A mirror of steel is silent, as are the ghosts I still feel each day as I walk streets that plague has emptied. Ghosts, like reflections in steel, have only the voices we give them, even though what they speak is theirs alone.
I look at myself in a mirror of steel, newly shorn by a glass blade, unable to bear the vertigo inspired by the too-slow, counter-clock swirl of stubble and glycerine foam down the drain that will remake stubble, dead skin and foam into food that I will not eat. I pushed the basin flush with the wall, then activated the spray of water that streamed too thinly and slowly to truly be called a shower.
The droplets fell so that I saw through them as if through tears wrung by gusts of bitter cold. The ceramic walls of the train could never know the voices of ghosts such as I’d been taught to hear by Allen’s brother. No ghost’s voice could be heard over the train’s engines and the spin of its turbines that kept my feet too lightly pressed to the floor. No ghost could ever walk from such dim shadows as those cast by artificial light, amid hallways and corners that, even while they were constructed, had never been touched by sunlight.
Washed for the first time after half a year of sleep, I walked back to my compartment and spoke a kaddish into those voiceless spaces for the brother I’d lost and whom I’d never know, and through whom I’d tasted the bread and the prayer of his deathbed Communion.
In these voiceless spaces, what voice have you, that we may speak in this way? What prayers in what language shall we offer as mirrors silent to each other?
AFTERWORD
Irwin Shaw, a member of what we’ve dubbed “the Greatest Generation”, even though not so long ago as a Boomer-dominated culture we vilified and ridiculed that generation as a kind of two-headed monster in the form of Peter Boyle in Joe and Archie Bunker, wrote how he and his stories are products of their times (. . . the Depression, WWII, the rebirth of Europe, McCarthyism, Kennedy, Vietnam . . .). I’m not a product of my times. I’m a carrier of them. My times, those of my friends and my work, don’t end. They go into remission. In my boring middle-class neighbourhood of Buffalo, New York in the early 1970s, it seemed a really good idea to get home from school one day by cutting through neighbours’ yards because there were rumours of an impending race riot, and the prospect of taking a stray “Kent State” bullet and dying like a lung-shot deer in my Garanimals-like polyester finery and Keds didn’t seem that much fun. This was the same school, PS 22 on Huntington Avenue, where as a kindergartner, I’d played “House” with an Asian girl, Leni Wong, and we used a Black doll as our baby, not knowing in 1970 the extent we were realizing the Dream of a certain Reverend who took a slug through the neck on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis 20 or so months before.
That fever returned when I was an apartment building manager in a crack neighbourhood in Oakland—reading Jack London’s People of the Abyss and sitting in a chair that had been re-upholstered with a bed sheet by one of my tenants before she’d abandoned it upon moving out around the time someone torched a drug dealer’s car under her window—when the Rodney King riots broke out. I’d been thinking of going to see a band I liked in San Francisco that night when the radio said that the Bay Bridge and Market Street were shut down. Unlike what had happened when the legacy of a different King had defined how we all got along, there’d be no neighbours’ yards for me cut through to duck the violence.
If what Henry Miller said is true, that all a writer “succeeds in doing is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment,” then these stories hold strains from the Plague Years. In the interest of medical disclosure, and to steal from William S. Burroughs when he wrote about “a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork,” here’s what’s on the tip of the vaccination needle pressing into your skin.
“DISPLACEMENT”
I wrote the first version of this in the early ’90s. The original back-of-the-junkmail-envelope note read: “Guy with cancer kills knowing he’ll get chair but killing makes him better.” Thought I’d write it as a 10-page Henry Slesar riff and send it to Hitchcock’s or Ellery Queen. Then I read Michael Crichton’s autobiography/memoir Travels, in which Crichton describes a bug-fuck-crystal-rubbing New Age ritual he undertook to rid himself of a child-shaped agency that was the vessel of his rage and that clung to him like a psychic lamprey.
