Carrion Comfort Read Free Page A

sixteen and twenty hours a day on
Carrion Comfort
. Jane would come in to play on the floor of the study to be close to me, if she could find a bare spot on the floor of the tiny room. Karen would say good night to me at ten or eleven P.M. , knowing that I would be working another four or five hours into the quiet night. Every day Arleen would bring back typed pages of the next-to-final-draft, minus the last few hundred pages I was still writing, and I’d scribble more revisions on them and send them back to her while I continued to write the new pages longhand. It was exhausting chaos. It was madness. I loved it.
    Karen and I were concerned about the expense of hiring Arleen as a typist, but we reassured ourselves. That $12,500 half of the payment upon signing was a fortune. And half of the other $12,500 would be ours upon acceptance, the final $6,250 upon publication of the hardcover early in 1987. So what if I had to pay the entire first half of the advance out in typewriter purchase, typist’s fees, and magic markers? We had a book to finish!
    Late that summer, I finished
Carrion Comfort
. One thousand five hundred and thirty-four pages. The last I’d heard from James Frenkel and Bluejay weeks and weeks before, when I’d told him the final length of the opus, was—“That’s long, but don’t worry. We can handle it in one book.” (Frenkel hadn’t read a page of it, but he liked the verbal updates on the story.)
    In the last days of my theoretical summer vacation before I went back to the eighty-to-hundred hours a week APEX teaching, I was spending days and nights madly typing up the last draft of some chapters. Arleen— much more speedily— typed up other chapters I gave her. We finished the day before school started again. I took the day off and went up to our town’s little public swimming pool with Karen and Jane. Lying in the end-of-summer sunlight (I was as pale as a grub), I looked around at the other families and swimmers and thought
This— these few hours
—
is my summer vacation.
    It had been worth it.
    Just as I was ready to send
Carrion Comfort
to Frenkel, I learned two things: my first novel,
Song of Kali
, had been nominated as one of the six finalists for the World Fantasy Award. And Bluejay Books had gone bankrupt.
    “When shall we three meet again . . . ?” asked one of the three witches or Wyrd Sisters in Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
. The witch might have been talking about the three major parts of the human brain.
    Decades ago, Paul MacLean, then chief of the Laboratory of Brain Evolution and Behavior of the National Institute of Mental Health, forwarded his theory of the human “triune brain.” The theory has been contested, debated, confirmed, and denied, but the essential anatomic and evolutionary facts of it are clear enough:
    Our brains evolved over hundreds of millions of years, through a multitude of earlier species, and consist today of three major elements— the most recent and advanced and outward-lying neocortex, which we share (in size and near complexity) with certain advanced primates and whales and dolphins; the limbic system—so-called because there lies the control of our limbs among other things— which we share with all other mammals and partially with reptiles; and— most deeply buried— the reptilian complex, also called the R-complex, which evolved hundreds of millions of years ago and was
all
that the brains of early reptiles and dinosaurs had to work with.
    Imagine a modern iPod that had to be built around (and depend upon) an old Commodore 64 that, in turn, had to be built around and depend upon (in all its actions and computations) a rusty abacus with only a few dull (but absolutely imperative) beads on its wires.
    The R-complex reptile brain concerns itself with territoriality, with ritual and repetition, with fight or flight decisions, with rage, with violence, with aggression, and with hierarchy.
    Always with hierarchy.
    Carl Sagan reminded us that the term