Table of Contents
Title Page
Foreword
Warning Sign
Contemporary Country Music: A Songbook
Title: SUPPORT THE TROOPS
Title: WE DON’T HAVE MUCH MONEY BUT WE HAVE A FAITH CALLED JESUS
Title: THE WORLD IS FULL OF MANY PEOPLE THOUGH WE REMAIN PROUDLY IGNORANT OF ...
Title: TECHNOLOGY IS OVERWHELMING BUT FUN
Title: DON’T FORGET ABOUT YOUR BUDDIES AT THE BAR
Title: EVERY MAN MAKES MISTAKES IN HIS LIFE AND AS LONG AS HE ACKNOWLEDGES THEM ...
Title: OCCASIONALLY WE REQUIRE THAT OLD-TIME MOUNTAIN MUSIC
Title: HANG ONTO YOUR SMALL-TOWN VALUES WHEREVER YOU GO
Title: AS GRANTED BY THE CONSTITUTION EVERY CITIZEN HAS THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS
Title: FOCUS ON THE FAMILY
Something in My Eye
If We Should Ever Meet
Whoring
Five Didactic Tales
1. THE LONESOME VEHICLE
2. THE GREAT HOUSE
3. THE FAST MEAL
4. THE VENGEFUL MEN
5. THE STRANGE NURSE
Repenting
The New Year
The Buddy
Murder Ballad
Last Seen
I Shall Not Be Moved
Acknowledgments
Copyright Page
Foreword
Three or four stories into Michael Jeffrey Lee’s Something in My Eye—I believe it was right after I read the phrase “The motel had complimentary toilet paper”—that I became aware of feeling what I can only describe as a rush of gratitude, pure and simple. Specifically, I felt grateful that a press like Sarabande exists, so that this remarkable story collection will be able to go out in the world and find other grateful readers.
Mavis Gallant, who is among the very greatest short-story writers of this (or any) century, has said that stories should not be read one after another, but one at a time, with pauses in between. In the pauses between reading the stories in Something in My Eye—not while I was reading them, because they held my full attention—I had begun to imagine a conversation. This fantasy discussion seemed to be taking place between a literary editor at a mainstream publishing house, a real reader who admired the singular voice of a writer, let’s say Michael Jeffrey Lee, and a person from the marketing department, who had a very different opinion. I kept hearing what the marketing person would say, the adjectives predicting why this book might have an especially difficult journey from the point of origin to the point of sale and into the hands of the consumer.
Here’s how that side of the conversation might go: Too dark. Too strange. Too disturbing. Too many of the characters are not automatically sympathetic. You certainly don’t want to date them or go out for a beer with them after yoga class or working out at the gym. Worse still, it’s hard to find another book—another book that made money—that one can compare this to, another book that this collection more or less exactly resembles.
All of which is true, and all of which is why I so admire Something in My Eye. Of course I would eliminate the “too” in front of dark and strange and disturbing. The other objections—excessive originality and characters about whom we may have mixed feelings—are in my opinion major recommendations. I myself don’t read to meet more people I’d want to date or have a beer with.
I was drawn to Michael Jeffrey Lee’s lineup of loners and drifters, imperiled children, and haunted psychos neither because I want to hang out with these bad boys, nor because I plan to cross the street when I see them coming, but because the invitation to inhabit their minds, to see the world through their eyes, and to watch their often unsettling stories play out in space and time enables Lee to do all sorts of extremely interesting things with consciousness and language. If I failed to mention the marketing person’s discomfort with the loopy off-key humor, perhaps it’s because I wasn’t sure if he or she would even register how funny these stories frequently are.
Allow me to quote from the passage that, for me, sealed the deal. It appears in the story “If We Should Ever Meet,” which is narrated by a man who had been fired from his job for reasons unrelated to the private hell he’s been inhabiting because he semi-lied about seeing a man jump from the roof of his office building. Even as our hero goes through the motions of moving to a new town and “starting over,” he is haunted by memories of a brother who, before he was redeployed and killed in battle, used to lead the family in a “vague and kind of ominous” song he’d written about meeting strangers, a song which the family found “controversial” because they weren’t strangers but close relations.
In the mornings I would shower and shave with a disposable razor and soap, which was sometimes tricky because I tend to grow hair inconsistently, at inordinate speeds along different parts of my face. The motel had complimentary toilet paper, so I was able to staunch any of my cuts with little folded scraps before I left my room. One day though, I was in such a hurry that I cut myself under my nose, bad enough that I had to ask the manager nicely for a Band-Aid. People gave me nasty looks on the bus that morning, and I only figured out why, when, after I had filled out an application at a coffee shop and was using the bathroom in the back, I noticed that I had a pretty sizable amount of blood in my teeth, which I wasn’t able to taste because of the cinnamon gum I was chewing. My brother’s song went something like: If we should ever meet, I will kindly take your hand. If we should ever meet, I will cudgel every lamb. If we should ever meet, I will wear my cleanest gown. If we should ever meet, I will set fire to this town. If we should ever meet, I will deny those close to me. If we should ever meet, I will feign to disagree.
