Lovedeath Read online

  Frontispiece: “Love and Death” by G. E. Watts. By permission of The Tate Gallery.

  “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly” by Ezra Pound. By permission of New Directions.

  Excerpt from “The Glory of Women” by Siegfried Sassoon. From Siegfried Sassoon’s Long Journey, edited by Paul Fussell, © 1983, Oxford University Press. By permission of George Sassoon.

  Excerpt from “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen. From The Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by John Stallworthy, The Hogarth Press. By permission of the Random Century Group.

  Excerpt from “The General Inspecting His Trenches” by A. P Herbert. From Somme by Lyn McDonald. By permission of A. P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of Crystal Hale and Jocelyn Herbert.

  Excerpt by C. H. Sorley. From Marlborough and Other Poems by C. H. Sorley, Cambridge University Press, 1915.

  “The Great Lover” by Rupert Brooke. From Collected Poems by Rupert Brooks, published by Papermac. By permission of Sidgwick & Jackson.

  Table from Death’s Men—Soldiers of the Great War by Denis Winter, Allen Lane, 1978. Copyright © Denis Winter, 1978.

  Soldier’s Doggerel, “The World Wasn’t Made in a Day,” and excerpts by A. G. West, S. Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Charles Sorley from Eye Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I by John Ellis. Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore © 1976. By permission of Pantheon Press.

  Copyright © 1993 by Dan Simmons

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books, Inc., 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  A Time Warner Company

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing: November 1993

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Simmons, Dan.

  Lovedeath / Dan Simmons.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-446-51756-9

  1. Horror tales, American. I. Title.

  PS3569.147292L68 1993

  813'.54—dc20

  92-51031

  CIP

  Book design: H. Roberts

  This book is dedicated to Richard Harrison and Dan Peterson, good friends, good traveling companions.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to acknowledge the following people:

  To Richard Harrison, a sincere thank-you for sharing his treasure trove of books, materials, and personal expertise on the Battle of the Somme and for the conversation on the Normandy beach that rainy August day, from which the entire project grew.

  To Dan Peterson, a double debt of thanks for his interest in the Sioux (which may have rubbed off a bit on the author) and for traveling with me through the gardens of Japan, the back alleys of Hong Kong, and the klongs of Bangkok in search of a story.

  To Richard Curtis, my agent and friend, a sincere thank-you made no less sincere for its repetition, for again helping me to write what I wanted, when I wanted.

  And finally, as always, to Karen and Jane, for their love, patience, and unwavering support.

  “Love, thou art absolute sole lord

  of life and death.”

  —Richard Crashaw (1613-1649)

  “Hymne to St. Theresa”

  “Never, never, never, never, never”

  —William Shakespeare

  King Lear

  Contents

  Foreword

  ENTROPY’S BED AT MIDNIGHT

  DYING IN BANGKOK

  SLEEPING WITH TEETH WOMEN

  FLASHBACK

  THE GREAT LOVER

  Notes

  Foreword

  I wanted to call this collection of five novellas “Liebestod,” but was gently reminded that not many Americans are fond of or familiar with opera, that not everyone would instantly translate the German as “lovedeath” and know that it was from Act II of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, and that even if everyone did know all this…it still might not be a good idea to associate my book with the image of a huge lady in a brass brassiere belting out an indecipherable dirge for her dead boyfriend. That is what my advisors said. Of course, I think they’re all philistines. But then again, I don’t care that much for Wagner myself.

  I have heard Mark Twain credited with saying, “Wagner’s music is not as bad as it sounds,” but I’ve never seen the source of that quote. I did recently run across a letter from Twain written during a trip to Europe in which he attended his first Wagnerian opera and the following excerpt shows some of his enthusiasm at the experience:

  Each sang his indictive narrative in turn, accompanied by the whole orchestra of sixty instruments; and when this had continued for some time, and one was hoping they might come to an understanding and modify the noise, a great chorus composed entirely of maniacs would suddenly break forth, and then during two minutes, and sometimes three, I lived over again all that I had suffered the time the orphan asylum had burned down.

