By Chris Cleave
[STARTS]
“For the most part we have made the beasts of fancy in our own image--far more cruel and bloodthirsty, that is to say, than the actual "lower animals". The dragons of the Western world do evil for evil's sake; the harpy is more terrible than the vulture, and the were-wolf is far more frightful than the wolf. Almost the only beast that kills for the pure joy of killing is Western civilized man, and he has attributed his own peculiar trait to the creatures of his imagination. There are a few exceptions, however, to this rule that our projection of ourselves is lower than the facts of Nature, and the unicorn--noble, chaste, fierce yet beneficent, altruistic though solitary, strangely beautiful--is the clearest exception of all. The unicorn was not conceived in fear. Our early sense of Nature's majesty and mystery is revealed in him. If he came from Ur of the Chaldees, where the moon was a friend to man always contending against the demoniacal sun and the powers of darkness alike, his constant benevolence is more readily understood; but whatever may have been his first local habitation and whatever was his original name, this "airy nothing" was born and bred in the human mind. There are times when one takes hope and comfort in remembering the fact.”
- From "Lore of the Unicorn" by Odell Shepard, 1930
Shannon says, I mean I’ve studied these things, and the thing you learn is, you don’t ever pick the date. Right? I mean you can tell your followers the world is going to end, you just shouldn’t ever name the actual day it’s going to end on. Cause then they can hold you to it.
And she sits there holding the rest of us with this very calm expression she has, a look in her eyes like someone sounding a brass bell on a grey New England morning, and everyone nods because what she spoke, frankly, has a ring of the absolute truth to it. You never pick the date.
By way of an aside, Shannon tells the group that she works weekends in a café called The Butcher Shop or The Abattoir or The Slaughterhouse – I forget exactly which – but some name that makes it possible at a stretch for a guy in a lumberjack shirt to walk into the place early one morning with seventy pounds of bleeding deer slung over his shoulder and ask, Can you guys cut this thing up for me?
And although the establishment is absolutely a café – with the panini bread stacked in big wicker baskets behind the counter, and the pickles and the cold cuts all laid out in white ceramic dishes ready for use, and the little tipping tin beside the cash register with the handwritten sign taped to it saying THANK YOU – although this place could not to any lesser extent resemble a one-stop carcass shop, Shannon decides to ask her manager if it might be possible to accommodate the gentleman’s request.
I guess she does this out of kindness. With those calm eyes she looks at the guy and she perceives that the guy knows, the second he sets foot inside that oddly misnamed café, that he’s come to the wrong place. But his question was already half-formed on his lips when he saw the café’s sign and pulled in. He’d been rehearsing it behind the wheel of his pick-up while the dawn broke and he drove back from the woods into the city of Providence. Trying to get the shake out of his voice; trying to get the question to sound nonchalant. Like this wasn’t the first time he’d tracked and killed a deer. Like he didn’t have a moment of regret as the light faded from the animal’s eyes. Like he wasn’t sad and pale with sleep deprivation; like he did this every day; like he knew exactly what the hell to suddenly do with a warm, bleeding body that weighed the same as his ten-year-old boy. Hey, can you guys cut this thing up for me? And even now it’s a sandwich shop, the guy can’t help blurting out his question.
And Shannon relays the question to her manager – even though she knows her manager is going to stare back at her for a full minute with an expression approaching pity – and she does it so as to not make the man in the lumberjack shirt feel like he’s all alone. To share the feeling that someone else – even someone else who actually works in the café, for goodness sakes – might allow in her own mind too some possible ambiguity concerning the place’s function; some ambiguity that was not immediately dispelled by the rows of gherkins and the salad onions glistening in their jars. In these situations human solidarity is important, and someday you hope some other human will return the favor. Because you never know the day when you’ll walk into the wrong shop yourself. You never pick the date.
Can you guys cut this thing up for me? Today we’re assembled for a creative writing workshop, so the thing is every human story and we’re going to need to slice and dice it somehow. How we started this was to find ourselves some news articles. Free choice. We went out into the wilds of the news media and we bagged ourselves one each and we walked into this class with seventy pounds of story.
