A City Made of Words Read online

  Paul Park

  Shortlisted for the

  Nebula Award

  World Fantasy Award

  Arthur C. Clarke Award

  Tiptree Award

  Sidewise Award for Alternate History

  Theodore Sturgeon Award

  “Paul Park is one of the most gifted and subtle story writers I know.”

  —Jonathan Lethem

  “Entering a Paul Park universe means slipping into an eerily compelling plane where nearly palpable visions transform as disturbing as the images in a sexually charged fever dream.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Paul Park’s short stories are blunt, funny, distressing, strange, true—all these qualities, often all at once.”

  —Kim Stanley Robinson

  “Genre writing is both a liberation and a confinement. If those who don’t read science fiction could discover Paul Park, they would find a writer as complex, as skillful, as ambitious, and as many-faceted as any they would find under any rubric.”

  —John Crowley

  PM PRESS OUTSPOKEN AUTHORS SERIES

  1. The Left Left Behind

  Terry Bisson

  2. The Lucky Strike

  Kim Stanley Robinson

  3. The Underbelly

  Gary Phillips

  4. Mammoths of the Great Plains

  Eleanor Arnason

  5. Modem Times 2.0

  Michael Moorcock

  6. The Wild Girls

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  7. Surfing the Gnarl

  Rudy Rucker

  8. The Great Big Beautiful

  Tomorrow Cory Doctorow

  9. Report from Planet

  Midnight Nalo Hopkinson

  10. The Human Front

  Ken MacLeod

  11. New Taboos

  John Shirley

  12. The Science of Herself

  Karen Joy Fowler

  13. Raising Hell

  Norman Spinrad

  14. Patty Hearst & The Twinkie Murders: A Tale of Two Trials

  Paul Krassner

  15. My Life, My Body

  Marge Piercy

  16. Gypsy

  Carter Scholz

  17. Miracles Ain’t What They Used to Be

  Joe R. Lansdale

  18. Fire.

  Elizabeth Hand

  19. Totalitopia

  John Crowley

  20. The Atheist in the Attic

  Samuel R. Delany

  21. Thoreau’s Microscope

  Michael Blumlein

  22. The Beatrix Gates

  Rachel Pollack

  23. A City Made of Words

  Paul Park

  24. Talk like a Man

  Nisi Shawl

  “A Short History of Science Fiction” was first published in the collection Other Stories (PS Publishing, 2015).

  “A Resistance to Theory” was first published online at Conjunctions.com, November 2014.

  “Blind Spot” was first published in “Other Aliens,” Conjunctions 67, Fall 2016.

  “Creative Nonfiction” was first published in Asimov’s 42, no. 5–6, May/June 2018.

  “A Homily for Good Friday” was delivered at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Williamstown, MA.

  “A Conversation with the Author” and “Climate Change” are original to this volume.

  A City Made of Words

  Paul Park © 2019

  This edition © PM Press

  Series Editor: Terry Bisson

  ISBN: 978-1-62963-642-9

  LCCN: 2018949075

  Cover design by John Yates/www.stealworks.com

  Author photo by Deborah Brothers

  CONTENTS

  A Short History of Science Fiction, or The Microscopic Eye

  Blind Spot

  A Conversation with the Author

  Climate Change

  “Punctuality, Basic Hygiene, Gun Safety”

  Paul Park Interviewed by Terry Bisson

  A Resistance to Theory

  A Homily for Good Friday

  Creative Nonfiction

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  A Short History of Science Fiction, or The Microscopic Eye

  This course was taken with John Palmer, and the true secret of his mysterious power of vision detected in an instant…. The eye examined was exceedingly flat, very thin, with large iris, flat lens, immense petira, and wonderfully dilated pupil. The effect of the shape was at once apparent. It was utterly impossible to see any object with distinctness at any distance short of many thousands of miles.

