Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker almost always had a cold this time of year. She caught colds like other people … well, do something both easy and unpleasant. Falling off a log. Something like that.

One year, she was especially hooked on Bartles & James Wine Coolers (anyone remember those?) They soothed her throat, got her a little tipsy, tasted good. Man, she loved those sugary teenager drinks! Then we found out that something in the wine made her sinuses overactive, which meant she had been making her colds worse while she swigged them … but Kage loved candy booze, and was always running into side effects like that. I switched her to hot toddies and at least they didn’t make her colds worse. The advantage is not that they cure you, of course – alcoholic drinks don’t do that, kids – just that you feel, if not better, at least less.

Last year, though, she was totally cold-free! Of course, she’d had flu and pneumonia shots in the fall – people on chemo and radiation  get them early, to try and compensate for their cold-cocked immune responses – but we expected it to sneak up on her anyway. Maybe not the dreaded Swine Flu, but even an ordinary little rinovirus could have had its way with her. Her lymphatic system was like the wall at Helm’s Deep after the suicide orc gets done.

Kage said she had expected to catch everything under the sun – we’d already learned that having cancer did not mean you got a free pass from all the lesser inconveniences of life. Funny, but you really do rather expect that – there’s a feeling , among the medical staff as well as the patients, that, Hey, I can’t have a yeast infection/a cold sore/a headache/a hangnail!  I have cancer! And sometimes, it’s true, the massive amounts of “kill everything” they give you do eliminate a lot of small time contendahs. More often, though, you just catch things you never dreamed were out there – Cenozoic life forms that have been hanging around for millions of year waiting for the human immune system get drunk on duty.

In this, though, Kage got lucky. No cold. And if you think she did not appreciate that – well, you’ve just never been sick enough to find out how grateful you can be for the elimination of even a tiny discomfort, that’s all. And as Kage observed, “After 57 years, you do get tired of blowing your nose all winter.”

Kage’s annual colds had always been exaserbated, at least emotionally, by the fact that I did not catch them. Oh, no one is immune, of course; but I usually go two or three years without a sniffle. I just don’t get colds. Kage found it especially unfair since, prior to my heart attack two years ago, I had smoked since my mid-20’s: not cigarettes (vile things) but a clay pipe, a dudeen. And I never got colds. I stopped smoking the day of my heart attack, but I still didn’t catch any colds. It bugged the hell out of Kage.

Well, now she is avenged. The last year has dealt a fairly major blow to my stamina and immune system, and I have become prey to sinus infections. Kimberly catches them as frequently as Kage did, and my defenses are lying in a corner in a swoon … so today I am sniffling and sneezing and I can feel my skull filling with mucous. I feel like there is a transporter in my head connected to the Planet of the Space Slugs and set permanently to “Energize”. Every time I glance in the mirror my nose and eyes are  glowing redder … and you know what? Those paper tissues with lotion on them are bull. Greasy dish towels would work just as well. And they’d be bigger.

As you can tell, Dear Readers, this has also done wonders for my frame of mind and sparkling personality. I do not possess the blithe and childlike faith that let Kage indulge in the placebo effects of hot toddies. And since I now take a dozen different pills a day for assorted cardiac problems, most decongestants are forbidden to me (they raise blood pressure). The few I can take do not work a lot, although they do make me aimlessly nervous and hyperactive … I drip a bit less, but I also gibber a lot more.

Harry likes that. Parrots are always in favour of gibbering. Kage herself would just have retired to her chair at this point, and watched something goofy with Harry. So I guess I will too.

Kage Baker believed firmly in her dreams. She had good reason – they often came true. Of course, a large part of that was that she forced them to come true. She pursued them, fed them, researched them, and did everything in her power to bring about the condition of which she had dreamed. And she often succeeded.

One night she dreamed of a goddess holding a child in Her arms; the child was a little boy, whose feet were burned. The goddess told her the child needed a salve of elderberries for the burn, and that they grew on Catalina Island.

Kage woke determined to get there. Despite being native Angelinos, neither of us had ever been to Catalina. On clear days in the Hollywood Hills, it was a vague blue blur on the horizon (on un-clear days, that blue blur was the Pacific Design Center) – we knew it was 26 miles across the sea, and that was about it. And this was waaaay pre-Internet. But there were phones and library books and bus schedules and even ads in the LA Times: it didn’t take long for even such a feckless pair as we were to find the route.

