The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself

By Chad Taylor

A new edition of the original 1995 collection The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself with new cover art by Christchurch artist Ian Dalziel. The collection features 12 short stories: 'Running Hot & Cold', 'Calling Doctor Dollywell', 'The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself', 'Fire in the Hole', 'Archie and Veronica', 'No Sun No Rain', 'Somewhere in the 21st Century', 'Oilskin', 'John', 'Me & Misspelt', 'From Soup to Nuts', 'Another White Gown'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chad Taylor
• Release date: Dec 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310285035

Chad Taylor

Chad Taylor is the author of the novels Departure Lounge, Electric, Shirker, Heaven, Pack of Lies, and The Church of John Coltrane. He was awarded the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship in 2001 and the Auckland University Literary Fellowship in 2003. Heaven was made into a feature film, and his novels and short stories have been translated into several languages.Chad Taylor's latest novel is Blue Hotel.The New Zealand Listener named Blue Hotel as one of its Best Books of 2022: the "long-awaited return by Taylor is a dark and funny tale set in 1980s Auckland that veers from BDSM dungeons to corporate raider offices."– "Full of depth, striking characters, sparkling writing, and a rich sense of time and place" Craig Sisterson, Crimewatch– "Blue Hotel is darkest crime noir. It takes place in old fashioned newsrooms, questionable newsagencies, seedy bars, S&M clubs and cars. It's as New Zealand-as, but it's not." – Karen Chisholm, AustCrimeFictionBIOGRAPHYChad Taylor's first published fiction appeared in Other Voices: New Writers and Writing in New Zealand, Sport and Landfall. His debut novel PACK OF LIES (1993) was published in Germany as Lügenspiele. His second novel HEAVEN (1994) was made into feature film produced by Sue Rogers and directed by Scott Reynolds.Read NZ describes Chad Taylor as "a writer of contemporary short and long fiction. His novels and short stories often focus on urban transience and the shifting realities of the modern city. Unreliable or unattractive narrators are common in his writing which often deviates from the premises of genres such as futuristic fantasy, murder mystery and romance triangle. His work has a strong visual quality and often employs filmic devices and structures."The 1999 entry for the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature describes him as "a writer of uncompromisingly contemporary fictions of transience and shifting realities in the modern city. Born and educated in Auckland, where his work is largely set, he graduated BFA at Elam and has carried that interest into the strong visual quality of his writing... The fictions often work on the edge of such conventions as the murder story ('No Sun, No Rain'), futuristic fantasy ('Somewhere in the 21st Century') or romance triangle (Pack of Lies, 'Calling Doctor Dollywell'), often through unreliable or unattractive narrators... As these literary norms are subverted, perceptions of reality and identity are challenged. Strong visual representations, especially of sex and clothing, and filmic treatment with fragmentary and mobile scenes and chronology, provide metaphorical access to these internal concerns."SHIRKER was published by Canongate Books (UK) in 2000. Rebecca Ascher-Walsh, writing in Entertainment Weekly said the novel "morphs from a mystery into an exploration of passion and mortality." Published by Walker Books in the USA, SHIRKER appeared in Italian and German editions and was published by Editions Christian Bourgois in France. The novel was praised in Stern, The Guardian and Livres Hebdo. Andre Meyer in Eye wrote that "Taylor's resistance to fashionable cynicism and the paucity of pop-culture references gives Shirker a timeless quality." The Sunday Telegraph hailed it as "a beautifully written and skilfully constructed nightmare from a writer of great imagination." He was awarded a Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship for literature in 2001.ELECTRIC was published in 2003 by Jonathan Cape (UK) and Editions Christian Bourgois. Electric received strong reviews in Le Figaro, The Observer and HQ magazine. The Australian's Clare Harvey applauded the novel as "rare and refreshing." Novelist Scarlett Thomas in The Scotsman described ELECTRIC as "blank, noirish, drugged-up - an intense juxtaposition of big ideas." ELECTRIC was London Time Out's Book of the Week in 2003. Roger Howard described it as a story of chaos and urban malaise:"His setting is a New Zealand you won't see in Lord of the Rings: a city suffering from the same urban malaise as glitzier metropolises on other continents. Our protagonist, Samuel Usher, is a drug addict who supports himself by recovering data from damaged computers. He falls in with a couple of drifters who occupy themselves with recondite mathematics. But the favoured activity for all three involves powders on polished surfaces. When Jules dies in mysterious circumstances, Usher sets off to find