Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (251 page)

George Hagman (2001) observes: “Mourning involves the transformation of the meanings and affects associated with one’s relationship to the lost person the goal of which is to permit one’s survival without the other while at the same time ensuring a continuing experience of relationship with the deceased…Thus, mourning involves a reorganization of the survivor’s sense of self as a key function of the process” (p.24). “Reoganizing the survivor’s sense of self” is the almost insurmountable challenge faced by Kaph.

It is only when Martin nearly dies in an earthquake some weeks later that Kaph, witnessing Owen’s frantic worry and rush to help Martin, begins to reach beyond himself. “His face was changed, as if he were glimpsing something he had not seen before; his voice too was changed. ‘How can you…? How do you….?’” (p. 59). Owen responds “I don’t know. We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?” (p. 59). Here at last is a beginning of Kaph’s slow movement into a new way of coping and being in the world.

Two unusual stories, Zenna Henderson’s “The Anything Box” (1956), and Gene Brewer’s
K-Pax
(1995), offer a different perspective on grief, suggesting that the griever knows within him or herself what he or she needs to cope and that outside intervention may not only prove ineffective but may even be harmful. Brewer’s character, prot, according to his psychiatrist, Brewer, is really Robert Porter who has been so deeply traumatized by his shock and grief at the violation and murder of his wife and daughter that he has developed a full blown alternate identity and reality as an alien from the planet K-PAX where there are no family ties, no concept of love, and no suffering or crime. Whether the psychiatrist or prot (along with the many others in the book who accept prot’s alien identity) are correct is left to the reader to decide. In either case, Robert Porter ultimately is left catatonic as a result of the psychiatrist’s attempt to “heal” him, leaving us to wonder whether it would have been better to leave matters alone.

In Henderson’s story, a young teacher sees the absorption of the child Sue-lynn in what appears to be an imaginary box which the child calls her “Anything Box”. The teacher herself is granted momentary access to the joy and the imaginative landscape when the child lets her “look” into the box: “My heart outstripped my flying feet and melted with a rush of delight into warmness as his arms…” (pp. 143–144). After Sue-lynn’s father is imprisoned for burglary, the child begins to gaze into the box longer and longer and withdraws from the other children. She becomes steadily thinner and visibly unwell and the teacher begins to actively worry. When Sue-Lynn faints and then whispers to the teacher “I almost got in my Anything Box…Daddy’s there…and where we used to live,” the teacher panics and invalidates the box: “It’s fun-for-play, but it’s not for real. It’s only play…There is no Anything Box” (Henderson, 1956, p. 147). She tells herself that this is for the child’s good. “We may need ‘hallucinations’ to keep us going…but when we go so far as to force ourselves, physically, into the never-never land of heart’s desire…” (1956, p. 149).

Science Fiction commentator, Bud Webster (2007), suggests that Henderson’s story grew out of her year of teaching in a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II: “Henderson’s experiences at the…camp must have shown her children—and even adults—lost inside themselves trying to escape the harsh reality of their ruined lives.” Henderson’s fictional teacher indeed has reason to worry about the pressures of a traumatic event or situation on the fragile psyche. Nonetheless, for Henderson, as for Brewer, the writer, the answers are not so clear-cut and the “rescue” can be more devastating than the alternative reality the traumatized person constructs.

The child is devastated by the teacher’s rejection of the box. “’You took it!’ she sobbed.…And she wrenched herself out of my arms.” The child’s ensuing depression is so complete that the teacher helplessly tells herself “that never, never again would I take any belief from anyone without replacing it with something better” (p. 147). When the teacher is finally able to restore the box (eliciting the child’s ready promise to “never try to get into it again” (p 150), the child’s relief and gratitude is a healing balm for the teacher as well. “It seemed to me that everything about her had suddenly turned upward…. The subtle flame about her that made her Sue-lynn was there again” (p. 150). It is true (Henderson suggests) that we must guard against losing ourselves in our attempts to flee reality, but not at the cost of our imagination, hopes and dreams. These remain vital to our emotional, psychological, and physical health, the “subtle flame” about us that makes us who we are.

Death in science fiction is almost always sudden and traumatic—the result of violence, or disastrous accident, or swiftly spreading plague.
²
While such traumatic loss sometimes only serves as a plot prompt (i.e. the death of Luke Skywalker’s family frees/necessitates him to leave), more often it gives the writer the opportunity to explore the dimensions and shape of grief and the reaching after meaning that accompanies it. The characters are changed by their grief; the readers are changed by the stories.

