Black gla.s.s.

short fictions.

by Karen Joy Fowler.

FOR SHANNON.

FOR RYAN.

MY HOMEGROWN INSPIRATION.

AND ALSO TO THE STARRY URSULA LE GUIN, FOR LIGHTING THE PATH.

Preface.

I was raised by professionals. My father was a behavioral psychologist and my mother was a highly educated nursery school teacher. Already, I know how you expect this story to end, with my confessing that, despite their education and qualifications, or better yet, because of all that, they made quite a hash of being parents.

Nothing could be further from the truth. They were pretty wonderful. The household ran on the scientifically supported principle of positive reinforcement. I was loved, admired, encouraged, disciplined gently, and listened to seriously. All this will be confirmed by my older brother, who had much the same experience and remembers it better. Those mistakes we have gone on to make are entirely our own.

Recently, I did an event with another writer who said, in answer to a question, that he had become resigned to his material. "We all had the childhoods we had," he said. "Nothing can be done about that." I might change that to "We all think we had the childhoods we think we had," if it weren't, in addition to being true, also nonsensical. We'll stick with his configuration, but asterisk it.

I'm far from the only writer to have had a happy childhood. But I think we writers who did share a nagging sense of it not being very writerly, all that early happiness. We suspect, as Maeve Binchy once said, that a happy childhood is an unsuitable beginning for a writer. (She said "Irish writer," but why quibble?) We wonder why, reared in relative contentment, we became writers in the first place. What is our material?

For many years I never asked myself those questions, as I could see no way in which the answer would be helpful to me. I like to think of myself as wide-ranging, no book much like the last. I like to think I follow whatever obsession has its current hold on me. I like to think my material changes. But when, as in this book, I'm confronted with a collection of my stories written over a number of years, certain themes become impossible to ignore.

My father is a clear obsession-I sometimes wonder if I write about anything else. We fell out when I was an adolescent and he died before our relationship could right itself. I am always trying to fix that.

As an adjunct, the scientific study, particularly when focused on human behavior, seems to come up often in my writing. Scientists appear frequently as extraterrestrials. I imagine that not only speaks for itself, but also demands an apology.

I have always suffered from the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern syndrome-an excessive concern with peripheral characters. This first manifested when my ninth-grade English cla.s.s was taken to see Prometheus Bound. My idea of great storytelling at that time was The Man from U.N.C.L.E. There were no s.e.xy Russians, no triumph of good over evil, no action, no ending of any kind in Prometheus Bound. There was, however, a strange tormented cow that caught my interest. I asked my teacher about her and was given some extra reading to do as a consequence. This is how I learned that most of the male G.o.ds were horrible rapists and most of the females, jealous harpies. (For the record, I have never minded being asked to do additional reading. It is a privilege.) At its core, this focus on the peripheral is a struggle against literature's ubiquitous suggestion that some people are more important than others. This is a deeply outrageous, globally damaging thing to believe. But I haven't yet found a way to write that doesn't inevitably partake of it.

And finally there is also this recurring theme: Eden lost. This popular plot was standard in many of the stories I loved as a child-A Little Princess, The Hobbit, The Wizard of Oz, The Once and Future King, Cinderella, Snow White, Black Beauty. My own first stories, written when I was about five years old, never deviated from it. But at five, while I understood that happiness could be lost, I expected it would also return. A return home was not only possible; it was the way stories ended.

THIS IS THE THING about a happy childhood-it ends, and not in the way of those stories. "There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in" (Graham Greene).

For me, that door into the future was, of course, a book. One day, when I was maybe eight or nine years old, I was looking through the case in the hall and I pulled something off a shelf for no other reason than this: I had never seen a book that tried less hard to get someone to read it.

The spine was a plain black with a barely discernible t.i.tle: The Black Book of Polish Jewry. There were photos inside, so I turned at once to those. What I saw made no sense to me: pictures of beings who mostly looked human, but not completely-their bones too prominent, their heads, their eyes, too big. My first thought was that I was looking at some alien life-form I had never been told existed. I called on my mother to explain.

Her explanation was the worst thing I had ever heard. It is no exaggeration to say that I lived in one world before my mother began to speak and a completely different one when she was done. Why didn't everybody stop it? I asked, and my mother had no good answer.

I was surprisingly angry with my parents about this.

As was quite common in the time and place of my childhood though quite rare today, I had enormous freedom, both in s.p.a.ce and time. I wandered at will, unsupervised and unscheduled, having my own adventures, making my own plans. There was a lot of room in my childhood.

