“Xander, thank God. Where’s Ada? Please tell me she’s—”
“She’s fine, but it’s been tough. You must be worried sick.”
“God, you can’t even imagine. What happened?”
“The ship crashed into the river.”
“Ridiculous,” I snapped.
“I know it sounds outrageous, but I assure you, it did.”
“You expect me to believe—”
“I knew it was flying too low, but Mother had instructed the captain to glide right over the water, sprinkle her ashes near some sacred Incan ruins. I don’t even know how many crew members made it or where they—”
“Ada. I want to see Ada right now.”
“She’s napping in the hotel room. Isabelle’s with her. I didn’t want to wake her because she didn’t sleep much last night and she just ate dinner. We’ve been camping in an emergency pod with a dead battery for almost a month, separated from the others, hiding from the sun, living on stale provisions. I don’t know what happened to my phone. Isabelle lost hers too. We didn’t know where we were exactly.”
“A fascinating new drama, debuting tonight at nine o’clock.” I felt ashamed of the bitterness in my voice.
“I’m telling the truth,” he murmured. And I knew that he was.
“We had no way to communicate with the world,” Xander said, “but then the rains finally came and we found the town with a compass and an old-fashioned paper map. All it took was an iris scan to get us back into civilization. Sorry about the cheap phone, but it’s all I can get in Sepahua. Mother’s other ship has to be checked over. It’s been in port for nearly a year. But my cousin Andre is picking us up in a week.”
“And then?”
“Of course we’ll come to you immediately.”
He started to tell me about the forest there, but then his connection fizzled right in the middle of an elusive word: Gush? Gas? Ghost?
On a cool evening in June, the air misty, I stood on the beach with my bags and watched the sky. Due to the complexities of Xander’s mother’s estate, due to a malfunctioning shuttle on his cousin’s ship, due to freak weather patterns, fluctuating cloud densities, and the mysterious whims of a superstitious aunt, they were coming weeks later than planned. But they were coming.
Every time a bird swooped down from the trees, my heart beat fast. Every time an animal rustled in the woods, I jumped. The lake smelled stronger than usual. The sand glittered with specks of lavender I’d never noticed before. My own hands looked strange, fingertips gnawed, blisters blooming where I’d torn out hangnails with my teeth.
When the shuttle whirred down from the clouds, I clutched my stomach and released the bellow of a sick cow. I’d expected to see a ship appear first. But I wiped my tears on my sleeve and straightened myself.
Xander stepped out first, startlingly thin but still lovely, his skin glazed with a moist sheen. Behind him was a small adolescent girl, a cousin perhaps, who looked a lot like Ada. She wore a 1950s-style frock with a lavish crinoline, her hair swept up into a hot-pink bouffant. When she teetered toward me in ridiculous stilettos, I realized that the child was my own Ada.
My insides felt molten.
“What have you done to my child?”
“Done?” Xander said.
“Hello, Mother,” Ada said in an affected British voice that made me wince.
“She’s been watching ancient James Bond films,” Xander laughed. He hugged me hard.
“She’s still the same girl,” he whispered. “You’ll see.”
“I don’t understand,” I muttered. “How?”
“Premature puberty onset caused by early weaning and synthetic xenoestrogens in the emergency provisions. At least that’s what Isabelle said.”
“My fault,” I moaned, feeling my knees go rubbery.
“Not your fault. And not an unusual phenomenon with sky-children.”
But she was not a sky-child. She was half earth, half me. Three months ago, the tiny, eager mammal had drunk milk from my breasts.
“Why didn’t you warn me?”
“She was always around when we talked. I didn’t want to make her feel self-conscious. She’s confused enough as it is. And you know satellite children develop earlier anyway. It was only a matter of time before—”
“She’s half earth,” I snapped. “Never forget that.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” said Xander, “but she’s adapted to our—”
“Mama,” Ada said softly, tottering toward me. Her eyes were wet and luminous, beautiful beyond belief. I could still peer into them and see glimmers of my baby.
Shy, awkward, she leaned toward me. She wrapped her arms around my neck.
I squeezed, shocked afresh by the womanly heft of her, the new body humming with secrets. I pictured fruit falling from a bush, taking root, sprouting. I saw bees swarming around a tiny, flowering tree. I saw a self-possessed young woman floating up into the clouds. I felt like a husk, going to dust.
Now Ada was weeping, shaking in my arms. I burrowed my face into her stiff, dyed hair, searching for familiar smells among the alien chemicals. Gone was the silk, the gloss. Gone was the warm, kittenish musk.
“Mickimoo, Mama,” she whispered as she pulled away, joking, of course. But her smile was sweet, not sneering. And the eyes beneath her contrived hair looked vulnerable.
She slipped her hand in mine, just as she used to do. Xander leaned in on my other side, holding my bag.
