The Apocalypse Reader (50 page)

The ground shakes. Boulders come bounding down-whole sides of mountains....

Who would have thought it, the end of the world as if just for me. Right on time, too, before my slippers give out entirely. We're all going together, the whole world and me. Isn't that nice! Best of all, I'm in at the end. I won't have to miss all the funny things that might have happened later had the world lasted beyond me. So, not such a bad birthday after all.

SAVE ME FROM THE PIOUS
AND THE VENGEFUL

Lynne Tillman

for Joe Wood 1965-1999

OUT OF NOTHING comes language and out of language comes nothing and everything. Everything challenges the tenuous world order. Every emotion derails every other one. One rut is disrupted by the emergence of another. I like red wine, but began drinking white, with a sudden thirst, and now demand it at 6 P.M., exactly, as if my life depended upon it. That was a while ago.

What does a life depend upon? And from whom do I beg forgiveness so quietly I'm never heard? With its remarkable colors and aftertastes, the wine, dry as wit, urges me to forgive myself. I try.

Life's aim, Freud thought, was death. I can't know this, but maybe it's death I want, since living comes with its own exigencies, like terror. In dreams, nothing dies, but birth can't be trusted, either. I remember terrible dreams and not just my own. Memory is what everyone talks about these days. Will we remember, and what will we remember, who will be written out, ignored, or obliterated. Someone could say: They never existed. It's a singular terror.

The names of the dead have to be repeated daily. To forget them has a meaning no one understands, but there comes a time when the fierce pain of their absence dulls and their voices become so faint they can't be heard.

And then what do the living mean by being alive, how dare we? The year changes, the millennium, and from one day to the next, something must have been discarded, or neglected, something was abandoned, left to wither or ruin. You didn't decide to forget. People make lists, take vitamins, and they exercise. I bend over, over and over.

I'm not good at being a pawn of history.

The news reports that brain cells don't die. I never believed they did. The tenaciousness of memory, its viciousness really-witness the desire over history for revenge-has forever been a sign that the brain recovers. But it's unclear what it recovers.

Try to hang on to what you can. It's all really going. So am I. Someone else's biography seems like my life. I read it and confuse it with my own. I watch a movie, convinced it happened to me. I suppose it did happen to me. I don't know what I think anymore. I don't know what I don't think. I'm someone who tells things.

Once, I wanted to locate movie footage of tidal waves. They occurred in typical dreams. But an oceanographer told me that a tidal wave was a tsunami, it moved under the ocean and couldn't be seen. This bothered me for a long time. I wondered what it was that destroyed whole villages, just washed them away. In dreams, I'm forced to rescue myself. This morning's decision: let life rush over me. The recurring tidal wave is not about sexual thralldom, not the spectacular orgasm, not the threat of dissolution and loss of control through sex-that, too-but a wish to be overcome by life rather than to run it. To be overrun.

I don't believe any response, like invention, is sad. The world is made up of imagining. I imagine this, too. Things circle, all is flutter. Things fall down and rise up. Hope and remorse, beauty and viciousness, and imagination, wherever it doggedly hides, unveil petulant realities. I live in my own mind, and I don't. There's scant privacy for bitterness or farting or the inexpressible; historically, there was an illusion of privacy. Illusions are necessary. The wretched inherit what no one wants.

What separates me from the world? Secret thoughts?

What Americans fear is the inability to have a world different from their fathers' and mothers'. That's why we move so much, to escape history.

Margaret Fuller said: I accept the universe. I try to embrace it. But I leave it to others to imagine the world in ways I can't.

I leave it to others.

Out of nothing comes language and out of language comes nothing and everything. I know there will be stories. Certainly, there will always be stories.

CONTRIBUTORS

GRACE AGUILAP, (1816-1847) was the author of
The Spirit of Judaism
,
The Women of Israel
, and several other books of fiction and nonfiction, as well as poetry. Her novella
The Perez Family
was the first book about British Jews written by a Jew. "The Escape" was first published in the collection
Records of Israel
(1844).

STEVE AYLETT is the author of
Lint, Slaughtermatic
, and a dozen other books. Though effectively about 9/11, "Gigantic" was first published in 1998.

ROBERT BRADLEY is writing a novel in stories titled
Invisible World
. "Square of the Sun" is from this collection. He teaches the Alexander technique on Long Island and in NYC and works nights in a psych ward.

DENNIS COOPER is the author of the novels
God Jr
. (Grove Press, 2005),
The Sluts
(Carroll & Graf, 2005),
My Loose Thread
(Canongate, 2002), and The George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels that comprises
Closer
(1989),
Frisk
(1991),
Try
(1994),
Guide
(1997), and
Period
(2000), all published by Grove Press. His books have been translated into sixteen languages. He's the editor of Little House on the Bowery, an imprint of Akashic Press. He currently lives in Paris and Los Angeles.

