The Collector |
Issue 19
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A young man is attending an outdoor poetry reading with his girlfriend at Audubon Park in New Orleans. It is summer. The originally announced artist was to have been a brilliant and acclaimed poet, a leader of his generation. He has canceled, but the crowd is still very large, especially for a poetry reading. Some of the people do not realize he has canceled, so they have come to hear the famous poet. But the announcement arrives that the speaker will be Sidney Fields, and the young man in the audience, Jack Finney, is excited because Fields is to join the creative writing staff of Jack’s college, Tulane University, in the fall semester, which is just two weeks away. The rest of the audience is not very excited, but Jack can’t help feeling it was meant to be. Jack thinks experience is intentional, not accidental, and if Sidney Fields is reading poetry to Jack Finney, then it has to mean something, so Jack pays special attention to every word.
Jack closes his eyes and listens as Sidney Fields reads his poetry. It is not an altogether pleasant experience. Jack thinks that Fields’ poetry is like Poe’s in being very brilliant technically, doing interesting things with meter and rhyme, but also that it shares Poe’s phoniness about the real matter of poetry, which is people and feelings. The poems that Fields reads remind Jack of butterflies pinned and preserved in a glass case – something to be studied rather than enjoyed. After the reading, Jack tries to meet the poet and tell him he is a student at Tulane and will register for his class in two weeks. The poet has a male companion who seems intent on keeping Jack and his girlfriend away. He appears to be a combination bed-partner and bodyguard, but finally Mr. Fields walks over to Jack. “Well,” he says, “did you come to laugh about the failure of rhymed verse, or do you have some darker secret?” Jack has no answer, but the familiarity of how Fields speaks to him makes him feel uncomfortable. “Nothing as dark as your poetry.” “You caught that, huh?” Jack tells him about how the poems mirrored Edgar Allan Poe, but withholds the part about Poe’s failure of emotion. “You know, people misunderstand Poe. They think he wrote about death. He wrote about inevitability.” Suddenly, his desire to meet the poet has shrunk back into an unformed and unspeakable uncertainty. He feels like one of the butterflies pinned on Mr. Fields’ wall. And what darker secret could he possibly have anyway? He tells the poet that he will take his class in the fall, then backs away nervously, and Fields says he is looking forward to reading his verse. Later that night, Jack is with his girlfriend in their apartment in uptown New Orleans. She goes to sleep, and he picks up a book. It is Winner Take Nothing by Ernest Hemingway, a collection of short stories. Jack has read them all at least a dozen times. He goes onto the porch in the cool evening with a bottle of claret, and re-reads “A Clean, Well-lighted Place.” As he reads the last line, his attention wanders for a moment, and then the next title catches his eye: “The Collector.” Jack has read this book a dozen times and he has never seen that story before, but the story is real, it is twelve pages long, and he could read the first line: “It was good to be on the porch in the cool of the evening, reading a good book, and with a bottle of claret on the floor beside you.” Jack cannot be stopped now. He can’t tell if he is dreaming or really reading but he knows that the story is well-written and calling to him. So he plunges on and reads the story that he has never read before in a book that he has read many times before and he tells himself that the apparent allusions to himself must be coincidence. Yet the story talks about how the main character had spent the afternoon at a poetry reading with his girlfriend. And the poet had been no good, he was a formalist. Jack cannot sit still. He feels like his body is under attack, and he needs to shake the energy out of it. He begins to walk the streets of uptown, reading the words in the moonlight that scatters under the magnolias on Magazine Street. Then he notices that whenever he looks up at the buildings and trees, the character in the story does the same thing. And when finally the character in the story is named, he is called Jack. The real Jack cannot escape. When he turns around, the character in the story turns around, both looking for an explanation or a way out. He wonders if he should return home, wake his girlfriend and beg forgiveness. But it is no good. The Jack in the story does not return home, so this Jack, the real Jack, does not return home. Instead he walks up onto the porch of a house looking for someone to help him. He knocks, but no one is there. By now, he is afraid to act without permission from the story, so he looks down at the black words like crawling ants on the page and reads his hand turning the doorknob and opening into the shadowy spaces within. The room is filled with chests and cabinets, as you would expect in the home of a collector, someone who thought of experience as shards of memory that could be sorted and catalogued. Jack sits down on the bare wooden floor and continues reading. Almost tauntingly, the story tells him to stand when he has only just sat. It tells him there is a knife on top of one of the cabinets. He looks and the knife is there. When Jack reads that he has taken the knife and sat back down in the middle of the open room, he gasps with recognition. The book