by Jeffrey Ford
What was even more interesting concerning the story during my college years, and really the last time I would hear anything about it for a very long time, was an incident that transpired at the motel where I lived with my future wife, Lynn. The Colony Motor Inn on Vestal Parkway had a string of single rooms that sat up on a hill, separated from the main complex of the establishment. These rooms were reserved for students, long-time borders, and the illegal Chinese immigrants who worked at the motel restaurant, The House of Yu. It was a dreary setting in which to live on a daily basis—a heaping helping of Susquehanna gothic. The maintenance guy had one arm and an eye patch, and two of the maids were mother and daughter and sisters, whose other job was slaughtering livestock.
Lynn was in nursing school and I was doing my literary thing, spending a lot of time writing crappy stories with pencil in composition books. The room we had was really small, and the bathroom doubled as a kitchen. We had a toaster oven in there on the counter, and we cooked our own food to save money. In the mornings I’d shave onto ketchup-puddled plates in the sink. The toilet was also the garbage disposal, and it wasn’t unusual for me to try to hit the floating macaroni when I’d take a piss. That bathroom had no door, just a sliding curtain. Right next to the entrance, we kept an old Victrola, and if one of us was going in to do our thing, for a little privacy, we’d spin the “Blue Danube Waltz” at top volume.
When the weather was good and the temperature was still warm, we’d walk, in the mornings, down to the motel pool at the bottom of the hill. Lynn would swim laps, and I would sit at one of the tables and write. If we went early enough, we usually had the spot to ourselves.
On one typical day, while Lynn was swimming and I was hunched over my notebook, smoking a butt, trying to end a story without having the protagonist commit suicide or kill someone, I heard the little gate in the chain-link fence surrounding the pool open and close. I looked up and there stood this skinny guy dressed in a sailor’s uniform, white gob hat tilted at an angle on his shaved head, holding a Polaroid camera. He said hello to me and I nodded, hoping he wasn’t going to strike up a conversation. I watched his Adam’s apple bob and his eyes shift back and forth and immediately knew I was in for it.
He came over and sat at my table and asked to bum a smoke. I gave him one and he lifted my matches and lit it.
“That your girl?” he asked, nodding toward Lynn as she passed by in the water.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Nice hair,” he said and grinned.
“You on leave?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Got a big bunch of money and a week or so off. Bought this new camera.”
“Where you staying?”
“Up on the hill,” he said.
“They usually don’t rent the places up on the hill unless you’re staying for a long time,” I said.
“I made it worth their while,” he told me, flicking his ashes. “I wanted to be able to see everything.”
I was going to tell him I had to get back to work, but just then Lynn got out of the pool and came over to the table.
“Ma’am,” he said, and got up to let her sit down.
“Well, have a nice day,” I told him, but he just stood there looking at us.
I was going to tell him to shove off, but finally he spoke. “Would you two like me to take your portrait?” he asked.
I shook my head no, and Lynn said yes. She made me get up and drew me over to stand against the chain-link fence with the Vestal Parkway in the background.
The sailor brought the Polaroid up to his eye and focused on us. “Let’s have a kiss, now,” he said, that Adam’s apple bobbing like mad.
I put my arm around Lynn and kissed her for a long time. In the middle of it, I heard the pool gate open and close and saw the sailor running away across the parking lot toward the hill.
“Creep,” said Lynn.
Then I read her my new story and she dozed off while sitting straight up.
That night, as we lay in bed on the verge of sleep, I heard a loud bang come from somewhere down the row of rooms. I knew immediately that it was a gunshot, so I grabbed Lynn and rolled onto the floor. We lay there breathing heavily from fear and she said to me, “What the hell was that?”
“Maybe Mrs. West’s hair finally exploded,” I said, and we laughed. Mrs. West was the maids’ supervisor. She had a seven-story beehive hairdo she was constantly jabbing a sharpened pencil into to scratch her scalp.
About ten minutes later, I heard the police car pull up and saw the flashing red light through the split in the curtains. I hastily put my shorts and sneakers on and went outside. In the parking lot, I met Chester, our next-door neighbor.
“What’s up?” I asked him.
He was shaking his head, and in that Horse Heads, New York, upstate drawl, said, “Man, that’s gonna ruin my night.”
“What happened?” I said.
“Admiral asshole blew his brains out down there in 268.”
“The sailor?” I asked.
“Yeah, I heard the shot and went down to his room. The door was open part way. Jeez, there was a piece of jaw bone stuck in the wall and blood everywhere.”
Two more cop cars pulled up and when the officers got out they told us to go back inside.
After I told Lynn what had happened, she didn’t get much sleep, and I tossed and turned all night, falling in and out of dreams about that goofy sailor. I just remember one dream that showed him in a small boat in shark-infested waters, while in the background a volcano erupted. I awoke in the morning to the sound of someone knocking on the door; Lynn had already left for her shift at the hospital. I got out of bed and dressed quickly.
It was Mrs. West. She wanted to know if I wanted the room cleaned. I said no, and quickly shut the door. A second later, she knocked again. I opened up and she stood there, holding something out toward me. It was then that I noticed that her hands and arms were red.
“They had me here early this morning, cleaning the death,” she said. “I found this amidst the fragments.” She handed me what I took to be a square of paper. Only when I touched it did I realize it was a photograph—the picture of Lynn and me kissing, while all around us splattered flecks of red filled the sky like a blood rain.
That afternoon, I had the photo setting on the table next to where I was writing a story about a sailor who goes to a motel to commit suicide and falls in love with the maid. Every time I’d look up, there would be that picture. It gave me the willies, so eventually I turned it over. I hadn’t noticed before, but written on the back in very light pencil were these words: He stepped out into the bright morning and quietly evaporated … I recognized it immediately as part of the last line of Kafka’s elusive story. That photograph is still in my possession, at the bottom of a cardboard box, out in the garage or in the basement, I think.
Just when the synchronistic influence of that text seemed to be reaching a crescendo of revelation, it suddenly turned its back on me, and I heard nothing, saw nothing about it for years and years, until I could easily ignore my awareness of it. The avalanche of books and stories I read in the interim helped to bury it. Occasionally, when I was in a bookstore and would see some new edition of Kafka’s stories, I would pick it up and scan the table of contents, hoping not to see the piece listed. I was never disappointed. So many other writers came to call, and their personalities and plots and words became ever so much more important to me than his.
Slowly, and I mean slowly, the stories I wrote became less and less crappy and I actually had a few published by small-press magazines. The amount of time it took me to become a professional writer is reminiscent of the adage of a hundred apes in a room with a hundred typewriters, at work for a hundred years, eventually producing Hamlet’s soliloquy. From there, it was only a matter of more time, and then one day I sold a novel to a major publisher. I could less believe it than the fact that the sailor had known “Bright Morning” well enough to quote it. When my novel was published, the blurb
the publisher had written for it mentioned Kafka twice. At the time, I wasn’t thinking about all the incidents that had been related to the Kafka story; they seemed light-years away. All I thought was, “Hey, Kafka, it’s better than Harold Robbins.” Or was it? The book didn’t sell all too well, but it got great reviews. Nearly every critic who wrote about it mentioned Kafka at least once, so that when the paperback edition came out, it carried all of the critical blurbs and the back cover was lousy with Kafka.
In four years, I’d published three fantasy novels, a dozen short stories also in the genre, and a couple of essays. The first novel won a World Fantasy Award, the first two were New York Times Notable Books of the Year; one of the stories was nominated for a Nebula Award, another appeared in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror; there were starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Review, the Library Journal; three stories in one year made Locus magazine’s recommended reading list. I tell you all of this not by way of bragging, because there are others who have written more and garnered more accolades, there are others who are better writers, but for me it was a goad. I thought that to stop for a moment would mean to let all I had worked for slip away. At the same time, I was teaching five classes, over a hundred writing students a semester, at a community college an hour and a half from my house, and I had two young sons with whom I needed to spend a considerable amount of time. So I slept no more than four hours a night, smoked like mad when writing, and lived on coffee and fast food. It was an insane period and it made me into a bloated zombie. Finally I hit an impasse and needed a break. I couldn’t think of one more damn fantasy story I could write. And as it turned out, what stood between me and a vacation from it all was just one more story.
Like a good soldier, I had finished off all the pieces I had promised to editors, and then all that remained was a final story for a collection of short fiction I really wanted to see published. When the project had first presented itself I had, with reckless largesse, promised to write a piece for it that would appear nowhere else. My imagination, though, was emptier than the dark, abandoned railway station I visited every night in my dreams. In four years, I’d done just about everything I could possibly do in fantasy. I told you already about the flying head, the cloud city with attendant panopticon, but there was much more—demons, werewolves, men turned to blue stone, evil geniuses, postmodern fairy-tale kingdoms, giant moths, zombies, parodies of fantasy heroes, an interview with Jules Verne, big bug-aliens enamored of old movies, Lovecraft rip-offs, experimental hoodoo, and that’s just for starters. The only fantasy I could now conceive of was sneaking in a nap on Saturday afternoon after the kids’ basketball games and before the obligatory family trip to the mall. I was burnt crisper than a fucking cinder on the whole genre.
The deadline for the story collection was fast approaching, and all I had was a computer file full of aborted beginnings, all of which stunk. I was determined not to fail, so when the college I taught at closed for spring break and I had a week to write, I said to myself, “Okay, get a grip.” Driving home the last night before the vacation, I had a brainstorm. Why reinvent the wheel? I decided I’d just take one of the old fantasy tropes and work it over a little—a ready-made theme. Upon arriving home, I went to my office and scanned the bookshelves for an idea, and that’s when I came upon a book I had bought at a yard sale back when Lynn and I were still in college. I’d almost forgotten I’d owned the thing—an anthology of vampire stories. That night and the next day, I read almost all of the pieces in it. There was one great one, “Viy,” by Gogol, that reinvigorated my imagination somewhat. As I sat down to compose, though, a memory of Kafka’s “Bright Morning” came floating up from where it had been buried, and breached the surface of my consciousness like the hand of that corpse at the end of the movie Deliverance. I thought to myself, “If I could just read that story one more time, that would be all I’d need to get something good going.”
