In Bed One Night

"In Bed One Night"
Short story by Robert Coover
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Horror fiction Short story, Gothic Literature
Publication
Published in	1983
Publisher	Burning Deck Press
Media type	Print

The literary work, "In Bed One Night", by Robert Coover was originally published in 1983 by Burning Deck Press. Later, in 2014, it was re-published by Dzanc Books in, "In Bed One Night and Other Brief Encounters". Similarly to Coover's other work, this short story holds dark undertones and is written with a cryptic message. This story tells the tale of a man who suddenly finds his bed overcrowded by a variety of people because of a mix up at the Social Security Office. Coover suggests that there is a link between social and ethnic background and the level of treatment one receives. Coover subtly questions whether or not the Social Security program is reliable and stable. Intentionally, Coover chose characters from all different walks of life to illustrate his message.

Plot

The story opens with a man in his bedroom, just winding down at the end of his day, getting ready for bed. When he lies down, his arm brushes against someone else. He looks over and sees it's a pale white-haired lady. As she talks to him, he wonders why she can't say her S's, and notices a set of dentures out on the nightstand, which belong to her. The elderly woman tells him that all five of them were assigned by Social Security. "Private beds are a luxury the world can no longer afford" and "at least he still has his own bed has he not he's after all luckier than most" says the elderly lady to the bed owner. The owner feels her brother at first with his feet, then he sees Albert at the foot of the bed, and an Oriental man is lying next to her. Albert is described as a person who "has only one leg is ailing poor soul. " The owner of the bed is surprised that Social Security has assigned that many folks. At this point, Duke another man ("heavy bellied Worker"), shows up with his woman of similar stature. They end up knocking the dentures into the air and the elderly woman goes chasing after them. Duke forces his companion to have sexual relations with him while everyone is still on the bed. She argues with him at first, but then is overpowered. Albert gets mad that Duke has a girl to himself. Duke gets so wrapped up in his sexual activity that he ends up kicking Albert in the face out of the bed. It is revealed at this time that the Asian man has a knife, though he seems scared as he holds it. Albert crawls back to top of the bottom of the bed with a pin in his mouth. The pin was holding Albert's pant leg up while he was lying next to his sister earlier. Duke feels some intense pain and manages to wipe his tears away. A mother appears with three runny-nosed kids at this time and Duke starts to fade away wondering if he remembered the light in the bathroom and the cap on the toothpaste. At the same time, the elderly lady, with a lisp, suddenly shouts out in fear asking whether Albert has swallowed the pin.

Publication history

This short story was originally published in 1983 by Burning Deck Press. Years later it was published in a group of short stories in 2014 by Dzanc Books, titled, "In Bed One Night and Other Brief Encoutners"

Analysis

In Bed One Night and Other Brief Encounters, the shortest and slightest of Coover's fiction is an example of "metafiction". Per Gass, metafictions are "the forms of fiction (that) serve as the material upon which further forms can be imposed". Coover's style causes the reader to shift one's gears, widen one's frames, and expand one's consciousness. Robert Coover has an "affinity for the grotesque." Readers, as repressed and submissive human beings, tend to resist, flee, and fear the attitudes and myths of age, death, and other aspects of life; Hume indicated that, "By yoking the gross or upsetting with the ordinary, the comic with the tragic, Coover forces awareness of the cultural limits we have sublimated" (840). Therefore, Coover "breaks the mechanisms of repression, reintroduces awareness of our submission, and tries to awaken us to the nature of our situation" (Hume 840).

Coover's grotesquerie is evidenced in "In Bed One Night" by the whitehaired lady's explanation of the shortage private beds—a luxury to the world in the story (Coover 301). Readers of In Bed One Night, with knowledge of their society, suddenly enter into a world of fantasy; as a result, they shift their gears into thinking in a broader perspective—"the widening of frames" (Heckard 211). The readers will then realize that their government and society may have done something similar to what "the social security" (Coover 301) does; hence, they are now experiencing what Heckard would call "the expanding of consciousness" (211). Having sexual intercourse in front of others and killing a person who is of a different race do not appear to be out of the norm in the story's setting—the characters are not surprised at all about any of these deeds. As the readers visualize the scene in which the "heavybellied worker" and the "fat woman" (Coover 302) are performing sexual intercourse or the scenes in which the old lady told Duke—the worker—to kill the Asian man on the grounds of his skin color. they are suddenly immersed into a "grotesque world, a world that looks respectable on the surface, but proves underneath to be what we have feared it to be all along. That such strangeness is indeed intrinsic to Coover's worlds is shown by the frequency of its manifestations and by characters' lack of surprise at these" (Hume 828).

In this short story, Robert Coover utilizes "a range of polyvalent grotesquerie" (Hume 829). Depending on "each reader's mental make-up, which in turn rests on ideologies and beliefs" (Hume 829) outside Coover's control, the readers can interpret having sexual intercourse in front of others as indecent and killing a person based on racism is wrong or vice versa. Hume also asserts that the "instability of values also interferes with most readers' satisfaction, because they tend to like works they feel they have conquered and Coover's permit no such self-congratulation" (Hume 829). Coover's fiction maintains that the world cannot be objectively understood and that there is just too much to sort through—all the people in on world social security assigning too many people to one bed. In the face of an overwhelming amount of data people take another route: myth. Myth has the ring and feel of truth, but rational thought and objective analysis are not needed to put it into place and allow it to function. By accepting myths, people put themselves in a position where they feel as if they can go on with life and they have a place of stability from which to operate.