Interfictions 2

by Delia Sherman

  Hanging over the depleted reservoir I fall into a meditation of things the 121 recall: a yellow prom dress, a golden retriever, the face of a child. I find myself reproducing the images of these things on my surface. I am drawn to my own reflection on the low water, and without realizing it I drop close enough to raise steam. Through the haze I stare at the buttery orchid a key grip has conjured out of me. I hover a moment, and then fly high over the hills to wait for sunrise.

  * * * *

  Before dawn arrives, a dark sedan drives up to the reservoir, and a man in a dark suit gets out. He walks to the edge of the water, lights a cigarette, and waves. I move closer.

  "Mr. 121?"

  "Just 121,” I say. “I'm not a Mister or a Miss."

  "Right,” he says. “Sorry about that. My name is Howard Callaghan. Special Agent Callaghan. Can we talk?"

  "We're talking now."

  "Yes.” He takes a long drag off his cigarette and then picks something off his tongue. “We've learned something about the bomb,” he says. “A man named Phil Lima built it. We believe it detonated accidentally—"

  I guess I flare up a little, because he takes a step back and shades his eyes. Inside me the 121 are rioting. If they had bodies, Phil's would be torn to shreds.

  Callaghan holds up a manila folder. “We have evidence that he intended to use it—"

  I lash the folder with a tentacle of flame, setting it ablaze. Callaghan drops it and steps back, his hand going to his pistol. After a moment he must realize how foolish that is.

  "I have other copies.” His hands shake as he replaces the pistol in its holster.

  I expand to my full size and hang over Callaghan, so close that I see my reflection in the sweat on his forehead. I know I would burn him if there was no other way to shut him up. I hang there, rotating, breathing black and orange gouts. I can't tell my rage from that of the dead inside me. I'm not sure I want to keep it under control.

  He spreads his hands and takes a step back; the cigarette falls from his lips. He gets in the sedan and drives away.

  Phil hasn't said a word.

  * * * *

  I spend the night wandering the city, blazing up at the stars, wondering if they burn rage as well as helium. At some point I realize I'm moving down Highland Avenue. It's morning, although I can't see the sun. The Stooges are walking behind me, arguing.

  "Here's what I don't get,” says Moe. “Muslims don't allow their dead to be cremated, right? They consider it a desecration."

  "I didn't know that,” says Larry.

  "It's true. So how do the people who train suicide bombers convince them that it's OK to vaporize themselves like that? It's the same thing, isn't it?"

  "They're fanatics,” says Larry. “The Quran doesn't condone religious violence, either, but it still happens."

  "That isn't the reason,” says Curly. “It's very simple—it's the difference between life and death. The bombers are alive when they're blown apart. No one is desecrating them; it's their final act, their choice."

  An unmarked black sedan is following us, creeping along the curb about twenty feet behind the Stooges. No lights, no siren. I turn off Highland onto Santa Monica, heading west toward the mountains and the Pacific. Two more squad cars turn to join the first.

  Lots parked with rusted weed-catchers, caved-in strip malls picked clean. A red-and-yellow Shakey's Pizza blazes on the right, a shredded “GRAND RE-OPENING” banner in front. There's not enough water to fight all the fires. The ATF Studio Lot is on the left; Phil told me it used to be United Artists, back in the day. Not so long ago. Sometimes I have to remind myself how young I am.

  I asked Phil once if he missed the way things were before Justice won the war. He said he missed the way things never were. The way he said it, I could tell it was something he'd started saying a long time before, maybe back when he first met Holly. I'd like to ask him about it now, but I'm too angry.

  Phil was right about L.A. and Baghdad, though. This is just a desert town surrounded by enemies, trying to keep up appearances.

  AL-MUSTAKFI

  This will be the end of the Abassids.

  AL-QAHIR

  Idiot. You equate your own fortunes with those of the caliphate? L'?tat, ce n'est-pas toi.

  AL-MUTTAQI

  Now that the Turks are gone from the city, the Shi'a will rise. I have seen it.

  AL-MUSTAKFI

  You see nothing. You are blind, have you forgotten?

  He laughs, and al-Qahir joins in. Al-Muttaqi throws a punch in the direction of al-Mustakfi's voice, and the three of them begin scuffling. Behind them, a parade of conquerors marches: the Bayids, the Seljuks, Ayyubids, Mongols, Jalayirids, Quyunlu, Safavid, Ottomans, British, on and on and on, grinding the great city into ruins beneath their feet.

  * * * *

  West Hollywood. Sex and hamburgers. Inside me, Phil is talking to Holly, while 119 other voices shriek a backing soundtrack.

  "It was an accident,” says Phil. “I was going to put it in the administration offices."

  "Because that would have been OK,” she says.

  "There are only two choices in life: you live or you fight. Not because the fighting kills you, although it often does, but because to really fight you have to give up living."

  "What is art, then?” Holly asks.

  "Art,” says Phil, “is not making the choice."

  Behind me the ululations of the mourners become sirens. I am a long way from the ocean. The vizier's men—the attorney general's, I mean—are lined up behind me for almost a mile, two and three cars abreast. Helicopters thunder above. I haven't seen the hoses yet, but I know they are coming.

