Ben Marcus
New American Stories
NEW AMERICAN STORIES
Ben Marcus is the author of four books of fiction, The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, The Flame Alphabet, and Leaving the Sea, and he is the editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. His stories have appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Tin House, and Conjunctions. Among his awards are the Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Whiting Writers’ Award. He lives in New York, where he is on the faculty at Columbia University.
INTRODUCTION
There is a game I play with my young son. He shuts his eyes while I sneak to the shadows with my weapon. On the dark side of a bookcase, concealed by a doorway, I stand and wait. I stifle my breathing, and the game begins.
My son does his best to avoid capture, even though he circles my hideout, risking the worst. He cannot yet play this game silently. He advertises his location with badly muffled squeals. He sprints through rooms, taking the corners too fast. He’ll stumble, wipe out, right himself, and charge again. I always hear him coming. Maybe he wants to be captured just as much as he dreads it, but you can hear the conflict thumping inside him. He produces frightening sounds, a pure bullet of feeling. How does one body hold so much? What will I do when he grows up and learns to conceal this feeling, or, worse, when the feeling stops rising up so strongly in the first place?
My son can’t be sure where or when the ambush is coming. But it always does. When he tears past me I roar from his blind spot, ensnaring him in a blanket. Down he goes, kicking and laughing, a thrashing little figure under cloth. I close the bundle, cinch it in my fist, and drag it from room to room.
My son is five now, as easy to lift as a pillow. I hoist him over my head, teeter on one leg for suspense, then plunge him onto the couch. He bounces high, still tucked inside the blanket. I hold on tight and swing until we’re spinning. His little voice drifts up from far away. Inside his trap he is in heaven, or so it sounds. I swing him and drag him and toss him until I’m ready to collapse. When I let him go he is red and sweaty and wild. Usually he glares at me. Why did I stop? What is wrong with me? He begs, begs, for us to play again. It’s all he wants to do. He promises not to peek, and I steal off to hide again.
My son would not put it this way, because he knows better than to try to dissect his own pleasure. But he is asking to be amazed and afraid in this situation we’ve contrived. He cannot really come to harm — the boy is so small that it is child’s play to keep him safe — but by surrendering control, submitting himself to the darkness, to the fast passage inside a careening world, he can take himself to the bursting point. He is looking to suddenly feel a great many things, and to feel them intensely, inside this fictional crisis. And I can’t blame him, because, more and more, I would like that very same thing.
When I want to be ambushed, captured, thrust into a strange and vivid world, and tossed aloft until I cannot stand it, until everything is at stake and life feels almost unbearably vivid, I do something simple. I read short stories. When I was young I read fiction because nothing much happened to me. As a reader I could fight a war, lose a father, be pushed from a bridge with a noose over my neck. I could grow up and grow old, turn angry and sad. I could love and hate and harm and get away with it. In stories I had children of my own, got divorced, worried, wondered, rode shotgun inside intellects far swifter than mine. My earliest reading was not just a romance with what was possible, but a romance with what was not. If something was never likely to happen in real life, I was doubly committed to live it in fiction. I think back to when I have had the most intense feelings, and most often those moments resulted not from cruising through a so-called real world of bodies and things, collecting actual experiences. Those feelings arose out of something invisible yet strangely more powerfuclass="underline" the language of others. Language has made some of the most durable feeling this world has seen. Not the functional kind of language we bleat at each other out in the world when we want something, or need to declare or deny something. Not the quotidian language that showers down everywhere around us to block us from our true thoughts. I’m thinking of the much more unusual and spell-like language of fiction, which generally does not occur out loud: razored, miraculously placed, set like stones into staggeringly complex patterns so that, somehow, life, or something more distilled and intense, more consistently moving, gets made.
I have been reading stories for forty-two years and I still find it astonishing that, by staring at skeletal marks on paper or a screen, we can invite such cyclones of feeling into our bodies. It is a kind of miracle. Our skin is never pierced and yet stories break the barrier and infect us regardless. We study these marks, move our finger along them, and they transmit worlds. If we could paint what happens between the page and our face, the signal channel saturated with color and shape, the imagery would be so tangled that the picture would blacken into pure noise, a dark architecture of everything that matters.
A story is simply a sequence of language that produces a chemical reaction in our bodies. When it’s done well, it causes sorrow, elation, awe, fascination. It makes us believe in what’s not there, but it also pours color over what is, so that we can feel and see the world anew. It fashions people, makes us care for them, then ladles them with conflict and disappointment. It erects towns, then razes them. A story switches on some unfathomably sophisticated machine inside us and we see, gloriously, what is not possible.
And yet language is a prickly delivery system. It requires attention, effort. It does not produce reliable results across the population. The same text that makes one person weep makes another blink with indifference or spit with contempt. By reading more, and more variously, we decimate our immunity, increase our vulnerability to this substance, but our private wiring does something profoundly subjective to this material that would seem unique from body to body. Language turns out to be the most unruly of medicines, the most unknowable, and yet, provided we collaborate with it, still among the most powerful.
Language is a drug, but a short story cannot be smoked. You can’t inject it. Stories don’t come bottled as a cream. You cannot have a story massaged into you by a bearish old man. You have to stare down a story until it wobbles, yields, then catapults into your face. But as squirrely as they are to capture, stories are the ideal deranger. If they are well made, and you submit to them, they go in clean. Stories deliver their chemical disruption without the ashy hangover, the blacking out, the poison. They trigger pleasure, fear, fascination, love, confusion, desire, repulsion. Drugs get flushed from our systems, but not the best stories. Once they take hold, you couldn’t scrape them out with a knife. While working on this book, I started to think of it as a medicine chest, filled with beguiling, volatile material, designed by the most gifted technicians. The potent story writers, to me, are the ones who deploy language as a kind of contraband, pumping it into us until we collapse on the floor, writhing, overwhelmed with feeling.
Imagine trying to assert the importance of water. Food. Love. The company of others. Shelter. There are some things that we need so innately that it feels awkward and difficult to explain why. To this list of crucial things, without which we might perish, I would add stories. A short story works to remind us that if we are not sometimes baffled and amazed and undone by the world around us, rendered speechless and stunned, perhaps we are not paying close enough attention.