[For the previous entry on the Countdown, click here.]
#2. "Closing Time"
The fact that "Closing Time" (2003) is collected in both Peaceable Kingdom and (obviously) Closing Time and Other Stories is a strong indication of the novelette's stature. The piece is at once a heartbreaking love story (centering on the turbulent relationship of Claire and her already-married paramour David) and a heart-pounding tale of suspense (as the protagonists cross paths with a sadistic criminal). Set in New York City in October and early November of 2001, the narrative also uses the World Trade Center disaster as a literal and thematic backdrop (Ketchum peppers poignant details throughout: "the smell of burning" and "the strange sad New York silence"; the "thick brown-white dust [that] lay everywhere"; the "windows filled with appeals for information on the missing"; Claire's observation that "Even if you'd lost nobody close to you, you'd still lost something").
Yet Ketchum's concern is not with al-Qaeda but a local, small-scale operative: a Caucasian native New Yorker who graduates from armed robbery (he preys on the City's bars just before they shut down for the night) to physical and psychological torment of his victims. Though he carries a gun, the unnamed villain considers
"surprise and fear" his real weapons. He performs "shock therapy" on those he robs, ostensibly so that they will end up too frazzled to remember his features (when he holds up bartender Claire, he thinks: "Time to put the fear of God into the bitch and see if she remembered anything but fear after that"). And he goes a long way towards accomplishing this by forcing Claire into a dangerous game involving splayed fingers and the bar-top spindle normally used as a spike for checks.
As vociferous as he is merciless in his terrorizing, the man proclaims that "after me you'll never feel safe again, Claire. Never. Not at work, not at home. Nowhere." One has to wonder just how much of this is playacting, and how much the transferal of his own anxieties (after watching the endless news reports about the anthrax scare, he decides to use tossed talcum powder as a further means of unnerving his targets). Despite his dismissal of current events (he "strictly worked ground floor," doing "what he always did. Plain old-fashioned armed robbery"), the man seems to have been deeply affected by the terrorist attacks. He is no garden-variety psycho, but rather a criminal with a twisted philosophical outlook (reminiscent of the Misfit in Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find"): "He can see she knows a truth he's known all along, that there is no help in this world, that what will happen will happen and no amount of pleading to god or jesus or to the milk of human kindness will get you any goddamn where at all." The events of 9/11 could have done nothing to help the existential angst this man is carrying around.
The narrative builds incredible suspense as it cuts back and forth between scenes of the terrorist's manipulation of Claire and of (now-ex-boyfriend) David's journey to seek out Claire at work. Perhaps David will arrive in time to rescue his beloved from harm, but then again, a Ketchum story isn't likely to end without casualties. "There could be no good ending to this," David thinks of his decision to visit Claire after she begged him to stay away, and David's thought proves terribly prophetic. An earlier passing line about "the perversity of incident and chance" also resonates in the bloody and devastating climax.
In his afterword to "Closing Time," Ketchum cites the novelette as "the most bleak and hopeless piece" he's ever produced. Yet it is also a shining example of the author's ability to create lifelike, recognizable characters (whose dire circumstances become that much more compelling because of such realism). Without a doubt, Ketchum's self-described tale of "irreversible, irretrievable loss" is the gain of readers everywhere.
No comments:
Post a Comment