* * * *

References

Attig, T. (2001). “Relearning the world: Making and Finding Meanings.” In R. Neimeyer. (Ed.).
Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss
(pp.33–54). American Psychological Association: Washington, DC.

Brewer, G. (1995).
K-PAX
. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Currier, J. & Neimeyer, R. (2006) “Fragmented stories: The Narrative Integration of Violent Loss.” In E. K. Rynearson (Ed.) (2007).
Violent Death: Resilience and Intervention Beyond the Crisis
(pp. 85–100). New York: Routledge.

Finney, J. (1970).
Time and Again
. New York: Scribner.

Gilbert, S. (2006).
Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve: A Cultural Study
. New York: W. W. Norton.

Goonan, K. A. (1997).
The Bones of Time
. New York: Tor Books.

Hagman, G. (2001). Beyond decathexis: toward a new psychoanalytic understanding and treatment of mourning. In Neimeyer, R. (Ed.),
Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss
(pp. 13–32). American Psychological Association: Washington, DC.

Holland, N. N. (2004). The power(?) of literature: A neuropsychological view. New Literary History 35(3), 395–410.

Klass, D., Silverman, P. & Nickman, S. L. (1996).
Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief.
(Death Education, Aging and Health Care). Oxford: Taylor and Francis.

LeGuin, U. K. (1969). Nine lives. In Hartwell, D. G. & Cramer, K. (Eds.).
The ascent of wonder: The evolution of hard sf
. (pp. 44–60). N.Y.: Tom Doherty, 1994.

Le Guin, U. K. (1973). On theme. (pp. 204–5). In R. Scott Wilson. (Ed.).
Those Who Can
. NY: Signet.

Lem, Stanislaw.
Solaris
. Trans. from the French by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox. San Diego, CA: Harvest Book.

McConnell, Frank. (1996). You bet your life: Death and the storyteller. In G. Schlusser, G. Westfahl & E. Rabkin. (Eds.).
Immortal Engines: Life Extension and Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy
. Eds.: George Schlusser, Gary Westfahl, and Eric S. Rabkin. (pp. 221–229). Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Sagan, Carol.
Contact
. NY: Pocket, 1985.

Shaw, Bob. (1966). The light of other days. In Hartwell, D. G. & Cramer, K. (Ed.). (1994).
The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF
. (pp. 61–67). N.Y.: Tom Doherty.

Webster, B. (2007, Apr. 1). Past masters—Zenna Henderson. http://www.philsp.com/articles/pastmasters_04.html Accessed 03/06/11.

Worden, W. (2008).
Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy: A Handbook for the Mental Health Practitioner. Springer.

Yolen, J. (1988).
The Devil’s Arithmetic
. Puffin Books.

Zelazny, R. (1965). This moment of the storm. In G. Dozois. (Ed.). (1991).
Modern Classics of Science Fiction
. St. Martin’s Press.

* * * *

Notes

¹
This is, perhaps, most obvious in the perennial SF motif of the quest for immortality which has already been ably traced in Schlusser, G., Westfahl, G. & Rabkin, E. (Eds.). (1996).
Immortal Engines: Life Extension and Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy
. Athens: University of Georgia Press and Yoke, C. B & Hassler, D. M. (Eds.). (1985).
Death and the serpent: Immortality in science fiction and fantasy
. Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy. No. 13. Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press.

²
Like the news media, SF writers rarely choose to focus on deaths from aging or from an extended disease.

* * * *

Kathleen Fowler
, PhD is a Professor of Gerontology and Women’s Studies at Ramapo College of New Jersey and a Fellow of Thanatology (the study of death, dying, and bereavement). She has published on literature and thanatology and is at work on a book entitled The Literature of Loss: Vital Words, Mortal Writers. She is the Editor of The Forum: The Quarterly Publication of the Association for Death Education and Counseling.

(1920–1986)

After lying about his age as a teenager to get his first newspaper job, Frank Herbert spent most of his life as a journalist (including a stint as a Navy photographer during World War II), until he was finally able to write full-time in his fifties. After years of sporadic publication beginning with two stories sold to Esquire in 1945, Herbert had built a reputation as a solid writer of hard SF, but not an especially commercial one.

