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Other Aliens
Conjunctions, Vol. 67
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
Editors’ Note
Leena Krohn, Two Stories (translated from Finnish by Eva Buchwald)
Jeffrey Ford, Not Without Mercy
Julia Elliott, Clouds
John Crowley, The Million Monkeys of M. Borel
Laura Sims, Walking Dead Love Songs
Valerie Martin, Bromley Hall
Lavie Tidhar, Tinkerers
Samuel R. Delany, An Interview (conducted by Brian Evenson)
Matthew Baker, The Transition
Paul Park, Blind Spot
James Tiptree, Jr., Favored by Strange Gods: A Selection of Letters to Joanna Russ (with an introductory note by Nicole Nyhan)
Michael Parrish Lee, The Showroom Variations
Peter Straub, The Process Is a Process All Its Own
Kelly Link, An Interview (conducted by Elizabeth Hand)
Madeline Bourque Kearin, Fallout
Jean Muno, Cartoon (translated from French by Edward Gauvin)
Jonathan Thirkield, Two Poems
John Clute and John Crowley, Mysterious Strangers: A Conversation
Joyce Carol Oates, Undocumented Alien
S. P. Tenhoff, The Unrivaled Happiness of Otters
Brian Evenson, Smear
Jessica Reed, Four Atomic Poems
E. G. Willy, Radio City
James Morrow, Noh Exit
Notes on Contributors
EDITORS’ NOTE
Who or what is an alien? Someone or something whose profound otherness stirs in us terror, even dread? Or perhaps a healthy—sometimes dangerous—curiosity? In Joseba Elorza’s cover art for this issue, are the aliens those commandeering the descending saucers or are they the three conspicuously nonchalant figures in the foreground, interrupted on their way to work? On the other hand, are both UFOs and metropolitan pedestrians somehow alien?
Aliens are, by definition, Other. They are the stuff of science and speculative fiction, of Fantastika and fantasy, yes, but they are also traditional literary figures whom society, however unfairly, has labeled misfits, nonpersons, the Ishmaels of the world. When Frankenstein’s monster stalks the countryside, an ill-fated product of human genius and hubris, he is the alien, the Other. But those who misjudge him and seek his destruction are also the Others in Shelley’s story.
In The New Wave Fabulists issue of Conjunctions, nominally “genre” writers tested literary boundaries in risky and exciting ways. In Betwixt the Between, “literary” authors explored the terrains of genre fiction. Having thus established a discourse between the literary and genre worlds, we felt compelled in Other Aliens to further unsettle the precincts of genre and literary writing, push for even more freedom to define what alienation and otherness is about.
Joyce Carol Oates’s chilling experiment turns the mind of an immigrant alien into that of an alien in the interplanetary sense. Matthew Baker explores a new body dysmorphia. Peter Straub’s synesthetic serial killer inhales the odors of languages. Michael Parrish Lee markets human products. Madeline Bourque Kearin’s marooned heroine sits still in the middle of time. Laura Sims writes odes of love to zombies. A host of other aliens can also be discovered here.
To be able to offer interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Kelly Link, John Crowley, and John Clute, along with a generous selection of previously unpublished letters by James Tiptree, Jr., who knew better than most what it is like to feel other, is for us a distinct honor. In these glimpses into the writerly mind, as in all the imaginative worlds this issue contains, we pursue a definition of the indefinable.
—Bradford Morrow and Elizabeth Hand
October 2016
New York City and Lincolnville, Maine
Two Stories
Leena Krohn
—Translated from Finnish by Eva Buchwald
IN THE QUIET OF THE GARDENS
The shallow clay pot contained white sand and a black stone. Around the stone, there were rings in the sand traced by Sylvia’s fingertip. This was one of Sylvia’s miniature landscapes, a kind of zen garden. She named all her gardens, as one does with works of art. This garden was called “Cause and Effect.” The white sand was taken from the city’s public beach, where Sylvia had spooned it into a plastic bag. She suspected this was an unlawful activity, so she had gone to the beach late in the evening, once all the sun worshippers had gone home. The round black stone was from one of Sylvia’s trips abroad, plucked from a Greek graveyard.
The stone was action, any action, or prime cause. The sand was water, and its rings, traveling far beyond the rim of the pot, were the result of the stone being flung into the water.
Sylvia had made her first miniature garden for her niece. She thought Anja might feel inspired to create her own landscapes, which would take the girl’s mind off the maelstrom of her parents’ divorce and her subsequent move. But it seemed that Anja joined in the game only for her aunt’s sake. She managed to put together one landscape in a glass-domed pot that Sylvia gave her, using a little moss and a pebble for a boulder. It seemed to Sylvia that Anja didn’t even choose the pebble very carefully, it was just a random pebble of suitable size that happened to catch Anja’s eye in the local playground. The mirror in Sylvia’s compact served as a lake. And that was that. Having reached the ripe old age of nine, Anja had grown out of playing; nowadays she practiced competitive dance, went downhill skiing, and tweeted with her friends. But Sylvia began spending more and more time in her little worlds. This turned out to be Sylvia’s own way of playing.
