Famous Men Who Never Lived & Parallel Universe Cocktails
Image from Tin House
Novel: Famous Men Who Never Lived
In 1909, a ten-year-old boy doesn’t drown and instead lives to becomes a well-known, and well-studied, writer. His works include titles you’ve never read: The Pain Ray, What to Do with the Night, and, of course, The Pyronauts, his most acclaimed novel about an Earth, much like ours, that’s visited by a benevolent race of aliens that accidentally decimate the planet with “an extraterrestrial organism, a microscopic pirate from the homeworld that clung undiscovered to the hulls of their crystal ships” that cause plant life to wither, and the only way to stop the organism is to destroy infested plant life with fire, a task undertaken by the eponymous Pyronauts.
Famous Men Who Never Lived, written by K Chess and published by Tin House, isn’t about The Pyronauts, and it isn’t about the boy that didn’t drown, Ezra Slight, who, in our universe, did die in 1909. It’s about the universe he lived in, a parallel Earth to ours that was ruined by nuclear war and the subsequent evacuation of 156,000 of its people that stepped through the Gate, a dimensional portal, in their New York City and into ours. These trans-dimensional immigrants were quickly identified, catalogued, and categorized as Universally Displaced People, or UDPs. And while there are grand and recognizable science fiction elements like that woven throughout this novel it is, at its core, an immigrant story about trauma, displacement, identity, and home.
Literature always seemed to have some hidden meaning that a normal person wouldn’t guess. According to Vikram, most critics understood The Pyronauts to be an anti-colonial narrative and an anxious exploration of the possible consequences of the atom bomb. It was read and taught as a parable, warning its readers of the possible unforeseen results of harnessing a power greater than man to influence geopolitical affairs. Now, Vikram saw the novel as a trauma narrative speaking to the varied ways in which individuals cope with adversity.
FMWNL primarily follows Helen Nash (Hel) in her pursuit to build a museum to UDPs in the childhood home of Ezra Slight, which still exists in our universe. She deduces that up until 1909 her Earth and our Earth followed the same timeline and before diverging, with Ezra Slight’s drowning seeming to be the earliest known divergence, something Hel struggles to prove to her UDP partner, Vikram, with Carlos Oliveira, the most publicly established UDP, and with Ayanna Donaldson, a museum director that Hel is put in contact with in hopes of getting her museum of vanished culture funded. To provide “proof of concept,” Hel works to locate The Shipwreck, a painting that, in their world, put the fear of water into Ezra Slight as a child and saved his life but had gone missing from the boarding school he’d attended in our world. Painted in 1828 by George Lowery, it’s an element that anchors both UDPs and non-UDPs to this Earth.
It helps that her partner, Vikram, studied Slight’s work on their Earth, and brought a copy of The Pyronauts through the Gate with him. Hel and Vikram, beyond being connected through their UDP status, grew together as a couple through Vikram’s ritualistic retelling of Slight’s other fictions which drew Hel closer to Slight’s work, too, and because he has a copy of the novel, Hel is able to use that, and the story of The Shipwreck, to leverage Donaldson’s tentative support before losing it, and The Pyronauts, along the way. This projects Hel on a path to becoming an outsider for the second time in her life, the first being when she stepped through the Gate and become a UDP. “She’d never been despised before,” we’re told, as she lies to Vikram about what she’s done with his copy of The Pyronauts, an uncomfortable position for a white woman who used to be a doctor in her world and now needing to ask for the help of others while being seen as a burden and strange, and growing increasingly angry with how little people care about the culture she’s working to preserve.
Hel and Vikram’s relationship in FMWNL mirrors, in a certain way, the two divergent Earths: Hel the lost world UDPs came from, and Vikram the world they found on the other side of the Gate. Hel is vehemently resistant to assimilation and chooses to live off the government stipend UDPs receive instead of getting a job, and she fights to carve out a unique and dedicated space for UDP culture. Vikram, though, is a part of the workforce and easily befriends non-UDPs, and generally displays less outward aggression in the way that Hel does. This metaphorical representation of the two Earths plays out as expected in these characters, with Hel slowly alienating those around her as she hunts tirelessly for The Shipwreck and then The Pyronauts when it vanishes and, effectively, destroys her world. Vikram builds bonds, though, and relationships with others, slowly but surely, and is more willing to step into a situation that’s unfamiliar with people he doesn’t know well. He’s someone people will let crash on their couch for weeks when he needs it, and is a person people want to help. The resolution of their arcs at the novel’s end not only ties the story together, but redeems Hel, too, who manages to rescue her relationships, and effectively reconcile the “two Earths”.
Hel took his hand, but did not speak. A chain-link fence curled above them to preclude suicidal jumps. Through the grille, Vikram watched barges and boats far below, some carrying tourists. The watercraft parted the skin of the water in white-foam cuts that closed seamlessly behind, scars that could heal perfectly.
