I think Karl Strange would be a great name for a spy.
Think about it. Either nobody would ever believe it was
your real name or if you bothered to tell people you were
a spy, nobody would believe that either because what spy
would be stupid enough to have such an obvious name? And
wouldn't you just tingle all over at the melodious uttering
of "Karl. Karl Strange" whenever someone asks
him what his name is?
What does any of this have to do with anything at all?
Not much, really. But you have to start somewhere and would
you rather have calculated absurdity as opposed to grim
reality? Call it a bit of whimsy, if you will. A last stab
at relevancy before heading off the deep end.
Karl Strange, alas, is not a spy. At least, if he is, he
can't tell us, because, as the saying goes, he'd have to
kill us. Ha. Ha. What he is, is an innkeeper of the Black
Dragon Inn and once, apparently, he was a hero and was and
maybe still is a magic user of some power. But what can
he tell us? What can he really say?
In this story, he's supposed to tell us about a feast.
Not just a feast, but a Feast, so big it deserves the capital
letter, a Feast that Karl remembers because he was around
for its origins but due to the decaying of collective memory
has become nothing more than another cutesy gathering of
adults and children, who build effigies and eat things without
really understanding why they're eating stuff and building
things and doing it all with the vague feeling that it might
mean something, but they're not really sure what it is.
They've forgotten, you see, and they're probably not going
to remember, unless Karl tells them. But that's not remembering,
that's telling.
In a sense the story could tell us something about the
holidays, the idea of a special event being warped into
something that nobody a few hundred years ago would have
seen coming is something that could be fairly relevant for
this time of the year. Christmas season seems to begin in
September these days, before anything else, and what was
at first a holiday of purely religious significance eventually
took on a massive cultural weight and eventually morphing
into the year end orgy of acquisition that we see these
days. Christmas is about buying and getting and being nice
to people, but only so they'll buy you stuff. Santa Claus
sells everything from toys to cars and even seamier things,
depending on what kind of channels your cable company will
let you have. It meant something once, maybe, at least it
stood for something, but does it mean anything these
days, at least on a collective level . . . or is it just
a time of year when everything is cheaper and there's more
of it to be cheap?
I couldn't tell you. My buying habits remain resolutely
consistent. But this isn't about me, as the man sitting
in the back of the room tossing rotten vegetables likes
to keep reminding me. Get on with the damn show, he says.
Entertain me.
I don't think I know how. I do know that Karl is supposed
to tell us a story . . . and he never does. Or maybe he
does but we don't get to see it. The last image of the story,
of children, their eyes alight with visions of pastries
and pies, gathering around Karl as he's about to explain
to them what it all means . . . right at that moment the
curtains come down and we're left in the theater wondering
where everyone went. The story doesn't so much end as become
decapitated, the ending so abrupt that you think your web
browser didn't load something right. The story builds and
builds to a Feast that you never see, that only happens
off screen, to the best of your knowledge.
Stories have weird metaphysics. Characters don't age right,
either going ridiculously slowly or absurdly fast, and no
matter how often that idiot steps into the bottomless pit,
every time you go back he hasn't learned his lesson, he
does it again. Even the smartest fictional character really
isn't so bright in the end, they go through the motions
like good little robots. I've gone back to the page again
and again, hoping for another sentence, just one more second
of a peek into their lives, just to see what was going to
happen next, only to get hit in the face with the door as
it slams shut.
I used to wonder what happened to characters when the story
ended. After all, my coworkers' lives don't stop when we
all call it a day and go home, why should people in stories
be any different? But in a sense it's the same as seeing
a photograph of a ball in mid-flight. It probably did keep
going, but it's all in your imagination. It might have just
dropped to the ground. Or maybe it's still hovering there,
waiting for the next frame. I can see characters like that,
frozen in a weird kind of stasis, waiting for their cues
and wondering when it got so dark. Children gathered around
Karl, waiting for a story that will never come. Flash frozen,
like shadows from an atom bomb. What he never got a chance
to say to me is far more interesting than what he does say.
