Cautionary Tales (24 page)

But what could she do about it? The incubus was gone, captured by the magic potion. Had she discovered her illicit urge too late?

Maybe the matron at the magic shop would agree to share her captive on occasion. Solita now understood the woman's desire, and shared it; that would surely count for something. A confined demon, forced to do anything a woman, or two women, demanded—that could be sexual heaven. So to speak, as there was nothing any heavenly power would approve about it.

Hellish temptation and opportunity, with no physical impact. She was ready. More than ready.

“Mommy, will the monster come again?”

At least she could reassure her innocent child, however guilty her own secret heart. “No, dear.”

“Should we put in more potion, just in case?”

“No, that was just to stop the monster from getting in there. There's no need for it now.”

“So it won't lick me any more with its big hot tongue?”

Solita kept her face straight, her voice even. “It won't, dear; it's gone.”

“Are you sure?” Lita seemed oddly disappointed, when she should have been relieved. That was curious.

“Yes, dear. It is safe for you to sleep in that bed now, though you don't have to.”

“How do you know?”

She would have to be more candid than she liked. “Because I let it lick me, and the potion got rid of it.”

“Did it run its tongue into your wee-wee?”

Damn! The thing
had
invaded Lita. Fortunately she had no way to comprehend the significance. Much of her innocence could still be salvaged. “Yes. Into my vagina and rectum. That's how it got dosed with the potion. I had to let it, to get rid of it.”

Lita turned a disconcertingly knowing look on her. “Was it fun?”

The emotional pavement shielding her from hell began to crack. Lita had liked it! She had been repulsed and afraid, but also felt the first stirring of desire. Already. This could mean that she was another potential sexual masochist.

In fact it made sense. Lita had spent the first night in the bed, and the incubus had come to her. If he preferred having a woman without resistance, wouldn't he seek those who were secretly amenable to his attention? Maybe he attacked only a certain type, when she made herself available by lying in that bed. So he had gone after Lita, knowing her nature, and then after Solita, knowing hers. Like daughter, like mother.

She had thought she had saved her daughter, but maybe that was impossible. Now what was she to do?

She could find no acceptable answer. Rat bait would not work this time. Not when the evil was as much in the victims as in the perpetrator.

Had the rat won after all?

Note:
“Rat Bait,” written in January 2010, was another story contributed to an Excessica anthology, Something Wicked, deliberately provocative sex. I think this the most aberrant erotic story I have done, and I am curious what else was in that volume, which I never saw. If it shocked you, well you were warned. It also reflects my belief that adults often don't take children's fears seriously enough. I remember when my preschool age daughter attended school-sponsored swimming classes, and became increasing nervous about them. We brushed it off. Then I attended one of the classes, and saw a woman take my child with warm reassurances, then dump her alone in the center of the deep pool. Unable to swim, she was so frightened that she vomited in the water. “Don't be concerned,” a teacher told me. “She's been dunked before.” What a betrayal! In the name of teaching swimming, they were actually teaching horror of swimming. We had to buy a shallow plastic pool and work with our child all summer to gradually overcome her inculcated fear of the water and teach her to swim. Thereafter I was far more careful to watch what schools and other organizations did with children, and intervened when necessary to save my child, right up through college. Those non-erotic experiences were perhaps behind this erotic fiction; betrayal is betrayal. Our society is hyper about young sex; it should be hyper about a good deal more than that. No wonder some children grow up twisted.

Caution: essay

14. Humor

What does it take to write humorous fantasy? I'm not quite sure I know, as I never set out to do it. I simply found that I could not take fantasy seriously, and thus did not. Not at first.

I think of two phenomenal misconceptions about writing humor. The first is that it is easy. It isn't. It is perhaps the most challenging writing discipline. I have heard it said that a person who can do humor can do anything, and this isn't limited to writing. Movie actors who are comedians can also do serious roles, while serious actors can't necessarily do humor. Why? Because anyone can be serious, but not anyone can make another person laugh. It takes a special talent.