Small is beautiful, this had always been Sylvia’s motto in her youth, but as she grew older she became increasingly convinced of how true it was. Small became more than a mere hobby; it turned into a passion, a new calling.
Possibly it was a notion that had its roots in Sylvia’s childhood. Back then, she’d had moments when she’d see everything around her as if it were small and far away. This had happened especially when she was tired. She would be playing hopscotch in the yard, or eating dinner with her mom and dad, and suddenly everything would come to a standstill. She would stop hopping and be left standing on one leg, or if she’d been eating, her spoon would come to a halt between her bowl and her mouth. When she looked around, her friends, her mom and dad, objects, rooms, houses appeared ever so small, as if she were looking through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars, as if they had receded so far into the distance that it was barely possible to make them out. This would last about a minute, if that, then the world would return to normal. Only her mother would sometimes ask her: “What are you looking at?,” to which Sylvia would bluntly retort: “Nothing!”
This only happened once during Sylvia’s adulthood, one autumn day when she had climbed to the top of a viewing tower with a fr
iend, in order to watch the migrating birds as they left. The melancholic autumn landscape that lay before her—the island, the birch grove with its turning leaves, the suburban tower blocks beyond—all shrank suddenly into a kind of toy land. She could still clearly perceive every single detail, however, and the view seemed more and more beautiful and fascinating. She didn’t know whether it was something to do with her eyes or whether it was a sort of fit, like epilepsy, or some other neurological complaint. But these moments didn’t frighten her; rather, she almost longed for them. They were crystal clear and yet dreamlike, almost magical.
The world was repeatedly thrown into turmoil, both the world at large and Sylvia’s own private world. After being diagnosed with rheumatism, Sylvia retired early on sickness benefit from the bank where she worked, losing her friends and her daily routine. She would very gladly have taken care of her own real garden, but she didn’t have one. She did have a balcony, however, facing east, in her one-room, already mortgage-free apartment in a clean, modern suburb. She was very happy about that. It was on her balcony, which got the morning sun, that she drank her coffee in the summertime, and it was there she built her first few miniature gardens.
In her youth, and even in later years, Sylvia had been something of an activist, in her own modest way. She had donated to several humanitarian organizations, first out of her student loan and later out of her modest wage. She had participated in demonstrations against war and nuclear power and private car ownership and poor mining regulations and animal abuse, not only in her hometown but also in far-flung reaches of the world, saving up for months on end for the privilege of demonstrating. Both her own problems and other people’s tragedies made her sad. She took matters, both near and far, to heart: devastated environments she’d never seen, strangers who lived on the other side of the globe hungry, homeless, and oppressed. She didn’t know them, but to them she extended her sorrow and pity. Of course they were completely unaware of this. Their hunger persisted, wars continued, mines collapsed, the landscape grew uglier, and animals and people suffered.
Now Sylvia applied her rheumatically deformed fingers to the creation of meticulously designed landscapes over which she had unique control. When the scale of things changes, everything changes. The smaller, the better, was how Sylvia thought. Her toy lands were free from suffering. No one could spoil them. They were not only landscapes but also fantasies, like the models for set designs in a theater. But they didn’t require actors.
Sylvia ordered miniature equipment over the Internet, preferably on a scale of one to twenty-four, even though the range was more limited than in the more popular dollhouse scale of one to twelve. Sometimes she combined both sizes in the same landscape. It gave a surrealistic touch to her work. In winter, her toy worlds had to be brought in from the balcony. They filled her windowsills but the space wasn’t enough. By taking a lot of her books to a secondhand bookstore, Sylvia managed to clear off a whole long shelf to accommodate her landscapes.
Sylvia gathered moss and lichens from the local woods, she picked sprigs of blueberry and lingonberry, heather and coralbells, all of which turned into meadows and copses and coniferous forests in her landscapes. The winter stalks, which Sylvia planted in the sand, became exotic trees. Occasionally Sylvia went to the nursery to buy precious bonsai plants such as myrtle, hornbeam, and Chinese juniper.
One of her gardens was called “Laundry Day.” The pot contained a roof-covered wooden well, in front of which lay a tin basin. Sylvia had stretched a piece of thread between two bonsai for a washing line, and from it she hung handkerchiefs cut into quarters, representing sheets. They were attached to the line with minuscule clothespins.
Another garden was called “Road to America.” For this she had acquired succulent plants of various shapes and sizes: mistletoe cactus, Haworthia, pebble plants. A dirt road ran through the desert and on it Sylvia had drawn the footsteps of a wanderer in boots. They led to a bright red drinks dispenser with its door slightly ajar. It was full of Coca-Cola bottles.
A square pot, which Sylvia had placed on the bookshelf, was called “Author’s Garden.” Sylvia had tried to make it resemble an English cottage garden. The little star-shaped flowers of the yarrow impersonated white roses. The landscape included a little house that was surrounded by a picket fence made of matches. The house was, in fact, a music box that Sylvia had been given as a child, a souvenir from Switzerland. When the box was opened, it played Es ist für uns eine Zeit angekommen. The author lived in the music box house. He was not visible, but his typewriter, a wad of paper, and a stack of books lay on the garden table along with a telephone, wine bottle, and glass. A slim wooden chair stood facing the typewriter, and on the chair Sylvia had placed her own hand-sewn cushion. The chair was a miniature model of Charles Dickens’s chair. It had slender armrests and crafted legs, and its backrest was wicker. It was the most expensive piece of miniature furniture Sylvia had ever bought.