And we went to Avalon, where many mysteries were revealed and adventures were had over the next 20 years. We did gather elderberry blossoms (on an Easter morning, from a grove at the foot of William Wrigley’s mausoleum, while ravens watched us and two baby foxes frolicked in the grass … no lie, that was what happened.) And Kage made a salve and kept it in a glass jar for the rest of her life, in case a burned baby god showed up.

What did happen was that several story ideas lodged in her head like elf shot during that first trip, story ideas that formed one of the several major plot lines of her Company series. It probably happened our first night on the Island, when we couldn’t find a hotel room, and the cops wouldn’t let us sleep in the jail (I asked; very politely too) and we ended up sleeping on the ground in a drift of eucalyptus leaves in the ruins of the Saint Catharine Hotel …

The incident of the dream is nowhere in the books. The actual consequences of the dream helped form them all. Kage was very serious about dreams.

I’m not sleeping much right now, myself. I can’t. I stay up writing and watching movies until I have to sleep or die – then I crawl into bed; it’s the only way to get my eyes to close. And when I sleep, I dream of last year. Oddly enough, I somehow manage to do this without ever getting a glimpse of Kage – man, she could haunt me and I would rejoice, but no – she’s off somewhere researching something, I bet. But I dream, as I did last year, about what we need to do, about her drug and therapies schedules, about whether we are out of soda water or chocolate syrup (egg creams were big last year). And I wake up exhausted.

This time last year – Kage simply could not manage the stairs anymore. I couldn’t find anyone to help transport her, and she had to go to therapy daily. I finally screamed for help, and all my dear friends answered at once – with food baskets (thank you, Kelly and Shannon and Giova and Neassa and Steve and Carol and Carol ….), with comforts, even with money. Steve and Carol Skold (who are saints) sent me the cash to take a room down by the seashore in a hotel on the flats – where a lady in a wheelchair could actually get to and from a car and the doctors’ offices. Neassa, on orders from her mother and my sister Kimberly, made me finally buy a microwave to I could heat food.

Kage and I were set up for the end game. We knew it, too, but thanks to all our beloved friends, we were able to make this try, at least. Kage was more comfortable, she was getting the treatment she needed, and we could hear the sea all day and night. On a day by day basis, it was pretty good.

I read to her when she was awake – her own They Might Be Gods, which had just come out. We finished the P.G. Wodehouse. I read an ancient children’s book named Coppertop to her, which she had loved since childhood and which had informed all her dreams of exotic lands and strange travels … a fan sent her a copy (Blessings on you!) and it made Kage so very happy.

That’s what I dream about – our weird little interim household there in the hotel room, with the winter rains beating on the walls. We were warm and safe. Kage was patient and hopeful. It really was not so bad, the week or so we spent there … the last in a long life of weird stopping places, but one of the nicer ones, at least.

It’s not so bad, dreaming about it.

Kage Baker hated weather like this. So do I. Nothing is getting done today … everything I write is dreck, and if I go back over what I’ve done lately I will discover it too has miraculously turned into crap. So I don’t dare look at it, y’see. Kage taught me that.

“I’m not bored,” Kage would say on days like this, leaning back in her chair and and tying knots in the end her braid. “There’s just nothing to do. Think of something for me to do.”

“You could edit that manuscript on the kitchen table.”

“No. It’s at the hateful stage. I’ll want to burn it.”

“We could play Scrabble.”

“No. You can’t spell, and Harry steals the tiles.” (Both, alas, true.)

“We could play Monopoly. You can be the top hat.”

“ Noooo …” in a long whine. And she would fall to fretfully shooting rubber bands at me, or teasing the parrot, or monologuing about a recipe she no longer had for zuppa inglese.

Today in Los Angeles, it’s dim and chilly and without distinguishing marks of any interest. At all. Whatsoever. The sky is covered with thin grey clouds that won’t rain. They’re not thick enough to provide any pretty colours or patterns, only vague beige sunlight here and there. It looks like the sun is dimming out, but it’s not scary – just depressing.