The other misconception is that humorists are happy. In my observation the opposite it true: they tend to be depressive. How can that be? It may seem counterintuitive, but a bit of examination clarifies the case. Satisfied folk don't have reason to jump out of their ruts; they like what they're doing and it makes sense to continue doing it. Why rock the boat? But unsatisfied folk do have reason to change. An irony is that when they do change, they tend to remain dissatisfied, so they have to try again, and again.

I have an analogy here. When I was a child I had a bowl of oatmeal. It wasn't sweet enough, so I put sugar on it. It still wasn't sweet enough, so I put on more sugar. But no matter how much sugar I used, it still wasn't sweet enough. Then my sister said “Try salt.” That seemed nonsensical, but I tried a little salt. And suddenly my oatmeal was sickeningly sweet. I had been looking for the wrong thing.

Okay. I can make people laugh, so I guess I'm a humorist. Can I do other kinds of writing? You bet. I have written in several serious genres, including historical fiction and borderline horror, and believe I do them competently. My science fiction/fantasy novel
On A Pale Horse
features Death as the main character, not played for laughs, and it was a bestseller. How serious can you get? So humor is merely the tip of my talent, as it were. Am I happy? No. There's a reason I wrote about Death: I thought about it constantly. I was borderline depressive for decades, until discovering thyroid medication; now I'm not happy, but neither am I depressed. I'm on the low side of normal. But in the interim I learned how to write humor, so I can still do it, even if the edge may have been blunted.

Let me give some examples, so I can come at some fundamental truth. I do tend to make people laugh, and I take a certain pride in scoring with the toughest cases. Such as the nurse who set me up with the anesthetic when I was in for a colonoscopy. A colonoscopy is not something anyone does for pleasure; it's a six-foot deep penetration of the anus and colon to spot any beginning cancer. You don't hear many laughs among people who are getting their posteriors reamed. So I said to the nurse “I bet I can make you laugh.” Naturally she doubted that. I said “I asked the doctor whether I could do this without anesthetic, as it's not supposed to be a painful procedure. He said I could, but it would make him nervous. Well, I thought about having a nervous doctor doing it, and changed my mind.” Yes, she laughed. Then she knocked me out with the anesthetic, and next thing I knew I was in the recovery room. Score one point.

Another time my wife had a serious ailment, and they were trying an expensive treatment to see whether it worked. It was a four-hour IV infusion, another no-fun procedure. I talked with the hospital nurse about it. Those nurses don't get many laughs; they deal all day with patients who may be in desperate pain or even dying. Was it the right procedure? “Wouldn't it be awful,” I said, “if halfway through they discovered that it was the wrong treatment.” I paused. “Especially if it was working.” She laughed. Score another point. Fortunately it was the right treatment, and in a few weeks my wife was out of her wheelchair and learning to walk again, and she remains mobile today.

I invested in Xlibris, a company that enables ordinary folk to self-publish their books at a reasonable cost, instead of being forever denied by traditional print publishers. This is good for family biographies, technical information, and, yes, fiction that doesn't make the grade with choosy editors. I invested from idealism: to make it possible. But this put me in the company of venture capitalists, people who are in it strictly for the money, hoping to make big profits on new ventures. I felt like the notorious petunia in an onion patch. But they had to take me seriously, because my wife and I constituted the second largest investor in the company, and I served for several years on their board of directors. Once Xlibris was stabilized, I retired from the board, but listened in on board meetings. And, after losing money for years, the company finally got its act together and was making money, paying off debts and doing very well. So how did I make these serious folk laugh? I said “I am chagrined to see how well the company is doing—since I left the board.” They laughed, and assured me that there was no connection.

