Rick Wayne's Blog, page 92

Mystery!

I was talking with my buddy this week, and we decided I should probably write mysteries if anything. Mysteries have to present and solve a puzzle, so they’re very plot-centric, which I tend to be. Not that my characters are crap, but there’s a certain style of writing — which is the more popular one, I’m sure — that sort of lets characters run around doing things and so puts their thoughts and feelings ahead of any goings on, which otherwise may not be very interesting at all.

I started a book last year where the main character was wrestling with a genuine moral dilemma and for three chapters, she went around asking people’s advice and fretting about it at the grocery store and trying to drown it in shopping, and while it _was_ a big deal, I was just like “Jesus, shoot someone in the face already!” and stopped reading.

That of course is a “bad” example of what I mean. A “good” example is maybe someone like Stephen King. His peeps run around making bad decisions and generally getting themselves killed until that starts to get tedious, whereupon King says “Oh shit, I have to end this somehow,” and then it just kind of stops, which explains why so many of his books fizzle at the end. But before that, they’re generally very interesting.

Thing is, I just don’t write that way. It wasn’t a choice. That’s just how it turned out. I like plots. I like stories that have plots. I’ll take a book with stock characters inside a clever plot over one with deeply drawn characters wandering around arguing with each other — which is why I’ve never finished anything by Neal Stephenson.

Ideally, books would have BOTH interesting characters and a swift and clever plot. And that’s what I aim for. Every time. But at the end of the day, I’m not going to subordinate the goings on to the characters because I don’t even like reading that shit, let alone spending months and months crafting it.

I don’t feel bad about this. For one, I doubt most readers stick exclusively to one or the other. People can enjoy different things. And the conversation with my buddy this week really helped me let go of the feeling that I should be writing like King or Stephenson or Gene Wolfe or whoever. My stories have plots. Every chapter advances the plot. Every. Chapter. I don’t pause for character development. I don’t _skip_ it either. I find a way to combine the two. I think good writing should. That’s part of what makes it so difficult to execute.

Take the penthouse scene in Episode Five of The Minus Faction. In order to (hopefully) deliver a satisfying emotional experience, I had to forge the four members of the team into a family, which meant relating each to the other over the course of the series in every possible combination. Ian and Wink start off together. John recruits Xana. John and Ian share a moment together in captivity at the end. And so on.

This is why it’s Xana and Ian on the run together. That was all that was left. But I wasn’t just checking boxes. It was also a way to present their opposing belief structures. A family isn’t comprised of people who think the same. Families argue. Families differ. For example, Xana is Christian, but being from a Third World country, hers is a very organic faith rather than the homogeneous mass produced middle class suburban Protestantism most people in North America think of when you say “Christian.” Ian, on the other hand, never had Xana’s troubles. He was raised in that comfortable homogeneous mass produced North American suburbanism (he’s Canadian) and rejects it, like so many of us, in favor of a tepid agnosticism.

I didn’t just want to show these two hanging out doing random shit. That’s not interesting. It also creates no tension. So I had Ian go through the files they stole from the bad guys, which both gave me a way to reveal some of the evil plot (through his description to Xana) and to deepen the characters — that plot reveals a moral dilemma, and so Xana’s and Ian’s differing responses to it become symbolic of their worldviews.

Ian is analytical and skeptical of authority, but that doesn’t give him any answers, just better questions, and so he starts off somewhat sympathetic to bad guys’ aims. That’s me saying it’s easy to be led astray when you try to reason your way through life.

Xana is deferential to authority. She knows she doesn’t have the answer, she’s okay with that, and she trusts in someone who does. Trust in God is the essence of faith, so she says they need to rejoin the others, that Cap will know what to do. But of course at the end of the episode we find out that the team is working for a complete fiction — a kind of absent god.

Thus, over the course of that one chapter, the reader gets to discover more of the plot and to see two members of the team wrestle with some heady questions, bonding with each other in the process. And lest anyone get bored, I end it with a bang! Barricade fires a rail gun into the building and a battle ensues. In the next scene, Xana uses a refrigerator like a missile, a surprise enemy appears, and someone dies.

THAT’S what I write. Plot. Characters. Philosophy. Action. And so I’m thinking mystery might be a good genre for me. Weird mystery.

illustration by Reiko Murakami

Review of Dashiell Hammett’s “The Glass Key”

Reading Dashiell Hammett is a lot like listening to the Beatles; you’ve heard them before even if you’ve never heard them before. Edgar Allen Poe invented detective fiction, but Hammett invented the detective that audiences since immediately associate with the genre.

A former Pinkerton, Hammett abandoned the British gentleman-detective popularized by Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, characters who are never really in any danger from the murderers they chase, and replaced him with the hardboiled detective: the womanizing, tough-as-nails urban cowboy who lives by a rigid code, even where that code requires him to commit crimes or be violent, and who is very much in danger from the people he meets in the story.

We know this character. We grew up with him, both in print and on screen. He’s so common, in fact, that it’s difficult to react to him as anything other than a trope (bordering on cliche), and it’s impossible for us to approach “The Glass Key” as it would have seemed at the time, when plain-speaking streetwise men of dubious affairs like Ned Beaumont, the protagonist of the book, would have stood in stark contrast to someone like Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, for whom solving crimes was a way to fill an otherwise aristocratic life of leisure.

(In fact, Sayers herself described Wimsey — whose name, of course, sounds like whimsy — as a mix of Fred Astaire and Bertie Wooster. Wooster, for those who don’t know, appeared in the novels of P.D. Wodehouse, where he had a clever butler named Jeeves, which is where that trope came from.)

Ned Beaumont, on the other hand, is an enforcer for a political boss — a half gangster, half-politician named Paul Madvig. Beaumont is thrown into the action, not out of some sense of gentlemanly justice, but out of loyalty to his friend, and as a result ends up being kidnapped and beaten within inches of his life. Ned threatens, both with his fists and with a gun; he lies to those close to him; he destroys evidence; and so on. But not because he’s a simple thick-jawed criminal. Just the opposite. In his world, EVERYONE is a criminal, and the only way to do the right thing is to treat the law like any other obstacle.

The modern reader will see this as the blueprint for so much of 20th century detective fiction, right down to the “loose cannon” TV cop, popular in the 1970s and 80s, who has to secretly break the law to see justice done. As Raymond Chandler — the other don of hardboiled detective fiction — said, all that started with Hammett, and if this book doesn’t do it for you, it’s only because you’re sitting atop the tree that grew from the seed that Hammett planted.

The title of this book comes from a dream one of the characters describes to Ned, where the two of them are on the roof of a locked house surrounded by vipers, but that the key is made of glass, and it shatters. It is a wonderfully poetic metaphor for the possibility of peace and safety in a world governed by corruption and violence, as evidenced by the ending. After spending the entire book trying to help his friend, and nearly losing his life (several times) in the process, Ned solves the mystery only to…

Well, you’ll just have to read it.

The Planck length as a “pixel” of our universe

One of the chief characteristics of simulations is low information density compared to the phenomenon being simulated. Very complex simulations may have relatively higher information density, in the sense that high definition images are noticeably closer to real life than standard definition images, but even those will still fall short of reality.

The human eye, for example, has a discrete resolution. The width of the photosensitive cells at the back of your retina represent the lowest limit of our ability to detect light. In fact, it is now possible to construct a display with a greater resolution than the human eye, meaning such a display would present us with more information than we can actually perceive.

But then, that’s no different than what happens every time you open your eyes. Light from the world comes in photons, each of which carries information and most of which are discarded, first by the simple biology of our eyes (although there’s actually some complicated “averaging” going on there) and then by our brains during visual perception.

