I am bowled over. The likelihood that I can adequately describe or analyze this story for a third party is lower than usual, and I can without reservations encourage every one of you to find it and read it for yourselves. It is amazing.

 

"Time-Tracker" by Barry N. Malzberg, 1989

From Phantoms, edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Rosalind M. Greenberg

Grade: A+

 

Barry N. Malzberg is an old warhorse of the science fiction community, one who has garnered significant critical praise and who is widely regarded as a brilliant writer whose works are by and large inaccessible to the general public. These things are all true. This story is an excellent example of Malzberg's style, in that it's incredibly beautiful, ineffably effortless, and totally incomprehensible upon first read. I read it three times, something I almost never do, because it demanded it. I'm still not really sure I grasp it entirely.

 

The story is set up as though being presented like a play to the reader, who moves into the role of audience; the use of present tense throughout gives the prose a sense of urgency and immediacy that keeps the narrative fresh and breathlessly engaging. The prose, and this cannot be said enough times, is amazing: lyrical but descriptive, precise but poetic, instantly evocative but always concealing another layer. This prose is so awesome that I want to bring it breakfast in bed. I want to have this prose's babies. In fact, here, have a sample from the first page:

 

"He is a short bitter man with a short bitter scar slashed across his features, a high and dreaming aspect to half-concealed eyes staring wistfully below an enormous forehead, limbs of some disproportion meant to scuttle. Looking at these wizened atrocities, thinking of the strange and winding events which have brought him here, Ossie Publick is overwhelmed by the weight of time, the shadow of his mortality which twists his features ever further into a simulacrum of malevolence. The Flower Aria quests three levels below."

 

Did you not get chills? I think this prose and I are soulmates. The skill and diligence required to craft sentences like that is nothing short of incredible, and I will probably be eternally jealous of Malzberg's amazing ability. As a side note, the repetition above of "short bitter" is not a mistake but a stylistic choice: descriptors are rhythmically repeated throughout, tying all the players together in choice characteristics and creating word motifs that color the entire tone of the piece. The word "bitter", in particular, is used extemely frequently, bringing a sense of desperate and helpless resentment to all the players in the drama.

 

The story cannot be analyzed as a straight up narrative, because it definitely isn't one. Instead, we'll break it down somewhat unconventionally. As I said earlier, this is set up like a play, and the most important part is the declamatory narrator's role. In italics at the beginning of each scene shift, sometimes combined with a mishmash of the traditional phrases in French ("please pay attention now", "at this point", "your attention now, please") that are generally used in dramatic asides, are presentational phrases and asides from a narrator to an invisible audience. Usually they instruct the audience as to where to direct their attention, or comment on the action, lauding the actors, or provide commentary on the action, interpreting it. They are difficult to describe, to be honest, but not only do they keep the play form continuous and engaging and lend a dream-like quality to the entire short story, but they also provide brilliant flashes of insight that are vital to understanding what's going on. I looked forward to each one, always eager for more explication, because this story is like an onion with ten thousand layers.

 

What else do plays have? They have dramatis personae, and the individual characters are crucial here. They are as follows:

 

Ossie Publick: The Phantom character, scarred, deformed, and lurking in the quarters he has created for himself in the opera house. The descriptive prose surrounding him is tantalizing, suggesting both that he has created his own place within the world of the opera house and that he has been imprisoned there, a conflict that both keeps a high level of mystery and intrigue around the character and also relates to the Leroux's Phantom and his metaphorical struggle between being lord of his domain and prisoner of the outside world. He is both obviously enamored of opera and harshly critical of it--at the beginning, when listening to a rehearsal of Bizet's Carmen, he initially praises its success and passion and then lambastes Bizet for his hubris and inferior counterpoint. The overall effect is of a hunched, crabbed little monstrosity haunting the opera, far better equipped to appraise its music but remaining hidden from the less-talented masses out of necessity. His thoughts, as well, skip with such speed and frequency to such extremes that the reader can't help but suspect that his mind may not be entirely healthy.

 

Olive Partness: A chorus girl, Olive is also scarred; the disfigurement is described as "the arc of a rose stem slashed across her cheekbones" (initially I thought that this might just be a description of extremely sharp features, but it turned out to be a scar after all). She, too, is full of seething bitterness, clumsy and having a difficult time merely keeping herself moving through the correct patterns in the production of Carmen. The descriptions of her ungainly movements and her hatred of her state allow the reader to infer that she may be pregnant, though this is never explicitly stated.

 

Opaul Pauling: A young singer, the Christine character (or is she?), whose career is on the rise. She is beautiful, sweet, and naive, described as simple and accommodating without any of the pejoratives that so frequently accompany such modifiers. Despite her talent, she is fast friends with Olive, and seems to be the perfect Christine modeled on Leroux's original: kind, humble, guileless, beautiful, and loving.

