In the ensuing weeks, I function as best I can, no longer troubled by memories of the dark past. The present is black enough. In the mornings I am still a Seer of the Hunt. In the temple, I continue to lie with even greater skill and imagination. I see a long and glorious sunrise that scorches the land. I see terrific floods of cleansing rain.
In the mirror, I see a coward. Sometimes I stare into my own eyes and relive my part in the trial of Carl Drossan. I keep thinking I’ll have the courage to say something different. But I say, “Death” every time.
Then one morning, five months after the trial, a hooded man comes up to me and kneels as I pass near the temple. He grabs my hand and says, “Thank you, Seer, for your visions of prosperity. They give me and my wife so much hope!”
The hood falls back. For a moment his face looks like Carl Drossan’s. But it is just some other old man possessed by the illusions Drossan wanted.
The illusions I help spread.
Staring at him, possessed by a meanness I should direct at myself, I say, “Your wife will die of disease.”
The shadow of doom blights his face and he clutches my robes. “Please, Seer, please tell me you do not foresee such a tragedy for my beloved!”
Crying, I jerk free of him. “What do you want to be told? That death does not exist? That sadness is a myth?”
“But I have heard the Seers’ visions read aloud. The long sunshine—”
I strike him. This single blow uncorks a torrent of violence and disgust within me. I kick and stomp him, wishing it could be Carl Drossan. Wishing, in a greater sense, it could be myself. I deserve no less for my duplicity.
A strong hand grips my arm and spins me. It is my father. He drags me away, off the street and into the otherwise empty temple. He shakes me once, peering in to my eyes. When I grin at him, he slaps my face.
“You sentenced Carl Drossan to die.”
“Of course. It is my duty as Chief Seer.”
“You made me sentence him to die.”
Father nods. “You also did your duty as a Seer.”
“But he was once your friend.”
We stare at each other. Realization lights my father’s eyes.
“Thomas, you can’t believe anything Drossan told you. He was a liar.”
“He was worse than that. He was a coward. And when I saw that man groveling in the streets to me, I knew I was a coward too. I’m just like Carl.”
“You’re not a traitor like he was. Drossan sided with the aliens—”
“There were no aliens!”
He pulls back, head turned to the right, almost looking at me askance. “What did you say? I reiterate, anything Drossan told you—”
“He didn’t tell me anything I haven’t seen for myself. In here.” I touch my head.
“You know?” he says, the words barely audible.
“Know. Remember. Call it what you will.”
He seems almost breathless as he shakes me by the shoulders. “You have your memories?”
I grin at him, flushed with fear and a savage triumph. “I recall everything. It seems the procedure failed with me, Father.”
“How could it have failed? How long have you known?”
“Long enough to realize I want no part in this lie.”
“It’s not a lie, not if you believe. Thomas, I can correct your problem. I can—”
“What? Inject visions into my head?”
“The same kind of vision that will, through you and the office of the Seers, keep people in a state of hope.”
“They don’t need a lie!”
“They do,” he says, his grip softening. “I used to think like you did. I thought what was needed wasn’t some hopeful expectation of the future, but an uncompromising stare at the past. Now I know that all our history shows one thing: that those who remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”
He holds his hand out to me. I just stare at it.
“I know I can’t escape you,” I say. “But I think if you try to do the procedure on me again, it will still fail. What happens to me if it does? Will you kill me?”
“I’m a hard man,” he says, but his voice is soft.
“I’m going to go, Father. Out into the desert with the others. It’s where I belong.”
“What will you do? Try to overthrow the peace?”
“No. Just live, day to day. Maybe that’s the only way to forget the past. Focus on the now.”
“What about your mother?”
The question freezes me. At last I say, “Could you . . . make her forget me.”
My father smirks. “Hyopcrite.”
“I’m my father’s son.”
I step toward the temple door. My father does not move.
“The hunting parties will continue, Thomas. If I lead one that encounters you . . . do you think I won’t fire?”
“I know that you will.”
“Then goodbye, Thomas.”
I leave him and the temple behind. My pace quickens as I head away from Almindor and into the wastelands. The day is so bright my eyes hurt from seeing.
© 2013 Sean Eads
Originally from Kentucky, Sean Eads is a writer and librarian living in Denver, CO. His first novel, The Survivors, was published in 2012 by Lethe Press. His writing has either appeared or is slated to appear in a variety of places, including the Journal of Popular Culture, Shock Totem, Stupefying Stories, Pseudopod and the forthcoming anthologies Once Upon an Apocalypse and Shambling Through History. Sean workshops his fiction regularly in a small writer’s group led by Nebula Award winner Ed Bryant. When not writing or working, he tries to develop his golf game. You can find him online through Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/sean.eads.14.
