Better Than Fiction

by Lonely Planet

  I sat down by the window overlooking the street and that’s when I saw the women. At first I didn’t think of them as a discrete group. Nearby was a bus stop, but the women didn’t strike me as a bus stop crowd. Some appeared to know one another; at least they were chatting away. They spread along the road, too many to be hookers, and in any case barely a car passed down that street while I stood at the window. As well, some of the women looked to be a bit long in the tooth to be plying that trade.

  The building across the way from the hotel was nondescript, no windows, I thought maybe a warehouse of some kind; and that’s where the women directed their attention. They gazed up to a place that I couldn’t see because the curtain rod was in the way and I couldn’t press my face to the window any harder. I gave up and switched my attention to the street below.

  This time a woman wandered out to the road and craned her head. I shoved my face back against the window and managed to see a strip of blue lights come on in the top floor of the building. Down on the street the women were eleven; I thought to count them just in case it was information later required by the police because it had crossed my mind I might be witnessing the kind of event that leads to something else.

  When I next looked, the women were reaching up with their arms and hands to catch bits of paper fluttering down the side of the building.

  The papers have the same drifty floaty feel as snow, they shine as they enter the lit side of the building, and the women leap to catch them.

  One of them, much younger than the others, is like a cat with a morsel. She carries a note away from the others to read under a streetlamp. I would like to know what is written on that note; I’d really love to know. The pain of separation is not much of a secret, but the thrill of that secret correspondence is.

  While I have my face at the window she begins whooping and carrying on. The other women hurry over. She holds up the paper for them to read. Now they are all laughing and clapping. One woman jumps clean out of her shoes.

  I try the window but it is sealed – not that it would do me any good anyhow, I am still stone deaf.

  Next morning I crossed the road to search the pavement, but all the paper was gone. When I looked up, the brick side of the building reared away from me. It was impossible to tell at a glance what kind of a building it was, so I started to walk around in search of a way in, a door or a sign. But oddly, as I came around one corner I kept finding another corner, and so on it went, corner after corner, until I gave up and backtracked to where I had started.

  I began to doubt what I had seen the night before. I counted up the floors in the hotel and found my window. No. I was not in doubt at all, but still it was mystifying.

  I picked up my bag and re-crossed the road to the hotel. As I came through the doors, the receptionist looked up, not quite as pleased to see me as when I had checked in.

  I described to him what I had seen from my window the night before, the women, the drifts of paper. Nothing I said seemed to come as a surprise. He heard me out, rammed his glasses back on, and taking my notebook because I was still stone deaf, wrote down the word ‘jail’. And I thought of those women parading like cats in heat, casting their thin high-heeled shadows against the walls of the jail, and above all the need for words to be put down and their urgent need to be read.

  I doubt I have ever seen a more devoted audience than those women standing on tiptoes to catch a note written by an inmate. And as I left town I remembered two years earlier when I had first got to the US, sitting in the local San Diego courtroom for something to do and marvelling at the parade of men in orange overalls, like something out of television that I might have seen at home, and at the process and the regular business-done sound of the judge’s gavel coming down, when I followed the crazy smile of one bearded inmate – he wouldn’t have been older than myself – to the young woman in the next row down from me, a little to my right, in a denim blue top and long brown hair tied in a knot at the nape, who, as I recollect, with a Madonna-like smile had slowly unbuttoned her blouse to pull her bare breast free. The judge banged his gavel down and roared out something like, ‘Now that’s enough, young lady.’ That judge couldn’t have been more wrong.

  You, Me and the Sea

  BY STEVEN HALL

  Steven Hall’s first novel, The Raw Shark Texts, won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Borders Original Voices Award, and has been published in over thirty languages. In 2010 he was included on the Telegraph’s list of the twenty best British novelists under forty. He currently lives in London.

  It’s 2007 and I’m walking along the beach at the bottom of Sea Lane, in Middleton-on-Sea, West Sussex, UK – about a mile from the faded seaside town of Bognor Regis.

  The tide is almost all the way out, exposing the rock pools beyond the breakwater. It’s raining, late afternoon, and I’m the only person on the beach. I have miles of wet, rippled sand to myself. Blue-grey thunderclouds are piled in the big, wide sky.

  I’m in the process of leaving my partner. It’s slow and painful and I feel awful a lot of the time. I say I’ve come here to think, but I suppose, really, what I’m doing is waiting. I don’t know whether this is a good or horrible thing for me to do, because, by now, my compass is completely shot from it all. How many people in the same position are really doing the same thing when they say I need to get away and think? How many are actually waiting a few days out of respect or properness – a sort of extended minute’s silence – because it’s such an unkind and ridiculous truth that one not-very-special moment, on one not-very-special day or night, they simply knew it was all over?

  So here I am. Staying at my aunt’s seaside home and spending most of my time walking on the beach, hoping the wind and bad weather will eventually blow all this out of my head – blow my brain clear of everything – and I can just stop thinking.

  It’s important to say that my first novel had been published seven months earlier. The book is an entirely fictional story about loss and grief and a man being hunted by a very strange type of shark. I should also say that everything in this story, the story you’re now reading, actually happened. It’s all completely true. It’s important to remember this, because, written as fiction, what happens next would seem pretty ridiculous.

