Every writer has gotten back a manuscript full of red squiggles and gone, huh? If your copyeditor is confusing you, check out this comic by cartoonist Grant Snider he recently posted on Twitter:
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.
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.
Craig Davidson is the author of a number of books featuring hard-living characters in bleak landscapes. His collection Rust and Bone was adapted for a critically acclaimed film in 2012, and his most recent novel Cataract City traces the shifting fortunes of two childhood friends over several decades. The cast of characters there involves small-time criminals, greyhound racers, and a drug-addled wrestler. One early set-piece finds its protagonists lost in the woods as children. It’s a constantly terrifying section of prose.
So it’s not that surprising to find that Davidson also writes horror under the name Nick Cutter. His novel The Troop puts a group of scouts on a camping trip in contact with a terrifying entity, and his forthcoming Little Heaven (January 2017) follows a trio of guns-for-hire as they track a child abducted by a religious cult, finding something terrifying lurking out in the desert in the process. I met up with Davidson at New York Comic Con to talk about his double literary identity, how the two sides of his work feed one another, and what scares him as a reader and a writer.
Tobias Carroll: What first drew you to horror as a reader?
Craig Davidson: What drew me to it for sure, as with much of my generation–and generations after, and generations before–was Stephen King. He casts a big shadow. You know, Poe and Lovecraft and lots of great writers. I became omnivorous as a teenager, twentysomething, thirtysomething, reading as much horror as I could, way down the rabbit hole — other writers who weren’t as popular as King, and maybe in some ways didn’t really deserve to be, because their outlook on things was, maybe, too dark. I like them, but you also recognize that maybe not everyone would necessarily like them, because their worldview is really dark and unremitting. King definitely would have been the pole star as far as my reading. He gives me so much joy, so the idea would be, I’d like to try and enter the fray.
Carroll: King also holds a pretty formative place for me; I’m also pretty sure that Danse Macabre was the first book I ever read about writing.
Davidson: I think it was for me, too.
Carroll: As someone with a foot in multiple genres, was there one that came first for you, or have you always written horror and more realist works?
Davidson: What happened was, I started writing horror under a pseudonym years ago. I had a couple of books come out in my mid-twenties. I did my Master’s degree in Creative Writing, and as a function of that, you had to do a thesis. I knew they were not going to let me to do a zombie book, or a slime creature book, or some more refined idea of horror. Even a book like House of Leaves, as much as I love it, they might not have been able to get behind that. It was very strict, in terms of what you had to write on, at the time. Hopefully that’s changed.
I wrote a short story collection, thinking that was about as literary as I could get, and as academic, as I could get. That was Rust and Bone, my first book, basically. That took me off on a quasi-literary path. But I’d always had this desire to write horror. I had this idea, and I wrote a book in about six weeks. Fast enough that I didn’t even want to think about it, because I didn’t know what would happen with it. Sending it to my agent, I didn’t even know what he’d say. But I did it and sent it off, and he said, “We might be able to do something with this.” That was The Troop, and that went in that direction.
Carroll: One of the things that struck me most about Cataract City was how the first hundred pages, where the boys are lost in the woods, seemed like it could turn into a horror story at any minute. Do you know, when you’re starting to write something, if it’ll fall into one category or another, or are the two moving closer together?
Davidson: Now that I think about it, they are starting to merge a little bit. I think my next literary novel, whenever I sit down to write it, will definitely have some very genre elements in it that would not have been in my earlier work. I like to think of my horror work as “literary,” in as far as I dwell on the language and characterization. And, obviously, good genre writing is the same–it’s not like good genre writers don’t dwell on those things. The same level of intensity goes into writing both.
Carroll: Both Cataract City and Little Heaven have structures that jump around in time, where both timeframes have mysteries that need to be unraveled. Is that how you like to approach the plotting of a book, or is that more what worked for those particular stories?
Davidson: With Cataract City, it was submitted to the editor as a linear story. She said, “Because it starts out as these kids, readers aren’t necessarily going to know that they’re going to grow up to be adults, and it’s going to be a totally different thing.” So she suggested that we let readers know where those characters are now, know that this is an “adult story,” and we broke it apart and shifted the narrative all around. Some of it was difficult, but some of it was kind of easy. It took on the structure that it ended up being.
Little Heaven is like It. That was my template for it. Let’s introduce these characters where some awful thing happened some years ago. These present-day characters are still suffering the effects of it. Once you’ve established that there’s something terrible happening, let’s go back in time and show readers what the hell happened.
Carroll: Earlier today, you were on a panel about villains, so I was curious: In Little Heaven, you have both a supernatural villain and a very human one. Is there a challenge in coming up with a compelling antagonist to whom human psychology doesn’t apply?
Davidson: I was really pleased to be on that panel, and I thought it was a lot of fun. To me, the best villains are the ones who start out doing something that you could sort of agree with. You could say, “Okay, I see your motivation”–and maybe your motivation is to benefit the human race, or some subset. And then your obsession takes it over the line. I think I’ve always had a bugaboo about religion. I’ve always been very resistant and scared of its potential. It’s a potential that you can see enacting itself in real life–not just in Jonestown, which is invoked in the book, but also just in giving your life over and feeling guilty and being made to feel guilty about things that may be aspects of human nature and are not in themselves terrible.
Carroll: The Troop involves an outdoor setting; there’s a very ominous, primal aspect to the outdoors in the first hundred pages of Cataract City; and there’s this sprawling outdoor space in Little Heaven. What draws you to these naturalistic spaces where horrible things take place?
Davidson: I don’t know if it’s the Canadian in me, but there are a lot of wide open spaces out there. It’s not like we’re getting carried off by enterprising bears very often, but we were always warned about the woods, and yet we were always taken into the woods on scouting trips or camping trips. There’s this push-pull between “These are very dangerous” and “These are very beautiful and you can learn a lot and grow as a person, and you don’t want to be in front of a TV all day.” So I think a lot of that must go back to my childhood, in the sense that wide-open outdoor spaces hold as much beauty as threat. And that’s very much part of the Canadian character and part of Canadian literary history. It’s a lot about man versus the elements. I’m sure early American frontier literature is the same, and that a lot of people are still fascinated by frontier narratives and forging civilization out of nothingness. That’s probably where it came from.
It’s not like we’re getting carried off by enterprising bears very often, but we were always warned about the woods…
Carroll: Is there a Canadian literary horror tradition as a subset of that?
