Through the remorseless power of interpretive gazes,
Doomed to pass their postmortem existences
Entombed in the perceptions of their fellow prisoners,
All the while transforming one another into objects,
Surrendering their freedom to phantoms,
And dwelling in ignominious inauthenticity.
SARTRE. So now we know.
BEAUVOIR. Naraka is other people.
FLORENCE. There’s no way out.
SARTRE. What happens next?
IKEDAMA. I suggest you get on with it.
FLORENCE. All right.
BEAUVOIR. Very well.
SARTRE. Yes, let’s get on with it.
(The flutist plays a long mournful note. The drummers beat out a final cadence. SARTRE suddenly points to the floor. BEAUVOIR and FLORENCE stare at the indicated spot.)
Look! An ant!
FLORENCE. With a sesame seed in its mouth!
BEAUVOIR. (Putting on her mask.) Let’s find out where it’s going!
(Slowly, solemnly, eyes fixed on the ant, SARTRE walks toward the protagonist’s pillar and starts down the bridge to the floor, presumably pursuing the ant. BEAUVOIR, FLORENCE, and IKEDAMA follow. Next come the MUSICIANS and the CHORUS. After descending from the bridge, each member of the procession marches toward the focusing pillar. Eventually all sixteen troupers stand in a milling crowd before the dais.)
IKEDAMA. (To FLORENCE.) My gratitude to your honorable cultural society is as vast as the Great Pacific Sea. Nichiren’s ghost is surely at peace.
RUBY. (Waving script around.) A brilliant piece of work, Mr. Ikedama! Florence, you were sensational! Monsieur Sartre, Mademoiselle de Beauvoir, all I can say is—magnifique!
FLORENCE. Let’s take it on the road.
SARTRE. Mr. Ikedama, I would like to suggest a few improvements in your little play.
BEAUVOIR. I have some recommendations too, beginning with the first line.
(Suddenly the basement lights flicker and die. The troupers issue cries of bewilderment. “What the hey?” “Lordy!” “Darn!” “Who’s got a flashlight?” “Somebody forgot to pay the electricity bill!”
The tall, sinister figure of ABORASETSU, robed and masked, appears on the bridge, bathed in a red spotlight. He wears a golden robe with flaring shoulders, a fearsome kishin demon mask, and a wig whose white tresses trail to his waist.)
FLORENCE. Mister Ikedama, is this in the script?
IKEDAMA. I’m afraid not.
ABORASETSU. (Thunderous voice.) I am Lord Aborasetsu, king of demons and prince of caprice! O ye pathetic mortals, for whom life is but a dewdrop in the morning sun, I curse you with my dying breath!
IKEDAMA. He’s evidently functioning as the kyōgen, the comedy relief.
FLORENCE. I’m not laughing yet.
BEAUVOIR. (To ABORASETSU.) Dying breath? Since when can a god die?
ABORASETSU. Since you and your fucking exotropic nebbish consort confused the civilized world with your fucking overbearing existentialist ideas, Mademoiselle de Beauvoir!
FLORENCE. Language, sir, language.
(ABORASETSU charges over the bridge and vaults into the center of the playing area.)
ABORASETSU. What is it that makes a god a god? Not being-in-itself, certainly, the fullness of mere things, but neither does a god require being-for-itself, the emptiness of thinking creatures! (Howls in despair.) Aaaaaiiiiihhhhh! The essence of a god is being-in-itself-for-itself, but that is a contradiction, an absurdity, a fullness that is also an emptiness! Aaaaaiiiiihhhhh!
(As the mortals stand helplessly by, the angry deity seizes the upright protagonist’s pillar and snaps it in half over his knee. He then breaks the other three flagpoles, bashes a hole in the lectern with his fist, and rips down the pine tree from the back wall. He tears the canvas in two.)
(Pulling fan from sash.) Having become irremediably severed from myself, I now take leave of you, off to commit ontological seppuku! Aaaaaiiiiihhhhh!
(Brandishing his fan, ABORASETSU returns to the bridge, crosses into the other realm, and vanishes. The basement lights come back on.)
RUBY. My goodness.
FLORENCE. I suggest we run through the rest of our agenda before something else happens. Does anyone have a question for Mr. Sartre or Miss de Beauvoir?
(Silence. The spectators are too stunned to reply. At last RUBY speaks up.)
RUBY. Perhaps there’s a question the philosophers would like to ask themselves.
(SARTRE and BEAUVOIR look at each other, then burst out laughing.)
SARTRE. We have as many questions for ourselves—
BEAUVOIR. —as there are entities in a barrel of sesame seeds.
