SSM 2011: "Desultory" by Scott Garson, from REDIVIDER 8.1

In Scott Garson's very short story "Desultory" (from the most recent issue of Redivider), we're offered only brief snippets of the narrator's fuller story, delivering short, barely-connected passages in which Garson accomplishes everything he does via the implications of precise language, syntax, and diction, refusing us extensive interiority or backstory: this is a reflective story without its common frame, that context so many other writers rely on to give the events of the time narrated greater meaning. Instead, Garson denies us access to the larger picture, creating story that's all surface, where the surface generates all the story's power.

Our narrator is a (presumably) rookie newspaper reporter in South Dakota, who now lives "in a furnished apartment with several lamps and no overhead lights," where he "[sleeps] on the couch, in the twined subsidence of passing cars and a pivoting fan," where the "big story" is the "heat":

It cooked the oily nubbery of that couch, which glowed like a penny. It slicked my ribs and shoulder blades, sometimes producing fat trickle.

I disliked writing the story of heat, lodged as it was in the reasonable voices of men from the National Weather Service, from Water and Power and Light. That story was dull. It seemed blatantly counterfeit. On days when the heat finally brought someone down, I disliked writing it more.

An old man with frayed lips and thin arms in the knot of a T-shirt he never got off.

Or that's how I saw it.

I typed the man's name.

That's the bulk of the story's first section, and already the reader must be aware of the weight every writerly choice is given, considering the slimness of the story's vantage: instead of a maximalist accounting of everything possible, seen from some god's eye, we're instead given a super-minimalist peephole, through which all that we see inevitably takes on larger meaning: the hot room, the couch's "oily nubbery", the temporary lighting creating the scene's setting; the "fat trickle" all that exists to suggest the narrator's physical shape. The description of the apartment holds some few clues too, because who gets a furnished apartment, except someone who doesn't plan to stay? This is a person who owns nothing, who has taken a job and moved to a new city, but refuses to put down roots, is perhaps as yet incapable of doing so: after all, the narrator is describing a time when he too shimmered in the heat, when he felt "not well—like the lobes of [his] brain had unfolded in flower."

"I decided I smoked," the narrator tells us. He says, "I knew nobody in that place. No one could tell me I didn't." The narrator chooses a brand of cigarettes, and also their "provider," "a convenience-store clerk named Melissa, "trapped... in a yieldless two-tone shirt with her name over the pocket." Later in the story, he asks Melissa out on a date, awkwardly, her response his "summer's highlight... the highlight of his year," even though the date that follows "paled," as he is forced to accompany her and two of her male friends (both named Mike) to "the bar of a restaurant that made a display of ads of yesterday," and then on into the night:

Later, in the dark of their rental's front yard, she climbed a tree... I thought many things. that she knew what I wanted with her. That she knew we had not much to say. That the way she was laughing, up there in the tree, was self-conscious, untried—something new for her: a laughter she maybe had the idea would translate to whatever I spoke.

And so Melissa too is a temporary person, living in a temporary place, her home a rental, and also her mannerisms, her laugh in the tree, maybe even her being on the "date" with the narrator. Other temporary moments exist throughout the story: The narrator finds a "glitch in [his skin]," presumably a bruise or something else that will pass, into which he presses his thumbnail, "thinking to make it a scar." He moves around his apartment, never sleeping in the same place, seeking temporary sleeps, momentary coolness or comfort: After the couch, he says, "I dumped ice in the clawfoot tub and woke my dormant genes"; he says, "I put a block of ice in a pan and slept by it on the floor." Later, he says, "I drank too much and passed out with a pizza heating in the oven":

Then woke up in shock. I couldn't get air. I climbed to the roof, hung over the peak... Smoke from the various window holes rose past me toward the stars. A zillion hidden insects shaped a lush and melting sound. I lay there and breathed. I allowed the left half of my face to take the coarse print of the shingle... Was it the next day, when the photographer came looking for me?

This photographer is the narrator's "one ally," and the story contains only one instance of their working together, when they drive to a "nursing home in the middle of the great, baking plain... for a birthday," that of the "oldest woman around... [the] oldest woman on earth just about." "This was our story to tell," the narrator says, or, "Actually, it was her story but the woman was comatose":

She lived in a closet, behind a blue thickness of glass, in the ticking of an antique clock.

A murse said, Used to be an old diary here.

She said it apologetically, as if I might have interviewed that.

But the photographer scored. We received top billing in LIFE & STYLE, above the fold. South Dakotans could read the woman's lined face and think they saw serenity and wisdom in the light on her eye.

Crucially, "the light on her eye," not "the light in her eye," as might be a more typical usage, both because the woman is comatose (presumably, her eyes hidden behind their lids), and also because what the viewer is seeing is only their own projection, combined with the framing of the photographer. There's no true serenity or wisdom there, only the sleep of the comatose woman, and yet, what everyone sees when they look is something more what they want or expect to see instead of what is.

At the end of the story—when the photographer is calling the narrator in off the roof—the photographer looks in the bedroom, presumably seeing "the olden glow of bedposts in that space"—the narrator tells the photographer how he doesn't sleep in there, and then lies when the narrator asks him why not. It's only to the reader that he supplies "the truth," and then, only "the truth, in likelihood." What he provides is—just like what the South Dakotans see in the photograph of the comatose woman—the story he is telling himself, about where he once lived, about who he was during the time narrated. And this too calls back to the first section, quoted above: "[That's] how I saw it," the narrator said then, and that, if anything, is the truth of the story. These are not objective observations we're given in the story, but deeply subjective ones, offered as explanations of himself during the "time [he] wrote and reported the news" in South Dakota, but always his offering is undercut by his willingness to admit that this is only the way he saw it, only "the truth, in likelihood." It is reportage, but escaped from "reasonable voices of men," their dull stories, "blatantly counterfeit." And of course, despite the ambiguity, the retractions and the qualifications that come along with it, the guts of this story feel truer than many that take up far more words, that try to convince us with an overload of detail, some reasonable burden of truth.

In the beginning, I claimed that in a story in this style, every choice matters, so here's another pregnant word, its clues easy to miss to miss if you don't go back and read again, armed now with the context of the story: Garson has titled this short "Desultory," a word whose definition I didn't previously know, but for which my dictionary provides three: "Lacking a plan, purpose, or enthusiasm; Going constantly from one subject to another in a halfhearted way (in speech or conversation); Occurring randomly or occasionally." It's certainly overly reductive to note how well each of those definitions can be made to fit this story, but it's also pleasing and instructive that none of them can contain the whole. This same attention to certain available multipliers is evident throughout the story: Garson is working with maybe a thousand words total, but it feels like there's so much more here. One of the ways in which this story feels fuller than most other shorts of its size—which, despite the popularity of the form, too often suffer from their stripped-down nature, compared to the more powerful of effects of their longer fictional counterparts—is the way in which he complicates every word he puts down, so that each new sentence is not merely an addition of ten or twenty words doing only one thing, but rather a series of words and phrases tensioned by their surroundings, pulled taut to breaking, creating tension like an hour spent in a too-hot room, creating illusions like the shimmer across the story's "great, baking plain," until everything here might double or triple in meaning and implication, in poetry and in power.

Read the story: "Desultory" by Scott Garson, from Redivider 8.1