This is how the universe exists, in discrete packets of energy we call quanta, the physical manifestation of which is the Planck length, the point at which space can be divided no further. As such, it’s sort of analogous to a pixel on a display, where our universe appears to be discrete rather than continuous.

It occurs to me that such discreteness could be evidence that the universe is nothing more than a highly advanced simulation whose resolution is equal to the Planck length. Incidentally, that could also explain why there are only three dimensions since each added dimension would require exponentially more processing power for little gain over any number but three, depending what you were studying. (If that was life, then three is minimally sufficient since the complex chemical reactions required are not possible on a flat plane.)

If I were simulating a variety of entire universes, especially ones where life could evolve, and I wanted to be as meaningful as possible, I imagine I would opt for more information density rather than more dimensions, especially since each added dimension would come at such a high cost. I imagine I would also want there to be an arrow of time, such as the one we observe, if only to force the simulation forward to some sort of resolution rather than let it spin its tires in a random back-and-forth walk.

And of course, all of that would explain the anthropic principle as well.

I’m sure I’m not the first to have this idea, nor do I actually believe it (at all), but it occurred to me this afternoon all the same and it may find a place in my next novel.

 

cover image by Josan Gonzales

Review of Walter Mosley’s “Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned”

Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned by Walter Mosley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fans of Mr. Mosley’s “Easy” Rawlins novels might be disappointed that there’s no mystery to solve, but that doesn’t take away from the true strengths of this book, which is a series of vignettes about life in Watts: about poverty, about race, about violence. They read to me as modern Socratic dialogues, an association I found hard to shake given the protagonist’s name is Socrates Fortlow, where each introduced a moral quandary or sorts, and then through the action and dialogue, revealed the main character’s — presumably also Mr. Mosley’s — philosophical ruminations on the challenges of being black in America.

From the outset, for example, Socrates shows a young black thief, who prides himself on only robbing rich people, how what he’s doing winds up hurting black folks — not that he’s convinced. We learn in Socrates’s exchange with the owners of a bookstore what’s ineffectual about black intellectualism. We learn through his patronage of a young boy his ideas what it means to be a man, and a black man in particular. (Black women, on the other hand, are kept somewhat at arm’s length — treasures to be fought for or terrors to be avoided.)

At barely 200 pages, it’s a short read, and it’s full of Mosley’s snappy prose, which is worth reading if you haven’t yet. But I have to admit, a few of the vignettes felt a little contrived and I had the sense I was sitting in a classroom rather than reading a work of fiction. However — and this is important — I learned something all the same, or at least I reaffirmed what I have learned from time to time, that as a white man I don’t always know what I think I know.

View all my reviews

Why we eat what we do

There is not, and probably never can be, a science of why we eat the things we do. While there are clear material influences — people in hot climates tend to eat spicy food because chiles and hot peppers grow in hot climates — ultimately there’s no accounting for human taste. It’s one of the reasons that, once culture evolved, a full assessment of the world could never again be dogmatically material.

For whatever reason, the Chinese decided early in their history that it was impolite to use knives at the table, which meant food had to be prepared in ways you could east with chopsticks or spoons, in bite-sized or easily breakable pieces. It’s a prohibition that gives Chinese cuisine that particular feel it has. Similarly, the absence of dairy in most Chinese cuisine is not because it wasn’t available but because they associated it with the nomadic herdsmen who ate (and drank) a lot of it and who periodically invaded, causing death and general mayhem.

That’s all well and good, but I also expect — although this is my own invention and not something anyone wrote in a book — that the kinds of readily available starches also influence the physical characteristics (rather than the flavors) of traditional foods. Since the invention of agriculture, we get most of our calories from grasses, and although you can eat cracked wheat, it tends to turn to gruel after a time, the texture of which human mouths seem to universally enjoy less than the texture of bread, which is why, as soon as someone in the wheat-growing areas of Eurasia hit upon the baking of bread, pretty much everyone started grinding their wheat rather than cracking it.

And I’m sorry, oats were for the livestock, who could digest the cellulose and so get way more calories from it. Humans only ate it when there wasn’t anything else.

Back in the day, those folks who lived in areas with significant and dependable rainfall could grow rice, which produces a lot more calories per hectare than wheat, which means you don’t have to clear a forest way out in the boonies to grow enough to support your family, which means you can all live closer together, which means you’ll need to develop a culture that is significantly more communitarian than one based on the myth of the go-it-alone yeoman farmer.

But I digress.

Once you start getting most of your calories from rice, which doesn’t need to be cracked and which holds its shape even after being cooked, the foods you add to it will tend towards sauces and other condiments that can be poured on top and eaten together.

French cuisine, arguably the most developed in the West, is notoriously based on butter, a development that was never going to happen in China, with it’s aversion to dairy. Add to that a climate better suited to wheat, and bam! You get bread and butter, a phrase still synonymous with “the basic staples.”

But of course it’s taste that matters most, and there we all seem to share the same basic sensory apparatus. Yet look at all the variation! The availability of indigenous or easily importable spices will go a long way toward explaining why certain cuisines taste the way they do. India won the lottery there. Europe, on the other hand, lost. (I’ve argued elsewhere that the dearth of spices is part of the reasons Europeans were so rapacious. Remember that they first went to the Far East for pepper and spices. Imperialism only came much later.)

Salt is pretty much everywhere, which is good considering human beings can’t live without it. Looking at the basic tastes evolution provided us, then, it’s not surprising to see that everybody likes salty stuff. Everyone likes sweets as well, although there is a big difference in HOW sweet we like them, although it’s really only in modern times that sugar was cheap and plentiful enough to make things very sweet.

Not many places have built a cuisine on sour-flavored foods. In fact, in English the phrase “sour food” alone doesn’t mean sour-flavored. It means food that has soured — spoiled.

Some people were forced into sour food by circumstance — usually extreme poverty. Vinegar is sour. It’s also a reasonable preservative, which was important in the days before refrigeration when you could never be sure when the crops would fail or the seas would freeze. People pickled their fish for the same reason they pickled their vegetables. Then they starting adding herbs like dill to make the result a little more palatable in three months’ time.

The Japanese are the only people I know who have built a whole damned cuisine on sour. (Someone correct me.) Not because they had to. But because they fucking love that shit. I have tasted more sour things in my time here than I have in all the rest of my life put together, probably by a factor of three. There is at least one sour flavor with every meal.

Now, to be fair, the Japanese got the whole “a-proper-meal-should-balance-all-five-flavors” bit from the Chinese, who had been doing it for centuries and who also traditionally recognize the meaty, back-of-the-throat flavor we now know by the Japanese name: umami. In fact, my favorite Chinese place just down the road from here in Kamata has a vinegar pork that is fucking amazing. It hits high notes on both sour and umami, and I have it every time, along with the garlic rabe.

But the Japanese — who, let’s face it, aren’t particularly innovative — are all about taking something somebody else was doing, stripping away all the ridiculous bullshit they added to it, and making it better. WAY better. Probably the best it can be. They did it with tea. They did it with imperialism. They still do it with cars and TVs.

They fucking took the ball and ran with sour flavor. The best example is probably ume, which we call Japanese sour plum in English, except that it doesn’t taste like a plum at all. In fact, it’s most closely related to the apricot, and it kinda looks like that as well. Ume is everywhere. Ume-flavored potato chips, ume-flavored KitKats, ume-flavored noodles, ume paste on chicken, ume candies, and of course the fruit itself, salted or pickled.

