I'm going to read part of a chapter of my new novel
which got started by writing the fairy tale for the book.
The story Body Without Soul that's
in the fairy tale anthology was to my great happiness
the inception of this new novel.
And Kate gave me permission to do
this sort of unorthodox thing.
So this is-- I'm going to read-- this is about half
of a chapter that comes a little ways into the book.
And it really I think requires no explanation or introduction
I hope.
It's called The Rain of Beads.
Beads like necklace.
The story of the rain of beads goes back far enough
to seem like it never really happened.
The girl I first heard it from was always telling stories.
She was one of the older girls and all the little girls
were in awe of her.
We were sitting on the porch stoop one night
in late summer trading cards.
The cards were separated into packs according to category.
Still lives, famous paintings, horses, dogs.
Most of the trading cards have been bought in a store
and had an unpleasant texture making
them less desirable than the Joker
stolen from the decks of cards everyone's parents used
for bridge or poker.
These playing cards were larger and smoother to the touch
and often came in pairs.
The girl wanted a black horse to complete the pair
with her white horse.
Her name was Janice.
Generally speaking, the adults on the block
considered her a liar.
She said her mother beat her with a Willow branch
and she had stripes on her back to prove it.
She said humans have been right when
they said the world was flat and round like a coin
and you could fall off the edge.
Many things everyone had been told
weren't real turned out to be real.
The world had edges but you couldn't
see them going only when you were trying to come back.
Janice also said she had a brother who died of leukemia
and that amazingly enough turned out to be true.
Like everyone else, she could push buttons on her console
and find out whatever she wanted to know
about anybody or anything.
For this reason she kept everything exceptional
about herself hidden.
Janice's parents were at work all day long.
She was their only living child and they loved her dearly
though the older she got the harder
it was for them to show it.
Her mother worked in a lab at the university.
Her father sold the other fathers clothing.
The newlyweds in the house that was the other half of theirs
were paid to keep an eye on her when she got home from school.
But the whole street knew they spent every waking hour in bed.
If she got lonely, she had the family pet for company.
She taught the dog to balance a cracker on his nose
until she said OK.
And then he'd dip his head and let the cracker drop
to the floor and then he'd eat it.
The afternoon's had a way of stretching endlessly
in all directions as if time were taffy, something a person
could get caught in.
Janice said time was different now.
It used to be sadder.
The couple next door fought to get themselves in the mood.
They would scream at one another and then
Janice could hear the bed springs
creaking through the wall behind her parents' headboard.
Once there was a girl Janice said, like most girls
she was a sap.
By now everyone was listening even the girls
who were pretending not to.
In the beginning the fair tree of the void
abounded with flowers Janice said, acts
of compassion of many kinds.
The fair tree of the void also lacked compassion.
The two trees sprang from one seed.
Think of it like code she suggested.
And for that reason there was but one fruit.
The girl in the story spent a lot of time
most girls wishing for love.
If she could have been cut open, her ideal mate
would have been able to see her inner markings
even though they were practically invisible
like the black dots inside a banana.
As it was, he never had a chance.
He was a nice person but for some reason
he thought it would be funny to pass the girl a note asking
her to meet him at the pool mansion after school.
He lived one block over Janice said, above the movie theater.
He probably got the idea to send the note from some friend.
The theater was a family business
and that's why to this day they never showed funny movies.
After she arrived home, the girl washed the breakfast dishes.
She stood there with her head bowed,
crying into the sink exposing the nape of her neck
to the operational apparatus of the scow hovering
in the air above her.
All the way through the metal case of the scow and the debris
floating in the upper atmosphere and the many different layers
of her house.
The nape of a human neck is especially
attractive to non-humans.
Unlike the ideal mate, the apparatus
could see through her perfectly.
It knew it wasn't meant for her but that didn't stop it.
It was her fate, which had nothing to do with love.
It had nothing to do with the boy and the note either.
Things just worked out this way sometimes.