I am depressed. I would rather be in agony, in tears, than this numb and enervated state … it’s like the worst part of being 14 again. The insane passion part of that age is great (not when you’re in it, but afterwards – wow, the memories!) but the endless stage of “what-ever” is just horrid. And I am in a serious state of what-ever, without even the uncontrollable energy of adolescence to fuel me. I’d eat a lot of sugar, but … I ate it all last week. And now I’m too old and sensible to keep a stash in my desk for emergencies.

I keep letting my coffee go cold. I’m out of cream. I’ve burnt 4 pieces of toast. I had 23 pieces of junk mail this morning. The news is dreadful, and the commentary on the news is even worse. (Pardon me – I just had to go turn Judge Judy off. Self-righteous prig.) The cable stations are all showing marathons of horrible old shows like “The Green Hornet” and thrilling documentaries like “The History of Granite.” And I have almost run out of Jeff Bridges’ movies on Amazon Video On Demand.

I am going to go drink Earl Grey tea and see if I can remember where I hid the emergency Almond Roca. Then I am going to sit on the couch and read – maybe Steven King novels; ol’ Stevie always cheers me up, because nothing that bad ever happens to me. Our basement may have a slight raccoon problem, but at least there are no vampires in it.

Tomorrow: what do Channel swimmers use to grease up? In 1848?

Kage Baker was diagnosed with uterine cancer in May of 2009. Her chemo and radiation therapies started in August of that year.

The changes in our life were not great at first, as neither of these therapies is especially onerous per se. A little nausea and loss of appetite, a little more fatigue. The new tattoos and piercings for markers and chemo shunts rather amused Kage; she kept saying, “At my time of life! I’m suddenly fashionable!” We’d been working for decades on how to keep beer cold and flowing in primitive circumstances – keeping Kage’s drugs cold and her daily chemo port clean and flowing was a snap. It was all plumbing, and I’m a decent plumber. Medical hardware proved less cranky than beer taps, too.

It required a bit more forethought to get through daily life, but Kage and I were experts on improvisation! A life in historical re-enactment and live theatre doesn’t give you any cancer specific skills, but it surely does teach you to think on your feet. Her drugs required an infusion every 6 hours, round the clock; luckily, I’m a dedicated insomniac, and Kage learned to sleep right through the rituals of attaching drug bulbs to her port.

She hated the gauze coverings supplied by the tech who trained me on her round-the-clock drugs: I knitted cotton covers, all the bright colours she liked best, so she had a full wardrobe of them. When someone asked (as sometimes happened) why she wore a single leg-warmer on her upper arm, she would make up some goofy political cause for which she claimed it showed support … she did the same thing in high school, wearing a plaid scarf forbidden by the dress code. She got away with it, too.

All the therapies continued. A cane and a wheelchair were added to her accessories (we did have fun with that wheelchair … and Steve, thanks for the loan of the cane.) In November 2009, Kage had surgery for the uterine cancer.  The wound was slow to heal and prone to infections; but I made a wound care kit from one of our dozens of baskets (props again!) that could be carried anywhere; slowly, we began to beat the infection.

I don’t relate this to complain. Please realize, Dear Reader, that we felt much hope – the therapies were working, the cancer was gone! And with every clever way we found to let Kage continue her daily routines, we congratulated ourselves. It was for that last 2009 birthday that she graduated to a little HP Notebook – it fit in her neat wood and brass steampunk briefcase, and was small enough that she could use it anywhere. She called it her Buke, after one of the ubiquitous devices in her Company series. A lot of writing got done on that Buke. And a lot of movies were watched.

Kage was diagnosed with brain cancer on Christmas Day 2009. The uterine mass had metastasized.  She had  surgery on Boxing Day, and was home by Twelfth Night.  The chemo stepped up and the radiation therapy changed focus to her skull. “Great,” was her comment, “first I get a late-life Brazilian and now I’m gonna go classic punk.”

“I’ll knit you chemo caps ,” I assured her. “Or I’ll shave my head, too.”

“Knit me a pink cap and I will run you over with my wheelchair,” Kage told me most sincerely. “And I refuse to be seen in public with a bald you.”

“I’m trying to show solidarity!”

