— Weird Fiction Review Editors

They wouldn’t allow us near the lake when they hauled the bodies out. We stood, huddled against each other, at the edge of the road, looking down the grey embankment at the police trucks and the rescue equipment, the boats, the divers, the men in uniform standing between us and a last view of all we had lost.

I insisted on going to the morgue and making the identification myself, though Gabe told me someone else could do it, my brother or his, someone.

—It shouldn’t have to be our last memory of her, he said.

—I want to go, I said. I want to see her face.

When he said again someone else, someone else, I screamed at him, I pounded his chest with my fists, and, in the end, he agreed, and went with me, and it was done.

***

For a few weeks, ours became a community of loss. Other parents, ones I’d never liked before, became my friends, their stupidities and thoughtless comments over the years swept away by what we shared in grief. We cooked for each other, we talked for long and empty hours, we exchanged memories, hoping that words might bring some life to the death we lived. Gabe and I had never been religious, but we began going to church because other parents would be there, and because any rituals were comforting.

The lake became a sacred place. Even as the water froze in winter and the shores grew thick with snow, there wasn’t a day when I didn’t find other parents there, standing on the bank, looking out at the calm water, our faces placid, our eyes incapable of tears. We stood like beacons or totems or guards, at dusk or dawn, morning and afternoon, not waiting so much as bearing witness to the peace that seemed so unjust.

***

There was an investigation, of course. They said it was a mechanical failure, that the brakes on the schoolbus gave out as it came around the corner, the speed at which it moved was not excessive, the driver was not at fault. The lake gets deep very quickly, they said, and the water was cold, the force of the impact enough to stun, wound, even kill the passengers.

The passengers.

No fault. An accident. A very unfortunate accident. A tragedy, the newspapers said and the television reporters said and the condolence cards said, and we, too, said: a tragedy.

We were left to live inside the shadow of that tragedy, and we carried on as best we could after the funerals, after the burials, after the cards and flowers were packed away, after we got so we could walk past the closed door of her bedroom without pressing an ear to the wood to listen for what we knew was not there. It was months before Gabe or I could open that door, and when we did it was a bright day, motes of light drifting through the room, and we sat on the bed, hands together, and assured each other it was all right to cry.

***

By summer, the lake had dried up. The muddy crater that remained quickly filled with sand that no amount of rain made wet.

We had lived eight months without Julia, and I went to the lake every day. I and the others who stood faithfully on the banks watched the water drift farther and farther from the shore, but no-one ever ventured out to where the lake had been until the water was gone and the mud turned to dry white sand. When the sun shone down, the sand was too hot to touch, and so we waited until evening to walk, always barefooted, into the crater where the lake had been. All of the parents were there every day, kneeling down, fingers pressed into the sand, digging. Soon, there was a breeze that never died. It blew soft clouds of dust around us.

Gabe stopped going after a week.

—What do you think you’re going to find there? he said.

—I don’t know, I said.

He stood in front of me, blocking the door.

—Why do you want to be there, then?

—I don’t know, I said. Where else should I be?

He sighed, and I knew what he thought. He had returned to work, had won every case he’d tried, tripled his income, bought us a new car and talked about moving somewhere else, a place where every inch of everything could not summon memories. He never told me to go back to work, but every day he suggested something I could do, something that would distract me: volunteering at the hospital or library, joining the board of the conservation society, learning golf.

—I already have something to do, I said.

—You spend your whole life at that goddamned lake.

—It’s where I should be.

Now, standing in front of the door, he said quietly:

—Please don’t go.

—I have to, I said.

***

No-one brought children to the lake, though of course there were brothers and sisters, cousins, friends. The survivors, the living. I rarely saw children in town, even. Once, though, I saw a boy running down the street, his face glistening with tears as he screamed for his mother. Every car stopped in the street and every person stopped moving to watch him. He ran between people and between cars, he flailed, he fell to the ground and stood and fell again. His screams grew louder, more piercing, and the crowd shivered as people took tiny steps away from him, until finally one woman, older than most of us, approached the boy and touched his head gently and smiled and embraced him, kissed him, held him until the rest of us began to move again and continued with our days.

I returned to the lake. Holes dotted the sand. A father and mother had dug so many feet into the lakebed that all I could see of them were hands rising out of the hole to drop a few more grains from their fingertips. For a moment, I thought the pair had found water, but when I looked again I saw that the sand at the side of their hole had been moistened by blood from raw hands.

My own hole remained more broad than deep.

I’d forgotten all the names of the children, and, what made me more sad, the names of the parents—my true companions, the only people who understood the language I uttered when I chose to speak, the only people who didn’t look at me with sympathy or pity, because who among us had enough to spare? I remembered knowing their names, but I did not know them now. Now they were strangers again, and I feared them, feared they would find what I was looking for and would destroy it, feared they knew what I was looking for when I did not.

I watched the other people around me and hoped my hole would not engulf theirs, but I feared it would, because though I tried to force myself to move closer and closer to the center I had dug, all I could do was pull back the sand from the sides. I knew the others were watching me. More and more each day, I could feel their eyes staring, I could hear the whispers caught by the ever-present breeze.

The other people had begun to push their piles of sand into my hole to keep me away. I did not blame them. I would have done the same.

***

—I’m buying a house in Colorado, Gabe said one night late in the summer. You can come with me or … not…

My hands ached from swollen joints, broken fingernails, and cracked skin. I covered them with lotion every morning before I left and every night when I returned, but the sand was stronger, it was wiping my flesh away.

—How can you leave here? I said.

—I can’t stay.

