Her Husband's Hands and Other Stories

Extro: “Bad People Doing Evil Things”

You’ll find the letter, and my reply, in a May 2012 Brass Tacks, the letter column of Analog.

It came from a reader upset at a story you won’t find here, a tale that hinged on a horrific series of events on a far-future alien planet; he felt that the story didn’t jibe with his vision of science-fictional optimism, and complained, “I find Adam-Troy Castro to write uncomfortable stories. He writes about evil people doing evil things. I believe that this story is more appropriate for a horror magazine. What I want from a story is something that helps me be inspired and a science fiction escape with a happy ending.”

Given the chance to respond, I pontificated at far greater length than editor Stanley Schmidt ever expected, citing a number of classically dark stories that had appeared in that venue and arguing with great self-important eloquence, about fiction’s responsibility to embrace the uncomfortable… but, more to our current point, I also revealed my essential discomfort at being labeled an exclusive purveyor of visions nasty and reptilian with the following words: “You distort my own Analog record just a tad. My seven contributions to this magazine also include ‘The Astronaut From Wyoming’ (written with Jerry Oltion; a saga of a disfigured boy who stands up against all obstacles to defy the naysayers and join a manned mission to Mars), ‘Sunday Night Yams At Minnie and Earl’s’ (about a friendly couple who bring warmth and a taste of home to lonely early lunar pioneers), ‘Among The Tchi’ (a comic piece about a human writer who stands up for the value of our race’s prose), and ‘Gunfight on Farside’ (a tale about heroism, self-sacrifice, belief, miracles, and even redemption, whose murderous ‘villain’ was a fundamentally decent man suffering from madness brought on by exposure to a toxic substance, and was not only understood and forgiven but also ultimately granted a happy ending of his own). Not one of these stories hinges on authentic human evil. They all hinge on humanity’s virtues, and they’re so optimistic about the best of us that they’re downright giddy.”

Translation: whatever else I might be, I’m not just a sick bastard.

Further exploration of my collected short fiction will further bear out the existence of my soft side, as dedicated explorers will find oodles and oodles of gentle farces, heartfelt tributes to my writing heroes, and tales about heroes saving the day.

I’m a remarkably sweet guy. Honest. You know those TV commercials for the animal charity where that pop singer croons “Eyes of An Angel” over visuals of sad-eyed puppies and kittens in cages? The wife has taken to changing the channel upon the first few notes, to protect me. I don’t just weep when actually exposed to the damn thing, I mist up even now writing about it. One viewing of Born Free ruins me for the whole day. Don’t even think about exposing me to the soundtrack of Les Miz. I’m so sensitive to emotional appeals that I’m downright disgusting. You can destroy me with a manipulative McDonald’s commercial.

But then we have stories like the one that roused that reader’s ire, and the stories you’ll find in this collection, which was originally intended as a straight science fiction collection but, as works from recent years accrued, gradually developed a darker and more disturbing tone, up to and including the inclusion of some pretty extreme horror.

Where do they come from, if I’m such a sweet guy?

Well, in part they come from the awareness that the best fiction is about testing and in the process defining human nature, and that extreme circumstances tend to provide starker definitions.

They come from the knowledge that the human race is a corrupt animal and that the worst elements in our collective nature deserve just as much examination as the best.

They come from actually having experienced close encounters with a couple of sociopaths myself and trying to work out a rational explanation in my head.

Finally, they come from just paying attention, which isn’t hard in a town where, just a few days ago as I wrote this, a man achieved national tabloid headlines by going berserk and chewing off another man’s face.

Don’t worry. You won’t find that particular scene in any story here. But I will dwell on it long enough to note that a lot of the online reaction to that particular loveliness, and a similar incident from elsewhere in the country that went viral a few days afterward, involved jokes about it being the first manifestation of the oncoming zombie apocalypse. The part of me that loves zombie fiction and has written some (none of which appears here), did find resonance in that… but that joke actually diminishes the horror. The guy with the strange concept of chewing gum was not an undead thing, but a living and breathing if far from rational human being, who might have been an exceptionally cute baby, once. That’s a life arc, people. That’s a story, even if not necessarily an edifying one.

Dark circumstances spawn stories.

So over the past few years, in addition to some other stuff not-quite-so-dark, I also wrote some stuff that grew from that fertile soil. So let us take a look at the stories, with the usual proviso that these notes should be read after the stories and not before:

ARVIES: This one, one of the more acclaimed and frequently-reprinted pieces from my last few years, straddles the abortion debate and has been accused of supporting both sides in that contentious conflict. Sorry, folks. I’m firmly pro-choice myself, but the tale is wholly non-polemical, taking no side either way.

The premise comes entirely from one fine engine for producing science-fictional ideas: namely, take something that is considered a given and imagine the implications of a world that turns that accepted truth on its head. In this case, my starting point was the oft-repeated argument that life begins at birth. I wondered what kind of world we’d have if life legally ended there, if only the unborn were considered alive and anybody who had ever completed life’s first great passage was considered “dead.” It occurred to me that such a place would only be viable, you should only excuse the expression, if fetuses held all the political and financial power. One assumption led to the next, up to and including the realization that, even in societies that offer the privileged unlimited opportunities for happiness, somebody somewhere still gets royally screwed.

My biggest fear on marketing the story was that nobody would “get” the title. The story itself makes no effort to explain the term’s derivation except by providing readers with room for figuring it out by themselves.