  I considered changing the title of this collection to Burning Down the Orphan Asylum, but, despite the delicious ring that phrase has to it, my literary advisors again won out.

  Lovedeath it is, then.

  Novels and novel-length projects are, for me at least, labors of love even at the worst of times, but Lovedeath was most especially so, at least in part because it demanded to be written at precisely that…the worst of times. When the labor pains began in earnest for this book, I was happily embarked upon one novel and arranging a deadline for a second one. I had not planned to write these novellas now, it was not convenient to do it, and there would be repercussions if I took the time and energy to do so. Tough cookies, came the muffled message from within as the familiar literary contractions began. Here I come.

  It is odd how living things rarely arrange their births to fit conveniently into our busy schedules.

  It was time for Lovedeath to be born and now it has been. Since you are holding it in your hands right now, you might do me a favor and count the fingers and toes. If anything is missing, tell me later. I’m resting at the moment.

  I had considered writing something superficially profound here about the themes of Eros and Thanatos which circle through these five tales like hungry sharks in a crowded pool, but truth be told, almost all successful stories include some element of the twin themes of love and death. What make these tales distinctive—if anything does—are, perhaps, the different angles at which I approach the topic. After publishing a dozen or so books, I know my own work well enough to be aware that the themes of love, death, and the act of dealing with the sense of loss so common to both these human experiences, are almost obsessive topics in my fiction. I do not plan it so. It is what stirs me deep within and I write about it. I have no choice in the matter. In these novellas, however, I did choose to approach the topics from a variety of perspectives in the hope that some useful parallax would emerge.

  I believe it has for me. I can only hope it does for the reader.

  A word here about novellas. Fiction of this intermediate length—too long to be called a short story, too short to claim the title of novel—is well loved by most writers and loathed by editors and publishers.

  For the writer, the novella can be the perfect length in which to observe a fictional universe without suffering the inevitable diffusion of focus that the large lens of the novel necessarily brings to the process. A novella allows the writer—and, with luck, the reader—to breathe deeply of character, setting, theme, and unrushed narrative without the added pollutants of subplot, ancillary characters, chapter breaks, and the inevitable digressions which cloud the atmosphere of all but the most perfect of novels. A novella, as with a short story, demands that each sentence—no, each word—has at least a double reason for existence. Writers love novellas, both as challenge and change of pace.

  Editors and publishers h
ate novellas because they are hard to sell. Despite the enormous popularity of novellas by such diverse writers as Ernest Hemingway, J. D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, and Stephen King, publishers still lie awake nights worrying about how to package the things. The publishers and readers of “serious fiction” tend to take their novellas straight and solo (i.e., The Old Man and the Sea), throw in a lot of blank pages fore and aft, pretend it is a novel, hope that no one important will notice that it is not, and wait for the Nobel Prize.

  Other writers tend to return to a theme again and again, exorcising in the process whatever demons drive them to the topic, and then publish these medium-length tales over the moans, groans, and whimpered entreaties of their editors. For some writers this approach has several strengths: firstly, the novella seems to be the perfect length for a work of horror; secondly, overt genre-fiction novellas can coexist comfortably with straight-fiction novellas in a way which no other type of collection allows; finally, if the author is capable of multiple styles and a variety of narrative tones, such a collection can be a showcase for the writer and a treasure trove for the reader.

  Or at least that is how I respond as a reader when confronted with a collection of novellas from a writer I trust. I remember reading Stephen King’s novella “The Body” for the first time and thinking Yes!

  And now, having belabored the point about whimpering, moaning, groaning editors, I would like to thank my editor at Warner—John Silbersack—for his enthusiasm and total support for this project. John understood why I chose the twin themes of love and death as well as the form of the novella for their delivery. He was a good midwife and I recommend him to other writers who are expecting novellas.