FLORENCE. (To unseen woman.) Ellie, I think we’ve got some customers for you.
RUBY. Me first!
(Clutching her script, RUBY rushes offstage, bound for the Ellie’s Browserama Bookshop table.)
BEAUVOIR. Forget my complaint against the American translation, everyone. I am happy to have you buy my book.
IKEDAMA. (Bowing before SARTRE and BEAUVOIR.) Thanks to your philosophy, honorable sages, a terrible dragon was slain tonight.
SARTRE. Mademoiselle de Beauvoir and I are evermore the enemies of bad faith.
FLORENCE. That kyōgen certainly made a mess of things.
BEAUVOIR. No god goes gently to his grave.
IKEDAMA. I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Larson. My company will pay for the damage.
(RUBY returns with two book purchases and a ballpoint pen. She gives the pen and The Battle of Alienated Gazes to IKEDAMA. He autographs the first page. She hands her copy of The Second Sex to BEAUVOIR. The philosopher signs the book.
RUBY presents Being and Nothingness to SARTRE. He writes an inscription on the title page, then returns the volume.)
RUBY. (Reading.) “L’enfer, c’est les autres, mais nous n’en sommes pas encore là.” “Hell is other people, but we’re not there yet.” (Reading.) “Avec toutes mes amitiés, Jean-Paul Sartre.” Oh, Monsieur, I shall treasure it always. Je vous aime.
SARTRE. So, who’s next?
(BLACKOUT.)
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
MATTHEW BAKER is the author of If You Find This (Little, Brown), an Edgar Award nominee for 2016, and the founding editor of Nashville Review.
Drama and fiction translator EVA BUCHWALD is a dramaturge for the Finnish National Theater in Helsinki.
JOHN CLUTE is coeditor of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (Gollancz). His most recent books are Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm and Stay (both Beccon).
World Fantasy Award-winning author JOHN CROWLEY’s most recent novel is Four Freedoms (William Morrow). His next will be a history of crows.
In 2016 and 2017, Dover Books will reissue science fiction pioneer SAMUEL R. DELANY’s novel Dark Reflections, and Wesleyan University Press will bring out the first volume of his journals, In Search of Silence, Volume 1, 1957–1969, followed by his Letters from Amherst: Five Narrative Letters.
JULIA ELLIOTT is the author of The New and Improved Romie Futch and The Wilds (both Tin House). She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, and was awarded a Pushcart Prize for her story in Conjunctions:56, Terra Incognita.
Cover artist JOSEBA ELORZA, aka MiraRuido (miraruido.com) is an illustrator and animator living in Vitoria, Spain.
BRIAN EVENSON is a Conjunctions contributing editor and the author of more than a dozen books of fiction, including The Warren, Immobility (both Tor), A Collapse of Horses, and Windeye (both Coffee House). He teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.
JEFFREY FORD is the author of the novels The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, and The Shadow Year, and the story collections Crackpot Palace and The Drowned Life (all Morrow/HarperCollins). His latest book is the collection A Natural History of Hell (Small Beer).
The translator of almost two hundred graphic novels, EDWARD GAUVIN is a contributing editor for comics at Wo
rds Without Borders and the winner of the John Dryden Translation Prize and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award. His translations of fiction by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud have appeared several times in Conjunctions’ print and online editions.
Issue coeditor ELIZABETH HAND’s novels and short fiction have received multiple Nebula, World Fantasy, and Shirley Jackson awards. Her many books include Glimmering (Harper Prism), Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories (M Press), Generation Loss (Small Beer), and, most recently, Hard Light (St. Martin’s).
MADELINE BOURQUE KEARIN is a PhD student in historical archaeology at Brown University. Her academic work examines the intersection of class, gender, and madness in nineteenth-century asylums in the United States and United Kingdom. This is her first literary publication.
The award-winning author LEENA KROHN’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Her contribution to this issue is a translation from her most recent novel Erehdys [Mistake], published in Finnish by Teos. Her Collected Fiction in English appeared in 2015 (Cheeky Frawg).
MICHAEL PARRISH LEE is the author of The Food Plot in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan), a study of eating and appetite in fiction. His fiction has appeared previously in Conjunctions’ print and online editions.
KELLY LINK is the author of Magic for Beginners (Small Beer), Pretty Monsters (Viking), Stranger Things Happen (Subterranean), and Get in Trouble (Random House). She is the cofounder, with her husband, Gavin J. Grant, of Small Beer Press.
VALERIE MARTIN’s most recent novel is The Ghost of the Mary Celeste (Vintage).
