Are You There and Other Stories (2 page)

Introduction

There are committed writers and writers of commitment: distinct but, I would argue, not mutually exclusive categories.

A committed writer is one who is either committed to the process of writing (a commitment often reflected in great productivity) or to a particular aesthetic model (a commitment often reflected in the achievement of mastery of craft in that particular model), or to both. Consider, for example, Jules Verne, P.G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie or P. D. James.

A writer of commitment, on the other hand, is one who has made a deep, unshakeable pledge to the vast potential of literary expression, a sort of metaphysical, almost devotional lifelong pact; a writer for whom the removal of such an allegiance or self-identification would cripple his or her very identity, make them utterly unable to function. Given this highly unempirical definition of a writer of commitment, it’s impossible to know who is or isn’t one, but I’d guess that writers such as Gene Wolfe, Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates are all respectable candidates for consideration as writers of commitment. They’re likely
also
committed writers. (Do the committed writers I mentioned double as writers of commitment? I’ll leave it up to the intrepid reader to decide).

It may not be possible to become a truly great writer unless you exist in the intersection of both groups.

Jack Skillingstead should know. He satisfies that requirement.

And his career embodies an interesting evolution: always a writer of commitment, he has during the last decade built up a discipline of daily writing. In other words, he has become a committed writer. And with this transformation has arrived publishing success.

Touring the Bahamas between December 3rd and December 7th, 2012, during the “Sail to Success” writing workshop aboard the cruise ship
Norwegian Sky
, I learned in detail what being a writer of commitment, but not being a committed writer, looked like in Jack’s case. It meant a stack several feet high of novels, written in starts and fits, that were all dead on arrival--eight, nine, maybe more such abortions. Piles of stories, dozens and dozens of them. Twenty years of toiling away sporadically without any indication that publication was forthcoming. Here’s the crucial part. During these years Jack gave up on writing several times—
but failed at failing
. Writing was too necessary, too essential, for him to permanently forgo it. He needed to write,
had
to write, in order to live. A writer of necessity; a writer of commitment.

So he continued. Until one day publication did indeed arrive, and in the course of the next ten or so years Jack went on to publish a torrent of highly-regarded stories and two well-received novels (and he’s hard at work on several more).

I admit I’ve offered an admittedly romanticized notion of writerly commitment. But the grim reality is that the writer of commitment risks much. Graham Greene mentioned “the long despair of doing nothing well”; think about the
really
long despair of doing nothing poorly. And it gets worse. The writer of commitment risks losing himself, disappearing utterly in the pursuit of literature. Jack Skillingstead not only exists in his stories, but perhaps, given his commitment, risks existing nowhere else quite so fully. (Nancy Kress assures me that Jack definitely exists outside his fiction—but of course, she
would
say that).

Further, the writer of commitment doesn’t act like a veteran tour guide or a hardened expert when they invite us readers into a new landscape. They are as awed by the sights as we are. Jack’s writing provides a gateway into a strange, uncertain, shimmering world. Step by step, his narratives wend their way to stray, misbegotten, incandescent wonders of psychic subtlety, roiling mists of self-discovery, plummeting precipices of realization. Reading the fine stories assembled in this collection you get that sense of communal experience time and again, those moments of condensed, almost poetic porousness during which Jack’s experiences seep through the text, somehow directly
into
us.

Commitment, once simply a strand of Jack’s genetic constitution, has now also become a thematic vein running through his fiction. Commitment to what, we might ask? Many of Jack’s protagonists are wounded loners. Sometimes they get a shot at connection, at redemption of a kind, and sometimes they don’t. Some of them are bent on self-destruction. But they’re not necessarily committed to any such predicament. No, I think commitment rears its head thematically in the following way: a commitment to commitment. Jack’s characters, as one might expect from rich fiction, don’t share a common ideology or set of morals, and yet they do tend to operate by the belief that they ought to be finding
something
—love, art, parenthood, an acceptance of mortality—with which they might be able to align themselves, something to absorb into their psyches and help fulfill them. They’re committed to travelling, to searching.

And when we lose ourselves in their stories, and allow them to become our own, so are we.

—Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

May 2014

The Avenger of Love

N
orman Helmcke, aging pit bull, pounded away at his keyboard in the law offices of Cohen, Helmcke & Melko. After another sleepless night his eyes were burning. Then it happened again. Norman stopped typing. He slumped, pulled off his glasses. The Wakita brief went blurry. Norman himself felt blurry, contingent, as yet another hole opened within him.

This one was big.

Though sixty-two and divorced three times, Norman had always remembered his first love. He recalled her by the scent she had worn in high school:
Bon Nuit
. Associational memory. Like a sensory switch in his mind, lighting up secret chambers, illuminating innocent preoccupations he hadn’t experienced in decades. But now it was as if someone had crept into his memory vault and stolen the bottle of amber-gold perfume. And with the scent gone, so was the girl. Oh, he could
remember
Connie; but her vital presence was faded—a departing shadow.

It wasn’t early on-set Alzheimer’s; it was thievery.

And he could sense the other holes without knowing exactly what had caused them. More and more gaps occurring over the last few weeks, undermining his identity. Killing off what he was to himself. He squeezed his eyes shut and rode out an intense, drilling pain in his head. When it was over Norman called forth his rage. His rage had never failed him, and it didn’t fail him now. Instantly his attention sharpened. He flung himself out of the leather office chair, grabbed his hat and overcoat, ran through the rain to Macy’s and demanded a bottle of
Bon Nuit
. The saleslady, a dishwater blonde half his age, passed it to him as if she feared he might bite her finger (that cornered look he’d seen so many times in the eyes of witness-stand victims of his cross-examinations). He snatched the bottle, twisted the cap off and sniffed. Pale attar of roses. His frown deepened.

“It’s just perfume,” he said.

“Sir?”

“It’s
nothing
to me.” The memory association was dead. She was gone. First love.

Stolen.

Norman and his rage and his Swiss cheese psyche strode up Fifth Avenue in the cold rain. The wind flapped his unbuttoned London Fog out behind him. Head down, fists balled, he shouldered people out of his way, spoiling for a fight. The quadruple bypass was eighteen months old. They had taken twenty-seven and a half inches of vein out of his left leg. He had been on the table for nine hours and almost died. After the operation, he had been required to give up many things that he was disinclined to give up. His rage, for instance. Right now Norman didn’t care; all he wanted was the thief. He
was
his rage.

A whispery voice that might not have been a voice at all but an instinct cut through.
This way, then
. And Norman turned aside into the little urban park he passed every day on his way to the firm.

The park became . . . wrong.

He stopped and looked up. The rain, now warm and needling, rattled waxy leaves the size of elephant ears. Vines, thick and black and braided like chains, hung from shaggy monsters of trees. Steam rose from the ground. It was like something out of Tarzan. For a moment Norman was transported back to an almost pre-conscious state, and he was a little boy snuggled under his father’s arm, that lost voice speaking Burroughs’s words, and Norm doubly cozy occupying two worlds, the safe, comforting place beside his father’s breathing presence and the wild, unpredictable jungle.

Three worlds, now.

Directly before him stood a storefront. A sign over the door proclaimed:
norm’s junk
.

“What the hell?” Norman said.

He looked over his shoulder. Fifth Avenue traffic crawled behind a gray veil, almost invisible. The cement walkway blended seamlessly into brown earth.

Norm approached the store. Another sign, this one taped crookedly in the window: BIG GOING OUT OF BUSINESS SALE!!! He used his hand to shade his reflection in the glass. The shop was empty—except for a comic book in the window display.
The Shadow
, 1940s vintage, with a great Charles Cole cover and a dead fly beside it on the dusty drop cloth. Vol. 5, issue 6:
The Death Master’s Vengeance.

He
knew
that comic.

It had been part of his father’s collection. Something about the pulp hero especially appealed to Norm’s sense of injustice avenged. Two years after Norman’s father disappeared in Korea, Norman’s mother remarried. His stepfather, Steve, had soldiered with Bernie Helmcke. He came, ostensibly, to console the widow. Steve was hell on defining his territory. He showed Norm a picture of Norm’s mother, a wallet-sized studio shot that Bernie used to keep tucked behind his driver’s license.
When I was over there
, Steve said,
this picture kinda kept me going
.

How did you get it?
Norman wanted to know.

Steve just smiled. He burned all the comics, Norm’s and his father’s. With the ashes cooling in the fireplace (the flames had turned colors, fed by the alchemical ink of glossy covers), Norman had lain awake staring at the ceiling. It was
The Shadow
he remembered, the bold avenging hero.

A figure moved out of the gloom at the back of the shop, reached into the display, and snatched the comic book.

“Hey—”

Norman slapped the plate glass with the flat of his hand. The figure retreated to the rear of the shop. Norm ran inside. His head immediately began to throb. He rubbed his eyes, squinted at the man standing at the back of the shop. The man was holding up the comic book.

“Doesn’t feel so good in here, does it, kid?”

Norman pointed at the comic.

“That’s mine. Give it to me.”

“Naw. You want it, you’ll have to come and get it.”

Norman lurched across the empty shop, the pain in his head growing more intense, almost blinding him. He stopped, pressing the heels of his hands against his temples.

The man, now a vague, pulsating shape, reached back and opened a door.

“You have a choice,” the pulsating shape said. “It’s fair I tell you that. You can stay here, or try to go back, or follow me. You know what’s back. Stay here and you’re finished. If you follow me, there’s another story. I don’t guarantee you’ll like it.”

Norman lurched toward the shape, and found himself plunging over the threshold into darkness . . .

*

. . . to land on a broken tongue of pavement, wet after a recent rain.

It was night.

The yellow moon warped into black puddles. He heard the hissing of rolling wheels on wet paving. His heart was pounding. Norman pushed himself up on his knees and waited, catching his breath. After a while, he turned his head and looked back. The sidewalk ended a couple of feet behind him in jagged vacancy. The shop was gone, the jungle was gone. It was as if the sidewalk—maybe the whole world—had been bitten off by some unimaginable thing that had then recoiled into space, stranding Norman and whatever else remained to drift in a void.

Norman stood up and faced—the dark city.

Neon blinked and shifted, making paint-splash patterns on the wet street. Towers twisted into the sky, their points tearing at scudding carbon-paper clouds. Norman tilted his head, trying to get his mind around the architecture.

A dog appeared. It stood at the mouth of an alley between a diner straight out of Hopper and a pawnshop. It was an undersized, scruffy thing, a Puli. There was a red scarf tied around its neck.

The dog started walking in his direction. Norman watched it. The dog halted before him.

“Good boy,” Norman said.

“I’m good,” the dog said in a female voice, “but I’m not a boy.”

“I don’t believe it,” Norman said.

“Check under the hood, if you want.”

“I don’t believe you can talk.”

“I can’t. It’s telepathy. I’m projecting the words inside your head. Try not to look so stupefied. I’m thinking about getting a bite to eat. Let’s sit down, and I’ll give you the big picture. I’m Scout, by the way.”

The dog turned and started toward the diner. Norman stood where he was.

“Come on,” Scout said. “I can’t open doors by myself.”

After a moment he followed the dog to the diner and opened the door. The inside was long and narrow, like the inside of a rail car, and bright with fluorescent tube lighting. The counterman was Norman’s age, beefy and balding, a blue tattoo of a Marine anchor-and-world like a stain on his hairy forearm.

“They let dogs in here?” Norman said.

“Please. The rules aren’t the same as what you’re used to.”

Scout jumped onto the red leather bench seat of a booth. Norman hesitated then sat opposite the dog.

“Just where is ‘here’?” Norman asked.

“You wanted to catch a thief,” Scout said. “This is where the thief currently dwells.”

“Yes, but where
are
we?”

“The best diner in town. You want to read the Night Owl Specials to me? I can’t quite manage the menu. Old war wound, you know.”

“What?”

“That was a joke.”

“Hilarious,” Norman said. He was looking at Scout’s scarf. It bothered him. “Who tied that thing around your neck?”

“A former companion.”

“What happened to him?”

“Nothing good. Night Owl Special?”

Norman glanced at the menu. “Hobo Scramble . . .”

“Say no more.”

“I know that scarf.”

“Do you.”

Norman stared over the top of the dog’s head at nothing in particular. “I’ve had a stroke or something.”

