Questionable Practices

Michael Swanwick and Samuel R. Delany at the Joyce Kilmer Service Area, March 2005

Output from a nostalgic, if somewhat misinformed, guydavenport storybot, in the year 2115

Transcribed by Eileen Gunn

Their journey took place in verdant March, when the sun was not yet so high in the sky as to be dangerous. The New Jersey Turnpike was redolent with the scent of magnolias, and the trees in the Joyce Kilmer Service Area were clad in exuberant green. What brought them, the nascent politician and the noted philosopher, to this place, in a vehicle that shed its rich hydrocarbons liberally into the warm, clean air?

The truth was that Michael Swanwick and Samuel R. Delany shared a taste for animal flesh, and had come to this bucolic waystation to satisfy their common need. “I’m a burger kind of guy,” said the future ruler of Russia. “So am I,” said the white-bearded semiotician, and they chose an imperial meat-patty palace for their repast.

As they stood in line, contemplating a panoply of burgers, fries, and blue raspberry Icee®s and basking in the cool green glow of fluorescent lights, Swanwick was struck with nostalgia for a time long past.

“I miss Howard Johnson’s,” he said. “Not the food, of course — I miss the orange-roofed temples, celebrated by Jean Shepard as sirens of the highway. Once upon a time, every rest area on the Jersey Turnpike had a Howard Johnson’s. ‘A landmark for hungry Americans.’”

Though Swanwick had spoken the words, each man, involuntarily, heard the chime of the ghastly jingle. “Funny thing,” he continued quickly. “It was capitalism that killed it. Marriott bought it for the real estate.”

“Red in tooth and claw,” said Delany. “I miss the pistachio ice cream cones, that’s all…. But here,” he added in a soothing tone, “here we have trading cards with robots on them.” He accepted a trading card from the cashier. It depicted Cappy, a sleekly androgynous silver-metal lover. “I want a different one,” he said.

“Have it your way,” said the cashier, shrugging. He handed Delany another card, this one featuring Crank, a grubby makeshift robot with rust under his gnawed fingernails.

Delany laughed, a musical sound somewhere between a snort and a giggle. “I’ll keep this one,” he said. He ordered a beef patty made with real beef, medium rare, topped with horseradish and béarnaise sauce, kosher dill slices on the side.

“Have it your way,” said the cashier again.

“Are you a robot?” asked Swanwick, suddenly concerned. The cashier did not reply.

“I would like a big, sloppy, greasy double cheeseburger with lettuce and tomato and all the trimmings,” Swanwick told the cashier. “I want ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, and Russian dressing with beluga caviar. Hold the pickle.”

“Caviar is available only at the Walt Whitman Service Area,” said the cashier, frowning. “You can’t always have everything your way.” He gave Swanwick a trading card depicting Aunt Fanny, a matronly, pink, lipstick-wearing robot with a protuberant posterior. Swanwick accepted it with bemusement, wondering whether Burger King offered the same card in the United Kingdom. “Can I have another, too?” he asked. The cashier handed him a card with a pigtailed Lolita robot on it. “Another?” The third was Madame Gasket, who was a bit scary, frankly, for a trading card. He couldn’t get anything his way.

“Lucky in love, unlucky at cards,” said Delany.

“They hand these things out to children?” Swanwick asked, glancing again at Madame Gasket.

They paid for their meals in the devalued currency of the late-period religio-capitalist hegemony, and took their food trays to a small table at a window overlooking the Sunoco station.

“Bon appétit,” said Delany, gesturing with his hamburger as one would with a wineglass.

“Priyatnovo appetita,” replied Swanwick with a similar gesture. He had recently returned from the Urals, where he had been the toast of Ekaterinburg.

At first they ate in hungry silence, gazing out at the gas station, as languid pump attendants with huge palm-frond fans hailed approaching automobiles and waved them toward available fueling bays as though they were New Jersey’s famous zeppelins. Then, having taken the edge off their appetites, the two men continued the conversation they had begun in the car, the one great debate that writers and thinkers everywhere have carried on since writing and thinking first evolved: the debate about the ultimate futility of writing and thinking.

“I’m a cult writer in Russia,” said Swanwick, “and I’m a cult writer in the United States. And I’m sick of it.”

“Nothing so terrible about being a cult writer,” said Delany. “Christianity started out as a cult, and look at it now.”

“I want to make some difference in the world, communicate with the mass of humanity, have an effect.” He gestured toward the crowded freeway. “I want to change entire lives for the better.”

“Have you thought of a different career?” asked Delany gently. “Perhaps emigration to a land of greater opportunity? You speak some Russian, do you not?”

“Nyemnoshka,” Swanwick answered, with a modest shake of his shaggy head. “A smidgeon,” he translated.

“Maybe you should consider pulling up stakes, retooling for the new millennium. As a cult writer in the U.S., you’re nothing. You have considerably less effect on how the world fares than a Hollywood screenwriter, which is low indeed in the social hierarchy. But as a cult writer in Russia, you’d have some clout. They are afraid of writers in Russia, and with good reason. You could leverage your celebrity into a political career, take control of that long-suffering country, and change the world. Of course, you could also get killed.” He sighed. “It’s a sad thing, but nobody kills writers in the U.S. They just don’t matter enough.”

“I will consider that,” said Swanwick, and did. It would not be so difficult for him and his wife to create new lives in another land. She was a public-health scientist, although, when provoked, she sometimes described herself as a career bureaucrat. Russia had jobs in either category; like everyplace else, it needed scientists more, and paid bureaucrats better. And Michael had always enjoyed caviar and sour cream, however difficult they were to obtain on the Jersey Turnpike. It could work.

But, he thought, it was time to get back on the road. They gathered up their things, recycled the trash, slapped on their canvas hats and a heavy layer of sunblock, and hit the road.

They continued north in Swanwick’s chartreuse 1959 Thunderbird, past service areas named for the heroes of New Jersey: Allen Ginsberg, Paul Robeson, William Carlos Williams, Amiri Baraka, Frank Sinatra, Bruce Springsteen, Jimmy Hoffa, Yogi Berra, and Jon Bon Jovi. Soon enough, they found themselves at the most intellectually exciting stretch of highway in the United States. Between exits 16E and 13A, the New Jersey Turnpike at that time passed over the Passaic River. The General Casimir Pulaski Skyway, a masterpiece of Depression-era engineering, soared off to one side, crossing the Passaic and Hackensack rivers in great latticework leaps. As the car approached New York City, the primeval Meadowlands swept off on the left, balancing the demands of nature and of solid-waste disposal, and the darkly crystalline rectangles of the Manhattan skyline arose to the right. Gleaming networks of railroad tracks recalled to them the glorious empire, created by commerce and forced labor, that had, until the new century and its disasters, sustained the American dream. Where the towers had been there was still, in 2005, negative space.

The car containing the two men sped across the George Washington Bridge and made its way, under Swanwick’s instruction, to Delany’s residence. Chip Delany, ever hospitable, invited Michael Swanwick to come upstairs and continue their conversation, but Swanwick, by now lost to American literature, made a hasty excuse in mumbled Russian, and disappeared into the grey fog of urban twilight.