  —W.H. Rhodes, “The Telescopic Eye,” 1876

  HE WAS THERE WHEN I arrived in the morning, there when I left at night: an old man who had staked out as his place of business a square yard of sidewalk next to the revolving door, in which location he sold pencils and matches when he had them. Or if he did not he stood there anyway, marking time as did so many in those days, dressed in a threadbare blue suit and dirty collar, wearing around his neck a neatly lettered placard—“Blind.”

  All winter and into spring, in downtown San Francisco I saw him every day outside the bank where I worked. At that time I had taken up the habit of attending more than the usual complement of religious services. Nowadays I don’t participate at all. But that year I was a vestryman at an Episcopal chapel, and for Holy Week I was in charge of the Maundy Thursday celebration, during which our rector intended to wash the feet of twelve lucky indigents. Our chapel sponsored a soup kitchen where I could have easily found the requisite number or indeed any number at all, the evening crowd outside the basement was so large. But I was not drawn to these citizens, farmers from Texas and Oklahoma who had come to San Francisco as a last resort, as if the city were a mesh at the bottom of a drain. No matter how poor they were, they could always find money for tobacco and alcohol. Their leathery skins and flat accents were alien to me, and I was concerned, also, by the prospect of awakening any hope at all in them, any expectation of special treatment or potential employment, by their participation in what was after all a useless kind of spectacle.

  Instead, I imagined I could explain myself better to the match-seller outside my building, where I worked as a loans officer. His clothes marked him as a city resident, and his voice as he thanked me on some mornings for my nickel or even once my dime seemed to suggest a native of California. A deserving unfortunate, I thought, the kind of person our Lord specifically enjoins us to protect.

  You will forgive me if I speak ironically. I was just about at the end of my tether, and I thought his blind eyes would register no disappointment. I did not ask him on Monday or on Tuesday, but on Wednesday evening I stopped in front of him to stammer out my request. The crowds in the streets had diminished, and we stood alone beside the granite front. He raised his face to look at me, a gaunt face commanded by enormous, empty, bulging, malformed eyes. But for a moment I wondered if he was blind at all.

  I introduced myself.

  “John Palmer,” he said. He was past sixty, I thought, perhaps closer to three score and ten. “Culp Hill,” he suggested when I asked where he was from, a neighborhood that, with his name and the calm gaze of his enormous eyes seemed to tear something from my memory.

  “Sir, I am not a beggar or a vagrant. That makes it hard for me to accurately represent one of the Apostles, if I understand you …” He continued on like that, his voice gentle and good-natured, but by that time I had stopped listening. His eyes shone like lenses and I peered down into them. Could it be?

  I interrupted him. “You’re Johnny Palmer,” I cried. “You’re the boy who saw the men in the moon.”

  He winced. But I ignored his stricken look as I continued. “You’re the boy who saw the cities on
Mars. My father saved the clippings. Your picture was in the newspapers.”

  Laboriously, insincerely, he smiled. “Not a boy, sir.”

  Someone had turned on the lights in the restaurant across the street. The blind man shrugged, opened his palms apologetically. “I believed it,” I cried. “I believed every word. Oceans of quicksilver, colored creatures sliding back and forth across the horizon line. And then Percival Lowell and his Martian canali. We thought he had confirmed your observations.”

  “Percival who?”

  He kept on smiling that same false, ingratiating smile. But at moments I thought I could detect something else, some wisp of a genuine feeling that was both melancholy and reflective. But perhaps I was mistaken, and it was my mood that fluctuated as I recalled my childish hopes for worlds beyond this one, unimaginable frontiers.

  In 1876, when he was nine years old, Johnny Palmer was examined at his parents’ house on Culp Hill, in what was then the south end of the city. A committee from the School of Sciences, as well as several independent oculists, had subsequently published their results. Nature had flattened the boy’s eyeballs to a wonderful degree, they claimed, so as to cause a type of presbyopia or farsightedness. His mother had thought him blind from birth, though sensitive to light. It was only when he turned his gaze into the face of the full moon that he was able to see clearly, at a distance of 240,000 miles.

