The Collected Short Fiction

  'Candy,' I said, 'There's some business coming.'

  I had to tug at the jar to free it from her grasp, but she finally let it go and turned toward the door. As usual, I wandered off to one of the back rooms of the house, an empty bedroom where I liked to huddle in a corner and think about all the sleeping bodies that had dreamed there throughout innumerable nights. But on this occasion I did not huddle in a corner. Instead, I kept watch on what was happening in the front room of the house. The car outside had come to a stop too aggressively, too conspicuously, and the man in the long coat who walked toward the house moved in a way that was also too aggressive, too conspicuous. He pushed open the door of Candy's house and left it open after he stepped inside.

  'Where's the white kid?' said the man in the long coat.

  'No white people in here,' said Candy, who held her eyes on the television. 'Not including you.'

  The man walked over to the two figures across the room and gave each of them a nudge with his foot.

  'If you didn't know, I'm the one who lets you do business.'

  'I know who you are, Mr Police Detective. You're the one who took my boy. You took other ones too, I know that.'

  'Shut up, fat lady. I'm here for the white kid.'

  I took the pen out of my pocket and pulled off the top, revealing a short, thick needle like the point of a pushpin. Holding the pen at my side and out of sight, I walked back down the hallway.

  'What do you want?' I said to the man in the long coat.

  'I'm here to take you home, kid.'

  If there was anything I had ever known in my life as a cold, abstract certainty, it was this: if I went with this man, I would not be going home.

  'Catch,' I said as I threw the little jar at him.

  He caught the jar with both hands, and for a moment his face flashed a smile. I have never seen a smile die so quickly or so completely. If I had blinked, I would have missed the distressed transition. The jar then seemed to jump out of his hands and onto the floor. Recovering himself, he took a step forward and grabbed me. I have no reason to think that Candy or the others in the room saw me jab the pen into his leg. What they saw was the man in the long coat releasing me and then crumbling into a motionless pile. Evidently the effect was immediate. One of the two figures stepped out of the shadows and gave the fallen man the same kind of contemptuous nudge that had been given to him.

  'He's dead, Candy,' said the one figure.

  'You sure?'

  The other figure rose to his feet and mule-kicked the head of the man on the floor. 'Seems so,' he said.

  'I'll be damned,' said Candy, looking my way. 'He's all yours. I don't want no part of him.'

  I found the jar, which fortunately was unbroken, and went to sit on the sofa next to Candy. In a matter of minutes, the two figures had stripped the other man down to his boxer shorts. Then one of them pulled off the boxer shorts, saying, 'They look practically new.' However, he stopped pulling soon enough when he saw what was under them. We all saw what was there, no doubt about that. But I wondered if the others were as confused by it as I was. I had always thought about such things in an ideal sense, a mythic conception handed down over the centuries. But it was nothing like that.

  'Put him in the hole!' shouted Candy, who had stood up from the sofa and was pointing toward the hallway. 'Put him in the goddamn hole!'

  They dragged the body into the closet and dropped it into the basement. There was a slapping sound made by the unclothed form as it hit the floor down there. When the two figures came out of the closet, Candy said, 'Now get rid of the rest of this stuff and get rid of the car and get rid of yourselves.'

  Before exiting the house, one of the figures turned back. 'There's a big hunk of cash here, Candy. You're going to need some traveling money. You can't stay here.'

  To my relief, Candy took part of the money. I got up from the sofa and set the jar on the cushion beside my friend.

  'Where will you go?' I asked.

  'There are plenty of places like this one in the city. No heat, no electricity, no plumbing. And no rent. I'll be all right.'

  'I won't say anything.'

  'I know you won't. Good-bye, boy.'

  I said good-bye and wandered slowly home, dreaming all the while about what was now in Candy's basement.

