Nocturnals
347
Nocturnals
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Overview
Scheherazade famously spun stories for a thousand and one nights in order to sustain her life. In recognition of how vital it is to voice our own stories, the stellar works collected here—including entries by Sallie Tisdale, Rick Moody, Joyce Carol Oates, and many others—address our myriad experiences from dusk to daybreak.
In this volume, readers will encounter the monster of Kowloon, which relies on the imaginations of children in order to exist. Three men embark on a hallucinatory journey into the snowy pitch-dark night of the soul. Purgatory can be found here, along with ghosts, alternative universes, an East Village bar that doubles as a portal to another life, and a personal chronicle of a visit to Burning Man in Black Rock Desert.
Also included are the nightbird Nycticorax, musical nocturnes, night thoughts at solstice, wheeling galaxies, and the cosmos itself. The pioneering nocturnal photography of George Shiras is celebrated in these pages, and the dichotomous world of night versus day in equatorial Uganda is observed by an ethnographic eye.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504059305 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bard College Publications Office |
| Publication date: | 08/20/2019 |
| Series: | Conjunctions , #72 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 347 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Bradford Morrow (b. 1951) is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, editor, and author of children’s books. He grew up in Colorado and traveled extensively before settling in New York and launching the renowned literary journal Conjunctions. His novel The Almanac Branch was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and for Trinity Fields, Morrow was the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Academy Award in Literature. He has garnered numerous other accolades for his fiction, including O. Henry and Pushcart prizes, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship. Morrow is a professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow at Bard College.
Martine Bellen’s most recent collection of poetry is Wabac Machine (Furniture Press Books). Her other books include GHOSTS! (Spuyten Duyvil Press) and The Vulnerability of Order (Copper Canyon Press).
Peter Straub is the New York Times bestselling author of seventeen novels, which have been translated into more than twenty languages. His two collaborations with Stephen King, The Talisman and Black House, were international bestsellers. Two of Peter’s most recent novels, Lost Boy Lost Girl and In the Night Room, were winners of the Bram Stoker Award. In 2006, he was given the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award. Peter and his wife live in New York City.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Bar at Twilight
Frederic Tuten
— For Henry Threadgill
He walked into the bar, twilight at his heels, and without thinking ordered a Scotch, neat. He surveyed the room and its vacant tables. He was glad there was no TV, no music, blasting or otherwise. No colored lights brightened the liquor shelves or gave hope to the dim mirror. Nothing was there wishing to appeal, to please, nothing of false cheer and hollow welcome. But he had left his home hoping to find a bar to lift up his spirits and this was not it.
He considered making a quick exit and saying to the bartender, "Sorry, I forgot something at home." Then he'd leave a dollar — maybe even two — on the counter to show his goodwill, and split before he got further dispirited by the surroundings. Ghostly photographs of horses covering a wall had already sunk his spirits.
The bartender: she was neither tall nor short, neither blonde nor brunette, neither young nor old, neither composed nor disheveled, neither enticing nor repellent, neither extraordinary nor commonplace. He soon quit trying to place her.
But before he could turn to leave, she said, "I have a single malt Scotch for you. Been mellowed in stout oak barrels for fifty years in the depths of a highland castle, lulled to sleep at bedtime by the bagpipe's lullaby, and woken by a soft drumroll at dawn."
She poured him a shot.
He took a sip, out of courtesy. Then another. He looked around the room, which now appeared like a misty glen with a salmon-crowded brook running through it. Finally, he said, "This is the most extraordinary Scotch I have ever had."
"Thought it would suit you. I spotted you for a man of distinction the moment you walked in."
"How so?"
"The polite tilt of your homburg gave you away." "It was the blind wind that engineered it."
"The wind's a savvy artist," she said, giving the bar a towel wipe for emphasis.
A young centaur pushed through the door and spun once about the room.
"Is this the bar for horses or have I come to the wrong place?"
"Once was," Marie said, "but they've gone."
"My grandmother spoke about this place many times before she died."
"Maybe there's a picture of her on the wall," Marie said, "if she was a regular."
"May I have another?" the man asked. "A double?"
Marie half filled a water glass. Studying it, the man said, "That's more like a quadruple."
"It was your tilted hat and that you said 'may' instead of 'can,' is how I was sure you had the distinguishment. The drink's on the house. And I'm the house."
She crossed to the other end of the bar, where a ruddy-nosed man with a sailor's watch cap and graying beard was resting his elbows on the counter. "Marie," he said, "go out with me."
"That didn't work the first time around."
"Didn't we have fun?"
"I liked the tugboat ride down to the Narrows. I liked your effort with the liverwurst with onion sandwiches and the cold beer and the side of dill pickles you plucked with your fingers from the jar. I even somewhat like you, Harry, even though your beard smells like wet nails."
