Dreamer of Dune (54 page)

Now he had completed nearly all of the wishes on my mother's list. But he still had not purchased a house on Mercer Island, near me. With this in mind, he asked permission to stay in our Mercer Island home while we were in Hawaii, and from that base of operations he began to look for his own place nearby. Since we were living in his place at Kawaloa, this seemed like an appropriate
quid pro quo
.

One morning while I was writing, Sheila Hrast telephoned from the caretaker's house to tell me that a beautiful blue lily, one of my mother's favorite flowers, was in bloom in the upper garden. She said it was a rare occasion, and that the delicate petals, now full in the coolness of morning, would soon wilt in direct sunlight.

I hurried up the hill with a camera.

U
PON RETURNING
from Hawaii in late June, Jan and I lunched with my father at a small sandwich shop. He and Theresa were living in an apartment now, but were in the process of purchasing a house on Mercer Island. He was fighting an apparent case of stomach flu, and had visited the doctor that morning. Whatever he had was hanging on tenaciously, though he was feeling better than the week before.

The following weekend, Dad stopped by my house with the
Man of Two Worlds
manuscript, prepared on his word processor system. We spent two hours going over 319 pages that he had completed.
^*
Then he left them with me for editing and rewriting. The title
Man of Two Lives
kept going through his mind, he said, but I wasn't enthusiastic about it. I suggested
Man of Two Visions
as an alternative, mentioning, however, that one of the characters in his unpublished
Circle Times
manuscript was an Indian named Two Visions. He rejected that title, saying he tried to avoid Latin-rooted words, especially in titles. Given a choice between Latin-and Germanic-based words, he said to choose Germanic, since it was more closely allied with English.

He complimented me on two passages I had written in
Man of Two Worlds
, one involving the headquarters of the French Foreign Legion and the other about a character dying and melting into the superheated soil of Venus. Another passage I had written, involving a giant spider, had technical problems. Dad said a spider wouldn't scale up, since it couldn't support great weight without a skeleton. We would rewrite the scene with this in mind.

My father had been working on
Man of Two Worlds
in my old office at the insurance agency, by arrangement with my former boss, Hal Cook. Hal's fiancée, Jeanne Ringgenberg, was a realtor, and she was handling the purchase of the Mercer Island house. Because of all their help, Dad wanted to dedicate the book to them. I concurred.

As I reviewed the first 210 pages of the
Man of Two Worlds
material my father had given me, I found it fairly clean and surprisingly in line with what I had already written. In a number of places, however, Dad inserted words I either didn't understand or had never seen before. When reading his work I always kept a dictionary handy.

On June 30, 1985, the day after my birthday, Dad and I worked on
Man of Two Worlds
at my house for two hours. It was going well, and he concurred with most of the changes I suggested. The major bone of contention surrounded our feminine protagonist, Nishi D'Amato. In Dad's rewrite, he had her aggressively pursuing our protagonist, Lutt Hanson, Jr., to the point where I felt it was out of her character. She was, I told him, a virgin, and would know of Lutt's reputation as a womanizer. In the end, Dad came around to my way of thinking, except he still wanted Nishi to be highly interested in Lutt's money.

We also argued over a wild scene he wrote involving the French Foreign Legion going from Venus to Earth in order to protect the honor of a solitary woman, Nishi. I thought it was too far-fetched, and said this would deplete forces the Legion needed for military engagements on Venus. But Dad said the Legion would do this for honor. He mentioned an actual historical incident involving besieged Legionnaires in the desert. A hundred men were trapped, but for honor they still sent out a squad of ten men to retrieve the bodies of six fallen comrades. We reached a compromise. In our story, Legionnaires would perform the mission, but with only a small force.

Dad said he had to delay his Himalayan expedition for a year, until the spring of 1987. The Nepal government was edgy about having foreign journalists in the country, and he didn't want to go in under false colors. “I've enlisted the aid of Sir Edmund Hillary,” he said.

