McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories

by Michael Chabon

  My mother sat in the kitchen and cried as if I really had died; even my sister managed to look glum. My father wore his black suit. My grandmother baked. Everyone stuffed themselves. On the third day they filled the coffin with damp straw and carted it off to the cemetery and buried it, with prayers and a modest headstone, and three months later my sister got married. She was driven to the church in a coach, a first in our family. My coffin was a rung on her ladder.

  Now that I was dead, I was freer. No one but my mother was allowed into my room, my former room as they called it. They told the neighbors they were keeping it as a shrine to my memory. They hung a picture of me on the door, a picture made when I still looked human. I didn’t know what I looked like now. I avoided mirrors.

  In the dimness I read Pushkin, and Lord Byron, and the poetry of John Keats. I learned about blighted love, and defiance, and the sweetness of death. I found these thoughts comforting. My mother would bring me my potatoes and bread, and my cup of blood, and take away the chamber pot. Once she used to brush my hair, before it came out in handfuls; she’d been in the habit of hugging me and weeping; but she was past that now. She came and went as quickly as she could. However she tried to hide it, she resented me, of course. There’s only so long you can feel sorry for a person before you come to feel that their affliction is an act of malice committed by them against you.

  At night I had the run of the house, and then the run of the yard, and after that the run of the forest. I no longer had to worry about getting in the way of other people and their futures. As for me, I had no future. I had only a present, a present that changed—it seemed to me—along with the moon. If it weren’t for the fits, and the hours of pain, and the twittering of the voices I couldn’t understand, I might have said I was happy.

  My grandmother died, then my father. The cat became elderly. My mother sank further into despair. “My poor girl,” she would say, though I was no longer exactly a girl. “Who will take care of you when I’m gone?”

  There was only one answer to that: it would have to be me. I began to explore the limits of my power. I found I had a great deal more of it when unseen than when seen, and most of all when partly seen. I frightened two children in the woods, on purpose: I showed them my pink teeth, my hairy face, my red fingernails, I mewed at them, and they ran away screaming. Soon people avoided our end of the forest. I peered into a window at night, and caused hysterics in a young woman. “A thing! I saw a thing!” she sobbed. I was a thing, then. I considered this. In what way is a thing not a person?

  A stranger made an offer to buy our farm. My mother wanted to sell and move in with my sister and her gentry husband and her healthy growing family, whose portraits had just been painted; she could no longer manage; but how could she leave me?

  “Do it,” I told her. By now my voice was a sort of growl. “I’ll vacate my room. There’s a place I can stay.” She was grateful, poor soul. She had an attachment to me, as if to a hangnail, a wart: I was hers. But she was glad to be rid of me. She’d done enough duty for a lifetime.

  During the packing-up and the sale of our furniture I spent the days inside a hayrick. It was sufficient, but it would not do for winter. Once the new people had moved in, it was no trouble to get rid of them. I knew the house better than they did, its entrances, its exits. I could make my way around it in the dark. I became an apparition, then another one; I was a red-nailed hand touching a face in the moonlight; I was the sound of a rusted hinge that I made despite myself. They took to their heels, and branded our place as haunted. Then I had it to myself.

  I lived on stolen potatoes dug by moonlight, on eggs filched from henhouses. Once in a while I’d purloin a hen—I’d drink the blood first. There were guard dogs, but though they howled at me, they never attacked: they didn’t know what I was. Inside our house, I tried a mirror. They say dead people can’t see their own reflections, and it was true; I could not see myself. I saw something, but that something was not myself: it looked nothing like the innocent, pretty girl I knew myself to be, at heart.

  But now things are coming to an end. I’ve become too visible.

  This is how it happened.

  I was picking blackberries in the dusk, at the verge where the meadow met the trees, and I saw two people approaching, from opposite sides. One was a young man, the other a girl. His clothing was better than hers. He had shoes.

  The two of them looked furtive. I knew that look—the glances over the shoulder, the stops and starts—as I was unusually furtive myself. I crouched in the brambles to watch. They met, they twined together, they fell to the ground. Mewing noises came from them, growls, little screams. Perhaps they were having fits, both of them at once. Perhaps they were—oh, at last!—beings like myself. I crept closer to see better. They did not look like me—they were not hairy, for instance, except on their heads, and I could tell this because they had shed most of their clothing—but then, it had taken me some time to grow into what I was. They must be in the preliminary stages, I thought. They know they are changing, they have sought out each other for the company, and to share their fits.