“We’ll talk when we get a chance,” he said, and I felt the full weight of my isolation, the deprivation of communication like the twisting of an empty stomach devouring itself. I imagined us in bed, breath mingling into a warm fog, words merging like a flock and darting into a cloud.
The Million Monkeys of M. Borel
John Crowley
In the uncomfortably warm months of December and January in the year 19—, I found myself with little occupation and therefore much time for idle thought. Reading had become difficult for me owing to a progressive deterioration of my eyes, and if there was no one interested in reading to me from that small collection of volumes that I could still count on to give me pleasure, then I did not read, or rather I did not hear the voices of authors. Plato, as is well-known, said that when we read a book we believe that we hear the voice of a person, and yet when we try to put a question to it, it does not answer us.
What occupied my thoughts in those somnolent days was certain metaphysical or logical propositions that had been argued or at least passed around a great deal in the time of my youth. I was considering the million monkeys of Émile Borel, as described in his 1913 essay “Mécanique Statistique et Irréversibilité” (J. Phys. 5e série, vol. 3). As is well-known, Borel posited that a million monkeys randomly hitting a typewriter keyboard for ten hours a day will in time almost surely type all the words in all the books of the Bibliothèque nationale in many combinations, including the order in which they actually occur in those million volumes. In the restatement of the theorem most popular among English speakers, the monkeys eventually type out the collected works of William Shakespeare. The crux of the argument, as enunciated by Borel and those who took up his proposition, was that the term almost surely has a precise definition in the language of the mathematics of probability, a definition rather unlike the one we use: almost surely my mother loves me above her other children; almost surely my ancestor was a hero in the battle in which he died. These statements differ from Borel’s.
In later years the million monkeys of M. Borel were replaced in the theory by an infinite number of monkeys, or by a single monkey typing all the time forever. In the latter formulation, all of Shakespeare must eventually be produced; in the former, all of Shakespeare (and every other written work) is produced instantaneously as soon as the typing begins. Neither of these refinements seemed to me to be as worth pondering as M. Borel’s million monkeys who could only almost surely produce the soliloquies of Hamlet,
the madness of Lear, and the love of Antony and Cleopatra—who indeed could almost surely produce them even if Shakespeare had never written them, and likewise all other books both already written and never written before.
At this juncture, a visitor arrived with a piece of machinery he had brought to see if it could assist me in the dilemmas both banal and esoteric that a loss of eyesight entails. He had come to be devoted to certain works of mine, published in obscure journals long ago but apparently ubiquitous now. The machine was a computer of a kind not yet available to the general public, which he could set up in such a way as to cause it to read aloud whatever text it was given, or which it was directed to ask for from its memory. My young friend assured me that the memory of the computer—no bigger than a lady’s vanity case—contained the entire works of several of my beloved authors, as well as Shakespeare, the Bible in several languages, and other works of science and philosophy. If manipulated in the right way it could also reach into libraries around the world, where other bodies of miniaturized and encoded texts were kept.
My wonder at this was somewhat dampened when, after working an afternoon, he directed the machine to read a text I had selected (a story of Chesterton’s). The voice proceeding from the machine was neither the voice that the story had spoken in when my eyes had used to pass over it, nor the voice of a human reader sitting beside me. It was the voice that the dead gods of Egypt might have spoken in when summoned by Agrippa or Trithemius: a corpse’s voice. My shock and grief (for I had greatly anticipated the riches awaiting me) at this inhuman parroting of human words saddened my friend, and not wishing to seem to spurn his good intentions toward me, I began to question him about the machine and its powers.
“There are puzzles in metaphysics,” he said, “and thought experiments in physics, that can now be solved or carried out in actual fact. The long-standing problem of how few colors a mapmaker would need to construct a map where no two contiguous countries or regions would be the same color, no matter what the shape of the regions: a computer (more powerful by far than this one) has proven that three colors are in fact enough, which before there was no way to demonstrate. The only drawback is that the proof resides in the computer, and is so complex that only another computer as powerful as the first can certify it.
“And there is the problem of the million monkeys who sit down to type all the works of Shakespeare,” he continued, astonishing me with the workings of Coincidence, whose laws might also be known only to computers, and provable only by other computers. He said that computers were easily able to produce random series of letters according to any rule the maker imposed. Suppose, for instance, a rule was set that the computer should generate a text exactly as long as the First Folio of Shakespeare, all letters, punctuation, and spaces being counted. In a matter of seconds the computer could generate a text wherein, as in the Kabbalah of Abulafia, the letters of the Shakespeare text were replaced en bloc by others produced at random. It could be shown that if the computer were to produce these false folios at the rate of one per second, it was estimated that the universe would end, the suns burn out, and all would be reduced to aimless atoms and cold, before so much as a single play, perhaps a single entire line, was produced in its proper place.