I already mentioned Shannon. Shannon puts the same care into her story selection that she gives to making sandwiches at the café. She is calm and methodical and she takes pride in the small things. Her news story is called The Replaceable You. It’s about all of the body parts you can swap out of homo sapiens and still have a human being. The article doesn’t mention how to save human face, but I would imagine that voluntarily asking one’s café manager whether the establishment can eviscerate and butcher a wild deer – I imagine that would count.
Then there’s Stephanie. She looks at all the stories in the paper and none of them does quite what she’s looking for and so she’s unafraid to bring in a pictorial piece instead, a charity advertisement from the back of the paper, and she is absolutely right because the piece is mesmerizing. There are six kids with cleft palates, smiling, or making whatever that unpronounceable expression is that can only be made with a three-cornered mouth. And the headline is haunting: Each Of These Kids Needs Someone Who Cares Enough To Send $250 Once.
That gets us talking about children, and Astrid has come up with a winner; one of those stories you could tell a dozen ways up and make it darker every time. A bunch of third-graders in Georgia conspires to kill their teacher with a paperweight and a steak knife and some tape and a pair of handcuffs and I forget what else. I mean, that’s quite enough already. The thing is, each of the kids is assigned to bring in one item, like a macabre show-and-tell, and their roles fit perfectly together into a textbook execution. It’s the opposite of the lone gunman: single target, incorporated assassin. The teacher has unjustly scolded one of the student body, and so in an expression of human solidarity as admirable in its own way as asking your boss about butchering a deer, the kids are going to tie up their teacher and concuss her with the paperweight and then stab her to death with the steak knife. It’s nothing if not systematic. There is absolutely no way the teacher is walking away from this. She’s staying after class. The kids have even delegated one of their number to be the cleaner. The plan is inch-perfect and it’s only through treachery that they are rumbled. And the kicker is that this is a special class: these young team players are supposed to have learning difficulties. When doomsday dawns the meek shall rise up and inherit the earth. Their teacher would have driven into school, blissfully aware today was not like every other day. Nobody picks the date.
Next there is Jenna, and you don’t argue with Jenna, or at least I don’t because she’s too smart. I brought in a story of my own earlier this week, a novel I wrote three years ago, and I guess I basically arrived with it slung over my shoulder asking if anyone could cut it up for me, and Jenna took a good look at it and said, sure, and handed it back to me in neat Ziploc bags all ready for the freezer. I believe this is known as literary criticism. It was a pretty damned professional job, if you ask me, and it’s a famously elusive novel so I wonder how she went about it. Tied it down and laid into it with a paperweight and steak knives, maybe. And Jenna’s article is about a doomsday cult of 25 adults and four children who’ve barricaded themselves in a cave near the Volga river. Following Astrid’s lead we start talking about the children and what’s going on in their minds, down there in the dark. It’s not looking great for them, in all honesty. Their leader is Pyotr Kuznetsov, and he says the world will end in May, and he does not appear to have left instructions regarding why it will be helpful to be twenty feet underground at that time. Kuznetsov is described in the article as a professional engineer, and described by Shannon as a total amateur cultist because, as she says, you never pick the date.
You could say this group is drawn to the extremes. Sarah has brought in a cult story too. And it’s a great choice, this one; another of those stories you could tell and re-tell, and she goes through it with fine skill, picking up on all the angles that make it come alive as a story. The hand-sewn, ankle-length dresses. The hair tied up in braids. And best of all, the name of the ranch: Yearning for Zion. We guess they’re not referring to a much-longed-for summer vacation in the Zion National Park in Utah (famous for its soaring granite towers), although the article doesn’t specify. 401 children have been forcibly removed from a compound occupied by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which is a place where bearded men can go to practice polygamy with minors (a chapter of Jesus’ own example that the gospels have inexplicably missed).
To this place we have chosen to bring the stories of children accelerating towards doomsday. These are the precise extremes: the start of life and the end of all life. We are slicing and dicing in between. The details count. The third graders’ paperweight was seized by police – it was engraved with a unicorn. A single bright glass unicorn: there is something untamable in this story. And on the other hand the Police Chief was called Tony Tanner. You couldn’t make that up. Again these extremes: from the ultra-esoteric to the comically banal. Absolute human transgression, and Anthony H Tanner. Cleft narratives and dark palates.
