True False: Stories

By Miles Klee

Klee’s last book, his first, was variously hailed as “sharply intelligent” (Publishers Weekly) and “harsh, spastic” (Justin Taylor): we like to think of True False as intelligently spastic, or sharply harsh—disquieting and funny. A collection of stories that range from the very short to the merely short, these forty-four tales evoke extraordinary scenes in an understated manner that’s marked Klee one of today’s most intriguing writers. From the apocalyptic to the utopic, from a haunted office building to a suburban pool that may be alive, a day in the mind of a demi-god Pythagoras to a secret race to develop artificial love, True False captures a fractured reality more real than our own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: OR Books
• Release date: Sep 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781939293992

Book preview

Love

When Messieurs Lenfant and Mellant quarreled over a game of billiards in 1834 both men insisted on immediate satisfaction. After drawing lots to see who should fire first, Mellant seized the red billiard ball and hurled it at his opponent’s forehead. The ball struck Lenfant squarely between the eyes, killing him instantly.

—Felton & Fowler’s Best, Worst and Most Unusual

Dead Languages

The last known speakers of American English were garbagemen. In a rural county of Ohio they worked sorting trash for a nanoshuffler that emitted ozone and vitamin gas. They spoke normally elsewhere, but since most had had a grandparent who dealt in that strange vernacular, they liked to maintain a fluency exclusive to themselves. One among them picked up the dialect from scratch, putting in several years of practice. None passed their obscure and useless knowledge down to the younger generation; after a time just two were left alive, and even they could not read the stuff. Additionally, they would not speak to each other. Long before retirement, some bad blood had passed between the pair, and all the pleading of top linguists could not spark a conversation. Only when the first was dying did the other old man visit. How stupid, the visitor said. Stupid and stubborn. The words even sound alike, now I say them out loud. Haven’t had a chance in years. Nobody to use them with. You know I can’t even recall what that fight of ours was about? The dying man looked at his visitor and creaked in the medical bed. I made too much fun of your accent, he said.

A Syndicate of Angels

Last thing I did as a twenty-four-year-old was try to shave in the dark. I pictured all the puckerings and sneers, the facial flex, each tangled zone of beard. Stickiness mingled with the cooling foam: blood. I’d cut the pads of two fingers. Affixing Band-Aids, I blamed an obsession with a man. Then I successfully blamed the man. Then I knew what a struggle the rest of my life would be.

I left my Hell’s Kitchen sweatbox. The humid night put glaze on my chin. Two gypsy cabs patrolled, burning princely sums in gasoline. Another week’s energy tax would park these scavengers for good. Above Manhattan’s voluntary blackout: a cathedral ceiling of stars where electric lavender had hung. Skyscrapers were vast hanging shapes, black on black, imprecise. Streetlights, which City Hall couldn’t afford to switch on, became stooped trees bearing rotted husks of fruit.

Mitch, the man’s nametag said. Asst. Manager, it claimed. He worked at The Usual, a deli where I lunched with some ­frequency. Day before, I’d watched him slather unrequested mayo on a BLT, wrap the abomination and write the wrong price on it as if a twenty-cent error was destined or just. And in the customer’s favor! There was no earthly reason to carry his slight incompetence in my memory, and yet I did more than carry it. What had so infuriated me that I stood there knitting my shoulder blades? Perhaps that these events had been ­palpably ­insignificant, ­devoid of real consequence—apart from my ­having to scrape off the mayo, saving twenty cents, and replaying the meaningless scene all day.

Faintly the latticework of a construction site embossed itself on my vision. I took out my phone to double-check the address on Coupler, then felt for the plywood wall and peeled back a panel. I moved carefully past a wide trailer, running my fingers over its ribs, and saw movement in the templed peak of a backhoe.

1258, I said.

Don’t actually call me that, said a stalk of darkness, high up in the machine.

Is there an easy way to—

Not really. You don’t climb?

There are places we could have met.

Already an asshole. Not bad.

I entered the vehicle with some difficulty. She said she was married. I told her I’d be on my way after all, and she touched my shaven jaw. It was rough—I could never achieve that advertorial smoothness. She writhed around in her seat and I sensed that underwear had come off. It took her a moment to clear the little forest of levers, and then she was bent over me, hair curtaining my pointless sight, darkness falling on darkness. She sighed as she eased herself down, and as she slid back up I heard her draw trembling air through her nose.

I recalled the way Mitch had wiped his nose, a not bad-looking nose, with a plastic-gloved finger in the sharp light of lunch hour.

It’s my birthday, I told her.

You’re a mess, she whispered.

