The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant

by Jeffrey Ford

  The glow of the ringed planet shone in the one small window above where he slept on the floor. He became immediately aware that he was not alone in the structure. He cleared his eyes and saw the gleam of their hair and the shadowed curves and soft contours of their naked bodies.

  “Methina,” he said and held out his arms.

  As she came toward him, the final move of the Lover’s Conceit, she smiled sharply in her myriad forms.

  There you have it, one kernel of human history to serve as an example of the whole twisted game. The planet that Sikes had been stranded on is now called Fereshin, and the oasis that held him captive still exists. The Geets are still there and yet more changes have been wrought in them, leading on from the work he had accomplished. There are those who still bare a strong resemblance to Methina, and irony of ironies, their eyes are now the exact green of Karjeet. This development came not directly from Sikes but from their acquired cannibalism of those born differently without their selected beauty. Some chemical in the heart, I believe.

  Sikes’s unnatural stress on the species moved them to a sharper level of cognizance. The Methinas who became violently ill from the consumption of his flesh now had the wherewithal to remember never to devour another like Sikes again. His looks had become imprinted upon their newly vibrant minds and, in their eating of the ugly others of their species, they avoided those Geets who carried any of his physical traits. Follow the progression of this practice over generations. Now, if you were to travel to Fereshin and the far oasis in the red desert, you would find it predominantly populated with a multitude of Sikeses and Methinas, like a single couple trapped in a labyrinth of mirrors.

  The old saw in writing fiction is show it, don’t tell it, but there are those writers who tell it and do so to wonderful effect—Borges, Chekhov, Steven Millhauser, sometimes Kipling. This is a story in the “tell it” vein. I was influenced in writing this piece by the book, Ka, a reconfiguration of the stories of the Gods of India, by Roberto Calasso. These amazing myths take all kinds of wild and wacky plot twists without warning. They waste little time on devices that contemporary fiction insists upon to suspend disbelief. The concept at the end of “The Far Oasis” that deals with the radical altering of a species through unnatural selection came to me through an essay in Carl Sagan’s collection Cosmos. In this essay, he tells about a place in the Sea of Japan, where a princess and her Samurai retinue drowned themselves instead of being captured by the enemy. Local crab harvesters, in the ages that followed, sometimes found crabs with a mottling on their shells that somewhat depicted the face of a Samurai and would throw them back in honor of that ancient sacrifice. Now, there exists in those waters a species of crab whose shells carry precise portraits of those noble warriors.

  The Woman Who Counts Her Breath

  Dorothy Himmelreich, as I know her, has a stocky build, generous of bosom and gut, a rear end in the Rubens-meets-gravity line, and rather thin limbs. She wears her hair cut short, a bleached-blonde skullcap that is never quite perfectly combed. All of this is of little consequence, existing merely to frame her face. It is a meaty face, jowly, and thick in the lips. Her nose is short and pushed in a bit. The eyes are deep-set and always on the move, scanning the room to see that everything fits into her expectation of how it all must be. Should she come across, say, a child acting out or a person expressing a complex thought, her top lip curls ever so slightly and her nostrils flare. A slight grin that has nothing to do with merriment is the sure sign that she is about to set things straight. Her overall air is one of constant suspicion, an ever readiness to take offense.

  It is well known that Dorothy Himmelreich counts everything. The telephone poles she passes while walking, the steps from the house to the mailbox at the end of the driveway, the spots on a lady-bug’s back, the number of rings before someone picks up the telephone, the stars in the night sky, her husband’s sneezes. When the day is done and she is lying in bed, her eyes closed but not yet asleep, my mother-in-law, Dorothy Himmelreich, counts her breaths. The very experience of life for her is a running tally. Perhaps when it comes time for figuring the total, she wants to make sure she is not being overcharged. She is pathologically cheap, even to the point where I once heard her express joy at the purchase of a garden hose because it was probably the last one she would ever have to buy before she died. Her favorite story to tell is one in which a salesgirl had mistakenly undercharged her for an item.

  For one so concerned about money, it would seem logical that she would not be very interested in spending it on unnecessary items, but this is not the case. She will buy anything if it is cheap enough, and she will buy a lot of it, whether it is something she needs or not. Every weekend during spring and summer, she leaves her house early and travels to the local garage sales and flea markets. “I only spent ten dollars for all of this,” she will say to her husband while pointing to a box jammed full of rusting gadgets, single dinner plates from discontinued sets, old tools, ash trays (she doesn’t smoke), party decorations, shirts from the seventies with gravy stains. In response her husband simply stares in disbelief, his mouth open, thinking of the third stall of the garage, so heaped with possessions that it resembles the proverbial “Dark Side of the Moon.” Give the woman some credit, though; at the end of each summer, she has her own garage sale and tries to unload it all for more than she paid for it. Parting with these things causes her little anguish because she knows that the following spring other detritus will be hers again.

