Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story

by Lorin Stein

  “Be my guest,” Jack said.

  Roy began walking back and forth.

  “Okay, just about this point an historical element comes into it. Somebody going through old newspapers finds something interesting. It seems in the eighteen-nineties there was a wave of sightings of things called mystery airships. These were weird items, aerodynamically impossible naturally, with vanes and propellers and sometimes even paddle wheels. They were reported coast to coast in the U.S. Then slightly later, in England, a similar thing, except these were cigar-shaped. There was a threat element, too. There were some petty disappearances of animals. And there was the suggestion that these things were going to drop explosives in some connection. Then the whole thing stops. The airships did the usual meaningless repertory, mainly startling people with beams of blinding light.

  “What is going on here? And of course the Society has to take the position that all these old reports must have been a newspaper hoax, blah blah blah.

  “What I was coming around to, or being driven around to, was an idea some other people were getting. The idea is that the whole flying saucer phenomenon is basically part of the spectrum of other psychic phenomenon. That is, a flying saucer behaves more like a ghost in almost every respect than it does like a piece of machinery. It belongs right in there with apparitions, materializations, poltergeists. The difference is in magnitude only. Period.

  “Now it’s important to understand I’m not claiming any originality about this part of it. This struck me about the same time it struck other people and it’s an actual school by now, this part of it. But I do go beyond it. I do go beyond it. And I’m the only one.”

  Roy sat down again.

  “Anytime you want my reaction, say the word,” Jack said.

  “Not quite yet.

  “So.

  “So I was keeping pretty much undercover with this at the Society. It amounted to a conversion and I had to consider how hard I was going to fight for it, when to come out with it, all that sort of petty thing, when I figured out the next part of it.”

  *

  Jack reminded himself to be patient, be wary.

  “The Society rents computer time,” Roy said. “One thing they do is keep building the data base. There is an immense amount of stuff to work with, all kinds of data.

  “I was looking at the distribution of sightings by hour of the night (almost all of them are at night), by month, and by location. There’s a wave pattern which is pretty marked and suddenly I knew what it was. Or rather … I got a theory of the answer to what it was. I was looking at these patterns and what I was seeing was a feeding pattern.

  “I was looking at predation curves, which I know something about. Think about it.”

  “I don’t think I’m following. You mean the flying saucers are out trying to eat people…? I’m not following, Roy.”

  “Okay, take a step back. First let’s say we provisionally assimilate flying saucers to other psychic phenomena. Okay then. Now.

  “What would you say is the single most salient common feature of psychic events, broadly speaking?

  “Let me tell you. The single most important common feature of psychic phenomena is their absolute pointlessness. Psychic research is the study of pointless events. You can see what I mean. Hauntings and apparitions are pointless, the Loch Ness monster is pointless, the abominable snowman, poltergeists are supremely pointless. Strange and fearful events that never, ever, lead anywhere or cumulate in anything. Of course, you have your inescapable specialists who specialize in manufacturing explanations of what these strange things purport. The Society is one. Or some fraud of a psychic sits down in a haunted house and comes up with some song and dance about an earthbound spirit. Exorcists. And so on.

  “Wait, before you object let me lay out the whole thing so you can object to the whole thing. A strange thing happens. I started asking myself why are all these manifestations so pointless? Of course a lot of things you never get an explanation for, not even a lying one. In England in the eighteenth century there was a character called Springheel Jack, who was a figure that knocked on your door, had some kind of lantern box on his chest, made a terrifying face and then shot up into the air and disappeared. This happened all over London. What was the point? Take something else: animal reports—escaped lions and tigers reported seen roaming around in the suburbs someplace. You see it in the papers periodically. People see them but the local circus zoo says no animals are missing. They never catch them. Of course, you can fall back on everybody being a liar if you want. But take just the one case from my own life. It happened. Would you say I’m a liar?”

  “No, the reverse,” Jack said.

  “The Loch Ness monster is a good example. Bigfoot: some terrifying yells in your backyard and chickens with their heads torn off and maybe some dung. The Black Dogs of Kent. Poltergeists. Light bulbs explode, fires start, scissors follow you around … what for?

  “Okay, so there’s no point in terms of purpose. But there is something else. What’s produced in all these displays? Ask yourself that question and you get one answer. The product is fear. The product is extreme human fear, mostly fear to the exquisite point of fear of death, or capture, or alteration, or injury, or abduction, what have you. Big, rich blooms of fear. And when do these strange events tend to take place? Almost always when people are by themselves, alone, unsupported by other people, in lonely places, often or mostly at night. I can show you a graph of UFO sightings and the number involving more than one person is too low, not normal.

  “So you can see what this turns into is a general theory of apparitions, of which the saucer part is just one branch.”

  Their father would be in ecstasy. Here was Roy the champion of an idea so hopeless of adoption that everyone is supposed to marvel. Yet how could you not devote your life to it? If you did and no one believed you and then you died and were proved right, so much the better. Genius!

  Roy continued. “The short of it is that there’s something … I’m willing to call it a life-form, a population … a thing that, one, targets on individual vulnerable people … two, somehow activates some negative belief pattern of the individual … three, converts that into a somehow material quick display. Then it eats the fear.

