Stories From the Plague Years (2 page)

Well. It’s hard to be original. I wrote a very clever story recently—so I thought, but the editor I submitted it to claimed it was too much like a story from the 1970s by one E.C. Tubb. I may indeed have read that story, and forgotten it, and disgorged it, whole, in new terms. I don’t know. But I do know that’s part of the struggle of being a writer, a search for originality—we’re all products of our influences, our reading.

But writers like Marano transcend influences by merging their absorptions with honest impressions of the world around them; they’re reflecting it, refracting it, through a theme darkly, and their observation, their distinctive interpretation, however surreal the form might seem, is what gives it verisimilitude, the satisfying quality of imagery impregnated by real life; this capacity for observation, this attempt to formulate an existential ballad in fiction, is what can save us from being in lifeless league with whichever “Octomom” of genre-writing is currently spewing books.

Marano really goes for it. He plunges in; he dives fearlessly down. And I’m telling you that, commercially speaking, at least in the
conventional
wisdom, this is usually not allowed.

But the conventional wisdom is often wrong—because it doesn’t take into account talent and originality of vision; it doesn’t take into account personal experience, lived and projected through the lens of art. Marano is well aware of the ironies and underlying psychology of book publishing itself. He writes:

. . . doubt bowed in reverence to my new certainty as I tranced to the window display of a chain bookstore that doubled as a corporate coffee shop. . . . I looked at the high-end hardbacks and paperbacks laid in a carefully posed jumble. There was no stated theme to the display, beyond the fact that all the novels had been released in the past week. Yet the cover of each book is a prayer. An idolatry to fear and sainted worry. Fear that the sacred home, and all the home implies and the goods it contains, might be violated, might be depreciated by the stigma of a bloody boot-print on its white carpets. The razor-wielding apes and speckled bands swollen with poison that stalked the sitting rooms of more than a century ago are reborn as diabolical killers, Dark and Shadowy Men given new expression as fiends suitable for defeat by Sandra Bullock, Ashley Judd or Angelina Jolie in the inevitable film adaptations. . . .

We see a number of characteristics on display here—one is Marano’s being steeped in popular culture, old and new. This is one end of the bridge I mentioned. Another is the ironic tone, however grim, and the quick intensity of the imagery, which is very modern: the other half of the bridge.

We also hear voice. This is the mark of a writer coming into his power—he shows a capability for immersion in voice, in the merging of point of view and narrative. It is apparent when he writes, much later in this book:

The smoke was beautiful the way that only things that herald death can be, haloed by swirls of crows we were thankful we couldn’t hear.

Or, this, voice about voice:

A mirror of steel is silent, as are the ghosts I still feel each day as I walk streets that plague has emptied. Ghosts, like reflections in steel, have only the voices we give them, even though what they speak is theirs alone.

None of this is allowed, of course. It’s not permissible to think elaborately, to look for real poetry in nightmare. Horror is only to shock—not to express. You’re trying to be expressive with horror? Shocking!

Nor is it encouraged to write frankly about drug users, and street people, as if they were, in fact, the people right down the street that you pass every day. The lost people all around you. Marano dares to do it, as if Hubert Selby were working in dark fantasy. And in breaking the rules, he engages in a synthesis that may just get him notice, may make his work stand out in the pounding surf of genre literature, like one of those luminous, gelatinous creatures that scared Lovecraft as he stared aghast at a New England oceanside.

So let this gaping beast of a book consume you.

You’ll find yourself looking out of its eyes, as you swim through subterranean depths. And suddenly find yourself back on the midnight streets of your hometown.

I didn’t decapitate Catherine.

I liberated her from her body, trespassing on her self-inflicted inner wound . . . doing her the favour of pulling it to the tangible. She hated her body with the spite a mother saves for an unwanted child—because her body, in its arrogance, never fit the carefully purchased fiction of her life. She punished herself for being fat, though she was translucent-thin from a lifetime of shifting physical hunger to trinkets she could buy and people she could control.

