The Physiognomy

by Jeffrey Ford

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  The Physiognomy

  Book One of the Well-Built City Trilogy

  Jeffrey Ford

  For Lynn, Jackson, and Derek:

  My guides to the Earthly Paradise

  Introduction to the New Edition of the

  Well-Built City Trilogy

  Earlier in the summer (1996) in which I finally began writing The Physiognomy, I’d done a series of drawings with black magic marker—woodcut-looking things with sections that swirled and erupted into faces and then disintegrated back into mere design. In all, I must have done thirty or forty of these pieces, each of which took quite a bit of time to first draw and then to color in the appropriate spaces. The process was like some kind of weird therapy, and all the while I performed these simple techniques, I daydreamed about a novel I’d wanted to write for some time.

  Back when I was in the Ph.D. program at Temple University, writing a dissertation on the later fictional works of John Gardner, I was in the library one day searching for a book that might give me a description of Saint Cuthbert. I’d read in some notes and in a partial manuscript I’d found among Gardner’s papers in the archive at Rochester University that he’d planned at one time to write a novel or a novella about Saint Cuthbert. Coincidentally, the street I lived on at the time, Haddon Avenue, in Collingswood, New Jersey, intersected with a major thoroughfare, Cuthbert Blvd. Other than having seen the name in this manner, I’d never heard of the saint prior to this.

  The book I wanted was not in its spot on the shelf and so I went searching around for it, as it was supposedly somewhere in the library. I have a tendency to be easily distracted in a library, and I stop and start reading books willy-nilly, sometimes forgetting the one I was originally looking for. On the otherwise empty bottom shelf of one of the stacks I was perusing I found a giant book, old and covered with dust, as if it had been there for years, untouched. I dragged it out from its spot and sat down on the carpeted floor in the middle of the aisle. The library was unusually empty that day; I remember it was pouring rain outside. I opened this giant book in the middle and beheld a page filled with the most beautiful engravings of heads—a whole gallery of heads stared back at me.

  On closer inspection, I learned that the book was volume one of a facsimile edition of the complete works of Johann C. Lavater, the great eighteenth-century Physiognomist. The book was full of incredible illustrations. It took me about an hour of flipping through pages and reading various sections before it dawned on me what the science of Physiognomy was all about. Somewhere in that time I came to the realization that this kind of bogus scientific pursuit had not died out in the eighteenth century but was still very strong in the minds of many people in society at the end of the twentieth century. Here was the concept that a person’s moral worth could be determined by their physical appearance. I saw the connection between this belief and the reliance in and insistence on the importance of “surface” in our own time. I’m sure it took a bit of thought, but it seemed like the idea for my novel just opened out in front of me. The idea for the first book then led to the second and third volumes as I sat there on the floor of the library, and so the basic plots of all three novels were formed in that one afternoon in no more than an hour or so.

  By the way, at the end of my day in the library, I remembered once again to look up Saint Cuthbert, and I found that he was often depicted cradling the severed head of a martyr.

  A lot happened after that. My first son had been born and that upped the ante and caused me to move my ass. I dropped out of the Ph.D. program, realizing I didn’t want to be a scholar. I wanted to write fiction. So I accepted a full-time teaching job at Brookdale Community College, which was two hours away from my house. The teaching load was (and remains) five classes a semester, which was overwhelming, but I was teaching composition, real hands-on stuff, and that engaged my interest. And at nights I wrote fiction, so my life was full of writing. And the years passed.

  On the long drives to and from the college, through what was then sort of farmland, I’d daydream about the stories I was writing. Deer would occasionally intercede; and there was a pond I passed upon which a beaver had built a lodge, and I would often see the creature sitting on top of it in the sun. There was a one-hundred-acre field that, in September, when I started back to work after the summer break, was always brimming with sunflowers. I studied their disintegration throughout the winter.

  Ten years later, in the summer of 1996, I finally started writing the novel. Just previous to that summer, in the winter of ’96, I’d placed a short story, “Grass Island,” in Puerto del Sol, the New Mexico State University literary magazine. I then wrote the first three chapters of the novel before I started back to teaching the fall semester. I let the novel sit, though, because I was starting to sell and place stories in literary magazines and some smaller genre publications, and decided to keep writing stories for a while longer. Then one day I received a letter in the mail from what looked to be an agent from New York City. At first, I was sure it was a scam, trying to get me to pay for someone to edit my manuscript or something. I ignored the letter for a few days, and just before throwing it out, I looked it over more carefully and noticed that it wasn’t what I’d thought it was. In the letter, the agent said that he’d read my story in the issue of Puerto del Sol and was wondering if I had a novel available (note to new writers: just remember this when your friends tell you no one reads the literary magazines). I wrote back to him that, yes, I did have a novel in process, never expecting to hear anything further about it.

