The Gnome Stories, page 1
The
Gnome
Stories
ALSO BY ANDER MONSON
NONFICTION
Neck Deep and Other Predicaments
Vanishing Point
Letter to a Future Lover
I Will Take the Answer
FICTION
Other Electricities
POETRY
Vacationland
The Available World
The
Gnome
Stories
ANDER MONSON
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2020 by Ander Monson
The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Published by Graywolf Press
250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-64445-012-3
Ebook ISBN 978-1-64445-111-3
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2020
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019933471
Cover design: Walter Green
For Megan
Contents
Weep No More Over This Event
Believing in the Future with the Torturer’s Apprentice
The Golem
The Reassurances
In a Structure Simulating an Owl
This Time with Feeling
It Is Hard Not to Love the Starvationist’s Assistant
Everyone Looks Better When They’re Under Arrest
Opportunities for Intimacy
The Gnome
Our Song
The
Gnome
Stories
Weep No More Over This Event
I came upon him as he was rustling through the DVDs, throwing them into a sack in what appeared to be a self-congratulatory way, laughing to himself, probably at the selection, which was my wife’s, and I was doubly enraged. I don’t know why I thought of it when action was required, but I wondered where people got sacks like this, as in could you buy them at the supermarket, or were these specialized burglary tools endorsed by criminals? I was standing on the steps coming down from the spacious landing to the main floor, and I wondered also how he got through the alarm system I had installed after my wife saw too many of those threatening commercials on television and I felt the pressure of my husbandness coming down on me, and I called and got jacked by the small print but had it installed nevertheless, which gesture did not stop my wife from leaving.
I found out after she left that you can set the system, which is admittedly pretty glorious, to keep someone from leaving the house, too, though I did not read the entire instruction manual at the time and it would only seem important to me later, like most realizations I have had in my life.
So I was watching and he must have heard me coming down or something because he turned to me, and it must have been hard to see me in the dark because he began to walk toward me. That’s why I shot him. He advanced on me. He was an imminent threat. This is what the police told me later as I sobbed, more for the loss of my marriage than any kind of ruined innocence.
The fat policeman explained it like this: To shoot him where he stands is allowed now by law in this state, and is more than allowed, is in fact requisite of the situation, which is to say that you did the right thing and should weep no more over this event.
I liked that he said weep no more, like this was all a tragedy or a musical or spiritual. He asked if anything was missing, if this had occurred before, seeing the new alarm system on the wall and its array of lights blinking into a new configuration. I told him no, not as far as I could tell without inventorying the entire house, and no, it hadn’t ever happened before. Then I told him about the commercials.
Mm-hm, he said, I’ve seen those too. It’s good you had it, because it shows a lack of premeditation on your part, not that it matters since he was in your house, dude. He might have said sir instead of dude, but it’s hard to remember the exactitude of language in moments like these.
I said I found the pattern of the lights to be beautiful. He stared at me and did not blink until I spoke again.
I explained about my wife. How she had left a month ago and I think he divined the implied emptiness because he had a ring still on his finger. He looked at me like he was thinking of his own wife in this moment. He took down my information, took me to the station to give my statement, said it would only take an hour and then I could come back to my domicile and lie down, watch some news, or whatever I needed to do to get it off my mind.
The event weighed on me, though not in the way I expected. I was in the middle of a department store floor contemplating a couple of blow-up Christmas decorations to add to my menagerie, when I had what I guess you could call a flashback, or maybe a portent, or just a dream. In it my wife and I were in bed, and we had been crying separately for an hour, and had just drifted off to sleep, when I heard someone downstairs and so I got the gun and went downstairs and there he was, and I was on the stairs with my wife’s presence behind me, like I was guarding her from him, and when I shot him all I could see was light, and then she was gone, and it’s true, she is gone, she had gone, gone some time ago, and all I had left was light, and the house, her DVDs, and the system, and my menagerie.
Men of a certain age begin accumulation of collections. Some are private, like my father’s collection of over six thousand toy rocket ships. He had two whole rooms devoted to them. This was when I was a teenager, before I left that house, after Mom had died, after it had seemed so empty for a couple years, and he had started to fill it up with this stuff. I was a teenager then and wanted to blow the rockets up, but didn’t because I feared his anger. I still fear his anger, really. When I called him to tell him I shot a man and should weep no more about it, since he was in my house, since he was advancing on me, Dad told me it was okay. He had shot a man in wartime but never talked about it. We waited on the phone, neither of us saying much of anything, which was how most of our conversations went. I had expected him to have some wisdom for me, but he never was much for wisdom. He said, you sound lonely, son. You should get a cat. I told him I would think about it. He said go to shoot for a while at the target range. Sometimes others will come to a house once it’s been broken into, even when you shot the guy. You should be careful. You have all that Christmas shit to protect. He was joking, but it was true.
