“Sure you’re Rockefeller,” he is said to have replied, “and I’m Queen Victoria. Now get over to that furnace and get working.”
It is not clear whether the accident that occurred that day can be attributed to Rockefeller’s inexperience and incompetence because little is known about its details. It is the nature of explosions to erase the evidence of their own causes. It was close to midday. There was a sudden flower of fire and a roar and the furnace showered jots of liquid metal from its mouth that sewed flames wherever they landed. Fourteen men were killed including the newly hired man, whose name no one could quite remember — James or Jed or something like that — who was consumed so completely by the fire that afterward no one could recognize his face. It was only when Rockefeller’s personal secretary, hearing the news, raced down to the factory and made inquiries that the body was identified by the rings the man wore which, although they were disfigured by the heat, were still attached to the dead man’s hands.
Rockefeller is buried beneath a giant obelisk in a cemetery on the heights overlooking the city. From that spot you can see over the roofs of the houses where the millionaires used to live, to the places where the factories used to be, to where the workers used to live in crowded row houses, all the way down to the shores of the lake that used to carry boats that took the goods made there all around the country and the world. On a clear day, it is a wonderful view.
5.
Emily Mitchell lives with her husband, whom she sometimes loves so much that she’d like to climb inside his chest and stay there, curled up like a cat. She likes to lie against him so it feels as if their ribs have become clasped like fingers and when they try to get up they will have trouble pulling them apart. She couldn’t say exactly why she feels this way and she is frequently surprised by the persistence of this feeling over so many years. Her husband is often charming, smart and considerate. But he can also be melancholy and cantankerous from time to time. He has been known on occasion to worry too much about something that really wasn’t so terrible after all.
Nevertheless, she seems always to come back to her underlying enduring affection for him. Since they are both writers, they have moved around a lot and they don’t own very much material stuff like furniture or durable goods or electronics. Sometimes Emily Mitchell finds this frustrating. She will look at the empty rooms in her house and imagine all the things that could go in them. Wouldn’t it be nice to have an Empire chair in that corner? Wouldn’t a Danish modern coffee table be just the thing in the living room? She longs to own furnishings for which she knows only the names and not the functions, like an armoire or a credenza, an ottoman, a secretary or a chifferobe. But then she wonders whether all these things would look good together and she thinks that perhaps it is better to imagine them than to have them, so that other people can’t see how badly they clash and judge her for having bad taste or lacking any sense of design. Her husband doesn’t care much about furniture or the names of furniture.
For a while a few years ago, Emily Mitchell and her husband lived apart because they had jobs in different cities. They would call each other every night on the phone.
“Hello?”
“Hello!”
“He-llo. ”
“Hello.”
In the background of these calls, they could sometimes hear the weather where the other one was. Sometimes Emily Mitchell could hear a police car drive past her husband’s apartment with its siren blaring or a bus rumble or a rainstorm begin. On the phone, heavy rain sounded like hot oil crackling in a pan. Sometimes they would leave their phones on after they had nothing left to say so that they could hear each other turn the pages of their books while they read themselves to sleep. The turning pages sounded louder on the phone than they would have if they had been lying side by side; in fact, it sounded like they were each reading a giant book, maybe about the size of a bed, with huge, heavy pages. Emily Mitchell would listen to the sound of her husband turning the pages of his giant book. Eventually the sound would make her sleepy; she would relax listening for the next page to turn. She would feel less lonely and more comfortable until at last she could put her head down and go to sleep.
Acknowledgments
These stories are the work of many years and I had a lot of help with them, for which I am extremely grateful. Stephen Donadio and Carolyn Kuebler gave me invaluable, deeply appreciated support and encouragement; Meakin Armstrong, Terrance Hayes, Ronald Spatz and Chris Beha were thoughtful editors. I owe a great debt to Gail Hochman, my amazing agent. Jill Bialosky, my editor, chose, championed, shaped, and guided this book brilliantly through the editorial process; her assistant Angie Shih was smart and helpful; Nancy Palmquist did wonderful editing work, insightful and precise, on the manuscript.
Maud Casey, Howard Norman, Stanley Plumly and all my colleagues at the University of Maryland have welcomed and inspired me, as my colleagues at Cleveland State University, most especially Michael Dumanis and Imad Rahman, did before. A CAPAA grant from the Graduate School of the University of Maryland and a fellowship from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts gave me time to write. As always, my family has been generous and kind and they have never once told me I really should think about doing something more sensible with my life than writing made-up stories. My dad got me hooked on science fiction early and my mom made sure that I eventually read other things as well. Joanna Mitchell gives me light and courage. Joshua Tyree remains the writer I admire most and my very favorite, much beloved husband.
Acknowledgments
A number of these stories were published in magazines and journals prior to their inclusion in this collection. “Biographies” first appeared under the title “Biography” in Alaska Quarterly Review, where “Guided Meditation” also appeared.Harper’s published “If You Cannot Go to Sleep,” and New England Review published “On Friendship,” “Lucille’s House,” and “Three Marriages.” “States” appeared in Ploughshares.