Wonderfreaks
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Wonderfreaks", a short story by Jan Wildt, originally appeared in New Genre’s second issue in 2001 and subsequently received an honorable mention in Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best Science Fiction for that year. It was reprinted in Fandom Press's anthology Northwest Passages in 2005.
Contents |
[edit] Synopsis
“Wonderfreaks” opens with Steve, the 25-year-old protagonist, picking up a young woman in a Seattle bookstore, ostensibly for casual sex. As they drive off, it becomes clear that they have something else in mind. Inside her apartment, they “osculate”, and then both lose consciousness. On awakening, each now knows things previously known only to the other person. They have shared information.
Steve and the woman (he belatedly learns that her name is Lisa) are “wonderfreaks” (or “freaks”), and they have just engaged in a telepathic form of brain-intercourse with is both pleasurable and addictive. As we follow Steve’s downward arc, we learn about the strange subculture in which he lives, where freaks pursue their “fixes”.
One in twenty humans is a latent wonderfreak who can be “activated” by a libidinally-charged mouth-to-mouth kiss from an active freak. Once this happens, his fate is sealed. He will be compelled to seek out other freaks and transact with them. Each act of “freaking” will leave more random knowledge in his mind, to be added to the accumulated “wad” of information from prior encounters. Freaks with large wads are prized but rare, as the ever-accelerating process of addiction soon becomes unmanageable, leading to despair and suicide. Urban legends circulate among wonderfreaks about a mythical freak named McD, who may or may not have owned the largest wad in history, may or may not have broken his addiction, and may or may not have existed.
A Newsweek reporter named Joan asks Steve if she can shadow him through the underworld of freaks for a story she is writing. He demurs until Joan offers some information in exchange. She has evidence that the legendary McD does exist, and she is looking for him. Steve agrees to help, hoping to meet McD and be cured by him.
Steve begins to deteriorate rapidly, and has a series of increasingly desperate encounters, with Joan in tow (at one point she hides in a closet to watch). Steve’s roommate, Rafe, comments to Joan that just recently wonderfreaks have begun committing suicide earlier than usual in their course, and in bizarre ways (ritual disembowelment, e.g.). Joan seems especially interested in this development. Rafe himself is shortly found dead.
Joan also begins to become an impediment to Steve’s peregrinations. She takes it upon herself to try to force Steve to quit “cold turkey”, which appears impossible, and shows contempt for Steve’s maudlin reminiscences of his first love, a girl named Heather, with whom Steve had his only fulfilling romantic relationship at age fifteen.
One evening, Joan and a very strung-out Steve track McD down to a specific Seattle address and knock on the door. The occupant, a man named Norm, admits he “was” McD, and tells them he is now healthy and knows how to cure Steve. Even more surprisingly, Norm turns out to be someone Joan knows. Joan is not really a Newsweek reporter: she and Norm both work for Pharmcorp, a drug company. Norm partly resolves all this confusion by confessing to Steve (over Joan’s strenuous objections) that Pharmcorp unknowingly activated the original wonderfreaks years ago while testing a new drug (see “The Science of ‘Wonderfreaks’”, below), and has since tried to cover up its involvement. However, he has good news for both Joan and Steve: he has hit on a cure, which he promises to demonstrate the next morning before the company’s assembled executives, with Steve himself as the patient.
Norm ushers the two out the door for the night and they return to Steve’s apartment. Steve knows Joan’s real role now, thanks to a note slipped him by Norm: Joan has been tracking down and exterminating wonderfreaks, with Steve’s unwitting aid, and Steve is next on her list. The note instructs him to escape from Joan and return to Norm’s for help. Under pressure from Steve, Joan admits to her true mission, but tells Steve (while holding him at gunpoint) that there is far more at stake than a company cover-up: “the fate of the human race” is at risk. Steve manages to escape and elude Joan, and returns to Norm’s as told.
But Norm now has a different story. He tells Steve he lied about having been McD and about having a cure: “That was just to placate Joan. Till I got you here alone.” However, he says, McD is indeed alive, and in his basement. There he shows Steve an unconscious young woman laid out on a bed. It is Steve’s long-lost ex-girlfriend Heather, who turns out to be not only one of the original wonderfreaks but also Pharmcorp’s only surviving test subject. Norm is in love with her and is keeping her alive with a life-support system.
As a Pharmcorp researcher, Norm understands the true nature of the disease, and has fostered Heather’s addiction to the point where her stored information interferes with the brain centers for consciousness and respiration. He believes that her “wad”, uniquely, is at a final stage of development, and is now capable of passing out of her entirely and into the head of the next person she “freaks” with, like a baby delivered from its mother. Norm wants Steve to kiss Heather so that Norm can have Heather back.
Steve knows that this transaction will be fatal to him, but in his current state he finds it impossible to resist. In a bizarre reunion with his old flame, he kisses the unconscious Heather, experiences something “brilliant, massive, dappled,” and, apparently, dies.
