The Keyhole Opera Read online

  P. O. Box 1818

  Wilsonville, OR 97070

  Copyright © 2005 by Bruce Holland Rogers

  Some of these stories first appeared in the following publications:

  The North American Review, The Quarterly, New Mexico Humanities Review, Northwest Review, Fourteen Hills, Westword, Realms of Fantasy, Harpur Palate, Talebones, Aeon, The Asylum Annual, The Illinois Review, Portland Review, Abyss & Apex, Horror Garage, Polyphony 1, Polyphony 2, Polyphony 3, Xaxx Quarterly (United Kingdom), Prairie Dog 13 (United Kingdom), Descant (Canada) and Imago (Australia).

  “Avery’s Story,” “The Last Unseen Window in the Last Unseen Car,” and

  “Something Like the Sound of Wind in the Trees” were first published in Quarterly West.

  “Lydia’s Orange Bread” first appeared online at the 3 AM Magazine web site.

  “Periwinkles” was first published on the web site of The Absinthe Literary Review

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from both the copyright owner and the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following address: Wheatland Press, P. O. Box 1818, Wilsonville, OR 97070.

  These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available upon request.

  ISBN 0-9755903-7-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  Cover by Lara Wells.

  Interior by Deborah Layne

  Contents

  An Introduction to an Overture to The Keyhole Opera by Michael Bishop

  I. Stories

  Avery’s Story

  The Last Unseen Window in the Last Unseen Car

  Lydia’s Orange Bread

  Stallion

  As Far East

  Valentine

  The Burlington Northern Southbound

  The Goblin King

  Aftermath

  The Minor Poets of San Miguel County

  II. Metamorphoses

  Spotted Dolphin

  Rich and Beautiful

  Red-Winged Blackbirds

  Alephestra

  Periwinkles

  Sea Anemones

  Gold

  Rag Monster

  Ghost Fever

  Don Ysidro

  III. Insurrections

  Murder, Mystery

  Vocabulary Items

  Résumé

  One Thing After Another

  Invasions

  Come the Revolution

  A Story For Discussion

  IV. Tales

  The Djinn Who Lives Between Night and Day

  Listening, Listening

  The Rower

  Half of the Empire

  Chambers Like a Hive

  Okra, Sorghum, Yam

  The Beast

  The One Who Conquers

  Tiny Bells

  The Dead Boy At Your Window

  V. Symmetrinas

  Something Like the Sound of the Wind in Trees

  Dead White Guys

  The Main Design That Shines Through Sky and Earth

  An Introduction to an Overture to

  The Keyhole Opera

  by Michael Bishop

  BEAR WITH ME. Few books require two introductions by the same introducer, but this one unaccountably does.

  Bruce Holland Rogers, the author of The Keyhole Opera (a title deriving from Kate Wilhelm’s provocative observation about the contents of an earlier Rogers collection, Flaming Arrows, i.e., that the short-short story “offers a glimpse through a keyhole”), well, Bruce believes that although he groks the game I play in my “Overture,” which follows, an uninitiated reader may require a primer to get up to speed and to play along.

  I concur.

  When Bruce asked me to write an introduction to The Keyhole Opera, I accepted immediately, but knew that I would defer its authorship owing to a host of other standing obligations. Still, how could I decline? Bruce’s stories—freshly conceived, attentively observed, and tenderly crafted—speak to me as do the works of only the very best writers among either my contemporaries or his. (I believe I’m about fourteen years older than he.) But when I sat down to write my introduction, I wanted to pay homage to one of the hardest workers, most unusual talents, and most vivid personalities now committing short fiction. A writer of Bruce’s caliber deserves no less.

  A glance at the table of contents reveals that Bruce Holland Rogers writes all sorts of compelling stuff. The labels he applies to the fictions in this volume include stories, metamorphoses, insurrections, tales, and symmetrinas, and the monikers of the first four categories strongly suggest their approach and/or subject matter. However, symmetrinas probably gives the new reader pause. What is a symmetrina?

