Shadows & Tall Trees (2 page)

The sad fact of writing is that nothing will match your initial vision. Our character Mary may seem perfection itself. But try this experiment—I certainly have—leave her alone in the basement for a few days, a week, a month, and then return. Formerly an angel, she will now be dirty, rank as onions, a clawing creature of the pit. With revision, she may once again approach that original ideal. Below, I suggest several strategies for revision.

The Kingectomy:
Even Stephen King, one of the most prolific writers of our age, in his book
On Writing
, describes how he excises 10% of a story to achieve final form. Perhaps your character could use a
diet
, her excess ten percent whittled away symmetrically. But don’t feel so constrained. How about amputating a leg just below the knee? A one-legged runner has narrative possibilities.

The Straubing:
In Peter Straub’s short story, “Blue Rose,” there is a description of how the narrator inserts a thick needle into the arm of his hypnotized brother. This scene, running for pages, captures the obsession with which an author focuses on a particular scene in need of revision. The author might, for example, flay a finger tip, then deciding this is not sufficient, retract the skin to the second knuckle. Blood dribbles. Something is still not right. The author extracts strands of muscle with a pen point, exposing pink nubs of bone. The author licks and tastes the tainted calcium, then gnaws at it to reveal the divine white bone of memory.

The Flauberation:
Gustave Flaubert is quoted as saying, “I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.” Do you remember Mary’s silvery blue eyes? She has only one now, having lost the other in a misguided attempt for freedom. But didn’t she function better with binocular vision? Editing is sometimes harder than even Flaubert could imagine.

Author: I’m doing this for your own good.

Character: (no answer)

First coined by Samuel Coleridge, this is one of the most cumbersome phrases to make its way into common parlance. Yet . . . 

I thought I had my character trussed up tighter than a Thanksgiving turkey. I did mention my facility with knots, did I not? I used a good granny knot—not the most elegant choice, but a damn sight better than a square knot.

A knot?

Wasn’t it a bicycle chain (“hard and serpentine”)? A fumbling inconsistency. So easy to overlook. But, just like that, Mary is

going

going

gone.

Really and truly gone. Not a stray hair remaining. Not a whiff of her sweet salty skin. Only this: that strange felt hat with its stretchy band. A felt bird. Yes, it’s true. My character has gone and given me the bird.

In spite of what your English teacher may have told you, there are no hidden meanings in stories. That doesn’t mean items in a story can’t take on a significance greater than themselves: an idiosyncratic felt hat, for instance.

How often is an author abandoned by their main character? Far too often, I’m afraid. But on those occasions of true and honest success, when every rope is knotted, every door locked, and your character left no recourse for escape, on those occasions one can spin tresses into gold, guts into glory. Consider Ursula K. Le Guin’s finest story, the Hugo-award winning “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Here we have the earnest depiction of a utopia made real in its last pages by the description of the abused child held captive in the dark basement of the city. It is on the frail shoulders of that child that the whole edifice stands. Yet, for all Le Guin’s willingness to exhume that child as a symbol of the horrors that create wonder, I have a feeling that should Le Guin ever read my own small contribution to the literary arts, should she ever meet me in person, she would abhor me. Abhor is not too strong a word for it.

Frank O’Connor titled his influential book on the writing of the short story,
The Lonely Voice
. We are all lonely voices. Remember this. I won’t say it again, but it almost owes repeating. Abandoned by our characters, despised by those we love, the author is the lonely ghost haunting the story, refusing to relinquish it.

I’m all out of advice. All out of jokes, too. My main character is gone, lost due to a momentary lapse, a failure in editing, a rupture in your “willing suspension of disbelief.” What is left?

Why you, my dear friend, my diligent reader. You who have followed this narrative since its inception, who wonder of wonders are still with me. It was only with your willing participation that I was able to create a character.
Our
character. I wrote the words, but you gave Mary life. You explored her, edited her. You lived with her, breathed the perfume of her flesh, and, dare I say, loved her. This narrative would not exist without you.

What is left? (I repeat myself.)

You and I. Alone, together.

Pablo Neruda, commenting on his great friend Federico Lorca, told of how Lorca would pick up prospective lovers with the line, “Let us be alone, together.”

In short stories, any number of texts will warn you against the use of the second person in a narrative. Use of the second person causes a rupture in the uninterrupted dream that is, according to these texts, the ultimate goal for any true short story writer.

