Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand
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Sleights of Hand
Conjunctions, Vol. 65
Edited by Bradford Morrow
CONJUNCTIONS
Bi-Annual Volumes of New Writing
Edited by
Bradford Morrow
Contributing Editors
John Ashbery
Martine Bellen
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Mary Caponegro
Brian Evenson
William H. Gass
Peter Gizzi
Robert Kelly
Ann Lauterbach
Norman Manea
Rick Moody
Howard Norman
Karen Russell
Joanna Scott
David Shields
Peter Straub
John Edgar Wideman
published by Bard College
Contents
Editor’s Note
James Morrow, Tactics of the Wraith
Laura van den Berg, Aftermath
Bin Ramke, Five Poems
Porochista Khakpour, Something with Everything
Rae Armantrout, Six Poems
Gabriel Blackwell, La tortue, or, The Tortoise
Susan Daitch, Piracy, Chemistry, and Mappa Mundi
Can Xue, Story of the Slums (translated from Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping)
Michael Martin Shea, From The Immanent Field
Joyce Carol Oates, Walking Wounded
Arielle Greenberg, Seven Pieces on Deception, the Whore, and Anderson, IN
Margaret Fisher, A Monologue Addressed to the Madame’s Cicisbeo
Edie Meidav, Blind in Granada, or, Romance
Eleni Sikelianos, Six Poems
Gwyneth Merner, Wounded Room
Michael Sheehan, September
Andrew Mossin, From A Book of Spells
Terese Svoboda, Curtain Call
Yannick Murphy, Caesar’s Show
Magdalena Zyzak, Zeroes
Paul West, The Admiral
Paul Hoover, The Likenesses
Aurelie Sheehan, From Once into the Night
Peter Straub and Anthony Discenza, Beyond the Veil of Vision: Reinhold von Kreitz and the Das Beben Movement
Notes on Contributors
EDITOR’S NOTE
We all deceive, whether or not we care to admit it—denial often being yet another form of deception. We deceive others as well as ourselves. People of every age and stripe—whether rarely or often, on purpose or unknowingly—dissimulate, exaggerate, bluff, and beguile. Sometimes our deceptions are meant to protect, to shelter, to spare; sometimes they’re meant to harm. Nature is no stranger to deception, as flora and fauna use wily camouflage to confuse prey and avoid predators. Art itself, from fiction to film, from theater to painting, often relies on aesthetic subterfuge. Then there’s an altogether different angle of approach, let’s call it ameliorating deception, suggested by the idea that “a deception that elevates us is dearer than a legion of low truths”—a concept forwarded by the great poet Marina Tsvetaeva, who, according to at least one scholar, appropriated these words from Alexander Pushkin. Another deception or simple oversight? Impossible to know. The horizon line where deception and truth nearly touch can be as blurry as a heat mirage on the asphalt of a baking desert highway. And as dangerous for the traveler.
A hitherto unknown school of nineteenth-century European painters whose darkly captivating lost works are as mysterious as its leader’s arcane philosophy. A self-possessed Midwestern adulteress with an acerbic wit and bitingly incisive view of herself, her lover, and those she betrays. A slum rat, who, through abiding fear and a weird capacity for identity dislocation, curiously embodies the Chinese villagers it strives to avoid. The stories, novellas, poems, and essays in Sleights of Hand investigate the myriad masks behind which we hide, hoping to create an alternative reality in the eyes of our beholders. Some of these works operate within the realm of the fantastic, where the artistic imagination is least fettered, while others take a level-eyed approach, staring down a difficult subject many would prefer to avoid. This is not a preachy gathering, however, and while I imagine readers will recognize aspects of themselves here and there, as often as not these writers discover wildly fresh ways of exploring a classic theme.
This summer, Conjunctions held its first benefit in some years, with a gala reading as part of the renowned Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts’ SummerScape series. Francine Prose, Michael Cunningham, and I read before a lively audience in Bard College’s magical Spiegeltent. We want to thank everyone who participated in this successful fund-raiser. In particular, thanks to Debra Pemstein, Bob Bursey, and so many others who made this event both possible and a resounding success.