Now Mary says something amazing. She says she felt certain when she was a kid that all of the stories in the newspaper were somehow connected; that they were all fragments of one single narrative that fitted together and collectively made sense if you only knew the sacred trick of reading it. Then the whole story would reveal itself; everything would become whole. She says, when she was a kid, she was certain that the adults knew how to hold it all together.
She smiles and this is a high point and a watershed and now all of us are six years old again and we look at each other around the table and we laugh and just for this moment there is a single story that rings in this place like a brass bell, before the chime fades away and our narratives must deconverge and run multiplicitous to their extremities, ever downwards into the catacombs at world’s end, but always loud and always clear and always with this one bright sound dissolved in them.
And she sits there holding the rest of us with this very calm expression she has, a look in her eyes like someone sounding a brass bell on a grey New England morning, and everyone nods because what she spoke, frankly, has a ring of the absolute truth to it. You never pick the date.
By way of an aside, Shannon tells the group that she works weekends in a café called The Butcher Shop or The Abattoir or The Slaughterhouse – I forget exactly which – but some name that makes it possible at a stretch for a guy in a lumberjack shirt to walk into the place early one morning with seventy pounds of bleeding deer slung over his shoulder and ask, Can you guys cut this thing up for me?
And although the establishment is absolutely a café – with the panini bread stacked in big wicker baskets behind the counter, and the pickles and the cold cuts all laid out in white ceramic dishes ready for use, and the little tipping tin beside the cash register with the handwritten sign taped to it saying THANK YOU – although this place could not to any lesser extent resemble a one-stop carcass shop, Shannon decides to ask her manager if it might be possible to accommodate the gentleman’s request.
I guess she does this out of kindness. With those calm eyes she looks at the guy and she perceives that the guy knows, the second he sets foot inside that oddly misnamed café, that he’s come to the wrong place. But his question was already half-formed on his lips when he saw the café’s sign and pulled in. He’d been rehearsing it behind the wheel of his pick-up while the dawn broke and he drove back from the woods into the city of Providence. Trying to get the shake out of his voice; trying to get the question to sound nonchalant. Like this wasn’t the first time he’d tracked and killed a deer. Like he didn’t have a moment of regret as the light faded from the animal’s eyes. Like he wasn’t sad and pale with sleep deprivation; like he did this every day; like he knew exactly what the hell to suddenly do with a warm, bleeding body that weighed the same as his ten-year-old boy. Hey, can you guys cut this thing up for me? And even now it’s a sandwich shop, the guy can’t help blurting out his question.
And Shannon relays the question to her manager – even though she knows her manager is going to stare back at her for a full minute with an expression approaching pity – and she does it so as to not make the man in the lumberjack shirt feel like he’s all alone. To share the feeling that someone else – even someone else who actually works in the café, for goodness sakes – might allow in her own mind too some possible ambiguity concerning the place’s function; some ambiguity that was not immediately dispelled by the rows of gherkins and the salad onions glistening in their jars. In these situations human solidarity is important, and someday you hope some other human will return the favor. Because you never know the day when you’ll walk into the wrong shop yourself. You never pick the date.
Can you guys cut this thing up for me? Today we’re assembled for a creative writing workshop, so the thing is every human story and we’re going to need to slice and dice it somehow. How we started this was to find ourselves some news articles. Free choice. We went out into the wilds of the news media and we bagged ourselves one each and we walked into this class with seventy pounds of story.
I already mentioned Shannon. Shannon puts the same care into her story selection that she gives to making sandwiches at the café. She is calm and methodical and she takes pride in the small things. Her news story is called The Replaceable You. It’s about all of the body parts you can swap out of homo sapiens and still have a human being. The article doesn’t mention how to save human face, but I would imagine that voluntarily asking one’s café manager whether the establishment can eviscerate and butcher a wild deer – I imagine that would count.
Then there’s Stephanie. She looks at all the stories in the paper and none of them does quite what she’s looking for and so she’s unafraid to bring in a pictorial piece instead, a charity advertisement from the back of the paper, and she is absolutely right because the piece is mesmerizing. There are six kids with cleft palates, smiling, or making whatever that unpronounceable expression is that can only be made with a three-cornered mouth. And the headline is haunting: Each Of These Kids Needs Someone Who Cares Enough To Send $250 Once.