His meticulously textured breakthrough novel,
Dune
, originated in research for an article on sand dunes. Significantly longer than most commercial SF at the time and ecologically themed before that was fashionable,
Dune
was rejected by more than twenty publishers before being bought by Chilton, which mostly published auto repair manuals. The novel went on to win both the Hugo and Nebula, and was the best-selling science fiction novel of all time until passed by Douglas Adams’s
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
. Along with its sequels,
Dune
gave Herbert the freedom to write full-time.

After his death of a pulmonary embolism while recovering from surgery for pancreatic cancer, Herbert’s oldest son, Brian, continued the series in collaboration with Kevin J. Anderson. Brian’s biography of his father,
Dreamer of Dune
, came out in 2003.

First published in
Astounding Science Fiction
, July 1955

In the nine years it took Welby Lewis to become chief of criminal investigation for Sheriff John Czernak, he came to look on police work as something like solving jigsaw puzzles. It was a routine of putting pieces together into a recognizable picture. He was not prepared to have his cynical police-peopled world transformed into a situation out of H. G. Wells or Charles Fort.

When Lewis said “alien” he meant non-American, not extraterrestrial. Oh, he knew a BEM was a bug-eyed monster; he read some science fiction. But that was just the point—such situations were
fiction,
not to be encountered in police routine. And certainly unexpected; at a mortuary. The Johnson-Tule Mortuary, to be exact.

Lewis checked in at his desk in the sheriff’s office at five minutes to eight of a Tuesday morning. He was a man of low forehead, thin pinched-in Welsh face, black hair. His eyes were like two pieces of roving green jade glinting beneath bushy brows.

The office, a room of high ceilings and stained plaster walls was in a first floor corner of the County Building at Banbury. Beneath one tall window of the room was a cast-iron radiator. Beside the window hung a calendar picture of a girl wearing only a string of pearls. There were two desks facing each other across an aisle which led from the hall door to the radiator. The desk on the left belonged to Joe Welch, the night man. Lewis occupied the one on the right, a cigarette-scarred vintage piece which had stood in this room more than thirty years.

Lewis stopped at the front of his desk, leafed through the papers in the incoming basket, looked up as Sheriff Czernak entered. The sheriff, a fat man with wide Slavic features and a complexion like bread crust, grunted as he eased himself into the chair under the calendar. He pushed a brown felt hat to the back of his head, exposing a bald dome.

Lewis said, “Hi, John. How’s the wife?” He dropped the papers back into the basket.

“Her sciatica’s better this week,” said the sheriff. “I came in to tell you to skip that burglary report in the basket. A city prowler picked up two punks with the stuff early this morning. We’re sending ‘em over to juvenile court.”

“They’ll never learn,” said Lewis.

“Got one little chore for you,” said the sheriff. “Otherwise everything’s quiet. Maybe we’ll get a chance to catch up on our paper work.” He hoisted himself out of the chair. “Doc Bellarmine did the autopsy on that Cerino woman, but he left a bottle of stomach washings at the Johnson-Tule Mortuary. Could you pick up the bottle and run it out to the county hospital?”

“Sure,” said Lewis. “But I’ll bet her death was natural causes. She was a known alcoholic. All those bottles in her shack.”

“Prob’ly,” said the sheriff. He stopped in front of Lewis’ desk, glanced up at the calendar art. “Some dish.”

Lewis grinned. “When I find a gal like that I’m going to get married,” he said.

“You do that,” said the sheriff. He ambled out of the office.

It was almost 8:30 when Lewis cruised past the mortuary in his county car and failed to find a parking place in the block. At the next corner, Cove Street, he turned right and went up the alley, parking on the concrete apron to the mortuary garage.

A southwest wind which had been threatening storm all night kicked up a damp gust as he stepped from the car. Lewis glanced up at the gray sky, but left his raincoat over the back of the seat. He went down the narrow walk beside the garage, found the back door of the mortuary ajar. Inside was a hallway and a row of three metal tanks, the tall kind welders use for oxygen and acetylene gas. Lewis glanced at them, wondered what a mortuary did with that type of equipment, shrugged the question aside. At the other end of the hall the door opened into a carpeted foyer which smelled of musky flowers. A door at the left bore a brass plate labeled OFFICE. Lewis crossed the foyer, entered the room.

Behind a glass-topped desk in the corner sat a tall blond individual type with clear Nordic features. An oak frame on the wall behind him held a colored photograph of Mount Lassen labeled PEACE on an embossed nameplate. An official burial form—partly filled in—was on the desk in front of the man. The left corner of the desk held a brass cup in which sat a metal ball. The ball emitted a hissing noise as Lewis approached and he breathed in the heavy floral scent of the foyer.