Davidson: There are some really good presses. ChiZine Press is a Toronto-area press that’s doing a lot of “dark fiction.” It’s not really straight-up horror. There’s a huge love for horror practitioners, but that love is largely heaped upon foreign people, like Barker, King, Koontz, on down the list. We have some really good horror writers, but not any that are super-well known. Thus, maybe the tradition in Canada is emergent. Let’s hope it’s emergent.
Carroll: As you were saying that, David Cronenberg’s name popped into my head. And he’s written a novel as well…
Davidson: Consumed, yeah. I think maybe visually, he’s a huge influence on me. On the book side, maybe I’m missing somebody.
Carroll: Is there an Alice Munro of horror?
Davidson: Well, Andrew Pyper, who’s a buddy of mine and a really good writer, did a book called The Demonologist, and many others. He would be our closest. There are a lot of up-and-comers, well, you hope, anyway. That’s how you establish a tradition: to have a bunch of people come up at the same time and push each other. You’re seeing it here with Joe Hill and Paul Tremblay and many others. The American horror is strong and continues to be strong; the Canadian horror, just like in many things, we’re catching up.
Carroll: I wanted to ask about location–it’s very significant to Cataract City, and a cursed place is at the heart of Little Heaven. How much worldbuilding do you have to do as you create a setting for a book?
Davidson: Writing a book is a daunting thing. There are more daunting things, don’t get me wrong, but it’s daunting enough that you want some sureties. One of the main sureties that I have is that I know where I’m from. I know the rhythms of that place. I know how the people behave, generally, because I’m one of them. That’s usually why most of my books are set there, because I know that place. It takes away one of the many things you have to worry about, to a degree.
In terms of horror, location is important because of the action it’ll kindle. One of the most classic horror things is, you take a group of people and you isolate them. You cut off the outside world somehow, by hook or by crook. And it’s the external monster, whatever that happens to be, and–as The Walking Dead or The Mist does so well–it’s the actual dissent among the people and that descent towards anarchy and bloodthirstiness. So when I isolate characters in horror, it’s to do a very specific job.
Carroll: Earlier, you said that you started reading horror with Stephen King, so I’m curious about where your taste in horror is now. Who are you reading these days?
Davidson: A couple of years ago, I found myself realizing just how little, in some ways, I had known and read in horror. You read the big guys and women, but they put out so many books that you can just be taken up by reading them and trying to keep up with them. So I made a very distinct effort to read a lot of 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s horror. Thomas Tyron’s The Other, [Ray Russell’s] The Case Against Satan–which, if you read The Exorcist, you go, “That’s it.” [Robert Marasco’s] Burnt Offerings. Thomas Ligotti–he’s more modern, but I’d never read him.
Stephen King gives a lot of credit to Burnt Offerings for The Shining. And you sit down and you read Burnt Offerings after reading The Shining, and it feels good as a writer. I’d thought The Shining was this sui generis thing–that it was him, that he’d made it up, whole cloth, and you’re awed at the talent and the imagination. And then you realize, no, it’s good to see the antecedents. It’s not like he ripped off any of it. The Overlook Hotel is much different than the mansion in Burnt Offerings. But I can see the roots; I can see that there were things there that he liked and used in his own way. In some ways, reckoning with a talent such as King, it’s important to see that he’s a human being, too, and inspired by the same things we are.
In some ways, reckoning with a talent such as King, it’s important to see that he’s a human being, too, and inspired by the same things we are.
Carroll: Is there a type of horror that you find gets under your skin the most?
Davidson: I’m not sure if it’s a category, so much as certain books that work well. The Exorcist–of course, I read that after seeing the movie, so I think those things go in tandem. I felt those same sweeping chills running over me. House of Leaves is truly disturbing [and] scary–just the immensity of space. The idea that there is this infinity of space that you can just get lost in, or that your obsessions will carry you into. And of course, all of the tricks with the narrative. I was amazed by that, but the simple story itself was terrifying. And Pet Sematary, as a father especially, reading it again, you’re doubly terrified. The works of Ligotti. Songs of a Dead Dreamer–that shit gets under your skin in a very profound way!
Carroll: I remember the first time I read House of Leaves, I was scared to open the door of the room I was in because I no longer felt sure about what might be on the other side.
Davidson: But when you break that book down even further, it was a story of a man and his family, or a woman and her family. And it often is that way. There is, in some way, a very human resonance that we feel there as well on top of the uncanny terror that some of that stuff inspires. I think he did a great job.
Carroll: Earlier, you talked about writing a horror novel in six weeks. Does your process vary depending on the type of book you’re working on, or is it less so now?
Davidson: As Stephen King said, the page opens up and you fall in, and you come up and go, “I’ve written three thousand words here.” It’s easier for me to do that with horror–at least it feels like that lately. That’s why it’s enabled me to write some of those books really quickly. Maybe there’s some hoary old feeling in my head that you need to throw yourself around the room a little bit more for a literary book; you need to go down and plumb the deepest parts of yourself and reckon… Some of that may be unnecessary writerly junk that gets in your head. It does take me longer to write those, but I have a lot more fun, generally, writing the Nick Cutter stuff. Mentally, it works out well.
Carroll: Is it ever disorienting to think that some readers may only be aware of one side of your work?
Davidson: I think we’re all fortunate to have any readers at all. But I’ve seen a lot where someone will read Cataract City and then discover a Nick Cutter novel and read The Troop and go, “Aw, why’d he even do this?” Or vice versa–they loved The Troop or The Deep and then they read a Craig Davidson novel and go, “Ugh, this is weak sauce.” With the cross-pollination, if it happens, it happens; you can’t do anything about it. I feel like there are some key similarities. It may be a bit of a double-edged sword, but it’s something I’m more than willing to deal with.
Carroll: Both Cataract City and Little Heaven feature kids in the woods in jeopardy; there’s also a a brief reference in Little Heaven to low-level wrestling circuits, which hearkened back to Cataract City…
Davidson: As you know as a writer, we have our obsessions. I don’t see why you wouldn’t indulge them. Why else would you be a writer? I mean, plenty of other reasons, but one of them is, indulging your obsessions and really having fun with them.
Why else would you be a writer? I mean, plenty of other reasons, but one of them is, indulging your obsessions…
Carroll: Is there a type of monster or a type of horror that you’d like to tackle that you haven’t already?
