by Marge Piercy
Again she strolled along the block across from the hotel. Why could she smell a stakeout? She could no more cross the street than a fish could climb out of its tank. She felt the surveillance. She cursed herself and kept walking. She could not cross.
The man sitting in a blue sedan on her side of the street, the guy reading a newspaper just inside the door of the lobby, they could be heat or just folks. The only way to find out was to go over. She could not cross; she could not enter. A strong magnetic wind blew against her. She could feel something wrong and she could not approach the hotel.
Why was she being so fearful? She stepped into a store, a women’s boutique. The clothing was not suitable for the role she was playing, but she needed to watch the street. She felt crazed as she lilted to the salesgirl, “Something for my daughter. I’d like to bring her a present from New York City.”
“Oh? Where’re you from?”
”Erie, Pennsylvania” Abruptly her eyes stung, and she turned to finger a beige silk blouse. The car with the man sitting in it had left—ah, but the man holding the newspaper still stood just inside the lobby watching who came and went. Waiting for his wife? His mistress? Or her? She noticed a cab standing by the marquee, but it had its sign turned to Off Duty. When a couple tried to climb in, he waved them away. She felt a stab of certainty.
Slowly she walked in the direction from which she had come, back to the pay phone that was hers by use. This time she called Leigh’s station. “Yes, I’m returning Leigh Pfeiffer’s call. I had an urgent message to call him?”
“Oh, is this his wife?”
“Yes.” A year ago, she would have denied that but meant it. Now she pretended it and had never felt less connected to him. “Is something wrong?”
“Don’t be upset, Mrs. Pfeiffer. We had a phone call from Leigh’s lawyer telling us the police are holding him for questioning. I’m sure it’s some mistake. Apparently he was interviewing a deserter. We don’t know anything more about it, but you should get right in touch with Leigh’s lawyer. Do you have his number?”
“Yes, thank you. When was this?”
“We had a call just half an hour ago. The lawyer said that at first they wouldn’t let Leigh make his call, but he was supposed to be downtown covering the gay-rights hearings so we had to be notified. That’s where we thought he was.”
“Thank you ever so much” she said mechanically, hung up and began to walk south toward the Port Authority bus terminal. She had to get moving; she had to keep moving; she had to walk and keep walking, although she did not know why. Leigh would be out by nightfall, for he had his journalist’s cover. But the police had Joel. They had Joel and they had been waiting for her. Her they would not get.
She waded on as the flakes came down faster, beginning to wet the sidewalk, beginning to whiten the edges of buildings, the small squares of open ground around a tree or an excavation. They had Joel. She forced herself on, her life peeling off in strips. Part of her mind fixed on that loss, her heart ripped out of her; part of her mind worked rapidly, solving equations. Would they have Port Authority covered yet? Could they cover it with Christmas travelers in lines a block long? Should she head for the East Side instead, take the bus to LaGuardia, the shuttle to Boston, the bus north from there? She could go to ground in Boston if she had to. Contact Laura? No! She could not bear the thought of returning to the cabin on the pond without Joel. She would go crazy.
She felt as if she stood back there still paralyzed, gaping at the facade of the hotel where her lover had been taken while snow fell on her. Disguised as a hunched-over invisible woman of middle age, she trudged on through the snow falling with a slight hiss on the heated metal of cars waiting in stalled traffic. “O come, all ye faithful” “had a very shiny nose,” hit her from loudspeakers. No more distractions. No humanity. No hostages. What can be taken from me now, except my life? I could piss that away and feel only relief.
Yet she could not walk into a trap. Joel and she would not be together in prison. Break him out? Some of those federal facilities did not employ tough security. He was still alive. Unlike Ruby, Joel was still alive. But tomorrow, the next day, the next day, stretching away toward a gray horizon, she woke up and he was not with her. Shaking her head in exasperation, she must have mumbled because a young man glanced at her and veered away as if startled. Crazy, he judged. She could not afford to seem crazy and tried hard to compose her face. He was so inept as a fugitive! Perhaps because he had been underground all his adult life, it was too normal to him and he did not take the precautions she lived by. Nevertheless, he was alive, even though she could not see him, hear him, touch him. Only she felt dead, the ghost of a life broken off a second time midway. Another great wound through the center of her life. She did not know if she wanted to survive it.
