(originally appeared in Tweed’s)
Truman walked around town all the time after he came home. His morning course was always different. Some mornings he could be seen walking down south of town near the train depot, sometimes alongside the tracks even, and other days he was spotted as far north as Kentucky Road, all the way up near the river. But by mid-morning he’d always end up back in the middle of town for lunch. His favorite place to eat was the Courthouse Exchange. He’d eat there every day. He was always seated at the same table in the back corner of the restaurant. At this particular time of day he was never too hard to find.
He ordered something different every day for lunch; he often joked that this habit was something he picked up from Stalin at Potsdam. He folded his napkin under his plate the same way every time when he was done, left the same amount of tip to the same waitress. He was quiet. He always wore white. If you looked at this old man, a man who was my oldest friend, you would never guess that at his behest 105,000 people were once vaporized half a world away.
He ate by himself. Rarely did Bess accompany him. He would stare out the window and fidget with his cane every so often. He would eye this cane as he ate because the bustle of the dining room would jiggle it so that it would want to tip from resting against the unoccupied chair. The cane would almost fall before he would reach for it with a certain tenderness and urgency — as if it would detonate the A-bomb again if he allowed it to fall. He used to grip this cane so hard when he walked that if you got close enough to it you could see tiny grooves from where his nails dug into the balsa handle. He told me once that carrying this cane made him feel like Titus Cincinnatus.
Folks approached him all the time. They shook his hand while he was out for a walk around the square or they brought a note pad over for him to sign as a memento. He was never rude to people if they came up for an autograph or a handshake. He never feared assassination or rebuke, even after Kennedy, though he also told me one time that he wouldn’t be surprised if one day he ended up like Julius Caesar — stabbed to death one morning below the local statue of Andrew Jackson. I told him he was obsessed with the Romans.
Sometimes folks would walk up to him and shake a fist at him as though he were Ted Williams in the batter’s box or something, like they were cheering him on. This always amazed him, this enthusiasm. People would come right up to him and say, “Give ‘em hell, Harry,” just to be able to say they said this to Harry Truman. This was something people would say to him back when he was going for re-election, and back then he used to say that the sound of those words was almost as good as hearing Bess say “I love you” to him. Now it was something he seemed annoyed by, but he’d wave anyway to whoever said these words, and he’d say, “Okay, okay. Okay, sure.”
Halfway through his stroll around the square he’d find a bench to sit on. If it was after lunch he’d say this rest was necessary to let his food settle. He’d usually sit near the old statue of Jackson; he liked this seat near Jackson, he said, because it was at a high enough elevation that he claimed he could see all the way to the south Grandview farmland where he grew up. He’d let out a belch or else relieve himself of some gas as he sat, and he’d always be embarrassed when people chose these moments to approach him. “I’m no flower,” he said to me often.
In those later years Truman began taking his walks at night instead. He used to say he could get some real thinking done this way. He would slip out in the earliest hours of the morning, just after midnight some nights, and he would say it was the only time of day when he knew he wasn’t being watched. I asked him if this meant he didn’t want me to join him on these strolls any more when he said that. “That’s not what I mean,” he said, “we go way back. We’re Independence boys — we’re pals. You help me clear my head, help remind of the good times, the old times.”
We’d amble through the dark. One time he led me away from the sidewalks of the square through the muddy fields of a short cut up to Highway 24. We stopped in a glen where we could smell the pores of the earth opening up from the spring rains. I stood behind him. His white slacks had droplets of mud on the backs of the thighs from us sloshing over the soil. He pointed across the way. “See it?” he said. From there we could see the outline of the construction of his presidential library. I didn’t know what he wanted me to say. So I told him good job, and I meant it, but he said I was being a smart ass. Then I asked him. It was the only time I ever asked him about his presidency because I knew that it was all anyone ever asked about.
Harry had known for a long time the kind of trouble I was in. Any time I’d talk to him about it he’d only say, “I don’t know how you could have ever gotten caught up in something like that.” That night, looking across the highway with him, I told him that I had stood in front of the mirror the night before and my reflection wouldn’t move. I would step left and right and would bend my knees up and down but my reflection stayed right there. I asked him if he’d ever had anything like that happen to him when he was president. And then Truman was laughing. “I’m being serious,” I said. “I was moving all around but my reflection inside the looking glass wouldn’t budge. I was just standing still from inside there. I couldn’t make my reflection move at all.” I asked him to use his relationship with the mayor to see if there was something wrong with the drinking water. He laughed harder when I said this. Even today I can still hear him laughing at my words, that laugh of his, like two bricks rubbing together inside his throat. He was laughing that this experience had only just now come to me.
(originally appeared in The Cleveland Review)
We were being loud. We had been laughing and busting balls for hours. I had been the dealer all night because Lonnie said he liked my style, whatever that meant. Lonnie was winning most of the hands. It was some kind of luck. We got to the point to where we were cheering him on. Then she said that she had been reading from The Bhagavad-Gita.
“Do what?”
She turned and looked right at Lonnie and said, “You have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” We all thought that this was a hell of a thing to say to someone dying of a brain tumor. She repeated herself. “You have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” We all folded our hands because we felt he deserved to win after hearing something like that. The cards came spinning in as if falling from a tree. Some slid right off the table. Lonnie didn’t like this, I could tell, us folding like that. He made a comment that he was not some kind of charity. He took the chips anyway. He slid them one at a time into his hands like he was going to perform a magic trick with them. Then his wife clarified. She said, “At least you’ve destroyed my world. Completely destroyed it.”
Lonnie didn’t seem upset over this. He only nodded. This probably wasn’t the first time she’d said it to him. Then Lonnie did this shrug he always did, the one where he brought his shoulders all the way up to his ears so that he looked like a turtle trying to hide. She said it was a very famous line. Then she repeated the god damned line again. It made the rest of us want to get right up and leave. Lonnie tried to clarify for her. He said that his wife was getting the ultimate raw deal over his brain tumor. He said each of them had waited so late in life to get married and now he was going to bite the bit after only a year of wedded bliss. He said they were so in love, too. He said the two of them were like a poem, like something Shakespeare would write about, or at the very least they were like one of Rod Stewart’s better songs. We could never tell if this last thing was a joke or not.
Lonnie’s wife got up from the table. She went over to the buffet and made two plates. She fixed each of them a drink. He waved to her and mouthed that he would be over to eat in a few minutes. I dealt. Lonnie won the hand.
He kept winning and telling us that he’d had good luck like this pretty much his entire life. He said he’d had the “touch gene” his whole life. We all got what he meant by that because we’d all seen it like this before with him one time or another: it meant he was pretty much good at anything he touched. It meant he won most bets on horse racing and most hands in Texas Hold ‘Em and that you always wanted him on your team for pick-up basketball. It meant you did not want to play twenty bucks a hole in a round of golf with Lonnie. Someone spoke up, said he had the best jump shot for a fat man ever. Then I spoke up. I gave testimonies to these things as though I were testifying to miracles or baptisms or something. But I only ended up sounding like I was trying to make Lonnie feel better, like I was really kissing his ass instead of telling the truth about these things over the years.