It’s hard to explain precisely why I found this passage thrilling. Either you get it or you don’t. But it did make me wonder why my imaginary person from marketing didn’t seem to consider the existence and tastes of readers like myself, who are drawn a literary experience that sends one’s brain on a sort of roller-coaster joy ride careening from sentence to sentence. I enjoy the suspense of not knowing where a phrase or a thought will end up, let alone an entire story. I like trusting that the destination to which I’ll be taken will be rewarding, and that it won’t be anywhere I would have thought to go on my own.
Another story, “The New Year,” takes place on the bank of a river where an even further down-on-his luck narrator is living on a couch that literally fell off the back of a truck and over the side of a bridge in the course of a catastrophic auto wreck. As the story opens, our hero is bathing in the river and listing all the things he has to be thankful for.
1. The recent return of my health.
2. The range of my mobility.
3. The fact that there was always someone listening to my prayers.
4. The fact that I had not been murdered at any time the past year.
5. My couch.
At the end of the story the narrator explains why he has troubled us with this narrative that involves (among other things) his odd manner of life, a meeting with a stranger, a suicide, and what may strike us as a uniquely dada approach to political campaigning. “I want to end this positively . . . because I know that these kinds of moments are the only things people remember from the stories that they hear. I want to leave you feeling good. But however you feel, good or bad, for some reason, right now, I feel the need to tell you that, selfish as it might seem, the most important reason why I am telling this is because I want you to remember me.”
Reading the stories in Something in My Eye, you will want to tell this character and his creator: Don’t worry. I do feel better. And I won’t forget you.
—Francine Prose
Warning Sign
I was seated comfortably in a bright room, surrounded by cameras and microphones and the people who pointed them. On a table before me, just as I had requested, they had placed a glass of spring water and a plate of decadent cheeses. I had contacted every major news outlet I could find the day before, telling them—should they offer enough money—that I would consent to a taped interview on the subject of the perpetrator. Normally I would have tried to abstain from capitalizing on an atrocity, but I was unemployed at the time, and a bit frustrated with the direction my life had recently taken, and so, after considering the exorbitant sums that they offered, and imagining all the ways in which the money would help me get back on track, I decided that it would be an act of incredible pride to turn them down, and so complied.
“It’s hard to believe that only twenty-four hours have passed since the incident,” they said.
“Yes,” I said, “when I close my eyes, all I see are the faces of the dead and missing.” This was true. I had found it difficult to sleep the night before.
“It will haunt us all for many years to come,” they offered.
“It?” I said.
“The event yesterday,” they said.
“Something new will replace it,” I said. I ate a piece of cheese.
“Tell us how you knew Buddy.”
“Buddy was my roommate.”
“We understand that you and Buddy had other roommates. . . .”
“Oh yes,” I said. “But they lived in different parts of the house. Have you spoken to them?”
“They’ve agreed to talk,” they said, “but you’re our first, among those who knew him. We were told you knew him best.”
“I knew him fairly well,” I said. “We had different schedules.”
“So you shared a room with Buddy?”
“Yes,” I said. “Our beds were on opposite sides of the room, next to our desks.”
“Was it your decision to arrange the room this way?”
“I suppose. I guess that it was.”
“Did you see Buddy yesterday morning?”
“Do you mean the morning of the atrocity?” I asked.
“It will be difficult for us to continue this interview if the word ‘atrocity’ is repeatedly used. Many of us have friends who have friends who have friends who perished in the . . . yesterday.”
“I’ll try to work around it,” I said.
“You seem a bit detached, given the trauma of the last twenty-four hours.”
“My grief and anger are packed so tightly inside me,” I said, “they might take a few minutes to loosen themselves.”
“Take us through yesterday morning.”
“Well,” I said, “when I opened my eyes from sleep, Buddy was performing jumping jacks in the middle of the room. He liked to do them very slowly. He would raise his pale arms and clap them together. He was very steady. Are you familiar with the paleness of his skin?”
“It is very pale,” they said. “What else did you perceive?”
“Sometimes, during his jumping jacks, his hands wouldn’t meet each other and his wrists would slap together.”
“There seems something symbolic in that action,” they said. “A circle closing, then reopening. The hands slapping against each other, eager for something to do. The very hands that would later that day. . . . How did you fail to pick up on it?”
“I suppose you have a point,” I said, “but I focused on the beauty of his movements, nothing more. Is that acceptable? I feel as if I’m on the witness stand.” I was trying to stretch the interview as long as possible, because several of them had offered to pay me by the minute instead of a single lump sum. At this point in our conversation, beneath the table on which my water and cheese lay, I had uncapped my pen and begun scribbling on the palm of my hand.
“Please don’t get upset,” they said. “If we sometimes sound harsh and insensitive, it’s only because we aim to find out the truth of yesterday morning.”
“I’m doing fine,” I said.
