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  DEAD COLLECTIONS

  Sarah Jung

  Isaac Fellman is the author of The Breath of the Sun (published under his pre-transition first name), which won the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. He is an archivist at a queer historical society in San Francisco.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2022 by Isaac Fellman

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

  Names: Fellman, Isaac R., author.

  Title: Dead collections / Isaac Fellman.

  Description: [New York] : Penguin Books, [2022]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021011936 (print) | LCCN 2021011937 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9780143136910 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525508403 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3606.E38848 D43 2022 (print) |

  LCC PS3606.E38848 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011936

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011937

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design and illustration: Evangeline Gallagher

  pid_prh_6.0_139201561_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1: A Slow Event

  Chapter 2: Feet of Clay

  Chapter 3: A Butch

  Chapter 4: Series 1: Screenplays

  Chapter 5: The Milwaukee Protocol

  Chapter 6: The Shalk Stalk

  Chapter 7: Darya

  Chapter 8: Series 2: Show Bibles

  Chapter 9: Can You Ever Forgive Me?

  Chapter 10: Vampire Support Group

  Chapter 11: Series 3: Correspondence: Subseries A: Personal Correspondence

  Chapter 12: Alcohol, Morphine, or Idealism

  Chapter 13: The Festival of Lights

  Chapter 14: Dead Buildings

  Chapter 15: Spirit!

  Chapter 16: A Sense of “Deadness”

  Chapter 17: Series 4: Subject Files

  Chapter 18: Ababo, Baobab

  Chapter 19: Series 3: Correspondence: Subseries B: Business Correspondence

  Chapter 20: Home Under Home

  Chapter 21: That Little Bit Inside That She Couldn’t Lever Out

  Chapter 22: A Very Bad Liar

  Chapter 23: A Storage Unit

  Chapter 24: Processing

  Chapter 25: The Spirits Did It All in One Night

  Chapter 26: A Totally Serious Person

  Chapter 27: Solus Rex

  Acknowledgments

  The collector is an honest lone vampire; the archivist is a licensed vampire.

  —Andrei Codrescu, Bibliodeath

  CHAPTER 1

  A Slow Event

  When I was training to become an archivist, my mentor told me, “A thing is just a slow event.” The line wasn’t hers, but it struck me with the needle-prick of originality. A slow event. A person is that too, an event seventy or eighty years long, very complex, hundreds of systems, iron and nitrogen and oxygen, blood flowing into blood.

  This story is a mystery of sorts, although most mysteries begin with a dead body. That’s a thing whose event is nearly done, with its last climaxes soon to come. The dead body is always pretty rude. It comes into your life and reminds you of the joke at the end; it ruins your appetite, it ruins your day. There are no dead bodies in archives—except maybe for mine. Oh, sometimes there are ashes, and a few times bones, and there’s often quite a lot of hair, but in general what you find in archives is the absence of a body, the chalk outline of a life, crowded all around with papers and artifacts and ephemera, but with a terribly small hollowness within. You can almost taste the closeness of the body sometimes, almost feel the glossy heat of it, but never quite. It’s cold in the archives, and there’s nobody there. I belong in the archives. I am cold too.

  * * *

  —

  As that day began, I was soaking my hands in hot water until they got warm enough for me to shake someone else’s. I jammed one and then the other into my Styrofoam cup, and with the hand that wasn’t soaking, I kept trying and failing to get my phone to acknowledge my fingerprint. When it’s warm enough for the button to work, that’s how I know it’s warm enough for a handshake, plus I wanted to read my phone.

  I didn’t see myself as being in the closet about my illness, my vampirism, but I’d only ever told my boss and HR. As for telling visitors, it felt too private to explain, especially early in the morning, in a room where the guests aren’t even allowed coffee. So I’d give them a mock-up of life, immersing my hands in the water until they took on its warmth like rubber does, and putting on gloves when I handled photographs in front of visitors, although my fingers make no prints.

  My coworkers also didn’t know that I lived down here, and for that matter, neither did HR. There was a couch in my office where I would sometimes lie down for what passes for my sleep; there was a vivid network of bars, all-night coffee shops, and wet sugary streets in which I could take my greedy sips of fresh air at night. I do drink, you see, and I do breathe. And I can eat if I want, but only the strongest foods make any impression on my burned-out taste buds, and of course none of them nourish me. They tend to be the preserved foods—strong kimchi, pungent cheese, ultra-sweet jams and jellies. I’m all about preservation. I never meant to become such a walking stereotype, but I love my work.

  * * *

  —

  Someday, I will write all this down. For now, I prefer it in my head, where it’s mutable and fresh as clay. I prefer to remember this story between one bright moment and the next of an increasingly crowded life. It’s not an old story yet, and I am still figuring out what it means.