Not wanting to go straight home, where there was no hiding from my inexplicable and embarrassing thoughts, I dropped in on some friends. Deidre and Hyler adored one another painfully. Not that they fawned or let pet names slip. I mean they suspended themselves in corrosive love. They struck up debates over who’d get which role in the murder-suicide; that was their sort of co-dependent humor. When better moods struck, they’d organize a team and paint inspiring murals on some lost-cause school in Queens. All part of the bipolar duet.

She was soaking in a cold bath, he and I nude and asprawl on cool tile.

Heard about another self-sufficient, Hyler said.

Yeah, I said, finding I wasn’t asleep.

Engineer in Morningside. Doing five-plus hours a day on a treadmill hooked up to a storage battery of his own design. Said he got enough to power an air conditioner.

Shut up, Deidre said.

Oh, you haven’t drowned, Hyler said.

Goodbye, I live underwater now, she said, and submerged. Shortly afterward, a flurry of bubbles was heard to surface.

Small miracles steel the soul, Hyler said, possibly quoting.

Have you met anyone else with Coupler? I said.

Have I met anyone. It sounded like Hyler was talking into a towel. Deidre stood; the water slapped around in the tub.

Just meeting you by the park that night, she said.

Disappointing, Hyler added. Might’ve written you a bad review, actually.

Don’t hurt my feelings.

Don’t pretend not to have any, Deidre said.

We only did uppers. A freakish clarity to guide us through hidden shapes. We moved according to temperature flux and the quality of floor underfoot. You’d know when the couch was close—your shin could intuit distance. Deidre and Hyler had junked most of their furniture anyway, to fight claustrophobia and make ample room for humans of interest, which we never quite became. A glass broke somewhere early. Shard cut my foot later on. I wagged a leg that seemed no more mine than the pain. Can we turn a light on, I wondered aloud. What do you think, Deidre said.

Work: It dominated my waking life yet managed to seem an interruption. I was burnishing my résumé when Myron, the dapper cubiclemate, spun his chair. He had some news. He said it had been a pleasure, dodging the axe as long he had.

Guess you’re all the copy editor they need, he said.

Let me take you to lunch.

The Usual? Or is Sixth too far.

In fact it was just far enough from the steady drip of posts to proofread, reports of bankruptcies and unraveled mergers sprinkled too generously with commas. I winced all the same, hoping Mitch’s poor service would prove an aberration. What made the man such a splinter between my toes, I thought as we crossed Lexington against weaving cyclists, was that The Usual was otherwise perfect. In the two months since unplugging my fridge, I’d lunched at The Usual every day, tried every special, found no systemic flaw. Two months: I had much invested.

Today Mitch wore a poppable zit in the crease of one cheek. Myron ordered prosciutto and mozzarella on ciabatta, showing no impatience when Mitch paused to clarify the bread choice three, three times. I longed to be openly hostile; this was a goddamn consolation lunch. But Mitch assembled my Asian chicken salad well enough, if sluggishly, and I saw no chance to ply this contempt. Myron set down a six-pack of pale ale next to the cash register.

Myron dispatched beers and disparaged the custom of cover letters. I ate and monitored Mitch, against my own will, from our corner table. Mitch re-tucked his polo shirt into khakis. He swept greasy hair away from his eyes and asked another ­employee a question. This second man was taller, tanner, wore a red tie and carried a clipboard, all of which bought him the aura of bosshood. This tan superior gave Mitch a pouty headshake, unclipped a sheet from his clipboard. He crumpled it and leaned for a three-pointer that widely missed the garbage can, bouncing off the door to a unisex restroom. Myron was asking for my bottle opener. I tossed it and shoved out from the table. Before knowing why, I was hunched forward on a loose toilet seat, pulling the discarded paper taut with freshly bandaged fingers.

What I’d grabbed grabbed me back: phone glow revealed a manifest of The Usual’s employees, surnames A through M, alongside salaries, contact info. And there was Mitch—Mitch Falkin, a suitably itchy name—taking home twice the paycheck his colleagues did. Two and a half times what Brandon Ellison, the sap above him, could claim. In the next column were phone numbers, Mitch’s circled in red ballpoint.

A knock exploded against the silence.

Let me in. (Myron’s voice.) Gonna puke.

Because I didn’t see the point in refusing, I went out with Deidre and Hyler that night. A billionaire named Victor Ohnesorg supported their abused little Chelsea gallery. He also invited them to his Moth Parties. The old man flooded his uptown penthouse with light from a hundred aluminum chandeliers, Japanese paper lanterns, bulb-studded and wire-festooned coat trees, chrome Swedish lamps that took the shape of commas, the entire lot arranged to cast an appalling glow over his Sotheby’s centerpiece: a carbon filament from Edison’s lab, naked on a pure white box, in the middle of a dining room so bright it triggered migraines.

