‘This Content Has Been Removed’ by Kate Vine

There were no phone calls the next day, and the fact that neither Mr Rosenwasser nor the kitchen hand had heard of the department where I was due to start had roused my suspicions.

I had asked the proprietor, in the strictest confidence, whether he might have the contact of someone who could look into the matter. He wrote an address on a sheet of the hotel’s notepaper.

I took a packed bus across the city (past the docks, into an industrial area). There was a small kerfuffle on board—a passenger annoyed by another jostling him. I disembarked at the bus’s final stop.

The investigator’s office was on a mezzanine above a storage warehouse. I recounted the details of the job I had been offered, my stay at L’Hotel Delle Cento Storie, that I had not heard from the secretary since arriving in the city. ‘Will you be able to find the department—the secretary in particular?’ I asked him. It would not be a problem, the investigator assured me—he specialised in company and institutional investigations. He reeled off the details of his recent cases—the latest, he told me, had been into a company director who had fallen down an escalator: the accident wasn’t considered too serious at first, but weeks passed, then months, and though the director recovered from his injuries, something from the trauma had rendered him mute.

‘But, as comes to pass with nearly every case,’ the private investigator opined, ‘a client’s original inquiry is most often a decoy from what they are really pursuing. In this case, the client’s relationship was not with the subject of the case, the director—as she had initially implied—but with the man sent, by secondment, to cover the voiceless director’s work: her interest was in the veracity of her lover’s excuses. Eventually, the director recovered—by that point, though, the client had stopped answering my calls. I did not hear from her—nor her seconded partner—ever again.’

Published in Lunate #2, 2023, and available to read online here

‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Donald A. Yates

With my case now in the hands of the private investigator, I felt more at ease. A burden had been shifted: I would now wait, either for the apologetic call from the legitimate yet disorganised departmental secretary, or for an update on the matter from the investigator. (Could it be, I had asked the investigator, that my appointment within the department is some elaborate fraud? He would not be able to say, he had replied, until he had made some preliminary inquiries.)

The temperature had dropped slightly, enough for me to walk through the city that afternoon. I again walked along the docks, then back into the labyrinth of the old town.

The owner of a small bottega had just opened up. I ordered a vermouth and a sandwich, and sat on the terrace under a parasol. A tall gentleman stopped to ask me for a light. He had a coarse moustache—of both white and thick black hairs—and, despite the heat, he wore a light overcoat that reached his calves.

The gentleman lit his cigarette and offered me one, which I accepted. He introduced himself by his surname, Proto. Was I visiting the city? he asked. I told him the story of the job offer and the now silent departmental secretary, the same story I had told the hotel proprietor, Mr Rosenwasser, the kitchen hand, and the investigator. The gentleman nodded. I remarked on the heat of the afternoons and the charm of the old town, of the side streets and alleyways that crossed the small canals, splitting and rejoining each other at unpredictable intervals.

‘Once one has lived in the city as long as I have,’ Proto replied, ‘he might come to see that the real labyrinth in which we live is not geographical, but rather temporal. I find myself talking with you less due to the chances that both our walks would take us to this exact same point—this spot beneath this parasol—but far more—given your so far brief stay in this city, and especially your tendency, that you have mentioned, to pass this time of day in the hotel lobby—a coincidence of the incalculable pasts and futures we might live. The great Ts’ui Pên believed in an infinite series of times—a network of paths we might live, times that run in parallel, which fork, break off, and diverge or converge on themselves. In one, I come to you asking for a light; in another, I have long quit tobacco, and walk straight past you. In one, my overcoat is brown; in another, it is grey; there are some in which I wear a handkerchief in my breast pocket, others with an extra button fixed to my lapel. In one of these times, we are already friends; in another, I am your enemy.

‘And in the majority of these times, we may not even exist; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us.’ 

‘And the department? My new job? Will I find these in the future that I am currently propelled towards?’ I jested.