"So? Where did I go wrong?"
"You're too old for me."
"Not too old to love you with feeling. Profound feeling. Feeling that comes with having walked around the block a few hundred times in all weather and sailed many seas in storms and in swells the height of tall buildings and learned at the end what's to be treasured in life, knowing who's an authentic woman when you meet her and knowing how to appreciate her."
"Too old, dear Harry."
"What, Marie, has age to do with the heart's disposition? With its fickle waywardness and adamant devotions, with its reckless longings and childishness?"
"Anyway, Harry, I have enough in my life what with the bar and Red."
"Sure, Marie, but can't I fill in when Red's away?"
Outside, in Tompkins Square Park, the wind tortured the trees, wrenching leaves from their branches and speeding them into the bar's large plate-glass windows. The door rattled; dust and pigeon feathers whirled under its sill and introduced the street's chill of impending night into the warm room.
"Another storm," Marie said.
"My grandmother told me there were stalls for the horses in the back and that sometimes she'd sleep over if she had got too tipsy to trot home."
"They're stockrooms now but they still smell of the horses' sweat and the aroma of their beer swilling," Marie said. "Sweat and piss, I mean, and their droppings, which harden into plates of straw that you step on for good luck. I miss the horses. I wish they were back." "This is an odd place," the man said, waving his hand as if delineating the territory. "Its lack of charm is its very charm."
"You're a good example of that yourself, Mister," Marie said.
"The name's Louie. Like 'Meet me in St. Louis, Louie.' Thank you for the compliment and for its brevity. In art and in life, less is more," he said, his faced flushed, his glass raised in a toast, indefinite to whom addressed.
"Not necessarily," the centaur said. "Sometimes less is simply less or sometimes less is a form of emotional stinginess, a miserliness of spirit in the guise of an aesthetic ideal. Or it's a striptease in reverse."
"It's about seeking perfection, I suppose, about making things so lean that nothing may be added or subtracted," Louie said. "But the removal of all unnecessary ornamentation from a person or an object or a text or a musical note must be done with restraint and with care not to obliterate the blood and tissue and guts of the thing."
"Must not remove the stink of life from life," the centaur said. "We centaurs have known that from the beginning of time. Even though our heads and thoughts are high up to the dreamy stars, our rears, which do the shitting and pissing and fucking, keep us grounded from floating to the abstract heights. Thus, we centaurs know what's what and what we are."
"I would say the same," Louie said, addressing all around. "After all, I'm no delicate reed with a scented hankie stuck to his nose in the subway at rush hour. I praise the unkempt and the irrelevant, the loose ends and the unresolved, the untidy and imperfect, the ragged edges and pieces that don't fit — the incomplete, even. I praise art that sweats life and life that sweats art."
"You sure let out a lot of line, Mister," Harry said.
"When you were young," Marie said, addressing the world in the bar and the world beyond its door, "when you were semiformed things in grades just above kindergarten, did you paste dead leaves in your scrapbook? Did you one day open a trunk and find your longforgotten scrapbook and study the dried leaves you had embalmed there, and did you say to yourself, 'Oh, look!'?"
"My grandmother was in love with the man she met at this bar," the centaur said. "He was the love of her very intense life."
"Was she called 'Red'?" Marie asked, coming from behind the bar and taking a stool between the centaur and Louie.
"Yes, that was her moniker," the centaur answered. "She was in love until her last long breath."
"The love between a horse and a man is a difficult one, I imagine," Louie said. "Both physical and emotional, I'm sure."
"It posed problems, but then what doesn't?" the centaur noted, raising a thick eyebrow for effect.
"The centaur makes sense, Marie. Nothing matters if you are in love," Harry said, in the voice of his fourth rye and two beer chasers.
"Less is more," the centaur said, "in love too. The less of whatever clutters love, the less fat of the everyday that smothers the passion and purity of its flame, is what I mean. The physical self is nothing but a caretaker of that flame, and the flame burns in the souls of lovers, horse or man, young or old, even after death."
"Only the very rich can love so totally," Marie said, "unencumbered, as they are, by what you call the fat grease of the everyday. Only the rich or those who can love purely, unrequitedly. As I love this bar, for example."
"Are you more horse or more man?" Louie asked the centaur.
"In equal distribution," the centaur said. "Neither predominates, but the blend of both has made me — made my kind — rather special. We can, for example, discern patterns in the stars."
"And your grandfather?" Marie asked. "Of what stuff was he made?"
"The stuff of humans who were lonely and through love became less lonely."
"These are the consolations of love, Marie," Harry said, in the bleary voice of his fifth rye. "Consolations both temporal and eternal."
