The Wiktionary defines "beckon" as "to wave and/or nod to somebody with the intention to make the person come closer." We do this all the time, running into friends on the street, signaling to someone across the office, the silent way we have of telling our children to get the heck over here now before I reach the count of five. For the most part the act of beckoning is active but one-sided, we do all the work and the results are not guaranteed. I can wave to you and use all the male studness powers at my disposal, but there's no force in the world that can make you succumb to my manly charms and walk over to me, if you don't want to. And while the intent may be there, the intention is never specified. I may want you to come over because you've dropped your purse and I want to give it back to you. I may want you to come over to tell you to stop staring at my girlfriend. I may even be doing it to see if you're stupid enough to respond to nonverbal cues from strangers. You don't know, which on some level is whole point. I'm waving and the only way you can really know what I'm thinking is to come closer and find out for yourself.
"Tie this in," they say, as if it's that easy. Writers beckon, in a dozen different ways. When you walk the rows of your local book stores, the covers we've chosen entice you, the titles that blare from those covers attract you, the blurbs on the paperbacks make you want to keep reading. We try to bring you forth, because there's no other way to get you to read if we don't do a little work on our own. We wink at you from shelves and call for your attention from racks, all for a chance to imprint ourselves on your memories and become something more than just a bundle of paper with typesetting on them, moldering away in some dusty corner. The intent, there, is simple. To get you to read. But is that too simplistic. It doesn't touch on any of the myriad reasons that lurk behind the main reason. Do we want to entertain you? Or provoke you? Make you think? The cover can't tell you that, no matter how much you ask it. We bring you forward, but we're nothing but teases in the end, promising only what you bring to the table, sitting back and pretending that whatever reaction you've had is what we intended the entire time.
So, we beckon. We draw forward. We bring you closer for a variety of reasons, reeling you in and keeping you there until you're done with the book. Because readers are a fickle lot, not easily satisfied. You get them to come in, but you can't make them stay. Snag them with the first chapter but maybe you lose them with the third. Or maybe they like the concept but don't like your writing. Maybe they really only bought the thing for the nifty cover and find that everything inside is utter crap. You can lead them there but you can't make them read, you have to prove your worth over and over again, with every word and every line on every page. Lose them for a second and you may have lost them forever. Do your best work on ninety-nine percent of the story and it's that one percent that finally brings you down. "It was good . . . except for that one part." And guess which part they remember, always? That's how it goes. Get them and keep them, but there are always risks. They may not like it, they may feel their intelligence being insulted, they may find you a bit arrogant. Do whatever you like but they'll remember, these readers. They'll remember how you begged them to come forward, asked in quiet whispers, promised things that maybe you didn't actually promise, but who can argue with interpretation? They won't forget and they'll make sure others don't.
What am I saying here, in such a circuitous fashion? You've got one chance to catch them, by stretching out the metaphorical hand. Put your best foot forward and make sure it's the best work you have, because if you fail in that one chance, you probably won't get another one. You can make them find you but if you want to keep them, that's where the work gets hard. That's-
Christ. Platitudes. That's all I'm giving you, like you're a bunch of kindergartners that have never touched pen to paper before. You get one of these columns every quarter or so and what am I wasting it with? Telling you things that you already know. Sad. You've come to read what I think of one of your stories, not for me to lecture at you about things that should be self-evident. And if they aren't self-evident by now, then I probably shouldn't be the one telling it to you, because you're too dense to figure it out for yourself.
See, then, what happens? Like the woman who slaps you across the face, when someone beckons you forward, there's no telling exactly what you're going to find, until maybe you're too deep into it to back out. You bring them closer, only to dart forward and disturb them, once they're in your reach. The trick then, is to decide whether you're going to go against expectations, or run with them. That alone will probably determine what kind of relationship you are going to have with your audience, if you have one at all.
So, with the overly elaborate metaphor out of the way for the month, how about we get to the actual story at hand, hm? More than anything else, this column is going to be a Race Against Time, since it's due in less than a week and my work schedule is nothing short of ridiculous for the near future. But we shall prevail and persevere, in our fashion. In fact, we'll even stop rambling. Rambling? Who's doing that? We have a story to tackle!
