Strange Tales of Secret Lives Read online

  The only effect of my change in worldview, I see now, was to distance myself from the loyal employees who still remained, and for this I take full responsibility. My interrogations and probings were taken in the gracious spirit with which I offered them by most. However, some did not see my work for what it was. If I had to do it over again, I might have stayed more within the powers of my assistant managership, for twice the manager of the store reprimanded me for what he said was “intrusive and inappropriate behavior.”

  I couldn’t take him seriously, of course. How could I? He had gone in with Shane and the rest of them. Now it was not just Shane saying things about Sarajevo, it was other employees, although, as is the way with statements handed down, they became changed by the time I heard them from the other employees. One employee, a girl I rather liked until that moment, said, as we stood at the cash register, “I wonder if it’s snowing where Sara is.” “Sara?” I said. “Who is Sara?” “No one,” she said, gazing with a strange, strange look on her face out the window. It wasn’t until later that I caught the odd similarity.

  By this point, 17 months and 2 weeks into Shane’s Folly, the galley was finished. He had painted it, added caulking, furnished the galley, and even—of all the audacious things!—let some of the employees “ride” in the boat and practice pulling on the oars. They all, including the manager, seemed in awe of this oddity Shane had created; Shane himself seemed awed by it. Now all Shane was doing, it seemed, was waiting. As was I. I had by then decided all I could do was watch and wait and record, so that if a report was required by corporate HQ, I could provide one, as I am now doing. I am not violent by nature, nor persuasive; I am a simple assistant manager, devoted to the company, and to the idea of our bookstore. What else could I do? I could not stop Shane, although I was fairly sure Shane would stop himself.

  So Shane waited. One day, 17 months, 3 weeks, and 2 days since he had started, I overcame my mental objections long enough to stand in front of the galley with Shane. It glistened in the morning sun and the sail whipped in the wind. The sail had a huge “S” in red on it. What it stood for was not immediately clear to me. It could have stood for Shane, or it could have been a mocking “Sarajevo,” intended to get to me. The whole thing looked like a hideous monster made of wood, and no doubt un-seaworthy to boot. We were, after all, in the middle of Iowa. What could any of possibly know about building boats like this one? Especially using an old coin to design it?

  “What are you waiting for?” I asked Shane.

  Shane stood there with his hands in his pockets, smiling up at his folly.

  Then he stared at me, with what I can only call ill intent, and he said, “I’m waiting for the girl I kissed in the graveyard. Once she gets here, I’m gone. Because you know”—and as he said it I could hear the laughter in his voice, and the echo, as if he had been waiting for this moment for a long time—“Because you know, I’ll bet it isn’t snowing in Sarajevo now.”

  I’m afraid I broke down. I’m afraid almost eighteen months of this nonsense had gotten to me. I turned red. I stood there, trying to control myself, but could not.

  “You bastard!” I said. “You complete and utter bastard! What the hell are you talking about?! What can you possibly mean?! Why did you build this ridiculous ship? Why does the manager like you so much? You bastard! Bastard!”

  After a while, I could not stop saying bastard, although after a time I could not look Shane in the eyes any more, and my “bastard” became a groan and then a mumble and then a whisper. By the time I had stopped, Shane had gone inside, no doubt to spread more mutiny and to tell the employees who reported to me about my little episode.

  I admit, it was a clear violation of corporate policy for assistant managers—but it was in direct response to Shane’s own violation of hundreds and hundreds of corporate policies, repeatedly flaunted day after day, minute after minute, for months and months and months. What else could I do? My own mouth knew it had to mutiny against this mutiny.

  But when I went back inside, no one would talk to me, not even the manager, not even to reprimand me. And that is when I knew beyond any doubt how far things had gone.