is open between his knees now, and as he reads, he cuts off his ear. The same happens in the story. Both ears. His nose. He starts to cut his leg off, but realizes the knife is not sufficient for the job. When he turns the page, he discovers he needs to cut off his toes, one at a time. And every time he cuts something off, he walks or drags himself to a closet or cabinet and throws the piece inside. The chests are filled with identical parts from other bodies. There have been others before him. And now Jack wonders how he has come to this place. Where had the book come from? What about Sidney Fields and his mysterious boyfriend? What were the darker secrets that had been teased by Fields? Who was the collector? Jack has none of the answers, but he feels that if he could read ahead, he will learn more and will finally see the answers. One thing is certain to Jack. It is not fair that this is happening to him – to him, and not someone else – but he has to ask himself, does this happen to everyone sooner or later? There were those other body parts in the drawers and cabinets, and maybe this has been going on for a long time. What did Hemingway have to do with it? Had there been a dark pledge made in Paris? Did Sidney Fields have anything to do with it at all? Everything is a blur, and Jack tries to remember if this has ever happened before, but he can’t remember anything. It is all too hard to remember: so he turns back to the book and reads. And he knows what will come next, but his eyes are hard to give up, and he knows that he should scream, but his mouth is wordless and his hand with the knife is relentless, and with a quick gouging motion, he takes one out – one of his eyes – and he knows when the other eye is gone he cannot read the rest of the story, so he cuts off one of his arms instead, his left arm, and he bleeds recklessly, but he keeps his left eye and his right arm. He knows he will have to pluck out his last eye with his right hand, but with his left eye he reads the blood-smeared book and tries to make sense of the story he is living. The gradual death of his senses, the loss of his eye, his nose, his toes and his arm. What does he have left to give? His right arm which is his best arm, but he cannot cut it off because the knife cannot be angled by the right hand against the right shoulder with any force. Besides, he has to keep his right arm to pluck out the last eye, but first he must read. And he knows he must read to the end of the story, and he must remember the end of the story, because after he plucks out his last eye, he will not be able to read, and he has to know what to do after he has finished taking his last eye out. The last paragraph is a long paragraph. It begins: He cries out, screaming, there must not be any end to this. And he knows he must read to the end of the story, and he must remember the end of the story, because after he has plucked out his eye, he will not be able to read, and he has to know what to do after he has finished taking his last eye out. Only when he reads the last paragraph does he realize ... this could go on forever. But he still has one arm left and he can still strangle himself to death, and if he is too weak to strangle himself he can use the knife to make a bloody stump of his left leg. He can kill himself and end it all. Or he can do the honorable thing, which is Japanese, and is called harakiri to the English and seppuku to the Japanese, and he could disembowel himself on the knife. Then he has a horrible thought. There is one thing he has not yet surrendered. He has not cut off his manhood, though he has cut everything else off of any value. His cock has value. He has used it, and loved it. But he knows that if the story demands that too, he will obey. He has no choice. But before it reaches that point, he still possesses one freedom. He can die. Willingly. He clasps the knife in hés right hand, and prepares to disembowel himself, but first he knows he must finish reading the story because it is Hemingway and great, and there are only one or two more lines, and maybe when he finishes the story, he will wake up or it will be a sick joke, and he will laugh about it afterwards in a quiet bar with a double whiskey. So he reads to the last line of the story. And the last line of the story always makes him laugh when he comes to it, because he knows he has read the last line before, and he does not know how he could have forgotten its absurd black humor. And the last line of the story always says the same thing. Jack thinks maybe he missed something important. There has to be some answer, some meaning, some solution or way out. But when he finishes reading the last line of the story, he flicks his one good eye back to the beginning of the last paragraph, and he begins reading: “He cries out, screaming, there must not be any end to this. And he knows he must read to the end of the story, and he must remember the end of the story, because after he has plucked out his eye, he will not be able to read, and he has to know what to do after he has finished taking his last eye out. Only when he reads the last paragraph does he realize ... this could go on forever…” |
FRANK MIELE, since attending writing programs at the Universities of Montana and Arizona, has devoted his writing career to journalism while continuing to keep a hand in poetry and fiction. He lives in Kalispell, Montana, with his wife and youngest son. Published in Kansas Quarterly, Northwest Review, Whitefish Review, among others.
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