The Strange Horrors of Robert Aickman

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One had to lose the noise of the mechanism, not least the ever-deafening inner echoes of it. One had to dispel practicality. Then something else could be heard — if one was lucky, if the sun was shining, if the paths were well made, if one wore the right garments, and if one made no attempt at definition or popularisation.

— Robert Aickman, “Into the Wood”

Thirty-five years after his death, Robert Aickman is beginning to receive the attention he deserves as one of the great 20th century writers of short fiction. For the first time, new editions of his books are plentiful, making this a golden age for readers who appreciate the uniquely unsettling effect of his work.

Unsettling is a key description for Aickman’s writing, not merely in the sense of creating anxiety, but in the sense of undoing what has been settled: his stories unsettle the ideas you bring to them about how fictional reality and consensus reality should fit together. The supernatural is never far from the surreal. He was drawn to ghost stories because they provided him with conventions for unmaking the conventional world, but he was about as much of a traditional ghost story writer as Salvador Dalí was a typical designer of pocket watches.

Laird Barron once noted that “[t]he surest way to comprehend Aickman is to read a lot of Aickman.” Until now, that task was, for many, all but impossible.

Tartarus Press has done heroic work over the years to keep Aickman in print, first with 1999’s two-volume Collected Strange Stories, then, beginning in 2011, with exquisite reissues of each of the individual collections, culminating with The Strangers and Other Writings in 2015, a collection of work previously unpublished, as well as nonfiction that had never been reprinted before. The Tartarus editions are jewels, but they are limited editions, and most casual Aickman readers will not want to spend the money on them (even though they are bargains given the quality of their production).

In 2014, the centenary of Aickman’s birth, Faber & Faber released in the U.K. inexpensive paperback and e-book editions of four of Aickman’s story collections, as well as his novella The Model and novel The Late Breakfasters. Over the next six months, Faber’s editions of the stories are arriving in the U.S., and Valancourt Books has recently published The Late Breakfasters and Other Strange Stories.

For the first time in decades, the majority of Aickman’s work will now be generally available in the U.S and the U.K.

Such a wondrous situation poses challenges for new readers, though, who might wonder where to begin. That question is easy to answer: You can’t go wrong with any of the four Faber collections, particularly The Wine-Dark Sea and The Unsettled Dust, both put together posthumously to reprint some of Aickman’s best tales. All together, the Faber collections reprint just over half of Aickman’s complete stories, with only “Bind Your Hair” appearing more than once. The Late Breakfasters and The Model are odd, fascinating, and beautiful, but a bit atypical; the stories are what sit at the heart of the Aickmanesque.

The question of Aickman now is not so much what to read, but what to do with what is read: how to experience and interpret his work in the most satisfying way. Aickman is a difficult writer for many readers, but the difficulties are not inherent to his writing (which is usually quite accessible) so much as they are to the lenses through which we see that writing.

It is among aficionados of esoteric horror stories that Robert Aickman’s name is best known. But Aickman himself preferred other labels — he associated the horror story with sadomasochism, a goal different from his own. Even if we define “the horror story” more broadly, however, focusing on Aickman only as a horror writer does a disservice to the range and originality of his work. Further, such a focus sets up expectations that may warp how the stories are read. It is one thing to start reading expecting a horror story; it is another to start reading expecting an Aickman story.

He typically called his fiction “strange stories”, an accurate label, and one that sets the right expectations for any reader making a first journey into Aickman’s world.

The “strange stories” label also helps us place Aickman in a broader lineage: not just that of great writers of terror and the supernatural, but also of great writers for whom there is no one label or even a recognized tradition. Though it is certainly accurate to say that Aickman’s work often falls into the realm of the ghost story, we will understand his achievement better if we think of him among such unsettling writers as Franz Kafka, Elizabeth Bowen, Paul Bowles, Flannery O’Connor, Shirley Jackson, and even — particularly in his approach to story structure — Anton Chekhov.

In his introduction to The Wine Dark Sea, Peter Straub writes:

Aickman’s characters find themselves trapped in a series of events unconnected by logic, or which are connected by a nonlinear logic. Very often neither the characters nor the reader can be certain about exactly what has happened, yet the story has the satisfying rightness of a poem — a John Ashbery poem. Every detail is echoed or commented upon, nothing is random or wasted. The reader has followed the characters into a world which is remorseless, vast, and inexorable in its operations.

Much of Aickman’s best work obliterates any certainty between real and unreal, dream and waking reality. In one of his greatest stories, “Into the Wood” (in some ways an ars poetica), an insomniac tells the protagonist: “Dreams … are misleading, because they make life seem real. When it loses this support of dreams, life dissolves.” Aickman’s project was to explore all the repercussions of this idea.

“Dreams … are misleading, because they make life seem real. When it loses this support of dreams, life dissolves.”

Given his stories’ frequent interest in dreams, imagination, and the unconscious, it is no surprise that Aickman read plenty of Freud. Yet while Freud’s influence is clear in many of his stories, they are far from being simple illustrations of Freudian concepts. (In this way, they are interesting to compare to the tales in May Sinclair’s 1923 collection Uncanny Stories, which hew closer to Freud.) Large, dull theses could be written relating Aickman’s fiction to Freud’s “The Uncanny”, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Civilization and Its Discontents at the very least. In the first of the introductions for the eight volumes of The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories he edited from 1964–1972, Aickman declared:

Dr. Freud established that only a small part, perhaps one-tenth, of the human mental and emotional organization is conscious. … The trouble, as we all know, is that the one-tenth, the intellect, is not looking after us: if we do not blow ourselves up, we shall crowd ourselves out; above all, we have destroyed all hope of quality in living. The ghost story, like Dr. Freud, makes contact with the submerged nine-tenths.

Here, then, Aickman sees the ghost story as a melding of Romanticism and surrealism: it escapes the intellect via the subconscious. He also saw it as related to poetry, reiterating throughout his Fontana introductions (all collected in the Tartarus Press edition of Night Voices) something similar to what he said in the fourth volume: “The ghost story, like poetry, deals with the experience behind experience: behind almost any experience.” Such a story is an expression of imagination, not reason, and as such Aickman viewed it as superior to science, which he tended to denigrate. Truth, he thought, lay far beyond rationality, and science, along with the technologies it sprouted, was smothering the truths available via imagination, poetry, and religion. The power of mystery must be respected:

The essential quality of the ghost story is that it gives satisfying form to the unanswerable; to thoughts and feelings, even experiences, which are common to all imaginative people, but which cannot be rendered down scientifically into “nothing but” something else. In a world of meaningless fact and meaningless violence, people shrink from admitting that they still harbor entities of the imagination. The element of form in the ghost story is, therefore, crucial.Giving satisfying form to the unanswerable is what makes Aickman’s stories often perplexing on a first reading, because satisfying form is not the same as satisfying answers. Seeking answers for the unanswerable is, to Aickman, the murderous foolishness of modern science, and his stories stand in stubborn opposition to such quests.

Aickman is often celebrated (and frequently condemned) for the ambiguity of his stories: ambiguity of cause and effect, ambiguity of motivation, ambiguity of resolution. Few Aickman stories have a neat ending, and it is in this sense that he seems to me most Chekhovian, though Aickman and Chekhov came from almost entirely opposite world-views: Chekhov, after all, was a doctor with much respect for science and little use for religion or mysticism. Where they overlap is in their sense that individual human perception is immensely limited, and that, to compensate for such limitations, the prose must pay careful attention to objective details. (“The artist should not be a judge of his characters or what they say, but an impartial witness,” Chekhov once wrote in a letter.) Michael Dirda also makes the Chekhov connection, writing in the introduction to the Tartarus edition of Tales of Love and Death,

Like Chekhov, Aickman seldom attempts to rouse our emotions: he sets down what happens without narrative histrionics. Not even the most astonishing turns of event elicit much surprise or wonder. As a result, that affectless, unruffled tone adds immeasurably to his work’s distinctive, unsettling eeriness. Odd or horrible things occur but they do so without fuss, and they are observed with a dispassionate, Olympian clarity.

Not even the most astonishing turns of event elicit much surprise or wonder.

The dispassionate tone is especially important to third-person narratives; the first-person stories of both Chekhov and Aickman betray the two writers’ passion for theatre and often read like extended monologues.

Aickman, who cherished Oscar Wilde, was drawn to epigrams and aphorisms, and first-person narrators allowed him particular opportunities to employ his wit:

It is strange that people train themselves so carefully to go to waste so prematurely. (“The Unsettled Dust”)

It is amazing how full a life a man can lead without for one moment being alive at all, except sometimes when sleeping. (“The Fetch”)

There are no beautiful clocks. Everything to do with time is hideous. (“The Clock Watcher”)

If one goes to parties or meets many new people in any other way, one has to take protective action quite frequently, however much one hates oneself in the process; just as human beings are compelled to massacre animals unceasingly, because human beings are simply unable to survive, for the most part, on apples and nuts. (“Ravissante”)

…it is no joke being a married woman in East Anglia, if the woman has the smallest imagination. (“Wood”)

Regardless of the narration, though, in both Aickman’s and Chekhov’s stories, seemingly irrelevant details serve to indicate a world beyond the protagonist. In Chekhov, it’s often a larger world of social systems and of nature; in Aickman, it’s a world beyond the limited realm of human perceptions. Aickman was as interested in subjectivity as any Modernist, but he chose the seemingly outmoded conventions of the ghost story for his explorations of perception’s limits, rather than the conventions of interior monologue. In stories like “Meeting Mr. Millar”, Aickman plunges us into a character’s consciousness, but does so without fanfare, simply letting the accumulation of what the narrator chooses to relate contribute to a steadily-growing feeling of claustrophobia.

