(urth) Short Story 132*: The Monday Man

[Marc Aramini]

#THE MONDAY MAN

"The Monday Man" first appeared in the *Readercon 3 Anthology* in 1990 and
has been collected in *Innocents Aboard*.

#Summary

Once again, a narrator named Gene tells us of a strange event in reality
otherwise much like our own contemporary one. The story starts, "I knew
John Genaro more than forty years, I suppose, if you want to go all the way
back to the beginning." They played softball together when "the old Harry S
Truman School split the tracks." Gene went off to law school and forgot
about John, but ran into him again when he returned to work in a very small
law office where he handles petty cases and writes wills for poor families.
His father had lost his money and Gene says, "It killed him, and that
killed Mom; but nothing had killed me yet."

Gene says he took all the criminal cases he could, and tried to shake down
John, who was a police officer, but found out he couldn't: "I recall
thinking it might be because he wasn't married." They renew their
friendship and go hunting, mostly rabbits and pheasants, but Gene can never
get John to go fishing with him: "I never even got him to get a line wet;
before he died he told me why. Now that I'm close to going myself, I think
I ought to pass his story along. You won't believe it, but perhaps you'll
remember it just the same. If only when it's too late."

When Gene was still in law school, John was a rookie, and he claims, "it
hit me harder than anything has since, though I've had a partner shot down
beside me, and I was the one that opened the box they'd put the Rothman
girl in. Know what a Monday man is, Gene?"

Before the laundromats and driers were widespread, people would steal
clothes off the line, and Monday was when most of the washing was hung out.
"Sometimes they were the kind that steals women's underwear to keep -
there's something wrong with those - but mostly they'd take anything that
wasn't too worn, and wear it themselves or sell it."

One day on patrol, A woman yelled that her husband's overalls had been
stolen, and John chased the small man (saying that in those days, before
cops patrolled in cars, they were supposed to know everyone on their beat,
but he did not recognize the Monday man.) He lost him, but managed to find
out where he went through a child who had been in trouble for vandalism
(and who, as John told this to Gene, later worked in the Assembly).

"Anyway the kid pointed out the place. These days it'd be full of addicts,
but back then you didn't see so much of that." He goes up to the fourth
floor and hears the man moving around upstairs, on the fifth and top floor.
John kicked down a door to find the man just looking at him with the
overalls still in his hand.  He approached him and grabbed him by the
sleeve of his jacket, commenting to Gene, "That was what saved me, even
though I didn't know it then."

John snapped handcuffs over both of their wrists and pulled the Monday Man
a few steps down, before being pulled right off his feet and being dragged
back up the landing. John then rapped him on the head, ordering him to
stop, pulled back down the stairs, surprised that a man as small as this
one could resist him. He finally punched the man hard right on the jaw.

His fist stuck to the man's jaw: "You ever touch a piece of bare metal
that's been in the freezer? It was just like that, except he didn't feel
cold." He compares it to Krazy Glue, which wasn't around then [it would
have been marketed by the late 50s as Super Glue]. At this point, with his
hand stuck to the face, he noticed that there were only little black
depressions in the man's face rather than real nostrils, and that his eyes
also lacked depth. John claims, "it was ... like he was a dummy, like they
have in department stores. Only I've never seen one half as good as he was."

Pulling away with one hand stuck and the other cuffed to the Monday man,
John managed to get him down the stairs and out the front door. He screamed
for help but no one was willing to aid a cop: "I could hear windows banging
shut and people hustling to get off the street. Then he dragged me back
inside the building."

He kicked at the man's feet before realizing his legs weren't really
holding him up: "He was like one of those bass lures you're always bragging
about - they wiggle a lot when they go through the water, but it isn't the
wiggle that makes 'em go." John managed to get the handcuff key with his
teeth from his watch pocket, and released the handcuff.

>"This time the door that I'd thought probably belonged to a closet was
standing wide open, but there wasn't a closet in back of it - it was as
black as an alderman's heart." At this point in his story, John sees that
Gene doesn't believe him, and says he was done drinking anyway.

After Gene says that the story has a lot that needs to be considered, John
states he has been thinking about it for twenty-eight years, and that he
believes there was someone inside the closet, "on the other side of the
dark. ... I couldn't make him out, but I could feel him just like you can
feel death at the scene of a murder. I call him the Fisherman."

He explains why: when a fisherman wants to catch something, he uses
something like small chunks of wood formed to resemble a bug, frog, or fish
with a hidden hook so the prey cannot let go once it has taken the bait.

John says that he was being reeled in, and he managed to make a cavalry
draw with his left hand since he wore a cross draw then (grabbing the
handle on his left side with his palm facing away from his hip and into the
handle of the gun). He shot the Monday man three times and also fired into
the closet, then finally managed to tear his hand free from the thing's
face - the Fisherman did not realize the handcuffs were not a secure
attachment to his prey.