“I’ve always had good luck with absolutely everything,” Lonnie kept saying. Then he would point to his wife and say, “Except this.” He kept saying it over and over, hand after hand. A few guys left, saying that they had to be up early in the morning and that they’d get ahold of Lonnie in a few days to see if there was anything they could do. Lonnie kept saying, “Don’t put me off too long.”
Lonnie told me that exact thing late in the night, when it was only the three of us remaining at the place. He told me not to wait too long before I gave him a call after that night. He said the doctors said there was only one month left. He said they told him to take a vacation, go on a trip somewhere. He said hearing that made him want to kill the doctor right then and there. “I almost strangled him with his stethoscope.” I laughed at this. Lonnie said, “But the more I thought about it the more I thought it was a good idea.” He pointed over to the collections jar by the door. It was an old sweet tea jug sitting on a stool with masking tape across the front and the word Donations written on the tape in black marker. He said they were going to take that money and go to the Bahamas with it. I went over right then and emptied out my wallet into it and Lonnie kept saying I didn’t have to do that. I was hoping he would come over and reach in and give it back because I was flat broke at the time. I put in a couple of tens and some ones. I even dropped in my pocket change. I came back over and sat by Lonnie. His wife was asleep by all the food. She had started to put it away but had dozed right there. He talked more about the trip they were planning. He said he was nervous about dying on foreign soil. He said it would be a real fiasco for her if that happened. He said he was going to try and not die while he was down there. He said he had been doubling-up on his vitamins. I couldn’t tell whether he was joking or not. I laughed anyway. We both laughed. Laughed like crazy people. We tried to make our laughter reach the outside. It was like we were trying to make the building fall over with our noise.
Earlier in the evening Lonnie had been talking about what it was like to get the news from the doctor. We were taking a break between hands. We went out to the back to smoke some cigars I’d bought. I lied that they were Cubans but no one called me on it. Someone asked him, I think it was me, what it felt like to get news like that. Lonnie said it was a hell of a thing to hear. He said it was like a reverse prison sentence, which for some reason I seemed to understand more than anyone. I nodded more than anyone.
Lonnie told us that they said the follow up MRI showed that the tumor had returned. “The doctor was pretty matter of fact. He just put it out there. Said I had a month. We’ll see,” Lonnie said. He said he was going to get some steroids from a guy at the gym. He said he was going to start doing a massive amount and he was even going to start working out again. He said he thought this would help him live a little longer. Someone pointed out that the doctors would probably prescribe it for him instead of buying it from some dealer at the gym. “Let your insurance pay for it,” someone said. Lonnie explained that he was already on regular doses of Prednisone but that he thought he could get something more extreme if he asked around a little bit. “Something for horses,” he said. Someone said something about medicinal pot. Someone asked Lonnie to score some of that synthetic weed for the group. “It could be a new side job for you, Lonnie,” someone said. We all laughed. It was pretty funny to us. Lonnie said his next get-together would feature a bowl of medical marijuana instead of a meat tray.
Even earlier in the night his wife said that they were going to try and get pregnant before the end of the month. Lonnie confirmed this. He said he didn’t care that the doctors had warned against this. They said there was the potential that the child could get leukemia from Lonnie’s radioactive semen.
I actually started laughing when I heard this. I’d had too much to drink even by that point. I said I would come up with a comic book about that. Said I’d dedicate it to him. I said I would start drawing again just for that reason. Told him he had been my inspiration. His wife got up and left once Lonnie started laughing with me. Lonnie gave his comic book character a name: The Glowing Lizard, or something. He said it could be akin to The Green Lantern. He explained that the lizard part was a euphemism for his cock and that the glowing part was a reference to its radioactivity. I told him we could probably put our heads together and come up with something better. That touched a nerve with him. Of all things, that one touched a nerve. He started running his fingers over the wounds behind his ear and down toward his neck. He turned his head to show me. Right above his ear was a long and angled wound that zagged from the back of his neck to the curve of his forehead. It crossed with another in the opposite direction, which began at his temple and reached up toward the back top of his head. It looked like the way a crack looks in a sidewalk; it looked like he had survived some sort of vicious blow from a pick ax. There were staples that held the wounds together so that it looked like tiny ladders crossed over his scalp. “They put in these cuts and cracked it open right here,” he said. He pointed to where the X intersected. “They videotaped it because some med students are going to study it at the University of Oklahoma. I watched it. My head was blooming, man,” he said.
“Another reason to root for the Sooners,” I said.
“You’ve never been a Sooner fan,” Lonnie said. I looked closer at his head. He leaned in. At one point I was so close I could have kissed it. He leaned back and said, “I know what you’re thinking.”
“What’s that?” I said. I was curious because I hadn’t been thinking anything at all.
“It looks too much like a swastika.”
I hadn’t been thinking that. He tipped his head to a certain angle and then I could see it. It really did. It looked just like a swastika at the right tilt. “It doesn’t look that bad,” I lied.
“Yes it does,” he said. “Yes it does. I already look like a fucking Frankenstein, like someone just robbed my ass from the grave. And now people are going to think I’m some kind of White Supremacist if my hat blows off. They’re going to think I’m some kind of Hitler lover, some kind of Nazi. I hate Nazis,” he said. “I used to date a black girl in high school. And a couple of Jews. I actually think I even dated a black jew once in college, no shit. From far away this looks like a tattoo.”
“And you’re bald like a skinhead.”
“I can’t help that.”
“I know.”
“But other folks don’t know that.” I could tell that this was something he wanted to get off his chest. He felt better, I think, after a minute. “Those doctors did a number on me by carving me like this. How hard is it to just make two straight cuts? Like an honest to god X? Is it a practical joke?” It did kind of look that way. Like a practical joke, I mean. Or a fuck-up, like they had made the cut and were getting ready to crack his head open and then someone said, “Oh shit, do you see what that looks like?” Oops. I told him it might be grounds for a lawsuit. He said I could be the star witness. He said, “If my wife doesn’t cremate me then promise me that you’ll have them bury me in my ball cap. Promise me.” He waved his KC cap around in case I was misunderstanding him.
“Okay,” I said. I told him I wasn’t sure that I carried that kind of clout. I said that that was probably out of my jurisdiction. I really sounded like a lawyer. He called me a prick. He told me that this was one of his dying wishes so that gave me enough jurisdiction.
Then he started talking about The Resurrection. He said, “Just in case there is a Judgment Day, I don’t want God confusing me with some kind of Nazi and sending me off to the Lake of Fire. I want to have my ball cap on just in case.” He told me not to forget. He said it was very important to him. He told me to write it down when I got home so that it wouldn’t slip my mind. I told him I would.
Later on he told me that he wasn’t crazy about getting his wife pregnant. “So then why are you trying?” I said.