Davidson: I think I’d like to do something more cerebral, for lack of a better term. I like narratives, like Rosemary’s Baby, where you’re not sure if she’s going crazy or if they’re out to get her. Ira Levin was so good at carving the atom so that you didn’t know until the end. Something like that. You’ve always got to try new stuff, and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. I’m a working writer, for lack of a better term, so as much as I’d like to go, the push-pull is between doing stuff you know you’re good at or trying to do something where you know you’re going to have to go through a lot. It might be more satisfying to do this, but it’s safer to do this. The push-pull is between satisfaction and safety. And with–I can’t believe I’m saying this–a mortgage and a wife and a child, sometimes safety wins out. Which is nothing that I’d ever tell you at 18, nor would I advocate it to other writers. But in some ways that’s kind of the truth. But hopefully I’ll say, “Fuck it” and do stuff that I know I might fail at. You can fail going safe, too. Failure lurks on the other side of the fence.
Carroll: When you mentioned Rosemary’s Baby, I was thinking of Paul Tremblay’s Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, which I’m reading right now, and which seems to deal with a similar ambiguity.
Davidson: I love that book. I wouldn’t say he’s come out of the blue, because I’ve known Tremblay for years; we’re kind of contemporaries. But with these last two books–I wouldn’t say he’s upped his game, because his game has always been good. But he’s really found his seam, and it’s lovely to see. And it’s well-deserved, because that guy has been working hard, he’s a real student of the genre, and he’s a really good writer.
Carroll: Have you ever read something that scared you to the point where you had to put it aside for a little while?
Davidson: I wish. If I ever do that and it actually scares other people… I’ve been working lately with dream stuff, really carrying stuff out of my dreams and not using bits of it, but using it whole. Dreams are, if you can remember them, Lynchian. That could be scary, because you don’t know where that shit comes from.
Fifth Dimension Books, the Austin-based sci-fi bookmobile, is proof that the modern bookscape is a vibrant, diverse ecosystem.
Four years ago, the owners of Fifth Dimension Books, Sukyi and Patrick McMahon, purchased a collection of 100,000 science fiction books from the estate of family friend, Dr. John N. Marx. They bought a 1987 library-system bookmobile from Craigslist, spent months putting the books in storage, and bringing it up to snuff. In 2013, they opened their mobile bookstore in Austin’s hipster Hyde Park neighborhood.
They bought a 1987 library-system bookmobile from Craigslist, spent months putting the books in storage, and bringing it up to snuff.
“We knew that we couldn’t compete with something like Amazon,” Ms. McMahon said. “And we knew we didn’t want to. But we also knew that we had to translate being ‘science fiction aficionados’ into ‘successful business owners’ if we wanted Fifth Dimension Books to work. So we have to be creative and we’re always looking for new ideas to try out.”
Their niche? Expertise. They knew their sci-fi and they love to talk about it. They also know how to connect readers with the genre. From neophytes (“I’m not sure science fiction is really my thing — all those robots”), to connoisseur collectors (“You have signed copies of rare books?!?”), to niche fans (“I’m looking for something in early diesel punk”), Ms. McMahon believes that there is a science fiction book for everyone. Fifth Dimension’s motto is Used & Collectable Books For All Ages; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, & Other Fringe Books. And they have those books by the shelf-ful.
Every month, Ms. McMahon stocks the shelves with new and different books, curating special shelves featuring less-read authors and various subgenres. She offers children’s puppeetering and a free, outdoor, award-winning story hour near in.gredients neighborhood grocer. The story hour is so popular that dozens of kids and their parents find their way to the Fifth Dimension’s child-sized bookshelves and to meet Octavia the puppet — named in honor of Octavia Butler. If you email Ms. McMahon, she’ll compile a personal “must read” sci-fi list for you.
“Sukyi and her weird wandering book mobile were a wonderful addition to our grounds every Monday morning for nearly a year,” said Josh Blaine, owner of local grocer in.gredients. “She attracted families from all over Austin with her free children’s story time, which included puppets, songs, and dance. It’s a beautiful sight: 20–30 parents and kids gathered on our lawn every Monday morning enjoying old-fashioned entertainment offered by a passionate and caring member of our community.”
The very, very young bookmobile patrons love lying on the floor, utterly absorbed in shelf of sci-fi for kids.
On its surface, Fifth Dimension Books appeals to the nostalgia of the thirty-plus and older crowds — readers that can remember bookmobiles from their childhoods. Younger book-goers love its “shop local” vibe. The very, very young bookmobile patrons love lying on the floor, utterly absorbed in shelf of sci-fi for kids. The store touts itself as a “mighty, yet miniature mobile mover of literature.”
The physical machine of Fifth Dimension Books is a Chevy P30 bookmobile — it’s over twenty feet long, gets 6 miles per gallon, and has a top cruising speed of something like 54 miles per hour. It drives like a refrigerator on wheels.
“I try not to stress it out, driving on the highway,” Ms. McMahon laughed. “Honestly, it was a bit terrifying to try and park this thing, before I installed the rear-mounted camera. Now if feels natural.”
Originally from New Jersey, the bookmobile was active for twenty-five years in the public library system before the McMahons purchased it. After the bookmobile checked out with a mechanic’s inspection, they had it shipped to Austin from the East Coast.
Once they had the bookmobile in Austin, they started thinking about how to move the books from Lubbock (where they were located) to Austin. The limiting factor in moving was how much weight a single truck could carry at a time. It took eight trips between Lubbock and Austin using the largest truck Penske had at about four hundred boxes per trip to move the entire collection.
It took eight trips between Lubbock and Austin using the largest truck Penske had at about four hundred boxes per trip to move the entire collection.
Fifth Dimension Books also had to figure out how to operate, legally, in the city. “Austin at the time did not offer a permit for mobile retail businesses. The ordinance we needed was currently under discussion by the city legislature so it was a matter of sitting through those meetings and stating our support,” Patrick McMahon said. “After the ordinance was unanimously passed we were the first mobile business in Austin to receive a permit of its type.”
But it’s the books and the bookshelves of Fifth Dimension Books that command curiosity, attention, and interest as soon as you step into the mobile bookstore.
The books on the shelves of Fifth Dimension and its inventory in storage are the lifetime collection of Dr. John N. Marx, a longtime professor of chemistry at Texas Tech University. When Dr. Marx passed away in 2012, the McMahons purchased the 100,000+ collection from the Marx family — a collection so well-known in the science fiction community that Dr. Marx’s passing was noted at the 2012 World Science Fiction Association’s Hugo Awards. (Dr. Marx ran his niche online bookstore, from 1998–2012.)
His collection, though, was more than just its numbers and sheer volume; the compendium represented a lifetime of collecting, cataloging, and curating. With Dr. Marx’s passing, the collection metamorphosed in its life cycle. “We feel that we are stewards of the collection and take that responsibility seriously,” Ms. McMahon said, referring to the legacy of the books.