But it goes beyond that. There are all kinds of sour flavors here, ones I’d rather you just taste rather than rely on me to describe, and I want to know why. And I want to know why they can eat stinky tofu and fermented soy beans (natto), but strong smelling cheeses — which I love — make them retch.

I guess we’ll never know.

Waking from the dead

I was woken from my memories by the gentle hand of the mortician. I turned to meet his eyes peering over me gently. I was lying on a steel table. He had done me the dignity of dressing me. I turned my head the other way. Next to me, just out of reach, was another body on an identical table. It was covered by a sheet.

I sat up and the man, whose last name was Bobbin and whose first name I never learned, asked if I was okay. He was aging, short, and nearly bald with a long, pert nose perfect for suspending his bifocals as he bent over corpses preparing them for their final rest. He fixed the glasses in front of his eyes and I answered with a nod of my head.

“It took some doing,” he said as he handed me a packet sheathed inside a folded plastic bag, the kind used to store food in the freezer. “It’s getting harder and harder, you know, since all this terror business.”

I took it. I popped the seal and removed the passport, tucked in the middle of a stack of neatly creased documents. I wanted to see who I was.

Annette Dunlop from Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

“Terrorism is just the excuse. They would have done all of it sooner or later anyway.”

I looked at the smiling passport photo. There was very little resemblance. But that wasn’t the end of the world. She was much heavier than I was, and people expect you to look different when you lose weight. I’d have to fix my hair like hers and dress similarly when I went to update the documents, and I’d have to don that ridiculous smile, but as long as I did so in a smaller city where they weren’t overly suspicious, then everything would go through and it would be my picture on the replacement documents and never an issue again.

I pulled out the death certificate to see how she passed.

Car accident. No next of kin.

“You might want to burn that,” Bobbin warned me. “According to the system, it never existed.”

I nodded. I had a good guess as to which day it was. I always rose three days later. And I knew where I was. Bobbin’s was just across the river in Jersey.

I replaced everything in the plastic bag as he went about tidying up the tile-lined clean room. I didn’t recognize the clothes I was wearing. I was barefoot. I looked around for a pair of shoes.

“In the corner,” he said. “I took the liberty of printing an obituary.” He nodded to the sheet-covered body.

I sat in an armless chair and dressed my feet. “Was that necessary?”

“Does it hurt?” he retorted.

I shrugged. “It might. If the wrong people take notice.”

“Yes, well, the right people would like to say goodbye, and I thought that would be more important.”

“I’m not so sure there are any of the right people left,” I breathed.

Bobbin shrugged. “Maybe you’ll be surprised.”

“When?” I asked.

“Thursday. I can only keep the body for so long before the Department of Health starts to ask questions.”

Thursday. That didn’t give me much time. I finished tying my shoes and stood. “Then I’ll see you in a few days.”

He bowed politely and I left.

I needed money, first. There was no telling when I would have to run. (I couldn’t even be sure my enemies weren’t waiting on the street to ambush me, but there was no choice but to risk it.) After that, I’d have to get my hair fixed as much like Annette Dunlop as possible, just in case I was stopped. Not that I had a car. I’d have to get one of those as well. And a cheap hotel. Worst case, both of those would only need to last me until the funeral, assuming things were quiet enough in town for me to stay that long.

I reached the street. It was cool and cloudy but bright. “Well, Annette, here we go again.”

I repeated the name to myself several times to get used to it. “Annette.”

It was all coming back to me. How to resurrect myself.

“Annette.”

I had done it so many times, and almost always with a sense of excitement. The world tends to close in after a while, and taking a new identity had always felt liberating, like I had been absolved of a great debt and the weight of it had been suddenly lifted and I was free in ways normal people would never know, with their one and only life. Free to start over. Free to do anything. Yet with all the skills and experience I’d earned before.

“Hi. I’m Annette Dunlop. Nice to meet you.”

But not this time. This time seemed different. Different than any that had come before. I didn’t feel free at all. I felt more laden than ever. Hunted, in fact, as if I was not escaping a closing world but running just ahead of a cresting wave that would break over and drown me at any moment. I watched over my shoulder at every turn. I used back doors and side entrances. I watched for cameras and bowed my head when walking underneath.

I had money, but accessing the bulk of it required paperwork, the kind that raises questions, so I preferred to wait until some time had passed, which meant I’d be living off petty cash for a time. There was a small stack in the pack Bobbin had given me, but it wouldn’t last long.

At least the sun was shining, which gave me an excuse to cover my eyes and so extend my poor resemblance to the person on my ID. I bought a cheap pair of plastic sunglasses at a convenience store. I took a bus to the airport and rented a car. I found a hotel and washed and slept. The next day I paid cash for new clothes from a fashionable vintage shop. Annette’s hair was longer than mine, so I would have to let it grow, which was disappointing. There’s a reason old ladies like me tend to keep their hair short. And I always enjoyed changing mine when starting a new life.

I decided to splurge and at least got a color. I sat in the chair and kept thinking about Benjamin.

And Etude.

The next day, I sat in a coffee shop for a long time and practiced Annette’s signature. My signature. Which I would need to perform flawlessly if I ever hoped to change my documents. After three lattes, an athletic young man in his middle 20s with a close crop of brown hair and narrow, flashing eyes sat in the chair opposite me at my narrow table. He wore a T-shirt, brand name sweat pants, and sandals.

“How are you?” he asked, smiling.

I set my pen down and folded my paper full of practice signatures.

He noticed it. “Half an hour,” he said. “Half and hour I’ve been standing over there by the window trying to get your attention. I thought I’d come see what was keeping it.”

“A gentleman asks before taking a seat opposite a lady.”

He squinted his eyes in mock thought. “Hmm no I’m pretty sure we stopped doing that about 1960 or something.”

I folded my hands over my folded paper.

He leaned forward. “Know what I think?”

“That you have a chance?”

He laughed. “I think you have the hint of a Russian accent.”

“Do I?”

“It’s faint. But my dad was Ukrainian, so I have an ear for it.”

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Know what else I think?”

“I’m on pins and needles.”

“You’re practicing someone’s signature.”

“Yes. Mine.”

“People don’t practice their own signature.”

“They do if they’re recovering from a horrible accident. But thank you for reminding me how I struggle to accomplish even the simplest of tasks.”

He sat back with a serious face, as if he hadn’t contemplated that. Then the smile returned. “Oh, you’re good.” He raised a finger. “You’re really good. You’re, like, the real thing. Like, no joke.”

“The real thing?”

He leaned in again and whispered. “One of those Russian hacker identity thieves. Who’s the mark?” He whisked the folded paper from under my hands and looked at it. “Annette Dunlop.”

“Me.” I took the paper back.

“Then show me your driver’s license.”

There was no way Annette’s picture would hold up to his level of scrutiny. Not that I was worried about the cocky little shit. But I certainly didn’t need him calling some identity theft hotline and getting Annette’s name on a list. She was only two days old.

I started packing my things, careful not to let him see what weighed down my new oversized handbag.

“You’re going?”

I made a face and stood. I thought about telling the staff he was harassing me, even though it hardly qualified, but that brought some small risk of police involvement. I had a better idea.

I put one hand on the back of his chair and the other on the table and leaned to his ear. “You want to know the truth?”

He nodded with a smile. He thought I was playing with him then, that I was giving him some kind of test to see if he was worth my time. I’d like to think young women didn’t fall for his kind of bravado, but I knew better.

“Then follow me.” I walked out and put on my sunglasses.

He ran after me. “I’m Chris.” He held out his hand as we walked past a pizza and sub joint.

I didn’t take it.