One rule, however, would hasten the process. (He called it an algorithm, a word of the Arab arithmeticians who in their texts had liked to write out their endless equations in words made of letters, and not in the number forms they had themselves invented.) The computer could easily, in its comparisons, determine if so much as a single letter of any false text fell by chance where the same letter fell in the folio text. Preserving that letter in its position, the computer would examine the next, and the next, discarding everything in each one except the letters—it might be two, or ten, or none—that fell where the same letters fell in the text.
“If that little rule is followed,” said my young friend—eager and smiling, it was hard not to see him as the herald of a triumphant army, come joyfully to demand the instant surrender of an ancient town—“then the entire works of Shakespeare can be recreated in a very short time. All that’s needed is for the computer to save the accumulated coincidences of all the false texts with the real text.”
All that was needed then was for the text to exist in advance of the attempt to produce it. It was, as he said, a simple matter. Yet it would never satisfy those who contemplate, in the shadows of ancient libraries, the million monkeys of M. Borel. For the secret longing of those dreamers is not for the books of ours they might reproduce, but for those texts of their own, unknown to us, unknown even to themselves, that they might create. The great computer my young friend contemplated, examining the texts that its blind mechanical monkeys produced at inconceivable speed, retaining only what they shared with an Elizabethan whose works we know by heart—what other works, unknown to us, works we have needed and sought for and dreamed of existing, would it, every day, every instant, discard forever?
When the young engineer had gone—somewhat downcast, it seemed to me, yet promising to return to give me further instruction—I placed my hand upon the box he had brought, as silent now as the statue from which the god has departed. The fact that it—unlike those fatuous and impossible monkeys—actually could generate such things could break the hearts of those who, in another day, were able to smile at the thought of an endless library composed of all possible combinations of all the letters that we know. “We think, when we read, that we hear the voice of a person; but if we question it, it will not reply.”
Walking Dead Love Songs
Laura Sims
I was born
and then I died.
I was born and then
I died fighting. I was
born and then I died fighting zombies while the sand
ran out of the holes in my hands back down to the bottom
of the ocean. I was born and then I died fighting zombies like my mother
and her mother before her and her mother’s
mother. Women have it so bad, we’ve got
holes in our hands and in our hearts where the babies
have pierced them
Ouch. I was born and then I died watching TV. I came back
I was born and then I died watching zombies die on TV. I held my remote like a saber and hoped pushing buttons would make me the man whose smooth hands are dappled with dust-speckled light from the redolent land of Arcadia. The smooth-handed man takes up his bow, knocks the arrow
The arrow goes thwack
when it pierces
the eye. That’s how they die
I was born and then I died leaning close to you, singing, pouring words in a river down your small pink ear through the channels to your brain made of subatomic particles like neutrons, perhaps, though I’m not sure, because
I died. Everything in sight smacks of hedonistic lassitude. A box of soft tissues filled with lotion and a bottle of Chablis. The babe, the sweet babe, on a blanket, unarmed. He was born and then
eventually
I’ll die
*
Three unnamed criminals, first. Then
a zombified child. Two former people
named Leon and Hannah. A family horse.
Wayne (bitten), Ed (eaten), and thirteen
anonymous lives. Amy, sweet Amy, shot once
in the head. “Out of mercy,” it says. Jim
died of infection. Two Drs. Jenner, and Jacqui,
who chose to explode. The way the wind
billows a motorbike cover. Stepping over a
tea bag squashed on the street. My husband
says, fondly, What’s left of your brain is decaying
at breakneck speed. The woman in front
of me’s long blonde hair. Almost white. The yellow-
billed loon sounds like someone is laughing—
At me? At me?
*
I want it all: wall clocks
T-shirts
dog tags mugs doll
s
The fleece throw
with Michonne
The poster of you
when your hair was too short
with your
crossbow
The bracelet hitching
my heart
to your name
I’m not thinking
of how I’m bewitched
and belittled
by corporate
dominion
or how I’ve been
yoked
to a man-shaped
ghost
I’m just thinking
At last
the fourth wall
has dissolved
and
My love is
incarnate
forever
*
the car it’s dusk your back’s
against the window which
the dead. Our talk grows
leaves and stems and
passionless as dust. The light is low
the dead are rumbling like
the thunder in a show your hair
is slicked with great precision
by your ears. You are
my own and someone
forty million else’s
how your thigh
lies close to mine and psychically
we meld but we
eternally untouching
look ahead, into the windshield
where the view is of the future
rotting-jawed and so un-
fruitfully unslakable the dead
*
You broke
down the bodies
saying feed me
belabor my soul
in the scraped
bowl of summits
the kings all around
crossing snow
we wore sinews
and hides all the
hellish long haul
Survival
takes time. It takes
place in the mind
Who’ll cleanse
& align the charred
morsels of story
we sell
the hacked limbs