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Traveller’s Tales from Another World
Part One
Welcome to Possible
(as told to Starhawk)
It takes a certain kind of person to maintain a tight knot of anxiety in the pit of the belly when a chorus of frogs is happily croaking in the morning fog outside your window, and the scent of honeysuckle drifting in. But as a lifetime New Yorker, and a science writer for the New York Times, I’d had plenty of practice maintaining tension. The arias of the songbirds, the lemony scent of herbal tea brought to me by my hostess, the lavender-scented fresh sheets on my comfortable bed all made me nervous. I missed the slight chemical taint of the dehydrating, artificially cooled air of the Marriott, where I should have been staying, the comforting traces of someone’s stale cigarettes, the homey conversation of the early morning talk shows on TV, the bad coffee from the automatic coffeemaker.
My name is Alice Stickly, I’m a successful journalist in an extremely competitive field, and I want to go home!
But let me get hold of myself, and start from the beginning, with the who, what, where, when and why, as they taught us in the journalism school at NYU, even if the how has me mystified.
Yesterday, I was on my way to San Francisco to cover the biotechnology industry’s biggest annual get-together, a massive flocking of journalists, lobbyists, CEOs and management and marketing teams and here and there a few actual scientists. It was an ontime, nonstop flight from La Guardia. No boxcutter-wielding terrorists attempted to highjack it; no anthrax was piped through the ventilation system and nothing whatsoever exploded. I spent the flight napping and worrying about nothing more than would there be protestors at the convention, and could you get a decent margarita at the Marriott? Everything was completely normal, unless you count the fact that my luggage arrived on time and undamaged. I picked up my bags, and walked out of the baggage area at exactly midnight, through a big, black gate like a metal detector. Then things began to get strange.
I remember thinking, “How odd, a metal detector as you’re leaving…it must be some new antiterrorist device,” when everything changed. A mist rolled in, as if all the fogs of San Francisco coalesced and slipped through the airport’s revolving doors. I found myself walking down a long hallway. I could hardly see beyond my face, but I kept going, as if some mysterious force was drawing me. A banner loomed out of the mist ahead of me. It proclaimed, “Another World is Possible!” It was the slogan from the World Social Forum, in India this year. I didn’t think much of it—after all, this was liberal San Francisco. But a few yards further on, a second banner read, “An Otherworld is Possible.” And beyond that, “Welcome to Possible.”
I blinked, feeling a sudden nervousness. Where was I? What had happened? Had I gotten onto the wrong plane? In thirteen years of professional journalism, hundreds, thousands of trips, I had never before so much as misplaced a ticket. Was something wrong with me? But even if I’d somehow gotten on the wrong plane, I hadn’t been in the air long enough to get to India. Besides, the conference was in January and this was June. Could I be losing my mind?
Just then I noticed a booth to my left, glowing through the fog with its own pearly light. A bright colored sign read, “Dazed and Confused Traveller Orientation Station. Welcome to Possible!” A beautiful young woman behind the desk beamed at me and gave me a big smile.
“My name is Glinda. Can I help you?”
“What’s happened? Is this San Francisco?” I asked.
Her deep brown eyes gazed at me kindly. “Yes and no,” she said. “Perhaps you’d better come in and sit down.”
Inside the booth was a small, comfortable armchair, and Glinda sat me down and poured me a cup of what she said was a soothing tea of valerian and St. John’s Wort. I could have used a whiskey, frankly, but I was in no shape to complain.
“What do you mean, yes and no?” I asked.
“Have you ever heard of the theory of parallel realities?” she asked.
“I’m a science writer for the New York Times. I’ve heard of everything.”
“We’re not sure just how it began. It might have had something to do with voting patterns, or the time our mayor decided to register gay and lesbian marriages. Anyway, for a long time many of us had been feeling that San Francisco represented a somewhat different reality than the rest of the country. And gradually that Otherworld seemed to become, well, more and more real. One day we woke up and discovered that reality had divided, like an amoeba. And every now and then, someone like yourself slips through.”
“Holy Sweet Jesus,” was all I could say, reverting to my mother’s favorite expression. Would I ever see her again? What would this do to her hypertension?
“Don’t worry,” Glinda reassured me. She was beaming at me with just that doe-eyed, New Age, treacly smile that made me want to hit her. What about Jason, my fiance? What about my job? What would they think if I didn’t show up for my assignment? “Our helpful Indymedia technicians are working on ways to bridge the reality gap. In the meantime, you’ll be a guest of the city.”