The portrayal of consciousness as limited and perception as narrow is not an end in itself, though, which is why, for Aickman, the uncanny is essential. The world is not what our consciousness presents, and our conscious mind cannot bring the world’s truths to us. The supernatural, like the subconscious, can be glimpsed, sensed, even experienced, but it is often beyond most sorts of perception, and always beyond understanding. The first sentence of “The Hospice” could point to the location of truth in all of Aickman’s stories: “It was somewhere at the back of beyond.”

Another key to Aickman’s writing is his hatred of modernity. His collaborator and (briefly) lover Elizabeth Jane Howard wrote in her memoir Slipstream that Aickman believed “everything had declined.” She says he felt that

Before the beginning of the century, life had held more promise. The arts, architecture, hotels, food, clothes, furniture, the governance of the country — everything you could think of — had been better. … There had been nothing, since those unspecified and halcyon days, but a steady diminution in all standards. We were approaching the end of civilization.

This sense of civilization’s decline and impending fall rarely leads Aickman’s stories toward nostalgia, but instead toward an always-present sense of doom. His characters generally survive their encounters with oddity, but there is little sense of triumph, and anyone who still believes in the possibility of triumph is a dolt or a cad. Aickman had more than a little impulse toward satire, but the sharp despair inspiring the satire is what makes any laughter provoked by Aickman’s stories disturbing on reflection.

Consider, for instance, “Growing Boys,” a tale of twins who grow quickly and don’t stop until they have become destructive giants. It’s a darkly funny story in its premise and even its title, taking a familiar, happy phrase and literalizing it. But the story itself is no lark — it enters the territory of Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child. What are parents to do when their children are, truly, monsters? To this, Aickman also brings in questions of gender and imperialism.

Quite a few of Aickman’s best stories feature women as protagonists, and for all his preference for the life of the past, he does not seem to have wished to return to a time of conventional gender roles or sexual expectations. Millie, the mother in “Growing Boys,” is plagued not only by monstrous children, but by an oblivious and self-centered husband and a patriarchal uncle who wants nothing so much as to protect fragile white womanhood as he thinks he did in India and Africa. (He is a devoted reader of The Imperialist magazine.) Millie’s salvation comes from a woman who represents a very different tradition: Thelma, a gypsy fortune-teller (an unfortunate stereotype, though not used for entirely stereotypical purposes in the story). Thelma tells Millie to flee and make a new life for herself. Later, Millie dreams of climbing Mount Everest with Thelma. The story’s enthusiasm for female homosociality is clear. Thelma is the only person who gives Millie useful help, the only person who sees that Millie needs somehow to get away from men who take advantage of her (her husband), from men whose masculinity is predicated on war and domination (her uncle, whose guns prove impotent), and from men who want nothing so much as to eat her alive (her sons).

After reading the story, Joanna Russ wrote:

I can’t shake off the impression that “Robert Aickman” is a pseudonym and the author is a woman, since the tale’s subject is the cannibalistic horror of family life, from which the Everywoman heroine is offered two escapes: decamping with another, friendly woman (the heroine dreams at one point that they’re happily climbing the Himalayas together) and an ideal, protective substitute father. The ending is the kind mothers — but not fathers — dream of.

Men in Aickman’s stories tend to suffer all sorts of repression, while women are often more liberated, their terrors the result of proximity to men who are (or yearn to be) good patriarchs who follow the laws of the fathers. The chaos that comes to their lives is a chaos caused by repression and patriarchy, with violence and imperialism often linked to that patriarchy. (For all his conservative tendencies, Aickman was a pacifist and had been a conscientious objector during World War II.)

Of his own experience with a patriarch, Aickman wrote in The Attempted Rescue (one of his two autobiographies), “My father, as I knew him, was impossible to live with, to be married to, to be dependent upon.” Aickman assisted his father some in his business as an architect, and architecture is important to many of the stories, where traveling characters often encounter strange houses and buildings. In such stories, Aickman feels close to Kafka: not just The Castle and the various spaces of The Trial, but also the confining bedroom of “The Metamorphosis,” the tunnels of “The Burrow,” and other structures. Walls protect no one, and building them only creates new areas to hold mysteries within the greater area of the mysteries of the universe.

It is his devotion to the mystery of the universe that leads Aickman to the images and forms in his stories, and those images and forms link him not only to his fellow writers of supernatural fiction, but also to many writers who find unanswerable worlds in everyday experience — there is no reason, it seems to me, not to speak of Aickman alongside such celebrated “realists” as, for instance, David Constantine and Joy Williams. The reading protocols we use when making our way through the pages of Tea at the Midland and The Visiting Privilege are ones that would serve us well when approaching The Wine-Dark Sea and Cold Hand in Mine. Some volumes of strange stories get shelved as horror fiction, and some others do not; that has as much to do with marketing and happenstance as it does with how we should read and value those books.

Daycares in Washington to Censor Books With “Frightening Images”

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The daycare censors are coming for you, R.L. Stein…

Stephen King’s latest spooky children’s book, Charlie the Choo-Choo, probably won’t be making it onto daycare bookshelves in Washington state anytime soon. Neither will R.L. Stein’s Goosebumps series, or any other story that contains a hint of hair-raising imagery for that matter. According to the Guardian, daycares in Washington that receive support from the state government are being encouraged to self-censor their book collections, and their government subsidies are on the line if they don’t choose wisely. The Washington State Department of Early Learning awards grants based on a points system, and one of the newer stipulations for qualification is that daycare programs ensure only “appropriate books” are available.

The National Coalition Against Censorship is particularly perplexed by the provision discouraging daycares from having “books that glorify violence in any way or show frightening images are not considered to be appropriate.” The organization worries that the state is ignoring the educational value of narratives that scare children, or push them beyond comfort zones.

Sadly, it seems that book censorship has become a regular phenomenon for children growing up in this era. PEN America recently conducted a study which found that children’s books are more likely to be banned if they feature diverse characters.

While the effects of the new policy in Washington are yet to be felt, I for one can state with certainty that I wouldn’t be the same person I am today if I hadn’t read Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach and lived in fear of the Cloud Men impaling me with snow if I said something snarky (despite growing up in sweltering Georgia). Come to think of it, aren’t all our favorite childhood fables a little disturbing? Maybe that’s just what some kids need at that age.

Which other childhood classic might run afoul of state authorities? What about Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, or Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are? What will become of Washington’s children without them? Let’s hope that these kids have access to books at home, or at least a decent library that isn’t quite so firmly under the state’s thumb.

Midweek Links: Literary Links from Around the Web (October 27th)

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All the best literary links that are fit to, well, link

Great vampire novels where the undead don’t sparkle

A look at the publisher who (gasp) rejected Jane Austen

Philip Roth is donating his 4,000 book library to Newark Library

Critics react to Paul Beatty’s Booker win (the first for an American author)

Joyce Carol Oates remembers the late Thom Jones

Stephen King is writing a children’s book about Charlie the Choo-Choo from The Dark Tower series

The books every fan of Black Mirror should read

A guide to the work of horror author Joe Hill

When Charles Dickens met Edgar Allan Poe

The great American gothic author Shirley Jackson is finally getting her due

First they Came for the Office Workers, and I Wrote Poetry

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The first and last pages of Matías Celedón’s The Subsidiary appear to be images of the top and bottom of a stamp pad. Between these pages are the ink impressions of an anonymous narrator, an office worker documenting in rubber-stamped snippets his experience during an unnamed crisis.

My medium is decidedly less interesting, but if I’m not careful, I’ll quickly exceed the source material’s low word count.

The book offers no backstory or setup. Personnel — of precisely what entity, we don’t know — are notified to remain at their workstations in advance of a power loss. Exits are soon blocked, phone lines cut, and shouts pour in from outside. The employees are left alone. The reader and characters remain equally clueless, but while the latter appear uninterested in an explanation, I, for one, actually wondered what might be going on.

The narrator, trapped in the offices, documents the situation’s steady decline via his only available tools — the very rubber stamps he uses to approve possibly nefarious directives within a sinister corporate bureaucracy. His testimony is the story.

Allow me to say up front: I’m not gimmick-averse, and I’m always a sucker for workplace satire or commentary on draconian office politics. Locked in cubicles beneath harsh fluorescent lights, drudging along, our animal instincts threatening to boil over at the slightest hint of a rupture in the societal order — please, do tell. Replace decorum with bloodthirsty, survival instincts, and I’m happy.