I think I said once before, I read into these things so
you don't have to. I think the best stories have beginnings
and middles and ends (maybe not in that order) and a sense
of closure so great that you don't care at all what happens
after the story ends, because it truly doesn't matter. But
I think a truncated tale leaves all kinds of questions open,
not all of them bad but not complete good either. In a way
this feels like a build up for a climax or a chapter that
never comes, like we walked in on a moment that we shouldn't
have, like the characters were preparing for a chapter and
we saw the work that goes into getting everything ready,
but we weren't supposed to see this part, in all its ramshackle
glory. The real chapter may not start until after this piece
is over. We'll never know. Maybe it's an idea for a chapter,
stillborn, dreaming of the novel it might one day become.
We can't say. Like Karl's story, we're rendered mute.
I want to comment on plot, I want to comment on characterization,
but the story reads like an excerpt from Karl's diary, going
through the motions of his life in mundane detail, not explaining
anything, leaving us to figure out what it all means. Maybe
it means nothing. Not everyone's life is important. Karl,
for all his age and experience, is just a guy, watching
people shuffle into his Inn day in and day out and not really
getting to know any of them . . . they come and they leave
and maybe some of them he sees again and a lot of others
he doesn't. Maybe Karl did heroics things once, but he doesn't
anymore . . . he says he's immortal and maybe he'll do this
forever, until the human race passes into something else
. . . or maybe he'll get bored and move onto another game
entirely. A million stories intersect at the Inn and Karl
only sees a portion of them, just like the rest of us. Is
that what the story does then, shows us how Karl sees the
world? Scattered conversations, actions without reason,
held together only by whatever logic you try to impose on
it. Who knows? The story doesn't say, it can't speak for
itself. The only words it has are the ones we put into its
mouth.
One gets the feeling that Karl is merely going by a script
. . . he's been at the Inn for a hundred years and the faces
may change and the language may change and the sky might
even change but the routine never does. All of it feels
well worn and rehearsed, even down to the pretty ladies
with the secret desires . . . like any hero Karl is undeniably
attractive to all women . . . but his hero days are over
and he has nothing more to give them, just old stories.
Something tells me that if they did go into his room, they'd
be sorely disappointed. This is a man who pines for his
lost family, a man with the body of a younger fellow but
the mind weighted down by a hundred years of horror and
boredom. What would a woman have to offer a man like that,
that he hadn't partaken of a thousand times before, in a
thousand permutations . . . what could Karl have to offer
them but the ghosts of old loves, of actions in the dark
driven by an automatic engine, tested and perfected on lovers
long dead but now worn so smooth that there's nothing to
grasp anymore. If you touched Karl your fingers would slip
right off. He's right there, but you can't feel him. He
hovers above the Inn, somehow outside and inside and right
where you aren't standing. It's a wonder that more people
don't think Karl is homosexual, being so old and unmarried
(his wife has been dead over fifty years and most folks
probably never remember him as married) and otherwise robust.
But then one could make the same claims about me, I imagine,
so let's make a firm decision not to go there.
Otherwise he mouths things he's said a million times before,
saying that were probably once new to him but are just words
now, foreign in the same way that if you stare at any word
long enough it stops becoming a word and instead transform
into just a random collection of letters and loses all meaning
entirely. He watches them come and watches them go and maybe
he's looked in the same direction for so long that he's
forgotten exactly what he's staring at. He mentions the
"warlock-goblin" wars and maybe those are different
from the Troll Wars that gave him his immortality but he
doesn't say and we have no way to be sure. There's no telling
how many wars he's seen, after the first few you probably
start to lose track. Strange questions abound. In the last
story, Karl said he built the Inn after tearing down another
Inn that stood in its place, a dark mirror of the things
he eventually wanted to create . . . he did this a hundred
years ago, after the wars. Here, he says the land was granted
to him by the King, who still demands tribute. Is the King
also immortal, or is there another King. And why would he
grant land to Karl that had such an evil place on it to
begin with. Unless Karl didn't know. He's in the same boat
as us, then, as it were.
