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  For my grandson, Emery Charles Spearman

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  The Weave

  Prince of the Ascetics

  The Cynic

  Kamadhatu: A Modern Sutra

  Follow the Drinking Gourd

  Idols of the Cave

  Occupying Arthur Whitfield

  Welcome to Wedgwood

  Guinea Pig

  4189

  The Night Belongs to Phoenix Jones

  Night Hawks

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Find the good and praise it.

  —Alex Haley

  So the first thing we see about a story is its mystery. And in the best stories, we return at the last to see mystery again. Every good story has mystery—not the puzzle kind, but the mystery of allurement. As we understand the story better, it is likely that the mystery does not necessarily decrease; rather it simply grows more beautiful.

  —Eudora Welty, “The Reading and Writing of Short Stories”

  Introduction

  Although I’ve written ten novels since 1970, and published four that I felt were most successful in terms of philosophy, artistry, and spirituality, my writing roots are in the short story, beginning in 1965, when I was seventeen and published three stories (one of which I illustrated) in the literary section of my high school’s newspaper. Those stories, as juvenilia, are reprinted in a wonderfully rich anthology titled First Words: Earliest Writing from Favorite Contemporary Authors, edited by Paul Mandelbaum. The first of those stories, “Men Beneath Rags,” is about the irrepressible dignity and humanity of two homeless men. Another, “50 Cards 50,” dramatizes the feelings of a boy in Harlem who through black-themed Christmas cards purchased by his mother loses his childhood innocence when he is forced to awaken to the tribal ways adults partition the world along the lines of the illusion of race. And a third story, “Rendezvous,” is a kind of shaggy dog tale about how during the Cold War an American astronaut and the Soviet cosmonaut he loves must go to ridiculous lengths for their romantic trysts—on the moon.

  When I compare those “first words” to these fictions in my fourth story collection, Night Hawks, I realize that in the last fifty-two years my literary sensibilities have not changed a whole lot. Half a century later I still prefer to write and read imaginative stories that deepen my bottomless sense of wonder about the operations of consciousness and this mysterious universe it delivers to us moment by moment; stories that can be deadly serious or completely whimsical, playful and irreverent (I am, after all, an old cartoonist, and love humor and irony) yet also contain a measure of honest hope for the promise of our human species; stories mimetic or fantastic; stories that affirm the heroic struggles and triumphs of people of color; and, finally, stories that emphasize the tantalizing “what if . . .” element that is a mainstay of speculative fiction.

  In a magnificent anthology I recommend for all readers and writers, What Is the Short Story? edited by Eugene Current-Garcia and Walton R. Patrick, the authors make it abundantly clear that the tale has been attractive, as a form, for a very long time—to writers as diverse as Geoffrey Chaucer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Washington Irving—and within its long tradition we find other forms of short prose—the sketch, apologue, parable, anecdote, vignette, and fable, to name but a few. In May of 1842, in Graham’s Magazine, Edgar Allan Poe published a review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales entitled “On the Aim and Technique of the Short Story” and in that brilliant essay—as well as in his own work—defined the modern short story as a form distinct from the novel, novella, and other kinds of short prose. Poe asserted that the short prose narrative should require “from a half-hour to one or two hours” to read. Furthermore, he insisted that its writer,

  having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents—he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design.

  Clearly, most novels cannot be read in two hours or convey but a single emotional effect. Poe stressed the importance of “invention, creation, imagination, and originality.” To his demand that every word reinforce that overall effect, Poe added in another essay, “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), that “it is only with the denouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, of causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.” And in yet a third essay on Hawthorne, published in 1847, Poe condemned his use of allegory, saying, “If allegory ever establishes a fact, it is by dint of overturning a fiction.” What emerged from the theory and practice of this nineteenth-century genius, who has been credited with inventing both the modern short story and the detective story, was a craft that judged all examples of this form’s success by their “unity of effect.”

  Others built upon Poe’s insights, among them critic Brander Matthews, who, in his essay “The Philosophy of the Short-Story” (1901), attempted to give an even more precise definition: “the Short-story fulfills the three false unities of French classic drama: it shows one action, in one place, on one day. A Short-story deals with a single character, a single event, a single emotion, or the series of emotions called forth by a single situation.”

  From Poe’s attempt to define a form the short story quickly crystallized (some would say “ossified”) into a formula that enjoyed enormous popularity with the public and popular magazine editors at the turn of the century. Current-Garcia and Patrick make clear that what began in the late nineteenth century as a spirited exploration of a new form quickly degenerated into a rigidly commercial, prefabricated formula—“The kind of story most in demand was fast-paced and action-centered, one which moved rapidly to a sharp climax and exploded in a ‘surprise’ ending.” That calcification was fueled by editors of the 3,300 periodicals in circulation in America by 1885, and the close to forty writing craft manuals published between 1900 and 1930. One of my favorites of these is a truly mechanical approach created in 1928 by William Wallace Cook, who in 1910 wrote fifty-four nickel-and-dime novels, his book on “craft” being titled Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots, which had a significant influence on Alfred Hitchcock’s early film The Lodger.