Entering the blaze, I tried to shake an anxiety. The more amphetamines consumed, the more the bloggers and critics and gossipists would interrogate me about my antiquely precious job, my lack of opinion as to recent digital controversies. Several guests informed me that an annual meteor shower would be visible, what with the lack of light pollution. When a fashion photographer said as much, I asked him what time we might stand outside to observe. He shrugged.

As he did every week, Ohnesorg eventually stood next to the Edison Altar, clapped twice and signaled a regular to cut the stereo’s bossa nova. A choral excitement spilled through the room and lured smokers in from the roof deck.

Very quickly, Ohnesorg assured the party, looking fussy Italian but sounding glib Slovenian. Hyler leapt to my side with a handful of ampalex. I popped two and stashed the rest. Newcomers must realize only two things, Ohnesorg was saying. One: A Moth Party is only reasonable. Two: If and when this very ambitious, very hypothetical revamp of the northeast energy grid is realized, you are all invited to a Blackout Party.

Where all the lights are off? a man dressed like the fifties jutted in.

Yes, Ohnesorg said. But I’m afraid in your case it won’t help. Here came oily laughter, Victorian chuckles. What’d he say, a low voice in the background asked. I didn’t hear him. The insulted went sportingly crimson, smiling.

I can’t prove it, Hyler said, his breath chemical. But that guy is a plant.

He’s given a set-up before?

Damn it, man, I told you I’ve got no evidence.

Pocket buzz. Hyler wandered off as I peered at a Coupler alert. 1258, nearby. Ohnesorg was passing out index cards for some hideous guessing game—people were throwing elbows to get one. Deidre was talking to the fashion photographer but felt my idiotic stare and discreetly turned to stick her tongue out.

Outside, a tall hooded or longhaired person was leaning against a street sign.

Lucky I came down, party was getting interesting.

And here I’d pegged you as a good liar.

We walked without destination. Soon we came upon an open black rectangle and ducked under the yellow caution tape. The lightlessness below the sidewalk was hotter, moldier. I helped her jump the turnstile. We fucked against the tunnel wall. She struck me across the face, repeatedly, and begged me to return the favor. Somewhat perplexed, I did. After a while our selves floated back. We stood there, panting foolishly.

Next time, call me names, she said.

Why do you love to take abuse?

Why are you willing to give it?

I have no understanding of my motivations, except to say that they strike me as highly contradictory.

Jesus, she said. No wonder you don’t talk. Flame illuminated her mouth and bowed into the eye of a cigarette. At the flare of her lighter, a rasping cough and papery shuffling started on the far end of the platform. A disused voice smoked out of the distance, telling us it was hungry.

Wordlessly we emerged from the subway. My sight had been sharpened by the inkier dark below. Each cell in my body was hummingly tight. I pulled the Band-Aids off spongy fingers and began to bite the nails. We stalled at a dead intersection, waiting for something to part us.

You see the meteor shower? she asked.

Did it already happen?

Probably, she said.

People have always been like this. But vanity settled over the night, convincing us we were new.

Mom’s call woke me. She asked if my little brother, unemployed, was an alcoholic. Relayed some week-old incident with all the details missing. I strolled down to 33rd Street, nabbed counterfeit tickets from a slim teenage pillhead and took the train into Jersey. Dad picked me up on a tandem bike. The lush green suburbs were shot in soft focus, grease on the lens. We ate the best dinner I’d had in weeks, vegetables they grew out back, and ignored my brother’s foam neck brace. He drank beer at exactly my rate.

Got back to Penn Station, lit by emergency lights, at ten. Too early to show up anywhere. I swam across the invisible grid and wound up near my office. Walked into a mailbox with my eyes aimed up at Mars. Turned west. Checked Coupler: nothing. Went down Sixth and came to The Usual, closed. But inside, on the counter, a pale candle was lit. And it wasn’t flickering. I waited—I watched. The wax wouldn’t melt. For half an hour, this candle didn’t flicker and its wax didn’t melt.

At that point, thank god for Mitch Falkin. The man could absorb my fury, and he didn’t fail me then.

Monday I figured Myron was sick.

Tuesday I recalled he’d been laid off.

Wednesday the company’s chairman died, and on Thursday, William Zheng, the CEO himself, arrived in the newsroom and stood on a box of printer paper. He reminded us that our product had value with or without a living founder.

Who has control of us now? a blogger asked.

A number of his funds, Zheng said. They all lead back to him.

Dead man’s in charge, the video editor said into her chest.

I wish I had answers for you, Zheng said.

I returned to my desk and stared at story abstracts in the queue. Through the haze of my disinterested reading, jargon looked accidentally poetic. Golden parachutes had built-in flaws, being either too heavy or flaky. A tender expiration: death slow enough that a family can gather to say goodbye. Stress pendulums were onyx metronomes, insidious. The shadow rate was the cost of each unit of doubt, printed atop a monthly bill. A syndicate of angels would turn salvation and love into illicit enterprise. I looked at the street beyond my computer. A woman held a bodega door for a man who didn’t enter. Do It In The Dark, read a bit of graffiti on some delivery truck. I couldn’t take my eyes off all the things down there.