We're given the story of the holiday, then, of the Feast
of the Beast, a story that only Karl knows anymore. As it
turns out, children were sacrificed to the dragon Lord of
the Dead (interesting how people have no gods of their own
but instead worship the gods of another race entirely),
staked out on hilltops. It's not said whether the hills
ran red with blood because all the children were killed
due to being staked or because the Lord of the Dead actually
showed up and ate them. It's a superstition gone terribly
wrong, the equivalent of hanging people under ladders or
stuffing their internal organs down sidewalk cracks in order
to ward off the gods of ill fortune. And yet it was transformed
into something utterly innocuous and harmless . . . children
dress up now and play games and eat more than they should,
just like any other holiday. The transition is jarring,
as if Santa Claus had once been Vlad the Impaler but now
was just a jolly old elf. That in itself would have been
an interesting story, the changing attitude of the times,
witnessed by a man who falls through time like a heavy rock,
who can't stay rooted but doesn't know how to change. But
instead we get the beginning and the end, but no middle.
Rather the opposite of the story itself, which seems to
be all middle, starting after the story has already begun,
like Weezer's "Buddy Holly", (which sounds like
they started playing and then hit the "record"
button) and ending before we've come to anything resembling
a conclusion. But didn't someone once comment that "life
is all middle"? Are we seeing a reflection of own lives
in the story, or does it just seem that way. Some stories
are infinitely flexible like that, changing to suit the
viewer, transforming it into whatever the reader wants to
see.
Memories banished, Karl engages in small talk with Dora,
trying to find the drama in small things. Some of the girls
are pregnant and Karl will try to find them husbands . .
. apparently some of the help sleeps with the guests (which
in most places would be frowned upon but not here) . . .
could this be the thing Dora turns a blind eye towards that
she hinted at in the last story. Maybe and maybe not. Either
way there's never any doubt here . . . either Karl will
find them happiness or they'll seek their own. The Inn staff
is one big happy family, milling about in day to day splendor.
Dora sounds like a kindred spirit to Karl, even though she's
much younger. But like him she drowns herself in the mundane,
cooking for the guests, mediating the petty disputes of
the staff . . . unlike Karl her loss probably weighs heavier
on her, since she hadn't had his decades to forget it. For
Karl, it's not as acute, it's the roadkill still lingering
in the road, growing grotesque in the sun . . . while for
Karl, it's nothing more than a bleached skeleton. The shape
is still there but the guts are gone, the messy disgusting
bits that get on your hands that you can't wash off. All
bone can do is stab and poke and all you have to do to avoid
it is move away. Rots lingers for a longer period and follows
you wherever you try to escape.
But memories come and memories go. The Dragon Lord of the
Dead, once a feared figure (was he real? Karl doesn't say
. . . although his comment that Smahane would bow to their
efforts must be a weird jest . . . no doubt if the Lord
of the Dead were to happen upon the scenes, he would simply
eat them all because that's what dread gods do . . . everyone's
got a role) is now nothing more than a hollow effigy that
people give small gifts to without really understanding
why. It's a vague fear, done because their ancestors did
it and they lived long enough to have children and maybe
if these people do it the same thing will happen to them.
In a hundred years the rituals and celebrations might be
long gone and forgotten, in the same way that we all don't
go out and dance at the onset of Spring. And what's the
point of remembering, if nobody cares? Karl may eventually
find himself so stuffed full of memories that he'll find
himself growing crazy, no room for echo in his head and
hearing the replayed scenarios over and over again, overlapping
with the present day. After a while, maybe things repeat
so much he won't be able to tell if he's living his life
or a memory. Or maybe he'll just forget, because the brain
can only hold so much and after a while it'll start jettisoning
the useless stuff. Maybe the Troll King will come back after
a thousand years to find that his hated enemy doesn't even
remember the origins of the conflict and thinks he might
be immortal but time is just like rain touching his face
. . . he can feel the wetness without seeing it. The dampness
leaves a stain but you can't find the cause.
Karl keeps the old ways alive, in his way. But is that
a good thing? Fear derives power from memory, in a way.
