Interfictions 2 (24 page)

"Catherine!” Poniatowski wrenched himself from my father's grip and ran for the tree. My father ran after him, clutching at the hem of his cloak.

In the morning the world had turned to glass. Crystallized leaves fell from the trees onto the newly frozen ground with the plinking sound of a celestial harpsichord. Bodies trapped under the ice and snow would remain there until spring, immobilized like pike in a frozen pond. Survivors of the night stayed indoors with the curtains drawn.

Poniatowski lay inside his Marble Palace like a corpse in a mausoleum. My father had carried him home during the night. He and the nameless, wordless nurse had put the count back into his bed. Having weathered several winters in wartime Poland, my father knew that you could survive this kind of cold only if you kept your head. He broke up the Karelian birch armchairs for firewood and gathered together the count's fur-lined cloaks—the red one, the black one, and the silver one with the chinchilla lining—wrapped himself and the nurse and the count, spooning together to conserve body heat. Toward dawn of the following day, death came softly on kitten paws and left behind an elegant corpse.

The weather had grown mild once again. My father handed the cloaks to the nurse and bid her good-bye with a short bow. In no time at all he was back in my spare bedroom. When he came down to breakfast the day after he arrived, he looked a little more like his old self. Six months later, he asked me to help him with his memoirs.

It was nine o'clock on a perfect July evening of our last session in the Catskills, and the sun was just beginning to set behind Slide Mountain. Dragonflies were dancing the mazurka with a flock of swallows as my father and I sipped vodka-spiked lemonade, gently rocking in our aluminum lawn chairs. We hadn't eaten since lunch, and I was starving, but there was still one question I wanted to ask. The fading light obscured my father's features, so now seemed like a good time.

"Why didn't you go back?"

My father put his drink down under his chair and shifted in his seat to stretch his bad leg.

"You could have gone back,” I continued, “to an earlier time, when Poniatowski was a bit more lucid. Before he found his chicken, for instance. Maybe he would have listened to you then."

"Well, it's obvious, isn't it?” said my father.

I shrugged. Nothing in this story was obvious.

"Cause and effect,” my father continued. “What have I always taught you? Follow the sequence of events to their logical conclusion."

I shrugged again, not sure if he could see the gesture now that it was full dark.

"If there was no war, the part of Poland in which I was born would not have become a Russian satellite state. I would not have gone to university in Russia, would not have met your crazy mother, and you would not have been born."

"Oh,” I said, though this is what I had expected my father to say, exactly what a man of science
would
say in lieu of an apology. It was enough for me. To forestall the sentimental tears that threatened to mess up our beautiful moment, I tried to grasp the concept of my nonbeing. What I imagined was a vast marble room without furniture, weak northern light, a chill in the air.

My father pulled something out of the pocket of his short-sleeved shirt. It was a feather, extremely white in the dark, moonless night. He leaned forward and handed it to me. “You are my beautiful chicken,” he said, “a gift after all my suffering."

I ran the feather across my cheek and smiled in the dark. Time heals all wounds.

Dinosaur Eggs

I am grateful to the editors for giving me “interstitial fiction” to use in response to the question, “What sort of writing do you do?” Now I'm compelled to offer up another term in exchange: “concretion."

According to Wikipedia, a concretion is what you get when mineral cement fills the porosity (the spaces between grains) in a mass of sedimentary rock. This mineral cement is younger and denser than the rock in which it forms. When the sedimentary rock erodes, the concretion, usually spherical or ovoid ("time is a sphere without exits"), pops out of its mold. Although “concretion” comes from the Latin word “con,” together, and “cresco,” to grow, the more common name for these geological objects is “dinosaur eggs."

What does this have to do with writing interstitial fiction? I believe that interstitial fiction is created in exactly the same way as concretions: mineral cement (narrative) fills the porosity (imagination) in a mass of sedimentary rock (dreams, family history, objects and people you covet, allergies) to create an ovoid object (the story) that pops out once the sedimentary matrix erodes.