“Kiddo, I can’t summon up solidarity with a bald mushroom – which is what you will look like. Buy me pirate scarves.”  And we did, but she never had to wear them – not to hide a smooth skull, anyway. She died before her hair got thin. But she wore the scarves anyway, with elan.

This week a year ago, her headaches came back. She always been prone to them, but this was different – it felt like the one on Christmas Day, and it would not relent. I called all her doctors – they swiftly and obligingly prescribed a variety of pain killers, but none worked. Kage turned out to be allergic to oxycodone and after 5 or 6 hours of vomiting and no cessation of pain, I took her back to the ER.

Another CAT scan. Kage hated those things; she said she left like a Cuban cigar in the tube. But the painkillers there at the ER worked. So we were both calmer when the results of the next CAT scan came in.

The tumour in her cerebellum was back, in the same place and bigger than ever. Over-achiever: it took it barely a fortnight to regenerate.

Kage was too weak for more surgery – not a good idea to go opening the skull every couple of weeks. evidently. They prescribed steroids, and painkillers that worked, and a more aggressive course of radiation and chemotherapies. I browbeat the hospital into taking her to the therapy sessions every day for week, via patient transport, while the drugs had a chance to work and she stabilized a little. Twice I got to the hospital late for her transfer, and they told me she had been discharged – no, they had just lost her temporarily. It was a bad week.

A week of that and Kage was ready to go on a shooting spree – which was, in a black way, a good sign. She had more strength. Her doctors approved a return home as long as she kept up the therapies, but now the hospital had misplaced her discharge papers … I got a call from her one afternoon, telling me that the shift change was due to start in half an hour and the nurses were short-staffed due to the flu epidemic: we could sneak her out!

A crazy idea. Maybe I was not precisely in my own best mind, either. But when I got there, there was no one within 20 feet of Kage’s room. Her roommate was wearily pressing the HELP button over and over, and told me no one had answered in 45 minutes. I suspect it was longer; I had to change several necessary items for Kage before I got her into the wheelchair.

But she was manic with the glee of escaping, and her moods were always infectious. We were both giggling as we set off down the hall at a brisk but not-panicked pace. We didn’t want them to chase us … as soon as we rounded a corner, though, Kage said: “Gun it!”

And I flew down that hospital corridor, pushing Kage to the light of the day at the great glass doors, and they opened  like magic and we were OUT … I think I picked her up bodily to get her in the car.

“I am never going back there,” said Kage. That tone of voice had meant she was serious since she was a tiny child.  “I’ll do whatever I must, but no more hospitals.”

“Gotcha.”

“Screw them all,” she decided. “Let’s drive down by the beach and then go home.”

So we did. We had to call the fire department to get up those damned 14 steps, but they were lovely guys and obliged cheerfully. Small towns can be great. And so we came home, and resumed improvising life.

Kage Baker loved kaleidoscopes. Between her fondness for coloured glass and a love of symmetrical patterns, there was no way she couldn’t. And yet she didn’t own a lot of them. Usually just one, small and cheap and made of cardboard, the sort you win at a Halloween festival. In fact, a lot of hers came from Halloween festivals.

She greatly admired the huge fancy ones that you see in expensive stores and catalogs, though. She just never got one. I regret that quite a lot, now.

I always meant to get her one – in polished wood, perhaps; or better yet, brass. Kage loved polished brass. A kaleidoscope that looked like a brass telescope (one of which she did have) would have been perfect. But she always said:  No, not just now. I still have that one I got at the carnival last year … but when we went into fancy stores, she’d pore over the ones for sale there, one after the other.

Maybe, with her amazing memory, she remembered all the patterns she saw. I wouldn’t find it unbelievable. Or maybe she just liked keeping them as chance encounters – a sudden unexpected glimpse, a few minutes’ peering into the faceted mysteries. Because, believe me, her coming across the keepsakes in her desk was usually purely chance, and what came to hand depended on the continental drift across the desktop. She was as likely to find a notebook from high school as a kaleidoscope. Or a wind-up brain. Three mismatched earrings (none of them hers). A Hugo pin.