Dispersed throughout the novel are interviews from other UDPs. Some are from characters we meet in-story, like Wes and Oliveira, and even Helen, and others we don’t, including Micah Lee, who was part of a Christian denomination in the other Earth known as Keepers of the Covenant, and Joslan Micallef, the most notorious of the 156,000, who was a caretaker in our world that murdered an elderly woman she was assisting. These peeks into the distinct lives and histories of other UDPs not only feed our curiosity about the world they came from but they provide a type of oral history, a tradition that many immigrants rely on when displaced. Oral histories can preserve their culture in a new and foreign land, because what they’re able to take on their journey, which is often dangerous and fraught, can be very little and consist primarily of things necessary for survival. And though they’re disguised in the trappings of a science fiction narrative, the importance and necessity of these interviews in the novel are the same, and Chess does a nice job of giving a voice to these displaced people who, unlike displaced people in our world, can’t hope to return home.
Which makes Hel’s pursuit of the museum, a pseudo-home for UDPs in this world, both urgent and alien: the narrative takes advantage of the reader’s need for and preconceived notions of “home” and uses it to create tension. What seems to be a woman on a self-destructive path is actually a person clawing for equal standing in world where she has been given very little and expected to be contempt with her meager portion. Once a privileged doctor, Hel is now a nobody, or worse, a UDP in our world, and her fall from privilege helps her to see the value of others like her, no matter who they were in her world. Even Micallef, a murderer, deserves a space. By establishing the museum, and by filling it with things that have never existed in our world—ordinators, unsung songs and untold stories, those books that never existed, like The Pyronauts—she can create a portal back to a world now gone and, in a way, save it from disappearing altogether, carving out a little bit of home for all UDPs.
There are so many themes in the novel that can be teased out and explored, like the notion of fate and destiny, or the ineffective and detrimental role governments often play in the lives of immigrants (cough, cough, “Reintegration Education”), but I want to look at the nested narrative, the book-in-a-book. Portions of The Pyronauts appear in FMWNL and, beyond adding more richness and allegory, they provide a meta-commentary about storytelling.
Through story, we can elevate something ordinary to extraordinary, inviting inside our minds a topic or point of view we might never have given time to otherwise, and effectively giving it a home, a place to live inside of us. Chess does that here, too, swaddling issues of immigration in science fiction, highlighting a topic well-known the world over in an exotic way without diluting the important human element. And the excerpts of The Pyronauts are just as important. They’re like portals for the reader in the same way the book is a gateway for Vikram and Hel in the narrative, giving a voice to a ruined, destroyed world that never existed which is carried by people who came from a parallel world that feels as if it never existed—and yet the novel proves otherwise. The existence of the novel takes the place of their lost world and the bits of that narrative we get nested within Famous Men Who Never Lived makes The Pyronauts feel more real, connecting us briefly to another’nother world and more closely to Hel and Vikram, and the other UDPs. The novel is a momentary visit to a place that doesn’t, and never, existed, and challenges us to think beyond the surface of things by defamiliarizing what we think we know and then recontectualizing it for us differently, making it strange and new, allowing us to step through a Gate into a world like ours but not so that we can better understand what’s important here, on planet Earth.
Parallel Universe Cocktails
Many of our spirits and cocktails grew from recipes that began well before 1909, but the people who invented our modern cocktails didn’t follow the same paths on a parallel Earth. This week’s cocktails are an exploration of those divergences and what came of them.
Cocktail: El Mero Mero’s Demise
…in [Catalina’s] long-ago youth, she’d fought against the United States as one of a second generation of woman commandos in its on-again, off-again war against Capitalism. Once, Catalina had brought in her old uniform shirt to group and shown them the many medals pinned to it, explaining with pride what each one meant. A small condor emblem for her birth place. A bee in memory of the fallen dictator, El Mero Mero. A purple hammer and sickle and sickle representing ideological purity.
Ngiam Tong Boon grew up on Chinese Hainan island in 1870 and, having ruined the family’s dinner for Chinese New Year by knocking it into the fire, he ran away. The port of Hainan gave him access to a ship where he worked until being deposited in Vietnam, in French colonial Indochina where Boon began working as a waiter, working his way up to bartender before moving to Singapore to work eventually at Raffles. What’s important to know is how he came be known for both the Raffles classic, The Singapore Sling, and the Hotel Monteleone classic, the New Orleans Sling. While slings have been known for centuries, first being documented in the New York Times in 1883, it gets its name from the German word schlingen, which means to gulp; it’s made with gin, sugar, grated nutmeg, and a handful of ice. Boon’s success at Raffles in the early 1900s allowed him the money to purchase a rubber plantation in Malaysia that his brother helped run. His success was thanks in part to his recipe for a pink sling made with the addition of cherry brandy (heering), orange liqueur, and pineapple. Sometime in 1915, after traveling back to China, Boon died of an illness he didn’t know he had that took him swiftly. But before he died, he told his wife that he had left a safe in Singapore and that she would never need to work a day in her life, but when the safe was located it was empty.