And yet, there is both more and less to this story. More, in that considering the author’s Chilean heritage, one can’t help but read it in light of the often brutal history of 20th century Latin America, with its timeline of assassinations, death squads, coups, protestors violently squelched, dissidents quietly disappeared.

In The Subsidiary, there are commands issued from above. There are attack dogs. Bodies are quietly removed. The methods are all there. The book reads like poetry or a series of cryptic koans, each page usually only a single sentence or even a single word. Considering the nature of its composition, this makes sense.

The medium is the message, and the effort in composing a message via rubber stamps requires patience, deliberation, and economy. To give you an idea, rubber stamp sets actually come with a pair of tweezers to select and place the tiny characters. The sparse writing is certainly consistent with concept.

Sure, Celedon’s self-imposed limitation could be labeled a device, but I find it a wonderful premise.

If this was an actual, historical document, I would marvel at its existence.

The book could be an artifact from a group of people who’ve gone missing, or have been disappeared. If uncovered from a mass grave or presented as evidence to indict a brutal, murderous dictator, it would be an amazing document. I would even clamor for its publication. That said, however fascinating an artifact, as a story or literary work, it’s ultimately unsatisfying.

Sadly, I doubt that even a third reading would soften my opinion that many of the events and characters verge on complete inscrutability. The ease with which you can dive back in and read several pages somehow makes it all the more frustrating when you close it, having gained no further insight.

This dissonance between value as artifact versus value as novel begs the question of how much to suspend my disbelief and play along, because a narrator change late in the third act confirms Celedón wants us to read it as such a document. If read as an accompaniment to a history of Pinochet or another human rights nightmare, it would certainly resonate. Sans that context, however, it’s difficult to engage with a text so purely idea-driven.

As a physical object, it does appeal to a resurgence in print versus e-books. Publishers Weekly and the Codex Group recently cited a possible “digital fatigue” among consumers, and stories with qualities unique to printed books are ripe for success. Reading The Subsidiary, I thought, this could only exist as a printed book. It is a story defined by its device. I heard Chris Ware speak during the release of his massive project, Building Stories, about sales in bookstores being boosted by graphic novels and their appeal as unique objects versus mutable variations of “content.” They are stories only able to be told in book form.

To my surprise, I discovered The Subsidiary is available for the Kindle. I can’t even imagine. What good comes from this book, what thoughts it engenders, what horrors it suggests, stem from its inherent possibility as testimony to historical tragedy or farce. To download such a thing, a missive from a dark corner of a frightened bureaucrat’s office during a political or corporate cleansing, is absurd.

Had I read the e-book, I can tell you this review would be much shorter, considering much of the discussion surrounding it is and will be its storytelling device. As a piece of literature, there’s simply too little to discuss.

The handful of characters are all named after their particular physical limitation. “Blind girl,” “deaf girl,” “lame man,” “one-armed man,” “one-eyed man,” “mute girl.” What symbolism there is, or why a corporation hires only the disabled is unclear. At one point, “The mute girl moans. The one-armed man applauds.” There’s the koan-like (and in this case, groan-inducing) nature I mentioned.

At one point the Mute Girl tells the narrator that the Lame Man is holding a young boy captive and teaching him to read. “The Mute Girl went on calmly and in detail. The boy was lost. He was poor, without manners: the Lame Man had to bathe him.” There are no further details. How did this boy get into the office? How, over the course of the book’s two-week narrative, was the idea to teach a child to read something that entered the imagination? What office has a bathtub?

The ending is somewhat chilling, but having no emotional investment in characters or story, it’s hard to know how to feel. The original office worker’s record lives on, accessed by another anonymous bureaucrat. Despite briefly acknowledging the horror within, it’s clear the incident will be filed away, covered up, buried. The final image is an impression of the lines of a rubber stamp devoid of text. Only the blank stamp has been covered with ink and pressed to the page. Nothing left — or permitted — to be said.

Celedón thus maintains verisimilitude, as I’m sure similar accounts exist in international courts created by people whose names we’ll never know, who died horrible deaths in isolation. But in so doing, the story never transcends its device. It is a self-contained document that remains impenetrable.

Maybe it’s a failure of my own imagination. Maybe it says something about my lack of humanity, or maybe it’s the privilege of living a comfortable existence in the United States that prevented me from connecting with The Subsidiary. If November heralds the rise of President Trump, at least I know a third reread will take little time, and I can draw comfort from the knowledge that rubber stamp sets are very affordable.

Mark Slouka Will Not Flinch

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Mark Slouka is no stranger to authordom. He’s published six books, fiction and nonfiction. His work has been in Best American Fiction and Best American Essays both. He’s won awards. He’s done some press, you know? And yet as I prepared for this conversation, I kept thinking, God, he must be so worried about what I’m going to say.

Even by the standards of memoir, Nobody’s Son (W.W. Norton & Co., 2016) is personal. It’s not heart-baring so much as bone-baring: look, this is how I work inside. These are the veins, this is the tissue. This is all I am. Lucky for Slouka, he happens to express his innermost thoughts and pore over his darkest memories in laconic, gorgeous prose.

Nobody’s Son travels from Slouka’s mother’s abuse-filled childhood in Czechoslovakia to the post-World War II refugee world on four continents to Brewster, New York, where a novelist realizes he’s been writing about himself in disguise. It would have been cheesy to call this book Portrait of the Writer as a Son, but that’s what it is. Well, it’s all kinds of portraits, but that’s the first and central one. The rest? You’ll see.

Lily Meyer: You must be very scared of interviewers for this book.

Mark Slouka: When you have personal material, it’s hard not to be invested. But this book is a rescue operation as much as a memoir. It had to be written. It had been sitting back there for forty years, so by the time I got to it — no, by the time it mugged me, which is more how I feel about it, it was like, What the hell is happening — anyway, by the time I got to it, it just poured out of me. I don’t even remember writing big chunks of it. The book just went. Seven, eight months and it was done. Like literature in a microwave. And now here it is, my heart with a cover on it.

LM: I am shocked to hear that. This book is so formally aware of itself, so calculated-seeming, I was sure that you’d been writing it for years.

MS: Nope, seven months. I wrote it in a kind of white heat. Five, six hours a day, and I wouldn’t notice the time. I’d stand up and my back would be locked. But I was so happy! There was a sense of unburdening, of clarity, of seeing the light ahead. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel that kind of creative energy again.

LM: How much did you edit? And what was that process like?

MS: I’m an obsessive re-writer, but I re-write from the beginning, continually. If I don’t have the first stone correctly laid, I can’t put another one on top. So when I sit down in the morning, I read through what came before and prune, adjust, re-write. By the time I’ve finished a draft to my satisfaction, then, it’s a finished book. Though I should say, I believe that Hemingway line that any story can be made better by being made shorter, so there was some condensing and distilling at the end.

LM: Who is this book a portrait of first, or most?

MS: It’s a self-portrait in the sense that I’m thinking about my past, my history, the story I inherited, the ghosts that were handed down to me. It’s a portrait of my parents, too, but from there I’d have to say it’s a portrait of memory and how memory works, how memory spills into fiction all the time. And it’s a portrait of abuse, and how abuse is handed from generation to generation. It took me a long time to understand that the abuse my mother suffered changed forms and then came down to me.

It’s an argument for the defense, too. I’m trying to say, Listen, I was a good son. At some point I had to pull away from my mother, and I carried a lot of guilt for that, so part of this book was a self-exoneration. It’s one of those big baggy many-thing books, which I happen to have a real affection for. It doesn’t fit neatly into a genre, which is fine, since I’m not completely sure I believe in the genres.

LM: Something you didn’t say is that this book is a portrait of a writer, and of the writing process.

MS: I suppose it is. The process is so much a part of who I am, maybe it’s invisible to me. But it was embarrassing to think back on Brewster or on some of my short stories — on a good many things I’ve written — and think, Good God, man, you just didn’t see what you were trying to say. You didn’t know what you were writing about. So yes, it’s about self-revelation through writing.

LM: You flag what you’re doing very explicitly, too. You spend the whole beginning writing about how you’re beginning, and then there’s a point about forty pages in where you say, “Might as well begin with the end.” Same at the end, too. You say, “I’m ending now, I’m ending now,” and then the book ends. The reader can watch you watch yourself writing.

MS: That’s what was so liberating about it. I’ve always hidden myself in my books, and suddenly it was like, Get your ass out on the microscope slide. I’m going to take a look at you. I tried to look at myself as objectively as possible, and I had to do that through the lens of my parents and my history. But the more I did that, the more I understood that chronology just isn’t useful to me. Take an ending: when is it really an end? My father died three years ago; I dreamt about him three nights ago. He’s very vivid to me. I’m more interested in how we navigate our memories and histories than in chronology.

LM: You contrast that experience to what you call Big History, which you define as thing follows thing.

MS: Well, certain things happened! I have no patience with revisionism. Certain things happen in big and small history both, but once a thing has passed, we shape it into a story. We leave certain parts out, stress other parts. Once an event is in the past it becomes a kind of fiction.

Once an event is in the past it becomes a kind of fiction.

