NEGATIVE FIVE IN THE SHADE A Written Creative Work submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree A5 Master of Fine Arts In Creative Writing by Christopher Yun San Francisco, California May 2017 Copyright by Christopher Yun 2017 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL I certify that I have read Negative Five in the Shade by Christopher Yun, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree: Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. Assistant Professor NEGATIVE FIVE IN THE SHADE Christopher Yun San Francisco, California 2017 A short story collection comprised of works of fiction, both realist and speculative, engaging with themes of inadequacy, idealized love, and squalor, all threatening to crush the protagonists. These are stories with cold people in cold places seeking the purification of fire, realizing too late their mistake. I certify that the Annotation is a correct representation of the content of this written creative work. Date TABLE OF CONTENTS Recurse........................................................................................................................................1 The Usurper.............................................................................................................................25 Kick Down the Door............................................................................................................... 40 Kamikaze................................................................................................................................. 51 Grounded.................................................................................................................................. 67 Poison Queen...........................................................................................................................79 Family Matters.........................................................................................................................99 Negative Five in the Shade...................................................................................................121 The Future Queen..................................................................................................................136 9/11, the Military-Industrial Complex, and M e ................................................................. 139 The Lion of N-Judah............................................................................................................. 143 A Koan....................................................................................................................................164 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am forever grateful to the faculty and fellow students at the MFA program at San Francisco State University, especially Andrew Joron, Chanan Tigay, Junse Kim, Nona Caspers, and the Fairmount crew. Also to Anna Keesey for her much needed encouragement ten years ago. v 1 Recurse Echo off. You return home from the two month trip you’d begged your boss to take. You open the front door and step inside. It is very dark. Someone is sobbing in a chair in the furthest corner. Turn on light OK The light above the kitchen table flicks on. Your wife of ten years is covering her face with massive, swollen hands. She removes her hands and you see she has somehow gotten uglier, her features coarse and iron. She is going on about her everlasting headache and how awful it has been while you were gone. Say right thing You can't do that now. Embrace wife You don’t have anything to do that with. Talk wife OK “Yeah, I bet,” you say. “Stop brushing your hair and see how depressing you get. Jesus, you look in the mirror lately?” 2 Your wife asks, “Can you take me to the doctor tomorrow?” Then, as apology: “I can’t see well enough to drive.” The next morning you take her to the doctor’s office. You hold her purse while the doctor examines her on the table. Both of you are perplexed when the doctor asks if she has any old photos. Look The doctor is examining the peculiar way your wife’s forehead hangs like a shelf over her eye sockets. He is taking longer to diagnose psycho­ somatic headaches than you’d thought. You are sitting in an uncomfortable chair by the door. You are holding your wife’s purse in your lap. Look purse The purse contains: a bottle of ibuprofen that contains two types of pills, several crumpled bus transfers, a pair of bifocals even though your wife is only forty, and a burgeoning 3 clutch. Ask wife pills She avoids your gaze and says they are for her headaches. Look bifocals They are a pair of bifocals. As far as you knew, she had never had vision problems before. The doctor notes them and writes something down. Open clutch Inside is cash and many photo­ graphs. You withdraw one that you shot, from a hiking trip to Alaska while you were dating. Look photo She is standing on a steep glacier in a fur parka and smiling. Her cheeks and nose are flushed and raw from the wind. You remember how young and energetic she had once been. You wonder if she always carries this picture in her purse. Give photo doctor OK 4 The doctor looks at the photo, then back at your wife. It seems to decide something for him. He orders a head scan and sends you to a surgeon. The surgeon holds to the light the slices of your wife’s brain and points out a bright acorn in their deepest shadows. “That’s an adenoma of the pituitary,” she says. “Making way too much growth hormone. This is why the changes in the skull and hands.” Self You think the surgeon has just said that your wife has a brain tumor but you’re not sure. Look wife She is trembling. Say right thing wife You can't do that now. Ask surgeon adenoma OK In that dangerous two-second gap between hearing and understanding, you shoot off a question. “And it turns you into a whiny mess?” you ask. You realize immediately this is a question to either ask the doctor in private, or to never ask at all. Your wife looks at you and just as quickly looks down. Her face is red. The surgeon, bless her, pretends not to notice. The surgeon schedules the surgery for two weeks from today. 5 At home, your wife goes into the bathroom and is pulling her hair down to make bangs to cover her Lurched mug. She says, “I’m medically ugly.” Self OK You wish her problem instead was a kidney, or liver, or cornea; something you could donate that would surely erase your debt and probably get the both of you on the news. At the next appointment you pull the surgeon aside to make sure she knows that if your wife needs blood that you are willing to roll up your sleeve. The surgeon assures you that it will not be a bloody surgery, and that the hospital’s blood bank has plenty in case. “Just be there for her when she goes in, and be there when she comes back out,” she says, patting your arm. At home, your wife goes into the bathroom and is pulling her hair down to make bangs to cover her Lurched mug. She says, “I’m medically ugly.” Say right thing wife You can't do that now. Help You can: go, talk, throw, eat, drink, fight, use, look, or Inventory. But use your imagination and see what happens! Look wife Your wife is failing to obscure her 6 Neanderthal brow. Take-out Indian food is congealing on the table. Inventory You have: the business card to a cancer psychiatrist that the surgeon gave you, a one-hitter, your car keys, and a looming despair that if you don’t find something amazing to say, and let your wife get wheeled away and gassed, alone, sur­ rounded by masks, irrevocable harm will be done. Not just to your marriage but to the reckoning you believe is waiting for you. Use one-hitter You inhale deeply. Nothing else happens. Use despair On what? Use despair to say right thing You can’t do that now. wife Use despair on wife OK You tell your wife that you don’t trust her surgeon and that you want a second opinion. She ignores you. You turn the light off so she can’t use the mirror. She turns it back on. You slam the door, open it again, and yank her out of the 7 bathroom to listen to you. Your wife says that insurance won’t cover a second opinion and you cry out that money doesn’t matter! Yelling and manhandling her makes you feel a little better. Here you realize that you’re missing a parallel subplot designed to illustrate and reinforce the main plot. You can: suffer from chronic lower back pain, have a stray fox arrive in your backyard, or try and confront your mounting struggles against racism, or | more |. Back pain OK Every morning for the past year you’ve been waking up with a terrible ache down around your right kidney. You tell your chiropractor you tweaked it while raking leaves out front, but really it happened during love-making acrobatics in an airport Ramada. He kneads and kneads it. “It’s really bad today,” he notes. After your half- hour session it feels worse, somehow. Hotter, angrier. The chiropractor refers you to an acupuncturist in Chinatown. The acupuncturist thoroughly aerates your back, then lays his palms on it. He frowns at you for a while, and then consults his colleague next door, who arrives with an armload of suction cups and candles. By the time they’re done, you 8 have a new limp and have to push your car seat back three notches to accommodate the swelling. Even worse, you get home to find your wife has dragged herself to the store and bought a hot water bottle with a strap for you, and fills it every thirty minutes with new water from the kettle. It doesn’t help. The next morning you are suplexed by pain. You can’t get out of bed—can’t even wiggle your toes—for twenty minutes, and your wife wants to call an ambulance. She helps you down the stairs. The old forgotten tenderness for her further cripples you. Say thank you You groan out “Thanks” and your wife says “Don’t mention it.” Say thank you, really You say “Seriously, I—” but your wife deposits you on the couch and you seize up with fresh pain.