Viral

by Emily Mitchell

  Some climbed water towers; others went onto the roofs of houses or apartment buildings. One boy in Tucson climbed up the inside of the enormous tilted dish of a radio telescope. A girl in San Francisco pulled herself onto the railings of the Golden Gate Bridge. They took their places in the dark. They waited for the hour to arrive. And when it did, they lit the fireworks they’d tied onto their ankles or wrists or stuffed into their backpacks and launched themselves out so that they all blazed up in a single moment and then plummeted burning through the night engulfed by flames before they hit the ground and burned and guttered there like candles laid out in remembrance of something, then forgotten.

  Down in the lobby, the police were starting to cuff and take away the rioters, though some were still breaking and dismantling the furnishings. Below me a woman was sitting on the floor, holding her head, looking dazed. A man, perhaps her husband, tried to comfort her. I thought about my niece, how on earth it might have been for her as she fell from the eighth floor of the library in town—to which she had the key because she volunteered there twice a week—how she must have known at some point that the parachute was not going to save her and how entirely alone she must have been. I felt something like a wave of molten lava rising up inside my body and I tried to tamp it down as I had done many times before, keeping a careful hold of myself so that I could report objectively on all that had occurred. But I did not succeed this time, and the great, hot mass welled up out of my chest and came out of my mouth as a sound I’d never heard myself or anyone else make until that moment and before I knew what I was doing, I found that I was running down the wide, carpeted staircase, with my fists swinging out in front of me, still shouting without words and looking, looking, looking for something, anything to smash.

  Biographies

  1.

  Emily Mitchell was born in London in the middle of a garbage collectors’ strike. The strike began when the year had just crawled out from winter and it was still cold and rainy and the garbage collectors were unhappy because exponential growth in the manufacture and use of disposable food containers had added to their workload but there had been no expanded hiring to meet this increased demand. The leader of their union was a charismatic man called Donkey who got his moniker for his very long ears and braying voice as well as for his stubborn nature, although it is worth noting that Donkey, whose real name was Clive, was also a father and husband whose wife and children remember him as very kind, gentle and patient.

  All spring the garbage piled up against the walls of the city. Fruit and scraps of meat dampened and drooped; vegetables blackened, frayed, disintegrated. Bristling animals slipped in and out of the mounting piles of plastic bags and bottles, beverage cartons, tin cans, old shoes. Children had to be warned not to play and climb on the heaps of refuse clogging up the streets, but some nevertheless made games of running up their sides and some of them fell into the piles of trash and had to be rescued. In places around town, whole streets were blocked and traffic had to be diverted.

  In the end, the government decided to settle with the garbage collectors, but by this time the mountains of trash were so high and so dense from the pressures of the layers above that they could not be moved by the normal means. In some places the city used helicopters to dislodge the mass of compacted matter and hoist it into the air so that it could be flown away. People who were alive at that time remember from that summer the frequent spectacle of fleets of helicopters flying across the sky, each with a misshapen mass attached beneath it on the end of a long cord, silhouetted against the setting sun. As picturesque as these flights were, they had the disadvantage that the masses of garbage would lose their integrity in flight and start to shed, showering the populace below with banana peels and old chocolate-bar wrappers.

  By the time Emily Mitchell was born, in the fall of that year, most of the garbage had been cleared away. Some of it had been buried and the land above turned into parks. Some of it had been moved to a secret location. The strike was over and the growling trucks moved again through the blue early streets waking people before dawn.

  One surprising after effect of the strike was not discovered until the following year. It was found that several species of insects, including a variety of butterfly, and some types of flowering plants—a ragweed, a tasslewort—had begun to adapt to the garbage mountains even in the short time they existed. These insects and plants had changed their colors and in some cases their shapes in order to camouflage themselves more effectively and had come to mimic the prevalent designs found in their new environment. The bold red-and-white design of the Coca-Cola can in particular seems to have inspired these adaptations, and several of the plants began to select for a mutation of brilliant scarlet with white curlicues. Even today, these flowers can be seen growing wild in unexpected places around the city. They are deemed rare and desirable and expensive—when they can be found. Efforts to raise them commercially have not been successful. So if you can locate them, you can sell them for a remarkable sum.

  2.

  Emily Mitchell has worked as a waitress, a receptionist at a bakery/tanning salon, a short-order cook, a snowmobile driver, a crime-scene cleanup technician, an exotic animal trainer, a war correspondent, a phone dispatcher, a secretary, an environmental campaigner, a freelance journalist, a bean counter and a holistic pediatric oncologist.

  She has never worked as an exotic dancer. She might have done this—since she has no moral objection to sex work as such and certainly not to the deliberate and conscious choice by women to use their sexual desirability, long the source of their unjust and egregious oppression, as a means of obtaining economic and social power—if only her breasts had been bigger. Not much bigger, but big enough that they appeared large in proportion to her torso, which seems to be the important ratio in these cases. Or maybe it was her torso that was too big. Or her hips, which are round and scoop-shaped, so her body is like a tulip bulb or an old-fashioned earthenware jug. She thinks she might have been pretty good at exotic dancing, actually, if not for her overwhelming self-consciousness, her basic discomfort with disrobing in front of people with whom she’s not intimate, her physical clumsiness and her inconvenient but persistent sense that there is something exploitative about the whole endeavor.

