Stories

e utopia Stories

William in Eternity A Love Story Johannes A Box The Field Trip Red Bullets Pretty A One Pint Man Time and Money? After the Game The Winner Ted Builds a Car William at Work and at Play Bears Some Other Planet Thinking Fast George and the Cherry Pits - of all things

William in the Water Speedy and Whiz Some More William in Eternity Blue Beach Cap Arthur Community Soup William on the Road The Dead The Ocean Cab Ride The Art Colony Jim and the Machine Eden Unburied The Garden

William in Eternity

W illiam woke up one day and realized he had an entire other body somewhere else that he controlled, just as he controlled his body there in the bed. T he other body didn’t send strong sensations back to his brain. That’s why William lived so long without realizing it was even there.

I t was a body in a general sense: it didn’t have toenails or eyelashes.

I t was an eternal body, in eternity, and William had control of it. If he wanted to, he could make motions in eternity.

A Love Story

nce, a very long time ago, a boy and a girl met.

T hey fell in love. T hen they didn’t see each other for just about the rest of their lives.

A t the very end of their lives,

they met again.

T hey had remembered each other with fondness and now they smiled.

I t isn’t much of a love story.

Johannes

J ohannes was a time traveler. He wasn’t a time traveler like others we’ve heard of: he built no machine, he had no deeply insightful ideas about the physics of space-time, he didn’t travel spiritually. He didn’t travel at all, or not far, really. Actually he wasn’t much of a time traveler at all, much less so than all of us, even. We travel through the weeks and days and months and years. He only traveled through Wednesday. Not

through a metaphysical, universal Wednesday of the soul, but through a particular Wednesday - over and over again. One day Johannes woke up and it was Wednesday. He went to sleep, woke up and it was Wednesday again. Still. It was a Wednesday in February; one of fine weather, consolingly.

“ D e ja vu. I’ve been here before.” J ohannes went through his second

Wednesday quite amazed. He noticed that the things on his night table were different in the morning. “ T his is the way I left them Tuesday night, not as on Wednesday night.” He found that whatever he would do during any particular Wednesday, the next Wednesday morning everything began as it was left the previous Tuesday night. While this is true for many of us, it is true in a different way for Johannes. “ T hat is one of my rules now.” He couldn’t stockpile anything except memories. It took him a while to trust his memory. H e lived for the day. For Wednesday.

A Box

Three people sit

around a table.

(A, B, and C.) (We could call the table D, but it doesn’t have a speaking part.) A box sits in the middle of the table. A. There is something inside the box from God to us. B. I don’t think anything is in there. A. There is! I think it’s chocolate. C. It’s not chocolate! I think there is something in there, too. It’s not chocolate. A. It is chocolate! Until we agree, we can’t open the box.

They sat around the table for awhile. “Well, why don’t we just open it up?” “O.K.”

As the lid came off, yes, light spilled from the box, and to everyone’s surprise the room filled with

The Field Trip

Today, class, we are very fortunate to be allowed to visit the work of some of our nation’s top research scientists.

Here in the mountains where the highest quality, pure silicon has been discovered, you can see the extensive mining operations . . .

. . . and the dangerous journey through the mountain range down to the grassy plains . . .

. . . where the thousands of men move these giant, pure silicon boulders back and forth, experimenting in mathematical calculations.

Here in the tower where the scientists direct the research carried out on the plain below . . .

“We’ve made many significant discoveries as we probe into the workings of the universe. The even additions have been worked out, which some of you already know: 1+1=2, 2+2=4, 3+3=6. So far we have worked all the way up to 7+7=14, and have found remarkable consistency. We have also performed research into uneven additions, which you probably won’t study until next year.

“Right now we are experimenting with subtraction, where we have discovered that while 2+3=5, 5-1=4. I don’t really expect you to understand all of this. I’m telling you, though, just so you’ll understand that the world is full of surprises. Just when you think you have the whole thing figured out, you turn the corner and find something new and unexpected. “Our highest level of research, however, is concerned with new methods of mining and transporting even larger silicon boulders, if you can imagine that. These will be used in a new, and as yet highly theoretical, field coming to be known as division.”

