Copyright © 2016 by Sean Carswell.
All rights reserved.
First Paperback Edition
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher.
Please direct inquiries to:
Ig Publishing
PO Box 2547
New York, NY 10163
The following stories originally appeared in the following publications:
“Mad Nights of Springtime,” The Rattling Wall and California Prose Directory
“A Place Called Sickness,” Fourteen Hills
“The Wide Empty Sky,” Thin Air
“Big Books and Little Guitars,” Fjords Review
“The Bottom-Shelf Muse,” VLAK: Contemporary Poetics and the Arts
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Carswell, Sean, 1970- author.
Title: The metaphysical ukulele / Sean Carswell.
Description: New York, NY: Ig Publishing, [2016]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016005397 (print) | LCCN 2016014399 (ebook) | ISBN 9781632460271 (Ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Authors--Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Short Stories (single author). | FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Alternative History. | FICTION / Satire.
Classification: LCC PS3603.A7764 A6 2016 (print) | LCC PS3603.A7764 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016005397
For my mom, who really did give me a notebook when I was seven years old and said, “If you’re bored, write a story.”
“the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” —Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“But it was heaven there, with ukuleles for harps.” —Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge
Table of Contents
1. Big Books and Little Guitars (Herman Melville)
2. Far Off on Another Planet (Leigh Brackett)
3. Mad Nights of Springtime (Jack Kerouac)
4. The Song at the Bottom of a Rabbit Hole (Patricia Geary)
5. The Five-Cornered Square (Chester Himes)
6. Ukulele Fallout (Richard Brautigan)
7. A Place Called Sickness (Flannery O’Connor)
8. The Bottom-Shelf Muse (Raymond Chandler)
9. The Wide Empty Sky (Pam Houston)
10. The Incognito Players (Thomas Pynchon)
11. The Reticent Corpse (Yoko Ogawa)
12. Ukes for the Little Guy (Sean Carswell)
Big Books and Little Guitars
Apparently, Herman Melville was a brilliant ukulelist. His biographers tend to leave this part out of his life. Obsessed with his big books, they forget his little guitar. Or perhaps they just get swept away in Melville’s South Sea adventures, dreaming about the days after he deserted the Acushnet and wandered into the interior of a Polynesian island, convinced he’d find a tribe of beautiful, sexually available women. Or cannibals. Or both. The biographers romanticize Melville’s time among the Tai Pī. They speculate about who the real Fayaway was—the Polynesian girl who offered herself to Melville. His very own gift basket. And think of what a treat she must’ve been for a twenty-year-old, mostly-heterosexual kid from puritanical New England, who had just spent a year at sea without a woman in sight, whose sex life amounted to trading blow jobs with whalers who had no real way of bathing, or else lubing his rod with blubber and masturbating to a little naked woman carved out of a whale bone. A few months with Fayaway must have been everything to him. Fayaway, who saw sex as natural as a breakfast of breadfruit. Who wouldn’t be fascinated by Fayaway? Lonely, bearded men in dusty academic offices are more in love with Fayaway than any other word Melville wrote.
When you consider that Melville was unable to walk during his first few weeks with the Tai Pī, and that he was convinced Fayaway was a cannibal, the romance is even wilder. She straddles his erection on a South Sea summer morning, and he wonders if he’ll be the main course that night. Will Fayaway join in the feast? Will she think of him fondly as she chews a slice of his wounded thigh?
Of course you’ll forget about the ukulele among a scene like this. But make no mistake. It was there.
The first ukulele in the Tai Pī tribe came from a Portuguese missionary. Melville was never clear about what happened to the missionary. Either the missionary left or the Tai Pī ate him. Either way, his cavaquinho had been left behind.
The cavaquinho changed over the years. Sun and rain caused the wood to warp and crack. The Tai Pī used it as a model and made their own versions of the tiny guitar. When the original strings snapped, they stretched the intestines of one animal or another to make new strings. Melville wondered about those intestines and where they came from. Was he strumming the stretched, dried, and cut digestive tract of the ill-fated missionary? Was Melville desecrating or honoring the missionary’s life by strumming a tune from his guts? Would Melville’s own guts be strung out over a miro wood ukulele and used to strum an island tune?
After several weeks, Melville’s leg healed and all the sex with Fayaway wasn’t enough to shake his haunting visions of the Tai Pī eating him. He nestled the ukulele that Fayaway had given him as a gift and snuck out of the village. Melville carried the Tai Pī uke with him onto his next whaling ship, the Lucy Ann.
Conditions were rough on the Lucy Ann. The captain kept a close eye on the available food and refused to feed the whalers with enough of it. He wielded his power like the overseer of a Nike shoe factory, slapping his crew around, keeping them hungry, and remaining ever vigilant for new ways make them miserable. While no one murmured the actual word mutiny, the idea floated around before the mast. Amidst this scene, Melville would break out his ukulele. He played it under the Pacific stars, singing songs of Fayaway and freedom and food so plentiful that no one even thought about eating him. Later, after the mutiny went down and the ship docked in Tahiti and everyone but the captain was arrested, one of the sailors on the Lucy Ann claimed that Melville’s