The best thing about the little cheap cardboard ones, I think, was that they eventually came apart. Sooner or later, Kage would spill a Coke or a cuppa coffee; or the lid would come off one of the jars full of sea water she always kept around. Cardboard kaleidoscopes, of course, dissolve … they can also be dissected, to see how they work. Kage dissected or autopsied many over the years.

What amazed her was not the mechanism (she figured out the angled mirrors as soon as she saw them) but the mundane objects that made the competed patterns: beads and random bits of broken glass. Paper clips. Flower petals, dried beans, buttons. Coloured sugar – that one was most grotesquely invaded by ants, some of which then died and became part of the pattern themselves. (Very karmic, that.) Torn bits of coloured paper.

While a fancy kaleidoscope can have fancy ingredients – and it is rather cool if you know you are looking at specially designed millefleur beads – it’s no less beautiful if the pattern is made of old postage stamps. The one with stamps was rather neat, in fact, as sometimes the pattern would yield a mouth or an eye, repeated a dozen times like a detail from delirium. Kage was deeply moved to see  scraps transformed into ordered beauty. She said it was spiritually fulfilling.

Maybe that was also why she never wanted a fancy kaleidoscope of her own. Then it would have been a toy, a personal indulgence,  instead of a bolt of geometric lightning. It wouldn’t have been a miracle.

And Kage dealt in miracles.

Kage Baker had the most fabulous and unique skill, as I have previously mentioned, of making things happen. Or maybe it was a magnetic quality of some sort; some capacity as a nexus-generator – her gaze on a subject, her interest in a place or a song or an unusual food would summon it out of the aether. Deus plasmator, that was Kage. Causal static would resolve into access for her.

It seems to work a little in reverse, too … she loved Nepenthe Restaurant, near Big Sur, with all her heart; we went there several times a year, and she checked its deskside live cam every day. She liked to see the tourists out there, the happy crowds after dark during Halloween and Christmas and New Year’s, all light and life and raised wine glasses on that lit deck above the Pacific. But I check it every day, and you know what? There has been hardly anyone there this year.

There were strange lights in the oak woods beyond it; there were mysterious figures of shadow and spectral light glimpsed crouched beside the railing in the twilight (I have photographs …). There were coloured umbrellas and happy luncheon crowds and dinner parties. Now it’s mostly empty and dark, and I haven’t seen a shadow man in months.

I hope it’s just resting. I wouldn’t want the place to suffer from the lack of Kage’s actintic gaze on it. And there a few unexpected miracles of coincidence – just the sort she always seemed to find – suddenly popping up this past week of the New Year …

Beach glass, for instance. I just found a reference on http://boingboing.net to a guy who has found a way to mass-produce DIY beach glass – he wants to make a garden path for his house, and wants lots of it in a hurry. He does it in an honest way, too, with water and sand and an old low-tech cement mixer – look it up here, and see how he’s doing it:

http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/beachglass

I love Turkish Delight. While it’s not especially hard to find, getting really good Turkish Delight is not easy. Applets and Cotlets, while delicious, are just not the same – they taste so … not exotic. There is no flavour of Byzantium in them. It’s probably the blueberries – a more gingham and denim fruit does not exist. There are Middle Eastern markets all over Los Angeles (especially in Glendale and Burbank) and they do carry it – but, surprise! It’s all made in Turkey and imported. And though it is wrapped up and sealed, it’s – well, not fresh.

But! Now there is a family in Glendale making it right freaking there! Only blocks from where I live! They’re neighbors, for heaven’s sake! Check this out:

http://www.norylokum.com

Kage would be delighted. And I, personally, would like to think that maybe I can still crank a little juice out of her laser attention, and get it focused on a few choice projects. Beach glass and Turkish delight are not a bad start.

Kage Baker always held that the holiday (whatever holiday was currently “It”) wasn’t over until the leftovers were gone. For instance, you might be munching cold spareribs for a couple days after 4th of July, while setting off the last bat-killer rockets in the back yard because you’ve used up all the big fireworks two days before … and everyone knows Halloween candy lasts for days, and Easter eggs will hang around until they go zombie and try to kill you.