  A fixed prose form that Bruce originated and that he writes with great passion and skill. I highly regard all three appearing in this volume’s final section, but view the third, “The Main Design That Shines Through Sky and Earth,” as a masterpiece not only of its particular kind, but also of the art of the short story, period. It deserves and repays many readings. The devisers of future fiction-writing texts, I predict, will one day include it in their books as frequently as today’s include Ray Bradbury’s “And There Will Come Soft Rains,” Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” or Gabriel García Márquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.”

  In any case, I decided that I would frame my introduction as a symmetrina, which always includes an odd number of sections, with the longest in the middle and mirroring sections fore and aft. Section 4 of the Overture, which follows, presumes to explain the process, but the entire Overture presumes to illustrate it. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, imitating a form that the flatteree has originated surely elevates the satellite’s earnestness to a celestial apogee. Also, like Bruce, I relish the element of play implicit in fulfilling the requirements of a fixed form, right down to limiting each section to an exact number of words. But Bruce thought of it first.

  In Section 5, incidentally, the mentors whom “Rattlesnake Hiram Belize” visits correspond to writers whom Bruce admired as a young man or admires even yet. “Mister Ray,” an early hero of my own, stands for Ray Bradbury; “Papa” for Ernest Hemingway, another of my youthful idols; and “the Colombian” for Gabriel García Márquez, the great realist magician. In Section 6, “Billy Hitchcock Raintree” represents both Bruce and another of his influences, Richard Brautigan, author of Trout Fishing in America. And Yasunari Kawabata, like García Márquez a Nobel laureate, appears as himself for reasons that I hope he clarifies in that section.

  A couple of final matters: In further homage to Bruce, I resolved to write the nine parts of my symmetrical Overture, which follows, using the nine rhetorical modes that instructors of challenging courses in freshman composition present to their students as models. (A writer who strives to make the work harder rather than easier—because difficulty focuses his mind—is one whose impulses vibrate in harmony with my own.) Thus, you will find the nine modes of discourse at play in the Overture, which follows, in this deliberate order: 1) definition, 2) exemplification, 3) description, 4) process analysis, 5) narrative, 6) comparison and contrast, 7) classification and division, 8) cause-and-consequence analysis, and 9) argument. Finally, I dedicate the Overture, which follows, t
o Bruce Holland Rogers, whose stories have inspired it and whose genius springs from a play ethic as searching as his talent.

  Rogerian Modes of Discourse: An Overture

  For Bruce Holland Rogers

  1. Hello, Hello

  I make this overture, reader, to facilitate a relationship—not between you and me, but between you and Bruce Holland Rogers. An overture also generally precedes an opera, however modest or grand.

  Modesty, we know, does not preclude profundity.

  Listen.

  2. Man in a Moving Cage

  Listening, you conclude that Rogers inhabits a cage moving through forty many-shafted tunnels. Whenever the cage stops, he kneels before its door (more a fixed panel than a portal) to peer through its keyhole. Each glimpse, you figure, adds to the observations—opuses or opera—carrying his retinal imprints, visions that he meticulously preserves for expectant audiences outside the tunnels.

  You take back this conceit, for no one is less likely to inhabit a cage than is Bruce Holland Rogers.

  3. Portrait of the Artist

  Bruce Holland Rogers boasts seven, nine, or eleven heads—always an odd number. His visions require such oddity. But if a person stares at him face-on, only one head shows. It resembles a melancholy dolphin’s, the tentacle of a sea anemone, a lump of tattered rags, a mask made from a dead potter’s skin, or the face of a scholar bemused to address the minor poets of a mountain hamlet.

  So disguised, Rogers commits blue-sky murders, writes résumés and vocabulary quizzes, flies a kite fabricated from the body of a boy born moribund, and rides in a car as far east as his daddy can drive it. He holds most of his heads aslant this dimension so that only one at a time impinges upon it, and he sneaks up on friends and strangers alike with the air of one who treasures his faceless multiplicity.

