T H E P E RT U R B AT I O N Award-winning author and genre-shifting writer Dan Simmons may be the ultimate travel writer. He has farcasted readers across the universe in his awardwinning Hyperion series, taken them to Hemingway’s Cuba in The Crook Factory, and in his dystopian novel, Flashback, introduces them to a drug that allows people to “live” in their own fully realized memories. In his 2007 New York Times bestselling novel The Terror, he transports us to the 1840s to join Captain Francis Crozier and the ill-fated Franklin expedition to the arctic to find the Northwest Passage.
IN THE C O U N T RY
of Fear
—by Brian Doyle from…L E A P I N G
MY FURTHEST JOURNEY ABROAD, I believe, was the week I spent in a hospital two years ago, when surgeons opened my son’s chest, cut and stitched among the highways of his heart, and slowly returned him to me. He is sitting across the room as I write, absorbed in a book about pigs, healthy as a horse; but I do not forget, cannot forget, our travels in the country of fear.
of course, a hard fate for a boy not yet two years old, and I have heard him talk of that time to his twin brother; and while I traveled with my wife and family and friends, each of us was in the end alone in that land. We were, in a real sense, abroad
MY SON TRAVELED ALONE,
34
| WA BA S H M AGA Z I N E
of Stars —by Dan Simmons ’70
from…T H E T E R R O R
The Opening Scene: CAPTAIN CROZIER COMES UP ON DECK to find his ships under attack by celestial ghosts. Above him —above Terror—shimmering folds of light lunge but then quickly withdraw like the colourful arms of aggressive but ultimately uncertain spectres. Ectoplasmic skeletal fingers extend toward the ship, open, prepare to grasp, and pull back. The temperature is -50 degrees Fahrenheit and dropping fast. Because of the fog that came through earlier, during the single hour of weak twilight now passing for their day, the foreshortened masts—the three topmasts,
—not at home, but in a foreign nation, a country of unfamiliar topography and tongues, in an ocean of strangers, assailed by woes and wonders here-tofore unknown. The woes were imaginable, if unbearable; the wonders were astonishing, and had to do with love. I remember that I became hard of hearing in those days, and that food seemed less savory. I remember that I could never get physically comfortable, that I wriggled in chairs and waggled in bed, unable to relax or sleep. Being in that country was a kind of sickness, a seizure of the heart, and everything slowed excruciatingly. In the way of writers I kept notes, as a form of defense against horror, perhaps, and here are some: My son may be fine. My son may have some minor problems. My son may have some major problems. My son may die. I try to imagine what it would be like if my son died. I cannot. I try again—try to envision a house where there is only one infant, one bottle, one stroller, one car seat, one boy. I cannot. When I concentrate on my writing I gnaw at my fingers, an unconscious habit for which I was often scolded in grade school by enormous nuns with faint mustaches and dockworkers’ forearms. The scolding didn’t take and I still chew my own skin, without thinking, when I am thinking. I eat