Men wrote the fantasy and science fiction of my youth. I close my eyes and I’m a kid at B. Dalton’s bookstore, rushing past twirling displays packed with paperbacks of Dune, Star Wars, 2001: A Space Odyssey. I dismissed those books as uninteresting, as action and gadgets for boys to dream over. How I didn’t know that the last thing you should do was cede the future.

Black women have every reason to practice imagination in a country that counted us as the means, and the substance, of wealth. We were supposed to be machines, but we had minds of our own: we tended with warm cloths the foreheads of men who dreamt we’d slaughter them in their sleep. Whenever I see androids gone amok, or aliens on the march, I can’t help but see our American history of slavery getting the work-through. In the fever dreams of American overlords – and our pop culture – we’ve always been the robots just out of master’s control.

And the fantasy. We labored in bedrooms or wherever they caught us, raped us. We stayed on their minds as ideals of hot, compliant sex that’s always hot and compliant, our bodies abundantly endowed. If we weren’t the Hottentot Venus, we’re the club scene from Total Recall, when the woman turns and she has three breasts.

Overlord art fills my mind but I keep writing the recent past, this world of knotted hair we must comb and keep combing. How as a Black girl, or woman, I never felt encouraged to write the future. I could be the George Lucas. I could be the Harrison Ford. Right? Or some Black goddess creative I conjure. I could make up my whole damn world like a proper Afro-futurist, but there’s these cages I’m still trying to escape first.

2.

Consider the Star Wars trilogy and later films. This George Lucas empire flooded our senses with imagery of American heroism as sexy resistance. People of color wage resistance daily in the United States. Americans have maintained global empire through markets, warmongering and military bases abroad. But hear the stirring John Williams Star Wars score and even if you do think about who’s zooming who, you root for the rebels. Mark Hamill as star. Harrison Ford as maverick. Billy Dee repping and looking good. Carrie Fisher shining and never making me think for a moment I could inhabit her role, or write something like it.

I don’t blame Carrie or George. I didn’t see entry.

But I saw lunch boxes and action figures. Halloween costumes and video games. Over forty years of film and marketing that you don’t have to know all about it. So many ways stories become culture, ideas like salt in our water.

Now, for something different but similar: Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner, based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. In 1982, no one took me to see Blade Runner and I didn’t stumble into it on HBO as I did other R-rated movies. But as a teen, I saw Blade Runner sold around me on t-shirts of cool boys at the mall, or as inspiration for heavy metal band White Zombie’s “More Human Than Human,” the song that made sure we all knew the Tyrell Corp’s line for hawking “replicants” so human the naked eye couldn’t tell them from the real thing. I saw film clips and what a mood: no rah rah America, instead, Los Angeles plunged into perpetual rainy night with signs of Japanese hegemony all around, especially on electronic billboards stretched long down skyscrapers.

Harrison Ford returned to the screen as the star and maverick Rick Deckard, a “blade runner” tasked with “retiring” rebel replicants – or, androids no longer docile, androids fighting to live their lives and passing as human to do so. White readers can go a long while without thinking about “passing” but readers of color know that for some of us, there could be the chance to pretend to be white, and to do so to escape the violence of racism. How is Blade Runner not a 21st century passing narrative with flying cars and mood music? Race is not an announced topic in this movie, but that’s all I see in Japanizing of Los Angeles, or, more crucially for this essay, the blade runner vs replicant dynamic. How reviewer Robert Barringer noted the paucity of actual Black people in “future” Los Angeles in his 1997 essay “Blade Runner: Skinjobs, Humans and Racial Coding.” What’s erased and what’s centered must all be determined when you’re writing the future.

I recently read the Blade Runner source novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Early in the story, author Philip K. Dick imagined the United Nations encouraging humans to leave the war-poisoned land and settle space colonies. Dick had his version of the UN promise to prospective colonizers humanoid robots who would do whatever they pleased. The appeal made actual references to antebellum days. From page 17 of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Del Rey, 1968):

The TV set shouted, “—duplicates the halcyon days of the pre-Civil War Southern states! Either as body servants or tireless field hands, the custom-tailored humanoid robot—designed specifically for YOUR UNIQUE NEEDS, FOR YOU AND YOU ALONE—given to you on your arrival absolutely free, equipped fully, as specified by you before your departure from Earth; this loyal, trouble-free companion in the greatest, boldest adventure contrived by man in modern history will provide—“ It continued on and on.

