Tailchaser's Song (2 page)

At the beginning of the
Tailchaser’s Song
experiment, I think I was still waiting tables in one of the world’s least busy restaurants, a little place called La Cigale off the El Camino Real south of San Francisco. (It means “The Cricket.” I have no idea why it was named that.) It was a French restaurant owned and operated by Thai people—very nice people, very good cooks, but perhaps not the world’s best businessfolk. All I remember for certain is that whole nights would go by without customers. The chef, a large mustached man named Johnny, never did figure out that my name was Tad rather than Ted, so he would follow me around the place in our copious free time, doing his best Elvis imitation as he sang “Baby let me be your little Teddy Bear.” His heavy Thai accent turned “Teddy” into “Terry,” which made it even stranger.

Somewhere around this time I was also working as the graveyard shift operator for an answering service, fielding calls from distraught psychiatric patients. On occasion, when their shrinks had tired of them and refused to answer any more of their calls, I would bravely take on the therapeutic role myself, since most of them just desperately wanted to talk to someone, anyone—even an impoverished waiter. (If the AMA is reading this, however, I will deny everything in court, so don’t bother with the lawyers.) In any case, I don’t think I did any worse for these poor suffering people than their therapists did. On occasion, I would tell them about my work history, which seemed to make some of them feel better about their own lives.

While I was selling shoes, drawing soldiers’ hands (forget it, it’s a long story), peddling insurance, throwing newspapers, stacking tiles, I was always doing something more or less artistic on the side. I was in a band for a long time, I did theater, I worked as a cartoonist and illustrator, and I did a radio talk show for the entire decade of the eighties. But none of these things made any money to speak of, and I began to wonder if I was finally going to have to go to college and get a real job. Not the sort of thing I’m suited for, I’m afraid. I’m allergic to business suits, for one thing, and I can’t get up in the morning without a major electrical shock of some kind. Also, stupid people trying to manage me sends me into acute depression.

So I decided that it was time to find some other artistic thing at which not to make money.

I’m surprised that it took me so long to get around to writing. I came from one of the most bookish families you’ll ever see, and reading has always been one of the most important parts of my life. I’d written bits and pieces here and there throughout my life, some journalism in school, song lyrics, parodies of various things to amuse my friends, but had never seriously considered trying it for real. I’m not quite sure what made me change my mind, except perhaps the glum prospect of having Johnny the chef following me around for another decade singing that damn song.

The first thing I wrote was a not-too-good science fiction film script called “The Sad Machines.” I still think the title was okay, and the protagonist was sort of an early model for Simon from my Memory, Sorrow,
and
Thorn books, but otherwise it’s just as well I never tried to sell it to anyone, or even show it to anyone not bound by ties of love and kinship.

I decided I was ready to write a novel—why I thought so I have no idea, but I suppose the word “chutzpah” figures in there somewhere—and the cat-concepts I’d been playing around with seemed like a fun place to start. I’d grown up on animal stories and fantasy fiction, so it didn’t seem too far from what I knew. Later on, many people told me how clever I was to write about cats—so popular with the fantasy-reading crowd, you know—but I can honestly say that I never thought of that. It was just proximity: if my ex-wife had kept armadillos, I probably would have wound up writing
Truck-dodger’s Song
or something.

I wrote at least the first half of the book on a cursive typewriter—yes, it looked funny, but it beat the hell out of handwriting—laboring at night on the kitchen table after the various other jobs were done (I usually had more than one.) I’m not sure how long it took me to write the book all together, but it must have been about two years. I tried to bring real cat-behavior into it, but it was also very much a fantasy novel—there are even a couple of
Lord of the Rings
jokes, like the audience with Queen Sunback, a glancing parody of the hobbits meeting Galadriel. When I finished I didn’t do anything with it for some time, not because I thought it was bad, but simply because I wasn’t really sure what I was supposed to do next. Writing a book on the kitchen table was kind of like going out jogging in the evenings. Trying to sell it suddenly seemed like entering the Olympic trials. At last I made a list of publishers who were doing fantasy novels and sent it to the first name. They sent it back so quickly that I’m pretty sure when I got it back I was still waving to the mailman who’d taken the manuscript away in the first place.

The gist of their refusal was that they didn’t do “talking animal books,” although they’d make an exception for a potential bestseller which mine, they gently informed me, clearly wasn’t.

They were actually nice people, so except for the time I drove by their corporate offices and tossed a
Publishers‘ Weekly
bestseller list through their window—it was only coincidentally tied to a large brick—I have never gloated or mocked them for their tactical error.

And in actuality it was a lucky break for me, because I wound up with DAW Books, who you can see is still printing copies of the book many years later (and presumably selling them, too, or else they’re going through a very expensive charade for the sake of my self-esteem.)

The day the we-want-to-buy-your-book letter came, in January of 1985, is one of those things you never forget, right up there with weddings and the birth of children. The letter itself, signed by company founder and SF legend Donald Wollheim, is framed and hanging on the office wall across from me as I write this introduction. I was on my way out to walk my dog Gala, who was then a youthful post-pup of about two and a half years. Strolling in the hills above Stanford after getting that letter was like getting a dose of some fabulous but gentle drug, like a big breath of pure oxygen. My life was finally going the way I wanted it to. I had long since left the French restaurant behind—well, it had unceremoniously closed—but I was still doing the same kinds of jobs, so the prospect of doing something I really liked for a living was a heady one.

