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  The New Wave Fabulists

  Conjunctions, Vol. 39

  Edited by Bradford Morrow

  Guest-Edited by Peter Straub

  Illustrations by Gahan Wilson

  CONJUNCTIONS

  Bi-Annual Volumes of New Writing

  Edited by

  Bradford Morrow

  Contributing Editors

  Walter Abish

  Chinua Achebe

  John Ashbery

  Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

  Mary Caponegro

  Robert Creeley

  Elizabeth Frank

  William H. Gass

  Jorie Graham

  Robert Kelly

  Ann Lauterbach

  Norman Manea

  Rick Moody

  Joanna Scott

  Peter Straub

  William Weaver

  John Edgar Wideman

  published by Bard College

  Contents

  GUEST EDITOR’S NOTE

  John Crowley, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines

  Kelly Link, Lull

  M. John Harrison, Entertaining Angels Unawares

  Peter Straub, Little Red’s Tango

  James Morrow, The Wisdom of the Skin

  Nalo Hopkinson, Shift

  Jonathan Lethem, The Dystopianist, Thinking of His Rival, Is Interrupted by a Knock on the Door

  Joe Haldeman, From Guardian

  China Miéville, Familiar

  Andy Duncan, The Big Rock Candy Mountain

  Gene Wolfe, From Knight

  Patrick O’Leary, The Bearing of Light

  Jonathan Carroll, Simon’s House of Lipstick

  John Kessel, The Invisible Empire

  Karen Joy Fowler, The Further Adventures of the Invisible Man

  Paul Park, Abduction

  Elizabeth Hand, The Least Trumps

  Neil Gaiman, October in the Chair

  Gary K. Wolfe, Malebolge, Or the Ordnance of Genre

  John Clute, Beyond the Pale

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

  GUEST EDITOR’S NOTE

  WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE, and what are they doing in Conjunctions? Jonathan Lethem won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award for Motherless Brooklyn, and Harold Bloom put John Crowley’s Little, Big on his list of 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century, but aren’t Gene Wolfe and Joe Haldeman science fiction writers? And didn’t Neil Gaiman become well known with a series of, um, graphic novels, the street or gutter phrase for which is comic books?

  Yes, they are, and he did, and the author of these words is, even worse, a conspicuously popular horror writer. Should you have a reflexive disdain for anything connected to genre fiction, as you very well may, issue number 39 of Conjunctions is going to represent, at least initially, something of an unwelcome aberration in the history of an otherwise honorable literary journal. Those who have just nodded in assent should turn immediately to the back of the book and read the critical essays by Gary K. Wolfe and John Clute, which ought to persuade even the faintest of hearts to persevere. Clute and Wolfe know what they are talking about, far better than I, and my conversations with them over the past few years—conversations that began at the 1998 International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts in Ft. Lauderdale—have helped me understand the phenomenon this collection is designed to illustrate.

  It would be easy but misleading to account for this in evolutionary terms. That is, it is not really accurate to say that over the past two decades the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror have been, unnoticed by the wider literary culture, transforming themselves generation by generation and through the work of each generation’s most adventurous practitioners into something all but unrecognizable, hence barely classifiable at all except as literature. Even evolution doesn’t work that way. The above process did take place, and it was completely overlooked by the wider literary culture but it did not happen smoothly, and the kind of posttransformation fictions represented here owe more than half of their DNA and much of their underlying musculature to their original genre sources. Contemporary, more faithful versions of those sources are to be found all over the place, especially in movie theaters and the genre shelves at Barnes & Noble. Gene Wolfe, who is necessary to this volume, was producing fiction of immense, Nabokovian rigor and complexity thirty years ago, alongside plenty of colleagues who were satisfied to work within the genre’s familiar templates. Now, writers like Nalo Hopkinson, John Kessel, and Patrick O’Leary, for all of whom Gene Wolfe is likely to be what Gary K. Wolfe calls a “touchstone,” are still publishing shorter fiction in magazines like Asimov’s and Fantasy and Science Fiction, and so is Kelly Link. (Jonathan Carroll, Jonathan Lethem, Elizabeth Hand, John Crowley, and China Miéville seldom write short fiction, and we are fortunate to have stories from them.) Strictly on grounds of artistic achievement, these writers should all along have been welcome in thoughtful literary outlets.