  But readers hungered for this quickly digested new fiction. Indeed, its influence can be seen most clearly in O. Henry’s fiction, specifically his story of a classic reversal, “The Gift of the Magi.” It is present in the work of black America’s first renowned short story writer, Charles Chesnutt (read “The Wife of His Youth”), in W. W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw,” and in many of Rod Serling’s scripts for the Twilight Zone. In other words, so influential and powerful was this form-become-formula that for many twentieth-century readers it limned the contours of what a short story must be, and even today in novels, short stories, motion pictures, television episodes, comic books, and graphic novels, instances of it provide the entertainment values of suspense, surprise, and intensity.
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  Inevitably, a backlash against the rigidity and predictability of this design had to occur. In his studies on American literature, The Symbolic Meaning, D. H. Lawrence was at times savage in his criticism of the way Poe’s “philosophy of composition” mechanized the form of the story to such an extent that life’s mystery, spontaneity, and vitality were lost. These, of course, were crucial aesthetic aspects that defined Lawrence’s own brilliant contribution to the novel and short story. In “Edgar Allan Poe,” Lawrence decided that

  Poe is hardly an artist. He is rather a supreme scientist . . . He is not sensual, he is sensational. The difference between these two is a difference between growth and decay . . . As an artist Poe is unfailingly in bad taste—always bad taste. He seeks a sensation from every phrase or object and the effect is vulgar.

  For Lawrence, “A tale is a concatenation of scientific cause and effect. But in a story the movement depends on the sudden appearance of spontaneous emotion or gesture, causeless, arising out of the living self.” Most of those who rebelled in theory and practice damned the early twentieth-century magazine editors for demanding that short fiction fit such an “artificial” mold. “The very technique of the short story is pathological,” Herbert Ellsworth Cory stated in a 1917 article in Dial, “and titillates our nerves in our pathological moments. The short story is the blood kinsman of the quick-lunch, the vaudeville, and the joy-ride.” Two years earlier, Henry Seidel Canby bemoaned in The Atlantic Monthly that

  once started, the narrative must move, move, move furiously, each action and every speech pointing directly toward the unknown climax. A pause is a confession of weakness . . . Then the climax, which must neatly, quickly, and definitely end the action for all time, either by a solution you have been urged to hope for by the wily author in every preceding paragraph, or in a way which is logically correct but never, never suspected.

  For Canby, and many others, this “formula is rigid, not plastic as life is plastic. It fails to grasp innumerable stories which break the surface of American life day by day and disappear uncaught. Stories of quiet, homely life, events significant for themselves that never reach a burning climax, situations that end in irony, or doubt, or aspiration, it mars in the telling.”

  These judgments were shared by such fine storytellers as Sherwood Anderson. “As for the plot short stories of the magazines,” he wrote in 1924, “those bastard children of De Maupassant, Poe and O. Henry—it was certain there were no plot short stories ever lived in any life I had known anything about.” In his own fiction in Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson rejected the earlier emphasis on plot-driven storytelling and focused on what he called a form that more organically “grew out of the materials of the tale and the teller’s reaction to them.”

  Put simply, the early nineteenth-century efforts to define the short story, which placed it on its feet as a distinct form, led quickly to senility, and that in turn produced an outcry for reform, specifically for greater artistic freedom, by the 1920s. This revolt against formalism was, of course, pervasive in all the arts after World War I—in poetry’s free verse movement, the paintings of Picasso, and the sculpture of Eric Gill.I

  Fortunately for us, the aesthetics of the literary rebels of the 1920s and 1930s, some of whom worked in lonely isolation for years and were often misunderstood, carried the day, though in pop culture we are still awash in formulaic fiction. I’m sure their spirit of adventure and freedom—Poe’s emphasis, for example, on “invention, creation, imagination, and originality—sank deep into my storytelling DNA when I was a young reader and writer in high school. Yet elements of every phase of the short story’s aesthetic evolution, formal and structural (and elements from its predecessors, such as the tale, fable, fabliau, et cetera), can be glimpsed in the stories and novels I’ve published since 1965.

  It’s a form I’ve practiced every year, partly because I love its equation-like elegance and compression, and partly because for nineteen years I’ve written and performed a new work of short fiction for Bedtime Stories, a reading series I fathered for Humanities Washington to support their cultural and educational programs. That event has nudged me to create new works of fiction I would never have dreamed of doing on my own—stories in second-person, third-person, and first-person (audiences always seem to enjoy the greater intimacy and individuated voices afforded by first-person narratives); tales that stretch from ancient Athens, India, and America’s slavery era to modern-day America, Japan, and Afghanistan as well as into the future.