The man behind the desk got to his feet, put a pen across the burial form. Lewis recognized him—Johnson, half owner of the mortuary.

“May I help you?” asked the mortician.

Lewis explained his errand.

Johnson brought a small bottle from a desk drawer, passed it across to Lewis, then looked at the deputy with a puzzled frown. “How’d you get in?” asked the mortician. “I didn’t hear the front door chimes.”

The deputy shoved the bottle into a side pocket of his coat. “I parked in the alley and came in the back way,” he said. “The street out front is full of Odd Fellows cars.”

“Odd Fellows?” Johnson came around the desk.

“Paper said they were having some kind of rummage sale today,” said Lewis. He ducked his head to look under the shade on the front window. “I guess those are Odd Fellows cars. That’s the hall across the street.”

An ornamental shrub on the mortuary front lawn bent before the wind and a spattering of rain drummed against the window. Lewis straightened. “Left my raincoat in the car,” he said. “I’ll just duck out the way I came.”

Johnson moved to his office door. “Two of our attendants are due back now on a call,” he said. “They—”

“I’ve seen a stiff before,” said Lewis. He stepped past Johnson, headed for the door to the rear hall.

Johnson’s hand caught the deputy’s shoulder. “I must insist you go out the front,” said the mortician.

Lewis stopped, his mind setting up a battery of questions. “It’s raining out,” he said. “I’ll get all wet.”

“I’m sorry,” said Johnson.

Another man might have shrugged and complied with Johnson’s request, but Welby Lewis was the son of the late Proctor Lewis, who had been three times president of the Banbury County Sherlock Holmes Round Table. Welby had cut his teeth on logical deduction and the logic of this situation escaped him. He reviewed his memory of the hallway. Empty except for those tanks near the back door.

“What do you keep in those metal tanks?” he asked.

The mortician’s hand tightened on his shoulder and Lewis felt himself turned toward the front door. “Just embalming fluid,” said Johnson. “That’s the way it’s delivered.”

“Oh.” Lewis looked up at Johnson’s tightly drawn features, pulled away from the restraining hand and went out the front door. Rain was driving down and he ran around the side of the mortuary to his car, jumping in, slammed the door and sat down to wait. At 9:28 A.M. by his wrist watch an assistant mortician came out, opened the garage doors. Lewis leaned across the front seat, rolled down his right window.

“You’ll have to move your car,” said the assistant. “We’re going out on a call.”

“When are the other fellows coming back?” asked Lewis.

The mortician stopped halfway inside the garage. “What other fellows?” he asked.

“The ones who went out on that call this morning.”

“Must be some other mortuary,” said the assistant. “This is our first call today.”

“Thanks,” said Lewis. He rolled up his window, started the car and drove to the county hospital. The battery of unanswered questions churned in his mind. Foremost was—Why did Johnson lie to keep me from going out the back way?

At the hospital he delivered the bottle to the pathology lab, found a pay booth and called the Banbury Mortuary. An attendant answered and Lewis said, “I want to settle a bet. Could you tell me how embalming fluid is delivered to mortuaries?”

“We buy it by the case in concentrated form,” said the mortician. “Twenty-four glass bottles to the case, sixteen ounces to the bottle. It contains red or orange dye to give a lifelike appearance. Our particular brand smells somewhat like strawberry soda. There is nothing offensive about it. We guarantee that the lifelike—”

“I just wanted to know how it came,” said Lewis. “You’re sure it’s never delivered in metal tanks?”

“Good heavens, no!” said the man. “It’d corrode them!”

“Thanks,” said Lewis and hung up softly. In his mind was the Holmesian observation: If a man lies about an apparently inconsequential thing, then that thing is not inconsequential.

He stepped out of the booth and bumped into Dr. Bellarmine, the autopsy surgeon. The doctor was a tall, knobby character with gray hair, sun-lamp tan and blue eyes as cutting as two scalpels.

“Oh, there you are, Lewis,” he said. “They told me you were down this way. We found enough alcohol in that Cerino woman to kill three people. We’ll check the stomach washings, too, but I doubt they’ll add anything.”

“Cerino woman?” asked Lewis.

“The old alcoholic you found in that shack by the roundhouse,” said Bellarmine. “You losing your memory?”

