by John Crowley
And what about the great ones of the world, the leaders and the Presidents for Life and the Field Marshals and the Members of Parliaments and Presidiums, have they really all come? If they have, we haven’t been informed of it—of course there are some coming with their nations, but the chance of being swallowed up amid their subjects or constituents, suffering who knows what indignities and maybe worse, has perhaps pushed a lot of them to slip into the city unobserved on special flights of unmarked helicopters and so on, to be put up at their embassies or at the Plaza or the Americana or in the vast apartments of bankers and arms dealers on Park Avenue. Surely they have left behind cohorts of devoted followers, henchmen, whatever, men who can keep their fingers on the red button or their eyes on the skies, just in case it has all been a trap, but we have to be realistic: not every goat-herd in Macedonia, every bushman in the Kalahari is going to be rounded up, and they don’t need to be for this to work—you can call your floor thoroughly swept even if a few twists of dust persist under the couch, a lost button beneath the radiator. The perfect is the enemy of the good. He’s an engineer, he must know that.
And it is working. They are filling, from top to bottom, all the great buildings, the Graybar Building, the Pan Am Building, Cyanamid, American Metal Climax, the Empire State—a crowd of Dutch men and women and children fill the souvenir shop at the top of the Empire State Building, milling, handling the small models, glass, metal, plastic, of the building they are in. The Metropolitan Museum is filling as though for a smash hit opening, Van Gogh, Rembrandt, the Modern as for a Pollack retrospective or Op Art show, there is even champagne! How is it that certain people have managed to gather with people like themselves, as on Fifth Avenue, at the Diocesan headquarters, Scribner’s bookshop, the University Club, whereas old St. Patrick’s is crowded with just everybodies, as though they had all come together to pray for rain in a drought, or to be safe from an invading army? They are the invading army!
We know so little, really, plodding along footsore and amazed yet strangely elated among the millions, the river of humanity, as Ed Sullivan said in his last column in the Daily News before publishing was suspended for the duration. The broad streets (Broadway!) just filled all the way across with persons, a river breaking against the fronts of the dispatcher stations, streams diverted, uptown, which is north more or less, downtown, which is south. And now the flood is at last beginning to lessen, to loosen, a vortex draining away into the shops and the apartments, the theaters and the restaurants.
She and I have received our assignment. The building is in Manhattan, below Houston Street, which we have learned divides the newer parts of the city from the older parts. Though old Greenwich Village is mostly above it and all of Wall Street is below it. We would like to have been ushered down that far, to find a space for ourselves in one of those titans of steel and glass, where perhaps we could look out at the Statue of Liberty and the emptied world. We were surprised to find we both wished for that! I’d have thought she’d want a small brownstone townhouse on a shady street. Anyway it’s neither of those, it’s a little loft on the corner of Spring Street and Lafayette Street, an old triangular building just five stories tall. Looking down on us from the windows on the east side of the street as we walk that way are Italian men and women, not people just arrived from Italy but the families who live in those places, for that’s Little Italy there, and the plump women in housedresses, black hair severely pulled back, and the young men with razor-cut hair and big wristwatches are the tenants there. They’re waving and shouting comments down to the crowd endlessly passing, friendly comments or maybe not so friendly, hostile even maybe, their turf invaded, not the right attitude for now.
But here we are, number 370, we wait our turn to go in and up. Stairs to the third floor. It seems artists now live in the building, they are allowed to, painters, we smell linseed oil and canvas sizing. Our artist is lean, scrawny almost, his space nearly empty, canvases leaning against the wall, their faces turned away. We look down—maybe shy—and can see in the cracks of the old floorboards what she says are metal snaps, snaps for clothing, from the days when clothes were made here by immigrants. Our artist is either happy to see us or not happy, excited and irritated, that’s probably universal, we are all cautious about saying anything much to him or to one another, after all he didn’t invite us. Okay, okay he keeps saying. Is that dark brooding resentful girl in the black leotard and Capezios his girlfriend?
Well, better here than in some vast factory floor in the borough of Queens or train shed in Long Island City, or out on Staten Island, not much different from where we come from. The ferries are leaving from Manhattan’s tip for Staten Island every few minutes, packed with people to the gunwales or the scuppers or whatever those outside edges are called. World’s cheapest ocean voyage, they say, just a nickel to cross the white-capped bay; Lady Liberty, Ellis Island deserted and derelict over that way, where once before the millions came into New York City to be processed and checked and sent out into the streets. The teeming streets. I lift my lamp beside the golden door. For a moment, thinking of that, looking down at those little metal snaps that slipped from women’s fingers fifty, sixty years ago, it all seems to make sense, a human experiment, a proof of something finally and deeply good about us and about this city, though we don’t know what, not exactly.