In their actions, in letting me roam as I had roamed, my parents had as much as said that the world was a safe place, that people could be trusted. I felt in some indirect and unclear way that they had lied to me, that my whole life had been a lie.

My school was about four blocks from my house. I usually walked there. One day, a woman I often stopped to chat with as she worked in her yard asked for my phone number. That night my mother told me that she'd invited me to lunch. By myself. I was nervous about this, because I was extremely fussy about food back then, not liking most of it. Being asked to eat something I didn't like was the greatest horror I was capable of imagining. Not to worry, my mother told me. It had all been covered in the phone call.

Sure enough, my hostess was ready with my favorites. We ate off china plates and she told me stories about her own childhood. Before the lunch was over, she'd promised me a kitten from her cat's next litter and she was as good as her word. It turned out that she wrote a gardening column for the local paper. A few days later, I was in print, being publicly celebrated for my sweetness and sunshine.

This was how strangers treated you: they brought out the good china and made your favorite foods; they entertained you with stories; they gave you kittens; and they wrote laudatory newspaper columns about you.

They didn't s.n.a.t.c.h you from your mother and father, then beat and starve and gas you.

More revelations followed. Life magazine did an article on abused children that included a pair of siblings raised in a bas.e.m.e.nt. Once again, there were pictures. Once again, I was looking at an image of something dreadfully wrong written on someone's body. The children were stunted. They were bonsai children. And the people who had done this to them were their very own parents.

I'VE LIVED MY ADULT LIFE at the exact halfway point between joy and rage, grat.i.tude and dismay. There is surely no need to say that, at sixty-five, I've had a great many disappointments and suffered some agonizing losses. No one gets through unscathed. Still, by any reasonable reckoning, life has treated me gently.

I like almost everyone I know, easy enough as the people I know are quite lovely. I would think well of us as a species, if I'd never read a history book. Or the newspaper. Or the comments sections of the Internet. Quite recently I learned of a new app, a way to quickly a.s.sure your family and friends that you've survived a shooting, a bombing, a drone strike, a military a.s.sault. The app is called I Am Alive. Developed for those in Lebanon, but useful in so many places around the globe. A great future is predicted for such an app.

This, I now believe, is the place my writing comes from; this is the central puzzle of my life. Is the world more beautiful than terrible? Is it more terrible than beautiful?

How can I praise such a world?

How can I be so ungrateful as to not?

Some days I answer these questions one way and some days the other, but I am always asking the questions. As I work my way through any given story, the answers often change as I go. What doesn't change is this-I am always aware that, beautiful as the world sometimes is, deeply as I sometimes feel that beauty, there is no denying or forgetting that I once lived somewhere so much better.

Karen Joy Fowler.

January 21, 2015.

BLACK GLa.s.s.

It was a Wednesday afternoon in the Senate Bar. Schilling, the proprietor, stood behind the curved counter, stroking the shot gla.s.ses with a towel. Every part of the bar was reflected in the mirrored wall behind him: the marble and black onyx floor, the oiled cherry-wood counter, the bra.s.s bar rail. A chandelier hung in the center of the ceiling. Rows of cut-gla.s.s decanters filled the shelves. Schilling ran his towel over their gla.s.s stoppers. In the corner, on the big screen, Cher danced and sang a song for the U.S. Navy. Schilling had the sound off.

There were three customers. Two sat together at a table near the door. They were businessmen. One of them smoked. Both of them drank.

Every time either of them picked up his gla.s.s and set it down again, he made a new wet ring on the table between them. They were careful to keep the spreadsheet out of the water.

The third customer, a college student, sat at the bar, drinking his way through an unexpected romance with a woman old enough to be his mother. He'd asked Schilling to bring him three drinks at once, three different drinks-a b.l.o.o.d.y Mary, a s.e.x on the Beach, a Velvet Hammer. As a compromise, Schilling had brought him the b.l.o.o.d.y Mary and put in an MTV tape, picture only, out of deference to the businessmen and as a matter of personal preference.

A fourth man came into the Senate Bar from the street. A shaft of sunlight sprang into the room when the door opened and vanished when it closed. "Give me a drink," the man said to Schilling.

Schilling glanced at the man briefly as he polished the wood bar with his sleeve. "Get out of here."

"Give me a drink."

The man was dirty and dressed in several tattered layers, which still left a bare hole the size of a tennis ball above one knee. He was smoking the stubby end of a cigarette. It was not his cigarette; there was lipstick on the filter. He had retrieved this cigarette from the sidewalk outside the bar. "You pay your tab first," said Schilling.