What I think is coded in movies is made plain in prose. What am I to do with science fiction as slave patrols with better tech, when even the human organizations with the best intentions – the United Nations – are portrayed as reverting back to the promise and pleasure of oppression, the kind that’s supposed to be OK because the servants are contrived as subhuman?

Consider this film sequence: rebel slave killer Rick Deckard forcing himself on the pretty replicant Rachael as a love scene’s saxophone plays. We know that story all too well, how human status seems to exist primarily to ensure supply of lower status women for the sexual gratification of those with power. How the book adds another level of oppression-play: the world-threatening android company is not “Tyrell” but “Rosen,” tapping into anti-Semitic tropes of subversive Jewish people bent on world domination. I watch actors Harrison Ford and Sean Young and I can’t help but think of actors Ralph Fiennes and Embeth Davidtz in that “Schindler’s List” scene where the Nazi officer lusts for and attacks the Jewish Auschwitz prisoner he’s forced to be his home maid. Scenes of violence and rape confused with love that burn our senses and remain with us decades later.

If your future is your fantasy fulfillment, where does that leave us?

3.

Like generations of Black people before me, I piece together meaning out of what I find or was is fed to me in my country.

4.

When I was nine years old I watched MTV and the local afterschool video show. Rock bands sang songs in four minute scenarios. Sometimes, a Michael Jackson extravaganza like “Thriller.” Sometimes David Lee Roth vamping and kicking air like “Jump.” Or, a story so gripping that nine-year old me watched it beginning to end anytime I saw the video on TV: “Owner of a Lonely Heart” by Yes.

The eagle soars over June-time English greenbelt. Enter: guitar. That opening riff. A young man, buzz cut, business suit, walking in a crowd, a crowd of other people like him, going to work, going to work, the cogs in the machine. The camera pulls up and you see the bridge over that storied river, the Thames.

This is Cold War time. “Owner of a Lonely Heart” will peak—literally—in 1984. At age 9, I will not have read George Orwell’s classic 1984. I won’t get what “Orwellian” means. But the fear of the state, the overreaching authority with a billion tentacles, the fear of being controlled by a system of men, women, and laws you cannot escape, I either know this, for maybe this is the worst of family life when you’re a child, or, with each flash to worms, to a tarantula, to a snake, primal fears were made real to my body. The desperation, too.

Our man, played by English actor Danny Webb, walks through the morning rush crowd. He’s done everything, visibly, to fit in. Suit. Tie. Briefcase. Cadence that matches the others when on each side of him, men in black hats and trenchcoats grab his arms and yank him from the flow, drag walk his resisting body to a behemoth stone building. The kind of building built stone, by stone, by human hands, yet the creation is cold and spills our blood if we’re thrown against its walls.

Inside, the state nightmare. Men and women, solemn, waiting. They’ve sat waiting for years. A baby cries and it doesn’t matter. The black-hatted men pull our man through and he resists and we cut to the shower scene, a snake wrapped around his neck, choking his ability to speak, breathe. Cut to a woman with uncaring eyes, the look of the concentration camp guard. The brutal bureaucracy, or, because this is England, the Nanny State. The worst kind of woman: indifferent to your fate.

Our man is led straight past the supplicants to the judge. Cut to more primal fear scenes. A black cat jumps on him. Water he raises to his face is not water but worms. In every cut to scene, the body in danger. Every fear coming true. The black-hatted men lead him to the system’s judgment, and the only known outcomes for convicts are death and pain.

The white man judge gives a hard nod. Decision made. But our man resists the sentence. He pulls away and they push him through rows of women typists hardening the bureaucracy with each key stroke. He is pushed into the elevator. Down. Down he goes. Doors open and he’s trapped in the cellar where chains are forged. A big blond bully man rules this lair with his welding—iron sparking red. The enslaved working class you could say but right now, our man must beat off the bully who would kill him or manacle him. He fights him off and ascends the ladder.

Flight after flight he must climb and he does because next shot and he’s reached the roof. Sunlight. Spin around and we’re dizzy. We’re high above the London skyline, though from this view, so close to freedom atop this office skyscraper, this could be Los Angeles, Sydney, Johannesburg.

Our man is surrounded. He looks to each corner and a business-suit man appears. Members of the band Yes, yes, but each, in turn, morphs into and out of the primal fear creatures. Our man turns a circle and yes, no escape, except for the sky. He is surrounded. He runs, running through the approaching men as the song itself crescendos. He leaps—

Release! Sonic peak at the point of jump. His body is not magic, it is only flesh and it falls. But look up—the eagle soars! We know that the spirit lives, that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. We hear the lyric “don’t deceive your free will at all” repeated.