“So, this is the part where you say your name,” he said with that easy smile.

“You already know my name.”

“What? Annette? Come on . . .”

I shrugged.

“Alright, Annette, where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

“Secret identity thief stuff?”

“Something like that.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Yes. Actually. It is. Is that a problem?”

“Depends,” he shrugged.

I didn’t ask for clarification.

“You don’t say much,” he said.

“I wouldn’t be a very good criminal if I revealed all my secrets to a teenager.”

“That’s funny. I’m 26.”

“Hmm,” I said. “You don’t look it.”

“Come on! You can’t be that much older than me.”

“How old do you think I am?”

He shrugged. “About the same.”

He was smooth enough to under-guess. Most people put me at 30, give or take.

“Well?” he urged.

“Well what?”

“Am I right?”

We turned off the main thoroughfare and onto a residential side street packed tight with pre-war gabled-roof houses. Cars lined both sides of the narrow road such that I’m not sure there was enough space for two to pass going opposite directions.

“You have a lot of secrets,” he said.

“Is that surprising for a Russian hacker-thief?”

“So you admit it!” He clapped his hands once. “Man, this is awesome. What are we gonna do? If it’s dangerous, you gotta let me know.”

“Why? Are you scared?”

He made a face. “Fuck no. It’s just, ya know, it helps if I know what I’m walking into.”

“Well, it’s just up here.” I pointed to a house just down the way. “And you’re right about one thing,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Quite a lot of forging goes on at this place.”

“I knew it. So after we do this thing, how about you and I go somewhere—”

“First you have to meet Charles.”

He stopped. “Is that your boyfriend?” He stood on the sidewalk deciding if I was worth a fight, or a potential conflict of any kind.

“And if he was?” I said without stopping.

He caught up and shrugged. “That’s between you and him. Don’t have nothing to do with you and me.” His demeanor became much more street hustler then.

“Are you saying you’re going to try and come between us? After all these years?”

He studied my face. “You’re joking again.”

“Very good. You learn quickly.”

“So who’s this guy Chuck?”

“Charles V.” I turned the block. Our destination was on the next street over, and I wanted to approach from the back rather than from the main road.

“Who?”

“Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain.”

“Ha. Here? A King in Queens. Wasn’t there a show like that?”

He had no idea who I was talking about. “I don’t know.”

“So what’s he doing here?”

“You’d be surprised how many of them came to the new world.”

“Them?”

“Poorman’s has books he can read, you see.”

“What? Like braille or something?”

“Something.” I stopped at the corner. “But like I said, it might be dangerous. There are some people who are angry at me. So I need you to do something for me.”

“Name it, babe.”

I shut my eyes momentarily at that word. “You see that house there in the middle of the street? Past. The tree. With the cast iron ravens on the porch.”

“Yeah.”

“I need you to go over and knock on the door.”

“And?”

“And if an old man is there and he’s alone, ask if it’s safe. If he says yes and you believe him, signal me. If he’s not alone, or if you suspect anything, anything at all, just turn and walk away as quickly as you can. Think you can do that?”

“Don’t worry. You’re safe with me.” He touched my arm.

I looked at his hand. “Thank you. I feel so much better.”

I stepped off the curb and stood between two parked cars and watched as he walked to the residential home of Poorman’s Rare Books and Manuscripts. He opened the gate of the half-height fence that surrounded the front yard and walked up the steps to the porch. When he passed the twin ravens, I put my hand in my heavy handbag.

He knocked. We waited. He noticed the doorbell and rang it. We waited more. He knocked again. Then he turned to me from down the street and raised his hands, completely giving me away.

“Idiot . . .” I walked to the house. It was either that or flee. I stepped up to the porch and pushed past the young man and tried the door.

It was open.

In front of me was a small entry. Just past was a narrow hall to the back and a staircase to the second floor that ran along it. At the far end of the hall was another staircase that followed the slope of the first and led to the basement. I could see the outlines of a small kitchen through the doorway at the back. To my right was a cramped but formal dining room. To my left was a narrow living room that looked like it hadn’t changed since the 30s, complete with grandfather clock, spinet piano, and radio.

I stepped inside and listened.

The young man, Chris, started to speak, but I raised my hand quickly and he stopped.

I waited a moment.

“Anson?” I called.

No answer.

I kept one hand in the bag on my shoulder as I moved into the narrow living room. It had windows at the front and along the side, giving a clear view of the side of the house. It would be difficult for anyone to sneak up. At the back was a short hall, no more than a couple steps, where you could turn right and enter the kitchen or keep going to the enclosed sun room, down a few steps, which Anson used as a workspace. It was crammed with old books, boxes, wood cabinets, tools, and utensils.

I saw a shoe. “Anson!”

I hurried forward and found the bookbinder, Anson Verhoeven, hunched on the floor. He was a gray man in his 70s, and he’d been beaten squarely. He had dried blood on his forehead and a smudge on his cheek. Both his eyes were bruised, although the left was far worse. His cheeks had been slapped raw.

Chris came up behind me, but he hung back. And I noticed he’d left the front door open so it would be easy to run. “I thought you said this guy’s name was Charles.”

“Get some water and a towel,” I barked.

Anson awoke at my prodding, although he was incoherent. I helped him to his feet and slowly to the couch in the living room, which faced the piano. I dipped the kitchen towel Chris brought into the glass of water and cleaned the man’s face. Then I urged him to drink.

After ten minutes of care, he nodded to me like he understood where he was and what was happening.

“Chris?” I turned to him. “Can you give us a minute?”

“Sure. I’ll just wait in the—”

“You can wait in the basement.”

“The basement?” He scowled.

“Yes,” I said. “Charles is probably there. You should introduce yourself.”

He was streetwise enough to be suspicious, so I took his hand, folding my fingers gently between his, and led him around to the stairs to the basement. I clicked the light, but the stairway was so narrow, you couldn’t see anything but the concrete at the bottom and a bit of the front wall.

“Talk to Charles for ten minutes,” I breathed. “That’s ten minutes for me to complete my business with Anson, and then you and I can go somewhere.”

I don’t think he entirely believed me, but he didn’t want to appear the coward. Part of him was clearly excited. And I suspect he felt the mere chance of more was worth ten minutes of his time.

I watched him rumble down the wooden slats in his sandals and fashionable sweat pants. Then I returned to Anson, who had finished the glass of water. It brought some of the color back to his face. I reached for the empty glass and he gave it.

“I don’t suppose it’s any secret who did this,” I said as I walked to the kitchen to refill the glass. I also took and apple from a bowl on the counter.

“They’re getting bolder,” he said from the next room. “Each time, they push a little more. And each time no one pushes back, they get that much stronger.”

I walked back and handed him the water and apple.

“Thank you.” He set the fruit on the couch and drank the water.

I sat opposite him on the piano bench. There were old framed photos on the top of the spinet.

“What else have I missed?”

“A purge,” he said as he finished the second glass.

“Do you want more?”

He shook his head. “He’s united all the covens. No one even knows how many of them there are, just that they’re acting in concert. Anyone they think is a threat has been killed or driven away. And the night market shut down. Indefinitely. The gypsies have all scattered.” He raised his eyes from the floor. “They all blame him.”

He meant Etude. “Do you?” I asked.

He tilted his head as if he weren’t sure and turned away. “Whatever else they’d become, The Masters kept the peace.”

“They did. Once. Yes. But all things are eventually corrupted.”

“Even you?” he asked with a smile. It stretched the wrinkles of his face.

“Me?” I turned sideways on my seat. “I was always bad.”

