Decomposer in Chief
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Excerpt
“Hey, Roberts, the botanist is here.”
Tanaka is a mycologist, not a botanist, but he doesn’t bother with a correction. He’s still woozy from his first ride in a helicopter. All the way down from Boston he whistled his favorite Vivaldi concerto to distract himself from the machine’s manic jostling and swooping. This may be why his graduate student kept taking off her headset and shaking out her hair. She never said a thing about his whistling, though. She isn’t a complainer. He’s eighty-five percent certain her name is Jill, but he’s never been good with names, especially not women’s names, and especially not younger, attractive women’s names. There’s a good chance he made “Jill” up. Whatever her name is, she’s pretty in a button-nosed, girl-next-door sort of way, and respectful of his needs. He wishes more women were like Jill. He wishes all women were like Jill.
“Doctor. Welcome.” A tall, dark-suited federal agent extends her hand. Tanaka can’t see her eyes behind her sunglasses. “I’m Agent Roberts.”
Tanaka suspects the Secret Service called him in because of last month’s interview with the Globe, during which he’d allowed a female reporter with elfin features and a lopsided grin to draw him into embarrassingly wild speculations about the unusual crop of mycelia that were, and still are, turning up in unexpected places across the Eastern Seaboard: parking garages, shopping malls, even a television studio.
Lindsey Godfrey Eccles
Lindsey Godfrey Eccles lives on an island in Puget Sound, spending as much time as she can in the woods and the water and occasionally practicing law. Her fiction has appeared in Ninth Letter and Uncanny, among other places.
Patrick Ryan on “Decomposer in Chief”
Recently, I rewatched both versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers—the original 1956 version and the 1978 remake. Both films are very serious in tone. That makes sense, because they’re about an invasion of aliens who grow exact replicas of people—replicas who plan to take over the planet. Not exactly the stuff of comedy. By contrast, when I read Lindsey Godfrey Eccles’s “Decomposer in Chief,” a story about a fungi takeover, what most struck me most about it was its humor.
The story opens just outside the door of the Oval Office. Tanaka, a hapless mycologist, has been summoned by the powers-that-be (and the Secret Service) to deal with a mysterious development: the President, apparently, has been replaced by a fungal entity that looks exactly like him. That fungal entity is lying on the floor beneath a couch and is unconscious (and possibly non-sentient). The Secret Service agents are confounded, and they are begrudgingly dependent on Tanaka’s scientific assessment of the situation. Tanaka’s assistant, meanwhile, is acting a little strangely and might not be who she says she is.
For its weighty subject matter (the potential devastation of humanity), “Decomposer in Chief” is a brisk and funny story, fueled, in part, by the shortcomings of our mycologist. Lindsey Godfrey Eccles walks a fine tightrope of tone here, establishing the high stakes of the premise while slyly zeroing in on the clumsiness of humanity. The result is a surprisingly light-hearted read we’re happy to unleash upon the world.
Q&A by Patrick Ryan
- PR: Where did you get the idea for this story?
- LGE: I like to work with prompts, and the original idea for this story came from two distinct calls for submissions on the themes of “botanist” and “blight.” I’ve always been fascinated with fungi, and I started to wonder what a “blight” that formed on a human body might look like. I was also musing over why it might be very urgent for a “botanist” to understand such a phenomenon. And then I got the idea of a scientific researcher being called to a crime scene…
- PR: How long did it take you to finish a draft you were happy with?
- LGE: This story came together unusually quickly for me. I first started playing with the abovementioned prompts last October, and by early May I had a draft I felt comfortable submitting to One Story. So, just over six months!
- PR: Do you consider “Decomposer in Chief” to be, first and foremost, a work of speculative fiction, science fiction, humor, horror, satire, or none of the above? How did you regard it when you embarked on the first draft?
- LGE: Most of what I write could be considered speculative fiction in one way or another, so that’s a given for me. But “Decomposer in Chief” is different in that, early on, I realized I wanted to make the reader laugh out loud if I could, and I wanted that light-heartedness to draw the reader along as much as any other story element. So, in a way, I think of it as humor. It was a departure and a stretch, for me.
- PR: Is this story part of a cycle of related stories, or is this (so far) your only foray into fungi-takeover fiction?
- LGE: This question made me laugh out loud. At the moment this is a standalone story, but I like the idea of taking it farther. Think of all the people and places and things that could fall to fungal invasion! The possibilities are truly endless.
- PR: The story steps forward in time, at one point, and the setting makes a significant shift. Was it always the plan to write the story this way? Were you at all tempted to a) take the story further into the future than it goes, or b) end it sooner?
- LGE: Early drafts of the story closed with the end of the first part, but as time went on, I grew more and more curious about what happened to Dr. Tanaka after he left the Oval Office. I’ve never structured a story like this before, where the first half consists of one long set piece and the second half meditates on the repercussions of that initial scene. I wasn’t sure it would work, but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to give it a try.
- PR: “Decomposer in Chief” is one of the most original, unusual stories I’ve read in a while. Was there anything that surprised you, in the writing of it? Also, how different is the story you ended up with from the story you first envisioned?
- LGE: Thank you! The humorous tone of the first part of the story appeared suddenly and without warning. Once I recognized it, I leaned into it, and I was delighted to see where it took me. In the past, when I’ve wanted to inject a bit of humor into a story, I’ve often had to go through an embarrassingly deliberate process of listing jokes, choosing the best ones, and figuring out how to fit them in. Here the humor grew more organically, so to speak. And then in the second, perhaps more serious part of the story, I decided to set the humor to the side (but not entirely) and let the characters’ disappointments and regrets take center stage. It ended up being a much more grownup story than I ever thought it might be when I started.
- PR: What are you working on now?
- LGE: I always seem to have an unwieldy pile of half-imagined projects demanding my attention like poorly trained puppies, but lately I’ve been devoting a big chunk of my time to a near-future science-fiction novel set in an exclusive high-desert golf resort that isn’t at all what it seems. The main character is more good-natured than Dr. Tanaka, but just as hapless, and the tone is very much in the spirit of “Decomposer in Chief.”
- PR: What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
- LGE: I had the great good fortune to take a workshop with Lauren Groff several years ago at Seattle’s Hugo House. Among many other excellent bits of writing wisdom, she told us that “words are seducers.” I sat right next to her for the session, and she noticed that we were both using the same type of composition notebook. Then she said that she writes all of her first drafts longhand in just such a notebook, and when she’s done she throws it straight into the trash. I was, and am, in bewildered awe of the courage and confidence that procedure suggests, but I’ve come to understand it as a more useful version of the oft-repeated advice to kill your darlings. I think what she was saying, or at least what I’ve taken from it, is that the story comes first, and the words serve the story. Get the story right, and then figure out how best to tell it. Don’t ever be afraid to throw it all away and start over, and don’t give up until it’s right.