Sitting back in my office chair, I lit a cigarette and tried to remember what I could about the piece. Bettleman and his apples; Gregor Samsa lying in bed on his back, six legs kicking; the sailor’s hat; the worm-filled wound of the kid in “The Country Doctor”—all passed through my mind as I called forth the intricacies of the plot. Then I imagined I was back in the West Islip public library on a winter’s afternoon, reading from the violet book. Ironically enough, it dawned on me that “Bright Morning” centered around a frustrated writer, F.—a young dilettante of literary aspirations, who feels he has all of the aesthetic acumen and an overabundance of style, but, for the life of him, cannot conceive of a story worth telling. It is intimated that the reason for this is that he has spent all of his days with his nose in a book and is devoid of life experience. There is more to it than that, but that’s how the story begins. Somewhere along the way he hooks up with this haggard, bent, old man, a Mr. Krouch, whose face is “a mask of wrinkles.” I think they meet at night on the bridge leading into the small town that is the story’s setting. The old man offers his life story to the young writer in exchange for half the proceeds if the book is ever published. The writer is reticent, but then the old man tells him just one short tale about when he was a sailor, shipwrecked on a volcanic island in the Indian Ocean, south of Sumatra, and encountered a species of ferocious blue lizards as big as horses.
The young man is soon convinced he will become famous writing the old man’s biography. Each night, after their initial meeting, the old man comes to F.’s house. On the first night, as a gift to the writer, the old man gives him, from his tattered traveling bag, a beautiful silver pen and a bottle of ink. The pen feels to the young man as if it has been specifically designed for his grip; the ink flows so smoothly it is as if the words are writing themselves. Then the old man begins to recount his long, long life, a chapter a night. In that wonderfully compressed style Kafka utilizes in his parables, he gives selections from the annals of Krouch. Years tending the tombs of monarchs in some distant eastern land, a career as a silhouette puppeteer in Venice, a love affair with a young woman half his age—these are a few I remember, but there were more and they were packed into the space of two or three modestly sized paragraphs.
At the end of each session, Krouch leaves just before dawn, and F. falls asleep to the sounds of bird song that accompanies the coming of the sun. The work has an exhausting effect upon him and he sleeps all day, until nightfall, when he wakes only an hour before the old man returns. The gist of the story is that, as the auto/biography grows, F. slowly wastes away while Krouch gets younger and more robust. It becomes evident as to how the old man has managed to fit so many adventures into one lifetime, and the reader begins to suspect that there have been other unsuspecting writers before F. By the time the young man places the last period at the end of the last sentence—a sentence about him placing the last period at the end of the last sentence—he is no longer young but has become shriveled and wrinkled and bent.
“Now off to the publisher with it,” Krouch commands and gives a hearty laugh. F. can barely stand. He struggles to lift the pile of pages and then, knees creaking, altogether out of breath, he shuffles toward the door. “Allow me,” says Krouch, and he leaps from his chair and moves to open the door.
It takes much of his remaining energy, but F. manages to whisper, “Thank you.”
He steps out into the bright morning and quietly evaporates, the pages scattering on the wind like frightened ghosts.
It is one thing to vaguely remember a story by Kafka and quite another to actually have the book before you. There is that wonderfully idiosyncratic style: the meek authorial voice, the infrequent but strategically placed metaphor, a businesslike approach to plot, and those deceptive devices of craft, nearly as invisible as chameleons that make all the difference to the beauty of the imagery and the impact of the tale. I knew I needed that story in my hands, before my eyes, and that I would obsess over it, unable to write a word of my own, until I had it.
I enlisted the help of my older son, and together w
e scoured the Internet, made phone calls to antiquarian and used book shops as far away as Delaware; the western wilds of Pennsylvania; Water-town, New York, up by the Canadian border. Nothing. Most had never heard of the story. One or two said they had a very vague recollection of the violet edition but couldn’t swear to it. The used book sites on the web were crammed with copies of the more recent Schocken edition and some even had expensive originals from Europe, but none of the abstracts described the book I was searching for. I drove around one day to all the used bookstores I knew of and, in one, found the violet-covered book. I was so frantic to have my hands on it, I could hardly control my shaking as I forked over the $23.50 to the clerk. When I got out to my car and opened it, I discovered that it was really a copy of Mansfield Park by Jane Austen. I was livid, and on my way home as I drove across an overpass, I opened the window and tossed the damned thing out into the traffic below.
My week off was nearing its end and I was no closer to Kafka’s story, no closer to my own. The frustration of the search, my fear of impending failure, finally peaked and then dropped me into a sullen depression. On Saturday afternoon, between basketball and the mall, I received a phone call. Lynn answered it and handed me the receiver.
“Hello?” I said.
“I understand you are looking for the violet Kafka,” said the voice.
I was rendered speechless for a moment. Then I blurted out, “Who is this?”
“Am I correct?” asked the voice.