But she still had Natalie. Herself. Eva. Work. Her history, her political intent, her ability to cause trouble. What she had was what she had had in September, except for Ruby, except for the false promise of Leigh. Natalie must keep an eye on Joel for her. She shook her head heavily to and fro as the snow settled on her hair. How could she go on? She could not cry yet. She had to survive, even if she could not remember now just why—a life in the service of something that had once felt far more pressing. She stopped abruptly and pulled the bag of bagels out of her rucksack and threw them into a trash can. She could not bear the smell; she could not bear the hope they leaked in fragrance. I am at the mercy of history, she thought, feeling its force concretely as a steel press closing on her chest, but I can push it too a bit. One thing I know is that nothing remains the same. No great problems in this society have been solved, no wounds healed, no promises kept except that the rich shall inherit. What swept through us and cast us forward is a force that will gather and rise again. Two steps forward and a step and a half back. I will waste none of my life.
She hurried faster toward the Port Authority terminal and Vermont.
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Dance the Eagle to Sleep:
A Novel
Marge Piercy
ISBN: 978-1-60486-456-4
$17.95 208 pages
Originally published in 1970, Marge Piercy’s second novel follows the lives of four teenagers, in a near future society, as they rebel against a military draft and “the system.” The occupation of Franklin High School begins, and with it, the open rebellion of America’s youth against their channeled, unrewarding lives and the self-serving, plastic society that directs them. From the disillusionment and alienation of the young at the center of the revolt, to their attempts to build a visionary new society, the nationwide following they gain and the brutally complete repression that inevitably follows, this is a future fiction without a drop of fantasy. As driving, violent, and nuanced today as it was 40 years ago, this anniversary edition includes a new introduction by the author reflecting unapologetically on the novel and the times from which it emerged.
“Dance the Eagle to Sleep bears a strong family resemblance, in kind and quality, to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and to Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. It would be no surprise to see it become, like these others, a totem and legend of the young.”
— Time
“Dance the Eagle to Sleep is a vision, not an argument… It is brilliant. Miss Piercy was a published poet before she resorted to the novel, exploiting its didactic aspect, and her prose crackles, depolarizes, sends shivers leaping across the synaptic cleft. The ‘eagle’ is America, bald and all but extinct. The ‘dance’ is performed by the tribal young, the self-designated ‘Indians,’ after their council meetings, to celebrate their bodies and their escape from the cannibalizing ‘system.’ The eagle isn’t danced to sleep; it sends bombers to devastate the communes of the young… What a frightening, marvelous book!”
— New York Times
“It’s so good I don’t even know how to write a coherent blurb. It tore me apart. It’s one of the first really honest books this country has ever produced. In lesser hands it would’ve been just another propaganda pamphlet, but in Marge Piercy’s it’s an all-out honest-to-God novel, humanity and love hollering from every sentence and the best set of characters since, shit I dunno, Moby Dick or something. At a time when nearly every other novelist is cashing in on masturbation fantasies, the superhip college bullshit stored up in their brains, even on the revolution itself, here is somebody with the guts to go into the deepest core of herself, her time, her history, and risk more than anybody else has so far, just out of a love for the truth and a need to tell it. It’s about fucking time.”
— Thomas Pynchon, author of Gravity’s Rainbow
The Wild Girls
Ursula K. Le Guin
ISBN: 978-1-60486-403-8
$12.00 112 pages
Ursula K. Le Guin is the one modern science fiction author who truly needs no introduction. In the forty years since The Left Hand of Darkness, her works have changed not only the face but the tone and the agenda of SF, introducing themes of gender, race, socialism and anarchism, all the while thrilling readers with trips to strange (and strangely familiar) new worlds. She is our exemplar of what fantastic literature can and should be about.
Her Nebula winner The Wild Girls, newly revised and presented here in book form for the first time, tells of two captive “dirt children” in a society of sword and silk, whose determination to enter “that possible even when unattainable space in which there is room for justice” leads to a violent and loving end.