  The agent then called me, and he asked me to send him my novel. I told him I only had three chapters done, and he said to send them. I wasn’t going to because the book I was working on was very strange—darkly humorous and somewhat hallucinogenic. William John Watkins, my teaching partner at Brookdale Community College and who was also a science fiction writer, really talked me into sending the chapters I had. If it wasn’t for Bill, I’d not have done it. About a week and a half went by, after which I got a call again from the agent, asking, “Where’s the rest of the book?” I reminded him that I’d told him I only had a few chapters. He told me, “That’s a shame, because I have a number of editors interested in it.” My heart sank. I said, “How long can you give me to finish it?” He said, “How long will it take?” I told him, “I’ll have it to you in a month.” I know how crazy this sounds, but I’d been seriously writing for about fifteen years, every night hacking away at short stories till early in the morning. My dream was to publish another novel. So when the prospect of doing so was dangled in front of me, I was on it like a striking Alsatian.

  I wrote the rest of the book in one month. I mailed a copy to the agent on the overnight precisely thirty days after I’d promised it. That month was crazy. I had, over the years, what with work and family and always writing, conditioned myself to only sleep about four hours a night, but in this month I was lucky if I slept four hours altogether. I’d lay on my bed for ten minutes and get to that state where I was just about to doze off, and then I’d bring myself back to full alertness, get up, and go work some more. I smoked about 5,000 cigarettes, drank as many cups of coffee, whatever it took. But I got the book done. I still remember the day, a Saturday morning in September: Lynn and I and the boys were at her parents’ beach house on Long Beach Island enjoying the last dregs of nice weather before it got too cold, when I got a call from Jennifer Hershey, the editor at Avon Books. She said she wanted to buy the book and offered me a nice sum of money for it.

  That’s the basic story of how the trilogy ca
me to be, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention two other people. Nat Sobel, my first agent, was the one who read the story in the literary magazine, contacted me, and made the deal for The Physiognomy. Jennifer Brehl was the editor for the other two novels of the trilogy. I felt upon meeting her that we were very much on the same wavelength. She had a lot of great ideas for the novels that we used, and her editing was a more intense learning experience for me than anything I’d been through in college. Beyond that, she went to bat for me for the books, which sold poorly at that time. In the eyes of the marketplace, these were three stiff ships on the way down. I remember her telling me about having to pitch Memoranda in a sales meeting. She said, “You try to explain that plot so it makes sense.” We laughed, and she said, “Cut me a break.” I promised I would, but the next book was even more extreme. However it happened, the trilogy was completed.

  When I was writing the trilogy—oh, what machinations, what devilish tantalization of the gods—the visions were intense, but to tell you the truth, I had forgotten a lot of it. There have been other novels and bunches of stories since then. Particular moments from writing these books come back to me still, though, emitting sparks of palpable energy. I think there’s something in them for you: a journey to the Earthly Paradise. I’m very pleased to have the books published in this edition by Golden Gryphon Press—thanks to Gary Turner and Marty Halpern—and to have been lucky enough to have John Picacio create new covers.

  Jeffrey Ford

  1

  I left the Well-Built City at precisely 4:00 in the afternoon of an autumn day. The sky was dark, and the wind was blowing when the coach pulled up in front of my quarters. The horses reared against a particularly fierce gale and my papers—describing the case that had been assigned to me no more than an hour earlier by the Master, Drachton Below, himself—nearly flew out of my hands. The driver held open the door for me. He was a porcine fellow with rotten teeth, and I could tell from one look at his thick brow, his deep-set eyes, that he had propensities for daydreaming and masturbation. “To the territory,” he yelled over the wind, spitting out his words across the lapels of my topcoat. I nodded once and got in.

  A few minutes later we were speeding through the streets of the city toward the main gate. When the passersby saw my coach, they gave me that curious one-finger salute, a greeting which had recently sprung up from the heart of the populace. I thought of waving back, but I was too preoccupied with trying to read the clues of their physiognomies.

  After all my years of sweeping open the calipers to find the “soul,” skin deep, even a glimpse at a face could explode my wonder. A nose to me was an epic, a lip, a play, an ear, a many-volumed history of mankind’s fall. An eye was a life in itself, and my eyes did the thinking as I rode into the longest night, the dim-witted driver never letting up on the horses, through mountain passes, over rocky terrain where the road had disappeared. With the aid of the Master’s latest invention, a chemical light that glowed bright orange, I read through the particulars of the official manuscript. I was headed for Anamasobia, a mining town of the northern territory, the last outpost of the realm.

  I reread the case so many times that the words died from abuse. I polished my instruments till I could see myself in their points. I stared out at moonlit lakes and gnarled forests, at herds of strange animals startled into flight by the coach. And as the Master’s light began to dim, I prepared an injection of sheer beauty and stuck it in my arm.

  I began to glow as the light failed, and an image from the manuscript presented itself to my eye’s-mind—a white fruit said to have grown in the Earthly Paradise, purported to have all manner of supernatural powers. It had sat under glass on the altar of the church in Anamasobia for years, never spoiling but always at the perfect moment of ripeness.

  Years before, the local miners who worked the spire veins beneath Mount Gronus had broken through a wall into a large natural chamber with a pool and found it there in the withered hand of a mummified ancient. The story of its discovery had piqued the interest of the Well-Built City for a time, but most considered the tale primitive lunacy concocted by idiots.