  Her belief system is a gumbo of stoicism and superstition. If you try to rest while the sun is up, she bangs the pots and pans in the kitchen, slams the door, calls out in a loud voice. Naps are tantamount to public masturbation. If you try to tell her about a supernova recently discovered at the edge of the universe, she will shake her head, squint her eyes, and ask you to show her in writing where you saw such a story. Since you don’t have the magazine with you, she simply smiles, self-satisfied. She has told me that she would never want to win the lottery, because that would make her famous and great catastrophes only happen to famous people. Her children have, to a degree, accepted her superstitious system. They recount a story about a young boy in the neighborhood whom she didn’t like because he was impolite. When he reached the age of twelve, he climbed a water tower in town and leaped to his death. She told her family back then that she had put a hex on the boy. Now when the story is told in her presence she does not admit to the hex, but in her eyes there are small fires burning and she can’t help but laugh.

  Her attempts at showing affection are similar to a well-trained soldier breaking down his rifle for inspection. The usual counsel of wise elders, namely, “Don’t worry, it’ll work out,” becomes metamorphosed on her lips to, “You have acted in a ridiculous manner once again.” For all of Dorothy’s inability to display emotion, my wife did tell me about having seen her cry once. On the hutch in the living room, Dorothy displayed her zoo of crystal animals. They were expensive little knickknacks and, in lieu of having to actually think of a gift, her husband would give her money at each holiday to purchase another. There were dozens of them, arranged in concentric circles around her favorite, a delicate dragonfly, which she had purchased years before with her first paycheck from her first job. Every month she would perform the ritual of dusting each piece with a small chamois cloth the size of four postage stamps. During one of the dustings, the dragonfly slipped from her hand and smashed into slivers against the hardwood floor. Her reaction only lasted a moment, but there were tears in her eyes, and a small, muffled sound of anguish escaped from her mouth. Years later I interrupted her once when she was staring into the empty center of the zoo. Her eyes were unusually vacant and her lips slightly parted.

  My mother-in-law’s cold nature has had an adverse affect on both her husband and children. The children are all grown now, married, and live on their own, but she keeps all four of them trapped tightly in orbit around her. It is her fuming silence—her never-voiced but obvious disapproval—t
hat works the trick for her. My wife has been in therapy for some time now, trying to figure out how to please her. The eldest son is a live wire of nerves. He can’t leave anything alone. If he develops a wart on his foot, he must dig at it with an X-acto blade. My wife’s older sister seeks solace in status, and veils the disappointments of the past in catalog silks and designer sunglasses. The baby brother has become a cop who, when confronted with emotional situations, stares silently into the distance. All of them are tight with a dollar. All of them can spot a garage-sale sign while doing sixty on a busy road. She does not approve of their marriage partners or the way they are raising their children. It is hard to tell how much responsibility Dorothy can claim for her husband’s dark mood. At one time, he had been creative, an artist who had attained some level of recognition. Now he is a grouch who can barely lift a paintbrush without cursing his very existence. Because of her scorn for naps, he sleeps until noon every day. Then he has lunch and works until after dinner when he begins on the martinis. Each night, he sits in his chair in the den, gazing listlessly at the television while flipping through the forty-six channels, trying to find some soft-core porn that will take him through the night. When you ask him how it’s going, his only reply is, “Grim.”

  In times of crisis, the mind of the woman who counts her breath runs flawlessly, as if filled with the whirring gears of a Swiss watch instead of the usual, easily flustered gray matter. Her solution to most problems is to restore order at any cost and then mete out a swift, harsh punishment to the responsible individual or individuals. There is no such thing as an accident to our subject; even the inherent chaos of normal change has a culprit lurking behind it, more often than not a member of some minority. Occasionally, she feels it necessary to remind even Nature that she will not tolerate any monkey business.

  My wife’s younger brother told me that one night he discovered a raccoon inside a garbage can and was quick enough to trap it by slamming the lid down tightly and placing a large brick on top. Just then, as if she knew she was needed, Dorothy appeared in her nightgown. Assessing the situation with a look that might have cracked rock, she immediately began barking orders. “Get me a light,” she said. “Go to the laundry room and bring me a bottle of Clorox and a bottle of ammonia.” When he returned, he found that she had taken a ski pole from her collection of junk in the garage and punctured a hole in the top of the plastic garbage can. For some reason, she was also wearing a black ski glove on the hand she used to grasp the pole. He was ordered to hold the light above and behind her, and was admonished when its beam strayed from the opening she had made. “Ammonia,” she said like a surgeon demanding a scalpel. Her son handed it over. The entire bottle was emptied into the hole. The procedure was repeated with the Clorox. In seconds a yellowish-gray mist began emanating from the opening, as if it were a chimney on a winter’s night, and, from within the can, he heard the creature’s claws scrabbling against the hard plastic. She stood and listened for ten minutes, her nostrils flaring. He could tell she was counting. A little while later all was silent inside the can. She turned to her son and said, as if giving the last few instructions for a recipe, “Get it out of there and beat it with a shovel. Then cut the tail off and bury it.”