  They have taken the Stooges into protective custody, but I know what they are saying. This is the moment. They don't want to miss it.

  I can move fast when I want to. I rise above the shopping towers and the apartment complexes, shining down brighter than the sun behind the city's gray haze. I hear Callaghan's voice through a bullhorn, but I can't distinguish the words through the polyglot of voices demanding blood.

  I fly toward the ocean.

  By now Justice has blacklisted me. Marty's going to flip out. I'm seven months old, and I'd never threatened one of the Trinity before last night.

  It's sort of a desert palette I've been given. It seems appropriate. Not quite enough green, I suppose. But a little gray mixed in with the yellow might work. Colors of destruction and desire. Red like a fruit, or a warning, or skin flushed with need. Yellow for sunlight and cowardice and gold. Black, and white, and gray for all the choices in between.

  Phil's choice killed him, but it also gave me life. The script we've created together has given me purpose, and the rage of those he killed has given me resolve. This won't make up for their deaths, but maybe it will mean something to the ones who are still alive.

  The ocean is far enough below that no ships will reach me, far enough that the spray does not hiss along my underside. I could let go, dive down, see if I can be extinguished after all.

  But for now I am making something, a moving image I cannot see, a story that will shift over the hours and days and—if I can sustain it for that long—the years. I invite my cast of dozens to speak through me, to let me be their medium. This can't be just Phil's script, not now. It has to come from all of us to mean anything. If that means we will contradict ourselves, then so be it.

  The angry voices of the 121 carry over the water in all the languages we know. We don't know who will choose to watch or listen. We don't know what they will take from what they see and hear. We have to set aside hoping for that, and just hope they will look at us, stretched out to our fullest size, brushing light and heat across ourselves like a living canvas.

  Look at us, world.

  Look at us not making the choice.

  * * * *

  If interstitial art is art about the between, about gaps, then I think that's where I live, and probably where all of us live at one time or another. Whether it's in small way
s, like living in so-called flyover country, or in big ways, like waiting to find out what happens in an economic apocalypse.

  In “The 121” things get a bit recursive; part of the foundation of the story is stolen from the film The Third Man, which is about life in fragmented Vienna after World War II. Except that the setting is a fragmented United States, and the protagonist is a movie star with a fragmented self. Sometimes I think that's what an artist is, someone who's always moving in all directions, seeing the world from every angle, looking in as much as out. Sometimes that's paralyzing. To keep creating it, you have to believe that art is worth something, that the gaps you expose will resonate with others, that we all know that between and what it feels like to be there. That's a shaky faith, sometimes, and in large part that's what this story is about.

  David J. Schwartz

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Afterwords: An Interstitial Interview by

  Colleen Mondor with Christopher Barzak

  and Delia Sherman

  Colleen Mondor: In discussions on the idea and definition of interstitial writing, writers and editors often describe it as a “crossing of literary borders” or “filling of gaps between literary conventions.” I'm curious as to why we need to formally address this so-called Interstitial DMZ (to quote Heinz Fenkl) at all. Will these stories gain following without the title of “interstitial” to describe them? How does the “interstitial” label help a story gain readership?

  Christopher Barzak: I was initially skeptical of creating a term to categorize the uncategorizable, to be honest. It was only after I began to think about the term and its openness that I started to understand how apt it is. By calling attention to the wilderness that exists between conventional genres (such as the focus on the observable, material world in realism), readers can locate a kind of writing for which they are being asked to hold no expectations whatsoever. “Interstitial” is a term that informs readers of a book's content the same way that the “romance” label signals sex, adventure, women who get their dream man, etc. As a term, “interstitial” tells readers to expect the unexpected. This may seem simple, but I think telling readers straight up that what they're reading is a narrative based on a set of rules that they may never have encountered elsewhere is not only a selling point in some cases, but also an honest contract.

  Delia Sherman: In a world of too much marketing and too many choices, labels give people something to latch onto, something to signal whether a work of art is worth their time and energy to pick up or not.

  Interstitial art, by definition, is art that's hard to describe or pigeonhole, art that stretches definitions and asks its audience to leave its expectations at the door. Some people like that experience. Some don't. Some would enjoy it if they were warned ahead of time to expect it.

  A lot of beautifully written, highly literary stories were submitted for this anthology. The question I always asked myself when I was reading something I really loved was, “who else might publish this story?” If the answer was The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, then I suggested the writer send it there. If it was Weird Tales, then I suggested that. If the answer is “beats me,” then I put it in the “to be seriously considered” pile. Because the whole point of Interfictions is to publish stories I thought wouldn't find their audience otherwise.

  Can a story (or novel's) structure mark it as interstitial regardless of content? Are there certain story elements (ghosts, hauntings, reliance upon myth or legend) that would move an otherwise literary tale into interstitial territory?

