In your story in this week’s issue, “The Relive Box,” you imagine a device that would allow us to return to and relive (virtually) any moment in our past. Where did the idea come from?
I’m tempted to say, “From a diseased mind occupied by an adult who once had the diseased mind of a child,” but that wouldn’t really be in the spirit of things—though, of course, it’s true. I suppose a more helpful answer would be to point out that I am an inventor, as well as a novelist and short-storyista, and so am constantly working on such devices in my basement lab. This is merely one of them. Other things I’m tinkering with: a ray that will obliterate all TV transmission forever; a spray-paint-like product that will restore not only the finish of your car but the engine and the interior, too (with a single application); and a remote-control device that will eliminate parking problems in congested cities because, with a mere click, it will reduce your vehicle to the size of a breadbox, albeit one very, very heavy breadbox.
If there were a marketable relive box, do you think that society would fall apart in the way that this particular family unit does?
Of course, I am meditating here on the addictive qualities of video gaming in general, and what it’s done to our society, as, for instance, exemplified by my narrator, Wes’s, musings on his daughter’s loss of an active social life. (What, no haunting the malls in girl packs anymore?) With Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the like, not to mention pizza delivery and the drones Amazon is planning to employ to ship us things, we just, as a society, don’t seem to get out much anymore.
Wes is reliving his past relationships in order to understand why they went wrong—why his wife left him for another man. Do you think he reaches any form of understanding?
Without tipping my hand—we must let the reader decide such things—I will say that an addiction does tend to close one’s eyes. And mind.
“The Relive Box” is set in an alternate version of the present. Do you think that version will exist in the near future?
Please see my response to question No. 1 in this regard. I plan to start shipping the prototype by the end of the month.
If you had a relive box, what date would you go to first?
I think I’d go back to this morning and reminisce about breakfast. And yet, what a temptation to relive your dead parents, your childhood schoolmates, your teachers, the golden, endless summers of the eight-year-old. There was a moment in elementary school, maybe fifth or sixth grade, that seems frozen in time for me. It was the first day of summer vacation. I’d already played ball all morning and was now in the woods, sitting up in a tree, idly gnawing at an apple and revelling in the fact that I had the whole, infinite summer before me, but then somebody snapped his cosmic fingers and not only was the summer gone but a whole lifetime, too.
You recently finished writing a new novel. Can you tell us anything about it? Does it mine similar territory?
“The Relive Box” is a reaction, I suppose, to the novel, which is realistic, set contemporaneously, and deals with violence in American society, specifically with regard to the shooters out there. It’s called “The Harder They Come,” and it occupies the opposite pole from the novel that preceded it, “San Miguel,” which was told from a female point of view and explored the hermetic existence of three women on an island. If “San Miguel” was contemplative, this one should get your pulse pounding. Really pounding.