"My grandfather was an ordinary man, an ordinary clerk in an ordinary office," the centaur continued. "He lived alone across the park here on Tenth. He knew little of life except for his desk in the day and dinner at a local Polish restaurant after work — mushroom soup, black bread, and a vodka, neat — his daily fare. He was a sweet, solitary man and would have lived and died alone until he accidentally came here, to this very bar, and met my grandmother, Red, the then recently retired circus show horse."
"Marie, let's tug downriver to the Narrows and this time we'll make for the open sea and out into the vast itself, out and beyond until we blend with the sky."
"There's too much brine in you for me, Harry. I'm a landlocked woman who likes the firm ground underfoot, who loves the elms before her eyes and a hawk or two plying the sky."
A tug's long hoot from the East River caressed the bar, leaving all there in a mood of inexplicable longing.
The centaur grew melancholy and said, "There are times when one must go home, or to its nearest facsimile. I think I'm going home."
Louie said, "There are moments too sad for anything but mild oblivion."
Harry said, "I wish I had a dog that didn't bark or shit or shed or smell bad with a bad wet stink after a walk in the rain. I wish I had that kind of dog."
"There is nothing like the mournful call of a tug to summon up thoughts of love and death and what lies in the between," Marie said, sinking a double shot of Scotch and pulling a face between pleasure and pain.
The snow rushed the night sky and clotted the windows with an icy- silver sheen that spread over the bar and its inhabitants.
"Look at us," the centaur said. "We're like ghosts with sheets."
"Marie, I'd be happy to be a ghost if I could be a ghost with you," Harry said.
"A ghost in love," Louie said. "There's something in that to suggest that death might be worth living for. By the way, Miss Marie, isn't that a piano in the back?" he asked, nodding to the gloom at the end of the corridor. The drink had warmed him, puffed up his spirits.
"A piano from the horse-bar days," Marie said. "Never played since."
"Mind if I try it?"
"Only if you don't murder the air with sugary sonatas or bubbly show tunes."
Louie dusted the keys with his handkerchief and gave his wrists a few twirls and cracked his fingers and gave them a few warming rubs before hitting the keys, which produced notes like milk gone sour. The centaur reared and whinnied: "Stop, please! It's killing my will to live."
"You call that music?" Harry said. "Stop fooling around."
"Give him a chance," Marie said. "He's just warming up to it."
"May I continue then?" Louie asked.
He knocked off an assortment of melodies by Chopin and, just as the air was enjoying the romantic mood of moonlight and champagne, he switched to some jazzy sketches that hinted at store-bought bourbon and hand-rolled cigarettes in a brothel on lower Maple Street in the New Orleans of the twenties.
But soon Louie dived into his innermost core, producing music keyed to a tug's mournful hoot and the swoosh of its wide wake and to the tones of an owl preaching in a cemetery at midnight and to the wild cries of the river gulls.
The piano trembled, seeing the cold East River gazing up at the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, waiting for the next jumper; nights spent in a furnished room with a forty-watt bulb dangling from a crack in the ceiling; a dying cat shivering in a patch of moonlight on the windowsill; the soul's darkness at the basement of the heart; the first shovelful of earth on the coffin of the woman you love.
"He makes joy of the Futile and the Why-Go-On? He makes perfume from bouquets rotting at the roadside. He tells Death to fuck off. He shames Death's jealousy of Life. He makes Death long for a day off. He makes Death yearn to make love. He raises Beauty from Death," Marie said.
"Yes, yes, Miss Marie, even his pauses between notes open to eternity and to the moment after," the centaur noted, his head bowed.
Louie had earlier, in the day's shadow, left his apartment overlooking Tompkins Square Park, having chosen, from all the others on his rack, a homburg. He left behind a sailor's cap; a sombrero he bought in Chapingo, Mexico; a cowboy hat from Fort Worth, Texas; and a brand- new beret found on a bench in Barcelona. The snow would ruin the homburg, take years from its youth, fade it before its time, drain out its original ivory-black color, and coarsen its supple skin. But he wanted to stroll about with a jaunty hat, to appear jaunty, debonair, pleased with himself even, as if life and he were on good terms.
He would look, before the light failed, for a café to buoy him up, a place with attractive people with attractive lives, and conversation to match, a place that was somewhere close by so he could easily walk home should the snow pile up to the sky and barricade the streets and make a glacier of the park and its pathways. As it was, snow was mounting the park, topping the black iron railings with crumbly white lines; sparrows fell from the trees and buried themselves in the white; Jason, the hawk, swooped down from the Christodora building on the park side of Avenue B and snatched a snow-coated rat feasting from a spilled-over trash can. A shivering old woman wrapped in newspapers slept on a park bench, the snow fast blanketing her with a soft coat to warm her dying.
