“Enough, young lady. I am sentencing you to nine months at Catskill Tolerance Development Camp, or until the baby is born, followed by nine years at Point Pleasant Repeat Pregnancy Farm. I sincerely hope you will use your time at Pomt Pleasant to think about how racist attitudes such as yours threaten the rainbow fabric of our multiethnic democracy.”
“What about me?”
“I’m putting you on probation, Yusef, and taking you home for dinner as soon as court is over. I want you to meet my daughter. Marshal, put the cuffs on this one and take her away. Pay no heed to her crocodile tears: they are masters of deceit.
“NEXT!”
NECRONAUTS
NECRONAUTS
The first time I died was an eye-opener. Literally.
I got a call from a researcher at Duke. He said he had seen my paintings in the National Geographic and Smithsonian magazines and wanted to engage me as illustrator for an expedition he was planning.
I explained that I was blind and had been for eighteen months.
He said he knew; he said that was why they wanted me.
The next morning I was dropped in front of the university’s Psy Studies Institute by my ex. You can tell a lot about a space by its echoes and the one I entered was drab and institutional, like a hospital waiting room.
Dr. Philip DeCandyle’s hand was moist and cold, two qualities that don’t always go together. I form a mental picture of those I am dealing with and I saw an overweight, soft man, almost six feet tall; later I was told I was not far off.
After introducing himself, DeCandyle introduced the woman standing beside him as Dr. Emma Sorel. She was only a little shorter, with a high-pitched voice and a cold, tentative touch that told me she was more skilled at withdrawing from the world than engaging it; a common quality in a scientist, but curious for an explorer. I wondered what sort of expedition these two could be planning.
“We’re both very excited that you could come, Mr. Ray,” said Dr. DeCandyle. “We saw the work you did for the undersea Mariana Trench expedition, and your paintings prove that there are some things that the camera just can’t capture. It’s not just a technical problem of lack of light. You were able to convey the grandeur of the ocean depths; its cold, awesome terror.”
He did all the talking. It was my introduction to a manner of speech that struck me as exaggerated, almost comical—before I had experienced the horrors to which he held the key.
“Thank you,” I said, nodding first to his position and then to hers, even though she had said nothing yet. “Then you both undoubtedly also know that I lost my eyesight on the expedition, as a result of a decompression incident.”
“We do,” said Dr. DeCandyle. “But we also read the feature in the Sun; and we know that you have continued to paint, even though blind. And to great acclaim.”
This was true. After the accident, I learned that my hand hadn’t lost the confidence that almost forty years of training and work had built. I didn’t need to see to paint. The papers called it a psychic ability, but to me it was no more remarkable than the sketcher who watches his subject and not his pad. I had always been precise in how I lined up and laid on my colors; the fact I was still able to sense their shape and intensity on my canvas had more to do with moisture and smell, I suspected, than with ESP.
Whatever it was, the newspapers loved it. I had discussed it in several interviews over the past year; what I hadn’t told anyone was how badly the work had been going lately. An artist is not just a creator of beauty but also its primary consumer, and I had lost heart. After almost two years of blindness, I had lost all interest in painting scenes from my past, no matter how remarkable they might appear to others. My art had become a trick. The darkness that had fallen over my world was becoming total.
“I still paint, it’s true,” was all I said.
“We are engaged in a unique experiment,” said Dr. DeCandyle. “An expedition to a realm even more exotic and beautiful—and dangerous—than the ocean depths. Like the Mariana Trench, it is impossible to photograph and therefore has never been illustrated. That is why we want you to be a part of our team.”
“But why me?” I said. “Why a blind artist?”
DeCandyle didn’t answer. His voice took on a new authority. “Follow me and I’ll show you.”
Ignoring the awful irony of his words, and somewhat against my better judgment, I did.
Dr. Sorel fell in behind me; we passed through a door and entered a long corridor. Through another door, we entered a room larger and colder than the first. It sounded empty but wasn’t; we walked to the center and stopped.
“Twenty years ago, before beginning my doctoral work,” said DeCandyle, “I was part of a unique series of experiments being performed in Berkeley. I don’t suppose you are familiar with the name of Dr. Edwin Noroguchi?”
I shook my head.
“Dr. Noroguchi was experimenting in techniques for reviving the dead. Oh, nothing as dramatic and sinister as Frankenstein. Noroguchi studied and adapted the recent successes in reviving people who had drowned or suffered heart attacks. Learning to induce death for as long as an hour, we—I say we, for I joined him and have since devoted my life to the work—began to explore and, you might say, map the areas of existence immediately following death. LAD or Life After Death experience.”
My aunt Kate, who raised me after my parents were killed, always told me I was a little slow. It was only at this point that I began to understand what DeCandyle was getting at. If I had been nearer the door, I would have walked out. As it was, in the middle of a room where I had no bearings, I began backing away.
“Using chemical and electrical techniques on volunteers, we were able to confirm the stories those who had been revived told about their spirits looking down on their own bodies; about floating toward a light; about an intense feeling of peace and well-being—all this was scientifically investigated and confirmed. Though not, of course, photographed or documented. There was no way to share what we discovered with the scientific world.”