(Fortunately, I had no idea how stunningly unusual it is to make a living writing fiction or I might have been a little less joyful. But perhaps my ignorance actually helped me toward being a full-time writer—one of those “the bumblebee doesn’t know it can’t fly” things.) I remember events, times, things, better than I remember the feelings. I remember that neither of the two cats who had fascinated me in my maiden sharing-with-cats experience were still around when the novel was published. A sexually ambivalent cat named Mishka, who I only found out later was male, had run away from that apartment before the book was finished. Fever, our beloved orange tom (to whom the book is in part dedicated) had died a couple of years earlier, one of the last generation of cats to get lymphoma before they could vaccinate for it. His last afternoon alive, when his strength was failing and we had agreed to take him to the vet for the final shot the next day, he scratched feebly to be let out, although he had not been outside the house for days. He staggered into the front yard and sniffed a dandelion, then walked with unsteady dignity back into the house. He died that night, at home and on his own terms.

Time passes, and people are as mortal as cats, if longer-lived. I also dedicated the book to my two grandmothers. My mom’s mother, Elizabeth Anderson, only lasted a bit beyond the publication of the book. She was in her early nineties and had been through several strokes; I don’t think she was holding onto life very hard in the end. I miss her very much. More than anyone else, I wish I could show her how lucky I’ve been with my writing, what it’s brought me and where it’s taken me. She was always very proud of me, always expected great things. I don’t know that I have done anything great, but I know that my grandmother would think so (and would even if I were still throwing newspapers.) That’s what grandmothers do.

My dad’s mother, Elizabeth Evans, died a little over a year ago. She made it to ninety-nine—we should all be so lucky—and was very, very proud of the dedication in
Tailchaser’s Song.
She acquired several copies and made sure at least one of them was in her retirement home’s library at all times, where she could point out the dedication to everyone (more than once to some, I’m sure.) She lived long enough to see the birth of my first child, and told my wife Deborah and I many times that even though our little son could barely stand up yet, he was “a true wonder” and “just as clever as can be.” And that, I suppose, is what great-grandmothers do.

Even Gala, the young Golden Retriever I was walking on the day I got the letter offering to buy
Tailchaser’s Song,
has gone now. In her own way, she was just as long-lived as my grandmothers, succumbing at last at the splendid old (and, to be honest, largely immobile and highly flatulent) age of seventeen. As my British friends would say, she had a good innings.

I can remember all sorts of things and people from when I wrote the book, but as I said at the start of this, I’m not sure I can remember me. Much of the past is frozen for us, which is why it’s often such a shock to go back and visit remembered places or meet old acquaintances—it seems almost treacherous that they should have changed when we were looking the other way. But our own selves are like pearls, created by layer after layer of present laid over past until the original thing is completely hidden. (Yes, I realize that I’m likening myself to hardened oyster spit. I never claimed to be a sentimentalist.)

I do know that I will never as long as I live get over the strangeness of seeing copies of
Tailchaser’s Song
in languages I will never learn to speak, sent from countries I may never get to visit. It’s not so disconcerting with my later books—this older me is a bit more jaded about the marvels of my life—but somehow with my first book, the wonder remains. To think that the little imaginary cat who came into being on my kitchen table in that apartment has been so many places, met so many people! And through him I have met so many people myself, both directly and indirectly. It’s quite marvelous, really. For most people, what their cat gets up to only brings them into contact with the neighbors on either side.

The fact is, even when I read the book I can’t remember the person who wrote it, not really. I can remember what he did, some of the things he thought, but I can’t really remember what it felt like to be him. Which is the fascinating thing about books, as opposed to authors. That me is gone, but the book he wrote is still around. That’s worth celebrating, as far as I’m concerned.

Thank you for coming to meet me and my imaginary cat. Thanks for helping the person I was then become a generally very happy older version of himself—it could have been a lot worse. If you’re about to read this book for the first time, I hope you enjoy it.

I did. And I do.

 

—Tad Williams
April 12, 2000

For I will consider my cat ...

For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.

For this is done by wreathing his body seven times around with elegant quickness ...

For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.

For this he performs in ten degrees.

For first he looks upon his fore-paws to see if they are clean.

For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.

For thirdly he works it upon the stretch with the fore-paws extended

For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.

For fifthly he washes himself.

For sixthly he rolls upon wash.

For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted on the beat.

For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.

For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.

For tenthly he goes in quest of food . . .

For when his day’s work is done his business more properly begins.

For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary.

For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.

For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.

For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.

For he is of the tribe of Tiger.

For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger . . .

For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.

For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion . . .

For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements...

 

For he can tread to all the measures upon the music...

 

 

—Christopher Smart

In the Hour before time began, Meerclar Allniother came out of the darkness to the cold earth. She was black, and as furry as all the world come together to be fur. Meerclar banished the eternal night, and brought forth the Two.

Harar Goldeneye had eyes as hot and bright as the sun at the Hour of Smaller Shadows; he was the color of daytime, and courage, and dancing.

Fela Skydancer, his mate, was beautiful, like freedom, and clouds, and the song of travelers returned.

Goldeneye and Skydancer bore many children and raised them in the forest that covered the world at the beginnings of the Elder Days. Climbfast, Wolf-friend, Treesinger, and Brightnail, their young, were strong of tooth, sharp of eye, light of foot and straight and brave to their tail-ends.

But most strange and beautiful of all the countless children of Harar and Fela were the three Firstborn.