Last Days

INTRODUCTION. What Are You Doing, Where Are You Going, Who Are You? by Peter Straub

The first persons to mention the work of Brian Evenson to me were students in the Writing Division of the Columbia MFA program. Despite the handicap of never having taken or previously taught a course in creative writing, once a week during the month of October 2004, I conducted what Columbia called a "Master Class." In our first class session, not long after I learned that the campus bookstore had not yet received the students' copies of our text, I asked the fifteen people arrayed before me to name the writers they most admired, and boom, there it was, a whole new world. George Saunders, Jim Shepherd, Ken Kalfus, Gary Lutz, Brian Evenson, two or three others. . Of the writers they mentioned, I knew the work of only Mary Caponegro, Lydia Davis, and Ben Marcus, the director of Columbia's writing program. Over the next few days, I ordered a good number of books by these writers, among them Evenson's Altmann's Tongue. Soon the books arrived and I read them, or at least started reading them, at least sampled them. Some of the stories in the books Amazon faithful delivered to my doorstep really worked, I thought, really made the case for their author's vision by maneuvering language and the old tools of character, situation, rhythm, and presentation into brilliant combinations and patterns. Some others seemed less successful, and a very few clearly had been written for an audience that did not include me. (Their resolute bad temper as prose narratives closed the door, but these same stories struck me as extremely interesting, even beautiful, if read as poetry. Apparently, a radical reinterpretation of basic genre markers had been put into play utterly without my noticing it. In the intervening four years, I came across examples of this process I found more congenial, chief among them being Rosalind Palermo Stephenson's great story, "Insect Dreams.")

Evenson and Altmann's Tongue, though, seemed to me to operate on another level altogether. In these stories, stoniness, obduracy, harshness, madness, and violence take wing and fly, released into the air by a completely original imagination. The early Evenson stories tend to stop you in your tracks with flat, declarative reports of monstrosity. Bodies litter the ground. Murders take place, again and again. A man chews his way out of his coffin. A man named Horst advises our unnamed first-person narrator to eat the tongue of Altmann, whom the narrator has killed, whereupon the narrator kills Horst, admires his handiwork, and (I think) turns into a crow. Former concentration camp barbers hang out together. Alfred Jarry and Ernst Junger pop in and do things that might as well be called inscrutable. In a great story called "Two Brothers," a dying religious fanatic attempts to amputate his own gangrenous leg, but is murdered by one of his two sons, who cuts his eyes out of his head. Despite all the violence, which is somehow muffled by Evenson's spectacularly matter-of-fact delivery, the feel of the comic is never distant from the enterprise. It is not entirely clear where the comedy lies, unless it is in the extravagance of the grotesquerie. Very little else can be said to be extravagant.

In fact, an incredible amount is left out of these stories' rather sketchy narratives-landscapes, contexts in general, back stories, and history in general. The stories take place in a barren world that offers very little of the unspoken consolation provided by fictions in which the reader sees the characters park their (brand name and dashboard description supplied) cars, walk up their paths past the pansies and daffodils, open the fridge and take out a (brand name supplied) beer, then walk past a coffee table and a corduroy sofa to flop down onto a Barcalounger and point the remote at the TV. None of that ever happens in Evenson's fiction, unless the fridge contains a severed head and the corduroy is sticky with blood. The landscape inhabited by these Therons and Aurels and displaced writers is as stripped of particulars as the empty universe in which lovelorn Ignatz the mouse aimed bricks at the head of Krazy Kat. We might as well be in a desert. Also absent are the different, more profound consolations given by traditional narrative methods that establish tacit ground rules and expectations. Evenson was never at all interested in writing fiction that provided its own safety net. Without ever quite recognizing this habit, we enter fiction looking for the proscenium and the parted curtain, and when these comforting signs have been utterly erased, we readers have to deal with what turns out to be a productive anxiety. What does it say, to have violent acts depicted in such a thorough isolation, with such an absence of emotional affect? I don't mean "say" in some vaguely philosophical sense; I mean: what does it "say" to the reader? One has the sense of a requirement without much specificity as to the required. This in itself evokes a powerful requirement, that of suspending judgment, of maintaining openness to whatever thoughts are evoked in the reading process.

Before we move on to the book at hand, one other point should be made about Evenson's early, very striking fiction, namely that it clearly is the work of a writer just coming into his stride. Despite a pervasive nihilistic despair, the atmosphere and flavor of youth penetrate everything. This writer is willing to try almost anything that occurs to him, as long as it falls more or less within the circle of his aesthetics. Going wild makes him feel good, and he believes that when they read the results other people will feel good, too. Experiments with compression and duration tempt him. There are passages in these stories that, no matter how seriously their author took them, how much he understood to be at stake at even the simplest word-to-word level, undoubtedly made him laugh out loud with pleasure.