 

Oliver Private: A policeman and captain of the gendarmes, he is dedicated to the capture of Ossie Publick to a point almost of fanaticism. He is a sinister and loveless man, consumed by his obsession, and the brief moments we spend in his consciousness give us frustrating allusions to Ossie's past deeds and a hunt that has apparently gone on a long time, but no real information that we could point to.

 

Of course, we have to take a minute to look at the names. As any reader probably notices if they are not a complete dunderhead, all the characters share the same initials: O.P. Additionally, in the initial monologue by the narrator, he mentions three persons whom he refers to as the Original Partaker, the Observant Partner, and the Obedient Participant; in a later aside he also mentions the Observant Participant, a blurring of the lines. The repeated OP could have several meanings or none at all, but the most likely one that suggests itself to me is that "Op." is the accepted abbreviation for opus (and also occasionally used as an abbreviation for opera, as well); the story or play is very much an opus, as we'll discuss later on, and certainly has plenty to do with opera. As for the individual names, they all have their purposes. Ossie seems to be related to the Latin root ossi, meaning bone; therefore, his name means public or visible bone, which is very appropriate for Leroux's original Phantom and his death's-head and which suggests a being or condition (i.e., his deformities) that should be hidden but is not. Olive comes from the Latin oliva which refers to the olive tree, the sacred gift of Athena to mortals long considered one of the staples of life, while Partness indicates a setting apart or a separateness appropriate for her dislike of pretty much everyone except Opaul; therefore, her name could be translated to mean "that which is bountiful but also set apart", a very neat encapsulation of her character. Opaul seems at first glance to be an unorthodox spelling of Opal, which simply means jewel, but the addition of that renegade u also gives one reason to relate it to the male name Paul, meaning humble or small (which is then echoed in her last name, Pauling). Together, the two names can be seen as giving us the idea of a "humble jewel", which is very appropriate for her sweet-natured, unassuming beauty. Finally, Oliver, while at first glance seeming to be the male form of Olive's name, is actually a Norman French version of a Germanic name meaning "army of the supernatural" (the similar spelling is because of language mixing and confusion with the Latin oliva--the original spelling is closer to "Alfihvar"), which is then combined with his last name, Private (the opposite of Ossie's); therefore, he is a hidden or unshared army, the constant dog at Ossie's heels.

 

The story itself is deceptively simple: Ossie is listening to the rehearsal of Carmen when Opaul accidentally intrudes on his quarters. He succumbs to a moment of madness, assaulting her and apparently intending to rape her. Meanwhile, Oliver is hunting for him in the city, drawing ever nearer to the opera house where he has finally pinpointed his quarry. Olive hears Opaul's scream and rushes offstage to her defense, but when she arrives in Ossie's quarters the two recognize one another and appear to know each other from some previous occasion. Ossie realizes that it is not Opaul he wants but Olive, but before any more action can be taken Oliver bursts in and captures him.

 

That's the linear story, but there's so much more between the lines. The action of Carmen parallels the desperate drama taking place backstage, the passion/lust/desire and the motif of love expressed through violence prevalent. Both the opera rehearsal and the short story itself speed along at a breakneck pace, and wherever they intersect they compliment one another: the wondering Flower Aria accompanies Ossie's lonely brooding, Carmen's screams of defiance coincide with Opaul's capture, Carmen's dying cries alongside Opaul's helpless ravishment, and at Don Jose's final suicide Oliver captures Ossie. The symmetry is never overt (quite the opposite of the Haber story's attempt at the same idea), but it is sublime whenever noticed. Further inferences can be made from the slightest of sentences and the most oblique of references--for example, the implication that Ossie is the father of Olive's implied fetus, or that Ossie is so deeply fractured in the mind that he is incapable of thinking beyond the needs of the moment--and enrich the text even more upon every subsequent re-reading.

 

As the action begins to come to a head, the characters suddenly begin to experience a curious sense of deja vu. Ossie is afflicted first, pausing in that last moment before ravishing Opaul because of a profound feeling that he has done this or seen this before; Oliver echoes this a few minutes later as he races to head the madman off, succumbing to a sudden certainty that he has done the same thing many times before. None of the characters are able to change their behavior as a result of this feeling, carrying on with heedless abandon even as they realize on a fundamental, incomprehensible level that something is wrong. The narrator, in his asides, continues to present this as a story viewed from the outside or a performance for the reader's pleasure, and begins to make certain pointed references to allegory and metaphorical truths that force the reader to wonder when the sudden thunderbolt of enlightenment, obviously poised right above our heads, is finally going to strike.

 

The climax of the play comes with Ossie's capture, but that is not where the realization occurs for the reader. Instead, after that, we are suddenly presented with the same story all over again, exact in so many details and yet here and there just a hair different: Gounod's Faust is being performed instead of Carmen, but more fundamental than that, somehow Oliver has become the lurker in the opera house, tormented and lonely, obsessing over a singer, while Ossie has become his determined pursuer, and Olive is now the transcendent angel of musical mercy while Opaul watches her enviously from below. The roles have all been altered but the story is the same, reiterating itself as though nothing has changed. The readers are now able to appreciate the characters' sense of deja vu for themselves.

 

The story ends there, with the drama unfolding for the second time above the narrator's triumphant crows of delight. So what are we to make of this tangle of beautiful insanity?

 

Is the entire thing a play indeed, one with four characters who are played interchangably? I don't think so. The characters are too convincing in their internal monologues and realizations, too obviously unaware of the big picture. Is it some kind of zany time-traveling thing, as the title could suggest, sending the four characters back in time to play out the same point in their lives over and over with all the permutations that a change in choices could result in? Again, I doubt it. The narrator's ringmaster/crier-like presence seems to disprove any such scientifically mundane (ha! time-traveling: apparently mundane in my world) solution.

 

No, the narrator himself gives us the story's purpose and outline: "It does not say what it seems to say, it has much to convey other than what it conveys, one can in the understanding of this tale perhaps grasp the mettle of the higher, finer plot which otherwise fully exposed would sting." The story is a massive metaphor, a commentary on the human condition rather than a story about these four tragic characters. The endless round of souls, each of them taking on each role in their drama over and over, highlighting the pettiness and futility of their little lives is pointed in its implication that none of us is the significant that we would like to believe. Rerdemption, so often the key concept in the Phantom story trope, is absent, but not out of neglect: there can be no redemption when each soul continues to repeat its actions, doomed to ride the wheel of samsara over and over into eternity. The narrator's constant references to the Original Partaker or, in his final praiseful cries, to the "merciful captivator of us all", is referring to the only being outside this continual cycle of struggle and ineffectual failure: the Phantom, yes, but in the allegorical sense, God. The story leaves us with the final thought that despite our actions and our choices, we are in the end all of us merely characters in his unending theatre, participants in the contrived play created for our benefit and without our knowledge.

 

The metaphorical link between the Phantom and God seems odd at first, as it is usually Christine that functions as the Christ figure (as she is depicted in the original Leroux), but the connection is firm and well thought-out. The Phantom, as the behind-the-scenes controller of the opera house and all its denizens, is on an ultimate level considerable as their little God; the twisted, deformed and crippled body is merely a sham, comparable to the frail mortal body of Jesus as opposed to the ineffable and inconceivable image of God.

 

I am exhausted after all that religious analysis. You can see what I mean about the complexity of this one--I read it three times and I still have a nagging suspicion that I'm missing something important. I'll probably read it again before I go on to the next one. My faith in literature, the writing profession, and humanity in general is restored: this little gem of a story, buried in an anthology full of self-indulgent emo tripe, is art.

 

All five feet and two inches of me stand at attention and salute you, Malzberg. Your skill is amazing, and I hope someday to have even a whimper of your talent. I am beyond impressed.

 

EDITED TO ADD:

 

Corollary to my original notes on this story, because I read it again (I told you, this one was hard) and came up with yet another possiblity for its baffling circuity.

 

As I was thinking about the repeated initials O.P. and how I had assumed they stood for either opus, which is commonly abbreviated as Op., or for opera, the thunderbolt of enlightenment struck from above and made me smack myself right in the forehead.  Occam would be disappointed to realize that the simplest possibility for those initials never even occurred to me at all:  Opera Phantom.

 

If the narrator is referring to the Phantom himself each time he refers to the Participant/Partaker/Partner, and each of the characters shares his initials, what exactly does that suggest?  By making each of the characters analogous to the Phantom himself, as well as giving all references and side notes to him, Malzberg manages to pull off an amazing feat: he turns one character into countless more.  In this light, it makes perfect sense that the characters are interchangable in the repeating play: they are all the Phantom, each one a reflection or creation of his own psyche.

 

The entire story, therefore, may be seen as a journey through the Phantom's memories--a continual recursive loop in which he relives the moments of his greatest triumph and defeat over and over and over, each time changing his characters but never the scene itself.  The story exists only in the Phantom's mind, his own private, eternal performance.  The unseen master of the opera house has, at last, complete control over the people and performances of his theatre--if only in his mind, and at this point, who is to say that is not just as powerful?  The image conjured up is of the Phantom alone in his subterranean warren, deranged beyond interaction with the world above, existing only for his remembered, unfolding drama, trapped--voluntarily or otherwise--in a single moment of time for the rest of his life.

 

All of this, then, begs the question: if each reiteration of the story is only a fantasy of his own mind, a kind of resurgent dream, then what proof is there that the original story ever happened at all?  Did the Phantom ever love and kidnap a beautiful girl, earning his redemption by setting her free, or did he only dream the entire episode in his cracked and fevered mind, playing it over and over until it is his only reality?

 

I think I was dancing around this idea all the way through the first few readings, not quite able to grasp it.  I feel like I got it right this time.

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