—Who do you know in Colorado? You don’t know anybody. How will you get a job, how will…

—I already have an offer from a firm. It’s very good money. In Boulder. Everybody I know says Boulder is a wonderful place to live, it’s heaven.

I ran out of the house and drove in the old car to the lake. The sky was full of clouds, but bits of moonlight shone through and drifted over the white sand. I sat near the road, my back against the front wheel of the car, and stared down at the place where our daughter had died.

Only a few parents remained, digging, and their shadows spread across the sand like chasms. As I watched them, I realized words had formed on my lips, and the words became whispers: Eliza, Tommy, Maria, Lily, Jack, Tizzie, Eveline, George, Lucia… I whispered them all through the night, again and again and again until the dawn, giving words to memory and to the wind.

Sometimes in the middle of the night I would go into Julia’s room and turn her little radio on very low so that it whispered to me while I sat on the floor, my fingers drawing patterns across the carpet. I imagined the radio told me stories—stories dreamed up by young people who had grown old, the sentences left as remnants of a writer’s youthful self, some part of that self preserved in each word, alive now in the whispers weaving their long-ago life into my own.

***

Two days before Gabe was to leave, water returned to the lake. It bubbled up through the sand into puddles, filling all the holes. One of the diggers screamed, Water! and seconds later I felt cool liquid against my own hands. Murmurs and cries echoed through the breeze. The puddles spread and joined until the entire lake was one thin sheet of water, and the water rose. Not until the water had reached our knees did any of us move to the shore of the lake. The last to leave was a small woman with short red hair. She swam from the far side, and when she climbed out of the water to join us, the light blue dress she had worn every day had shed all the dust and dirt that had encrusted it, and it clung to her body like seaweed.

Within only a few hours, the lake was as deep as it had ever been.

—The water has returned, I said when I stepped into the living room where Gabe was looking at a TV show about politics.

—Shhhhh, he said. I’m watching this.

—Did you hear me? The water’s returned.

—Will you shut up!  I’m watching this.

I went to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of milk. I sat at the table, looking out the double windows at the back yard, where shards of starlight sprinkled over the garden I had neglected all summer.

Eventually, Gabe trudged upstairs to bed, but I waited in the kitchen with all the lights turned out until I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore. I lay my head down on the table and slept.

***

A week after Gabe left, people began to say they saw faces in the water, the faces of the children. I still went to the lake each day and stayed long into the night, but though all the other parents around me knelt down on the bank and looked into the lake, I could not force myself to look. Their squeals of joy, their sudden outbursts of love and happiness, disgusted me.

I had begun to remember their names now, too, though I could not remember which names went with which children. (Were Richard and Beatrice the parents of Lucia or Tommy or Eveline? Were May and John the parents of Eliza, Jack, George?)

For the first time, children visited the lake. In the beginning, they came alone and stood far away, but soon enough a few children—siblings, I’m sure—walked down to the water, where the family knelt together and stared into the gentle ripples. Some of the children shed tears into the water, and some yelped or wailed, but most were silent.

I began to spend more time at the house, packing up Gabe’s things and hauling them to the post office in town. I enjoyed filling boxes with his collection of Matchbox cars, his racks of neckties, the many books he’d bought and never read. He had taken with him only what he could fit in his car.

—What do you want me to do with the rest of your stuff? I asked.

—Doesn’t matter, he said, getting into the car. He drove off without looking at me, without waving goodbye.

I could have destroyed it all, the books and neckties and Matchbox cars, the NFL mugs full of pens that didn’t work, the portable television set, the camping gear we’d never used. Destroying Gabe’s things didn’t occur to me, though; all I could do was pack them up, put labels on the boxes, and bring the boxes into town day after day. Most of the clerks at the post office weighed my boxes and charged my credit card without comment, but one clerk, Marsha, talked to me, first about the weather and the heaviness of the boxes, then the Red Sox and the absurdities of postal bureacracy. I enjoyed seeing her, but as I brought more and more boxes to the post office, I became self-conscious, wondering what people thought of me, and I tried to go at different times each day so I might get a different clerk, but there were only three, and one day Marsha said,

—Are you sending all her things away?

She covered her mouth with her hand suddenly, as if to put the words back in.

—I’m sorry, she said, her voice so soft I could barely make out the words.

—It’s okay, I said. These are Gabe’s things. He needs them more than me.

***

As the house became barer, the bookshelves empty, Gabe’s closet left with nothing but bits of lint and dust, the walls freed of all decoration, I found it easier to sleep at night and easier to breathe during the day. I called a moving company and had them take away all of the furniture except for the kitchen table.

Some days I never went to the lake at all.

Finally, the house contained nothing of Gabe’s. The only room I hadn’t touched was Julia’s.

***

When I brought the last of the boxes into town, one of the other parents, Stephen, followed me to my car.

—Haven’t seen you out at the lake recently, he said.

—No, I said, I haven’t been there.

—Don’t you want to see the children?

—I don’t think so. I don’t know.

—They smile at us. We saw Tommy. Our son, Tommy. We saw him. He smiled at us. He’s happy now.

—I’m glad, I said, and closed the door of the car.

Driving home, I slowed as I passed the lake. Cars clogged the sides of the street. I was sure what the parents said was true, that they saw their children’s faces floating like reflections in the water and the faces were smiling, joyful. If I had thought it was some sort of mass delusion, I would have been more tempted to park my car with the others and walk down to the lake, to kneel on the shore and wait for Julia’s face to slip across the water. I yearned for the comfort of fantasy, of relief from the grey life I lived, but the only fantasy that appealed to me was one I could control, one I could turn off, a world I could escape from when I wanted and return to at will.

***

After two months away, Gabe called.