  Some who could easily be included here are not, among them Terry Bisson, Ted Chiang, Tom Disch, Geoff Ryman, Ray Vukovich, Jeffrey Ford, Jeff Vandemeer, Graham Joyce, Kit Reed, and Carol Emshwiller. I regret their absence. Had I approached this literary territory from the other side, I would have included Mark Chabon, Dan Chaon, and Stewart O’Nan: the latter two, especially, approach horror from the inside out, with the understanding that it is above all a point of view.

  For remarkably mature examples of that particular point of view, which has literally no points in common with the genre’s conventional definitions, see M. John Harrison’s “Entertaining Angels Unawares” and John Crowley’s limpid, devastating “The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines.” These two stories give us an Angel of Death and a gracious Lucifer, and in them the world is spun helplessly toward disorder, loss, uncertainty, and grief—horror being the literature that, as if under a sacred charge, most urgently honors the brute fact of these conditions—while the stories themselves both suggest and preserve a profound internal mystery.

  I am grateful for Bradford Morrow’s suggestion that I guest edit an issue of his journal, of which I have long been a friend and supporter. Brad’s trust in this project, never in question, deepened as we went along, as did my appreciation of the dazzlingly efficient Conjunctions team, Michael Bergstein, Martine Bellen, Pat Sims, and Bill White. With a crew like that, Roebling could have put up the Brooklyn Bridge in a matter of weeks.

  —Peter Straub

  August 6, 2002

  New York City

  The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines

  John Crowley

  IN THE LATE 1950S the state of Indiana had its own Shakespeare festival, though not much of the world knew about it. Far too little of the world, as it happened, to keep it in existence. But for a few summers it was there, a little Brigadoonish, or like the great Globe itself, that leaves not a trace behind.

  That was a time for Shakespeare festivals. One had recently begun in Stratford, Ontario, directed at first by the great impresario Tyrone Guthrie. I used to pore over the pictures in my Theater Arts magazine (I was surely one of the few boys my age who had a subscription; who asked for a subscription for Christmas). It had begun as simply a big striped tent, then became a tentlike building; it had a clever all-purpose stage set on which Roman and Venetian and English plays could all be accommodated. The man who got the idea for a Shakespeare festival in this little town was a disabled war veteran, who liked the fact that his hometown was named for Shakespeare’s. There was a picture of him, shy and good-looking, leaning on his cane.

  Stratford, Connecticut, had a Shakespeare festival too, about as far from Indiana, where Harriet Ingram and I both lived, as Stratford, Ontario. On a summer trip to the sea—from which long ago her mother had been taken away by her father to s
ealess Indiana—Harriet wangled a visit to the Connecticut Stratford. While her family picnicked on the great lawn waiting for the matinee to begin, Harriet walked up and entered the cool dark of the theater, whose smell is one of the few she can recall today from that time; she passed around a velvet rope and down into the empty auditorium. On stage an actor read lines to himself under a single rehearsal light hanging over the stage. Harriet walked down closer and closer, seeing up into the flies and inhaling the charged air, when the floor beneath her vanished and she fell into darkness.

  The trap was only six or eight feet deep, and Harriet claimed to be all right, but the actor, who had heard her tumble down, made her lie still till help could be called; they got her out and took her backstage and bound up a nice long gash on her leg with yards of gauze, and she was made to call the theater’s doctor on the phone, who put her through a series of movements to find out if any bones were broken. Then the young actor who had rescued her took her all over the theater, into the dressing rooms and the scene shop and the rehearsal rooms. When her mother finally found her, she was talking Shakespeare with her new friend and some others, like Jesus among the doctors, with probably something of a religious glow about her too.