Janice leaned in close, her attention to personal hygiene
left a lot to be desired and her breath was often stale.
Everyone knew she'd stolen the fair tree of the void
from somewhere since her vocabulary wasn't normally
that impressive.
Do you know why the girl was crying, Janis asked.
She was crying because she felt sorry for the world
and everyone in it.
The world was sadder then too and she wanted everyone
to be happy like she was meeting the boy.
If she hadn't wanted that things would be different now
though not the way she hoped.
After she dried the dishes, the girl put on her jacket
and got on her bike and started out
even though she'd promised her mother and father she
wouldn't go anywhere before they arrived home from work.
The bike was a red Schwinn with a bell
and a basket over the handlebars.
It was the time of day when the moon and sun
are both out at once.
The girl rode to the end of the block across the vacant lot
and up the hill past the school and over the trestle bridge.
The shadow of the scowl rode behind her,
tapping her onward like a cat toying with the mouse it's
about to eat.
She loved pumping her legs, feeling her heart beating.
From above it was the size of the end of a pencil.
The street ran along the Western edge
of the pool estate and the only way
in was a driveway so overgrown with vines
she would have ridden right past it
if it weren't for the two goddesses
crouched atop pillars at the entryway.
Young lady, Aphrodite called.
Over here.
She was missing her nose but Athena
was missing her whole head, which
was a pity since what the girl needed
to hear more than anything at this point
was the voice of reason.
I'm not telling her name, Janice said,
so don't bother to ask it would make it hard to pay attention
to the story.
At first the driveway was almost impassable
and the girl had to get down off her bike to wheel it in.
She could see little eyes suspended
in the thicket of bushes on either side of her.
Could hear the sound of small things moving
under the blanket of vines.
But she was too excited to feel frightened.
The light was behaving the way it always
did at the end of the day.
The sun having hit bottom like an apple thrown down a well.
Perhaps, this is why she didn't notice when the driveway began
to change before her very eyes.
Now the lamps went on guiding her footsteps.
Mechanical things are able to communicate with one another
the way mushrooms grow out of a single long strand of fungus
underground.
The road was clear of brush and laid with paving stones.
And up ahead, she could see the mansion,
the windows brightly lit.
Very eyes someone said.
What are very eyes?
Shush said someone else.
Inside the mansion the scow's operational apparatus
was waiting for her.
The system was much less sophisticated in those days.
It was a young man but everything was not
quite right about him.
Still it was very handsome in an overly polished highly buffed
way.
It could dance like most robots better than humans.
And the girl was clumsy on her feet.
Her father said she could trip on a smooth linoleum floor.
She knew right away she'd been tricked
but she didn't mind because it was giving her
its special pleading look, the one it had been designed
to give her to win her heart.
It had nothing to do with love.
It was her fate remember.
It could come from out of nowhere
and mow a person down just like sickness.
And no matter how many things the doctors
did to try to stop it, no matter how many machines
they brought in or how many parts of the sick person's
body they replaced with parts of a healthy person's body
it kept moving, killing everything in its path
until all that was left was a jar of ashes.
She was a nice middle class girl and he
was a garbage man, which is the way this often
happened in movies.
And then he would turn out to be a prince
or something like that.
They danced and they danced.
The robot knew exactly how to lead the girl
to make it seem like she knew what she was doing.
And the music helped as well because it
was coming from a pear drum.
Next time he said, bring your friends.
He encouraged her to imagine herself whirling among them,
the most graceful and beautiful one in the bunch stirring
their envy.
Because after all, she deserved to be envied he said.
Just look at you.
It was then she noticed the mirror
that ran along the entire side of the ballroom.
How can that be she thought for the window panes reflected
in it were missing or broken with pieces of glass still
stuck in the frames like knives and the outside of the building
was overgrown with a thick net of creeper that
kept the whole thing from falling in a heap.
The dancing partner looked handsomer than ever.
The girl herself like a fluid shapeless sack of parts
held together by skin and the skin
pulsing with blood and pink with smudges here and there of hair
and blowing panels of fabric.