  So.

  I’m walking along the empty beach in the rain, feeling sick and worrying and wondering about what I’m going to do or write next and how, when something moves, something down towards the sea, at the edge of the rock pools. A sinuous, solid black something. It flips or flaps – like a muscle spasm – up off the sand, then it falls back, lying flat.

  I stop walking and watch.

  The thing lies completely still.

  I think maybe it’s washed-up rubbish – a black carrier bag, caught and flapped by the wind. Or perhaps it’s just my eyes, blurred by the rain and the cold, seeing jumps and movements that aren’t really there at all.

  But then the something flips itself into the air again, and there’s no mistaking it – it’s alive.

  Fuck, I say.

  The thing has to be a fish. But that isn’t what surprises me.

  You know how a goldfish looks when you lift it out of its tank? A sort of round, deflated, useless creature, wriggling hopelessly? Well, this is nothing at all like that. And it isn’t like the chubby trout you see on ice in a fishmonger’s either.

  Even from some distance, it looks – aerodynamic.

  This is a dark, sleek, serious thing.

  I set off down the beach towards it, thinking I know those proportions, but also that it can’t be what I think it is. Not on a rainy beach in West Sussex, England. Not on a beach a mile from Bognor Regis, for God’s sake.

  But the closer I get to the thing, the more it refuses to resolve itself into anything else. The closer I get, the more I know that the thing is exactly what I think it is. It flips itself into the air again as I get closer and then I’m standing over it and there’s no doubt left at all …

  It’s a shark. />
  It has the full complement of stiff, triangular fins, a long, curved tail, a big round shark-eye looking up at me from the sand, and a C-shaped mouth full of teeth.

  It’s a small, grey/brown, perfectly formed shark.

  In length, it’s about the same as the distance from my fingertips to my elbow, or perhaps a bit longer. Something between a foot-and-a-half and two feet, I guess. It must’ve been trapped as the tide retreated over the rock pools, then left high and dry when the sea pulled back altogether.

  The shark springs again, then falls back to the sand.

  Of course, if the shark doesn’t go back in the water, it’s going to die.

  And at this moment, I realise it’s incredibly important to me that the shark does not die. Not just because I hate to see any animal suffer, but because there is a task to be performed here, and the task is so stripped down and obvious, and the situation so very surreal, that it takes on the unnatural, stylised air of myth or parable, despite the fact that it is also entirely real and happening in the hereand-now. It’s one of the strangest sensations of my entire life, but the facts seem perfectly clear:

  I’m wet and cold and alone on a beach near Bognor Regis with a dying shark, and somehow I have to get this shark into the water.

  I look up and down the beach.

  There’s nobody at all around.

  Just me and the shark.

  There’s also nothing around that I can use to move the shark. The part of my brain that understands stories tells me this, tells me that’s how it’s going to be before I even begin to look, and sure enough, it’s true. I try anyway. I try with all there is – a hopelessly small piece of driftwood and seaweed as a sort of scoop, but it’s never going to work.

  If I want to save the shark’s life, the only way to do so is to reach down, grab hold of the shark around its middle, pick it up, and physically put it back in the sea myself.

  And, to my surprise, I realise this is exactly what I’m about to do.

  I push my jacket sleeve up my arm and look down at the shark, full of a sort of wild, giddy disbelief.

  How to do this?

  The shark has teeth, so I know I’m going to need to take hold of it quickly and firmly. But how solid are sharks? How robust? I have no idea. If I grab it too hard, am I going to kill it? On the other hand, if I don’t grab it firmly enough, am I risking being bitten? Looking at the thing – very probably.

  I decide I’m going to lunge and grab hold of it quickly and tightly behind the dorsal fin. If it turns out that sharks are actually fragile creatures – well.

  I make a grab for the shark and know at once I’ve made the right choice – the creature is all rough skin and solid muscle, a gymnast’s bicep wrapped in medium-grain sandpaper. The moment I have hold of it, the shark arches itself into a tense C-shape, like a taut bow, trying to get its mouth around to bite me. It doesn’t wriggle or thrash at all, but tries with every bit of strength it has left to get its teeth to where my fingers are. But it can’t.

  I lift it up and take the few steps to the water’s edge, shark held out in front of me, then I carefully lower it into the sea. I release my grip and pull my hand back fast.

  The shark darts away amongst the submerged rock pools. In less than a second, it’s gone.

  I turn away, walk back up the beach.

  It feels like something has been achieved, something great, something ridiculous, something not quite part of the real world – all of these things at once.

  It’s not until I get right back to the top of the beach that I realise I’ve made a mistake. I turn to look back at the place where I released the shark, and see a familiar black shape flipping and flopping on the sand.

  The tide hasn’t gone out. It’s still going out.

  All I’d managed to do was put the shark into another shallow, draining rock pool, so it could beach itself all over again. To save the shark’s life, I’d have needed to actually wade out into the sea with it, past the rock pools, and let it go there.

  I’ve underestimated the task. I’ve achieved nothing.

