The Fiction Understood (479 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 2 on 11 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Zampano (View user info) at 2007-04-06 20:46:39 EDT
Our uncle's magic came from his sound effects. He took us down to the beach, under the awning of a night sky so far removed from civilization that we believed we were observing all the stars that had ever been made. The moon hid beneath the roots of the world, and for the only time in our lives we could see the rest of the Milky Way and identify that we were its far-flung flotsam. No artist's interpretation in a textbook. There it was: cosmic cumulus. We were all-seeing, all-knowing, flung suddenly naked and raw into realization, looking so far up that our necks began to ache and we lost our balance in the sand. The only limit to our sudden omnipotence was where the stars ended, the inky mirror of the lake that lapped out our toes, chilled our blood. We couldn't see the water, only its unpresence. We were good Catholic kids, but that lake was larger than any God we could imagine. Our Lord could drown in its waves, and even if He found the impossible opposite shore, He too would be afraid of the stars as He watched and wondered if, perhaps, there was something there too. We were too small to be considered by God, who was too small to be considered by the uncaring universe.
Our uncle, he made those nights claustrophobic. He had the power to grab at all corners of creation and mash it together, pack it like an extra pair of jeans into a too-small suitcase. We couldn't breathe when he told his stories, and it was because he had the sound effects. He was deceptive, a magician of storytelling. He used the darkness of moonless nights and our awe of the lakeshore, free of light-pollution, to his advantage. If we'd known it was only a beer can with clay and rocks, we might have thought his stories nothing more than good attempts. But we were blind. We reached out with timid hands, first to make sure the ground was still beneath us, and when we grabbed at fistfuls of beachsand and dunegrass we reached out again to find our uncle.
We couldn't find him. Perhaps he shed his body back at the cabin, at the campfire that we abandoned so that we might hear his stories. That was always the condition: down to the beach, and I'll tell you a little tale. He was tricky, because he was just a voice. It's silly, really, because he had to have held the beer can somehow, but we never found so much as the sleeve of his shirt. Our fleshless narrator, taking us back through the centuries to when the pirates of these lakes, these freshwater seas, would routinely wait in abandoned coves for merchants and Spanish galleons sailing against the wind. He took us back and into the heart of the storm, a gale as wide as three horizons laid end to end, that rolled over the mountains and onto the waves, swallowing whole anything misfortunate enough to be caught at sea, the pirate fleet included.
He took us there and brought us back, to the shushing of the high tide and the breeze that bent the dunegrass. A breaking of waves in the water, soundlessly. Hardly a ripple. A statue could scarcely be as still. A pirate ship rises from the depths of the lake, and rotting timbers squeal together for the first time in centuries. Sails are useless, cancerous lungs gasping for breath that isn't there. Figures move across the deck, and if it weren't so dark, one could count the shipmates' stacks of ribs.
("They could in the moonlight.")
("But the moon isn't out.")
We don't remember how the story ends, if it ever was a story. All any one can remember is how suddenly, in that darkness beneath the cogwork spheres of the stars, we were treated to the sounds of an army of bloated, seaweedy corpses preparing to drop rusty anchors in at shore. Thick chains rattled across the rotted deck, and fingers of bone rapped on steel. Fluid in the movements, but definitely there. Grind, grumble. Nautical percussion. Ever a beat, timed to a metronome, or a giant's heartbeat. We looked onto the water, waiting to find a sudden blackness pressed up against the stars, an emptiness taking the form of a ship without sails. We couldn't find it. It was there, but we couldn't find it.
Not one of us thought to find the beer can, with its stones and mud.
When the story was over, our uncle stepped back into his skin, zipped up his vertebrae and told us it was getting a bit chilly. There was s'more stuff by the fire, and we knew that the pirate ship had been a fabrication. For the second time in an evening, a dawning of realization came upon us, but there was no grandness to its scale. It made us small, it made everything small. It shrunk the world into a manageable size. If only were old enough to understand the depression of our innocence, of how in our adulthood nobody can make us believe the lie.
A verisimilitude, our uncle calls it around a similar campfire shortly before college graduation. He's just my uncle at the moment. No sisters, no cousins. I have the sole privilege of his stories now. It's surprising how little liquor it takes to earn his loyalty. The pot is cheap. Next to nothing.