out why. Thematically, Taylor's concerns are twofold: the infinite extent of digitised culture; and the limitless flood of narcotics (not to mention the global industry behind it). Electric looks at what happens when chaos rises up to warp these apparently unassailable worlds."In 2003 Taylor was awarded the Auckland University Fellowship for Literature and appeared at the Auckland and Sydney Writers' Festivals. In the same year he was listed as one of New Zealand's Top Ten Novelists Under Forty by The Listener, which said:"What could be more topical than electricity failure? More than a device to reveal the rat underbelly of Auckland, Chad Taylor's Electric has taken service failure and its character exposing metaphors to an international audience. Secretly we are delighted to be on the map of inner-city decline. Taylor's writing is relentless, cool, focused like a police horse in a riot. "He was sustained, without knowing it, by the French refusal to accept poverty as a sign of failure in an artist" (Mavis Gallant) might be a credo, but fortune has a way of changing. Chad Taylor deserves it because he has real style." (Elizabeth Smither)"Chad Taylor's Electric confirms him as one of the outstanding novelists of his generation. His Auckland is a node in the global marketplace and a casino of possibilities. He writes about drug-enhanced chaos, about abundance, excess, choices - about everything grinding down towards entropy. His novels are as smooth and as aggressive as the best techno. He captures the way a whole trendy sub-culture of Auckland speaks and thus renders their mindset with satisfying, pitch-perfect precision." (David Eggleton)Chad Taylor appeared at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Literary Festivals in 2005. His short story 'Oilskin' reappeared as a short film adapted by director Josh Bridgeman. 1993's Pack of Lies was re-published in Peter Simpson's Nine New Zealand Novellas and reviewed in New Zealand Books in 2005:"Catrina takes her ex-lover Babe, now pregnant, to a surprise out-out-of-town birthday party that never materialises. There are no beaches here, only a hot pool at a seedy motel, and a relentless tone of grimy, urban nihilism that is pure Taylor. It's another clever selection on [editor Peter] Simpson's part, ending as he began with a challenging read, and implying in the trajectory from [Janet] Frame to Taylor both continuity in the NZ novella and a strong future for the genre."DEPARTURE LOUNGE (2006) was published by Jonathan Cape in the UK, Editions Christian Bourgois in France, in Italy by Edizione E/O and in the USA by Europa Editions. The novel received a starred review in the Publishers Weekly (20.02.2006) and was recently dramatised for National Radio. Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post described it as "smart, original, surprising and just about as cool as a novel can get" and compared the novel's style to Raymond Chandler:His style owes a lot to Raymond Chandler and lesser apostles of noir, but at the same time it's very much his own. His prose is spare but with a strong undercurrent of emotion; "cool" certainly is the word for him, but there's a good deal of heat beneath.The Houston Chronicle's PG Koch described DEPARTURE LOUNGE as a crime novel that played with expectations of the genre:"New Zealand writer Chad Taylor plays with the crime/noir genre for his own philosophical purposes in an open-ended way that subverts reassuring convention. In Departure Lounge, we first glimpse a newscast tragedy – a plane that has vanished in Antarctica – before moving on to the book's narrator, Mark Chamberlain, as he shoots pool with Rory, a real estate developer who is short on scruples and whose apartment Mark later burgles... For all its nighttime street life of taxis and clubs, this is an oddly silent book. It is as if we move through its impeccable structure seeking resolution the same way that Mark ghosts through all those houses he breaks into. Taylor in effect has taken the not-knowing at the mystery genre's core and enshrined it, occupied its amorphous territory and made of it, as in this slight book's emotional peak, a luminous art."Chad Taylor was one of 12 New Zealand authors invited to tour France for Les Belles Etrangeres in 2006. His sixth novel THE CHURCH OF JOHN COLTRANE was published in 2009. He appeared at the Frankfurt Book Festival in 2012.In 2013 his original 2005 screenplay REALITi was produced as a feature film which premiered at the New Zealand International Film Festival and was selected for Fantastic Fest 2014. Harry Knowles at Ain't It Cool News said: "This is a deliberately paced mind-bender ... A societal science fiction horror film. The more you hang in there, the more you#re rewarded." REALITi received five nominations in the New Zealand Film Awards including Best Screenplay.Taylor's original work on Kurt Cobain featured in the art & text project Mythiq27 in Paris in 2014. In 2015 he scripted the radio version of his short story 'Close to You' for Radio New Zealand. The production was nominated for Best Drama in the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union (ABU) Prizes 2016.