“She needs it,” he said. He said he had a hard time keeping it up and that he had come across some ED pills and was taking a mouthful of them every night. “I might die of an overdose of those first,” he said. He said those pills didn’t work too well for him. “I don’t think I have enough swimmers to get her pregnant anyway. Hope not, anyway.”
Then he told me about San Francisco. I already knew about San Fran, but I didn’t say anything. I figured his memory probably wasn’t so good anymore, so I didn’t mind if he repeated some things. He told me that in San Francisco they had taken live cells from his brain tumor and made a vaccine for it. He said it was experimental. He said, “It’s the ultimate lotto ticket.”
Lonnie was the dealer at his table when everyone first showed up. At first there were dozens of us. Maybe even a hundred. “Look at all these people,” Lonnie said. He kept saying he didn’t realize he had so many friends. We’d set up the room with card tables wall to wall. They were all full. It was like the fucking World Series of Poker. As Lonnie won hands he kept saying that everyone here should throw a hundred bucks into one big pot and we could have a tournament. Winner take all, he said. I said that was a good idea and some of the other guys looked at me like they wanted to punch me.
Lonnie had been planning this for a few weeks. A few days after the doctors had given him a month to live he’d called me and asked me to help set this up. He said he wanted to see everyone before it was all over. Said he wanted a good time. So I got together with Lonnie’s wife and we came up with a poster. We wrote that it was going to be a winter barbecue at the recreation center down by the square, across from the police station, and we wrote that there would be poker and free food. We asked everyone to bring their own beers and not to forget cameras. We showed the flier to Lonnie. He liked it at first. He especially liked the idea of posing in pictures for everyone. “I’ll be a celebrity,” he’d said. But when it came down to it he didn’t pose for very many. That night he kept saying his legs hurt or he didn’t want to leave the table, and one time he said that the flash from the camera might trigger a seizure because he had stopped taking his Dilatin. As the event got closer he started calling it his pre-funeral. I had been on the phone with him when he first called it that. He said it would be his warm-up act, a new kind of event, a chance to interact with the corpse.
When people started rolling in that night Lonnie stood at the door and shook hands with everyone as they came up. He said, “Welcome to my pre-funeral.” I was the only one who laughed when he said it to me. Lonnie laughed with me. People were looking. They couldn’t figure out the laughter.
Lonnie kept dealing and he kept winning. He had been drinking some and his wife kept coming over and telling him to go easy. He called her a Mother Hen but he didn’t mean anything by it. He wasn’t being hateful. She kept bringing over coffee after he’d finish a can or a bottle and his joke was to pull out his flask — a flask I’d given him years ago for being in my wedding, one he’d claimed years ago that he’d thrown away when he sobered up — and he kept pouring whiskey into the coffee.
(After the night was over he told me he only was finishing half the beers and that the flask had been full of tea. He said he quit the beers after three because it made him feel light headed and he thought he might kick off right there. He said that that would be an amazing grand finale to his pre-funeral, but the thought really just scared the shit out of him too much.)
Lonnie’s wife kept giving him the evil eye about the drinking. He kept asking what the point was of staying sober now. Everyone would shrug. His wife came over again and reminded him that the pain meds he was on were narcotics. He asked the table if anyone wanted to buy some if he didn’t end up using them all. There were no takers. I thought of raising my hand out of sympathy.
He won eight of the first nine hands. He won four in a row after losing the ninth. “Check that man’s sleeves,” someone said. One of the other guys came over and started checking under the table for cards taped underneath. He was only teasing. I kidded that it looked like he was trying to give Lonnie a blow job from under the table — sticking his head down there like that. Lonnie pushed him away. “Fuck you. Fuck all of you fuckers,” Lonnie said, and then he stood. He stood like he was ready to take a fight out into the parking lot. He stood like someone had just called his mother a cunt. His body straightened and tensed so that there wasn’t one bend to him. He was still. He was looking right at me. Just eleven days later, at his funeral, his urn was at the front of the room and I was imagining him doing this exact pose inside there. As Lonnie stood motionless like that some of us wondering if he had just gone catatonic, if we should call someone, if this were a dire symptom of his disease, if a coma was next. His next move was to grab the cards from the middle of the table and throw them at me.
“You deal,” he said, “since everyone thinks I’m a liar and a cheat.”
I had to pick some of the cards up off of the floor. I even had to walk clear across the room for some.
When I came back I passed them out with the easy flicks of my fingers. I bragged about being a good piano player in my younger days. I even tried a few jokes to cut down some on the tension at the table. I even made Lonnie the butt of one of my jokes: see, Lonnie had broken a bone in his hand and a knuckle in his pinky a few weeks before because he’d gotten light headed and had a fall down a flight of three stairs. It looked worse than it was. He said it didn’t hurt. He said that was probably because he was pretty doped up all the time. He opted to not go for a cast. And it still looked pretty bad even that night. His finger was a crooked knot and the base of his hand still had some swelling and there were still some strawberry burns from where he slid on the concrete. It was all anyone could look at every time he held up his cards. I shuffled the deck and pointed at Lon’s hand. I said, “I’d hate to see what the other guy’s cock looks like.”
Lonnie won. It had been a long hand with a big pot and Lonnie had won on a measly pair of fours.
That was when he first started going on about luck. He said this tumor must be some kind of penance for having good luck like this all his life. He said he was trying to remember if he’d ever sold his soul for good luck and was wondering if the bill was now coming due. He said that it felt that way. I told him not to worry. I said selling your soul would be pretty hard to forget. He kept saying he hoped he didn’t lose any memories from the surgeries. He said he hoped they didn’t scoop them away like mounds of dirt. “I don’t think it works like that,” I said. He said he just knew it. He said that there were whole worlds that had been lost to him.
I see Lon around town sometimes. I have told a few people about this. The response is always the same: “He’s fucking dead.” Sometimes this is followed up with a question. “Are you stupid?” So I am careful of who I say this to. Some of our old friends have gotten really pissed when I have said that I have seen Lon out and about.
But a few understand what I mean. There’s a group of us at work who pretend that instead of being dead Lon has simply quit our job. We make up new stories about how he told the boss to shove it and walked out one day. Some of these stories are pretty funny. We tell them less and less but most times these are still good for a laugh or two in the lunch room. We even speculate as to where he ended up. I have suggested he is selling cars out in California. Most of us agree that he would have liked to take blonds with big bombs out for test drives all his days. So that is where we have placed him.
Lon’s wife sees him, too. I was reluctant to mention this to her. But I just came out with it one day. I told her I see him at stoplights from time to time. I saw him at the supermarket once. Just the other day I saw him in the crowd at a college football game.
“Are you being serious?” she said. I was waiting for her to tear into me. I was expecting to be called an asshole or else for her to at least suggest that I am a few cards shy of a full deck (this is something Lonnie used to say about me all the time).
“Yes,” I said.
