Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories Read online

  Brighten to Incandescence: 17 Stories

  Michael Bishop

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Introduction — Lucius Shepard

  Thirteen Lies About Hummingbirds

  The Unexpected Visit of a Reanimated Englishwoman

  Chihuahua Flats

  With a Little Help from Her Friends

  “We’re All in This Alone” — with Paul Di Filippo

  Sequel on Skorpiós

  i

  ii

  iii

  iv

  Murder on Lupozny Station — with Gerald W. Page

  A Tapestry of Little Murders

  O Happy Day

  Herding with the Hadrosaurs

  The Tigers of Hysteria Feed Only on Themselves

  Tithes of Mint and Rue

  Of Crystalline Labyrinths and the New Creation

  Simply Indispensable

  Last Night Out

  The Procedure

  Help Me, Rondo

  A Lingering Incandescence: Notes About the Stories

  Website

  Also by Michael Bishop

  Acknowledgments

  Further Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Introduction

  WHEN CALLED UPON TO INTRODUCE A WRITER AS widely known to the general readership as Michael Bishop, I’m tempted to put aside the traditional notion of introductions and turn to the music business for a model, to the MCs of early rock concerts, hirsute young guys with no shame and freshly damaged brains who would stand before a shabby closed curtain at, say, the old Eastown Theater in Detroit, trying to appear cooler than the glassy-eyed stoners clamoring for music. These quasi-luminaries would invariably tell everyone to chill, the band was having set-up problems (code for the drummer’s passed out or some such), and when this admonition merely agitated the crowd further, they resorted to inept jokes, crude sexual allusions, and acts of self-debasement in order to pacify the beast. I had a particular fondness for this one kid, a lanky drug-inspired fellow with freckles and a prominent Adam’s apple, his dyed-red hair butchered into a mohawk, who—should all else fail—would fall on his back and hump his way back and forth across the stage. Though a literary approximation of this freakish yet (at the time) mildly entertaining performance might be appropriate to the moment in that it would serve less as an introduction than a delaying action, something to fill a few minutes before giving way to the featured attraction, I’m not sure such a display would suit the character of what is to follow.

  But then thinking about Bishop in terms of a classic r&r band, a group whose music has survived shifts in fashion, changing hairstyles, et al., and still rocks as hard as ever, is not in the least inappropriate. Bishop’s lucid narration, his spiritually complex characters, and carefully employed moral sensibility have altogether fashioned a style that has managed to ring out clean and true above thirty years or thereabouts of science fiction’s ever changing Next Big Things, from bell-bottom prose to sampled tropes and acid house hallucinations. Indeed, it would be apt to view this collection of seventeen uncollected stories as an album of outtakes and singles that did not make it onto previous albums, not because they were of lesser quality, but because they did not quite suit the tone of those collections, and now, gathered together, can be seen to have themselves a unity that derives from a constancy of obsession. From “A Tapestry of Little Murders” (1971) to a group of stories that saw print in the new millennium, we are able to bear witness to the continual revitalizing of Bishop’s great themes and familiar passions (spirituality, family, paleontology, rock and roll, et al.). All in all, it’s rather like coming across the bootleg of a lost concert by Hendrix or the Clash.

  Truth, like good whiskey, like a great song, burns along the nerves, and whenever I’ve read Mike Bishop’s work, I’ve gotten that burn. When I started thinking about trying my hand at science fiction and fantasy, it was the writers who gave me that burn—Le Guin, Disch, Wolfe, Ballard, Aldiss, to name a few others—who nourished what was then only a vague urge and caused it to grow into a firm intent. I took something from each of them—not elements of their styles, but a comprehension of what was possible to impart through fiction, of how truth (and by truth, I mean not what George Washington never strayed from, but a natural measure of the world distilled into words) could be injected into a story, how it could become the story. Attempting to say exactly what I derived from each of these authors would be a difficult chore, because the quality of this sort of honesty in fiction is ineffable, much easier to detect than to define. However, I feel more commonality of purpose with Mike than with the other writers named, and I believe that the apperception I had of his novels and stories, what gave me the burn, was the sense of a man with a clear moral focus who declined to make facile judgments about a clearly amoral world and, instead, allowed that world to speak through him. This is not to suggest that Mike is without bias or agenda in his writing, but rather to say that his biases and agendas always seem the servants of his experience and not its masters. And that strikes me as a remarkable and enviable quality, more remarkable and enviable even than Mike’s considerable gifts with language.