—I miss you, he said.

—Do you?

—Yes. Of course I do. I just … needed some time on my own.

—And now?

Silence for a moment.

—I’m taking care of a child, he said. A friend of mine’s daughter. She’s eleven. Her parents are in Switzerland, skiing. They’re professionals. She usually goes, but she has to be in school right now. She’s always seemed fond of me, and I told them if they didn’t want to have to hire somebody to take care of her, I’d be happy to. They told her to call me Uncle Gabe. Isn’t that great? Uncle Gabe. They’re coming back next week and…

—Did the furniture arrive? I asked.

Silence.

—Yes, he said.

—Good, I said.

—Will you come out here?

—No, I said.

—Why?

—Because I don’t want to move.

—Will you?

—Will I what? I said.

—With time, will you want to move, do you think?

—I don’t know. I can’t predict the future.

I told him I was tired and I wanted to sleep. He thanked me for sending out the furniture, the paintings and prints, the clothes, the neckties, the Matchbox cars, the mugs and pens. He said his house was a dream, it was big and had a breathtaking view of the plains, it had walk-in closets and ceiling fans, it had a fireplace and a cathedral ceiling in the living room and skylights in the bedroom and outside a garage plenty big enough to turn into a pottery studio, which is something I’d always wanted, wasn’t it, a studio right at home?

He said he would never come back east.

He didn’t ask where I slept now, even though the movers had brought him our bed. Perhaps he thought it was a sign that soon I would join him and we would start our life again. Perhaps.

I climbed the stairs and walked into Julia’s room. I undressed and pulled the sheets back on her bed, then lay down in it. I closed my eyes and slept more deeply than I had in years, a dreamless, restful sleep.

Night after night I slept in Julia’s bed, wrapping myself tightly in the blankets, her teddy bear clenched to my chest, the radio quietly playing old folk songs that weaved their sad, hoarse tones into my dreams.

***

A knock on the door one night.

I was just about to go upstairs to sleep. I stood at the door and listened to my breathing. Another knock. Another. I did not look out the peephole. I knew who was there.

Another knock.

I opened the door.

One of the children, the brother of Lily, stood on the front step. Behind him, arrayed in the flickering glow of the single orange streetlight at the end of our driveway, stood other brothers and sisters, and behind them, in the darkness, their parents.

—Will you come with us to the lake? the boy said.

I could not remember his name.

—No, I said. Please, I said. Please go away.

—The water is getting colder. The faces are fading. Soon the lake will freeze and snow will cover it.

—No, I said.

—This could be the last chance.

He took my hand in his. It was small and warm. He led me out into the cold night. The other children gathered around us, and then the other parents. We walked together down the dark street and to the lake.

—What is your name? I asked him as we approached the shore, but he did not reply.

Looking out at the dark water, I hesitated.

The brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers pushed me gently forward. I felt their hands against me, their shoulders and arms, hips, thighs. As we moved closer to the edge of the shore, I pushed against them.

—No, I said.

I staggered and nearly fell. I lunged out of the crowd and back toward the street. They stopped, but did not turn. I scampered up the embankment to the pavement, the hard surface somehow comforting.

I watched a little girl bend down and touch the skin of ice at the edge of the lake.

***

Tonight, as I lie here in Julia’s bed, silver flakes of snow fall through moonbeams and tap lightly against the window. The whispers on the radio had not predicted snow, but it is falling nonetheless, falling on the houses and the town, the church, the forests to the west, falling softly on the lake, where parents kneel over the water. I imagine the water unfrozen, and I imagine the snow falling on the faces in the water, and I imagine the faces open their mouths in joy and laughter so that, for a moment at least, the parents see the children catch the snow in their mouths as it softly falls. But I know the water is ice, and the snow has covered the ice, and the faces are not there, I’m sure of it. In the morning, the snow will lie in thick drifts in the yards and on the roofs of houses, on the sides of the roads and the banks of the lake. It will cover the gravestones in the cemetery where Julia and so many others were buried last year, it will hang like cotton in the trees around the cemetery and on the iron posts of the gate.

Tears streaming down the sides of my face, whispers in my ears, I listen to the snow falling gently through the night air, gently falling over all the living and the dead.

The post The Lake appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

1.

More and more, I find myself attracted to innovative writing that isn’t afraid to leave great gaps within itself, that doesn’t try to stick the world onto a postage stamp, but rather puts a postage stamp in the middle of the world’s unfathomable complexities. There was Leena Krohn’s short “sort-of novel” Tainaron, a book that I preferred to various massive novelistic tomes of erudition and insight that I have abandoned, a book that felt like it expanded within my mind rather than a book I had to squeeze into the cluttered space of my cranium. I feel the same way about Mac Wellman’s script “The Sandalwood Box” — I would happily go to see a production of this play, while I tend to dread going to the theatre much anymore, because the time is so often fizzled away with banalities, stock language, clunky character arcs, and desperate attempts to use whizzbangs to take hostage the attentions of an ever-more-distracted audience of tourists seeking live movies, the simulacrum dreams of imaginations colonized by Hollywood.

2.

Leena Krohn has, with a slim volume of thirty letters written from an imaginary city of insects, given us a lens of words through which to consider reality, a microscope to reveal yearning and wonder, a telescope to look for what it means to be human, a window and a mirror and an eye other than our own.

In the world of fractal complication we inhabit, maybe what we most need are not grand gestures and multi-volume compendia, but sharp-edged shocks of concentration and reflection, little gems of language and action that don’t try to sum up their own themes or explicate themselves, but rather give a rich glimpse of imagination and possibility, of gaps and fissures, of vitrified catastrophes with just a touch of ontological whigmaleery.