  When the Master had handed me the assignment, he laughed uproariously and reminded me of the disparaging remarks concerning his facial features I had whispered into my pillow three years earlier. I had stared, dumbfounded by his omniscience, while he injected himself in the neck with a syringe of sheer beauty. As the plunger pushed the violet liquid into his bulging vein, a smile began to cross his lips. Laconically, he pulled the needle out and said, “I don’t read, I listen.”

  I bit the white fruit and something flew out of it, flapping around the interior of the coach and tangling itself in my hair. Then it was gone and the Master, Drachton Below, was sitting across from me, smiling. “To the territory,” he said, and offered me a cigarette. He was dressed in black with a woman’s black scarf tied around his head, and those portions of his physiognomy that had, years earlier, revealed to me his malicious hubris were accentuated by rouge and eyeliner. Eventually he broke apart like a puzzle that put me to sleep.

  I dreamt the coach stopped on a barren windswept plateau with a shadowy vista of distant mountains in the moonlight. The temperature had dropped considerably, and, as I burst out of my compartment, demanding to know the reason for the delay, my words came as steam. The absolute clarity and multitude of stars silenced me. I watched the driver walk a few yards away from the coach and begin drawing a circle around himself with the toe of his boot. He then stood in the middle of it and mumbled toward the mountains. As I approached him, he unzipped his pants and began urinating.

  “What nonsense is this?” I asked.

  He looked over his shoulder at me and said, “Nature calls, your honor.”

  “No,” I said, “the circle and the words.”

  “That’s just a little something,” he said.

  “Explain,” I demanded.

  He finished his business and, pulling up his zipper, turned to face me. “Look,” he said, “I don’t think you know where we are.”

  In that instant, something about his garish earlobes made me think that perhaps the Master had set the whole excursion up to have me done away with for my whispered indiscretions.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  He walked toward me with his hand raised, and I felt myself begin to cringe, but then he brought it down softly on my shoulder. “If it will make you feel any better, you can kick me,” he said. He bent over in front of me, flipping his long coattails up in the back so as to present a clearer target.

  I kicked the seat facing me and came awake in the coach. As I opened my eyes, I could already sense we had stopped moving and that morning had finally come. Outside the window to my left I saw a man standing, waiting, and behind him a primitive town built entirely of wood. Looming over the town was what I took to be Mount Gronus, inexhaustible source of blue spire, the mineral that fueled the furnaces and engines of the Well-Built City.

  Before gathering my things together, I studied the stranger. Cranium derivative of the equine, eyes set wide, massive jaw—a perfectly good-hearted and ineffectual political functionary. I deemed him trustworthy and prepared to meet him. As I opened the door, he ceased his whistling and walked forward to greet me.

  “Welcome to Anamasobia,” he said, holding out a gloved hand. His obesity was canceled by an insistent chin, his overbite by the generosity of jowls. I clasped his hand and he said, “Mayor Bataldo.”

  “Physiognomist Cley,” I told him.

  “A great honor,” he said.

  “You are having some trouble?” I inquired.

  “Your … honor,” he said, as if on the verge of tears, “there is a thief in Anamasobia.” He took my valise and we walked together down the hardened dirt path that was the only street in town.

  The mayor gave me a tour as we walked, pointing out buildings and expounding on their beauty and utility. He taxed my civility with colorful tidbits of local history. I saw the town h
all, the bank, the tavern, all constructed from a pale gray wood full of splinters and roofed with slate. Some of them, like the theater, were quite large with the crudest attempts at ornamentation. Faces, beasts, lightning bolts, crosses had been carved into some of the boards. On the southern wall of the bank, people had carved their names. This tickled the mayor to his very foundation.

  “I can’t believe you live here,” I said to him, mustering a shred of sympathy.

  “Heaven knows, we are animals, your honor,” he said, slowly shaking his head, “but we can certainly mine blue spire.”

  “Yes, very well,” I said, “but once, at an exhibition at the Hall of Science in the Well-Built City, I saw a monkey write the words ‘I am not a monkey’ five hundred times on a sheet of parchment with a quill. Each line was rendered with the most magnificent penmanship.”

  “A miracle,” he said.

  I was led to a sorry-looking four-story dwelling in the center of town called the Hotel de Skree. “I have reserved the entire fourth floor for you,” said the mayor.

  I held my tongue.

  “The service is magnificent,” he said. “The stewed cremat is splendid and all drinks are complimentary.”

  “Cremat,” I said through tight lips, but it went no further, because coming toward us on the left side of the street was an old blue man. Bataldo saw me notice the staggering wretch and waved to him. The old man lifted his hand but never looked up. His skin was the color of a cloudless sky. “What manner of atrocity is this?” I asked.

  “The old miners have lived so long in the spire dust that it becomes them. Finally they harden all the way through. If the family of the man is poor, they sell him as spire rock to the realm for half what a pure sample of his weight would bring. If the family is well-off, they register him as a ‘hardened hero,’ and he stands in perpetuity somewhere in town as a monument to personal courage and a lesson to the young.”