Three stories. Four Works. One fire.

Charles Tuomi writes a short story entitled “you then asia” in 2003. 

One of his favorite short stories is “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” by Ursula K. Le Guin. 

Charles submits “you then asia” to ChiZine, an online dark fantasy magazine, for consideration. The editor at the time, Paul G. Tremblay, accepts the story, recommending a few small edits, and it is published in the July 2003 issue, number 17. It gets listed with hundreds of other stories as an Honorable Mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Seventeenth Edition, in 2004.

Charles and Paul meet in person for the first time a decade and a half later, during a Halloween Horror Fiction Festival held at the Haverhill Public Library in Haverhill, MA. Paul remembers the plot of “you then asia” and they briefly discuss it. Paul also signs multiple copies of his books for Charles, inserting a particularly cryptic, ominous yet fun-sounding warning inside the cover of The Disappearance at Devil’s Rock.

Charles never mentions "The Ones Who Walk Away," Ursula K. Le Guin, or anything else that inspired “you then asia” to Paul and never publicly shares that information, either.

Paul’s novel The Cabin at the End of the World is published in 2018. It wins the Bram Stoker Award for Novel in 2019.

The Cabin at the End of the World is made into the film Knock at the Cabin by director M. Night Shyalaman in 2023. The film grosses $54 million and is nominated for Best Horror at the 6th Hollywood Critics Association Midseason Film Awards, splashing Charles Tuomi’s sister, another girl Charles fell in puppy love with, the personality and behavior of light, and Le Guin's critique of apathy all over the screen in the process, among many other things.

Light traveled from Ursula to Charles to Paul to M. Night (and many others, one can be sure) like a divine virus, and this is the story of how.

I'll start with the least known of the four works, my short story "you then asia," then begin uncovering the strange and magical ways that story DNA and my own autobiography leaked into the other stories. It's complicated, and as of time of writing this intro, not nearly fully explicated, and some of the documents are in something like a rough draft form, but if you enjoy storytelling you might enjoy exploring the content here.

None of what follows here should be meant to imply a claim by the author of this translation (me, Tuomi) to know anything about the conscious intent of Paul G. Tremblay, M. Night Shyalaman or anyone else involved with the publishing of Mr. Tremblay’s novel or the making of Knock at the Cabin.

This is a description of a close reading of four stories by someone with inside information on three of them (again, me). 

Japanese adult film star Maria Ozawa is encoded into the short story "you then asia" by the name of the child who is born almost dead (Maria), the word "asia" in the story's title, and various references to The Wizard of Oz.

More specifically, via references to news stories, the story encodes a video featuring Maria Ozawa in which she plays a newscaster, reading from sheets of paper in front of her, while one man after the next approaches her and stands on a chair, or a step stool and just dumps his stuff all over her. Maria's face, her hair, her eyes, her mouth, her body, her clothes, are all covered in goop by the end of the video. Like an abominable snow lady.

Sometimes this feels to me like how we have treated Mother Earth. 

Sometimes this feels to me like how the world treats open-handed giving people as well (like I try to be, with mixed success). 

Taking thoughtlessly works until the goose that lays the golden eggs is so trashed and wounded from the takers' mistreatment that she can no longer lay them. Shel Silverstein's Giving Tree story is an excellent depiction of the character of Mother Nature and the way humans have regarded her.

The apocalypse in "you then asia" involves nature changing the way it works. Sort of like the uprising of the Ents (ancient trees) against Isengard in The Lord of the Rings. 

Death stops doing its job. People stop dying. The results are unpleasant.

The core idea of this type of apocalypse stems from a quote in a H.P. Lovecraft story, "The Nameless City."

In the story, the quote is attributed to Lovecraft's fictional "mad poet" Abdul Alhazred (the "Mad Genius Behind the Immortality Epidemic" in "you then asia"). My best friend in elementary school had a neon poster hanging in his parent's basement with this quote on it. It may have been a Judas Priest poster, at least that is how I remember it.

This is the quote:

"That is not dead which can eternal lie, 

and with strange aeons even death may die."

I believe the quote can be read as being hopeful, and in other essays in this series I've explained how I used a "creative" understanding of Zeno's Paradox to explore how the first part of the sentence might work in practice in "you then asia" for nice things. Then I explored the social consequences of that happening.

"you then asia" covers the same thematic territory as my primary reading of Ursula K. Le Guin's short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas": apathy and selfishness and materialism. Her story delves into a lot of other things, as well, but those are ones on which I focused.

Omelas in Le Guin's tale is a city. No longer a "nameless" one now, via "you then asia". Because silence on topics of import hurts. As James Baldwin said:

"Not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed that is not..."

[Disclaimer: click the link below and you will see what Maria Ozawa looks like at the end of that video via an image on Reddit]

..."faced."