Tainaron is about identity and empathy and metamorphosis and death and life and humanity and—

“A city of insects, you said?”

Yes, indeed, a city of insects, of human-sized bugs, but more than that — and of course you’re thinking of Kafka at this point, of the city Gregor Samsa (who woke up one morning after a night of fitful sleep to discover he had metamorphosed into a monstrous insect) dreamed of escaping to from the tiny bedroom where his family tormented him — but no, this is not Kafka, this is less portentous, less angst-ridden, more wistful and –

“But I don’t like bugs. Why would somebody write a book about a city of bugs?”

Because sometimes it is best to use fantasy to imagine our way back to where we actually are.

3.

Leena Krohn: “When I wrote letters to (from!) Tainaron, I never thought it as a sci-fi or fantasy novel, nor would I name myself a sci-fi writer. As I have written it, there is only a little bit of fantasy in Tainaron, but many facts of life.”

4.

Laird Hunt’s The Exquisite takes place in New York City, more or less now, though the hardboiled tone of the narration sometimes makes it feel like an imagined New York in the 1940s, a New York that exists only in memories of black and white movies. The city is as important a character as any of the people in the tale, and some of the best passages in the book give vivid glimpses of life there. The setting and language of its evocation are inseparable, the sounds and rhythms of the sentences providing as much architecture as the landscape they create.

5.

In the nonfictional epilogue to her fictional travelogue Hav, Jan Morris ends with words from the German Romantic writer Novalis: “Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.”

History’s shortcomings are the impetus, material, and theme of Hav, a remarkably subtle book, a novel of indirections that presents an imaginary (and richly imagined) geography and history for a Mediterranean nation called Hav, a country that incorporates the potentials and mysteries of various real societies and cultures. Morris takes the details of recorded histories and visitable places and turns them into the stuff of a vivid dream, then uses the dream to meditate on the currents of history that shape the world we perceive as real, the present moments that get abstracted and represented by historians.

Hav is an alternate world, a possible place, a nation found only on lost maps and in imprecise memories.

6.

Leena Krohn: “I liked so much the sound of the name Tainaron. I have never visited Greece, but I read that Tainaron in southern Greece is a rocky cape, like Helsinki, my birth town. In Greek mythology there was a cave entrance to the Underworld at Tainaron.”

7.

Barry Lopez’s “The Mappist” is in some ways an homage to Borges, as it tells of a narrator’s obsession with a pseudonymous author of remarkable travel guides and maps, works of such detail and care that they capture the “essence” of whatever city they describe. The narrator eventually tracks down the creator of these works, the reclusive Corlis Benefideo, and visits him, viewing new maps Benefideo has created, maps of remarkable depth and brilliance. Benefideo states his philosophy:

I could show you here the whole coming and going of the Mandan nation, wiped out in eighteen thirty-seven by a smallpox epidemic. I could show you how the arrival of German and Scandinavian farmers changed the composition of the topsoil, and the places where Charles Bodmer painted, and the evolution of red-light districts in Fargo — all that with pleasure. I’ve nothing against human passion, human longing. What I oppose is the blind devotion to progress, and the venality of material wealth. If we’re going to trade the priceless for the common, I want to know exactly what the terms are.

The story ends with the narrator asking if Benefideo will serve as mentor to his daughter, and then driving off into the darkness. It’s a quiet ending, one of many possibilities, with a final paragraph of sentences perfectly balanced against each other, a final image which resonates with as much power as any I have encountered.

The story could have been an attempt to proselytize for Benefideo’s values against the values of modern consumerist society, but it is far more nuanced than that. The narrator’s own flaws and limits ground us in the complexities and contradictions of the human world, and while Benefideo is presented as a kind of god or wizard, he does not strain credibility because of the story’s mythic air, which permits us to believe in such impossible perfection. Benefideo is a beacon indicating the potential humans possess when they are willing to observe the world around them with care and sympathy. We are the accumulation of our details, he seems to be saying, and so we must start with the details if we are to discover our truths. In the face of chaos, why not try to create some beautiful maps?

8.

The first Jorge Luis Borges story to appear in English was “The Garden of Forking Paths”. It was published in the August 1948 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in a special “United Nations Issue” of the magazine. It has one of the more remarkable tables of contents of any magazine issue I know, with stories by Cornell Woolrich, Ferenc Molnár, Georges Simenon, Karel Čapek, and Anton Chekhov.

The EQMM “Garden of Forking Paths” appeared in a translation by Anthony Boucher, which means that Boucher was not only a well-respected writer of mysteries and science fiction, not only an important and influential reviewer of mystery fiction, not only the man whose name is honored by the annual World Mystery Convention (Bouchercon) and its awards (the Anthonies), not only the man who co-founded The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, not only an important mentor to many writers, including Philip K. Dick — he was also the man who first brought Borges’s work to the United States. Later translations would become the standard ones (as far as I know, Boucher’s has rarely been reprinted), but Boucher was first.

Borges is one of the incontrovertibly great writers of the 20th century. When discussions of the Nobel Prize for Literature turn to listing the major writers who never received the award, Borges’s name comes quickly to mind. And yet it was not in the pages of The New Yorker or even of a small, prestigious literary journal that he made his U.S. debut. No, it was in the pages of a saddle-stapled digest mystery magazine. It appeared between a story called “Being a Murderer Myself” (by Arthur Williams) and a story called “Killer in Khaki” (by Edgar D. Smith).

9.