The superstitions of the past live on because somebody bothered
to pass them on. He reminds people of what they were afraid
of, a long time ago, but is he helping them or just giving
them a reason to run into their houses when it gets dark,
staring fearfully at the sky? The children have the right
idea, treating it all like a big game, while the adults
stand back and wonder what they're doing wrong. But then,
in a world where magic clearly is real, is disregarding
the old ways pragmatic or a sure way to discover suicide?
In this world, claiming that your neighbor might invoke
the wrath of the Old Gods down upon you is a quick way to
either garner strange looks or get an involuntary appointment
with a psychologist. In Karl's world, dissing the dragons
might actually get your home leveled and your family eaten.
The rules are different when men live for hundreds of years
and giant lizards can fly and men can set the air on fire
just by thinking about it really hard. One might not want
to experiment with the correlation with the power and proportional
belief in it, if it means that a giant might scoop up your
house and fling it very far. So maybe Karl makes the only
sane choice, keeping people mired in old traditions because
it's the only real way to keep them alive. Closing your
eyes and fervently insisting that dragons aren't real isn't
the best defense against one getting ready to sit on you.
The segment ends gaily, with piles of food and laughing
children. The shadowed doubt flickers only for a moment,
when Karl admonishes his workers for not paying the proper
respect . . . but it passes, like faraway clouds, not even
leaving the outline of its fear behind. Food is listened
with an almost numbing attention to detail, trying to sicken
us with the sheer richness of the courses. Almost more attention
is paid to the material details, to clothing, to food, than
to the characters themselves . . . emotions and bad feelings
are mentioned in passing, an excuse for a dark expression
across a character's face, an exchange that seems to acknowledge
"things were very bad, but they're much better now"
. . . you don't really get to know anyone, except in the
broadest strokes, like an Impressionist painting . . . too
far and it's just patches of paint, too close and all you
see are the dots, with all shape lost. We may not know the
people here, but we certainly know what they like to eat.
And it ends with Karl smiling happily over the brood of
children before him, indulging in their fantasies with indoctrinating
them into the terrible myths of the past. We'll never know
what story he actually tells . . . it might be a poignant
tale of his childhood, too long removed . . . or maybe a
funny story about a man who built an Inn . . . the implication
is that he does tell them about the origins of the Feast
itself and it's hard to imagine Karl explaining in exuberant
detail how children like them were taken to barren hilltops
in the chilled wind and tied down with stakes to wait for
something nameless and terrible to come and eat them all
up. I don't think I'd ever sleep again if someone told me
that story and the contrast between the piles and piles
of food and decorations and the horrible events that begat
such delights is an odd comparison indeed. It's hard to
resolve the contradictions, in the end, and the story doesn't
even try, instead cutting itself off, snipping off the tail
instead of bringing the whole load onto the runway safely.
On its own the lack of resolution isn't a bad thing, some
of my favorite things in life end abruptly . . . most of
the good Magnetic Fields song click off instead of fading
off and my favorite novel of all time Gravity's Rainbow
cuts off so abruptly that even as you're left stumbling
forward, looking for the next page that will never come,
you know it's the only way it could end.
But those things, and others, have the bulk of the rest
of the work behind them to bolster them up, to give them
heft and weight. This is a pleasant little sequence, but
almost featherweight in its depth, showing the happy Inn
getting ready for their happy party . . . and that's it?
Was that all we were supposed to see? The question of intent
comes into play again but I'm not sure what questions to
ask. I find that what the story says isn't as fascinating
as what it doesn't say, and I find myself wondering why
it doesn't come out and say those things . . . because it
won't or because it can't. I don't know. I wonder if anyone
does. Just because I ask the questions doesn't mean they
needed to be asked, or that the author ever considered them.
So they hover there, without a home.
I want to say something, but it's quite possible there's
nothing to really say.
Hm. I told myself I wouldn't be able to write much about
this story. Nice to see I can be proven wrong.
The rest of you can open your eyes and look over here again.
The train wreck is finished for another week. It's safe
to peek.
I wonder if I think too much.
- MB
12.17.04
"I'll get the pencils, we'll draw ourselves a new world
. . ." - Kitchens of Distinctions, "Prince of
Mars"
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