The story actually starts out in classic fashion, bringing you to a crucial point in the story and then knocking you back to sort of bring you up to speed. That approach definitely has merits and for a psychological, "scary" story it's probably the best way to go about it, especially for a short work. You need to bring up the mystery right away and it's easy to set a mood of dread when the reader goes in without knowing what the heck is going on? Why are they on the Alps? There's a feeling of isolation and distance in this first part, the sense that Something Is Not Quite Right, which of course is key to this sort of thing. In a short story, if you're going to introduce the suspense and take the reader into it on a linear path, you have to work fairly fast before you lose their attention. But if you set it right away and then promise to show you how they got there, you have a better chance of steering them where you want to go. I'd like to cite HP Lovecraft here but unfortunately I haven't read enough of him to know if he's relevant to this discussion or not. But I'll name-drop him, just the same. Yog-Sothoth is the gate!
Ahem. Moving on. I'm of two minds about the opening dialogue between Alex and Ella. It sets up the main thrust of the story and gives us a clue later on why Alex would let himself be taken by the "Beckoning" or at least hint that whatever psychosis came upon him, was there the entire time, just in a different form. A man pushed over the edge, perhaps, by something impending. Sometimes you know things without actually realizing you know. The thing is, while I do like the bedroom conversation for its utter strangeness ("If you have get pregnant, I shall disappear" . . . way to kill the mood there, Casanova) at the same time it makes you wonder why in the name of all that is holy Ella would be with Alex, being he seems to act like that all the time. In fact if I were Ella I'd start to question why the heck he's in the relationship in the first place, if he doesn't even want to deal with the concept of having kids. Is he just in it for the sex and ready to book when it gets too inconvenient? Relationships can last quite well without children and without marriage, as a number of people out there can attest. But when one person wants them and the other doesn't, that really isn't something that goes away. Ella's initial longing for a child is well played, going through all the biological urges, the deep seated need to pass on our traits and continue the species. The problem is now the relationship has struck a point where it can either go forward or disintegrate entirely. It can't stay still any longer and still be the way it used to be. In some ways the setup reminds me of Lesje and William is Margaret Atwood's Life Before Man where William was this bland, not very exciting bloke who Lesje was just comfortable with, even though the relationship had basically stagnated and was going absolutely nowhere. But sometimes momentum can give you the illusion of movement, even when things have stopped completely. In that novel we couldn't understand why she'd be with William and she eventually cheated on him, which made sense given the context. Here, we wonder what the heck Ella is doing, being with this guy. A little context would help here I guess, at least a tiny scene of the two of them in a normal situation, before the pregnancy debate takes hold, to show that they were basically a happy couple before the snake entered Eden, so to speak. Otherwise we have to assume that things were always this way and to my mind that makes Ella look like a bit of a patsy, staying with this guy who clearly only wants to sleep with her. That may not be true but that's how it looks.
I do have to mention Ella's line about genes being an "invisible, abstract concept" which seems a bit absurd for someone who went through college (they don't make you take general biology when you're an anthropology major?) . . . go ask the parents of a child with cystic fibrosis how abstract genetics seems.
At first glance, Ella's request for an Alps vacation strikes me as a bit odd, although given the setup pieces start to fall into place and we can take a guess. Even if we're wrong. To me, it seems here that Ella is making plans to get rid of Alex, knowing that he'll leave when he finds out that she's pregnant, that she has some idea in mind to take care of him and make sure that if he can't help her take care of the child, then she'll make sure he takes care of nothing, ever again. A story like that, this would be the point where we'd see the first threads of madness starting to form, those tiny rational decisions that we make that ever so slowly lead to the things that snowball into disaster. Watching her go down the path and not realizing where it goes until she reaches the destination. Simple at first and gradually ensnaring you until you reach a point where there isn't any way out. This could be the tale of a woman pushed to the very edge and doing something unthinkable and not realizing it until the unthinkable was made very possible. But that also runs the risk of dipping into the "woman scorned" cliché and raising the specter of suggesting that any woman who doesn't get what she wants becomes a crazy psycho-bitch. Things need to a bit more nuanced then. We need to get inside their heads and try to figure out what's going on. We know what Ella tells us but not what she's thinking. Not in any regular way.
