The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant

by Jeffrey Ford

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  The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant

  and Other Stories

  Jeffrey Ford

  This book is for Jack and Derek—

  Some stories for all of the beautiful stories

  you have given me.

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION: THE COMPREHENDING STRANGENESS OF JEFFREY FORD by Michael Swanwick

  CREATION

  OUT OF THE CANYON

  THE FANTASY WRITER’S ASSISTANT

  THE FAR OASIS

  THE WOMAN WHO COUNTS HER BREATH

  AT REPARATA

  PANSOLAPIA

  EXO-SKELETON TOWN

  THE HONEYED KNOT

  SOMETHING BY THE SEA

  THE DELICATE

  MALTHUSIAN’S ZOMBIE

  ON THE ROAD TO NEW EGYPT

  FLOATING IN LINDRETHOOL

  HIGH TEA WITH JULES VERNE

  BRIGHT MORNING

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Introduction:

  The Comprehending Strangeness of Jeffrey Ford

  It begins with dreams. Jeff ford tells me that he gets a lot of his ideas for stories from dreams, and I believe it. They have that feel. They float a few crucial inches above reality. They obey a narrative logic that is not that of the waking world. They have that eerie beauty that the better sorts of dreams can have.

  But though the translation of even the most generous dream into a sensible narrative is a prodigious task, if that’s all these stories were, I would not be writing this introduction. A lucid intelligence is at work here as well.

  Consider “At Reparata.” It begins deep in the domain of Dream with Flam, titular High and Mighty of Next Week, standing on a cliff at twilight, fly-fishing for bats. This is a wonderful conceit, but a dangerous one. Immediately the story is situated so far from consensus reality that it threatens to break free entirely and float off into the empyrean of pure whimsy. Yet with craft and cunning Ford reels the story in and rationalizes it not all the way to the domain of the Real, perhaps, but certainly into the realm of Fantasy. A wealthy eccentric has established an absurdist monarchy at Castle Reparata, and there provides a haven for the outcasts and broken souls of the world. A prostitute is made a Countess, a madman becomes the Philosopher General, a highwayman is declared Bishop to the Crown. But when the queen dies, His Royal falls into a melancholy that threatens the realm, and Flam goes in search of a healer.

  At this point, we all know how this story is going to play out and the lessons (about people becoming the roles that they assume, mostly) that we’re supposed to take from it. Except that’s not the story being told. Ford has better images and more original lessons in mind for us. Images and lessons that exist somewhere between the fluid unreliability of pure imagination and the dull predictability of the conventional well-made story.

  Sometimes the dreams are nightmares.

  A salesman opens his sample case to reveal a human brain floating in a bottle. “Floating in Lindrethool” is ostensibly set in our near future, when new technology has made silicon-based computers obsolete. But the hard-bitten and cynical salesmen, with their hats and cheap hotels, come straight out of Depression-era America. It is a gritty noir scenario, and it comes complete with a gritty noir love story. But there’s comedy there as well. Slackwell, the Sad Sack of a salesman who is this story’s hero, undergoes a series of almost ritual humiliations, attacked by a bishop, hammered on the foot by a housewife with higher-than-average sales resistance. His nightmarish situation is comic, and so is his romance. But the comedy, rather than alleviating the horror, intensifies it.

  A man trapped in his job, a brain trapped in a jar, a woman trapped in her dreams. How could they possibly be worse off than they are now? Well … they could lose the self-delusions that make their lives bearable. They could become aware of exactly how ridiculous they are. That, rather than death or dismemberment, is the Damoclean sword that hangs over this tale.

  “Floating in Lindrethool” may be a horror tale or (for it has a perfectly unexpected happy ending) fantasy, or we can accept the initial rationalization and dub it science fiction. Ford’s works evade easy categorization. Many could be fit into any of these three realms. Most would rest uneasily in whatever category they were placed. Genre boundaries melt in their presence.