‘There is another time where I walk past this bottega, searching for a light, yet we never meet: you are already in your office, already at work in the department you have been appointed to.’

First published in Spanish in the eponymous collection El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, Editorial Sur, 1941; translated and collected in Labyrinths, New Directions, 1962 and Fictions, Calder and Boyes, 1965, both still in print. Also available in the Collected Fictions, Viking 1998 and as a Penguin Modern, 1998

‘Phone Calls’ by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews

The next afternoon, the phone beside my bed did ring. It will be the secretary of the department, I convinced myself, but when I picked up the receiver, no one spoke.

When I asked the proprietor if he had the number of the silent caller, he told me he hadn’t put any calls through to my room. ‘How can that be?’ I asked. He told me they must have called the room directly.

As I turned away from the reception desk, I realised our exchange had been overheard by another guest in the lobby. As I looked over, she smiled at me, and beckoned me towards her. She wore lipstick in a deep scarlet and, despite the lack of natural light, oversized sunglasses. She looked at me as if she recognised me. ‘Have we met?’ I asked. She ignored the question.

I pulled out a chair at her table. ‘The story that I’ve just overheard,’ she told me, ‘brings to mind my old friends B and X. B would call X to tell her of his dreams—a snowman, a desert, a border, I seem to remember—but he would hear nothing from the other end of the line—there would only be silence.’

There was something compelling and familiar in this woman: if she had nowhere urgent to be, I would order us each a drink, I insisted. I went up to the bar: again, the young bartender barely acknowledged me, refusing to engage in conversation (my new companion also fell silent: a jealousy, no doubt, of the younger woman making our drinks, the beauty of her youth).

I struck up conversation again: when I mentioned the job I should have been starting at the department, the woman in the sunglasses asked me whether I had come to the city for the job or to run from something else. ‘For the job,’ I began, but I (and she) suddenly felt my argument peter out. She took my eventual silence, she told me, as clear indication I was running from something—from someone, perhaps, from where there had once been love.

I did not respond to her assertion.

‘There are countless men like you, placing all meaning in where they are going, failing to recognise what they are fleeing. Up to this point,’ she told me, ‘your story is banal; unfortunate, but banal.’

Published in Llamadas telefónicas, Editorial Anagrama, 1997, and in English in Last Evenings on Earth, Vintage, 2008

‘D.I. Aubertin’ by Jack Robinson

The body of a woman (X) at the foot of the cliffs, a body maimed by whatever it snagged against as it fell, a body a local newspaper will describe as partially clothed, and a London businessman (Y) shot at his holiday home—reluctantly, D.I. Aubertin phones the bank manager to cancel their round of golf. The two incidents are connected—in this genre they can’t not be.

X and Y: is X the same woman that the woman wearing the scarlet lipstick and oversized sunglasses has mentioned? Would there be any merit in questioning B, or does this overcomplicate the case? Aubertin has a stomach-ache, and rushes to the bathroom.

…while he is reaching for the loo roll he notices that two books have fallen behind the radiator. One of them is an anthology of Daily Telegraph obituaries. The other is a thriller; set in a picturesque coastal town, its plot involves not two murders but three, and Aubertin thinks he might as well just sit tight and wait for Z.

Short story within the novel An Overcoat, CB Editions, 2017

‘Free Verse’ by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright

I again asked the proprietor if there had been any calls for me. He shook his head. Not even from the investigator that you recommended? I asked. He flicked through a pile of notepaper. No, I’m afraid not, he said.

I took the bus out to the industrial area (to the storage warehouse, the mezzanine office). There was no answer; the door was locked.

I am sure that, on the return journey, I saw the same two men bickering over one having jostled the other. I looked at the accuser: a long neck, as if someone had been tugging at it. I looked at the overcoat he was wearing: there was no button on the lapel, no handkerchief in the breast pocket.

the bus
full
the heart
empty
the neck
long
the ribbon
plaited
the feet
flat
flat and flattened
the place
vacant
and the unexpected meeting near
the station with its thousand
extinguished lights
of the heart, of that neck, of that
ribbon, of those feet,
of the vacant place,
and of that button.