LUCY CORIN's novel
Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls
was published by FC2 in 2004. Her stories appear in such publications as
Ploughshares, Southern Review, Conjunctions
, as
Fiction International
. She teaches fiction at the University of California, Davis.

ELLIOTT DAVID is a writer and artist; he lives in New York. Contact: [email protected].

MATTHEW DERBY is the author of
Super Flat Times
. He lives in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

CAROL EMSHWILLER's new novel,
The Secret City
, will be out in April 2007. Another short story collection will appear shortly after that.

BRIAN EVENSON is the author of seven books of fiction, most recently
The Open Curtain
.

NEIL GAIMAN is the critically acclaimed and award-winning creator of the Sandman series of graphic novels, and the author of several novels and children's books, the most recent of which include
Anansi Boys
and the short-story collection
Fragile Things
. Originally from England, Gaiman now lives in the United States.

JEFF GOLDBERG is former vice president of a Fortune 500 insurance company. He lives in New York City. Contact: [email protected].

THEODORA GOSS was born in Hungary. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between the real and the fantastic are often ambiguous. She is currently completing a PhD in English literature at Boston University. Her first short-story collection,
In the Forest of Forgetting
, was published in 2006 by Wildside Press. Visit her at www.theodoragoss.com.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804-1864) was the author of
The Scarlet Letter
,
The House of the Seven Gables
, and other classic works of American literature. "Earth's Holocaust" was first published in 1844 and then collected in Mosses from an Old Manse (1846).

JARED HOHL was born and raised in southeastern Iowa. "Fraise, Menthe, et Poivre 1978" is his first published story.

SHELLEY JACKSON is the author of
Half Life
,
The Melancholy of Anatomy
, hypertexts including the classic
Patchwork Girl
, several children's books, and "Skin," a story published in tattoos on the skin of 2,095 volunteers. She is cofounder of the Interstitial Library and headmistress of the Shelley Jackson Vocational School for Ghost Speakers and HearingMouth Children. She lives in Brooklyn and at www.ineradicablestain.com.

URSULA K. LEGUIN is the internationally acclaimed author of twenty novels, ten collections of short stories, six volumes of poetry, four volumes of translation, thirteen books for children, and four collections of essays. She has three children and three grandchildren and lives in Oregon.

STACEY LEVINE's books include
My Horse and Other Stories
and
Dra-
; her novel
Frances Johnson
was published last year by Clear Cut Press. She also wrote a libretto for a puppet opera about the Quileute tribes of Washington State. Formerly a creative writing instructor, she is now working on another book.

TAO LIN is the author of the poetry collection
you are a little bit happier than i am
(Action Books, 2006) and the story collection
Today the Sky Is Blue and White with Bright Blue Spots and a Small Pale Moon and I Will Destroy Our Relationship Today
(Bear Parade, 2006). He earned an MFA in hamsters from The Pessoa Institute. His web site is http://reader-of- depressing-books.blogspot.com/.

KELLY LINK is the author of two collections,
Stranger Things Happen
and
Magic for Beginners
. With her husband, Gavin J. Grant, she edits the fantasy half of
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror
.

H. P. LOVECRAFT (1890-1937) was the author of
At the Mountains of Madness
,
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
, and many other works of horror fiction, as well as
Supernatural Horror in Literature
, a nonfiction study of the genre. "Nyarlathotep" was first published in the November 1920 issue of the
United Amateur
.

GARY LUTZ is the author of
Stories in the Worst Way
and
I Looked Alive
.

RICK MOODY is the author of the novels
Garden State
, which won the Pushcart Press Editors' Book Award,
The Ice Storm
, and
Purple America
; two collections of stories,
The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven
and
Demonology
; and a memoir,
The Black Veil
, winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award. He has also received the Addison Metcalf Award, the Paris Review's Aga Khan Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

MICHAEL MOORCOCK published
Outlaws Own
magazine, at the age of nine (in 1949) and made his first professional appearance in print at the age of sixteen. A professional editor at seventeen, he became editor of
New Worlds
in 1964 with policies creating what became known as the New Wave. He has won many literary awards and lives in Texas and France.

ADAM NEMETT is the writer/director of the narrative feature film
The Instrument
(Magister Productions, 2005).He received a BA from Princeton University (Religion, Creative Writing) and an MFA from California College of the Arts. He lives in San Francisco, where he's working on his first novel.

JOSIP NOVAKOVICH was born in Croatia and moved to the United States at the age of twenty. He has published a novel (
April Fool's Day
, HarperCollins), three story collections (
Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust, Yolk
, and
Salvation and Other Disasters
), two collections of narrative essays (
Plum Brandy: Croatian Journeys
and
Apricots from Chernobyl
), and was anthologized in Best American Poetry, Pushcart Prize, and O. Henry Prize Stories. His work has been published in translation in a dozen countries. He teaches in the MFA program at Pennsylvania State University.