Book preview

The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself

Collected short stories by Chad Taylor

Copyright 2013 Chad Taylor

Smashwords edition 2020

Running Hot & Cold

The old carpet slouched in the door.

‘You brought white.’

She said it flat, without tone or inflection. She read the label slowly, rotating it against the hallway bulb, and the light shining through the bottle turned her skin green.

‘Don’t you like it?’ he asked. ‘I could get something else.’

She considered. His weight shifted from one foot to the other, then back again. Finally she let the bottle fall. ‘White’s good.’ She smiled. ‘I like white.’ And motioned him into the room.

His footsteps sounded loud on the floorboards. Ripping up the carpet had left lines of broken staples maybe fifty years old. The wood was dark as chocolate.

‘So, are you happy?’ he asked.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘With the house.’

‘Oh.’ She slipped past him, digging in the kitchen for the corkscrew. ‘Yes.’ She gestured toward the cat that glared at him from the window sill. ‘Pussfeller likes it. Don’t you? Eh?’ She made kissing noises. He remained unsoothed, as did the cat.

He spoke for awhile about foundations and studs. The wine tasted bitter, he thought, but then again he knew very little about wine. He caught himself before he leant on a stack of brown cardboard boxes: the lids had been marked FRAGILE in red ballpoint pen.

‘You should unpack these,’ he warned, ‘instead of leaving them lying around.’

She shrugged. ‘Probably.’

‘Before you know it you’ll be here six months with everything still taped shut.’ His eyes followed the rim of her glass.

‘Do you like my hair?’ She had slicked it flat across her forehead, like an old-fashioned photograph. She was wearing a man’s white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and the tails covered her body to mid-thigh, front and back. Her legs were bare. Her sandals buckled at the ankle.

‘I like it.’

‘I got so dirty, cleaning,’ she regarded the ceiling, ‘I put my bathing cap on.’

He laughed. ‘And your togs?’

She shook her head. ‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing at all?’

‘Nope. Just the cap, then you get in the shower and wash everything off.’ Nonchalant. ‘It’s the only way to clean ceilings. Weren’t you taught that?’

‘Who’d teach me?’

‘I dunno.’ She smirked. ‘Anybody, really.’

He switched on the oven light. ‘Mutton.’

‘Yup.’ She filled his glass again. ‘You want to get out and let me finish cooking it?’

He raised a toast. ‘To the new house.’

He found the bathroom at the end of the hall, opposite the bedroom. He did not switch on the fluorescent. He watched his shadow washing his hands in the mirror, in the half-light. Then he picked up his glass and went into the bedroom and sat down on the unmade mattress.

He smelled perfume. There were more boxes in the corners and beneath the window. He listened to the squeak and clump as she opened the oven door, and the fat spitting as she turned the meat. ‘You want me to carve?’ he called, and waited. She hadn’t heard. He held the glass between his knees and looked down at his shoes. Good wood on the floor. It was a good place. He tipped his weight back, then forward on his toes and stood up, stretching. He could still see himself in the bathroom mirror. The wine was going to his head. He drained the glass. ‘You want me to carve?’ he called again, and she heard him this time.

The dining table was almost as big as the room.

‘Asparagus.’ She stood the plate on the table, green stalks swimming in cream. ‘Adds salt.’ She smiled quickly at the thought and drew her chair close, ushering in the next sentence with a short bob of her head. ‘Makes you piss salty.’

