As he moved nearer to the foot of the bed, he saw on the floor the bright jacket of the book he had decided not to read, and knew that in the night it had fallen from his movable tray. The book on his bed had no jacket, and at first he had no idea where it came from. When he remembered the circumstances under which he had seen this book—or one a great deal like it—he felt revulsion, as though it were a great slug.
Bill turned his back on the bed, swung his chair around, and plucked the newspaper from under his arm. After he had scanned the headlines without making much effort to take them in, habit led him to the obituaries on the last two pages of the financial section. As soon as he had folded the pages back, a photograph of a sly, mild face with a recessed chin and tiny spectacles lurking above an overgrown nose levitated up from the columns of newsprint. The header announced charles chipp traynor, popular war historian, tarred by scandal.
Helplessly, Bill read the first paragraph of Chippie’s obituary. Four days past, this once-renowned historian whose career had been destroyed by charges of plagiarism and fraud had committed suicide by leaping from the window of his fifteenth-story apartment on the Upper West Side.
Four days ago? Bill thought. It seemed to him that was when Chippie Traynor had first appeared in the Salon. He dropped the paper, with the effect that Traynor’s fleshy nose and mild eyes peered up at him from the floor. The terrible little man seemed to be everywhere, despite having gone. He could sense Chippie Traynor floating outside his window like a small, inoffensive balloon from Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Children would say, “Who’s that?” and their parents would look up, shield their eyes, shrug, and say, “I don’t know, hon. Wasn’t he in a Disney cartoon?” Only he was not in a Disney cartoon, and the children and their parents could not see him, and he wasn’t at all cute. One of his eyes had been injured. This Chippie Traynor, not the one that had given them a view of his backside in the Salon, hovered outside Bill Messinger’s window, whispering the wretched and insinuating secrets of the despised, the contemptible, the rejected and fallen from grace.
Bill turned from the window and took a single step into the nowhere that awaited him. He had nowhere to go, he knew, so nowhere had to be where he was going. It was probably going to be a lot like this place, only less comfortable. Much, much less comfortable. With nowhere to go, he reached out his hand and picked up the dull brown book lying at the foot of his bed. Bringing it toward his body felt like reeling in some monstrous fish that struggled against the line. There were faint watermarks on the front cover, and it bore a faint, familiar smell. When he had it within reading distance, Bill turned the spine up and read the title and author’s name: In the Middle of the Trenches, by Charles Chipp Traynor. It was the book he had blurbed. Max Baccarat had published it, and Tony Flax had rhapsodized over it in the Sunday Times book review section. About a hundred pages from the end, a bookmark in the shape of a thin silver cord with a hook at one end protruded from the top of the book.
Bill opened the book at the place indicated, and the slender bookmark slithered downward like a living thing. Then the hook caught the top of the pages, and its length hung shining and swaying over the bottom edge. No longer able to resist, Bill read some random sentences, then two long paragraphs. This section undoubtedly had been lifted from the oral histories, and it recounted an odd event in the life of a young man who, years before his induction into the armed forces, had come upon a strange house deep in the piney woods of East Texas and been so unsettled by what he had seen through its windows that he brought a rifle with him on his next visit. Bill realized that he had never read this part of the book. In fact, he had written his blurb after merely skimming through the first two chapters. He thought Max had read even less of the book than he had. In a hurry to meet his deadline, Tony Flax had probably read the first half.
At the end of his account, the former soldier said, “In the many times over the years when I thought about this incident, it always seemed to me that the man I shot was myself. It seemed my own eye I had destroyed, my own socket that bled.”
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Among MARGARET ATWOOD’S novels are The Handmaid’s Tale, Alias Grace , The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake. She lives in Toronto.
POPPY Z. BRITE is the author of seven novels and three short-story collections. Early in her career she was known for her horror fiction, but at present she is working on a series of novels and short stories set in the New Orleans restaurant world. These also involve the Stubbs family characters who appear in “The Devil of Delery Street.” Her novel Liquor was recently published by Three Rivers Press, and her follow-up, Prime, will be released in 2005. She lives in New Orleans with her husband, Chris, a chef.
MICHAEL CHABON lives in Berkeley. He served as guest editor for the tenth issue of McSweeney’s.
CHARLES D’AMBROSIO is the author of The Point and Other Stories and The Dead Fish Museum, forthcoming from Knopf. His recent plotless stories have appeared in The New Yorker, usually without any moment of truth, although he’s still trying. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
RODDY DOYLE lives and works in Dublin. His books include Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, The Woman Who Walked into Doors, A Star Called Henry, and, most recently, Oh, Play That Thing.
STEVE ERICKSON is the author of Our Ecstatic Days, which will be published in February 2005 by Simon & Schuster, and six previous novels, including Days Between Stations and Tours of the Black Clock. Erickson is the film critic for Los Angeles magazine and the editor of Black Clock, which is published semiannually by CalArts, where he teaches writing.
DANIEL HANDLER is the author of two novels under his own name, and (allegedly) twelve books under the name Lemony Snicket.
HEIDI JULAVITS is the author of two novels, The Effect of Living Backwards and The Mineral Palace (Putnam), as well as Hotel Andromeda (Artspace), a collaborative book with the artist Jenny Gage. She is a founding coeditor of The Believer.