Around this time, Bill Ransom told me he wrote three chapters of
The Ascension Factor
, didn't feel good about them and rewrote them almost entirely. He also said this collaboration would be the first of the three in which neither he nor my father were experiencing a personal crisis. Bill had been in the throes of a marital breakup during the writing of
The Jesus Incident
, and Mom had been seriously ill when
The Lazarus Effect
was written.

Unfortunately, Bill spoke too soon.

The Mercer Island house transaction closed in the second week of July 1985, and Dad and Theresa were able to move in. We made the move a family affair. It was an unusual one-story home, with metal siding and a huge vaulted dome in the middle of the structure that gave it, perhaps appropriately, the appearance of a flying saucer. My father, true to form, had extensive remodeling plans, and enlisted the help of Jan to do the interior decorating. In this endeavor, Jan would meet with him and Theresa regularly to determine what would best suit their needs and tastes.

It was a hot day, and toward the end of it when the moving was nearly complete, we saw Dad sitting on a chair in his study, staring blankly at unopened boxes all around him. I thought he was just tired, but he said he was still having trouble with his stomach, and thought it was either an enzyme problem involving milk products or chemical poisoning from a tainted California watermelon he had eaten. (There had been a recent watermelon recall.)

Two days later I was visiting my father, standing with him beneath a carport in front of his house. He had a Band-Aid on the vein of one arm and said he had been in for a complete medical checkup. “They gave me an EKG,” he said cheerily, “a blood test, everything. The doctor even held two fingers up next to one of my ears, looked through the other ear and saw the fingers!”

A short while afterward he held both hands in front of himself, palms open, and exclaimed, “Don't touch me, nurse! I'm sterile!” And he laughed boisterously.

On the morning of Friday, July 12, 1985, Dad dropped off pages he had printed through number 432, for my review. He wore white tennis shoes, blue jeans and a dark blue Gore-Tex coat, open at the front to reveal a gray and blue Ralph Lauren polo shirt. Today, as he often did recently, he wore a dark gray Irish cap with a brim all the way around. Without his luxuriant beard, he looked old. His skin seemed thinner and more wrinkled, with age spots on his hands. I recalled a time only a dozen years earlier when he was fifty-two and a woman had commented that he looked young enough to be my brother.

I never thought of him as old before my mother died, but afterward he seemed to age with frightening rapidity. His short-term memory became increasingly bad, although typically he could recall events vividly from half a century before. Despite the recent travails of his life and the diminishment of the familiar burly man in the beard, he still walked briskly wherever he went, with a youthful spring in his step.

As we sat in my family room, Dad estimated our book would reach six hundred typed pages, leaving us around a third to go. We discussed what he called “seeds” or “loaded guns” in the story. These were dispersed throughout the early pages to be used later. A character trait, for example, that might come in handy later to solve a crisis. Or the beginnings of a problem that would ultimately have to be resolved.

Overall, despite occasional mild disagreements over the course of the story, we worked smoothly together. We shared many fine and memorable times, when his study or mine was filled with laughter. In the process we put together some wildly hilarious scenes.

In the midst of all the activity around Dad and the book we were writing, I never really got to know his new wife. She and I acknowledged one another politely—but then one or the other of us rushed off alone with Dad to do this or that. I knew Theresa had an interest in popular music, because I heard it on the stereo system as I came in the door. And she showed special attention to Margaux, giving her several children's books. Theresa had a passion for books, though she had been forced to leave her job in that industry in order to be with Dad. He said she spoke of wanting to collect rare books.

Most of the
Man of Two Worlds
sessions were at my father's house, in a study he set up in a small room at the rear. He had a rustic black desk on one wall, with a single bookshelf holding books about Nepal and mountain climbing, along with the
Dune
movie clapboard. Along the opposite wall were his word processor and printer, and to the left of that was a closet with an immense fire safe inside. A brass lamp stood on a shelf over the word processor. On the floor by the window sat the framed list of national bestsellers from earlier in the year, showing
Dune
as number one.

He would sit in front of his Compaq computer, with its black lettering on a light green screen, and I, not knowing how to use a computer at the time, sat in a chair to his left with notes on my lap. The dot-matrix printer was set up in front of me, with a large box of tractor-feed computer paper beneath it on the floor.