  * * *

  —

  I used to be an archivist at the Historical Society of Northern California. The society is in the basement of a building on Market Street, a basement whose generous toilet was always on the edge of overflowing, and which had mice but not rats. The rooms were really designed to be storerooms. I had an office, by virtue of my seniority, which was just off the main workroom and fifty feet from the vault; the director’s office was next door. She was off on maternity leave, so I was in charge. The carpet was thinly striped in maroon and beige, clotted with dust and crud and rusty staples. The walls between the offices and the vault didn’t have any tops to them. You could bung a penny or a plasticlip right over them, and I have, late at night after everyone’s gone home.

  Every day I felt the city’s palpable weight. There was a ten-story building above us, sealing the daylight out like a stamp, but it felt sometimes like fifty stories, a hundred stories. I would come out at night almost dazed that the city was so small. In my mind, it all grew to monstrous height above me, rootless and dazzling.

  The elevato
r dinged outside the archives’ door. Normally at that point you heard an anxious hup, the sound of someone turning our gritty steel doorknob, unsure whether the archives can even be in here—in this vinegar-smelling hallway like a conduit for acid, like a long-abandoned part of the body. Elsie turned it with confidence, like staff. But when she was inside, her hands were hesitant, and she looked around the same way most people do at first: slow and wondering, with more up in the look than usual. Our ceiling’s low, but people always do look up, as if they’re worried about the weight of the city too.

  It’s hard to remember my first impressions of Elsie, who has become so familiar to me that those memories are all worn away like stones in a watery cave. First impressions are strange things. I believe in them the way I believe in fortune-telling. What, then, did she portend?

  I think she was all stiffness and solidity. A tall woman, big, in a stiff green velvet dress whose skirt stood out from her hips. Some big women are loose and soft, with a creamy invitingness—I mean not of attitude or personality, but a coincidence of how their body’s built. Elsie’s body was of denser stuff, and her face was matte and inexpressive, and her brown hair in a curly bob was very much “done.” I read her as about my age, forty-one, though I look much younger than I am and it turned out that she looked a little older. Her fingernails were matte too, kept short but manicured in black, and when her hand met mine, it was if it had slipped beneath that painstakingly warmed skin and peeled it off. She was shaking raw muscle, and her hand was much colder than mine. Her shake was weak, her hands soft.

  Where had this jolt come from, this shot to the heart? I saw my little office through her polite eyes: the jar of bitten pencils, the trash can full of water-damaged folders. On the wall was a panel from an old exhibit, Blood: The Last Hundred Years—a paragraph of absurdly somber text, headlined “Vampirism: ‘The Thirsty Sickness.’”

  I motioned her to the sofa and all at once I was aware that it was the sofa where I slept. It seemed suddenly inappropriate, even with my nubbly electric blanket folded away and sitting on my piano keyboard, the cord still protruding down and plugged into the wall. I like things tidy and efficient, although I do very little with the time I save.

  “So I think I told you that I’ve been planning to donate my wife’s things,” she said, prompting me. I must really have been sitting still for the full length of that paragraph, dazed and breathing my reflexive breaths. It takes the body a long time to forget that it doesn’t need to breathe anymore; I know very senior vampires who still do.

  “Yes, well,” I said, and I launched into an explanation that’s not relevant here: our collection policy, how we decide what to accession, committees, my absent boss. Then I snapped protocol like a rubber band and added, “Of course, we’ll say yes. For a collection like this, that’s just a formality—the only objection I could imagine is that it’s a bit out of scope, since Tracy lived in Los Angeles for most of her life, and she went to USC, and no doubt they’d be very interested in her papers.”

  “But we’ve been in Marin forever,” she said. “And she wrote The Black Kite in Marin, and The Black Kite is how she wanted to be remembered.”

  “I’m sorry—The Black Kite?”

  “Her novel,” said Elsie, as if I ought to know. Then there was a faint embarrassed shifting whose source I couldn’t determine. Her hands? Her breath? Something deeper in the body that showed itself only in a twitch of the skin? “She’s been writing it for the past seven years. I think it was almost done, but she didn’t want to show more than a few paragraphs to anyone, even me. The whole time she was dying, I expected her to show it to me, or to give me some idea of what to do with it. But she didn’t.”

  “So typically an archivist will want you to donate the copyrights to the work, so that if we lose touch with the heirs, we can still publish parts of things, or give permission.”

  “Oh, that’s fine. I never want to see this stuff again.” She went rigid for a moment and looked down. “I’m sorry if I sound callous. It’s just that I feel her presence, and it makes me so tired.”

  “People tell me that sometimes.”

  “They do? Why do you think it is?”

  “Loss of context,” I said. “That’s what I think. When I take in a new collection, every tchotchke and every line of text feels like it’s been soaked in meaning but left to dry out. So what’s left is just a color, and a mark, and maybe a smell, but what the liquid was is impossible to tell. You can’t know why they kept these things, and you drive yourself nuts trying to understand what was in their mind. It reminds us that we can’t know our loved ones’ minds.”

  “Oh,” said Elsie, her face collapsing into a smile, “I knew her mind just fine.”