>"I've been thinking about that Fisherman, on and off, ever since it
happened. That's why I won't fish, and why I always look real carefully at
everybody I run into, which is what got me my captain's bars. I'm not too
worried about meeting another lure like the Monday man - I'd know one of
those the minute I laid eyes on it.

>"But I keep wondering whether the Fisherman ever uses live bait."

##Commentary

Of this story, Wolfe says, "'The Monday Man' refers, of course, to those
sad and frightening men who steal women's underwear. When I was growing up
no one had clothes dryers, and Monday men were a perennial problem for my
poor mother." This rather domestic problem is here given a kind of
primordial treatment filled with dread - an inexplicable and strange lure
which might lead to consumption, extinction, or even damnation.  Perhaps
"The Monday Man" can be viewed in purely Freudian symbols, in its
personification of a clothing thief's semblance as something which also
tries to snatch away humanity. However, there does not seem to be much
subtext, save for the indication that this reality is ever so slightly
different than ours - it seems financial stability is extremely hard to
come by, and that this Gene has become a poor, small time lawyer rather
than a writer. However, judging from the set up of the later story, "The
Card", in which a writer is told of a crossing over between probable
realities, also by a policeman, the pattern of the story is one which we
can see refracted and diffused several times through Wolfe's more mimetic
fiction. One question we might ask is how far after the Great Depression
are these events occurring? Certainly the late 1950s seems a possibility,
though it could certainly be earlier.

Perhaps with the sense that there is not much subtext to "The Monday Man",
I wanted to try something slightly different for this entry.  "The Monday
Man" seems to have been composed at a crucial time in Wolfe's career, when
he had retired from editing and working with engineering concepts all the
time, and began instead to write more fantasy and horror, producing far
less SF than during the 1960s and 1970s. Certainly "The Monday Men" appears
to be an overt horror story of the eldritch, exploring something which
wants humanity for some unknowable purpose - representing a trap from which
there is no return. the final line is paranoia inducing - would this live
bait actually be something like a servant of the darkness, or simply
someone pinned like a worm on a hook, wriggling to escape the torture?

It occurred to me as I looked over this story that Wolfe's short stories up
until the late 1980s where by and large either science fiction or a kind of
urban fantasy similar to fairly realistic *Twilight Zone* episodes where
just one or two things seem "off" from normal reality. His obvious fantasy
horror stories, influenced by Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, had been
written fairly early in his career: "The Grave Secret" and "The Dead Man"
really stand out in this regard. Then, for much of his career in the 1970s
and 1980s, if he wasn't writing science fiction, his stories seemed *almost
but not quite* completely realistic, like "The Island of Doctor Death and
Other Stories", "Against the Lafayette Escadrille", or even "Sweet Forest
Maid", "Tarzan of the Grapes", and  "Beech Hill" - all composed in such a
way that they were only in the most subjective manner classifiable as
"fantasy" - a remnant of the unexplainable and the bizarre lingered in
their ontogeny, often in the form of subjective or distorted perceptions
somehow entering reality, but there is never a glimpse at the kind of
terrible fantastic evil that would be a matter of course in a Lovecraft
story - the type of horror that we begin to see starting to proliferate
throughout Wolfe's writing in the late 1980s. Thus, "The Monday Man"
represents a turning to something intrinsically and innately unknowable,
the very different but equally important influence of the horror genre in
general and of Kafka specifically in Wolfe, allowing paranoia and neurosis
to walk hand in hand with fantasy and even contemporary realism (one of
Wolfe's most haunting, bizarre stories hides under the rather innocuous,
realistic title "Houston, 1943".)

"The Monday Man" marks a departure into this urban horror, in a way that
seems to congeal naturally with many of Wolfe's other stories of a reality
right next door to ours. He employs the identical double narrative strategy
that we will also see in "The Card" and "A Fish Story": a stand in for our
author is told a story by another, who has experienced something which
cannot be easily explained away. However, it seems that at this point in
Wolfe's career that his interest in genuine horror exploded. "The
Friendship Light", "The Game in the Pope's Head", "The Haunted
Boardinghouse", "Queen of the Night", and "Black Shoes" are all disturbing
and horrific stories quite unlike the type of writing Wolfe had done
earlier in his career, where the terror and the unravelling of the actual
representational nature of Wolfe's work becomes increasingly exposed to
view, and "The Monday Man" seems a key link between his religious
supernatural works set in contemporary times (for example, "How the Bishop
Sailed to Inniskeen", "The Arimaspian Legacy", or "Procreation") as his
writing transitions to all of these true horror stories. Our narrator here
is a subtly altered version of Gene, something which may or may not be the
case in his more religious "self-narrated" stories. The interesting thing
about "The Monday Man" is how closely it resembles the sentiment of the
modern religious stories Wolfe had composed (or would come to compose).
This story is a mirror to the later "The Card", even down to Gene relating
the story of a policeman acquaintance who tells his story second hand.