I feel a truth conveyed: there are fates worse than death.

I sing the song for years, hum it over in my mind. Owner of a lonely heart… sounds like a man grieving heartbreak, but the romantic kind. What does a broken heart have to do with this four-minute movie? I accept the dissonance, refuse to worry about it, love both song and video for years. Though the dissonance will prick me from time to time.

5.

In 1997, deep in Hilary term at Hertford College, University of Oxford, and I sat typing in the Octagon’s computer lab. My alma mater awarded me a scholarship and I’d read politics for one year. I had an old Mac computer back home, but not there in England. If I needed to type a paper or check email I went to the Octagon.

This computer lab seated maybe 10 graduate students at a time, in an octagon formation, matching the shape of the room. The room was never crowded, yet the company was fascinating. The Indian man who told us stories of his father, a high-ranking official in the Indian military. The Uzbeck woman studying business who knew communism as a child and now headed for McKinsey. The Englishman from Birmingham who played Peter Gabriel songs and looked like he sang for Echo & The Bunnymen.

Then, my fellow Americans. The charismatic Black man track star who was a Marshall Scholar. The white Jewish man who shared a name with a famous economist and idolized Norway. Or was it Sweden? This was 25 years ago but I remember he admired how a Scandinavian people came together to support socialist policies. The young white male policy wonk who beat me for both Rhodes and Truman scholarships in successive cohorts and would later become mayor of Flint, Michigan, in office when the state forced the water supply change.

Sometimes J, the young Englishman I dated, would join me. He lived and studied at another Oxford college. Together, we talked. All of us. Assignments could wait.

One day, J tells us all he’s been thinking about philosopher Robert Nozick’s thought experiment “The Experience Machine” and wondered what we thought.

From Nozick’s “The Experience Machine” in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974):

Suppose there was an experience machine that could give you any experience you desire. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life’s experiences?

Several guys were all in. Women were silent, or I just don’t remember their responses because it’s the men I remember, and their yeah, why not? I had why nots for them, though I only thought the reasons, my rebuttal a gathering storm. Watch the men surge the door into a pre-programmed world, I thought, a door I would not enter. Was it their age – their young twenties – that kept them imagining the possibilities, and not novel-writing, come on Dr. Nozick, but the sexual possibilities, the chance to preprogram sex for a lifetime? I swore I watched ultra-gifted and talented boys throw free will overboard if that meant avoiding the work and heartbreak of relationships. I don’t know how much any of those young men thought about their future families or children beyond avoiding them with birth control.

Maybe that’s why J rejected the Experience Machine. He was a devout Catholic. The sacraments meant something to him. We had sacred obligations on this plane, said the church. How would we serve God, how could we “be fruitful and multiply,” when our body was in a tank and our mind riding someone else’s roller coaster?

Or, if we entered this life with any purpose beyond, or included with, church teachings, with an amount of ground to be covered before death, before assessment that determines our next life, that determines if we’ve achieved release of human existence and finally Nirvana, an experience machine would be a stall. As if you’re supposed to walk 10,000 miles and you don’t move an inch.

If we hear New York City’s WCBS radio edit of “Owner of a Lonely Heart” we miss the last two stanzas—they’ve been cut. The radio edit ends with the last “owner of a lonely heart” chorus. The problem with this, beyond pain for purists, is that we miss the part when the eagle flies again, or, as I interpret the imagery, the spirit is free. We miss “don’t deceive your free will at all…just receive it, just receive it.” Or, as I’ve come to decide, we miss the major lyrics of meaning in the song.

For decades I believed Yes sang of rejecting romantic love. Owner of a lonely heart...much better than the owner of a broken heart. I thought they were advising men, and anyone else, to be their own islands. Better to be lonely than broken by women. Yet, what would that mean? More loneliness I thought. Or, relationships where the man wielded heavy control. And if that wasn’t possible, retreats into pornography, prostitution, sexbots– sexual situations with supposed fixed outcomes. Like the Experience Machine.

I’ve searched for intimacy and romantic love for a long time and I have found it. Over the years I’ve known loneliness and stretches of depression. Three times I’ve suffered catastrophe in love. The first, when my father died and I was six years old. The second, when I blew up my first marriage. The third, when I fell for a bona fide sociopath. I finally found love with a man that has lasted. We created a child together. A life together. We survive each other’s differences and similarities, and have created equilibrium. Fights and decisions not to fight anymore. Doing what we can to care for each other, though the actions can feel small and never enough.