  I set off back down the beach.

  Picking up a small shark the second time is easier. You know how it’s going to feel, what it will do (arch into that angry C shape, thrash a couple of times, but not so violently that you can’t hold on) and what it will try to do (bite your fingers off). Almost before I know it, I’m walking out into the sea, feeling the cold water seep into my boots and soak my jeans, with the shark held out in front of me. I have to go slowly and carefully over the submerged rocks – the absolute last thing I want to do is trip and fall, fumbling face-first into the sea while carrying a small shark. This, I am quite sure, would be bad.

  Eventually, I make it out past the rocks and feel soft sand under me again. I’m almost waist-deep in very cold seawater now. Wading towards the horizon. The drag of my jeans and waterlogged boots makes it hard to move quickly.

  I stop.

  Of course, there’s now the one, obvious problem.

  I have to put this small but angry shark back into the sea, with me.

  I’m holding it so that its nose points out to the horizon, and I decide that what I should probably do is put a bit of distance between the two of us by releasing it before it actually hits the water – or, in other words, launch the shark a few feet away with a gentle throw, so that when it slips into the sea it’ll be travelling away from me, and will then hopefully decide to continue doing so, and not turn around and come back.

  Understanding that I have no control whatsoever over what happens the moment I let go, I throw the shark forward, and it slides into the sea a few feet away with an aerodynamic plop.

  I see its shape in the swell for a second – powering out to sea (out to sea!) – and then it’s gone.

  I wade back, struggling over and around rocks on the way back to shore, cold, wet and starting to shiver.

  Dripping on the beach, I pace, I crouch, I stamp my squelching feet.

  I wait at the waterside for a long time.

  I have to be sure that the job is done, and done properly.

  But the small shark doesn’t come back.

  I walk up and down the beach to be sure. Then I walk up and down again.

  I’m utterly soaked from sea and rain. I’m so cold I can barely feel my feet, fingers, mouth or nose. The whole, strange episode seems utterly remarkable to me. And obvious. Utterly, impossibly obvious, and all the more bizarre because of that.

  I suppose that, by now, I’ve been waiting by the sea for around an hour.

  Yes, the shark is most definitely gone.

  The task is done.

  I turn away from the water, and set off home.

  The Fairbanks Shakespeare Camp

  BY STEFAN MERRILL BLOCK

  Born in 1982, Stefan Merrill Block grew up in Plano, Texas. His first book, The Story of Forgetting, was an international bestseller and the winner of the Best First Fiction prize at the Rome International Festival of Literature, the Merck Serono Literature Prize, the Fiction Award from the Writers’ League of Texas and the OVID Festival Prize from the Writers’ Union of Romania. It was also a finalist for the debut fiction awards from IndieBound, Salon du Livre and the Center for Fiction. Following the publication of his second novel, The Storm at the Door, Stefan was awarded the University of Texas Dobie-Paisano Fellowship and a fellowship at the Santa Maddalena Foundation in Italy. Stefan’s nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, Granta, the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, Corriere della Sera and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn.

  It was a bright 2am when my connecting flight from Utah descended toward the tarmac, a gray slot in the tundra. I had been sure to get a window seat; I pressed my nose against the plastic oval, searching for the mountain-fanged idyll I had imagined for weeks. But the landscape of Fairbanks, Alaska, appeared to be just an infinity of stunted evergreen forest, punctuated by the boring geometry of mass-produced buildings.

  Typically, when planning a
trip, I spend a good part of the preceding weeks researching the place online, luxuriating before the digitized splendors of my near future. But when my roommate, Anne, invited me to Fairbanks, where she had a stint as an actor for the Fairbanks Shakespeare Theatre, I accepted immediately and deliberately avoided learning anything about the place. Fairbanks seemed impossibly far, the edge of the habitable world, a liminal place between human civilization and hostile nature. Any uploaded snapshot would have trespassed upon my imaginings. And imagine I did: I would spend the two weeks of my trip in the verdant meadows that stretched all the way to the dead mountainous north, a landscape that fit well the brutal, romantic lives of its famous pilgrims, people like Timothy Treadwell, the ill-fated activist of Grizzly Man, or Christopher McCandless, the ill-fated adventurer of Into the Wild. Only now do I realize that every famous Alaskan traveler I can think of could be described as ill-fated.

  Anne, who had been working in Fairbanks for the last couple months, picked me up outside baggage claim in a diesel truck with Hefty bags for windows. She had traded in her low-cut blouses for a paint-streaked hoodie and her feet, typically propped up in black pumps, now inhabited a dirt-grayed pair of sneakers. On the drive, as we shared our stories from the last weeks, I tried not to look out the window, wanting to delay the register of my disappointment at the nothing of the horizon, still just an endlessness of scraggly pines whimpering off into the distance. This landscape seemed more Ingmar Bergman than Timothy Treadwell.

  We drove north out of Fairbanks, the road signs counting our distance from places called Chicken and North Pole. We were headed for the Fairbanks Shakespeare Camp, a settlement that the theater company had carved out of a birch forest to provide its cast and crew a place to live rent-free.