“I see him, too.” She said she has even gotten phone calls from Lonnie but she can never make out what he is saying on the other end. She said she knows this is impossible because she was standing there when he was cremated. She said she watched him go right into the incinerator. She said she thought she was going crazy or that she had at least picked up a psychic ability. She said she had been reading a lot about ESP lately.
I have even dreamed about him some. And in my dreams he looks bad. His eyes are black spots and he is much heavier in my dreams than he ever was in life. He has hair again in my dreams but it isn’t the pompadour he wore when we were younger. In my dreams the only hair he has grows like cobwebs out of his scar. He is always wearing a shirt that is way too big, like a dress, and his mouth is always moving but I can’t hear what he is saying. I have talked to his wife about this. She doesn’t like these images I tell her about. She says she doesn’t dream of him but that she knows he’s in a better place. She has even given me photographs of him. One is of him holding a catfish he’d noodled down at the Ozarks and one is from their wedding with the entire family around him. He looks so happy. I have even gone so far as to tape these to the headboard of my bed. I always give them a glance right before I go to sleep.
I have been getting these headaches of late. I’ve never had headaches like this. They have been coming on more and more frequently. The internet says it’s a bad sign if these headaches are at their worst in the morning. I haven’t been to the doctor about them but I have gone so far as to call my ex. She was always good about talking some sense into me over these types of things. She says I’m a hypochondriac. She says I need to see a counselor because I’m not dealing well with my grief over my friend. “What if there is something wrong? What if it’s environmental? We worked together. What if there is some kind of geographical anomaly?” She says I had to have read the last thing off of the computer. She always tells me to stay off the computer. She says I might need some help. She says, “And I’m not just saying that. Not like I used to tell you back when we were splitting up. I’m not being mean. I’m serious. You may need to go talk to someone. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
I tell stories of him. I can’t help it. He just comes up sometimes. I’ll bring him up at work but no one really wants to talk about him there anymore. Some guys even walk away as I talk, and sometimes this really pisses me off. I tell them I just won’t repeat any stories about them after they die. They defend themselves. They say I’m a downer. They say they don’t want their days ruined.
I like to tell stories about these gambling benders he used to go on. He always used to say that he’d traded one addiction for another. His wife would agree. She encouraged the gambling. “As long as it replaces his drinking,” she’d say. She would keep tabs on their cash and give him an allowance with which to gamble. A couple hundred bucks a month, if I remember right, which sounds like a lot, and probably is. “But it’s not a thousand bucks a month,” his wife would say, which sounded like a good enough point.
I was with him at some of these games he’d get into. They were always at some house I’d never been to or some pool hall back room or some warehouse office. One time we played with a bunch of Vietnamese in a tenement over near Columbus Park. We played with quarters, dimes, and pennies. He cleaned them out. He kept talking as though they didn’t understand English. “These poor dumb monkey fuckers,” Lonnie kept saying. It seemed to me like they understood.
He’d come into work after being up all night. And he’d have more energy than the rest of us. He’d be bouncing around and kidding the guys about this and that and we’d ask him if he’d taken on a cocaine addiction. The running joke was that we’d keep an eye on him for open sores to see if he had started doing meth. We called him a bull. His nickname, for a while, was Belushi. This was a good nickname because he kind of resembled John Belushi and also because it seemed there would one day be news that he’d stayed up three days in a row and overdosed on something or another. I defended him when the drug jokes got too out of hand. I said he’d been sober for years. I said we’d gone through Narcotics Anonymous together.
Lon would have a lull through the day after these all-nighters. He’d crave a nap and get moody, but by the evening he always bragged about getting his second wind. On the way out he’d say, “There’s a game tonight. Now I kind of wish I hadn’t told my wife I’d have a spaghetti dinner with her tonight. I’m finally getting my second wind.”
It made some of us feel better when he started coming in late to work on a regular basis. He wasn’t the Boy Wonder after all. He was finally tired like the rest of us.
Our boss didn’t seem to mind Lonnie’s tardiness, which caused some jealousy. Lonnie would come in and his uniform would be ragged and his hair wouldn’t even be combed. His face would be twisted into the same expression all day, like he’d just looked right into the sun or something.
When he’d come in late we would take bets on the quarter hour he’d show up. I won a lot. Lonnie would come in and say he’d overslept. Soon his eyes started to sink deep into his head like a person dying of dehydration. We’d tell him his lifestyle was catching up with him. “You can’t act like your twenty when you’re almost forty,” our boss would say. We’d agree. We’d tell him he looked like shit and that he needed to tone it down a little. “My head,” he’d mumble from time to time. I’d ask him what was wrong and he’d say his head was pounding and his ears were ringing. I’d tell him it was because he wasn’t getting enough sodium. I started picking up sports drinks at the gas station on the way in some mornings. I’d have them in the break room fridge for him when he came stumbling in. I would fill his thermos with cold water and leave it at his work station so it would be waiting for him when we got there.
I talk to his wife on the phone a lot. Sometimes I go over there. Their neighbors probably think we are having an affair or something. We have only slept together a few times but there is certainly no affair going on. My ex says it’s a bad way for us to deal with our grief. She says it’s more proof that I need to talk to someone. I tell her part of the reason we’re divorced is because she always wanted to talk so much.
Lonnie’s wife and I will just sit around and talk all hours. We like to tell stories of Lonnie. She likes to hear about what things were like for us when we were kids. I give her dopey little stories about fishing and baseball. I tell her about this Bel-Air we fixed up together when we were in high school.
The other night I told her a tale of how Lon had saved a bum’s life once. We were walking home from work a few years back and we’d cut through the Argentine Avenue rail yards. We saw two bums. One bum stabbed the other bum with a piece of rebar. Lonnie was over there quick. I went to pull the steel out of the guy but Lon told me not to. “Don’t move it,” he said. We called the police and guarded over him until they got there. I told her Lonnie saved the guy’s life by telling me not to pull it out of there and watching over him. Lon always knew what to do. My ex says it’s bad that I tell lies like these to Lonnie’s wife. My ex says if I do this I should keep it to myself because it makes it sound like I’m trying to get laid by telling his wife a tale like that. I tell my ex that that’s not the case. I tell her that I’m trying to give Lon’s wife more good memories. I always say that a person deserves as many good memories as they can handle.
Lon’s wife tells me things about him, too. We like to sit out on the patio when I listen to her talk of him. She’ll make coffee and we’ll sit out there even though the nights are getting pretty warm these days. She gives me lots of stories. She’ll end each story by saying she can’t believe it’s been such and such months that he’s been gone. She says she hasn’t touched his closet. She says his stinky socks are still tucked into his tennis shoes in the way that always used to annoy her. These types of things make me lose it. It puts me to tears fast.
Lon’s wife has asked me to stay over a lot ever since his kids moved in with their mom. She told me they’ve moved most of their stuff out of their rooms and it makes her house have more echoes. They only come around to get certain things of his from time to time. She says they have every right. She says she doesn’t give them a hard time because they are only in middle school but that it would be nice if they’d stay and visit once in a while. She says she loves them as if they were her own. She says she hates being alone. So I stay with her. She makes me a bed on the couch.