  She obtained a joint degree in neuroscience and engineering from the American University of Southern Abkhazia and a master of fine arts from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She taught English in Japan for several years but was fired when it was discovered that she had been deliberately teaching her students a dialect entirely of her own invention because she thought it would be “amusing” to create a group of people who spoke a wholly imaginary language without being aware of it. She said, in a statement at the time of her termination: “I wanted to make something beautiful and aloof, a language that floated in the world with the levitating detachment of a cumulus cloud. I had only the best intentions and I am sorry for anyone whom I have hurt.” At the end of her statement she added several sentences in her invented language, which no one except one or two of her more advanced students understood and which they would not translate when asked for comment. After that she was led away and deported.

  3.

  Emily Mitchell’s first novel The Art Historian’s Daughter-in-Law was published in 2009 and was almost entirely plagiarized from the work of the nineteenth-century Norwegian novelist Amund Eilertsen. She was immediately sued by the Eilertsen estate for copyright infringement but argued successfully that, because she stole material from more than one of Eilersten’s novels, her book constituted an entirely new work of literature that crucially reframed and reimagined the content of the original and therefore was a legitimate contribution to the intellectual conversation of our time. She is now working on a novel that combines excerpts from the works of George Eliot with lyrics by the Rolling Stones.

  Her short fiction has appeared in various publications and then disappeared. This is unusual and seems to be attributable to a peculiar warp in the space
-time continuum, which her work has caught like a virus and which makes it vanish shortly after publication never to be seen again. There were recently rumors that some of her stories had inexplicably turned up in a computer seized by police in Harare, Zimbabwe, but these are uncorroborated and may in fact have been a hoax perpetrated to generate publicity for her forthcoming novel.

  4.

  Emily Mitchell lives in Cleveland, Ohio, or at least she is fairly certain that is where she lives. Some mornings she wakes up and isn’t sure. She looks out the window and the street seems different: it looks more like a street near the Bund in Shanghai, flanked by heavy Victorian hotels, crowded with bicycles and loud with car horns. Or one of the precipitous canyons in midtown Manhattan, which are perfectly designed for all kinds of animals, like peregrine falcons, rats, mice and cockroaches and for the significant percentage of people who dream at night that they can grow a reflective shell over their skin, become dark and shiny as an automobile and move through the world smoothly as if they were being drawn forward on a thread. Emily Mitchell is not one of these people.

  Mostly, however, she gets up and looks outside and sees the old, once-grand houses and the tossing deciduous trees of northeastern Ohio and she is quite pleased.

  What does it really mean to “live” in a place anyway? There have been some places where she’s resided for even years at a time that so flattened and enervated her that she felt like she barely existed, a sketch of a woman, a leaf skeleton with a smile that she pulled open like the tray on the back of an airplane seat. There have been other places that made her so dizzy she could hardly stand or places in which she felt like she was falling, hurtling downward at a steady, terminal velocity, flailing to grab hold of something that could stop her, a ledge of some kind, but was never quite able to lay hold of anything to stop her plunge. Can this really be described as “living” in the sense we usually mean?

  She tries to avoid these places when she can. Someday she wants to go back and understand the nature of their poison, maybe dig a garden there. But for the moment she is content where she is.

  Cleveland is not as crowded with stories that have already been told as the great cities of the US coasts or Europe, or as those places like Gettysburg or Selma or Hiroshima where history pivoted in ways that are very clear. For this reason you must peer at Cleveland a little harder to see it. Although it has since fallen on hard times, it was once a place of great, ostentatious wealth, the home and resting place of John D. Rockefeller. In those robber-baron days, so different from our own time, there was little restriction on what the rich could do with their money, and they lived in a world made of mirrors in which even their friends merely served to reflect back at them their sense of their own virtue and importance.

  It is a less-known fact about Rockefeller that he loved to disguise himself as a working man and go into his own businesses and factories in order to see without being seen the running of his enterprises. One day when he had just started working in one of his refineries, he was ordered by the foreman to replace the man who oversaw the furnace that heated the oil before distilling, in spite of the fact that he had no experience at this work and no skill at it. When Rockefeller refused, the foreman threatened him with violence if he didn’t comply, saying that the furnace must be kept running at all costs to meet the quota set for the factory or they would all lose their jobs. Rockefeller then removed his disguise and revealed his identity, telling the foreman who he really was. But in those days before television, people did not necessarily recognize the faces of even the most prominent citizens and the foreman just looked at him and laughed.

  “Sure you’re Rockefeller,” he is said to have replied, “and I’m Queen Victoria. Now get over to that furnace and get working.”

