They begin a candlelit nightly ritual of gathering on the roof, for fresh air, the beautiful view and socially distanced conversation, which quickly morphs into monologues, mini-marathons of what has become known, thanks to organizations like The Moth and the plague of podcasts, as “storytelling.”
There is something so folksy about that term, so inappropriate for New Yorkers who tend to lack patience for other people’s anecdotes. But the resident of 5C, a fan of Eurovision, proposes it, and 6D, a therapist, endorses it, so we must accept it as a premise, even though it seems exceedingly unlikely that everyone at the down-at-heels Fernsby has the narrative capacity and endurance of Spalding Gray. They’ve all had incredibly interesting lives.
“Fourteen Days” is an orgy of representation, and issues including immigration, racism, police violence and PTSD are all aired in these soliloquies. Credit to Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston, the novellus’s editors (who also wrote portions), that I wasn’t tempted until the end, and then only mildly, to flip back and see which of the authors had contributed which bit. Preston is responsible for Yessie’s “frame narrative”; Atwood for one about a mysterious interloper, a spiky-haired bedbug exterminator who claims she used to be a spider — only in New York, kids — and still has spidery qualities.
“As you are storytellers, may I humbly point out that many of the terms you use — spinning a yarn, weaving a tale, following a thread — are borrowed from our arachnid culture,” she intones improbably but charmingly to the group. “‘Text’ of course comes from ‘textile.’” And “spiders are not lying and deceiving when we weave webs, we are simply eating.”
Well, the seams may be smooth, but this is nonetheless a crazy patchwork quilt.
Amnesia, aka 5E, who writes comic books and computer games, details her time as a stage actress — and how “the hunger sort of propels you,” not for fame, but dinner. (That’s courtesy of Erica Jong.) The poet of 4B describes a contentious reading of“The Decameron” (the “Ten Days” of the Black Plague), where attendees declare Boccaccio misogynist and homophobic. (Ishmael Reed.) And the super tells of a rape creatively avenged (shades of “Promising Young Woman”) in a tale that, the character notes, was told before at a storytelling night — how meta. (Who else but merchant of irony Dave Eggers?)