  In “High Tea with Jules Verne,” for example, a nameless reporter interviews not the pioneering science fiction writer, but what seems to be a physical avatar of his subconscious mind. The master of rationality is turned inside out and remade into a dadaist ringmaster of the id. His characters infest his house like mice, and like mice must be trapped and exterminated. The founding father of a quintessentially rationalistic genre is made into a Maestro of Unreason. Surrealism, recursive criticism, simple literary playfulness—whatever this is, it is not SF, save by the loosest of standards.

  Nor is “Exo-Skeleton Town.” Though it takes place on an alien planet, whose atmosphere necessitates that humans wear protective exo-skeletons, it fails as science fiction in that it simply cannot be taken literally. I have heard Jeffrey Ford referred to as “the consummate inverter,” and here he proves the validity of that title by turning everything inside out. In a neat reversal, his people physically inhabit movie stars, living within exo-skeletal simulacra of Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart and other cultural icons. They have colonized the stars that in our world have colonized our imaginations. Their true identities have become perilous secrets. The estrangement and interminable exile of modern urban life at its worst has been literalized in the deceitful pursuit of a product that is explicitly unworthy of such sacrifice.

  You could write a thesis on this story’s metaphoric take on the sins of late capitalism. Or you can simply let the dreamlike weirdness of the narrative carry you away. Whatever genre this might be, it is wonderful stuff.

  Ford’s fiction takes you by surprise. It undercuts all your assumptions. “Creation” begins with the Baltimore Catechism, that font of doctrinal certainty, and falls swiftly through the essential mystery of life to arrive smack-dab at the Unknowable. The young narrator, acting on a compulsion he does not understand, builds a log man out in the woods. “A large hunk of bark that had peeled off an oak was the head. On this I laid red mushroom eyes, curved barnacles of fungus for ears, a dried seedpod for a nose. The mouth was merely a hole I punched through the bark with my penknife.” In a dream, a saint tells him his creation’s name is Cavanaugh. Then Cavanaugh comes to life, and begins to haunt the boy.

  Only, maybe not. The physical evidence is not compelling. Further, the lad is entering his adolescence, prey to subterranean ocean storms of emotion. He may be projecting his fear of a meaningless universe onto a literal stick figure. But while two separate readings of events are offered the reader, the story resolutely refuses to collapse its possibilities into one or the other. Believe what you will, the story says, in the fantastic or the workaday, in God or in Nothing, you’re still looking at one and the same world.

  This sort of effect—this dance of the literal and the figurative—is achievable only in prose. And Jeff Ford’s prose is a highly idiosyncratic thing. Words come unstuck from their original meanings. The first name of Cellini’s sister becomes the name of a castle. The adjective for a particular insight into the perils of overpopulation becomes an Armenian-American scientist. It is best not to pursue these meanings because they lead nowhere—not at any rate to the author’s intentions. They are evocative, but what they evoke goes beyond the saying.r />
  An extreme example of Ford’s peculiar verbal alchemy is “Pansolapia,” in which time has been abolished, at the cost not only of sequence but of causality. Dreaming of his fate-to-come, a sailor decides not to travel beyond the end of the world, and so gives birth to a dream-child. Simultaneously he drowns on his return from that ill-fated journey to a place where lion-men can speak but only in a language that has no meaning. Drowning, he enters a castle. Waking, he finds himself aboard the ship. These are not separate fates but aspects of the same thing experienced all at once. He is contained within a sorceress’s dream, just as she is contained in his. But dreams can kill, and their consequences cannot be contained. Elsewhere, Ford writes, “Make no mistake, words have magic.” Never more so than here.

  If a lion could speak, Wittgenstein tells us, we could not understand it. More famously, he said, “That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence.” If I have made Ford seem cryptic and elusive, it is not because he is trying to mystify the reader but because he is in hot pursuit of truths that are extremely difficult to put into words.