  “Now I know there are a lot of somehows in there but I’m giving this to you very quick and rough. I have ideas about all the mechanisms involved. Don’t say anything yet.

  “Just a couple of things I need to add. The thing is ancient and vast and permanent and basically evil. Also, it adapts! It has to. You could even develop some sympathy for it if you let yourself. It has two serious enemies, scientific progress and stupid human optimism. Show you what I mean.

  “It relies on people having a stock of things to be afraid of. You can see it easily in the case of ghosts. In order for a ghost to appear there has to be a prior notion that a ghost is likely to be attached to a certain place or a certain kind of place. But science marches on and fewer and fewer people are disposed to believe in ghosts. The threshold gets higher. Everything is squeezing the thing, really, if you look at it. Secularization, science, urbanization, pushing people into mutual supportive crowds, streetlighting. And another thing. As a species we seem determined to give the most optimistic interpretation to a thing that we can. You no sooner get spiritualism off to a roaring start with the dead coming back being nasty and vengeful than people start churchifying the movement into modern spiritualism with its happy summerland view of death. The optimists are already at work on the saucers, saying Oh they’re only here to make us respect nature and they’re going to give us some damned wisdom scroll pretty soon or a cure for cancer: don’t be afraid. Poor entities. It’s hard. Did you see Close Encounters? The saucer people live in a giant thing like a wedding cake and they are so gentle …

  “Look, the whole psychic plenum is lies! Lying presences command it. The saucers have nothing to do with space, lake monsters have nothing to do with plesiosaurs, ghosts have nothing to do with the dea
d. I’m getting excited.”

  Roy stopped. And Jack had the sense that Roy was afraid. What could be done with that?

  Roy briefly pressed his knuckles into the crown of his head, a headache treatment.

  *

  Roy resumed before Jack felt fully ready.

  “Now we need to focus on the saucers. Maybe as I was saying we should have a certain amount of sympathy for the phenomenon. It gets hungry. And here we have the situation of the host population getting harder and harder to terrify. Think how easy it must have been to go out and feed in pagan times, for example, when everybody was doing human sacrifices. Pens full of people knowing they were going to be put to death, a whole spectrum of fears, animism, every tree or rock with some guardian entity associated with it you had to be careful not to offend. You might not even need to manifest at all.

  “Okay. Then come the more refined religions, but you still have an evil adversary element in the religion that people really believe in. So you can still operate. Then religion moderates even further and the evil forces get to be merely symbolic. The whole backdrop of folklore about witches and vampires and ghosts gets removed by science and the new sanitized religions. You can imagine the thing getting desperate. What it needs is some kind of fear coming out of technology and science itself, since they’re not going to go away. Themselves, I meant to say.

  “It’s interesting. Did you ever hear about the ghost rockets they had in Sweden in the late thirties, just before the war? A whole wave of reports of frightening huge rockets going over and never hitting anything. Clearly an abortive try.

  “Okay, I’m giving you too much detail.

  “So the thing needs something coming out of science itself, something that’s going to be a plausible occasion for fear it can manipulate. So of course this is what we get. How it starts is beside the point, in a way. It starts. Flying discs from somewhere seen in the sky. It gets on the radio. We’re being visited by craft from other planets. They have an awesome technology. They threaten our aircraft (famous early case on this, the Mantell case). They’re invulnerable to our technology and their intentions are unknown. They become terrifying.

  “Everything is working! The thing gets quickly associated with disappearances like the Mantell case or those six seaplanes that disappeared off Florida, right or wrong. They pick you up and do things to you that you can’t remember. They make electrical systems fail. What’s more terrifying than something that makes your car not work, for an American? Nothing. It multiplies: lonely roads, night, isolated people…”

  Jack wanted to change the subject. He knew he was being irrational. There was too much green in the wall color, at least by artificial light. The situation was bad, too theatrical because of the silence of the empty building, which was becoming intrusive. Roy was talking.

  “… and the structure of the thing is fascinating. You have your garden variety type-one encounters which means close approaches of lights that scare you but they may not even come that close. Just some anomalous light is all it takes to get a fear-rush going. Then you have a scale of manifestations all the way up to full-dress abductions, time-loss, where you get your genitals toyed with and needles inserted. There’s a parsimony in the way the thing works that’s really admirable. The big events keep the fear game going. The little lights cruise around and do okay during the interims, although all the entrepreneurial propaganda about our friends the space brothers is unhelpful. Fear is the key.

  “The thing of actual physical effects is fascinating. I mean, they can do it, no question about it. But you have to remember that the pattern of token physical effects going along with psychic events is absolutely traditional. Take poltergeists: okay, they can start fires and displace crockery in your house. The pattern of injury to small animals that you have with bigfoot and these other swamp fakes, I don’t know how that works. Maybe the thing initially capitalizes on regular kinds of predation and just manifests in the vicinity. Then it develops the means to duplicate the effect. But once the circuit is formed with a really strong fear template, they really are able to have physical effects, aside from just the visual. What the limit is I don’t know.

