Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Retrospective Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 2001 The time of roses: collected stories Paul David Cockeram Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd Part of the Creative Writing Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Cockeram, Paul David, "The time of roses: collected stories" (2001). Retrospective Theses and Dissertations. 16237. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/16237 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Retrospective Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The time of roses: Collected stories by Paul David Cockeram A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Major: English (Creative Writing) Major Professor: Debra K. Marquart Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2001 Copyright © Paul David Cockeram, 2001. All rights reserved 1 The time of roses: Collected stories Paul David Cockeram Major Professor: Debra K. Marquart Iowa State University This is a collection of short fiction, the bulk of which was written during the author's two years at Iowa State University. Many of the stories contain magical elements, which has resulted in many people calling them "Postmodem." The collection begins with a nonfiction essay that catalogues the author's transition from the working world into the academic world. 11 Graduate College Iowa State University This is to certify that the Master's thesis of Paul David Cockeram has met the thesis requirements of Iowa State University Major Professor For the Major Program For the Graduate College 1U To my parents, of course IV TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION V PROLOGUE Mortimer 1 THE STORIES Ray Carver and the Inimitable Impulse 21 Strictly Solitaire 47 One Less Miracle 64 The Devil In The Machine 79 Couldn't Care Less 105 Not His House 116 The Edge Between Life And What Else 135 Little Mouse 147 v INTRODUCTION I have always been intrigued by the magic of everyday life. I'm not talking about Strange Happenings, like the coincidences that television shows mystify and gleefully package for mass consumption. I'm talking about those serendipitous moments when the natural world suddenly seems to reflect what's happening in my mind. It could be as simple as pulling my arm out of the sleeve of my coat and feeling the sting of static electricity under my fingernails, at a time when my mood is high, my brain feels like it's singing, and the synapses are firing with the brilliance of lightning. There are other days when I'm so elated I feel like I could fly, and suddenly it seems perfectly reasonable that I should be able to fly, and I wonder why I don't. I'm not the only person who has these thoughts. A recent episode of National Public Radio's popular program This American Life was devoted to examining superheroes. One segment featured the results of an informal poll on whether people would rather fly or have the power to become invisible at will. Within the last few years, two hit movies by writer/director M. Night Shyamalan have featured characters who had supernatural powers. Going back even further, there are the novels and stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges, which feature flying carpets and labyrinthian libraries. Yet there is a gulf between comic books and canonized literature. Writers who include flying people or mythological animals in their stories have traditionally been relegated to the categories of Science Fiction or Fantasy, and as such they have rarely been taken seriously by the New York Times Book Review and the more formidable critics. The gulf has, however, been narrowing. Art Spiegelman's Maus series won the Pulitzer prize (though what people had been calling "comic books" were quickly renamed "graphic novels"). Meanwhile, for the last fifteen or twenty years, another group of American writers has given rise to the "postmodem movement." This movement plays with form and structure VI to the point that the story itself is infected with self-referentiality, contradictions that challenge the integrity of the text, even magic. Though I have greatly enjoyed reading them, I didn't set out to write postmodern stories. I thought I was writing magical realism, a literary movement whose champions include Garcia Marquez and Borges and whose roots extend back to Cervantes' Don Quixote. Magical realism seeks to examine the relationship between the normal life and its magical elements by exaggerating some aspect of the characters to the point that this aspect becomes a special ability, completely real and acceptable within the physics of the story. In One Hundred Years a/Solitude, for example, Marquez has one of his fiercely religious characters literally rise into the heavens and disappear from the text. The other characters in the story respond like regular people would-they mourn her passing, yet remain impressed with the religious ecstasy it displayed. In my own stories I have a man who can open locked doors, a man who can fly, and another who is completely empathic. I only mean to exaggerate qualities that are already within myself (and, I think, my audience) so that I can examine these qualities, investigate the role they play in my life. Even when my goal was to write magical realism, however, my stories often ended up being labeled postmodern. So I set out to discover what that meant. What I found is that the meaning of the word "postmodernism" is elusive. In fact, I'm afraid that the definition of postmodernism has expanded to mean so much that, practically speaking, it means nothing at all. As Umberto Eco said in his famous Postscript to The Name a/the Rose, "I have the impression that it is applied today to anything the user of the term happens to like." When I was walking through the King's College chapel in Cambridge, England, I realized that ifI really could fly, I would want to explore the fan-vaulted ceilings of English cathedrals. This would not only be a perfect opportunity to see a part of the cathedral that nobody else had, but in a large, confined space I wouldn't have to worry about flying too high Vll into the sky and not being able to land safely (a long-standing concern of mine). And whenever I find myself in museums or thrift stores, I am inevitably overcome with a feeling of hot disjointedness, as if my head is packed in foam and my arms are made of rubber. I don't know why, though having read about empathic people, I've considered that it's the objects in the gallery communicating their history. I find myself making up stories about a tin soap can or a 1t h century French chair. This is the motivation behind the magical elements in "One Less Miracle." My work is often self-referential, another quality of postmodernism. This is because I stumbled across a couple of essays by John Barth called "The Literature of Exhaustion" and "The Literature of Replenishment." Barth wrote that he and his contemporaries inherited a literary tradition that felt used up. Everything that could be done had already been done. His solution to the problem of what to write about when you feel that everything has been written was simple: write about that. Take the dilemma of how to write something fresh and make it the story. "Strictly Solitaire" and, to a lesser extent, "Ray Carver and the Inimitable Impulse," are my attempts at a literature of replenishment. I have learned these and other facts about my writing by assembling this collection of stories. Looking at a large chunk of my own fiction is like looking into a mirror; I see reflected the interests and obsessions that keep returning to me, and I see that these obsessions fall into the categories of magical realism and postmodernism (to my mind, the difference between the two has become negligible). I'm gratified to be alive in a time when the limits of fiction are being pushed. If Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried can kill characters in one story and resurrect them for the next, surely I can have scores of ladybugs descend to aid a troubled young man. Yet in the real world, in autumn, ladybugs really do swarm. This points to the other important lesson of magic, that it's not so magical after all. 1 PROLOGUE Mortimer Our high school graduation was an approaching lion my friends and I could smell, could hear and finally see. And we were like sick gazelles. Everyone else was making plans for colleges, careers, families, while we made no plans whatsoever. I had scattered a few college applications across Ohio, and I was lucky enough to get a good scholarship at a small school four hours to the north, outside of Cleveland. One of my only two friends would leave for the Army when summer began. My other friend Bill had not bothered applying to college because of mediocre high school grades. His only plans involved his girlfriend Sommer, with whom things were growing steadily more serious. He wanted to stay with her, while she wanted to attend Ohio University. One night he put his problem to me this way: if not college, ifnot ajob at one of the local factories, what would he do after she left? The answer came during our final Christmas break in high school, when we were savoring our last months together with alcohol and pot.