What I Didn't See (24 page)

Behind the monkeys were the rats. Their cages were stacked one on the next, so many of them they formed aisles like in the grocery store.

There was never more than a single rat in a single cage. They shredded the newspaper lining and made themselves damp, smelly-confetti nests. When I passed they came out of these nests to look at me, their paws wrapped over the bars, their noses ticking busily from side to side. These were hooded rats with black faces and tiny, nibbling teeth. I felt that their eyes were sympathetic. I felt that they were worried to see me there, lost without my father, and this concern was a comfort to me.

At the end of one of the aisles I found a man I didn't know. He was tall and blond, with pale blue eyes. He knelt and shook my hand so my empty mitten, tied to my sleeve, bounced about in the air. “I'm a stranger here,” he said. He pronounced the words oddly. “Newly arrived. So I don't know everyone the way I should. My name is Vidkun Thrane.” A large hooded rat climbed out of his shirt pocket. It looked at me with the same worried eyes the caged rats had shown. “I'm not entirely without friends,” the blond man said. “Here is King Rat, come to make your acquaintance."

Because of his eyes, I told King Rat my father's name. We all took the elevator up to the fourth floor together.

My rescuer was a Norwegian psychologist who'd just come to work in the United States with men like my father, studying theories of learning by running rats through mazes. In Oslo, Vidkun had a wife and a son who was just the age of my older brother. My father was very glad to see him. Me, he was less glad to see.

I cared too much about my dignity to mention Scott Arnold. The door I had knocked on earlier was the office of the department chair, a man who, my father said, already had it in for him. I was told never to come as a surprise to see him again. Vidkun was told to come to supper.

Vidkun visited us several times during his residency, and even came to our Christmas dinner since his own family was so far away. He gave me a book,
Castles and Dragons, A Collection of Fairytales from Many Lands
. I don't know how he chose it. Perhaps the clerk recommended it. Perhaps his son had liked it.

However he found it, it turned out to be the perfect book for me. I read it over and over. It satisfied me in a way no other book ever has, grew up with me the way a good book does. These, then, are the two men I credit with making me a writer. First, my father, a stimulus/response psychologist who believed in reinforcement in the lab, but whose parenting ran instead to parables and medicinal doses of Aesop's fables.

Second, a man I hardly knew, a stranger from very far away, who showed me his home on the large, spinning globe and, one Christmas, brought me the book I wanted above all others to read. I have so few other memories of Vidkun. A soft voice and a gentle manner. The worried eyes of King Rat looking out from his pocket. The unfortunate same first name, my father told me later, as the famous Norwegian traitor. That can't have been easy growing up, I remember my father saying.

The stories in
Castles and Dragons
are full of magical incident. Terrible things may happen before the happy ending, but there are limits to how terrible. Good people get their reward; so do bad people. The stories are much softer than Grimm and Andersen. It was many, many years before I was tough enough for the pure thing.

Even now some of the classics remain hard for me. Of these, worst by a good margin is “The Pied Piper of Hamlin.” I never liked the first part with the rats. I saw King Rat and all the others dancing to their doom with their busy noses and worried eyes. Next, I hated the lying parents. And most of all, I hated the ending.

My father always tried to comfort me. The children were wonderfully happy at the end, he said. They were guests at an eternal birthday party where the food was spun sugar and the music just as sweet. They never stopped eating long enough to think of how their parents must miss them.

I wasn't persuaded. By my own experience, on Halloween there always came a moment when you'd eaten too much candy. One by one the children would remember their homes. One by one they would leave the table determined to find their way out of the mountain. They would climb the carved stairs up and then down into darkness. They would lose themselves in caves and stony corridors until their only choice, eventually and eternally, was to follow the music back to the piper. It was not a story with an ending at all. In my mind it stretched horribly onward.

Shortly after I met Vidkun, I wrote my own book. This was an illustrated collection of short pieces. The protagonists were all baby animals. In these stories a pig or a puppy or a lamb wandered inadvertently away from the family. After a frightening search, the stray was found again; a joyful reunion took place. The stories got progressively shorter as the book went on. My parents thought I was running out of energy for it. In fact, I was less and less able to bear the middle part of the story. In each successive version, I made the period of separation shorter.

I can guess now, as I couldn't then, what sorts of things may have happened to the monkeys in the psych lab. I suppose that the rats' lives were not entirely taken up with cheese, tucked into mazes like Easter eggs. As I grew up, there were more and more questions I thought of but didn't ask. Real life is only for the very toughest.