LM: It does seem that your mother is more resistant to your storytelling than anyone else. As a reader, I felt like I was chasing her through the book.

MS: Well, we were impossibly close when I was a child. The sound of her laughter is something I’ll remember the rest of my life. She was so fun to be with, and that’s what made what followed so extraordinarily difficult. For a long time, I didn’t understand, and for a long time after that I tried to save her, and after that was the anger and sense of betrayal, and then I was just fighting to save myself.

LM: You don’t spend much explicit time on your mother’s being a survivor of sexual abuse, or on your mother’s addiction. Why does that come so late in the memoir? And why does her lover come so late in the memoir?

MS: The drugs come late because I discovered them late. I was fifty-six years old before my father told me my mother had been an addict for the better part of thirty years. How she remained standing is beyond comprehension. As far as F., her lover, goes, I don’t know if I can answer why he appears in the memoir where he does, but I can say that I think of him as the core of this memoir. You know, it’s kind of a love story, really. I remember him very well; I thought he was a wonderful man, and I think he came really close to saving my mother.

LM: I’m fascinated by the total lack of shame in Nobody’s Son, and in the way you’re talking to me about it now. How did you learn that lack of shame?

MS: When I was a teenager and my family life began to go sideways, I developed a willingness to look at myself. That’s how you learn to see outside you, by looking at yourself. I really believe that. So shame is not something that plays a big role in my life. That’s not to say that writing this memoir wasn’t excruciating. I had this notion of my mother pleading with me, saying, Don’t do this. It felt like a brick in my chest, the idea of her begging me not to write it. I externalized that feeling. I put it in the book. I’d sit there with tears in my eyes, unable to write, and then I’d remember how much my mother believed in literature. She was a librarian for thirty years, and a real reader. Books were almost a religion to her. And her standard for writers was always fearlessness. A writer shouldn’t flinch. If you’re going to flinch, find something else to do; if you’re going to write, then fucking well write.

A writer shouldn’t flinch. If you’re going to flinch, find something else to do; if you’re going to write, then fucking well write.

LM: Are you working on another book now?

MS: I’ve been working on a sequel to Brewster. The protagonist there was thirty years old, and he’s fifty-eight now. And there’s another book that has to do with Milan Kundera, but it’s harder to describe.

LM: Does it feel different to write fiction having written this memoir?

MS: Absolutely. This was a liberation book for me. It freed up my voice, I think, and unclouded my vision. There’s something about having written in this naked first person that was liberating creatively in ways so big I haven’t figured them out completely. It’s like I’m ambidextrous now, or like I’ve added something new. Sitting down to write feels different now. It feels good.

11 Haunted Novels with Emotional Ghosts

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The ancient Greeks believed that the boundary between the land of the living and the underworld of the dead was permeable. Orpheus and Odysseus both made it to Hades and back, and their experiences were traumatic. (Orpheus bungled his wife’s rescue mission and Odysseus spotted his mother, who he didn’t know was dead.) Humans have been obsessed with animating and interacting with the deceased — in other words, with ghosts — forever. Our fascination with breaking down the boundary of this life and the next results, in part, from the fact that we humans are so permeable ourselves. We don’t truly let anyone or anything go; every experience penetrates our consciousness and stays there, threatening to come back and make us feel all over again.

Ghosts are problems, emotional knots to be untied (no ghost is sticking around to see who wins the Giants game), which makes them popular devices in literature. Of course, hauntings come from endless sources. Characters can be haunted by ex-lovers, lost parents, or bad life choices. Being haunted simply means a forced reckoning with your past — which, depending on your life, can be much more terrifying than seeing dead people.

In that vein, here are 11 novels with emotional ghosts, plus a few dead people moving furniture, because it’s Halloween season, after all.

Artful by Ali Smith

Artful by Ali Smith

This enchanting book is delightfully strange and essentially Ali Smith — she took four talks which she gave at Oxford University on Comp Lit and put them into a ghost story. We open with the narrator speaking to her dead lover, a ghost who has maintained some proprietary instincts about the apartment. The ghost is there, puttering around, stealing TV remotes, and slowly decaying. By mixing essay, meditation, wordplay, and love story, Smith achieves an original, sincere picture of loss.

Image result for grief is the thing with feathers max porter cover

Grief is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter

Another hybrid tale, this debut is a poignant mix of novel, fable, and prose poem. When a man’s wife dies suddenly, he and his two sons are faced with the challenge of processing the titular grief. Help comes to them in the unexpected form of a supportive yet rather sassy crow. But that’s the thing about grief — being in its throes can feel like being sucked into a hallucinatory alternate reality, one where you might just find solace in a large, smelly, talking bird.

Image result for savage detectives by roberto bolaño

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

Bolaño’s episodic novel is the story of two poets, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, who are on a quest to find Cesárea Tinajero, a Mexican poet considered to be the mother of Visceral Realism. But it’s also about young male artists coming of age, Mexico City in the 1970s, and the impressions that we leave behind. Belano and Lima themselves become ghost-like — for much of the book, we learn about them through other people’s glimpses, tales, brief encounters, and lingering fragments of memory.

Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante

Those who only know Ferrante from the Neapolitan series might be surprised that her other novels tend to be slim, intense works that take place over a short time frame, in this case, a few days. Troubling Love is both a mystery and a meditation on parent-child relations, as the narrator, Delia, comes back to Naples for her mother’s funeral. Investigating why her mother committed suicide, Delia is sucked into the smelly, passionate, vulgar world of Naples and must confront uncomfortable truths about her childhood that have haunted her for years.

Outline

Outline by Rachel Cusk

A writer is in Athens to teach a course; we know that she is a mother and divorced, but that is about the extent of the information that Cusk gives us in this ingeniously crafted novel. Though short on names and details, the past of the narrator, and the people she speaks to, reverberate through every sentence. Reading this novel makes you realize how much of the present is spent talking about the past.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

A butler goes on a car journey to see an old colleague, and as he passes through the bucolic English countryside, he recounts his career working at Darlington Hall from the heydey of the great English houses through their decline after World War II. Ishiguro’s works tend to be preoccupied with the immutable past, but I found Remains of the Day to be especially devastating. Stevens, the narrator, captures the battle between regret and acceptance that we all must suffer when the past didn’t go as planned, when it feels incomplete, suddenly over, and we realize, only too late, that we would do it differently if we could do it again.

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

You could say that the characters in this Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel are haunted by an exclamation point. After the death of mamma Bigtree, the Bigtree family park deteriorates from a thriving alligator wresting park (!) to an empty relic of the family’s once happy past. As in other pieces written by Russell, characters also attempt to find literal ghosts in the creepy, watery world of the Thousand Islands off the coast of Southern Florida.

Image result for did you ever have a family by bill clegg

Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg

Bill Clegg’s novel isn’t just content with one ghost; it has many. The day before her wedding, a gas explosion kills June Reid’s daughter, her daughter’s fiancé, her boyfriend, and her ex-husband. Clegg explores such an overwhelming magnitude of loss in a surprisingly quiet, thoughtful way.

Old Filth by Jane Gardam

This is the first book of Gardam’s series starring Edward Feathers, or Old Filth (from the saying, Failed In London Try Hong Kong), a Raj orphan who grew up in British Malaya. When his wife Betty dies, the stiff, proper Feathers, who is in retirement in England, is pursued by memories of their life in Hong Kong. Like Stevens in Remains of the Day, Feathers is haunted by a past which he has idealized but is starting to show its flaws.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Beloved uses a literal ghost to create one of the most powerful images in literature. Sethe, a slave who escaped a brutal plantation in Kentucky, is haunted by the baby she killed rather than allow her to be sent back into slavery. The haunting extends to the figurative level, as every character is plagued by what they’ve experienced in the ugly, hellish world of slavery.

Image result for graphic design

Sleeping on Jupiter by Anuradha Roy

Roy’s atmospheric novel features a wide cast of characters but at its center is Nomi, a young woman who returns to the seaside town of Jarmuli to investigate her past, particularly the Guruji — leader of a large ashram — who sexually abused her when she was a child. Guruji is the ghost here, and though he’s gone he continues to influence her, from her inability to connect with her foster mother to the way she dresses as a punk.

The World Reacts to an American Winning the Booker

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Paul Beatty’s The Sellout is the first American prizewinner

As you likely already know, yesterday Paul Beatty took home the 2016 Man Booker Prize (and $60,000) for The Sellout, making him the first American to win the award and, regardless of nationality, a rare comedic victor.

The controversy surrounding the 2014 decision to extend eligibility to all novels published in English in the UK (i.e. to include Americans, among others) hasn’t exactly dissipated over the past couple years. During the lead-up to last year’s announcement, The Telegraph published an article ominously headlined “American Dominance of Man Booker Prize longlist ‘confirms worst fears.’” The year before that, novelist Philp Hensher bemoaned American inclusion, commenting it would be like “an economic superpower exerting its own literary taste,” and Jim Crace provided the particularly British insight that something ineffable would be “lost” from the prize should Americans be added to the bill. All that is to say, Beatty’s victory has certainly aggravated some still healing wounds across the pond.

