The Entire Predicament Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  First Person

  Airplane

  Rich People

  My Favorite Dentist

  Midgets Often Marry Each Other

  Wizened

  I: OTHER PEOPLE

  II: ONE PERSON

  III: ANOTHER PERSON (MYSELF)

  A Woman with a Gardener

  The Way She Loved Cats

  Who Buried the Baby

  Some Machines

  CLOCK

  PHONE

  HEATING PAD

  SUPERMARKET CHECKOUT MACHINE

  REFRIGERATOR

  MOTORCYCLE

  GYM

  RUBE GOLDBERG

  PROJECTOR

  AIR CONDITIONER

  AIRPLANE

  SOME MATH

  CYBORGS, OR UNIVERSE AS MACHINE

  YOGURT MAKER

  PRINTING PRESS

  VIBRATOR

  TAXI

  AMPLIFIER

  MACHINE

  STILL LIFE

  MACHINES

  MY MACHINE

  MACHINE

  BODIES AND PARTS

  Baby in a Body Cast

  The Entire Predicament

  Incognito

  Mice

  Simpler Components

  I: BLOOD AND GUTS

  II: A REPRIMAND FOR AFFECTION

  III: LIFE IN A BOX

  IV: OTHER PEOPLE’S OBSESSIONS

  V: THE EVERYONE OF WHOM WE SPEAK

  VI: A GOOD DAY

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  For Melissa Malouf writer, teacher, friend for life

  Introduction

  Lucy Corin is a fearless writer.

  I came across her work for the first time while I was locked inside the stuffiest room on the University of California, Davis, campus, sitting in an uncomfortable chair, in front of four boxes filled with more than two hundred applications for a fiction position. And then all of a sudden I wasn’t there anymore: I was in a dentist’s chair; I was turning the soil in a garden; I was backed up against a Pottery Barn couch, making out with a girl with too much eyeliner.

  In “My Favorite Dentist,” as in all of Corin’s fiction, it is not only the images that won’t let us go but also the words with which they are rendered, as if Corin has access to some Dr. Seuss-like On Beyond Zebra alphabet and is therefore capable of descriptors that are at once strange and strangely accurate, übervivid. Once readers have seen the world through Corin’s eyes, seeing straight will never seem like seeing straight again. We have become implicated in the process, brought to wonder with a mounting panic why we have never chosen a favorite dentist or seen the world through the eyes of a baby in a body cast. Corin has the absurdist’s knack for reversing the figure and the ground, and her stories shake us up, but almost kindly. Neither relentless nor insistent, they are playful, creepy, earnest, hopeful, and terrifying. That’s their true brilliance: how many things these stories can be at once.

  The Entire Predicament is a dazzlingly successful experiment in first-person narration, an investigation of the apparent conflict between Corin’s love of the traditional (character-driven, forward-moving, action-centered dramas) and the experimental (language- and idea-centered works that challenge conventional modes of storytelling). The result is a book that locates the storytelling outside of the conflict, in a place of witnessing the world in its wild diversity and complexity and interacting with it via language. Corin uses the first person to create character, but she is also interested in how the first person can work as a conduit for what she calls, in “Mice,” “the shape of everything.” That is, her characters form the conceptual “white space” she creates, as defamiliarizing perspectives on the objective world, minutely rendered physiological reactions, and aphoristic pronouncements meet one another in a given monologue. As the housewife-narrator in the title story affirms (while floating upside down, suspended by ropes above her houseful of things), “There is simply no end to the suspense when one becomes one’s own psychic landscape.”

  Corin’s fiction is interested in apocalypse, in how characters act “normally” in the most extreme situations and “extremely” with almost no provocation at all, until the notions of “normal” and “extreme” are not so much obliterated as given unlimited range. She takes ordinary spaces and makes us see how strange they are, ordinary machines (again, she makes us wonder if there are any ordinary machines) and makes them seem diabolical.

  In the story “Airplane,” for example, the narrator observes the severely constricted world of a plane’s interior in acute detail. She panics, and her panic becomes prescient, as if it causes the ensuing plane crash instead of the other way around.This reversal allows Corin to write toward what passes in her fiction as a “big” lyrical ending, and yet she wisely leaves the crash itself off the page. The approach is representative of Corin’s entire fictional project: the way she interweaves the conventional with the fabulist, refusing to spin off entirely into the unrecognizable (on the level of sentence and on the level of story) but completely avoiding the predictable. Instead, she deftly volleys between satisfaction and surprise.

  The congenial strangeness of these stories is completely beguiling: their depiction of natural history as a kind of contraption, their commitment to the idea that absurdity is a serious thing. Though aspects of her work are reminiscent of a number of admired twentieth-century writers—Donald Barthelme, Patricia Eakins, Russell Edson, Amy Hempel, Robert Coover, Carson McCullers, and, sometimes, Gertrude Stein—Corin’s voice and vision are highly original. Even when it is floating in a world disjunct and bobbing, inclusive of war and giraffes, her signature voice has a declaration of independence about it. The collection ends with an affirmation of the drive behind the first person: “I know that if I continue to speak, some recognition of difficulty will materialize, as if difficulty is produced from the interaction of my voice with the air it encounters.”