Maybe a woman at the café would glean that he was a good sort, lonely but not desperate, maybe she would see from his eyes that he was on the sincere side, that he was vulnerable, intelligent, courteous, kind, brave even. Maybe she would see that he had a feel for style but was not driven by it, that he understood style's place in the discourse of everyday life, that one could be rightly or wrongly measured by it, to be seen to have or have not made an effort to brighten the lackluster day and to give life a little push toward the sun.
Maybe there would be a woman there who could don the comic mask when needed, a face to keep up her spirits — and of those in her circle — and profess the charm of life, the ever-lively fun of it, so that neither she nor those whose company she graced ever saw in her a troubled, brooding, crushed moment. Never would anyone see her wear her true, tragic mask, and her need to seek comfort in the East River, in its depths, all the way to the bottom, among discarded rubber tires, strangled babies and murdered cats, all the way down to its soulless muck.
"You play like a revelation, like the first buds of spring, like the death rattle that sounds the end and the beginning. You play like everything that can't be said in words. Play us another," Marie asked, when Louie had struck his last note and rose, pale, from the piano.
Pale, as if he had learned of the suicide of a woman he loved. As if the woman he loved had walked out his door to spread open her thighs to another man in his thousand-ply Egyptian cotton sheets in the tonier reaches of Park Avenue, with twenty-four-hour doormen and a private spot in the basement garage. And maybe even with a fully equipped gym and a lap pool on the roof, en plus. As if he had just been told his blood was swimming with cancer, which was tirelessly doing laps in his bloodstream. Cancer drunk on blood, and taking little bites here and there, a nibble of liver, a snippet of pancreas, a morsel of kidney, never stopping, multiplying like fucking rabbits, like fucking drunk amoebas.
"I've reached my limit for now," Louie said, "but I may revive presently, depending on the disposition of the weather, depending on the developing cut of the company, depending on whether I can wipe clean the memory slate and leave fixed there nothing but void. Depending on the next drink, which I hope will be as exhilarating as the last."
Twilight finally let go and tumbled into black night. Snow shrouded the windows, turning the bar into a dim cave without shadows.
"Marie, we need more light in here," Harry said. "I can't see beyond my nose in this two-bit obscurity. We need brighter bulbs, bulbs whose light stretches to the limits of the room and pours out the window and pools into the street. Light that cheers the heart and plucks it from ruminations on the inequity of unrequited love and other such disquieting pensées."
"Quite elegantly put, Harry," Marie said. "I need a stroll. My heart's pounding with Louie's music. Pounding in a ravishing way, that is, Louie. Tu vois?"
"I'll go with you," Harry said. "Let's go down to the river and watch it congeal and freeze itself into ice."
"The weather may be an impediment to your excursion, Mr. Harry, but why don't we all take a peep outside, to be sure," the centaur said.
"Good idea," Harry said.
"Why not?" Louie said.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Nocturnals"
by .
Copyright © 2019 CONJUNCTIONS.
Excerpted by permission of Conjunctions.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
EDITOR'S NOTE,
Frederic Tuten, The Bar at Twilight,
Cecily Parks, Nineteenth-Century Nights and Nocturnal Lights,
Brian Evenson, In Dreams,
Anne Waldman, Nocturne,
Sallie Tisdale, Twelve Hours,
Sarah Gridley, As Mica Means Crumb, and Galaxy, Milk,
James Morrow, Psi, Phi, Omega,
Carmen Maria Machado, Haunt,
Peter Gizzi, Ship of State,
Erika Howsare, Prey Ethics,
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Lux,
Steven Potter, The House at the End of the Night,
Cole Swensen, George Shiras: The Heart Is the Dark,
Ann Lauterbach, Nights in the Asyntactical World,
Han Ong, Dutch Kills,
Raven Leilani, The Blue Hour,
Kathryn Davis, Walking in the Dark,
Robert Walser, Ten Poems (translated from German by Daniele Pantano),
Martha Ronk, Four Night Poems,
Rick Moody, One-Eyed Jack,
Bennett Sims, A Nightmare,
Rita Chang-Eppig, Saving the Monster of Kowloon,
Gillian Conoley, In the Next Night,
Paul Park, Anosognosia,
Joyce Carol Oates, Nightgrief,
G. C. Waldrep, Night Watch,
Elizabeth Robinson, Four Nights,
Danielle Dutton, Nocturne,
Sejal A. Shah, Your Wilderness Is Not Permanent,
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Cosmos, A Nocturne,
James McCorkle, Two Poems,
Carole Maso, Solstice Night,
Daniel Torday, Neighbor,
Laynie Browne, Four Poems,
Bin Ramke, Nycticorax Nycticorax,
William Hicks, Them,
Heather Altfeld, A Scribe from the Double House of Life,
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS,