Super Flat Times
Copyright © 2003 by Matthew Derby
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications in which some of these stories were first published: “Instructions,”
5 Trope;
“Home Recordings,”
3rd bed;
“Joy of Eating,”
Conjunctions;
“The Father Helmet,”
Fence;
“The Boyish Mulatto,”
American Journal of Print;
“Meat Tower,”
Elimae;
“Behavior Pilot,”
Failbetter;
“Sky Harvest,”
Pindeldyboz
Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
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The Warner Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
First eBook Edition: July 2007
ISBN: 978-0-316-02589-8
Book designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott
Contents
Super Flat Times
“The sign on the road to Derbyville should read ‘Welcome to the Apocalypse of the Innocents.’ Matthew Derby’s zanily inventive fictional world will disarm you with its bleak humor, its dire and giddy sentences, its irrepressible sense of wonder, its urgent narrative force. Prepare to laugh, to be uplifted, to be a tiny bit ruined.”
—H
EIDI
J
ULAVITS
, author of
The Mineral Palace
“I can’t believe I’m writing this sentence, but Derby’s book is a bold step forward in science fiction. Imagine
The Matrix,
but funny, or a neurotic
Metropolis,
and you might get some sense of what this weird, beautifully written book, made by someone who has watched far too much television, does to your brain.”
—N
EAL
P
OLLACK
, author of
The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature
“Matthew Derby stages a wagon circle around everything dull and earthbound in American fiction. His stories arrive in an almost fantastical mode, shimmering with broken robots and strange machines, but their sense of doom, hilarity, and overwhelming grief comes directly from the real world. A vital and astonishing writer.”
—B
EN
M
ARCUS
, author of
The Age of Wire and String
and
Notable American Women
“These stories are hilarious, the dialogue is pitch-perfect, as if you’re listening in on the last minutes of doomed men in a bunker who have no idea they’re doomed. These are about the only sentences I would say actually have acoustics. The stories took me out of this world and into a more interesting one. Derby’s characters are helpless, angry, and very seductive, and his decrepit, futuristic world is both wonderful and terrible and entirely too credible.”
—RJ C
URTIS
For Mary-Kim and Zooey
Is history ever just “past,” really over? Recognizing the specific social circumstances, the ideological development and material differences hardly breaks the thread — just splits it, like a net cast wide.
— Mimi Nguyen
F
irst they took men. Heavy ones — men that might sink to the bottom. In secret they stormed the towns, the suburbs, the complexes. They bound the men’s hands behind their backs and marched them out to the foothills or into ravines, anywhere low enough so that no one would see. They lined them up along the edge of the deep concrete pools they’d built, whispered brief slogans into the men’s ears, and then shoved them, face first, into the quickening substance. When the heavy ones were all accounted for, they took men who struggled, men who hid, men with sharp tongues, men with hair on their backs, men named Kevin. The men who did not resist, the men who were willing to die, were sent off to fight wars instead. When men grew scarce, they took children, and when the children thinned out they tossed women into the gritty, viscous pits. Then they moved on to the next region. We never knew what the executioners were after, only that each time they were through, there were fewer of us for the killing.
The concrete pools have since been converted to parks, and those of us who have been allowed to remember (or,
Those of Us Who Have Been Allowed to Remember
) feel that this was the right thing to do. But it has become clear that these public gathering spaces are not enough, that some more substantial document of this era is necessary. These were the Super Flat Times, after all — years that did not seem to pass so much as inflate crazily to the bursting point, break, and collapse, withered and damp, only to be replaced by another weepy, indistinguishable abrasion. That we survived at all is a monument in itself, but we will soon pass, and the parks, too, will gradually lose their meaning, as each successive generation of children wears the concrete structures down to pillowy stumps with their play. There will be those who will claim that the executions did not happen, that they could not possibly have happened, and every year the temptation to give yourself over to this impression will grow. That is why we have decided to produce this document, a living record of the past, so that you who have been spared the memory of what you went through, what you narrowly survived, can understand. We at the Hall of Those Who Have Been Allowed to Remember have decided that it must be a document for families, a book to be placed on a wooden lectern and read aloud at gatherings. An article through which the unbearable truth of these years might be preserved.
We decided right away that an account of our own remembrance would prove so extraordinarily spotty that it would only drive this period further into obscurity. It is true that we were allowed to keep our memories because of the great care with which we’d mentally catalogued what we saw during the Super Flat Times, but nobody in our group felt capable of putting it into words. In the first years after the Great Severance, we could barely write down a Daily Personal Emotion Statement without having to douse our heads in the static bucket to stop them from quivering, much less attempt to convey a string of memories so painful that wincing had become our default facial expression. The volume, we decided, should give those who did not survive the one last chance to air their grievances that never came to them in life. By drilling down into the concrete pools, we were able to extract their last breaths, piercing with a sharp metal straw the tiny crescent-shaped sac of air forced out of their lungs as they collapsed under the weight of the rapidly solidifying medium. This air, once isolated in a glass cabinet at the Hall of Memory and massaged by a professional translator, can sometimes reveal the Missing Person’s final thoughts. Those of us who have been allowed to remember refer to the resultant documents, the clearest of which you are about to read, as prayers.
