{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/6752", "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it. Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.", "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'" }, "archive": "urth", "thread": { "id": 6752, "subject": "Short Story 132*: The Monday Man", "messages": 1, "voices": 1, "first": "2015-04-29T05:15:39+00:00", "last": "2015-04-29T05:15:39+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Marc Aramini", "address": "marcaramini at gmail.com" }, "date": "2015-04-29T05:15:39+00:00", "subject": "(urth) Short Story 132*: The Monday Man", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "#THE MONDAY MAN\n\n\"The Monday Man\" first appeared in the *Readercon 3 Anthology* in 1990 and\nhas been collected in *Innocents Aboard*.\n\n#Summary\n\nOnce again, a narrator named Gene tells us of a strange event in reality\notherwise much like our own contemporary one. The story starts, \"I knew\nJohn Genaro more than forty years, I suppose, if you want to go all the way\nback to the beginning.\" They played softball together when \"the old Harry S\nTruman School split the tracks.\" Gene went off to law school and forgot\nabout John, but ran into him again when he returned to work in a very small\nlaw office where he handles petty cases and writes wills for poor families.\nHis father had lost his money and Gene says, \"It killed him, and that\nkilled Mom; but nothing had killed me yet.\"\n\nGene says he took all the criminal cases he could, and tried to shake down\nJohn, who was a police officer, but found out he couldn't: \"I recall\nthinking it might be because he wasn't married.\" They renew their\nfriendship and go hunting, mostly rabbits and pheasants, but Gene can never\nget John to go fishing with him: \"I never even got him to get a line wet;\nbefore he died he told me why. Now that I'm close to going myself, I think\nI ought to pass his story along. You won't believe it, but perhaps you'll\nremember it just the same. If only when it's too late.\"\n\nWhen Gene was still in law school, John was a rookie, and he claims, \"it\nhit me harder than anything has since, though I've had a partner shot down\nbeside me, and I was the one that opened the box they'd put the Rothman\ngirl in. Know what a Monday man is, Gene?\"\n\nBefore the laundromats and driers were widespread, people would steal\nclothes off the line, and Monday was when most of the washing was hung out.\n\"Sometimes they were the kind that steals women's underwear to keep -\nthere's something wrong with those - but mostly they'd take anything that\nwasn't too worn, and wear it themselves or sell it.\"\n\nOne day on patrol, A woman yelled that her husband's overalls had been\nstolen, and John chased the small man (saying that in those days, before\ncops patrolled in cars, they were supposed to know everyone on their beat,\nbut he did not recognize the Monday man.) He lost him, but managed to find\nout where he went through a child who had been in trouble for vandalism\n(and who, as John told this to Gene, later worked in the Assembly).\n\n\"Anyway the kid pointed out the place. These days it'd be full of addicts,\nbut back then you didn't see so much of that.\" He goes up to the fourth\nfloor and hears the man moving around upstairs, on the fifth and top floor.\nJohn kicked down a door to find the man just looking at him with the\noveralls still in his hand. He approached him and grabbed him by the\nsleeve of his jacket, commenting to Gene, \"That was what saved me, even\nthough I didn't know it then.\"\n\nJohn snapped handcuffs over both of their wrists and pulled the Monday Man\na few steps down, before being pulled right off his feet and being dragged\nback up the landing. John then rapped him on the head, ordering him to\nstop, pulled back down the stairs, surprised that a man as small as this\none could resist him. He finally punched the man hard right on the jaw.\n\nHis fist stuck to the man's jaw: \"You ever touch a piece of bare metal\nthat's been in the freezer? It was just like that, except he didn't feel\ncold.\" He compares it to Krazy Glue, which wasn't around then [it would\nhave been marketed by the late 50s as Super Glue]. At this point, with his\nhand stuck to the face, he noticed that there were only little black\ndepressions in the man's face rather than real nostrils, and that his eyes\nalso lacked depth. John claims, \"it was ... like he was a dummy, like they\nhave in department stores. Only I've never seen one half as good as he was.