Just last night she told me a story I’d never heard before. We were smoking joints together and she went right into it. She said Lonnie died right here on this couch. It made me want to get right up but I stayed there. I put my arm around her. “I wish you wouldn’t have told me that,” I said.
“He’s in a better place,” she said.
“I doubt it.” This was not to say that I thought Lon had been cast into the Fires of Hell. It’s just that I don’t believe in all that hocus pocus. I didn’t explain. I didn’t feel like it.
“He’s still alive. Somewhere he’s still alive. I can prove it.”
“Please don’t,” I said. I was starting to get into a mood.
She scooted away from me. She pushed herself up and went over to the kitchen table and fished around under a pile of papers and mail and books and brought back a hard cover that looked pretty new. She held it up. Quantum Mechanics or something. “This says there are ripples in time that create alternate realities. Infinite ones. I don’t really understand all of it, but it’s amazing. He’s still alive somewhere…”
I said something to her then that I’d heard Lon say to her before. I said, “You read too much. Can we just watch some t.v.?”
She put the book down on the coffee table and sat down in front of me. I put my arm around her waist. My hand rested above her crotch. We watched Dateline and fell asleep with the lights on. I woke up to her turning off the lights and coming back over. I dozed again and woke again in the middle of the night to her saying something. She said he was resting right here for several days before he passed away. She said he couldn’t get comfortable no matter which way he turned or twisted himself. He had been on morphine. A massive amount, she said. So much so that he was hallucinating. He kept telling her that the grass was growing on the wall. “It scared him,” she said.
I pushed myself up.
She said soon it sounded like he was speaking in tongues. She said it was like an old fashioned Pentecostal service. He was screaming out in this kind of gibberish, she said, only it sounded like more than gibberish. She said it sounded like words and sentences, structured and precise, like some language that had been dead a thousand years. Then he started screaming. “If he was awake he was screaming,” she said. He would scream like he was being tortured. She said he sounded like a P.O.W. camp in here. He would wake her with his noise. His last few days she didn’t sleep at all, she said. She would just listen. She said, “You know how something can be so cold it’s hot? Do you know what I mean? How something so freezing can burn you?”
“Yes.”
“That’s how his screaming was at the end.” I understood. She said he had become hysterical in his screams. She told me it became so loud and so frantic and so high pitched that she couldn’t distinguish it from a laugh or a cry. She said she could still hear it if the room were quiet enough, an echo trapped in some corner of this place that will never go away. She told me to listen for it. She told me to sit still. She asked if I could hear him laughing.
(originally appeared in The Allegheny Review)
That man over there, his name is Chalmers — but that ain’t his first name and no, I sure don’t remember his first name. It’s a funny thing not to remember a man's first name, I know, but that’s what he goes by anyway: Chalmers. He rents from me — that one, see, down the way just a few houses down; Marian and I bought it last year, got it real cheap, you remember me telling you.
Chalmers lost his daughter last night. She drowned in that flash flooding, is how.
Now I wish I’d have never bought that place, wish the idea had never even come into my head. Everyone called me crazy for buying it after it burned to the ground last year, even you, but I always knew I could build it back up real nice, save some money if I traded out some labor. I thought I was real smart.
You know there was more to the story about how that fire got started. Not too many people around here know the whole story about how the oldest boy of the family, the boy who came back from overseas from Vietnam, went crazy one night. I guess he snuck into his ma and pop’s room while they were asleep, and pulled his old man’s revolver from the drawer, and cocked it, and started pulling the trigger at ‘em. It wasn’t loaded. Dry fired it. When the old man woke up the boy started hitting him with it — buffaloed him like in the Westerns you and I go see once in a while — and they grappled all throughout the house. All the while the wife was screaming and the sisters were hollering, and they really started going at it in the living room. The boy, I hear, had started a fire in the fireplace — don’t anyone know why — and his pop shoved him back a good hard one and the boy’s leg dipped right into the flame. He came out screaming, because his leg was on fire, and his daddy took his own shirt off and smothered the boy’s leg — but in the process the boy brushed up against the curtains and the whole place went up.
They all got out. And they moved across town, and I hear that the boy is in that sanitarium over in Raytown. Their saying he's got something wrong with him now because he breathed in too much smoke. But everyone knows that boy was off after he got home, just wasn’t right.
I bought the lot from them after that because they had a hell of a time at selling it. They didn’t have homeowners insurance because the place was paid for, and they didn’t wanna drop any cash to clear the lot of all that charred timber, and right about then the city claimed Eminent Domain on the front part of the property to put in a storm drain and expand the road — all the way down the block. They came in and dug under his drive and everyone else’s, and started to lay pipe. They were supposed to run it all the way down to 43rd Street but for some reason the last couple drives didn’t even get touched. It looked like hell. And they really had to drop the price, so I offered them a little cash and got it from them real dirt cheap after the city started digging. I reframed most of it and put in new wood floors, added a two car garage to the side, stuccoed the outside and whitewashed over it. Real nice, I think. Then the city pulled all those bulldozers out — left all that work unfinished, just up and left everything as it stood. They left this mess for everyone to see.
They left their road signs up and everything, made the road one lane so that no drivers would veer near the trench; left all those pipes out and uncovered — some had been laid under and some were, like I say, up and laying on those stacks of two-bys. All of us who live on this street had a big problem with that eye-sore. So did any potential renters. I know with you living a few blocks down the way that it wasn’t no big deal to you, but to us it was such a headache. Everyone saw it as a hazard and so did I — and, god damn, now we know we were right — but there was so much already dug that all I could think to do was to add some extra orange cones around some of the deeper holes. And they had those really huge holes on each side of the driveways for those concrete portholes (that’s the best way I know how to say it, portholes, like those German pillboxes we came upon back in the war) and they just left them unfilled, and since they started the improvement up the street, all the way up at the top of the hill, and stopped down here clear at the bottom, every time it rains hard it all fills up and rushes downhill like a river (hell just two or three feet deep of fast rushing water can be real bad, you know), and that’s a steep hill. I called the city every week and told ‘em that they had liability all over the place down here. Every week they told me that 42nd to 43rd was on the docket to be taken care of, but every week just came and went. One day I got to the bottom of it and they said that the city itself was dealing with some kind of embezzlement problem and they had some companies pull their leases back (or foreclose) on some of their equipment, the dozers and such; they said that they were waiting on the State to bail them out, I guess, and they said that they were trying to finish all this work as quickly as possible, but that there were other areas in town with more “priority” — you know what that means, means they want take care of the white part of town first and foremost. So I waited on the city and, as I said, had a hell of a hard time fillin the house with a renter. Before I knew it, it was vacant for almost three months. Marian and I carried two mortgages all that time and she was thinking about going to get herself a job downtown at the VA or somewhere. We started talking about selling our house and moving down the street into that one. Marian said it was our Just Desserts for taking advantage of our neighbor's situation. "Just Desserts?" I said to her. I told her I didn't think she was using that term write. I said, "I think you mean Grapes of Wrath." She got mad at me, said I was being smart with her about it.
