Alexandra Kingsley

I bookended my year of short story reading with Steven Millhauser, not by design but because sometimes things just work out this way.

The first story I read in 2010 was Millhauser’s “The Wizard of West Orange.”  It comes from his collection Laughter in the Dark (which I sadly had to take back to the library before I finished), and it’s the kind of story that continues to exert an extreme power over the mind of the reader, long after one puts the book away.

Being that I don’t have the book in front of me, I’ll let someone else describe the plot:

The haptograph – an experimental device that mimicks ordinary feelings on the skin and stimulates previously unknown tactile sensations – sits in a locked room in the basement of a renowned scientific institution. It is 1889, and the reasearch facility is headed by the Wizard. He is a brilliant inventor who is cognizant of the importance of patents and profits. Multiple projects are ongoing, and the Wizard supervises all of them. One of his aims is to mechanically replicate each of the human senses.

The Wizard has many assistants. Kistenmacher, an electrical experimenter, is one of the best. His pet project is the haptograph. The machine consists of a body suit (covered by a network of wires, brass caps, and miniature electromagnets), battery, and unit containing replaceable cylinders. Two test subjects are enlisted. The research librarian (who tells the story in the form of diary entries) is a willing volunteer. Earnshaw, a stockroom clerk, is an unwilling participant.

Inside the suit, the librarian is impressed by a variety of familiar feelings of touch. When strange sensations – a total body caress, regeneration, an out-of-body event, and a sense of being suspended in air – are provoked, a new world is revealed to him. He experiences bliss. With ten times more funding and three additional researchers assigned to the venture, the haptograph could be commercially available in three years.

I’ve clipped that from an NYU site, leaving out the last paragraph which rather inelegantly gives away the plot.  The intricate and strange story explores the sensation of touch in a disturbingly erotic way, pushing at the boundaries of consent, control, and sanity.

The last story I’ll read this year feels very different, but is still very much Millhauser.  ”Getting Closer” was just published in The New Yorker, and is available to read for free.  It’s a much smaller, sparser story: a boy and his family spend a day swimming in a river, a hallmark of each summer.  The boy delays his entry into the water as long as possible; once the day starts, he knows, it will soon end.

But now, as he stands at the end of waiting, something is wrong. He’s shaken deep down, as though he’ll lose something if the day begins. If he goes into the river he’ll lose the excitement, the feeling that everything matters because he’s getting closer and closer to the moment he’s been waiting for. When you have that feeling, everything’s full of life, every leaf, every pebble. But when you begin you’re using things up. The day starts slipping away behind you. He wants to stay on this side of things, to hold it right here. A nervousness comes over him, a chilliness in the sun. In a moment the day will begin to end. Things will rush away behind him. The day he’s been waiting for is practically over. He sees it now, he sees it: ending is everywhere. It’s right there in the beginning. They don’t tell you about it.

That longing, I think, is characteristically Millhauser, that overwhelming mix of an almost physical nostalgia, celebration, and mourning.

But unlike the dreadful allure of the haptograph, these memories of summer are something to which we can relate.  Haven’t we all had a moment like this?  For me, it was the day at the lake pictured above, riding out my last summer in the South, very pointedly not counting down the days until my summer stock job would end, and I’d leave my favorite home.

I thought it strange at first that the magazine would choose a summery story for the first issue of January.  But that feeling of possibility mixed with sorrow that exists in the summer, of days opening out ahead of one while time simultaneously slips away from us, happens at one other time: the start of a new year.