  Indiana had no town named Stratford, but there was one named Avon, an almost quaint little Brown County town through which a small river ran, where swans could be induced to reside. Not far from the town, a Utopian sect had once owned several hundred acres of farmland, where they began building an ideal community before dying out or moving West; what remained of their community was a cheerless brick dormitory, a wooden meeting house, and a huge limestone and oak-frame circular barn: circular because of the founder’s scientific dairying theories, and circular because of his belief in the circle’s perfection. The barn was over a hundred feet in diameter, and lit like a church by a clerestory and a central windowed turret; when an ad hoc preservation committee first went in, in 1955, it still smelled faintly of hay and dung. It was as sound as a Greek temple, though the roof was just beginning to leak.

  So History wanted the place preserved; and Commerce wanted it to turn a profit and bring custom into the town; and Culture wanted whatever it was used for to be not vulgar or debased. A young man who had grown up in a big house nearby, who had made money in New York and then come home, conceived the festival plan. His money and enthusiasm brought in more, some of it, as we would learn, from unlikely places; and the process began that would turn the great round barn into an Elizabethan theater. Among the methods the organizers used to publicize, and partly to underwrite, the Avon festival was to offer a number of apprentice positions to Indiana high-school students: these were a little more costly to the chosen students than a good summer camp would have been—I think there were scholarships for some—and provided the festival with some enthusiastic labor. When Harriet, that year a junior, heard about the program she felt a tremendous grateful relief, to learn that the world was not after all empty of such a possibility; and at the same time an awful anxiety, that this one would escape from her before she could secure it for herself.

  Harriet’s mother used to explain Harriet by saying that she was stagestruck, but that wasn’t so, and Harriet resented the silliness of the epithet; she connected it with a girlish longing for Broadway and stardom, glamour, her name in lights—Harriet’s ambitions were at once more private and more extravagant. When one of her parents’ friends asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up—she was about thirteen—Harriet answered that she wanted to be a tragedeean.

  Harriet and I grew up on different sides of the state. Her parents taught (history and economics) at a little Quaker college in Richmond, in the east; my father was a lawyer in Williamsport. The Williamsport house was a big square Italianate place, almost a mansion, built by my mother’s grandfather, who had been lieutenant governor of the state and ambassador to Peru under Grant. A ten-foot ormolu mirror in the front hall came from Peru.

  Harriet went to a smelly old public school—Garfield High—and after classes she took dance lessons and on weekends she rode horses; and she read, in that deep and obsessive way, with that high tolerance for boredom, that is (it seems to me) gone from the world: read books about Isadora Duncan and Mae West, read Shaw and Milton’s Comus and the plays of Byron and Feydeau and Wilde’s Salome. And Shakespeare: carrying the family’s Complete Works around with her, its spine cracking and its fore-edge grimy from her fingers. She read the major plays, of course, though to this day she hasn’t read Lear, but mostly she turned to the odd numbers, Cymbeline and Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida. She keeps surprising me with the odd things she read then and still remembers. I went to a little private school my family had an interest in, and spent a year home-schooled (as they call it now) because of my asthma, mostly better now. So we were both smart, sheltered, isolated kids, she isolated by being an only child, I surrounded by four sisters and a brother but miles from anything and dreaming about Theater, or Theatre, as I much preferred to spell it.

  Mine was a kind of megalomania not so unusual in a kid with my statistics, so to speak: dreams of dominance and glory. Most of my ambitions, and most of my knowledge, came out of books; just like Harriet, I’d never seen many plays, though I tried to see as many as I could reach. They all seemed comically inadequate to me, shaming even; I bit my nails to the quick and squirmed in my seat till my mother took my shoulder to hush me.