Published in Exercices de Style, Éditions Gallimard, 1947, and in English in Exercises in Style, Alma Classics, 1993

‘Since You Ask Me for a Murder Mystery…’ by John Finnemore

It was mid-afternoon when I arrived back at L’Hotel Delle Cento Storie, drenched in sweat from the bus journey and the walk. I had decided I would take a drink in the bar: perhaps I might speak to the young bartender; perhaps—this time—she might reciprocate in the conversation.

The interior of the hotel was darkened compared to the glare of the sun outside, but as my eyes adjusted upon entering, I noticed a group of people seated in the lobby. The proprietor, sat behind the reception desk, looked worried. A tall man stood up from the group and walked over. I saw the coarse hair of his moustache, his overcoat: it was Proto.

I asked him what he was doing here in the hotel. ‘Another coincidence of the incalculable pasts and futures we might live,’ he said. He ushered me towards the waiting party. ‘In one, you have arrived in the city for a job you cannot trace, and I am a stranger seeking a light for a cigarette; in another, you are the suspect of the most banal and trivial deceptions, and I am the superintendent assigned to your case.’ He pulled out a chair; I felt I had no choice but to sit down.

I recognised everyone seated at the table that Proto led me to: the private detective I had hired, the woman with scarlet lipstick who had told me of B and X, as well as Carruthers (a man from my past, to whom I will come shortly). The bartender polished glasses, looking over to us repeatedly and nervously from behind her counter.

‘What is all this?’ I protested. ‘I can only trust you have news of my role at the department…’

Proto shook his head. ‘As I am sure you are aware, and as comes to pass with nearly every case, a client’s original inquiry is most often a decoy from what they are really pursuing.’

Proto gestured towards the private investigator. ‘Our fellow associate visited me last week, to ask my opinion on a case he had just taken on—the case, as you well know, of a missing secretary. A simple case of Subjects A, B, C, and D? he had asked me. I had agreed, but secretly, my intuition was that it was permutation, not identification, which was holding up his case.

‘On the face of this drawn-out tale, we have Subject A, our mutual associate, the private investigator engaged by your good self. You had been drawn to the city, you told Subject A, by the offer of a role in a department administered by whom we will call Subject B, a secretary who has suddenly disappeared from the face of the earth.

‘Subject A makes his preliminary inquiries. Quite quickly, he deduces—through a letter found in the trash, written on discarded hotel notepaper, and a mole he has sent to the hotel—that perhaps you have not come to this city solely for the promise of work from Subject B, but you are instead fleeing Subject C—an ex-lover, he assumes, a love that is now unrequited through the passing of time and tense. Yet there is another chance conversation that casts doubt on the whole case—the investigator’s mole has spoken to the proprietor, who has in turn had his suspicions roused by his employee, Subject D—Subject D, our young bartender, who has had a funny feeling all is not quite as it seems to be, that there may be ulterior motives at play.

‘It is here, though, that to make sense of this case, that we must reshuffle our hand. So Subject D—our subject with a funny feeling, a fear of ulterior motives—is not the young bartender, but is now our mutual associate, the investigator, no longer convinced by your story, concerned that your account does not quite tally. He has come to ask for my opinion, yes, but not before he himself (no longer Subject A, as he is Subject D) had engaged his own Subject A—an ex-lover of yours, embittered by how casually you had once dropped her, who has only been to happy to take a trip to this city and hotel courtesy of the expenses you are paying to the investigator—and whose simple disguise of lipstick and sunglasses appears to have deceived you more easily than any of us could have imagined. But is she also Subject C, we have asked, a former flame that you would be running from? This is a remark she found hilarious—you have no regard for the past, she told us, as evidenced from your sudden yet inevitable walking out on our new Subject C,  Signor Carruthers—a partner at the firm which you fled without a word three weeks ago, who have been making their own local inquiries into your whereabouts.’ Carruthers looked at me silently; his expression conveyed a deeply corporate disappointment.