Red Bullets

Hernando worked in a bullet factory. He wondered why some of the bullets that came down the assembly line were red while the rest were leaden

gray. His friends told him they were all gray and that he was crazy. He found out that the red bullets were the ones that would eventually kill someone. He figured out how to take the red ones off the assembly line without being seen. At night he hid them in a box in the ceiling. One day the box fell through the ceiling onto Hernando, killing him.

Pretty

Once upon a time there was this man and this woman who had been married. For years and years and years and years (you figure out how long). The woman always thought that she had a pretty face. Other people had told her so. Other people treated her in the way that people treat a woman who has a pretty face. So, she thought she had a pretty face. (She was probably right, you know.) And then one day her husband told her that he never had thought she had a pretty face - in that way, you know. I don’t know why he said it, but I know what he meant: he meant that he loved her so much it didn’t matter and he didn’t care what she looked like. He loved her. Her face represented her the way a word represents what it signifies. (And so, in a way, he loved her face. In a way.) She thought about how she had always thought that he had treated her the way people treat a woman with a pretty face because he thought she had a pretty face.

A One Pint Man

Reginald was a one pint man. For years, he stopped at the neighborhood pub after work for one pint. Most of the other people in the pub were laborers who spent most of the evening in the pub. Reginald would take fifteen to twenty minutes to finish his pint.

One afternoon Reginald asked for a second pint. Everyone stopped talking and looked at him. The bar-keeper looked embarrassed. He looked like he was embarrassed for Reginald.

“You can’t have two pints,” a laborer on a stool next to Reginald told him. “You’ve only signed up for one. You’d have to increase your subscription price.”

Reggie didn’t know what the man was talking about, but he didn’t order the second pint. On his way out, he felt somehow that not taking his second pint didn’t make up for asking for it in the first place.

“I can be a one pint man who has a second pint on occasion at my own discretion,” he told himself later.

He kept going to the pub. Every now and then he’d order two pints, but when he did everyone seemed to ignore him.

Time and Money?

One day someone (we don’t know who, but one who knew) told Bill that he had only 24 hours left to live, but he could have ten million dollars ($) to spend any way he liked - to make up for it?

- - - - - - - - - - -

This same person (we don’t know who, but one who knew) made offers to other people. They could have one hundred million dollars and give up the rest of their lives except for the next day, or a few million and the next week. No one wanted to take a month for just a hundred thousand dollars.

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And there are stories about people who sold their souls to the devil in exchange for something they wanted real bad.

After the Game

It was dark. It was really dark. It was one of those nights where you just couldn’t see anything. We were back behind the gym after an away game waiting for our parents to pick us up. Now, years later (more years than I had lived at that point), I can imagine a parent driving around behind the school, seeing no lights anywhere, wondering if it was the wrong time or place - then illuminating with headlights a huddled pack of adolescents looking like early man on the plains of Africa. One kid kept walking off into the dark and coming back. Years later (not as many years later as he had lived at that point, though), he died in a car wreck and they named the new gym after him. Uncomfortable, I kept wondering what he might come back as. We made fun of him, of course. We peed on the wall of the gym in the dark. The older kids talked bad about the principal.

The Winner

There was a little boy who, once he grew up a bit, began to play baseball. He pitched.

As it turned out, he pitched very well. He pitched so well that his team won all the time.

He went to college on a scholarship and his college team won championships every year he played.

A pretty good professional team drafted him and they won the pennant when he pitched for them.

For Harpo Hitch

Ted Builds a Car

Three hundred years ago Ted thought up an automobile.

He designed the whole thing: engine, transmission, suspension, you name it. Et cetera. Tires.

Ted had to develop several technologies to build his car: he had to mine certain ores, make the right size and shape chunks of metal out of them.

Ted Builds a Car

He had to invent, design and build machine tools. He found all the right materials for his tires and built machines to build the tires.

He refined gasoline. And built a long road.

And showed Bill how to drive the car. Bill hopped in the car and drove two hundred miles per hour.

“I am a human being that can go two hundred miles per hour,” Bill said.