This year, the Irish Times posted a particularly scathing write-up that equates Beatty’s novel, the satiric tale of a narrator named ‘Me’ who, despite his African-American heritage, attempts to reinstate slavery and segregation in his “agrarian ghetto” outside Los Angeles, to “TV shows and sketches, or any number of screwball movie plots,” calling the choice “a bit of a sellout.” The same article also noted that “as darkening clouds of disbelief continue to gather over the US, anything can now happen.” Just a wonderful sentiment. To their credit, the Irish Times did consider Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton, eliminated after the long-list, both a “great American novel,” and a worthy contender for the Booker Prize.

The Guardian took a more optimistic view, lauding Beatty and the Man Booker Committee in two separate pieces, titled “The Sellout Rips Up Rulebook For What Award-Winning Fiction Looks Like” and “How Paul Beatty’s Win Shakes the Jonathan Franzen-Loving US Literati.” The common theme running between the two is an appreciation for writing that is both difficult and unbound from expectation. However, a more tacit critique of a “polarized literary culture of the United States,” which author Michelle Dean perceives to be an undoubted truth, is also present. While this interpretation of the American literary scene is more than a tad reductive, and The Sellout certainly was not really that overlooked on its home turf, I can, counterarguments aside, endorse prizewinners who operate in a high literary register and critics who consider Jonathan Franzen to be an absolute blowhard without getting too up in arms.

Back stateside, the response has been more unequivocally joyous. For The New Republic, Alex Shephard wrote, “it’s hard to think of a better first American Man Booker winner than The Sellout, a profane, hilarious, and often uncomfortable look at America.” He also added the spirited aside, “if nothing else, the Man Booker Prize finally confirmed what has always been true…Americans write the best books.”

The New York Times, characteristically, took a more demure and balanced approach, acknowledging the controversy without positing a divisive stance. The Gray Lady did, however, include a lovely quote from Beatty on his novel:

“It was a hard book for me to write; I know it’s hard to read. I’m just trying to create space for myself. And hopefully that can create space for others.”

Congrats, Mr. Beatty. And well done.

Was Shakespeare’s Rival His Sometime Ghostwriter?

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Christopher Marlowe will be listed as a co-author on all three of William Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays when the Oxford University Press releases its new collected Shakespeare anthology in November.

While the two great playwrights are often portrayed as rivals (or the same person, according to more misguided conspiracy theorists), recent scholarship argues Shakespeare not only worked with Marlowe, but was a frequent collaborator throughout his career. A lot of this has to do with the creative structure of the early modern British theater. The process worked similarly to television scriptwriting, with various playwrights frequently redrafting weak sections of others original scripts. In fact, scholars consider 38% (17 of 44) of Shakespeare’s plays co-authored to a significant degree.

As for Henry VI in particular, the edition’s editors relied on a mix of traditional and data based research to identify Marlowe as a contributor. The team created a data set of Marlowe’s works, tasking the computers with identifying linguistic idiosyncrasies in his writing. Perhaps the most notable finding is the phrase “glory droopeth,” that apparently only Marlowe has ever used. They then repeated the process with Shakespeare’s texts and cross referenced the findings. The results indicated a significant number of passages across the Henry VI trilogy that employ language both commonly associated with Marlowe and uncharacteristic of Shakespeare’s usages.

Even though the traditionalist notion that Shakespeare worked alone has largely been shot dead (after all, speculation surrounding Marlowe’s collaboration dates back to the 19th century), some scholars still aren’t convinced we have the full story. Carol Rutter, a Professor at the University of Warwick specializing in the study and performance of Shakespeare, suggested in an interview with the BBC that “it’s much more likely that he started his career working for a company where he was already an actor, and collaborated not with another playwright but with the actors — who will have had Marlowe very much in their heads, on the stage, in their voices. … They were the ones putting Marlowe’s influence into the plays.” Although she concludes her remarks by acknowledging that, regardless of Marlowe’s actual influence, the change has sparked a continuation of a discussion that is ultimately worthwhile.

All the Keys to All the Doors by Clare Beams

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On that first Tuesday in March, the assistant principal came to tell Cele what happened. She answered the door still in the thick bathrobe she wore against the achy morning chilliness, still holding her second cup of coffee. His lips were gray around the edges. It was all over; the boy who’d done it was dead. For some reason the doors to the school and the third-grade classroom hadn’t been locked. There will be no more Tuesdays in Middleford, Cele decided while the assistant principal spoke. She looked over at Kaitlin’s dark house and willed her to keep sleeping. No more month of March either. She opened her mouth to tell him so.

“What?” she asked. “What did you say?”

Middleford was a tablecloth of a town, stretched loose and green over gentle New England hills. Anchored by Cele’s gifts. Cele gave buildings the way other women gave candies linty from the bottoms of their purses. The town hall, the library, the middle school, the high school, the rec center. Gracious hulks of buildings, Greek temples swathed in brick, monumental. She gave a monument, too, dedicated to the general war dead, which the town festooned with flags on Memorial Day.

These buildings’ caretakers were all old men, and Cele hired other old men to replace them when they died. People in town wondered absently how these men, so old, managed to keep the buildings so spotless and clean lined. There was widespread mild worry about their backs. Cele didn’t hire them for their backs, but for their discretion. Forty years ago, the first of them had come to talk to her, three months into his tenure at the town hall (the first of her gifts, answering the first, most urgent need, or so she’d then thought — putting the main in Main Street). Sam Brewer, a stooped man of seventy, who took off his hat when he spoke to her. “Something’s funny with the building.”

“Funny?”

He crossed his arms. He didn’t want to say the crazy thing he had come to say. Cele didn’t know what it was, though some corner of her had suspected that there’d be something. That faint itching knowledge was what had made her hire Sam for the job in the first place and not some strapping, younger, louder man.

She was quiet. She was only thirty, that long-ago morning, but she’d already learned the power of silence, the way it let you set terms.

Sam finally spoke. “There’s no work for me to do. I dust and I mop and I sweep, but it’s just to be doing something. There’s never dust, or dirt, nothing. Sometimes I’ll even see somebody’s dropped something, or left a footprint, but when I come back to clean it, it’s gone already. Like . . .”

He let his eyes roam over her living room: The mantel with the blue-and-white Chinese vases her father had set there when he bought this house before Cele was born, with some of the money Cele herself would quadruple. The worn-in chair that had come with Garth when she’d married him. Her father had been dead for ten years, on that morning of Sam’s visit, and Garth for two. It was in the aftermath of Garth’s death — so unexpected, both of them so young; and so rapid, just months after they’d realized anything was wrong — that Cele had first had the thought to give a building, to try to somehow stick things back in place.

“Like?” Cele prompted Sam, when she couldn’t wait anymore.

“Like the building soaks it up.”

So it seemed the buildings had gone one step farther than merely assuming the role she’d envisioned for them. They were taking in life and mess as ballast, affixing themselves. Here was some understanding, instead of just that faint itch from before, though the understanding felt like something pulled from her sleeping mind. It made sense to her in the same way her dreams did.

Cele’s heart pounded. She raised her eyebrows politely. “I imagine you just don’t know your own efficacy, Sam.”

In these forty years since, mud, dirt, and dust had continued to vanish, when no one was looking, from the hallways of Cele’s buildings. Graffiti continued to disappear from the walls of their bathrooms — the more embarrassing its message, the faster it went. What was more, none of her buildings had ever needed painting, or new roofs, or their brick walls re-pointed. Cement did not crumble. Furnaces did not break down. Middlefordians assumed Cele had these matters taken care of while they slept. It did not seem beyond her.

Cele herself had never gained a clearer sense of how it worked — what was even working. Mostly, she kept this lack of knowledge a secret from herself.

If only she’d gotten to the elementary school a little earlier. The existing building, which dated from the twenties, was slated for demolition, a new building to be given next year. In one of her buildings, Cele was sure, this could never, ever have happened.

The elementary-school assistant principal nearly hyper-ventilated as he drove them down Main Street, talking rapidly and senselessly. Cele patted her knees and tried to remember his name. John? Jim? The horror of the moment, of course, but even so she couldn’t ask. She was seventy now, and she was careful with herself in a way she hadn’t bothered with at forty, keeping her gray hair trimmed blunt and precise as the edge of a paintbrush just below her ears, asking only the kinds of questions that betrayed no confusion.

John-Jim was too red where he’d been too pale before. Flooded with blood. Blood-flooded.

“You have to tell them,” John-Jim was saying.

Cele blinked. “Who?”

“The families.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just told you,” he said, though that was a thing people did not say to Cele, people just repeated, if she wanted them to. “Some of the families are at the police station, the ones who can’t find their kids, not outside the school, not at the hospital, and no one will tell them anything.”

“Well, the police should tell them.”

“They will, once they know who exactly, once they’ve handled…” He blanched again. She willed him not to say it, and knew they were all right when he turned back to red. “The police won’t say anything yet, just keep telling them to stay put, and everyone keeps asking and asking, and I don’t know what to say to them. I thought you might. You were who I thought of.”

