Introduction

The stories in Klim's new collection include tales of controlling women and ne'er-do-well men trying, well, to do well if they could; an upscale chef helping to prepare a condemned man's last meal; best friends who find themselves in a middle eastern battlefield; a rocket scientist on the drink who gets lucky; a heartbreaking and haunting tale of a neglected boy and what he learns from his runaway dog; and an abused girl who views a kaleidoscope of past lives. Told with the light, deft touch and well tuned dialogue that Klim's readers will be familiar with from his novels-a variety of characters and situations for every taste. -Thomas E. Kennedy, author of In the Company of Angels

Editorial Review

No editorial review at this time.

Excerpt

Excerpt from the story “True Surrealism”

The smell of grease in the Horseshoe Diner was strong, like the residuals of every meal that had ever been cooked over its open griddle. I lingered in a corner booth near the window, speaking to my wife Ava on the cell phone. With as much free time as a corpse, I pondered past mistakes, but I kept the call short before she asked too many questions and revived the dying thoughts in my mind. A man was a sharp and useful tool, I thought, as long as he never paused to consider it.

“John, when are you coming home for dinner?” Ava asked.

“Same time as always.” Beneath me, I felt the duct tape that crudely sealed the crack in the red vinyl cushion.

“Can you bring milk for the kids?”

“I have your note.”

Thursday was milk day. To rescue the weekend for my vigilant wife, I must stop by the supermarket on my way home and pick up a gallon of milk. God forbid we should go without the comfort of milk or bread for a second. God forbid we should run short of anything, ever. And we never did. I had built a life where nothing failed expectations—bills were paid, heaters kept heating, roofs never leaked. We could be framed and shot by the Good Housekeeping paparazzi, and they would never catch a brick out of place, a shrub overgrown, or our boys in shoes or pants a half size too small. Our life was perfect, until I ruined everything.

But no one knew, at least no one important to me, especially not Ava. I listened to her wonderful voice outline the mechanical details of her day. Not even the trains ran with such timing and luck—luck she didn’t know was rapidly leaving town. I had lost my job at Smith & Wallace International Communications. Two years ago, I had been top salesman, before they siphoned off my commissions and outsourced my accounts to a call center in Calcutta. At the time, I’d explained to Ava why my paychecks kept shrinking and the perks disappeared. No more lush dinners on the company. No luxurious cruises to the islands. Searching for coupons instead of vacation rentals, we downgraded our expectations from Peligrino to tap water. By settling Ava’s fears, I held her terrifying worry-hives beneath the surface. She got into the leaner living, and then three weeks ago, SWIC laid me off me. I couldn’t form the words in my mouth to tell Ava—me, John Gooden, the golden-tongued national sales leader of SWIC, Inc. My boys were too young to understand shifting markets and a father with overpriced skills. Unbeknownst to Ava, I spent my days weaving through crowds at job fairs like an undercover detective trying to make his mark. My credentials were camped on more Internet sites than cable television had sponsored programming. At my most desperate, I spoke to local fortunetellers about my prospects. Trying to divine my future seemed less difficult than processing the obvious facts, and keeping them both a secret was my new occupation.

“Don’t worry, honey,” I finally said. “I’ve got it covered.”

I hung up with Ava and continued my morning ritual. My exit interview from SWIC included a cheery brochure that insisted I should maintain my daily routine. Boldly confident in its approach, it glossed over the part about separating me from the single act that defined my days. I was told to make appointments, keep schedules, and continue my regular habits, but all of this hinged on a regular paycheck. In western culture, it seemed that a man was defined by the pile of gold he created, and on Tuesday, my severance pay ran out. With my pot of gold shrinking, my best prospects lay over the horizon. God, I just didn’t know where. Or when.

Which was why I became involved with psychics. I was not the type of guy who believed in the stars or premonitions. When people told me that they had lived past lives or received a signal from a dead aunt or a bunch of clouds arranged in a particular pattern, I tried not to laugh in their faces. However a few days ago, I discovered the alter ego of the universe. I was seated in the Horseshoe Diner, having coffee and a bran muffin that I would soon no longer be able to afford, when I spilled my troubles to Ruth, the diner’s owner. Perched at a cash register with the Horseshoe’s very first dollar taped to the front, she noticed that I wasn’t leaving at 8:10 am every morning. I was searching the back of the newspaper and sometimes staring up at the talking heads on CNN who covered the same story ad nauseam. Ruth claimed that she’d seen this behavior before. At a glance, middle-aged unemployed men were dead giveaways.

“Yeah, I have no place to go,” I said.

