Where Is Here?

Contents

Lethal
Area Man Found Crucified
Imperial Presidency
Bare Legs
Turquoise
Biopsy
The Date
Angry
The Ice Pick
The Mother
Sweet!
Forgive Me!
Transfigured Night
Actress
The False Mirror
From The Life of . . .
The Heir
"Shot"
Letter, Lover
My Madman
Cuckold
The Escape
Murder
Insomnia
Love, Forever
Old Dog
The Artist
The Wig
The Maker of Parables
Embrace
Beauty Salon
Abandoned
Running
Pain
Where Is Here?

Reviews

• Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 1992
• Publisher's Weekly, August 10, 1992
• Booklist, September 1, 1992, p33
• San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, September 20, 1992, p5
• Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 4, 1992, p6
• Detroit News & Free Press, October 11, 1992, R7
• Washington Post Book World, October 25, 1992, p5
• Chicago Tribune, November 1, 1992, 14,7
• New York Times Book Review, November 1, 1992, p14
• World Literature Today, Autumn 1993, p825
• Small Press, Winter 1993, p43
• Antioch Review, Winter 1994, p187

Epigraph

In the end I would much rather be a Basel professor than God; but I have not dared push my private egoism so far as to desist for its sake from the creation of the world. You see, one must make sacrifices however and wherever one lives.

—Nietzsche, in a letter to Jacob Burckhardt, 6 January 1889

Excerpt

THE MAKER OF PARABLES

M., the maker of parables, a small dwarfish delicately built man with shining dark eyes, lived inside a large slovenly bearlike man of late middle age. Each morning the two clambered up out of sleep, the one trembling with anticipation to set down, in the crystalline prose for which, while yet living, he had become immortal, the beautiful and terrifying wisdom yielded him by night; the other trembling with anticipation to eat—to eat, and eat, and eat. For there was a ravenous hole in his belly.

There was then each morning of M.'s life, unknown to his admirers, this struggle between words demanding to be recorded—for words are perishable as those who utter them—and appetite: the big slovenly fellow seating himself with a sigh of contentment to eat, and eat, and eat. Eating, he was at peace. He and his destiny were one, not even the thinness of a shadow between them. And afterward he drifted in a dream like that of an infant in the womb.

Then for a certain privileged space of time M. was free to write. He wrote quickly, furiously, scarcely daring to pause, for fear the other would wake suddenly to fresh pangs of appetite; and his precious freedom would be curtailed. Thus is a maker of parables a desperate man: his little stories, rarely more than one or two pages, are exclusively of desperation.

Icy cold and passionless, the parables, fed by appetite, disdain all knowledge of appetite; or of the large slovenly bearlike fellow whose laboring jaws make them possible. The maker of parables, M., contemplating the mirror's gross reflection, cannot see himself in it: this, he calls his destiny.

His admirers would not have it otherwise.