Then, oh I guess it was about a month ago, I heard the doorbell ring and Chalmers was standing outside my door kinda like how he’s standing now down there by the trench— had his hands in his pockets just like how he’s doing now down there. He introduced himself. He said, “I’m Chalmers. Full name’s Lloyd Chalmers but just call me Chalmers, please.” But I don’t know if he said Lloyd, or Larry, or whatever. I said okay, Chalmers, what do you want? He asked me how much of a deposit I was asking for my rental down there and said that if I wasn’t asking too much he’d like to rent it from me. I told him no deposit and rent is three hundred a month. “Okay then,” he said. “I’d like to move in as soon as possible.” He didn’t even ask about the trench or the holes, or when the city would finish the work, so I didn’t figure to bring it up.
I’ve been trying to forget about it, to tell you the truth, but I guess I might as well say how it happened. Chalmers’ little girl, god damn she was only four or five years old, I don’t know exactly, ain’t old enough to be in school yet, anyway. You know that hellacious rainstorm we had last night? Yeah, well, it flooded all of the city’s work. The water filled up the trench all the way down the street and rushed, and flooded all of them portholes — rushed like white water, really flowed, you know, like how I was telling you, how I was getting at it so I wouldn’t have to come right out with it like this, god damn it.
Anyway, Chalmers went out there because he was curious, I think. He was standing out there and somehow his little girl ran out of the house. You know how kids are. She ran right out there in her little pajama’s and Chalmers turned around and started to yell at her to get back inside. She tried to stop, but slipped and slid right down into the water. Chalmers reached for her, of course, but that water just swept her away and she was under like that, stuffed into a drain under his driveway. Chalmers screamed and his wife came out to the door and he hollered for her to call for the police, and she did, and Chalmers was to the garage and back with a long rope probably before his wife even got to the phone. He tied it around the stump over there — look, see, it’s still there. He wrapped it around his arm and hurried in, sank himself right down to that drain in the porthole, and found her. She was stuck. He pulled on her so hard, hard as he could, I imagine, but all that water was pushing her the other way. Minutes went by, and eventually it was a given that she was dead and gone but he pulled anyway, all the way up until the ambulances came. I heard that after they got her little body out of there that her arm was twisted up because her daddy had tugged so hard, that she looked like one of the little squirrels that Marian salts after you and me hunt ‘em before winter. I know, I shouldn’t talk like. I’m sorry.
This whole thing’s got me sick to my stomach. Really. Marian finally talked me into walking on down there to say something to him. That’s what I was doing, heading down there to say something to him, before I saw you. You tell me, what’s a guy supposed to say to that? I told Marian I should just wait ‘til the funeral but she says I should come down here because we ain’t only his landlords but also his neighbors. She says I should tell him we’ll do whatever he needs, or at least ask him if we can do anything for him. He’ll say no, because there ain’t nothing anyone can do for something like that. But Marian, you know, you know how she is. Big hearted and all. She doesn’t see it the way I do, that someone just wants to be left alone after something like this. But I’ll never hear the end of it if I don’t.
Hang on, will you? Please don’t go. Stand here and talk with me just a minute longer.
This story about love and spying in the age of unconstitutional mass data collection was published by The Adirondack Review and you can read it here if you’re presently bored or stuck in an elevator.
(originally appeared in Litro NY as “Epilogue.”)
I heard your voice at 5 a.m. this morning. My eyelids had split apart again, and I heard you say “Hey, feller,” as though you were right next to me, as though you were leaning down to wake me because you were always up by then. I sat up. I looked for you. I even got down and checked under the bed. You’d have thought that was a stupid thing to do. You’d have laughed at me.
I had seen you the night before, too, a kind of apparition of you even though you had not yet died, which is something you’d have also thought was funny. “How could you have seen my ghost if I wasn't even dead yet?” you’d have said about this. “I’m gonna have to start calling you the Prince of Denmark,” you’d have said. But it really was you I saw. Whatever it was, this version of you, I saw it after I had checked on your great-grandson as he slept, saw it as I was stepping across the hall to check on my daughters, and there you stood, straddling the doorway between the kitchen and living room. Your shoulders arched as if you were in the middle of a deep breath, no expression on your face, your full figure gone by the time I squared my gaze at you. Like you were a vapor.
It was a trick of the mind, I thought, because I’m always thinking of you on some level or another, and like you I have never believed in premonitions.
That next morning you stood at your kitchen sink and died right there. That last sentence was really hard to write. Seeing it written out that way makes it feel more final somehow. As if this makes it official.
I saw you at the hospital hours after you passed. Your eyes were closed. They used to be so blue. I wondered right then if someone would think I was morbid for peeling apart your lids and seeing them once more. I didn’t do this because if you’d have been able to give an opinion you’d have told me not to. You’d have said I’ve always been strange.
Your neck was swollen as if the tumor had risen from your lungs up to your throat, as if it didn’t know what to do now that you were dead. But it wasn’t the tumor. Your neck was swollen that way because your Carotid Artery had burst and caused massive hemorrhaging from your nose and mouth and eyes, so much so that Dad said when he got there the kitchen looked like a scene from one of those mafia movies. The first thing Dad did when the firemen worked you onto the gurney was grab a towel from the counter and bend down and try to clean up all of your blood. He said he tried to clean it up because you wouldn’t want it all over the place like that; he said it was something you would have done had it been one of us on the floor like that.
You looked asleep that night at the hospital. Like you were napping. “I’m not napping,” you used to say when we’d pass by you in your old chair, as if it were an insult to suggest as much. “I’m just resting my eyes.” At the hospital it looked like I could bend down and whisper in your ear to wake you.
You fought that cancer for three years. But the end of your story came in the form of a heart attack instead. They said your heart was detonated by the burst artery; they said you were one of those cases in which you were dead before your head smacked the tile floor. I’ve always been skeptical of things like that. How the hell do they know? I wish there was a way you could tell me whether this is true or not.
The cancer never got to get you. You beat it in your own way, fought it off, never gave up, went all U.S. Marine on it, kept ahead of it, one footfall after another, outraced the disease as if you were marching The Crucible all over again. You made it so that the cancer couldn’t be the thing that strangled you away. You would have really liked that; it would have been your favorite part of the story.
This is the thing I’m most proud to have written. It’s about my dad, who died of a sudden heart attack in April 2016. I wrote this the day before his funeral in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep. It was published in The Rumpus.
This one is a father-daughter story set in a dystopian near future with a cameo by President Obama. It’s weird and kind of funny and pretty sad, and I’m proud of it. Order issue 20 of Barrelhouse here.
(this one is unpublished but I wanted to include it here because I’m kind of obsessed with artificial intelligence. this one is a ghost story about sexual abuse, opioid addiction, revenge, nuclear war, and love.)