Instead of The People of Paper, Salvador Plascencia should have called his first novel The Book of Extended Metaphors, to go along with one of the books between its covers, The Book of Incandescent Light. He should have called it The Book of Heartbreak or The People of Sorrow. He should have equipped it with warning signs and seatbelts to protect those of us naive enough to get caught up in the fairy tale first pages, those of us who ignored for a moment that this is a book for mature adults, people with scars, people who should not expect a book about a childproof world. He might have dropped a few more hints, might have whispered: “This book will lock you in a shed of tears.”

I don’t know of another book where the metafictional games are so necessary to the ultimate emotional effect, where the fireworks explode fantasy and reality to rain down not wonder, but heartache. The experiments of typography do not create any real difficulty for the reader, but instead evoke a visual and sometimes even physical analogue to the narrative, bringing the story beyond words. Watch the colors, for instance. It is no coincidence that dominoes are a passion for so many characters here — letters combine into words and words combine into sentences like a game of dominoes with twenty-six numbers to place together in infinite possibilities, to stack up in paragraphs and knock down in pages, the black dots of ink on the white tile of paper. Notice, too, how little color is in this world, how much depends upon green lettuce, the green rind and pulp of limes, a green dress. Little drops of poison. Paper cuts, each.

10.

Leena Krohn: “Tainaron is a distant place that reminds us of every place in the world in its plasticity, strangeness, frightfulness. But its properties are the properties of our own heart.”

11.

I am hardly the first or only person who has been known at times to state that weird fiction has a relationship to what might be perceived as metaphor that is different from the relationship mainstream or allegorical fiction has to what is necessarily perceived as metaphor — in science fiction and fantasy, the monster is a monster first and foremost, not a representation of the id/ the evil at the heart of humanity/ the moral panic of the moment/ fathers-in-law/ whatever. This concept is fine as far as it goes, but the best SF makes it so simplistic as to be nearly meaningless. China Mieville’s The City & The City, for instance, is the sort of book that does just that — the basic premise is wonderful purely for its own sake and for the sake of the care with which it is conceived and explored, but the metaphors it suggests (for urban life, for certain historical and political realities, etc.) are just as important to what makes the novel work so well — The City & The City starts with the literalization of a metaphor, but it doesn’t end there, because ultimately it is not literalizing one metaphor but is, rather, literalizing an idea that is rich with metaphorical potential. It’s the difference between writing a story based on the idea, “What if a guy woke up one morning and discovered he was a giant bug?” and writing the story that follows the opening sentence, “One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.”

12.

In Guy Davenport’s story “Belinda’s World Tour”, Franz Kafka is a guest for tea at the little girl’s house when the girl, Lizaveta, returns with her nurse. “Her father and mother were at a loss to comfort her, as this was the first tragedy of her life and she was indulging all its possibilities.” Herr Doktor Kafka offers Lizaveta the comfort of a story, saying that Belinda met a little boy (“perhaps a doll, perhaps a little boy, I couldn’t quite tell”) who asked her to travel around the world with him, and so she has gone off to do so, but has promised to send postcards chronicling her adventures.

The rest of the story consists of the postcards. They are charming, gentle, and utterly bizarre, as Kafka’s Belinda presents Lizaveta with a picture of a world in which Londoners all wear clothes that cover their entire bodies (“the buttons go right up into their hats, with button holes, so to speak, to look out of, and a kind of sleeve for their very large noses”), everyone in Japan “stops what they are doing ten times a day to write a poem,” and at Niagara Falls newlyweds can get in barrels and ride over the falls (“you bounce and bounce at the bottom”). Belinda also has good luck meeting great writers and artists—in Copenhagen she encounters Hans Christian Anderson and Kierkegaard, in Russia both Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, in Tahiti Gauguin, and in San Francisco Robert Louis Stevenson.

A little knowledge and reflection prevents us from accepting the postcards as having been written by Kafka (or, at least, the historical Kafka). They are artifices, just as the places Belinda visits are artifices. The character of Kafka uses the names of real places to create a certain sort of verisimilitude, but it is the verisimilitude of legends, stereotypes, and the ridiculously (or amusingly) contrived sort of historical novels where ordinary characters encounter one famous figure after another. Belinda’s chronicle of her travels collapses world culture into greatest hits and greatest myths, a delightful concoction for a child, certainly, but by teasing our desire for innocence and whimsy, “Belinda’s World Tour” also poses unresolveable problems of fantasy and reality. The names of real people and places within the story suggest connections and allusions in the reader’s mind, but those suggestions simultaneously tell us that the only reality the story adheres to is its own.

The anomalies in “Belinda’s World Tour” remove the story from any world other than the reality of its words, and so the actual items of life—names, books, places—become tools of fantasy. Details from real histories and real cultures function in the story as props for a fairy tale about a fairy tale. The effect is unsettling, like staring at a particularly clever optical illusion. Also unsettling is how delightful the story is, because the tale remains a closed system, separate from the realities it seems to reference.

The absurd portrayals of various cities, countries, and cultures in the postcards are occasionally based on misperceptions and generalizations that, in the reality of history, produced nightmares and bloodbaths. The presence of Wild West Indians in a few of the postcards recalls not only the one-sentence Kafka story “Wunsch, Indianer zu werden” (“The Wish to Become an Indian”), but also the genocidal policies and actions that constituted the reality hidden beneath the tales of brave cowboys and noble-savage injuns. The tales we tell of history and culture are as fanciful as the tale of a doll going off on a world tour.

