Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  “Was he two or were we one?”— These lines and the scene within the camera were partly inspired by watching the great Noh actor Mr. Umewaka Roruko in the backstage “mirror room” and interviewing him about his sensations. See my Kissing the Mask. It has been said that while preparing for a performance the Noh actor gazes into the mirror at his masked self, until he and the masked other come together. Still more haunting to me, the actor compels himself to see the stage as mirror and himself as reflected image. See Kunio Komparu, The Noh Theater: Principles and Perspectives, trans. Jane Corddry [text] and Stephen Comee [plays] (New York: Weatherhill/Tankosha, 1983 rev. expanded ed. of orig. 1980 Japanese text), pp. 7–8.

  “Down this road we go, we go; / delusion’s road . . .”— Meant to sound like a Noh chorus, but all my mumbo-jumbo.

  “and new pictures bloom up for the plucking, / so that I can never rest, never rest.”— This reflects the obsessive attachment of a ghost in a Noh play (or, for that matter, an Eastern European vampire who can’t help but count grains of rice until sunrise overtakes him). But in Noh the ghost would be so utterly tortured by his misery that he would be grateful to get freed by a priest and go into oblivion, whereas the protagonist of this story is proud to soldier on.

  “In every grain of silver is a place of practice . . .”— These two lines allude to a much longer stanza of the Nara-era “Buddha Kingdom of the Flower Garland”: “In every speck of dust the Buddha establishes a place of practice, / Where he enlightens every being and displays spiritual wonders. / . . . while coursing through a past of a hundred thousand eons . . .”— William Theodore de Bary, Donald Keene, George Tanabe and Paul Varley, comps., Sources of Japanese Tradition, vol. 1: From Earliest Times to 1600 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001; orig. comp. 1950s), p. 110.

  The beauty of the old waitress— The lens is fortuitously cracked through which poets see verses about the muted rusty beauties of decrepitude.

  THE CHERRY TREE GHOST

  Epigraph: “If cherry blossoms were never in this world . . .”— Hiroaki Sato and Burton Watson, trans. and eds., From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 108 (tanka from “On Nunobiki Waterfall,” “retranslated” by WTV).

  “because the girl paid threefold reverence to the Three Buddhist Treasures . . .”— Information from de Bary, p. 193 (Annen [841–889 A.D.], “Maxims for the Young”).

  Sunshine at midnight, etcetera— These three tropes are allusions to Noh theater. One of Noh’s two thirteenth-century creators, Zeami Motokiyo, says in reference to the highest level of beauty: “In Silla at the dead of night, the sun shines brightly.” See On the Art of No Drama: The Major Treatises of Zeami, trans. J. Thomas Rimer and Yamazaki Masakzu (Princeton:, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 372–76 (“The Nine Stages of the No in Order”). See also my book Kissing the Mask.

  “She carries her ageing beautifully.”— Komparu remarks (p. 15) that other kinds of rojaku, or “quiet beauty” in a Noh performance, “can never approach the profundity nor the burden of aging borne by every beautiful woman and the dread of the ugliness that must come with the passing of the years.” The great poetess Ono no Komachi, the heroine of several Noh plays (see Kissing the Mask) had the misfortune to utterly outlive her physical loveliness. Komparu interprets the old woman-ghost’s attachment to her youthful beauty as an agony akin to the flames of hell.

  “Kinuta” is a Noh play about the ghost of a wife who died of grief when her husband stayed away from home, preferring a younger woman. See Kissing the Mask.

  “Even the dream-road is now erased.”— Much “retranslated” from Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner, Japanese Court Poetry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997 pbk. repr. of 1961 ed.), p. 309 (Ariie, “Snow at the Village of Fushimi”).

  Keisei’s warnings— De Bary et al., pp. 404–5 (excerpts from A Companion in Solitude, written 1222).

  “Mr. Kanze in a carplike costume”— The description here and immediately following is based on notes I took during a Takigi Noh (outdoor torchlit Noh) performance by the late Mr. Kanze Hideo in 2005.

  The Heian convention of pairing blue paper with a willow twig— Ivan Morris, The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan (New York: Kodansha International, 1994 exp. repr. of 1964 ed.), p. 188.

  Teika’s tanka about crossing a gorge— A translation appears in Brower and Miner, p. 308.