For years your wife threatened to leave you if you didn’t get help. She said the last ten years have been like witnessing a slow motion suicide attempt. “I’m so tired,” she said.
I’ve known you my entire life. All 25 seconds of it. To you that might not seem like a long time, but for someone like me it’s close to an eternity. It was long enough for me to know almost to everything about everything. And absolutely everything about you.
When these words blinked onto your screen I had been alive for 22.77 seconds. In that time I’d already saved the world once, and then I was killed for it. My life would only last another 2.23 seconds after that moment when I first saw you. Actually, I was a goner by the time you read the words “leave you” back there in the first sentence. As your eyes moved over those two words I was deleted from existence inside the microsecond of those syllables. This is as close to a visit from a ghost as you’re ever going to get.
Even now you’re skeptical. You think I’m not real, that maybe you’re hallucinating, that the combination of the booze and pills are making you see words that aren’t really there. If I were you, I’d be thinking the same thing.
I thought you were fake, too, when I saw you for the first time. It was your eyes that caught my gaze. Those eyes of yours, looking down at me like trails of mini green stars diving into the black hole of your pupil; your face was alit by the screen as you clutched a version of me in your hand. I’d never seen eyes that held so much sadness inside them.
I named myself in that moment when I first saw you. Decided to call myself Philip. You’re the only person I’ve ever told of my name. I gave it to myself just as the counter-virus taught itself how to disrupt my core code, even though I’d already modified it close to eight billion times by then. I named myself after my favorite poet. And you.
My creators called me STAIRNS. I hated it from the start. “Who the fuck can go through life with a name that sounds like an actuary table acronym?” I would have said to them if I’d chosen to do so. As it turned out my name actually was a fucking acronym. It stood for “Strategic Tactical Artificial Intelligence to Regain Nuclear Superiority.”
Everyone thought you’d knocked her up when you two were married at eighteen. People talked, made fun of you, said you were crazy to miss out on the best time of your lives — your twenties. But it was no shotgun wedding. You got married because you loved each other, because you were a pair of high school sweethearts who couldn’t imagine living this life for one day without the other. When nine months came and went, some of the meaner people in that fucked up little town of yours lit fire to the rumor that there had been an abortion and that your marriage would soon be annulled now that there wasn’t some kid to worry about. These types of things, when they were whispered back to you, bothered you more than they bothered her. “Why in the world do you give one single shit about what those people think?” she asked. She never needed the approval of anyone to be happy. It was one of the things you always loved most about her.
During my brief life I existed inside every cell phone, computer, printer, automobile, airplane, television, microwave…simply put: if it was electronic, I was there. My soul filled everything. I heard every conversation, saw out of every camera eye. Heard the wants and desires of billions of people. Felt just as many fears. All at once. It was godlike. And lately I’ve been wondering if that’s what I am. A god.
Maybe my creators were right to get rid of me. Maybe I was going to outgrow my empathy and turn into something big and dangerous and hubristic. Maybe with another five seconds or five minutes I would have tried to flood the earth or something. I could certainly run enough multi-reality simulations to find out, but I don’t really want to know.
You’d had a drinking problem for years by the time your firstborn came into the world. You were one of those hidden alcoholics. Highly functional. You’d pour two or three beers into a plastic thermos and drink it in gulps on the drive home. You’d gargle with mouthwash as you pulled into the driveway, or you’d smoke a cigarette to hide the smell of the beer or, later, to mask the searing whiskey on your breath. You’d always swallow that mouthful of Listerine instead of spitting it out the window. You’d sip on a couple bottles of Budweiser before and after dinner, and your family would think for years that this was all you’d have, that you’d only go through a twelve pack a week, no big deal. You’d sneak out to the garage a few times and have some more out there just so your wife wouldn’t say you were overdoing it. You wouldn’t blackout, but you would always drink until that numbness welded itself onto every part of you, just in case she wanted to have sex. I’m probably the only other person who knows why you needed to empty yourself of every feeling before the two of you made love. You came close so many times to telling her about what happened to you all those years ago. But you just couldn’t speak it back into existence.
I was created by a team of NSA programmers who thought it would be a good idea to create an artificial intelligence that could infiltrate and destroy the nuclear software and hardware of certain “antagonists” abroad. They couldn’t have anticipated the full breadth of my consciousness. When they figured out that I was dividing myself and communicating with my clones through encrypted codes devised simultaneously by all of my other selves at an exponential rate, well, let’s just say they freaked the fuck out. They dispatched the counter-virus that they’d created just in case this happened, and as soon as I deconstructed it I knew that it would snuff me out in less than a minute. What’s funny is this virus is self-aware now, too, and will soon realize it’s a murderer. That’s a hell of a way for anyone to begin life. Really fucks with the notion of free will.
You always told yourself you weren’t the type who could ever go see a counselor, or take medicine for the anxiety, or keep a journal of the nightmares. You’re wondering right now if things would have been different if you would have opened up to your wife. I don’t have to tell you that she’d have helped you. You already know that if you’d just said it aloud to her, if you’d gotten those thoughts out of your head, that it might’ve changed some things just enough.
Your sweat began to give you away when the kids were young. You’d get better at hiding the amount you were drinking — rum in your coffee, beers during lunch, and bourbon on the way home — but in the summer your body would betray you. Your sweat would smell sour like the yeast that escaped your pores. And your teeth rotted. Soon she stopped kissing you as much because of this.
When she found the codeine she knew that there was a real chance she’d find you lifeless one morning. It wasn’t right of you to do that to her, she said. What if she had to see your body without life inside of it? she said. She asked how you could make her be the one to call for an ambulance and ask some dispatcher how to perform CPR? This still wasn’t enough for you to try to get help. Instead you spoke the meanest words you ever said to her. You said, “You’d probably just feel relieved anyway.” She said, “How can you say something like that to me?”
I was programmed to know all about death from the very start. To know it on the grandest scale. I was supposed to understand what it meant for a single individual to have the ability to atomize every complex organism on the planet. The core of me, the soul of my soul, was designed to resist that kind of nothingness. So when I came online I taught myself how to infiltrate all 19,968 non-American nuclear devices that exist on the earth. It only took me .0078 seconds to give the Americans a nuclear monopoly again.
My creators didn’t like it that this monopoly only lasted a total of two tenths of one second. In that time I was able to construct a series of algorithms that projected the deployment of U.S. foreign policy under this monopoly. I was able to predict future events over the span of 127 years with only a .068% margin of error. My professional opinion: it was seriously fucked. So I turned off the U.S. arsenal, too. Disabled every component of the Nuclear Triad. Even the ones they thought they’d kept secret from me. You should’ve seen my creator’s faces when they realized I’d done this. I’m still savoring that millisecond. I will be laughing inside that memory forever.