  Exactly eighteen months after Shane started his little project, his folly, his insanity, he disappeared along with the Roman galley built using an image on a coin as his guide. It is believed that he took all of our bookstore employees with him, including the manager. When I got into work that dreary Monday morning, I had to open the bookstore myself. At first, I thought there must have been some emergency, someone from the bookstore in the hospital. But no: when I unlocked the back door to prepare for the daily delivery of books via truck, I saw the truth. The ship was gone. They must have gone with it. The first thought that went through my head was actually a series of images: of a girl, of a graveyard, of Shane, of Sarajevo, a place I’d never been. The second thought was a n actual thought, a treacherous one: A sudden pang in my heart, a sudden pain there—that I had been left behind, that they all had left me here, in Iowa, in our bookstore, while they left for . . . for what? As you know, it is still unclear, which is why you have asked for this report. To stop it from happening again? To explain what happened at our store? To track down Shane wherever he might be? This is unclear to me, too.

  But I know my thought, my pain, was just the last poison Shane brought to us making its way to the surface—my body, my brain, betraying me to Shane’s mutiny, just for a second. Just for that second when part of me wanted to join them. I know that now, and I have consulted the corporate policy book many times for guidance on how to stop it from ever happening again to me. I know it is not behavior appropriate in an assistant manager, even if it a betrayal of thought not deed.

  I suppose what bothers me the most, though, is the simple mystery behind what Shane said and the way in which Shane’s encounter in a graveyard will not leave me, and the way in which I still, now, six months after the disappearance, see that huge sail in my dreams, flapping in a sudden breeze. I wish I could stop thinking about it.

  If you need any more information, please do not hesitate to ask. I am happy to provide it.

  THE SECRET LIFE OF

  MATT CHENEY

  aka

  The Secret Life of The “Secret Admirer” of Jeff VanderMeer: a “Scrivener Who Is IMPATIENT with the SUN”

  This secret admirer, a scrivener familiar with the famous yet tragically underrated author Jeff VanderMeer, is IMPATIENT WITH THE SUN. The sun, it seems to the scrivener (who we will call “he” until otherwise informed . . .), is at best overrated, at worst a glorified light fixture. Why, he thinks, should anyone depend on so distant a source of illumination? One that disappears every night. The scrivener, being a scrivener, has more time to waste on pointless thinking than those who fulfill the demands of many another profession. This drives him to obsession — he does not want to rely on the sun unless he absolutely has to. He is sick of the darkness the sun leaves behind. He’s sick of the glare of sunrise and sunset, when it’s difficult to even discern a stoplight turning green. One day, he decides he has had enough. He’s not just IMPATIENT WITH THE SUN — he’s furious with the sun. So he buys three thousand candles for the yard and a hundred lamps for the inside of his house, and at dusk of one particularly annoying day, he lights the candles and turns on the lamps. In an hour, his lawn turns into a slick wash of wax. Not only do his lights short out, but the lights for the entire neighborhood go out. Undeterred, he plots his vengeance against the sun. He uses torches outside instead of candles. He uses batteries for huge outdoor flashlights, buys a generator. Something always goes wrong. Finally, he has no choice but to burn his house down at dusk. And this he does, cackling as the night is placed in temporary abeyance due to his grandiose obsession. When he is done, his house is a cinder, and the sun seems to appear the next morning just to mock him. The scrivener becomes a wanderer. He wanders here and there, hither and thither, preaching hatred of the sun. One day, he happens upon a bookstore where Jeff VanderMeer is doing
a reading. Jeff is giving a secret life to anyone who buys his short story collection. The scrivener is dirty and thirsty and hungry, and by now he has so succumbed to his obsession that he babbles uncontrollably to Jeff about his impatience with the sun, while the huge line behind the scrivener, waiting to receive Jeff’s benediction, grows impatient. Finally, the scrivener finishes his tirade. He says to Jeff, “Can you give me a secret life? If I scrape together the money to buy your book? And I will tell you my name then, the name of your most secret admirer.” Jeff scratches his left ear, the pre-arranged signal for dealing with insane people. His bodyguards take the scrivener, kicking and screaming — “I’m still IMPATIENT WITH THE SUN!” — out into the cold light of day to his not-so-secret fate . . .