My collection is on my lawn, all over the exterior of my house. I tell myself it’s for the kids, the families in the neighborhood. My neighbor, Rutan, has a competing collection. His display is spectacular. He has twice the inflatable Christmas decorations, even makes stuff by hand. There are lights and moving parts. I got the idea from him. When Katie and I would come back at night and go by that house with all those inflatable things alive, the air compressor humming, with them moving back and forth in the night, it impressed me. You could see it from our bedroom window. I could see it as we fucked. I could see it after. It was like I was fucking Santa, the reindeer, a series of penguins, Dora the Explorer. It glowed all night. Sometimes it was all I’d look at. Now I have my own. Rutan was a single guy. I think for him it was a little desperate; he was into Christmas, sure, but he didn’t have any kids, no wife. I think he was trying to attract them by accumulating the trappings of Christmas cheer. He and I are making our own society here—people came from across the whole city after they read an article about us in the paper. He spent most evenings outside, adjusting the compressors and the angles, talking to the gawkers, suggesting photos, giving hugs. It is not impossible that his method will work.
Here’s the problem: my domicile immediately began to appeal to me less—it felt like a mausoleum, or, maybe, not that, a crime scene, then. A place where I couldn’t forget the past. If someone could be shot there, if I could be home invaded and, potentially, if she were still here, Katie could have been carried off and raped, or traumatized because of this, then it was a problem—my problem, this city’s problem, America’s problem—but I was the only one able to take action. I had already taken action. What I needed was I needed more action.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it, like the way I thought about my mother at unexpected times and couldn’t get her out of my head, like when Katie and I were having sex one of the many times we called our first for effect, and she was high, but I wasn’t, and she was talking about the thousand needles all around us, by which I take it she meant the stars. I did
Some nights I would sit at my own darkened window and watch the lights wink off in the neighbors’ windows, or what I could see of them through the trees. I’d see silhouettes, a setting sun of motion in a window. I felt increasingly sure that eyes were looking back at me. So I installed a more robust security system with encrypted codes and a superspectrum something or other that transmits signals to itself and its backup systems via infrared. This may have been about sexual jealousy, but I don’t like to think about that very much.
Of course at first I tried some spells that I found on the internet, but they had no effect at all. I don’t know what I expected but it was worth a shot and I thought back to days playing D&D with friends in high school and how magic was one option, and Katie had gone and we had said some things, and it had been weeks by this point, and I wasn’t sure where she was—she’d said just don’t fucking call her for a while, that she had things to work out, probably in Cancún. So I had the alarm system—a kind of spell of protection—installed and I lit some candles for the incantation, too many as it turned out, since it set off the fire alarm, which triggered a manned response by the security team—this is why I signed up for them, the personal responses, the sense that we, that I, have a security team ready for response at the slightest electronic dip or tuck or wavering—and I had to call them off and tell them the code word and all that.
They do a good job with all of this. Like in the commercials, they make the effort to make it realistic for you. I was charmed. I felt completed. And happy that I purchased the second gun they recommended after the invasion: a .357 pistol, big and loud and hard, an exclamation point in my hands. My forearm holds the memory of firing at the range, shot after shot, meaning something probably in Morse code, followed by muscle soreness, which wasn’t much different from firing at the guy on the carpet in the main room, the intruder, the interloper in my domicile, attempting to make off with my—with Katie’s—probably ridiculous shit.
I don’t know what exactly I’m trying to tell you here, why this is emerging the way it is, what secret I have to offer up that you might be amazed by. I look down and see a spider slowly skittering up to me. I hold my ground. I will live in peace with it, even if I am terrified of them. It will spin its threads and capture interlopers and slowly consume them: Nature’s Defense. It disappears. See. I can coexist with something. This is already helping.