  Corin’s writing is daring, original, stylistically and psychically courageous, and worthy of critical attention. There were some terrific writers in that stack of applications, but once we had read it, the members of the hiring committee could not get “My Favorite Dentist” out of our heads. This fiction is up to something wonderful and very serious. I envy your discovering it here, for the very first time.

  —PAM HOUSTON

  First Person

  This is my day in the sun and I’ve got my arms in the air, my head tipped back like the hinged lid of a lighter. Contrary to popular belief, I am not alone. Everyone’s listening. All I see is the bulging gas above me and I’m shooting my mind at it. I’m as close to God as I’ll ever be. The people are tiny. They’re buckshot around my ankles. I could kneel and run my fingers through them.

  Airplane

  I get into my seat pretty early and look at my book here and there, but mostly feel edgy to see if I’ll luck out and keep my elbow room, the plane filling up and my heart beating in its cozy pocket with the suspense as seats fill but not next to me yet. A man hunches in the aisle, leaning his forehead on his fists on the overhead compartment, paunchy and affable. His kids are up there and he’s back here. I express my sorrow. Blowers blow in my face and when I reach to twist the little doohickeys the guy straightens up but that’s all and I surmise he’s supposed to cross me and sit but he doesn’t, shrugging a lot and not situating his stuff. A young guy, at this point, with a compact build like a wrestler (regular wrestler, not costume wrestler) comes over, with his shirt tucked in and a baseball cap. He takes off his cap as if this is a done deal and announces that he’s here to swap seats.

  “My hero!” say
s the man, which makes me look at him sarcastically, squinty, like you’ve got to be kidding, because it’s, shall we say, odd to hear a big guy call a younger guy a hero when it’s not like it’s a child on local news who told his mother about his brother flailing in the pool and this is the reporter explaining about small packages, and it’s not like this affable man is a princess in a tower with a cone on his head. He looks at me in a way that is distinctly pissed off.

  Let me see if I can think of when that look occurs that he gave me: we are at a dinner party and I am his wife and maybe a week before the party we had a fight but I figure it’s in the past, or I’m hoping it’s in the past but I’m not sure, so I say something in context like, “Hal loves baking pans,” (supposing his name is Hal), which is also a reference to the fight but no one in the room would know that, or if they did know it was about the fight it would just be me affirming our togetherness anyway because everyone has fights, it’s a sign of a healthy relationship, so when I make the carefully innocuous remark it’s sort of me giving him the chance to publicly get over it without making an announcement, and this elicits the look from him that I’m talking about right now with the plane.

  What I mean is it’s an intimate kind of anger he’s looking at me with, that I should know him, and know better, and I am not taking care of my end of things. That I am not pulling my weight in this community.

  They slap shoulders symmetrically, big pudgy affable and tight squat hero, holding their carry-ons in their hands. They shift sideways and turnstile around each other, their bellies nuzzling, their arms making spokes of a ferris wheel in the air or whatever you call it, it being the exact space between everyone and the ceiling, the corridor between overhead compartments. These men are the gears of the plane. It’s as if the plane needs them to do what it is preparing to do. Like they say, We need everyone to take their seats. We need everyone to look at the lighted signs.We need everyone to pass their cups to the flight attendant, remember about the seat belts and masks, push the button when you need something.

  Everyone is bits of their clothing or hair from where I sit. It’s where artists got the idea for collage, I think, sitting in a crowd with a slot of erratic visibility. There’s only so much that can happen on a plane. Kids kicking the seat, babies screaming or being about to scream. The mile-high club. Do you or don’t you have a comic pilot. Actually, now that I try to list the things on the airplane it seems clear that anything can happen, just like anywhere else, it just usually doesn’t, but this time I’m here to tell the tale. Not to jack anything up here, but every airplane story has got to be about crashing or I swear to God, why bother?

  Stubby yet handsome younger guy slips in. Slipping in is never graceful on a plane, but I tuck my knees to my chest like we’re already going down and he squeegees by, pooching his butt over and across the middle seat with happy little comradery noises and then, with an expressive exhale of self-satisfaction that means I can ask him anything now, he plops into the window seat and is mine for the duration. He puts his cap back on and adjusts it. The cap says “Marines.” Of course he’s a Marine, clearly he is, if plainclothes, if a tad squat, and I knew it.

  There are ways to ensure almost anyone will not talk to you. It’s easy, especially on planes, and it is part of what books are for. Someplace to put your eyes. Any contained space has a protocol that is soothing, the Spanish fans of its social dance. This is why it will be a certain kind of relief, if terrifying, when everyone in the world either speaks English or shuts up for good. I consider cementing my eyes to my book.Three times I read this phrase: “It is not so much a matter of humanism,” and then I move on to the next one. My Marine takes his baseball cap off again and holds it in his lap, rubs his head, which is clipped but not severely, and then folds it—the hat—and stuffs it in with the magazines behind the elastic so the bill sticks out. The fabric on this plane is blue on blue, light blue with check marks of darker blue that make a pattern like scales.