It’s the last day, the last evening: we’re lucky to have arrived so late, there won’t be problems with food supplies or sleeping arrangements that others are having. The plan has worked so smoothly! All the populations are being accommodated, there are fights and resistance reported in various locations, but these are being handled by the large corps of specially trained minimally armed persons—not police, not soldiers, for the police forces and the armies were the first to arrive and be distributed, for obvious reasons—because they could be ordered to, and because of what they might do if left behind till last. And now it’s done: everywhere, in every land, palm and pine, the planners and directors and their staffs have taken off their headsets, shut down their huge computers and telephone banks and telex machines—a worldwide web of information tools whose only goal has been this, this night. They have boarded the last 707s to leave Bombay, Leningrad, Johannesburg, and been taken just like all the others to the airports in New Jersey and Long Island, and when they have deplaned the crews too leave the airplanes parked and take the last buses into the city, checking their assignments with one another, joking—pilots and stewies, they’re used to bunking in strange cities. When the buses have been emptied the drivers turn them off and leave them in the streets, head for the distribution centers for assignments. Last of all the dispatchers, all done: they can hardly believe it, not an hour’s sleep in twenty-four, their ad hoc areas littered with coffee cups, telexes, phone slips, fanfold paper, cartons from the last Chinese restaurants: they gather themselves and go out into the bright streets—the grid is holding!—and they take themselves to wherever they have assigned themselves, not far because they’re walking, all the trains and taxis have stopped, no one left to ride or drive them; they mount the stairs or take the elevators up to where they are to go.
It’s done. The streets now empty and silent. The city holds its breath, they will say later.
In our loft space we have been given our drinks and our canapés. It’s not silent here: we allow ourselves to joke about it, about our being here, we demand fancy cocktails or a floor show, but in a just-kidding way—actually it’s strangely hard to mingle. She and I stick together, but we often do that at parties. We stand at the windows; we think they look toward the southeast, in the direction of most of the world’s population, though we can’t see anything, not even the night sky. Every window everywhere is lit.
But think of the darkness now over all the nightside of earth. The primeval darkness. For all the lights out there have been turned off, or not turned on, perhaps not all but so many. The quiet of all that world, around the earth and back again almost to here where we stand, this littl
e group of islands, these buildings alight and humming, you can almost hear the murmur and the milling of the people.
He was right. It could be done, he knew it could be and it has been, we’ve done it. There’s a kind of giddy pride. Overpopulation is a myth! There are so few of us compared to Spaceship Earth’s vastness, we can feel it now for certain in our hearts, we hear it with our senses.
But—many, many others must just now be thinking it too—there’s more. For now the whole process must be reversed, and they, we, have to go home again. To our home places, spacious or crowded. And won’t we all remember this, won’t we think of how for a moment we were all together, so close, a brief walk or a taxi ride all that separates any one of us from any other? And won’t that change us, in ways we can’t predict?
Did he expect that, did he think of it? Did he know it would happen? Moon-faced little man in his black horn-rims, had he known this from the start?
One final test, one final proof only remains. We’ve received our second drink. At the turntable our host places the 45 on the spindle and lets it drop. In every space in the city just at this moment, the same: on every record player, over every loudspeaker. The needle rasps in the groove—maybe there’s a universal silence for a moment, an expectant silence, maybe not—and then the startlement of music. That voice crying out, strangely urgent, almost pleading, to take his little hand, and go like this.
Alone together in the quiet world, the nations begin to twist.
Paul Park’s Hidden Worlds
THERE ARE WRITERS WHOSE biographies—in the sense of the life-stories they tell themselves about themselves—are an important force in their work, and writers whose private lives are largely irrelevant to what they write. Probably no writer can write entirely beyond the pressure of his or her own life, but those writers whose work couldn’t exist without the basis of their life experiences are identifiable: Joyce, Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Malcolm Lowry, many others, more of them the nearer we come to the present. But the writers of works now generally classed as “genre”—thrillers, horror novels, fantasy and science fiction, mysteries—seem the ones who put their lives to the least use. (New trends in mysteries, especially those from up above the 50th parallel, break away from this in certain ways.) The reason of course is that worlds created in such work have to function in ways that ordinary life-courses don’t fit into, and writers who attempt to insert their own conflicted and unsummable selves within the constraints of planetary romance or international spy chases or alternate-universe battles risk bathos.
Paul Park’s new collection Other Stories complicates these truisms in interesting ways. Park is not a realist or “mimetic” novelist. His first science fiction/fantasy series began to appear in 1984; he has written other-planet SF and a historical fantasia about Jesus. For much of the past decade he has been creating a four-volume epic set in a reimagined fin-de-siècle Europe charged with magic and dream. But his shorter work is infused with fragments and perspectives drawn from his own and his family’s life. Some of the stories are frank about the intersection of his life and times with other times and realms, others are more sideways, but none are directly autobiographical or naturalistic. Other Stories includes several of these, and the brief afterwords Park has added to each story make the connections apparent, or at least conjure them up. Several raise the question of whether in order for the fiction to have its full effect the biographical material has to be known—if the man himself, even, has to be known.
In an interview with the SF journal Locus, Park described how these metafictions arose: “A lot of things happen in my fiction through a process of accumulation rather than design,” he reports. “For example, I had loose characters wandering around in my stories and I hadn’t named them yet, so I gave them the name Paul Park as a placeholder. For me, naming characters is almost the most artificial thing you do in fiction. You have a character and you think, ‘Is this Joe Doakes? Is this Francesco Bellesandro? Who is this?’ At a certain point I just called a lot of them Paul Park…. When I started to publish those stories it was natural for people to make some connection between the character and the author because we had the same name.” Well, yes. He then came to see how interest could arise when readers came to believe that they could see traces of a real life—of his, Paul Park’s real life—even in genre or “extremely mannered” fiction.