  “Well, I mean,” I said, “I’m also an idiot.”

  “No, you’re clearly not. But you didn’t know Tracy. She had a mind that you had no choice but to live inside—not that she was a cruel person, an abusive person—but she was a very fully realized person. And it got worse when she died. Tracy alive was like dating a boa constrictor, or that Norse snake whose body is the world. Tracy dead is like dating nitrogen or hydrogen. She’s in every particle of air. I’m sorry,” she added.

  She wasn’t apologizing for her words, but for a rough flurry of tears that had broken through her smile, and I poked the tissues on my desk and she took three in loud, quick succession. She wasn’t doing that tender little dab-crying women in makeup do. She was mopping her eyes, blowing her nose, sobbing.

  I went to get her a glass of water, although there were archival papers in my office. I just couldn’t bear to watch her cry without doing anything more. She took it when I nudged it into her hand; she drank it with her hand over her eyes, like an initiation. Then our eyes met, mine dry and hers wet and mascara-softened, and she said, “Thank you.”

  “People cry in here all the time.”

  “You know, in another life, maybe I would’ve been a librarian,” she said into the cup. “Do people tell you that a lot too?”

  “Yes, but any reasonable person would want to be a librarian.”

  She smiled again, but I could tell that she felt a little dismissed. “I actually do work with an archive, though.”

  “Do you?”

  “I’m on the board of the Organization for Transformative Works.” She fingered the edge of the cup and finally threw it away. “So we run something called the Archive of Our Own, which is for fan fiction—”

  “Oh, I’m very familiar.” I felt my voice drop three notes, the way people’s voices do when they meet another person who’s ever been deep in fandom. The vocal cords thicken with irony and the dirt of the trenches, and you don’t have to say any more; you know you share a secret. She noticed that, and all at once her face was approachable and wry, each smile line clutching tight some small emotion.

  “What fandoms?”

  “Original Trek,” I said, “Lord of the Rings, the movies. That’s neat, though, that you work with the AO3.”

  “I’m really proud of it. People don’t think fandom’s important to remember.”

  “Well,” I said, “they think it’s ephemeral. But I have twenty feet of boxes labeled ‘ephemera’ in the back.”

  * * *

  —

  After the meeting I took out my phone and looked at my face in it. I can’t see myself in a mirror, but I can see myself in a camera, and so I am used by now to seeing myself washed-out and grainy. My little face looked back at me, sallow with smooth delicate skin, my long-drawn teeth, the chin-length hair—brushed back—that I’ve never cut because I might regret it and my hair will never grow again. Was my chin a little squarer, my nose a little bigger? Everything seemed to be going so slowly. My eyes were hot in their sockets and when I closed them I saw bars of light. I needed my transfusion.

  * * *

  —

  It was the end of November, and the sun wen
t down at four thirty, but I waited until seven to go outside. You can’t be too careful with the sun. In my building, there were three doors between the sky and the stairwell, but still, I caught myself paranoid that visitors would bring the sunlight in on their glowing skin, or that the elevator would slide open and release a cube of trapped sunlight to batter me to death against the wall. I smelled the sun in the fresh-air smells that caught and eddied on their coats, and in the cigarette smells that came down the vents from the street. It infused the greens I ate, it seemed caught in the reflection of my leather shoes, which had once been a cow’s skin. But the archives were one of the safest places in the city, and I left them only in the full dark. Once, I’d had other things than the archives—a home, a car, ferry trips and hikes and cups of ice cream in a hot tanned hand—but these memories had dulled next to my terror of the annihilating light.

  * * *

  —

  The transfusion clinic was kept dim, and only one unsavory fluorescent light burned above the three recliners. I took my place in the middle one, my least favorite. Two other vampires with whom I had a nodding acquaintance were seated in the other two chairs, having obviously been there for at least an hour. They looked sleepy, puffy-faced, that blood-drunk look. I closed my eyes too when they put the needle into the IV port in my chest, too tired to do anything but listen to the television. The IV and the TV. They used to call it the TV/TS split, transvestite or transsexual. If you’d put a glass to my mouth and held my nose, I don’t believe I would have had the strength to swallow.

  * * *

  —

  I felt better after the transfusion, my arms humming with fresh live blood. Blood lives only about a week inside me. I don’t believe that anyone would give a damn about keeping vampires alive, except that they don’t need to spend good blood on us—they don’t even have to screen it, and they pull it out of anyone who comes in off the street to donate for the fee that my subscription supports. HIV, hep, all the blood-borne diseases: they die in me after two days. There’s been research on this, trying to figure out what our bodies secrete that can kill anything, but so far no one understands it, and anyway all the studies are on a certain kind of vampire—male and turned within the past ten years. Technically, I fulfill both of those requirements, but I’m not the kind of male that interests the scientists. I’ve tried, but they tell me the XY chromosomes are what they care about, and the testosterone must be made in the same body that uses it.