Then my phone flashes a notification. I click from this page to another. Then another. Then I stay on Twitter for 30 minutes. An hour. Facebook. Instagram. The world I see through my screens which is real, yes, but it is not this hard brick world, the wooden table where I sit. The world that nourishes my body, the one that spills my blood if I’m hit by a RAV4 while crossing the street while staring at my phone. The world I leave to finish work on this essay. How people could lay in the same bed together and choose the narcotic call of the screen.

It’s 2019 and I think about Nozick’s thought experiment. We don’t float in tanks alone. We float in tanks connected.

6.

In the 1999 film The Matrix, Neo, a young man played by Keanu Reeves, looking very much like Danny Webb with a dark buzz cut, is recruited to resist alien overlords that keep humans in tanks to use our bodies for electricity. While we float in tanks our minds our stimulated by the “Matrix”: an elaborate computer program that creates the illusion of life as usual. In the illusion, the aliens look like US Secret Service agents. Morpheus, played by Lawrence Fishburne, is the leader of a rebel group freed of the Matrix; he thinks Neo is “the one” that’s been prophesied to lead the resistance. Morpheus offers Neo the choice of red pill or blue pill. Blue pill, and its back to “life” simulated while his body is mined. The red pill frees him of the Matrix, but he’s a rebel insurgent trying to survive. Constant stress. Constant threat of death. Gruel for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We understand why someone might go blue. Stay red, though, and you get to have the strong and beautiful Trinity, played by Carrie-Anne Moss, as comrade-in-arms.

There will even be a rooftop scene where an agent snatches the body of a SWAT police responder and Neo and the alien agent will evade each other’s bullets in epic fashion. Neo gets nicked and falls. The agent has his gun in this face. “Only human” he says before Trinity comes and blows a bullet in the agent’s brain. Did I mention that The Matrix is one of my all-time favorite films? Not for the violence. Despite the violence. I love The Matrix for the heroes’ attempts to escape all that is totalitarian in this life. To escape is to suffer and to slog but it is possible. I just won’t see this kind of story as film until I’m in my twenties.

Unless you count the “Owner of a Lonely Heart” video.

Years later, I get it. Owner of a lonely heart…better than owner of a broken heart. Romantic love is just a cover. The plausible deniability one needs if attacking power. Dig deeper and this song is about stepping away from the crowd. This song is about leaving the Matrix. You might be lonely. But your heart isn’t crushed by the machine. You escape the tank.

But people swallow the blue pill. Or, they sit in a beautiful octagon room in Oxford, England and joke about taking it. Maybe not all of them. Maybe just for five minutes. But I remember excitement. A hell yesness. A desire to remain in the thought experiment and really feel the possibilities.

I want to be Trinity, Morpheus, Neo. But why, I ask myself, can’t I just fantasize another world? What harm could it be to slip into the Experience Machine for just five minutes? I try to do it. I try to imagine getting everything I want:

Maybe the Einstein life, world-renowned brilliance, genuflection in every classroom. No. Who cares if it’s not real. Or a Supermodel’s life, one of the women in George Michael’s “Freedom ‘90” video, the ultimate standard of beauty, each walk a claiming. What’s the point if it’s not happening? Or, greed is a goddess and I rule the corporation. The Pentagon. Spacecraft near Jupiter. And sex. So much sex. The sex you want with the people you want. Just one long movie and it’s you but it’s not you it’s not really happening! But what about the dream of safety and security, where I could love anyone I wanted in peace, where everyone, I mean everyone, leaves you the fuck alone? They don’t.

Heaven alone that isn’t really heaven. To imagine children, to pretend to raise them, and then be pulled from the tank at the end and there’s no one. No one at all. Just you naked, wet, with the weakest muscles you’ve ever known as an adult. Or, you die in the tank. Aliens harvest your organs and burn the rest.

7.

If the future remains to be written, who writes it?

Identify with the master and forget what you need is no way forward. The eagle flies high over Londontown, Detroit. The radio cuts off the song. But when I’m home watching the video on YouTube, don’t deceive your free will at all is sung, repeated.

As a Black woman, I am more than the same old problem of labor wanting more than its station, of the enslaved plotting the end of enslavement. My imagination muscles may be weak but I’m refusing the tank.

Contributor Notes

Stacy Parker Le Melle is the author of Government Girl: Young and Female in the White House (HarperCollins/Ecco). Originally from Detroit, Le Melle lives in Harlem where she curates the First Person Plural Reading Series.