vividly those matches where I had to play against someone ranked just below
me. These were matches where I had nothing to gain and everything to lose. One of
the unique things about tennis is that it is a very mental sport. The best player
does not always win. All it takes is a small distraction and next thing you know,
you've lost.

For example, I was playing a girl in a tournament when I was about
fourteen. I was winning easily. I'd won the first set 6-2 and I was up 5-3. I was
about to wrap things up. Then during one of the changeovers (every two games you
switch sides), I noticed her left hand. It was prosthetic. I was only about fourteen
years old and this killed my concentration. I went on to lose the match because I
couldn't stop looking at her hand and marveling at the fact that she could
compensate so well.

Loss of concentration is not the only type of mental struggle when
playing someone ranked below you. I was immature and highly competitive and such
matches sparked sharp nervous fear. Despite this, I had to go out there. The walk
out to the court was like a death sentence. The warm-up was torture. When I began
playing the first point, I would find that I had to either curl up and lose or stand
up and fight.

This is a battle I fight when beginning a new story, when facing the
dreaded blank page. There's a voice in my head saying, “There's nothing there! How
can you create something from nothing? Where do I begin? There's no instruction
manual or guide I can Google.” That blank page is like the opponent who has
everything to gain from me and nothing to lose. Though I feel this fear every time,
I have never walked away from it. I stand and face the monster, then I dance with it
and it is exhilarating. “If you fear something you give it power over you,” says a
North African proverb. And if you conquer that fear, you are rewarded with power and
joy.

For one year, between the high school tennis season and my first (and
only) year playing college tennis, I joined my high school's track team. I went on
to win over twenty-two medals and compete and place in the state championship in
multiple events. My best event was the 400M. This race was once around the track; it
is the longest sprint. Whenever I ran this race, something peculiar happened. I'd
black out from the hundred-meter mark to the three-hundred-meter mark. Then I'd
return to myself in that last hundred meters. The sound of the crowd would burst
back into my ears as if it had been on mute and I'd speed up all the way to the
finish line.

At first I was disturbed by this blacking out. These were moments where
I had no control of what was happening. However, after winning a few races, I
learned to stop questioning and just trust in it. This is something I've applied to
writing many many times. Practically every successful story I've written grew from a
“blackout” moment where I would fall into a creative zone. During these times, no
matter how hard I try, I cannot recall how I came up with what I wrote. When I first
began writing, these moments scared me. I didn't like the idea of not knowing
precisely where something came from or how I wrote it. Nonetheless, many novels and
short stories later, I've learned not to question, fear, deconstruct or try to
remember these blackouts.

There is a side of creativity that defies logic. This is the side that
is no longer craft, but art. Imagine driving your car. Now, remove your hands from
the wheel. Or imagine running. Now, shut your eyes. Now trust that you will not
crash or fall. These are mystical moments for a mystical practice. Both athlete and
writer are better off accepting these moments, welcoming them, even seeking to evoke
them.

When life happens, certain emotions can cripple progress…like rage.
There is one particular tennis match where I was being eaten alive by rage just
before I went out onto the court. It was the state championship and I was tired of
everything—the constant matches, nosy reporters, trash talking and pressure. I felt
burned out and generally angry at my existence. I just wanted to go home and
sleep.

Instead, I had to play a girl who was just below me in rank, one of
those “everything to lose and nothing to gain” situations. However, instead of
letting that hold me down, I went out there and focused my rage to a razor-sharp
edge. Then I used this weapon to demolish my opponent in a half hour. I beat her
6-0, 6-0, acing nearly every serve. I didn't care about winning; I just wanted to
get off the court so I could go relax.

Rage and writing can be enemies or friends. One can be so angry that she
walks away from the page because she can't focus enough to write. The words fall
apart when she looks at them. Her eyes cloud with tears so that she can't see them.
The angry throb in her head is too loud for clear thinking. Or one can use that rage
to sharpen her pen. Rage can be a great blade sharpener. It doesn't feel good but
it's burning inside you, so you might as well use it. Don't let it stop you from
producing; channel it into your work instead. Let it serve a purpose. Produce
something positive.

Possibly the greatest lesson that I took directly from sports and
brought to writing was stamina. The stamina needed to practice day in, day out and
then prove one's worth in a tournament or track competition is the exact same
stamina needed to navigate one's way through the mental and physical obstacle course
of finishing a novel. My days of training for the nationals and state championships
helped me tackle the challenges of my first novel,
Zahrah the
Windseeker
. Right after I sold this novel to Houghton Mifflin, my editor
asked me to change it from third to first person.

On the tennis court I'd tell myself, “One point at a time.” When
writing, I tell myself, “One page at a time.” One of my favorite Nigerian proverbs
is, “Little by little the bird builds its nest.” I used this proverb to create Nnedi
Rule Number One: Don't look a novel in the eye until you are done with the first
draft. Focus on the journey, not the destination. This is the best way to reach your
destination. Understand that the journey will be tough, perilous and sometimes
painful. Never give up, but be willing to change and listen. Finish what you start.
I've written over twenty novels and there has only been one that I have not
finished.

The body and the mind are deeply connected. Writing is a mental and
spiritual art but there is a physical side to it, too. One must have the stamina to
sit and focus for long periods of time. There's the physical act of the fingers
flying across the keys or the hand holding the pen as it dances across the paper and
the mouth moving as it exhales the story. Part of my own writing process includes
working out at the gym. My muse sends me many of my finest ideas while at the gym,
sweating and breathing hard, blood pumping. Exercise keeps my body fit and I
therefore have more energy to burn writing.

It's all connected.