\"\n\nPulling away with one hand stuck and the other cuffed to the Monday man,\nJohn managed to get him down the stairs and out the front door. He screamed\nfor help but no one was willing to aid a cop: \"I could hear windows banging\nshut and people hustling to get off the street. Then he dragged me back\ninside the building.\"\n\nHe kicked at the man's feet before realizing his legs weren't really\nholding him up: \"He was like one of those bass lures you're always bragging\nabout - they wiggle a lot when they go through the water, but it isn't the\nwiggle that makes 'em go.\" John managed to get the handcuff key with his\nteeth from his watch pocket, and released the handcuff." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "\"This time the door that I'd thought probably belonged to a closet was\nstanding wide open, but there wasn't a closet in back of it - it was as\nblack as an alderman's heart.\" At this point in his story, John sees that" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Gene doesn't believe him, and says he was done drinking anyway.\n\nAfter Gene says that the story has a lot that needs to be considered, John\nstates he has been thinking about it for twenty-eight years, and that he\nbelieves there was someone inside the closet, \"on the other side of the\ndark. ... I couldn't make him out, but I could feel him just like you can\nfeel death at the scene of a murder. I call him the Fisherman.\"\n\nHe explains why: when a fisherman wants to catch something, he uses\nsomething like small chunks of wood formed to resemble a bug, frog, or fish\nwith a hidden hook so the prey cannot let go once it has taken the bait.\n\nJohn says that he was being reeled in, and he managed to make a cavalry\ndraw with his left hand since he wore a cross draw then (grabbing the\nhandle on his left side with his palm facing away from his hip and into the\nhandle of the gun). He shot the Monday man three times and also fired into\nthe closet, then finally managed to tear his hand free from the thing's\nface - the Fisherman did not realize the handcuffs were not a secure\nattachment to his prey." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "\"I've been thinking about that Fisherman, on and off, ever since it\nhappened. That's why I won't fish, and why I always look real carefully at\neverybody I run into, which is what got me my captain's bars. I'm not too\nworried about meeting another lure like the Monday man - I'd know one of\nthose the minute I laid eyes on it." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "\"But I keep wondering whether the Fisherman ever uses live bait.\"" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "##Commentary\n\nOf this story, Wolfe says, \"'The Monday Man' refers, of course, to those\nsad and frightening men who steal women's underwear. When I was growing up\nno one had clothes dryers, and Monday men were a perennial problem for my\npoor mother.\" This rather domestic problem is here given a kind of\nprimordial treatment filled with dread - an inexplicable and strange lure\nwhich might lead to consumption, extinction, or even damnation. Perhaps\n\"The Monday Man\" can be viewed in purely Freudian symbols, in its\npersonification of a clothing thief's semblance as something which also\ntries to snatch away humanity. However, there does not seem to be much\nsubtext, save for the indication that this reality is ever so slightly\ndifferent than ours - it seems financial stability is extremely hard to\ncome by, and that this Gene has become a poor, small time lawyer rather\nthan a writer. However, judging from the set up of the later story, \"The\nCard\", in which a writer is told of a crossing over between probable\nrealities, also by a policeman, the pattern of the story is one which we\ncan see refracted and diffused several times through Wolfe's more mimetic\nfiction. One question we might ask is how far after the Great Depression\nare these events occurring? Certainly the late 1950s seems a possibility,\nthough it could certainly be earlier.