"I don't have any money," said the man. Cher closed her eyes and opened her mouth.

"Where's my s.e.x on the Beach?" asked the boy.

"You're disturbing my customers," Schilling told the man at the door. "You're stinking up my bar." He reached under the counter for a bottle of gin.

"He gave me my first drink," the man at the door said to the boy at the bar. "I used to be just like you." He took two steps into the room, leaving two gritty footprints on the black onyx. "Finish what you started," he told Schilling.

"Get out," Schilling said.

The boy rolled a quarter down his nose and let it drop, catching it loudly in his empty b.l.o.o.d.y Mary gla.s.s. "Can I get another drink?" he asked. "Am I going to get another drink?"

A second shaft of sunlight appeared in the room, collided with the mirrored wall. Inside the sunlight, barely visible, Cher danced.

She turned her back. Schilling heard a woman scream, and then the Cher in the mirror broke into five pieces and fell behind the counter. The sunlight disappeared. "Madam," said Schilling, hardly breathing, in shock. A nightmare dressed in black stood at the door of his bar, a nightmare in the shape of an enormous postmenopausal woman. In one hand she held a hatchet. She reached into the bodice of her dress with the other and pulled out a large stone. She wore a bonnet with black ribbons.

"Glory be to G.o.d!" shouted the woman. "Peace on Earth! Goodwill to men!" She hit the big screen dead center with the rock. The screen cracked and smoked, made spitting noises, blackened. She took a step, swept the cigarette from the shabby man's mouth with one hand. "Don't poison the air with your filthy gases!" she said. Then she held her hatchet at the vertical. She charged into the bar, clearing the counter. Maraschino cherries and stuffed olives flew. "Madam!" said Schilling. He ducked.

"You purveyor and protector of obscenity!" the woman shouted. "Has your mother ever been in this place?" The boy at the bar slipped from his stool and ran for the rear door. In three steps the woman caught him. She picked him up by the neck of his sweater as if he were a kitten, throwing him to his knees. She knelt over him, singing. "Touch not, taste not, handle not. Drink will make the dark, dark blot." He struggled, and she let him go, calling after him, "Your mother did not raise you for this!" The back door slammed.

The businessmen had taken cover under their table. Schilling remained out of sight. The shabby man was gone. The woman began, methodically, with her hatchet to destroy the bar. She punctured the decorative keg behind the counter and then, apparently disappointed to find it empty, she brought her hatchet down on the counter, severing a spigot from one of the hoses. A fountain of soda exploded into the air. She broke the decanters. Pools of liquor flowed over the marble and onyx floor. The woman's bonnet slipped to the side of her head.

"That brandy costs seventy-five dollars," Schilling said.

"Broth of h.e.l.l," she answered. "Costs your soul." She gashed the cherry wood, smashed the mirrored wall. She climbed onto a stool and brought the chandelier down with a single stroke. Schilling peered over the bar. She threw a rock at him, hitting a bottle of bright green creme de menthe behind him.

He ducked out of sight again. "You'll pay for this," Schilling told her. "You'll account for every penny."

"You are Satan's bedfellow," she said. "You maker of drunkards and widows. You donkey-faced rum-soaked Republican rummy." She lifted the hundred-and-fifty-pound cash register from the counter and held it over her head. She began to sing again. "A dreadful foe is in our land, drive him out, oh, drive him out. Oh, end the monster's awful reign, drive him out, oh, drive him out." She threw the register at what remained of the big screen. It barely missed the tabletop that hid the businessmen and crashed onto the marble and onyx floor.

She worked for twenty minutes and stopped when there was nothing left to break. The woman stood at the door, straightening her bonnet, tightening the ribbons. "Until the joints close," she said, "the streets will run red with blood." She opened the door. Schilling crouched lower behind the bar. The businessmen cowered beneath the table. n.o.body saw her leave.

"The sun was in my eyes," Schilling explained to the police. "When she opened the door, the sunlight was so bright I lost sight of her."

"She came in screaming?" A man from the press was taking notes.

"Shrieking." The first businessman tried to read the reporter's notes, which were upside down from his point of view and cursory. He didn't enjoy talking to newsmen. When you dealt with the fourth estate, accuracy was your social responsibility. You could still be misquoted, of course. You wouldn't be the first.

"Kind of a screek," the second businessman offered.

"She's paying for everything," said Schilling. "Don't even ask me to be chivalrous."

"She was big," said the first businessman. "For a woman."