Which leads us into the decidedly odd disconnect of the next scene, where our two main characters argue over leaving or staying on the glacier without actually doing either. I think there needs to be more of a sense of motion here, so the tension can rise properly. It feels static, in a way, just two people talking back and forth, with Ella getting heated but we can't really feel it. And Alex's behavior seems to come out of nowhere, he speaks all of his sentences in that same flat fashion that even though he's technically acting out of character, it doesn't feel like that because nothing has really changed about him. We're told that his behavior about staying on the mountain is odd, but this is the same man who said in the first section that if his lover got pregnant he'd walk out and leave her, in a fashion not unlike someone telling you they got bread on sale the other day. So with Alex weird was sort of our baseline to start, and so while we're told that it's a change from his usual demeanor, we have really nothing to go by, other than that one scene. And to be honest, based on that first scene with him, I can totally believe he'd talk like that and enjoy barren mountain landscapes as opposed to something a tad less desolate. I mean, this is the guy who told his girlfriend he couldn't commit to his own hypothetical child. That takes talent. That is why I think an extra scene, maybe even flashbacks, showing Ella and Alex at earlier stages of the relationship when he was a bit more normal might be helpful, that way this slow change comes as more of a shock, or at the very least unsettles the reader, who is wondering what is going on. Because right now, I can totally back Ella dropping him off the side of the mountain. Is he any fun at all? Why does she even care about him? Is the sex that great, I ask, half crass, half serious? Really, what keeps her around?
The conversation then, in light of all that, seems to come completely out of nowhere, boiling down to Alex saying he wants to see the glacier (and not moving) and Ella insisting in an almost panicked fashion that he shouldn't go (but she's not moving either) and so you have the two of them just standing there having basically parallel conversations. And eventually they just go in circles, with Alex saying, "I'm going to go to the glacier" and Ella is like, "Don't go to the glacier" and Alex says, "I think I must see the glacier" and Ella says "You mustn't see the glacier" and so on and so on.
Maybe what the scene really needs then is context. Cue flashback!
And thus we get a bit of an info-dump, which actually goes a long way toward explaining exactly what is wrong with Alex and why he acts the way he does. Being bumped from family to family, the young Alex was never able to let himself become attached to people and thus tried to stay distant. Which of course still begs the question, why is he with Ella? Convenience? Great sex? I keep coming back to that because it's hard to reconcile. He remains opaque to us for the most part, we see his past actions but his present motivations are a mystery. Is he even trying, and maybe that's why he's living with Ella, in an attempt to overcome his natural inclinations, the inertia that life has given him. Can he get past himself? If the story was about Alex, that might be the central conflict, his struggle to be something other than what he is and become more like what he used to be, back before he could really remember. Except in this case, he would tragically lose (in theory, if I read the ending correctly) and maybe that's where the true horror would come from. Because you can't escape yourself, the story might suggest, and once you change, you aren't capable of changing back. You can become something else still, but not what you used to be. The unfurling of it feels a bit disjointed, though, and I'm not sure how good it is to have it all spelled out for us in the last paragraph of the flashback. I wonder if it would have been better to just lay out the events as they were and let the reader draw the conclusion, to realize that by being continually torn away from any semblance of love and family, Alex had isolated himself in order to protect his own feelings.