\n\nPerhaps with the sense that there is not much subtext to \"The Monday Man\",\nI wanted to try something slightly different for this entry. \"The Monday\nMan\" seems to have been composed at a crucial time in Wolfe's career, when\nhe had retired from editing and working with engineering concepts all the\ntime, and began instead to write more fantasy and horror, producing far\nless SF than during the 1960s and 1970s. Certainly \"The Monday Men\" appears\nto be an overt horror story of the eldritch, exploring something which\nwants humanity for some unknowable purpose - representing a trap from which\nthere is no return. the final line is paranoia inducing - would this live\nbait actually be something like a servant of the darkness, or simply\nsomeone pinned like a worm on a hook, wriggling to escape the torture?\n\nIt occurred to me as I looked over this story that Wolfe's short stories up\nuntil the late 1980s where by and large either science fiction or a kind of\nurban fantasy similar to fairly realistic *Twilight Zone* episodes where\njust one or two things seem \"off\" from normal reality. His obvious fantasy\nhorror stories, influenced by Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, had been\nwritten fairly early in his career: \"The Grave Secret\" and \"The Dead Man\"\nreally stand out in this regard. Then, for much of his career in the 1970s\nand 1980s, if he wasn't writing science fiction, his stories seemed *almost\nbut not quite* completely realistic, like \"The Island of Doctor Death and\nOther Stories\", \"Against the Lafayette Escadrille\", or even \"Sweet Forest\nMaid\", \"Tarzan of the Grapes\", and \"Beech Hill\" - all composed in such a\nway that they were only in the most subjective manner classifiable as\n\"fantasy\" - a remnant of the unexplainable and the bizarre lingered in\ntheir ontogeny, often in the form of subjective or distorted perceptions\nsomehow entering reality, but there is never a glimpse at the kind of\nterrible fantastic evil that would be a matter of course in a Lovecraft\nstory - the type of horror that we begin to see starting to proliferate\nthroughout Wolfe's writing in the late 1980s. Thus, \"The Monday Man\"\nrepresents a turning to something intrinsically and innately unknowable,\nthe very different but equally important influence of the horror genre in\ngeneral and of Kafka specifically in Wolfe, allowing paranoia and neurosis\nto walk hand in hand with fantasy and even contemporary realism (one of\nWolfe's most haunting, bizarre stories hides under the rather innocuous,\nrealistic title \"Houston, 1943\".)\n\n\"The Monday Man\" marks a departure into this urban horror, in a way that\nseems to congeal naturally with many of Wolfe's other stories of a reality\nright next door to ours. He employs the identical double narrative strategy\nthat we will also see in \"The Card\" and \"A Fish Story\": a stand in for our\nauthor is told a story by another, who has experienced something which\ncannot be easily explained away. However, it seems that at this point in\nWolfe's career that his interest in genuine horror exploded. \"The\nFriendship Light\", \"The Game in the Pope's Head\", \"The Haunted\nBoardinghouse\", \"Queen of the Night\", and \"Black Shoes\" are all disturbing\nand horrific stories quite unlike the type of writing Wolfe had done\nearlier in his career, where the terror and the unravelling of the actual\nrepresentational nature of Wolfe's work becomes increasingly exposed to\nview, and \"The Monday Man\" seems a key link between his religious\nsupernatural works set in contemporary times (for example, \"How the Bishop\nSailed to Inniskeen\", \"The Arimaspian Legacy\", or \"Procreation\") as his\nwriting transitions to all of these true horror stories. Our narrator here\nis a subtly altered version of Gene, something which may or may not be the\ncase in his more religious \"self-narrated\" stories. The interesting thing\nabout \"The Monday Man\" is how closely it resembles the sentiment of the\nmodern religious stories Wolfe had composed (or would come to compose).\nThis story is a mirror to the later \"The Card\", even down to Gene relating\nthe story of a policeman acquaintance who tells his story second hand.\n\nWhy does Wolfe like to employ the second hand first person narrative in\nstories in which a writer or a man named Gene is the first person\nstoryteller? What effect does this have on our interpretive task besides\nproducing a kind of distance from its bizarre nature or the fear it would\nproduce?