Throughout stories published over the six or seven years that followed Altmann's Tongue, as well as in the more mature and developed work Evenson has been producing since Dark Property of 2002, he has been demonstrating, illustrating, and justifying a consistent faith in the operations of the kinds of extremity present in his work from the beginning. The Open Curtain, published in 2006, uses a character's psychic disorder to push the novel into actual red-eyed, hell-for-leather narrative extremity, the only occasion I have ever seen in which a novel stops in its track and hunkers down to question its most elemental components. It's beautiful. It's stunning. It takes your breath away. The moment I read it, I knew that I had to steal it, and so I did, in the novel now sprawled out on my workbench/operating table, its little heart struggling to beat while its guts squirm beneath the editorial screwdrivers.

Extremity radiates through every inch of Last Days, though you would never know it from the book's odd, deliberate tone. This is a novel made of two novellas joined at the hip, where they share a common seam. When one ends, the other begins, and we are within a new fictional body, one that perfectly remembers all that took place in the body we just left. The narrative manner picks up with exactly the same gestures, i.e., minimal to none, and the same intention, to import into the Evensonian world a version of the hardboiled detective novel, that its genre-specific stances, devices, and expectations might be upended, ignored, denied, and mocked with the straightest of faces.

With its traditional concerns for the restoration of order and proper assignment of blame, its well-nigh universal depiction of its detective-protagonists as agents of reason, personal honor, and proper communal ethics as represented by the marginalized, the detective novel makes an odd vessel for representation of extreme acts and extreme psychic states. In perhaps the greatest and most probing of all PI novels, Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, the only psychic extremity on view-apart from Philip Marlowe's accelerating loneliness and disgust-is the product of his frequent beatings and consequent spells of unconsciousness. You would have to go to one-off eccentrics like Harry Stephen Keeler and John Franklin Bardin to find in detective fiction anything faintly comparable to the unflinching oddness, morbidity, and perversity of Brian Evenson in full spate, as in Last Days.

The novel begins with an after-the-fact recognition that, as far as our protagonist is concerned, everything was lost right from the beginning. It's pretty striking, this first sentence: It was only later that he realized the reason they had called him, but by that time it was too late for the information to do him any good. ". . only later. . too late. ." The repetition lets us know that we really are in the Last Days, which begin at the very moment when it has become too late for intervention. In the Last Days, the apocalyptic circumstances gathering around us can no longer be reversed: don't start looking around for that Bible now, sorry, it's too late for herpicide. It is precisely this situation in which Evenson's detective, "Mr. Kline," more a non-hero or un-hero than hero or anti-hero, finds himself enmeshed in the novel's first few paragraphs.

Reluctant detectives, PIs who take cases on despite the feeling that they cannot end well, are far from uncommon in the mystery genre, but Kline takes this initial hesitation to its logical limit. Like most ruthlessly logical end-points, it turns out to be savagely irrational. He flatly refuses, a number of times, the job his callers are offering to him. He has two reasons for his refusals. Most days, Kline is too depressed to get out of bed. There is an excellent reason for his depression, namely that his left hand was severed by a foe, "the gentleman with a cleaver," who watched stunned as Kline cauterized his stump on a hotplate before shooting him in the eye. The depression occupies the precise amount of time it takes him to adjust to his traumatic loss.

The second reason Kline refuses the offer of a job is that he in no way needs the money. On his way out of the room he snaffled up several hundred thousand dollars. Not only does he not see taking the money as an act of theft, he regards it as "a profoundly moral act in a kind of moral, biblical, old testament sense: an eye for a hand, and a bag of money thrown in." Being without forgiveness or mercy, utterly cold-hearted and completely without nuance, and steeped in a code of well-earned retaliation, this version of the moral life far outdoes the simple desire for justice and clarity that animates most fictional private detectives. PIs like Marlowe and Lew Archer seek a kind of historical understanding, familial and societal, of the various messes wished upon them by their clients; as far as we can see, Kline is incapable even of conceiving of, much less desiring, such an understanding.

In his case, the familiar reluctance to take up a matter that seems too complex, too simple, or too draining to be rewarding is replaced by the detective's outright and obstinate refusal. In the end, his callers, Ramse and Gous, both of whom are at least as mutilated as he, must drag him out of bed, stuff him into a car, and deliver him to the man who set them in motion, Borchert. At every opportunity, Kline tells his captors that he wants out, he wants to go home. They want him to investigate a great crime, the murder of their founder and Borchert's only superior, Aline. Kline informs Borchert that he wishes to go home, but basically by persuading him to listen to a few of the details, Borchert gets him involved in the case. And then, protest though he does, he is involved, enmeshed. Much later in the story, Kline's request to go home has been replaced by the frequently voiced desire never to be bothered again by these lunatic people, and Paul-the prime figure in a competing band of lunatics, the Pauls-informs him that to be left alone, all he must do is kill every member of the Gous-Ramse-Borchert faction. And so far into blood and madness has he wandered that he agrees to commit mass murder. In the second half of this novel, Kline does very little else but murder people: the section "Last Days" accumulates a great many sentences that end with variations on the phrase, "and then he killed him with the cleaver." By Kline's hand, nearly everyone in the Borchert faction and the Pauls perishes; a severed head, Borchert's, has been dropped into a bucket and set on fire; behind the locked door of a burning building, the few who would have survived Kline's bloody progress through their world wind up screaming for help. This is where strict adherence to logic gets you.

