'Hands Up! Who Wants to Die?'
Sep. 13th, 2004 09:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coalescentIn an interview from March 2003, Shepard talks about 'the idea of using science-fictional or fantasy backdrops against which to set stories that have nothing to do with those backdrops, that are essentially mainstreamish.' Trujillo's fifth story, one of two in the collection dated this year, is somewhat of this type. It describes the intersection of two stories, prioritising the mimetic over the science fictional.
Which is not to say that the science fiction elements (UFOs, alien abductions) are insignificant. The narrator of 'Hands Up! Who Wants to Die?' is a small-time criminal--of a very different stripe to Viktor Chemayev; Maceo is red (neck), white (trash), and blue (collar). He's done ten for armed robbery, and currently works shifts stacking shelves in a supermarket. Shepard handily reconfigures his prose to match this background, making it choppier and rougher-edged than usual, although still more poetic than is strictly realistic.
Out one night with Leeli, his new girl, trespassing on government land somewhere in Florida, Maceo hooks up with three slightly odd strangers. Two men--Squire and Carl--and a woman, Ava, whose claim that 'you can't get much more government than we are. Government's like mommy and daddy to us' (p212) may be more literally true than you might normally expect.
None of them are particularly pleasant characters (they seem mostly driven by their respective libidos), so it's not much of a surprise when a diner discussion escalates into violence and all five go on the run. The developing relationship between Maceo and Leeli then comes under some strain; and it's also at this point that the mysterious history of Squire, Carl and Ava is most prominent. There are things that are not right about them.
When Maceo finally confronts Ava, however, she doesn't give him a straight answer, she gives him three separate stories. They were abducted by aliens, she says; or they're hybrid clone babies, she says; or they're just an unusual family unit, she says. In the end, Shepard suggests that none of these explanations are correct, although elements of each may be. Maceo doesn't discover the truth, largely because although the maybe-aliens themselves are important to the resolution of Maceo's story, their true nature isn't.
I don't always like this type of story. If the speculative elements are too far into the background, I find it can be hard to see the point of them. 'Hands Up! Who Wants To Die?' seems to get the balance about right. One reason, I think, is length. Where sfnal ideas can pack a punch in almost as few words as it takes to outline them, I find that mimetic ideas need space to be developed and nuanced. Here, that space is well-used, and the foreground story--Maceo and Leeli's relationship--is interesting enough in itself to carry me along. Another reason it works is that Shepard makes the backgrounding of the speculative elements part of what the story is about. The characters are (like us?) so immersed in their own concerns that they are unwilling or unable to take a step back and look at the larger picture, to really see the extraordinary as it passes through their lives. Shepard describes exactly this lack of perception in the interview I mentioned above:
[Back to Trujillo index]
Which is not to say that the science fiction elements (UFOs, alien abductions) are insignificant. The narrator of 'Hands Up! Who Wants to Die?' is a small-time criminal--of a very different stripe to Viktor Chemayev; Maceo is red (neck), white (trash), and blue (collar). He's done ten for armed robbery, and currently works shifts stacking shelves in a supermarket. Shepard handily reconfigures his prose to match this background, making it choppier and rougher-edged than usual, although still more poetic than is strictly realistic.
Out one night with Leeli, his new girl, trespassing on government land somewhere in Florida, Maceo hooks up with three slightly odd strangers. Two men--Squire and Carl--and a woman, Ava, whose claim that 'you can't get much more government than we are. Government's like mommy and daddy to us' (p212) may be more literally true than you might normally expect.
None of them are particularly pleasant characters (they seem mostly driven by their respective libidos), so it's not much of a surprise when a diner discussion escalates into violence and all five go on the run. The developing relationship between Maceo and Leeli then comes under some strain; and it's also at this point that the mysterious history of Squire, Carl and Ava is most prominent. There are things that are not right about them.
When Maceo finally confronts Ava, however, she doesn't give him a straight answer, she gives him three separate stories. They were abducted by aliens, she says; or they're hybrid clone babies, she says; or they're just an unusual family unit, she says. In the end, Shepard suggests that none of these explanations are correct, although elements of each may be. Maceo doesn't discover the truth, largely because although the maybe-aliens themselves are important to the resolution of Maceo's story, their true nature isn't.
I don't always like this type of story. If the speculative elements are too far into the background, I find it can be hard to see the point of them. 'Hands Up! Who Wants To Die?' seems to get the balance about right. One reason, I think, is length. Where sfnal ideas can pack a punch in almost as few words as it takes to outline them, I find that mimetic ideas need space to be developed and nuanced. Here, that space is well-used, and the foreground story--Maceo and Leeli's relationship--is interesting enough in itself to carry me along. Another reason it works is that Shepard makes the backgrounding of the speculative elements part of what the story is about. The characters are (like us?) so immersed in their own concerns that they are unwilling or unable to take a step back and look at the larger picture, to really see the extraordinary as it passes through their lives. Shepard describes exactly this lack of perception in the interview I mentioned above:
Most of us are intently focused on our immediate surround, on problems that distract us from observation, so inured to the ordinary rhythms of our days that we often remain more or less unaware of the great shapes of history that enfold us, and often unaware as well of simpler things.In the story, he has Maceo put it more simply: 'Somewhere in all that slop of life,' he thinks, 'was a true thing.' (p276) And that, for me, about sums it up. In 'Hands Up!' the narrator and the reader both have an incomplete understanding of the events they've witnessed; but (and in contrast to, say, 'CrocodileRock') it leaves me wanting more in the right way.
[Back to Trujillo index]