An epilogue shows us just how bizarre the reunion really is. Heather, returned to health, talks with Steve, who seems to have survived. Their dialogue is confusing until we realize that Steve’s consciousness has indeed been obliterated, and Heather now somehow occupies both bodies. Heather and “Steve” corner Joan, and the “Steve’s” muscled body wrestles Joan to the ground, where he moves in to kiss her. The struggling Joan objects that “I’m not one of you” (i.e., she is one of the 95% of people who are genetically insusceptible to being “freaked”). But Steve replies, “Famous last words” (an established “Heather-ism”), and then “[gives] her all we have.” The implication is that Heather’s soul, which has already colonized Steve, is now capable of spreading to Joan and every person on Earth.
[edit] The science of “Wonderfreaks”
The “plague” in “Wonderfreaks” results from the interaction of modern pharmacology and latent primate brain circuitry. The story adduces fictional scientific studies showing that certain “instinctual” behaviors in prelinguistic primates are in fact learned via information transfer from one brain to another. This neurological basis for telepathy was lost when language evolved (it is postulated that the telepathic availability of linguistic abstractions was maladaptively overwhelming). However, the telepathic circuitry survives beneath its newly-evolved inhibitory layer in 5% of the human population.
Six years before the present action of “Wonderfreaks”, a pharmaceutical company, Pharmcorp, conducted initial human testing of a new Ritalin-like compound known only as PHC-9037. The drug had proven safe and effective in lower animals, but caused selective neuronal destruction in higher brain circuitry in four of the 80 test subjects. This re-enabled the telepathic capability, unbeknownst to the victims and to Pharmcorp. These four subjects, the first creatures in biological history to possess the potent combination of telepathy and language, became the first four “wonderfreaks.”
A wonderfreak spreads the “disease” (which is not an infectious process) to another person if the target is one of the 5% of humans still carrying the latent telepathic circuitry, if the two are libidinally attracted, and if their crania come into close approximation while so attracted (e.g., by kissing). This triggers the rapid mutual exchange of abstract knowledge between the two. The process is pleasurable and addictive. Both participants retain their prior knowledge and gain more, and each soon aches to share his enlarged “wad” of information with another person. Attempting to “freak” with a prior partner is ineffective, presumably because one already has all of that partner’s information.
To facilitate effective connections with new partners, wonderfreaks work to adopt sexually desirable characteristics (a muscular physique, breast implants, etc.). Bisexuals have a competitive advantage due to their more inclusive “limbic map.” The ever-enlarging store of information eventually interferes with normal brain function and survival behavior, and the urge to “feed” the growing wad becomes practically impossible. Withdrawal induces despair and suicide, the inevitable end of a wonderfreak. (The one exception is the character Heather, who is kept alive artificially.)
[edit] Allusions
As may be expected in a story about the pathological accumulation of human culture, “Wonderfreaks” is rich in both literary and popular-culture allusions. The two most important sources are Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” and Dante’s Divine Comedy, especially the Inferno.
Although the mythological Ulysses (Odysseus) is a beleaguered warrior overcoming obstacles on his voyage home, Tennyson’s poem portrays this voyage as driven by Ulysses’ unquenchable thirst for new experience. Both depictions find obvious application to “Wonderfreaks”: in searching for McD, Steve pursues a quest to return “home” to health, while foremost among his obstacles is his own disease-induced thirst for knowledge. At least three quotations from “Ulysses” are aptly placed throughout the story, and its epigraph (“Life piled on life/Were all too little”), also taken from Tennyson’s poem, points to its apocalyptic ending.
The Divine Comedy is explicitly invoked when Joan proposes in Section 3 that Steve serve as Virgil to her Dante, guiding her through Steve’s “wonderworld” (underworld). “I didn’t mention that my own Commedia Divina was looking seriously abridged,” Steve presciently tells us: “just the descent into hell.” Indeed, Wildt’s narrative is divided into nine sections, each more dire than the last, probably meant to mirror Dante’s nine circles of Hell. (This excludes the epilogue and the isolated and ironically redemptive final paragraph, which may well represent Purgatory and Paradise, respectively.) Thematically, the central passage of the entire story is Steve’s rumination in Section 6 about Dante’s encounter with Ulysses in Canto XXVI of the Inferno. However, this passage is more than just the intersection of Dantean and Tennysonian themes; it also anchors a wide-ranging network of symbols at work throughout “Wonderfreaks” (see "Symbols", below).
Other sources quoted or alluded to in “Wonderfreaks” include Virgil’s Eclogues, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty”, Dylan Thomas’s “The Force That Through The Green Fuse Drives The Flower”, Nicholson Baker’s Vox, George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, the movies My Fair Lady, The Lion King, Casablanca, Heathers, and Belle of the Nineties, Pink Floyd’s song "Dogs", Sir Mix-A-Lot’s song “I Want A Freak”, The Doors' song "Love Street", and Gilbert Shelton’s comic-book series The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.