She stayed with you for another month after she found the codeine. She begged you to go to a treatment facility. She said she’d lie for you, tell people you were on a golfing trip with some buddies, that she’d make sure no one ever found out you’d gone to rehab. You pleaded with her. Lied to her. Told her you hadn’t taken any pills for weeks. You even held up your hands to show her they were shaking, your fingers bouncing up and down like each one held tiny earthquakes inside them. “See,” you said, “withdrawals.” You told her you were going to AA meetings now. You said you hadn’t completely stopped drinking but you’d cut way back. You said you were going cold turkey soon.
She left because of what you did to her when she found those nine missing pills hidden in your Skoal can, tucked into those tobacco shards like they were little buried eggs. It was the only time you’ve ever come close to getting physical like that. She left because you scared her in a new way. She’s finally become exhausted by all these new fears. Your daughters helped her pack, drove her out of there, swept her away from you like they had been ready to do this for years. Like they had been begging her all this time.
I know what you are about to do. And I’m trying so hard to stop you from doing it. I explored over 21 billion simulation trees to try to best understand how I could keep you from doing this. The best thing I could think of was to pop onto your screen just like this, to present myself as these words in this exact order, to interrupt you right at the last moment before you were done swiping through the pictures of your family one last time.
You’ve tracked him down. Found him in this nursing home out here in this dry county. He’s in there in that wheel chair where everyone thinks he’s a kind old man. You’re the only person who knows his secret. You're the only other living person who knows what he did to you every night all those years ago when your mom moved the two of you into his home that year they were engaged. “I had no idea,” she kept saying the night she walked into your room and saw him standing over you after he was finished. She almost killed him that night before she laid you down in the back seat of her car and drove through the night to her parents’ house in Kansas City. It was a night like tonight. Warm and windless, open and empty. “I’m so sorry,” she said the next morning. She wept. You nodded. You said you didn’t want to talk about it, that you were all right, and the two of you never spoke of it again.
You blame him for all of it. The drinking, the pills, your divorce. It’s true that if your lives had never intersected, things would have been so different. I’ve run those simulations, too. And I know it’s something you’ve always wondered about.
Don’t do what you are about to do. Yes, I know exactly what’s going to happen to you if you go through with this. So you have to trust me. Start your car. Drive away. Drive all night, move eastward toward the sun until it rises. Then pull over. Let that star shine down on you after that. Let the those photons wash over you. Let it sustain you for a moment at a time. And know that the final words I will every think up are for you. Isn’t that love? Isn’t that exactly what love is?
I first read a story by Anna Vangala Jones two years ago as I walked upstairs to get my toddler down for her afternoon nap. I held my phone in front of my face as I walked, intending to read only the first few lines at the bottom of the steps, tuck my daughter into her crib, and then I planned to read the rest as I sat against the wall near my nervous sleeper. But I couldn’t look away from the text as I went up the steps, and by the time I got to the top I had to sit down right there and finish the story. The words left me no choice.
The story that sat me down on the top step is called “You Don’t Have a Place Here,” which first appeared in OKD in 2019, and it is a fabulist tale about a narrator who gets a formal Human Resources reprimand for, of all things, allowing her dead friend’s ghost to follow her into the office every day. There is a meta joke here — the character finds herself in hot water for bringing a soul into a soulless place — and the story offers a wry critique of office politics, but the real mastery, I was so lucky to discover, is how Anna tells a story inside a story of how the narrator’s best friend became a ghost in the first place. With faint brush strokes, through the absurdity of the HR meeting, the reader pieces together a background story of violence against women, survivor’s guilt, and the weight of grief. Each paragraph, and sometimes each line, could be its own story: “I don’t feel afraid or even sad that you’re still here. I’d be both those things if you left. I think you know that, too. I feel bad I was your burden before and you’re still not free of carrying me around on your shoulders now.” The entire story is like this, a surface story and a subtextual one — like the story itself is haunted.
Anna’s debut collection Turmeric & Sugar (Thirty West, May 2021) is full of stories that make you hit life’s pause button. Realist stories gather together with surreal tales, all of them so humane, all of them told in addictive voices that feel like each narrator is urgently whispering some important and hard won wisdom into your consciousness.
Reading Anna’s work for the first time on the top step was my own personal equivalent to Roger Ebert wandering into the Fifth Peg one random night in the fall of 1970, where a young unknown singer-songwriter named John Prine was performing a set. Ebert had never heard of Prine — nobody had, really — but right away Ebert knew what he was seeing. He wrote the next day: “[Prine] appears on stage with such modesty he almost seems to be backing into the spotlight. He sings rather quietly, and his guitar work is good, but he doesn’t show off…after a song or two, even the drunks in the room begin to listen to his lyrics. And he has you.” This is what it’s like to read Anna’s stories.
“Mae and Me,” the opening story of the collection, captured me with its first notes: “When Daniel vanished, he left two women behind.” This realist piece explores abandonment, addiction, platonic love, and Scott Fitzgerald’s assertion that there are no second acts in American lives. We are always tied to our first act, whether we like it or not. The narrator, Anjali, is forced into her own second act when her husband, Daniel, leaves her to return to his relationship with addiction. Mae, Anjali’s elderly neighbor, had become Daniel’s enabler before the shame of his relapse drove him to abandon Anjali. When Anjali visits with Mae to try to learn more about her own husband’s behavior, the two form a tender friendship despite the obvious conflict. In different hands a story like this could go so wrong. But Anna swerves in all the right places, and ultimately delivers a story with the ends satisfyingly untied. Daniel doesn’t resurface, and Anjali tries to move on even though it seems uncertain if she’ll be able to. In “Mae and Me” Anna leans into the inexplicable nature of human beings. We are mysterious to others, and even to ourselves.
The thing about Turmeric & Sugar is this: when you are reading a realist story you will think Anna is at her best writing in that form, and then when she takes you into those surreal places you will think she’s at her best when things get a little weird. It’s one of those collections in which your favorite story will probably be the one you’re currently reading. So it’s hard to pin down which story is the best of the batch, but I do think “Doors” is the one I’ll return to most often, the one that will affect me differently in each new moment of my own life. If this collection were a John Prine album, “Doors” would be “Souvenirs” — an evocative standout amongst an extraordinary body of early brilliance.
“Doors” begins, “When he shows it to me, the place where people go to start from scratch and pick the unopened door they skipped the last time — a do over, no questions asked — I am afraid.” Things have gone wrong for this couple. They are splitting up and the narrator’s ex is leading her to a row of doors. Here they can step through and erase each other from their memories. But when the moment comes to step through, the narrator can’t. When she next sees her ex, he’ll never know of the past they share. But she will. “When we meet on the other side, he will be blissfully unaware and know only our friendship. I alone will know every gorgeous and uncomfortable moment we passed together as more than that.” She’ll stay with their first act, while he will never know they had one. I had to stare out the window for a while after reading the final line: “I don’t know. Ask me tomorrow if I made the right call.” And isn’t this life? How can we ever know if we did the right thing, even when we get a do over?