Notes from the Fog (Vintage Contemporaries) - Softcover

Marcus, Ben

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1101971681 ISBN 13: 9781101971680

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Ben Marcus returns with a collection of timely dystopian visions of alienation in a modern world. Here a hapless, corporate drone finds love after being disfigured from testing his employer’s newest nutrition supplement; a father starts to suspect that his son’s precocity has turned sinister; and two architects in a failing marriage must consider the ethics of artificially inciting emotion as they construct a memorial to a terrorist attack. It’s these characters and others that over the course of thirteen short stories showcase Marcus’s compassion, imagination, and mordant humor. Never has existential catastrophe been so much fun.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ben Marcus is the author of four books of fiction—The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, The Flame Alphabet, and Leaving the Sea—and the editor of two short story anthologies: The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories and New American Stories. His fiction has appeared in Bomb, Granta, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. Among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Berlin Prize, a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, and three Pushcart Prizes. He lives with his family in New York City, where he is on the faculty at Columbia University.

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Excerpted from "Blueprints for St. Louis"


It was winter, which meant that a pelvic frost had fallen across the land. Or maybe just across Roy and Helen’s apartment. And, in truth, the frost had long since matured into a kind of bodily aloofness, just shy of visible flinching when they passed each other in the halls, or when they co-slept in the intimacy-free bed they’d splurged on. Why not have the best sleep of your life next to the dried-out sack of daddy you’ve long taken for granted, whose wand no longer glows and quivers for you and for whom you no longer quietly melt? You had to track the erotic cooling back into summer, or the prior spring, and, well, didn’t the seasons and the years just dog-pile one another when you tried to solve math like that?

Helen wasn’t particularly concerned, because, whatever, there was a clarity to the coldness, right? And screw Roy if he’d fallen down a brightly-colored porn hole, pummeling himself to images of animated youngsters slithering around nude, in grownup crotch, gear in a cartoon fairyland. Internet histories weren’t her favorite literary genre, but she knew how to read them. Anyway, if her husband’s use-case viability on the marital graph had taken a nose-dive, then so, too, had her own burden. She had her friends, she had her work on the memorial, and she had the shower head. When she and Roy first got married, whenever ago, Helen’s mother had told her that, if people don’t visit, you don’t have to host. Period, full stop. And even though Helen’s take on this advice now was off-label, it applied just fine to her touchless union. The body unloved, the body unhandled and unseen. The body as a ghost in training for whatever soiled world came next. Anyway, wasn’t left-alone the best place to wind up?

Maybe old age and the cold blue death of the groin would solve that. Maybe Helen would inherit a sweet and useless Roy, post-pornography, sitting politely behind a drool cloth, swaddled in food-stained sweaters. She’d feed him until he cooed and maybe sometimes they would run out of gruel and she would watch his hunger grow, watch his eyes turn small and sad. Would it be so terrible? The sexual urge would be merely an embarrassing spasm of the past. They’d been friends once, before they’d got into designing memorials for unspeakable catastrophes. Intense and respectful partners in their architectural firm. Mutually committed cattle prodders of each other’s darker, stranger brains, torturing out each other’s best ideas, before the chemical repulsion and bed-death had struck. Maybe by old age they’d return to form, be ideal dance partners again, if only they could stay alive long enough.
           
The problem was today and tomorrow and the next fucking huge bunch of days, the entirety of their middle age, really, which shouldn’t be just a rotten footbridge you had to navigate, with a creepy old troll beating off underneath it. Roy was technically handsome, but he preened, and he moped, and he fished for so many compliments that Helen was fished out, empty, unable to smear any favorable speech over his prim, needy body. Lately he’d been taking himself to the gym with more ambition and lust than he showed for their collaborative design work, and he was all cut up now, a strange, photoshopped musculature slipped over his bones like a bronzed wetsuit. She should have wanted to handle the new body he’d built, use it to snuff out her baser urges, not that Roy offered it to her, but she asked that he keep it covered. In loose-fitting layers, please. It stank of his not-so-hidden effort to attract a mammal outside the home. To sport with it and lick its fur, no doubt. Plus, she had tolerated her husband better when he wasn’t such a vain custodian of the ephemeral—one mustn’t fawn over that which will rot, someone important must have once said.
           
***

What consumed them both right now was the situation in St. Louis, for which their firm had been ceremoniously commissioned to design the memorial. Months after the bombing, the city was still digging out. Thirty dead souls, the news had said when it happened. But everyone knew that number wasn’t real. It was low by a couple of decimal points. For days, the toll did not breach a hundred, which seemed impossible. Where did these cautious estimates come from? Maybe from actual bodies. Maybe this meant that the other, more plentiful dead were simply nowhere to be found, in the same way that wind can’t be found. What you did was you factored in the missing, and privately you did not call them “missing.” Thousands of people had not suddenly left their homes that morning and vanished to the mountains. When you watched the footage of the bombing, the dark slab of glass folding over itself like a blanket, then erupting into a pale-brown flower of smoke, and you calculated the typical occupancy, not just of the office tower but of the surrounding plaza, with its underground restaurants and shops, its perimeter of cafes, along with the time of day, the number thirty was a violent piece of wishful thinking, heavy, heavy, heavy on the wish.
           
“10k+,” Roy had texted Helen from wherever he was the day it happened.
           
He wasn’t wrong. It emerged that explosives had been buried in the foundation of the tower when it was being built, two years before, by some slithering motherfuckers on the construction crew. Stashed down there the night before the footings were poured, apparently, and then triggered when the building was finished and stuffed to the gills with people. In burning daylight, a time of high commerce, maximum human traffic. Not a government building, so far as anyone knew. Just as dense a cluster of people as any in the Midwest, excepting one or two zones in downtown Chicago. And so, and so. They had the perpetrators on video, brutes in hard hats. Except that they were skinny and they laughed a lot and were often seen hugging one another. Four of them had walked off the job on the same day, before the building had even started to rise up out of the concrete. How that very act—quitting in a group, never to be seen again—hadn’t been some sort of security trigger was beyond Helen, but whatever, hindsight was a foul drug. And now everyone was asking, Who were these men and where had they gone? Oh, please, Helen thought, whenever this particular investigation blistered onto the screen. The St. Louis Four. The villains of Missouri. Can we please not believe that finding these men will matter at all? Please?

***
 
“Terrorism” wasn’t really the term anymore. Helen found that it soured in her mouth, like a German word for some obscure feeling. “Tax” seemed to be a finer way to put it. A tax had been levied in St. Louis. In New Orleans last year, in Tucson three years back. Etcetera. A tax on comfort, safety. A price paid for being alive, for waking up. Occasionally the tax collector came. Not just occasionally. Quite a lot these days. You could run out of breath trying to name all the cities that had been hit in this country. The collector came, and people were subtracted from space. Buildings withered into rubble. One’s imagination needed to frequently dilate in order to accommodate the ways and means, and otherwise smart men and women were busy with their scuffed crystal balls trying to figure out what was next, and how, and how. As if this forecasting ever… oh forget it. Soon you knew not to be...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1101971681
• ISBN 13: 9781101971680
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar