Notes Toward The Story and other stories

by KUBOA

  “It’s really a good time to do it,” she suggested. “Before, you know, everyone makes it trashy.”

  “If it’s gonna be trashy, why do it?” Vicki countered, but with a smile.

  “Well, the way I see it, we have the opportunity of being forerunners, and by making it beautiful now, we sort of set the ground rules, the groundwork, you know.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Vicki said. “Should we match?”

  “Yes!” Valerie said. “Let’s match!”

  The twins entered the mall as if they were royalty come down into their kingdom for a visit, for a tour of all they governed. They shopped. They spent good money on good clothes and gaudy baubles. They were happy.

  Vicki followed Valerie to work. There they ran into Dago Swell, who was just coming off duty. His uniform hugged him like a second skin. His nightstick was a dark dream-symbol.

  “Hey Dago,” Valerie said. She was showing her sister how easygoing it all was, this Dago thing. How blithe it was.

  Dago Swell looked at the twins as if they were circus freaks, as if they were two-headed or had snake scales. Had he really never noticed them before, at Ransom P. Stoddard High? Perhaps not. He walked on clouds.

  “Twins,” he said, as if the word was a naming he could be proud of.

  Vicki laughed. Valerie burned red, looked at her sister as if she had just burped in church.

  “We’re not twins,” Vicki said, simpering. “We are the same person but occasionally it is called upon us—me—to travel to two places at once. It’s a secret, so don’t tell.”

  Dago Swell looked at this new girl, this mirror image of Valerie, Valerie—whom he had already dismissed in his mind, in his heart. She was an echo of her less interesting sister, a capricious echo.

  “You got a mouth on you,” Dago Swell said. “You giving me lip?”

  Vicki smiled. Flirting with a man was easy because she had no emotional investment in it. It was sport. She looked at Valerie, and Valerie’s stricken expression was like a tuning fork in her head. Yet Vicki found that betraying her sister was as uncomplicated a trick as a conjurer swallowing a poker. She uncovered a part of herself previously unidentified.

  “You look like you could use some lip,” Vicki said.

  The air, the sweet mall air, crackled.

  “I’m off work now,” Dago Swell said. “You come have coffee with me. You want to come have coffee with me?”

  Vicki allowed herself one quick glance at Valerie. Then she switched off her ESP and left the mall with Dago Swell.

  Valerie burst into tears. And she cried the whole time she walked the mall that night. Before the place closed many salespeople saw the crying cop pass and they shook their heads at the slight alteration in their otherwise tedious night selling perfume or books or pretzels or sex toys.

  “Did you see the cop crying?”

  “I did. Female cop, too.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you notice her shadow?”

  “I didn’t. She have her shadow done? Maybe that’s why she’s crying. I’m telling you that’s messing with something that shouldn’t be messed with, you know? Like DNA or something. That shadow work is tricky stuff. Hell, it made her cry.”

  And that was what the story became: the fable of a girl whose shadow job messed up her hormonal balance. That particular take on things caught on. It became, gradually, the truth.

  All that night, after the mall closed, Valerie walked her rounds, sobbing, her colorful shadow trailing her like a spurned bride’s train. The colors failed to glow. The shadow was inert, all but useless.

  The next morning the breakfast table at Vicki and Valerie’s house was a place of inaudibly festering loneliness. Mother and Father ate alone, neither feeling it incumbent upon them to discuss their absent twins. The truth was that Valerie, alone, was in the bedroom. After coming in at 4:35 a.m., and seeing that Vicki had not come home at all, Valerie renewed her seemingly endless torrent of tears and never did collapse gratefully into the arms of Morpheus. After 8:30 a.m., when she was sure both her parents had departed, she dragged herself to the kitchen, fixed an indifferent cup of coffee, accompanied by a stale sticky bun, and sat with both in front of her and ate not and drank not and let the morning sun, coming in the window, smear her face and make tiny rainbows of her tears and she let the warmth enter her like a flu and she cursed her shadow and she cursed Dago Swell and, most of all, she cursed her foul, perfidious sister.

  Vicki came home sometime later. She was chipper. She was animated. She was like a fresh apple, juicy and bright and full of sin. Valerie put on a brave face. That’s what they call it: a brave face.

  “Good morning, Sis,” Vicki said, rummaging in the refrigerator. “Whatchoo eating?”

  “Bun,” Valerie said. She felt perhaps single- syllable words would be okay.

  “Where the hell is my kefir?” Vicki said.

  Valerie concentrated on her coffee. If she took half-sips it would last twice as long.

  Vicki sat with a cup of coffee and a box of shortbread cookies. She smiled at Valerie.

  “Where?” Valerie said.

  “Where was I?” Vicki stalled. “Well…first, no, not first. Here.”

  Vicki stood and placed herself against the light coming in the window. A versicolored shadow spilled over the breakfast table and onto Valerie’s lap. It was shimmering like a trout freshly hooked. It did not match Valerie’s at all. Worse, it outshone it. It was a deluxe job, with anodized mauve streaks. Valerie thought she was going to be sick. The shadow on her lap felt like glistening poison, as if it were leaking into her.

  “Do you like it?’ Vicki asked.

  “How,” Valerie tried. A beat or two of attenuated time stretched between the twins.

  “How could you?” Valerie finished and then leapt from her seat and disappeared.

  Vicki stood in the kitchen sunlight for a while, sipping her coffee and admiring her own dodgy shadow. It was a threshold day, a day when things formerly one way became forever another. Vicki decided she was pleased that it was so.

  Meanwhile, all over the planet Shadow Work became a hotly debated craze. Newer and more complex ways to dye shadows were invented practically daily. Some people, dragging around old uni-hued shadows, were suddenly cast as out -of -step, as if they were still watching Beta VCRs, or wearing the fashions of the year before. And, naturally, there sprang up movements which depicted Colored Shadows as dangerous, as cCorrupt. One such movement was called Daltonism and its followers were as fanatical as Green Ppeace zealots, though, honestly, they did not have that kind of moral weight behind them. Daltonists sprang up in every city, their meetings marked by a lot of bloviating and speechifying and much fun was poked at the Vainglorious Colored Shadow People. In Memphis a small chapter sprang up, meeting in the basement of First Congo Church. Enthusiasm didn’t run very deep, however, and, after a few half-hearted gatherings, the group dissolved.

  And so the twins grew apart. Where did the love go? The continental drift between them became cold and hard. They each thought the other a quisling.

  “I don’t know,” Valerie lamented to Elspeth. “I think he’s bad for her.”

  “Yah,” Elspeth yawned. “But he’d a been good for you.”

  “No, I see that now,” Valerie said. “I see how treacherous and shallow he is.”

  “Dago Swell is a piece of work,” Elspeth said. Valerie didn’t know if he was being praised or damned.

  “Besides,” Elspeth said. “I figured your sister for gay.”

  This gave Valerie pause.

  “Why would you think that?” she asked.

  “I thought she had the, you know, hots for me.”

  “You think everyone has the hots for you.”

  In a more conventional friendship this may have caused a serious breach.

  “Yeah,” Elspeth answered.

  Time passed. Shadow Work became a part of the everyday. That is to say it was amalgamated
into the warp and woof of dailiness and, if thought about at all, it was with the attention afforded haircuts or spring wardrobes. Some people had shadows that were prettier than other people’s shadows. Some people still had charcoal- graey shadows, things which sometimes seemed quaint and sometimes seemed as beautiful as one of Durer’s engravings. A new appreciation was born for some of the old ways and many saw this as a good thing.

  Meanwhile, the twins were so estranged that they rarely spoke. Vicki and Dago Swell got a place of their own and Valerie quit her job at the mall—how could she do otherwise?; Sshe couldn’t abide seeing Dago every day—and began working for a small private detective agency: Alec “Fast” Lemon’s Shadow Bureau. It was mostly repo work, or adultery cases. Valerie hated it. She grew morose and waspish. Her shadow, once a glorious appendage, seemed to fade and achromatize. She dragged it behind her like a tattered bathrobe. She probably shouldn’t have been issued a gun, but she was. It was all perfectly legal.

  Vicki saw it coming. She was watching TV, eating Ccheetos. Dago was asleep in the back room because lately he had been working the night shift. There was a tempering of the light, something at the edge of vision. At first Vicki thought it was just an anomaly of the TV reception. A sputter in her tangential vision. Then she realized that her shadow was bending unnaturally. It was moving, ever so slightly, toward the light. Her ears pricked, or perhaps her thumbs. She stood up just before she heard the shot.

  In the back room Dago Swell lay face -down on the bed, a small, black puncture, deep as night, right in the center of his finespun foulard pajama top. Valerie stood at the foot of the bed, her face blank, her shadow a snapping shower of sparks. The room was unnaturally still as if the report of the gun had created a vacuum of silence and immobility. Very slowly, a shy creature emerging from its hole in the ground, a thick cord of bright red blood, surfaced from Dago’s new opening.

  Vicki quietly moved near her sister. She took her hand. The twins stood over the murdered body of Dago Swell and they held hands as if, against the indifference and gravity and approbation of the world, their united love was a safeguard, was ballast. And their shadows, their troublesome shadows, merged into one, pooling behind them on the hardwood floor, a colorful figuration, in fathomless hues like the wake of the helmsman’s bark of yore, a final, vivid umbra.

  Publisher

  “That was commonly believed to be a function of great literature: antidote to suffering through depiction of our common fate.”

  —Philip Roth

  1

  I am a whore and a pimp. This may seem preposterous to you, but I assure you, though self-knowledge has not always been my strong suit, here I am neither exaggerating for shock value nor confessing for pity.

  I came from good schools with a lot riding on me, the aspirations of my own ambition, duly inflated by well-intentioned professors and administrators, the hopes and dreams of my hard-working but underachieving parents, the burnout of my older brother, who was both smarter and more industrious. These are onerous pressures, each, and, collectively, quite oppressive. I was promise and capacity. I was Golden Boy. It was assumed I would make it, in the vague sense that expression is intended, but mostly this: procure a big bundle of money while doing meritorious things.

  Oh, I started out with high hopes. With my degree in English lLit tucked, metaphorically, under my arm (my area of specialty was Twentieth 20th Ccentury British LLiterature) I headed to New York City—where else?—with the aim of landing a job in publishing, figuring, naively, on walking into an assistant editorship at Knopf or Henry Holt or Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Figuring, I guess, they were hungry for a bright young man who had digested a lot of writing and practically passed metaphors and similes with his flatulence. You’ve guessed by my tone by now that the doors were not exactly swinging open for me. Oh, everyone was nice enough—egad, those publishing houses are filled with beautiful young twenty-four-24 year- old women fresh from college, firm jawed, severe, the kind of women who look you right in the eye until you look away no matter how unchallenging your last remark was—and I even had a few promising interviews. I actually met Roger Giroux—he must be 104—though it was in the corridor of the building where FS&G resides, and our conversation was brief, chatty, meaningless. He was, at that particular moment, concerned about some television show that had just aired (I gathered from his somewhat disjointed commentary) and which offended him deeply by its depiction of J. D. Salinger as a nasty old man. To be honest I’m not sure Mr. Giroux knew to whom he was talking or ever registered a single comment I made.

  So, to pay the rent for my pitiable one- room apartment (New Yorkers settle for so little in the way of comfort, the city itself, supposedly, redressing the imbalance by its sizzle) I took up a job—where else?—in a bookstore in the Village, a squatty, dark, dank little dungeon where used books mixed with a random, arbitrary sampling of some of the newer offerings by our contemporary geniuses. If this all sounds rather bitter, rather sour- grape flavored, I plead guilty. I enjoyed spending my time in the bookstore—more often than not, rearranging Trollope, Iris Murdoch, the Powyses or John Fowles, ad infinitum, one week alphabetizing their subsections by title, one week placing the books chronologically. And, if this was just idle make-work, the owner, Pat Trevelyn, a corpulent, ex-hippie who only wanted to make enough money to feed his cat and keep himself in marijuana, never questioned a single move I made. Nor did he recognize any of them.

  So, the time went by, weeks and months. New York became a heavy yoke around my neck and my letters back home were full of book-talk, most of which I garnered from the eccentric clientele who frequented The Book Inglenook (a clumsy appellative which one can only imagine was designed to avoid the clichéd Book Nook) or from the sagacious pages of The New York Times Book Review and The New York Review of Books. It didn’t take too many Rramen Nnoodle meals to make me realize what a failure I was, and I was on the verge of bailing out—running back to Saskatoon with my paper- stuffed suitcase—when an ad in the back of the NYTBR caught my attention.

  It said: Editor wanted. Small press. Benefits. Rapid advancement.

  And a phone number.

  I called—of course I called—and got the ubiquitous answering machine, and it wasn’t until the next day when I returned home from the BI that a return message lit up the red-eye on my own machine. Its message, delivered in a smooth, slightly nasal but very proper voice said, “Mr. Brackett, thank you for answering our ad. If you could appear at our offices tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. we could talk further about this employment opportunity. Please bring a current resume.” And he gave the address. An address, which I was unfamiliar with, though I knew it was squirreled away among some claustrophobic uptown non-descript buildings, and, indeed, it turned out to be absurdly difficult to find. One had to wend one’s way through trash-strewn alleyways, up some unpromising exterior stairways, down some darkened corridors, to finally arrive. I expected the Minotaur at any moment. It was almost as if it were consciously concealed.

  The small white sign with black lettering on the door said, “Ardent Publishing, James Quillmeier, Publisher.”

  I gave the hollow plywood door a light knock while opening it enough to poke my head in. My first sight was a wall decorated entirely with oversize blow-ups of book jackets, presumably some of the firm’s successes (though I had heard of none of them). Rotating my head a few degrees east I found a smiling visage, bright as a blister. It seemed to single-handedly hold back the room’s fuscous gloom. The face belonged, it turned out, to Ardent’s loyal secretary, Sherri Hoving, and it was a face which was to turn up in my dreams for years to come, a face like an iceberg refracting light, with a gaze like a baby uses on another baby. She was a brunette with skin like sealskin and she seemed to be both dark and light simultaneously. But, before I get ahead of the story, before I wax idyllic and burn my candle at both ends, leaving little suspense for your delectation, allow me to proceed into the cluttered and claustrophobic offices of Ardent Publis
hing.

  “Mr. Brackett?” the face tinkled.

  “Yes, I have...”

  “Yes, I know. Mr. Quillmeier is expecting you. At the moment he is on the phone to Tokyo but he’ll be with you momentarily, I’m sure.”

  “Thank you,” I said and backed, self-consciously, into an old-fashioned armchair that was shoved against one wall.

  The face beamed at me. I tried to beam back but my smile felt phony and I imagined I might have looked like Dr. Sardonicus. I tried to relax.

  “Can I get you anything?” she asked after a few sunny moments.

  “Nothing, thank you.”

  “Oh. By the way, I’m Sherri Hoving. Sherri. Sort of the grunt around here, do a little of everything, nothing of any real consequence.”

  This turned out to be so far from the truth—Sherri (short for Sherrifa, of all things) Hoving kept Ardent Publishing together with ingenuity, spit, and rubber bands, and, if not for her devotion and sapient governorship, this small concern would not stay afloat. It didn’t take me long to learn this, and other necessary, hard-to-swallow truths.

  I bided my time in their cramped waiting room, feeling as if I were being kept waiting only for show, but enjoying the view of Ms. Hoving’s immaculate bare legs under her desk. Every few minutes—you could set your watch by it—she raised her freckled face toward me and smiled.

  When I finally was ushered into Mr. Quillmeier’s presence I found myself in an office not much larger than the waiting room, papers on every surface, the walls decorated with more book jacket blow-ups (Mr. Anthony’s Reproductive Organs, Flowers and Petals, The Scamp’s Dog) and along every wall stacks of books, about a hundred copies of each title.

  Quillmeier was a piece of work himself. As round as a turnip with a mustache which appeared to be stuck on with sweat, he punched out a chubby- fingered hand and gave mine one quick pump.

  “Sit down, Mr. Brackett,” he said, gesturing toward the only other chair in the room, pushed uncomfortably close to the edge of his worn old desk.

  “Thank you,” “ I said, already formulating escape plans. This was certainly low-end publishing. How desperate was I to work in that rarefied atmosphere of disseminating literature to the great unwashed?