With worries churning around in my brain, I let her bundle me into an oddly silent taxi that brought me here, to Mercedes’ guesthouse. I lay in bed, shuffling my worries as if they were a definitive hand of cards I was damned if I’d put down. Until with the stress, and the jetlag, and the fact that it was now close to four AM in New York, in spite of myself I fell sound asleep.
Off my room is a small balcony, where Mercedes, my hostess, had set a lovely breakfast of homemade scones, fresh cream and eggs which she said come from the chickens I could hear clucking nearby. I’d trade it all for a plastic room-service omelet or even the tasteless lasagna on the plane yesterday.
Mercedes was looking at me sympathetically out of her big, brown, eyes, but I refused to be soothed. She was so beautiful she annoyed me, with her glossy black hair and her face that could have come straight off a Mayan carving, and that damn smile. No one has ever mistaken me for a beautiful woman, although I’m fashionably thin, chicly dressed, and the price of my every-six-weeks haircut could support a small village in the Third World.
A chorus of songbirds competed with the cackling of hens objecting in principle to the omelet made of their scrambled potential offspring. I had a wide view of the garden, which extended over the full interior of this block of row houses. All the old dividing fences had been taken down, and the result was truly charming, at least, for anyone capable of being charmed by a garden. I’d lost that capacity years ago. Minoring in botany at Smith College, I’d had a summer job writing catalog copy for White Flower Farm. Three months of trying to describe every scrawny scabiosa in mouthwatering prose left me hoping to never see another iris that wasn’t already safely dead and entombed in some expensive and tasteful arrangement.
I thought back to my last breakfast with my fiancé Jason, his eyes darting anxiously to the clock, the cell phone in his jacket pocket ringing, the worried frown line between his eyes as he stared at the morning paper. Actually the same line formed between my eyes whenever I thought of my job. The conference I was supposed to be covering started tomorrow. I HAD to get back by then.
But this was an extraordinary garden, I had to admit. Mercedes handed me a basket, and suggested I might like to pick some berries for dessert. I wandered out, along a small path edged with alpine strawberries. Near the kitchen door, a raised spiral mound grew every kind of fresh herb a cook might need. Tubs of fragrant water lilies spilled over into miniature waterfalls that flow over rock beds and into a small wetland of reeds and cattails. Round, raised beds were thick with lettuces, arugula, radicchio and sorrel, or newly planted with baby squash and young tomatoes. The path wound between berry bushes and around fruit trees, with apples just beginning to swell and plums almost ripe. Another fork dove into a small wilderness of native shrubs and berries. All in all, it was quite delightful and took my mind off my anxiety.
Deep in the center of the garden was a large pond, surrounded by rounded stones and full of water lilies, water hyacinths, and paddling ducks. All the little streams and rivulets and waterfalls seemed to converge here, and a large frog sculpture spouted a fountain from its mouth that splashed happily into the pond. Two small children lay on their stomachs, scooping tadpoles out with a glass jar. They scrambled up to their little feet when they saw me, beaming and thrusting a dripping jar into my face. I shuddered. I hate children, as a rule, noisy little rugrats. But these were extremely polite, introducing themselves as Tad and Lily, beaming with those obnoxiously bright, healthy faces that looked as if a bad thought or a whiff of air pollution had never brushed across that glowing skin.
“Look, you can see its legs starting to grow,” Lily said to me, holding up the jar for my inspection, where a hapless tadpole thrashed. “That one will be a red-legged frog. They’re rare, but I bet we have a thousand here.” She gave me a big smile, flashing perfect teeth that appeared to have never crunched a Fruit Loop or sucked a Pepsi in their short life. She had the big dark eyes of those poster children who gaze so pathetically out of direct mail appeals for aid to the Third World, but hers were glowing with health and happiness. Tad, in contrast, was as blond and blue-eyed as a miniature Leonardo di Capria.
“We’re the Frog Block,” Tad explained. “Every family on the block has at least one pond or water barrel where frogs can breed. And we grow catfish, too, and water chestnuts.”
“Don’t you have terrible mosquitos?” I asked.
“No, silly,” Lily said. “Mosquitoes can’t breed in moving water. That’s why we have the fountain.”
“And fish eat them,” Tad added.
“The next block over is the Hummingbird Block,” Lily said. “You should see their garden—it’s so beautiful, with so many red flowers. Pineapple sage and trumpet vine and honeysuckle.”
“And the block on the other side is the Songbird Block,” Tad said. “They have all these really cool bird feeders and nesting boxes, and they plant things for the birds, like sunflowers, or flowers that attract the insects birds like to eat.”