But the story instead seems to be about Ella, who starts out one way and really doesn't change fundamentally by the story's end . . . unless you count the major change, which is a change of sorts but we don't get to really see the ramifications of it. Things just happen and we don't what the catalyst for them is. The story seems to be made of several disparate elements that struggle to cohere properly, without ever really seeming to do so. We have Alex, struggling with his sense of isolation and detachment (actually "struggling" may be the wrong word, he appears to be okay with it, really). We have Ella, caught in a relationship that is stagnating from her perspective and she's not sure if a sudden change will cause the relationship to evolve or simply break apart entirely. And then we have the sudden introduction of a supernatural aspect to it. Different parts, almost like a different story. The main thrust of the story seems to be based on coincidence and at points characters really only seem to act the way they do because the plot dictates that they have to. Alex gets out of the car and walks toward the blue stone at the glacier . . . a blue bit of ice that has had nothing to do with the story until the two of them happen to drive up the side of a mountain at a random place that Ella has chosen for their vacation. But he gets out because it calls to him and Ella does not stop him, she cries out for him but does not go after him, doesn't attempt to follow him. She simply waits there for him to come back. There's a sense of the unknown, a sense of "why is he doing this" but it's not really strong enough to lay itself onto the story. Instead of getting a sense of the Weird, of Things Beyond Our Understanding, we get a variation of "and this happened and then this happened and this happened and then the story ends" and the biggest thing a horror story needs is atmosphere. The best horror isn't the one that involves monsters coming out of our closets, but taking the safe, normal things of the world and turning them into something dangerous, making them things that we recognize in our world and the horror comes from the fact that this could happen. People doing terrible things to each others for what seem to be no reason at all and the horror comes from stepping back and trying to get into their reasons, see why they did it. And it always comes down to simple things. We don't need to construct hairy beasts to tear us to pieces to truly scare the reader. We're redundant in a sense, because the world has already gone and scared the crap out of them for us. If you want to see real horror, open your newspaper every day and read the stories there. Of parents killing children, children killing parents, people destroying each other out of greed or jealousy or because they can. And those people were all people that somebody knew, and they did the things that they did for reasons that we can all understand. But there's a difference between understanding and taking that step and that's where the horror comes in, for me at least. Because there are people in the world who know where the line is and who willingly step over it, for crazy reasons that nevertheless make perfect sense to them. Every day, every single day.
I'm getting off-topic, I know. I apologize. I can't promise it won't happen again, before we're done here. I think the story could have worked well without the supernatural element, though we'll dissect that more when we reach it. The suggestion of it adds a nice touch, but I think the story implies that said element is more prominent to the story then it actually is. When, to me, that's not the important part. To me, the story is more about the couple and how they react to a major sea-change in their lives. Alex, for the first time, is forced to confront the fact that he has to take care of something other than himself. And your choices are to either grow up in the face of it and take some responsibility, or collapse completely. For Ella, it'd be a journey as she realizes that the man she thought isn't the man that actually is, and the sad part will be that he was that man the entire time and she just never realized it. And I think the tragic portion of it, is that Alex won't be strong enough to sustain the change. He can't deal with it and that will cause the collapse, which could end with him simply leaving, isolating himself further, tearing off and trying to forget it all. An extension of the paralyzing fear we all probably feel, however briefly, when we know that our lives are about to change forever and won't be the same again. And we all think that we'll be strong enough, that the marriage will last, that we'll raise the children into fine human beings, that we'll succeed, simply because we are honest and true to ourselves. But the truth of the matter is, maybe we're not strong enough and maybe we'll fail. Alex is the embodiment of that, the notion that maybe you can't do it, no matter how hard you try. He does his best to adjust and simply can't do it, can't effect the change. So he goes away, because he doesn't know what else to do.
The story implies this, I think, it starts to go that way and dodges at the last second, delving more into the dancing men and mysterious things on glaciers that snatch people. But the truth of the matter is, Alex left because he couldn't stay. And he couldn't stay because staying meant changing and he was unable or unwilling to do that. It could be any one of us, walking out. We think we're better, but we really aren't. And by pointing that out, however subtly, the story illuminates a part of ourselves that we really don't like to acknowledge. Which I think is a good thing. The next to last scene works even better if you take it as a dream sequence, brought on by pregnancy perhaps. Ella's fears just running rampant over her subconscious, showing her a better, safer explanation, to mask the real horror. Because it's easier to think that Alex was taken against his own will, that whatever force was out there on the glacier called to him and took him. She can believe that, because it's easier. But I don't think it's the real explanation. In reality, he walked out and left her and either died there in the snow because he finally snapped or simply went on to live another life somewhere else. Or perhaps she killed him and forgot about it but that's less likely. To conceal the horror from herself, she has the dream (a little Seventh Seal, I have to say, nice touch) and tells herself that it really happened. It's impressionistic, fears and terrors all given physical life, mingling in some bizarre tableau in her mind. It seems to come out of left field but it's really the only way to close off this portion of the story and I think illustrates how Ella is deluding herself, to avoid the pain. That the man she loved didn't feel he was good enough to stay and raise his own child. I like that interpretation, it causes the story to make sense for me.
