Notes Toward The Story and other stories

by KUBOA

  And then, as a coda, he adds: “I am through with the game. Let the savage gods take the stage. If I ever held the baton I hereby pass it on. As Jesus said, ‘It is over.’.” A rather galling bit of egomania.

  His publisher is said to be collecting Partee’s analects, his letters, his notebooks, for a possible last work, a period to the convoluted sentence Partee has been writing his whole life. When this is released perhaps it will reveal more than this “autobiography,” the least revealing book of its kind since Graham Greene’s. Lark Partee, whoever you are, wherever you are, you were once a gale in the mild weather of modern writing. Perhaps we shouldn’t ask for more from you, more than you are willing to give. Like the Salinger ghouls, your fans seem more intrigued with your invisibility than your books, and this is a sad thing. The camouflage you have chosen to hide behind is a gossamer invention, like Salome’s veils. It teases and reveals little. It distracts from your genuine importance, that eccentric body of work—no two books seem to have anything in common, as if written by divers and dissimilar writers (perhaps you are a committee!)—which is unlike any other in American letters.

  * Mr. McRey is no mathematician as the years he has quoted in his review do not jibe. [ed.]

  Strangers in Love

  “It’s a beautiful day,” Ron said, pocketing a stone.

  “You always say that,” Allison returned.

  “Well,” Ron capitulated.

  “There are no stores open anywhere. What kind of town is this?”

  “I like this town.”

  “You would.”

  Allison stood on her toes and peered down the road where a wind soughed like an old dream or a congregation of whispers.

  “Maybe we should move on,” she said.

  “Let’s not be hasty,” Ron said.

  They walked. Ron started to take Allison’s hand. It was an old impulse. It had been a long time since he had done so. Her hand used to fit his like a pistol. They used to always hold hands. Holding hands now was as out of the question as Mormonism or group sex. Ron thought about something else.

  “Dead,” Allison said.

  “Mm,” Ron mmed.

  “I’ll only walk a bit longer,” Allison huffed.

  “Just up around this corner here,” Ron said, although the corner did not look promising. It looked like an ex-corner, a place of ripe dissatisfaction.

  At the corner the couple looked in four directions but neither of them the same one at the same time. Desolation has its own sound, it’s own way of being. It stood in front of them like the Colossus.

  “Well,” Ron said.

  “Shit,” Allison proposed.

  “There’s another town a few miles down the highway. I think I saw a sign.”

  Allison stood still, her emotions wrinkled and desiccated, her face a modernized Vvirgin Mary.

  “Shit,” she finally said, unaware, probably, that she was repeating herself.

  “Allison,” Ron said, her name feeling odd in his mouth like a new retainer. It had been years since he’d said it quite this way.

  Allison could perhaps not have heard him. Perhaps she didn’t.

  “I’m in love with someone else,” Allison said at last.

  Ron looked down the off-white side street. He thought he saw a sign lit up, a paint store full of colors.

  “This is not turning out the way I planned,” Ron said.

  “Well,” Allison answered him.

  “There are plenty more towns,” Ron said. “I’ve been in plenty of towns. Most have motels, nice little motels in pastels and with a pool lit at night. I’ve slept in many different beds.”

  There was a bad stillness. The air was black or appeared so.

  “I guess I’ll just live in a new town,” Ron said.

  “What about me? What about me? What about me?” Allison keened.

  But Ron had already moved on, setting up his things in a new apartment, putting his cdCDs in alphabetical order, studying each of his books as he shelved them. It was a nice apartment if you didn’t look behind things. Ron thought his life here could be different. He thought it needed to be, maybe.

  A Small Fire

  The man built a small fire ostensibly to keep warm. There was no breeze next to the deserted highway, but the air was filled with prickly wintriness. He found dry brush, discarded wrappers, civilization’s detritus. It burned humbly, a hermit’s chauffer.

  He squinted toward the horizon. The view was bleak, a long stretch of emptiness, relieved by withered trees and scrub grass. Above there was a gibbous moon and a scattering of stars.