“And besides, appreciation of beauty doesn’t really pertain much to Buddy’s story,” they said. “There was, in fact, nothing beautiful about his actions yesterday.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“Are you also aware that at the jailhouse where they are holding him, he routinely asks—on the hour—to be executed?”
“Such a strange man,” I said. “Out of curiosity, what manner of execution is he requesting?”
“A hanging. He has stressed several times that it must be public.”
“It’s not so good to hang a man,” I said, feeling a little bold. “The rope leaves a hideous bruise. And the soiled trousers. . . .”
“So you are intimately familiar with the hanged?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “My brother went the way of the rope a long time ago.” Again I was not lying.
“That’s very sad. Very interesting and sad.” I saw several of them dab handkerchiefs at their eyes. “Does suicide run in your family?”
“Oh, no,” I said. “My brother committed an atrocity and was justly punished for it.”
“How is it,” they said, “that you have managed to avoid this kind of fate yourself? You carry your parents’ genes, after all.”
“I was adopted,” I said. Also true. “I did not meet the people who made me.”
“Here it seems appropriate,” they said, “to ask how you came to know Buddy?”
“I answered his want ad for a roommate.”
“Do you remember what the ad said?”
“Oh, yes. ‘Happy man needs like creature to sleep on other side of bedroom and pay half the rent, until the day when roommate is no longer present among the willing, at which point remaining roommate will pay rent in totality or find other roommate.’ ”
“So you might admit that right away, the warning signs were there?”
“I find people very difficult to read,” I said. “And I admired his honesty in saying that there would come a day when he’d be gone. I can’t tell you how many roommates of mine have skipped out without any notice.”
“Do you plan to search for a replacement, now that Buddy is gone?”
“No,” I admitted. “I think a part of me still believes he will come back. I plan to leave his bed the way he left it.”
“And what way was that?”
“Messy,” I said, which had everyone, including myself, laughing for a moment.
Then a door on the side of the room opened, and several more of them walked in, carrying cameras and microphones. Some very good-looking ones approached me, and—whispering in my ear—offered outrageous sums for the chance to record the remainder of my interview. Obviously I agreed. I even signed the contracts with my own pen.
“Now,” they said, “Did you two have a conversation while he performed his jumping jacks?”
“No,” I said. “I knew enough not to disturb him when he exercised. However, when he was finished, he came and sat at the edge of my bed and leaned over me.”
“The memory must be chilling now, considering what he was doing only hours later.”
“I thought it was nice of him to devote time out of his busy day to me. While I pretended to sleep, he whispered a song in my ear. To interrupt him would have been a sin, his voice was so gorgeous.”
“Tell us the nature of the song,” they said.
“Well,” I said, “the melody was rather rudimentary, almost folksy. Were it not for the lyrics, it could have been a children’s song. He sang, ‘Farewell endless toiling, farewell old shambling frame. I’m attending to my second self, reacquiring my good name. Please regard me joyfully, as you listen to me sing. I have an appointment in America, for to kiss the king’s fat ring.’ Then he went on to rhyme ‘atrocity’ with ‘paucity,’ which I thought especially clever.”
“And how did you interpret those lines?”
“I didn’t,” I said. “I thought it was a spiritual.”
“Do you realize,” they said, “that he was spelling
out exactly what he was going to do later that day? The fatalism in those farewells? The second self? The fat ring of the king? It couldn’t be more obvious.”
“Well, now that you mention it, his words do seem a bit prophetic. Maybe Buddy was trying to warm me, in his own way. He was quite a man.” My heart ached a little for him just then.
“Did you say warn, or warm?”
“I don’t remember,” I said.
“In what way was he quite a man?”
“Well,” I said, “yesterday morning, after his jumping jacks and that apparently clue-ridden song, I opened my eyes just as he began disrobing. He stood there, in his glory, for several minutes, until I told him to get in the shower or risk getting me a little hot under the comforter. I’m sure you know how well-proportioned Buddy is—you have access to medical records, correct?”
“Yes, but this is news to us that the two of you had a relationship.”
“Oh, not at all,” I said. “We were perfect platonic roommates. Only it had been a good number of months since I’d had a chance to ravish someone, so I was definitely ready to go. I’m sure everyone here can relate.”
The room went silent. I looked down to see what I had written on my palm, but discovered that my pen had exploded—my hands were smeared all over with ink and nothing legible remained.
“We are,” they said, “so deeply saddened by the . . . events yesterday, that it seems impossible, at this moment, to either empathize or fail to be offended by your sentiment.”
“May I ask a favor?”
“You may.”
“I’m feeling a little tickle in my lungs as I talk, and if it isn’t too much to ask, I’d like a towel to expel the culprit into.”
Then the door opened and one of them left. We all sat in silence. Some cried silently, shifting the cameras away from me and onto themselves, while into the cameras they mouthed the word “why?” over and over. Then the door opened again, and someone in white entered, making his way down the aisle. He placed the towel on the table. With a clean finger I drew it to the table’s edge, picked it up, coughed several times into it, and then, when it was safely in my lap, used it to clean the ink.
Something in My Eye: Stories Page 1