Scarlet Ribbons

Suzy McKee Charnas

Part V

A funny thing happened on the way to finishing The Vampire Tapestry. The story that became the third chapter, which had been published separately in an anthology while I was still completing the book, won a prize. To my surprise and delight, the Nebula for best novella of 1980 went to "Unicorn Tapestry". No money comes with a Nebula, and the mainstream press hardly takes note of its existence, but I was encouraged all the same.

The Nebula is an award given by one's peers, the other writers who make up the Science Fiction Writers of America (a body which consisted at that time of under a thousand members). It has nothing to do with sales — not unless you win a Nebula for a novel — but I found it hugely supportive to know that some significant number of my colleagues liked and admired this piece of my work.

The award itself, given amid much revelry at a rubber-chicken banquet in a hotel in — was it New York? — is a rectangular block of lucite on a black base inscribed in gold. The clear plastic encloses a handsome hunk of white quartz with a nebula in greenish glitter-dust circling above it, the whole about ten inches high by 4-5 inches to a side. It's very pretty, and I whooped and jumped up and down when it was handed to me by Isaac Asimov at the podium (but when he poked his lips out for a smooch — traditional whenever a male presenter hands an award to a female acceptor or vice versa and sometimes when both parties are women, but not, I notice, in the other gender combinations — I dodged; I didn't know this guy, had read him but never met him, so what was this kissing stuff?). I was a happy writer that night.

What I covet now and forever, though, and will never obtain — I don't write enough horror to be in serious competition for it — is the Horror Writers of America award: a little ceramic haunted house with doors that open on little ghosties and skeletons and things hidden within. It doesn't just stand there; you can play with it.

At any rate, it was time to close the tale of Weyland, and the final chapter offered a chance to wind it all up with a pleasing symmetry to the first chapter: we see our blood drinking professor in the same sort of setting where his story began, at a university, this time a western university in a relatively raw part of the country. In fact it's a school that I am familiar with myself from having taught there from time to time, and from having done a good deal of research for my books (the campus is located right up the hill from my home). I put my scholarly vampire to work at the University of New Mexico, and imagined him a nice little house a few streets away from my own.

Into UNM I inserted people built out of my own past, people Weyland could interact with in interesting ways on his way to a final confrontation with the vicious cult leader from chapter two, Alan Reese.

I took an old friend from my Peace Corps days, trimmed and enriched my memories of him by the addition of elements from other people I'd known or read or heard of, and he came out of the process as the character named Irv. I say "enriched" because of course the image I have in my mind of the original of Irv is the sort of superficial and distorted cartoon we all carry in our minds of the individuals we know in real life, from the most distant to the closest. In Irv, I could flesh out that cartoon into something much closer to a real person. Not the real person, of course, but a fictional person.

No one knows anyone, not really, not to the heart. If you did, you would be able to deduce accurately that person's entire past and predict their future actions. We can't even remember our own pasts or predict our own futures, right? When we dare to admit it, we are largely opaque to others (as they are to us), and often to ourselves as well. Think of those stunned neighbors and relatives of the serial murderer or high school sniper, all shaking their heads and murmuring, "But he seemed like such a nice young man."

But we can't operate in a constant perception of chaos. If you aren't able to perceive order as your society perceives it, you imagine an order for yourself and project that onto reality instead — you count things to attain mathematical certainty, or you get instructions from Martians who secretly run everything according to a plan of their own, or you see angels (or devils) who know what's going on even if you don't. Similarly, although we can't truly know one another we must have some assumptions to work with, so we create each other in our minds in very much the same way that an author creates fictional characters, using the glimpses we get of the other person's behavior and our interpretations of those glimpses.

That intimacy exists at all in the world under these conditions is extraordinary: but it does. It's our best reward, our highest hope, our sweetest joy, and it is achieved in spite of the limitations on our knowledge of each other.

Intimacy is the leap into trust with another person even though you do not and cannot fully know that person. The trust itself, the risk, lies in that lack of full knowledge, of perfect predictability, between you and that person. Trust is the offer of acceptance that you hope will elicit that same blessing in return, regardless of all the details you do not and cannot know about each other. In a way, it's the acting-out of the faith that allows human society to exist at all — the faith that another human being is basically benevolent (until proven otherwise), whatever the vicissitudes of his or her individual life story. It's the affirmation that everyone has a soul, and that the soul is by its nature good and worthy of respect.

Which, believe it or not, brings us back to my vampire. Part of what the final chapter is about is the power, and the dangers, of intimacy. Instinct is always reliable: it preserve one's own physical existence. Intimacy reflects the choices of the soul, which can be fatally cavalier about the body's survival; think, Joan of Arc.

That's why Weyland's story is, ultimately, the tragedy of of a being with human potentiality who lacks the courage to make the final step into becoming a human being — the step from relying on instinct to taking chances on trust — and whose forgotten history is a long series of such retreats, repeated again and again and again.

My first idea of his ending was that he would express his quandary by sneaking off to his cave to sleep, to heal, to recover his predatory detachment. But I rejected this as a dumb cliche: the vampire is driven back into his coffin by the forces of good, to lurk there til another day (ominous chords of movie music as the credits roll). I'm too good a writer to resort to that. I'll do something original.

I had my own solution ready to hand. My vampire is different from his prey, a being who has never been human, no matter how much like a man he appears. That's what makes him unusual among vampires in fiction: his identity is tiger, his identity is wolf, it is not and never has been "man". He is so much an animal (in human form) that compared to the rest of us he might as well have come from Mars.

What better way to confirm this alienness than for him to simply cancel "Professor Weyland" as an identity and hitchhike out of our view as a nameless drifter, unknown and all but invisible, without a backward glance? No normal human being, given what this guy's recent experience has been, could do that in the cool way I had in mind for Weyland. I had deliberately enmeshed him in intimacy of a heightened kind, the kind that has been known to humanize real human beings — the trust of and even trust in others. His ability to simply abandon all his intimate contacts, as if they had had no impact on him, would convincingly demonstrate his non-humanity. It would shock readers, it would blind them with its (well, ahem, my) brilliance.

Boy, was I pleased with myself.

One of the continuing challenges of science fiction (and of fantasy too) is the creation of convincing strangeness — characters who are recognizably not-us — without crossing over into the territory where characters are so alien that they become unintelligible. In the latter case readers can't get a grip on them, which means the story fails (ie, people don't finish reading it). And here I was, about to do the job right — suck the reader in with Weyland's apparently increasing humanity, and then let the old bloodsucker spit in our eye and walk away!

So I wrote it that way, pointing up issues of intimacy all along the way as a foreshadowing of the great denial that was coming.

I set Irv up as the center of contrast to Weyland. Irv is the epitome of the warm, social person who craves intimacy (as deeply as Weyland craves blood), who thrives on it. I used the painter (who recognizes Weyland as inhuman because his anatomy is subtly wrong) and her lover to show the strength of the friendships Irv makes in his life. Poor Alison presses Weyland for the intimacy she longs for (and is she ever looking in the wrong place!).

Everything in the story became part of an argument about the value and significance of intimacy, brought to a head when Irv dies. Irv kills himself because a crucial past relationship has cropped up again as a crisis he can't resolve — something about a child, a sibling, a parent, one of those close contacts we all have to deal with, that Weyland never has to do anything but observe and mimic. No details were required, not if Irv came across as the warm, emotional person I'd intended.

Then Weyland turns the deadly confrontation with Reese into a desperate parody of just such a relationship: he uses the human hunger for closeness to seduce Reese into dropping his guard. The alien has learned our emotional secrets from his time with the therapist, but in the sense of learning to use a weapon of ours against us in defense of his own life and freedom.

And then, with the simple, instinctive power of self-preservation making the judgment for him, Weyland changes his appearance and rides away in the passenger seat of somebody's truck, to make a different life totally divorced from all these dangerous emotions that he's got tangled up in -- all because back in chapter one he got overconfident and picked a hunter, Katje de Groot, as prey.

Only when I talked about the finished manuscript with David Hartwell, the editor who bought it, he said that my ending didn't work.

It didn't work, he said, because I had induced the reader to make such a strong emotional investment in Weyland's increasing humanity that my protagonist's sudden reversal would be felt — and deeply resented — by the reader as a betrayal. You, reader, empathize with the vampire and his seduction by humanity as if it were happening to you along with him, but look, hey, surprise — none of it was really happening to him, just to you, sucker. It was as bad as the old cliche of pulp SF, in which the protagonist wakes up to find the whole marvelous story was "only a dream". It was unfair.

So what happens instead at the end, then? I said, feeling pissed off, mortified, and defensive.

David said, He goes to ground in the mountain cave, just as you have him arranging to do earlier in the final chapter. He carries out his carefully prepared plan to turn to the long sleep for escape and renewal.

I squirmed, I struggled, I fought. Dave patiently insisted. Finally I agreed, very reluctantly, to write the ending that way just to see how it would feel. On the plane home I remembered what I had so conveniently forgotten til then: that my own original idea for the ending was precisely this retreat, but I had rejected it as a cliche.

Rereading the chapter at home, I saw that Dave was right. The story promised one thing — the drawing of a solitary, predatory animal into human passions and connections — and then delivered a conclusion that said that those passions and connections are worthless, they have no power over him.

And that's not what I meant at all. My artistic ego, a quality without which no creative person can persist in creating, had seduced me into betraying my creation for the sake of an artistic flourish, an authorial power-play.

If there are self-aware, intelligent aliens somewhere who are impervious to the power of intimacy, what am I doing writing a book for them? They don't go to the local SF bookstore, they're not going to read it. Let 'em write their own books.

The proof that the new ending was right, though, came in the rewriting itself.

I was on the next-to-last page, reminding the reader of all the people who had brought Weyland to his crucial decision to withdraw. A quick recap of the major characters he had met on his way through the story seemed called for, so I wrote a little summary, adding a brief note about the significance of each of these people to my vampire from his point of view, here at the close of his current human life.

The links fell effortlessly into place, one after the other, each human impact leading to the next, all building to precisely this defeat of the legendary monster: the vampire must go sleep off his accumulated humanity, because he's become so enmeshed in human life and emotions that he can't trust his instincts any more. The successive chapters of Weyland's story formed a coherent arc driving straight to this resolution, even though during the writing the episodes had felt to me like a string of picaresque adventures with an almost comic edge, as the monster arrogantly marched himself ever deeper into the quicksands of his own latent humanity.

With the rejected ending restored, the internal logic of the chapters fused them into a real novel, a novel that worked (and continues to work to this day; the book is something of a classic, still in print and selling after two decades).

So whatever rude things I say about editors (and, like all authors, I do say such things from time to time), I want to record it here that this particular editor saved my bacon when I was young and foolish and my bacon desperately needed saving. Thanks, Dave.

To Be Continued...

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Copyright © 2001 by Suzy McKee Charnas