Finally, in reading through the stories collected in this volume, I see that there’s a need here to address the question of why, of what it is that impels me and so many of the writers around me to create stories even in the face of the world’s general indifference. As students at Iowa we thrilled to the notion that we were part of something important, all-important, and we thrilled too to the readings and public displays of the masters of the form who came through town to entertain us — Borges, Updike, Vonnegut, Barthelme, Leonard Michaels, John Gardner, Grace Paley and many, many others. And yet I remember a student raising his hand after one of Stanley Elkin’s astonishing performances (we knew enough not to sit in the first three rows because of the flying spittle as Stanley worked himself up into an actor’s rage) and asking this: “Mr. Elkin, you’ve written a terrific collection of stories — why don’t you write more of them?” Stanley’s answer: “No money in it. Next question.”
Money or no, a writer writes. The making of art — the making of stories—is a kind of addiction, as I’ve pointed out in an earlier essay, “This Monkey, My Back.” You begin with nothing, open yourself up, sweat and worry and bleed, and finally you have something. And once you do, you want to have it all over again. And again. And again. There is an elemental power in a good short story, an awakening to something new and unexpected, whether it’s encountered on the page or from the lips of an actor in a darkened theater where the words stand naked and take you all the way back to the first voice that ever resonated inside you. In my own way, I’ve become an actor too, regularly presenting my stories onstage and feeling the pulse of the audience beating steadily there in the darkness before me. In the beginning, I didn’t fully trust the relationship and performed only comic pieces, hooked on the easy gratification of the celebratory wash of laughter flowing from the audience. But then I began to read darker things, like “Chicxulub,” and felt the command of tragedy, of horror, of putting myself and the audience in a place we never hope to be in the life we lead outside of fiction. I will never forget the woman in Miami who began one night to sob openly a third of the way into the story and whose terrible harrowing grief riveted us all. I wanted to stop and tell her not to worry, that it was just make-believe, a kind of voodoo charm to keep the randomness of the world at bay, but there was no stopping and no consolation: she’d lived the story and I hadn’t.
There is a daunting power in that and a daunting responsibility too. We each receive the world according to our lights and what the sparking loop of our senses affords us, and all I can do is hope to capture it in an individual way, to represent the phenomena that crowd in on us through every conscious moment as they appear and vanish again. I want to be playful and serious, investigative and imaginative, curious and more curious still, and I don’t want distractions. I don’t make music anymore, I don’t write articles or film scripts or histories, I don’t play sports or do crossword puzzles or tinker with engines — it’s all too much. The art — the doing of it — that’s what absorbs me to the exclusion of all else. Each day I have the privilege of reviewing the world as it comes to me and transforming it into another form altogether, the very form I would have wrought in the first place if only it were I who’d been the demiurge and the original creator — the one, the being, the force, whether spirit or random principle, that set all this delirious life in motion.
PART I After the Plague
Termination Dust
There were a hundred and seven of them, of all ages, shapes and sizes, from twenty-five- and thirty-year-olds in dresses that looked like they were made of Saran Wrap to a couple of big-beamed older types in pantsuits who could have been somebody’s mother — and I mean somebody grown, with a goatee beard and a job at McDonald’s. I was there to meet them when they came off the plane from Los Angeles, I and Peter Merchant, whose travel agency had arranged the whole weekend in partnership with a Beverly Hills concern, and there were a couple other guys there too, eager beavers like J. J. Hotel, and the bad element, by which I mean Bud Withers specifically, who didn’t want to cough up the hundred fifty bucks for the buffet, the Malibu Beach party and the auction afterward. They were hoping for maybe a sniff of something gratis, but I was there to act as a sort of buffer and make sure that didn’t happen.
Peter was all smiles as we came up to the first of the ladies, Susan Abrams, by her nametag, and started handing out corsages, one to a lady, and chimed out in chorus, “Welcome to Anchorage, Land of the Grizzly and the True-Hearted Man!” Well, it was pretty corny — it was Peter’s idea, not mine — and I felt a little foolish with the first few (hard-looking women, divorcées for sure, maybe even legal secretaries or lawyers into the bargain), but when I saw this little one with eyes the color of glacial melt about six deep in the line, I really began to perk up. Her nametag was done in calligraphy, hand-lettered instead of computer-generated like the rest of them, and that really tugged at me, the care that went into it, and I gave her hand a squeeze and said, “Hi, Jordy, welcome to Alaska,” when I gave her the corsage.
She seemed a little dazed, and I chalked it up to the flight and the drinks and the general party atmosphere that must certainly have prevailed on that plane, one hundred and seven single women on their way for the Labor Day weekend in a state that boasted two eligible bachelors for every woman, but that wasn’t it at all. She’d hardly had a glass of chablis, as it turned out — what I took to be confusion, lethargy, whatever, was just wonderment. As I was later to learn, she’d been drawn to the country all her life, had read and dreamed about it since she was a girl growing up in Altadena, California, within sight of the Rose Bowl. She was bookish — an English teacher, in fact — and she had a new worked-leather high-grade edition of Wuthering Heights wedged under the arm that held her suitcase and traveling bag. I guessed her to be maybe late twenties, early thirties.
“Thank you,” she said, in this whispery little voice that made me feel about thirteen years old all over again, and then she squinted those snowmelt eyes to take in my face and the spread of me (I should say I’m a big man, one of the biggest in the bush around Boynton, six-five and two-forty-two and not much of that gone yet to fat), and then she read my name off my nametag and added, in a deep-diving puff of a little floating wisp of a voice, “Ned.”