All Alone at the Top of the World

Zack Graham

Following this work of short fiction, we are pleased to present an interview with the author and Brooklyn-based critic Christopher Byrd.

I hate the women I work for. I hate them so much. They are fat and they are cruel and they do not let me eat my lunch for more than two minutes without calling me lazy and telling me to get back to work. Every morning I wake up before the sun and take the train to the awful place where I clean the clothes and I don't leave until late at night, after the pizza restaurant next door has shut. I sleep on the train on the way home and I sleep at home and I wake up in the morning and get on the train and return to clean the clothes. I get up too early to eat in the morning. I barely eat during the day. I am so tired I barely eat at night.

My husband and I got married in China when we were young. We married because we were the only two Malay living in our town in Guangdong province. He smoked many cigarettes. He never made me pregnant. Now he is dead.

Every day is a miserable day. I tell myself stories to make it from one to the next.  

There was a boy who liked light. When the sun came out, he smiled. The more light he saw, the more light filled him up. More light, more light. Then he had so much light that he started to float, and he floated up and up, past the clouds and the sky, and he burned up in the gasses protecting the earth.  

English is so odd! So many words are the same but mean different things, and so many words mean different things but sound the same. As soon as you learn the rules, you learn how the rules never apply.

The women I work for treat me like a piece of trash because of my Malay skin. I speak Chinese, it doesn't matter. I grew up in China, it doesn't matter. I am a dark Malay, and so the driver who picks up the laundry doesn't look at me, doesn't know my name -- he grunts and points, like I am a slave.

I am not a slave. They pay me something. I work too hard, but at least they pay me something. The television told me there were slaves here before, dark people like me who would pick the cotton until their fingers bled. They did not get paid. 

Today is Wednesday. I have two more hours of work.  

A girl from nowhere had nothing, no money, no father, no mother, nothing but one thing: she was fast. She could outrun a jackrabbit and a wildebeest and a horse. But with her speed came hubris. She was arrogant. She grew fat because she knew she could run faster than anything else on earth, no matter how many sweets and meats she ate. One day, a man challenged her to a race for the title of the fastest runner in the world. She accepted. And because it was for that title, they would have to race around the whole world. So that's what they did. They ran over mountains and through valleys and over the ocean just like the man with the hair of wool and the feet of sand. They ran and ran. And because she was fat and arrogant, she stumbled in the last stretch and broke her foot. So she lost to the man.

My mother used to tell me that story before I went to bed. She would kiss me on the forehead and tell me never to get arrogant, because arrogance will trip you and make you fall.

I come home today and my landlord is waiting on the steps. He says I owe rent. I tell him I don't have it, but I will have it on Friday when I get paid. He tells me I better.

The next morning I am more tired than usual when I get up for work. When I arrive, it is the same as usual.  

Around midday, a lady comes in with a beautiful silk dress. She says she wants it hand-washed and lightly ironed. The boss gives it to me. I have never had something so pretty in my hands ever. It's the kind of dress that you only see on a television, not in real life. It slides through my fingers like an eel. I dunk it in the bubbly water and let it hang until it's dry. And then I press it all over with the hot iron. 

As I press, I tell myself a story. Only this story is about me. Me, wearing this pink silk dress. I am walking on the deck of a big ship. I see a fine man before me. His back is turned to me, and he is wearing the suit with the back splayed open like a gutted fish. He is smoking. He turns to me. He is my husband. We get nearer and nearer to one another. He cups my lower back with his little hand. We kiss.

Screaming. Stinking. I open my eyes. The dress has a smoking black spot. I pressed the iron in one place for too long. 

They fire me, the women I work for. They yell at me, they hit me, they tell me I am worthless. Maybe they are right.

I go looking for jobs in the neighborhood. No one will have me. They won't let me sweep the floors or clean the tables. Nothing.

So I go to another neighborhood and ask around for work. I see the police, so I run. 

When I arrive home, all of my things are outside the building. Now I have nowhere to go. I take some things and put them in a pack and put on my coat and I walk. I walk and ask for work, but no one will give me any. I walk and walk all day and no one will give me any work. I have not eaten. I have not slept. I go to the shelter for dinner. I eat boiled hot dog and bread. Then I go back out looking for work. No work to find. I go back to the shelter for sleep. The people there recognize me. I am one of them now.

I curl up around my pack and I close my eyes. I want to keep looking for work, but I think about looking for work tomorrow and my stomach goes cold. I do not want to get up. I do not want to feel such shame.

So I tell myself a story as I lie there waiting for sleep. It is about a little girl. She is all alone at the top of the world. Such wind, so much snow. She shivers and shivers beneath her coat. She is so alone, she is in the middle of nowhere, and no one will ever know.

Author Interview: “I Wanted to Shine a Light on Her”

Critic Christopher Byrd in Conversation with Zack Graham

When did you begin working on the story collection “All Alone at the Top of the World” belongs to? Are there any themes or stylistic motifs that unify the collection?

I started the collection a few months after I graduated from college, which was in 2013. The collection focuses on people who have unique and compelling backgrounds and lives and stories and who are overlooked by mainstream media, popular culture, and the literary world. People who most readers have never thought about in a meaningful way. Only one story in the collection focuses on a character based on me. The rest focus on the kinds of people I describe above.

What inspired you to write about a Chinese-Malay woman living on the margins?

Racism is pretty widely talked about these days, but people seldom talk about the vociferous racism in Asia. Racism in Asia is probably worse than racism on any other continent. The Uighurs in China and the Rohingya in Myanmar are but two of many, many groups of dark-skinned peoples that are treated as sub-human across Asia.