STEPHEN KING was born in 1947 and grew up in rural Maine. For the last thirty years he has written novels, beginning with Carrie (1974) and ending with Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower (both 2004), the concluding novels of his Dark Tower cycle. He has promised to retire, but “Lisey and the Madman” is from what may eventually be a new novel called Lisey’s Story. In his own defense, King points out that all novelists lie—sometimes to others, almost constantly to themselves.
JONATHAN LETHEM is the author of The Fortress of Solitude and five other novels. He lives in Brooklyn and Maine.
CHINA MIÉVILLE’S novels include Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and, most recently, Iron Council. He is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke and British Fantasy Awards. He lives and works in London.
Although he began working as a professional comic book artist in the early 1980s, MIKE MIGNOLA is best known as the award-winning creator/writer/artist of Hellboy. He was also a production designer on the Disney film Atlantis: The Lost Empire and visual consultant to Guillermo del Toro on both Blade 2 and the film version of Hellboy. Mignola lives in New York City with his wife and daughter.
DAVID MITCHELL’S first novel, Ghostwritten, appeared in 1999 and was awarded the John Llewellyn-Rhys Prize. His second novel, Number9dream, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2001, and his third, Cloud Atlas, was published in 2004. He spent eight years in Hiroshima, Japan, and currently lives with his wife and daughter in West Cork, Ireland.
JOYCE CAROL OATES is the author of numerous works of gothic fiction, including the novels Bellefleur and Mysteries of Winterthrun and the story collections Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque and The Collec tor of Hearts. She recently edited Tales of H. P. Lovecraft (Ecco).
JASON ROBERTS lives in northern California. He is the author of the forthcoming The Gentleman in the Distance (Fourth Estate/ HarperCollins), an examination of the life of James Holman (1786–1857), the blind man who became history’s greatest traveler. Mr. Roberts’s previous publications include three books on technology and one that was, at least in part, abo
ut shaving and campfires.
PETER STRAUB is the author of sixteen novels, which have been translated into more than twenty languages. They include Ghost Story, Koko, Mr. X, two collaborations with Stephen King, The Talisman and Black House, and his most recent lost boy lost girl. He has written two volumes of poetry and two collections of short fiction. He has won the British Fantasy Award, four Bram Stoker Awards, two International Horror Guild Awards, and two World Fantasy Awards. In 1998, he was named grand master at the World Horror Convention. He is currently at work on his seventeenth novel, In the Night Room.
AYELET WALDMAN is the author of Daughter’s Keeper and of a series of murder mysteries. She lives in Berkeley.
THIS BOOK BENEFITS 826 VALENCIA
Open since April of 2002, 826 Valencia is a writing lab disguised as a pirate-supply store, dedicated to helping students with their writing skills. It’s our belief that students can benefit greatly from one-on-one assistance, and we’ve had more than five hundred volunteers devote themselves to the students, from grades K through 12, who come in every day. With rising class sizes, overburdened schools sometimes struggle to give all of their students the individualized attention they need. Under the supervision of Bay Area teachers, the tutors at 826 Valencia help bridge the gap.
Our volunteers include published authors, magazine founders, SAT course instructors, documentary filmmakers, graduate students, and all kinds of professionals who do everything from after-school homework help to evening and weekend workshops— covering everything from SAT prep to playwriting to digital filmmaking to broadcast journalism. And given that many public schools have had to cut their school-publication budgets, 826 Valencia helps schools and young authors design, edit, print, bind, and self-publish their own newspapers, literary magazines, and books. This spring, in collaboration with the Isabel Allende Foundation, we published Waiting to Be Heard, an amazing collection of essays by students at Thurgood Marshall High School.
Two or three times a week, we welcome entire classes in for field trips, a morning of storytelling or bookmaking, or a custom-designed curriculum on a subject a class has been studying. And because our own space is small and the need for tutors is great, we work with thousands of students in their own classrooms by sending tutors, platoons of them, into public schools, to assist teachers for as long as needed.
To this end—engaging students in their classrooms—last fall we established a permanent space at Everett Middle School, a Writers’ Room where students can receive one-on-one feedback on their work from our trained tutors; this year, we’ll open another, at Horace Mann Middle School. In 2003, we worked with over 6,000 students—more than 10 percent of the San Francisco Unified School District.
We also grant two scholarships a year, of $10,000 each, to graduating seniors from public schools. In addition, each month we present the 826 Valencia Teacher of the Month Award, a $1,500 prize honoring an exceptional local teacher. And, of course, we run a storefront selling nautical brigandage supplies— lard, hooks, mops—to full-time pirates and aspiring buccaneers.
Though McSweeney’s takes care of most of the costs of running 826, we can always use more help, and this collection, co-published with Vintage Books, is providing a needed boost. For more information, please visit www.826Valencia.org, or come see us in San Francisco, on Valencia Street, between 19th and 20th—or, by the time you read this, at our new center in Brooklyn, 826NYC (www.826NYC.org) at 372 5th Avenue in Park Slope.
A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL, NOVEMBER 2004
Copyright © 2004 by McSweeney’s Publishing LLC
Illustrations copyright © 2004 by Mike Mignola
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McSweeney’s enchanted chamber of astonishing stories /
edited by Michael Chabon;
illustrations by Mike Mignola.—1st Vintage Books ed.
p. cm.
1. Short stories, American. I. Chabon, Michael.
II. Mignola, Michael.
PS648.S5M38 2004
813’.0108—dc22
2004054617
www.vintagebooks.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-42681-9
v3.0
Michael Chabon, McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories
(Series: # )
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