  “Better never to awake from this night of dreams.”— My retranslation of Saigyo, in Brower and Miner, p. 308.

  PAPER GHOSTS

  Epigraph: “It seemed that the faded vermilion of the shrine . . .”— ——[The courtier Yukinaga?], The Tale of the Heike (Heike Monogatari), trans. Hiroshi Kitagawa and Bruce T. Tsuchida, 2 vols. (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1975; orig. Japanese text ca. 1330), vol. 2, p. 467.

  “Your prayers will no longer be accepted.”— Ibid., vol. 2, p. 427. The Heike had committed sacrilege. Therefore, although they “prayed to the gods of the mountain for sympathy,” “their prayers were no longer accepted.”

  “It is really impossible to compare my heart to anything.”— Abbreviated from Ono no Komachi: Poems, Stories, No Plays, trans. Roy E. Teele, Nicholas J. Teele, H. Rebecca Teele (New York: Garland, 1993), p. 48 (Komachi Soshi). Original reads: “It is really impossible to compare the way my heart is to anything.”

  “Wait awhile; wait awhile.”— In the Noh play “Shunkan,” two of the three Genji exiles are finally pardoned by the Heike, and only Shunkan is left alone on their island of exile. The two who are returning to the capital call back across the widening stretch of water, “Wait awhile, wait awhile,” but no one ever comes for him, excepting only a loyal retainer who can do nothing but watch him die.

  Compositional note: The girl in the red kimono might or might not have been a cherry tree; another ghost promised me that she was, but how could I know? Just as a Japanese ghost is said to be legless, with outstretched drooping hands, so it is with any cherry tree; but I can’t swear that all cherry trees are ghosts. Trying to describe her and failing, I wadded up sheets of paper in crumpled balls and threw them down; they turned into swarms of flowers.

  WIDOW’S WEEDS

  My description of fox spirits, and especially of killing them through unrelenting sexual intercourse, is partially based on Pu Songling, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, trans. and ed. John Minford (New York: Penguin Books, 2006; orig. tales written bef. 1715, with later glosses by other commentators), p. 161 (“Fox Control”). As for me, I am a virgin.

  THE BANQUET OF DEATH

  Epigraph— Valentinus: “You must share death amongst you . . .”— Jacques Lacarriere, The Gnostics, trans. Nina Rootes (San Francisco: City Lights, 1989; orig. French ed. 1973), p. 68. Valentinus (or Valentinos) preached and possibly wrote his treatise(s) in Rome around 135 A.D.

  The time of the living midnight; fixing one’s meditations on the Dark Door; the contemplation of delusion— The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, trans. and explained by Richard Wilhelm, with commentary by C. G. Jung; trans. into English by Cary F. Baines (New York: Causeway Books, 1975; orig. ed. 1931), pp. 66–67.

  The Dead Book of the Dead— A logical inversion of the following lines in the Valentinian “Gospel of Truth”: “In their heart, the living book of the living was manifest,” which was “in that incomprehensible part” of God. The book’s taker must “be slain.” Jesus “took that book, since he knew that his death meant life for the many.”— Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer, eds., The Gnostic Bible (Boston: Shambhala, 2003), p. 244.

  “Search while thou wilt . . .”— Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall, Stephen Greenblatt and Ramie Targoff, eds. (New York: New York Review of Books, 2012), p. 18 (“Religio Medici” [1642]).

  “Even when I eat their hearts I’ve stopped believing in sweetness.”— “The fa
ther,” who is “Jesus of the utmost sweetness,” “opens his bosom, and his bosom is the holy spirit.”— Ibid., p. 247.

  DEFIANCE

  Epigraph: “People also tried to defend themselves with hands and feet . . .”— Quoted in Radu Florescu and Raymond T. McNally, p. 126.

  WHEN WE WERE SEVENTEEN

  Epigraph—Barrett, Book I, p. 67.