Of course she was. Who else? Officially, Cele had no real role in Middleford, was nothing more than a donor, but all Middlefordians knew that titles and actualities were not the same. She’d appeared next to Cal Tompkins at his campaign events, when he was running for First Selectman, and he won in a landslide. Zoning changes, tax increases, plans for new parks required her approval. When Jenny Long, local mother, was dying of ovarian cancer, Cele went to visit her every Thursday, and held a fundraiser that produced more money than Jenny had been able to use.

But what did John-Jim expect her to say, once he brought her to this room in the police station where the families were gathered? It would be a small room, without enough chairs, she imagined. What could she possibly say, inside it?

Cele’s cell phone rang. “Cele, is it true?” Kaitlin’s voice, on the line, wavered and caught odd emphases, as if someone were turning the volume on Cele’s phone up and down.

“I think so,” Cele said, because somehow it seemed kinder than just saying yes.

“How can it be? All those kids? All of them?”

Cele pictured Kaitlin hunched over her kitchen table, leaning her rib cage into the wood so the mound of her pregnant stomach could expand beneath. Pressing her palms to that mound, herself and not herself, like a diviner. “Kaitlin, go back to bed,” Cele said, firmly enough that maybe she would listen, and hung up. She wanted to imagine Kaitlin snug beneath her quilt.

John-Jim was still talking, maybe had talked right through the phone call. “You have to tell them something. You’ll know how to do it.”

Crisply, Cele said, “Let me off here, please.”

John-Jim pulled to the side of the road with the automatic obedience that would have returned him to his seat, in school, when instructed. “Here? Why? Please. Please, Mrs. Bailey.”

“I have something I need to take care of.”

“But — ”

She waved a brisk hand and opened the door, a trembling escapee. “Thank you,” she said. Shut the door hard, strode away, leaving him no choice, she thought, but to begin driving, though she didn’t risk turning her head to see.

The town hall loomed before her. No one would look for her here, not for a while. No one would find her and bring her to those families and make her talk to them. Town offices opened at 9:30 and so the door was still locked, but Cele produced her key chain, choking with all the keys to all her doors, from her handbag.

The air inside had its usual marvelous past-scent, marbly and cured. The quiet was another time’s quiet. She breathed it greedily.

Cele knew that Marcia, the town clerk, kept Middleford High School yearbooks in chronological order on a bookshelf in the office on the second floor. Our kids are the heart of this town, Marcia said.

A sophomore last year, not enrolled this year, the assistant principal had told Cele. The name was familiar. His parents she could see in her mind, hazy but there: the father was bald and quiet, the mother brown-haired, with a frequent laugh. But she couldn’t picture the boy, and his faceless name burrowed and chewed. Not that Cele thought she knew every person in Middleford, but she’d thought she knew the ones who might need various kinds of watching. Not to have known this boy — not to have sensed what was lurking, coiling, readying — was a failing, indicative of larger failings.

Cele took the stairs and opened Marcia’s office with another key. There was the yearbook, last in line. Heavy in her hands. She could not open it, but she couldn’t leave it either, so she took it with her down the hall to the Meeting Room, which was Cele’s own understanding of Middleford’s heart. She came here, sometimes, when she had decisions to make. Forty years ago, it had been the first room she envisioned. The first room of her first building: ceremonial, with a somber lacquer, a place for battle-time strategies. She’d known by then that battles could happen when they were least expected.

She set the yearbook on the rich dark wood table at the center of the room and sat down before it. From the walls, portraits of the town’s founders gazed down, peering at the book or at their own reflections in the table’s surface. All of Middleford’s legends. Where no portrait had existed, and no likeness on which a portrait might be based — many of these people were historically significant only in the most local sense — Cele had commissioned artists to make them up wholesale, so that Middlefordians could have faces to put with the names they knew. Sometimes, when she came in here, she even talked to the founders’ portraits. The weight of their gazes helped her hear her own words differently and know what to do.

Cele let herself lay her cheek on the table for a moment. Then she opened the yearbook.

In his picture, the boy looked already dead. Maybe her knowledge was coloring him, but Cele thought he would have looked that way to her yesterday too. The strange pale thinness of the face, as if the flesh were falling away. The eyes canted slightly to the side, looking at what came next. He hadn’t been there, not really. Already he’d been beyond touching.

To leave him that way was more than Cele could bear. She pulled a pen from her handbag, detached the cap with a crisp pop, and then her hand became a child-hand and crab-scribbled out the boy’s face, plaguing him with a swirling cloud of ink, like a rough rendering of dirt or a swarm of insects.

She dropped the pen. She felt the portraits watching her and looked up.

Such histrionics, said the piggy eyes of Richard Stanley, gentleman apple farmer, first to call Middleford a town back in 1723, and who had cared enough to argue with him?

Emmeline Lewis, 1940s Middleford schoolteacher, spectacles aglint: Is it the picture’s fault?

Cele’s own father, his jowly, hairless head sculptural, mythic: You know whose fault it is.

Garth was last in line, there at all only because Cele had insisted. He gazed at her gently and sadly. You know.

A gulping sob ached up Cele’s throat and made a soft, low note. She closed the yearbook and shoved it. It zipped across the tabletop that never in this town hall, in this town, would need polishing. She grabbed her keys and shuffled out, slamming the door behind her and locking it. In the bathroom she vomited up her coffee and flushed away the stinging brown.

She quivered, but she felt calmer. The yearbook should be returned to its line. She could do that, at least.

When she opened the door, the book was no longer on the table.

It must have slipped right off the opposite edge. She went to check, though she knew already that it hadn’t, because she’d seen it in the middle of the tabletop as she ed. The floor was bare but for the chairs’ feet, shaped like lions’ paws.

A book, something so large and substantial as a book, she would not have believed. This room, it seemed, could take in a different kind of disarray. Maybe that was what had been happening all those times she’d come here with half-thought-out plans, and said them out loud, and found her thinking suddenly clearer. Or maybe this was a new gift, for today.

She leaned out the Meeting Room door, listening carefully. Nothing stirred. Nothing would stir. The news must have spread by now, and the people who normally reported here to run the sleepy town offices would be at the police station instead, trying to sort out what they were supposed to do.

She stepped back and surveyed the room, asking it a question. The portraits wouldn’t meet her eyes.

Then Cele heard stirring, after all. Someone calling “Mrs. Bailey?” and footsteps coming up the stairs. She emerged to find John-Jim panting his way toward her. Cele must have left the front door unlocked. She wasn’t the first to forget, today, to lock a door.

“Here you are,” he said. “I drove around so you’d have some time. But now you’re finished. You are, right? And I can bring you.”

Some sickened piece of Cele seemed to have vanished with the yearbook, and she was able to see John-Jim clearly, the whole shaking mess of him. The way a person treading water, breathing deeply, head well clear of the surface, can see every thrash of a distant person as he drowns.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

His face crumpled.

“I saw it,” he blurted. “I heard the noise. I went to check what it was. The whole thing, I saw it, through the door.”

Cele understood. For the rest of his life, he would know himself to be the person who had seen it happen without somehow stopping it (certainly he couldn’t have, but that didn’t matter) — just as Cele would know herself to be the person who had not replaced the elementary school in time.

She was able to see, though, whose knowledge was worse.

Behind her, the portraits whispered. The sound gathered texture in her mind. What she did next came from the same sort of instinct that would have led her to cover up a wound — so it could heal, and because it hurt to look at it.

Cele put her hand on the assistant principal’s plump elbow. “James,” she said, for of course the man’s name was James, how could she ever have forgotten? “Come with me.”

She showed him to a seat at the table. “Wait here. Just for a minute. I’ll be right back.”

Cele closed the door behind her, and locked it. James might or might not have heard the click — it was a quiet lock. She went back to the bathroom and combed her hair into place with her fingers. She looked like herself in the mirror.

When she unlocked and opened the door to the Meeting Room, it was empty, though the chair in which James the assistant principal had been sitting was pushed back from the table just slightly, as if he’d gotten up in a hurry to go wherever he’d gone.

Cele talked to people all day long. To the police, to the various reporters who arrived so quickly it seemed they must have scented the event before it actually happened, to members of the school board. To the families. She didn’t cry. To cry would be disrespectful — what would it leave for the others to do, with so much more to grieve than she had? Expression had a ceiling whose height must be considered, and where one’s claim lay beneath it.

“Where did James go?” said the raw-nosed, weeping elementary-school principal, Heidi Watkins. Heidi had seen nothing. By the time she came out of her office it was all finished.

“I have no idea,” Cele told her, not untruthfully.

Cele had Mark Barrows from the police department drive her home, long after dark. Instead of taking the trim path to her own front steps she turned toward Kaitlin’s house.

Andrew answered the door. “Oh, thank God,” he said, without any of his habitual charming irony. There was a crease down the middle of one of his freckled cheeks, as if he’d been recently in bed. Cele’s feelings about Andrew in general were mild, benevolent: he was no worse than anyone would have been. Today she felt grateful he’d been home with Kaitlin all day. She followed him back to where Kaitlin sat, tucked into a corner of the couch, her belly like a pillow she’d positioned herself behind for security, staring at the television.