I almost admitted that I had a job with Edward Trask, the richest man in town, the benefactor of a dozen outlying towns and hundreds of charities, but that was only half the story. I wasn’t even his advisor, accountant, or personal secretary. I worked a part-time job doing grunt work in his sculpture studio—not a gold star on my executive resume.

“How long have you been out of work?” Ruth looked as if she cut her hair with dull garden shears, a spiky creation that never laid flat.

“Three weeks.” Although relieved to get it out in the open, I felt queer making my confession to a woman who only ever said “thanks honey” as I paid my tab.

“You ought to talk to Lucian. He has terrific insights.”

“Like what?”

“Last year, when he noticed the chickens were dancing…”

“Chickens dancing?”

“He has a farm. When he saw the chickens, he predicted a twenty-two car pile-up on the interstate.”

Already last week, in a tiled shack by the railroad station, I had visited a fortuneteller who laid Tarot cards in a pyramid on the table and then suddenly looked up and uttered, “There will be a man with sawdust on his boots.” I liked that she didn’t mince words, but frankly, if I was dabbling in the occult and shedding light on the unseen, I hoped for a little more information, such as the man with the sawdust boots held a generous employment contract in his hand. That information focused the beam a little tighter, but apparently psychics had their own lingo like everyone else. You had to pay them, not only to see the future, but also to explain what it was they were seeing.

“Who is this dancing chicken guy?” I asked, certain it was a wrong move, but with the right moves all dried up, the wrong moves were looking sexy.

“Lucian Cartier. He’s famous in these parts.”

Famous people in Centerville? It was amazing how we all lived now. You might be famous in your hometown and half the residents didn’t know your name. I had been famous at SWIC for reciting our entire product line and rate sheet by memory, and no one at the Horseshoe Diner knew or cared. Hell, no one at SWIC cared anymore. When salaries and commissions were one-tenth the cost in India, each salesman at the SWIC home office became famous in an infamous way.

“What does Lucian do exactly?” I asked.

“He reads the signs.”

“Thanks for the tip.” Preparing to leave, I knew better than to argue with someone’s beliefs, especially if that someone served you food. You didn’t joke with the person who fed you, and you didn’t mock a person’s faith. I had been joking all along, cruising really, never worried that the hand that fed me would bite my hands off to save a buck. And it wasn’t just my ability to earn money. I no longer had hands for Ava, having lost that touch as well.

Ruth slipped me a note with directions for Lucian Cartier’s farm. I knew who he was because I’d given him the middle finger last month when he’d blocked the road with his tractor. It had been the start of an awful week, and by the end of it, I had enough time on my hands to wait for him to plow an entire field.

As my Volvo pulled into the dirt tire ruts that split Lucian’s acreage in two, I saw him near the barn dumping corn into a trough for the spring piglets. His boots were covered in mud and pieces of straw, which might resemble sawdust in a day or two, but I wasn’t giving this one to the fortuneteller.

Lucian wore brown canvas overalls and an axe dangling from his belt. A rugged French Canadian, he had a bold face as if carved in Mount Rushmore—the unfinished side of Rushmore, with the pilot lines and weathering of years. He watched me rise from my car and walk toward the pigpen. With a glance, I knew that he recognized me from the road incident, but I got the feeling that he wasn’t about to revisit the issue.

“I was expecting you,” Lucian said.

Here we go again: another portentous psychic. I braced for a bizarre prediction to match the fortuneteller’s sawdust boots.

“Ruth called me on the phone,” he said.

I was relieved that conventional modes of communication still prevailed and Ruth hadn’t signaled him via the brainwave highway. Trying to keep specific thoughts from my head, I focused only on an apology for the road incident. Forgive me. Forgive me.

“Did you think I read your mind?” Barely suppressing a smirk, Lucian dropped the feedbag and closed the gap between us. “I don’t work like that.”

“Then how do you work?”

“How does anybody?”

“We negotiate,” I said, although I wasn’t feeling on my game. For years, negotiations had been the key to my success in life and at work. Some salesmen made buddies of their prospects with gifts and favors. Others put on the hard sell and blew a good number of their chances. When people didn’t see eye-to-eye, a good salesman needed to unravel the confusion and reach an understanding. I wondered if a person in Calcutta could do that over the phone, if a person who never set foot in the United States was able to traverse the ambitious, harried, underfed American mind. No matter how sophisticated or well documented the culture appears, some terrains required a native guide.

“I should have seen my layoff coming,” I said aloud, “when they began building computer servers offshore.”

“Last week, I had to order a replacement tractor part from Malaysia. The freight cost more than the part itself.” Up close, Lucian’s accent was more apparent. He spoke deeply, as if the words caught in the back of his throat.

“I just never figured they’d move the jobs offshore, too.”