  “The Honeyed Knot” cuts right to the heart of that pursuit. It begins with a cascade of tales, story after story tumbling down the page, related by a protagonist who is Ford himself, teaching a writing course that is for his students more a means of self-discovery than a road to publication. One tale steps forward to achieve centrality, but its uncertainties and revelations do not trace a straightforward arc of revelation. The discoveries made by Ford, searching for the truth behind the tales, fold in upon themselves and reconnect in unexpected ways. The machineries of night are at work here, and if their mechanisms cannot be laid bare, their effects can at least be held up for examination.

  Ford says that “The Honeyed Knot” is highly autobiographical. He held that job. The students were all real, as were the stories they wrote. One of them did indeed murder a little girl. He wrote this story as a kind of exorcism of his sense of disappointment in himself for not being able to foresee and prevent that death. “One of the things I think the story gets at is how a sense of responsibility can exceed its bounds and turns into a kind of destructive vanity or self-righteousness,” he told me. “Maybe that’s what I was going for there. Believing I should be able to do things I had no way of doing.”

  So there is serious stuff going on here. But I invite you to examine “The Honeyed Knot” on a more superficial level. In it, Ford’s universe is revealed to be literally made up of stories. And the revelation at the end, the explication of the “honeyed knot” that is the story’s central metaphor, leads us again both outward and inward, to life and to words.

  If you were to require me to explain Ford’s fiction with his own words, however, that’s not where I would have you look. Rather, I would refer you to the last story in this volume.

  “Bright Morning,” original to this collection, is an audacious work that is on the surface an exercise in self-reference. The narrator might as well be Jeffrey Ford’s doppelgänger. He gets the kind of blurbs and reviews that Jeffrey Ford gets. He has a publishing history not at all unlike that of Jeffrey Ford. But I wouldn’t put too much weight on that, if I were you. Ford is a trickster, and not likely to be caught out as easily as that.

  Right in the middle of “Bright Morning” comes a moment that touches upon the revelatory. “My sentences,” writes Ford, who never seeks to obscure when it’s possible to make manifest, “sometimes have the quality of Arabic penmanship, looping and knotting, like some kind of Sufi script meant to describe one of the names given to God in order to avoid using his real name.”

  Exactly. There is an inexplicable strangeness at the heart of this story, as there is in all of Ford’s work. It is not, however, an alienating, but a comprehending strangeness, a means of coming to grips with something that can almost but not quite be put into words. Time after time, his protagonists come face to face with that instant of insight that might, even if only for that instant, reveal the hidden workings and secret connections of the universe.

  But don’t take my word for it. To understand the essential strangeness of Jeffrey Ford’s world, you have only to dip into the stories contained herein. Experience the man’s voice firsthand. Let him work his magic on you. Read. Marvel. Enjoy.

  Comprehend.

  Michael Swanwick

  September 2001

  Creation

  I learned about creation from Mrs. Grimm, in the basement of her house down the street from ours. The room was dimly lit by a stained-glass lamp positioned above the pool table. There was also a bar in the corner, behind which hung an electric sign that read RHEINGOLD and held a can that endlessly poured golden beer into a pilsner glass that never seemed to overflow. That brew was liquid light, bright bubbles never ceasing to rise.

  “Who made you?” she would ask, consulting that little book with the pastel-colored depictions of agony in Hell and the angel-strewn clouds of Heaven. Mrs. Grimm had the nose of a witch, one continuous eyebrow and teacup-shiny skin—even the wrinkles seemed capable of cracking. Her smile was merely the absence of a frown, but she made candy apples for us at Halloween and marsh-mallow bricks in the shapes of wise men at Christmas. I often wondered how she had come to know so much about God, and pictured saints with halos and cassocks playing pool and drinking beer in her basement at night.

  We kids would page through our own copies of the catechism book to find the appropriate response, but before anyone else could answer, Amy Lash would already be saying, “God made me.”

