"The Dark Arts"

By Ben Marcus
~7400 words

A man undergoing an experimental medical procedure in Germany awaits the arrival of his girlfriend.

Julian has what he believes to be some sort of autoimmune disease—"An allergy to himself," as he describes it—though apparently not all his American physicians agree, and even he has occasional doubts. At a clinic in Düsseldorf, he allows his blood and marrow to be extracted, doctored through various procedures (the "dark arts" of the title), and fed back to him. Meanwhile, he waits for his girlfriend Hayley, who was traveling with him but stayed behind in France after a feud. Her half-hearted arrival at the end, together with a brief encounter Julian has with another man and a poor prognosis he receives from one of the German doctors, ends up dooming their relationship.

Complexity of character forms the heart of this story. Julian's debilitating illness has left him with an exceptionally bleak outlook on life: he views bodies as "biological sewage" and people as "rounding errors," and he spends his free time thinking up tombstone inscriptions for himself ("He lied to himself, and now he lies here"). What keeps his gloominess from tilting into unbridled self-pity is his self-awareness. With respect to his girlfriend's absence, for example, he opines: "if Hayley had been there he would have tried to scrape her, day and night, for pity and understanding. She would have been empty by now, empty and seething, but still he would have kept scraping with his spoon, digging deep into her sweetest parts until they were completely gone." And yet he is not so callous or selfish that he cannot recognize the depth of his father's love: "He should never, until the very second he died, stop knowing that he had a father who would do anything for him. What a crime to forget this." The complexity is rounded out with the question of Julian's sexuality, evidenced in the unexpected but not incongruous turn at the end.

And that's just Julian. There's also Hayley, whom we see little of until the end, where, despite the built-in narrative bias against her, the reader sympathizes as she struggles with her sense of loyalty. And there's Julian's father, whose single appearance, in a phone conversation, is sufficient to confirm his gentle character. Even the doctors and nurses at the clinic, despite some stereotypical German mannerisms, come across as unique.

The story's strong characterization is matched by exceptional language. The author's gift for powerful diction never slips into the verbosity of a writer like Michael Chabon. The following passage epitomizes the combination of morbidity, humor, and raw creativity that distinguishes Marcus's unique idiom:

Julian took a shortcut to the Old Town, up along Adersstrasse, dipping around the Graf-Adolf-Platz. Germany was deadly cold this time of year, the trees slick with ice, the grass so scarce it seemed the whole country had been poured in cement. The weathered stone, the weathered people—even the language was weathered. It was genius, Julian thought, to create a language from strangled cries, deathbed wheezing. There was perhaps no truer way to communicate. If he spoke German, his inanities would escalate into parable. Everything out of his mouth would be a eulogy. German was the end-times language, the only tongue worth speaking as the sun shrank and went cold. 

Instead, Julian was stuck with whiny, nasal English, in which every word was a spoiled complaint, a bit of pouting. In English, no matter what you said, you sounded like a coddled human mascot with a giant head asking to have his wiener petted. Because you were lonely. Because you were scared. And your wiener would feel so much better if someone petted it. How freakishly impolite, how shameful, to let these things be revealed by one’s language. At least overseas he didn’t speak much English. He didn’t speak much anything.

I do have a quibble with one piece of the story's logic. It seems odd, in an age in which digital communication has become so easy, that Julian would traipse off to the train station every day, in freezing weather and in his debilitated condition, to see if Hayley has arrived. But I'm happy to suspend my disbelief on this point because the story gives us so much else to admire. With its complex characters, exceptional language, and surprising (though not O. Henryesque) turn at the end, "The Dark Arts" is a must-read.

Outstanding.