Bears Discover Fire

“NEXT!”

“We’re here to see the Colonel.”

“I am the Colonel. I’m here to help you if I can. And let me begin by warning you that anything you say will be used against you.”

“Will be?”

“Can be, will be, whatever. Young lady, are you splitting hairs with me?”

“No.”

“Good. Now, I see you are under indictment for Discrimination and Conspiracy.”

“Conspiracy? All we wanted to do was get married.”

“Which is against the law. Surely you knew that or you wouldn’t have gone to the Marital Law Administration in the first place.”

“We were trying to get a special license.”

“Precisely. And what is that if not trying to evade the Melanin Redistribution Act which prohibits black intramarriage? The mere presence of you two in line A21 is in itself evidence of a conspiracy to circumvent the provisions of the Melanin Hoarding Ban.”

“But we were trying to obey the law!”

“That makes it even worse. The law is a just master, but it can be harsh with those who try to sabotage its spirit by hypocritically observing its letter. However, I’m going to delay sentencing on Conspiracy and Hoarding because we have an even more serious charge to deal with here.”

“Sentencing? We haven’t even been convicted yet.”

“Young lady, are you splitting hairs with me?”

“No.”

“Good. Now let’s move on to the Discrimination charge. Deep issues are involved here. You two aren’t old enough to remember the Jim Crow Days in the South, when blacks weren’t permitted to swim in the public pools. But I remember. Do you know what Discrimination is?”

“I read about it in school.”

“Well, then you know that it is wrong. And blacks who don’t marry whites are denying them the right to swim in their gene pool. Discriminating against them.”

“Nobody’s denying anybody the right to do anything! I just want to marry Yusef.”

“That’s a conveniently simplistic way of looking at things, isn’t it? But it won’t wash in a court of law. You can’t marry Yusef without refusing to marry Tom, Dick, or Harry. It’s the same difference. If you marry a black person, you are denying a white person the right to marry you; and that’s a violation of his rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. Do you recognize those two pictures on the wall?”

“Sure. Martin Luther King and John Kennedy.”

“John F. Kennedy. Somehow your generation has lost sight of the ideals they died for. Let me pose a purely hypothetical question—would it be fair to have a society in which one racial grouping, such as yours, had special rights and privileges denied to the rest of us?”

“It never bothered anybody before.”

“Are you getting smart?”

“No. But what about the Fourteenth Amendment? Doesn’t it apply to me?”

“Certainly it does. To you as an individual, and to your young man as well. But as African Americans you are more than just individuals; you are also a precious natural treasure.”

“Huh?”

“Under the Melanin Heritage Act, your genetic material is a national resource, which America is now claiming for all its people, not just for a privileged few. It is the same genetic material that was brought across the ocean (bought and paid for, I might add) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”

“But the slaves were freed.”

“And their descendants as well. But genetic material, being immortal, can be neither slave nor free. It is an irreplaceable natural resource, like the forests or the air we breathe. And whether you kids like it or not, the old days when our resources were squandered and hoarded by special interests are over. Your genetic heritage is a part of the priceless national endowment of every man, woman, and child in America, not just your private property to dispose of as you please. Am I making myself clear?”

“I guess.”

“You guess! Would it be fair to have an African American child born double M; while a white child, denied his or her Melanin Birthright, was doomed to twice the chance of skin cancer and god-knows-what-else?”

“Nobody ever worried about white kids being born with twice everything before.”

“Enough, young lady. I am sentencing you to nine months at Catskill Tolerance Development Camp, or until the baby is born, followed by nine years at Point Pleasant Repeat Pregnancy Farm. I sincerely hope you will use your time at Point Pleasant to think about how racist attitudes such as yours threaten the rainbow fabric of our multiethnic democracy.”

“What about me?”

“I’m putting you on probation, Yusef, and taking you home for dinner as soon as court is over. I want you to meet my daughter. Marshal, put the cuffs on this one and take her away. Pay no heed to her crocodile tears: they are masters of deceit.

“NEXT!”

NECRONAUTS

The first time I died was an eye-opener. Literally.

I got a call from a researcher at Duke. He said he had seen my paintings in the National Geographic and Smithsonian magazines and wanted to engage me as illustrator for an expedition he was planning.

I explained that I was blind and had been for eighteen months.

He said he knew; he said that was why they wanted me.

The next morning I was dropped in front of the university’s Psy Studies Institute by my ex. You can tell a lot about a space by its echoes and the one I entered was drab and institutional, like a hospital waiting room.

Dr. Philip DeCandyle’s hand was moist and cold, two qualities that don’t always go together. I form a mental picture of those I am dealing with and I saw an overweight, soft man, almost six feet tall; later I was told I was not far off.

After introducing himself, DeCandyle introduced the woman standing beside him as Dr. Emma Sorel. She was only a little shorter, with a high-pitched voice and a cold, tentative touch that told me she was more skilled at withdrawing from the world than engaging it; a common quality in a scientist, but curious for an explorer. I wondered what sort of expedition these two could be planning.

“We’re both very excited that you could come, Mr. Ray,” said Dr. DeCandyle. “We saw the work you did for the undersea Mariana Trench expedition, and your paintings prove that there are some things that the camera just can’t capture. It’s not just a technical problem of lack of light. You were able to convey the grandeur of the ocean depths; its cold, awesome terror.”

He did all the talking. It was my introduction to a manner of speech that struck me as exaggerated, almost comical—before I had experienced the horrors to which he held the key.

“Thank you,” I said, nodding first to his position and then to hers, even though she had said nothing yet. “Then you both undoubtedly also know that I lost my eyesight on the expedition, as a result of a decompression incident.”

“We do,” said Dr. DeCandyle. “But we also read the feature in the Sun; and we know that you have continued to paint, even though blind. And to great acclaim.”

This was true. After the accident, I learned that my hand hadn’t lost the confidence that almost forty years of training and work had built. I didn’t need to see to paint. The papers called it a psychic ability, but to me it was no more remarkable than the sketcher who watches his subject and not his pad. I had always been precise in how I