“Well. It’s all moot anyway. They’re all gone. And so is he. And the saints are dead, ad there’s no one left to stop them.”

“You haven’t heard anything?”

“About the chef? Is that why you came?”

I nodded.

“No.” He sat back and picked up the apple and looked at it. “I haven’t heard anything. I thought if anyone knew anything, you would.”

“We were separated.”

“I see.” He raised the fruit to bite it.

“Wait!” I stood and took it from his hand. I looked at it. Then I set it on a side table, picked up a brass lamp, and smashed the fruit with the heavy base.

Worms and cockroaches crawled from the brown center.

I knocked the apple on the floor and stomped on it.

He stared. “They’ll know you’re here. You should go. Now.”

“Ahhh!!!” Chris screamed from the basement.

Anson and I heard him bound upstairs in four thumps, which meant he was striding three or four stairs at a time. He didn’t even say anything. He just ran out the door screaming “Fucking shit! Fucking shit! Fucking shit!”

Anson smiled at me.

“Thank you, Charles!” I called to the basement. I replaced my sunglasses and walked to the front door.

“Is this goodbye?” he asked as he stepped into the entry to see me out.

He was shaky, but walking. And that’s what had tipped me off—that he was mostly okay. Anson was a decent man, but he was elderly and bookish. He would have told them whatever they wanted to know once the beating started in earnest. That meant they knocked him out for some other reason.

“You know,” he said. “When I was a young man growing up in Bruges, there were still people who believed. Nothing significant, of course. More like the last shadows of the old ways, superstitions of their grandparents people performed out of custom and habit. But now all of that is gone, and I don’t think anyone really believes. I thought it was the coming of the computer. But it’s not, is it? It’s them. It’s been them the whole time.”

I nodded.

“They flood the world with nonsense. Gibberish books written by crackpots. They used to try to hide the True Canon. Because they wanted it for themselves. Now they just bury it under a mountain of lies and no one knows what to believe.”

I stood in the door. “Please be careful.”

“Of course.”

I started across the porch to the stairs.

“Ms. Milan.”

I turned.

“If I may. The library. What became of it? They say it burned, but . . .”

But he knew better. He’d forged the mock replacements that would leave just enough ash and paper to convince people the real thing had gone. To convince the followers of the dark that they were successful. So that they would pursue it no further.

But they’d discovered the truth. He was letting me know that he had told them. When they beat him. That meant the new owner was in trouble.

“The less you know, the better,” I said. And I meant it. He was a risk.

“I know it’s not my place to say,” he added quickly with a shaking, apologetic voice, “but don’t let it go to waste. Please. No one else has the knowledge. No one.”

I nodded and walked down the steps and found the nearest public phone and made a call.

rough cut from my forthcoming occult mystery/urban fantasy FEAST OF FIVE SHADOWS

cover image by len yan, used without permission because it’s too awesome.

Wandering the Forest of Forgetting

There isn’t a common name for the magical community—other than that cumbersome phrase, I suppose—which is unfortunate because it’s a tower on a hill. A bastion, a keep, a prison. It gets its fair share of tourists, of course, but those who stay tend to make it a lifestyle more than a hobby. It permeates their identity. The closest thing to it that I can imagine is the taking of holy vows. Once entered, one has difficultly approaching life in any other way except through, as it were, the keyhole of Solomon. Which is why, incidentally, there is so little mixing. Like with the races, our identities are formed as much by the beliefs others as by our own.

I had not only witnessed this first hand, I had succumbed to it—the superiority of difference. Ideologues the world over also look down on the rest of the world, but rarely does mere ideology also determine your clothing, your occupation, your diet, your pastimes, the manner in which you move through the world, how long you live, and so forth. Liberals and conservatives are both sports fans and fashionistas and software engineers. But if one is a druid, or a geomancer, one engages with the world in no other way.

It wasn’t always so, not until the priests and astrologers erected towers to study the heavens, and having ascended them, turned round to look down on the world of men. And to believe they were more.

The shamans, on the other hand, who served man before the wizards, took the world as it was. They lived with the people rather than atop ziggurats—albeit usually outside the village, if only to protect their community from the dangerous spirits that routinely visited them—and their trade was eminently practical. They were expected to know both the white and black arts and to employ whichever was necessary to cure the sick and protect the village. A shaman was to do whatever worked, the chasing of spirits an the summoning them close, even where that put their own lives at risk. And so it was said, he who serves a wealthy man desires to be wealthy. He who serves a community desires to be rich.

I say all of this only to qualify my reaction to young Etude. He fascinated me. He was so unlike any of the grand old men I’d served, which is why it was so easy to mistake him for a charlatan at our first encounter, where he approached me cordially wearing simple clothes rather than dressed in robes and speaking from the other side of a tinted Mercedes window. But once I began to see past that, once I began to feel his soul was deeper than I could readily grasp, I was in awe. Here was a young man who, regardless of his age, had a repertoire of skills that would put any of the High Arcane to shame, and yet he employed no attendants to prepare his mixtures. He had no disciples or cult of hangers-on, nor even—most surprisingly—a cadre of benefactors seeking to profit from his talent. Like any good shaman, he took the world as it was and he did whatever worked, which meant he employed not only the dark arts, but also science as well as magic, a fact that did more to distinguish him from our unnamed community than any other single trait.

To be honest, I don’t remember much of our first journey up the mountain. Even the parts I’ve already related have been pieced together from later conversations and subsequent visits. I know we walked through the tiny village. I can see a faded pink house with flower boxes on the windows standing at the end of an empty field of cobblestone paths, as if God Himself had reached down and picked up all the other shops and houses. I can see a disheveled man in clown paint holding a pinwheel, but in my mind, he is both ministering to laughing children who are not there as well as watching Etude and I pass with a suspicious eye. I have no idea which is true. I have no idea how long I wandered the forest of forgetting, trailing the cord that was tied around my waist. I have no memory of ascending the steep slope I must surely have ascended.

For what I do remember—clearly—is standing confused near the top of the crevasse that cut through the far slope of the mountain at the very moment Etude came up behind me, following the cord. He touched my shoulder as I stared in confusion at his marks on my palms, having totally forgotten what they were and how they’d got there.

Seeing my face, he removed the vial of muskroot oil that hung from my neck, opened it, and shoved it under my nostrils again. I stepped back and coughed. My eyes watered. And it all trickled back. Pieces anyway.

I looked at the wistful leaves of the wood that surrounded us, rustling softly on the breeze, and recalled that the forest of forgetting had stood guard over the cemetery for one and a half thousand years. Think on that. One and a half thousand years. Sowed by the Byzantine emperor Justinian in what was then the barbarian fringe of the world, it was built to keep weapons and artifacts confiscated from the marauding Turks. In their destructive centuries-long march westward from their ancestral homeland in central Asia, the Turks amassed an arsenal of the occult, which elicited from the Byzantines much the same reaction modern peoples have to chemical or biological weapons, and the Emperor ordered that all such weapons should be disposed of, and for all time.

But it would not be so easy. Justinian and his generals soon discovered that many of the artifacts were merely containers of evil and so had to be preserved unmolested. Others simply couldn’t be destroyed, for no one knew how. And so a secret place was chosen, a crevasse in the mountainous frontier of the known world, carved long ago by waters that no longer ran. It was consecrated and ceremonial graves were dug, and around them, the old forest was cut and a new one was planted, grown from seeds that had been dipped in the river Styx. And so it became a place of forgetting, a secret place where secrets were buried—anything the world wanted to forget had ever existed—where those who wandered in wandered blissfully out again.