  They appeared to derive pleasure from their flailings about, even if they occasionally bit each other. I knew how that could happen. What a consolation it would be to me if I, too, could join in! Through the years I had hardened myself to loneliness; now I found that hardness dissolving. Still, I was too timorous to approach them.

  One evening the young man fell asleep. The girl covered him with his cast-off shirt and kissed him on the forehead. Then she walked carefully away.

  I detached myself from the brambles and came softly toward him. There he was, asleep in an oval of crushed grass, as if laid out on a platter. I’m sorry to say I lost control. I laid my red-nailed hands on him. I bit him on the neck. Was it lust or hunger? How could I tell the difference? He woke up, he saw my pink teeth, my yellow eyes; he saw my black dress fluttering; he saw me running away. He saw where.

  He told the others in the village, and they began to speculate. They dug up my coffin and found it empty, and feared the worst. Now they’re marching toward this house, in the dusk, with long stakes, with torches. My sister is among them, and her husband, and the young man I kissed. I meant it to be a kiss.

  What can I say to them, how can I explain myself? When demons are required someone will always be found to supply the part, and whether you step forward or are pushed is all the same in the end. “I am a human being,” I could say. But what proof do I have of that? “I am a lusus naturae! Take me to the city! I should be studied!” No hope there. I’m afraid it’s bad news for the cat. Whatever they do to me, they’ll do to him as well.

  I am of a forgiving temperament, I know they have the best of intentions at heart. I’ve put on my white burial dress, my white veil, as befits a virgin. One must have a sense of occasion. The twittering voices are very loud: it’s time for me to take flight. I’ll fall from the burning rooftop like a comet, I’ll blaze like a bonfire. They’ll have to say many charms over my ashes, to make sure I’m really dead this time. After a while I’ll become an upside-down saint; my finger bones will be sold as dark relics. I’ll be a legend, by then.

  Perhaps in Heaven I’ll look like an angel. Or perhaps the angels will look like me. What a surprise that will be, for everyone else! It’s something to look forward to.

  WHAT YOU DO NOT KNOW YOU WANT

  by DAVID MITCHELL

  MY THREE A.M. NIGHTMARE DISPERSED like a disappointed audience as I tried to find the Coke machine. A woman passed, in her fifties maybe, cuddling, saying, “All I want out of life is a good night’s sleep.” Too woozy to reply, I just smiled back. The second person I met at that sweltering hour was a barefoot girl of eighteen or nineteen, kneeling before the Coke machine, extracting a can from its cumbersome mouth. Pixie-nosed, Oriental, wearing surfer’s clothes for pajamas, not an ounce of fat on her, bony as macaroni in fact. “You can’t sleep either, huh?” I asked. Apparently she hadn’t heard. I raised my voice. �
�So you can’t go to sleep either, huh? We should throw us a party for insomniacs.” The machine relinquished her 7UP but she still refused to acknowledge me. Her dead eyes bore through me. “Sure was a pleasure meeting you,” I thanked her retreating figure. Bitch. But particles of the girl remained in the air. These I breathed in. Musk, salt, lime.

  Back in room 404 my sheets were chewy with sweat. Jesus Molten Christ, where was the Hawaiian ocean breeze tonight? A double dose of aspirin downed with whiskey and Coke—revolting—helped my mind cut its tight moorings. Each lush leaf on the lime trees lining the Ganges at Varanasi, you once told me, houses a soul for forty-nine days before the soul is reincarnated. Did you make that up? Remember the crows on the floating carcasses, eating their rafts? I thought about the Oriental girl, lying on her bed, sipping her 7UP. Her blanking out of me belittled—erased—me more than any verbal insult. Oriental? Who knows? Anyone in Hawaii could be from anywhere, no matter how they look. Who was she thinking about now? Me? Doubted it, but. Hotel rooms store up erotic charge, and men sleeping alone are its copper wires. Once upon a time she would have smiled, stroked her midriff, struck up a conversation. One thing might have led to It. Was she sleep-walking? Or is my voltage weakening now I’m thirty-six? Mirrors are my friends no longer. Nightingale picks through my golden locks for gray hairs. I must laugh along.