‘Makes it stink.’

‘It’s not that so much as the salt strengthens it. The flavour.’ She began to say something else but stopped herself. ‘Excuse me,’ she laughed. She pushed her empty glass across the table. He saw that her fingernails were broken, the skin pads grazed white. ‘Would you mind?’

He poured.

‘I’m glad you like my hair,’ she said later. ‘I thought it might have been a bad idea.’

‘Let me see it again,’ he said. She turned her head. ‘No,’ he corrected, ‘closer than that.’ She leaned forward over the empty plates. He reached across the table and took the back of her scalp in his fist and tipped his knuckles, carefully judging the tension. ‘It’s good,’ he confirmed.

She gasped: ‘It’s shorter at the back.’

He shifted his grip. ‘Here?’

‘Mmm.’ She drew in her top lip.

His laugh wasn’t a sound so much as an exaggerated breath. She opened her eyes to him, her shoulders hunched. He let go. She blinked and sat back, pressing her palm against her cheek. ‘There’s dessert,’ she said, as if she’d just remembered. ‘Apricots.’ She got up to fetch them.

He stood up walked to the bathroom again. This time he turned on the bathroom light and saw a pale man in a cheap shirt, slightly bored by the routine. Dinner had been slow, really, too slow for him. He looked at the mattress across the hallway and wished she’d taken time to make the bed instead of charging in and ripping up the carpet for two days. He shut the door and unbuckled his belt, and when that was done he took off his shirt and his shoes and socks.

After a time he heard her footsteps coming down the corridor. ‘Did you see the shower?’ she called, her voice muffled by the wood.

‘What?’

‘The shower.’ She entered the room apricots first, pushing open the door with the rim of the bowl and placing it in front of the mirror. He watched her reflection, soft in the dark stripe of the hallway. She was naked now, except for her shoes. She chose an apricot and leaned on the door to eat it. ‘The shower,’ she said. ‘Look.’

He looked at the walls and then down at the metal basin: the floor had been marked with dozens of tiny dents. She pointed the bitten fruit at her delicately strapped ankles. ‘Someone wearing heels in the shower,’ she said.

‘Who?’

‘The people before me. She. Him, I dunno. Mmph.’ She spat the fruit stone into her palm and set it carefully next to the basin. He watched it rock on the laminate.

‘Was that good?’

‘Oh yes.’

He reached up and put his hands around her sides and pulled her towards him. He was fascinated by her skin. He touched it, licked it, bit it. He enjoyed foreplay as if that was where he expected it to stop – at the skin.

She was easy to lift, balanced on her left hand, reaching out and turning the shower taps with her right. He raised her up against the shower head and the water fell in gulps, drumming on the basin. She shut her eyes and said something about the water stinging.

For a second, her knees were sandwiched exactly between their shoulders. As his cock touched the beginnings of her cunt she let go and pissed in a fine, straw-coloured stream. He held her tight and still. The water and her piss ran down in two streams on either side of his balls. And then her legs fell and he was inside her, and the noise was incredible – the water in his ears and the shouting and the impact of their bodies against the cubicle wall.

They dried each other with the same towel and sat watching the steam collect on the walls. She sat on his stomach and ran her hands over his chest and fed him apricots, and when they finally grew cold he lifted her into the bedroom and they fucked again on the mattress, their hands lost for a grip on the slippery factory quilting.

She lay face up in the darkness, with his arm across her. ‘My orgasms are all so different with you,’ she said. ‘I feel like I should give them names.’

‘What would you call that one?’

‘Beatrice.’

He felt warm in the sheets, but the sheets themselves were cool.

‘Sometimes orgasms are hot,’ she explained, ‘with a center, like a bomb’s been dropped. You get warmer and warmer. And other times they spread out from my stomach in a wave and go through my fingertips and my toes... And sometimes they are sudden. Quick. You want another because you feel you’ve missed the first.’