But one path was kept, its entrance and meanderings a carefully guarded secret, known in our time only to the High Arcane. And they used it only to inter the fraught and the deadly such that what was feared would be forgotten, and what was lost would stay lost.

And so it was. For one and a half thousand years.

One and a half thousand years.

Until, one bright afternoon, the forest that couldn’t be traversed was traversed by a young man of barely twenty.

I stood there, watching him as he scrambled down the narrow crevasse, which near the top of its course was nothing but a slope of boulders resting at angles against each other. The safest path down was along a V-shaped gap, but without a flat surface below us, we had to walk with our shoes wedged carefully so as not to break our ankles.

I steadied myself on the steeper of the two boulders as I moved one foot in front of the other along the line. “You did it . . .” I breathed.

“Of course,” he called from the scramble. “I said as much.”

“Yes, but . . .”

It was incredible. It was legitimately amazing. He’d done what even the grandest wizards were sure was impossible—so sure, none of them had ever bothered to try. He’d done it with less than a month’s preparation. And he’d done it with science rather than magic.

I saw him toss something from his backpack into a crack between the giant rocks.

“Come. The cemetery is hidden. Just there.” He pointed down the crevasse.

I followed, and as we passed the boulders, the slope lessened and a crack in the mountain opened, like a small canyon, at most two meters high, where a narrow patch of flat earth stretched between the rock faces. It was covered in dead leaves and ran for no more than ten paces or so before there was another slope of boulders and then a longer stretch of flat, again inside a crack about three meters high. The trees of the forest lined the top of the short ridge and bushes and shrubs grew from pocks and holes in the rocks such that I was certain nothing of it was visible from the air. Passing in a helicopter, it would look like any of a thousand nearby ravines.

But it wasn’t. Walking on the flat earth, I saw ancient stone markers under the rocky overhang, half hidden by bramble and dead leaves. Vivid green moss covered more and more of the crevasse the further we descended, and in between periodic rocky interruptions, the crack widened and the overhang grew more pronounced until it was almost, but not quite, possible to walk underneath it, if you stooped. Here were mossy gravestones, so old the carved inscriptions had all but weathered away. Gnarled roots of ancient trees, which had penetrated the gaps in the cliff over centuries, poked up from the tree-covered earth, and there was a sense that we were disturbing something. I felt like I had walked into the bedroom of a sleeping lover, someone I knew I had woken but who pretended to be asleep and who wanted only for me to stop making noise so that they could return to their slumber.

A narrower crack broke off from the central passage, a tributary of the waters that no longer ran, and my eyes—my soul—were drawn to it. The gap in the crag left barely enough space to shuffle sideways, and it was covered in lichen. The footing was covered in wet leaves, for the sun never reached it directly, and so waters gathered, and it stank of rot.

I was about embark therein when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“No,” he said. “That place you must not enter. Come.”

I turned back once again and noticed the wasp that flown from it and, intentionally or not, right at my face. I squealed and swatted my hands in the air, back and forth, as my feet danced on the soft, leaf-covered ground. I was aware that the wasp was around my head, as if it wanted to nest in my hair, and I shivered and danced and moved about making gibberish sounds with my eyes shut tight.

Then I was aware it had stopped, and I saw Etude drop the crushed wasp from one of his now-bare palms. I looked at my own and wondered what would have happened to me just then had I approached that place without benefit of his protections?

He called to me again, and I followed, determined to stay on the path. We traversed another field of gathered boulders, but smaller than before, at most thirty paces, whereupon we reached our destination, or so it seemed. Under the now-high overhang of the crevasse, Etude had found a cracked and pockmarked sarcophagus that had been buried by the centuries to within half a meter of its lid. Dead leaves surrounded it, but the top had been cleared of debris down to the dark crumbles of freshly disturbed earth. Something had been buried there recently. Or perhaps I should say re-buried.

He set to work immediately. He pulled a folding shovel, not much larger than a spade, from his bag, unfolded it, and started scraping the surface as fast as he could. It took longer than I expected, and since I had no tools, I leaned against a rock and looked at the sky. I felt a deep longing for the woods and quiet spaces of my youth, and I reminisced indulgently, despite that I knew it was the stupor of the forest falling down on me as I stared.

A heavy, hollow THUNK brought my attention round to our quest. He had reached something, a coffin, clearly much younger than the half-buried sarcophagus that held it. Late 1800s, I’d say. It took him a bit longer to clear around the lid, but soon it was done, and he lifted it until it hit the rock overhang. He stepped in, using his bent back to prop the lid while he dug through the contents.

I stepped closer.

Books.

Stacks and stacks of books. It was a grave of secret knowledge, and it was the only resting place in the entire cemetery that had been disturbed in years.

But the sarcophagus was deep, and full, and soon Etude started throwing ancient texts frantically onto the ground one after the next without care.

I watched them bounce across the damp leaf bed. One cracked and opened and nearly disintegrated in a cloud of dust.

“Should you be doing that?”

“It’s not here!” More books flew, two and three at a time. He was chucking them out with both hands. After a moment, I heard fingernails on bare wood. He pounded it. Then he came out from the grave. The lid of the coffin fell with a thud as he looked in all directions. “It must be here . . .” He started scrambling over the rocks again. He scowled at me.

“What are you doing?” he yelled.

“Taking a break,” I said.

I was leaning against one of the rough and immovable fragments of the mountain that poked up from the deep ground. My legs were tired, as if I’d been walking for hours, and I realized then that I probably had. He’d neglected to tell me how long it had taken me to traverse the otherwise narrow stretch of forest that ran from the tip of the ridge to the meadows below. I was famished, which I mentioned three times. But it was still a good hour before the echo of his mutterings stopped and I found him collapsed on the ground further down the crevasse. He was holding his head in frustration.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

He turned to me. His face was so forlorn. But it wasn’t just sad. It was fearful. “I’m not ready,” he said.

“Ready?” I was confused. “Ready for what?”

“It has already begun.” He turned back to look over the crevasse. “It has already begun.”

After all his work, all his preparation, the book was nowhere to be found.

rough cut from the final course of my forthcoming occult mystery, FEAST OF FIVE SHADOWS.

cover image by Michał Klimczak

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More on the Limitations of Writing Really Good Villainesses

One of the reasons Darth Vader is a timeless villain is because he’s Luke’s father. Luke, as the hero, represents us — either indirectly in that he fights for us, or directly as a stand-in, a power-projection of the self. Vader, then, in perverting his role as father, inverts it and becomes the antithesis of protector, and his betrayal of Luke becomes the betrayal of all of us. As proof, consider how ready we are to forgive him, despite all the people he’s tortured and killed, when, at the end of Return of the Jedi, he finally accepts the role he denied and casts the Emperor into the pit.

Gender figures into these kinds of things considerably. The villain, as perversion, has to pervert something not only recognizable, but deeply felt by the audience-reader. Anything less is weak. I’ve lamented before the lack of genuinely despicable women in books and film. This is a reflection of our deeply felt gender norms, which still place women predominantly in two roles: lover/spouse, or caretaker/mother. That means, because a truly effective villain perverts deeply held norms (not just of gender, but that especially), most female villains are either some version of the jilted lover/spouse, or the false caretaker/mother.

Consider the story of Lamia: “In the myth, Lamia is a mistress of the god Zeus, causing Zeus’ jealous wife, Hera, to kill all of Lamia’s children and transform her into a monster that hunts and devours the children of others. Another version has Hera stealing all of Lamia’s children and Lamia, who loses her mind from grief and despair, starts stealing and devouring others’ children out of envy, the repeated monstrosity of which transforms her into a monster.