Great gratitude goes to Jay Hanus and Hy Abady, our two founding members of Conjunctions’ newly established Publishers Circle ($5,000 and up), for their generosity and belief in our project. Barbara Grossman and Michael Gross’s donation made it possible for us to get benefit planning under way and they are the founding members of our Benefactors Circle ($2,000–$4,999). Nancy Leonard, James Jaffe, and Motoyuki Shibata are the founding members of our Friends Circle ($500–$1,999), for which we are very grateful. Also, we are pleased to announce the establishment of our Supporters Circle (up to $500), with founding members William Mascioli, Henry Dunow, Rachel Tzvia Back, Mary Jo Bang, Forrest Gander, Alison and John Lankenau, Literary Hub, Debra Pemstein, Christopher Sorrentino, Cole Swensen, G. C. Waldrep, James B. Westine, Mary Caponegro and Michael Ives, Kathryn Davis, Elizabeth Ely and Jonathan Greenburg, Tim Horvath, Michèle Dominy, Thomas Wild, Roseanne Giannini Quinn, Karen Burnham, Rebecca Thomas, and many others. If you would like to join this group of activist readers who support Conjunctions, please don’t hesitate to make a gift at http://annandaleonline.org/supportconjunctions, or to contact our managing editor, Micaela Morrissette, at conjunctions@bard.edu or (845) 758-7054.
—Bradford Morrow
September 2015
New York City
Tactics of the Wraith
James Morrow
I had never intended to spend Cinco de Mayo of 1962 cooped up in a seedy little Mexico City screening room watching low-budget horror movies with titles like El Ataúd del Vampiro and La Maldición de la Momia Azteca, but back then my life wasn’t my own. Ever since my literary career fell apart, my finances had been keyed to the whims of my older siblings: Oswald Belasco, the hack Hollywood producer-director, and Waldo Belasco, the hack Hollywood writer-producer. If the twins told me, “Get thee to Tenochtitlán, little brother,” then that’s where I would go.
Mine was a commonplace sort of desperation. Carnage Pastorale, my first novel, received some marvelous reviews, The New York Times calling it “the hypnotic odyssey that On the Road wanted to be.” But you can’t eat appreciation, and when only a thousand or so determined Lucius Belasco readers appeared in the bookstores, and the public librarians balked at all the fucking, and the paperback deal collapsed, and my editor at Viking told my long-suffering agent, Yvonne, “I think we’re going to pass on Lucius’s new one,” I could see the writing on the wall, even as I admitted to myself tha
t the original Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin narrative, Belshazzar’s feast, was considerably more compelling than my second novel, Fatal Laughter. So when Oswald and Waldo offered me a modest salary to leave New York City, drive my VW Beetle to California, and become their official water carrier, wood chopper, and barge toter, I considered myself a lucky man.
No sooner had I landed in Los Angeles than my brothers handed me a bus ticket to Tijuana and points south. They expected me to spend three days as their official emissary to Cinematográfica Calderón and Producciones Agrasánchez, the Mexican equivalents of American International, Allied Artists, and other cheapjack studios north of the border. When I bristled, they offered me a perk. After mailing them my viewer’s reports on the latest breakthroughs in el cine de terror méxicano, I could spend two unpaid days vacationing in Cuernavaca.
So there I sat—a notebook in my hand, an empanada on my lap, a smoldering Chesterfield parked in the ashtray—sweating and drinking Dos Equis and coming to terms with The Curse of the Aztec Mummy. By stretching my high-school Spanish to the limit, I managed to puzzle out the plot, as I’d done earlier that day with the three-picture La Bruja cycle, none of which increased my pulse rate, and the two Vampiro pictures, both of which I enjoyed with reservations. Inevitably my mind drifted—this wasn’t Citizen Kane or even Kiss Me Deadly—washing up on anxiety’s beach and then surrendering to the tide and then coming ashore again. Gloria and I were experimenting with a trial separation. After I accepted the offer from my brothers, she’d elected to stay behind in Manhattan, pursuing her playwriting career (she was fast becoming the toast of Off-Off-Broadway), and she made it clear that divorce was far more likely than détente. When I invited her to join my Mexican adventure, she replied, rationally enough, “Three days of zombies and tamales? Sorry, Lucius, I’m not in the mood.”