So here is how the concretion entitled “Count Poniatowski and the Beautiful Chicken” was formed: a pastel portrait of a white Polish Frizzle chicken purchased at a garden shop; the Tim Hawkinson ?berorgan exhibit at the Getty Center, which I went to see with my husband (finally, a soul mate); the fifth-grade science fair; the humiliation of being disqualified for passing off my father's windmill as my own; Count Stanislaw Poniatowski, whom I encountered in a dishy biography of Catherine the Great (research for my novel-in-progress). What he wrote about himself touched me: “An excellent education enabled me to conceal my mental and physical defects.” I hear you, buddy. All the rest—my father, the Catskills, time travel—is mineral cement.

Elizabeth Ziemska

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Peter M. Ball

The first time the Black Dog showed up, I was five. We were living in Miriwinni, and it lurked behind the low, chain link fence that marked out our backyard, hunkered down in the long grass filling the space between the fence line and the train tracks. Noone else could see it, not even my parents. It was good at hiding when other people looked.

I don't remember much about our house back then. My parents were teachers, so we moved a lot. I was five, and that means I'm working with hazy images here: I remember the house was on stilts, thick hardwood pylons that would keep the snakes out and keep us dry if the river flooded. I remember off-white weatherboards and a corrugated iron roof. We lived across the road from an endless expanse of north Queensland cane fields. They burned blood red and spat ash into the air during the harvest months. The town was just a school, a pub, and a corner store that sold fizzy drinks and cordial. Maybe a couple of dozen people lived around the train station, the rest spread out in the houses that nestled in the heart of the cane fields. My friends were mostly farm kids, seen only on weekends.

Miriwinni was the kind of place where adults were filled with conventional worries: a bad harvest, the bills coming due, snake bites while cutting the cane, a cyclone sweeping in over the coast. No one worried about the Black Dog except me. At first my parents would check the long grass when I spoke of him, just to make sure nothing was hiding there, but it didn't take long for their concern to falter. I was a child prone to imaginary friends and childish fictions. There was no reason to believe my stories. “It doesn't exist,” they told each other. “He'll grow out of it."

One day, when my mother was taking me seriously, she convinced me that I should be making friends with the Black Dog. I was six, and I was terrified, and I refused to play outside. “It's time to conquer your fear,” she said, handing me a fistful of sausages. They were slimy to hold, the meat squelching through my fingers. My mother held my other hand and dragged me down the back stairs. “Give them to the dog,” she said. “Just throw it over the fence and let it know you want to be friends."

The Black Dog didn't want to be friends. It was already sniffing out my scent as I trundled down the back steps. I saw the wolfish head rise out of the grass, fixing me with its crimson gaze.

"Nice doggie,” I said. I held up the sausages so it would know I was willing to try. The Black Dog just smiled and pressed its body against the chain-link fence. The silky midnight of its muzzle pressed through the links, the moist tip sniffing as I got closer. Mum was looking in the other direction, her eyes on the dark clouds that squatted on the horizon. Clouds were worrying things during storm season.

"Little boy,” the Black Dog whispered, his voice just low enough that mum couldn't hear. “Yum."

I dropped the sausages and squirmed out of my mother's hands, taking the stairs two at a time as she yelled out my name and demanded I come back. I refused to leave the house, watching her search for the dropped sausages through the wire of the screen door.

Later that night she told my father what had happened, whispering the story in hushed tones after I went to bed, when they thought I could not hear. She couldn't work out how the sausages had disappeared.

When I was seven, my parents were transferred, so we moved south to the Gold Coast. I was happy to move. We settled into the suburbs, and the only thing behind the fence in our backyard was another backyard and the neighbor's pool. We envied that pool during the sweltering summer months, but most of the time I was just happy to have something good to watch on television. Having multiple channels seemed like a smorgasbord after Miriwinni's patchy reception.

I liked our new house. I had friends who lived in the same neighborhood; they could come around and play after school. There were enough people around to play Frisbee or cricket in the backyard, as long as no one threw too hard or hit the ball high enough that it would go over the fence.