  CB: I do think that a narrative's structure in and of itself may make a piece interstitial regardless of its content. For example, though there is a sort of mysticism in M. Rickert's “The Beautiful Feast,” the story's interstitiality resides not in the mysticism so much as in the structure, which weaves in and out of time and space in the most effortless manner and is more a war story than it is a fantasy. Or consider Peter M. Ball's “Black Dog: A Biography.” Here's another story that has a sort of strange legendary creature involved in a fairly domestic account of a man who has absolutely terrible luck in love, but it wasn't the inclusion of the black dog itself that interested me so much as the story's pull between fiction and autobiographical narrative.

  Sure, I think that a blend of content—ghost stories, alien invasion, slave narrative, historical, romance, etc.) can move a story into the realm of the interstitial. The problem I have with the term “literary” is that it connotes “realism,” when in fact I think it's a much more usable term for any writing in which not only the tale but how the tale is told—its structure and style—are particular features. For example, Alan DeNiro's “The Warp and the Weft” is particularly easy to categorize in terms of its content: it's science fiction. But the structure of the story and the language he invents in the telling are completely unlike the plate glass prose of conventional science fiction. In this case, it's not the content of the story that makes it interstitial, it's the language and structure that take it outside of its own genre's expectations.

  DS: All serious fiction is literary fiction. Domestic realism, which is the genre that so-called mainstream literary fiction properly belongs to, is as circumscribed by genre convention and expectation as the hardest SF or the most formulaic bodice-buster romance.

  That said, interstitial fiction isn't just domestic realism with ghosts or gods inserted like raisins in a pudding. Of the twenty-one stories in Interfictions 2, only three include ghosts, and in no case is the ghost the primary point of the story. In “The Score,” Jake's ghost is almost incidental—a by-product of the media controversy surrounding his death. In “The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria,” the ghost of Sal's mother is a problem to solve according to scientific principles as understood by a ten-year-old boy whose father had been a Santero in Cuba. In “After Verona,” the ghosts are mysteries without answers—mysteries a lot less pressing than how and why Verona died.

  Certainly, most of these stories have an unusual narrative structure. “The Long and the Short of Long-Term Memory” is structured around a series of medical diagrams illustrating the physiology of memory. “Valentines” is a series of recursive descriptions of three different men who might or might not be the same man. “L'Ile Close” cycles repetitively, like its characters, through all the variations of the Arthurian legend. But “Remembrance Is Something Like a House” is a fairly straightforward narrative of a cross-country journey undertaken by a house that has something it really, really wants to communicate—from the house's point of view.

  So, I guess the real answer is: it depends.

  The problem with trying to pin down interstitial fiction is that the examples are going to change from year to year. Stories that were interstitial when they were published are now the proud centers of their own subgenres: steampunk, mythic fiction, fairy-tale retellings. I wouldn't say that any of the stories we published in Interfictions 1 looks sweetly old-fashioned after only two years. But I expect some of them will after ten years. As will the stories we have collected here.

  Well, not sweet, maybe, or exactly old-fashioned. But no longer outposts on the edge of genre.

  Chris, I thought it was interesting that your story “What We Know About the Lost Families of House,” a haunted house story, was published in the first Interfictions collection while your first novel, One for Sorrow which relies heavily on the protagonist's interaction with more than one ghost, is categorized as literature. In your own writing, where do you think the line between interstitial fiction and general fiction lies?

  CB: For my own writing, I believe the line between interstitial fiction and general fiction exists in a couple of places. Contentwise, I tend to treat fantastical elements as realistically as I do anything that we typically consider part of the real, observable world. So when a boy falls into a hole where a murdered boy was initially buried, he comes out transformed, a bit of death caught inside him, the same way, say, Frodo Baggins begins to slowly wither towar
d death after being pierced by the blade of a death knight in Lord of the Rings.

  There is a logic to all of this, and I treat it logically, rather than fantastically, even though I set my stories, for the most part, in the recognizable world, rather than in Middle Earth. In terms of structure or style, though, as in “The Lost Families of House,” I tend to try to write around the ordinary conventions that make up a haunted-house narrative; to erase the expected trappings and setup and follow-up; and also (at least in that story) to hold the narrative together in a collective narrator's voice ("we” of the small-town setting) while at the same time breaking the narrative with subheadings and jumps in time between past and present, and with arguments among the members of the collective narrator about how to interpret anything that occurs in the story (and sometimes argument arises within the collective narrator in regard to a belief the narrator claims for the entire community, while others disagree with that same statement of belief). So for me the interstitial is both a way of treating the fantastic as if it is real, and the real as if it's strange, and also a way for me to push against the rules of the techniques and various aspects of fiction—structure and point of view, etc.—that I've chosen to use in a given piece.

  What do you think of a book like Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union, which is about an alt-history Jewish settlement in Alaska, being marketed and shelved as literature rather than fantasy? Aren't these interstitial titles?

  CB: I'd definitely say that book is interstitial in several ways. It's being marketed as general fiction rather than as any one of the various genres from which it draws, but in a bookstore, sellers like to pigeonhole for the sake of convenience. In an ideal bookstore, such books would be tagged under each category that they partipate in, but apparently this is too difficult to manage, at least from what I've been told by people who work in sales and marketing. They've never clearly explained why it's difficult, only that it is. I myself think it would be worthwhile to find a way to help bring books to a much broader audience.