“Oh… oh, certainly,” said Lewis. “I was just thinking of something else. Thanks, Doc.” He brushed past the surgeon. “Gotta go now,” he muttered.

* * * *

Back at his office Lewis sat on a corner of his desk, pulled the telephone to him and dialed the Johnson-Tule Mortuary. An unfamiliar masculine voice answered. Lewis said, “Do you do cremations at your mortuary?”

“Not at our mortuary,” said the masculine voice, “but we have an arrangement with Rose Lawn Memorial Crematorium. Would you care to stop by and discuss your problem?”

“Not right now, thank you,” said Lewis, and replaced the phone on its hook. He checked off another question in his mind—the possibility that the tanks held gas for a crematorium. What the devil’s in those tanks? he asked himself.

“Somebody die?” The voice came from the doorway, breaking into Lewis’ reverie. The deputy turned, saw Sheriff Czernak.

“No,” said Lewis. “I’ve just got a puzzle.” He went around the desk to his chair, sat down.

“Doc Bellarmine say anything about the Cerino dame?” asked the sheriff. He came into the room, eased himself into the chair beneath the calendar art.

“Alcoholism,” said Lewis. “Like I said.” He leaned back in his chair, put his feet on the desk and stared at a stained spot on the ceiling.

“What’s niggling you?” asked the sheriff “You look like a guy trying to solve a conundrum.”

“I am,” said Lewis and told him about the incident at the mortuary.

Czernak took off his hat, scratched his bald head. “It don’t sound like much to me, Welby. In all probability there’s a very simple explanation.”

“I don’t think so,” said Lewis.

“Why not?”

Lewis shook his head. “I don’t know. I just don’t think so. Something about that mortuary doesn’t ring true.”

“What you think’s in them tanks?” asked the sheriff

“I don’t know,” said Lewis.

The sheriff seated his hat firmly on his head. “Anybody else I’d tell ‘em forget it,” he said. “But you I dunno. I seen you pull too many rabbits out of the hat. Sometimes I think you’re a freak an’ see inside people.”

“I am a freak,” said Lewis. He dropped his feet to the floor, pulled a scratch pad to him and began doodling.

“Yeah, I can see you got six heads,” said the sheriff.

“No, really,” said Lewis. “My heart’s on the right side of my chest.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” said the sheriff. “But now you point it out to me—”

“Freak,” said Lewis. “That’s what I felt looking at that mortician. Like he was some kind of a creepy freak.”

He pushed the scratch pad away from him. It bore a square broken into tiny segments by zigzag lines. Like a jigsaw puzzle.

“Was he a freak?”

Lewis shook his head. “Not that I could see.

Czernak pushed himself out of his chair. “Tell you what,” he said. “It’s quiet today. Why’ncha nose around a little?”

“Who can I have to help me?” asked Lewis.

“Barney Keeler’ll be back in about a half hour,” said Czernak. “He’s deliverin’ a subpoena for Judge Gordon.”

“O.K.,” said Lewis. “When he gets back tell him to go over to the Odd Fellows Hall and go in the back way without attracting too much attention. I want him to go up to that tower room and keep watch on the front of the mortuary, note down everybody who enters or leaves and watch for those tanks. If the tanks go out, he’s to tail the carrier and find out where they go.”

“What’re you gonna do?” asked the sheriff.

“Find a place where I can keep my eye on the back entrance. I’ll call in when I get set.” Lewis hooked a thumb toward the desk across from his. “When Joe Welch comes on, send him over to spell me.”

“Right,” said Czernak. “I still think maybe you’re coon-doggin’ it up an empty tree.”

“Maybe I am,” said Lewis. “But something shady about a mortuary gives my imagination the jumps. I keep thinking of how easy it could be for a mortician to get rid of an inconvenient corpse.”

“Stuff it in one of them tanks, maybe?” asked the sheriff.

“No. They weren’t big enough.” Lewis shook his head. “I just don’t like the idea of the guy lying to me.”

* * * *

It was shortly after 10:30
a.m.
when Lewis found what he needed—a doctor’s office in the rear of a building across the alley and two doors up from the mortuary garage. The doctor had three examining rooms on the third floor, the rear room looking down on the mortuary back yard. Lewis swore the doctor and his nurse to secrecy, set himself up in the back room with a pair of field glasses.

At noon he sent the nurse out for a hamburger and glass of milk for his lunch, had her watch the mortuary yard while he called his office and told the day radio operator where he was.