  All but one of the stories collected for the first time in this volume (but published individually in other places) were composed for Bedtime Stories and to be read in tandem with other writers within a two-hour time period. Some have received awards, like “The Weave,” included in the 2016 Pushcart Prize XL: Best of the Small Presses; or been anthologized, like “Prince of the Ascetics,” which appears in The Best Buddhist Writing (2008) and The Best Spiritual Writing (2010); and “The Cynic” is reprinted in The Responsibilities of Rhetoric (2010).

  The one exception is “4189,” a future dystopia tale I coauthored with the prolific science fiction writer Steven Barnes for The Burning Maiden anthology of horror stories (Vol. I). And, really, this is Steve’s story. He, a veteran and endlessly inventive entertainer, provided the meat-and-potatoes—the story idea, characters, and plot. I just added seasoning—a little philosophy and lyricism.

  As with my three previous story collections, it is my sincere hope that readers will enjoy these dozen tales in Night Hawks, and experience a little bit of the possibilities for wonder and mystery that made me fall in love with short fiction as a literary form so long ago.

  —Dr. Charles Johnson

  Seattle, Washington

  August 2017

  * * *

  I. Some material on the evolution of the short story is taken from my essay “Progress in Literature” in Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing.

  The Weave

  Three thieves battered through a wall, crawled close to the floor to dodge motion detectors and stole six duffel bags filled with human hair extensions from a Chicago beauty supply store. The Chicago Tribune reported Saturday that the hair extensions were worth $230,000.

  —Associated Press news item, July 12, 2012

  So what feeds this hair machine?

  —Chris Rock, Good Hair

  Ieesha is nervous and trying not to sneeze when she steps at four in the morning to the front door of Sassy Hair Salon and Beauty Supplies in the Central District. After all, it was a sneeze that got her fired from this salon two days ago. She has a sore throat and red eyes, but that’s all you can see because a ski mask covers the rest of her face. As she twists the key in the lock, her eyes are darting in every direction, up and down the empty street, because we’ve never done anything like this before. When she worked here, the owner, Frances, gave her a key so she could open and straighten up the shop before the other hairdressers arrived. I told her to make a copy of the key in case one day she might need it. That was two days ago, on September first, the start of hay fever season and the second anniversary of the day we started dating.

  Once inside the door, she has exactly forty seconds to remember and punch in the four-digit code before the alarm’s security system goes off. Then, to stay clear of the motion detectors, she gets down on the floor of the waiting room in her cut-knee jeans, and crawls on all fours past the leather reception chairs and modules stacked with copies of Spin, Upscale, and Jet magazines for the salon’s customers to read and just perhaps find on their glossy, Photoshopped pages the coiffure that is perfect for their mood at the moment. Within a few seconds, Ieesha is beyond the reception area and into a space, long and wide, that is a site for unexpected mystery and wonder that will test the limits of what we think we know.

  Moving deeper into this room, where the elusive experience called beauty is manufactured every day from hot combs and crème relaxers, she passes workstations, four on each side of her, all of them equipp
ed with swiveling styling chairs and carts covered with appliance holders, spray bottles, and Sulfur8 shampoo. Holding a tiny flashlight attached to her key ring, she works her way around manicure tables, dryer chairs, and a display case where sexy, silky, eiderdown-soft wigs, some as thick as a show pony’s tail, hang in rows like scalps taken as trophies after a war. Every day the customers at Sassy Hair Salon and the wigs lovingly check each other out, and then after long and careful deliberation, the wigs always buy the women. Unstated, but permeating every particle in that exchange of desire, is a profound, historical pain, a hurt based on the lie that the hair one was unlucky enough to be born with can never in this culture be good enough, never beautiful as it is, and must be scorched by scalp-scalding chemicals into temporary straightness, because if that torment is not endured often from the tender age of even four months old, how can one ever satisfy the unquenchable thirst to be desired or worthy of love?

  The storage room containing the unusual treasure she seeks is now just a few feet away, but Ieesha stops at the station where she worked just two days ago, her red eyes glazing over with tears caused not by ragweed pollen but by a memory suspended in the darkness.

  She sees it all again. There she is, wearing her vinyl salon vest, its pockets filled with the tools of her trade. In her chair is an older customer, a heavy, high-strung Seattle city councilwoman. The salon was packed that afternoon, steamed by peopled humidity. A ceiling fan shirred air perfumed with the odor of burnt hair. The councilwoman wanted her hair straightened, not a perm, for a political fund-raiser she was hosting that week. But she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—sit quietly. She kept gossiping nonstop about everybody in city government as well as the do Gabby Douglas wore during the Olympics, blethering away in the kind of voice that carried right through you, that went inside like your ears didn’t have any choice at all and had to soak up the words the way a sponge did water. All of a sudden, Ieesha sneezed. Her fingers slipped. She burned the old lady’s left earlobe. The councilwoman flew from her seat, so enraged they had to peel her off the ceiling, shouting about how Ieesha didn’t know the first thing about doing hair. She demanded that Frances fire her. And even took things a step farther, saying in a stroke of scorn that anyone working in a beauty salon should be looking damned good herself, and that Ieesha didn’t.