Plus: Le Guin’s scandalous and scorching Harper’s essay, ‘Staying Awake While We Read’, (also collected here for the first time) which demolishes the pretensions of corporate publishing and the basic assumptions of capitalism as well. And of course our Outspoken Interview which promises to reveal the hidden dimensions of America’s best-known SF author. And delivers.
“Idiosyncratic and convincing, Le Guin’s characters have a long afterlife.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Her worlds are haunting psychological visions molded with firm artistry.”
— The Library Journal
“If you want excess and risk and intelligence, try Le Guin.”
— The San Francisco Chronicle
“Her characters are complex and haunting, and her writing is remarkable for its sinewy grace.”
— Time
“She wields her pen with a moral and psychological sophistication rarely seen. What she really does is write fables: splendidly intricate and hugely imaginative tales about such mundane concerns as life, death, love, and sex.”
— Newsweek
SWITCH BLADE
1-5
Summer Brenner
ISBN: 978-1-60486-019-1
256 pages $15-95
A novel of crime, transport, and sex, I-5 tells the bleak and brutal story of Anya and her journey north from Los Angeles to Oakland on the interstate that bisects the Central Valley of California.
Anya is the victim of a deep deception. Someone has lied to her; and because of this lie, she is kept under lock and key, used by her employer to service men, and indebted for the privilege. In exchange, she lives in the United States and fantasizes on a future American freedom. Or as she remarks to a friend, “Would she rather be fucking a dog … or living like a dog?” In Anya’s world, it’s a reasonable question.
Much of I-5 transpires on the eponymous interstate. Anya travels with her “manager” and driver from Los Angeles to Oakland. It’s a macabre journey: a drop at Denny’s, a bad patch of fog, a visit to a “correctional facility,” a rendezvous with an organ grinder, and a dramatic entry across Oakland’s city limits.
“Insightful, innovative and riveting. After its lyrical beginning inside Anya’s head, 1-5 shifts momentum into a rollicking gangsters-on-the-lam tale that is in turns blackly humorous, suspenseful, heartbreaking and always populated by intriguing characters. Anya is a wonderful, believable heroine, her tragic tale told from the inside out, without a shred of sentimental pity, which makes it all the stronger. A twisty, fast-paced ride you won’t soon forget.”
— Denise Hamilton, author of the L.A.Times bestseller The Last Embrace
“I’m in awe. 1-5 moves so fast you can barely catch your breath. It’s as tough as tires, as real and nasty as road rage, and best of all, it careens at breakneck speed over as many twists and turns as you’ll find on The Grapevine. What a ride! l-5’s a hard-boiled standout.”
— Julie Smith, editor of New Orleans Noir and author of the Skip Langdon and Talba Wallis crime novel series
“In 1-5, Summer Brenner deals with the onerous and gruesome subject of sex trafficking calmly and forcefully, making the reader feel the pain of its victims. The trick to forging a successful narrative is always in the det
ails, and l-5 provides them in abundance. This book bleeds truth—after you finish it, the blood will be on your hands.”
— Barry Gifford, author, poet and screenwriter
FOUND IN TRASLATION
Calling All Heroes:
A Manual for Taking Power
Paco Ignacio Taibo II
ISBN: 978-1-60486-205-8
128 pages $12.00
The euphoric idealism of grassroots reform and the tragic reality of revolutionary failure are at the center of this speculative novel that opens with a real historical event. On October 2, 1968, 10 days before the Summer Olympics in Mexico, the Mexican government responds to a student demonstration in Tlatelolco by firing into the crowd, killing more than 200 students and civilians and wounding hundreds more. The massacre of Tlatelolco was erased from the official record as easily as authorities washing the blood from the streets, and no one was ever held accountable.
It is two years later and Nestor, a journalist and participant in the fateful events, lies recovering in the hospital from a knife wound. His fevered imagination leads him in the collection of facts and memories of the movement and its assassination in the company of figures from his childhood. Nestor calls on the heroes of his youth—Sherlock Holmes, Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp and D’Artagnan among them— to join him in launching a new reform movement conceived by his intensely active imagination.
“Taibo’s writing is witty, provocative, finely nuanced and well worth the challenge.”
