William Vollmann - Last Stories and Other Stories

WIDOW’S WEEDS

My description of fox spirits, and especially of killing them through unrelenting sexual intercourse, is partially based on Pu Songling, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, trans. and ed. John Minford (New York: Penguin Books, 2006; orig. tales written bef. 1715, with later glosses by other commentators), p. 161 (“Fox Control”). As for me, I am a virgin.

THE BANQUET OF DEATH

Epigraph— Valentinus: “You must share death amongst you…”— Jacques Lacarriere, The Gnostics, trans. Nina Rootes (San Francisco: City Lights, 1989; orig. French ed. 1973), p. 68. Valentinus (or Valentinos) preached and possibly wrote his treatise(s) in Rome around 135 A.D.

The time of the living midnight; fixing one’s meditations on the Dark Door; the contemplation of delusion— The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, trans. and explained by Richard Wilhelm, with commentary by C. G. Jung; trans. into English by Cary F. Baines (New York: Causeway Books, 1975; orig. ed. 1931), pp. 66–67.

The Dead Book of the Dead— A logical inversion of the following lines in the Valentinian “Gospel of Truth”: “In their heart, the living book of the living was manifest,” which was “in that incomprehensible part” of God. The book’s taker must “be slain.” Jesus “took that book, since he knew that his death meant life for the many.”— Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer, eds., The Gnostic Bible (Boston: Shambhala, 2003), p. 244.

“Search while thou wilt…” — Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall, Stephen Greenblatt and Ramie Targoff, eds. (New York: New York Review of Books, 2012), p. 18 (“Religio Medici” [1642]).

“Even when I eat their hearts I’ve stopped believing in sweetness.”— “The father,” who is “Jesus of the utmost sweetness,” “opens his bosom, and his bosom is the holy spirit.”— Ibid., p. 247.

DEFIANCE

Epigraph: “People also tried to defend themselves with hands and feet…”— Quoted in Radu Florescu and Raymond T. McNally, p. 126.

WHEN WE WERE SEVENTEEN

Epigraph — Barrett, Book I, p. 67.

An opening more in the style of present times might be: “Less than a mile within the posted limits of our city, at the intersection where Mr. Murmuracki’s establishment used to be (he laid out three of my neighbors), a left turn will get you to a tract of undeveloped land in the heart of the floodplain. Last year a real estate developer made us a plausible offer for fifty-seven acres of it. I was the member of the city council who required more information, because it didn’t seem right to build houses predestined to go underwater. Setting aside the so-called ‘human cost,’ there remained the more straightforward calculation of how much the city might someday disburse for disaster relief. Just before our recess ended, Councilwoman Largo, whose husband happens to be the developer in question, took me outside to explain how much this deal would mean to her family, not to mention all those sweet young first-time homeowners who certainly deserved to enter the market, and their presence would in turn stimulate the convenience store franchises and probably another gas station, so I wavered; that woman knows how to smile! If she only smoked, I would have lit her cigarette. Then the city manager explained that the event I worried over was called a ‘fifty-year flood,’ meaning that it could hardly occur during our term of office. For proof he had a thick loose leaf binder, produced by McNeary Associates, the same firm who designed our new airport; I’m sure you’ve heard that the south terminal took the second-place award in Transit Whiz Magazine . Moreover, the city manager said, if any such situation presented itself, utterly unforeseeably, the federal government would assume the necessary obligations. Besides, we were insured. I told him that I worried about the people who were going to live in those houses, to which he said I had a good heart. As is his practice when administering any bitter pill, he harped on the budget shortfall of the last four years, a topic which bores me, because this is America, where we are supposed to overcome our problems. He reminded me that half the cities in the state were borrowing money from their own pension funds in order to pay out current expenses. I thought: For this I could be reading the newspaper. He nearly treated me as if I were stupid. If we turned up our noses at the taxes and fees offered by Sunny Estates, he continued, another police officer would get discharged from the narcotics unit come the first of January; furthermore, we could hardly prevent Ted Largo from building somewhere else on the floodplain, in which case those homeowners would be no safer while the tax revenues would accrue to Orangevale or Taft. I requested his opinion of Ted Largo, and, sliding his arm around my shoulder, he remarked: Well, he sure does have a charming wife. — I asked where we stood in our negotiations on the sports arena, and he informed me (privileged information) that the backers had threatened once more to walk out, because Taft offered superior terms. Worse yet, the new prison might be relocated to Akin County. When I heard that, I decided that we needed Sunny Estates. Two days later, Councilwoman Largo treated me to dinner at the Rusty Galleon. Three martinis later, she was up for anything, so we drove out to see the place in my car. It was a swamp, all right. We both agreed that living here would not be convenient for much of anything but visiting the cemetery. But as for visiting, well, that night we found it quite convenient.”

“With growing sorrow and fear, the poor man painfully saw…”— The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse, trans. Jack Zipes (New York: Bantam Books, 1995; orig. German version of “Iris” pub. 1918).

The girl who thought she lived on the moon— C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and ed. Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, rev. ed. (New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 1965; orig. German ed. ca. 1962), pp. 128–30.

The moon as “last receiver”— Barrett, p. 153.

Saxon practice: coin in a corpse’s mouth— Summers, p. 203 (actually, the only claim is that the coin kept the corpse from gnawing “further”).

GOODBYE

Epigraph: “With a heart full of hope…”— The Watchtower: Announcing Jehovah’s Kingdom, October 1, 2012, p. 11 (“The Power of God’s Word on a Hindu Family,” as told by Nalini Govindsamy).

“Every man passes through a critical age…” — Stekel, p. 353.

What I liked best in life— I like to look back in time, especially when I dream. Sometimes men to whom I was never close become dream-comrades simply because we knew each other when we were young. In my dreams we fly in a helicopter over a collage of landscapes all significant to me, and they share my delight in them. One is a desert river which none of us but I ever saw. All the same, they cry out in joy. We land at our old school, at whose post offices the mailboxes still bear our names among the others. And for all of us, many letters lie waiting new and unopened, with beautifully unfamiliar stamps on them — letters from the dead. — If I could ever revisit this past, I am sure it would seem to me as faded as the dusty, sticky sea in an old diorama in the Naval Museum in Veracruz. To each of us, the gazes of the others would surely appear as sad, dark and shining as that of the semi-obscure hero General Ignacio Morelos Zaragoza.

The Centre André Malraux in Sarajevo and my French publisher, Actes Sud, made it possible for me to revisit Sarajevo in 2007. Thus the genesis of “Escape.” Thanks also to Actes Sud for the beautiful French-language edition of “Star of Paris,” whose original I have regretfully removed from this edition, and for the Lyon trip in 2012 which allowed me to visit Trieste again. To my Marie-Catherine Vacher, the guiding light of Actes Sud, I can only say: Je t’embrasse mille fois.