‘And Subject B,’ Proto continued, ‘the reason you have been drawn to this city? At the heart of this farce are a department, a secretary, and a job offer which don’t exist: each a fiction of your own making, a decoy from what you are really pursuing. And this is where we find Subject B: a young woman you had once sat next to on a train, with whom you had struck up the briefest of conversations on what she was reading, a situation where her only option was polite yet distanced engagement, and from there we have the beginnings of a non-existent romance that you have fabricated and exaggerated in your own mind, and your dropping of everything to follow her to the place of work she had mentioned in that briefest of conversations—L’Hotel Delle Cento Storie.’

I looked into the eyes of everyone sat around me: Proto, the investigator, my ex-lover, Carruthers; further back, at each end of the lobby, the proprietor and the bartender. ‘This is obscene!’ I wanted to cry, but my voice would not carry my protests.

The elevator doors shuddered open; the hotel porter emerged, carrying my suitcases.

‘Your reservation ends here,’ stated Proto, ‘the proprietor and the investigator will be in touch for payment of their bills.’

My head was spinning; I demanded another drink—whiskey, white rum, even an aperitif. Proto instead stood me up, and guided me out of the hotel. The hotel porter followed, placing my suitcases on the pavement beside me.

First broadcast in John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme, Series 5, Episode 5, 2016. Available to listen to online here

‘Some children’s story about a tramp rolling smokes from the tobacco in discarded cigarette butts’ by Unknown Author

The heat of the afternoon seemed unbearable; I stumbled down the street with my suitcases, unable to look back towards the hotel. I collapsed, shaking, into the shaded alcove. Perhaps it was a few moments or a few minutes that passed. When I looked up, a man was standing over me: the old kitchen hand. He reached to the floor, picking up a discarded cigarette, half smoked. He gestured for a light.

I composed myself, and handed him my lighter. He didn’t need to smoke the cigarette from the floor, I insisted—I pulled one from the packet in my pocket. He put the cigarette I had offered in his own pocket, and lit the one he had picked up from the ground.

‘I’m not paid enough to walk past good tobacco,’ he said. He drew heavily on the half-cigarette. ‘When I find a cigarette on the floor, it reminds me of a story from my childhood: the fable of the tramp who collected cigarette butts. The townsfolk let this slide: the streets were cleaner for it, and the tramp would not try and bum cigarettes from others. For every six butts he has, you see, he can make his own cigarette—he takes a little of the unsmoked tobacco from each, rolls it in his own paper and, by piecing these fragments together, has a smoke of his own.

‘Here’s the riddle of the fable, though: one day, he finds more cigarette butts than he ever has—he picks up thirty-six cigarette butts from the ground. The question is: how many cigarettes is he able to roll and smoke that day?’

I took a cigarette for myself from the packet in my pocket, and lit it. Before I could answer, the kitchen hand stubbed out his own cigarette, and wiped his hands on his apron. ‘Think it over. And the answer’s not six, Giovanotto.’

Published in a book of short stories which I read as a child, but cannot find nor trace

‘The Grand Claremont Hotel’ by Catherine Lacey

The Grand Claremont Hotel was on the other side of town (the caution that Proto had issued stated I was free to remain in the city, as long as I did not venture near L’hotel Delle Cento Storie, nor come into contact with the young bartender again during my stay).

There was no issue with my reservation at this new hotel, although I was greeted with grave (yet perhaps not unexpected) news on completion of my check-in.

The desk attendant handed me a pale beige envelope made of exquisite heavy paper, paper of such a high quality, such weight, that one might feel—whether correctly or incorrectly—that even by holding such an envelope one’s life had been irrevocably changed. The envelope had a matte navy lining and contained a heavy note card embossed with the Grand Claremont Hotel’s official logo—a small illustration of the Grand Claremont Hotel’s façade, encircled by an ornate typography reading The Grand Claremont Hotel.