Whether this is actually how the several stories that bear on this notion in Other Stories came to be as they are, or if the explanation is itself a metafictional dodge, is a question to be addressed. But to arrive at that I’ll look at Park’s earlier work, which to me forms a major achievement not only in the standard bookstore/publisher genres—to which it does truly belong—but in the larger or general realm of fiction as well.
His first three novels formed a trilogy, the Starbridge Chronicles, set in a world where seasons take tens of thousands of days to pass, and where a pervasive and death-oriented religion supports a vast militarized power structure. There is an Earth, and other planets, but not ours; there is an ancient hereditary monarchy, great castles, mounted soldiers, but also photographs, pickup trucks, cardboard boxes, gallows, cigars, perfumes, automatic rifles, monkish orders. The three books—their marvelous titles are Soldiers of Paradise, Sugar Rain, and The Cult of Loving Kindness—don’t have the simple forward drive of fantasy epics deriving from Tolkien (and Tolkien’s forebears), nor the sort of endpoint to which stories like those aim. There are dozens of characters, and none is precisely the hero; all of them are constrained by their place in the hierarchy, capable of cruelties they can hardly acknowledge because of their rank, and yet open to sudden transformations and escapes. Instead of a quest or a conflict that forms a thread through the imagined world, it’s the oppressive richness of that world itself that’s gripping: it’s as though the writer’s attention is inverted from the usual focus on people and events and turned instead on the inert mass of the surrounding and penetrating civilization in all its particularity. Often the characters do little but ponder these same things, before a spasm of action takes them; their actions often have effects opposite to what they hoped for, or come to nothing and leave them as they were.
The three books struck me when I first read them as an ideal kind of fantasy: one that was largely, in some sense solely, about an invented world—a world of a complexity equal to or surpassing our own, whose laws can’t be entirely known but whose physical and social constraints cause certain kinds of lives to be lived. A world like the one we inhabit, the world that SF and fantasy writers call the “shared” world: complex, irreducible, indifferent or hostile to human success. In teaching the writing of fantasy and SF I sometimes ask students to read accounts of real civilizations and cultures in this shared world, from voodoo societies to North Korean totalitarianism to Romany social practices and Tibetan religion: I want them to see that invented worlds should seem at least as elaborated and rich as the ones we humans have actually created, though they rarely are.
Park went on to write a series of unique novels that might seem to fit various common rubrics but actually don’t: an unsettling and original alien-encounter novel (Cœlestis); the fantasia on the life of Jesus, who gains his enlightenment and his teachings from Himalayan Buddhists (The Gospel of Corax); and a further take on the Jesus story which earns its intensity by an absolute and startling this-worldness (Three Marys). All of them earned insightful reviews and thoughtful praise as well as a measure of incomprehension and dismissal. Then (besides a number of unclassifiable tales, some included in the present volume) he undertook another multi-part fantasy, resembling but going far beyond the first.
The series is called collectively A Princess of Roumania—the spelling is significant—and so is the first volume, which qualifies as the common fantasy form identified by the great taxonomist of the fantastic John Clute as a portal fantasy: the kind where people pass out of the shared or common world into a different one via a portal or gate or other egress—a wardrobe in C.S. Lewis�
�s Narnia tales, a rabbit hole and a mirror in Lewis Carroll’s. Park’s setting at first is a college town in the Berkshires, recognizably Williamstown, where Miranda, a girl of twelve, lives with her adopted parents, hangs out with her new friend Peter (who was born with only one arm) and her racier girlfriend Andromeda. She was born in Romania [sic], and her adoptive parents took her at age eight from one of the hellish orphanages of the Ceausescu era. She came with a few possessions, one of which was a book, written in Romanian, seeming to have come from some long-ago time of wealth and luxury. It, and a bracelet of tiger’s heads and a few coins, had been given to her new parents by the orphanage.
Books as portals aren’t unusual in fantasies; it’s a kind of primitive metafiction whereby a character in a book can escape into a book in the book, and find it real (Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story, e.g.). Park leads us for a time to suppose that this is what will happen to Miranda, that in the book she’ll find her real home. But a strange gang of punk teenagers speaking Romanian steals the book from her and throws it into a bonfire. And instantly the pleasant world of Massachusetts, the famous art museum, the Price Chopper, the nice old houses and the college, vanish away. Miranda and her friends are in a different America: the real, untamed America. We come to learn that Massachusetts and our twentieth century existed only in the book, a haven to keep Miranda safe, created by her alchemist aunt Aegypta Schenk von Schenk in the great and powerful state of Roumania far away. Miranda doesn’t merely travel from the common world to a different one, like Harry Potter; her real world was always unreal, and now is destroyed. It’s a daring device—daring because all readers, particularly those like me who live there, know that Massachusetts is, outside of this book, still very real.