Margaret Atwood - Stone Mattress - Nine Tales

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact I am,” says Naveena. “It’s an in-depth examination of the function of symbolism versus neo-representationalism in the process of world-building, which can be studied so much more effectively through the fantasy genres than in its more disguised forms in so-called realistic fiction. Wouldn’t you say?”

Reynolds clacks in, carrying a tray. “Here’s our tea!” she announces, in the nick of time. Gavin can feel the blood pounding in his temples. What the fuck was Naveena just saying?

“What kind of cookies?” he says, to put neo-representationalism in its place.

“Chocolate chip,” says Reynolds. “Did Naveena show you the video clips yet? They’re fascinating! She sent them to me in a Dropbox.” She sits down beside him and begins to pour out the tea.

Dropbox. What is it? Nothing comes to mind but an indoor cat-poo station. But he won’t ask.

“This is the first one,” says Naveena. “The Riverboat, around 1965.”

It’s an ambush, it’s a betrayal. However, Gavin cannot choose but look. It’s like being drawn into a time tunnel: the centrifugal force is irresistible.

The film is grainy, black and white; there’s no sound. The camera pans around the room: some amateur starfucker, or was this shot for an early documentary? That must be Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee onstage, and is that Sylvia Tyson? A couple of his fellow poets of those days, hanging out at one of the tables, in their period haircuts, their downy, defiant, optimistic beards. So many of them dead by now.

And there he is himself, with Constance beside him. No beard, but he’s got a cigarette dangling out of his mouth and an arm casually draped around Constance. He isn’t looking at her, he’s looking at the stage. She’s looking at him, though. She was always looking at him. They’re so sweet, the two of them; so unscarred, so filled with energy then, and hope; like children. So unaware of the winds of fate that were soon to sweep them apart. He wants to cry.

“She must be tired,” says Reynolds, with satisfaction. “Check out those bags under her eyes. Big dark circles. She must be really whipped.”

“Tired?” says Gavin. He never thought of Constance as being tired.

“Well, I guess she would be tired,” says Naveena. “Think of all she was writing then! It was epic! She practically created the whole Alphinland ground plan, in such a short time! Plus she had that job, with the fried-chicken place.”

“She never said she was tired,” says Gavin, because the two of them are staring at him with what might possibly be reproach. “She had a lot of stamina.”

“She wrote to you about it,” says Naveena. “About being tired. Though she said she was never too tired for you! She said you should always wake her up, no matter how late you came in. She wrote that down! I guess she was really in love with you. It’s so endearing.”

Gavin’s confused. Wrote to him? He doesn’t remember that. “Why would she write me letters?” he says. “We were living in the same place.”

“She wrote notes to you in this journal she had,” says Naveena, “and she’d leave it for you on the table because you always slept in, but she had to go to her job, and then you would read the notes. And then you would write notes back to her that way, underneath hers. It had a black cover, it’s the same sort of journal she used for the Alphinland lists and maps. There’s a different page for every day. Don’t you remember?”

“Oh, that,” says Gavin. He has a dim recollection. Mostly he can remember the radiance of those mornings, after a night with Constance. The first coffee, the first cigarette, the first lines of the first poem, appearing as if by magic. Most of those poems were keepers. “Yes, vaguely. How did you get hold of that?”

“It was in your papers,” says Naveena. “The journal. The University of Austin has the papers. You sold them. Remember?”

“I sold my papers?” says Gavin. “Which papers?” He’s drawn a blank, one of those gaps that appears in his memory from time to time like a tear in a spiderweb. He can’t recall doing any such thing.

“Well, technically I sold them,” says Reynolds. “I made the arrangements. You asked me to take care of it for you. It was when you were working on the Odyssey translation. He gets so immersed,” she says to Naveena. “When he’s working. He’d even forget to eat if I didn’t feed him!”

“I know, right?” says Naveena. The two of them exchange a conspiratorial look: Genius must be humoured. That, thinks Gavin, is the kindlier translation: Old poops must be lied to would be the other.

“Now let’s see the other clip,” says Rey, leaning forward. Mercy , Gavin pleads with her silently. I’m on the ropes. This teen princess is wearing me down. I don’t know what she’s talking about! Bring it to an end!

“I’m tired,” he says, but not loudly enough, it seems: the two of them have their agenda.

“It’s an interview,” says Naveena. “From a few years ago. It’s up on YouTube.” She clicks on the arrow and the video starts to play, this time with colour and sound. “It’s at the World Fantasy Convention in Toronto.”

Gavin watches with mounting horror. A wispy old woman is being interviewed by a man dressed in a Star Trek outfit: a purple complexion, a gigantic veined skull. A Klingon, Gavin supposes. Though he doesn’t know much about this cluster of memes, his poetry workshop students used to attempt to enlighten him when the subject came up in their poems. There’s a woman onscreen too, with a glistening, plasticized face. “That’s the Borg Queen,” Naveena whispers. The wispy oldster is supposed to be Constance, says the YouTube title line, but he can’t credit it.

“We’re thrilled to have with us today someone who, you could say, is the grandmother of twentieth-century world-building fantasy,” says the Borg Queen. “C. W. Starr herself, the creator of the world-famous Alphinland series. Should I call you Constance, or Ms. Starr? Or how about C. W.?”

“Whatever you like,” says Constance. For it is indeed Constance, though much diminished. She’s wearing a silver-threaded cardigan that hangs on her loosely; her hair’s like disordered egret plumage, her neck’s a Popsicle stick. She peers around her as if dazzled by the noise and lights. “I don’t care about the name or any of that,” she says. “I only ever cared about what I was doing, with Alphinland.” Her skin is oddly luminous, like a phosphorescent mushroom.

“Didn’t you feel brave, writing what you did, back when you started?” says the Klingon. “That whole genre was a man’s world then, yes?”

Constance throws back her head and laughs. This laugh — this airy, feathery laugh — was once charming, but now it strikes Gavin as grotesque. Misplaced friskiness. “Oh, nobody was paying any attention to me then,” she says. “So you couldn’t really call it brave. Anyway, I used initials. Nobody knew at first that I wasn’t a man.”

“Like the Brontë sisters,” says the Klingon.

“Hardly that,” says Constance, with a sideways glance and a self-deprecating giggle. Is she flirting with the purple-skinned, veiny-skulled guy? Gavin winces.

“Now she really does look tired,” says Reynolds. “I wonder who put that awful makeup on her? They shouldn’t have used the mineral powder. How exactly old is she, anyway?”

“So, how do you go about creating an alternate world?” says the Borg Queen. “Do you make it up out of nothing?”

“Oh, I never make anything up out of nothing,” says Constance. Now she’s being serious, in that ditzy way she had. This is me being serious . It had never convinced Gavin at the time: it was like a little girl wearing her mother’s high heels. That seriousness, too, he had found charming; now he finds it bogus. What right has she to be serious? “You see,” she continues, “everything in Alphinland is based on something in real life. How could it be different?”