The Line Between

The Line Between

by Peter S. Beagle

Introduction

When my children were still small enough to be suckered (that's the two youngest, not their older sister; she was never that small), I could keep them occupied in the car for some while by telling them that if they turned their heads fast enough they could look in their own ears. (What, you never bought yourself a single blessed moment of sanity by risking your children's cervical vertebrae, eyesight, digestion, or emotional well–being? — Hypocrite lecteur, — man semblable, — monfrere! I want to see a note from your mother.)

In a very real sense, that's what I've been doing all my life — trying to turn my head in time to glimpse that creature, that color, that melody, that metamorphosis, that human situation to be found living just around the farthest corner of my vision. Ever since I was a small, shy, overweight boy — a boy who could most often be found curled up under the stairs of his Bronx apartment building, telling himself stories — I've been used to almost hearing voices, almost catching sight of Donne's «things invisible to see.» Indeed, my favorite among my own novels, The Innkeeper's Song, had its birth on an island off Seattle, with me well–snuggled into the sweet spot between sleep and waking, when a rough, sour growl announced itself in my head, saying distinctly, «My name is Karsh. I am not a bad man.»

There it is: that invisible boundary between conscious and not, between reality and fantasy, between here (whatever «here» is) and there (whatever «there» might be), between the seen and the seen's true nature. A line neither one thing nor ever quite the other, but now and eternally between.

As a writer, the line between is where I have always lived. It is my personal tightrope of choice, the one I most naturally walk, clutching only a small and somewhat silly–looking parasol of logic for a counterbalance. At times this precarious high–wire act exhausts and exasperates me, to the point where I feel that I'd give almost anything to step off the line, once and for all, and settle down to stories that, whatever their matter or milieu, don't always insist on balancing so. But this is what I do. Clearly. In life and art I have never been able to laugh without being intensely aware of tears, or to shine a light on horror without also illuminating beauty. So it goes still for everything I write.

I'm on the books as a fantasist, a genre writer, and I'd go on being considered one even if I wrote nothing but naturalistic novels and gritty urban–realist tales from here on in. Fair enough, I suppose; anyway, one of the few really nice things about growing old is that a whole lot of stuff simply stops mattering — categories among them. But fantasy to me means far more than a stock preindustrial landscape populated with figures out of Scottish ballads, French fairytales, and Germanic sagas of dungeons and dragons. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I've employed these beloved old standbys as often as most, and undoubtedly will again. You will find a few of them in this very book, approached from my own skewed angle. But that's not what I'm talking about here.

Fantasy to me has always been a certain mindset, a way of looking around. In speaking publicly on the subject, I often use as an example the classic films that Val Lewton produced (usually on a budget of approximately $1.98) for RKO in the 1940s. Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, Isle of the Dead, The Leopard Man, The Seventh Victim… What keeps these sixty–year–old movies alive and fascinating today is not the special effects that Lewton couldn't afford anyway, but the trademark sense he creates that things invisible to viewer and characters alike are happening just off–camera. There are no demons in Lewton's work, no brain–eating Caribbean zombies (never mind that one's title; it's really Jane Eyre in Haiti), and no vampires — only the possibility of a vampire, which is infinitely scarier than red contact lenses and fake fangs. These movies remain categorized under Horror in the video store; but if there was one thing Val Lewton knew, it was that it is the shadow that terrifies, not the monster it hides. The monster is an actor in a monster suit. The shadow is always real.

Of the stories in this collection, «A Dance for Emilia» perhaps best exemplifies my notion of fantasy, which is especially appropriate since it is also by far the most autobiographical. Do I really believe that a lost life–long friend might return to the world in the body of his own aging cat? That doesn't matter — if I need to believe it I can manage the trick for any given ten minutes, as I do with belief in most things,