However, you and I are not in a short story. We stand outside the story, living our own circumspect lives—different jobs in different cities, maybe different countries, continents—knowing nothing of each other until we meet within the confines of these pages. How did this piece come into your hands? I have no idea, yet here we enter into a collusion. Ours is the faith of long-time friends. Together, we build a grand artifice. Together, we clothe our dreams in flesh. New worlds blossom in the cold, dark reaches of space. Glass cities erupt from the desert sands. A populace dances, loves, fights, and screams in the glittering streets. Together, we create and live the story of their lives.

Who is the writer and who is the reader? Neither? Both? We are all creators. We are all writers. We are alone, you and I, together.

I have something for you.

A thank-you gift for having been my accomplice in this enterprise.

It’s nothing much, but I want you to have it. A hat. Again, nothing much, but once upon a time it was quite fine: created by a true mad hatter. The hat is of felt. Bird-shaped. Feel how soft it is. Perhaps not so much any more. It was quite fine once but—confession time—the cats got at it. To be frank, it still smells of cat piss on occasion. Only when wet, though. Otherwise it can be quite dandyish. So I’ve been told. Some might call it a crown.

I trust you’ll wear it.

I’m afraid I’ve nothing more to offer.

H
e’d missed Christmas and her last two birthdays. His mother looked the same, a husk that never seemed to age. They sat at a short oval table, her walker standing sentry on its hollow aluminum legs. Adam laid four white pages beside her. A nurse passed by the open door, humming something he almost recognized. He repeated “Mom” in a soft cadence until her face lifted and found him.

“I remember Dad telling me once,” he said, “not long before his heart attack, that you were born in Norway. He said Amanda wasn’t your birth name, but you never told him what it was.”

She focused in on him. He had a hard time looking at her in these rare moments because she never blinked. Her eyes would dry out as she stared.

“Is that right, Mom?” He reached over and picked up the cold bones of her hand and held them. “What was your name?”

She was still. Her pupils dilated and the hazel darkened. Her thin greyed hair reached past the rails of her collarbones. He tried to remember the woman she once was, but a distance had been in place from his earliest memories. She’d spent far more time staring out her bedroom window than with her only child. He was still a boy the last time he’d gotten anything more than her sad parting sentiment. But now her mouth opened wide as though tasting the air and she said, “Some say it is Dronning.” He was amazed as ever at the crisp enunciation in her voice, despite the loss of all her teeth more than twenty years earlier.

“Dronning.” Adam watched their twined hands and took a shaky breath. “I think you were mentioned in a story a girl I know wrote. Does the name Meli Gramia ring a bell?”

He thought she smiled then but she would say nothing else. Her face was directed back into her other world now. Every visit he asked her pointlessly where she’d gone when he was a boy, but today he didn’t. Instead he waited in her silence a while longer before hugging her goodbye.

“You will be my son,” he heard as he turned to close the door behind him. But she always said that.

You lay in the dark and heard the wet parting of my mouth. Warmth dripped onto your face from above the bed, where I clung in a corner of the room.

You closed your eyes against the scuttle of fingernails across the ceiling. When I was gone the room hung in quiet. You threw the sheets away from yourself and went to the window and twisted the blinds open. Below, figures on all fours skulked behind parked cars. Another watched you among the low bones of dogwood trees. The line of them stretching to the right, their petals gone.

In the fog of your breath you wrote MOTHER on the glass. You wrote DRONNING, and I had never filled your heart more.

He’d never thought Meli was the girl’s name, even when she murmured it against his neck the night they’d met at a reading in September. She was the earthy type he’d pick out of a room first, twenty-ish, hovering at the fringe of the bookstore. Milk skin with grease spot freckles, high rounded cheekbones and dense black hair. A girl who wore scarves in late summer, more like a Jennifer or a Karen, something that buried the truth of her under a soft screen.

Afterward she’d quoted one of Adam’s old stories and complimented the rhythm of his sentences. They both agreed he was better than the guy they’d listened to. Her praise and the way her body moved and he was half in love. In bed she asked a lot of questions about his childhood and he gave answers that even he thought were foggy. She was insatiable and let him do everything but stick his tongue in her mouth.

He’d woken alone in the early morning and found the sheets speckled with flowers of her blood.

Though Meli had softly demurred when he asked about her own work, she left a manuscript beside his laptop. A surreal story about a woman who believes she has become a great queen and explains her new status to her son. It was titled “Amanda,” the same as his mother and his stalled novel. From the first sentence the hours fell away and a vague despair built up around him.

