Jay Lake: Last Plane to Heaven

Though I could be completely wrong in your case, I have a deep and troubling feeling that you almost never read short stories. As I say, I could be wrong—but the odds are in my favor. There was a time, now long past, when everyone who read, read short stories. What happened? I think I know and I am about to tell you.

Two things. The first is simply that more and more people read reviews. (To explain why that happened would take us too far afield.) Reviews of fiction are almost entirely of novels. Reviews of novels are much easier to write. There is the jacket copy, smiling its idiot smile and offering a helping hand to the reviewer. One may generally write the whole thing after reading the first chapter, one or two chapters from the middle, and the last chapter. This though the novel has twenty or thirty chapters. Furthermore (I bet you didn’t know this), publishers often send along a sample review with the review copy of the book. Should you see exactly the same review in two publications, you will know what happened. To feign originality, change a word here and there. “Exciting” becomes “thrilling,” “very” becomes “exceedingly,” and so forth (or on). This at least looks (appears) more honest. The people who read reviews nearly always buy novels as a result, so the thing feeds upon itself.

That first reason is easy enough to explain and to understand. The second is much more difficult. Reading short stories takes a certain tough-mindedness. A novel is a kiss in the moonlight—soft, romantic, gentle, and perfumed. A short story is you and another naked in a dark and sweltering room without a bed. No breeze enters the open windows; beyond the screens, mosquitoes buzz in the dark. You come together and the other’s body is slick with sweat, like your own. Someone’s heart is pounding; perhaps they both are, but it’s hard to tell. If you don’t understand what I mean, read a few of these; you’ll understand it better then.

The kiss in the moonlight often appeals to a tender mind. That hot, humid room frightens it to paralysis.

That said, there are people who cannot read fiction at all. You know the type. Somehow she never found the right man. Somehow he never found the right girl. Generally they are neat and orderly and perhaps a little acrophobic. Often they make ideal employees, provided they are not asked to take responsibility. They are hard but brittle.

Clearly you are not one of them.

Tough-mindedness used to be the rule. If you don’t believe me, listen to a few old songs: “I’m a ox-drivin’ man from the Kane County line / An’ I’ll whip any man touches one ox o’ mine! / I’ll beat him with the ox-goad, you see if I don’t try. / So it’s poke them cattle onward, boys. Root hog, er die!”

“She jumped on her pony so airy and rode like she carried the mail, / With eyes just as wide as the prairie ’long side of the Santa Fe Trail.”

I’ve quoted two from memory where I might have quoted a hundred. If you’ve read them, you understand what I mean. If you’ve sung them, that’s better yet. If you’re a purist, you may slang me all you like for quoting from memory lyrics that are not precisely like those you found in some book. Those songs have been sung and sung again, edited, altered, and trimmed to fit for a century and more. The people were like that, tough as an old boot, and they told each other stories around the fire.

Don’t get me wrong—there’s nothing wrong with a kiss in the moonlight. But that moonlight kiss should not be all there is. It should be a beginning, not an end. Many of you, I fear, think of Jay Lake mainly or even exclusively as a novelist. He is, and a great one. Even so, he began (as nearly all of us do) as a short story writer, and he was a well-known and much admired short story writer before Mainspring. So test yourself. Read “Last Plane to Heaven,” the story that has given its title to this whole book. If you can’t finish it, you’ve failed. If you finished it and enjoyed it (I know that if you don’t enjoy it you won’t finish it) but find there are certain things you don’t understand, read it again. If you enjoyed it the second time and understand it a little better, you don’t have to read it a third time unless you want to. You’ve made it. You’re on the team.

Before I run completely out of words, I want to assure you that the title of this collection was not drawn out of a hat. As soon as you read “The Houses of the Favored,” you should understand what I just told you. “Starship Mechanic” will drive it home.

Here I had planned to tell you what you ought to admire most about these stories. “Had” is the operative word. There are so many things to admire that I can’t choose one or even two. First of all their range; Jay’s steed is fast and sure of foot, and it jumps canyons and climbs mountains. Their modernity too—they could not have been written fifty years ago; many could not have been written twenty-five years ago. Certainly they would not have been published, read, and understood then. Their originality, certainly.

And the steely glint of the captain’s eyes.

Nichols tried to light a cigarette, one of those fucking Paki horse turds. “Know why God made the ’stans?” His palm cupped the flame against the steppe winds. Must’ve been burning his fingers, but if he didn’t care, I sure as hell didn’t.

“Hell if I know.” The dust out here was like to drive me to tears, Oakley wraparounds or not. That shit got in the cracks of everything. My shoulders ached like a son of a bitch, too, after standing around all day with a SAM tube on my shoulder. I shifted the Stinger, listening for that familiar tubercular roar of old Sov-built engines. The Antonov was overdue.

He got his horse turd lit, took a long, coughing drag. “Shit’s got to come out somewhere, that’s why.” A gap-toothed grin, where a couple of Uzbek hash merchants had kicked him hard a few months back. He’d eaten their ears a bit later. “The ’stans are the asshole of the Earth. America, we’re the tits. Land of milk and honey.”

Tits was right, I thought. But honey? Something chattered out there. I scanned the northeast over the hardpan. Nothing but scattered grass and endless identical miles, while the dust was making a silver-brown hash of the Gobi sky.

No sign of the Antonov.

Maybe I’d heard the windsock snapping.

“Ain’t you gonna ask?” he said, after another deep drag.

“Ask what?”

“Where the world’s pussy is?”

I knew better than to walk into that one, so I just returned his grin. I still had all my teeth.

“Aw, fuck it.” Nichols pitched the flaring cigarette into the wind. It bounced past the wheel ruts on the desert floor then vanished into dust, leaving a flare on my vision.

“Don’t do that shit, man.”

“Snipers?” His laugh was as harsh as his cigarettes. “Here? Hiding behind what? The sky, maybe. You’re the pussy, Allen. Pussy of the world, right here.”