  Then Richard Antonelli would get up and begin to jump around, making fart noises through his mouth, and Mrs. Grimm would shake her head and tell him God was watching. I never jumped around, never spoke out of turn, for two reasons, neither of which had to do with God. One was what my father called his “size ten,” referring to his shoe, and the other was that I was too busy watching that sign over the bar, waiting to see the beer finally spill.

  The only time I was ever distracted from my vigilance was when she told us about the creation of Adam and Eve. After God had made the world, he made them too, because he had so much love and not enough places to put it. He made Adam out of clay and blew life into him, and, once he came to life, God made him sleep and then stole a rib and made the woman. After the illustration of a naked couple consumed in flame, being bitten by black snakes and poked by the fork of a pink demon with horns and bat wings, the picture for the story of the creation of Adam was my favorite. A bearded God in flowing robes leaned over a clay man, breathing blue-gray life into him.

  That breath of life was like a great autumn wind blowing through my imagination, carrying with it all sorts of questions like pastel leaves that momentarily obscured my view of the beautiful flow of beer. Was dirt the first thing Adam tasted? Was God’s beard brushing against his chin the first thing Adam felt? When he slept, did he dream of God stealing his rib and did it crack when it came away from him? What did he make of Eve and the fact that she was the only woman for him to marry? Was he thankful it wasn’t Amy Lash?

  Later on, I asked my father what he thought about the creation of Adam, and he gave me his usual response to any questions concerning religion. “Look,” he said, “it’s a nice story, but when you die you’re food for the worms.” One time my mother made him take me to church when she was sick, and he sat in the front row, directly in front of the priest. While everyone else was genuflecting and standing and singing, he just sat there staring, his arms folded and one leg crossed over the other. When they rang the little bell and everyone beat their chest, he laughed out loud.

  No matter what I had learned in catechism about God and Hell and the Ten Commandments, my father was hard to ignore. He worked two jobs, his muscles were huge, and once, when the neighbors’ Doberman, big as a pony, went crazy and attacked a girl walking her poodle down our street, I saw him run outside with a baseball bat, grab the girl in one arm and then beat the dog to death as it tried to go for his throat. Throughout all of this he never lost the
cigarette in the corner of his mouth and only put it out in order to hug the girl and quiet her crying.

  Food for the worms, I thought, and took that thought along with a brown paper bag of equipment through the hole in the chain-link fence, into the woods that lay behind the schoolyard. Those woods were deep, and you could travel through them for miles and miles, never coming out from under the trees or seeing a backyard. Richard Antonelli hunted squirrels with a BB gun in them, and Bobby Lenon and his gang went there at night, lit a little fire and drank beer. Once, while exploring, I discovered a rain-sogged Playboy; once, a dead fox. Kids said there was gold in the creek that wound among the trees and that there was a far-flung acre that sunk down into a deep valley where the deer went to die. For many years it was rumored that a monkey, escaped from a traveling carnival over in Brightwaters, lived in the treetops.

  It was midsummer and the dragonflies buzzed, the squirrels leaped from branch to branch, frightened sparrows darted away. The sun beamed in through gaps in the green above, leaving, here and there, shifting puddles of light on the pine-needle floor. Within one of those patches of light, I practiced creation. There was no clay, so I used an old log for the body. The arms were long, five-fingered branches that I positioned jutting out from the torso. The legs were two large birch saplings with plenty of spring for running and jumping. These I laid angled to the base of the log.

  A large hunk of bark that had peeled off an oak was the head. On this I laid red mushroom eyes, curved barnacles of fungus for ears, a dried seedpod for a nose. The mouth was merely a hole I punched through the bark with my penknife. Before affixing the fern hair to the top of the head, I slid beneath the curve of the sheet of bark those things I thought might help to confer life—a dandelion gone to ghostly seed, a cardinal’s wing feather, a see-through quartz pebble, a twenty-five-cent compass. The ferns made a striking hairdo, the weeds, with their burrlike ends, formed a venerable beard. I gave him a weapon to hunt with: a long, pointed stick that was my exact height.