How did you come up with “The Seer?” What stages did you go through in the process of getting the idea down?
Basically, the central premise just popped into my head one day. “What if there was a guy who was part of a society where everyone had visions of a glorious future, and he had to hide the fact he saw only visions of death and destruction.” The hardest part of the process was deciding on the character’s age. It felt like he should be a teen dealing with all kinds of insecurities and not wanting to disappoint his father. I’d been reading some classic science fiction stories like “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” around the time I wrote “The Seer,” and I think some of that story’s ideas about ‘scape-goat’-ism and a society built on false pretenses influenced my own tale when it came to creating the idea of the “traitors” out in the desert.
The themes of betrayal and control run deep in The Seer. Do you tend to consciously choose the themes of the stories you write, or do they become more apparent in revisions?
It’s a bit of both. I think I’m a very formal writer in a lot of ways, one who thinks a lot about theme, symbolism and allusion even while working on a first draft. I have a Master’s degree in literature and very early on in my academic career I gravitated toward the technique of “close reading” championed by the New Critics in the early- to mid-20th century, in which one seeks to discover how a work of literature has its own internal cohesiveness and unity. One of the pleasures of rewriting, for me, is to close read my own draft after I’ve separated myself from it for awhile, and look for the unintentional things that nevertheless seem to be giving meaning to the story--perhaps the accidental and unconscious repetition of an image, for instance. As I discover them, they help me direct or redirect the flow of the story in multiple rewrites. In the case of “The Seer,” I had the theme of betrayal from the beginning, and once I decided the narrator was going to be an adolescent I knew I’d filter the theme through a few difficult “father figure” relationships--his real father, the Huntmaster, and the leader of the “traitors.”
Your novel, “The Survivors” tells the story of a strange alien ‘invasion’ whereby the aliens seem to do nothing but ignore folk at first. Would it be fair to describe it as a dark comedy, or the other way around?
I st
ill maintain it is a dark comedy, but the comedic elements dwindle a lot in the novel’s second half. Generally, I love absurdism and the original intent was to have a constant mix of absurdist humor and violence to create this “I dare you to laugh” atmosphere. The main character’s voice is based a bit on the type of humorous narration David Sedaris uses in his essays. When I got the idea for The Survivors, way back in 2005, I had been re-reading Me Talk Pretty One Day at the same time I learned Spielburg was remaking The War of the Worlds. I instantly wondered how David Sedaris might do as a war correspondent in an alien invasion, and the initial conceit of the novel was born then and there.
Why write? Surely there are so many other, far easier, things you could be doing?
It was either write or try to become a professional golfer. And since my typical golf score is around 110, I figured I had a better chance with a pen. In reality, the urge to write has just always been in my blood as the one thing I’ve wanted to do in life. It’s been my primary focus since I was about 14. Nothing compares to storytelling in terms of personal interest and satisfaction. Though I now think Dead Poet’s Society is a pretty bland movie, it played well to me when I was 15. There’s a sequence where Robin Wiliams’ character quotes the great line from Whitman’s “O Me! O Life!” -- “That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” Actually, I believe Whitman went back and forth in his various revisions of that line, sometimes writing “you may contribute” and other times writing the rather more certain “you will contribute.” I don’t know if I’m “contributing a verse” or not at the moment, but I’m working on it.
What are you working on at the moment? Where can our readers find more Sean Eads?
People looking at my other recent or forthcoming fiction credits are going to think I’ve got some kind of zombie fetish. I just published a story in Shock Totem called “To ‘Bie or Not to ‘Bie,” which I think attempts something different with the zombie concept. And I’m triple-dipping with an upcoming story called “The Revenge of Oscar Wilde.” This is an alternative history tale in which Oscar Wilde finds a new reason to live when he has to battle a zombie outbreak during the 1900 Paris Olympics. “The Revenge of Oscar Wilde” is slated to come out in a TBA issue of Stupefying Stories. In the meanwhile, it was also picked up for an exciting anthology from Prime Books called Shambling Through History, which releases this summer. The story will also appear in Wilde Stories 2014, from Lethe Press--the same good people who published The Survivors. I’ve got a couple of novel manuscripts floating about to agents and small publishers, and I’m currently rewriting a manuscript that is basically a supernatural sequel to Huckleberry Finn. It occurred to me how much credence the characters in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn put in the supernatural--witchcraft, divination, bodily possession--and I thought it would be great to revisit their world under the assumption that all of those beliefs were completely accurate. So the novel takes place 10 years after Huck “lit out for the Territories,” only to discover the Territories are full of various sinister creatures. Now trained as a warrior, Huck has to protect a little runaway slave boy whose innate magical ability holds the key to ending slavery forever. The novel is completely ridiculous and a blast to write.