“You could go shopping,” I said.
“I can go shopping in New York,” she said.
“You could tinker with your latest play. The atmosphere down there is conducive to creativity, very bohemian.”
“I’ve heard the atmosphere is mostly hot,” said Gloria. “Tell me, Lucius, are you prepared to pay for my plane fare?”
“Not exactly.”
“Send me a postcard.”
Sic transit Gloria mundi.
I had to admit my brothers knew what they were doing with this Mexico scheme. For the past five years they’d been bankrolling their own ridiculous pictures by importing cheesy melodramas from other countries, chopping out the slow parts, dubbing them into English, and distributing them through the drive-in and grindhouse circuits, making sure the posters and lobby cards never emphasized the movies’ foreign provenance. The twins had done well with El Barón del Terror, which they’d marketed as A Bucket of Brains, and even better with Misterios de Ultratumba, which became The Black Pit of Doctor M, but to find those gems Oswald and Waldo had to sift through twenty or so 16mm prints of recent 35mm offerings from Calderón and Agrasánchez, the black-and-white images flickering across a bedsheet tacked to the far wall of their claustrophobic Glendale office. (They refused to rent a 35mm screening room and pay a projectionist union wages, and the display on their Moviola editing machine was so small it precluded a fair evaluation of a finished picture’s mise-en-scène.) Eventually they realized that instead of having Calderón or Agrasánchez make dupes, crate them up, and ship them north, it would be more economical to dispatch a scout to Mexico and have him spend several days assessing 35mm release prints on the spot.
I didn’t exactly hate this assignment. The films I saw on Cinco de Mayo featured skilled actors, crisp film noir cinematography, and directorial flourishes executed in homage to those endearing Universal monster movies of the thirties and forties.Which is not to say the stuff Calderón and Agrasánchez cranked out was essentially derivative. Mexico had its own homegrown spooks—the Aztec Mummy, the Crying Woman, the Volcano Demon, the Headless Conquistador, the Were-Jaguar of Zacatecas, the Succubus of Xochimilco—and the film industry deployed them with an impressive mixture of national pride and commercial savvy.
The Curse of the Aztec Mummy boasted all the virtues of its predecessor, including a snappy pace and a truly scary monster, so when the last reel was over I decided to quit while I was ahead. As the tail leader went flapping about on the take-up reel, I scribbled down my immediate reaction, “Let’s take a chance on this one,” then told Javier, the nonunion projectionist, that tomorrow morning he could sleep an hour later than usual. All he had to do was mount reels one and two of El Castillo de los Muertos on his pair of cantankerous old Philips FP3s. I knew how to switch on the projectors and focus the lenses, but if I threaded the reels myself the machines would probably eat them alive.
After the first forty minutes of El Castillo de los Muertos were ready to run, I said goodbye to Javier, then ventured into the clotted heat of the incipient evening. My plan was to walk back to my room, subject myself to a cold shower—the Hotel Amigable provided no other kind—then take a bus to the Centro Histórico, where I would drink more alcohol and observe the dancers and mariachi bands celebrating the holiday. I’d heard that the festivities were more colorful in the nearby states of Puebla and Veracruz—the occasion for the merriment being the Battle of Puebla, in which General Seguín had routed a superior French force on May 5, 1862—but this was Mexico City, after all, where revelry and tequila need never go looking for sponsors.
The rectilinear route to the Hotel Amigable, along Avenida Repúblicas to Calle Miravalle and from there to Camino Egipto, took me through a district in no danger of ever becoming a tourist trap. Prostitutes struck poses on the street corners. Beggars lolled in the doorways. Ranchera songs blared from phonographs perched on windowsills. Redolent of hookers’ perfume mixed with a touch of sewage, the side alleys sheltered sleeping drunks.