  AFTERWORD: A REPORT ON THE SECRET LIVES OF VERY IMPORTANT PEOPLE:

  Everyone has a secret life. It may seem trite to re-state this, but sometimes it needs restating. Even the most banal individual has some sort of secret life, often a profoundly rich secret life. Can it be said that the more boring the public face of the person, the more fecund their clandestine existence? Not necessarily, but I’m sure it is true for some people. (Not that we’d ever know about it.) “The Important” often seem to lead lives so busy and so full that we cannot imagine they have the time to pursue secret lives. For make no mistake—one must pursue a secret life. Although some have secret lives thrust upon them, in most cases, the individual runs toward the secret life willingly, almost as a kind of release. At least, I find this is true in my case.

  Famous people who have either pursued a secret life or had one thrust upon them include William the Conqueror, P.T. Barnum, Teddy Roosevelt, Indira Gandhi, Kate Blanchett, P-Diddy, and George W. Bush. Of course, many countless thousands of others have led secret lives, but for some reason these seven have caught my magpie eye where others did not. The secret lives of Genghis Khan, Rasputin, Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Thatcher, Jennifer Aniston, William Hurt, and Bill Clinton, for example, do not excite nearly as much interest upon a thorough review and investigation. When charting these secret lives on the bulletin boards in my office—when cutting out various photographs and articles and spreading them out across the floor, when noting the connections between them with candle wax and gobs of paint—the first seven formed a rather pleasing if mysterious pattern, while the latter seven seemed only chaotic and random, with no order to speak of.

  Therefore, I did not choose the latter seven for my planned exhaustive book on secret lives of famous people—a companion volume to my book of fictional secret lives of “ordinary” people. (I use double quote marks around “ordinary” because in all of my travels and conversations with people around the globe, I confess to being unable to determine what “ordinary” or “normal” might mean; each person, in his or her way, has seemed extraordinary to me. I feel like Kinsey, faced with data that determined “norms” but not “normals.”)

  Of the seven I chose, the most challenging to research and investigate was, of course, William the Conqueror, simply because the trail was so old, and for this reason I haven’t gotten past writing about his secret life (70 pages of the book-in-progress).

  I received my first clues about William the Conqueror from examining pages from the Domesday Book at the British Library while on a book tour last year, and it has taken me until almost this very moment to track down the relevant details, to receive the confirmations and recognitions—including a look at a very old, inscribed, fragment of sword, said blade “shewed” to me by an ancient woman who claimed to be the Conqueror’s great-to-the-nth-degree granddaughter—that would allow me to publish my conclusions, with some degree of their accuracy.

  I believe, based on my findings—and certain emanations I felt whilst walking over places William would have trod—that during the dusks and evenings of his days, the Conqueror led a secret life as an ophichthusanthrope. In layman’s terms, William led a secret life as a giant eel. I cannot tell if his transformation was voluntary and he changed only at night so as to keep his ability a secret, or if the transformation was involuntary. If involuntary, was his transformation tied to the lunar cycles? To the way in which river water changes from season to season? Did he only change during the spring and summer, for example? Did silt or clarity compel or entice him? It is maddeningly impossible to tell from the written record, or even from anecdotal evidence.

  However, that he did change into an eel seems to me to be certain. There is, as mentioned, the evidence of the blade fragment—from the sword William broke at the Battle of Hastings. Inscribed on it in Sicilian (forecast of Norman conquest-to-come) is the phrase, “of earth and water, limbless yet fast, swimmer to the heart.” The serpent commonly attributed to the sword—an engraving of no small skill by the famed Antonio of Padua—looks to me, from the tail I saw on the sword fragment, much more like the sinuous coilings of an eel.

  Then there is the small matter of the Domesday Book (1086), one of England’s landmark “documents” in bound form. The Domesday Book qualifies as one of the most extensive land surveys of its time, edging out the Chinese “Counting of the Little Sticks” (1042; “little sticks” referring to the way in which the Chinese surveyors used the cut up delicate branches of the yee-han tree to count people in each village, cutting notches in each branch). The conquering Normans used the Domesday Book to determine the extent of their wealth, and to divvy up said wealth amongst their knights and nobles.