“They aren’t really saying anything new,” Kaitlin said. Cele sat down beside her, and Andrew ducked out again.

“They must have already said what they know,” Cele told her.

“So what do you know?” Kaitlin turned to face Cele. Always that sharpness to her. It was what made seeing her round in pregnancy so odd — a globe strapped to a collection of angles.

Kaitlin’s parents had lived in this house for years, and had begun raising Kaitlin’s older brothers and then Kaitlin herself here, before Cele really noticed any of them. Then one Halloween she’d answered a knock at her door to find Kaitlin, who was then about six, in a Dorothy costume on the stoop with her two older brothers, both attired as Star Wars Stormtroopers. Cele had turned fifty that year, and all evening as she’d bestowed candy on neighborhood children, she’d been dogged by a sudden understanding that if these children discussed her after, they would call her the old woman.

“You didn’t want to be Princess Leia?” she asked Kaitlin.

“I’m Dorothy every year.”

“Why?”

“Knowing ahead of time makes everybody feel good.”

The two brothers were jostling over Cele’s candy bar selection. Cele peered at the little girl in her wig with its brown braids, a loop of her real, blond hair caught in the band at the forehead.

“What a good thing to have realized,” Cele told her.

After that Kaitlin came often to Cele’s house to drink juice at the dining room table, dipping her beaky little nose into her cup with each sip and telling Cele about her brothers and teachers and friends and parents. Cele sometimes played a private game while Kaitlin talked, pretending Kaitlin was her child, hers and Garth’s. Any child they’d actually had would have been grown by then, of course, but it was just a game.

When Kaitlin went away to college, Cele thought she’d lost her. As it turned out, Kaitlin had only found Andrew and brought him back here, where she took a job teaching fifth grade at Middleford Elementary. “Middleford just feels more real than other places,” she’d told Cele.

“Yes,” Cele had said, thinking of all the bricks she’d piled. But Kaitlin had never shown any sign of suspecting the bricks’ role. To her, it seemed, Middleford’s stability was simply one of its features, like the sharp curve on Main Street, or the tea-colored, leaf-clogged pond at the north edge of town.

Once Kaitlin began spending her days at the elementary school, Cele had wanted to bump up its replacing in her plans. But the original building was still sound enough, and the foundation of the middle school had cracked. To switch the order would have been to make an admission of something.

Now, Cele held Kaitlin’s bony, oddly warm hand. “Well, what have they been saying?” she said, and Kaitlin began to recite the numbers and the names and the sequence of locations — parking lot to front door to classroom, and why weren’t the doors locked? That question again.

“That’s all I know too,” Cele told her. “Nobody knows more than that now.”

“You must.” Kaitlin’s nose ran. She rubbed it angrily.

“It was third grade, Kaitlin. It was far away from your wing,” Cele said.

“I know that.”

If Cele knew what Kaitlin wanted to hear, she’d say it. She was used to understanding Kaitlin, but since Kaitlin’s pregnancy and especially since her maternity leave had begun two weeks earlier, Kaitlin had been saying things Cele couldn’t see to the bottom of. I wish there were a window in my stomach, so I could look at all his parts and organs and everything and make sure it’s all in the right place, she said, making Cele think of cadavers hacked up by medical school students. I wish I knew every thought my son was ever going to have. Cele had never felt that way about another person, not even Garth, whom she’d loved until she felt she was about to split open.

I think having a child is the most terrifying thing a person can ever do to themselves.

“What else do you want to know?” Cele asked.

“I want to know why. I want to know what was wrong with him, that he did this. What his reasons were.”

“The reasons of people like this aren’t reasons. They don’t help anything.”

“It would help me, to know.”

Cele said what would help Kaitlin was going to bed. Bundled her up the stairs. Andrew appeared and watched from the top, and Cele felt better, knowing that Kaitlin only had to traverse the staircase itself alone. Halfway, Kaitlin stopped and turned back.

“Cele,” she asked, “what are those mothers going to do?”

Cele sat in her bedroom that night and held her keys in her lap. She hadn’t been able to leave them downstairs. The weight of them, in the dip between her thighs, pulled the material of her nightgown tight, like somebody’s sleeping hand. Two of the rings held all the keys they could; the last was almost full. If that last ring had been a clock face, the keys took up all the room between ten and two. The key to every door in every building Cele had built was on one of these three rings. Nothing special, in itself, this key chain — just a cracked black plastic fob and the large metal rings — other than the fact that it had been Garth’s, once.

Because the elementary school wasn’t hers yet, Cele had no keys to it. So she couldn’t touch the ones for the front door, the third-grade classroom, and wonder why their corresponding locks had not been thrown that morning. Probably there was no real reason, only that locking them had never been necessary before. Probably it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

Cele had visited the elementary school along with the other schools this winter, as she did every year. There was no official justification for these visits, of course, but no one was going to tell her she couldn’t. She went because she wanted to watch the children’s faces at the middle school and the high school, looking for signs that they could feel the buildings’ hunger for the gum they stuck under their desks, the crumpled paper that fell short of trash cans, the clumsier of their words. At the elementary school, she laid plans for new classroom spaces as she sat against back walls and listened to lessons. She stayed no longer in Kaitlin’s classroom than in any of the others, just as she’d promised herself ahead of time. But she loved watching Kaitlin at the front of the room, her belly then just visibly swelling, teaching a lesson on The Witch of Blackbird Pond. It seemed exactly the right place, in all the world, for Kaitlin to be.

The elementary-school children, too, had demanded Cele’s attention. They twitched with their wants and fears. Chewing on pencils and fingers, sucking on swatches of their own hair, as if they were trying to take their world inside themselves.

Cele counted her keys now, for the soothingness of it, the way a miser counts coins. Eighty-two. Each key attached to a space she could open at will. Locks mattered. Locks made you owner. Plus, there was all they let you keep in, and out.

Cele wasn’t sure what that meant for James. She had no guesses about where he was now, if he was anywhere. What she’d done was horrible, maybe, except it didn’t feel that way. If she’d known what would happen when she locked him in the Meeting Room, she was almost sure she wouldn’t have been brave enough, though it was true she had never been lacking in bravery. Really, she was sure of nothing except what she’d relieved him of, what his life in Middleford would have been like after this day. She had no means of evaluating the rightness or wrongness of closing that door, turning that lock, but at least it was a decision, a shaping. Better, perhaps, than the formlessness of accident — a forgotten lock, or two, the imbalances of one boy, a rogue and energetic cell in the bloodstream — reverberating and knocking things down.

The new elementary school would come with maybe twenty-five keys, all told. Cele closed her eyes, pinched the pads of her fingers together, and imagined those keys between them, each jagged tooth. But she couldn’t seem to give them the weight of metal in her mind. They stayed light as toothpicks, light as fingernails, light as hair.

The reporters settled in and got comfortable. Their stories in print and on television made Cele ill — they used quaint postcard-like pictures of Middleford that they’d tinted gray, and horror-movie music hummed in all their prose. To discover more about the young man, they talked to his three-doors-down neighbor, and trumpet teacher, and dentist, and former classmate. Watery collages of details about the children and their teacher were assembled. Cele unplugged her television and threw away her newspapers still in their bags.

Schools stayed closed, all that week and into the next. The streets were empty of Middlefordians but chock-full of rubberneckers from near and far. On her way to buy groceries, Cele was tempted to run down with her car a pair of middle-aged women, pointing and clutching each other on the street, cheeks rouged by titillation.

Garth had always told Cele she was ruthless. He said it with warmth but also with wonder. Somehow he’d spied this sort of impulse in her, even then.

James’s family seemed only a little concerned about where he had gone. Cele took this impossibility for a reassuring sign, a demonstration of rightness, like the failure of anyone in town to ever demand an explanation for her buildings’ strange self-repair. James’s wife told somebody James must be clearing his head, and that was the explanation that circulated. The question of his current location seemed papered over: there, and everyone knew it, but nobody looked at it. He’d become part of the anchoring, maybe, Cele thought, which they all needed more than ever. Part of what the buildings sucked in to keep this town in place.

Meanwhile, Kaitlin stopped brushing her hair, allowing it to become a pale knotty cloud. She wore the same black sweatpants and T-shirt every day and began to take on the smell of overripe fruit. Andrew had gone back to work, and Cele thought it might have been better in some ways if Kaitlin could have returned to teaching; the children would have asked questions, and made mistakes, and dropped things, and stopped seeming like symbols of anything. But of course the school wasn’t even open. Cele adopted the routine she’d imagined for a month from now, after the baby was born, having Chinese food delivered to Kaitlin and Andrew’s, or stopping by to make coffee. Their house seemed so quiet, quieter somehow than Cele’s own.

“Cele, what do you remember about Sonya Cummings?” Kaitlin asked, one rainy Thursday.

“You worked down the hall from her. You don’t need me to remember her for you.”

“When she was a kid, I meant.”

Cele considered. In her mind, she stripped Sonya’s face of its middle-aged fleshiness. “She was noisy. That’s probably not surprising. She loved jump rope, I think.”

Kaitlin chewed on her lips. “She always sounded like she was reading Hallmark cards. I keep trying to imagine what she’d have said about this.”