A portrait of Dr. Marx, and a brief biography of him, hang above the bookmobile’s dashboard. It feels like Dr. Marx is offering a final benediction on his collection as customers pass by his picture, clutching a new-to-them book, eager to read. This new reader is a new chapter in the book’s own life history.
“Don’t the books fall off the shelves when you drive?” the customers of Fifth Dimension Books invariably ask the McMahons.
Thanks to the bookmobile’s design, the answer is no. The shelves line both sides of the vehicle, with five or six shelves per unit. They’re built to tip backwards just slightly, insuring that the book snug in their shelves. While the shelves travel from location to location as part of the bookmobile’s architecture, the books on the shelves move only through the circulation of inventory.
But books and their shelves move in curious and unexpected ways. Space in the store is at an utter premium — books, buttons, and T-shirts are tucked away in every nook and cranny — but the bookmobile means that the bookshelf comes to the reader, rather than the reader coming to it.
The bookmobile means that the bookshelf comes to the reader, rather than the reader coming to it.
There’s a kinesis about the books on those mobile shelves of Fifth Dimension Books, as the shelf inventory is restocked every month. Because the bookshelves are so small and the number of books so different — relative to what one might find in a traditional brick-and-mortar store — Ms. McMahon changes out the books on the shelves with regularity.
She also spruces up the shelves to help readers create their book encounters. Some books face out, some books are shelved spine to spine. To celebrate Black History Month, for example, Ms. McMahon curated a shelf of under-read African-American science fiction writers. Her “Blind Date With A Book” shelf features books wrapped in brown paper with snippets from the book’s covered penned on the wrapping and readers buy the books, title unknown. Thanks to the Blind Date With A Book, I read Serpent Catch by Dave Wolverton — a Neanderthal sci-fi that I probably wouldn’t have picked up on my own, but enjoyed reading it.
It is the constant — yet thoughtful — churn of books on their shelves is what really underlies the success of Fifth Dimension Books.
As book commerce becomes decreasingly non-local and impersonal, the McMahons and the Fifth Dimension bookmobile’s business builds a niche through its connections within the Austin community and the creativity of its owners.
Craft books are tricky. In an era inundated with YouTube tutorials, WikiHow entries, life hack listicles, and Reddit explainer threads, the act of keeping a reader interested for 150+ pages of how-tos — let alone bringing that reader to the book in the first place — is a tall order.
Enter Benjamin Percy’s Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction (Graywolf), which probably deserves a crunchier subtitle. (“How to Succeed in Writing Stories Without Really MFAing” and “How I Learned to Stop Fetishizing Realism and Love Genre Writing” are two descriptive, if egregious, non-contenders.) Percy’s bona fides are wide-ranging and robust. After cutting his teeth with The Wilding, a literary debut with a twist of the gothic, Percy jumped into the genre writing he’d loved as a kid with supernatural thriller Red Moon and post-apocalyptic road trip thriller The Dead Lands. He also writes the Green Arrow and Teen Titans series for DC Comics.
Thrills are Percy’s specialty and calling, in case you hadn’t noticed, and a plot that keeps the reader seeking answers is his Holy Grail. His appetite for skillful storytelling is admirably indiscriminatory. Over the 15 essays that make up Thrill Me, Percy cites authors ranging from T.S. Eliot to Annie Proulx and praises the plotting and execution of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian in equal measure.
So, naturally, Percy endeavors to imbue these essays on the craft of fiction with the same sort of muscled tale-spinning found in both his favorite works and his own creations — and by and large, it’s a winning strategy. The prose, much of which was originally designed for delivery as lectures at writing workshops, is clean and clear, woven with an abundance of anecdotes and references that work as more than a perfunctory performance of subject knowledge. His textual exegesis, that gold standard of literary criticism, is crisp and pithy, serving the essays and their flows and rhythms rather than overwhelming with shows of erudition.
The book treads little new ground, but Percy makes style count, and the willingness to move beyond the standard-issue, well-worn “this is how fiction works” sort of deal is a huge boon — in other words, you’ll find no James Woodsian paens to free indirect style here. Percy also stresses that while there are certain objective requirements for good fiction, personal preference is also a huge part of the writing and reading process. This makes the author relatable to an audience outside the typical gathering of literary minds, and his appreciation for the master storytellers of genre fiction — Stephen King, for instance — who he holds in equal esteem to more hifalutin authors like McCarthy and Proulx, Jhumpa Lahiri and George Saunders, is refreshing. Genre has long been belittled in the world of letters, and when accepted, that acceptance is usually grudging. Percy dives in head first, and his enthusiasm, in conjunction with his eye for substance and style and his skillful explication, prove a heady mix.
That said, for many writers, who comprise the typical audience of such a book, there’s not much new here. Thrill Me is comprehensive in its scope, touching on most of the important pieces of storycraft from stylistic choices to character development, but in part because it’s just over 170 pages, it simply doesn’t have the space to do more than just that — touch on. It does so with character and vigor, and with a joyful populist tone, but rarely does it delve deep.
Percy’s genre touchstones, too, often skim the surface, both in choice and content. While Jaws may rarely get a namecheck in a literary essay on narrative plotting, there’s more than enough film criticism available that better explains the genius of Robert Shaw’s U.S.S. Indianapolis monologue in terms of narrative construction and delivery. And Percy’s penchant for the neat wrap-up — multiple essays, including the titular essay, end with a line regurgitating their titles — occasionally grates.
That said, even when they feel a bit too easy, Percy’s essays are expertly constructed. They neatly balance the objective and subjective, formal and informal, literary and genre. They educate and entertain. They lead you quickly to the book’s end. They are, in other words, never boring. For a book entitled Thrill Me, that is just as it should be.
I first met Larissa Pham at a reading at the Asian American Writers Workshop last spring. Her piece was lyrical and vulnerable, and she introduced herself to me (with some ambivalence) as a sex writer. Her novella, Fantasian, part of the New Lovers series from Badlands Unlimited, is a meditation on power and the self, in addition to being an erotic thriller. I interviewed Larissa about sex writing and power over e-mail and G-chat in early October. The author photo of Larissa that accompanies this piece is from an ongoing portrait series of mine.
Adalena Kavanagh: On twitter you wrote: “I maintain that you can’t talk about most things without talking, at some point, about desire.” Later you tweeted a photo of a pair of pants with a label that reads DOMINATE.
Your novella, Fantasian, is erotica, so yes, desire is a major theme but there are elements of dominance, as well. Why must we talk about desire? What role does a dominant/submissive paradigm play in your book and your work? (I hesitate to ask what place it has in your life, but if you feel comfortable talking about how the personal influences your art, feel free.)