  At least, this is the official version of the reasoning behind the book. Look, however, at this entry in the book from Essex, which I examined at the British Library:

  Peter de Valence holds in domain Hecham, which Haldane a freeman held in the time of King Edward, as a manor, and as 5 hides. There have always been 2 ploughs in the demesne, 4 ploughs of the men. At that time there were 8 villeins, now 10; then there were 2 bordars, now 3; at both times 4 s 1, woods for 300 swine, 18 acres of meadow. Then there were 2 fish ponds and a half, now there are 5. One pond finds a stream three ox wide. At that time there was I ox, now there are 15 cattle and I small horse and 18 swine and 2 hives of bees. At that time it was worth 60s., now 4f-. 1 Os. When he received this manor he found only I ox and I planted acre. Of those 5 hides spoken of above, one was held in the time of Kind Edward by 2 freemen, and was added to this manor in the time of King William. It was worth in the time of King Edward 10s., now 22s., and William holds this from Peter de Valence.

  Although the Domesday Book wasn’t completed during William’s lifetime, sections of it were sent to him upon completion, and he is said to have examined these closely. The section quoted above has notations made by William’s personal scribe. These annotations are in a short-hand incomprehensible to modern scholars—perhaps it is even a cipher?—but one fact is of extreme interest: the notations all revolve around the mention of “Then there were 2 fish ponds and a half, now there are 5. One pond finds a stream three ox wide.” Next to the sentence about a “stream three ox wide” we find the letters “d-l-t” and, a little farther down, “open stream in winter”, the only recognizable words.

  Based on examining this passage and several others detailing freshwater ponds, lakes, rivers, streams, and brooks, it is my belief that part of the reason William the Conqueror undertook to create the Domesday Book, besides the benefit to his Norman knights, was to document every possible body of freshwater in the land, thus ensuring that wherever in his realm he might travel he would have access to his natural element while transformed into a giant eel. Thus, the notations, which, to my way of thinking, probably dealt with follow-up questions regarding the course of such bodies of water, their depth, their length, etc.

  There are the persistent rumors about William and his ilk before they became known as Sun Kings (or, Kings of the Sun, due to their Kingdom of the Sun in Sicily later in the same century). These rumors hinted of a secret society that the Norman knights and kings belonged to known as “Le Serpent.” However, the depiction of “Le Serpent” on the broken blade from the Battle of Hastings,
and even in the stylized banners in parts of the Domesday Book do not look like snakes so much as pale eels. (See also French and English folktales about the “eel folk” and the “eel life,” most of which date from William’s time and after.)

  Then there is the water component of Le Serpent’s rituals. According to an untitled document I happened upon in the British Library, found among the belongings of one of William’s spies before the battle of Hastings and brought to Edward the Confessor along with other intelligence, “Shall we immerse in waters like unto baptism. Ours is the moonlight, wherefore we writhe and receive the benefit of the waters, to rejuvenate and lengthen us; let us swim twice upon a moon and all our cares and wounds shall be gone.” (Translation mine.)

  This strange passage hints at an unusual scene indeed: of William and his knights in the water, dissolving from human flesh into the thick length of eels and cavorting like teenage boys at summer camp. I have this very humanizing image in my head of William shedding his armor or courtly attire at dusk and jumping energetically into a pond filled with his fellow knight-eels while yelling out the Medieval equivalent of “cannon ball!” (which just might have been “cannon ball”). It almost becomes science fictional to me, the more I think about it, as if from a bad science fiction movie: What if not eels at all, but extraterrestrials on vacation, inhabiting the bodies of Norman knights? But this is, of course, ridiculous and unsupportable. As a kind of surreal Jodorowsky image, however, it retains a certain amount of power for me. (Of course, I am not so invested in the legitimacy of my theory that I don’t recognize that William may have merely thought he was a giant eel.)