Meanwhile, the creeper was filling with more and more gray
brown birds.
Hundreds of tiny bright eyes and beaks chirping and fluffing
their wings.
This was the way robots had viewed living flesh ever
since they've been granted the gift of color sightedness
and prophecy to compensate for the fact
that they hadn't been made by God.
In the robot universe, there were
six windows through which the sun rose,
six windows through which the sun set.
And the stars moved around opening and shutting
the windows like servants.
Even though they had no interest in the way humans measured time
or how the planets affected their actions,
the robot's knew mercury retrograde
was a point of crisis for them, inaugurating
a period of voluptuous activity one which
would grow more and more intense as the days grew shorter.
Really, it told her, bring your friends.
It told her there was a nice surprise in store for her
if she did.
When the girl got home her shoes were torn to ribbons.
Her father sat there in his easy chair and his white shirt
and khaki pants looking through his reading glasses
at her worn-out shoes.
The expression on his face like a person
going through a closet trying to find some worthless article
of clothing.
He suddenly realized he wanted more than anything.
His hair had turned gray at the temples
but was otherwise thick and black,
his skin mostly wrinkled.
He hadn't changed that much since when he was a boy really.
The girl was the one who had changed.
I'm not made of money you know her father said and the girl
laughed because who was.
People weren't made of paper or metal,
that was what made them people.
The next day she returned to the mansion only this time
she brought her friends.
Girls can talk other girls into doing things with them
by making it seem like it's the in thing to do like trading
cards or taking ballet lessons or going all the way
or entering a religious order.
Still, for the girl to get her friends to come with her,
she had to twist the truth.
Another thing girls do is lie to get what they want.
For instance, she didn't mention the mirror or that there
was only the one dance partner.
How many friends did she bring someone asked because I
think I know this story.
Lots, Janice said.
Maybe 16 or 17, 20.
All the girls from her class anyway.
It was the first generation of girls.
That's not the way the story goes someone else said.
There should be 12.
But Janice wasn't telling the 12 dancing princesses.
That was make believe this was history.
The girls came to the mansion just as it was getting dark.
Like now, Janice said, only night was sadder then.
The wind was blowing and it was starting to rain,
real rain not what came later.
Oh Western wind when wilt thou blow that the small rain down
can rain.
Poets used to write things like that.
The mansion windows were ablaze and the girls
could hear music very sweet and exciting,
strings and horns and woodwinds, and maybe,
just maybe if only they'd been listening more closely, if only
they'd stopped their endless chatter
and paid attention for a change they
might also have heard the tap a tap tap of the pear drum.
A pear drum in case you don't know,
Janice said, is shaped like a guitar and has three strings
but only two pegs to tune them with
and a little square box attached to the side
for keeping fairies.
They're the most beautiful fairies of all.
Their faces are like crystal but alive with real eyes that
can see and the sweetest little tongues.
You never want to let them out though,
they have no regard for human life.
Of course, there weren't enough dance partners to go around.
One of the beauties of the operational apparatus
was that it could be reproduced infinitely
and at the drop of a hat.
Every girl thought her partner was the handsomest
and that she was the loveliest girl in the room.
The later it got the harder it was
to hear a thing over the noise of the orchestra
and the dancers feet and the wind
and the rain and the gray brown birds.
The girls were never able to compare notes to figure out
what was happening.
Dictators gather crowds for the same reason.
The rain swept in through the broken windows.
The wind blew away the girls dresses.
They were too busy thinking how ugly all the other girls looked
to look at themselves in the mirror.
No one noticed when the first girl got taken up.
Taken up where?
Someone asked.
I would have noticed, said someone else.
Janice whirled around.
You don't notice anything, she said.
None of you do.
She pointed at the cigar box in my lap it was empty.
Did you see him stealing your card?
She asked.
They're your ticket out of here.
Don't you know anything?
Where are your mothers and fathers?
Shouldn't they be calling you in right about now.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]