With one thankful stroke (
thankful
, in that only one stroke was needed), I rewrote the fiction she’d so foolishly bought. New, red words defaced the
Sex and the City
calendar that hung in tribal-mask adoration over the Norwegian pine table in her breakfast nook, blurring calligrapher-precise notes made in peacock blue fountain pen. Rude, thick words, darkening, rewrote the still-life tableau of the lone espresso she’d made for herself just before my arrival, marked the perfect twist of lemon rind resting beside it on Italian porcelain that she’d first shown me years ago, when she’d theatrically unpacked the set to which it belonged. Cooling ink blotted the covers of the book she’d placed beside the espresso, so she could preach to me the marketed Truths the book asserted. All that stayed legible of the back cover copy was the idolatrous, bold-type prayer: “
She seemed to have it all. . . .
”

I stood in the lifetime of half-seconds, in the muted
between
that vista’ed from one beat of her Pilates-strengthened heart to the next, taking in the entirety of her kitchen, her home into which she invited me in the way that legend says one should
never
invite the un-living. And I saw that Catherine had nothing, that she was owned by all she thought she owned.

So it was a
good
thing I did for her. A benediction wholesome as St. Francis’s forsaking his life of comfort to wash the sores of lepers.

True, it was good for me as well—maybe the most intense moment of mutual gratification we’d shared. As her frail and spurting prison fell,
I
was liberated, too. Liberated from the rage I’d just felt and the stone-heavy hatred for her that had pressed inside me for years. Both rage and hate dissipated like smoke, and at last I knew without distraction the good things my heart held for her. I felt light as the avatar I’d become, ghost-dense as those in trances are said to feel as they let divine spirits speak through them.

I needed Catherine to understand I was helping her, to understand the baroque theatre she’d invoked by inviting me here. So while her eyes dimmed, I held her by her delicate jawline (and not by her strawberry blonde hair perfumed with the conditioner and shampoo she’d used since before we were lovers), and showed her the still-breathing mass that had been distasteful to her for so long.

In my dusk-trance, in my
becoming
her longed-for demon of the vindictive ex-lover, I held her level to the catharsis of my sight, freeing her from her vanity. I shared my view from my apotheosis as myth and let her see her own painfully distant thinness. I let her see that she’d exceeded the elfin slightness she’d always thought beyond her reach. The body she rejected lay where it had fallen beneath hanging expensive cookware she never used. For the first time, she saw herself outside the tyrannical, mirror-defined view of her life that had held her hostage, saw that her starved flesh was worthy of forgiveness.

I turned her face to mine. Her eyes, clear and blue, were losing their glimmer as beads do when they become scuffed and dusty. I smiled, letting her know in those desperate seconds that all was forgiven. And that I still loved her.

Her lips moved, sweetly, trying to speak. I thought of carpenter ants I used to catch, how their jaws flexed as I hurled them into a spider’s web or steadied them for the Truth of the sun focused through a magnifying lens.

And that was when, as I was fixed by her lorelei gaze, the police charged and ground me against the refrigerator, which wasn’t necessary, as I’m not a violent person.

Tackled from transcendence, shoved back into earthly, bruising flesh, I cried out as I was pinned against cold white metal. I cried out at the injustice that my final instant with Catherine should be violated—that the last thing she’d feel would be pain—because the rough blow of the policemen had made me drop her to the wet linoleum floor.

Through streaked vision, I saw pictures Catherine had taped to the refrigerator of models from the Victoria’s Secret catalogue: motivational reminders for her to stay away from food, to own her body the way she wished to own it.

And she’d been thinner than those models were.

Nightsticks came out.

Soon I was unconscious.

—You’re very sick, Dean.

As he spoke, the gaze of the mirror touched us: a fourth wall blinding us to our audience as would stage lights. In blinding us, it took the place of our audience. My twin, my hypocrite brother, lurked behind the mirror and the whirring lens that watched just past the mirror’s dead, silvered gaze.

—You shouldn’t make judgments like that. It’s not conducive to good patient/therapist dialogue.

Doctor Johansson was my court-appointed psychiatrist. His statement about my health (said without preamble) raised the curtain on this, the Second Act of our one-room drama. This was when I’d midwife things forward. When I’d make palimpsests of our First Act for those who’d have access to records of our exchanges only from this moment on, due to the red tape thickets of court bureaucracy. By now, Johansson was used to my hijacking his professional rhetoric (even, at times, setting his own rhetoric aside). He struck me as a nice person who knew to not take my
Doctor Phil
-flavoured parries personally. He wore on his tweed sleeve his rich liberal’s need to help people like me. His voice was soothing and unsettling, like HAL’s in
2001
. (
—I really think you should take a stress pill and think this over, Dave.
) Thoughtful sessions of white wine and NPR programming no doubt filled his evenings, and World Music no doubt filled his CD collection, stacked alphabetically on a teak rack from Pier One. Past his Brahmin demeanour glowed a warmth incongruous as the big, Mr.-Potter-from-
It’s-a-Wonderful-Life
wooden desk he sat behind in this sterile, fluorescent-lit room. By his desk squatted a dishwasher-sized air filter that seemed placed to pull smoke from the grandfatherly pipe he never lit, but always held.

—I have your medical records here, Dean.

—You spoke to Doctor Baker, back home? How’s he doing? I said, for the benefit of the polite mirror that, unlike any other audience, wouldn’t cough or shift chairs. And for the benefit of the underpaid hacks and interns at CourtTV who’d never get access to the files Doctor Johansson held, but who should know the name and location of Doctor Baker for the sake of a supplementary interview or two.

—I didn’t speak to Doctor Baker. The records were faxed last night by your lawyer.

—I . . . left instructions they should be made available if I were arrested.

I shifted noisily in my as-yet-to-grow-warm metal chair and smiled; my chest twinged, as if I were waterlogged from a day of swimming. Things dimmed, the way they do when you step into the shadow of a great church on a sunny day. Seated, I crossed thresholds again . . . perhaps this time, not alone.

Doctor Johansson chewed his lip that clearly craved the stem of his pipe.

—You planned? For your arrest? We’d thought it was your lawyer’s idea to send the records. . . .

—No. Mr. Seltzer followed my instructions. I try not to do anything slipshod.

The lighting of our little one-room drama continued to dusk in my sight as I inflected my role, and floated my lawyer’s name to our silver-eyed audience . . . my public defender’s name was in the papers. The mirror is a hungry audience, even when a camera doesn’t lurk behind it. Its gaze is a prison that never blinks. And it’s ever-greedy to see and to inflict wounds. Torn bodies. Torn psyches. The mirror savours both. So does the lens, and the mirror-dulled eyes the lens summons.

—Slipshod?

—You have my records. I’ll be dead by spring. No time for subpoenas and all that Paul Drake stuff.

—Ahh . . . Paul Drake?

—He’s the detective Perry Mason hired to do leg work.

—I see. About your cancer . . .

—I feel fine. Thank you. My digestion’s okay. But I should be on a bland diet. Then it’s weeks before my stomach, pancreas and liver give out.

—And you know, he said, running his thumb along the folder holding my medical records as if testing the keen of a razor, —that there’s no way to get your case to trial before you die.

I’d known Doctor Johansson was no fool before I’d met him, and had researched who’d likely be assigned my case, should I be arrested in the jurisdiction in which I had been. His few publications were quite good, and his dissertation was better than the limp-dicked work of his graduate advisor. He understood, though not the way I did, that the Second Act curtain had been raised. It was time for our interaction to change as would that of two smoking-jacketed characters in an Ibsen play. So he stated the obvious, referring to the figurative pistols we’d placed on the mantel in our First Act. He knew he had to be bluntly certain of the implications of what we were saying, and to gauge how to adjust his interaction. As would any actor, for whom
listening
is the most vital skill, I followed his cue.