I should warn you — not all of the prayers in this volume render with the precision that, perhaps, was felt by their original authors. Please keep in mind that the Missing Persons had no way of knowing at the time that their execution would be recorded by our organization years later. The great majority of relevant data is occluded by fits of shouting, flailing, or violent outbursts such as “Please help me die,” “I can’t feel my shoulders,” or “Someone I hate is on top of me.” (I have excised these intrusive bits only wherever their presence would otherwise hamper the flow of the prayer.) Other factors have conspired against an accurate representation as well — the persistent nausea we suffered while massaging the texts in the deep underground bunkers of the Hall (as you know, the air must be churned sometimes for hours in order to yield the fragile memory pockets), for example, and the single yellow elimination bucket we were allowed to carry down, a receptacle that brimmed always at day’s end with meaty, clotted waste. At times, the nausea was so intense that parts of us broke off while we vomited. Hence, my missing hand. None of this made our job any easier.
The first years, 5 to 50, are greatly underrepresented, primarily because of the incredibly poor condition of the prayers. The government’s attempts to advertise on the atmosphere through the use of colored gas, or Fud, and the ensuing accretion of hard chunks of air — what we now call Clouds — have so polluted and obfuscated the prayers that many of the remaining texts contain just a few recognizable words or gestures, readable only with the most sensitive horned instruments. Air samples taken from the North and Northwestern Properties, where the Meat Initiative was enforced starting in Year 7, are also difficult to manage, given that a sustained all-meat diet tends to deaden the lungs. Still other prayers contain only the fragile ululations that accompanied the words, and there is little that can be done to preserve them. One can still
feel
these works, but their translation into English III is impossible. This is regrettable, but it is hoped that what is left might be of some help in illustrating the period.
The reader will note a great many more prayers devoted to Year 51, proportionally, than to the years before or after. My reasons are embarrassingly personal. By Year 51, the government’s Population Redistribution and Elimination Program had failed in its efforts to contain and manage regional population and to maintain significant racial attributes solely through its weekly instructional radio hour. Over 70 percent of the world’s population was of mixed or untraceable racial heritage, and the population had increased 15 percent above acceptable loss, mostly because of illegal or unmonitored childbirth. The Royal Child Harvest was enforced in order to build an emergency egg repository and to formalize the population-control enterprise. Although my Culture Visa enabled me to work in the administrative offices of The Factories instead of on the workshop floor (I sorted fabric swatches and sounded the meeting gong), I was required nonetheless to surrender two eggs a year (and so, thankfully, only two eggs) to the Ministry of Child Harvesting. Women I interviewed in preparation for this project claimed I was lucky — lifting their tunics to reveal the twin flesh flaps, sealed shut with red plastic buttons, that covered their uterine holes, they spoke of the humiliating abdominal specula, the steel calipers, the bitter aftertaste of the generative pills that, when processed by the body, yielded up to nine thousand eggs a month, grapefruit-sized clusters that often broke the carrier’s hips, so that they walked forever afterward like angry, three-wheeled vegetable carts. But for me these words are of little comfort. These women, the donors, will always be able to take comfort in the sheer number of eggs they produced — their children are bound to be somewhere, at least one in every city. I yielded only two. Two untraceable eggs, lost in the world. Until the eggs were taken from me the whole proposition of childbirth bored me. The idea that I could somehow replicate myself in miniature seemed a reckless waste of time, but I have carried them to term in my mind so often now that I could sculpt their bulging, sloppy faces from behind a heavy blindfold. How close I have become to them, how frequently I have knelt beside their twin cribs, watching them go slack in the night, overcome with exhaustion. Tape a pencil to my atrophied wrist and I could render an intricate cardiograph for each rasping heart. But what really happened to them? Where are they now? In whose house have they been working themselves up, shakily, toward adulthood? Who else do they dare call mother, father, sister? I have often found myself loitering outside the memorial parks, clutching the wire fencing with one scaly, whitened hand, searching for some recognizable trait. Irrational as it seems, I am sure I could pick them, sight unseen, out of a crowd. It could be that my whole purpose in excavating these prayers has had to do with the improbable dream that I might find my children somewhere deep in the concrete, that their final thoughts might make a brief appearance in my palm. So far, nothing has surfaced.
The third era documented here — the period after the failure of the Royal Child Harvest and before the Great Severance, the Race Census — is illegal for me to reflect upon. I will say only that those of us who lived, lived through
it.
I had a husband during this period who was only part Korean. He didn’t go missing until three years into our relationship, right at the end, but there were near misses all the time. Once, on a crowded subway, he switched places with a meat farmer so that the farmer, who had a tired, dry face, could sit. At the next stop, the lights went out briefly, and when they came back on, the farmer was gone. Another time we were on a tiny sailboat in the bay. It was dark out — we’d temporarily stolen the boat from the amusement park. I was drowsy from too much wine. I put my hand in the water and immediately felt something move, something with the texture of rough, soaked cloth. There was a body swimming there, possibly two. I threw myself on my husband, who was asleep. “Leave us alone,” I shouted, but there was no answer, only the water lapping against the crude hull of the boat.