It's called a verisimilitude. Giving a fiction the qualities of something that's real, you know? Kind of like in some books, you've got fake documents to give a story some authenticity. Dracula was like that. Diary entries, newspaper headlines...it could've been a scrapbook or something. Not necessarily, but it's like that. A verisimilitude doesn't pass itself off as fiction, and usually the storyteller will go to extra lengths to keep the illusion alive, even outside of the story itself. I was always waiting for one of you kids to call me out on my stories, like that one with the pirates. I thought you, or your cousin Ian for sure, would ask me about it. I had this fake gold coin I was prepared to tell you I found on the beach when I was your age, and an "authentic" treasure map carved into a rock in the woods. Or the story of the headless farmer. There was a rancher down the street from the cabin who, when I asked him in town one day, was willing to let me borrow...
My uncle goes for some length about his past deceptions, and eventually he starts to tell me what he thinks I want to hear. Stories of his own days in college, and his apprehension of being the first immediate family member to attend university. He closes his eyes and invokes his old debauches, and I don't have the heart to tell him that I couldn't care less about it all. He adds a log to the fire and settles back into his seat. You tell me one, he says. I learned to tell stories at school. What'd you learn? Tell me something.
I don't have the benefit of sound effects. There would be no clever way to recreate the yells of a hundred frat boys, smelling of bourbon and cigarette butts and too many games of poker over forgotten textbooks, streaking across the quad in the dead of a winter's night. The fire is too bright to hide anything, and that is exactly what I want. My uncle's magic came from his sound effects and the fact that we couldn't see the rhythm to the shaking can, its timing against the waves. My magic is in what is seen but unheard, observed but left unsaid. The pack of beer. The amber bottles, the dime bag purchased in the laundry room of the dorm.
My uncle, he listens to my Dionysian stories pulled out of the air, and the jarring way I grab for details is deliberate, to mimic the haziness that I never felt, the stupor I never drank myself into. The verisimilitude is in the props that I fumble with awkwardly, but my uncle eats it up. He asks how many girls I fucked, and I tell him without hesitation. It can't all be a falsehood.
You lying sonuvabitch, he says.
When he falls asleep, I watch the fire ebb into sparks. Crickets fill the world with their rusty symphony. I'm too small to be seen.
User Reviews
Submitted by Fey (user info) at 2007-08-23 15:43:26 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I didn't read it right through. I skimmed it, I'm impressed. I'll be back to read more.
Submitted by AshK (user info) at 2007-04-24 12:18:00 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by ih8u2man (user info) at 2007-04-15 22:20:54 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by rob_berg (user info) at 2007-04-07 23:02:53 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
holy fuck.
I think one of my lobes just exploded.
...you got talent, kid. excellent work.
Submitted by MidnightToSix (user info) at 2007-04-07 20:14:20 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
wow es coherint sumwut
Submitted by Bubba2341 (user info) at 2007-04-07 19:24:49 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
This was excellent, and would have been even better without "He asks how many girls I fucked, and I tell him without hesitation." Regardless of the inherent shock value,I think it was unnecessary.
Submitted by TheUniter (user info) at 2007-04-07 16:50:38 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by skrapmetal (user info) at 2007-04-07 14:52:56 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I read it twice. Well done, better than most of what's here.
Welcome to Uber.
Submitted by lungfish (user info) at 2007-04-06 23:48:11 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
It's Friday.
I got paid today.
The D'Backs won tonight.
Brandon Webb pitches tomorrow.
I have a little whiskey and a lot of beer.
Bill Maher's on tonight.
The family's happy.
And I just paid off my fucking student loan in full. In fuckin' full.
+2s on me.
Submitted by DrogoRoch (user info) at 2007-04-06 21:42:54 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by The_taste_of_Monkeys (user info) at 2007-04-06 20:54:21 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Pretty fucking sweet dude.
www.pulsehead.com if you're not already a member, youd be welcome there too
--
I agree but I never had a fucking invite *sniff*
Submitted by The_taste_of_Monkeys (user info) at 2007-04-06 20:54:21 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Pretty fucking sweet dude.
www.pulsehead.com if you're not already a member, youd be welcome there too