  She was born during the depression, an only child. The family was poor and both her parents had to work. Her mother was a seamstress in a sweatshop, and her father a painter of houses. I have seen photographs of them. They are a tall and willowy pair. The mother wore small circular glasses that rested at the end of her nose, and her hair was put up in a bun that, in its tightness, appeared a perfect rock for hurling at a window. The father was lanky with thick wrists, and in every picture wears a look that verges on both horror and puzzlement. The mother’s favorite pastime was ironing. As Dorothy has said, “She loved to iron. She could iron all day.” Next to drinking beer, her father’s favorite hobby was cross-stitch. They lived on the bottom floor of an old two-story house. An Italian family, the Calabrias, lived in the flat above them.

  The woman who counts her breath had a lonely childhood. Her parents worked six days a week, leaving home before sunrise and not returning until well into the night. The child would wake to an empty house each day, and at night crawl under the covers with no one there to read her a story or give her courage against the dark. She had her meals with the Calabrias upstairs and, now, willingly states that it was Mrs. Calabria who really raised her. When she was not with this surrogate family for dinner or lunch (breakfast she ate in her own apartment, usually a piece of bread), she spent her days alone. She walked the neighborhood by herself, and her greatest joy was kneeling on the pavement, studying insects. Her favorites were the ants, the way they marched in single file with proper determination, the way they returned for their dead when she would thumb one into oblivion, the way they would band together to remove the pebbles with which she had plugged their holes. Most of the time she sat at home staring out the window, counting off the seconds as Sunday approached, the day her parents did not have to work.

  Sundays were days of chores. She would clean the apartment with her mother. Then they would prepare food, put up jam, bake bread. The place was not very big but the tasks continued from sunup to dinner. The times when she felt closest to her mother were when she would be allowed to sit and watch her iron. Three hours in silent communion, the old woman’s glasses fogged with steam, shrouding her eyes. On Sundays her father would wake early and go out to the bar to buy beer. He would return late in the afternoon, bringing a pail of suds home with him, and, from then till dinnertime, would sit by the front window drinking and cross-stitching initials on handkerchiefs, making wall hangings that read “A Fat Cupboard, A Lean Will.” The plan was that he would sell these creations, but in reality they just kept piling up. Before bed, the child would lift the back of her nightgown and her father would scratch her back, not with his nails but with the rough palps of his calloused fingers. Even today when Dorothy tells about this, her lips clamp together in a grin like a closed vise.

  One day, during one of her lonely journeys through town, she discovered an odd looking something growing on the branch of an oak sapling. It was shiny brown and looked like a miniature brain. She broke the branch off and brought it home and put it in her room. The seconds leading to Sunday came and went twice, and then one morning she woke to find her room filled with what she thought to be fairies. They were busy everywhere, crossing the expanse of bare wood that was her floor, scaling the curtains, traversing the ceiling, hopping about on the dresser, peeking from her shoes, reconnoitering the topography of her mounded comforter. They were tiny and dark and for much of the time stood on two legs like little men. When she crawled out of bed and her foot touched the floor, they all immediately stopped what they were doing. On closer inspection, she saw that they were baby praying mantises and that the strange little brain had been their nest. She sat down and began to count them, and, in the silence, they grew used to her presence and once again resumed their activity.

  That morning she skipped her meager breakfast and began setting up her dollhouse for them. She built forts from blocks and arranged the fleet of little wooden boats, carved by her father, on the lake that was a blue braided rug. By lunchtime, she stood in the midst of a bustling insect city. At night when she would go to bed, they would climb the bedpost and infiltrate the covers. In the mornings she would wake with dozens of tiny red bites all over her body. These little wounds itched and tormented her, but she said nothing to anyone. She never felt alone during this time.

  This all lasted till Sunday when her father, preparing to work her back, discovered, through his beer haze, the hundreds of insect bites. The slaughter that followed remains a blank spot in Dorothy’s memory. But from the way her usually wide nostrils constrict when telling the story, I can envision her mother painstakingly seeking out each little citizen of the mantis civilization and crushing it with the same patience she displayed when ironing. Here, the record becomes silent and whatever transpired
remains locked away in the past.

  One Sunday afternoon, while in the middle of ironing, Dorothy’s mother removed her spectacles and announced that she was going to have a baby. Instead of imagining a partner with whom she could share the burden of counting, Dorothy saw only a rival for her parents’ already limited attention. Before her mother put her glasses back on, she added that Dorothy’s bedroom would be needed for the nursery and that her father had gotten permission to build her a room at the back of the house. Her father, who had grown more reticent than usual of late, exhibiting a kind of general confusion in both his daily routine and cross-stitching, began at once on the room extension, working at night and on the weekends. He had always been handy with tools and had done construction before, but this job lacked his usual tenacious perfection. It was impossible to know at the time that he was suffering from the first stages of lead poisoning. The room at the back of the house was finished within a month. It was so poorly made that its walls would sway slightly in the autumn wind, and there were many gaps where the planks were supposed to fit together but, like her father’s thoughts, did not. The only substantial aspect to the room was a vault-like door that would need to be kept closed so that the cold could not creep down the hall and affect the expected baby.