Why does Wolfe like to employ the second hand first person narrative in
stories in which a writer or a man named Gene is the first person
storyteller? What effect does this have on our interpretive task besides
producing a kind of distance from its bizarre nature or the fear it would
produce?

Since there does not seem to be much interpretive work to do on this
particular story, I thought it would be interesting to place some of
Wolfe's famous stories in their primary "types" - while some can flit
between one or the other category, many of them are definitely of the same
type - for example, the paranoid transformation and infection of "Lief in
the Wind" has much the same feel as "Prize Crew", "Alien Stones", and "The
Other Dead Man", just as the eschatological feel of "King Rat" makes it a
spiritual successor to "The Hero as Werwolf". While there are probably
other suitable names for these categories, and perhaps even several others,
I think these are fairly descriptive catch alls:

*Urban Fairy Stories*
"The Changeling"
"A Cabin on the Coast"
"The Nebraskan and the Nereid"
"The Giant"

*Realism or Near Future SF*
"Paul's Treehouse"
"The Peace Spy"
"Viewpoint"
"Eyebem"
"Of Relays and Roses"
"Hour of Trust"
"Cherry Jubilee"
"How the Whip Came Back"

*Alternate Histories*
"Donovan Sent Us"
"How I Lost the Second World War and Helped Turn Back the German Invasion"

*Personal or Religious Experiences*
"The Card"
"A Fish Story"
"How the Bishop Sailed to Inniskeen"
"Procreation"
"The Arimaspian Legacy" (though the spiritual world is getting a little
horrific, there)


*Portraits of Psychological Abnormalities, Possibly Supernatural*
"Redbeard"
"Monster"
"Innocent"
"Why I Was Hanged"
"Melting"

*Parasitic, Transformative, or Insane SF Stories, (often involving ships)*
"Thou Spark of Blood"
"Silhouette"
*Fifth Head of Cerberus*
"Lief in the Wind"
"Civis Laputus Sum"
"When I Was Ming the Merciless"
"Prize Crew"
"Alien Stones"
"Many Mansions"
"Talk of Mandrakes"

*Apocalyptic Stories*
*Book of the New Sun*
"King Rat"
"The Hero as Werwolf"
"Beautyland"
"One Two Three For Me"
"Mute"

*Allegories*
"Redwood Coast Roamer/Mathoms from the Time Closet"
"The God and His Man"
"To the Dark Tower Came"
"A Criminal Proceeding"
"Love, Among the Corridors"

*Horror*
"The Monday Man"
"Kevin Malone"
"Queen of the Night"
"A Traveler in Desert Lands"
"Lukora"
"Black Shoes"
A special subset here might be called *Perspectives of the Dead*, which
could possibly include *Peace*, "Checking Out", "The Dead Man", and others.

*Dog Stories*
"Rattler"
"Calamity Warps"
"Dog of the Drops"
"Unrequited Love"

*Pastiche and Humor*
"Our Neighbor by David Copperfield"
"Slaves of Silver"
"Planetarium in Orbit"
"How I Got Three Zip Codes"
"A Walking Tour of the Shambles"

*Solstice or Christmas Stories*
"At The Point of Capricorn"
"The Boy Who Hooked the Sun"
"Christmas Inn"
"La Befana"
"No Planets Strike"
"War Beneath the Tree"

*Fantasy*
*Wizard Knight*
*Soldier of the Mist*
"The Green Rabbit from S'Rian"
"Under Hill"

Of course there are many other ways to categorize his stories (such as
*Island*, *Dickens*, or *Light in the Sky* stories) but Wolfe's tendencies
to repeat certain thematic patterns in stories of a similar type really
jump out.

##Literary allusions

I have already mentioned the feeling of eldritch dread that Lovecraft and
other early horror and supernatural writers produced, from Poe on down. The
Fisherman in some small way does remind me of the demon-like being awakened
and seeking to consume from behind a portal in one of Vance's *Dying Earth*
tales, though the Fisherman is quite generic enough to represent any kind
of supernatural temptation or damnation.

##Names

-*John Genaro*- (although in this reality John Genaro is a policeman, in
ours, it was also the name of a prominent member of the Dallas crime family
who died in 1954). The name Genaro is derived from the Roman Januarius,
meaning "January" in Latin. The name of the month may derive from the Roman
god Janus. Saint Januarius, the patron saint of Naples, was a 4th century
bishop who was beheaded during Christian persecutions, but Janus is the two
faced god of gates, doors, and endings who looks both to the future and the
past- what would happen if John Genaro was cast through that door into the
clutches of the Fisherman? Would he serve as live bait or simply face
consumption?
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