"She was enormous," said Schilling.

"She was as big as a football player," said the first businessman carefully.

"She was as big as a truck," said Schilling. He pointed with a shaky finger to the register. "She lifted it over her head like it was a feather duster or a pillow or something. You can write this down," he said. "You can quote me on this. We're talking about a very troubled, very big woman."

"I don't think it's such a good idea," the second businessman said.

"What's not a good idea?" asked the reporter.

"Women that size," said the second businessman.

"Just look what she did," said Schilling. Rage made his voice squeak. "Just look at my bar!"

PATRICK HARRIS HAD BEEN a DEA agent for eight years now. During those eight years, he had seen some action. He had been in Mexico and he had been in Panama and he had been in LA. He had been in one or two tight spots, but that didn't mean he couldn't help out with the dishes at home.

Harris knew he asked a lot of his wife. It couldn't be the easiest thing in the world, being married to a man who disappeared into Latin America for days at a time and might not even be able to get a message out that he was still alive. Harris could run a vacuum cleaner over a rug without feeling that he was doing his wife any favors. Harris could cook a meal from the very beginning, meaning the planning and the shopping and everything, without feeling that anyone needed to make a fuss about it.

He stood with the French bread and the Gruyere cheese and the imported Emmentaler Swiss in the nine-items-only-no-checks checkout line, wondering how he could use the tomatoes, which he hadn't planned to buy but were cheaper and redder than usual and had tempted him. The woman in front had twelve items. It didn't really irritate Harris. He was only sorry that it was so hard for some people to play by the rules.

While he waited for the three extra items to be tallied and worried in an ineffective, pleasant way over the tomatoes, he read through the headlines. Evidence of prehistoric alien cannibals had been found in Peruvian cave paintings, and a statue of Elvis had been found on Mars. A husband with bad breath had killed his wife merely by kissing her. A Miami bar had been destroyed by a sort of half woman/half gorilla. Harris saw the ill.u.s.tration before he read the story, an artist's rendering of Queen Kong in a black dress and bonnet. He looked at the picture again. He read the headline. One of his tomatoes spun from the counter to the floor. Harris stepped on it, squished it, and didn't even notice. He bought the paper.

He had never been in so much trouble in his life.

THE DOORS WERE HEAVY and padlocked. A hummingbird dipped through the entryway twice, held for a moment over an out-of-season fuchsia, and disappeared. The largest of the MPs tried to shoulder the doors open. He tried three times, but the wood did not give. One of the women smashed through a window instead. Harris was the fifth person inside.

The soldiers searched for fugitives. They spun into the hallways, kicked in the doors. Harris found the dining room on the other side of some broken gla.s.s. The table was set with china and the flatware was gold. An interrupted meal consisted of rack of lamb, braised carrots, curried peach halves served on lettuce leaves. The food had been sitting on the china plates for at least twenty-four hours.

He started into the library, but one of the MPs called to him from farther back in the house. The MP's voice sounded self-consciously nervous. I'm still scared, the tone said. Aren't I silly?

Harris followed the voice down a hallway and through an open door.

The MP had her rifle slung over her back. In her hands she held a large statue of St. George, spear frozen over the neck of the dragon. The dragon was considerably smaller than St. George's horse.

Behind the MP, three stairs rose to an altar with red candles and white flowers and chicken feathers. The stairs were carpeted, and a supplicant could kneel or lie supine if the supplicant weren't too tall. The room itself was not carpeted. A black circle had been painted on the stone floor, with a red triangle inside. The four cardinal points of the compa.s.s were marked.

Harris looked east. The east wall was a wall of toads. Toad-shaped stones covered every inch of seven shelves, and the larger ones sat on the floor. The toads were all different: different colors, different sizes. Harris guessed there were four hundred, five hundred toads. "Why toads?" Harris asked. He stepped inside.

The MP shook her head and put the statue back on the altar. "s.h.i.t," she said, meaning nothing by it, merely making conversation. "Is this s.h.i.t for real?"

One of the smallest toads was carved of obsidian. Its eyes were a polished, gla.s.sy black; it was no bigger than Harris's thumbnail. It attracted him. Harris reached out. He hesitated briefly, then touched it. At that moment, somewhere in the room, an engine cycled on. Harris started at the sound, closed his hand convulsively over the toad. He looked at the MP, who gestured behind him.

The noise came from a freezer back by the door. It was a small freezer, not big enough to hold the body of an adult. A goat, maybe. A child. A head. Harris looked at the MP. "Groceries," he said.