  It is not clear whether the accident that occurred that day can be attributed to Rockefeller’s inexperience and incompetence because little is known about its details. It is the nature of explosions to erase the evidence of their own causes. It was close to midday. There was a sudden flower of fire and a roar and the furnace showered jots of liquid metal from its mouth that sewed flames wherever they landed. Fourteen men were killed including the newly hired man, whose name no one could quite remember—James or Jed or something like that—who was consumed so completely by the fire that afterward no one could recognize his face. It was only when Rockefeller’s personal secretary, hearing the news, raced down to the factory and made inquiries that the body was identified by the rings the man wore which, although they were disfigured by the heat, were still attached to the dead man’s hands.

  Rockefeller is buried beneath a giant obelisk in a cemetery on the heights overlooking the city. From that spot you can see over the roofs of the houses where the millionaires used to live, to the places where the factories used to be, to where the workers used to live in crowded row houses, all the way down to the shores of the lake that used to carry boats that took the goods made there all around the country and the world. On a clear day, it is a wonderful view.

  5.

  Emily Mitchell lives with her husband, whom she sometimes loves so much that she’d like to climb inside his chest and stay there, curled up like a cat. She likes to lie against him so it feels as if their ribs have become clasped like fingers and when they try to get up they will have trouble pulling them apart. She couldn’t say exactly why she feels this way and she is frequently surprised by the persistence of this feeling over so many years. Her husband is often charming, smart and considerate. But he can also be melancholy and cantankerous from time to time. He has been known on occasion to worry too much about something that really wasn’t so terrible after all.

  Nevertheless, she seems always to come back to her underlying enduring affection for him. Since they are both writers, they have moved around a lot and they don’t own very much material stuff like furniture or durable goods or electronics. Sometimes Emily Mitchell finds this frustrating. She will look at the empty rooms in her house and imagine all the things that could go in them. Wouldn’t it be nice to have an Empire chair in that corner? Wouldn’t a Danish modern coffee table be just the thing in the living room? She longs to own furnishings for which she knows only the names and not the functions, like an armoire or a credenza, an ottoman, a secretary or a chifferobe. But then she wonders whether all these things would look good together and she thinks that perhaps it is better to imagine them than to have them, so that other people can’t see how badly they clash and judge her for having bad taste or lacking any sense of design. Her husband doesn’t care much about furniture or the names of furniture.

  For a while a few years ago, Emily Mitchell and her husband lived apart because they had jobs in different cities. They would call each other every night on the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello!”

  “He-llo . . .”

  “Hello.”

  In the background of these calls, they could sometimes hear the weather where the other one was. Sometimes Emily Mitchell could hear a police car drive past her husband’s apartment with its siren blaring or a bus rumble or a rainstorm begin. On the phone, heavy rain sounded like hot oil crackling in a pan. Sometimes they would leave their phones on after they had nothing left to say so that they could hear each other turn the pages of their books while they read themselves to sleep. The turning pages sounded louder on the phone than they would have if they had been lying side by side; in fact, it sounded like they were each reading a giant book, maybe about the size of a bed, with huge, heavy pages. Emily Mitchell would listen to the sound of her husband turning the pages of his giant book. Eventually the sound would make her sleepy; she would relax listening for the next page to turn. She would feel less lonely and more comfortable until at last she could put her head down and go to sleep.

  Acknowledgments

  These stories are the work of many years and I had a lot of help with them, for which I am extremely grateful. Stephen Donadio and Carolyn Kuebler gave me invaluable, deeply appreci
ated support and encouragement; Meakin Armstrong, Terrance Hayes, Ronald Spatz and Chris Beha were thoughtful editors. I owe a great debt to Gail Hochman, my amazing agent. Jill Bialosky, my editor, chose, championed, shaped, and guided this book brilliantly through the editorial process; her assistant Angie Shih was smart and helpful; Nancy Palmquist did wonderful editing work, insightful and precise, on the manuscript.

  Maud Casey, Howard Norman, Stanley Plumly and all my colleagues at the University of Maryland have welcomed and inspired me, as my colleagues at Cleveland State University, most especially Michael Dumanis and Imad Rahman, did before. A CAPAA grant from the Graduate School of the University of Maryland and a fellowship from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts gave me time to write. As always, my family has been generous and kind and they have never once told me I really should think about doing something more sensible with my life than writing made-up stories. My dad got me hooked on science fiction early and my mom made sure that I eventually read other things as well. Joanna Mitchell gives me light and courage. Joshua Tyree remains the writer I admire most and my very favorite, much beloved husband.

  Acknowledgments

  A number of these stories were published in magazines and journals prior to their inclusion in this collection. “Biographies” first appeared under the title “Biography” in Alaska Quarterly Review, where “Guided Meditation” also appeared.Harper’s published “If You Cannot Go to Sleep,” and New England Review published “On Friendship,” “Lucille’s House,” and “Three Marriages.” “States” appeared in Ploughshares.