  When Bruce Holland Rogers confronts a mirror, his reflection echoes forever in the silver-backed glass.

  4. How to Write a Symmetrina

  Bruce Holland Rogers donned his Shakespeare doublet, his Guy de Maupassant trousers, and his O. Henry moccasins, and padded to the door of his paper house—through which his visitor had poked her fist.

  Rogers spied her through the hole, and through other holes that others had poked; and although she had no features but holes for eyes, tinier holes for nostrils, and a slit for a mouth, a sign around her neck said APPRENTICE. He led her inside and gave her a scrap of paper saying APPLE, which she devoured.

  “What do you wish to learn?” Rogers asked.

  “How to write a symmetrina.”

  Rogers handed her three specimens of this fixed prose form of his own invention (albeit with some help from friends), then told her to riddle it and explain it aloud. Her brow furrowed.

  Finally she said, “Always an odd number of sections.”

  “Good.”

  Lustrous irises appeared in her eyeholes. “Each section tells its own story, but all have one theme.”

  “Excellent.”

  Her nostrils grew a nose. “One must order the parts in a nice pattern—longest in the middle, shorter ones at the ends.”

  “Always?”

  “Well, mirroring sections always have the same length, down to the word.”

  Rogers smiled.

  Her mouth acquired soft lips. “Two mirroring sections are told by an ‘I’; two others focus on ‘you’; but all the rest are told like fairy tales, ‘he’ or ‘she’ performing.”

  Rogers nodded. “Bravo, Grace.”

  Grace had a name! Her eyes and lips glistened; her nose twitched appealingly. “The number of words deciding the part lengths is the maker’s. It’s doubled, redoubled, and so on until the middle section, when the maker starts back down.”

  “Impressive, Sherlock.”

  Palely, Grace spit up a handful of apple—not paper, but fruit pulp. However, she left ecstatic, wearing her new face.

  Rogers, meanwhile, found that his own features had vanished. He sat down with pen and ink to rediscover them.

  5. Three Enormous Old Men, Possibly Winged

  Faceless and untried, a young man longed to make art. He called himself Rattlesnake Hiram Belize, but never aloud, because aliases (except in the salons of his fancy, where he danced like the dust, sang like an ensorcelled lark, and played the piano like an undead Liberace) offended him.

  So, after saddling Pertinacity, Hiram rode out of the mountains into a new phase of his life.

  On the sidewalks of the City of Angels, no one knew him, and even Pertinacity, who sometimes whickered in quiet alarm, made little impression on the natives. They sidestepped his horse, shoved it in the flank, or rolled their eyes at the plodding slowness of the beast. He wondered at their rudeness, although one kindly guy cautioned him not to leave any horses’ durves out on the streets: The mayor would make him skedaddle, pronto.

  So Hiram leapt down to buy a whiskbroom and a dustpan at a hardware shop, but wound up gazing at the tomes in a bookstore window. He entered and haled a clerk, who turned upon him a radiant face while scissoring ample silver-white wings: the first angel he’d seen in the alleged City of Angels. He reddened, but could not speak, prompting her to ask what he wanted.

  Wings, he mouthed, but no word sounded.

  “Ah, you want Mister Ray.” She led him through the store and into a cubbyhole where an enormous white-haired man sat at a typewriter typing. Hiram could not have been more surprised if Mister Ray had proved an armor-clad giant roasting venison. The typewriter rattled like a Gatling gun; pages wafted out like heat-bleached leaves.

  “What do you want?” Mister Ray asked without looking up.

  “The Secret. Power. Wings.” Hiram gathered some pages and discovered that however he shuffled them, they told astonishing tales—lyrical, horrific, mad.

  “You don’t want me, Snakebite. You want Papa.”

  “How do I find Papa?”

  Mister Ray looked up. “Use the Kilimanjaro Machine. Hop in. Take off.”