  Now a few words about the novellas themselves:

  “Entropy’s Bed at Midnight” is my attempt to explore the role that accident plays in death, love, pain, and laughter. It is a paean to the human side of Chaos theory. The “Orange File” insurance cases are real. Trust me.

  “Dying in Bangkok” may be my final word on the horror of AIDS, that “Liebestod” pairing of love and death that has transformed our world…and which will continue to do so into the next century even if a cure were to be found tomorrow. To research the setting, I arrived in Bangkok in May of 1992 mere hours after the government saw fit to shoot scores of young demonstrators in a country that had always tried to avoid such overt violence. Bullet holes were still visible on the bloodstained street near the Democracy Monument. People were eager to tell me of their experiences. But as tragic as the civil terror had been, as disquieting as the public bullet holes and bloodstains were, it still was the knowledge of the coming AIDS epidemic there, as silent and stealthy and unstoppable as the Red Death, that saddened me most as I walked the raucous streets of Patpong District.

  “Sleeping with Teeth Women” is my celebration of the richness of Native American lore—specifically Sioux, although the folktales of a dozen tribes are subsumed in this narrative—and it was a pleasure to research. Even for an inveterate spiritual nonbeliever such as myself, the Black Hills of South Dakota exert a strange and persuasive power. It is easy to see why the Paha Sapa are sacred to the Sioux and to other tribes…and why the young men of the Sioux still choose to go there for their visions. Finally, this long story of an unwilling young Messiah who wants only to get laid and instead ends up being chosen as the savior of his people, is my antidote to what I consider the saccharine condescension of such travesties as Dances with Wolves. I have only a trace of Indian blood, but even if I were a full-blooded Sioux, I think that I would rather be hunted and exterminated as a feared enemy than be patronized by Hollywood as a weak, whimpering, idealized, politically correct victim. Mitakuye oyasin. All my relatives.

  “Flashback” is science fiction. Sort of. There are very few gee-whiz, high-tech goodies in this tale of memory and loss, of love and death. It is, rather, an exploration of the point where the ability to recapture the past—and those lost to us in the past—becomes a sickness rather than a source of solace. While the tale itself has modest goals, I have found that the mere mention of a druglike flashback has stirred people to share their own thoughts about using it—if, when, why, how much. Even friends who have never used recreational drugs say that they might become flashback addicts in short order. And, with all of us still emerging from the Reagan era in which the nation seemed to be dreaming only of its past while mortgaging its future, flashback addiction seems more than an idle fantasy.

  Finally, “The Great Lover.” I need to talk a minute about this unorthodox tale.

  I have a fictional poet in “The Great Lover,” but the poetry he is supposed to have written is actually the genius of such World War I poets as A. G. West, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Charles Sorley, and Wilfred Owen. Normally, the use of actual poetry—unattributed except as footnotes—would be awkward. Creating the illusion that these poems come from the imagination of a fictional poet would seem to be unthinkable…inefficient at best, unethical at the worst.

  But there is a reason for this approach. In a real sense, I had little or no choice in the matter. The fact is that the poems were not included to add to the verisimilitude of the story—rather, the story was written as a personal form of illuminating and explaining the power of this particular poetry.

  Let me explain.

  In 1969 and 1970, as I approached the end of my undergraduate experience at Wabash College and the inevitability of being drafted and sent to Vietnam, my own obsession with the war led me to the antiwar writings of the 1920s and 30s. Largely forgotten now by the general public, the body of literature about the Great War and the description of the experience of war that was published in those years may be without equal. The young British men who were being wasted by the millions in World War I included some of this century’s finest writers. Present at the Battle of the Somme alone were the poets Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, John Masefield, Edmund Blunden, and Mark Plowman. The romantic poetry of Rupert Brooke, whose poem and title “The Great Lover” I have borrowed, best exemplified the romantic idealism of these men as they entered the war. But Brooke died of fever on the Greek isle of Skyros in 1915, before most of the great battles of that war were fought…before the death of innocence…before the death of much of his generation. The trench verse of Sassoon, Blunden, and the others showed the descent from romantic abstraction to vivid battlefield horror and cynicism. Those poets who survived the war wrote prose narratives such as Robert Graves’s Good-Bye to All That and Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen Nichts Neues (which I remember reading in German the week that my low draft number—84—was drawn in the lottery).