Lucian led me to the pasture where the sheep milled in clumps upon the uneven grass. With the henhouse upwind, the fetid odor of bird droppings, feathers, and who-knew-what-else reached my nose. Life on the farm, over the range, or in the woods never enticed my blood. I have resisted the notion of getting my hands dirty since finger painting in kindergarten. I’ve never planted a seed or chopped wood, even on a lark. If you asked me to dress a chicken, I might scan the L.L. Bean catalog for poultry cozies. Now I had to get my hands dirty, make magic out of the elements most foreign to me. I needed a desk, a phone, and a masthead on a business card that proclaimed me as an agent of an industry that mattered, that impacted real life, but I was an agent of free time, and everyone could get free time, if they wanted, when they wanted, even though they said they wanted and they really didn’t.

Standing beneath the naked sun, we watched the sheep graze. Sheep have been historically depicted as puffy white clouds, skipping about the fields, but these looked like filthy mop rags in bad need of a rinse.

“You want to know how to proceed,” he said.

Already knowing how to proceed, I wasn’t ready to face that option. Years ago, I’d promised Ava to make the world stand still, to keep her schedules unaltered, and to keep her clockwork days intact, but with my world rotating out of control, I soon would be confessing my situation and setting her off on a frightful worry jag. No, I didn’t need to proceed. Things needed to stay exactly as they had been before I joined the jobless ranks.

“But you don’t know where to turn,” Lucian continued. “The answer is all around us—in the rocks and trees, flowing in the wind.”

“Can you help me?” I glanced at his overalls and large frame. Of course he couldn’t help, and by the manner in which I asked the question, it was clear that I had little faith in his abilities. If I needed my hedges clipped or pets sheered, he was my man—but not for career advice, especially not for a glimpse of my days ahead.

“Arrière pensée,” he whispered.

I didn’t fully understand French but filed it away phonetically for the future. Any salesman worth his salt had a fast memory, remembering more than just names. He recorded a client’s favorite food and drink. He recalled a client’s birthday and if his wife was pregnant or his kids were graduating from school. He never wanted to be short a card to play later.

Lucian faced a hitching post where a chain dangled without a catch. “I used to have a goat—Trippy, a good girl, showed me many things.”

“What happened to Trippy?”

As he pressed a hand to his neck, water formed in his eyes. “A hunk of potato. It was too big. She loved green Russets.”

“She choked?”

“It was a bad day. The cows had been hind-stepping. I should have seen trouble coming.”

By his solemn tone, I knew that we were entering a sales negotiation. Few people wanted to buy what was being offered to them. They wanted to release themselves of their problems and, in exchange, pay me for the service. A master at identifying a problem, I began parsing Lucian’s words to get at the core of his issues. “You said that Trippy showed you many things.”

“They all do.”

“The goats?”

“All the animals—they reveal how things will go and what to avoid, like when the cows lie down before a storm and the snakes slither to the creek for protection. But there was only one Trippy. She was the best, terrific insight.”

That was exactly what Ruth from the diner had said. I let the information soak in. When negotiating, I needed to be careful not to rush or appear wanting, or else I might drive the deal away from the center of opportunity.

“The animals,” Lucian said, “give me signs.”

“Can another goat like her be found?”

“I don’t know.”

I gazed at the sheep as they herded themselves into the far end of the field. In the old days, before paper money rose to prominence and entirely destroyed the fair exchange system, people paid doctors with chickens and loaves of bread. They bartered for survival, often with the very items they needed to survive. I knew that Lucian required a goat—a goat like Trippy.

Excerpt from the story “Complete Exposure”

When I first saw my naked wife, she was standing at the stovetop flipping boneless chicken breasts. Our five-year-old son, Rudy, sat at the table, brushing a red crayon across a page in a coloring book. He was naked like his mother.

He raised his bright face. “We’re going natural, Daddy.”

My wife transferred the chicken to a plate, her pink breasts jiggling with the motion. Smoke slipped past the range hood and kissed the ceiling. Garlic and rosemary tinged the air. “We’ve given up clothes,” Laura said.

“Angela and Pam are natural too.” Rudy was referring to his unclothed sisters shuffling about the living room.

“Don’t worry, Michael,” Laura said. “I haven’t abandoned diapers. The girls are keeping those.”

All four of them seemed content, but I was seven moons removed from it. A computer virus at work had thrown my client base into disarray and my reputation into serious doubt. I didn’t know the full extent of the damage, but when I came home, I wanted warm comfort and a cold cocktail, not my family roaming the house like a coed locker room.

“Think of all the money we’ll save.” Laura stopped fussing at the stove and came to greet me. “It’s very green, ecologically smart.”

Any other night but this one, I thought. Don’t get me wrong, I adored Laura, and three kids later, she held up great, clothed or unclothed. Sometimes I wondered, as less of my hair grew and more of my gut showed, if she still found me attractive, if she still recognized the man who years ago stumbled into her apartment with a prayer and an apology, but I never wanted her to pause and take notice. Her love—the way she cast it toward me—flowed like a dream, and even raising the question might jar her awake.

“You don’t look so good,” she said. “Have a rough day?”

My tongue jammed like a knotted drawstring.

“Want to join us?” Reaching for my belt, she was far too casual for my mood. “It’d be fun.”

This had to be a joke. Laura was not foreign to pulling off surprises, but with the kids au naturel, I started to wonder if this was the antithesis of a joke, where I was the only funny part.

I went upstairs and sat on the edge of the bed. After pulling off my black loafers and socks, I tossed them in a heap with my suit. With a swing of my outstretched foot, the bedroom door slammed shut. I hadn’t meant to close it so hard, but it rattled the picture frames on the wall with a metallic sound like a prison cell door crashing into position, and then it was quiet and serene. Only the sound of my breathing reminded me that I was alive. A faint echo of other prisoners, other men, emanated from distant cells.

The clanking of dishes snapped me out of a trance. I jumped up and took a quick shower to wash away the day’s bad karma, and somewhere between the shampoo and the spiraling tornado of soap, I decided to play along. I put on a pair of boxer shorts and returned to the kitchen.

“Is that the least you can muster,” Laura said, twirling lettuce in the salad spinner. Her skin glowed beneath the glaring kitchen halogens. Her hair tousled with the cranking of her arm.

Laura in motion, I thought. She had the randomness of a fly on a fruit bowl. Knowing I would never be bored, I’d married her because of this, but here was my next thought: She had set up a web cam, and we were going live on the Internet for 99 cents per minute to whatever freak desired a bare glimpse of suburbia.

“Is this a forever-change?” I asked.

“What’s a forever-change?”

A forever-change was an event like losing your job. That hadn’t exactly happened to me, but maybe it wasn’t a bad idea to salvage what we could. In this economical age when people put everything—every slice of time, every body function, and every two-bit scrap of leftover junk—up for sale on eBay and the pornographic versions of eBay, I found myself scanning the kitchen for hidden cameras. Nothing.

“What’s the matter, Michael?” she asked.

The kids moved happily about the den. Rudy searched a box of crayons for the perfect shade of red, and as an episode of Sesame Street went ignored on the TV, Angela and Pam built a lopsided tower of blocks. Everything appeared regular, sans clothes. Why did their nakedness matter? For most of my bachelorhood, I had tried to strip women of their clothes and get out while they were still undressed. A significant part of my married life involved creating time for nude encounters with my spouse, but I couldn’t believe my mind. I was considering how to beg Laura to get dressed.

The doorbell rang, and before I flexed a finger, Laura was at the front door and signing for a package. The deliveryman—a husky guy in a brown uniform—stood inches away from my wife, almost hovering. These are the images in life that placard the inner walls of your thoughts. She must be getting even with me for something I’d done a long time ago.

The conversation at the door was snappy. It had been raining for days, and Laura and the deliveryman quipped about the monsoon weather. This guy was a real pro. What was his day like? Along his route, he probably came upon plenty of odd situations, but his eyes never strayed from Laura’s face, not for a second.

As she shut the door, Laura spotted me paralyzed near the kitchen table. A new expression had no doubt welled up from the nightmare of my day. I was the man of a thousand troubled faces.

“He didn’t notice your outfit,” I said.

She shrugged her shoulders. “He was here earlier today.” view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1) In what stories does Klim discuss societal gender roles, and how do they effect relationships and self-esteem?

2) What is “the final ingredient” needed for chef Nola Jones to complete her change toward her young understudy in the eponymous story?

3) The title story, “True Surrealism,” explores the alter egos of society or the subcultures and over-cultures that exist within the norm. How is duality seen in the everyday?

4) What are the three voices employed in “Girl in Landscape,” and how do each relate to the exploitation of children?

5) In “Complete Exposure,” becoming a nudist wreaks havoc on a marriage. How do both sudden and evolving changes effect long-term relationships?

6) Klim often writes about the dilemma of the shrinking middle class. How do these issues relate to today’s society?

7) What historical/media event, most specifically a photograph, inspired “Coffins”?

Suggested by Members

by Egress (see profile) 06/18/12

Weblinks

»	Author Christopher Klim's web site
»	Visit the official web site for True Surrealism

Book Club Recommendations

Recommended to book clubs by 1 of 1 members.

Member Reviews

Rate this book