  By the time I arrived at the house it was after midnight. My mother and sister must have also returned because I could smell the stench from my mother's European cigarettes as soon as I took two steps inside. My father was lying on the living-room sofa, clearly exhausted after so many days of working in the basement. He also seemed quite agitated, his eyes wide open and staring upward, his head moving back and forth in disgust or negation or both, and his voice repeatedly chanting, 'Hopeless impurities, hopeless impurities.' Hearing these words helped to release my thoughts from what I had seen at Candy's. They also reminded me that I wanted to ask my father about something he had said to the young man in the second-hand suit who had visited the house earlier that night. But my father's condition at the moment did not appear to lend itself to such talk. In fact, he betrayed no awareness whatever of my presence. Since I did not yet feel up to confronting my mother and sister, who I could now hear were moving about upstairs (probably still unpacking from their trip), I decided to take this opportunity to violate my father's sanctions against entering the basement without his explicit authorization. This, I believed, would provide me with something to take my mind off the troubling events of that night.

  However, as I descended the stairs into my father's basement, I felt my mind and senses being pulled back into the dark region of Candy's basement. Even before I reached the bottom of the stairs, that underground place imposed upon me its atmosphere of ruin and wreckage and of an abysmal chaos that, I was thankful to discover, I still found captivating. And when I saw the state of things down there, I was overcome with a trembling awe that I had never experienced before.

  Everything around me was in pieces. It looked as if my father had taken an ax and hacked up the whole apparatus on which he had once placed all his hopes of accomplishing some task that only he cared to envision. Wires and cords hung from the ceiling, all of them chopped through and dangling like vines in a jungle. A greasy, greenish liquid was running across the floor and sluicing into the basement drain. I waded through an undergrowth of broken glass and torn papers. I reached down and picked up some of the pages savagely ripped from my father's voluminous notebooks. Meticulous diagrams and graphs were obscured by words and phrases written with a thick, black marker. Page after page had the word 'IMPURE' scrawled over them like graffiti on the walls of a public toilet. Other recurring exclamations were: 'NOTHING BUT IMPURITIES,''IMPURE HEADS,''NOTHING REVEALED,''NO PURE CONCEPTION,''IMPOSSIBLE IMPURITIES,' and, finally, 'THE FORCES OF AN IMPURE UNIVERSE.'

  At the far end of the basement I saw a hybrid contraption that looked as if it were a cross between a monarch's throne and an electric chair. Bound to this device by straps confining his arms and legs and head was the young man in a second-hand suit. His eyes were open, but they had no focus in them. I noticed that the greasy, greenish liquid had its source in a container the size of a water-cooler bottle that was upended next to the big chair. There was a label on the container, written on masking tape, that read SIPHONAGE. Whatever spooks or spirits or other entities had inhabited the young man's head—and my father appeared to have drained off a sizeable quantity of this stuff—were now making their way into the sewer system. They must have lost something, perhaps grown stale, once released from their container, because I felt no aura of the spectral—either malignant or benign—emanating from this residual substance. I was unable to tell if the young man was still alive in any conventional sense of the word. He may have been. In any case, his condition was such that my family would once again need to find another house in which in live.

  'What happened down here?' said my sister from the other side of the basement. She was sitting on the stairs. 'Looks like another one of da
d's projects took a bad turn.'

  'That's the way it looks,' I said, walking back toward the stairs.

  'Do you think that guy was carrying much money on him?'

  'I don't know. Probably. He was here collecting for some kind of organization.'

  'Good, because mom and I came back broke. And it's not as if we spent all that much.'

  'Where did you go?' I said, taking a seat beside my sister.

  'You know I can't talk about that.'

  'I had to ask.'

  After a pause, my sister whispered, 'Daniel, do you know what a hermaphrodite is?'

  I tried my best to conceal any reaction to my sister's question, even though it had caused a cyclone of images and emotions to arise within me. That was what had confused me about the police detective's body. In my imagination, I had always pictured a neat separation of parts. But it was nothing like that, as I have already pointed out. Everything was all mixed together. Thank you, Elisa. Despite her adherence to my mother's strict rule of silence, my sister always managed to give away something of what they had been up to.

  'Why do ask that?' I said, also whispering. 'Did you meet someone like that when you were with mom?'

  'Absolutely not,' she said.