Along the way, the plot and, often, the nature of the dialogue warp this insanely grim progress into pure dizziness. Betrayals are common elements in crime novels, so about halfway through "The Brotherhood of Mutilation," Kline is subjected to a gigantic, central betrayal that is echoed by a series of smaller treacheries that spin off into yet more minor yet still homicidal betrayals between secondary or even tertiary characters. As this pattern suggests, repetition of events both large and small forms the spine of this book. Sometimes the repetition is a mirroring, sometimes it plays out as an inversion. If early in the book Kline is surprised to discover Ramse and Gous in his apartment, late in the book he will find Gous cowering there: the act of self-mutilation that brings everything in its wake is echoed, at the midway point of the book, by another greatly like it. This constant ticking away of rhyming events often fades back into the swirl of outrageousness, improbability, and brutality that accompanies Kline as he is dragged back and forth between the opposing camps, but when we are reminded again of its presence, the awareness of frequent rhymes has a formalizing effect. We cannot take these murders and dismemberments at face value, for they have in effect been set to music.

In Last Days, people tend to speak in short, urgent bursts. They favor the single-sentence paragraph. This tendency evokes two contradictory modes, the hard-boiled and the comic, which inevitably ends with the comic tone undermining the echoes of Philip Marlowe and Mike Hammer. Here is a bit of dialogue with a drunken Ramse and Gouse and their bartender:

"Ramse," said Kline. "Trust me and listen."

Ramse opened his mouth, then closed it again.

"Aline is dead," Kline said.

"Aline is dead?" said Ramse, his voice rising.

"Is that possible?" said Gous. "How is that possible?"

"Or not," said Kline. "Maybe not."

"Well," said Gous. "Which is it?"

"What did you say about Aline?" asked the bartender.

"Nothing," said Kline.

"Oh, God," said Ramse, shaking his head. "Dear God."

"Aline is either alive or dead," said Gous to the bartender.

"Be quiet, Gous," said Kline.

"Well, which is he?" asked the bartender. "There's a big difference, you know."

This knockabout minimalist ping-pong reminds me of Hemingway, but far more of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and even Joe Orton and David Mamet. It also seems deliberately to refer back to the Marx Brothers and the way the patter of 1930s vaudeville and burlesque comedians was represented in the 1950s by survivors like Bert Lahr and Ed Wynne, also by comedic teams like Abbot and Costello. We are not far from "The party of the first part" and "Who's on first?"

And let me just say this: cliff-hanger chapter endings, beautifully executed. It's like watching a magician snatch away a tablecloth without disturbing a formal, full-dress setting for eight.

This comedy, submerged but fully present, serves as an abiding corrective to the gravity of Last Day's actual theme, which concerns the fanatical belief-systems and zealotry encouraged by some organized religions. The "mutilates" who thrust unwilling Kline into contact with their fellows count their spiritual progress in the number of joints, digits, eyes, tongues, and limbs they have amputated. Having (initially) lost only a hand, Kline would be a lowly, standard-issue one, but for the respect he generated by cauterizing his own stump. For a time, it seems that self-cauterization may become a fad amongst the mutilates. Schisms, most earnestly to be avoided, threaten to destroy a hard-won accord. The faithful are as prone to valorized acts of self-injury as high-school girls, and any extra suffering means another step closer to the divine. According to the original Paul, leader of the Pauls, he and the other two founders, the church fathers, were inspired by the admonition in Mark 9:43 to have a go at cutting off an offending hand, and understood immediately that they were on to something big. While Paul felt that a single act of mutilation satisfied the demands of the sacred realm, the others, Borchert and Aline, embarked on the course that led the Brotherhood to its present system of validation. (Aline, the most validated, therefore holiest and official spokesman of the group, is little more than a whittled torso and an eyeless, earless, noseless, tongueless cranium.) All of the bloodshed in the book flows from this original doctrinal schism-the men most prominent in this religion are those most prone to treachery and homicide.