What do these laughs have in common? It's the surprise juxtaposition of sense and nonsense. The way of seeing something that makes inverted sense. Also the edge: a different take on an unpleasant medical procedure, or on the prospect of losing substantial money in a risky investment. My rule of thumb is that to get a laugh you need to come perilously close to trouble, without going over the edge. Humor isn't necessarily all pleasant; that's another misconception. It can be the overlapping of pleasure and pain, something funny but with an unfunny aspect. It is why the sight of a fat man slipping on a banana peel gets a laugh: it really isn't funny, but it's not happening to
you
, so, partly in relief, you can laugh.

Ah, but did you laugh at my examples? My guess is that you may have smiled politely, but did not come close to laughing out loud when reading any of them. And this leads to another misconception: that some things are inherently funny. I doubt anything is. Humor needs to be targeted to be effective. A joke delivered to the wrong audience will fall flat. There is no universally funny joke. Even one that gets a laugh the first time, won't work a second time, because the surprise is gone. So a joke about colonoscopy can make a colonoscopy nurse laugh, once, and one about IV treatment can make an IV nurse laugh. And one about business investment and management can make investors laugh. Context is everything.

Sometimes humor is merely implied, not for a laugh. When I collaborated with a martial artist, Roberto Fuentes, onetime champion of Cuba, on a series of judo novels, I didn't like the old familiar descriptions of skulls getting split open like falling pumpkins, and asked him for some more original imagery. He obliged with suggestions, and thus came about my favorite description: “His fist swung toward my face like a wrecking ball toward a condemned building.” That's more of a wince than a laugh, but still a humorous analogy, especially to a martial artist. I have a mental picture of a giant face crumbling and collapsing slowly, slowly, into rubble.

Ah, but can you take a joke out of context and make it work? Explain the background, so people understand what's funny about it? Not really. Humor is highly perishable. If you must explain it, you lose it. It's like vivisecting a live animal to find out what makes it live. Instead you kill it.

So you want to write humor. Are you a good, versatile writer who doesn't
have
to be funny? Can you readily come up with surprise connections that make superficial sense? Are you depressive? If you answer yes and yes and yes, you may have a future in this elusive and sometimes painful sub-genre.

Note:
I wrote this in February 2009 on request, and understand it was well received.

Caution: none

15. Lost Things

“Ian, I have bad news for you,” the professor said. “Your mother has died.”

Ian froze in shock. Doane, his seeing-eye dog and so much more, picked up his horror and whined.

“When? How?” Ian asked.

“No foul play, for what little comfort that may be. She was discovered after several days. It seems to have been a heart attack. The police notified us. You will want to return home immediately. The office is arranging your ticket now. You will of course be excused from the rest of your courses until the crisis has passed. Do you want another student to accompany you?”

“No thank you,” Ian said numbly. “I can make it on my own, with Doane.”

“I'm sure you can,” the professor agreed. “You handle yourself remarkably well. Is there anything else I can do?”

“I—thank you, no. I have to go.”

“Of course,” the professor agreed sympathetically.

Ian took hold of the brace on Doane's back and let the dog lead him out of the professor's office and to his own room. He stifled his grief for the moment; he couldn't afford it. “Catto,” he muttered. “He'll be in trouble.”

Doane made a low woof of agreement.

Soon they were on the plane and in flight. The college office had done an excellent job, perhaps using Ian's blindness as a lever to pry loose a good first-class seat.

While they flew, Ian kept his hand on Doane's back and they communed. “I remember how you were the first,” he murmured. “The first failure.” He smiled, sharing humor. They had been part of what he later learned was a secret project dedicated to developing telepathy in animals and people by enhancing their system's mirror neurons, sometimes even transplanting treated human neurons to animals. Unfortunately there were many failures. “You were slow, even for a canine. An idiot dog. They didn't realize that in your case slow was not a euphemism for stupid; your human neurons not only made you partially telepathic, they put your life into the human scale. At a year old you still drooled, but you may live seventy years. So you were marked for extinction, because budget cuts forced them to destroy their failures. Fortunately you used your power to divert their attention, and fled before they came for you.”