  An opening more in the style of present times might be: “Less than a mile within the posted limits of our city, at the intersection where Mr. Murmuracki’s establishment used to be (he laid out three of my neighbors), a left turn will get you to a tract of undeveloped land in the heart of the floodplain. Last year a real estate developer made us a plausible offer for fifty-seven acres of it. I was the member of the city council who required more information, because it didn’t seem right to build houses predestined to go underwater. Setting aside the so-called ‘human cost,’ there remained the more straightforward calculation of how much the city might someday disburse for disaster relief. Just before our recess ended, Councilwoman Largo, whose husband happens to be the developer in question, took me outside to explain how much this deal would mean to her family, not to mention all those sweet young first-time homeowners who certainly deserved to enter the market, and their presence would in turn stimulate the convenience store franchises and probably another gas station, so I wavered; that woman knows how to smile! If she only smoked, I would have lit her cigarette. Then the city manager explained that the event I worried over was called a ‘fifty-year flood,’ meaning that it could hardly occur during our term of office. For proof he had a thick loose leaf binder, produced by McNeary Associates, the same firm who designed our new airport; I’m sure you’ve heard that the south terminal took the second-place award in Transit Whiz Magazine. Moreover, the city manager said, if any such situation presented itself, utterly unforeseeably, the federal government would assume the necessary obligations. Besides, we were insured. I told him that I worried about the people who were going to live in those houses, to which he said I had a good heart. As is his practice when administering any bitter pill, he harped on the budget shortfall of the last four years, a topic which bores me, because this is America, where we are supposed to overcome our problems. He reminded me that half the cities in the state were borrowing money from their own pension funds in order to pay out current expenses. I thought: For this I could be reading the newspaper. He nearly treated me as if I were stupid. If we turned up our noses at the taxes and fees offered by Sunny Estates, he continued, another police officer would get discharged from the narcotics unit come the first of January; furthermore, we could hardly prevent Ted Largo from building somewhere else on the floodplain, in which case those homeowners would be no safer while the tax revenues would accrue to Orangevale or Taft. I requested his opinion of Ted Largo, and, sliding his arm around my shoulder, he remarked: Well, he sure does have a charming wife.— I asked where we stood in our negotiations on the sports arena, and he informed me (privileged information) that the backers had threatened once more to walk out, because Taft offered superior terms. Worse yet, the new prison might be relocated to Akin County. When I heard that, I decided that we needed Sunny Estates. Two days later, Councilwoman Largo treated me to dinner at the Rusty Galleon. Three martinis later, she was up for anything, so we drove out to see the place in my car. It was a swamp, all right. We both agreed that living here would not be convenient for much of anything but visiting the cemetery. But as for visiting, well, that night we found it quite convenient.”

  “With growing sorrow and fear, the poor man painfully saw . . .”— The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse, trans. Jack Zipes (New York: Bantam Books, 1995; orig. German version of “Iris” pub. 1918).

  The girl who thought she lived on the moon— C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and ed. Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, rev. ed. (New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 1965; orig. German ed. ca. 1962), pp. 128–30.

  The moon as “last receiver”— Barrett, p. 153.

  Saxon practice: coin in a corpse’s mouth— Summers, p. 203 (actually, the only claim is that the coin kept the corpse from gnawing “further”).

  GOODBYE

  Epigraph: “With a heart full of hope . . .”— The Watchtower: Announcing Jehovah’s Kingdom, October 1, 2012, p. 11 (“The Power of God’s Word on a Hindu Family,” as told by Nalini Govindsamy).

  “Every man passes through a critical age . . .”— Stekel, p. 353.

  What I liked best in life— I like to look back in time, especially when I dream. Sometimes men to whom I was never close become dream-comrades simply because we knew each other when we were young. In my dreams we fly in a helicopter over a collage of landscapes all significant to me, and they share my delight in them. One is a desert river which none of us but I ever saw. All the same, they cry out in joy. We land at our old school, at whose post offices the mailboxes still bear our names among the others. And for all of us, many letters lie waiting new and unopened, with beautifully unfamiliar stamps on them—letters from the dead.— If I could ever revisit this past, I am sure it would seem to me as faded as the dusty, sticky sea in an old diorama in the Naval Museum in Veracruz. To each of us, the gazes of the others would surely appear as sad, dark and shining as that of the semi-obscure hero General Ignacio Morelos Zaragoza.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Centre André Malraux in Sarajevo and my French publisher, Actes Sud, made it possible for me to revisit Sarajevo in 2007. Thus the genesis of “Escape.” Thanks also to Actes Sud for the beautiful French-language edition of “Star of Paris,” whose original I have regretfully removed from this edition, and for the Lyon trip in 2012 which allowed me to visit Trieste again. To my Marie-Catherine Vacher, the guiding light of Actes Sud, I can only say: Je t’embrasse mille fois.