The wondrous, disconcerting fantasies of “Belinda’s World Tour” rely upon the reality they seem to extend from, the reality they so beautifully brush away. Without its references to particular people and places, to real history and to real history’s lost dreams, the story would lack the paradoxes that provide its most satisfying meanings. The genius of the story is that it works at every level one might read into it. A reader who knows absolutely nothing about any of the names or places invoked is likely to find the tale a bit perplexing, perhaps, but, I expect, on the whole amusing. A reader who knows a bit about the various characters and settings will probably find the story to be charming. A reader whose mind, like mine, sometimes gets tangled on details and paradoxes might focus on those things, and also find considerable pleasure, though probably not satisfaction—which is fine, because once a paradox is satisfied, its fascination evaporates.

13.

A generous definition of allegory would suggest that all fiction, regardless of its label or merit, possesses an allegorical connection to reality: fiction is the shadow on the walls of Plato’s cave. It provides an imaginary Real that renders briefly visible selected elements of a vast, intangible reality. In the theatre, where the audience sits in what each member thinks is the real world while actors create an imaginary world on the stage, a narrative propelled by the friction of reality meeting fantasy is nothing to remark on, because fantasy and reality are equally imaginary in such a setting.

Prose fiction achieves its greatest moments not by celebrating some narrow sort of reality at the expense of fantasy, but by keeping every imaginative and imagined option open.

14.

One of the tendencies of Len Jenkin’s work is for the characters to be enlivened stereotypes. His novel New Jerusalem, like many of his plays, feels like a mosaic of bits of American pop culture from no later than the 1950s. Unlike some post-modernists, Jenkin doesn’t patronize or beautify his stereotypes, he doesn’t use them for any obviously ironic intent. Mostly, he seems to like the language they produce. He likes to listen to two-dimensional characters talk, and to put them in situations where their talk is definitely odd, but also oddly appropriate. While many of his characters and settings seem to come from classic film noir, Charlie Chan movies, and old comic books, they are made to play their hands and smoke their cigarettes and plot their triple-crosses in a world where nothing is absolute, and endings seldom arrive. (Unlike many of Jenkin’s plays, New Jerusalem not only follows a linear plotline, but it has a real conclusion. Dark Ride’s ending sums up the feeling many of his characters get to, though: All of the actors end up saying, or chanting, “I’m not interested in philosophy. Just tell me how it ends.” New Jerusalem suggests that this is a fatal wish.) It’s like Edward Whittemore with fewer spies, and though there are plenty of conspiracies, they only affect the conspirators.

15.

Kelly Link’s story “Stone Animals” both employs and parodies the basic elements of suburban psychological realism, the sort of scaffolding John Cheever and so many other writers hung their words and laundry on: a family buying a house and moving into it, a father commuting to a desultory job in the city, a pregnant wife who is uncertain about her marriage, suspicions and allegations of adultery, existentially anxious children, a controlling boss, stressful dinner parties, a lawn.

The world of the story is a world of binaries, a world falling apart for lack of grey areas. Catherine and Henry’s daughter Tilly divides the yard in half, with one side for herself and one side for her brother, Carleton. She likes to name things and “when the new baby is born, her mother has promised that she can help pick out the real names, although there will only be two real names, a first one and a middle. Tilly doesn’t understand why there can only be two.” Similarly, everyone seems conscious of what is “male” and what is “female”, though there are cracks in the borders — a group of women get together, for instance, to discuss the quintessentially “male” novel Fight Club. Eventually, everything may fall apart, and the binaries will not hold. Work and home, city and country, husband and wife, daughter and son, boss and worker, awake and asleep, reality and dream, there and not-there; all of it is getting confused. The children can’t inherit their parents’ patterns, so they start talking to the rabbits. Life just wants to be interstitial. (Is it any wonder that some of the women in the story yearn to write books? As if the borders they desire to cross are ones that can be breached with words.)

Tilly, like Alice before her, finds a door with a rabbit behind it, and follows it down some steps to a wonderland unrevealed to us, crying out “Hairbrush! Zeppelin! Torpedo! Marmalade!”, perhaps in a desperate cling to vestiges of childhood and innocence, as if nothing will open Sesame Street. Meanwhile, Carleton won’t stop attacking the rabbits with a stick. Catherine, like a woman of royalty, or perhaps Mrs. Dalloway, prepares for a dinner party, one to which Henry will, of course, be late. The binaries are breaking apart. The mother seeks solace in pregnant pauses of sociability, the daughter disappears, the son perpetuates pointless violence. Meanwhile, the father comes home to discover himself locked out of his life, so he rallies the rabbit around him and discovers “the others” are waiting with him for the dinner party to end, and for Henry, who wields a phallic spear and rides a fertility symbol, to bounce into the Agincourt that came with the house, . Except we don’t know who “the others” are, and we don’t know if this is Henry V or Henry VIII.

Summarizing a story as rich, allusive, and ambiguous as “Stone Animals” is always an effort against inevitable nonsense (or, at best, cleverness, which some people may not find preferable to nonsense). The only durable representation of the story is the story itself.

16.

Within the mysteries of The Exquisite, plenty of the herrings are red, but they’re part of an entire rainbow — or, to switch metaphors, an ocean of tributaries filled with plotting fish. No resolution is for sure, and every version of the truth tells some sort of story, with each story being as valid as the other — the point is not the resolution, but the pleasure of the telling, just as the joy of murder stories is not in how they end up, but in the planning, preparation, and execution that lead to the end. Cut out all possibility of an end, and most of the pleasures still remain, while new pleasures reveal themselves.

17.

Leena Krohn: “Fiction and so-called reality live in an odd symbiosis. Our civilization is not based on any rational fundament. Let’s think about money, for instance. We think it as something material, but alas! — what else is as speculative, as illusionistic, as liable to metamorphoses as money? What is ‘real’ money? Not banknotes or coins, which are only images of money, not even digital conditions. Money is a phantom phenomenon; it’s about our speculations of the future, our dreams of security. They are real, or ‘real’ (you choose).”