  I didn’t quite understand then that the theater work I dreamed about mostly dated to a time thirty or forty years before, when the town library acquired the albums and monographs in the Theater section that I pored over. I was studying Max Rheinhardt’s vast productions in Weimar Germany, the stage designs of Gordon Craig (he was Isadora Duncan’s lover). Once, I found in that library a book about how to build your own Greek theater and put on pageants. I tried to convince my mother that a Greek theater like this would be perfect in our broad backyard, over in front of the tall poplars (the drawings in my books were full of poplars) and look, you could buy these Ionic columns from any building supply house for ten dollars. The book, however (my mother showed me, laughing) had been published in 1912.

  Harriet thought that was a sweet story. I told it to her in Avon, that summer we were both apprentices there, the summer that changed everything. We were sitting by the campfire the apprentices made most nights, far enough away not to be grilled, near enough so the smoke discouraged the mosquitoes. She listened and laughed and then told me about falling into the open trap in Stratford, Connecticut. By the end of her story everybody was listening.

  It seemed then that Harriet had a better chance than I did of going on the way we were both headed. My visions all needed pots of money to realize, and the cooperation of many others, and the kind of tyrannical will and willingness to be boss that it would turn out I had none of. But everything Harriet needed came right out of Harriet; all she had to do was bring forth more, and there was more—that was clear. I knew it even then.

  It’s the middle of June in Harriet’s thirty-eighth year, a brilliant day of high barometric pressure. Harriet gets up early to take her camera out and make some pictures.

  The camera is a huge eight-by-ten plate camera of polished wood, cherry and ebony, with brass fittings and a leather bellows. Harriet thinks it’s the most beautiful and affecting object she owns; with its tripod of telescoping legs, also wood and brass, and its great glass eye, it seems to Harriet to be more a relative than a belonging, a gaunt beloved aunt, an invalid but still merry husband. Did you ever ever ever in your long-legged life (Harriet sings) see a three-legged sailor and his four-legged wife.

  Harriet has been using not film in the camera but paper, ordinary panchromatic printing paper. When exposed, the paper becomes a negative, and it can be printed by contact with another sheet. The resulting image is exact and exquisitely detailed but softened and abstracted—both warmed and cooled—by the light’s passing through a textured paper negative rather than through a transparent plastic one. Th
e very first photographic negatives were made on paper.

  So by the yellow safelight in her bathroom Harriet on this morning removes from their box six sheets of paper, and slips them into her three plate-holders, front and back: six exposures, the most she would ever make on a single trip, even on such a day as this one. She slides each black Bakelite slide back over the face of the paper and locks them up, safe in total darkness till their moment of day has come.

  Dismantled and shut up, the camera fits in the back of the Rabbit, though it takes Harriet three trips to bring it and its tripod and the bag of plate-holders out to the car. Harriet goes out of town early, driving up from the river into the old and largely abandoned farmlands above: hillside fields bordered by woods are what she likes to photograph when the slanting sunlight seems to set fire to the tall sedges’ heads and the shade is deep; another thing is dirt roads lined with old maples, the sun picking certain masses of leaves to illuminate like stained glass and the sun falling in tigerish stripes over the road’s arched back.

  Once Harriet and I were talking about what we would most like to have been if we weren’t what we are. I said—I forget what I said, but Harriet said she had always thought it would be impossible to be a landscape painter and be unhappy; unhappy in your work anyway. She still believes it’s so, but only if you are better at it than she was or could expect ever to be. For a while when she was younger she did paint, and it made her not happy at all to work all day and then next day look at what you had done, which claimed to be what you had seen and felt but wasn’t at all. The opposite of happy. But these photographs don’t disappoint that way. The happiness they give is a little pale and fleeting—half an hour to set up the camera and make an exposure (hurry, hurry, the earth’s turning, the light’s changing) and an hour or two to make a true print: but it’s real happiness. Since they’re made from paper negatives rather than film, they seem to Harriet not to have that look of being stolen from the world rather than made from it that most landscape photographs have; they are shyer and more tentative somehow. Not painting, no, but satisfying in some of the same ways. And she says they are selling pretty well in her shop too.