  “Now just one other sinister thing. The number of reports from couples and groups larger than three is going up. Which suggests the thing is getting stronger and learning to tap groups. Has to be looked at more but it seems to be definite.

  “This is like giving birth, doing this. I feel better.”

  Jack could wait. It was crucial to make Roy wait. After all, whether he knew it or not what Roy had was the theory of what’s wrong with everything in the world. What vistas etcetera of peace and harmony would be opened up if only this force could be slain or confined and so on. Genius! Jack hated to be in the building after business hours. It was a deep thing with him. This had to be finished.

  *

  Jack had to trust himself. He began blindly, not knowing what he was going to say.

  “You’re saying we’re slaves or something.”

  It got Roy immediately. “No, man, you don’t listen! Don’t improve on me!”

  Jack pressed on. “Also, and tell me if this is wrong, you and you alone are the one human being who’s figured this vast thing out.”

  “Probably I’m not. I’m the only one I know, is all. Look. It’s a hypothesis. Look, nobody can figure out what Gurdjieff meant when he said we were food for the moon, maybe he knew something. Anyway, it isn’t important.”

  “On the contrary,” Jack said. A point occurred to him. He knew it was petty. “Also, Roy, what about children? You’d think children would naturally be the ones involved in these experiences all the time, because of being credulous.…”

  “They are, a lot,” Roy said. “But it’s interesting they aren’t more. One answer is that you get kids less and less disciplined via the bogeyman and fear-objects than they used to be. Also, and this is just guessing, but I think they’re probably not ripe yet: what you’d want, I would guess, is the fear product of a mature nervous system, not the little squib you might get from a child.”

  Jack could project a demand for money materializing out of this. He had to focus.

  The phone on his desk began to ring. He indicated to Roy that it was to be ignored. This was good. He concentrated. He needed to consolidate.

  *

  Jack said, “So, obviously, with these views you become persona non grata around the Society. That figures.

  “Anyway, we can summarize. What you’re saying is there’s this widespread invisible force or parasite that lives on human fear. It preys mainly on isolated individuals but now you say couples. And it changes as the culture changes. It works by energizing certain mental patterns of belief and turning them into real scenes of varying degrees of materiality, depending. The saucer phase is part of a thing stretching back into the past as far as werewolves. The population of this enemy, it looks like, is growing. Or maybe keeping pace with human population. Is that fair?”

  Roy looked unhappy. “Yes (yeah). Keeping in mind that what I’m giving you is the Olive Pell Bible, so to speak. There’s so much detail on each step that I’m not giving…”

  “I’m curious about what ever happened to boring from within, Roy. Why you couldn’t just keep your head down and slowly…”

  “That’s what I thought I was doing. Somebody talked.”

  “So now the reason you need to stay with somebody is … say it again?”

  Roy was tiring. “I don’t know. I really need to. Not for long. I need to be around people. It would be short term.”

  “I think you’re being evasive. You think you’re in danger, possibly, am I right? Don’t want to be alone? Come on.”

  He had Roy really wary now. An approach was coming to him.

  “And about this thing getting stronger,” Jack said. “Something about that interests me. Say more about that.”

  “I can’t say much except that it is. I’m not competent. It may be the difference between being able to exploit
just individual biological electromagnetic fields, which are relatively weak, and modern artificial ones, which are incredibly strong. Or that could be all wrong.”

  “Can I ask you what’s the macro side of this thing as you see it? You must’ve thought about it, such as, what about wars? I mean, you’d think the thing would flourish during wars with so many people in fear of death over whole areas. So is the thing, say, implicated in wars, possibly?”

  Jack felt safe. He knew what to do.

  “I don’t speculate about it,” Roy said.

  “But why not? Would you say the incidence goes up in the periods between wars, offhand?”

  “All I know is it does go up between wars. But there could be all kinds of reasons for that. I don’t speculate about it.”

  “And the thing is getting stronger.”

  “I already said that. Yes (yeah).”

  Roy’s voice was up in the top of his throat. He looked damp.

  *

  Now Jack could do it. There was enough. It was only a question of which accusations to use. Roy could be part of the thing, spreading it. Or attracting it. It was a position. He had to drive Roy out, this time for good. In no way was he going to subject Judith to this. He had obligations. Everything was involved. He had figured things out. You struggled to escape a stupid artisan mentality and you did and here was your brother, a pauper but somehow so interesting. Never. It was not going to happen.

  He would use rage.

  Issue 84, 1982

  Ali Smith

  on

  Lydia Davis’s Ten Stories from Flaubert

  Even in a form where economy, wit, and distillation are the norm, the stories of Lydia Davis stand out for their precision. Their effect is homeopathic. A two-line or paragraph-sized story by Davis can deliver a whole thinking universe.

  “Ten Stories” came about when Davis (who is also a translator) was working on a new translation of Madame Bovary and reading through Flaubert’s letters to his friend and lover Louise Colet. “Every now and then,” Davis explained in an interview, “he would tell Louise a little story about something he had recently experienced or heard, and it began to strike me that these were nicely formed, discrete tales that with some revision would make good individual stories.”