  “Not this way! Not this way!” Jesus Jackhammer Christ, who fell out of that nightmare? A minute passed, two, five, thirty, but I heard nothing more. Hush now, I told my wild pulse, hush, it’s tomorrow morning already. I read Confessions of a Mask until Waikiki’s tourists, elevators, juicers, chambermaids, toilets, showers, bellboys, lifeguards, deliverymen and waitresses resumed their appointed function in this three-square-mile vacation machine. My Marc Jacob shirt, I decided, should send the right signal to the police. On my way out through reception I was surprised to see not the miserable werewolf who had checked me in, but the Oriental girl from the Coke machine, reading a Chinese paperback with a demon doll on the cover. “Good book?” I asked. “Stephen King,” she replied, glancing up, but making no reference to the previous night. “Chinese?” I asked, indicating the book. “Me? The book? Breakfast?” As you know, my interpersonal skills include both patience and charm, so I learned that Wei is from Hong Kong and has helped her uncle in the running of Hotel Aloha since his wife killed herself one year ago. “Sleeping pills,” Wei volunteered this detail. “Enough to kill an elephant.” “How tragic,” I responded. Uncle? If that hairy Caucasian belch really is her uncle then I really am Richard Nixon.

  My attention drifted over the lost-property form like a balloonist surveying a strange city. Name, address, occupation. Occupation . . . how would “Dealer in esoteric memorabilia” sound? I nearly decided the form was a waste of time. Was that fat custodian of justice, picking his nose and wiping it under the seat of his chair, really going to get me nearer my holy grail? One Nozomu Eno at Runaway Horses and even Werewolf at Hotel Aloha were far likelier leads. In the end I wrote, “Trader,” figuring officialdom may as well be on my side as not. Truth needed to be cut to size, however. The “missing item” I registered, therefore, was “an ivory-handled ornamental bread knife (approx. 40 cm) last housed in a flute case.” That this knife was crafted by the Master Kakutani of Old Edo in 1868, I omitted to mention. That the Yukio Mishima had disemboweled himself with this very blade and attained his gory apotheosis on an otherwise nondescript November 25, 1970, I omitted to mention. That one month ago my business partner, Zachary Tanaka, was approached by one of the writer’s ex-lovers, now an alcoholic dentist in Tokyo with debts up to his cancerous throat, for quick cash and no grief from the Mishima estate in return for this knife plus certificate of authenticity sealed by Mishima himself—verified by ourselves—I omitted to mention. That one week ago Zachary Tanaka had flown to Honolulu, phoned me in Yerbas Buenas to confirm he had receipt of the knife, then jumped to his death from the roof of Hotel Aloha here in Waikiki, I omitted to mention. That the dagger had not been found and that an ultranationalist emperor worshiper in Kyoto had upped his offer to ¥25 million—what, five years of police pay?—I damn well omitted to mention. “Ivory-handled ornamental bread knife, huh?” snorted the cop. “Is that for slicing ornamental bread?”

  Wei studied her admirable reflection in two mirrors held in exact positions. “If you look at your face from different places,” the girl explained, “you are reminded that we are not a Me, but an It who lives in a Me.” I showed her your photograph, the one I took of you by your glider. “Never seen him.” Wei shook her head. “Is he famous?” He is—was, I prompted—a Japanese-American named Zachary Tanaka who had stayed here two weeks ago. “So? Waikiki is Japan’s national playground. Even we have hundreds stay here, every year, all shapes, all sizes,” said Wei. Yeah, I said, but how many throw themselves from your roof? Wei did an oh face. “Uncle handled all of that. I slept through it, believe it or not. I sleep like a baby in this place. Ask Uncle about him.” Disappointing. Werewolf was a last resort. Hotel owners are hustlers, and if “Uncle” scented how valuable this artifact might be, and if it was in his possession, well, it may as well be guarded by lasers. So I just asked Wei what happened to Zachary Tanaka’s belongings. “The cops took everything,” stated Wei. “It was just clothes and pilot magazines, I heard.”