Some accounts say she has a serpent’s tail below the waist. This popular description of her is largely due to Lamia, a poem by John Keats composed in 1819. Antoninus Liberalis uses Lamia as an alternate name for the serpentine drakaina Sybaris; however, Diodorus Siculus describes her as having nothing more than a distorted face.

Later traditions referred to many lamiae; these were folkloric monsters similar to vampires and succubi that seduced young men and then fed on their blood.” (Wikipedia)

Here, everyone is a villain. Zeus is a dick, Hera is a bitch, and Lamia is a monster, but note how Hera is the jilted lover/spouse and Lamia is the false caretaker/mother and Zeus is still just a dick. Because he’s free to be.

And this kind of thing is still going strong. Neil Gaiman often employs the false caretaker/mother in his books, like the mom in Coraline and the nanny in The Ocean at the End of the Lane. And there’s a reason for that. Of the two roles, that is certainly the most powerful. A jilted lover/spouse has a reason to be upset, which is why it’s been so easy to turn the Wicked Witch, and indeed all witches, into sympathetic characters (a la the play Wicked).

In fact, to the degree such women were guilty — if they were guilty of anything — only of “perverting” traditional gender norms, modern audiences are probably predisposed to seeing them as powerful heroines more than anything else, tragic figures who fought the system and paid the ultimate price. And so we see Lamia and Lilith and Eve and every witch in Salem turned round in a lot of contemporary fiction.

This is not so easy to do with the caretaker/mother. One has a hard time imagining what could possibly justify Nurse Ratched’s behavior in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, or Kathy Bates’ character from Stephen King’s Misery, both nurses, a traditional caretaker role, and both absolutely devilish and effective villains. That kind of reversal has been done, such as in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, but it only works because Ms. Jackson, for example, revealed that the supposedly sick person, the one being cared for, was not only faking, but also abusing the sick role and their caretaker. Hence the fate of poor Eleanor.

As an example of just how powerful these expectations are, and how we’ll only accept someone as villain who is perverting a traditional role, consider that there have been several cases — real, historical cases — where women guilty of despicable murders were either let go or given significantly reduced sentences where they acted alongside a man.

In one case, a woman convinced her lover to help her butcher her husband, but when the couple were caught, she broke down on the stand and said it was all her lover’s idea, which was clearly contravened by the evidence. But we don’t accept a female Vader. Our narratives teach us men are perpetrators. Women are victims. So the jury gave her a reduced sentence, and she was eventually released.

Progress, if there’s been any, has been entirely one-sided. That is, we’re getting better at portraying women as something other than victims. They can be heroines. But as villains, they’re still restricted to perversions of the two traditional roles. Not that it’s not tricky. It’s great that the makers of Star Wars put a woman, Rey, in the lead. If Kylo Ren were also female, it would likely strike audiences as “a woman’s film,” rather than something for everyone. Look at the reaction to Ghostbusters (which also stopped short of casting a female villain, which I thought was a little disappointing).

There is a third role for the villainess that I shudder even to mention. It used to be more prevalent but is thankfully less common these days. This is the woman trying to “act like a man” — who thinks, for example, that she can be CEO or president or some other traditionally male (usually leadership or scientific) role, when we all know she’s just being silly and needs to get her ass back in the kitchen and bake us a pie. In her underwear. And of course, when she’s called on it, she fights back, only to have everyone’s worst fears confirmed in the end when the company goes under, or the country is attacked, or the virus escapes containment, or whatever. Fuck that and may it rest in peace, or at least stay in Christian fiction, where it still plays a role.

This is why I always say we’ll know sexism is truly on the ropes when we start to see engaging, effective female villains who aren’t perversions of the two traditional feminine roles, which brings things around to my work. All of my villains have thus far been male, more or less, with the exception of Anne Pickford, the witch from my horror short, Scratch, although really it turns out she’s possessed by a demon, so even that’s tricky. And what’s more, the only reason she was possessed at all is because she was shunned from the community (in the 1800s) for being a lesbian, which very much fits the Lilith/Lamia archetype already mentioned.

Without giving away any spoilers, I just want to say that my mind is turning towards female villains for my upcoming works, including the novel I’m co-authoring presently with +Lisa Cohen, as well as my next standalone novel, a sci-fantasy mystery tentatively called The Mysterians. The issue, of course, is how to make female villains genuinely effective when your audience comes “fully laden” — predisposed to really engage only with villains that pervert previously internalized norms, where anything else is trite and less-than-memorable.

At least in the latter case, I think I have a solution. We’ll see if it works.

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art by Mike Mignola

A Visit to the Night Market

“Where are we going exactly?”

“The gypsy night market.”

“Right.” I had no idea what that was. I hadn’t heard of there being a night market here like there is back home. “Why?” I wanted it to be somewhere public. Busy. Safe.

“We still need a pot.”

“Why do you keep saying ‘we’? I don’t need a pot. I don’t even cook.” I sighed, and after a good twenty music-less minutes on the road it was clear he was a lot more comfortable with silence than me. “What did you need it for?”

“The pot?”

“No. You know, your proposal. From before.”

He turned to look straight at me when he said this. “The surrealists define sex as a sumptuous ceremony in a tunnel.”

“Okay . . .” Aaaaand it was instantly weird again.

He said he was going to restart the Cirque, this time with the Eros Gastronomique. The event would “penetrate a wet cave,” an ocean grotto exposed by the tides. He said they had a location already picked and there was a stunning view of the sunset over the South China Sea. The tide pools left from the retreating water would be lit deep red. There would be candles and lights strung overhead, and the courses would be served with an increasing urgency as the tide returned over the duration of the meal, thrusting in and out. He said the whole experience would sway in tension between the desire to savor and the desire to hurry and finish before the waters returned and drowned them all. He said the diners would feel the rhythm and rocking of the waves as they ate dessert: a light salt-custard with chocolat avec de l’essence de la femme, chocolate with essence of woman.

He wanted me to be the woman.

I actually felt really honored. And totally silly for not even letting him explain it before. It sounded wonderful. But mostly I was thinking how it would get me a ticket home. I could see everyone. I was going to tell him that, but that’s when I noticed the boarded windows and graffiti and homeless people immobile under blankets of rubbish.

“Um. Where are we?”

“Here.”

“Which is where exactly?”

There weren’t even street lights. Always a bad sign. I don’t drive, as you know, but even if you were here and we had been given a car and written instructions, I’m certain we never could have found this place. It was like a hole in the city. It was hard even to tell where we were relative to downtown because of the two intersecting overpasses that arced overhead. We pulled through a wilting chain link fence and parked underneath. Giant concrete pillars kept the overpasses aloft, but they were so large as to seem otherworldly. It seemed like the old Chinese gods had lifted the city like a carpet and exposed the secret filth underneath. The whole place was a void, a non-place, like the inaccessible nooks left around the complex passageways of airports and hospitals or the slivers of never-to-be-developed land left between unrelated housing additions. Places only children and animals dare explore. Places the homeless hide. Or the insane.

But it was empty. And dusky, lit only from the second-hand glow of the street lamps on the overpass high above. There was only a stack of broken pallets and some colorful graffiti around the base of several of the pillars.

The chef turned off the engine.

I looked at him. He sat back and waited.

“Why is it called the gypsy market?” I asked.

“Because it moves. Continually. To avoid what chases it.”

“Chases?”

“I need to make several acquisitions before they depart.” He opened the car door.

I could hear the noise from the traffic above, like the wash of waves over sand. “There’s nothing here.”

“Stay here. Don’t get out.” He shut the door and locked the car. Then he waved his hands over it, like a priest before an altar.