  This poetry and prose was important to me in 1969 and 1970 as I came to grips with my own possible involvement in the nightmare that was Vietnam. Years later, thinking of the brilliant war literature of the 1920s and 1930s, I agreed with the reviewer who said that, in comparison, most of the “literature of the Vietnam War reads like whining letters from kids at summer camp who found the experience less agreeable than they had bargained for.”

  This is not to say that the horrors of Vietnam were any less terrible to those who suffered them than the horrors of trench warfare were to the Tommies and Doughboys of the Great War…only that the poets and novelists of that earlier conflict were better writers.

  For me, there was added to the forceful clarity of their writing the simple fact that the thought of World War I had always frightened me. For some reason, the form of life and death in that war—mud, claustrophobic trenches, gas, bayonets, shelling, the casual wasting of millions by foolish, foolish commanders—had been my particular bête noire. Rather than continue to read obsessively on the subject, I avoided it for years. It made me sick and it made me angry; and it brought back deep fears of my own.

  Two events conspired to change that attitude. First, my family and I happened to be visiting friends in England during the national Remembrance Day t
here in November of 1991, and I saw firsthand how fresh the wounds of that seemingly ancient war were on the minds and hearts of the British people. Second, almost a year later, I was touring the Normandy invasion battlefields with my friend Richard Harrison—a headmaster by profession but a military historian by vocation—and we discussed, over the bones of Hitler’s Festung Europa, what more terrible sacrifice of men had been demanded during the Great War.

  And at that moment, on a chilly August day in Normandy, far removed in time and place from the quiet River Somme and the cemetery headstones that rise like poppies there, row on row, I decided to write about the Battle of the Somme.

  The decision to write about it was easy. The way I chose to develop the novella was problematic.

  Most important to me was the inclusion of some of the poetry that had so affected me two decades earlier. In creating my fictional poet, James Edwin Rooke, I wished not to diminish the brilliance of the actual poets who wrote the verse, but, rather, to combine a few of their disparate experiences into the life of a symbolic “everyman.” In so doing, I hoped to be able to understand how a sensitive mind and heart could have survived—with mind and heart essentially intact—the incredible horrors of that first Great War of our bloody century.

  The second condition I set for myself in this novella was to present the horrors in as factual a manner as I could manage given the rather fantastic premise of my tale of love and death. In other words, I decided that the details of the Battle of the Somme would be as well documented as I could make them. The result—as with the included poetry—is a montage of reported images and experiences taken from life rather than imagination. Thus, when James Edwin Rooke has an encounter with a certain corpse, a set of dentures, and a rat, it is an echo of a French soldier’s memory of an event as recorded in J. Meyer’s La vie quotidienne des soldats pendant la grande guerre (Hachette, Paris, 1966) and retold by Henri Barbusse and quoted in Eye Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I by John Ellis (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1976). Similarly, the parallax view of the Somme attack of 10 July, 1916, might include a single incident as reported by Sergeant Jack Cross, No. 4842, C Company, 13th (S) Rifle Battalion, The Rifle Brigade (in Somme, Lyn Macdonald, Michael Joseph Ltd., 1983), briefly commented upon by Siegfried Sassoon (Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Faber and Faber, Ltd., 1930) and perceived quite differently by Lieutenant Guy Chapman (A Passionate Prodigality, Buchan & Enright, London, 1933).