Her prose read like it burned in her blood and spattered out of her. But she also wrote as if she had the time to pick up every seashell on some prehistoric beach, examine the sound inside each one until she found that inimitable tone.

He spent the day curled up staring at those twenty-nine pages, flipping back and forth to find so many passages beating with raw life. He felt sick with envy of a gift that was lifetimes beyond his own.

A few nights ago they’d run into each other—or she’d found him—at a release party for a poetry chapbook. Incestuous little circles of writers. They steeped themselves in drink and weed. Same as before, she wouldn’t talk about her work, and sometime in the night she left him. He woke tangled in sheets sprinkled with more bloodstains and heavy with her scent. A new manuscript lay on the floor beside the bed. It was titled “Dronning,” with the byline “from a novel by Adam Storen.”

His head throbbed at the seams. He wadded the bedding up into the trash chute. Dripped whiskey in his coffee and crawled back onto the stripped mattress with the story.

It was more scene than plot, twelve hundred words that cut off with a face in the window of a mountain cabin. The strange and singing prose was still there but had diminished over some dark threshold. The words felt ill, somehow, concerned as they were with some implied creature on the periphery of the page.

Yet something in the writing opened its jaws and he could almost hear them creak as he placed his head inside.

When he got back from questioning his mother, he booted his laptop and opened the bloated file of his novel. It sagged there half-written in its window, the cursor blinking at him.
Amanda.
She was so murky to him that he couldn’t even fictionalize her. His own words rode together as neat and hemmed as cars in traffic. Tuneless things. Dry as his mother’s eyes. He’d been plugging square blocks into the round holes in his childhood.

Eleven months out of work for the Great American Novel. He’d cashed in the paltry 401k and it would be fumes by spring. Edging into his thirties and this was what he’d slopped his soul into. He skimmed the first chapter but couldn’t make it through. He started drinking instead.

Meli’s stories sat on the desk. He lifted them and let the pages flutter. He sat and wished he could have her again, bed sheets be damned. Stronger still was a sort of hatred for her and the resonance of her words. He opened the trash bin icon at the bottom of the screen. Dragged the novel into it and clicked EMPTY and a thousand hours were gone.

The nights grew into things rimmed with glare, like days with their bulbs just clicked off and afterimages burned into his eyes. He stood at his fourth floor window and watched the parked cars below. Thought he saw a face peering from the black beneath his old VW Rabbit. The bare dogwoods shivered along the street. A sense of standing within the girl’s story draped over him. He heard a sound outside his door and pressed an ear to the wood, his glass clinking ice in a hand he couldn’t still.

In the sleepless dark he stared at the ceiling above his bed. The threads of a memory brushed him, a boy looking up and waiting for a shape to fill the corner, until the room turned from black to grey.

According to Google,
dronning
was Norwegian for “queen.” The word, the thought of it, gave him a vague panic.

He spent hours searching for Meli Gramia online. He trawled bars and readings. Chased her like a legend but she seemed less than a ghost. In the end he thought to use the words in “Dronning” to find her. Certain descriptions were a little too detailed, as though she’d spelled things out for him. Drawn him a map in prose.

So he left the city for the rust of nature. It struck him as a thing many lost and grasping writers did. He brought a fresh journal in the event she was leading him on a wild goose chase. He’d find a place to stay and take a break instead. Now that the novel was gone he meant to recapture the art of the short, which had made what faint name he’d enjoyed back in the days when people whispered about his potential.

Following the route in Meli’s story trimmed a good chunk off the drive and soon he passed through the creases between mountains. The Rabbit wasn’t happy as the land rose up but it made the trip without shuddering apart. He parked in the V of two low hills. The cabin was situated there in the way she’d written, “curled in the elbow of a dead giant.” Beyond it the Appalachians began their long course north. He stood in the dooryard and the shallow air, holding the better part of his recent life in a cardboard box. The place was a comforting trope with its uneven, knotted planks and thin chimney jutting from the end of the roof like a straw in a cup. It was half porch. It was perfect.

He stepped through the unlocked door and breathed the dust. Put the box down on the scarred table next to the wood stove. An ancient beehive the length of his forearm hung from the ceiling. Someone had tied a yellow ribbon just above the top of it. On the narrow bed was a sheaf of papers with “Onanon” crouching in the center of the top page. Beneath it in a leaning scrawl were the words “read & remember.” He didn’t move for some time. He stared at the pages and listened to a sort of quiet he’d never heard. Through the three windows dusk dropped quick and finally he went to the box and opened one of the bottles of whiskey he’d let himself bring.