18.

What makes Christopher Priest’s The Affirmation powerful is not its surprises, which are mostly superficial, but rather its unified uncertainty. It is a novel that is nothing other than itself; it is a hermetic structure. We cannot know what is “real” except the words that are provided for us. The book seems to reference a recognizable reality, but then it undermines that reference by positing other realities, and never settles obviously for one or the other. Everything could be a delusion. Everything is a delusion: the delusion that is fiction. We cannot choose what is true or what is imagined, because both are presented with the same techniques.

If the pages had become unworded, if the story was now untold, then it meant I could start again.

–The Affirmation

Blankness. Emptiness. Possibility. Nothing.

End? Beginning? Real? Unreal?

There’s no way to know. Peter tells a story about seeing a room differently from his sister. But Peter tells many stories. He tells stories about islands we have never heard of and distant wars we didn’t know existed. He tells stories, too, about places whose names we recognize and events we know happened in the world we think we live in, the past we call real, the one that created our present.

The narrator tells stories so that he may try to find himself, find some truth, remember something that was somehow lost, bring life to the dead past. He tries again and again. The something remains lost, the past stays dead.

He does not know who he is. Nor do we. All we have are words.

19.

I tend to be wary of anything which uses the events of September 11, 2001 as subject matter, because the dangers are immense: forced emotion, simplified meanings, the crass use of tragedy to sell a story. There have been a couple of good plays using September 11 as a setting (Where Do We Live by Christopher Shinn and The Mercy Seat by Neil LaBute), a poem or two (“When the Towers Fell” by Galway Kinnell), but Lucius Shepherd’s “Only Partly Here” is among the few works of fiction I’ve read which uses the results of that horrible day to create a real work of art (another is Richard Bowes’s “There’s a Hole in the City”). What makes it work is its modesty, its willingness to be little more than a portrait. The element of the fantastic at the end is not tacked-on, it is handled with subtlety and grace — here is a writer who has enough confidence in his work that he feels no need to stretch the story beyond what it can bear.

Would we read “Only Partly Here” differently if it had been published outside of the SF genre? For me, the fact that Shepard sent it to Asimov’s makes me read the ending more literally than I would had the tale been published in a non-SF market. Actually, I like the less literal, more ambiguous reading better, one which leaves open the possibility of the supernatural, but also suggests the protagonist may be jumping to conclusions in his interpretation of events.

The quiet elegance and careful, slow accretion of detail in “Only Partly Here” show Shepard’s mastery — few SF writers would, it seems to me, be willing to let a story like this go without mucking it up with plot developments or government conspiracies or alien interventions. Is it wrong of me to think this story owes less to the archives of Asimov’s than to the work of writers such as John Cheever or Bernard Malamud, both of whom used fantastic elements to illuminate the inner griefs and struggles of their characters, though of course Shepard is very different writer from either. But it seems to me that when we look at a story which veers (or shuffles) away from the strict limitations of realism, we will see that it does so for one of two main reasons: either to indulge the fantastic elements themselves, or to reflect on the realistic elements. Neither is better or worse, but the choice can have a profound effect on the way a story is told, and Shepard made the right decision with “Only Partly Here” to let the implied supernaturalism of the ending grow directly from a painfully realistic situation, because to have worked backwards and imposed fantastic elements on a setting as fraught with meaning as Ground Zero would have been to compromise the meaning for the sake of a cheap effect, something innumerable time travel and alternate history stories do.

What stories such as “Only Partly Here” do by avoiding tempting pitfalls of genre and cheap narrative effects is help us reflect on the painful contours of reality. Literature has hardly ever made anyone a better person, but the body of great literature has civilized readers a little bit by helping them cast their thoughts and emotions beyond themselves and what they know.

20.

J.M. Coetzee filled in some of the outline of his earliest days with Boyhood, which was labeled by different publishers with the subtitles “A Memoir” and “Scenes from Provincial Life.” It was, and remains, one of Coetzee’s most straightforward and accessible books, with the only obvious complication being the third-person point of view. There is certainly a long history of third-person autobiographies and memoirs, but a contemporary book marketed as a memoir is generally expected to be written in the first-person, and a deviation from that highlights the assumption. Most readers will unquestioningly accept the mode and rhetoric of a first-person autobiography unless the writer creates obstacles to such acceptance.

The acceptance of the mode and rhetoric of memoir is what leads to such situations as that created by Oprah Winfrey’s re-evaluation of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces in 2005 and 2006. While assuming the book to be a memoir, and thus an accurate representation of Frey’s own life and experiences, Winfrey chose it for her influential Book Club and then, when it was revealed that much of the book was fiction, Winfrey said she felt “duped” and her audience “betrayed,” and she summoned much righteous anger and indignation in an attack on Frey on her show. Some of the fury of the response was good melodrama, of course, and it certainly didn’t hurt the book’s sales or the show’s ratings, but beneath the bombast lay an interesting situation. The words and sentences of A Million Little Pieces had not changed, nor had the audience’s actual relationship to the author (since the relationship the readers had was to the text and not to the person), but the context of their understanding of the text had shifted. Winfrey and her audience conceived that shift as if it were a wound, then used their feeling of betrayal to heal themselves and shape the energy of their indignation as a weapon to, in turn, wound Frey, who was willing to play along and accept his public humiliation, to recontextualize himself as at least a version (less preening, perhaps, less confident) of the survivor and sufferer he had first been sold as. It was great theatre. The effect was to solidify a narrow concept of truth-telling and to strengthen the idea that memoirs are and should be verifiable accounts of a life. The genre’s boundaries were policed and fortified, the transgressor was punished, and the inherent ambiguities of autobiographical writing were buried in a tomb of unasked questions. In their silence, those questions were, in fact, banished to the realm of the unaskable, because once we know that “memoir” and/or “autobiography” means always x and never y, to wonder the y is to talk about something that is not memoir or autobiography, and is therefore irrelevant and, more likely within such a conversation, invisible.