“There isn’t a card for this,” Cele said.

Kaitlin waddled to the sink and banged her tea mug down inside, hard enough to rattle the spoon. “Jump rope? I can’t picture that at all.”

“Well, she was smaller then.”

When Kaitlin turned around, she’d lifted the spoon from the cup, and she brandished it at Cele. “I don’t think,” she said, “I want this baby to be born.”

“Of course you do,” Cele said briskly. But she was seeing her buildings bulging, their seams stretching, thinking how it would be if everything they’d kept safe and hidden inside were about to burst forth. Her knees trembled.

Kaitlin threw the spoon. It sounded much larger than it was, hitting the floor.

“Cele, why didn’t you build a new elementary school?” she said, and Cele was surprised enough that she had to sit down. Kaitlin sat, too. She watched Cele, who had no answer for her.

After a moment, Cele stood and picked up the thrown spoon. She washed it carefully, running her thumb along its rim. Dried it and put it silently back in its drawer.

The next day, Cele decided on gardening. She would plant hardy early-spring flowers so Kaitlin could see some color when she looked out the window. If she seemed to notice, Cele would plant some at her house too.

Cele’s legs didn’t like folding up so she could kneel on the ground — when had that happened, that they’d stopped listening to her without complaint? — but her fingers bent easily, dug easily. She enjoyed the feel of the soil. Cool and moist, like touching the deepest dark. She made holes for the pink and purple pansies and wondered about herself, whether her legs or her fingers foretold her future. Part of her was still sure she would turn out to be like her buildings. In two hundred years she would still be a fixture, and no one would quite know how old she was, and new Middlefordians would still be allowing her to stow them away in safe compartments. The prospect made her tired.

Astonishing, that Kaitlin should know about the buildings. Maybe the knowledge had just then risen up from Kaitlin’s depths like a bubble. Or maybe she’d known all along and never said a word.

The first pansy Cele planted settled perfectly straight. She tucked a mound of dirt around the roots, patted it firm.

When she turned to reach for the next, she found that the mothers were coming up her walkway.

A pack of them. A tribe of grief. Ella McIntyre, who’d cried loudest of any at the police station, led the way. They stopped, their toes at the edge of the at of pansies.

“What can you do for us?” Ella said to Cele.

“I’m sorry?”

“What can you do?” the blond Perkins mother said. Cele had never known her first name.

Why the mothers had come this way, all together, Cele had no idea. Perhaps the fathers would come up her path tomorrow, or next month, and then the grandmothers, and the grandfathers, and the siblings.

But the mothers were here now, waiting for their answer. Cele could tell them there was nothing. They’d have to believe her. Who do you think I am? she could say.

The mothers had white, nervous fingers. They had dry, blasted eyes. Their feet shuffled in place. From some things, Cele thought, there was no recovering. She should know — Garth’s death had been that, almost, for her. To turn it into only almost, to give herself enough heft to keep from floating away, she’d had to weigh down all of Middleford. There wasn’t enough space on the whole surface of the earth to build what it would take to reach these mothers. Their pain was a vast, unchartable, unimaginable sea. Cele couldn’t see its edges. She wasn’t sure it had any, but if it did, they were beyond the reach of her mind, and beyond the reach of the mothers’ minds too.

Well, what, then? People lived with unlivable things all the time. There was no rule that Cele had to watch them try.

Cele looked up at them, right into all those faces. Rules, though, had never had much to do with the actual shape of Cele’s life. These women weren’t Cele’s responsibility, except that she’d decided long ago they all were.

“Come with me,” Cele told them.

She led the silent line of mothers to the town hall. She could feel them behind her, like a black held breath. They were suspended, all of them, in the same moment, though it would look different to each. An orange backpack, a crooked braid, new nail polish, a tooth lost the night before. The way their treasure had looked the last time they’d seen it. None of these women was ever getting out of this moment, and it was too much to expect them to drag it around with them through the rest of their slow, slow lives. Cele felt sure that whatever she was bringing them to must be better than that. She imagined it as a long white room full of narrow beds with crisp sheets. They would each get in, and lay the black- ness down, and rest their eyes on a white ceiling.

The Meeting Room seemed to sigh as the mothers entered. They took their places around the table. They planted their elbows on the wood, leaned their heads into their hands. Some of them closed their eyes.

“Just a moment. I’ll be right back,” Cele told them. She closed and locked the door.

One of the fathers was interviewed on television, a few days later. Cele, who’d plugged her TV in again, watched him speak. “I think she just went off somewhere,” the father said. “I think she needed to.”

The mothers had gone off. James was clearing his head. The caretakers Cele hired were unusually strong and efficient men, especially given their age. Vast soundless hands placed new roofs, when needed, in the middle of the night. These stories were Cele’s gift to Middleford; something, if not as much as she would have liked.

Cele jingled her keys. She carried them everywhere with her now.

When Cele brought over a pizza the following week, Andrew met her at the door. He tugged Cele into the coat closet. “She isn’t getting better,” he said. “Everybody else is getting better.”

If Garth had been able to see what happened to Cele after he died, he would not have thought her ruthless. She stopped getting out of bed. It had soothed her to fold the blanket in a certain fashion: lying down, she would make a pleat at the top edge, then double it over, again, again, until it was thigh-level and she would have had to sit up to keep folding. Then she unfolded, up and up, tucking herself back in. Then she started over. She spent whole days doing that. In a different version of her life, she might have spent whole years. Garth would have been terrified, watching her drift, and he would have tried and tried to throw her lines. She was grateful she hadn’t ever had to see Garth look the way Andrew looked just now.

Eventually, Cele swam back in. She couldn’t quite remember why, or how. One day she got up instead of staying in bed, and the rest followed. This time she just had to tow Kaitlin with her, that was all. Kaitlin was not like the mothers, or James — she could not be that far out. There was no reason for her to be that far. Cele would bring her back in.

Cele put a hand on Andrew’s shoulder and used a muted version of her bullhorn voice, the one from her ribbon-cutting ceremonies. “Kaitlin will be fine, Andrew.”

“I hope so,” Andrew said.

After Kaitlin had eaten a piece of the pizza, Cele draped her in a sweater and brought her to see the pansies. The cardigan hung like open curtains, unable to button over Kaitlin’s stomach.

The flowers were taking, and they nodded their cheerful heads. Kaitlin stooped as if to smell them. Then she began ripping them up.

When she’d finished, when all the pansies lay limp on the grass, Kaitlin said to Cele, “Please.”

“Please what? What do you want me to do?” Cele asked. “Just tell me.”

“Wherever you took the others,” Kaitlin said. “Take me.”

Cele was willing to swim with Kaitlin forever, pull and pull, but she hadn’t thought to ask Kaitlin if the pulling hurt. Because it wasn’t just Kaitlin, after all. Kaitlin had to pull somebody else with her. Extra drag. Cele hadn’t thought of that. How could she have? How could she know what that felt like?

“I’ll just show you,” Cele said. “I’ll show you and you can decide.”

Cele drove Kaitlin to the town hall. It was too far for Kaitlin to walk, now that she was so big. Carefully, she shepherded Kaitlin toward the Meeting Room, hand on Kaitlin’s shoulder as she climbed the stairs. They stood together outside the door while Cele grabbed for the keys in her purse, fumbled them, grabbed again.

“Easy,” she said, mostly to herself.

“Easy-peasy,” Kaitlin said absently.

Cele turned. Kaitlin held the small of her own back, eagerly watching the door, as if behind it were nectar or balm. Cele didn’t think that was wrong, exactly. Still, there was Kaitlin’s face, the precious warm fact of it. She touched Kaitlin’s smooth cheek, and Kaitlin’s eyes darted to Cele’s face, then back to the door again.

She would only be giving Kaitlin a choice, but she didn’t want Kaitlin to have this choice. Did not want the possibility of having to close this door on her, having to stand outside and fit the key to the lock and turn. Why should Cele have to be the one to do it, over and over again?

Cele asked Kaitlin to sit on the stairs. “There’s something I need to check inside,” she said.

Kaitlin sat down, off-balance, front-heavy.

“Be careful,” Cele told her.

Cele went in and closed the door. She twisted the lock so Kaitlin wouldn’t come in. She thought about whoever had been the last person into the elementary school that morning, and of Sonya Cummings inside her third-grade classroom, both of them closing doors and stopping short of this one last movement.

Cele walked to the head of the table and set down her keys. She kept her eyes on the shine of them against the wood and tried to make her voice as strong as it had been when she’d come into this room to talk over other decisions, over the years, back when she had thought she was talking only to herself. “I don’t want these. I don’t want to do it anymore,” she said. She felt so light without the keys in her hand.

That isn’t all you’ve brought us.

She looked up. At the end of the row, beside Garth, was the yearbook photo of the boy with his scribbled-out face. Large as the others, framed like the others. Through the ink she could still make out his features.

“Not you,” she said.

Garth’s eyes sparkled. All their eyes sparkled. Wet, deep as small seas, then not small, widening. Cele looked back at the door, the lock on the door, which she herself had thrown.