coffee, angrily.
He had to go deeper, find something resonant, something to crawl beneath the skin of reality and render it monstrous from within. He paced to the sink, began rinsing his coffee mug. A tiny pod of silt had settled at the bottom and now, under a jet of cold tap water, the grains rose and spread and danced, a model of chaos. The Dystopianist retraced his seed of inspiration:
well-intentioned, bumbling geneticist
, good. Good enough. The geneticist needed to stumble onto something better, though.
One day, when the Dystopianist and the Dire Utopianist had been in the sixth grade at Intermediate School 293, cowering together in a corner of the schoolyard to duck sports and fights and girls in one deft multipurpose cower, they had arrived at a safe island of mutual interest: comic books, Marvel brand, which anyone who read them understood weren't comic at all but deadly, breathtakingly serious. Marvel constructed worlds of splendid complexity, full of chilling, ancient villains and tormented heroes, in richly unfinished story lines. There in the schoolyard, wedged for cover behind the girls' lunch-hour game of hopscotch, the Dystopianist declared his favorite character: Doctor Doom, antagonist of the Fantastic Four. Doctor Doom wore a forest green cloak and hood over a metallic slitted mask and armor. He was a dark king who from his gnarled castle ruled a city of hapless serfs. An imperial, self-righteous monster. The Dire Utopianist murmured his consent. Indeed, Doctor Doom was awesome, an honorable choice. The Dystopianist waited for the Dire Utopianist to declare his favorite.
“Black Bolt,” said the Dire Utopianist.
The Dystopianist was confused. Black Bolt wasn't a villain or a hero. Black Bolt was part of an outcast band of mutant characters known as the Inhumans, the noblest among them. He was their leader, but he never spoke. His only
demonstrated
power was flight, but the whole point of Black Bolt was the power he restrained himself from using: speech. The sound of his voice was cataclysmic, an unusable weapon, like an atomic bomb. If Black Bolt ever uttered a syllable the world would crack in two. Black Bolt was leader in absentia much of the time—he had a tendency to exile himself from the scene, to wander distant mountaintops contemplating . . . What? His curse? The things he would say if he could safely speak?
It was an unsettling choice there, amidst the feral shrieks of the schoolyard. The Dystopianist changed the subject, and never raised the question of Marvel Comics with the Dire Utopianist again. Alone behind the locked door of his bedroom the Dystopianist studied Black Bolt's behavior, seeking hints of the character's appeal to his schoolmate. Perhaps the answer lay in a story line elsewhere in the Marvel universe, one where Black Bolt shucked off his pensiveness to function as an unrestrained hero or villain. If so, the Dystopianist never found the comic book in question.
Suicide
, the Dystopianist concluded now. The geneticist should be studying suicide, seeking to isolate it as a factor in the human genome. “The Sylvia Plath Code,” that might be the title of the story. The geneticist could be trying to
reproduce it in a nonhuman species
. Right, good. To breed for suicide in animals, to produce a creature with the impulse to take its own life. That had the relevance the Dystopianist was looking for. What animals? Something poignant and pathetic, something pure. Sheep.
The Sylvia Plath Sheep
, that was it.
A variant of sheep had been bred for the study of suicide
. The Sylvia Plath Sheep had to be kept on close watch, like a prisoner stripped of sharp implements, shoelaces, and belt. And the Plath Sheep escapes, right, of course,
a Frankenstein creature always escapes
, but the twist is that the Plath Sheep is dangerous only to itself.
So what?
What harm if a single sheep quietly, discreetly offs itself?
But the Plath Sheep
, scribbling fingers racing now, the Dystopianist was on
He had to go deeper, find something resonant, something to crawl beneath the skin of reality and render it monstrous from within. He paced to the sink, began rinsing his coffee mug. A tiny pod of silt had settled at the bottom and now, under a jet of cold tap water, the grains rose and spread and danced, a model of chaos. The Dystopianist retraced his seed of inspiration:
well-intentioned, bumbling geneticist
, good. Good enough. The geneticist needed to stumble onto something better, though.
One day, when the Dystopianist and the Dire Utopianist had been in the sixth grade at Intermediate School 293, cowering together in a corner of the schoolyard to duck sports and fights and girls in one deft multipurpose cower, they had arrived at a safe island of mutual interest: comic books, Marvel brand, which anyone who read them understood weren't comic at all but deadly, breathtakingly serious. Marvel constructed worlds of splendid complexity, full of chilling, ancient villains and tormented heroes, in richly unfinished story lines. There in the schoolyard, wedged for cover behind the girls' lunch-hour game of hopscotch, the Dystopianist declared his favorite character: Doctor Doom, antagonist of the Fantastic Four. Doctor Doom wore a forest green cloak and hood over a metallic slitted mask and armor. He was a dark king who from his gnarled castle ruled a city of hapless serfs. An imperial, self-righteous monster. The Dire Utopianist murmured his consent. Indeed, Doctor Doom was awesome, an honorable choice. The Dystopianist waited for the Dire Utopianist to declare his favorite.
“Black Bolt,” said the Dire Utopianist.
The Dystopianist was confused. Black Bolt wasn't a villain or a hero. Black Bolt was part of an outcast band of mutant characters known as the Inhumans, the noblest among them. He was their leader, but he never spoke. His only
demonstrated
power was flight, but the whole point of Black Bolt was the power he restrained himself from using: speech. The sound of his voice was cataclysmic, an unusable weapon, like an atomic bomb. If Black Bolt ever uttered a syllable the world would crack in two. Black Bolt was leader in absentia much of the time—he had a tendency to exile himself from the scene, to wander distant mountaintops contemplating . . . What? His curse? The things he would say if he could safely speak?
It was an unsettling choice there, amidst the feral shrieks of the schoolyard. The Dystopianist changed the subject, and never raised the question of Marvel Comics with the Dire Utopianist again. Alone behind the locked door of his bedroom the Dystopianist studied Black Bolt's behavior, seeking hints of the character's appeal to his schoolmate. Perhaps the answer lay in a story line elsewhere in the Marvel universe, one where Black Bolt shucked off his pensiveness to function as an unrestrained hero or villain. If so, the Dystopianist never found the comic book in question.
Suicide
, the Dystopianist concluded now. The geneticist should be studying suicide, seeking to isolate it as a factor in the human genome. “The Sylvia Plath Code,” that might be the title of the story. The geneticist could be trying to
reproduce it in a nonhuman species
. Right, good. To breed for suicide in animals, to produce a creature with the impulse to take its own life. That had the relevance the Dystopianist was looking for. What animals? Something poignant and pathetic, something pure. Sheep.
The Sylvia Plath Sheep
, that was it.
A variant of sheep had been bred for the study of suicide
. The Sylvia Plath Sheep had to be kept on close watch, like a prisoner stripped of sharp implements, shoelaces, and belt. And the Plath Sheep escapes, right, of course,
a Frankenstein creature always escapes
, but the twist is that the Plath Sheep is dangerous only to itself.
So what?
What harm if a single sheep quietly, discreetly offs itself?
But the Plath Sheep
, scribbling fingers racing now, the Dystopianist was on
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