  “They turned in circles,” I said brokenly. “The lunarians, you called them. Millions of them together made patterns of polygonal shapes. I remember—”

  “Do you? I don’t. Not anymore.”

  His face, rinsed in the orange light from across the street, seemed beyond hope. His chin was covered in pale stubble, and there was a hole in the brim of his hat. His eyes gleamed like lanterns in his wasted face. “Please, sir,” he said finally. “If you have a dime, I could get something to eat.”

  I looked away. A taxicab was prowling down the center of the street. I put up my hand. “So it was all lies,” I murmured. “I suppose it must have been all lies. No one believes it anymore.”

  But then I wondered why he seemed so sad. As if to duplicate my thoughts, he murmured, “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think it was lies.”

  Always a sucker, I waved the taxi on and then turned back to him. “It’s just I can’t remember,” he said.

  But at that moment, as it happened, I looked up to see the nimbus of the moon off toward the east, a patch of light between the buildings. So excited I was, I grasped hold of the man’s sleeve and pulled him down the street, and in the larger sky by the cigar stand at the corner I could see the half moon above me, caught in a net of wires.

  “Look,” I said.

  I let go of him, and he stood smoothing his cuffs, staring down at the clogged gutter. “I don’t remember,” he said. And when he raised his face, I thought the changing light had bleached away all trace of resentment or ingratiation. “They took me away.”

  “Who did?”

  “I don’t know. I was nine years old. Ten years old, eleven. They took me places all the time, asked me questions. Examined me. So at first I didn’t realize they were different. They had foreign voices, but I didn’t guess. Not at first. How could I guess? They came to my house at night, took me from my mother—I thought it was the East Coast. New York City, some such place. But it was a long way on the train, a longer way on the cold ship, and when I came out—do you know what? Up above my head I could see the entire promontory. I could see the city, right here. The whole length of Market Street and all the people, for the first time. Sausalito, across the gate. Like a map come alive. My parents’ house, and all down the coast when the clouds pulled away. I could look at it forever.”

  There was a bus, a bray of horns. There were the headlamps of the oncoming traffic.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  But then as I grasped the significance of his remarks, I found myself trembling. “You are lying to me,” I said.

  He smiled, shrugged, made that peculiar gesture with his hands. I felt like striking him, old, blind, and hungry though he was. Fleetingly I wondered if the chapel was open, and I could run over there and sit down on one of the wooden benches near the altar, though off to one side. I’d sit under the stone vault and watch the candles.

  “Tell me,” I said, always a sucker. And he stood in the roadway as the people hurried past, and he told me how the people there had built some kind of observatory for him. When the round balloon of the Earth floated above the horizon, he had described it to them as carefully as he could.

  “How did they bring you to that place?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What was it like?”

  He smiled. “It was cold. I couldn’t see them. I couldn’t see anything. You must understand.”

  By this time I had brought him back up the street to the restaurant. I had sat him down and ordered him the blue-plate special, which was sausages and beans. He ripped pieces of bread from the loaf. He told me how long it was since he had eaten a hot meal. This was not the kind of food that I enjoyed or trusted, so I drank water. I have always had a sensitive stomach, and I disliked the sight of the cooks and their stoves, the flare of their greasy fires. The place was so small, the kitchen was in plain view. Palmer was lucky he was blind, I thought, and then chastised myself for being so uncharitable. But I was angry, more and more angry as he kept on talking. Did the fellow take me for a fool? Men from Mars! How had they come here? Why had they taken him and brought him back? What language did they speak?

  “I was no more use to them,” he said between mouthfuls. How sad he seemed! “It was because my eyes were changing. I have a medical condition,” he said, raising his face, staring across the seamed and pitted table, his eyes bulging out at me. A medical condition, I thought—that was the least of it! “Progressive myopia,” he said mildly. “It took a long time to develop.”