JAMES MORROW is the author of the Godhead Trilogy (Harcourt), The Last Witchfinder (William Morrow), and Galápagos Regained (St. Martin’s Press), among other books. He has received the World Fantasy Award, the Nebula Award, and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire.
Robert Burniaux (1924–88), who wrote under the name JEAN MUNO, is among the best known of Belgium’s Silver Age fabulists. The author of nine novels and four story collections, he received Belgium’s top literary prize, the Prix Rossel, in 1979. “Cartoon” is from his first collection, Histoires singulières.
NICOLE NYHAN is a graduate of Bard College and the New School for Social Research. A Conjunctions senior editor, she works at Grove Atlantic in New York.
Longtime Conjunctions contributor JOYCE CAROL OATES’s most recent books are The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror (Mysterious Press) and Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life (Ecco). She is currently the visiting distinguished writer in the graduate writing program at New York University.
PAUL PARK’s most recent books are All Those Vanished Engines (Tor) and Other Stories (PSJ). He teaches writing at Williams College.
JESSICA REED’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Conjunctions, Crazyhorse, North American Review, and other periodicals. She teaches a course on physics and the arts at Butler University.
LAURA SIMS’s most recent poetry collection is Staying Alive (Ugly Duckling). Her first book, Practice, Restraint, was the winner of the 2005 Fence Books Alberta Prize, and in 2014 she edited Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson (powerHouse).
PETER STRAUB’s most recent book is Interior Darkness: Selected Stories (Doubleday.)
S. P. TENHOFF is a recipient of Columbia University’s Bennett Cerf Memorial Prize for Fiction. His writing has appeared in Conjunctions’ online magazine, Southern Review, American Short Fiction, Ninth Letter, Antioch Review, and Fiction International, among other publications.
JONATHAN THIRKIELD is the author of The Waker’s Corridor (LSU Press). He teaches programming at the New School’s graduate program in media studies.
LAVIE TIDHAR’s books include A Man Lies Dreaming (Melville House); Osama (PS Publishing), winner of the World Fantasy Award; and The Violent Century (Thomas Dunne).
Alice Bradley Sheldon (1915–1987), aka JAMES TIPTREE, JR., aka Raccoona Sheldon, grew up traveling with her parents through regions such as India and Central Africa. In the 1940s and 1950s, she worked as an Air Force photo intelligence officer and for the CIA, before publishing her first short story in 1968. Writing under a male pseudonym for twenty years, Sheldon had a revolutionary effect on the science fiction of the 1970s and 1980s in her exploration of political—and especially feminist—themes. The many books she published during her lifetime include Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home (Eyre Methuen), Star Songs of an Old Primate (Del Rey), Up the Walls of the World (Berkley Books), Tales of the Quintana Roo (Arkham House), and Crown of Stars (Tor). Avowedly a lesbian (among other, more complicated orientations), she nevertheless enjoyed a close marriage of four decades with her husband, Huntington D. Sheldon. In 1987, with both spouses in ill health, Sheldon shot her husband and herself, having predicted her eventual suicide for many years. In 1991, the annual James Tiptree, Jr. Award was created in her honor to recognize a work of science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores understandings of gender. Tachyon published an omnibus collection of her stories, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, in 1994, and Open Road Media released the Kindle edition of Brightness Falls from the Air in 2014. Her honors include two Hugo Awards, three Nebula Awards, and posthumous induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
E. G. WILLY’s work has been anthologized in Stories from Where We Live (Milkweed Editions), The Breast (Global City Press), and Creatures of Habitat (Mint Hill).
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
EDITOR: Bradford Morrow
MANAGING EDITOR: Micaela Morrissette
SENIOR EDITORS: Jedediah Berry, Benjamin Hale, Joss Lake, J. W. McCormack, Edie Meidav, Nicole Nyhan, Pat Sims
COPY EDITOR: Pat Sims
ASSISTANT EDITORS: Matthew Balik, Ari Braverman, Nicholas Wetherell
PUBLICITY: Darren O’Sullivan, Mark R. Primoff
EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS: Janet Barrow, Kaitlynn Buchbaum, Brigid Fister, Adela Foo, Gilad Jaffe, Kelsey Johnson, Tessa Menatian, Charles Noyes, Chloe Reimann, Zoe Rohrich, Jay Rosenstein, Chloe Scala, Anna Sones
CONJUNCTIONS is published in the Spring and Fall of each year by Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504.
Copyright © 2016 CONJUNCTIONS.
Cover design by Jerry Kelly, New York. Cover art by Joseba Elorza (miraruido.com): Invasion, digital collage, 2013. © Joseba Elorza 2016; all rights reserved by the artist.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4468-4
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