Without Absolution. Amy Sterling Casil
I realized who and what Shakespeare was. He helped me understand just about everything. I stood and stand in awe of his language and his humanity.
“The most human of the great writers,” they call him. I think that was Pope, giving a whack, comparing him negatively to the more “transcendent” Milton.
And the younger me hated the hell out of “Paradise Lost,” though I’d probably like it now.
It bothers me that character is shortchanged in so much SF. I dislike the thinness of that approach and I don’t believe in its necessity, because after all, aren’t all great stories about what it is to be human? Whether they’re set in rotten Denmark or on the flaming surface of Venus?
Harold Bloom says that Shakespeare “invented the human.” Through characters like Hamlet and Falstaff, the Bard gave us all an idea of what people really were. I wonder if Hamlet and Falstaff aren’t even more than human, for they are after all quite immortal.
I wonder, since I do believe Harold Bloom’s thesis, if this might make Shakespeare a kind of 16th century Victor Frankenstein; except his people are a lot more functional than the Monster ever was. And even more ironic; the poor Monster was so much more human than his creator.
It’s a chase. Always chasing after some kind of invention. Some flicker of a dream, trying to make it flesh.
These poor players, strutting and fretting on their stage, looking for absolution.
And I’ve found, after this time, that the stories themselves are the way to find it.
* * * *
Amy Casil’s short fiction has appeared, among other places, in Talebones, the Writers of the Future Anthologies, Zoetrope: All Story Extra, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She has more novelettes upcoming in F & SF. Her novelette “Chromosome Circus” was the cover story of the January 2000 issue of that magazine. Last year, she finished her first novel, The Golden Age, and is working on her next, Live Forever. She is the Science Fiction/Fantasy writing instructor for iUniverse’s Writers Club University, Novel Advice site for writers, and Writers.com. She also teaches composition and literature at Chapman University. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Chapman in May 1999.
1 An aside: she learned not long ago that the reason she’d seen A.J.’s life-changing article was that 1984 was the year Damon and Kate got desperate and had to advertise for students by having A.J. write such things.
JONNY PUNKINHEAD
Outside my office, I hear the rubbery squeal of a wheelchair, followed by the damp exhalation of a sick child’s sigh. The shadow of the pumpkin-headed boy, Jonny, crosses the wall like a dark hand slapped on a sheet.
“Come in,” I call through the open door.
“Sure, Dr. Arlan,” Jonny says, lisping. It sounds like “sssir, docker awrin,” but I’m used to the way he talks.
Jonny wheels into my office. He’s very limber with the chair. In his hand is a small, crooked paper Santa and something else that I can’t quite fathom, made of festive paper. I finish the letter I’m composing and smile. It’s not easy to smile at Jonny.
He holds the paper Santa up. “I made this for gramma,” he says.
“That’s a great St. Nick,” I say. My mouth twists in a funny way, and I don’t like the feeling. His grandmother hasn’t visited him for at least three years, yet Jonny makes her something for every holiday. Her presents are all in a shoebox, tucked neatly in his cubby in Dorm A., where the seriously ill children live.
“This is for you,” he says, holding out the other bit of artwork. I see now that it’s pieces of paper, cut and pasted to look like a Christmas present.
The little present has “I love you, Dr. Arlan” written on it in spidery letters. “That’s a great job, Jonny.”
In a fit of the unprofessionalism which seems to have become my habit of late, I push away from the desk and walk to Jonny’s side, then kiss his patchy scalp. Jonny giggles and kisses me back. If I look in his good left eye, which is large, brown, and very pretty, I can pretend for a moment he’s a normal child. He turns toward me as he laughs, and it’s impossible to pretend any longer.
Jonny’s third eye stares vacantly. He can see only from his left eye, not the one on the right or the one in the center of his large, flat forehead. I gently stroke his veined head, which is twice as large as the head of a child his age should be, and I whisper that his grandmother will be very pleased with his gift.
Someone has named the syndrome from which Jonny suffers Webern syndrome. It’s not a common birth defect, but it’s one of the more unpleasant conditions children have come to suffer from in this, our pestilent age.
I’m Hedrick Arlan, forty-six years old, a doctor of education, not medicine. I’ve been the administrator of Southern California Sherman Institute for Differently Abled Children for six years. Jonny is nearly seven. He and I arrived at this place on the same day. He is a part of the landscape, like our chairs, molded in solid hunks of indestructible plastic, the mottled gray composite floors, the nurses, the aides, the ever-present medication and the constant stream of visitors who want to gawk at the children.
“Gramma is coming,” he says, spraying my face with his spittle. “This year, I know she’ll come.”
“Of course she will,” I say. The lies fall so easily from my lips these days. I pat Jonny’s twisted back and watch him wheel slowly from my office, waving goodbye with one tiny six-fingered hand.
Jonny’s family signed him over to the state and has forgotten he was ever born. Part of me understands their distress at bearing such a child into the world. Another part of me knows the history and I can’t help but feel a nasty stab of fury in my gut, because Jonny’s mother drank daily during her pregnancy, and took every drug she could find in staggering quantities.
Was it the drugs that made Jonny what he is? I don’t know. They say the virus which altered Jonny’s genes is both sly and opportunistic. The thing at work inside of him found a dirty needle somewhere or came through a perforated condom, that much we do know.
When I first came, my friends would ask, “how can you stand all those little children, suffering?” They said this in a disbelieving tone that really meant, “I can’t believe you’re taking care of those wretches.”
Now, they ask less often.
Years ago, Sherman housed developmentally disabled children, the ones they called “morons” and “imbeciles.” But no longer. This disease Jonny has, the DNA thief, started a decade ago. The initial wave of the stricken didn’t fall ill, so most of them didn’t realize that anything was happening, while the tiny bit of protein that saw them as a universe of meat lodged in their gametes, multiplied itself, changed things. Then, they bore children. Children with something worse than missing limbs, or hydrocephaly or spina bifida or muscular dystrophy or cerebral palsy.
These children were born with bizarre defects, like Jonny’s; a head sized and shaped like a great jack-o-lantern covered with patchy hair, extra fingers, extra toes, a spinal deformity that rendered him paraplegic and the ultimate horror, a blind, filmy, goggling third eye.
Then there were the children with no eyes, merely a nose hole and a gaping maw for a mouth. The children with three arms and a tail, with fishy scales and slit-eyes, the ones with fins in place of hands and feet.
And the horrible irony was that most of Sherman’s charges were of normal intelligence. No gravely mentally-disabled among them, these children were born with the ability, though they may not have even had eyes with which to see, of knowing how different they were, and one day perhaps realizing that despite all their pretty names, like “differently-abled,” they were what most people called monsters.
I know the histories of our children, save the few found in dumpsters or on some church