Larissa Pham: I think we always have to talk about desire! I think desire informs so much of how we move through the world. I mean erotics here, because I’m always talking about erotics, but I also do mean desire in terms of want/need. I think being able to articulate wants and needs, and having access to the right kind of language for your wants and your needs is very important.
Now, in terms of the D/s paradigm — that’s an interesting question. Fantasian is an erotic novella, in the New Lovers series, so contractually there had to be sex in it. (6 chapters, 6 sex scenes.) And what is sex but just an ongoing conversation about power? All sex is about power and if anyone disagrees with me they’re lying to themselves. That’s hyperbole but I do believe it. I think D/s provides a really hyperarticulate framework for power in sex and I find that fascinating. It knows that power plays a role in sex (as power plays a role in most things) and it seeks to push it from subtext to surface level and even like, a meta kind of level, with the performativity of most D/s interactions.
So Fantasian is not only an erotic novella, but it is a book about power. At least, that’s what I was thinking about when I was writing it. The characters’ relationships to each other are shifting, which means their relative power dynamics are shifting, and what better way to convey that than with D/s?
I think the amount of referents within D/s, as a dynamic, are so rich that I often return to them in order to talk about other things. Like, I get to talk about class, or there’s this part where one of the characters gets fetishized by the other, and you get this really lush combination of heady erotics and then the power play beneath it. It’s really effective as a literary tool, as a way of accelerating character development and relationships.
AK: You reference Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage. Could you succinctly break that down for us?
LP: I have to admit that even though I quote Lacan, often directly, what I’m really positing is my own interpretation of his work. It’s through a scanner darkly, or whatever. But essentially Lacan posits that the I (which I take to mean the idea of a self as a discrete person) is formed when the child witnesses himself in the mirror. A mirror, when you recognize it, provides you with the image of…you! You have to reconcile yourself to how you look. Say, you look down and you see feet, you see your knees — when you’re in your body, you don’t really have a full sense of how you look. But if you wave your hands, if you kick your feet — those are gestures that are attached to a discrete body, and that’s you. They might have felt frantic or fragmented before. But now they’re enclosed in a shape, and the shape is your reflection.
So you’ve become visible. And when you become visible, you can’t go back. “Now that you know how you look…” That’s where you learn what desire is. What it means to be seen and interpreted. Because you have to deal with being a seen subject, in the way that you look around a room and you see all these other subjects. So the mirror, it’s a site of self-discovery. And it’s the beginning of the formation of a self. That’s my take on it, anyhow.
AK: In Fantasian, two Asian women meet and are struck by how similar they look. When I read your book I had to laugh at that because I am sure I am not alone in being mistaken for another Asian woman. (I had a boss who called me by the wrong name, even after he fired the other Asian woman). They share their first intimacies while looking at one another in a mirror. What does the mirror have to do with their identity and desire? Is their attraction narcissistic? Does that matter? Can you make a case for or against a narcissistic sexual attraction?
LP: The narrator and Dolores are drawn to each other because they look alike, yes. I wanted to tap into the attraction/repulsion you feel when you encounter something in another person that you recognize in yourself. Like, you might have a friend who has a trait you really dislike but it’s because you share that trait, and you have to deal with seeing it in someone else — it’s jarring; it can make you realize how ugly you are.
Of course, Dolores is in some ways the narrator’s mirror, and vice versa — they’re using each other and projecting insights because of needs that they have for themselves. I think people are very selfish and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. The mirror itself, the thing on the wall, almost becomes irrelevant when the two are together. Even in the first scene, when they meet, Dolores makes the narrator turn toward her and away from the mirror — they use each other as a surface, as the place where they hope to be reflected. There is a power imbalance, however. It’s not a perfect reflection.
Is it narcissistic? Would you fuck me? I’d fuck me. Don’t answer that question. I think — with those two, I don’t know if it’s narcissism so much as idealism. They each have something the other wants, which might just be the other.
AK: There is mutual attraction between these women, but there is also understanding between them based on their experiences as Asian women, in a way they do not experience with their respective lovers — the narrator and her white girlfriend, Dolores and her white boyfriend. How do these differences they have with their lovers affect their desire and how they are desired? How do their similarities to each other affect the sexual encounter that happens later? I also note that the sex the narrator has with women is different than with men. She is both softer and harder with women — “Because we’re both girls we know it’s okay to be rough, that we can take it…”, more romantic. With the man she later takes on as a lover she plays out a submissive role. Are these differences gendered or rooted in the narrator’s own psychology?
LP: In the scene where Dolores is putting makeup on the narrator, I’m trying to tap into these questions of yours. The two girls create a very secret, private space between them — a space that is entirely based on their mutual experiences. And Dolores even goes so far to say, “You and I aren’t that different,” and the narrator reacts to that, but Dolores doesn’t listen. It’s a tight little cage they’re in. But I think, Dolores and the narrator — they’re both seeking to be understood. Astrid, the white girlfriend, obviously doesn’t understand the narrator. And Alexei and Dolores get into fights, even though they love each other and are obsessed with each other. Because Dolores and the narrator both have this desire to be understood without explaining themselves, they come together, they’re drawn to each other, to this new kind of communication that allows each of them to speak directly to the other.
The narrator has a very different relationship to Dolores than she does to either of the twins, or even Astrid. With the twins, they’re just, you know, bodies. She doesn’t really know Dmitri, she doesn’t want to know him, he’s kind of just this hot thing she can rub up against and project on. With Astrid, she’s her girlfriend, that’s a little more conventional. But with Dolores — I’m not sure how much can be felt in the text, actually, but I never considered her and the narrator to be equals. Dolores bosses her around a lot. And the narrator is submissive in a similar way that she is to Dmitri, but whereas her sex with Dmitri is more performative, with Dolores, it’s the real deal. She’d do anything for her.
AK: If Lacan says that we first form our selves, the I, by recognizing ourselves in a mirror, how does that relate to the reality Asian Americans find themselves living in America? If we do not see ourselves reflected back to us, how do we form our selves? I feel like you were teasing out that idea a bit without getting too theoretical. How does this influence or inform these characters’ sexuality?
LP: That’s a reading I hadn’t anticipated! Thank you. I wasn’t really thinking about the state of Asian America when writing this book. I’m usually hesitant to comment on the experiences of groups of people, especially from an Asian perspective because the Asian experience in America isn’t a monolithic one.
