Super Flat Times
Page 1
Copyright © 2003 by Matthew Derby
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications in which some of these stories were first published: “Instructions,” 5 Trope; “Home Recordings,” 3rd bed; “Joy of Eating,” Conjunctions; “The Father Helmet,” Fence; “The Boyish Mulatto,” American Journal of Print; “Meat Tower,” Elimae; “Behavior Pilot,” Failbetter; “Sky Harvest,” Pindeldyboz
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The Warner Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
First eBook Edition: July 2007
ISBN: 978-0-316-02589-8
Book designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott
Contents
Praise for Matthew Derby’s
Dedication
Epigraph
First
Years 5–50
Fragment
The Sound Gun
Meat Tower
The Boyish Mulatto
Sky Harvest
Home Recordings
Year 51
Fragment
Joy of Eating
The Father Helmet
Crutches Used as Weapon
Night Watchmen
Behavior Pilot
Years 52–59
Fragment
Stupid Animals
The End of Men
Instructions
The Life Jacket
Gantry’s Last
Fragment
An Appeal
Acknowledgments
Praise for Matthew Derby’s
Super Flat Times
“The sign on the road to Derbyville should read ‘Welcome to the Apocalypse of the Innocents.’ Matthew Derby’s zanily inventive fictional world will disarm you with its bleak humor, its dire and giddy sentences, its irrepressible sense of wonder, its urgent narrative force. Prepare to laugh, to be uplifted, to be a tiny bit ruined.”
—HEIDI JULAVITS, author of The Mineral Palace
“I can’t believe I’m writing this sentence, but Derby’s book is a bold step forward in science fiction. Imagine The Matrix, but funny, or a neurotic Metropolis, and you might get some sense of what this weird, beautifully written book, made by someone who has watched far too much television, does to your brain.”
—NEAL POLLACK, author of The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature
“Matthew Derby stages a wagon circle around everything dull and earthbound in American fiction. His stories arrive in an almost fantastical mode, shimmering with broken robots and strange machines, but their sense of doom, hilarity, and overwhelming grief comes directly from the real world. A vital and astonishing writer.”
—BEN MARCUS, author of The Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women
“These stories are hilarious, the dialogue is pitch-perfect, as if you’re listening in on the last minutes of doomed men in a bunker who have no idea they’re doomed. These are about the only sentences I would say actually have acoustics. The stories took me out of this world and into a more interesting one. Derby’s characters are helpless, angry, and very seductive, and his decrepit, futuristic world is both wonderful and terrible and entirely too credible.”
—RJ CURTIS
For Mary-Kim and Zooey
Is history ever just “past,” really over? Recognizing the specific social circumstances, the ideological development and material differences hardly breaks the thread — just splits it, like a net cast wide.
— Mimi Nguyen
First
First they took men. Heavy ones — men that might sink to the bottom. In secret they stormed the towns, the suburbs, the complexes. They bound the men’s hands behind their backs and marched them out to the foothills or into ravines, anywhere low enough so that no one would see. They lined them up along the edge of the deep concrete pools they’d built, whispered brief slogans into the men’s ears, and then shoved them, face first, into the quickening substance. When the heavy ones were all accounted for, they took men who struggled, men who hid, men with sharp tongues, men with hair on their backs, men named Kevin. The men who did not resist, the men who were willing to die, were sent off to fight wars instead. When men grew scarce, they took children, and when the children thinned out they tossed women into the gritty, viscous pits. Then they moved on to the next region. We never knew what the executioners were after, only that each time they were through, there were fewer of us for the killing.
The concrete pools have since been converted to parks, and those of us who have been allowed to remember (or, Those of Us Who Have Been Allowed to Remember) feel that this was the right thing to do. But it has become clear that these public gathering spaces are not enough, that some more substantial document of this era is necessary. These were the Super Flat Times, after all — years that did not seem to pass so much as inflate crazily to the bursting point, break, and collapse, withered and damp, only to be replaced by another weepy, indistinguishable abrasion. That we survived at all is a monument in itself, but we will soon pass, and the parks, too, will gradually lose their meaning, as each successive generation of children wears the concrete structures down to pillowy stumps with their play. There will be those who will claim that the executions did not happen, that they could not possibly have happened, and every year the temptation to give yourself over to this impression will grow. That is why we have decided to produce this document, a living record of the past, so that you who have been spared the memory of what you went through, what you narrowly survived, can understand. We at the Hall of Those Who Have Been Allowed to Remember have decided that it must be a document for families, a book to be placed on a wooden lectern and read aloud at gatherings. An article through which the unbearable truth of these years might be preserved.