  He opened the wallet, pulled out the sheaf of bills, folded them, and secreted them in his shirt. In amongst the bills were small bits of paper he had to pick out, oddments upon which were jotted notes. “Swan Lake Barbie for Kitten.” And, “Find duffel bag.” Arcane messages from someone else’s life, alive in their strangeness.

  And another, older scrap, almost worn away by its time within the bill pouch. It felt soft, tatty, decomposing paper turned to fur. Upon it a single, blurry word: “Rachel.” In one small wad he consigned these esoteric, ultimately meaningless comments to his fire.

  The credit cards were lined up like bright toys, multicolored and still crisp; he fingered each in its slot before removing them one by one. He was torn between reverence and aversion. These simple cards carried too much connotation, too much information: hope, loss, renewal, and waste. He relished how their edges blackened, curled, bent inward as he laid them carefully on the fire. The flames now guttered so he sought more dry brush to keep them going.

  Once the fire renewed itself the man sat back down on an overturned crate. He rededicated himself to the contents of the wallet. The fire now sizzled and smelled of melted plastic.

  Insurance card, country club membership card, sSocial sSecurity, a lawyer’s business card, a sandwich shop’s tally, voter’s registration. One life, so many tendrils, so many lifelines.

  After burning these the man discovered a clever hidden part of the wallet. The blackened nail of his forefinger sought its concealed secrets. He removed a neatly folded piece of paper, within which were more folded notes and a single photograph. The newness of this find spoke of a more recent squirreling away. The outer piece of paper, apparently a fine writing stock, was blank. The folded papers within were letters, three to be exact. The script was feminine. The words made the man squirm: passionate, seductive, furtive, private. They were all signed, “R.” The man flung them onto the flame and simultaneously brought the photograph closer to his face, maneuvering it so that his hand did not block the light from his solitary crematory.

  The woman’s face was lovely, dove-like. He could almost feel the down of her cheek, the moist corner of her lipsticked lips. So, it was with slight regret that he laid it also upon the pyre and watched the fire eat it, first with a quick black center burst and then, rapidly, from the edges in.

  There were other pictures, a wife, and two children. The wife was pretty, self-consciously so. There were a number of pictures of each child, nesting- dolls of varying age. Flip them quickly and they were a nickelodeon, telling a story about how soon they are grown and gone. For one flashing moment the family blazed to life in his head, whole. Then this passed. The man let the photographs slip through his fingers and tumble soundlessly into the fire.

  The driver’s license stubbornly stuck in its slit pocket. The man irritably pulled it loose. He brought it close to his whiskered chin. Numbers, letters, and symbols: data. As if this code bespoke a life. The weight was off by a good decade. Eyes: blue? Class: D? What did that mean? Dates: tThe renewal time was soon—only a few weeks away. The picture on the license was a good one, showing a strong jaw, a fierce eye. It said, Here is a man used to control. Here is a good man, a hardworking man. A family man, yet with uncertainties. Each of us has his or her own secrets, our own places of clouded mystery. He liked the man’s face, as he had before. The license ignited with a small pop as its plastic unsealed. The p
aper beneath was quickly consumed.

  The wallet itself, a leather, burned haltingly, poorly, as if it were flesh itself, and the stench of it was nauseating. The man rose into the frosted air, stretching himself like a cat. The night would soon give way to morning. He had a long way to go.

  Harry Styrene

  and the Holy Virgin

  Harry Styrene had worked at the bookstore since a teenager. Now, at twenty-seven, he loved books the way most men loved a woman or God. Harry had come to the business a naïf and, after listening to the smarter customers the store catered to, he had learned the names and works of the modern masters: Updike, Roth, Bellow, Garcia Marquez, Murdoch, Fowles.

  These books opened doors in Harry. Where once was a man like a plastered wall, solid but blank and uninspiring, there now was a learnéd and worldly fellow who could quote from contemporary literature as if from the gospels. Often he held a stranger’s gaze and, with a lightning- rod -finger raised, he would reel off a quote verbatim, ending with a name as solid as a period.

  “Anthony Burgess,” he might say and look intently at his audience until they nodded or walked away. Harry felt good at these times. He felt as if he were making a difference.

  So, though he was still often lonely, and his flesh ached like a sore tooth, he was content. Knowing a new Rabbit novel or another lovely Muriel Spark awaited him when he got off work assuaged some of the desperation of his position. Ah, books! Ah, humanity!

  So it may seem that The Powers that Be made an eccentric decision sending the Virgin Mary to Harry’s apartment one sere autumn evening as Harry prepared a pot pie and a soda for his bachelor’s dinner. Harry was just snapping the legs of a TV tray into place when light surrounded him from behind; he was spotlit.

  He spun and there she was, just as if she had transported from the Starship Enterprise. Yet, she was as solid as the eternal rocks.

  She was beautiful in her white raiment and corn silk hair. Her skin was the color of the dogwood blossom and her eyes were periwinkles. She smiled at Harry as if they were old friends. Harry clutched his chest in melodramatic pantomime, when in truth he was indeed awestruck. But, unpracticed in gesture or pronouncement, Harry could only ape a movie star playing a part.

  “Harry,” the beautiful vision spoke.

  “Grg,” Harry said.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  Harry had no idea. This is what comes of secular reading. Harry had never had religion; it was as foreign to him as the foliage of youth.

  “Mother,” Harry said, weakly. Harry’s mother was not dead, nor was she young and beautiful. She lived in Cincinnati and wrote romance novels at the rate of one per month for a publishing company that paid her by the book. “Mother” was a foolish hypothesis.

  Yet the radiant woman said, “Yes. Mother. Mary.”

  Now Harry wasn’t ignorant. It dawned on him pretty quickly what the vision was implying.

  “Pshaw,” Harry said.

  “No. Not pshaw, Harry. I am. I am the Virgin Mary come to you in a vision, a vision as real as early evening lightning, as genuine as butter spread on stale bread.”

  “Well, why?” Harry rightly asked.

  “Because, Harry,” the beautiful woman answered and looked for a place to rest her holy hip, settling on the arm of a truly monstrous easy chair. “Because you are godless and we need a messenger.”

  “Godless.”

  Harry did not take kindly to the word, regardless of its exactitude.

  “Godless,” the Virgin Mary repeated. “We use the godless for messages.”

  “We,” Harry said. “Who’s we?”

  “Harry,” Mary said, pursing her perfect lips, the color of sea-shell.

  “You and God?” Harry asked. Finally, he set aside the half-assembled tray.

  “Well, for our purposes, let’s say, yes. Anyway, you have been chosen to deliver the message.”

  “Deliver how, sister? It’s not like I have my own talk show.”

  “Oh. Here and there. Hither and thither. Yon. Tell the customers in your store. Tell the checkout girl at the grocery. Word spreads. It’s how it’s always worked. Well, since the, you know, burning bush thing.”

  Harry sat down in his La-Zzy-Boy. He ran a hand over his face as if he were washing away dreams. When he looked up she was still there, beautiful and shining and as resplendent as love. Or evil.

  “Okay,” Harry said. “Sure. I’ll do it.”

  “That’s the spirit,” the Virgin M. said. “Come here, Harry.”

  Harry rose slowly from his chair and shuffled toward his uninvited guest. He looked at his feet where black socks hung as loosely as Cossack pantaloons. The Virgin Mary seemed to glow like phosphorous, white though, like a star. Harry was afraid to look directly at her. She took Harry’s hand.

  Electricity flowed into him. A feeling like pure joy flooded his whole body as if it had been injected with a hypodermic. Her face was so lovely it hurt.

  “I knew you were right,” she said to him, smiling, well, beatifically.

  “Wh-what’s the message?” Harry said. His eyes were locked on hers. He couldn’t have looked away if his life depended on it, as it may very well have. Her smile was a promise, a deep promise.

  “Here it is,” she said. “Ignore the media. Life is still full of miracles.”

  Harry blinked a few times.

  “That’s it,” he said. He couldn’t help sounding disappointed.

  “That’s your message, yes. We do this all the time, sweetheart. Little messages, small steps. From a small acorn a mighty oak grows.”

  “Right,” Harry said.

  It was then the Virgin Mary stood and Harry stumbled a bit backwards. Her hand still held his. The warmth still flowed into him and he was still comforted, peaceful, happy.

  Mary leaned over—and though this was not in the usual realm of her duties—she kissed Harry.

  That is how Harry got the birthmark on his cheek in the shape of a mouth. And that is how he became a spokesperson for YHTD, simply by being home when His Hallowed Harbinger called. Just that modestly, Harry Styrene became one of the chosen, a Holy Fool.

  Mystical Participation

  “The primordial image, or archetype, is a figure—be it a daemon, a human being, or a process—that constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed.”

  —Carl Jung

  “My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory…we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark.”

  —Sigmund Freud

  Gus called me up, a rare- enough occurrence.

  “I need you to come with me. I’m collecting,” he began.

  “Uh huh,” I said. It was before coffee.

  “Can you?”

  “Sure. What are we collecting?”

  “Unconsciousness.”

  “Right.” I knew to give Gus enough rope. He went off on toots occasionally and it was best just to humor him.

  “Of the entire race. Why I need your help.”

  “I guess you do,” I said.

  “Can you?”

  “Sure, sure. When do you wanna start?”

  “Right away, this morning if you can.”

  “Lemmee get a few things done around here. About eleven?”

  Gus allowed as how eleven would be okay. I didn’t really have a lot to do, but I knew it was best to give Gus some time to reflect. On more than one occasion his initial enthusiasm for an idea waned after he’d had his morning bowel movement.

  “It’s collective, not collected,” my wife said.

  “What?” I blinked.

  “The joke doesn’t work.”

  “Oh.” She had stung me. While never my most enthusiastic cheerleader, she normally gave me a polite pass.

  “The joke is your whole premise, hence the story doesn’t work.”

  To be honest she had never been supportive of my little literary career (her diminutive), even after the novel. Sure, publi
cly, she had expressed glee. Ostensibly this was the best thing that had ever happened to me, us. She was the doting wife. The helpmate. Privately it was a different story. She wasn’t hostile to my intentions—except when my “writing day” interfered with something she thought I should be doing. She was, and this hurts more, indifferent.

  My name is James Royce. You probably remember my one afternoon in the sun, my academic novel, Schooled Royal. It made a small splash, the kind of splash that only happens in the shallow end. Kirkus called it “a good flirt.” My friend, the Jewish novelist, Shlomo Einstein, said, “With a pitch-perfect sonata of voices recalling the experiments of Nicholson Baker and William Gaddis, Schooled is a bittersweet gospel for our time.” My most oft-quoted blurb. Who can resist a good blurb?

  But, it’s been three years since Schooled was released and all I have accomplished is one short story in Cranky called “Notes Toward the Story,” a do-it-yourself grab bag of story ideas that said more about its author’s disarray than it did about experimental deconstruction. And I had a poem in American Poetry Review, a poem called “Strictly Blowjob,” whose history is best not measured.

  So, here I sit. Trying to make a story out of a joke, a joke my wife has informed me works about as well as an unreplenished stream. My eyes hurt—something behind them wasn’t right. And my fingers felt stiff, perhaps because it was cold in our house, drafty. I tried—

  By the time I reached Gus’s A-frame he was outside in the driveway, leaning against his Pontiac.

  “I guess you’re ready to go,” I said, grinning foolishly.

  “C’mon,” he said. Gus was intense—it was his defining principle. This intensity made him one of the best analysts in Zurich. Dr. Jung of Zurich—the Castor to Dr. Freud’s Pollux. Or, better perhaps, the yin to his yang.

  We took Gus’s battered Pontiac into the city. He was an indifferent driver, indifferent to the ebb and flow of traffic, seemingly indifferent to the possibility of an injurious crash. He talked as he drove.

  He concluded: “And that’s where we need to begin, I believe, at the university, among the lithe limbs and torsos of the youthful. Where better to measure the consciousness of the race?”