But perhaps you may have noticed that there’s nothing identifiably Asian about Dolores or the narrator aside from how they’re described in terms of appearance. They don’t talk about their families or food or any of the other cultural cues that make up the social construction of race. Where Dolores gets her cues is from her surroundings, which are the hyper-privileged classmates she has at Yale. (Of course, she’s also choosing to belong to that particular culture.) So, perhaps, in an oblique way I’m addressing that conundrum — of having uncertain models for identity formation, so picking and choosing and trying to see what’s most advantageous, socially, is what Dolores and the twins have found works best.
This reminds me of that Junot Diaz quote, about thinking you’re a monster because you don’t have a reflection. Funnily enough, I always felt like a monster because I didn’t see my Asian American experience — which is most similar to Dolores’s — reflected anywhere. I wrote her partly to offer that.
AK: In addition to mirroring, and doppelgängers, we have twin brothers — which might be the most transgressive element of this book, because their boundaries are so porous, with each other, with the two women. Twins are spooky in that they seem like an optical illusion of doubles, but they’re real. Why twins?
LP: This is the part of the book I never know how to explain! The twins actually came first. At first, the book was just about Dolores and the brothers. I was intending to write a pulpy, gothic campus novel. Later, in another draft, I wanted to add a narrator, to explain Dolores’s fucked-up psychology, and then I got interested in the relationship between the narrator and Dolores. That’s where the mirroring comes from.
So why twins? I don’t really know. Like D/s, just invoking twins brings all these references, these slight wrongness-es. It’s very effective. But their characters are also foils to each other, and they’re intended to bring up the same questions that the relationship between the two Asian girls brings up: who are you, what are you, where did you come from? What makes you you, and what makes you different from any other person?
AK: In this book you’re talking about desire, and yes, you’re contractually obligated to write six sex scenes, but for lots of people, this is difficult to talk about. How did you get here as a writer?
LP: Hmmmm. I’m trying to remember where I got started sex writing. I usually don’t like to describe myself as a sex writer, but it is what I do, or it makes up a large part of what I do. I’m not really interested in what sex has to say about sex; I’m interested in what the sex we have says about other things, like our relationships to each other, or the things we hide from each other, or the narratives we craft around each other. I think questions of desire, intimacy, and relationships have always moved through my work. I wrote an essay for Adult Mag, right when it started, that I think cemented my ability to write things that were hot — things that were actually sexy and would get you off and be described as erotic. So I did that for a while. I wrote personal essays. I also kept writing about desire, and intimacy, and I took up that column, Cum Shots, which you’re familiar with. That was where I also learned to have a light touch, or a not-so-light touch, and how to play with narratives and pacing and structure.
I’m not really interested in what sex has to say about sex; I’m interested in what the sex we have says about other things, like our relationships…or the things we hide…
AK: I wouldn’t describe you as a sex writer, but why the hesitation to describe yourself that way?
LP: It’s all about avoiding being categorized, really. I guess it’s like when people hesitate to be called “women writers” — because historically, that has meant something. And I don’t really identify with “sex writing” as a genre, or at least, not most schools of it that exist… I’m not really an advice columnist (though I have been!) or a how-to expert (though I’ve done that too) and I don’t think I write the sort of thing that works, well in say, Playboy. Because there has been historically a genre of sex writing, and I don’t really see myself in that space. I’m more in the line of memoir, creative nonfiction, that kind of thing.
AK: Maybe you’re creating a new space.
LP: I hope so! There are a few writers who are doing what I’d like to do.
AK: Who?
LP: Maggie Nelson is someone who comes to mind most prominently. She’s really good at pairing the dirty and the ecstatic with theory and art criticism.
AK: Yes! You center Fantasian on Lacan’s mirror theory, and power. But like desire, power is a touchy subject, especially when it comes to sex and or romance. Do you consider your writing feminist?
LP: That’s such a hard question! I don’t even know if I consider myself a feminist.
(But that’s because I have problems with like, the word and the way the movement is constructed, lol) I think… I write with a sense of agency. I think I take ownership over my actions and that my narrators are people who have agency. When I write about my own life, I think I do it in a way that’s not exploitative of myself or people around me. So… do I enjoy writing about and depicting rough sex, or being submissive, or you know, tweet about wanting to get beat up? Yes, absolutely. But I don’t think it’s exploitative. I hate the word empowered, but… I suppose you could say I am empowering myself in my work. Even when I’m copping to flaws.
Do I enjoy writing about and depicting rough sex, or being submissive, or you know, tweet about wanting to get beat up? Yes, absolutely. But I don’t think it’s exploitative.
AK: I think this is why power is so interesting but also so difficult to live with and talk about. If someone were to critique the submissiveness of your character, what gives her agency? (I am not critiquing, I’m genuinely curious how one reconciles the goal of gender equality with desiring a submissive sexual experience.)
LP: If the character had been sexually dominant, would that be considered feminist? I feel like it’d be silly to say yes, women dominatrixes are feminist! They’re no more or less feminist than other kinds of people who have sex. I think the narrator is a really porous, impressionable character, but she knows what she’s doing. She’s submissive sexually and also, sometimes, emotionally/literally, in the text. But she also holds her own, sometimes. When, I think Dmitri asks her — who owns you? She doesn’t respond. Because she doesn’t play to that performative part of the sex he wants to have with her.
AK: Ah, I think that’s the key. She decides what she responds to and how she responds to it.
LP: Yeah. I think, in sex, and sex that incorporates power — one needs to remember that there are layers of performativity across the whole thing.
AK: It’s difficult to acknowledge the performativity of sex if you can’t talk about desire. Going back to an earlier comment, you say your writing is not exploitative. What would make sex writing exploitative? How do you avoid writing gratuitous sex scenes?
LP: Hmm. On a really basic level, I think of my creative nonfiction (and reporting!) and how I try my best to honor other people’s identities and narratives when I’m writing. Someone once told me that they appreciated my work because of how genuinely fond I seemed to be of the people I wrote about and how generous that seemed. I want to preserve that. I think mean-spirited writing — you know, making fun of someone for their lack of sexual prowess or whatever — is very exploitative.
As for gratuitous sex scenes — when I was writing Fantasian I thought a lot about, what is this doing for the plot? What in the relationship is changing and, down to the gesture, to the dialogue, to the setting — what can I convey with this scene? Ideally, you can convey enough meaning that your sex scene is totally necessary.
AK: What are your favorite books or movies that center on sex? Have you read The Lover? Seen the movie?
LP: Is that Marguerite Duras? I haven’t!
AK: Yes!
LP: Also I just have to cite A Sport and a Pastime real quick. I’m obsessed with it.
AK: Explain.
LP: It does everything I try to do in such a beautiful and fluid way. It’s a huge influence. The unnamed narrator — I stole that from Salter. But the sex itself — not only is it unconventionally and honestly, incredibly accurately described, but it pricks at the emotional senses, it has depth, it changes. The timbre of the sex scenes in that book allow you to witness the changing relationship between the characters.