  “Where is it? Don’t I have to pass a test?”

  “You rode in on it. The tests never end.”

  Hiram rode the Kilimanjaro Machine, his own Pertinacity, to Paris. He arrived after dark at a clean, well-lighted bar where an enormous, white-bearded man stood alone at a lectern scribbling on posterity with an antique pen. Hiram dismounted and entered.

  “Welcome, kiddo. What do you want?”

  “Are you Papa?”

  Papa shrugged.

  “But where are your wings, sir?”

  “Wings? I prefer work. You?”

  “I like yours a lot, but I’d also like wings. A girl in LA—young woman, I mean—hers totally bowled me over.”

  “You don’t want me, kiddo. You want the Colombian.”

  “How do I find him—via my Kilimanjaro Machine?”

  “Absolutely. Fly the steed you rode in on.” Papa waved an age-spotted hand, and Pertinacity stepped into the bar like a solemn, wingless Pegasus.

  Aboard Pertinacity, Hiram soared back across the Atlantic, to land near a rusty chicken coop behind an adobe hovel. An enormous old man dressed like a rag picker, tiny wings sprouting from his shoulders, hovered over the mud like a swami, beatifically smiling. One finger inscribed curlicues of light on the air while midges swarming from his feathers etched a bleak halo about his head.

  “Are you the Colombian?”

  “¿Qué quiere?” said a curlicue at the man’s fingertip.

  “Wings.”

  “Wings are unnecessary,” the finger wrote. “Mire su caballo.”

  “You have wings!”

  “Yes. But I am a saint.” The Colombian farted. His handwriting dissolved.

  The smell struck Hiram. He spurred Pertinacity skyward, who arose more slowly than Hiram found convenient.

  A dark cloud engulfed them. He laid his cheek on the horse’s mane and wept as gravity and darkness dragged them back toward earth. Hands—small hands—massaged his neck and kept him from turning about when he tried to.

 
But her wings held them both aloft.

  6. Nightingale Birding in Japan

  Billy Hitchcock Raintree published a peculiar little novel, Nightingale Birding in Japan. When it sold forty thousand copies, its publisher sent him to the Land of the Rising Sun on a book tour.

  Billy wearied of signings and interviews, all with an indefatigable translator. He had never actually done much birding, he loved the word nightingale more than he did the bird, and he’d set his book in Japan rather than Shangri-La because his editor loathed fantasy.

  “Take me somewhere quiet,” Billy pleaded.

  His publicist took him to a Shinto shrine where he meditated amid the mountain bamboo, forgetting Nightingale Birding altogether and sewing silken patches on his soul.

  One evening, a frail, kimono-clad man introduced himself at dinner by presenting Billy a copy of his novel The Sound of the Mountain—a sound that Billy had lately begun to hear.

  This was Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata, also on retreat.

  Miraculously, Kawabata knew Billy’s work—not just Nightingale Birding, but small-press poems and stories long out of print. He remarked that although Billy and he differed in age, race, nationality, etc., as artists many similarities linked them.

  Billy marveled: His subconscious was fulfilling a chimerical wish.

  Despite writing novels, Kawabata said, they both preferred the cameo to the panorama, dragonflies to droning bombers. Had Billy been born Nipponese, he would have written haiku; instead, he wrote epigrams rather than epics, tales rather than sagas, and so indisputably qualified as a palmist.

  “But I don’t read palms.”

  “A writer of palm-of-the-hand stories,” Kawabata said. “A miniaturist.”

  Ah. Rather than dwindling in his own estimation, Billy enlarged.

  At length Kawabata said Sayonara and retired.

  Billy noticed that his copy of The Sound of the Mountain was in Japanese, which he could not read. Later his publicist revealed that Kawabata, who left that very evening, could not speak English. How, then, had they understood each other?

  High on the mountain, a nightingale sang.

  7. Q&A

  “What sorts of stories do you write?”

  “Besides short-shorts and symmetrinas?”

  “Yeah.”