  The thing that makes writing—art of any sort, for that matter—suspect as to its worth is that jerks can become proficient at it. Indeed, it might be said that being a jerk is something of an asset for a writer, affording him or her a flexible moral platform from which to declaim. But long before I met Mike, I was quite certain that he was no jerk. I actually thought I would be able to pick him out of a crowd by his expression and demeanor, despite never having even seen a photo (I failed in this, but was more or less right in my prejudgments concerning his general aspect). Though I had only exchanged a couple of phone calls with him, I knew him from his stories … and he is there in his stories with less deception and camouflage than any other writer of my acquaintance, visible as a good-humored, honest man who earns a living by telling ex
otic and mesmerizing lies, doing so with such heart and skill that we believe him utterly. I read somewhere that on the Hindu Wheel of Life incarnation as a poet precedes incarnation as a thief. If this is the case, then speaking as one of the jerks, it seems that Mike may be slumming from a much higher plane, for he brings uncommon honor and integrity to our profession.

  The stories in Brighten to Incandescence would be astonishing if we were only to consider their range. Here we have the comic metaphysics of “Simply Indispensable” cohabiting with the sinister allusiveness of “Thirteen Lies About Hummingbirds”; the Laffertyesque “Of Crystalline Labyrinths and the New Creation” cheek to cheek with the moving Vietnam piece, “The Tigers of Hysteria Feed Only on Themselves”; a powerful horror story, “Help Me, Rondo,” concerning the cult film actor, Rondo Hatton, sharing the covers with the quiet humanism of “With a Little Help from Her Friends,” a story that features an appearance by the Beatles (having always hated the Beatles—galled by their music, which my parents thought was “nice” and I considered overly sentimental—let me say that it takes an extremely persuasive author to get me to stick with a story involving them); the Cretaceous adventure story “Herding with the Hadrosaurs” in intimate propinquity with the marvelous 9/11 story, “Last Night Out.” My personal favorite of this collection, “Sequel on Skorpiós,” a stunning poetic recasting of the life of Christ, has the impact of a compressed novel, bringing to mind the effect—though not the dry academic tone—of Jorge Luis Borges’s fictions. It makes one wish that one could go on reading it, that the author had expanded upon his materials; but because he does not, it forces the reader to do his own expansion, and this is the finest gift any story can bestow—to fire the imagination, to create a fiction within the soul of the reader that is so real and important, it lives with him for the rest of his days.

  This has happened to me with Mike’s stories more than once. For instance, I recall wandering around in Guatemala in 1982, stopping at a seedy hotel in Flores, a little regional capital set on an island in the middle of a jungle lake, and finding under the bedside table a coverless rain-damaged fragment of a Terry Carr anthology that contained the Nebula-winning story “The Quickening,” which illuminates the unsettling transformation of a culture. I was headed back to the States, having just left behind the brutality and turmoil in El Salvador, a country then being gutted by civil war, and partly because of my troubled mental condition, partly because of the shifting nature of rain forest culture, partly because of the strangely dissolute appearance of Flores itself, with its children’s playground half under water, swings and seesaws sticking up from the lake, and crumbling buildings whose support posts were lashed to telephone poles and whose porches were held aloft by crutches of wood and stone, but mostly because of the artfulness of the writing, I began to see Guatemala in terms that the story had imprinted upon me; to perceive that everything around me was at the point of potential transformation; to understand that our culture, all cultures, were fluid, malleable, amoeba-like in the resilience of their form, yet frail at the center—that the apparent iron of the world was supported by an illusion.

  As every writer knows, finding a way out of a story, a means of exiting gracefully, is among the thorniest problems facing anyone engaged in the art, and I am discovering that this same problem is true of introductions. I had in mind to return to the conceit with which I began the piece, the rock and roll concert, and to conjure the image of a crowd (of readers, this time) stamping their feet and throwing lit cigarettes at the MC, demanding that this stammering preamble be done, calling for the curtains to open and the Michael Bishop Band to make its overdue appearance. But now that I’m here, I feel compelled to take the metaphor in another direction. Unlike the dinosaur bands of the ’60s who refuse to fade away, continuing to play on in retro-slanted clubs and VH1 specials, proving by their performances that the height of their creativity has long since passed and that they are merely cashing in, Mike Bishop continues to grow as an artist. I’ve been privileged to read several recent stories that have not yet seen print. They mark an astonishing evolution in his work, and I look forward to seeing them put between covers and celebrated for their beautifully etched particularity and their loving yet unflinching rendering of the American experience. Until that day, we have Brighten to Incandescence, a collection that not only offers seventeen wildly entertaining stories, but displays for us the paths its author has traveled and provides us with a strong intimation of the world he soon intends to show us, a world that—albeit familiar in its essential things—will seem newly immediate, freshly defined, and entirely Michael Bishop’s own.