AK: I recently wanted to watch romantic/sexual movies with Asian characters and I browsed through various streaming services and came up with very little. It was frustrating, which is partly why I made the connection between Lacan’s mirror theory and the creation of the self, and the frustration Asian Americans might have by not seeing their stories or selves reflected. I love that Dolores is Asian but you don’t write her using the markers that white audiences might expect when encountering Asian characters. Just to clarify my earlier question about the mirror stage theory and representation in media.
LP: Oh gotcha! Yeah I’m so tired of representations of Asian Americans in literature.
AK: Elaborate.
LP: We aren’t all tight with our grandmas and talk about food! (Even though I am both of these things!) It’s like — how do you represent an experience without using those markers? Obviously you don’t have to, but then you get accused of like, whiteness, which is silly because really it’s a class thing, or a regional thing that people are reacting to. That seems like a bit of a mess but do you know what I mean? I’ve received criticisms of, like… my characters seeming white but really they’re from the West Coast, or they went to Yale, etcetera, et cetera. There’s this idea that you have to tell that story of despair and pain and immigration.
AK: People forget that not all immigrants or children of immigrants are poor. I had the opposite problem growing up. Because my father is white lots of people didn’t realize I came from a working class background. It’s important to represent class in literature because that’s how lines are often drawn in society. It makes and breaks you!
LP: Yes! All of the characters in Fantasian are obsessed with class.
AK: Sometimes it seems easier to talk about race than it is to talk about class. Or maybe race is more visible so it’s easier to pretend class doesn’t exist.
LP: Yeah. Like on the one hand, it was important to me that Dolores is Asian and she’s in this relationship with Alexei, because I wanted to represent an interracial relationship that wasn’t like, weird and Orientalist. But I also wanted to write across that class line, I wanted to complicate their relationship. Race is definitely visible and affects you in a different way, but of course they intersect. That’s also why it was so important to me that Dolores is a bit well-off, a bit privileged and less aware of it. The conflict she and Alexei have is so emblematic of conversations I’ve had with white guys, men I’ve really cared about, but have had to navigate this difference of experience with.
AK: Money is another way to represent power, of course. I appreciated that you wrote an interracial relationship that wasn’t Orientalist. And then you have an incendiary relationship between two Asian women, which is no less complicated.
LP: Yes! Both of those things matter so much to me.
So, a bit of backstory: Fantasian originally started out as a conventional novel, a love triangle between proto-Dolores and the twins. In the character of Dolores, I wanted to explore casual sex and college relationships and the emotions that come with it. I wanted to represent in her, an Asian woman, the kinds of experiences I’d had but had no model for when I was in school.
I wanted her to be sensitive and pretty and like, maybe not very smart about everything but doing her best — I wanted her to be able to be flawed. So that approach to the character, and to the characters, stayed as the manuscript changed. Of course now Dolores is a bit more messed up, but that impulse — to be true to these real things, to depict these things that _do_ happen but aren’t really written about in satisfying ways — that stayed.
AK: Did she change as the novel became less conventional?
LP: Yeah, she’s become a much darker character. The novella’s a lot more psychological now. Which, personally, I love. I’m glad it’s this tight, dense thing.
AK: Dare we say she’s…somewhat “unlikable”? (Not a real question — I’m making fun of the literary world’s talking points) It’s very psychological. You’re left with a puzzle in the end, and no real answers. I mean, the narrator makes her choices, but they seem to satisfy Dolores. (This is vague, but readers — you have to read the book!)
LP: I wonder, is Dolores unlikable?
AK: Not until the end, I think.
LP: I have such a fondness for her as a character because I’ve been living with her for so long. Did you feel sorry for Dolores at the end? Some people told me they did.
AK: I didn’t find her unlikable. Maybe more unknowable. But how much do we really know someone?
LP: YESSSSS. THAT’S WHAT I WANT YOU TO ASK.
HOW
DO
YOU
KNOW
??????
AK: You can’t. You have to live with that uncertainty until it’s impossible to do so. You make a choice. But if people were easily knowable it would be much easier to write novels. Maybe even a bit boring.
LP: Definitely. I’m still not convinced I know what a novel is, though. (Or that the self exists.)
AK: My reasons for writing are rooted in trying to understand human psychology and studying people. But I would never claim to “get it”. I’m making educated guesses based on action.
LP: Yeah. It’s interesting to hear you say that because the impetus behind my writing comes from a different place. I’m really interested in trying to represent a feeling, or impart a feeling. Something really particular, which can be universal in its reception.
AK: I can see that. What do you hope to work on next?
LP: I’m working on a book proposal right now, although it’s in very early stages. It’d be nonfiction, auto-theory… like Intimacies, my current Tinyletter, or Cum Shots, but longform. I’ve been exploring that form for a while now, and I want to try doing something longer and more sustained in it.
AK: What do you mean by auto-theory?
LP: It’s such a trendy word but… theory that comes from the site of the self Chris Kraus / Maggie Nelson / Sontagian / Barthesian type stuff. Like, using the personal to theorize on relationships, intimacy, that sort of thing.
AK: Is it centered on a theme or experience?
LP: I think my work right now is centered on themes of intimacy and relationships, particularly sexual ones, so probably that, plus memoir — that seems to be the best description of what’s going on in my work and what I want to draw out. Using a small thing to illuminate big things, or using the personal to illuminate something that might mean something to other people.
ghost thing stuck in my head like Emily Dickinson/like a pop song
met a ghost thing, thought it was mine
come to me amplified by summer hunger
in a bad smell at street level, some death
washed incompletely down the drain.
come to me amplified by summer hunger —
slide out of time, down the memory hole
washed incompletely down the drain.
ghost thing, I’ll carry you on my back —
slide out of time, down the memory hole
waiting at the corner of Wooster and Broome.
ghost thing, I carry you on my back
wear a new old dress on your birthday.
waiting at the corner of Wooster and Broome
in a bad smell at street level, some death
wears a new old dress on your birthday —
met a ghost thing, thought it was mine.
ghost thing come in swinging from the chandelier
says you’re nothing but a prism for my light
nothing but a prison for my prison
blues to sing from
girl, your past is clean enough to eat from,
so why you play it so wounded?
ghost thing, I thought a surgeon
scooped you out
and I was glad and I was sorry
but here you are moving through this crowd
I’m moving through, nothing to do here
but keep on dancing.
yeah girl, let your shirt ride up to show that scar
as if it still belongs to you.
ghost thing in the laugh of the girl you should have married
She is the light that can’t be overthought or angled off to glare
into the squinting eyes
of a stonefaced passerby, but your orbit orients you indirectly
to the dark, the void
so you’re never facing the right way, or not for long, before
you look away.