I boycotted The Usual all week.

Friday I went to Chinatown for batteries. Soon as I plugged one into my phone, Deidre’s name was staring back.

What do you want.

You’ve got to help me, she said. I waved off the street vendor, who was trying to sell me a Polaroid camera. I can’t lift this sculpture alone, and you’re normal.

I resent that, I told her. Ask him.

No charging. The vendor tapped the camera. No ­electricity.

He’s not here, Deidre said. Been out at his family’s shore house, claims he can’t afford the ticket back, which means he’s waiting out a sunburn and reading difficult novels. He calls every night on painkillers and bores me to tears.

Like this?

Fuck you and come over.

Deidre and Hyler’s gallery was a concrete smudge with a door. It sat between two failing laundromats owned by a single unlucky immigrant. Deidre, vigorously brushing her teeth, let me in. Always had a toothbrush handy—I swear she kept spares in her purse.

She gargled that there was a Moth Party later, led me past a row of grotesque woodcuts into the supply room and spat in a paint-flecked garbage can. She rinsed her toothbrush in a rusted sink. Her color was Mediterranean, and the wide collar of her studio T-shirt left one bra strap exposed against a silky back.

Sorry, she said, spitting again.

For what.

What.

You said sorry.

Did I?

I stepped forward and kissed her clean mouth. She withdrew and studied my face for intent, then shoved me. I stumbled backwards, my left foot staggering for purchase but landing on a Jasper Johns book that slid.

I stood and brushed sawdust from my pants. Deidre had already gotten on with business: shelving jars of paint.

You can’t do anything to me, she said.

Didn’t I just do something, I said.

Stupid to go to the Moth Party. Doubly stupid to think Deidre might’ve. The place was empty save two wise-looking women. They stopped chatting to address me as I hung in the foyer.

Look at this now, one said, as though I were the most ridiculous yet in a long succession of fools.

Where’s… I said.

Someone on the East Side is throwing Moth Parties now, the second woman informed me.

I mean where’s Mr. Ohnesorg.

That party.

He left us in charge of this one, the other one added.

He isn’t calling off his own party to go to the other one.

Weird, right?

I backed out and sprinted for the elevator. Something about Fridays: they spoil. I dawdled in the cool marble lobby, conceded defeat, stepped out.

I moved down 10th Avenue, trying to be careless. Around 62nd Street a small creature or flock of leaves scuttled across my path. When I looked up, the dark ahead boiled. Five to seven figures loomed. The point man held something big that I strained to make out. Chemical powder erupted into my face and a fist unstraightened my neck. A hot grip found me in the cloud of fire extinguisher gas and slammed my head on a parked car. Then I was draped on the curb. High-heeled shoes swooped over me; a woman’s inflectionless voice said You okay as they clacked off into the void.

I got up after a minute or five and still had a wallet, keys, phone. A wetness was crawling up my shirt from the hip, that and shame. A contact lens had been blown out, or I was blind on my left side. I limped. An ear was ringing. Few blocks south, a bum thrust out of the dark at my steps. I took the only bill in my ­wallet—crisp ATM twenty, felt like—and laid it on the shaky palms.

I got beat up, I said.

Beat up, let me see. I can’t see you.

I’m right here, I said, and

Reviews for True False

[msarki_3 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

It is hard work to be a writer, especially if fame, recognition, glory, money, or a date is what you’re aiming for. It is more difficult just to sit down to it everyday, be disciplined to the degree you eventually get something scribbled down onto the page, and severe enough in your tyrannical self-editing to throw it all away. And harder yet there are others of us who write and care little about publishing. They save the stamps and envelopes and paper for more important correspondence than sending manuscripts out to be rejected or even published in less-than-desirable literary rags in print and those hovering out there on the web.

None of the stories collected in True/False by Miles Klee would have been previously read by me in any litmag for the simple reason I no longer subscribe to even one of them. The few mags I still might publish poetry in would not find me reading any of the short stories. I hate feeling disappointed. I am nothing short of an idealist when it comes to reading fiction. I want to know on very good intelligence that I will like the work before I ever sit down to read it.

But, here I went and broke my rule and agreed to read this book because it was free and it was the least I could do. You know, give it a try. And Miles Klee I suppose is a capable writer for no other reason than Gary Lutz said so. But I should have known better. Lutz enjoys and respects too much the clever turn of phrase. Especially more than I do. I actually hate that clever shit. Call me old fashioned. If you want your literature saying stuff like, I tripped into awareness of carpet, or The months melted by, or perhaps The pool was bleeding then this book is for you.