Sarah, the woman who I’ve based the narrator on, is a Chinese-Malay woman who worked in a laundromat around the corner from my apartment (until it closed a few months ago), and the way she’s treated in the story accurately reflects how she was treated in real life. She has a beautiful soul. I wanted to shine a light on her.

Was it difficult for you to nail down her voice? 

For a long time I tried to create my first person narrators’ voices realistically—by listening to people and trying to write how they talked. But that’s not really a good strategy, because listening to someone isn’t the same as reading something written in their voice. So now I perform an act of translation, in that I try to channel how the people I base my characters on sound into a voice that feels like them when you read it, if that makes any sense. A lot of the stories in the collection are first person, and I try to make the voices as unique as the people I’ve based them on. 

I know that you’re given to writing different drafts. Do you have a method for determining if something you’re working on should be pursued or abandoned? By extension, when does a piece of writing click for you?

Oh man. If only I knew the answer to that first question. There are stories in the collection I’ve been writing over and over since 2013 that I still haven’t figured out. If I could convince myself to move on, I would. But there’s something about them I love every time I come back to them that doesn’t let me abandon them.

To your second question: I keep a stack of current drafts of my stories. Every once in a while I’ll pick up the story on top of the stack, and if I can’t close my eyes and remember the first sentence of the story, I’ll read it again, as I’m distant enough from the process of writing it that I can read the story more as a critic and less as the person who wrote it. If something isn’t right, I do another draft, print it out, and put it at the bottom of the stack, hoping that the next time I read it, it feels complete.

What role does literature play in your life? Does it simply exist on a continuum with the other media that you consume or does it retain a unique value?

Reading fiction is my favorite method of consuming media. I’ll read fiction online if I can’t get it in print, but the experience is never as special. I’ll read criticism on my phone and computer, no problem. But fiction on the page is where my heart is. It’s better than watching films, or watching TV, or listening to audiobooks or podcasts. It’s second to none.

Tell me about your reading habits. Do you read systematically—diving into the work of one author or subject at a time, let’s say—or with a certain measure of caprice, letting your impulses lead you where they may?

I’ll only consume the entirety of an author’s work if I’m writing a piece of criticism about them. I try to stick to the rule that if I’m going to write about an author I’ll read every book they’ve written, which is a bit draconian, but really makes the piece better, in my experience. Let’s just say I hope I don’t find myself in the position of writing about Steven King.

Like most avid readers, I have a stack of unread books in my bedroom, which I try to reduce the size of when I’m in between pieces. When it gets reasonably short, I pile it high once again using a list of books and authors I’ve been recommended, which I keep on my phone.

You mentioned you also write criticism in addition to fiction. How do you decide what author you’re going to write about or what book you’re going to review? 

As a reader, my favorite kind of essay or review is about a writer I’ve never heard of that prompts me to find out everything about that writer and buy one of their books from my local book store. So when I approach writing criticism, I try to write the kind of piece I’d most want to read, and in doing so I champion writers I love who people don’t pay enough attention to. Like my favorite writer Machado de Assis (though Parul Sehgal has written two glowing pieces about him in the New York Times recently, which I am ecstatic about!), or Percival Everett, my favorite living American novelist, or Diane Cook, or Jean Rhys, or Garielle Lutz, or… you get the picture.

What was the last book that rocked your world?

Journey to the End of the Night, by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. It’s deeply troubling, just like Céline was as a person, but brilliant. I believe you recommended it to me – thank you!

When did you know that you wanted to become a writer? Did you go through any aesthetic phases? 

I wrote my first short story when I was 12 years old. The process of doing so made me happier than I’d ever been to that point in my life. Nothing has changed. Writing fiction makes me happier than anything else I do. In terms of phases, I wrote science fiction throughout middle and high school. None of it’s any good, but it allowed me to prove to myself that I could finish stuff. In college I wrote these post-modern Barthelme / Barth knockoff short stories that pain me to even think about now. The collection of short stories to which “All Alone at the Top of the World” belongs incorporates elements of the surreal and the supernatural as well as conventions of character-driven literary realism, as does a novel I’m writing. People used to refer to it as a genre called “slipstream”, but thanks to the mainstream success of writers like Victor LaValle, Carmen Maria Machado, and Jeff VanderMeer, the kind of fiction I’m writing is reaching a broader audience nowadays.

Do you fret over the state of literary culture in our hyper-distracted world?

I think there are a lot of literary cultures around the world, most of which benefit from technology, because the internet allows them to reach a wider audience than they possibly could before the internet existed. I can read literary magazines published in Dakar and Jakarta and Wellington now, where I couldn’t realistically have done so without going through a lot of agony before the invention of the internet.

I don’t really know if more or less people read literature now than during other periods in history. Literary culture has its flaws, but on whole things seem to be getting more equitable and inclusive and democratized, though that progress is agonizingly slow, and two steps forward are often followed by one step backward. True, social media and the internet are shortening peoples’ attention spans. People take less time with things now. There’s less room for introspection, for thinking about art, because we’re so plugged in all the time. But all in all, things could be a lot worse.

Zack Graham’s writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, GQ, the Believer, Electric Literature, Epiphany, and elsewhere. He is at work on a collection of short stories and a novel.

Christopher Byrd is a Brooklyn-based writer and the lead video game critic for The Washington Post. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, the Believer, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @Chris_Byrd.