Evenson's detective witnesses and takes part in all kinds of the childish mumbo-jumbo new faiths and other fraternal organizations employ to set themselves apart, inspire loyalty, and guarantee security for the faithful brotherhood. In varying degree, fraternal organizations from Skull & Bones to the Raccoon Lodge ritualize the appearance and observances of their membership. Some groups have actual uniforms, others content themselves with shared choices that add up to an ad hoc uniform. Have you seen Scientologists on the march in their Florida redoubt, members of the New York Athletic Club marching into their mansion on Central Park South, or Shriners whooping it up in a convention hotel? They don't really dress like other people, they dress like themselves. Ramse and Gous make Kline put on gray trousers, a white shirt, and (a brilliant detail) a red clip-on tie. That's what they all wear, the uniform of the anonymous white American drudge. Kline takes this fact in for a moment, then forgets it. So does the reader. The point of the uniform is that it is instantly forgotten.

Before the detective can be introduced to Borchert, certain ritual satisfactions must be accomplished at the gate. It is the guard's duty to enquire, "What is wanted?" and the applicant's duty to respond with the self-congratulatory formula, "Having been faithful in all things, we come to see he who is even more faithful than we." This rubbish sounds at least faintly parodic, but it is utterly surpassed by the formulaic rigmarole that goes on in the fortress of the Pauls, where the individuation of given names is erased and every remark of a person of higher status must be examined to determine if it is an orphic or parabolic bit of higher learning, a "teaching."

"What's your name?" Kline asked.

"I'm Paul," said the man.

"You're not," said Kline.

"We all are," he said.

Kline shook his head. "You can't all be Paul," he said.

"Why not?" said the man. "Is this a teaching?"

"A teaching?" Kline said. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Should I write it down?"

"Write what down?"

"'You can't all be Paul.' And whatever else comes thereafter from your lips."

"No," said Kline, a strange dread starting to grow in him. "I don't want you to write anything down."

"Is that too a teaching?" said Paul. "'Write nothing down'?"

A strange dread is right-the Pauls have decided he is the Messiah, and they intend to give him the honor of a crucifixion. The other side is just as horrifying, the only difference in their plans for Kline being that they wish to crucify him as Barabbas, not Jesus. In two regards he does seem perhaps to be singled out by a larger force: Kline could be seen as harrowing an all-but literal hell as he goes about his murderous business, and no matter how great the odds against him, it comes to seem that he cannot be killed. So as he sinks deeper and deeper into a river of blood, in the process completely aware that he is losing, then has lost, his soul, Kline may either actually have become a holy figure, the new Messiah who brings not life but the gruesome Last Days and End Times, or he may be completely deluded, off his rocker, a nut case whack job. Evenson, thankfully, lets the ambiguity stand.

Instead of resolving Kline's worldly status, he does something far more interesting. Reeking (one imagines) of smoke, covered in blood, Kline listens to the sound of the approaching sirens and, having nothing else to do, walks off. Soon he begins to jog, then settles into straightforward running, asking himself Where now? and What next? The last protagonist of a great work of American fiction to ask himself these questions so resonantly was probably Huckleberry Finn.

In the afterword written for the 2002 University of Nebraska Press republication of Altmann's Tongue, Evenson describes what befell him when the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, the institution in which he was raised to be a faithful and believing Mormon, decided to pose itself against his work, which it saw to be indulgent toward violence and depraved in its outlook. (It seems that none of this was made very explicit. The Church retreated into a prolix bureaucratic boondoggle intended to wear him down and ended by requesting that he prove his good faith by ceasing to write. The man was mugged by his own religion.) It is difficult not to frame the sects in Last Days as bleakly parodic versions of Mormonism, but to do so would be more than a little reductive. Sure, Mormonism is in there, but so is a great deal else.

Early on in his afterword, Evenson speaks of a period when he was living in Seattle, studying and writing. He had agreed to serve as a bishopric counselor and was sometimes asked to perform the tasks of a transient bishop. In this role, he picked up stranded, homeless, sometimes derelict people at certain specified locations and simply drove them around the city, hearing them out and trying to figure out how best to help them. Listening to what they had to say was central to his mission as he defined it. At least once, he felt that the man beside him represented serious danger.

The conclusion to his afterward pushes this situation up several notches:

"You have been driving in the car, a man pointing a gun at your head, and now he has left the car and you are free. Everything around you has gone strange. You are no longer in the same world you were in before the gun bruised your temple. You have the suspicion that you are no longer yourself.

"Now, now that you are free (if it really is you), the question is, How do you make sense of the rest of your life?"

What are you doing, where are you going, who are you? After great extremity, everything in your life should be seen anew. The objects are pretty much the same, except of course that they contain within them the seeds of what happened to you, but the maps around and to them have all been redrawn. You can get lost in a second. Who you are is a puzzle it may take the rest of your life to solve, and in the end it may turn out that you are merely the person who spent his life trying to work out the puzzle of who he was. But that. . that's not nothing.