“I wouldn’t like to live there,” Lily said. “Nobody in that whole block can have a cat.”
‘They can, they just can’t let it go outside,” Tad corrected her.
The children proceeded to escort me around the garden. A swathe of native plants meandered through the area, providing habitat for native insects, birds, and wildlife. Fruit trees were underplanted with fava beans, herbs, currants or artichokes, in what the kids called ‘guilds’—kind of plant support groups, as they explained it, with some fixing nitrogen, some attracting beneficial insects, others bringing up nutrients from deep in the soil, and some, presumably, encouraging the others to talk about their feelings and unashamedly admit their deepest traumas. One bed was covered with a domed chicken house, woven of willow. The chickens were happily scratching the dirt and consuming kitchen scraps.
“That’s our chicken tractor,” Lily said. “They eat our kitchen scraps, dig and fertilize the garden bed, and give us eggs to eat. When the bed is ready, we move the whole dome to a new bed and plant the old one.’
Beyond the chickens, a raised spiral bed was planted with strawberries, and I spied many ripe, red ones. I remembered my errand.
“Can I pick some of those?” I asked the children.
“Help yourself to anything you want, except from the beds right by people’s doors,” Lily said. “It’s all common.”
“But what’s to prevent someone from just taking it all?” I asked.
The kids looked shocked. “Who would do that?” Lilly asked. “You’d feel just terrible, sitting alone in your house eating strawberries and thinking that nobody else had any.”
“The most fun part of the garden is sharing,” Tad said. “And there’s enough strawberries so everyone can have as much as they want, anyway.”
It was clear to me that I’d fallen into some Otherworld, some different social order. I considered informing them that all such altruistic ideologies had been discredited by harsh experience and the failures of Soviet Communism, but why spoil their innocence? I just hoped, for their sakes, that they’d never reverse my little accident and fall into the real world, where the vultures would eat them alive. I picked strawberries, and the children showed me a few hidden vines of ripe blackcap raspberries and red currants.
“Be serious, now,” I said to Mercedes as we ate berries and cream on
the balcony. “This commons business can’t really work. It never has.
Someone always overstocks the sheep or whatever, and ruins it all.”
She just smiled, basking like a cat in the sun. “You’re working awfully hard at being unhappy.”
“Working! That’s what I should be doing—working! At the job I struggled and waited and planned and plotted and worked my posterior off to get! Do you have any idea how hard it is for a woman—a woman!—to get to be a science writer for the New York Times! And how important this assignment is—the assignment I’m going to blow because some weird glitch in reality has me trapped in some hippy gardeners’ utopia! “
“I’m sorry. I forget how upsetting this must be for you. But won’t your boss understand?”
“Understand what? You just can’t call an editor at the New York Times and explain that you missed an important assignment because you fell into another reality. Believe me!”
Mercedes sighed. “We do have to get you back, somehow. I know the Indymedia technicians are working on it—not just for you, but for the others. There’s been a steady trickle of Slippers over the past few years. Many don’t want to go back, but some do.”
“And how many have gotten back?” I asked.
“We’re working on it.”
I couldn’t help myself, I began to cry. “My mother has high blood pressure,” I sobbed. “This will kill her. And Jason—he’s expecting me to have dinner with his law firm next week. We’re supposed to announce our engagement.”
Mercedes patted me on the shoulder, looking deeply distressed, and handed me a fresh handkerchief so I could blow my nose. I’m not one of those women who cries attractively, and I knew my nose was red and my eyes puffy.
“Your poor mother,” Mercedes said sympathetically. “You must be terribly worried. Well, there’s only one thing to do. To hell with those slowpokes at Indymedia. We’ll have to go find the Wizards Collective."
“The Wizards Collective? What is that?”
“They’re very mysterious. Nobody knows exactly where or how they meet. But they are widely believed to have synthesized the most sophisticated virtual reality technology with magic. Some people think they’re responsible for the reality split that removed us from your world. And they are rumored to be able to manipulate time.”
“How do we find them? Follow the Yellow Brick Road?” The thought that my fate hung not just on a bunch of wizards, but a collective of them was extremely depressing to me. I had briefly been part of a women’s collective my first year in college. I’d attended three, long, grueling meetings where we never could agree on anything, and decided that I much preferred a clear hierarchy where someone, preferably me, could just tell everyone what to do.
“We’ll begin where everything begins in this city,” Mercedes said. “At the Garden of the Commons.”
To Be Continued
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