  'You have to tell me, Elisa. Did mom... did she talk about me... did she talk about me to this person?'

  'I wouldn't know. I really wouldn't,' said Elisa as she rose to her feet and walked back upstairs. When she reached the top step, she turned around and said, 'How's this thing between you and mom going to end? Every time I mention your name, she just clams up. It doesn't make any sense.'

  'The forces of an impure universe,' I said rhetorically.

  'What?' said my sister.

  'Nothing that drives anybody makes any sense, if you haven't noticed that by now. It's just our heads, like dad's always saying.'

  'Whatever that means. Anyway, you better keep your mouth shut about what I said. I'm never telling you anything ever again,' she finished and then went upstairs.

  I followed my sister into the living room. My father was now sitting up on the sofa next to my mother, who was opening boxes and pulling things out of bags, presumably showing what she had bought on her latest trip with Elisa. I sat down in a chair across from them.

  'Hi, baby,' said my mother.

  'Hi, Mom,' I said, then turned to my father. 'Hey, Dad, can I ask you something?' He still seemed a bit delirious. 'Dad?'

  'Your father's very tired, honey.'

  'I know. I'm sorry. I just want to ask him one thing. Dad, when you were talking to that guy, you said something about three... you called them principles.'

  'Countries, deities,' said my father from a deep well of depression. 'Obstacles to pure conception.'

  'Yeah, but what was the third principle? You never said anything about that.'

  But my father had faded out and was now gazing disconsolately at the floor. My mother, however, was smiling. No doubt she had heard all of my father's talk many times over.

  'The third principle?' she said, blowing a cloud of cigarette smoke in my direction. 'Why, it's families, sweetheart.'

  Sideshow, And Other Stories (2003)

  First published in Sideshow, And Other Stories, 2003

  Also published in: Teatro Grottesco.

  At the time I met the man who authored the stories that follow, I had reached a crisis point in my own work as a writer of fiction. This gentleman, who was considerably older than I, was several steps ahead of me along the same path. 'I have always desired to escape,' he said, 'from the grip of show business.' He said these words to me across the table in a corner booth of the coffee shop where all our meetings took place in the late hours of the night.

  We had been first introduced by a waitress working the night shift who noticed we were both insomniacs who came into the coffee shop and sat for many hours smoking cigarettes (the same brand), drinking the terrible decaffeinated coffee they served in that place, and every so often jotting something in the respective notebooks which we both kept at hand. 'All of the myths of mankind are nothing but show business,' the other man said to me during our initial meeting. 'Everything that we supposedly live by and supposedly die by—whether it's religious scriptures or makeshift slogans—all of it is show business. The rise and fall of empires—show business. Science, philosophy, all of the disciplines under the sun, and even the sun itself, as well as all those other clumps of matter wobbling about in the blackness up there—' he said to me, pointing out the window beside the coffee-shop booth in which we sat, 'show business, show business, show business.' 'And what about dreams?' I asked, thinking I might have hit upon an exception to his dogmatic view, or at least one that he would accept as such. 'You mean the dreams of the sort we are having at this moment or the ones we have when we're fortunate enough to sleep?' I told him his point was well taken and withdrew my challenge, having only half-heartedly advanced it in the first place. The conversation nevertheless proceeded along the same course—he submitting one example after another of show business phenomena; I attempting to propose plausible exceptions to the idiosyncratic doctrine with which he seemed hopelessly obsessed—until we went our separate ways just before dawn.

  That first meeting set the tone and fixed the subject matter of my subsequent encounters in the coffee shop with the gentleman I would come to regard as my lost literary father. I should say that I deliberately encouraged the gentleman's mania and did all I could to keep our conversations focused on it, since I felt that his show-business obsession related in the most intimate way with my own quandary, or crisis, as a writer of fiction. What exactly did he mean by 'show business'? Why did he find the 'essentially show-business nature' of all phenomena to be problematic? How did his work as an author coincide with, or perhaps oppose, what he called the 'show-business world'?

