Down among the dead, the wide-eyed and the legless

So this weekend I was at sen_no_ongaku's Old as God birthday party. It was awesome. There were serious quantities of meat, a punch made with green tea, sake, cucumber, and mint that I could not drink but aesthetically appreciated, at least half a dozen conversations running concurrently in different portions of the apartment and all of them worth dropping into, and I am resolved to try Rock Band the next chance I get. This is not a post about the party. This is a post about a story in The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories (1986), which I lifted from sigerson's shelf and read about three-quarters of before being increasingly distracted by Rock Band.¹ Blame the song about Hunter S. Thompson.

The story is "The Hollow Man" by Thomas Burke. It was reprinted from his collection Night-Pieces: Eighteen Tales (1935) and I approve of an author who can allude to both T.S. Eliot and E.T.A. Hoffmann; it concerns a dead man who comes unexpectedly to stay with the friend who murdered him fifteen years ago. Nameless and Gopak were business partners in Africa, they quarreled; in the heat of the moment the one killed the other and he has regretted it ever since. Nameless has a family now, he runs a little restaurant in London, and he still has nightmares—and here is their origin, white-faced and exhausted as a wraith in the old mackintosh he was buried in, standing helplessly in Nameless' doorway and asking if he can sit down, he's tired, he's so tired. When the ghost of your father comes to town, what the hell else can you do? The least Nameless can do for his erstwhile victim is invite him in. But Gopak doesn't go away. He's not haunting Nameless, precisely. He doesn't have anywhere else to go and he feels strongly that Nameless can help him, but neither of them knows how; so he sticks around the restaurant and soon there are fewer and fewer customers who feel comfortable eating in the same room as a dead man and Nameless starts drinking to deal with the weirdness and the more time his daughter spends around Gopak, the paler and more listless she looks. It's only as things really start to hit bottom that the truth becomes clear to both of them: that Gopak has sought out Nameless because his old friend, his murderer, is the only person capable of releasing him from this awful staring half-life. He can't end it himself. Third parties are no help. The man who killed him once must repeat the act. The question is whether Nameless—who got away with murder once in a hot, humming forest where there was no one to find out, who knows that this time a body on his floor will send him first to prison, then to the hangman's rope—will be able to bring himself to do it.

I don't know if it's a great story. At times it feels like the sketch for something much more complex, with paragraphs instead of pages. Gopak's resurrection is randomly brought about by African witchcraft; Nameless is never given more of a past than their time in the jungle together—and while I have no problem with unnamed protagonists, actually calling him "Nameless" quickly became an annoying authorial tic—and his family barely exists, even though it's the threat to his daughter that finally motivates him to figure out what it is that his uncanny visitor needs from him. The narrative acknowledges, but does not really explore the knot of emotions whose fantastic interpretation is a ghost story, the weird camaraderie of an interrupted friendship that resumes with too much guilt on one side and need on the other, the intimacy between a man who once did something terrible and the only other person in the world who knows his secret. Burke is not what I would call a stylist for the ages. And yet "The Hollow Man" is working toward something so different from the rest of the selections around it—even the ones published forty years later—that it sticks in my head. It's not a club story, where the frame-narrator relates some disturbing thing that happened at second- or third-hand and now troubles the teller only in existential moments, at night on certain roads or when the wind is from the sea. Here the supernatural irrupts into the everyday, but it doesn't vanish as inexplicably as it came; it hangs around and must be dealt with for the sake of everyone involved, including the supernatural. Gopak doesn't want to be a zombie bound to his former friend for the rest of time. If Nameless wants to exorcise either of them, he will have to face on more than one level the consequences of his past. A psychological ghost story where the ghost's psychology counts, too: I was peculiarly reminded of Slings & Arrows. Or stories by Peter S. Beagle. (Or things I've written.) In any case, it's not an approach to the fantastic I expected to see in a story published in Collier's in 1933. Either Thomas Burke was occasionally ahead of his time, or I really need to read more early weird fiction. And either way, "The Hollow Man" was wonderful to run across.

1. The same collection also reintroduced me to F. Marion Crawford's "The Upper Berth" (1886), which scared the proverbial bejeezus out of me when I read it in first or second grade in one of Alfred Hitchcock's ghost-edited anthologies; I had remembered vividly the drowned thing that tries to kill the narrator, but never had any idea of the author's name or the title, and now I have the dubious pleasure of knowing who to thank for the fact that in 1987 I hid that book behind the tallest set of shelves I could find and if I didn't know for a fact that my elementary school moved in 2006, I'd imagine it was there still. It's kind of nice to know that Crawford's is not, in fact, the story I'm still thinking about four days later.

All the time spent dreaming is never lost

Good morning, brain. I can only conjecture the reasons it pleased you to have me dream a play which was also a Symbolist painting in which old Oedipus, still king of Thebes, Iokaste's husband, unblinded, himself dreams that Teiresias and the Sphinx are one and the same: the two faces of the oracle: the lioness-woman with her falcon's wings, asking riddles; the man whose eyes are sealed, answering them. They shed one another other like snakeskins. Their smiles are the same, the close-mouthed kouros mystery.

Seriously, brain. Do I look like Gustave Moreau? I appreciate your trying to make up for the fact that I spent from two to four-thirty ayem cleaning my bedroom of the seemingly endless waves of baby spiders that came suddenly out of the woodwork—about forty-five minutes after I had vacuumed, dusted, and shelved all the windowsill-stacked books—because for a while there it was like the eight-legged zombie apocalypse, but did you really think I needed another high concept for the queue? I woke up with a line of pentameter; it wants to be a villanelle. Why do you do this to me?

At least the prior evening was lovely. I met stealthmuffin for dinner in Harvard Square: we ate at Tamarind Bay, home of delicious raw banana dumplings and Hyderabadi lamb curry with massive cardamom and the world's best bathroom signs; talked alchemy and Max Ernst and alternate histories and afterward poked around Raven Used Books, which fortunately had nothing that cried my name; I had already scored Anthony Burgess' translation of Cyrano de Bergerac from the Book Rack in Arlington. She has very kindly lent me the last four volumes of Fruits Basket. I need to find a copy of Une semaine de bonté (1934). I don't think I can blame it for my dreams, but it was rather like reading someone else's filtered through Wondermark.

I still wouldn't have minded the extra sleep, though. And fewer spiders.