Sealing the Sectors of Three Days After What
An examination of Karen Haber’s science fiction short story, “Three Days After,” by J.T. Dockery. For those arriving here independently, this essay appears here/functions as a supplement to a conversation between Haber and myself. The above illustration also serves as the principle illustration for the interview. That conversation may be read: here.
(Note: the parenthetical page numbers in the essay following refer to pages from the story as it appears in This Way to the End Times: Classic Tales of the Apocalypse.)
The title of Karen Haber’s story, “Three Days After,” challenges the reader to ask the question, “Three days after what?” The author provides two contradictory answers to that question in the story. The reader becomes uncertain whether the character Phelia suffers the personal apocalypse of a break from reality, or if she perceives the results of a literal, external apocalypse. Through the contradictions the reader considers the differing answers to the “three days after what?” question. This allows the reader to arrive at his or her own conclusions of the meaning, or interpretation, of the events. By scrutinizing the sections of the story that contain a repeated date and time, comparing those sections to the ones that omit the repetition, and considering the single section of the story written in the past tense in contrast, as well as considering allusions to literature and art in the text, the reader understands the methods used by the author to create this complex portrait of Phelia.
Haber presents scenes repeating the date and time of April 12 at 6:05 AM, in six consecutive variations. Those six sections, which include the motif of the repetition, in chronological order, are the same day revealed in four alternate versions. In each variation she awakens before her alarm, which is noted as “Twenty minutes,” before the time of 6:05 AM (355). Twice she leaves the apartment to go to work, but those two instances, apparently the same day, are not similarly portrayed. In the fourth section, she does not leave the apartment to go to work at all, instead sitting on her bed, following the details that, “The river is wide, the buses aren’t running, and she is […] too tired to swim” (361). This is also the only section of the story that does not end with Phelia sleeping. The reader comes to suspect none of these events are literally occurring, as each day features alternating details, such as the continually changing colors, differentiations in the descriptions of Phelia’s commute to and at work, and the dissimilarities of what appears on her television.
In the first section of the six that include the repetition, a figure emerges who distresses her, “A Frankenstein in dress whites [with a] fishbowl for a head,” as “Golden numbers click at his fingertips” (355–56). The figure does not reappear until the sixth and final section of this group, which also contains the only turn in the story from present to past tense. The first sentence of the past tense section reads, “PHELIA SAT UP IN BED” (361). The previous phantom figure is now a “man in the white box” with a “Geiger counter in his gloves” (361), which seems to provide a literal meaning to the previous “Golden numbers […] at his fingertips” (356). The man says, “Another deader,” adding, “We can seal this sector” (361). Phelia is apparently dead from a nuclear catastrophe, thus the shift from present to past tense, and is a radioactive corpse. This section, like the fourth, is the only other section of the six that does not conclude with Phelia sleeping. With this conclusion, all the versions of the day in present tense which also includes the repeating date and time may be interpreted as perceptions at the time of her death, memory or hallucinations based on actual memory, as prelude to death.
However, if the reader turns to the three sections that omit the time and date, there is a subversion in the story of the previous interpretation. These sections begin with a description of an explosion, “a fervid light brighter than the sun at midday” (357). The second section in this chronology brings doubt upon a literal explosion from the previous as “IMPLACABLE ARMIES” march over Phelia’s bed, and “faceless soldiers” rape and imprison her (360). Here the presence from the other sections is neither “A Frankenstein” (355) or a “man in the white box” (361) but instead “the doctor (360).” Phelia says to the doctor, “But it’s really not my erotic fantasy,” and as the doctor remains silent Phelia mentions a “synapse lapse” and “a stray countertransferrence” (360). If the reader accepts this is not all imagined, Phelia is not in her room but in a hospital, the one moment in the story that does not begin with her at home. The image when the doctor, “pulls out a small purring man with amber eyes, a long forked tongue,” appears a metaphor for a hypodermic needle (360). In the third section following, Phelia, with, “a relieved sigh […] goes to sleep” (362), which is the end of “Three Days After” in its non-linear, original chronology. These three sections lacking the repeated date and time lead the reader to conclude that Phelia is suffering a mental breakdown, being treated in a hospital by a doctor, and that the rest of the story is hallucinatory memories from when she experienced that break from reality.
When turning from the two separate chronologies based on the inclusion or exclusion of the date and time to the allusions in the story, the name Phelia appears as an arguable if not obvious allusion to Ophelia, a character emblematic of a woman having gone insane from the various pressures surrounding her, from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. When regarding Phelia from the perspective that she has suffered a break from reality, one can imagine this is due to the pressures she is receives from intense anxiety brought on by the news from her television. Ophelia also has often been a subject portrayed by painters over decades and centuries. With Haber’s use of changing colors and vivid, surreal imagery to portray Phelia, the reader notices references in the story to visual arts, such as when a visual artist alluded to by name, as with 19th century painter, “[Georges] Seraut” (359). Seraut famously applied tiny bits of color with painted dots to canvas, so that if observed closely, those dots look like abstract daubs of contradictory colors. Only by observing the applied paint at a distance does the viewer’s eye perceive the blending of the dots, revealing the cumulative representational image intended by the painter. Haber presents two sections on the same page that both repeat the same phrase, written in capital letters: “THE SOUND” (361). These two sections are separated by the singular section written in past tense, which operates as the conclusion of the repeated date and time sections in the story, as well as the one scene in which Phelia is depicted as dead. If one removes the past tense section between them, the reader notices in those two sections, it is written that Phelia “sleeps” (361) and then “goes back to sleep” (362), alternately. By presenting these endings so closely together, Haber is on the written page creating a full portrait of Phelia, providing small, related but contradictory details, reflecting Seraut’s technique of applying dots of abstract, contradictory colors in painting.
“Three Days After” is a fragmented portrait of a fragmented individual. If the reader regards the incongruities of the two conclusions as two individual portraits of Phelia that when put together create a single portrait of her, this allows the implications of both endings to be considered simultaneously. Whether or not Phelia is a victim of calamity and is dying or dead, or whether she is a victim of dread not death, having gone insane consequently, the result is the same character. Haber has the reader observing the world through Phelia’s perceptions. “Three days after what” is Phelia experiencing an apocalypse happening now, to her, from every angle. Published in 2014, Haber’s techniques and metaphors in “Three Days After” and six years later to the publication date are analogous to the time of this writing in November of 2020. Phelia in a particular instance describes herself as, “a plaything for a young fiery virus” (360). In the time of an actual pandemic, one must concern oneself not just with a the facts of living during a viral pandemic but also maintaining one’s own mental health concurrently, as well as doing so within a constantly shifting cycle of news and information, including disinformation, a figurative type of virus. Our own apocalypse is happening now, as with Phelia’s apocalypse, and our collective bodies and minds may also become playthings to a virus, perhaps simultaneously more than one virus.
Return/go to: Blizzard of Scales: Three Days After // In Conversation w/ Karen Haber