By the early 1920s, the on-again, off-again wars between the America Unida system and the United States was in full boom, and sometime in the 1950s Hotel Monteleone (where a Boon had been making New Orleans Slings with rum and cognac instead of gin since the 1930s) was partially destroyed in a barrage by El Mero Mero’s Abeja and Avispa bombers. When it reopened again in the late 1960s, after El Mero Mero’s assassination, the new head bartender, Charlie Yen Boon, celebrated the victory with El Mero Mero’s Demise¸ a riff on recipe his great grandfather, Ngiam Tong Boon’s brother, had stolen and renamed the New Orleans Sling. This new riff on the sling used aged tequila, yellow Chartreuse, pineapple and lime, sugar and bitters, and had a purple float of liqueurs that eventually plummeted to the bottom of the cocktail as both a nod to the purple hammer and sickle of the America Unida, and the eventual demise of El Mero Mero.
El Mero Mero’s Demise
2oz Reposado Tequila
0.5oz Yellow Chartreuse
2 dashes of Tiki or Angostura Bitters
2oz Pineapple Juice
1oz Lime
0.5oz Agave Syrup
0.25oz each Blue Curacao and Cherry Heering/Brandy, to float
Add all ingredients to a shaker except for the Blue Curacao and Cherry Heering, and shake with ice. Strain into a glass over ice; add a straw.
Pour the Blue Curacao and Cherry Heering over the back of a spoon to float on the surface.
Garnish with a lime peel rose and cherry bouquet, or a pineapple wedge.
Cocktail: Death in the Afterglow
And around the corner, [Vikram] saw it, the source of the faint brightness. A glowing cobalt trapezoid halfway down the corridor. In his shock, he took a moment to realize what that meant. An open doorway, the same unit as before. The half-open door partly obscured light that emitted from inside.
He ran.
He ran towards the light.
Ezra Slight and Dashiell Hammett would have been contemporaries on a parallel Earth, Hammett being born in 1884 and Slight in 1899. Hammett, who joined the Pinkerton Agency when he was nearly thirty, died in one of the first border skirmishes with the fledgling America Unida system which had been bolstered by the then-wealthy island of Cuba. Because of his death, Hammett never had a chance to write any of his detective stories he’s known for on our Earth, stories like “Death and Company,” so when Ravi DeRossi and David Kaplan opened their bar on East Sixth St. on New Year’s Eve 2006/2007, a few blocks from the airship station, they chose to name the upscale cocktail joint Pain Ray. Like in the titular story, Pain Rays were invisible, and completely unpredictable, emanating from the brains of working-class people knowingly exposed to alien radiation. And, as the story is allegory about the plight of the working class being the plight of every class, DeRossi and Kaplan built the concept of Pain Ray to be accessible to everyone, but elevated, deriving their most noteworthy cocktail, Death in the Afterglow, from both The Pain Ray and the classic Casoni, which, as legend goes, was going to be built with bitter red Campari but was built instead with a Rosolio di Bergamotto and bianco vermouth. Of the smallest things Vikram misses, it’s sharing Death in the Afterglow with his friends at Pain Ray.
Death in the Afterglow
1.5oz Gin
0.5oz Bianco Vermouth
0.5oz Italicus Rosolio di Bergamotto
Add all ingredients to a tin, then add ice; stir until well chilled, about 60 turns.
Pour over a large ice cube, as clear as you can get it; garnish with a grapefruit twist.
Cocktail: The Queen of Knives
So when Hel saw the Sword card…she wondered: upright or reversed? She still had all the mystical significance of the Truth Deck memorized. Depending on the card’s orientation during Truth reading, the Sword Queen could mean clarity, logic, matters of intellect. Or emotional bias, poor decisions. Which was it?
The Queen of Knives is stern and narrow-sighted. Air aspected, she can be cold and blustery or soft and invigorating. She cannot be fooled by anyone but herself. The knife in her right hand is a necessity because she’s been caught unaware before, and her left hand is in her empty pocket because she knows she’ll take the first out-stretched hand offered to her. The Queen gives us the gift of everyday skepticism towards others and the desire for them, too. In a dark alley, she wants to press you to the wall and kiss your throat, or cut it. She provides insight and urgency in the matters of perceived needs. She fights. She tries. She misses her son. She wants and wants and wants but only has this knife.
The Queen of Knives
2oz Whiskey
1oz Lemon Juice
Optional: 2 dashes bitters
3oz Rockstar Energy Drink
Build in a glass over ice.
Enjoy.