  An hour in the creamy Hawaiian surf was an inviting prospect after a day of precinct offices. Were you on the bus to Koko Head, Vulture? Did you see that bullish ocean kicking up three-meter waves? Grace would say you were watching me lick up those spectacular rollers. For thirty pure minutes I achieved a state of grace with the sea. Everything I tried came off, but then, scanning the beach for admirers, I neglected a fundamental rule: Never rest idle with your back to the ocean. A godalmighty breaker crashed down on me, forcing me way under, where a churning riptide pulled me deeper. Stay calm, and normally the air in your lungs tells you which way is up, right? Not off Koko Head. No up, down, sound—save a dim roaring— and an inner voice lamenting, Drowning, you’re drowning, and my lungs collapsing and ABBA, amazingly, singing Supertrouper lights are gonna blind ya to scenes flashing by. Not scenes of my life but of days after my death. Of my missing body, eaten by skipjack tuna. Of Wei or Werewolf reporting my absence to a nose-picking cop. Of Nightingale, assuming I’d bottled out of the wedding. I tell you of my dip with death, Vulture, to illustrate my conviction that ninety-nine deaths in one hundred—accidents, disease, old age, you name it—are banal. There. My Big Thought. Only suicides can truly say, Yes, here is my reason for dying, crafted by my hand according to my logic.

  A second breaker tumbled my puny ass farther up the sucking beach. Jesus Half-dead Christ, a gallon of Pacific or more I barfed up, then crawled to the high-water mark and lay prostrate and eyed the murderous surf. Funny, none of the other copper-skinned surfers had even noticed I’d almost died. A geriatric jogger passed at slower-than-walking speed, grinning at me without teeth or sanity. Finally I heaved myself over to my gear, then waited for the bus back to Waikiki. Another fundamental rule: Don’t be caught on American soil without a car. My second reason for telling you all this is to explain the eat-now-for-tomorrow-we-die frame of mind of this week. If my cruelty to others is casual, I only follow the world’s lead. And look, I’m paying for it now, aren’t I? Oh, it’s a fucking butcher’s shop down here.

  Nightingale called me from L.A., where she’s spent the week modeling for a chain of cosmetic surgeons to check for the nth time about Not Having a Veil. Sure, honey, I crooned, veils are too Barbie doll. Nightingale went stony on me, so I agreed with whatever guff the bounteous moo spouted next, so of course that added condescension to my list of sins against womankind. Premenstrual sadism, I hope. The shinier the apples of attraction, Vulture, the wormier their maggots of repulsion. Afterward, I shaved, after-shaved with a Hugo Boss scent—an expensive mistake—put on my Paul Smith suit, waxed my hair and was leaving when I saw these words doodled on the phone pad:

  Long live the
emperor i don’t think they even heard me.

  You will recognize Yukio Mishima’s final words, but I needed a minute to trace them to their source. That my unconscious mind had not only digested his last utterance whole, but excreted it during an earwigging from Nightingale is further proof that our brains are dark globes lit by very distant stars.

  Werewolf acted pissed that I’d assumed he’d know of Runaway Horses. “Bars spring up and die like weeds around here,” he said. “Find it in a phone book.” I asked him for a phone book. “Ain’t got one. So sorry.” All hail the service economy. Were his cracked eyeballs the last ones to see you? I was tempted to pluck them out to look for you, nickel-sized and inverted, impressed there. On Olohana Street I paid a Tin Man mime artist a dollar to direct me up to the intersection with Kunhio Avenue and down a flight of steps. Runaway Horses might have been any gaijin-friendly basement bar in Tokyo with a clientele three-quarters Japanese, one-quarter Western. I asked the barman if he had Sapporo beer. “Sure I do,” he replied, opening one for me. I said, “Nozomu-san , I’m Vulture’s associate.” My clever opener shot my foot off. “That settles it!” growled the barman, “I’m changing the name tomorrow , new sign, everything, and screw ‘Runaway Horses, Established 1998.’ I am not Nozomu Eno. I am Shingo Ogawa, okay? I own this bar now. Eno skipped town a week ago. Yes, gambling debts. No, I don’t know what stone he’s hiding under. No, I’m not his friend, I don’t know his friends, and no, his debts are nothing to do with me.” The man went on in this vein at length, but I’d glazed over. That your last known lover disappears at the same time that this singular artifact vanishes into thin air pointed to an obvious conclusion. I persuaded Shingo Ogawa—just—to write down my details, in case Nozomu showed up. Then, casually, I mentioned an ivory-handled ornamental bread knife left here by another friend. Shingo Ogawa clenched his jaw. “Nothing like that here,” he said, but I got a list of other Japanese bars you might have hung out at. One, I recognized from your last e-mail.