Who Wants to Know?: The Upside Down Pyramid of "What Maya Found Here"

In A People’s Future of the United States, Daniel José Older’s “What Maya Found There” spans  166-177. Which,

besides just looking rather nice, makes it particularly short, even in an anthology of short stories. This is why I love Older’s tale: it doesn’t waste time. I waste time. My writing wastes time. My stories ramble, stretch, twist, take leisurely strolls up and down the page. But Older’s writing spits and runs. He knows exactly what he’s giving you, and it’s just enough. Still, the prose does not lack flourish. Older lingers on certain images and lets dialogue flow. The economy of his prose disguises itself in memory-lane anecdotes and casual interactions. And somehow, eleven pages later, I’m left with the feeling not unlike having just finished some kind of mental appetizer at a new intellectual restaurant: piqued, and satisfiedly-dissatisfied in a way that leaves me wanting more. 

“What Maya Found There” is a story of almost. It’s almost knowing, almost familiar. It’s wondering if you’re finding

your place, if you're going to find your place, or if maybe you already found it but you lost it and won’t find it again.

It’s like this, actually. The reader begins on solid footing: an interaction between two characters. They are standing on the simple, rectangular-prism stage of an airport welcome area. In the third person limited perspective of Maya Lucia Aviles, she and Tristan Thomas share an awkward embrace. They greet each other, and their straightforward history is elucidated. They went to a prestigious college together. He liked her. She rejected him. They stayed friends. Haven’t seen each other in decades. 

 

Classic story. But as the narrative unwinds the reader starts to realize 

That they’re missing pieces. The streets of New York are empty. 

How long have they been? Maya had to leave the United States 

Because her (and all) bioengineering research was going to 

be overseen by the government. But what research? She’s 

Returned to find her notes somewhere. Where? And 

maybe her relationship with Tristan isn’t quite 

What it first had seemed… Chunks 

Are falling off the side of the 

Rectangular prism stage 

And leaving the reader 

With this inverted 

pyramid. 

​

So, almost knowing. “What Maya Found There” is obsessed with the idea of knowing because it's obsessed with

the idea of insiders and outsiders. Who gets to know? Who deserves to but doesn’t? Who actually does? By creating his characters, setting, plot, and ultimately world with this pyramid, Older takes specific control over what the reader is allowed to know and invites them to feel the discomfort of almost. 

We first get comfortable with our characters– or, more specifically, their relationship. Maya and Tristan’s history fits

so neatly within an archetype that a reader may feel they don’t have to work to understand it. They’re friendly but awkward, Maya is an outsider that insider Tristan welcomes with open arms. But upon closer examination, it becomes clear that a major element of characterization is missing in their relationship: Maya’s thoughts. While we get her anxieties and musings about her surroundings, she never actually says how she feels about him. There are simply descriptions of the physical and historical context of their relationship, and the reader takes what are seemingly obvious cues from there. 

More chunks begin to fall off as Older describes his setting. Maya and Tristan’s interaction is situated in a New York

airport, made uncomfortable (but not unrecognizable) by an emptiness in the space. There is a lack of people and activity. But it’s mostly familiar. It’s New York. It’s New York where there’s something wrong, but this is a speculative story– of course, there’s something. And Older doesn’t glance over the emptiness. This is one of those places he lingers in imagery and description, as Maya imagines “warm bodies tucked away behind layers of concrete” and revels in “the silence of snow” (168). In the opening paragraphs, Older interjects abruptly with details that seem so totally irrelevant (birds flitting about, an indistinguishable loudspeaker announcement) that they serve clearly to illustrate how little else is happening. He even uses the stillness of the city as a tool to further characterize Maya, giving her the opportunity to recall her days as a “ludicrous adventurer” in comparison to the inactivity of the setting. All this to say: we don’t quite realize that a major piece of the setting is missing. Yet Older neglects to situate the reader in any timeline meaningful to the reader, leaving us to assume that this is a New York we have never seen. And so we continue, assuming our assumption is safe. 

Older builds his speculative world with a similar, subtle, ambiguity. He doesn’t neglect the reader entirely. But

there is no explicit exposition until a few pages in, and Older instead builds the world through the ways in which Maya describes it. In the airport, she notes “Ever deepening irony of the name “welcome area(page),” signaling exclusion as something integral to this world. Maya implies that she was detained for her ethnicity without ever saying the word detained or mentioning where she is from, further signaling the significance of xenophobia without explicitly making it a part of the world. Finally, when she uses the language of calling New York a “ghost town” (166), there is a strong implication of some sort of cataclysmic before-and-after event by only describing the effect, not the cause. Ultimately, these descriptions echo the way that the world itself functions, where “things weren’t to be spoken of or complained about out loud, not in public, not here, not now” (167) and where you learn from “whispers, offhand references” (168). The reader is left to grapple with the unknowns, filling in holes. It is here, in Older’s world building, that the inverted pyramid is perhaps the most evident. 

The missing pieces of character, setting, and world building comes to a head with a sporadic series of reveals,

ultimately leading to an ending where the reader cannot be entirely sure whether they ever properly understood the plot at all. First, on page 171, we finally see a concrete warmth toward Tristan from Maya: she smiles at his accent. And then, in the next sentence, she spikes his drink. On page 172, we learn that Tristan’s cluttered home (which Maya drags him to, unconscious) is “the only thing in the entire U.S. that hadn’t changed during the Trump administration” (172). Suddenly this isn’t some distant New York– some of us lived in that New York. The reader can’t even be sure of the genre of the story’s world. We start off comfortable with the idea of a speculative, dystopian future. The world is not our own but it is fathomable. But the known and unknown clash once again with the introduction of science fiction elements: Tristan removes his mittens to reveal bioengineering has turned them furry and clawed. A minotaur-like creature bursts through the door. And so the reader is left with one question: “huh?” 

In his exclusion and subsequent revelation of these details, Older only highlights what more the reader can’t quite

understand. What was Maya researching? How does the government intend to use it? Who was Tristan, actually? And the answer is simple: you don’t get to know. Just like Maya, you are being made into an outsider. 

With “What Maya Found There,” Older showed me how to give less without actually giving less. His story shatters

the notion that a short (short) story doesn’t have room for complex characters, a meaningful setting, and purposeful world building. Instead, Older picks and chooses what to give so that he can flesh out each element, and makes the choices themselves reflective of key themes and ideas. I can only hope to emulate this. But I hope my next stories will take a leaf from Older’s book, taking less leisurely strolls and maybe doing some increment running every once and a while.