We decided right away that an account of our own remembrance would prove so extraordinarily spotty that it would only drive this period further into obscurity. It is true that we were allowed to keep our memories because of the great care with which we’d mentally catalogued what we saw during the Super Flat Times, but nobody in our group felt capable of putting it into words. In the first years after the Great Severance, we could barely write down a Daily Personal Emotion Statement without having to douse our heads in the static bucket to stop them from quivering, much less attempt to convey a string of memories so painful that wincing had become our default facial expression. The volume, we decided, should give those who did not survive the one last chance to air their grievances that never came to them in life. By drilling down into the concrete pools, we were able to extract their last breaths, piercing with a sharp metal straw the tiny crescent-shaped sac of air forced out of their lungs as they collapsed under the weight of the rapidly solidifying medium. This air, once isolated in a glass cabinet at the Hall of Memory and massaged by a professional translator, can sometimes reveal the Missing Person’s final thoughts. Those of us who have been allowed to remember refer to the resultant documents, the clearest of which you are about to read, as prayers.
I should warn you — not all of the prayers in this volume render with the precision that, perhaps, was felt by their original authors. Please keep in mind that the Missing Persons had no way of knowing at the time that their execution would be recorded by our organ
ization years later. The great majority of relevant data is occluded by fits of shouting, flailing, or violent outbursts such as “Please help me die,” “I can’t feel my shoulders,” or “Someone I hate is on top of me.” (I have excised these intrusive bits only wherever their presence would otherwise hamper the flow of the prayer.) Other factors have conspired against an accurate representation as well — the persistent nausea we suffered while massaging the texts in the deep underground bunkers of the Hall (as you know, the air must be churned sometimes for hours in order to yield the fragile memory pockets), for example, and the single yellow elimination bucket we were allowed to carry down, a receptacle that brimmed always at day’s end with meaty, clotted waste. At times, the nausea was so intense that parts of us broke off while we vomited. Hence, my missing hand. None of this made our job any easier.
The first years, 5 to 50, are greatly underrepresented, primarily because of the incredibly poor condition of the prayers. The government’s attempts to advertise on the atmosphere through the use of colored gas, or Fud, and the ensuing accretion of hard chunks of air — what we now call Clouds — have so polluted and obfuscated the prayers that many of the remaining texts contain just a few recognizable words or gestures, readable only with the most sensitive horned instruments. Air samples taken from the North and Northwestern Properties, where the Meat Initiative was enforced starting in Year 7, are also difficult to manage, given that a sustained all-meat diet tends to deaden the lungs. Still other prayers contain only the fragile ululations that accompanied the words, and there is little that can be done to preserve them. One can still feel these works, but their translation into English III is impossible. This is regrettable, but it is hoped that what is left might be of some help in illustrating the period.
The reader will note a great many more prayers devoted to Year 51, proportionally, than to the years before or after. My reasons are embarrassingly personal. By Year 51, the government’s Population Redistribution and Elimination Program had failed in its efforts to contain and manage regional population and to maintain significant racial attributes solely through its weekly instructional radio hour. Over 70 percent of the world’s population was of mixed or untraceable racial heritage, and the population had increased 15 percent above acceptable loss, mostly because of illegal or unmonitored childbirth. The Royal Child Harvest was enforced in order to build an emergency egg repository and to formalize the population-control enterprise. Although my Culture Visa enabled me to work in the administrative offices of The Factories instead of on the workshop floor (I sorted fabric swatches and sounded the meeting gong), I was required nonetheless to surrender two eggs a year (and so, thankfully, only two eggs) to the Ministry of Child Harvesting. Women I interviewed in preparation for this project claimed I was lucky — lifting their tunics to reveal the twin flesh flaps, sealed shut with red plastic buttons, that covered their uterine holes, they spoke of the humiliating abdominal specula, the steel calipers, the bitter aftertaste of the generative pills that, when processed by the body, yielded up to nine thousand eggs a month, grapefruit-sized clusters that often broke the carrier’s hips, so that they walked forever afterward like angry, three-wheeled vegetable carts. But for me these words are of little comfort. These women, the donors, will always be able to take comfort in the sheer number of eggs they produced — their children are bound to be somewhere, at least one in every city. I yielded only two. Two untraceable eggs, lost in the world. Until the eggs were taken from me the whole proposition of childbirth bored me. The idea that I could somehow replicate myself in miniature seemed a reckless waste of time, but I have carried them to term in my mind so often now that I could sculpt their bulging, sloppy faces from behind a heavy blindfold. How close I have become to them, how frequently I have knelt beside their twin cribs, watching them go slack in the night, overcome with exhaustion. Tape a pencil to my atrophied wrist and I could render an intricate cardiograph for each rasping heart. But what really happened to them? Where are they now? In whose house have they been working themselves up, shakily, toward adulthood? Who else do they dare call mother, father, sister? I have often found myself loitering outside the memorial parks, clutching the wire fencing with one scaly, whitened hand, searching for some recognizable trait. Irrational as it seems, I am sure I could pick them, sight unseen, out of a crowd. It could be that my whole purpose in excavating these prayers has had to do with the improbable dream that I might find my children somewhere deep in the concrete, that their final thoughts might make a brief appearance in my palm. So far, nothing has surfaced.
