Бен Маркус - Notes from the Fog - Stories

Not that I have specific information. I don’t. I have no gift for the future.

You’ve driven by houses like ours, and maybe you’ve wondered just how the surrender happened inside. Did the body rot from the head down, as legend would have it? Who gave up, and how? A question that is always relevant. Take a picture of a family, of any family, and that is always the caption.

Before her diagnosis, possibly even the very morning we learned of her cancer, Gin was outside doing something to the old tree. She loved the tree, felt it needed to know that. Loved it but feared it. Fretted forever that it would topple over and crush us. Now the kids and I will sit under it. It leans and sways and it makes a tremendous sound sometimes. The sound of a house getting crushed, the sound of a train slowing down, the sound of the world hurtling through space—all of this noise booming inside this monstrous tree. We will look around, at the other, smaller trees, at the leafy bushes, at anything that might move in the wind, and all of it is just so still, as if someone is suffocating the world with a bag and not even a breath can escape. And yet the tree above us sways and sways, observing its own private wind, moving according to a logic we’ll never understand. Sometimes I hope that Gin was right, that this tree is coming for us. Sometimes when the kids get antsy and want to go inside, I hold them close and ask them to wait. Just a little longer, I say, outside in the shade. Just wait with me under the tree here a little bit longer. Something amazing is coming.

I am grateful to the editors who first published these stories: Cecilia Alemani, Andrew Bourne, Junot Díaz, Matthew Fishbane, Ben Metcalf, Sigrid Rausing, Paul Reyes, Will Rogan, Nicole Rudick, David Samuels, and Deborah Treisman. Andrew Eisenman read these stories early with great critical care. I am indebted to him for his intelligence and vision. Max Porter, too. Smart and generous readings that always pushed the stories where they needed it most. Heidi Julavits offered crucial readings and critical editorial ideas at every stage of revision. To me there is no sharper reader, not to mention writer, not to mention person.

A special thanks is due to the MacDowell Colony, who provided not just time and space, of the most ideal kind, but some unnameable deeper gift, conducive to work and concentration, that is harder and harder to find.

To Deborah Treisman, thank you for your faith and support and always exacting editorial insights. Many of these stories are much improved because of you.

To Denise Shannon, my one and only agent, thank you as always for your brilliance, candor, and advocacy. I have been so fortunate to be able to work with you for all of these years.

To Jordan Pavlin, thank you for your unerring belief. I am endlessly grateful for your intelligence and loyalty and passion.

And to everyone at Knopf—thank you for sticking by me and offering such a very good home.

Ben Marcus is the author of four books of fiction— The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, The Flame Alphabet , and Leaving the Sea —and the editor of two short-story anthologies: The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories and New American Stories . His fiction has appeared in Granta , Harper’s Magazine , The New Yorker , The Paris Review , McSweeney’s , and Tablet . Among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Berlin Prize, a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, and three Pushcart Prizes. He lives with his family in New York City, where he is on the faculty at Columbia University.

The Age of Wire and String

Notable American Women

The Flame Alphabet

Leaving the Sea

The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories

New American Stories

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2018 by Ben Marcus

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Several stories were first published in the following publications Bomb: “The Trees of Sawtooth Park” · Frieze: “Critique” as “Notes from the Hospital” (2013) · Granta: “George and Elizabeth” (November 2015) · Harper’s Magazine: “A Suicide of Trees” as “A Failure of Concern” (January 2008) · The New Yorker: “Blueprint for St. Louis” (October 2017); “Cold Little Bird” (October 2015); “The Grow-Light Blues” (June 2015); “Stay Down and Take It” (May 2018) · Tablet Magazine: “Omen” as “A Problem with the Sun” (2015) · The Thing Quarterly: “Lotion” as “Prophecy” (Issue 21).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Marcus, Ben, [date] author.

Title: Speeding pieces of light : stories / Ben Marcus.

Description: First edition, | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017054648 (print) | LCCN 2017057668 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101947456 (hardcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781101947463 (ebook)

Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Short Stories (single author).

Classification: LCC PS3563.A6375 (ebook) | LCC PS3563.A6375 A6 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017054648

Ebook ISBN 9781101947463

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover photograph by Alexander Mourant

Cover design by Peter Mendelsund

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