In dark blue ink and intricate calligraphy, the note card read:

Due to Client Complaints
The Company has no choice
but to cease your employment.

A porter took my suitcases. The desk attendant asked if I might take an aperitif in the hotel bar. I declined—I said I would make my way to my suite, to get some rest.

The elevator took me to the twenty-ninth storey. The doors slid open soundlessly; the floor, high above the city and the rest of the hotel, decorated immaculately, was filled with light.

As I stepped out onto the landing, I noticed a maid walking towards me. I put my arm between the open doors, to hold the elevator for her.

As the maid passed me two strands of hair wafted from her head. One landed on a shaggy white rug in front of me and the other on my left shoe.

For a few minutes, I felt unable to move. I stared down at those two strands of hair, black and thick, and though I realize that technically hair is dead, they each seemed to be breathing, fluttering, moving toward me, telling me something. […]

I stand at the window all day, watching my breath gather wet on the glass, fade, gather, and fade again. […] I find myself fixed on the memory of those two strands of hair and what they told me on living and dying, but since there is only one thing to know about living and dying, I won’t bother with it now.

Published in Certain American States, Granta, 2018

Introduction

I volunteered for this job, you know. I wanted to talk about two things: stories that I love, and writers who I feel could do with being better known. And while some of these stories are loved by many people, and so are some of the writers, it’s nice to see them all together in one place: stories of my life and others, to paraphrase one of the authors.

‘How Alike Are We’ by Kim Bo-Young, translated by Jihyun Park and Gord Sellar

“There’s something I can’t see.”

Kim Bo-Young is a South Korean science fiction writer: she was a consultant on Bong Joon-Ho’s movie Snowpiercer but her own work is stranger and more dreamlike. ‘How Alike Are We’ is a story about an AI in a spaceship that’s part a Asimovian twist on detective stories and part comment on gender. It’s also brilliant.

First published in English in Clarkesworld magazine, Issue 157, 2019, and available to read here

‘The Armada’ by Caryl Brahms and SJ Simon

“Drake stirred. Elizabeth of England patted his shoulder as one might a shaggy dog.”

Brahms and Simon wrote the greatest comic fiction of the 20th Century, most of it historical. This extract from their brilliant novel of Shakespearian times was written, incredibly, to bring the book up to a more publishable length. It is at once a great history lesson and beautiful elegy to the past.

Chapter XV of No Bed For Bacon, Black Swan, 2012

‘Elizabeth Thug’ by Jonathan Carroll

“‘Comic Sans.’”

Jonathan Carroll is the great modern heir to surrealism, with a thing about talking dogs and very expensive pens. Neither feature in the beautifully brief ‘Elizabeth Thug’, an incredible  short story about erasure and the murder of mystery.

Collected in The Woman Who Married a Cloud, Subterranean Press, 2012, and available to read on Medium here

‘The Problem of Susan’ by Neil Gaiman

“She has the dream again that night.”

You may have heard of Neil Gaiman. He is my favourite modern story writer, in short and long form, and ‘The Problem of Susan’ is his incursion into the world of CS Lewis’: you might say it is the dark side of Narnia.

First published in Flights: Extreme Visions of Fantasy, edited by Al Sarrantonio, Roc, 2004, and collected in Fragile Things, Headline 2006

‘Story of Your Life’ by Ted Chiang

“Your father is about to ask me the question.”

‘Story of Your Life’ was filmed as Arrival, which is how I came to hear of Ted Chiang and his extraordinarily precise, unblinking science-fiction stories. His stories are sometimes almost clinical in their clarity, but there’s always emotion in them, and none more so in this deeply moving tale.

First published in Starlight 2, 1998. Collected in Stories of Your Life and Others, Tor Books 2002