The third era documented here — the period after the failure of the Royal Child Harvest and before the Great Severance, the Race Census — is illegal for me to reflect upon. I will say only that those of us who lived, lived through it. I had a husband during this period who was only part Korean. He didn’t go missing until three years into our relationship, right at the end, but there were near misses all the time. Once, on a crowded subway, he switched places with a meat farmer so that the farmer, who had a tired, dry face, could sit. At the next stop, the lights went out briefly, and when they came back on, the farmer was gone. Another time we were on a tiny sailboat in the bay. It was dark out — we’d temporarily stolen the boat from the amusement park. I was drowsy from too much wine. I put my hand in the water and immediately felt something move, something with the texture of rough, soaked cloth. There was a body swimming there, possibly two. I threw myself on my husband, who was asleep. “Leave us alone,” I shouted, but there was no answer, only the water lapping against the crude hull of the boat.
Some maintain that the disappearances, the mass executions, were a gift for the victims; at least they did not have to suffer the indignity of whatever came next. I could not possibly agree more. I saw secret executions from my office window, hundreds of them. I was told not to look, to keep my head down as I riffled through the fabric swatch bricks, but sometimes out of the corner of my eye I could see a single arm flailing on the surface of the thick gray pool, a fleeting, primitive white flag. I’d look away, and when I looked back all that was left was a finger. One time it was a woman’s head. I swear she was looking right at me, staring at me evenly as she sank. I remember thinking only how beautiful she looked, and how utterly calm. I kept thinking about the woman for months afterward. Whenever I thought of her I became irrationally angry. At first, I thought that the anger came from indignation, but eventually, as the thought of sinking into the damp substrate became more tempting, I came to understand it as a kind of jealousy.
And what will you have come away with after the last translated prayer has been read? You who have been fortunate enough to have had the whole history of the Super Flat Times swept from your head by the memory surgeons, so that all you remember is sitting up in the expansive Recovery Hall on Liberation Day with a bandage on your forehead and a sick taste in your mouth, how will you digest this volume? I hope that, above all things, you have not opened this book in order to learn. Because it is not what has been learned in these years that makes those of us who have been allowed to remember crumple with deep nausea every time we look back, but what has not been learned, the secret language we have carried in our bodies throughout these ordeals, in spite of them, the navigational matter coiled tightly in our hearts like the springs in a clockwork toy, gestures we sprung on one another in dense, overcrowded basement camps, in regenerative supermarket aisles, in the public showers, fussily breathing whole histories into the ear of whoever should be unluckily close. What we have learned will expire, but these things we have not learned will survive us. We pass these things along despite ourselves, and are nothing more or less than what we do with the rest of our time. Meanwhile, we are swelling with the unthought thoughts, hurling them out into the world like dead skin, temporary hosts for the larger, terminal memory.
Seoul II,
17 Tworuary, 67
Mi Jin Ahn-Strauss
Years 5–50
Fragment
My
stepfather was among the first to go. Days after he disappeared, we found his wig on the front porch. Whoever had taken him away had brought the wig back. There were things about him that weren’t even worth throwing away. My mother lifted the wig gently, as if it were a hurt animal, and brought it inside. For years no one spoke of his disappearance, and the wig remained on a table in the front hall. Then one day the wig was gone, and my brother found a small headstone in the garden, near a patch of freshly turned soil. He brought me back to show me the grave, and when he pointed at the tiny, misshapen stone he said only, “Get used to this,” before heading out to the barn where he made meat-loaf for the soldiers.
We hardly noticed the first Food Ban. There was a piece on the news about a cabbage virus, and then the cabbage stand was gone from the market. We were secretly relieved about the cabbage — no need to think up new ways to fix that particular item. It went this way with the other foods, until only meat was safe. Some people on our street held a small protest at the market, but then they were gone as well. We knew that something was wrong, that something essential was being hoisted from our grasp, but at the same time, meat was the one food we really liked to eat. An all-meat diet was something we’d been unconsciously lookingforward to, like the cooling storm that breaks a heat wave.
Meanwhile, there was a boy in our school who had been held back a year because he was slow. When the new Recruitment Initiative went into effect, he found he was too old to get a good job. He kept asking his parents to make him younger. Every time they told him no. “That is not the direction you were meant to grow,” they said, but he found a way to grow down anyway. He found a way to shed his age by eating pebbles and soaking himself in heavy water. One day he saw the hair on his leg start to retreat. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” he thought.
He got a job right away, one of the best available. In a month he was second-in-command at Corporation Two. He bought a high-speed boat, a rare poisonous snake, two rocket launchers, and a magnificent house for his parents. Every night he ate dinner with them at a long wooden table, punctuating the deep silence only to ask mockingly if they would let him grow younger. They only bowed their heads, shamefully forking around massive helpings of beef on gilded plates.