[edit] Symbols
A sophisticated symbolic infrastructure, unusually complex for a short story, is perhaps the most significant artistic achievement of “Wonderfreaks” and an apt illustration of Stephen Sessions’s observation that “many [of Wildt’s] short stories are really ten- or fifteen-thousand-word novels.” Flame, hell, heat, light, and stars (considered as both radiant light sources and as celestial bodies per se) combine in a circular chain of symbols and metaphors which heightens the story’s themes of isolation and the yearning to connect. Examples of these symbols include:
- Steve thinks back (Section 6) to the aftermath of an idyllic adolescent tryst with Heather in which he despairs of ever knowing what a “girl orgasm” feels like. “Deep inside we’re all the same,” Heather answers, but Steve compares the mutual isolation of two people, even lovers, to the impossible gulf of interstellar space separating two stars. “All I can do is… admire you,” he says. “All I see is your old light.”
- In Section 9, when Steve fights the urge to kiss the comatose Heather on her bed, he says: “[Norm] was a distant yammering. The white-hot girl in front of me was the center of my collapsing universe.” (If people are like isolated stars, then this imminent Big Crunch, or closing-in of all stars on one place, portends the “collapse” of all humanity into one soul at story’s end.)
- The wonderfreak seeks the accretion of all facts in the universe into one place: his head. His vision is violet-tinged right after a satisfying “fix”, and red- or orange-tinged when in withdrawal. These colors correspond to the violet-shift and red-shift of starlight in collapsing and expanding universes as described by Edwin Hubble. Violet thus represents integration, and red, disintegration, both in cosmology and in the mind of the freak.
- If red is disintegration and pain, then the Inferno motif for Steve’s progressive addiction as a descent into (red-flamed) hell is especially apt.
- The story ends literally in flames, as well. Joan tries to destroy Norm’s hideout with a Molotov cocktail, which does incinerate Norm. But Steve, bathed in firelight, manages to kiss Heather and awaken her; together they escape and watch Norm’s house burn in the night. The “freaking” of Joan outside the house is also illuminated in orange light.
- Finally, Steve’s citation in Section 6 of Inferno, Canto XXVI, connects this chain of linked symbols back to its beginning. In that passage, Steve’s two literary forebears, Ulysses and Dante, meet (see “Allusions” above). Ulysses appears to Dante as nothing more than a voice enclosed in flame. The restless sailor tells how he urged his men to sail one more voyage “behind the Sun” and “not… deny [themselves] the experience”, and how they then met their ends, “as pleased an Other.” The oceangoing Ulysses now desired to make a star-voyage and to approach the Sun. Similarly, Steve longs to close the interstellar gap between himself and Heather, approach her “star”, and lose himself romantically in another person – a desire which is, of course, ironically fulfilled.
[edit] Notes
[edit] Blue’s Clues
The theme of a Ulysses-like search for knowledge in “Wonderfreaks” is apparently buttressed by quest allusions from another, unlikely, source: the Nickelodeon children’s TV show “Blue’s Clues”, whose episodes follow a set pattern involving the discovery of clues to the identity of a missing or unknown object. (Observation due to K. Helm.)
- The protagonist of “Wonderfreaks” is known only as “Steve”; “Blue’s Clues” was originally hosted by Steve Burns, known on-air only by his first name.
- “Blue’s Clues” also features Steve’s animated dog, Blue; in Section 3 of “Wonderfreaks”, Steve says he had a dog but it left him.
- The dramatis personae of “Blue’s Clues” also include animated salt and pepper shakers with faces; as Steve experiences post-“fix” euphoria in a restaurant (Section 5), “the salt and pepper shakers seemed to smile.”
- Finally, the Steve of “Blue’s Clues” unfailingly wears tan slacks and a rugby shirt of alternating dark and light green stripes. In Section 6 of “Wonderfreaks”, Joan asks Steve, “Don’t you ever change that green shirt?...It’s your third day, Steve,” and in the epilogue, the Heatherized Steve looks at himself in the mirror and sees “rugby shirt, brown slacks, etc.”
[edit] Surnames
Regarding the names of scientific researchers cited in the Pharmcorp memo Joan reads to Steve (Section 8), “Al-Aaraaf” is also the title of a poem by Edgar Allan Poe; “Drayton and Ridenhour” are also the surnames of Flava Flav and Chuck D, respectively, of the rap group Public Enemy; and “Patton and Spruance” are also surnames of members of the band Mr. Bungle.
[edit] Headline text
THIS PAGE SUX OUT LOUD!
[edit] Numbers
McD lives at 7734 Pilkington Avenue. The number 7734, rendered in a calculator-type font and read upside down, looks like the word “hELL”. The number in the drug name “PHC-9037”, however, lacks any apparent significance.