He couldn't seem to beat the stomach problem. I heard it making noises as we sat together—a growling, squeezing sound—and sometimes he complained about it.

We were frequently interrupted by telephone calls. One came in from comedian Tommy Smothers, calling from Petaluma, California. The men had met in the past year, and while I waited, they spoke of getting together in Hawaii or in Australia, both destinations on a trip Dad was planning to take after our book was completed. The conversation was witty and jovial.

Another call came in from Warner Recordings, who wanted to do a six-hour cassette covering, in abbreviated form, the stories in all six
Dune
books. Dad was interested, but said he didn't have time to do the script. They spoke of hiring another writer for that task. Dad's literary agent was suggesting the creation of a special book to go along with the recordings—presenting shorter versions of the stories—and Dad and I kicked around the possibility of doing it together. Other calls came in from foreign literary and film agents, and from reporters wanting to interview him, and always he took time out to handle whatever they wanted with great patience.

In one of the telephone interviews, with a Salt Lake City newspaper reporter, my father said, “I always feel a little funny during these interviews. I was on the other side of them for so many years, asking the questions.” Dad mentioned our collaboration to the reporter, saying he thought it would be published in the spring of 1986.

Many of the interruptions involved construction work that was going on around us—questions from contractors or from Jan, who was redecorating the entire interior of the house, section by section, with new carpet, marble, tile, countertops, window treatments, appliances and fixtures. Electrically operated shades were being installed over the insides of the glass dome, at great expense.

The home had many roof leaks when Dad bought it, so reroofing was one of the first priorities. Still, after the new roof was finished he worried, and during the first heavy rainfall he checked every room, luckily finding no problems. “That night,” he told me later, “it rained cats…” He thought for moment, and his eyes twinkled. “…and
cats
. A dog wouldn't go out on a night like that.”

By the third week of July, we were on a roll with
Man of Two Worlds
. Dad agreed to delete a number of his passages that I didn't like, and he went along with my suggested substitutions. He concurred with almost all of my recommendations, but said I was too expository on occasion, that I should leave more to the imagination of the reader. We went over characterizations carefully, fine-combing each scene to make certain our people acted within their motivations, with actions that advanced the plot. Much of the material we reviewed was his first-draft work, and I was impressed by the quality—especially considering the rapid pace at which he wrote and the fact that he wasn't feeling well.

Incorporating his material, I typed an outline of all the scenes, which I kept handy. Dad was impressed at the way I used it to access scenes we needed to find. Very often my supposedly primitive method was faster than the search function on the computer.

Sometimes Dad and I did role-playing games to draw out characters, seeing how they might react to the situations in which we placed them. The dialogue went back and forth, and when we liked the way it was going, we wrote it down.

At the end of July 1985, when we were not quite finished, he had to go to a writing seminar in Brianhead, Utah, where he and Bill Ransom were teaching. We planned to finish the book upon their return, before Dad and Theresa left on August 12 for a month-long trip to Hawaii, Australia and Hong Kong.

On August 6, the day after Dad returned from Utah, we resumed work on
Man of Two Worlds
. His stomach continued to make growling noises, and he took occasional drinks of a thick, chalky liquid to settle it, complaining about the bad taste. He admitted he was in considerable intestinal pain and was taking high-potency painkiller medication, which worried me.

Thursday, August 8, 1985, was our longest day. We tended the printer and made corrections through the end
of the book
. During a break, he shared a hard-to-find Echt Paulaner beer with me, his last bottle. He wore a navy blue pullover shirt and blue jeans, but in the evening changed into a regal red velvet robe. His glasses had black rims, and as he looked through their lenses that night at the green-illuminated computer screen his head shook a little from side to side…the constant, apparently involuntary motion I had noticed previously, perhaps from fatigue.

When we were still at it past midnight, I reflected on how wonderful it was to be working beside my father, this great and learned man. I watched him leaning over the computer screen, punching buttons to cut words from a paragraph. Whenever we added material, he tried to find somewhere on the page where he could cut, so that the page numbering would not be altered. I was amazed at the way virtually any paragraph could be cut, without harming the quality of the writing. He felt this process actually improved the writing.