That gets us talking about children, and Astrid has come up with a winner; one of those stories you could tell a dozen ways up and make it darker every time. A bunch of third-graders in Georgia conspires to kill their teacher with a paperweight and a steak knife and some tape and a pair of handcuffs and I forget what else. I mean, that’s quite enough already. The thing is, each of the kids is assigned to bring in one item, like a macabre show-and-tell, and their roles fit perfectly together into a textbook execution. It’s the opposite of the lone gunman: single target, incorporated assassin. The teacher has unjustly scolded one of the student body, and so in an expression of human solidarity as admirable in its own way as asking your boss about butchering a deer, the kids are going to tie up their teacher and concuss her with the paperweight and then stab her to death with the steak knife. It’s nothing if not systematic. There is absolutely no way the teacher is walking away from this. She’s staying after class. The kids have even delegated one of their number to be the cleaner. The plan is inch-perfect and it’s only through treachery that they are rumbled. And the kicker is that this is a special class: these young team players are supposed to have learning difficulties. When doomsday dawns the meek shall rise up and inherit the earth. Their teacher would have driven into school, blissfully aware today was not like every other day. Nobody picks the date.
Next there is Jenna, and you don’t argue with Jenna, or at least I don’t because she’s too smart. I brought in a story of my own earlier this week, a novel I wrote three years ago, and I guess I basically arrived with it slung over my shoulder asking if anyone could cut it up for me, and Jenna took a good look at it and said, sure, and handed it back to me in neat Ziploc bags all ready for the freezer. I believe this is known as literary criticism. It was a pretty damned professional job, if you ask me, and it’s a famously elusive novel so I wonder how she went about it. Tied it down and laid into it with a paperweight and steak knives, maybe. And Jenna’s article is about a doomsday cult of 25 adults and four children who’ve barricaded themselves in a cave near the Volga river. Following Astrid’s lead we start talking about the children and what’s going on in their minds, down there in the dark. It’s not looking great for them, in all honesty. Their leader is Pyotr Kuznetsov, and he says the world will end in May, and he does not appear to have left instructions regarding why it will be helpful to be twenty feet underground at that time. Kuznetsov is described in the article as a professional engineer, and described by Shannon as a total amateur cultist because, as she says, you never pick the date.
You could say this group is drawn to the extremes. Sarah has brought in a cult story too. And it’s a great choice, this one; another of those stories you could tell and re-tell, and she goes through it with fine skill, picking up on all the angles that make it come alive as a story. The hand-sewn, ankle-length dresses. The hair tied up in braids. And best of all, the name of the ranch: Yearning for Zion. We guess they’re not referring to a much-longed-for summer vacation in the Zion National Park in Utah (famous for its soaring granite towers), although the article doesn’t specify. 401 children have been forcibly removed from a compound occupied by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which is a place where bearded men can go to practice polygamy with minors (a chapter of Jesus’ own example that the gospels have inexplicably missed).
To this place we have chosen to bring the stories of children accelerating towards doomsday. These are the precise extremes: the start of life and the end of all life. We are slicing and dicing in between. The details count. The third graders’ paperweight was seized by police – it was engraved with a unicorn. A single bright glass unicorn: there is something untamable in this story. And on the other hand the Police Chief was called Tony Tanner. You couldn’t make that up. Again these extremes: from the ultra-esoteric to the comically banal. Absolute human transgression, and Anthony H Tanner. Cleft narratives and dark palates.
Now Mary says something amazing. She says she felt certain when she was a kid that all of the stories in the newspaper were somehow connected; that they were all fragments of one single narrative that fitted together and collectively made sense if you only knew the sacred trick of reading it. Then the whole story would reveal itself; everything would become whole. She says, when she was a kid, she was certain that the adults knew how to hold it all together.
She smiles and this is a high point and a watershed and now all of us are six years old again and we look at each other around the table and we laugh and just for this moment there is a single story that rings in this place like a brass bell, before the chime fades away and our narratives must deconverge and run multiplicitous to their extremities, ever downwards into the catacombs at world’s end, but always loud and always clear and always with this one bright sound dissolved in them.
[ENDS]
Chris Cleave
Rhode Island and London, April 2008
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