“Welcome to non-sequitur theater,” Scout said.

“My neurons are misfiring. This is some kind of hallucination.”

“I can’t decide on a beverage,” Scout said. “I’m thinking cranberry juice.”

Norman stood up. “It isn’t real,” he said.

“Do you want the Hobo Scramble, too?” Scout said.

“You can’t die in dreams, and that probably goes for hallucinations, too. I’ll walk off the edge, and that’ll wake me up.”

Scout yawned and when she shut her mouth her teeth clicked like billiard balls.

“I wish you could keep your mind on breakfast.”

The voice was centered in Norman’s head, even though he was already at the other end of the diner stiff-arming the door. Thought projection. Once outside he headed straight for the edge. He didn’t slow down when he reached the jagged, broken-off place. His vision hazed over briefly, and his stride carried him forward—in the opposite direction, back toward the diner. He stopped, looked over his shoulder, turned and tried again, attaining the same result.

When he returned to the diner a plate of steaming hot scrambled eggs and a cup of coffee was waiting for him. A second plate was set before Scout. There were chopped onions, crumbled bacon, and cheddar cheese mixed in with the eggs, all of it heavily peppered.

“Have a nice walk? I waited for you.”

Norman picked up his fork. He didn’t want to be, but he was starving. The Hobo Scramble smelled almost orgasmically delicious. Naturally he wasn’t allowed to eat anything like it, not since his surgery.

“You don’t get to go back,” Scout projected. “You made the choice, remember that.”

Norman slipped a bite of scrambled eggs into his mouth, washed it down with coffee, and said, “I know who you are. And your name isn’t Scout.”

“Isn’t it?”

The dog started lapping and chewing at her plate of food, making wet-slurping sounds.

“That’s disgusting,” Norman said, though he didn’t really care; the Hobo Scramble was igniting his pleasure centers.

Scout looked up. “Maybe the way
you
eat disgusts
me
, ever think of that?”

“No. Why’d you change your name, anyway? Your name was Mona when I was a kid.”

“Scout,” the dog said, “was your private name for me. “You don’t remember, do you.”

“Everybody called you Mona, including me.”

“Sure, while I was alive. I’m talking about after I died.”

Norman put his fork down.

“You used to pretend I was still around,” Scout said. “I was like your imaginary friend. And you called me Scout, after the girl in that movie. Really, you wanted a father like Gregory Peck. Instead you got Steve.”

Norman rubbed his forehead. All his life he’d had a picture in his mind of Mona dying. He had watched from the front yard, paralyzed. His mother sat in the middle of the street in her green housedress, the little dog cradled in her lap, Mona coughing up blood in thick gouts, as if she were expelling whole organs. And, of course, Norman
had
forgotten the rest. The way he used to imagine Mona still existed as an invisible dog that only he could see. And in her new state of being she had been named Scout. Norman had been smarter than the other kids, and he made sure they knew it. So Mona had been his only friend, and the same situation obtained with Scout.

“The thing is,” the dog in the diner said, “I wasn’t an imaginary friend. I was really there, and I was really invisible. Life is strange, huh? It’s whatever you believe it is, even if you stop believing later on.”

*

They caught a yellow cab in front of the diner. It looked pre-World War II vintage, a Hudson or something. But it wasn’t that normal. The windshield was so narrow that it was barely more than a slot. Climbing in, Norman noticed the driver’s side wing mirror looked like a big human ear cast in silver. The driver wore a visored cap pulled snug over his eyebrows. He stared at his lap while he drove.

“So, you know who the thief is,” Norman said to the dog. They were sitting together in the back seat.

“Yes.”

“Well?”

“It’s one man.”

“Who is he?”

“You’ll know him when you see him.”

“When I see him I plan to knock his teeth down his throat. That is, after he gives me back my property, my memories.”

“It isn’t memories that he’s stolen. Look inward. There are no gaps in your memory.”

It was true. Norman remembered everything about his first love, for instance. Nevertheless she was gone.

“Well he took something. A lot of somethings. And I want them back. My mind is full of holes.”

“I know. But really there’s only one thing missing, trust me.” Scout barked twice, and the driver tucked the cab into the curb. “This is the place,” Scout said in Norman’s head.