Fantastic Metropolis

This brings us around to the story, “Lull,” which is the object of my parlamblings in this installment of The Virtual Anthology. I’d heard this story read by Link before seeing it in the Conjunctions 39 anthology that Peter Straub edited. This volume contains a number of great stories by Andy Duncan, John Crowley, M. John Harrison, etc., but it’s Link’s piece that really stands out. In describing the plot, it doesn’t sound like much—a group of long-time, middle-aged friends have gotten together in the basement of one of their homes to play cards and drink beer. They discuss all manner of subjects, often coming back to the trials and tribulations of their own lives. They decide to call a service where a woman will tell a story to you over the phone. The woman, Starlight, tells the story of the devil and the cheerleader, a story about time running backwards. After this part, there’s a section entitled “Things Get Better” in which some weird stuff happens and then its over. It doesn’t seem like much until you begin to realize that the story is created from stories—stories beginning, trailing off, picking up again, intersecting, weaving together, generating from other stories. It is a story teeming with stories.

All throughout, the stories are peppered with images and mentions of the Devil and the directional flow of time. What the characters mainly discuss are the changes that have taken place in their lives. We learn about the hardships they’ve been through, their desires for the past and hopes for the future—relationships gone cold, dead relatives, unrequited dreams, the dissolution of talents. This is told in Link’s straightforward writing and is infused with a real world sense of humor, arising from the situations and characters, and also a real world sense of loss. I don’t want to make too much of my interpretation, you will have your own, but the Devil, the agent of change, is the Father of Time. In the Judeo-Christian Mythos, Satan’s ploy awakens humanity to self-consciousness and, in doing so, the passage of Time and ultimately Death. The Devil disrupts our lives and leads us down dark paths, but like all good tricksters, the changes he causes can also lead us to a place where “things get better.”

The story of the cheerleader and the devil, a truly ingenious piece of writing, appears at first as if it is going to be wholly ironic, but it comes off as being the most eerily affecting in focusing the sense of the loss of innocence and the struggle that Time’s change brings to our lives. Link has told me that “Lull” was written in response to the loss of a friend, and, considering the emotional response I took away from it, that fact makes perfect sense.

Now, back to structure, for this story of many stories is also driven by structure. At first glance, it doesn’t seem like it is. To the contrary, it seems diffuse and completely digressive. The difference is that this piece has an organic structure, and I envision it as taking the shape of a spiral, like the curled arm of some sea creature or the twining of a plant’s tendril. What’s truly unique about it is that Link replaces the Euclidean geometry of the structure of a story like “Girl Detective” with a geometry that is capable, like Mandelbrot’s, of describing the chaotic shape of life. I’m imagining those wild, paisley computer designs based on the mathematics of chaos theory. The story is equally affecting as her other stories but it trades the usual energy of suspense, a measured drive toward an end, toward Death, for an ever decreasing orbit, or spiral, around the initial energy of creation, which can be both as energizing and as frightening as the former.

Thoreau had a theory of composition that the perfect form of a piece of writing would take shape at the behest of the writer’s emotional and intellectual commitment to the piece and not be applied beforehand. He desired a completely organic form. There’s a sense of this in Thoreau’s Walden, as if it is an extemporaneous nature journal being composed on the spot, but we know that he took great pains to revise that book over the course of twelve major revisions throughout a period of almost ten years. The clarity of “Lull” suggests that it has undergone the same process. So I suppose craft plays as great a part as initial desire and intent in achieving the “organic” in writing.

After reading all of this, it should become clear to you, if it hasn’t already, that my thoughts on this story are paltry in comparison to the experience of reading it. So go check it out, and don’t forget to try Link’s collection, Stranger Things Happen, too.

Jeffrey Ford is the author of The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque (Morrow, 2002) and The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant & Other Stories (Golden Gryphon, 2002). A new novel, The Girl in the Glass (preview), will be in bookshops this year.

Ford lives in South Jersey with his wife, Lynn, and two sons, Jack and Derek. He teaches Writing and Early American Literature at Brookdale Community College in Monmouth County, New Jersey.