Mary Canfield

Here's a nice little town, in some mythological Midwest, with a river running through it, a number of little churches (and a couple of big ones), a park or two with trees and ponds, an aged but functioning civic center, and a couple of peripheral industries (say, a cement quarry and a tire factory). Then there are several nice old neighborhoods (where the little churches are), old bungalow style houses, big trees, cracked sidewalks, yes, even a couple of surviving mom-and-pop corner grocery stores. A perfectly nice little town. If there's anything wrong with it (and of course there must be, somewhere), I don't know what it is. Yet, anyway.

On a tree-lined street in one of the nice old neighborhoods, in one of the old bungalow style houses, lives Mary Canfield. She's in her bedroom right now, reading. She graduated from high school a year and a half ago, and still hasn't decided whether she's going to go on to college yet and which school she'd go to if she did. She has a part-time job at the library which suits her to a T since she likes to read. Her folks are happy to have her at home, though her mother feels that, if she's not going to school, she should try to get out a bit more. Mary knows what she means, but here she is, lying on her bed happily reading "The Sparrow" and eating Cheese Puffs, one tennis shoe dangling from her toes.

So here she is, and now I say "Hello, Mary."

Well, I don't know what I was expecting. She jumps and the shoe falls off of her foot. She gets up and opens the door to the bedroom and looks around. Then she goes over to the window and carefully looks outside. She takes a deep breath, shakes her head, then goes back, takes off her other shoe, and lies down and resumes reading her book. The Cheese Puffs bag is on the floor, but she doesn't pick it up.

So I try again, making sure my voice is more cheerful this time.

"Hi, Mary! This is the person-"

She jumps right off the bed and bolts from the room. She hurries down the hall, pauses at the top of the stairs to look back a moment, then runs down the stairs. She walks quickly through the living room (her dad's asleep on the couch), through the kitchen and out the back door. The backyard has a couple of big trees, a rusting swingset, and a cute little mini-gazebo thing that's needed a new coat of paint for a couple of years. She walks around for a moment, looking back at the house, stands between the fence and the swingset for a second, then goes into the little gazebo.

It used to have a table and chairs in it (for idyllic meals) but it's empty now except for some leaves and an old broom. She turns around and sits down crosslegged facing the doorway. She's still holding the book with a finger holding her place. After a moment she begins to relax a little, and finally opens the book on her legs. She glances back up through the doorway, looks around at the flaking latticework, sighs, then settles back into her book.

A breeze is blowing gently through the latticework of the little gazebo. For months it's been pushing the same little batch of leaves back and forth across the floor. Now Mary is here and it's lifting her long, black hair and letting it fall back against her neck and shoulders. It's flowing past her pretty left ear, the one with the tiny rubyred gem glistening amidst the infinitesimally fine down on the soft, soft lobe.

It's tricky, but I finesse myself into the breeze, and whisper in her ear "Mary, this is the person writing the story you're in."

She doesn't even look up, but she stops reading. Then she shuts her eyes, and raises her hand with the fingers curled shut up to her mouth and presses her lips against her knuckles, holding her elbow with the other hand. I whisper again "It's OK - you're not going crazy. I'm writing this story, and you're in it, and I'm just trying to talk with you." She shakes her head, her lips still pressed to her knuckles, squeezes her eyes shut tighter, and a single tear runs down her cheek.

And then she says, very softly into her fist, "Why?"

"Ah, well," I breeze in her ear, "since you ask, it's a combination of a theological interest in exploring an analogy of the creator/creature relationship, and, well, frankly, probably an attempt at some sort of low-risk romantic interaction."

She frowns, but then relaxes and uncrosses her legs (the book falls on the floor), brings her knees up and puts her arms around them, and, with her eyes still closed, pushes sideways with her toes so that she rotates around on her fanny 'till she's facing away from the doorway, towards the back of the gazebo. She feels the dust grinding against the seat of her pants as she does this, and so can I.

Keeping her eyes closed, she says quietly "Where are you?"

"I'm in my bedroom, sitting at my computer, writing this."

She shakes her head. "By 'this', do you mean" and she opens her eyes wide, looks up at the latticework and spreads out her fingers with the heels of her palms still against her knees "this?"

"Yes. The world you're in, you, everything - it's a story, a piece of writing."

She raises one eyebrow skeptically, looks at her hands, turning them front and back, gives the wall of the gazebo a couple of kicks with her heel and, twisting around (she feels the muscles in her waist stretching - so can I), she picks up her book, whacks it against the palm of her hand, riffles the pages, then tosses it back on the floor with a thump. And says "But this is real!"

And all I can say is "Yes, yes it is - it's a real story, here on/in the computer, and in the mind of anyone reading the story. And its realness for you is part of the story!"

She springs up from where she's sitting and strides out of the gazebo into the middle of the yard, where she plops herself back down on the ground and stretches out on her back, her fingers interlaced across her tummy. She rubs the soles of her feet on the grass to clean the gazebo dust off of them. The grass is short (her dad's resting from having mown it) and this feels good; I can feel it too.

She stares into the sky until the brightness makes her eyes water and she closes them. And then she says, right into the cool air, "I know what you're thinking."

"Yes, you do."

"Well, let's go then."

"OK. Keep your eyes closed 'till I tell you."

"OK." She wriggles her shoulders, her fanny, and her legs, settling in. And that felt pretty good, didn't it?