Right now, Christmas is just about over even by this generous standard. The roast beef was revivified a couple of times by new Yorkshire puddings (pro tip, Dear Readers – muffin top pans make wonderful Yorkshire puddings; Sur Le Table – www.SurLaTable.com – carries them) and devoured on Boxing Day and the like. The New Year’s ham bone ended up in stock, which glorified last night’s Tuscan bean soup; the last shredded ham will go to pea soup this weekend. We’ve had re-warmed pudding (Yorkshire and sweet); we’ve had leftover mashed potatoes, Breakfast of Champions. The hoppin’ John was eaten down to the last money-symbolic black eyed pea.

Corgis don’t eat black eyed peas, by the way; they lick off the butter and spit them out apologetically. Parrots do eat them. Obviously,this year, the parrot will have money and the dog will be poor … we’re still trying to work out the deep meaning of this omen. Petomancy is not an exact science.

The Christmas sweeties last a little longer – chocolate keeps better than beef – but even there I am down to the foil chocolate Coins of The World, which always go last because they are so hard to unwrap. (Never save the foil gold coins for a desperate late-night binge: you’ll end up eating them foil and all when the voices get too loud.) The traditional box of See’s choccies is down to the peanut clusters and the damned molasses chips. Kimberly and I ate the last two marzipan piglet heads this morning – mmmMMM, marzipan pigs; the only thing better is sugar mousies.

At the moment, though, the weather and time are making it plain the Christmas holidays are, yes, over. Even in this neighborhood by Griffith Park – which is church-rich and wildly culturally diverse – the lights came down yestreday when the Epiphany was past. The day is cool and grey, without being  decently freezing or even wet; just soft and sleepy and chilly, clouds gathering and then absent-mindedly wandering away before they do anything of interest. We’ve  got all the packages ordered for Christmas, even the late ones. All we’re waiting for now is textbooks for the new quarter, which is just plain depressing.

Lunch was Thai food. It was wonderfully good Thai food – one of the joys of moving back to L.A. has been decent Thai food again – but when you are ordering in Asian food, you know the holidays are over. There is just no other excuse for pad thai or crab rice when you’re only a week past the New Year.

Time to resume writing on a dedicated basis again, and not just the daily catharsis of this blog. I can’t get chocolate on my notes because I ate it all (the chocolate) so I have no excuses at all. Time to pick up the silk threads of the Ladies of Nell Gwynne’s adventures,  and write a slam-bam ending to Who We Did On Our Summer Holidays.

Kage would understand the procrastination so far; but now that the sweets have all been eaten, it’s time to get back to work.

Kage Baker looked up once a few years ago on 12th Night and commented, inapropos:
“Twelfth Night – 12 letters and only 2 vowels. Ought to be Welsh.”

She could say things like that, being descended from some Welsh folks. When you are yourself cognisant with a given culture and know you have a fair share of the stereotypical eccentricities attached to it, you have some leeway. Kage partook primarily of the verbosity for which the Welsh are known  by the rest of the UK (that Monty Python skit in the mine is closer to reality than you can imagine); and, of course, she sang.

(I got a lot of this, too …)

“Twelfth Night” is a funny pair of words, though. They’re old words, none of your Johnny-come-lately Gallic or Asian borowings – like colour or catsup. They’re both cognates of Old English out of Old Germanic via Proto-IndoEuropean. These are words that came along out of the depths of the plains with the recurring tides of horse-riding, wheel-using, metal-smelting folks who overran Europe so long ago that no one is quite sure who they were. But Kage’s own red hair and pale skin and maybe even her left-handedness probably came with them.

“Twelfth Night” partakes of the Celtic tradition of counting the year by nights, as well. That is probably one of the reasons so many of the holidays we inherited from the British include Eves – the festivities start on the night before, the holiday begins at sunset or midnight. If you think this is not so, consider how many of them you yourself have been celebrating  just since the Autumnal Equinox rolled around …. Halloween, Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve. And now, if you are any one of several sorts of Northern or Middle European-descended people, Twelfth Night. The Epiphany. Little (or Armenian or Orthodox or Russian) Christmas. Partridge in a pear tree day, for heaven’s sake.

I myself get pedantic at times, just as Kage did. Hence this lecture, poised on the box that held my knitting calendar … there may not be a way to talk about Old English cognates and the like without getting verbose and scholarly, but I know I do this as well when I am upset. It’s one of my coping mechanisms. The insistence on the bon mot, the precise phrase, has always been my back-and-breast.