In anticipation of the next subtropical drizzle, a few of these insensate bums had wrapped themselves in laminated movie posters. As it happened, four such protective advertisements hawked Spanish-dubbed versions of films made by Oswald and Waldo’s company, Producers and Artists Releasing Corporation, PARC: initials that, reversed, identified the category to which, by my brothers’ own admission, these efforts belonged. (Believe it or not, throughout PARC Pictures’ nineteen-year existence, from 1955 to 1974, no journalist or movie critic ever noticed the joke.) I decided not to tell the twins where the Mexican versions of their lovingly crafted twenty-seven-inch-by-forty-one-inch one-sheets had ended up—I’m talking about posters for Squidicus (El Terrible Gigante de los Mares), The Lava Monster (El Monstruo del Volcán), Revenge of the Vampire Women (La Venganza de las Lobas), and Earth vs. the Death Robots (La Tierra contra los Automatas de la Muerte)—since the derelicts had most likely stolen them from the theaters before the pictures had finished their runs, though otherwise Oswald and Waldo would probably have delighted in all this impromptu outdoor advertising.
Upon arriving at the hotel, I entered my suffocating room, changed out of my PARC Pictures ambassadorial attire—button-down shirt, black tie, yellow blazer—and submitted myself as planned to a bracing bout of hypothermia. I pulled on jeans and a black T-shirt (my Jack Kerouac look), then descended to the lobby, ready for a night on the town. As I approached the front door, the clerk handed me an envelope bearing the famous logo of Western Union. The telegram from my brothers was more than a little outrageous, but I was hardly in a position to defy them.
SOMETHING BIG BREWING STOP NEED YOU HERE STOP TAKE BUS TO L.A. AFTER SCREENING LAST TACO FLICK STOP SORRY NO CUERNAVACA VACATION STOP OSWALDO
Something big brewing. No doubt they were alluding to the latest entry in the rash of publicity gimmicks for which PARC Pictures was famous. Who could forget the radio-controlled vi
nyl bat that flew over the patrons’ heads in the final reel of Terror of the Undead? Or the gouts of stage blood dripping from the ceiling and onto the proscenium at the end of Museum of Abominations? My brothers had devised their most outlandish stunt for Abyss of the Devil-Worms, “presented in the magic of Squirm-O-Rama,” which meant that whenever a character tumbled into a worm-infested well or culvert or crater, a third of the audience would experience creepy vibrations, their seats having been connected to little electric motors. I wondered what stratagem the boys had contrived for their impending release, Psychotic Eyeballs from Outer Space. Would each patron receive a toy gun and a supply of foam-rubber darts with which to attack the cyclopean monsters in the action-packed climax?
So I had three nights to paint la ciudad red, after which I would again be dancing attendance on the twins. I intended to waste my time astutely. As long as my cash held out, I would down the finest tequila, practice the art of gluttony, buy some under-the-counter weed at a cigar store, and perhaps even venture into the Zona Rosa and attend a striptease show at the Palacio de los Pechos, an entertainment that Javier the projectionist recommended even though the owner “wasn’t doing so good meeting the rent.” It occurred to me that this failing burlesque house could use the Oswald and Waldo touch. Presented with the challenge of saving the place, how might my brothers respond? Would they resurrect the moribund medium of 3-D movies, projecting stereoscopic tits on the walls while the onstage performers disrobed? When Belasco Brothers showmanship was in its heyday, everybody scorned it, but now that such endearing hokum has vanished from the cultural landscape, I almost miss it.
Oswald and Waldo called it the Corridor of Horrors, twenty paces down a threadbare carpet that, starting in the foyer of the Pico Building in Glendale, took visitors past a cavalcade of framed posters and deposited them in the shabby offices of PARC Pictures. Doing my best to avoid imagining what tedious and humiliating mission my brothers had devised for me, I ran the gamut from Squidicus to Gill-Women of Venus to I Was a Teenage Necrophile to Vampire Beach to Ghouls on the Loose to The Beast from the Deep to Reform School Werewolves until at last I reached the twins’ sanctum sanctorum. Flanked by my brothers and cloaked in a yellow silk scarf, a rectangular object lay propped against the desk—a dry-mounted one-sheet, I assumed, waiting to be unveiled. An ancient floor fan oscillated in the far corner, stirring a tentative breeze that caused the scarf to undulate like a specter’s shroud.