She rises straight up off the ground. Man, this is so easy. She rises at about a foot per second, to the height of the house, to the height of the trees, and then on up to where I figure she'll have a pretty good view of the neighborhood. Her hair doesn't hang straight down - it flows around her head like she's underwater, but never gets in front of her face. Now she rotates around so she's facing the ground, and then inclines to 45 degrees.

"OK, open your eyes."

She can see all of the little town she lives in, the trees and the houses, a church with its high pointed spire, and the streets, the boulevards meeting at a great circle park in the center of town. She can see the little lake in the park, flashing white sails dotting its surface. She can see the hills, covered with trees, that surround the town, and farther off still, the mountains, purple in the distance.

She hugs herself as she rotates slowly around the whole horizon. When she comes back around to the lake, she hovers still for a moment. Then she gasps and says "I know what you want to do."

"That's right."

She hugs herself a little tighter. "Omigosh." She takes a deep breath. "OK. Let's go."

"Don't close your eyes this time. Unless you want to."

"Oh - OK." She opens them wide, beautiful brown eyes.

Starting off slow at first, she rises away from the town. In a few seconds the lake has shrunk to a shiny dot, and the mountains come into view as a great range marching off north and south. She passes through the clouds. Through the patches she sees broad plains spreading out below, golden and green, swathes of forest and patchwork farmlands. Far off to the north one of the Great Lakes appears on the horizon as a dark streak, then tilts to become a ragged oval, discernibly shrinking as we pick up a little speed. In a few minutes, all five of the Lakes are visible, and the horizon is beginning to shimmer. Black space appears all around above the shimmering, and before she can blink the Space Station drops past on her left and away out of sight as the whole beautiful big blue Earth shines before her, whorls and streamers of cloudcover covering and uncovering the continents.

Whispering seems appropriate again. Whirling around in the bubble of air surrounding her, moving across her forehead, getting lost for awhile in her hair, now moving across her lips, her cheek, finding her ear again I whisper "This next part might be a little scary. And/or exhilirating, I'm hopeful. Ready?"

She smiles, curls up in a ball, does a slow somersault inside the bubble, then stretches out and shakes herself all over. Wow. Her hair has grown about a foot longer and is flowing all around her, and now she's wearing this blue jumpsuit with a red heart-with-wings-shaped patch between her breasts. She smiles quietly, her face lit with earthshine, and nods.

Whoom. The Earth drops away into the depths of space like a rock down a well, the moon whizzes by and they're both lost in star-studded blackness. Mars and the asteroids are too small to see, but she sweeps her arm to spin around and see Jupiter go by with its merry-go-round moons, and then Saturn in the center of her rings shrinks to a bullseye and the Sun becomes the brightest golden star in all the star-spangled space around her.

Sirius, Procyon, Altair, Vega and Arcturus, bright neighbors within arm's reach of the armchair Sun, each holding court amidst a retinue of golden Suns and throngs of red dwarfs, flow silently into view and drop away. Capella and Aldebaran, Castor and Pollux and the five stars of the Big Dipper Cluster. Then Betelgeuse and the Pleiades Cluster off to the left, here and gone. And there goes Polaris, just another star out here amidst the high-magnitude luminaries beginning to fill the view. Rigel's one of them, then in a second the Orion belt stars, Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka, go do-re-mi-ing by. And brighter than all of them (now you see him up close), Deneb, the kiloparsector king. Mary laughs. There's a watch-like gadget on her wrist that says "Warp Factor" and on it are three digital 9s, flickering frantically.

Something's happening. Deneb's lost in the sandy fields of stars. The starclouds are thinning and trailing into wispy filaments. Like a plane breaking through the clouds, Mary rises, slowly spinning, above the Orion Arm of the Milky Way. Far away, like the mountains before, is an enormous golden glowing dome, the hub of the galaxy. Up and out she goes, the starlanes opening out below, the Sagittarius Arm between ours and the hub, and the Perseus Arm trailing off into starless intergalactic space. The whole double-spiral armed circle of the galaxy floats below her, moving away, now a pinwheel, then a glowing golden iris in the dark. She folds her arms. The warpfactor watch flicks to the Sanskrit character for "om".

Whoom. Local Group, Virgo Cluster, Local Supercluster - space becomes filled with starglitter once again, only now the stars are galaxies. All around her are clouds and clouds of glowing spacetime, and then the quasars flash past, netting it all into a sparkling, pulsing sphere that shrinks to the size of a beachball and floats before her, moving gently in a little rhythmic orbit of its own.

"Where am I?"

"Darned if I know. Somewhere outside the known universe."

"And where are you?"

"Still sitting in my bedroom, clacking away at the keyboard."

"Can you - "

"Nope. We're forever on different levels of reality. So much for theological analogies."

"So...now?"

Abruptly she falls out of the air onto the grass near the lake in the park. People are picnicking, riding bicycles on the path, throwing frisbees - no one notices her landing, except for one guy sitting under a tree reading The Sparrow. He looks up as she picks herself up off the ground. She's still wearing her blue jumpsuit. She sees him looking at her and walks over to him and stands there smiling down at him, arms folded. He's got brown hair and glasses and is wearing a t-shirt with M.C. Escher's Logos on it.

So there she is, and now he says "Hi, Mary!"