The Collector of Hearts

I.
The Sky Blue Ball
Death Mother
The Hand-puppet
Schroeder's Stepfather
The Sepulchre
The Hands

II.

Labor Day
The Collector of Hearts
Demon
Elvis Is Dead: Why are You Alive?
Posthumous

III.
The Omen
The Sons of Angus MacElster
The Affliction
Scars
An Urban Paradox
Unprintable
Intensive

IV.
Valentine
Death Astride Bicycle
The Dream-Catcher
Fever Blisters
The Crossing
Shadows of the Evening
The Temple

V.
The Journey

Acknowledgments

From ""

For dessert, the dwarf-woman dropped bowls in front of us containing a quivering amber jelly. I thought it might be apple jelly, apple jelly with cinnamon, and my mouth watered in anticipation, we were to eat with spoons but my spoon wasn't sharp enough to cut into the jelly; and the jelly quivered harder, and wriggled in my bowl. Seeing the look on my face, Uncle Rebhorn asked pleasantly, "What's wrong now, Junie?" and I mumbled, "—I don't know, sir," and Uncle Rebhorn chuckled, and said, "Hmmmm! You don't think your dessert is a jellyfish, do you?"—roaring with delight, as the others laughed, less forcefully, with him.

For that was exactly what it was: a jellyfish. Each of us had one, in our bowls. Warm and pulsing with life and fear radiating from it like raw nerves.

Epigraph

Some are Born to sweet delight
Some are Born to sweet delight
Some are Born to Endless Night

—William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

Awards

• The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, 1998: "The Sky Blue Ball"
• The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, 1996: ""

Reviews

• Publishers Weekly, January 29, 2001, p65
• Booklist, February 1, 2001, p1020
• Book, March 2001, p70
• Boston Globe, March 11, 2001
• New York Times Book Review, March 25, 2001, p5
• New Yorker, April 9, 2001, p135
• Entertainment Weekly, April 13, 2001, p71
• Library Journal, July 2001, p74
• Virginia Quarterly Review, Summer 2001, p99
• Toronto Sun, January 27, 2002, p. S24

"The Dream-Catcher"
(from Off-Limits: Tales of Alien Sex)

As I sit here, the dream-catcher is on a windowsill about two feet from me, smaller than the dream-catcher of my story, but as intricately fashioned, and quite exquisite. It was given to me by a stranger—an attractive, androgynous, very exotic stranger—when I was signing books in a bookstore in Washington, D.C. in the fall of 1993. People sometimes give me presents at such occasions, or mail things to me, but this object seems to have made an unusual impression on me, or on my psyche. I'm sure that, that night, in my hotel room, it caused me to dream unusually vivid dreams, since I remember waking in the middle of the night, and rapidly writing down ideas for stories; of these, two or three have found their way into actual stories, including "The Dream-Catcher," though it must be said that dream-originated stories are, for me, the most difficult of all to render into prose. The dream-suggestion seems truly to come from a stranger, a source not inside me, and often I have no clue what it might mean; nor any coherent plot; I'm left with a powerful sense of emotion—but it's abstract, mysterious.

I believe that the mysterious—the not-to-be-explained—is a key to our inner lives; to that part of our inner selves that has no sense of time past or time present or time future. We can contemplate and we can try to write about it, but we can never comprehend it. Always elusive, and tantalizing, it recedes before us like a desert mirage, and perhaps this very elusiveness is the subject about which we write, given finite dimensions.

Out of an actual dream-catcher, and a night, or nights, of dream fragments, the story "The Dream-Catcher" gradually emerged. I did not write the story for some time after the dreams, needing time to imagine a coherent structure for them, and an ostensible "theme." The story bears a glancing resemblance, at least in my eyes, to a story of mine called, "The Doll," written almost twenty years ago . . . a discovery I made some time after I'd written it.

What this might mean, I don't know. And I assume I'm better off not knowing.

""
(from Fear Itself)

It's night. It has been night for a long time. Hours pass— yet it's the same hour. I can't sleep. My mind is fractured like broken glass. Or a broken mirror, shards reflecting shards. I am incapable of thinking but only of receiving, like a fine-meshed net strung tight, mere glimmerings of thought. Teasing fragments of "memory"—or is it "invented memory"?—rise and turn and fall and sift and scatter and rearrange themselves into arabesques of patterns on the verge of becoming coherent, yet do not become coherent. As in a childhood riddle never explained. As in one of those ingeniously intricate childhood puzzle-drawings in which shapes—faces, figures of animals—are superimposed upon one another, obscured by clouds, trees, natural objects. Something wants to speak—but what? This insomniac state is perhaps but the nighttime, and therefore the most obvious expression of a general fascinated bafflement of consciousness, for I have to acknowledge that occasionally—not frequently (which would be madness) but occasionally—such fugue states grip me by day, in public places; I am especially vulnerable while being introduced to give a lecture or a reading, for instance, or, on rarer occasions, while being cited for some honor or award. At such times one must sit gravely listening, one must not be seen to demur, still less to be assailed by gusts of wild hilarity, disbelief. Yes, I think ironically, as an enthusiastic stranger's voice extols the public achievements of the largely fictitious "Joyce Carol Oates," yes but no: you don't know me. If you knew me, you would not say such outlandish things.

What should be said in place of these "outlandish things," I have no idea.

Yesterday in Manhattan, on the twenty-third, penthouse floor of a Fifth Avenue office building facing Trump Tower, at a lavish luncheon in my honor, in the grip of a powerful fugue state I felt as if I were about to remember something—but could not, cannot. Wanting desperately to reread a certain passage from Pascal's Pensees, which I have virtually memorized yet can't trust my memory to replicate with the full dignity and gravity these famous words demand.

This is our true state; this is what makes us incapable of certain knowledge and of absolute ignorance. We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. When we try to attach ourselves to any point and to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes forever. Nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereupon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses.

Unless you are more protectively self-deluded than Pascal this is true for you, too.

Certainly for me.

"Joyce Carol Oates"—more helpfully comprehended as an imagination and a writing process, and not an individual— very possibly feels little of this existential anxiety, except in and through her fictitious personae; but I, who encompass, yet am hardly identical with "JCO," am in the grip of this anxiety whenever the momentum of my life slows, and its surface distractions fade. At such times, like the narrator of my story (its title refers precisely to the "abyss" of which Pascal speaks: a kind of black hole of the spirit) I seem about to remember and to know something—but what?

The story in this anthology is but one of any number of fictions I've created to attempt to comprehend, even in the face of ceaseless failure, this abyss, and the mystery surrounding it. The story is not autobiographical, except emotionally; I stand in awe of the possibility that being hypnotized by is a key to my putative industry.

At the same time, I think I am probably representative of the legion of people, women perhaps more than men, yet surely there are many men in our ranks as well, who are both fascinated by the contents of the unconscious and in terror of their uncontrolled eruption. The sudden incursion of an unwanted memory in our lives: how can we assimilate it into what we want to believe of ourselves? We build personalities, like ''fictions," to withstand the roiling waters. Or we build fictions, like "personalities."