SSM 2011: "Akhnilo" by James Salter (reviewed by Michael Beeman)

It was late August. In the harbor the boats lay still, not the slightest stirring of their masts, not the softest clink of a sheave. The restaurants had long since closed. An occasional car, headlights glaring, came over the bridge from North Haven or turned down Main Street, past the lighted telephone booths with their smashed receivers. On the highway the discotheques were emptying. It was after three.

In the darkness Fenn awakened.

I read this story in the most recent issue of Ecotone (Issue 10), where it is introduced by Benjamin Percy. Percy presents the story as a lesson in suspense—true suspense, not the kind forced by melodrama—and as a case study of a character's external mystery and internal urgency. I agree, but for me this story is also a lesson in combining the surreal and everyday in fiction convincingly, and how to gain more from the two than would be possible alone.

The storyline of Akhnilo is simple: Eddie Fenn awakens in the middle of the night to a noise he can not identify. Fenn follows the sound out of his house to a barn nearby, where he discovers it is language. He startles the unseen speaker and returns home with four words he is desperate to remember. Fenn's wife finds him awake, believes he is in distress, and tries to help him. As he fends her off, the words slip away. Ultimately, Fenn is left with one meaningless word that gives the story its title.

This alone is an interesting plot. However, larger themes move in the background throughout Fenn's journey, often revealed through a seemingly throw-away line. A menacing atmosphere pervades Akhnilo—a string of crimes, "robberies and worse," are mentioned in the second paragraph. Before leaving his house Fenn pauses, "His daughters were asleep down the hall. Nothing is safe except for an hour." The night outside is a "night of countless networks, shifting eyes." Fenn is described as having a "quenched" aspect, of never really setting out on life, and switching between hobbies as a sculptor, historian, naturalist, fine carpenter. As he approaches the noise, we learn he is a recovering alcoholic ("One morning he woke up lying by the car in the worn ruts of the driveway, the old woman who lived across the street warning away her dog").

The climax of the story, Fenn's ultimate disaster, is not in finding the "nameless pioneer" babbling strange language in a barn, or through an unknown danger in the night. Eddie Fenn's true disaster comes once he has returned home and his wife discovers him awake and disturbed, and her efforts to help him drive away the words he struggles to keep:

"What is it? What's wrong?" she whispered.

He backed away making vague movements with his hands. His head was sideways, like a horse. He was moving backward. One eye was on her.

"What is it?" she said, alarmed. "What happened?"

No, he pleaded, shaking his head. A word had dropped away. No, no. It was fluttering apart like something in the sea. He was reaching blindly for it.

Her arm went around him. He pulled away abruptly. He closed his eyes.

Salter does such a great job balancing the everyday and extraordinary that by the end of the story the reader is not distracted by the nameless pioneer, untroubled by the likelihood of a voice reciting an unknown language in the night. It is not the words Fenn needs to remember; he is not taking one journey. This is every journey he has been on as he imagined himself a historian, a naturalist, a sculptor, a fine carpenter, reimagining himself over and over and in his eyes failing each time until he comes to romanticize and embrace his failure. This is made clear in the closing lines, and especially in the last paragraph, in the abrupt shift out of Fenn's point of view to end the story through his daughter Dena's eyes:

Their hands were reaching for him. In the glass of the picture a brilliant square of blue and green was trembling, the luminous foliage of the trees. The countless voices were receding, turning into silence.

"What is it, what is it?" his wife pleaded.

"Daddy, please!"

He shook his head. He was nearly weeping as he tried to pull away. Suddenly he slumped to the floor and sat there and for Dena they had begun again the phase she remembered from the years she was first in school when unhappiness filled the house and slamming doors and her father clumsy with affection came into their room at night to tell them stories and fell asleep at the foot of her bed.

In "Akhnilo," Salter wedded the fantastic to the everyday, and through his surreal plot was able to make his story's central metaphor concrete. And all this in just over two thousand words.

Michael Beeman

Michael Beeman is a writer from New Hampshire who lives in Washington, DC. His most recent story is online at Emprise Review. He recently edited Chamber Four's digital short fiction anthology. He reviews books for ForeWord Reviews.