Coetzee’s memoirs assault the genre boundaries of autobiography. They do more than simply render questions about such writing’s inherent ambiguity visible, relevant, and askable. They make them a necessary part of the reading experience.

We are all one self full of countervoices telling stories and seeking truths.

21.

Stories — fantasies — make the vastness of the universe more particular; they tame it, organize it until it is bearable, but when it’s organized and bearable, it is no longer vast, no longer honest. Delusion is dangerous not because it is delusion, but because it is inexorable. In The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison, one of a triumvirate of friends, Lucas, writes a story and creates a persona to try to capture and tame the effects of the force that haunts them:

He and Pam had been telling themselves the story of the Coeur for twenty years: its worth as an invention — never mind as solace — now depended as much on his ability to convince as on her desire to be convinced. This was the moment of greatest danger.

The desire to be convinced and the desire to convince are the twin aches of fantasies and lies, and both leave their bearers naked and vulnerable.

22.

Concepts can affect habits of perception, and those habits of perception can be manipulated in a wide variety of ways for a wide variety of purposes. Conspiracy theories can be a tool of misdirection and control — used to divert attention from systems (and even conspiracies) that are more banal, insidious, and obvious than the baroque fantasies of the paranoid.

23.

Invitation to a Beheading refuses to create a stable fictional reality for the characters or for the reader, and, as with much of Vladimir Nabokov’s best work, there are multiple plots at once: the surface plot of what’s happening in the story, the subtextual plot of things “really” going on that the characters either aren’t aware of or are hiding, and the plot between the text and the reader (or sometimes the narrator and the characters). It could be that, in the last sentence, Cincinnatus has broken through to a “real” reality, but we have no way to know, because it is all a matter of perception — his wishful, imagined double achieves life in the second before (during?) Cincinnatus’s death, and he walks toward what he thinks are “beings akin to him”, but he is able to judge only by their distant voices. The characters who persecuted him have all metamorphosed into tiny, pathetic creatures. The funhouse mirrors have been turned. Body and spirit are inverted, but no-one can say which is which.

This is not a “it was only a dream!” ending, though, because the reality of the book is the reality of Cincinnatus’s perceptions, and he has not perceived the world he has escaped to be a dream — indeed, the hopefulness of the last sentence is predicated on everything before it having been, for Cincinnatus, utterly true and real. A shallow political interpretation of the book would have trouble with the ending, I expect, because such an interpretation would see the ending as suggesting that totalitarianism can be escaped through imagination, but what the book shows with nearly every sentence is, instead, that imagination is anathema to totalitarianism of every sort. Nabokov was no sentimentalist, however, and Invitation to a Beheading demonstrates as relentless a fight for purity and rigor of imagination as do his Lectures on Literature — Cincinnatus does not, after all, walk down a path toward beings who might be akin to him until he has been within a second of having his head chopped off.

24.

Cleverness is not enough. None of us need to read any more stories that are merely clever. A less sophisticated writer than Thomas Disch would have created a clever and inconsequential story from the central idea of “Descending”: a man gets on an escalator that never ends. From this idea, Disch builds a story that can be seen as an allegory, as a study of psychological breakdown, as a social critique. It does not scream a meaning at us, but it is rich with careful details that suggest as much as they say. Samuel Delany, in his introduction to Fundamental Disch, points out how well lists are used as a method of characterization, and this is, indeed, true, but the virtues of the story don’t simply rest on that technique, because the situation of “Descending” enhances the characterization as well, and the choice of complications all reveal more about the character’s personality. The lists are not only for characterization; as James Schoffstall has noted, they support the themes as well. Many elements of the story similarly serve multiple purposes — they keep the action moving, they reveal aspects of character, they lend texture to ideas and implications, they evoke mystery from concrete imagery.

25.

From Tainaron: “And then there are those who cannot bear such a situation, those who wish to see everything face to face and to reveal, open, show the whole world the nakedness of things.… Now and then the temptation becomes overwhelming to them, and they split open the house of some poor unfortunate. I awake to shrieking, sigh and turn over — and soon fall asleep again.”

Sources

http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2004/01/only-partly-here-by-lucius-shepard.html

http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2004/03/new-jerusalem-by-len-jenkin.html

http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2004/06/conversation-with-kj-bishop.html

http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2004/12/stone-animals-by-kelly-link.html

http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2005/02/vitrified-catastrophes-and-ontological.html

http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2005/12/people-of-paper-by-salvador-plascencia.html

http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2006/09/descending-by-thomas-m-disch.html

http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2006/11/some-notes-on-invitation-to-beheading.html

http://quarterlyconversation.com/intentional-schizophrenia-j-m-coetzees-autobiographical-trilogy-and-the-falling-authority-of-the-author

http://www.boomtron.com/2010/12/sandman-meditations-neil-gaiman-season-of-mists-prologue/

http://www.sfsite.com/03b/lk196.htm

http://www.sfsite.com/03b/ta196.htm

http://www.sfsite.com/08b/an206.htm

http://www.strangehorizons.com/2005/20051017/cheney‑c.shtml

http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2007/03/hav_by_jan_morr.shtml

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