Pursuit — Story, Setting & Ideas

Gaps in Memory, Habits in the Body

The first excerpt establishes a pattern: Hawkes’s mind has been wiped clean of months, but his body retains new habits. He smokes, though he never did. He finds himself in a changed season. The tape recorder holds no record. These are not vague amnesia tropes; they are physical evidence of a missing interval. Del Rey emphasizes the feel of wrongness—the cigarette falls from shaking hands, the pulse races—before any rational explanation appears.

This bodily memory contrasts with Hawkes’s conscious struggle to reconstruct events. He recalls a fight with Irma, a letter from a professor, then nothing. The narrative withholds the professor’s name and the letter’s content, leaving the reader to wonder whether the missing time was stolen or self-inflicted. The tension lies in the gap between what Hawkes knows and what his body knows.

Shifting Ground: From Bedroom to Moonscape

The second excerpt delivers a violent spatial jump. Hawkes is suddenly on the moon—naked, airless, under a black sky with Earth overhead. The description is stark: “harsh blacks and cold whites,” “blazing specks without a flicker.” Then, just as abruptly, he is back in a kitchen, dust between his toes. The transition is instantaneous, unexplained.

Del Rey uses these jumps to destabilize any fixed sense of setting. The moon is not a destination reached by spaceship; it is a place Hawkes is sent to, and from which he is returned, without warning. The terror is not the vacuum but the loss of control over where and when he exists. The lunar dust on his feet becomes a tangible proof that the experience was real, not a dream—yet the mechanism remains hidden.

The Accusation: Alien or Human?

In the final excerpt, Hawkes confronts Ellen, accusing her of being an alien monster disguised as a girl. His evidence: she sent him to the moon. But the scene is complicated by her response—she is crying, sober, insisting she is human. Hawkes demands she “prove it” by coming to him, a test that conflates intimacy with verification.

The language shifts: Ellen’s earlier drunken trust (“Nighty-night”) contrasts with her later terror. Hawkes’s own behavior is ambiguous—he feels like a heel, then like a man. The narrative does not confirm whether Ellen is alien or human; it only shows Hawkes’s certainty and her fear. The reader is left to weigh the evidence: the moon dust, the missing time, the blank tape—but also her tears, her name, her reach for him.

Readers should attend to the small, physical details that Del Rey plants: the cigarette habit, the season change, the lunar dust. These are the clues that anchor the story’s reality, even as the plot leaps between bedroom and moonscape. The novella rewards attention to what is not said—the blank tape, the erased months, the professor’s letter. The pursuit is as much internal as external, and the final test may be whether the reader, like Hawkes, can distinguish between paranoia and perception.

Reading Pursuit, I remembered a gray afternoon when I woke from a fever unsure which memories were mine. That same disquiet found me in The Psilent Partner — Text and Context, where each page seemed to ask if a story can belong to more than one teller. Both books leave that question hanging, soft as dust in late light.