The Sunday Salon : Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction
December 16, 2007
And so far, I am enjoying it immensely. The first two stories were wonderful.Today I am reading the third story, Live Wire. From the first sentence,
“You used to say you knew I was in a room before you saw me”
I know that we are, like the first story, in a piece where the narrator is talking directly to “you”. This is a technique that I like a lot, when done well. It doesn’t always work, can come across as if you are being ordered around. But right now, I am open to seeing where this goes. Very intriguing opening line. I want to know who they are, and what is going on between them that one of them can “feel” the presence of another!
But then, in the second paragraph, we don’t find out… The second paragraph begins “Energy is eternal delight,” and then we are flashed back to childhood, to wonderful images of how the narrator as a child would experience static electricity from the “creamy shag carpet” and shock her mother, whose elbow is described as “wrinkled and vulnerable”.
It isn’t til the fourth paragraph that we are given a clue about their relationship – “That first time, I called you Dr Numb” and we discover that she (I am assuming) was the patient and he the aneasthetist. We don’t know what is happening exactly. Then comes a stunning, poetic description of how it felt to go under.
“In no time at all I was inhaling the sweet smell of halothane and rising, over the song of the electrocardiogram, over you, over the balding head of Dr Burns, as if I were moving through water. Far below me, electrical storms were raging in the darkness, and in that upside-down, head-over-heels world, I was the golden key on the kite. The live wire. The finger of Adam. The spark in the synapse. You stood and watched seventy volts of electricity enter me, and in that moment, you wanted to enter me too. “
My god! Has there ever been a more highly-charged beginning to a romance?
Their first date is just as quirky, sitting with take-out coffee in a hospital bus shelter, she asking him about whether he has ever seen a dead body, the dialogue not on a separate line, without quote marks, so it just flows as if it were stream of consciousness. Our narrator, Gloria, then tells us how “talk of the weather became our private language, a code for intimacy and evasion”, and we learn about weather references and what they come to mean to the two lovers.
At this point, I am just loving the astonishing originality of what is essentially a description of somewhere most of us have been: the beginning of a relationship. The writing is thrilling me, I am in love with it and dying to know what happens next. Their talk of tornados, electromagnetism, to me has a veiled threat of upcoming disaster. We’ll see.
The next section carries this through. Turns out :
“You never asked what was wrong with me, though you were there, administering my halothane breeze at ninety, one hundred and one hundred and ten volts. Two sessions per week. Four weeks of treatment. Perhaps you had seen the case notes. You would have assumed mania. I spoke too fast, thought too fast, slept too little, sensed too much, and craved a life for ever in the moment as much as you craved the ephemera of the past.”
It is a little odd already that he hasn’t asked why she is getting electric shock treatment. Hmm.
Then, suddenly, we are on the eve of her final treatment and the voltage is to be turned up because “ Dr Burns has yet to find my seizure threshold,” and she and he start to talk about what he calls “awareness”, the nightmare state in which a patient is awake and conscious during a treatment, in terrible pain but unable to move. She explodes in a manic fit, shouting and screaming.
We are at her final treatment session, and suddenly “you”, the aneastheologist, isn’t there, someone else is administering the anaesthetic, and she panics, tries to leave. I won’t spoil the ending of this ten-page short story, but suffice it to say it is beautiful, painful, true and shocking, sad and real.
I can’t recommend this collection enough. I’ve only read three stories, but Alison MacLeod is fast becoming one of my favourite writers.
Wow – it sounds intriguing!