Riddance. Shelley Jackson

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СКАЧАТЬ life, they did not seem like mine. They were stamped with a maker’s mark I could not quite make out; they belonged to others and to elsewhere. Not to readers; I did not dream of fame. No, to the world of books, beloved and now lost to me. It seemed to me that I heard the buzzing of flies again and louder than ever, that my own voice (always faint enough, in any case) was completely drowned out by the din that rose from the page. I saw that the other world I yearned for was already inside me. To reach it I had merely to turn myself inside out.

      How to do that I would learn. It would take me some years.

      I became fluent—on paper. To summon this fluency into my throat was not then possible. I suppose that ordinary children begin by saying a word or two, graduate to sentences, then stories, and only much later and with difficulty learn to poke, pleat, and tuck the airborne phenomenon that is speech into a page-sized package. It is perhaps like folding a parachute? For me it was the opposite. My parachute came folded, and only much, much later would I tweak it out and call a wind to fill it.

      But the intricacy of those folds! Slowly, my distress at feeling that I had no voice and without a voice, no self, gave way to wonder and delight. What was a self? A wishbone stuck in my throat. On paper I could be anyone. There was nothing to be stuck in or to stick, only boundless elasticity, boundless subtlety, clarity, rarefaction, light and space and freedom; in a word, joy.

      I reveled in counterfeit. I wrote about myself in the third person and in hagiographic terms; I described a life that I did not live, and it seemed realer than my own. It eventually consumed my ledger; in searching for more paper in my mother’s writing desk, I came upon a little envelope of loose stamps, which inspired me to write a series of scurrilous letters to the editor of our local paper in the name, first, of fictitious entities, then of certain actual persons² who had aroused my dislike. This caused a minor stir. It died down. No one blamed me, of course; recall that I had never formally been taught to write, or even to read. What’s more, my style was scarcely juvenile. If anything, it was senescent, with the gaseous orotundity of an earlier era.

      One day I procured some writing paper and with excruciating care drafted the following letter, or one very like it:

      Harwood Joines, Esq.

      Dear Sir,

      I am very obliged to you for your review of our product, the Galvano-Magnetic Thingummy. You have identified shortcomings that even my own team of trained Galvanists did not recognize, and the solutions you suggest display astounding technical acumen. You are wasted in—that quaint name again?—Cheesehill! I would like you to come to my factory and train my workers in your methods. Would you do this for me, Harwood? I employ your first name, because already I think of you as a friend. Great minds must stick together! I see a fruitful partnership in our future. All expenses for your travel will be reimbursed when you arrive, so please do not hesitate, but come as soon as may be, no advance notice required. We shall not stand on ceremony, you and I.

      Affectionately,

      Your Brother in Science,

      Samuel B. Alderdash

      Proprietor, Galvano-Magnetic Thingummy

      I folded and sealed this in an envelope to which I had transferred a canceled stamp steamed from another envelope that I had found in the trash. To conceal the inadequacies in the postmark that I had carefully drawn on with faint stipples of ink, I ripped, crumpled, and dirtied the corner of the envelope, as if it had been mangled in transit. Then I slid it under the other mail awaiting my father on the hall table, minutes before he swept it all up and bore it with him to his study.

      My heart was slightly, unpleasantly out of time with the hall clock.

      My father came out again and stood in the hall, his arms hanging, staring past me. His eyes were wide and glossy; the pink pockets of his lower lids gaped. I realized that I had never before seen him happy. I could bear it only because I knew what was in store for him.

      After a few words with my mother, he shut himself in his study. My mother silently packed his bag. At the dinner bell he emerged to request that his food be brought to him on a tray. I ate my dinner with unusual relish, alone with my mother. My father departed early the next morning. From my bedroom window I watched him square his briefcase on his knees as the carriage jerked into motion.

      He came back very late that night and murdered my mother.

      Letters to Dead Authors, #1

      In April 1919, seven months before her death, the Headmistress wrote the first of a series of letters to deceased authors. We know the date because the envelope in which it was returned, stamped undeliverable, is postmarked. It appears from her own testimony (Letter #2) that she was not initially aware that the addressee of her first letter was dead, but once this was brought home to her, she recognized the merit of the practice, and was to continue writing to him and other deceased authors until the end of her life. Dating of these subsequent letters is infuriatingly approximate, since we possess only undated copies (the originals are presumably still lost in the mail), but they seem to have appeared with increasing frequency as time went on, approaching the function of a daily journal, and providing an invaluable record both of the clouds then gathering over the Vocational School and of Joines’s declining health, mental as well as physical. She herself notes (Letter #11) that she has addressed herself to a fictional character (Letter #10), though subsequent lapses go unremarked.

      Like the Final Dispatch and other materials here assembled that register the passage of time, these letters will be distributed at regular intervals throughout the volume, but readers should keep in mind that they are not contemporaneous with the Final Dispatch, but conduct us up to the point where it began.

      Incidentally, there is no evidence that any of her addressees ever wrote back. —Ed.

      Dear Mr. Melville,

      You will not have heard of me, as I am of small account by the great world’s reckoning. Nevertheless I have made discoveries that should interest any man of imagination—and you have imagination, Mr. Melville, do you not? When I read Captain Ahab’s vow to strike through the “pasteboard mask” of visible things, I knew that I had to do with a man who had run an inky finger down the chinks in the Wall, and had wondered what wind it was that blew through it.

      Mr. Melville, I have found the door in that wall.

      Having caught your attention, as I hope, I will now tell you about myself.

      I am a woman no longer young, tall, gaunt, with a strong brow. My dress is somber and guided by scientific principles (specifically, acoustics), not by fashion; I am no Lucy-Go-Lightly. I was born in the small town of Cheesehill, Massachusetts, and grew up odd and lonesome, since I had a stutter, and was shy to boot. Nor were my parents sympathetic, but sought, my father did, to scare my tongue straight. You may imagine what efficacy that had. Only my rabbits—

      A fit of coughing has disordered my thoughts. But I was speaking of my childhood. I was an ardent reader, Mr. Melville, and one of your books concealed providently in a flowerpot eased many a desolate hour spent locked in the garden shed with the potatoes, though I do not mean to asperse the potatoes, whose company, on balance, I preferred to that of most of Cheesehill’s other inhabitants. I feel a special affinity to writers, even though, to tell the truth, it seems a silly sort of life, making up stories. While I too work with words, it is as an explorer and a scientist. Nonetheless I write to you, and not to Mr. Tesla, Mr. Roentgen, Mrs. Curie, or even Mr. Edison, for it seems to СКАЧАТЬ