The Unsettling - Peter Rock

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these are seemingly realistic stories that don’t behave, whose reality begins to seem more and more flexible. They are not unlike the work of Robert Aickman, who wrote marvelous, strange stories that leave you in the end unsettled and wondering what just happened not only to the characters but to you as a reader as well. As so many great stories by the best Japanese writers do, they simply allow for the idea that in certain places the fabric that exists between worlds is frayed and thin, allowing things to leak out or pass through. It’s not that one world is more real than the other. The idea is more that now that one world has leaked into the other, we have a new reality that contains both.

      Taken together with Rock’s novels, which are at once so similar and so different both from his stories and from one another, these stories encourage us to think of his work (and of fiction in general) as existing beyond terms such as “realistic” and “fantastic”: the opposition between those two modes just isn’t the point anymore, and if you go into The Unsettling thinking it is, you’re likely to be convinced it isn’t well before you finish. It is a book that teaches you to think about what you read differently, and breaks down the artificial walls critics tend to build around realism. In that sense, The Unsettling strikes me as not only an excellent book but an important one: the stories can be read as taking different paths into and out of realism in a way that deftly marks out a new continuity between the real and the fantastic, a continuity that traces the possibility of a new literary landscape.

      —BRIAN EVENSON

       Life is so incredible. Can you believe it?

       All these things we’ve done, and we’re

       only fourteen years old!

      —CRAIG SMITH

      December 21, 1979 – June 12, 2003

      CONTENTS

      THE SHARPEST KNIFE

      THRILL

      GOLD FIREBIRD

      LIGHTS

      SIGNAL MIRROR

      THE SILENT MEN

      HALO EFFECT

      DISAPPEARED GIRLS

      PERGRINE FALCON

      DISENTANGLING

       BLOOMS

      I TOOK A JOB no one else wanted, and I learned many things I would never have believed. Here’s an easy one, to start with: Fungus can bloom inside books. Different kinds of molds, mostly, in dark, damp libraries where the air isn’t too good. Fungi cannot make their own food; they take what they can from other organic matter. They start on the fabric and cardboard of the books’ covers, then feed on the wood pulp in the pages, the vegetable dyes in the ink—kind of like how moss grows on tree trunks, swings from branches.

      Samples are taken, and sent to a laboratory, to check if the bloom is virulent. Usually, it’s not—it’s only penicillin or aspergillus—and then they send in a team to clean it up. This is no job for librarians. They hire other people, whoever they can get. It’s not exactly skilled labor.

      An injury had forced me from my previous occupation. I’d been working down the shore, on the boardwalk. I wore a suit with three inches of padding, a hockey mask painted with a fanged smile. I leapt around behind fake trees, in front of a canvas backdrop, and people shot paintball guns at me. Ten shots for three dollars—I had targets on my suit, my helmet, a bull’s eye on my crotch that everyone found hilarious. I wore two cups, with padding between them. Tough-talking boys couldn’t touch me, cursing with their cracked voices, slapping their temporary tattoos; it was their girlfriends—bikini tops, slack expressions, baby fat under their arms—who had the deadly aim. At the end of the day, in the shower, I counted the round bruises on my skin.

      One day I was recounting a story to a friend of mine, holding the mask in my hand. He had one of the guns, twirling it around his finger like Jesse James. When it went off, it caught me in the face—sideswiped me, actually, not even as hard as a punch. Dark red paint splattered across my temple, into my ear. I was left with this detached retina, where my vision’s crooked and everyone I talk to thinks I’m trying to say something else; it’s still shadowy on that side, but some days I believe it’s clearing. Some days I’m not so sure.

      My boss said he couldn’t be held accountable for a time I wasn’t working. Playing grab-ass—those were his words. And, of course, with my vision wrecked, my depth perception completely gone, I did not make a very challenging target. I was sore all over. We gave away half the stuffed animals in one afternoon.

      Fortunately, none of this impaired me for the new job—the blooms did not move so fast. I answered an ad and was hired over the phone, told where to be the next morning.

      They said I’d work on a team; what that meant was one other guy, Marco. He was forty, at least, from South Philly, where he still lived. Older than me, and heavier, with gray flecks in his hair, which was thick on the sides but you could see through it on top, his scalp shining. He had a heavy way of walking, almost sliding his feet. His hands would hang down at his sides, opening and closing with each step. My first impression was that he would never surprise me. Nothing he would do, nothing he would say.

      We didn’t shake hands when we first met, he just started to show me how things worked. Hair pushed out the collar of his T-shirt, both front and back. He’d done this kind of work before, and he told me there were worse jobs.

      I’ve had them, I said.

      He told me he was only working long enough to make enough money to get out of town, and I nodded and said that sounded wise.

      I have to get out, he said. The reasons are personal.

      We went through a side door, on a kind of loading dock, down a flight of stairs. The books we were dealing with were on two floors—a basement, and then another basement beneath that. There was not one window. Marco had already isolated the area with clear plastic sheeting, hung up the warning signs.

      He helped me into my suit, that first day. They were white, made of Tyvek, with a long zipper up the front, and zippers on the sides of the legs. We wore latex gloves, and baggy paper booties we had to replace every time we went outside. The hoods on our heads had clear plastic face panels; we wore battery packs on our belts, a fan with a tube that blew filtered air in front of our faces. It took one morning of breathing my own breath in that hood before I quit smoking. That’s one positive thing that came of that job.

      The blooms, they were a green fuzzy mold, streaked with black. Fibrous, like nothing you’d want in your lungs. They rested atop books, forced the covers open where they weren’t tight in the shelves and squeezing each other. We started out with the vacuums, fitted with HEPA filters that trapped spores. Marco would work one aisle and I’d do the next. The shelves were tall, but sometimes I’d pull out a book and see him there, on the other side, his face close but his expression hidden. We kept moving, slowly and methodically, as if we were underwater.

      The days went fluid, each like the one before it, progress marked only by the bookshelves left behind. Sections of maps, then encyclopedias. Novels, even poetry. It was strange to spend so much time so close to a person without being able to talk with them. We went our separate ways at lunch, and the rest of the time we were inside the suits and ventilators. It was all white noise, down there—the fans, the rustle of Tyvek, the sound of pages being flipped under our gloved thumbs. At least a week passed before we first had lunch together. He asked me to join him. We walked half a block, bought sandwiches from a truck, then headed toward a little park. When the children in the play-ground saw us coming, they started screaming Astronauts! We always got a kick out of that.

      The wooden

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