We had a big fence. An old, wooden thing with gray slats and pointed tips that was so tall even my mother couldn't peer over the top. My mother was the tallest person in my family, at least three inches taller than my father. It was her job to look over the tall fences; his job to repair the tall fences if anything went wrong.

My new bedroom was small, but so was I back then. It came with pictures of Donald Duck drawn into the walls and a built-in reading lamp that meant I could read in bed. I liked reading; my bookshelves were filled with fairy tales and the works of Enid Blyton. Reading was like having imaginary friends who did things on their own. It meant I didn't have to sleep.

I will tell you something true about the Black Dog. It can breathe fire. It could roast you in seconds, scouring you down to bare bones and ash. You can run away, but it will always come and find you. The Black Dog is persistent. It can smell your dreams in the warm night air as soon as you fall asleep, no matter how far you run. If the Black Dog wants to find you, there is nothing you can do to stop it.

When I was nine, the Black Dog found me again. I hadn't seen it for two years. First it slunk into my dreams and breathed its fiery breath. My skin crisped and flaked, the muscles and tendons melting away. I became a skeleton, blackened and crumbling, ready to be munched and crunched in the Black Dog's great jaws. I woke up screaming. My mother was sitting by the bed, wearing her pajamas.

"Shh,” she said, cool hand on my forehead. “It's just a nightmare. It can't hurt you."

She told me the same thing, night after night, her face growing tight and disappointed. The Black Dog kept coming. I learned not to scream in my sleep.

People came to the Gold Coast because it had beaches and sun. The Black Dog hated the sun; I don't think it was too fond of sand. That meant it came to the Gold Coast because it was following me. It took up residence behind the fence again, hidden in the shadows of our neighbor's garden. I liked the high fence; it stopped the Black Dog from seeing me play in the backyard. If I was feeling brave, I could climb up and snatch a quick peek, trying to spot it among the delicate fingers of the neighbor's low ferns.

I didn't feel brave all that often. If we lost a Frisbee over the fence, I'd make one of my friends go and get it. Sometimes they wouldn't come back, and my parents would get concerned calls from their parents. Sometimes, late at night, I would hear the Black Dog swimming. It would splash about in the neighbor's pool, growling and baying at the moon. It didn't like sand, but I think it was starting to like the water.

When I say the words
Black Dog
I am not speaking in metaphor. I don't use it as slang or to hide another meaning. There are legends that say you'll die if you see a Black Dog, unless you take the time to tell someone about it before the next dawn. I never said anything about the Black Dog to anyone, not at first, but I kept on living anyway.

Legends tend to refer to black dogs as capitalized: Black Dog, something singular and dangerous rather than something generic. The Black Dog is not just any black dog; you aren't going to die just because your neighbors have a sooty Labrador in their back yard. The name Black Dog is specific; you'll know it if you see it.

I lived on the Gold Cost for eight years. The Black Dog lived there with me. Sometimes it would disappear for months; I don't know why. There was never any obvious reason for its absence. It still crept into my dreams, lingering on the edges two or three times a week, breathing its fire-breath and gnashing its jaws and reducing me to a screaming pile of black bones.

I didn't miss the Black Dog when it went away, but I didn't sleep well, either. I would lie awake, reading in the dim glow of my night light, delaying the moment when I had to close my eyes. Sometimes, if I asked it nicely, the Black Dog would even give me the night off. I guess it had other places to go, other people's dreams to lurk in. Even Black Dogs can be busy.

I'll be honest: not all of this is true. I'm lying in places. I've left out the dull bits and built on old memories. It happens, in biography; some things are changed for the sake of convenience.

An example: We moved to Miriwinni when I was three, not five. We moved to the Gold Coast when I was six. I completely skipped the three years we lived elsewhere, hanging out in a country town with too many pubs and even more churches. We lived in more than one house on the Gold Coast; we moved across the suburbs like wandering stars for the first seven years I lived there. And the Black Dog never gave me a break, not even when I asked for it. It sat there, night after night, a malignant blot on the landscape of my dreams. The Black Dog was a bastard; he had no consideration for narrative momentum or character arcs.