He had been told this before, and was still intrigued by it. Her orgasms were as varying as his were consistent. Every time fucking was the same: a hunger, an initial wetness, then repetition, then a hunched, frantic twisting, a splitting noise in his head... and then extreme relief, a tonnage removed. Afterwards he wanted to roll away but she held him close, insistent. In those minutes she wanted him so much while all he wanted was a glass of something cold. And yet this was the base stuff she turned into so much jewellery. His sex was an unbearing vein in which she blossomed. Flowers in the dirt.

‘What would you name your orgasms?’ she asked.

Smith, Smith and Smith. ‘I wouldn’t,’ he said, sitting up.

There was a bottle of flat ginger ale in the refrigerator. He drank some, standing the empty tumbler on the bench. Then he went back to bed and took her in his arms and kissed her on the cheekbones and the sides of her eyes and her eyelids and the base of her neck – never on her mouth, not until his cock was hard again and inside her. She had a third orgasm. She said she would call it Petronella.

Two weeks later he smashed her pelvis. He did it inadvertently, with the back of his car. She was walking up his driveway as he was reversing down. She waved but he didn’t see her. The car was travelling at eight kilometers an hour when it hit her. She wanted to scream but could not: she instantly went into shock. All he heard was the thump and even that was nothing – it could have been the wheel going over a stone for all he knew. But something he saw from the corner of his eye – the white of her shirt, maybe, or her face – made him stop and get out.

The impact had thrown her onto the grass, and knocked the earring from one of her ears. Her pocketbook lay three metres away. Her mouth was open and her eyes were wider than he ever recalled seeing them, dilated, bulging. She grasped at the air and then lurched up on her elbows to look at her left leg which was sticking out from her side at a perfect ninety-degree angle. And then she voided herself, her urine jetting on the cement. He reached out to her, collecting the shambles of limbs and blood and fresh warm piss, and began moving her towards the house.

He set her down on the basement floor, near the place where his car dropped oil. She seemed even paler compared to the black greasy mark on the cement. She was still panting but her gaze was steadier now. Her hands explored his jacket, probing beneath for the flesh, the warmth.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

She laughed, but the laugh got away from her and turned into more panting. ‘Ouch,’ she said.

Sometimes in the past he would find himself avoiding her gaze. But now he wanted to look. He remembered a playground game: you had to hold hands with someone and not break your gaze for two minutes. At first there were giggles, then nervousness, then a feeling of extreme discomfort – aggression. And then the feelings fell away, and the two players became friends. He cradled her head.

‘I have never had feelings for you,’ he began. ‘Not truly.’

‘Doctor.’

‘I just put up with things.’

‘Doctor.’ She was describing a picture in her head. ‘Hospital.’ Something white and safe. Warm, but with cool sheets.

‘Don’t try and sit up,’ he told her, laying her head back on the ground.

‘Doctor,’ she said again.

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

He paused for a second, wondering.

He fumbled with her buttons for a brief second and then discarded the idea. He did not want to look at her body. This was no time for caressing, for regarding her nude. He had finished looking. As he leaned above her he realised what he wanted to do. While she lay pale.

Something in his stare communicated it. She was dizzy from the impact, beginning to dream. And in shock, her body chemicals had kicked in. The pain was leaving and taking with it its outward signs. Trembling. Reflex. Speech. Soon it would be too late.

He stood back. He reached down and began unbuckling his belt. She smiled.

He was slow with her, infinitely gentle. This time they made no sound. Her eyes rolled back in her head like a broken toy.

It had been – what? Seconds? A minute? And then the panic came.

He sprinted upstairs to phone and the ambulance came and they lifted her into the back. He sat with her on the way to the hospital. She swayed in the cot, her eyes opening a crack with each corner and bump in the road. As they drew up over the diagonal yellow lines of Emergency he crouched down at the head of the stretcher. She was straining to make out his form. He put his hand on hers, his fingers on the tubes taped to her wrist. Her hair was wet and her eyes were very dark. The cement floor had left an imprint on her cheek. He leaned close to her ear. ‘Violet,’ he told her. ‘Violet.’

‘What?’ The ambulance boy looked up. ‘What’d you tell her?’

‘I said, Violet.’

‘ ‘S a girl’s name, right?’

He nodded. And then