My brother went away to college, and I cried for three days. In his junior year, he went farther, to the south of England and an exchange program at Sussex University. During spring break, he went to Norway on a skiing vacation. He found himself alone at Easter, and he called the only person in all of Norway that he knew.

Vidkun insisted my brother come stay with him and his wife, immediately drove to the hostel to fetch him. He had wonderful memories of our family, he said. He'd spoken of us often. He asked after me. He was cordial and gracious, my brother told me, genuinely welcoming, and yet, clearly something was terribly wrong. My brother had never imagined a house so empty. Easter dinner was long and lavish and cheerless. Sometime during it, Vidkun stopped talking. His wife went early to bed and left the two men sitting at the table.

"My son,” Vidkun said suddenly. “My son also took a trip abroad. Like you. He went to America, which I always told him was so wonderful. He went two years ago.” Vidkun's son had touched down in New York and spent a week there, then took a bus to cross the country. He wanted to get some idea of size and landscape. He was meeting up with friends in Yellowstone. Somewhere along the route, he vanished.

When word came, Vidkun flew to New York. The police showed him a statement, allowed him to speak to a witness who'd talked with his son, seen him board the bus. No witness could be found who saw him leave it. Vidkun searched for him or word of him for three months, took the same bus trip two times in each direction, questioning everyone he met on the route. No one who knew the family believed the boy would not have come home if he were able. They were all just so sad, my brother said.

So often over the years when I haven't wanted to, I've thought of Vidkun on that bus. The glass next to him is dirty and in some lights is a window and in others is a mirror. In his pocket is his son's face. I think how he forces himself to eat at least once every day, asks each person he meets to look at his picture. “No,” they all say. “No.” Such a long trip. Such a big country. Who could live there?

I hate this story. Vidkun, for your long-ago gifts, I return now two things. The first is that I will not change this ending. This is your story. No magic, no clever rescue, no final twist. As long as you can't pretend otherwise, neither will I. And then, because you once brought me a book with no such stories in it, the second thing I promise is not to write this one again. The older I get, the more I want a happy ending. Never again will I write about a child who disappears forever. All my pipers will have soft voices and gentle manners. No child so lost King Rat can't find him and bring him home.

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Most of the stories included here went through one or another of my multiple workshops. I love workshops. One can never have too many of them.

I have a beloved workshop in Davis, where I lived until recently, and another in Santa Cruz, where I live now. I attend, irregularly, a workshop in the San Francisco Bay Area. The weeks I've spent with the Rio Hondo workshop in Taos and the Sycamore Hill workshop, now in Asheville, have been among my very happiest. Going at it, hammer and tongs, over issues of voice, plot, authorial intention, text and subtext, prose and politics is my idea of a good time. The list of co-attendees over my thirty-some years is a very long one, and I thank every one of you.

Special thanks though to Sycamore Hill. Most of the stories here made their first public appearances at the Sycamore Hill critique table. I owe those of you with me at that table not only for the careful and sometimes crabby readings you all gave me, but for the weeks of conversation and the years of friendship. I owe you for the stories themselves, many of which only exist because you can't go to Sycamore Hill without writing one.

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These stories were originally published as follows:

"The Pelican Bar,”
Eclipse 3
, 2009

"Booth's Ghost” appears here for the first time.

"The Last Worders,”
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet
20, 2007

"The Dark,”
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction,
June 1991

"Always,”
Asimov's Science Fiction,
April-May 2007

"Familiar Birds,”
Journal of Mythic Arts,
Spring 2006

"Private Grave 9,”
McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales,
2003

"The Marianas Islands,”
Intersections: The Sycamore Hill Anthology,
1996

"Halfway People,”
My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me,
2010

"Standing Room Only,”
Asimov's Science Fiction,
August 1997

"What I Didn't See,”
SciFiction
, 2002

"King Rat,”
Trampoline
, 2003

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Karen Joy Fowler
(karenjoyfowler.com) is the author of five novels, including
Wit's End
and
The Jane Austen Book Club
, which spent thirteen weeks on the
New York Times
bestseller list, was a
New York Times
Notable Book, and was adapted as a major motion picture from Sony Pictures. Her novel
Sister Noon
was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and her short-story collection
Black Glass
won the World Fantasy Award. She has co-edited three volumes of
The James Tiptree Award Anthology.
Fowler and her husband, who have two grown children, live in Santa Cruz, California.

Visit www.lcrw.net for information on additional titles by this and other authors.