Lori Meeker pushed her hair out of her eyes and leaned back against the sink. She squeezed the cold porcelain edge to still her trembling hands and focused on the pair of plainclothes cops shoehorned into the women’s can with her.
The space was hardly bigger than a closet but the restrooms were the only private spaces in the bar, and the detectives had insisted on questioning her alone.
“The restrooms always this clean?” Detective Gayle asked.
“Yeah. Augie’s bat-shit crazy about dirt and germs.”
Gayle raised an eyebrow. “Bat-shit crazy, huh? Is that your professional opinion?”
“Pardon my French,” Lori snapped.
Lori had met women just like Gayle. Always judging, always pretending they could do anything a man could do. Always looking down their perfect nose at girls who had to work in joints like Augie’s Bar & Grill.
And Augie was bat-shit crazy about germs. A damned phobia, that’s what she should have said. It was a bar, for god’s sake, not some fancy restaurant. The place was cleaner than it had any need to be.
“Tell us what you saw and heard,” Detective Osbourne said.
Osbourne looked like a nice man, the kind of guy who would listen without judging. Lori decided to talk to him. She weighed how much to tell him, though. She was afraid he might call her crazy, might laugh and stop listening to her, if she said she didn’t think the dead body out on the bar floor was human.
Lori fished her cigarettes from her sweater pocket, shook a fresh one from the pack and sparked it with her butane lighter. Gayle turned her head away and coughed. Lori smiled.
“You going to talk to us?” Gayle asked.
Lori blew more smoke toward Gayle and focused on Osbourne’s big, brown hound-dog eyes.
“I unlocked the door at eleven,” she said. “Right off, this little guy strolled in, just like he owned the place. Augie gave him the once over, went back to stocking the cooler with a case of Red Hook.”
“What did you make of him?” Osbourne asked.
“I saw right off that he was slumming. I can tell the type. But Augie always says it doesn’t matter where a customer is from or what they look like, long as they have money.”
Gayle jumped in. “And this guy had money?”
Lori nodded. “A wad of bills would choke a horse.”
“Did he sit at the bar?” Osbourne asked.
“Uh huh,” she said. “He crawled up on one of the stools. Could barely see over the edge. If we had booster seats I think I would’a offered him one.”
Her cigarette had burned down to the filter. Lori flipped it into the toilet, listened to it hiss, and popped her butane lighter to spark another one. A skinny job with lots of filter and not much tobacco. Her mother called them coffin tacks.
“What did the fellow look like?” Osbourne asked.
“Bald, a big head. Glasses on a little nose, not much chin. He ordered one drink. Straight-up scotch. Never touched it. Most times, that sets Augie off. This time he never say a word.”
“Any idea why?” Osbourne asked.
“They told each other jokes.”
“Jokes?”
Lori nodded. “Augie loves jokes, can tell them all night and not repeat himself. This little guy could tell them, too.”
“What sort of jokes?” Detective Gayle asked.
“All kinds. The one about the farmer’s daughter and the salesman. The golfer and the dead priest. The special pig. That one makes me laugh, but I can’t remember it to save my life.”
Gayle leaned in close now, ignoring the cigarette smoke. “Tell us what happened at the end.”
“I’d almost finished setting up the tables, when I heard the guy say, ‘Augie, you ever heard the one about the little green man that walked into the bar?’”
She could feel tears welling. She tried to push them back.
“Go on, Lori.” Osbourne said, kindness in his voice.
Lori closed her eyes, held on to his words. “Augie yelled, then I heard the shotgun. Almost peed myself. When I looked, the little guy was on the floor, his face shot all to pieces.”
Nothing fancy to the joint, but Augie March had always been proud to say he owned it.
Low-ceilinged; long and wide. Tables on the side walls, a bar across the back. Framed posters of country-western singers on the wall around the jukebox. Expensive neon signs above the bar to light the way back to the restrooms.
Pointers to the left. Setters to the right.
With the lights dimmed, after a few beers, the place had a certain charm. But this was middle of the day, the house lights full on, and Augie was stone-cold sober.
The joint was clean, of course. Augie wouldn’t have it any other way. But he had
never paid much attention to the way his place smelled, and just now, perched on a stool at the bar, he felt like he might drown in the reek of tobacco and hot grease.
“Wanna beer?” he asked the street cop standing watch at the end of the bar.