by Lewis Shiner
Introduction © 2009 by Karen Joy Fowler
Everything else © 2009 by Lewis Shiner
Final pages constitute an extension of this copyright page.
Subterranean Press
P.O. Box 190106
Burton, MI 48519
www.subterraneanpress.com
www.lewisshiner.com
For Richard Butner
My first line of defense.
Contents
Introduction by Karen Joy Fowler
Perfidia
Stuff of Dreams
The War at Home
Straws
Nine Hard Questions about the Nature of the Universe
White City
Primes
The Long Ride Out
Sitcom
The Death of Che Guevara
His Girlfriend's Dog
Deep Without Pity
The Circle
Twilight Time
Jeff Beck
Wild For You
Till Human Voices Wake Us
Flagstaff
Tommy and the Talking Dog
Oz
Love In Vain
Steam Engine Time
Kings of the Afternoon
Sticks
Mark the Bunny
The Killing Season
Scales
Snowbirds
Match
Relay
Castles Made of Sand
Prodigal Son
Mozart in Mirrorshades
Kidding Around
Mystery Train
Secrets
Golfing Vietnam
Stompin’ at the Savoy
Gold
Dirty Work
Lizard Men of Los Angeles
Author's Notes
Copyrights
Introduction
By Karen Joy Fowler
I meet a lot of people these days who tell me they don’t read fiction. Sometimes they don’t read books at all, but more often they love books – they read history, adventure stories that really happened, political and economic works, biography, and memoir–they only don’t want to waste their time on things someone has simply made up. They want, they tell me, to read about the real world.
The Bush administration is finally coming to its end. Among its many, many Orwellian contributions to the real world are:
the Patriot Act, which has opened the possibility of American citizens arrested for violations of secret regulations whose content, even in court, they aren’t permitted to know.
the re-naming of suicide attempts while in US custody as “self-injurious behavior incidents,” along with the re-classification of such attempts as an attack on the US military
the argument that every inch of American soil is now a battlefield where courts should not second-guess the battlefield decisions of the president
the re-naming of torture as “inhumane debriefings.”
In the real world, as I write this, we are coming up on the 2008 American election. John McCain, the Republican Party candidate, has actually said that Sarah Palin, his pick for vice president, has foreign policy experience by virtue of living in Alaska, because Alaska is close to Russia on the map. I live by the ocean. It’s almost like having gills.
In the real world, there is a puzzling array of things we all know to be true, but aren’t supposed to say, or know to be false, but must pretend to believe.
We are not supposed to say that the ghastly attacks of 9/11 were in any way a response to our foreign policies. We are not supposed to say that our soldiers ever behave badly. Even those very soldiers, the ones who have behaved badly, are not supposed to come back home and tell us about it.
We must pretend to believe, as we rocket from war to war, that we are a peace-loving people. We live in the country God loves best above all countries. We must pretend to believe that we are hated for our freedoms.
In short, the real world is full of lies and doublespeak and it is making you crazy. We’re all a bit crazy here. You will find more true things in the made-up stories of Lewis Shiner than you will in the real world of newspapers and newscasts.
If I were asked what I admire most in this collection, if I had to choose only one word to describe this work, the word I would choose is honest. A Shiner protagonist is most often someone who is searching for the truth. A Shiner story will always insist on the hard truth over the comforting lie.
But fortunately, I get many more words here than just the one. Although I had read many of these stories in their earlier publications, I found enormous pleasure in reading them again. They are intimate stories, thoughtful, political, emotional, and imaginative. I myself have a fondness for historical pieces. When a collection of stories features Glenn Miller, Amadeus Mozart, Che Guevara, Nikola Tesla, and Jean Lafitte, you will hear no complaint from me.
I particularly admire the variety. Shiner is conversant with, comfortable in, and respectful of many traditions–included here are several stories that would be classified as realism. In addition, there are westerns like “The Long Ride Out,” mysteries like “Deep Without Pity” and “The Killing Season,” horror like “The Circle,” and one piece, “Mark the Bunny,” that would be socialist realism if Aesop had created the world. Most though are clearly or at least arguably science fiction. There are stories that work through cleverness and invention, like “The Lizard Men of Los Angeles” and “Sitcom.” There are deceptively simple stories like the profoundly affecting “Flagstaff.” Music is a recurring element and to see Shiner improvising, changing tone and tempo and generally mixing things up, is an additional pleasure.
There is a strong showing of Shiner’s most famous stories–“The War at Home,” “Love in Vain,” “White City,” “Jeff Beck,” “Mozart in Mirrorshades,” and “Perfidia.” But the newest story in this collection, “The Death of Che Guevara” is already among my personal favorites.
With a few exceptions (see variety) Shiner doesn’t work through dazzle, diversion, or sleight of hand. His prose is a model of clarity. When you come to the end of a story, you know what happened; you know how Shiner feels about it. The power seldom arises in trick and technique, but is located instead in voice and conviction. He is not the sort of writer who keeps an ironic distance. His work is more the heartfelt sort.
The gravitational center is a feeling of longing; no writer evokes this more or more powerfully. The Shiner protagonist is often a man for whom things have not panned out. This man longs for connection. He longs for a future he won’t find, for a past he didn’t have. For all of his science fictional roots, Shiner’s gaze is usually to the past. But how he can create such a powerful nostalgia for a different time and place, while never once pretending that things went any better then and there than they are going here and now, is something I haven’t yet figured out.
The Shiner protagonist most likely won’t get what he wants. Or he will and it won’t be what he wanted after all. The emotional world of these stories feels very like the real world to me.
By the time you read this collection, the election will be over. We are in a happier place! We don’t even remember who Sarah Palin is. We associate her vaguely with machinations; we think maybe we saw her on one of the early seasons of Survivor.
Even here, though, even in this happier place, I know one thing for sure. Wherever we are, there is still reason for hope and there is still cause for despair. I am balanced pretty evenly just now between the two, but the hope is an amorphous, inarticulate sort while the despair is pretty specific. I’m afraid that I won’t get what I hope for. Or that I will and it won’t be what I wanted after all.
Reading these stories was good for me. The real world was driving me crazy with its degraded language of Orwellian dodg
e and all I wanted was something true. They will be good for you, too. Not good like cod-liver oil. These stories will be good for you like fresh air. Like music.
Karen Joy Fowler
October 16, 2008
Perfidia
“That’s Glenn Miller,” my father said. “But it can’t be.”
He had the back of the hospital bed cranked upright, the lower lid of his left eye creeping up in a warning signal I’d learned to recognize as a child. My older sister Ann had settled deep in the recliner, and she glared at me too, blaming me for winding him up. The jam box sat on the rolling tray table and my father was working the remote as he talked, backing up my newly burned CD and letting it spin forward to play a few seconds of low fidelity trombone solo.
“You know the tune, of course,” he said.
“‘King Porter Stomp.’” Those childhood years of listening to him play Glenn Miller on the console phonograph were finally paying off.
“He muffed the notes the same way on the Victor version.”
“So why can’t it be Miller?” I asked.
“He wouldn’t have played with a rabble like that.” The backup musicians teetered on the edge of chaos, playing with an abandon somewhere between Dixieland and bebop. “They sound drunk.”
My father had a major emotional investment in Miller. He and my mother had danced to the Miller band at Glen Island Casino on Long Island Sound in the summer of 1942, when they were both sixteen. That signature sound of clarinet and four saxes was forever tied up for him with first love and the early, idealistic months of the war.
But there was a better reason why it couldn’t have been Miller playing that solo. If the date on the original recording was correct, he was supposed to have died three days earlier.
The date was in India ink on a piece of surgical tape, stuck to the top of a spool of recording wire. The handwritten numerals had the hooks and day-first order of Europe: 18/12/44. I’d won it on eBay the week before as part of a lot that included a wire recorder and a stack of 78s by French pop stars like Charles Trenent and Edith Piaf.
It had taken me two full days to transfer the contents of the spool to my computer, and I’d brought the results to my father to confirm what I didn’t quite dare to hope—that I’d made a Big Score, the kind of find that becomes legend in the world of collectors, like the first edition Huck Finn at the yard sale, the Rembrandt under the 19th century landscape.
On my Web site I’ve got everything from an Apollo player piano to a 1930s Philco radio to an original Wurlitzer Model 1015 jukebox, all meticulously restored. During the Internet boom I was shipping my top dollar items to instant Silicon Valley millionaires as fast as I could find them and clean them up, with three full-time employees doing the refurbishing in a rented warehouse. For the last year I’d been back in my own garage, spending more time behind a browser than trolling the flea markets and thrift stores where the long shots lived, and I wanted to be back on top. It wasn’t just the freedom and the financial security, it was the thrill of the chase and the sense of doing something important, rescuing valuable pieces of history.
Or, in this case, rewriting history.
On the CD, the song broke down. After some shifting of chairs and unintelligible bickering in what sounded like French, the band stumbled into a ragged version of “Perfidia,” the great ballad of faithless love. It had been my mother’s favorite song.
My father’s eyes showed confusion and the beginnings of anger. “Where did you get this?”
“At an auction. What’s wrong?”
“Everything.” The stroke had left him with a slurping quality to his speech, and his right hand lay at what should have been an uncomfortable angle on the bedclothes. The world hadn’t been making much sense for him for the last eight months, starting with the sudden onset of diabetes at age 76. With increasing helplessness and alarm, he’d watched his body forsake him at every turn: a broken hip, phlebitis, periodontal disease, and now the stroke, as if the warranty had run out and everything was breaking down at once. Things he’d done for himself for the five years since my mother’s death suddenly seemed beyond him—washing dishes, changing the bed, even buying groceries. He could spend hours walking the aisles, reading the ingredients on a can of hominy, comparing the fractions of a pound that separated one package of ground meat from another, overwhelmed by details that had once meant something.
“Who are these people? Why are they playing this way?”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “But I intend to find out. Listen.”
On the CD there was a shout from the audience and then something that could have been a crack from the snare drum or a gunshot. The band trailed off, and that was where it ended, with more shouts, the sound of furniture crashing and glass breaking, and then silence.
“Turn it off,” my father said, though it was already over. I took the CD out and moved the boom box back to windowsill. “It’s some kind of fake,” he finally said, more to himself than me. “They could take his solo off another recording and put a new background to it.”
“It came off a wire recorder. I didn’t pay enough for it to justify that kind of trouble. Look, I’m going to track this down.”
“You do that. I want to know what kind of psycho would concoct something like this.” He waved his left hand vaguely. “I’m tired. You two go home.” It was nine at night; I could see the lights of downtown Durham through the window. I’d been so focused on the recording that I’d lost all sense of time.
Ann bent down to kiss him and said, “I’ll be right outside if you need me.”
“I’ll be fine. Go get something to eat. Or go to the motel and sleep, for God’s sake.” My father had come to North Carolina for the VA hospital at Duke, and Ann had flown in from Connecticut to be with him. I’d offered her my guest room, 25 miles away in Raleigh, but she’d insisted on being walking distance from the hospital.
In the hallway, her rage boiled over. “What was the point of that?” she hissed.
“That’s the most involved I’ve seen him since the stroke. I think it was good for him.”
“Well, I don’t. And you could at least have consulted me first.” Ann’s height and big bones had opened her to ridicule in grade school, and for as long as I could remember she’d been contained, slightly hunched, given to whispers instead of shouts.
“Do you really need to control my conversations with him now?”
“Apparently. And don’t make this about me. This is about him getting better.”
“I want that too.”
“But I’m the one who’s here with him, day in and day out.”
It was easy to see where this was headed, back to our mother again. “I’ve got to go,” I said. She accepted my hug stiffly. “You should take his advice and get some rest.”
“I’ll think about it,” she said, but as the elevator doors closed, I could see her in the lounge two doors down from his room, staring at the floor in front of her.
I had email from the seller waiting at home. Her initial response when I’d written her about the recorder had been wary. I’d labored hard over the next message, offering her ten percent of anything I made off the deal, up to a thousand dollars, at the same time lowballing the odds of actually selling it, and all the while working on her guilt—with no provenance, the items were virtually worthless to me.
She’d gone for it, admitting picking everything up together at one stall in the Marché Vernaison, part of the vast warren of flea markets at Saint-Ouen, on the northern edge of Paris. She wasn’t sure which one, but she remembered an older man with long, graying hair, a worn carpet on a dirt floor, a lot of Mickey Mouse clocks.
I knew the Vernaison because one of my competitors operated a high-end stall there, a woman who called herself Madame B. The description of the old man’s place didn’t ring any bells for me, but the mere mention of that district of Paris made my palms sweat.
My business gave me an excuse to read up on music history. I a
lready knew a fair amount about Miller’s death, and I’d gone back to my bookshelves the night before. Miller allegedly took off from the Twinwood Farm airfield, north of London, on Friday, December 15, 1944. He was supposed to be en route to Paris to arrange a series of concerts by his Army Air Force Band, but the plane never arrived. Of the half dozen or more legends that dispute the official account, the most persistent has him flying over on the day before, and being fatally injured on the 18th in a brawl in the red light district of Pigalle. Pigalle was a short taxi ride from the Hotel des Olympiades, where the band had been scheduled to stay, and the Hotel des Olympiades was itself only a short walk from the Marché Vernaison.
I walked out to the garage and looked at the wire recorder where it sat on a bench, its case removed, its lovely oversized vacuum tubes visible from the side. I’d recognized it in the eBay photos as an Armour Model 50, manufactured by GE for the US Army and Navy, though I’d never seen one firsthand before. The face was smaller than an LP cover, tilted away to almost meet the line of the back. Two reels mounted toward the top each measured about four inches in diameter and an inch thick, wound with steel wire the thickness of a human hair. More than anything else it reminded me of the Bell & Howell 8mm movie projector that my father had tortured us with as children, showing captive audiences of dinner guests his home movies featuring Ann and me as children and my mother in the radiant beauty of her 30s.
The wire recorder hadn’t been working when it arrived, but I’d been lucky. Blowing a half century’s worth of dust off the electronics with an air gun, I’d found the broken bit of wire that had fallen into the works and caused a short. That and replacing a burnt-out power tube from my extensive stock of spare parts was all it had taken—apart from cleaning the wire itself.
The trick was to remove the corrosion without affecting the magnetic properties of the metal. I’d spent eight hours running the wire through a folded nylon scrub pad soaked in WD40, letting the machine’s bailers wind the wire evenly back on the reel, stopping now and then to confirm there was still something there. Then I’d jury-rigged a bypass from the built-in speaker, through a preamp and into an eighth-inch jack that I could plug into my laptop. With excruciating care, I’d played it into a .wav file and worked on the results with CoolEdit Pro for another hour, trying to control the trembling in my hands as I began to realize what I had.