Happiness means… you start and there you’re stumped — meanwhile
she’s already at the beach
she’s been there all morning and you’re late but she’s not waiting
for you, or anyone —
she’ll sun, and swim, and take a nap, and if a sunny stranger wants
to chat, she’ll rake the sand
between them when she laughs — but you, you’re out there dishing
deathstare everywhere you want to fuck
out scanning the world for broken things — today: the broad dark
back of a butterfly
freshly torn but still alive. Can’t you see your ministrations
do no good?
You’re doing it wrong. If you even get there you might be the most
broken thing on the beach
and we’re talking Coney Island here, but she’s the one who loves you
anyway and not because.
DEAR ESCAPE ARTIST:
I was watching underwater
for your last big thing —
saw you pick the lock
with the same frayed rope
they tied you up with —
was there a they or do you
do it to yourself? I am
always imagining a they.
Perhaps this is something
we have in common. I wish
we could talk it over high
up on a ledge, feet dangling
just to pretend we’re not
holding on for dear life.
DEAR ESCAPE ARTIST:
My research tells me
there are at least three ways
to die in an escape-or-die
performance: drowning,
suffocation, falling (and
occasionally electrocution).
But this was something else.
Despair? The word calls up
a fainting couch, the word
is weak. There are times
the mind invents a rescue
helicopter and its ladder
flinging out like a tongue
just to get anywhere else.
DEAR ESCAPE ARTIST:
Tell me about the breath
I mean what you do to stop it.
No, not stop but quiet the need
for air in whatever box
you’re tucked into.
DEAR ESCAPE ARTIST:
I had a dream this morning I was you.
The trap was set, it was the kind of dream
that feels continued from another dream
mine or someone else’s bleeding through.
I was on a ferris wheel in black and white,
it was a famous movie, a theory of evil
at the highest point, everything so still
below, paused almost, except a single kite
whipping the gray air — it’s hard to watch
the struggle, as if its neck could break.
The dots move slow on the ground,
predictable, in circles. Why not squash
them, a man says, who is also me. I had to exit
the conversation before we started coming down.
DEAR ESCAPE ARTIST:
Do you ever think about the body
itself as the bind?
Out at Coney Island
the meat flag is flying. An airplane
pulls across the blue field.
If this were a film, you’d hear generic engine whir
in the distance — not this plane —
some stock recording from the archives
(was it going anywhere? were there passengers?
were they thirsty too?) — maybe not a plane at all,
some other kind of engine at close range.
Instead, children screaming — it’s alive!
They dug up a crab, so the boys
stab it to death with a rock
or a shell — hard to see that far —
the girls squeal — it’s oozing —
when the creature is entirely torn
in half, they wonder
how its legs still work the sand.
It’s hot.
When I close my eyes, the plane comes back
yellow slapped against the sky
like a refrigerator magnet, the red flesh
banner rippling on its line —
light falling on some red body
of water.
Last summer we came here hungover and I wanted
out of my body but we couldn’t even swim
because a storm out there somewhere drowned
three people at Fort Tilden.
We tried walking on the beach but nothing fit
us into the heavy air. I tried not to treat you like a ghost,
told you all the things that didn’t really matter that year.
If it had been a film, this would have been the moment
of recognition that the past is past,
and wasn’t all terrible, flashback sequence —
you and me spinning drunk in the square,
almost happy — cut to me slumped down
the wall of some historic building (your line —
why do you let me treat you this way?)
to your attic apartment, your two hands
clasping air, holding it to my ear
(cue the sound effect, wings flapping, heavier
than expected) then let it out the window.
to us sitting side by side beneath the statue,
dawn coloring the square.
Now the girls are not impressed with the two squirming halves
the boys run to show them. A man’s voice says to bury it.
In another family everybody lies on someone else,
piled up like sea lions,
too hot to move, only barely lifting their heads
to curse each other out,
demand drinks.
The sun is against us again today.
It’s too hot to care about anything
but the promise the water makes
and keeps on making
to meet us here.
Halloween is almost here, which means so is Electric Literature’s second annual Genre Ball. If you like books, booze, and writers in funny costumes, be sure to get your ticket before they run out!
To celebrate both, we asked cartoonist and Okey-Panky Comics Editor Sara Lautman to illustrate what kind of treats famous writers will be handing out this Halloween. Enjoy!
★★☆☆☆ (2 out of 5)
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing a carton of milk.
I’ve found a lot of surprises in my fridge, from moldy potatoes to forgotten Snickers bars to a neighborhood kid who was got trapped while hiding from some bullies. Fortunately, I found him in time. Unfortunately, when I let him out my front door the bullies were there waiting.
One particularly unwelcome surprise recently came in the form of a carton of Bradlees brand milk. Bradlees shuttered all their stores in 2001. The carton was unopened, which gave me hope that maybe, just maybe, it was still okay. It turned out to be the opposite of okay.
First of all, the glue that sealed the carton shut had become hardened over the years, which meant opening it via the normal folding process was impossible. I tried to tear the carton open but it hurt my fingertips. Because I had accidentally sold my only pair of scissors at my tag sale a month earlier, it meant having to guy buy a new pair. It took me hours to find a tag sale with a pair of scissors for sale, and by the time I got home, I had forgotten all about the milk. It wasn’t until the next day when I remembered the milk was sitting out on the counter.
If the milk hadn’t gone bad in the past 15 years, letting it sit out for an entire day may have been the tipping point. The milk had reduced itself to a paste — a paste that smelled like a human corpse, if you’ve ever smelled one of those things.
My life before opening the milk had been so pleasant that I just stapled the carton closed so I could put it back in the fridge and forget any of this ever happened. That’s when I noticed the missing person on the side of the milk carton. It was a young boy who shared my name. I don’t like to share things so in my head I renamed him Ricky.
I wondered about Ricky. Had he ever been found? If not, where was he right now? Did he know he was missing? Had his family stopped loving him? Maybe Ricky had his own family now, and his own missing child. It was all too overwhelming to consider. Sometimes life can become an incomprehensible mess of unknowableness and it’s best to just not think about any of it.
This carton of milk pretty much ruined my day.
BEST FEATURE: The odd proportions of the carton make my hand look gigantic.
WORST FEATURE: The ink transferred to my skin and then I got Ricky’s face all over my own.
Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing a turtle.
Thank You!