Twelfth Night was important to us, you see. Sometimes, in the rush of Dickens and Christmas and multiple sisters’ families to visit and all the rest of the holiday madness – this was the best quiet moment. This was the midwinter hush, the holy time in the snow, the instant where the curtains of northern light swept down to put paid to the tired, tired day. The noise of spring is not yet begun. The winter sacrifice has been made, the light has been reborn, the sun is dependably started back on His return journey. A special kind of holy quiet was always shared on Twelfth Night.

I miss it. I miss Kage. The winter equipoise and post-holiday peace are not for me this January. “This time last year” is a thought that has haunted me for the past year. I’ve often resisted it, though I have also often succumbed. But now it is growing thorns and tentacles; for the next 3 weeks it will twine close round my heart and its black blossoms will drip acid. And then this year, this ghastly year, will be at least be over.

But for now I talk too much, too long, too loudly – there are worse things I could do than indulge my genetic propensity for interminable pontificating. I think.

Kage Baker and I lived for the last 4 years in an upstairs apartment in Pismo Beach. It was a delightful eyrie, full of light and air and with a broad view of the sea. We could – and often did – see whales and dolphins sporting in the waves two blocks away, while we sat comfortably in our living room. All the Pacific danced out here, and we could see the curve of the globe under the shining water.

The building stood back from the street, with a narrow inner court; you entered a little passageway from the parking lot, and then climbed 14 stairs to our front porch. We had flowers everywhere, mostly in pots so the landlord’s gardeners knew they were not to be casually lawn-mowered … in the summer, the scent of Kage’s roses came right up like incense, and filled the living room.

We spent a blissful 4 years running up and down those stairs, and never counted them once. I had no idea how many there were, until the day I brought Kage home from the hospital after her first surgery. There were 14 of them – one straight line, no turns or landings, that rose maybe 10 feet above the garden. They were painted white and a weird Rustoleum turquoise.

I think they were imported from Hell. Certainly, Dante’s bolgias must have been separated by similar stairways. They had been a challenge when Kage came home from her hysterectomy, but she beat them. However, by the time the brain tumour showed up, many weeks into chemo and radiation – those stairs might as well have been the wall of a glacier for her.

This time last year … 12th Night Eve. Twelfth Night is a holiday we have always celebrated in our family – the actual, reallio trulio 12th Day of Christmas, the Epiphany, when the Magi finally got the GPS working and made it to Joseph and Mary’s house. Kage wanted to be home from her brain surgery by then, for a bit of leftover beef and Christmas pudding.

But those 14 stairs – we dreaded them. To get to her own bed at all, Kage had to climb them at least once. To receive chemo and radiation, she had to get down them and out of the house – to get  back home, she had to be able to get back up and in. Getting down was scary but doable, a sort of controlled crash into the wheelchair at the bottom. Getting up … was more like climbing out of Hell up the frozen body of Satan.

She was still in the hospital, but had reached the point where she was ready to just bolt out and escape – I spent most of each day there with her, talking and reading and taking dictation, to keep her obediently in her bed. Twice a day we walked through the halls and she tried to re-learn stairs. Up and down three little fake steps, one foot at a time; she tended to break into show tunes while she did it, flourishing her cane and doing the hand-jive that goes with a buck and wing. Which charmed her therapist and made both of us snicker, but wasn’t really adequate practice for our front stairs.

I kept thinking, she hasn’t had a stroke! She hasn’t forgotten how to climb stairs! She’s lost stamina and balance and just plain muscle mass: how will this help her up those 14 steps? I made constant inquiries as to where one found help in these circumstances, but met the same blank stare everywhere. Climb stairs? Well, she just has to do it, that’s all. No, no one can come transport her – it’s not safe for our ambulance drivers to carry someone up a flight of stairs, you know.

I began to have inklings of problems … But Kage wanted desperately to come home, and I was determined to get her there. She really felt she could do it, too. And when the day of blessed release came – she sang all the way home in the car, had me take the long way round so she could see her favourite vistas of hill and sea, and get a chocolate malt on the way – she made it up the first 4 or 5 stairs with fire and verve.