  'I make no claims for my writing, nor have any hopes for it as a means for escaping the grip of show business,' he said. 'Writing is simply another action I perform on cue. I order this terrible coffee because I'm in a second-rate coffee shop. I smoke another cigarette because my body tells me it's time to do so. Likewise, I write because I'm prompted to write, nothing more.'

  Seeing an entrance to a matter more closely related to my own immediate interest, or quandary or crisis, I asked him about his writing and specifically about what focus it might be said to have, what 'center of interest,' as I put it.

  'My focus, or center of interest,' he said, 'has always been the wretched show business of my own life—an autobiographical wretchedness that is not even first-rate show business but more like a series of sideshows, senseless episodes without continuity or coherence except that which, by virtue of my being the ringmaster of this miserable circus of sideshows, I assign to it in the most bogus and show-businesslike fashion, which of course fails to maintain any genuine effect of continuity or coherence, inevitably so. But this, I've found, is the very essence of show business, all of which in fact is no more than sideshow business. The unexpected mutations, the sheer baselessness of beings, the volatility of things... By necessity we live in a world, a sideshow world, where everything is ultimately peculiar and ultimately ridiculous.'

  'By what standard?' I interjected before his words—which had arrived at the very heart of the crisis, quandary, and suffocating cul-de-sac of my existence as a writer of fiction—veered away. 'I said by what standard,' I repeated, 'do you consider everything peculiar and ridiculous?'

  After staring at me in a way that suggested he was not only considering my question, but was also evaluating me and my entire world, he replied: 'By the standard of that unnameable, unknowable, and no doubt nonexistent order that is not show business.'

  Without speaking another word he slid out of the corner booth, paid his check at the counter cash register, and walked out of the coffee shop.

  That was the last occasion on which I spoke with this gentleman and fellow writer. The next time I visited the coffee shop and sat in the corner booth, the waitress who wo
rked the night shift presented me with a small sheaf of pages. 'He said to give these to you and that he wouldn'tbe back for them.'

  'That's all he said?' I asked.

  'That's all,' she answered.

  I thanked her, ordered a decaffeinated coffee, lit a cigarette, and began to read the tales that follow.

  I. THE MALIGNANT MATRIX

  For years I had been privileged to receive frequent and detailed communications regarding the most advanced scientific and metaphysical studies. This information was of a highly specialized nature that seemed to be unknown to the common run of scientists and metaphysicians, yet was nevertheless attainable by such avid non-specialists as myself, providing of course that one possessed a receptive temperament and willingly opened oneself to certain channels of thought and experience.

  One day I received a very special communication whereby I learned that an astounding and quite unexpected breakthrough had been achieved—the culmination, it appeared, of many years of intense scientific and metaphysical study. This breakthrough, the communication informed me, concerned nothing less than the discovery of the true origins of all existential phenomena, both physical and metaphysical—the very source, as I understood the claims being made, of existence in the broadest possible sense. This special communication also told me that I had been selected to be among those who would be allowed a privileged view of everything involved in this startling breakthrough discovery, and therefore would be guaranteed a rare insight into the true origins of all existential phenomena. Since I was an individual who was highly receptive in temperament to the matter at hand, I need only present myself at the particular location where this incredible advance in scientific and metaphysical knowledge had occurred.

  Scrupulously I followed the directions communicated to me, even though, for reasons that were not explained, I was not fully apprised of the specifics of my actual destination. Nevertheless, I could not help imagining that I would ultimately find myself a visitor at a sophisticated research facility of some kind, a shining labyrinth of the most innovative devices and apparatus of extraordinary complexity. The place where I finally arrived, however, in no way conformed to my simple-minded and deplorably conventional expectations. This scientific and metaphysical installation, as I thought of it, was located in a large building, but one that was very old. I entered it, according to my instructions, through a small door that I found at the end of a dark and narrow alley that ran along the side of the old building. I opened the door and stepped inside, barely able to see two paces in front of me, for by now it was the middle of the night. There was a faint click as the door closed behind my back, and all I could do was wait for my eyesight to adjust to the darkness.