Yep . . . when you think of hard-science advocate Little Mikey Crichton on CNN telling you that Global Warming is as about real as Santa, keep in mind this was a guy who participated in rituals like that, who claimed to have Uri Geller’ed spoons with his mind, and who said he’d had a meaningful, tear-streaked psychic dialogue with a cactus. Groovy. Crichton’s rage-child nudged my idea about the killer cancer guy into what I’d read about egrigors and tulpas—externalized thought-forms that act independently of those who create them.
I wrote this while my friends and I dealt with AIDS, crack, yuppie trickle-down oppression, and street-corner death threats being no more uncommon an urban occurrence than stepping in dog shit all while stepping in human shit was even more common than that. I showed it to my neighbour Cori Crooks, who’s now an accomplished feminist writer and who was at the time roommates with Amber Tamblyn’s sister (really!) and it freaked her out good. This made me happy.
I was getting nice feedback from editors for this piece when Se7en came out, and I said, “I’ll never place this!” Se7en was just too good, and screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker developed too many of the same themes too goddamn well. I figured Walker, a guy my age, was stepping in the same shit on different streets and came up with a similar idea. But over the years Se7en so completely rewrote the mythology of the “killer with a purpose” (without Se7en, there’d be no CSI, Cold Case, Millennium, Taking Lives . . .) that with tweaking, I could incorporate that new mythology. Hell, I felt obliged to incorporate that mythology.
This story, about payback, itself settles a score. A character I renamed Keene gets bumped off in this work. A guy named Michael Marano dies horribly in Brian Keene’s The Rising. Coincidence? You be the judge.
“LITTLE ROUND HEAD”
I sorta don’t want to say much about this one, as a lot of people who have read it have come away with wildly different understandings of it. I don’t mean different understandings of abstract things like themes and symbolism. I mean, totally different ideas of the story’s time, setting and background that are so off from what I’d imagined, it makes my frontal lobes spin. I don’t want to sound like some patchouli-soaked, espresso-sipping jerk in a frayed sweater doing the “mysterious artist” schtick, but I think this one’s a Rorschach test. I left a lot of it ambiguous—even the gender of the narrator, if you squint right—and if I say, “Hey! This is how I wrote it and here’s what it’s about!” I’ll limit how people read it, and maybe it’s the story’s flexibility that makes some people like it. Only one person who’s talked to me about “Little Round Head” read it the way I wrote it, and that’s Brett Alexander Savory.
I’ll just say that John Gardner’s Grendel taught me an important lesson: when in doubt, tell the story from the monster’s point of view. It’s just hard to figure out who’s the monster, sometimes.
“CHANGELING”
Speaking of Brett, and monsters, he tapped me to contribute to a charity anthology entitled Last Pentacle of the Sun: Writings in Support of the West Memphis Three, which he edited with M. W. Anderson. “The West Memphis Three” refers to Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley, and Jason Baldwin, kids from the Robin Hood Hills area near West Memphis, Arkansas who, if you see Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s documentaries Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills and Paradise Lost 2: Revelations, seem to have been railroaded in a fit of “Satanic Panic” onto Death Row for the 1993 murder of three little kids just because they themselves were “weird” teens who dressed in black and liked Stephen King and Metallica. You can read up on the ugliness at www.wm3.org. These kids were made into monsters, because others required them to
be monstrous. To be “other.” Teratogenisis is an anxious husbandry, a need to grow strange and ugly fruit in other people’s souls in order to convince ourselves that what grows in our hearts is godly and wholesome. In the case of making kids into monsters, you’re swapping out a child for something warped—a changeling. It’s not always wicked fairies that do the swapping.
Mary Shelly kinda got it wrong. We don’t make monsters that are monsters with their first breath. You don’t need atomic fallout or genetic engineering to make a monster. Malignant narcissism and a bit of contempt do the job just fine. Unca Friedrich might have been off too, when he said, “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.” To really become a monster, all you have to do is make someone else a monster.
“BURDEN”
The chronology of “Burden” makes no sense, if you think about it. The guy the story is about couldn’t be the age he is, with the past he has, in the era when HIV tests still took weeks to process. Oh, well.
I saw a documentary about the early years of AIDS, and I remember those days when AIDS was a weird and nightmarish rumour whispered out of Manhattan. “Gay cancer? You can’t . . . catch . . . cancer, can you?” The documentary crew interviewed a guy who was the last man standing among all his friends, and he said that every time a friend dies, a library burns, and that when he dies, there will be no one around to remember him. I thought about my friends who’d been devoured by the virus and said to the TV: “What about your obligation to remember them?”
“THE SIEGE”
Charleston shrouds herself in her own ghost. My friend, Charleston writer Harlan Greene, has described the town as being like Norma Desmond, dressed in her former glory and angry that time has had the hubris to pass her by. A city that wears her ghost might draw ghosts to her who are still living, even while so much of the town’s tourist trade exploits her haunted past. It’s a weird town to live in, and this story grew out of my culture shock when I first moved there. My mother claims that when she was pregnant with me, she toured the plantation where Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte was filmed, so maybe I was imprinted to be wigged out by that kind of vibe in utero. The kernel of this story is something I was thinking of writing as a novel—but a whole book with protagonists who have lost their souls might be a little . . . I dunno . . . soulless?
“. . . AND THE DAMAGE DONE” and “EXIT WOUND”
When you write about someone who has died, you’re appropriating that death, which is a trespass. Maybe mourning is itself a trespass. But I do grieve for my friend Marian, and everyone who knew her I’m sure still grieves. She was born in 1968 on the Friday the 13th that the Beatles recorded “Sexy Sadie” and “Yer Blues” and Soviet tanks rumbled toward Prague. She died on a Sunday in 2001, while the steel at Ground Zero still burned. As a homeless and formally homeless teen, she was the subject of two short documentaries: “Sadobabies” and “The Loser’s Club” by Nancy Kalow. And she’s the subject of a full-length documentary in the works, Last Fast Ride: The Life, Loves and Death of a Punk Goddess by Lilly Scourtis.
Marian lived down the street from me in Oakland, and she used to cat-sit for me when I was out of town. Part of “The Loser’s Club” was filmed in Marian’s apartment, and in one shot you can see my old building through her window. It’s weird to see a room you know artfully framed, even through the “true and non-fictional” medium of documentary film-making. I used to hang out with Marian in front of that window, talking about music and horror . . . written, filmed, and lived. Talking to Marian was a terrible and wonderful gift, because she never broke eye contact. When you talked to her, only a small bit of what she said was spoken. Most of her voice was in her gaze.
This was in the days that she was the lead singer for the now-legendary punk band, The Insaints, with Daniel DeLeon of Rezurex and The Deep Eynde on guitar. The art of the documentarian’s eye intrudes on my memory of Marian’s apartment and that window. The posters on her wall. The dolls she had everywhere. Her LPs, the sleeves of which were used as scratching posts by her cats. The way light hit the place in the afternoon and how that light touched her eyes and changed how she spoke with them. Which makes me wonder, what about my eye as a writer? Is that gaze an intrusion? How about your eye as a reader?
I don’t know if I have the right to mourn Marian, to intrude on her death by writing about her. We had a really shitty falling out, and if I wouldn’t have been welcome in her home while she lived, why would I be welcome into the situation of her death, and drag you with me?
But the dead intrude on us, too. When a friend dies of an overdose, it throws a shade over places you’ve walked. Under that shade, landscapes take textures, detail, an awful richness that has always been around you, but that you’ve never seen. Drugs are so all-pervasive, you can’t see them until your experience of them is immediate. Poe . . . Baudelaire . . .
Bukowski . . . Hunter S. Thompson . . . Cheever . . . the spectre of drugs haunts all their work, and in the vein-blue dusk of a friend’s overdose, their writings change . . . to the point that re-reading them seems like reading new works. The weight of drugs and how they thieve people from us is something you don’t feel until you’ve lost someone to them. The voice of drugs is something you don’t hear in music except in the shadow of that loss. So many songs of addiction and loss changed after Marian died. Songs like “Suicide Child,” “I Don’t Want To live This Life,” “This City of Vice” cause me physical pain, a folding behind my throat and ribs. The intrusion of Marian’s death has rewritten them.
In writing these stories, I hope I haven’t stirred her ashes. That I haven’t rifled her memory. Yet it’s a thing I couldn’t not do, because of how she has rewritten me.
“WINTER REQUIEM”
This was my first fiction sale, solicited by Janet Berliner for an anthology themed around unicorns and immortality. I bled it out during one of the worst times of my life. My best friend, Lee Marshal, was dying of AIDS. Family members were being sliced, sutured, gutted like fish on operating tables. Someone I loved teetered on the verge of madness and suicide, while her supposed “best friend” couldn’t be bothered to hear her pain, ‘cuz she was . . . like . . . being such a downer, y’know? I tried to get from Oakland to where Lee was on his deathbed in Buffalo by cashing in all my frequent flyer miles, but a fuck up at the airline delayed my departure a few days, and Lee died while I was in the air, just hours from landing. There were more deaths, more illnesses, not to mention the loving company of my dear old friend emotional cruelty, to the point that acquaintances stopped me on the street to ask if I was OK. All during this, Janet guided me through rewrites and went to bat with the powers that be to keep me in the anthology. I’ll always be indebted to her for that.
This version is not the one that finally appeared in the anthology. It’s the penultimate, longer draft that was serialized by Seth Lindberg on Gothic.Net a few years after the anthology came out to coincide with the release of the paperback edition of my first book, Dawn Song. “Winter Requiem” has the same backdrop of “The War in Hell” as Dawn Song, and in this version there’s more of that background on display.
“SHIBBOLETH”
A lot of this is taken from my reading of history, especially about 14th century Europe. One of the main inspirations was Hans Koningsberger’s A Walk With Love and Death, about a poor student and his noble girlfriend wandering the smoldering shit-heap of France in 1358, during the Jacquerie uprising. I’m not convinced those swell gems from 1358, epidemic, class warfare, starvation, aren’t milling offstage, waiting for their cue to visit us again. I feel the need to say up front that this isn’t a joke, seeing as my hometown of Buffalo is so often the brunt of jokes, but . . . watching a major city contract, wither and fall to ruin is humbling. There was a point in the Dark Ages when Rome shrank back to the 7 villages atop the 7 Hills it had been originally, and when I read about that, I thought of how when I was a kid, older kids would go to the abandon
ed train station downtown to make out. When what had been the hub of transport for a major industrial center gets used as a lover’s lane, it makes you think about the future and the past, and what kind of Shibboleth we’ll have to speak to slip past those cruel and monolithic sentries.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’d like to thank my wife Nancy for the gift of her love. The late William C. Nenno for allowing me to be his son. Dietmar Dath for reminding me there’s a point to staying in the game. Devin Grant, Derek Judson and Nancy Santos for the times in the trenches. Gabrielle Faust for being a friend and for the beauty of her artwork. Monica Sullivan and Steve Rubenstein for giving me a break in 1990. Larry Queen for crash pads and talks about art. Brett Savory for edits and Hannah Wolf Bowen for slogging through the slush with me. Cori Crooks and Ed Brubaker for memories of the Oakland years. Kamela Dolinova for wonderful breakfasts and saving me from a really crappy job. Alison Novak for being a loving friend, Buffy sing-a-longs and loaning me comic books. Geoffrey H. Goodwin and Nick Mamatas for taking me along to The City of Eternal Darkness, among other things. Lisa Morton for locking horns and throwing down. Larry Creesey for long nights of beer and horror talk. Janna Silverstein for throwing me tethers of hope, now and then. Staci Layne Wilson for junket tips. RiN and the Metal Monday crowd for getting me to sing. Michael Rowe, Nancy Holder and Nancy Kilpatrick for tapping me on the shoulder. Seth Lindberg and Mehitobel Wilson for the 56.6 K baud days. My colleagues at Grub Street and my “Page-Turner” students for helping me remember stuff I forgot I knew.
Stories From the Plague Years Page 28