  Lucius Shepard

  May 2002

  Thirteen Lies About Hummingbirds

  HER NAME WAS MEMORY YANG. AT KYSER, GODWIN & Kale, she had just come aboard as a junior marketing researcher. The first thing I noticed about her—once past the nifty frisson of her name—was the way her Amerasian features resisted pigeonholing. From certain angles, she radiated the pale gauntness of a film-noir beauty; from others, the innocent sultriness of a geisha.

  I was smitten once again. Absolutely snowed.

  One night about a month after she joined our firm, I stayed late, working on the secondary accounts that were my burden at Kyser. When Memory left, I followed her to the fourteenth-floor elevators, and we rode down together in a glass-faced capsule.

  It was spring. Streetlights illuminated the eerie white plumes of the dogwoods in a pocket park across from our building. From my briefcase, I pulled three tissue-wrapped, long-stemmed red roses. One would have been too ostentatiously modest, a dozen too vulgarly smug.

  “Pretty,” said Memory Yang. “And they smell nice.”

  “They’re for you.”

  Memory lowered her head in a parody of maidenly embarrassment. She was embarrassed not because she had attracted my attention and my unexpected gift. She was embarrassed for me.

  “Corny?” I asked. “Too corny?”

  Head still down, she looked aside.

  “Memory?” No answer. “Miss Yang?”

  “Mr. Jurusik—”

  “Peter. Pete.”

  “Mr. Jurusik, I hope what I tell you won’t endanger my job.”

  That made me angry. “I’m not your boss, Memory.”

  “Mr. Jurusik, the problem is this: You’re one of our hottest hot-shots in copy-and-layout, right?”

  “So they say.”

  “And your idea of a brilliantly rad come-on is … roses?”

  “Three roses.”

  She raised her eyes to me. I saw then that Memory was no kid. She was a woman at least as old as I: a woman of some experience, a late career-starter. Any advantage imparted by my position at KG&K or my man-about-town sophistication evaporated like windshield fog under a roaring defroster.

  “I thought it was the thought that counts,” I said.

  We were down. Foyer ferns, a vast slab of water-smooth marble flooring, and a uniformed security guard slid into view.

  “The thought does count,” Memory said. Side by side, we walked out to the hedge-protected parking lot.

  “What’s the trouble, then? Do you doubt the sincerity of my thought?” I clamped my briefcase against my side and brandished the rejected flowers.

  “Not the sincerity—the quality.”

  “The quality? Then what would do it for you? The keys to my Audi? An airline ticket to Acapulco?”

  Memory stopped walking. She took my lapel between a thumb and forefinger. “I’m not talking money.” She tweezered my lapel in a vaguely intimidating way. “Not necessarily, at least. I’m talking … imagination.”

  “Imagination?”

  Under the greenish-yellow arc lamps, Memory peered into my eyes without really seeing me. To reestablish contact, I had to twist free of her gently pinching fingers.

  “Roses are better than a gold-plated zodiac charm,” she finally said. “But not much. For the charm, you’d’ve at least had to find out my birthday.”


  “How about giving me some suggestions?”

  For a moment, I thought she was going to climb into her car—a Volkswagen beetle, recently repainted—and drive off, leaving me to simmer in my chagrin. But she didn’t. Brow corrugated, she turned back to me, defiantly lobbing examples:

  “A baseball signed by Hank Aaron. A full-color poster of the National Palace Museum in Taipei. A novel by García Márquez.”

  “Great. Go on.”

  “A shark’s tooth. A ginkgo leaf. A geode.”

  (The self-conscious list of a Granola-eating nature lover.) “Fine. Anything else?”

  “A hummingbird.” And then she did climb into her bug and putt-putt regally away.

  A hummingbird? Had Memory given me her real wish list or just a suggestive schema? It would be easy to get Hank Aaron’s John Hancock on a National League baseball; a friend of mine labored in public relations for the Braves. Travel posters weren’t hard to find. And every bookstore in town had Love in the Time of Cholera stacked up so high that it looked as if Garcia Marquez had put a move on Stephen King’s floor space.

  The hard part of making use of Memory’s examples, I saw, would come in determining beforehand what would suit her. How could I have known that she liked baseball, Taiwanese art, Latin American novelists? Or, finally, hummingbirds?

  So I played detective. I found out that Memory’s birthday was less than a week away; that her ex-hubby was doing time for a drug conviction in Macon’s Central Correctional Institute; that, as a result of wounds sustained during a holdup at his health spa two years ago, her father, an immigrant from Taiwan, was now disabled; that, late in Carter’s presidency, her mother had suffered a fatal stroke; that her only brother, Tom, lived in Connecticut; and that her favorite poet was Wallace Stevens.

  I did not go out and buy her a first edition of Harmonium. Not only would that have been nearly impossible, it would have been—in Memory’s eyes—show-offy and obvious.