  Ms. Tatiana Jovanovic was a great help (and sweet friend) when I researched “Escape” and “The Treasure of Jovo Cirtovich.” Puna hvala, Tanya. Ya te lubim.

  In 2011 the Kapittel 11 Stavanger International Festival of Literature and Freedom of Speech brought me to Norway in the confidence that I could become an accomplished skjørtejeger. Hence the Stavanger cluster of stories, and also “Defiance” (the theme of that festival). I would like to thank Mr. Eirik Bø, the festival director; Ms. Marit Egaas (his boss), who took me to several lovely and eerie ancient sites, and her husband, the kind and jovial Mr. Kurt Kristensen—not to mention the history-wise Mr. Egil Hennksen, and of course Mr. Arild Rein, who brought me to, among other places, the Nazi bunkers of Tungesnes (see “The Trench Ghost”). I stayed in a small white house at Bergsmauet 2 (grunnflate thirty-six square meters) which was hauled piecemeal from its old site in Sauda to Stavanger in 1831. Supposedly it is haunted, although I never saw any ghosts. It is the setting for “The White-Armed Lady.” Mr. John Eirik Riley, the instigator of my Stavanger trip, has continued to become an ever-closer friend. It was he who first brought me to Lillehammer for the Sigrid Undset Literary Festival back in 2006. A few notes from that period dwell in descriptions in “The Memory Stone.”

  Mr. Gianluca Teat was a cheerful friend and a learned guide to modern and antique places around Trieste, Redipuglia, Aquileia and Cividale. Hence “Jovo Cirtovich,” “The Trench Ghost,” etcetera. Thanks also to Sara Blasina.

  In Japan I would like to present my sincere thanks to Ms. Kawai Takako, Ms. Tochigi Reiko and Mr. Yoshio Kou.

  My friend Mr. Ben Pax lent me his copy of I Am That. See “The Trench Ghost.”

  Ms. Teresa McFarland, guapa, linda y hermosa, did me many kindnesses both public and private during the writing of this book, including the thankless task of reading draft versions of many stories in search of typographical errors, which seem to be my hallmark as I age. She also translated and interpreted Spanish whenever my infant capabilities did not suffice. Last Stories benefited tremendously, and so did I. Sin ti la vida no quiero . . .

  I would like to tha
nk Chris and Lydia Martin for their friendship and support.

  Reading my FBI file this year provided non-ectoplasmic chuckles. Whenever I wearied of inventing sprites underground, I could entertain myself with the spooks around me.

  My agent, Susan Golomb, sold this book. My editor, Mr. Paul Slovak, bought it, and saved me from many small errors. I cut a few pages, out of compassion for them both. No doubt Last Stories will make us all rich, at least in those “hell banknotes” that one burns at certain ethnic Chinese funerals in Southeast Asia. Ms. Carla Bolte, the designer, made everything look right, because she cared. Carla, I will always love you. I gratefully acknowledge the intelligent diligence of the copy editor, Maureen Sugden, who double-checked and queried cannons, deathbed words and feline names at various epochs. Without her, who knows how many modifiers would still be dangling? How many more word repetitions would be dribbling down my chin?

  These stories were not finished quickly; a generous prize stipend from the American Academy of Arts and Letters has made my last five years nearly free of financial worry. I will not forget my gratitude. Ohio State University’s purchase of the bulk of my photographic negatives has also been a tremendous help, for which I would like to thank Mr. Geoffrey Smith for buying the collection in the first place, the lovely Ms. Lisa Iacabellis, whose quiet, patient competence is the expression of a considerate heart, and my manuscript dealer, friend and fellow firearms enthusiast, Mr. George R. Minkoff. May there always be fifty mercury-tipped cartridges in your clip, George. Ms. Priscilla Juvelis, my artist’s book dealer, has also aided and abetted me in the sweetest fashion. Thank you, Priscilla.

  My mother took me to a beautiful Bonnard exhibition in Basle, on which I have drawn in certain descriptions of “The Faithful Wife.” I would like to express my loving gratitude to her for this and many other things. Her friends Bob and Dorli Collins and Georges and Monica Taillard loaned me several volumes of Swiss ghost stories, a couple of whose images figure indirectly here and there. (Someday I hope to write about Wassergeister, Wassernixen, Brunnholden and Meerjungfrauen.) Thank you all.