Guess what. Pretty much everybody twigged to it.

I love smart readers.

“Arvies” was nominated for a Nebula in the short fiction category, was reprinted a half-dozen times in about a year, and won the Storysouth Million Writers Award, which came with a gift certificate I used in part to buy a remote-control helicopter in the shape of the word FUCK. My cats were nonplussed.

HER HUSBAND’S HANDS: I wrote this one after first writing a failed story called “Her Husband’s Eyes,” in which an accident involving a pickup truck filled with unsecured saw blades sends those sharp objects flying every which way and neatly sections the spouse in question, somehow resulting in a neat, living cake-slice as thick as a good porterhouse steak that comprises the part of his head with those two blinking orbs. It’s the only part of him that remains living. His wife takes the slice home on a plate, puts it on a high shelf where it can live indefinitely as long as it’s regularly fed spoonfuls of magic nutrient, and then, just because she never liked him much, blindfolds him with one of his favorite ties. The End.

That first version was roundly booed by everybody who read it. In retrospect, I don’t blame them. It was stoopid, the kind of stupid that doesn’t even deserve a proper “u” for first vowel.

This second version had a happier fate, receiving nominations for both the Stoker and the Nebula awards in the same year.

As with “Arvies,” thematic resonances arrived by accident. People read the story as a profound meditation on the cost paid by our military families, but I had the central image of the man reduced to hands first, and added all the military stuff and post-traumatic stress disorder only because I was going for a more realistic tone than the rather silly first version and seized on the horrors of war as the most direct way to, umm, disarm my protagonist. An early draft was sheer fantasy, was set in a medieval era, and posited sorcery as the source of the medical miracle—which I did not want to discuss in any real detail—but the published version invoked just enough technological hand-waving to qualify the story as science fiction. I’m glad. I prefer it as science fiction.

OF A SWEET SLOW DANCE IN THE WAKE OF TEMPORARY DOGS: This was my 9/11 story, I’m afraid. It was born during a brief historical blip, following that terrible day, where people in my part of the country kept telling me that they’d never ever want to go to New York now, because they knew it would be attacked again. I couldn’t comprehend such thinking. As an ex-New Yorker, I wanted nothing more than to revisit Manhattan as soon as possible, and the thought made me think of people living in war-torn or chaotic homelands all over the world, who are willing to endure unbearable horrors just to stay in the places they love. I decided to test that human attribute in the most extreme manner possible. My future wife saw a key flaw and induced me to add an important fix. I cannot now imagine this story, my personal favorite among everything I’ve ever written, shorn of her vital epiphany. So thanks, Judi.

This was another Nebula nominee, the only one I’ve ever had at novelette length.

OUR HUMAN: This is the only story here that belongs to “The AIsource Infection,” the future history that includes all three of my Andrea Cort novels and a bunch of other short fiction. Riirgaans and Tchi are previously-established alien races from that universe, and Magrison is a previously-established much-wanted fiend and war criminal, first mentioned in passing in my Nebula nominee, “The Tangled Strings of the Marionettes.”

You don’t really need to know any of this to get this story in full, but if you do want to know more about Magrison and just why he’s so notorious, check out my Andrea Cort novels, where he is discussed in absentia.

CHERUB: This tale, one of several snagged by anthologist extraordinaire John Skipp, is born of long recognition that people don’t always have the faces they deserve. Osama Bin Laden, for instance, had a kind, avuncular face, with extraordinarily warm eyes. Shorn of personal history, and possibly beard, he looked like a guy it would have been great to know. You could imagine him as summer camp counselor. Now imagine that all his sins, past and future, rode his shoulders and could be identified at a distance. Imagine a world where every man’s sins ride his shoulders and can be identified at a distance. Imagine the sad life of a blameless boy with no visible sins. Brrr.

THE SHALLOW END OF THE POOL: This out-and-out horror story was a stand-alone novella for Creeping Hemlock Press. It was nominated for the Stoker nominee for Best Long Fiction. Never be afraid to go there. Any remaining comments I have on this one should be joined to the comments on the next story.

PIECES OF ETHAN: Like the prior tale, it also involves a deadly relationship between a pair of siblings, and even another brother named Ethan. I have no explanation for why this kind of thing always comes up in my fiction. But conflict between siblings has been a recurring theme, not just here and in “Cherub” and “Shallow End” but in another Stoker Nominee, “Baby Girl Diamond,” and even in my Spider-Man trilogy, where I contrived to raise the possibility that Peter Parker had a super-villain sister he never knew he had. The brother-sister relationship in my novel The Third Claw of God isn’t quite as ugly as some of these others, but is strange, and certainly key to the action. Don’t question this too closely. I get along with my own sister just fine. Sometimes the imagination just runs in well-traveled grooves, that’s all.

THE BOY AND THE BOX: This one’s based on several questions I happen to have about just who this supreme being thinks he is, if he requires people to spend their lives groveling before him. After all, a fragile ego is an unhealthy ego. I decided to see what would happen if the equation were rendered even more stark.

Thanks, all, for joining me on this journey. I owe thanks to John Joseph Adams, Julia Sevin, Scott Edelman, John Skipp, Sean Wallace, Paula Guran, Johnny Atomic, Brad Aiken, David Dunn, Dave Slavin, Christopher Negelein, Harlan Ellison, Jordan London, David Gerrold, my parents Saby and Joy Castro, and the love of my life, the splendiferous Judi Castro. The rest of y’all: enjoy yourselves.