“Potion” came to me in a dream.
The dream involved some corporate bureaucrat telling me I needed to drink some liquid in a glass in front of me. There was a distinctly unwholesome aspect to his talk, where I almost felt like I was being bribed. There was some talk about money, some haggling over salaries, and that kind of thing. I was keeping a dream journal at the time, and this dream in particular struck me as especially good for a short story.
The story as it turned out is not the same as the dream. The conspiratorial atmosphere, the existence of a shadow organization that runs the world, and the implication that our narrator has made a lot of effort to get here–this was all added later. Mostly in order to give some emotional meaning and stakes to the image of the flask full of something that might be just water.
As soon as I started drafting, it became obvious to me that the protagonist should be female. It made things a little more interesting, a little more fraught with unsavory implications. A male bureaucrat pushing a male interviewee through a compliance ritual is a little bit unsettling. Make the interviewee female and things become disturbing.
So what is this story really about?
Temptation, you could say. The fascination with evil and the rationalizations that allow people to do it. The little acts of submission, against integrity, that eventually bind people into evil systems of power. The lurking suspicion that some dark secret lies hidden behind all this world's transient appearances.
When arranging the pieces of The Invisible Woman and Other Stories, I eventually hit on the idea of structuring the opening along the lines of the book of Genesis. With “Creation” we have the creation of the universe, and with “The New Arrivals” we explicitly see the Serpent planning its revenge against God. And whatever else “Potion” may be, on some level it's a story of Eve being tempted in the Garden of Eden.
There is a sense of the biblical Fall in this story. The sense of succumbing to an ultimate evil that ought to be resisted. That's one reason why the evil Organization in the story is quite so extreme–inhuman, even anti-human. The project the characters discuss in this story is very nearly as purely evil as the one the Serpent was embarking on in “The New Arrivals.” This increases the stakes and draws the abstract notion of evil down into concrete (or at least contemporary) terms.
The protagonist of this story is not Eve, but we can call her Eve. And to ask extent we could look at it as a story about what motivates Eve in bringing about the Fall. To an extent, “Potion” is a story about the luster and allure of evil for the sake of evil.
Which was more than I was attempting at the time of writing, and if we're looking into Eve’s motives the story fails to express them adequately. Her motives are not universal, and they are not depicted in a way that will make them explicable to an unsympathetic reader.
Looking back on “Potion” at this remove, it's a flawed but gripping tale. At the very least it anticipates some of the mind games I'm attempting to capture in some of my more current work. I don't regret writing it, which might be the most we can ever say about our writing.
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The Invisible Woman and Other Stories is available on Amazon.
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