  I should say so! I sat back in my chair. He pushed his empty plate away, sipped from his coffee cup, put it down as well. He wiped his lips, refolded his napkin, while at the same time he was telling me about a happy portion of his life when his vision was corrected with ordinary spectacles, the lenses weaker every year. Then for a day or so he could see the faces of his wife and children unaided and at any distance. This was a contented time, between the earthquake and the great war. I also remembered it.

  “And now?” I asked. I couldn’t help myself.

  For an answer, he lowered his face toward the surface of the table. I thought for a moment that, sated, he was going to put his cheek down on the filthy surface and fall asleep. I thought also it was possible he had gulled me this whole time. Drunk all day, perhaps, now he was collapsing to unconsciousness. Except he pressed the point of his nose into the wood, and then turned his head so that the lens of his eye was no more than a quarter of an inch from the grimy tabletop. “Do you know what I see?” he asked.

  “God, don’t tell me,” I said.

  But he paid no attention. He could not keep from telling me. Nor did his tone contain any lingering admixture of diffidence or apology. Instead, he seemed almost proud of his disease, which had progressed so far as to enable him to see entire villages and municipalities of microbes, armies of them, serried ranks, marching and seething over the greasy plain. “They cannot be still,” he said, describing what he saw, a revolution or a civil war, a navy sailing on a pool of grease, a citadel succumbing under a mass of tiny assailants. “Fat ones, thin ones,” he said, seizing hold of my hand in an unbreakable grip, pulling it toward him and lowering his eye almost to the surface of my skin. “I see them,” he said. And I would not have been able to let go except he let me go, let me leave him, finally, and stumble out into the street, where I stood wiping my fingers in my handkerchief and rubbing my palms together.

  Blind Spot

  “THE THING IS, YOU can’t tell the difference. At least not from the outside. Because of interbreeding and genetic manipulation.”
r />   “What are you saying now?”

  “It’s a moral difference. That and perception. They have sharp ears, for one thing. Hear things from far away. Walk past a house from the outside, just along the garden walk, hear what people say around corners. Hear people in their bedrooms.”

  “That’s quite funny, the thing you do.”

  “What?”

  “Using the same word in different ways so close together. From the outside. Difference. Walk.”

  “That’s what I meant,” he said. “They’re very sensitive.”

  By “garden walk” he meant the crazy paving next to the stone wall, chest high. There were hollyhocks. By “around corners” he meant because the bedroom faced the street. The stone wall was in the back. You got to it across the meadow through the butter-and-eggs.

  “Please go on.”

  “Because they are reptilian, originally, they have a nictitating membrane. Some of them do. It’s very quick. It slides across. Yellowish, I suppose.”

  Or else he meant because the bedroom was on the first floor, the windowsill high above the ground. The house itself was yellow stucco and a tile roof.

  “No.”

  “I’m telling you. It was in the book. Long tongues. They smell through their tongues.”

  Roses among the hollyhocks around a corner of the wall.

  “And you can’t figure out by looking?”

  “What do you mean? They can see through walls.”

  “I mean by looking at them.”

  “Not anymore. It’s been too long. They could be you or me. Thirty-six hundred years is their planet’s orbit, and now the first ones have assimilated. But guess what?” he said. “They’re coming back.”

  An older man, he stood by the window looking out onto the street. Gauze curtains. The other one lay on his back across the saffron bedspread. Tufted chenille. He smiled. “Go on,” he said, “pull it again. Pull it harder.”

  “I’m telling you, they started everything. This was in Mesopotamia. Before that we were just living in caves. I’m speaking of the wheel, written languages, agriculture. They were technologically advanced. They’d have to be, coming from outer space. But not just that. They could see the whole past, the whole future, the whole world laid out. Worlds beyond worlds. Like it was written in a book.”