The more I contemplated possible entrances into the house—the twin skylights upstairs, the chimneys, the forty windows—the more I became convinced I would have to try out each of them. The security system wasn’t wired to the skylights yet, you see, because I hadn’t asked and I hadn’t thought it realistic to deal with that. I purchased some burglar’s tools on the internet including the cool suction cup thing that you attach to glass and cut out a circle and it doesn’t fall in, waking whoever’s inside. I tried it on the window. It took longer than I thought it would but it went eventually: with practice I could take out a pane of glass in a minute, I thought. I added this to the list of Additional Skills that I liked to deploy to impress Katie or possible employers. She’d be excited when I demonstrated some of these.
I could see Rutan’s lights just past my lights outside. I thought it important to appeal to passersby. The lights, I realize now, may have been a defense mechanism of another sort. They warmed the exterior of the house. They warmed my heart. They warmed a thousand visitors’ hearts inside their bodies as they drove by with their families’ bodies and their eyes adjusting to our sudden light explosions.
I didn’t take the guy’s mask off. When the cops showed up they shooed me out of the house so I didn’t have to see his face. Maybe they thought that would make a difference in terms of my psychological recovery time. The fat and sensitive cop gave me a couple of cards for psychologists to talk to after an event like this. They said to be careful upon waking—and to unload the gun for a couple weeks. People sometimes went a little nuts after.
I admit I couldn’t sleep. Not before, even, really, but certainly not now. Part of that was Katie’s fault: she’d want to sleep on me, like it gave her peace to be warmed from underneath, which was fine as far as it went, but I got hot too fast and would have to eject her for a while, and then she would get cold, and we would repeat. Sometimes it led to sex, which was better than the other times.
I began to think of myself less as a person and more as a force. I was becoming a force of vengeance, of redemption, a force of comeuppance for those who broke into homes and tried to make off with loot, who made off with our neighbors’ daughters, who left no trace at all behind.
A month later, I broke into my first house. It’s hard to explain why. I don’t even think I know. I made sure no one was home, casing it for a couple days. Chose a neighbor, Danny, whose wife had died two years ago. His daughter had also disappeared. I’d gone to his wife’s funeral and not known what to say. And in any of our subsequent interactions, I still didn’t know. I considered this a failure, as we had briefly bonded over discussions of the World Cup soccer matches just before his wife passed, and what we had—which wasn’t much surely, but it was something—has collapsed.
But being in his house (he had no security system) in his absence was exhilarating. I did not bring my gun. I didn’t plan on taking anything. I just wanted to be out of my space for a while, in somebody else’s. It had been a while since I had last been inside his house. Katie and I had attended a Super Bowl party a year ago, a sea of awkwardness, not just because I knew how much she hated football but also because I’d talked her into it, feeling like we had to go just to break up the sea of dudes. I had said we really ought to go, and she wouldn’t be the only woman there, which turned out not to be true, and she had left one quarter and four beers in, and had not returned, in spite of the hospitality, which was impressive, considering Danny had to learn to do a lot of things for himself after his wife died, and so every occasion was an occasion for him to commit a major social error. I knew he thought about these occasions for error because he often joked about it after he had a couple of drinks, him knowing that I was interested in systems and constantly trying to figure out what to do or say in any situation. I had felt torn between these two obligations: a sort of approximation of maleness, what he and I were supposed to be able to do together, and my love for Katie, who had no love for football or Danny, and no pity for his predicament, this particular brand of loneliness, the still-empty room he had kept that way, just as it was, for his daughter if she ever came back, if anyone ever found her, or if what happened to her became apparent, like if the body was found. I felt we could cut him a little bit of slack considering. Katie had said before that he was a clueless dick, and losing his wife didn’t make him any less of one, though I argued that it gave him complexity, and she said well then he is a complex clueless dick, which even I had to admit was true, though the complexity itself was an achievement, I said, something to aspire to. This was our problem, she said later, after I stayed for the rest of the game, my inability to commit to her needs at the expense of society’s, and she said it like that, that my connection with Danny was just a social obligation. I said what is our connection then, and that didn’t go well at all. Marriage is a social institution as is a neighborhood, and both come with obligations: the lawn, the trash, the lights, the packages we give each other because of grief a couple times a year, or because of fear of loss or change, keeping up the appearance of the exterior of the house, attending events you have no interest in, and my list went on for a while, ever increasing the more I thought about it. The point I was trying to make was that we were both part of something besides ourselves. She may have agreed, but she wanted finally to be ranked higher in one of the many lists I made of My Priorities in order to keep myself on task, make sure I met all the obligations I had committed to.