She made it up the next two like she was carrying me. And for the second half of the stairs, I carried her. One step at a time, because she was 4 inches taller than me and it was very hard to lift her the necessary few inches to make each next step; but if I stood on the step above with my arms about her waist, I could do it. She was very brave – her hysterectomy incision was still very tender and not quite healed – but I was hauling her up by brute force by the time we reached the top.

I had had the minimum good sense to take her wheelchair up there before we began the climb, so the rest was pretty easy. Getting her into her high, wood-framed bed would soon prove another challenge – but that day, she wanted to sit in her armchair and then lie on the fold out couch: so it was simple. In very short order she was comfortable and triumphant.

We told one another, over and over and with growing certainty, that as she got stronger the stairs would get easier. And if only she had gotten stronger, I am sure the stair would have succumbed to Kage’s fierce purpose. But they were demon stairs, and they were planning to suck the life out of her.

One of the great mercies of life is afternoons like that one last year. We watched the afternoon light on the sea, and were content.

Kage Baker never thought much of Isaac Newton. As one of the fathers of modern Western science, his is a name known and revered by most science fiction writers. But as someone whose first love was not science but history, Kage was not as impressed by his scientific achievements.

Part of that was her personal loathing for mathematics – as she used to say, of what use to her was calculus? (I know, I know – but you never argued with her, Dear Reader.) And Newton was certainly not objective about it, was he? she asked – citing all those arguments over Leibniz. She understood the celebrity phenomenon naturally, daughter of Hollywood that she was; she saw Newton as a man obsessed with fame rather than a seeker after impartial Truth.

She admired Galileo and Kepler more, saying that both those gentlemen showed the exemplary capability of learning from their mistakes and correcting their theories. Kepler’s bold abandonment of perfect solids impressed her with its devotion to observational fact. Galileo bet his life on his observations. And there is no devotee – of science or history – who does not count Eppur Si Muove as one of the deathless battle cries against blind conformism. Well, battle mutters …

Today is Isaac Newton’s birthday, of course. Which I recall because, in the “A Year Ago Today” game, I remember spending the better portion of this day discussing him with Kage. She was about ready to made a break from the hospital; she was bored and argumentative. We spent all day arguing over the history of science; which to some extent at least proves the value of a classical education …

Kage knew perfectly well that Newton’s studies in the laws of motion had revolutionized science, but maintained that heliocentrism was on the outs anyway – people had been re-discovering it over and over for the last 3 millennia. The story of the apple was a pretty fairy tale. His experiments in optics were just pretty. And then there were the Biblical hermeneutics (“Bibliomancy!”) and the life-long devotion to alchemy …

In vain did I plead Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica , planetary motion, reflecting telescopes, prisms and binomials. ” ‘Shoulders of giants’,” Kage gleefully pointed out.

What Kage most admired about Newton was his career as the Master of the Royal Mint. That took a man of his hands to accomplish, and a shrewd one at that: practical work. Hero of Alexandria, tinkerer and miracle-worker supreme, was her favourite artificer of all time, closely followed by da Vinci. Newton’s solution’s to the problem of England’s almost total lack of usable currency was swift, clever, insightful and – best of all – it worked. It was as close as he ever got, she said, to the successful production of the Philosopher’s Stone: better, because he made gold out of nothing at all.

And a lot of Newton’s solution is working to this modern day; meaning that the wistful alchemist’s answer to slipping, dipping and coin clipping has continued to work right up to the point of currency becoming obsolete anyway. Which is a pretty good record, really.

This may all seem like a willfully eccentric interpretation of the great Newton’s career (and some of it undoubtedly was), but it was also the way Kage, personally, explored ideas. The basic process starts with What if … Kage’s preferred method was to go on from there and imagine a whole world based on that single speculation. She liked to get into the idea and inhabit the universe necessarily created by its existence.

Not all of this ever, ever made it into a story: but for even the briefest vision, Kage worked out the physical laws and world it would need to survive. It’s one of the big basic writer tricks. She needed to know how it all worked in order to write about it. Sometimes that takes research into what is already known. And sometimes, you have to make up what no one has yet imagined clearly.

And I bet Newton would have understood that perfectly.

Tomorrow: the Circles of Hell are all separated by stairs