“So weird,” I breathed.

I heard noises then. Engines, first. But then voices. Some cheerful yelling. And music. Vehicles started pouring in from three different sides, including the break in the fence we had driven through. Rumbling motorcycles, RVs, jalopies with shimmying wheels piled high with junk, trucks hauling silver-sided campers, and more paraded past the chef’s car like the temptations of St. Anthony. The three motorized streams met in the middle of the space under the freeway and the vehicles turned past each other like a flock of birds. They parked, one next to the other, forming a labyrinth of walkways in moments. The drivers had clearly done it all before. Many times.

Then they all began to unpack.

I looked at the chef standing there in his amazing coat. He just watched, expressionless, as strings of holiday lights, already attached to posts, were unrolled and stretched across the walkways. They flickered to life as trunks were emptied and wares were displayed on blankets or folding tables or car seats or simply on the ground. And then, as if signaled by an unseen director, he stepped into the growing menagerie.

“Wait a minute,” I said out loud to myself. I opened the door.

He turned. “What are you doing?”

I locked my purse in the car and shut the door behind me. “Dude. I’m not a kid. I’m not gonna wait in the car.”

He scowled at me. I thought he was going to object. I kinda felt like I wasn’t even supposed to be there. But he didn’t. All he said was, “I cannot guarantee your safety.”

I looked around at the growing circus. I nodded.

I had to see.

The two of us stepped forward into the throng. We walked on cracked and uneven concrete that poked through a thin layer of dirt and gravel. Rubbish was strewn about, but not from the inhabitants—from the rest of us, blown in from the city. There was too much to see! A huge, sweaty woman in a flower-print muumuu had insect of every kind, both dried and alive, swarming in containers: beetles, lightning bugs, and dragonflies. A pair of gap-toothed twins, in their sixties I guessed, with long scraggly hair and 1970s clothes, sold seeds, nuts, and bulbs of unusual and rare variety, including a few that I’m sure were illegal, like coca leaves and poppy flowers, and some I wasn’t sure were even real, like mandrake and moneytree. There were vials and twisty-sealed baggies with labels I couldn’t pronounce. There were toys, games, empty bottles, books, bags, globes, shells, crystals, coins, plumage of every color—some still attached—pottery, prints, plastic figurines, fish, and feces—the excrement of every thing that makes it, dried and powered and sealed with wax. And there were bones. So many bones. Antlered monstrosities and toothy, grinning predators. Even the bones of people, pilfered from their final rest.

And there were the smells. Jasmine and cloves and urine and anise. Pepper and filth and flowers and mange. Smoke and meat and sweat and incense. And above it all, the music. Three or four separate tunes whose volume rose or fell depending on which way I turned my head. It was all so chaotic and free. My eyes went everywhere as I strolled under the holiday lights that zigzagged over my head. Some of the bulbs were bare, but many were covered in all different plastic shapes: a cactus, a birthday cake, Santa Claus, a donkey pinata, a candy cane, a heart, a star, and more.

Étranger led me to the end of the main row where a lanky man sat on a stool wrapped in a blue tarp, like it was his security blanket. Hanging from the sides of his RV was the most interesting collection of odds and ends I think I’ve ever seen. I saw a jewel-encrusted Mexican wrestler’s mask and an anatomically-correct colorful plush monster and looked like it was from 1960s Japan. There was a combination VCR-toaster and a book full of maps of places that never or no longer existed. There was a real Indian headdress and a painted Aboriginal boomerang. There was even an antique gilded porcelain toilet that apparently belonged to Napoleon and which he made his men carry around everywhere. And on and on.

The horn of a semi echoed down from the freeway above as we approached, and it totally obscured whatever the proprietor said to the chef, whom he didn’t seem to care for.

I looked up. It really seemed then like were underneath civilization, under the floorboards of the world, and that life—normal life—was passing by above us completely unaware of the magical scene just a few hundred feet below.

“Wait here.” The chef walked to the man in the tarp, who I understand is a finder of impossible things, and the two of them had words while I perused the collection with a few other patrons.

cover image: Temptation of St. Anthony by Joos van Craesbeeck

Setting and Hardboiled Detective Fiction

I was listening to some lectures on the detective novel on the plane, and the dude really had some neat points. (Go figure.)

But first, for background, you have to know that American detective fiction, sometimes labelled “hardboiled,” grew out of the English detective novel, which tended to be very genteel. The detective in the English stories, for example, was always protected by law and custom. Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot was never really in any danger from the murderers he was perpetually confronting. (Imagine elderly Miss Marple trying to solve a murder in Phillip Marlowe’s world and you can see the difference.)

To be clear, an American, Edgar Allen Poe, actually invented both the detective novel and the gentleman-detective, which is why the label “hardboiled,” which distinguishes Depression-era (and later) fiction from its predecessors, is probably more apt. Here we trade Poirot and his bourgeois obsessions for men like Ned Beaumont, the intensely moral but ruggedly individualistic streetwise womanizer who operates on his own moral code even when working outside the law — which became the paradigm for the action movie star, the “loose cannon” TV cop, and so on. But then, we know all this.

What I thought was interesting was where the lecturer noted that most of these stories — from The Maltese Falcon to Blade Runner — take place in L.A., and that there’s a reason for that. The rugged individualist, whose ancestors fled to this country to get away from the falsely genteel Old World, with its religious persecution and class oppression, must in turn flee the East Coast as the population rises and it becomes a miniature version what was left behind. So the rugged individualist goes to the frontier, figuratively, and we get cowboy stories.

But as the frontier is pacified by the railroad, there are fewer and fewer places to go. Eventually, he can’t go any further. The West coast, and Los Angeles in particular, is where he has to make his last stand against the corrupt society that has now fallen in on him. And the geography of the place perfectly fits this narrative — Southern California is so superficially beautiful, with the weather and all. It’s the perfect literary backdrop for stories seeking to create a contrast between truth and fiction, appearance and reality. (Of course, Vegas could also work, and Magnum P.I. seemed to get on okay in Hawaii, but those are all variations on a theme.)

Thus the hardboiled detective is really another incarnation of the great American myth of the rugged individualist, from the minuteman to the cowboy and so on, one who is presented in American detective fiction as a dying breed — a man who refuses to “sell out” and so is always struggling for money, a man who always finishes the case, who always figures out the truth even when he can’t bring the politically connected Big Fish (paradigmatically, Trump) to justice, and so on.

Of course, society never stops coming, especially after the advent of the computer, and by the turn of the millennium, our mythical individualist had nowhere else to flee, except underground, and so he’s either a half-man struggling (badly) with the perils of domesticity, like the guys in True Detective, or else he drops out entirely and becomes the cyberpunk warrior, a man literally on the run from an oppressive and totalitarian society that is now so corrupt it barely keeps up the pretense, a society that seeks to crush him at every turn, a society where he can only operate as a criminal (Kaneda), an outcast (Case), or a mental patient — or all three, such as “Jack” from Fight Club, on whom Elliott from Mr. Robot was based.

It’s interesting that what we’re seeing now are a lot of nostalgic repetitions of the myth, stories where the protagonist — someone solidly inside the system, someone less uniformly male, someone who would have been the rugged individualist if they hadn’t been co-opted by society — makes a discovery about how things used to be, and so lives in that world for a time, which is a bit like pulling a photo from a box or a relic from a museum. It’s not real anymore. It’s a ghost, no longer alive, and so eventually it has to go back in the box.

Eventually that will get old, which raises the obvious question, what will come next?

cover image is from the ultra-violent manga Sun-Ken Rock