  Things are settling into the thick hum that will coat everything for who knows how long, until I shower, usually.There’s the safety show, which I listen to as background music, humming along less than consciously. Then, as the engines gun, as their pitch swirls higher and into the ends of human aural perception, I lean to look up the aisle. The seats and the centermost slivers of people’s bodies replicate as if by drunken vision, a movie projected out of focus, the seats with their aisle arms and the arms of people bulging into view like shadows and receding along this most primitive diagram of three dimensions, the blue aisle slithering beneath the curtain to first class and disappearing, its imaginary head presumably plunked down in the cockpit, grinning, all fanged, out the front window like a kid leaning up between parents, pilot, copilot. One of them pats it on the head.

  A few rows up from me an arm comes loose from its regimen and flicks a coin. I’m lucky to catch this. I think I am the only one. I see no other heads in the aisle. I think the person with the arm did it secretly.The person with the arm is wearing a white shirt that buttons at the cuff and it’s far enough away that I can’t tell if it’s a man arm or a woman arm and I have no clue what precise color the hand is so I also have no clue about anything like the race or the age of the arm. It’s a generic arm. It’s Everyarm. It tosses a coin into the aisle and I think about it for a moment and then it comes to me like a transmission: this person has also been looking at the aisle, but the person has not seen a blue dragon; the person has seen a blue river and has tossed a coin in, for luck.

  The hero beside me is trying to get something out from between his teeth by sucking and using his tongue. He’s also using the seat between us for his jacket. I give my book another shot and it says,“Past belief because beyond knowing,” and I think about luck, and how if the coin works everyone on the plane will get the luck unless there’s such a thing as one survivor from a 737, and as if being a sole survivor could possibly count as luck. So I think for a second that Everyarm might actually be generous. It makes me feel I’ve been behaving crabbily and unfairly, which in my experience is rarely the same thing, so I decide to give the Marine a chance, for the sake of luck, and don’t they say lucky dragon anyway?

  This is the line of thinking that gets me to stick my book in with the magazines, and I stick it in there demonstratively, giving the elastic a solid snap. “Well!” says the Marine with a nod of approval and the kind of smile that is a fake frown like “that’ll show ’em,” and I know I’m in for it; I know I’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake. I grew up watching movies about encountering soldiers on trains. They wore their green uniforms and caps and gold pins.They encountered girls who had eyes of wonder. I can see him waiting for my eyes of wonder to come out. I’m as pretty as he is squat and I’ll do, I’m sure, in this real-life version. Chugga-chugga goes the airplane, gushing upward, and I grasp my armrests, and the Marine in street clothing watches over me as I do. I think of another set of movies where the girl encounters the soldier in his green outfit at a carnival and they go on a ride on a roller coaster, how she screams with glee and, I believe, if I remember correctly, what he does is sit grimly, knowing all too well what real fear is all about, something he will never be able to put into words.

  So here the suspense is beating in my shirt pocket all over again as I’m waiting for him to launch into the speech I realize I’m expecting because of a couple previous travel experiences where there was a current soldier and he 1) sidled up to someone by doing them an easy favor 2) told a story that put into the situation that he was a soldier and was either headed out or coming back, which 3) left the opening to be congratulated, which actually took the form of the two people exchanging loudly their coincidentally identical ideas about the war and the heroism of the soldier, as well as the sixth man back home 4) this happened once in a smoking room when a soldier offered a light to a guy and I quit not long after that, related or unrelated, 5) another time it was a woman with little kids and a lot of colorful luggage, and one of the little kids slip
ped, and the soldier lifted the kid up by the arm, and the mother said,“I can get that, but thank you,” and he said, “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen kids!” and it went on from there 6) and also a couple other occasions, one of which, I suspected, watching, was between the soldier and a person who was actually against the war but had normal hair, or was without whatever other sign might make the soldier think this wasn’t a good time to be helpful, so here’s this look I catch that I can’t tell by the soldier’s look whether or not he catches it, but the look comes from this deeply uncomfortable guy with normal hair who is looking, looking for a sign of something in the eyes of the soldier as he straightens himself out from having started to bend down to pick up the thing he dropped that the soldier got to first and is holding out for him, grinning, hovering, affable as a pudgy family man flying with kids 7) waiting—the Marine on this airplane this time—waiting, I predict, for the moment in the conversation, batted so far in my imagination like eyes bat, like Spanish fans aflutter, like a volley in badminton, airy and coy, when he can launch into the speech he has adopted from his commanders, as if from memory, but memorized with colloquialism as intact as euphemism, with moments of deviously composed acknowledgment of personal human frailty to make it all sound personal no matter who says it, 8) hoping—me, now—in a shameful way, that what will happen instead is this soldier will turn to me and say, “You know what? Fuck the Marines,” the way I’ve read so many of them feel but I have yet to encounter while traveling, and shock me into the wet dream of having been wrong.