\n\nSince there does not seem to be much interpretive work to do on this\nparticular story, I thought it would be interesting to place some of\nWolfe's famous stories in their primary \"types\" - while some can flit\nbetween one or the other category, many of them are definitely of the same\ntype - for example, the paranoid transformation and infection of \"Lief in\nthe Wind\" has much the same feel as \"Prize Crew\", \"Alien Stones\", and \"The\nOther Dead Man\", just as the eschatological feel of \"King Rat\" makes it a\nspiritual successor to \"The Hero as Werwolf\". While there are probably\nother suitable names for these categories, and perhaps even several others,\nI think these are fairly descriptive catch alls:\n\n*Urban Fairy Stories*\n\"The Changeling\"\n\"A Cabin on the Coast\"\n\"The Nebraskan and the Nereid\"\n\"The Giant\"\n\n*Realism or Near Future SF*\n\"Paul's Treehouse\"\n\"The Peace Spy\"\n\"Viewpoint\"\n\"Eyebem\"\n\"Of Relays and Roses\"\n\"Hour of Trust\"\n\"Cherry Jubilee\"\n\"How the Whip Came Back\"\n\n*Alternate Histories*\n\"Donovan Sent Us\"\n\"How I Lost the Second World War and Helped Turn Back the German Invasion\"\n\n*Personal or Religious Experiences*\n\"The Card\"\n\"A Fish Story\"\n\"How the Bishop Sailed to Inniskeen\"\n\"Procreation\"\n\"The Arimaspian Legacy\" (though the spiritual world is getting a little\nhorrific, there)\n\n\n*Portraits of Psychological Abnormalities, Possibly Supernatural*\n\"Redbeard\"\n\"Monster\"\n\"Innocent\"\n\"Why I Was Hanged\"\n\"Melting\"\n\n*Parasitic, Transformative, or Insane SF Stories, (often involving ships)*\n\"Thou Spark of Blood\"\n\"Silhouette\"\n*Fifth Head of Cerberus*\n\"Lief in the Wind\"\n\"Civis Laputus Sum\"\n\"When I Was Ming the Merciless\"\n\"Prize Crew\"\n\"Alien Stones\"\n\"Many Mansions\"\n\"Talk of Mandrakes\"\n\n*Apocalyptic Stories*\n*Book of the New Sun*\n\"King Rat\"\n\"The Hero as Werwolf\"\n\"Beautyland\"\n\"One Two Three For Me\"\n\"Mute\"\n\n*Allegories*\n\"Redwood Coast Roamer/Mathoms from the Time Closet\"\n\"The God and His Man\"\n\"To the Dark Tower Came\"\n\"A Criminal Proceeding\"\n\"Love, Among the Corridors\"\n\n*Horror*\n\"The Monday Man\"\n\"Kevin Malone\"\n\"Queen of the Night\"\n\"A Traveler in Desert Lands\"\n\"Lukora\"\n\"Black Shoes\"\nA special subset here might be called *Perspectives of the Dead*, which\ncould possibly include *Peace*, \"Checking Out\", \"The Dead Man\", and others.\n\n*Dog Stories*\n\"Rattler\"\n\"Calamity Warps\"\n\"Dog of the Drops\"\n\"Unrequited Love\"\n\n*Pastiche and Humor*\n\"Our Neighbor by David Copperfield\"\n\"Slaves of Silver\"\n\"Planetarium in Orbit\"\n\"How I Got Three Zip Codes\"\n\"A Walking Tour of the Shambles\"\n\n*Solstice or Christmas Stories*\n\"At The Point of Capricorn\"\n\"The Boy Who Hooked the Sun\"\n\"Christmas Inn\"\n\"La Befana\"\n\"No Planets Strike\"\n\"War Beneath the Tree\"\n\n*Fantasy*\n*Wizard Knight*\n*Soldier of the Mist*\n\"The Green Rabbit from S'Rian\"\n\"Under Hill\"\n\nOf course there are many other ways to categorize his stories (such as\n*Island*, *Dickens*, or *Light in the Sky* stories) but Wolfe's tendencies\nto repeat certain thematic patterns in stories of a similar type really\njump out.\n\n##Literary allusions\n\nI have already mentioned the feeling of eldritch dread that Lovecraft and\nother early horror and supernatural writers produced, from Poe on down. The\nFisherman in some small way does remind me of the demon-like being awakened\nand seeking to consume from behind a portal in one of Vance's *Dying Earth*\ntales, though the Fisherman is quite generic enough to represent any kind\nof supernatural temptation or damnation.\n\n##Names\n\n-*John Genaro*- (although in this reality John Genaro is a policeman, in\nours, it was also the name of a prominent member of the Dallas crime family\nwho died in 1954). The name Genaro is derived from the Roman Januarius,\nmeaning \"January\" in Latin. The name of the month may derive from the Roman\ngod Janus. Saint Januarius, the patron saint of Naples, was a 4th century\nbishop who was beheaded during Christian persecutions, but Janus is the two\nfaced god of gates, doors, and endings who looks both to the future and the\npast- what would happen if John Genaro was cast through that door into the\nclutches of the Fisherman? Would he serve as live bait or simply face\nconsumption?" } ] } ] }