Plus, it also explains why she didn't die after falling asleep in her car on the side of a mountain in the Alps for hours. She dozed off, had a quick dream, woke up and drove away. Maybe that's not the way it went, but it's the way that works for me. Sorry.
Letting go almost comes too easily for her, and for a second we can be afraid that she'll become like Alex, detached and uncaring, like he was a sickness that has to infect something. He's gone and she's numb and that's just how it is. No one seems to blame her, even though the situation is sort of suspicious (if I were the police, she'd be the prime suspect, if one thought foul play was involved) but I guess we can chalk that one up to dramatic license and move on. We get the usual Wise Villager talking about the mysterious going-ons at the top of the mountain and of course no body, because there is no body to be found. Ella leaves and the story moves on, without her and without us. Maybe she finds somebody else to help her raise the child, maybe she raises it alone, maybe the kid grows up and leaves her, the same way that Alex did, just opening the door and walking out into the show, without another word.
We started this column with a discussion of what it means to be beckoned. To be made to come forward, even when you don't want to. Here, I think, the surface implication is that some force beyond man seized upon Alex's latent detachment and drove him to come forward, to release himself into their midst and become like them, forever free but forever apart. That's a bit crap, I think, and the explanation is simpler. Alex was beckoned by something he recognized all too intimately and all too well. Like a bird pecking at its own image in a mirror, the ultimate force pulling him out of the car was himself. Everything else is just an excuse, or window dressing if you prefer.
I liked this story but I think my earlier comment about it consisting of a whole bunch of different parts that don't quite cohere still stands. Once we start understanding people's motivations for things, then it start making more sense and I think what I would add to it would be more of a sense of change or evolution. Alex started out one way, became something else and in the process of being faced with change, took another step entirely. The central thrust of the story comes from Alex and the main horror of the tale comes from us watching Alex do something utterly insane that to him probably seems completely rational, given how he was raised. In his mind, there can be no other response. And yet he's not crazy. It makes for a good autopsy of their relationship, and I think scenes in the beginning showing them as basically a happy (or at least content) couple would later underscore just how screwed up it becomes internally, when they start pulling in two different directions. It doesn't even need to be set in the Alps and the story does suffer a bit from Let's Do It Because We Can Syndrome, with actions coming suddenly and with little buildup. The meat of it works, and you can easily pull something out of all of it if you sit there long enough and work at it. But not everyone is going to ruminate over the issues that it brings up for seven single spaced pages like I did. They want their thrills to be more immediate and with that in mind things will have to be a bit more overt. I'd probably interlace flashbacks with current events a little more, so that the old scenes are commenting on the current events, showing us how we've gotten to this point, without explicitly saying so. So that by the end when we reach the flashback where Alex finally is living with his uncle and resigning himself to a life of not caring for anyone, that's when we see him take that final step into actually going and doing what he always said he would do. Walk away and never look back. What I'm trying to say is that maybe the story needs a bit more structure to it, with the sections both progressing and informing on each other, all the little bits coming together in the end. The heart of it remains true and I think you have a good domestic horror story at the center of it, with the little bits of supernatural at the end being a nice bit of misdirection.
But that's all they are, leading us away from what the story is really trying to say. And we can choose to believe that and believe that at any time forces beyond our control can make us do things contrary to what we are, that they can snag us and take us away. Or we can go down the other road, the one off to the side that's a bit darker and not as apparent. The one that tells us that what we do isn't subject to exterior forces, that in the end the only force acting on us and telling us what to do, is just us. The whole time, only us, no matter what the world might say.
And whichever road beckons the most to you, may wind up saying more about you than you'd like to admit. Or even contemplate.
- MB
7.09.06
"But me, I do as I please, I caught you and set you free, 'cause I've been left alone by the people I know, and I don't know when they're coming home . . ." - Margot & the Nuclear So and So's, "Jen is Bringin' the Drugs"
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