One garden had been built into a basket. It was rimmed with a low brushwood fence that Sylvia wove from birch twigs. There was a gate in the fence and, beyond the gate, a tree and a well. The tree was a small bonsai that had been trained from a linden shoot. This piece depicted the landscape in one of Sylvia’s favorite songs from Schubert, “Der Lindenbaum.”
There was a long, narrow pot, the longest clay pot Sylvia had managed to find, in which she created a park boulevard. It led to Rodin’s statue The Thinker. She was thrilled to have found a miniature of the statue through a commercial website. The trees in the park were created from the blueberry sprigs Sylvia had collected. Between the sprigs she placed small green iron benches, and the boulevard was surfaced with aquarium gravel. At one end of the gravel stretch, there was a red bicycle and at the other, a black car. This garden was called “I Think I Am.”
Sylvia’s friend Irene, a former colleague from the credit department of the bank, commented after seeing the gardens; “You’re regressing into childhood.”
And it was true, Sylvia played like a child, intensely focused, forgetting all else. Creating her miniature worlds gave her enormous satisfaction. Her aches and pains subsided, and she forgot to worry about the madness and injustice of the world. If her hobby did not improve the world, at least it didn’t harm it, Sylvia reflected.
Her niece said: “They’re nice, Auntie Sylvia. But you could do one with a beach and parasols and lots of people.”
But Sylvia’s world was devoid of people or dolls representing them, and devoid of animals. They were deserted landscapes, where living presence was only indicated by some object, piece of furniture, clothespins, or just footsteps in the sand.
Sylvia had become devoted to her new solitary hobby for some time, and was relatively content with her life. Then one day her gardens, in which peace and harmony had reigned, showed signs of strange goings-on. At first Sylvia could only wonder at them.
The first landscape to change was “Cause and Effect.” The black stone vanished, and the sand, in which she had drawn three concentric rings, lay flat and even, as if someone had smoothed them out. Sylvia searched for the stone for a long time, going through her desk, her bookshelf, the floor, her whole apartment. She thought perhaps her niece, who had been visiting on the weekend, had fiddled with it for some reason and forgotten to replace the stone. It was smooth and round and pleasant to handle. But then it occurred to her to search in the sand, and eventually, deep down in the bottom of the pot, her fingertips touched the stone. It had sunk into the sand representing water, as if it really were water.
Sylvia didn’t dwell on the matter; she soon put it out of her mind. Until, one day, one of the white sheets in her “Laundry Day” piece was ripped in the middle. It looked as though some creature had flown through the cloth. She couldn’t understand it. Perhaps a bird, a starling or a sparrow, had pecked at it when the pot was on the balcony? Instead of changing the ripped sheet for a fresh one, she renamed the landscape. It might as well be called “Who Ruined the Laundry,” she decided.
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A change also took place in the garden called “I Think I Am.” The black car at the end of the avenue had driven to the other end and knocked over the bicycle, mounting the handlebars with its front wheel. The Thinker sat staring pensively at the sight, which Sylvia did not readjust. She left the bike where it was, partially under the car, and renamed the work “Guilty.”
In the “Author’s Garden,” Charles Dickens’s beautiful chair had been knocked over and the wine bottle had fallen from the table onto the ground. The receiver of the old-fashioned telephone, which had previously rested in its cradle, was now hanging from its wire over the edge of the table, as if the speaker had just let it drop. She renamed this work too: “Bad News.”
Sylvia could not conceive of any explanation other than that Anja, who had a key to her place, had come over while Sylvia was at the shops or library or out walking. She asked Anja on three occasions whether she had been playing with her landscapes. “It’s absolutely fine if you have,” said Sylvia. “I’m happy for you to play with them. But I’d like you to tell me.”
After the third time, Anja lost her temper.
“I wouldn’t lay a finger on your crazy pots, not even if you paid me. It’s a stupid game. Stupid! No other adults play games like that.”
After that, Sylvia believed Anja was telling the truth. She apologized to her niece for wrongly suspecting her. But it left her even more baffled as to what was happening to her creations. Her little worlds, formerly so peaceful, seats of quiet and harmony, were turning into riddles, theaters of the absurd, stages of dramatic or criminal events. But the reason for their transformation was still as imperceptible as the black stone that had sunk to the bottom of the sand.
Nevertheless, Sylvia felt there was something exciting about the transformations. She accepted them. They brought suspense to her otherwise uneventful life. Until one day “Der Lindenbaum” was ruined. Sylvia was really upset by its fate. Her handsome, slender bonsai linden had broken and fallen—no, it had been felled. Its delicate trunk had been cut about halfway down. When she looked closely at the stump, she had the impression it had been chopped down with an ax. For the first time, she felt a shudder of fear. Her niece would never have been capable of such a monstrous act.
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