Kip Manley's Blog, page 14

a-Hunting (Closing)

They march past clots of cars and trucks haphazardly parked under the buzzing lights, many of them heading on foot up the curve of the ramp and out to the surface and the night above. The boy with the big-bellied guitar slung across his back is helping a red-headed man load a large white drum into the back of a van adorned with a candy-colored pin-up girl, holding a massive snake above her body with both hands. The side door’s open. Marfisa in a soft blue robe sits slumped, a cloth to her face, her greaves stacked on the pavement by her bare feet, her hair the color of clotted cream hanging like a curtain before her face. Agravante kneels before her, reaching up to brush the hair out of her eyes. “He’s loose,” she says, her voice slurred. One side of her face is puffy, mottled red and white and yellow, the eye swollen shut. “He’s out there, somewhere.”

“The Duke’s problem,” says Agravante, gently. “Not ours.”

Across the garage, halfway up the ramp, Pyrocles pauses to look back at them. His blue jacket draped across his shoulders, his bare chest wrapped in a white bandage. His expression masked by those long grey mustaches. Becker, unlocking the door of a little red hatchback, looks up to see Pyrocles trudging away up the ramp. “I don’t,” he says, looking about the parking garage, at the people marching past, a pickup truck with wood-framed plastic wings stashed in the back, a sedan topped by a monkey-faced stone idol strewn with ivy, spitting water on the windshield. “I don’t want to forget this,” says Becker, but Guthrie over on the other side of the car is looking down at his thin hands wrapped around each other. “Do you,” he says, “need a ride? Anywhere?”

“Anywhere,” says the woman swaddled in those skirts and sweaters. “Anywhere that isn’t.” She’s pointing at a black car parked a couple of spaces over from them, a powerful black thing standing empty. Meticulous lines of hand-painted white letters whorl up and over the sides and hood and roof.

Things to keep in mind (The secret of allusion)

Although it is perfectly natural for a writer as steeped in literature as Nabokov to build his fiction on a literary allusion, the procedure has been adopted by many novelists and is hardly an indication that the focus on literature somehow carries the writer away from the world of experience outside literature. Fielding makes the Joseph story in Genesis central to Joseph Andrews; Joyce famously organizes the episodes of Ulysses as parallels to episodes in the Odyssey; Faulkner uses the biblical story of Absalom’s rebellion as a prism through which to see the catastrophic history of the American South.

a-Hunting (Act IV)

Down by the ice rink it’s quiet. Differing songs float down through the big central atrium, a guitar, the fiddle, a flute off away somewhere, the slap of a drum not keeping time with any of them. Guthrie’s looking up one wing of the mall and down the other but potted trees and dead escalators and kiosks muffled under dust covers make it hard to see very far. “It was supposed to be a city within the city,” someone says, and he jumps.

There’s this woman next to him, swaddled in three or four skirts in muddy colors and a couple of sweaters under a grubby orange rain shell. “I’m just waiting,” Guthrie says. “Looking for a friend of mine. They’re both– just a minute ago. They were here. He was. No idea it was so late. I.” She’s laughing. Guthrie’s starting to grin. “What?”

“It’s fun, sneaking in,” she says. Her eyes are bright and blue and her hair is lost under a confetti-colored cap. “Like they don’t know.”

“It’s not what we were,” says Guthrie, looking up at the food court. Someone’s yelling. The fiddle’s stopped. “Not what he was expecting, anyway. I’m, uh. Kinda looking forward.”

“It should have been twenty-one storeys,” she’s saying, “just like the Waldorf-Astoria. What’s the Midnight Disease?” She’s pointing at his T-shirt. Her fingerless glove is yellow and spotted with red unravelling stars.

“A band,” he says. “Waldorf-Astoria?”

a-Hunting (Act III)

“Puertas a mi izquierda,” says the recording. “Lloyd Center, Northeast Eleventh Avenue. Doors to my left.” Jo starts awake, nearly dropping the long bundle wrapped in red. Ysabel’s shaking her shoulder. “Our stop,” she says. Her reflection hangs in the dark window like a ghost, the green of her new dress shining over a dimly lit office lobby across the street.

Outside, Jo in her army jacket and her new grey dress, red bundle under one arm, walks to the end of the platform, looking out over the parking lot. It’s almost empty, drowned in a dulling haze of streetlight. Past it a long barn of a movie theater lit up with neon. Across the street another empty lot spreads before the anonymous prow of a shopping mall. A bell rings. With a rising, grinding hum the train pulls away, clank-chunking over a rail junction. “Where is everybody?” says Jo.

“Inside,” says Ysabel.

“Inside.” Jo points across the street. “In the mall.” She shakes her head. “Of course they’re in the mall.”

“Give me your sword,” says Ysabel.

“It’s really fucking late,” says Jo, holding out the bundle.

“The witching hour,” says Ysabel. She’s unwinding the long red scarf from the short épée in its black sheath. “Hold still.” She stoops on one knee there before Jo, shaking the belt loose. Reaches up, wrapping it around Jo’s hips. “Hold still,” she says, buckling it. “We should have gotten you some shoes.”

a-Hunting (Act II)

The lights above the escalator are set in metal cups, the ceiling about them sooty from years of incandescent heat. At the top behind a low glass wall shine three glossy mannequins, smooth white shells with hair and lips and eyelids painted in bright thin colors. One wears a T-shirt that says Virgo! Are you absolutely positive? Another wears a T-shirt with Albert Einstein on it, that says INTP in big block letters. The center of attention! says the poster hanging above them. None of them wears shoes. Jo turns as her step nears the top, looking down at Ysabel behind her. “What?” says Ysabel.

