Stormy Weather
IT’S TRUE. THE WRITER BENTINCK, afterwards known as Lord Bentinck, the Blue Asphodel, visited our town once. He forced the girl Eva, the mayor’s daughter, whose mother adored his work and would gladly have given herself to him instead. But he chose Eva, betrothed at the time to the school teacher Mandelbrot, who hung himself from shame and disappointment. Eva bore a child called Boris, known as Uncle for his manner, from infancy, of nodding sagely at anything that was said in his presence. Eva gave Boris up to her sister Rhea, who was divorced, childless, and insecure, afterwards abandoning herself to a life of debauchery. She spent her days and nights in the bodegas at X_____, engaging in intense, drunken colloquies on literary subjects and accidental castration. Her favourite lover was the town coroner, a morphine addict, who often slept on a slab at his place of employment. His name was Ramon Toblerone. He had once had a wife and son, but they too had died. It had been his duty to perform their autopsies. When she heard Ramon’s story, Eva made up her mind to dedicate herself to relieving his unbearable sorrow. One day they took morphine together and shut themselves up in the mortuary freezer, where the coroner’s assistant, a man named Petal, found them a week later seated across from one another, as if in conversation, on two crates of embalming fluid. The surprising thing is that Eva’s son Boris, commonly known as Uncle, grew up to be a perfectly unexceptional, well adjusted chartered accountant with a Shih Tzu named Albertine and a 4chan channel devoted to collecting Hummel child figurines, especially the series called Stormy Weather.
Commentary
Another microstory. I may have mentioned that I am working on a long non-fiction project and my fiction-writing is being frustrated and constrained by that circumstance. So my flights into the imaginary tend to be brief and enigmatic, even to me.
This one came out of nowhere except that my friend Rob Gray was coming for a visit with his two Shih Tzus. Probably the whole story comes from that. Also my penchant for ironic melodrama and fictional places.
There’s an interesting narrative I tell myself about these made-up places. I used to write, like most people, about particular places, often infusing them with a sense of concrete history. See, for example, my story “The Obituary Writer.”
This is in Saint John on the Bay of Fundy, with its Loyalist graveyard in the centre of the city, moss covering the bone-white stones under the dark elms. City of exiles dreaming of lost Edens, it carries its past like a baited hook in its entrails. The O’Reillys, the Shaheens and the Pyes are descendants of Irish immigrants, survivors of the Potato Famine and cholera ships; Earl Delamare is the grandchild of American slaves. Beneath the throughway bridges, on a swampy waste next to the port, lie the ruins of Fort LaTour, scene of an even earlier betrayal. It’s no wonder these people see themselves endlessly as victims.
The place where we live, Sgt. Pye’s ageing apartment house on Germain Street in the South End, lies between the dry dock and the sugar refinery. We can hear the boat sounds, bell-buoys and foghorns in the night. When a fog blows in, as they often do, the streetlights look like paper lanterns hanging before the houses. Afternoons, when I finish work, I sometimes climb to the rocky summit of Fort Howe to watch the mist nose up through the port, threading the streets of the city like an animal trying to find its way in a maze.
Best of all is springtime, when the freshets swell the river, flooding Indian Town and Spar Cove above the falls. Television cameras mounted in chartered helicopters transmit aerial shots of a strange, watery landscape upriver. When the land dries, children set grass fires in railway cuts and vacant lots. Saint John is a wooden city, rebuilt hastily by ships’ carpenters after an earlier fire. So this is always dangerous; the whole place could go up. These are the brilliant spring days after the freshets, when I take my position on high ground and watch smoke drifting over the sagging, pastel-coloured houses and hear sirens snaking through the streets and dream that everything man-made is being scorched clean, reabsorbed into rock and air. (From my book A Guide to Animal Behaviour.)
I could go on quoting passages like this. But at some point I lost my taste for anchoring texts in reality. Perhaps I just got bored or I needed to get out of myself in some obscure way. I wrote a short story called “Story Carved in Stone.” You know how it starts. “I thought my wife had left me, but she is back. What she has been doing the last two years, I have no idea.” When I wrote those lines, I had no idea what the story was about or where it took place. Eventually, I dreamed up a fictional town called Ragged Point, Alabama. On the Gulf coast. No such place exists. I have never been to Alabama. I got the named Ragged Point from a map of New Brunswick. I have since written three more stories and part of a novel set in Ragged Point. Rance’s Menswear on Water Street, Sheriff Buck, the sewage lagoon, the marina, the AME church, the high school gym where Soledad Bay danced before losing her virginity, the coffee shop — the entire place is as familiar to me as my hometown.
Not satisfied with made-up but real-ish places, I have a latterly launched into invented non-places that float (no better word) on some literary-geographical cloud above the real world. “Uncle Boris Up in a Tree,” for example, takes place in an unnamed, vaguely middle-European location with nearby salt marshes and dikes with cows walking on them (borrowed from the Tantramar Marshes in New Brunswick). It’s also a place out of time with flirting references to historical events but also internet banking. A salad, in other words, of time and place. Quite fun, actually. And it relieves me, as a writer, from having to create plausible externals while focusing on the characters and their relationships (so the story has something like 18 active characters with plots).
This microstory, besides alluding to Rob’s Shih Tzus, is a spark struck from Uncle Boris. It takes place in an unnamed town in an unnamed country with a vaguely antiqu-ish feel to the language (“Lord Bentinck,” the town of “X_____”), European names, and no whiff of the contemporary world of social media and pop-therapeutic discourse (except that Eva’s sister is “insecure”). It’s the kind of country where they would nickname a famous writer The Blue Asphodel. Morphine is a word you hardly ever see anymore; we have moved on to other drugs. And the place is so small and backward that there is no one to sub for the coroner when his own wife and child turn up on the slab. And yet it’s a world where 4chan and chartered accountants also exist.
I think of this as pure story. The textual stuff beyond the characters and plot isn’t used to ground the action, to render it plausible. Instead, it becomes an arena for irony, obscure implication, and allusion. The name Albertine brings in Proust. Ramon Toblerone is a Swiss chocolate kind of town coroner (so a joke, but what a lovely word sound). The Blue Asphodel is a predatory visiting writer, beloved and famous. Of course. But my favourite is the Hummel figurines, brought in right at the end and meant to hang like a picture over the entire text. Stormy Weather.
Hangs ominously, of course. The story will go on. New evil written in the blood of innocents. How could you ever trust a so-called well-adjusted chartered accountant who haunts 4chan and obsesses on a particular line of Hummel figurines that look like this?
Missed seeing this one (blame obstinance). Invaluable. Heartened reading.
Interesting ideas on story, Doug. I'm thinking of some of the same issues myself. I think you trust imagination, spontaneity more.