Astral Weeks: ‘Another conversation bleeds into yours’

While assembling my notes for a review of the Library of America anthology “American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny” (Library of America, two volumes, edited by Peter Straub: “From Poe to the Pulps,” 746 pp., $35; “From the 1940s to Now,” 714 pp., $35), I noticed a peculiar thing. The quotes that I had quarried seemed to assemble themselves into a sort of ur-story, a template of the unheimlich. As I stitched together sentences from the works of writers as varied as F. Scott Fitzgerald and H.P. Lovecraft, John Cheever and Kelly Link, something about the common gambits and rhythms, across nearly two centuries, sent a chill through me. The following text has been constructed entirely from sentences found in “American Fantastic Tales.” Each is numbered and identified at the very end.

The cautious reader will detect a lack of authenticity in the following pages. I am not a cautious reader myself, yet I confess with some concern the absence of much documentary evidence in support of the singular incident I am about to relate. (1) It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to shew by this statement that I am not his murderer. (2)

I am the most unfortunate of men. (3) When I was eight years old my father was killed in the war, and my mother was broken-hearted. (4) My best friend when I was twelve was inflatable.(5) What began as a game, a harmless pastime, quickly took a turn toward the serious and obsessive, which none of us tried to resist. (6)

What can I do? There is only one thing. (7)

I don’t know why I should write this.

I don’t want to.

I don’t feel able.(8)

I’m having trouble remembering things. Small things, like where I put my keys, for instance.(9)

It’s fortunate I’ve dabbled a bit in psychiatry. (10) I have faithfully served Yuggogheny County as its district attorney, in cases that have all too often run to the outrageous and bizarre. (11) I should think the evidence was clear enough to corroborate my story, but I suppose I should have expected the reception it received from the police.(12)

Aside from my teaching, I had for some years been engaged in various anthropological projects with the primary ambition of articulating the significance of the clown figure in diverse cultural contexts. (13) I was interested in original sin and had dabbled in esoteric philosophy; my remote ancestors had been Salem witches. (14) I owed the formation of my character chiefly to accident. I shall not pretend to determine in what degree I was credulous or superstitious. (15) I shall tell you what occurred, and let you judge for yourself.(16)

I read of it first in the strange book of Von Junzt, the German eccentric who lived so curiously and died in such grisly and mysterious fashion. (17)

And then one afternoon ----(18)

That afternoon, Mother introduced us to the man who was to be Father’s successor in the household, and to his three children, who were to be our new brothers and sister, and we shook hands shyly, in a state of mutual shock. (19)

Twilight was settling over L.A.’s Koreatown, the lights of the stores clicking off, the lights of the restaurants and bars flickering on. (20) An inner voice warned me: Don’t go!(21) I walked up, and I walked down, and I walked straight into a delicately dying sky, and finally the sequence of observed and observant things brought me, at my usual eating time, to a street so distant from my usual eating place that I decided to try a restaurant which stood on the fringe of the town.(22) It was in this sector of town, known generally as the East Side, that the brewers and tanners who made our city’s first great fortunes set up their mansions. Their houses have a northern, Germanic, even Baltic look which is entirely appropriate to our climate. Of gray stone or red brick, the size of factories or prisons, these stately buildings seem to conceal that vein of fantasy that is actually our most crucial inheritance. (23)

“As a matter of fact,” the real estate agent snapped, “it is.” (24)

I found myself sitting in the library, and again sitting there alone. It seemed that I had newly awakened from a confused and exciting dream. (25) The manuscripts were as I had left them, undisturbed. I sat at the table, slid on the cloth gloves, and began to read, following the first text with the index finger of my right hand, the second with the index of my left, my head turning from one text to the other. (26) It had clearly been copied from a photocopy, and originally composed on a typewriter. (27) I remember after finishing the first act that it occurred to me that I had better stop. (28) It was then that I first came face to face with myself -- that other self, in which I recognized, developed to the full, every bit of my capacity for an evil life. (29)

Night had fallen without sound or ceremony when I came out again. (30) The silence pursued me like dumb ghosts, the still air held my breath, the hellish fog caught at my feet like cold hands. (31) It was a female figure, dressed in black. She was seated on one of the lower steps of the scaffold, leaning forward, her face hid in her lap, and her long disheveled tresses hanging to the ground, streaming with the rain which fell in torrents. (32) The flower heads were heavy with sodden, brown-edged petals and their stalks bent wearily as if cognizant of the fact that their lives were held by a tenuous thread that was soon to be snapped between the chill, biting teeth of an early frost. (33) I was compelled to make a drawing of it, almost against my will, since anything so outré is hardly in my line. (34)

On the worst possible stretch of dirt you can imagine, I blew a tire and discovered that my spare had leaked empty. (35) In the darkness one of the computer banks began humming. (36) For the smallest fraction of a second no sound issued from it but its own mechanical hum. (37) The sparkle faded and died. (38) There was silence on the line. (39) Have you ever been on the phone, canceling a credit card or talking to your mother, when all of a sudden -- with a pop of static -- another conversation bleeds into yours?(40) No longer a world of material atoms and empty space, but a world in which the bodiless existed and moved according to its own obscure laws or unpredictable impulses. (41) My travels were at an end, for here was the end of the machine. (42)

Notes for the quotes:

1 Bret Harte, “The Legend of Monte del Diablo”

2 H.P. Lovecraft, “The Thing on the Doorstep”

3 Ambrose Bierce, “The Moonlit Road”

4 Madeline Yale Wynne, “The Little Room”

5 Joe Hill, “Pop Art”

6 Steven Millhauser, “Dangerous Laughter”

7 John Collier, “Evening Primrose”

8 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-Paper”

9 Benjamin Percy, “Dial Tone”

10 Anthony Boucher, “Mr. Lupescu”

11 Michael Chabon, “The God of Dark Laughter”

12 T.E.D. Klein, “The Events at Poroth Farm”

13 Thomas Ligotti, “The Last Feast of Harlequin”

14 Julian Hawthorne, “Absolute Evil”

15 Charles Brockden Brown, “Somnambulism”

16 F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”

17 Robert E. Howard, “The Black Stone”

18 Tennessee Williams, “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio”

19 Joyce Carol Oates, “Family”

20 Poppy Z. Brite, “Pansu”

21 Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Hanka”

22 Vladimir Nabokov, “The Vane Sisters”

23 Peter Straub, “A Short Guide to the City”

24 Kelly Link, “Stone Animals”

25 Poe, “Berenice”

26 Brian Evenson, “The Wavering Knife”

27 Tim Powers, “ Pat Moore”

28 Robert W. Chambers, “The Repairer of Reputations”

29 John Kendrick Bangs, “Thurlow’s Christmas Story”

30 Nabokov, “Vane Sisters”

31 Ralph Adams Cram, “The Dead Valley”

32 Washington Irving, “The Adventure of the German Student”

33 Jane Rice, “The Refugee”

34 Clark Ashton Smith, “Genius Loci”

35 Jerome Bixby, “Trace”

36 Harlan Ellison, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”

37 Jack Finney, “I’m Scared”

38 Rice, “The Refugee”

39 Richard Matheson, “Prey”

40 Percy, “Dial Tone”

41 Fritz Leiber, “Smoke Ghost”

42 Melville, “The Tartarus of Maids”

Park’s novel, “Personal Days,” was recently named a finalist for the Asian American Literary Award. Astral Weeks appears monthly at www.latimes.com/books.