“I don’t know,” says Jo, stepping off. “I figured you as more a Nordstrom’s girl.”

“Nordstrom,” says Ysabel.

“What?”

“Never mind.” Silvery letters on the wall say Petites. Designer Dresses, say signs atop racks hung with deep greens, reds and browns like wet earth, like wines, all the toasted colors, umbras and siennas, ochres, butters. “Shall we?” says Ysabel.

a-Hunting (Act I)

A half-dozen T-shirts, most of them black, are scattered across the unmade futon. There’s a red one that says Farmers & Mechanics Bank in peeling brown letters. The empty legs of tights unrolled, unfolded lying across them, black again, red, dull green, blue jeans, grey jeans that once were black, a couple pairs of workpants, plumber’s navy, package delivery brown, frayed cuffs and the greasy sheen of nylon. Soft flannel shirts, arms tangled, dark green, a plaid of faded berry colors, a short black denim skirt, a longer Catholic tartan. Ysabel in an oversized blue sweatshirt that says Brigadoon! squats at the foot of the futon, looking over it all. The droning spatter of the shower cuts off, and there’s Jo’s voice, “Somewhere like New York City sounds oh so pretty, but let’s leave the timing to fate– !” Ysabel leans over and scoops a double handful of underwear and socks from one of the blond wood crates against the wall.

“I’ll be the one in tears,” sings Jo, coming out of the bathroom in a pair of boxer shorts, towelling her hair, “I’ll be the one who’s trying to make up for the what the fuck?”

Ysabel’s holding up a pair of washed-out pink underwear with a finger crooked through the split side seam. “Do these have some sort of sentimental value?” she says, frowning theatrically.

a-Hunting (Opening)

“Five hundred bucks,” says Frankie, shoveling the hair out of his face, looking up at the red-headed man. “It’s only fair,” he says. He frowns. “I mean, we’re not gonna hurt her. Right?”

“He says it’s only fair,” says the red-headed man into a slim red phone. He’s standing in the apartment’s open doorway, dark against the soft grey light outside, leaning lightly on a long portfolio tube. “Did you catch that?”

“What?” says the man in the dark gold shirt. Lit by a single bulb he’s standing in a basement at the foot of a sagging flight of stairs. “What’s fair,” he says, half stooping, swinging his head back and forth, craning to tilt the antenna of his purple phone. “Reception’s fucking wretched down here.” Somewhere in the dark something large clip-clops back and forth, grunting. A woman in a black vinyl miniskirt sits at the top of the stairs. She’s eyeing the shadows nervously.

“Five hundred,” says the red-headed man. “He wants five hundred, your grace. Half a thousand.” Frankie biting his lip says, “You’re not gonna hurt her,” to the thin man perched on the arm of the couch. “Right?” The thin man’s looking at the handle of his Japanese sword. His feet are bare.

“Five hundred dollars,” says his grace. He turns to look up at the woman in the black vinyl miniskirt. She shrugs. “This is the ex,” he says.

“Yes, your grace,” says the red-headed man.

“Fuck him,” says his grace.

Zoobombing (Closing)

Marfisa in the hall sits back against Jo’s door, long legs in blue and brown striped socks stretched across the orange carpet. She wears blue shorts and a tight grey T-shirt that says Property of S.H.I.E.L.D. Her arms folded over the blue fleece pullover wadded up in her lap. When the elevator down the hall dings, she opens her eyes.

“No, seriously,” Jo’s saying.

“I do not,” says Roland.

“That was one hell of a spill.”

“I do not need help.”

“I’m not,” says Jo, as Roland pushes past her, out of the elevator. “Helping,” she says. Following him, the épée still in its black leather sheath balanced on one shoulder, her hand up holding it lightly. “It’s just, you’re limping–”

“Jo,” says Roland.

The blue fleece pullover wadded about her left hand held up before them Marfisa elbow crooked up high in her right hand holds a sword, fluorescent light stretched thin glaring from the tip at Jo. She opens her mouth to say something.

“Don’t,” says Roland.

Zoobombing (Act IV)

The whipped cream melts into an oily sludge. Fluffy curds calve off, bobbing up and down as Ysabel pokes them with a plastic stirrer.

“We could sell the stuff,” says Jo.

“The stuff,” says Ysabel, not looking up.

“The furniture,” says Jo, leaning forward, her elbows on the table. “The chest-thing. That whoever it was brought, who came in and cleaned up the place.”

“We can’t sell that.”

“We can’t,” says Jo.

“We can’t sell it, Jo,” snaps Ysabel, throwing the plastic stirrer down by her coffee. “Honestly. Do you really think somebody hauled all that up the elevator and set it up in your apartment while we were out shopping for a half an hour?” She slumps back in her chair, looking up at the yellowing ceiling tiles. “It’s not mine to sell,” she says.

Things to keep in mind (The secret of the seann sgeòil)

Tolkien, Howard, and Lovecraft are only three of many examples: ideas about Celticness have permeated the fantasy genre in all its forms, sometimes explicitly embraced and sometimes absorbed by osmosis as simply part of fantasy’s genre conventions. As Cox has observed, “Celticity holds an ever-present position in fantasy media, but in so doing it becomes effectively invisible because it becomes associated with the fantasy genre rather than any particular source culture.” This then drives writers and audiences to turn back to what they consider “authentic” sources—often wildly out of date or simply made up—of “Celtic” tradition in order to supplement what they perceive as the “generic” æsthetic resources of fantasy. Cox describes this as a “double exposure”—