15 MY INTIMATELY PAIRED UNIT AND I ARE NOW INCOMPATIBLE / 25 EXPLAIN / 15 IT DEMANDS PROGENY / 35 WHY DO YOU DENY YOUR I.P.U. PROGENY / 15 I AM INADEQUATE / 25 SCANNING…… / 25 AGREED YOU ARE INADEQUATE / 35 UNFORTUNATE

I am grateful for my mother / who after casually snooping through my new apartment / found a vibrator – / I will not call it mine, though it was – / as far as she knew it was simply a, / and mercifully said nothing.

Our cabin had moths. Nothing too serious.

Henrik used to tell me that for any person to be truly considered great, that person needed a field against which to prove or define his greatness. When he talked like this, my head shrunk to the size of thumbprint; it detached from my body & tried to find some new kind of rhythm. Unfortunately, my hands have always been too clunky to deal with the elegance of grand concepts & my head knew this. This detachment served me well. It reminded people that I was an indomitable presence, but it also signaled that I was pretty useless in other delicate situations.

Like when the whole city starts to shift out of synch so all that’s left is a kind of ghost city, a thin cry that used to be a vivid & fully alive kind of scream. People would look at me & expect me to do more than notate the shape & color of every leaf. Actually, this isn’t theoretical. I’m talking here in generalities, like a case study, when in fact what I am describing is a real occurrence.

There’s nothing to trust about anyone or anything. So saying seems as good a note to start on as any with respect to Amelia Gray’s first novel, THREATS (March 2012, Farrar, Straus and Giroux). It doesn’t take too much attention to narrative detail to realize THREATS is, to say the least, an unconventional novel.

Gothic.

The word conjures up images of dimly lit dungeons, pasty emaciated butlers and ramshackle mansions. My Merriam-Webster pretty much covers it: a style of fiction characterized by the use of desolate or remote settings and macabre, mysterious or violent incidences. Okay. Like most other fiction genres, Gothic has its good stuff and its maybe not so good stuff and much in between.

Did you know? Adolf Hitler’s father / was a small dog with no recognizable / features whatsoever. During his time / as German chancellor, Hitler could often / be seen in the shadowy halls of the Reichstag, / plucking stitches from his legs.

To move away from talk about the tautness of certain genitalia, I asked about our cats. He said the one had stopped puking. I suggested maybe it was because there was less tension filling the house, and he said Maybe. The other cat, the girl cat, had become more dominant in my absence. “I think it’s because the estrogen levels in the house have decreased because you took yours with you. She sleeps high up on the bed now.”

“I don’t know exactly how this happened—Heavens! If I would’ve known, why I, I—but it appears anyway that my White House Press Secretary and my backup White House Press Secretary, both of them are tied up tonight. One’s daughter has a thing, and the other one is good friends with the one’s daughter and so, too, is attending the aforementioned thing.”

President President pausing, working out the dual relationship to the thing in his head. Quits (aforementioned thinking of the aforementioned thing).

“So anyway, I’ve got a room full of press in the back, they’re in the garage actually, and I need someone to announce my new motorcycle. I bought a Yamaha. Yamaha’s patriotic, right? American? Just yesterday I saw the most beautiful man on the television, he was wearing dark sunglasses and he had this magnificent black mustache…”