It’s nights like this one, when the noise starts its rumbling in the back of my brain, that I know I will not sleep.

It begins like a pulse. A steady thrumming, gaining momentum, until the hum is roiling like the water in a jug just coming to a boil.

For a moment I think the noise is new. But then I remember the noise is inescapable. It’s always there. It’s just a matter of degree.

And sighing and simply lying still in my bed is not enough to silence it.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Jonathan Franzen.

It was because of him that I met Mira Bartók, whose book The Memory Palace I mentioned in an essay about Franzen’s misguided attack on eBooks. In one of those twists of meta-synchronicity that makes me suspect I’m in an episode of Star Trek, Bartók read my essay, “tweeted” it, and I—having only joined Twitter a couple weeks earlier—saw it.

Years ago, when she was around my current age, my mother went to Mexico and was robbed.  She had just been granted American citizenship, so it was very important that she was able to find her papers.  The story has been passed down to me since puberty, as a word of caution for a woman entering the world: freedom is a risk.

We sit at my grandparents’ long dining room table, the worn green tablecloth unfurled, revealing years of red wine stains. My mother places a cassette recorder in the middle, trying to get it exactly center between the roast beef and the string beans, presses ‘play’ and ‘record’ at the same time. Nobody pays it much mind as the plates are passed, the gravy ladled over lumpy mashed potatoes, the pearl onions in cream sauce we all fight over. Father, we thank thee for this food. Bless it to our use.

The scene is cut from of the movie of our lives, a table full of cameos. There is my great-grandmother, her hair bobbed and dyed its purplish-blue. There is Uncle Bobby next to Aunt Kerri, who cuts his meat into bite-sized pieces. There are my grandparents at the head of the table, my grandfather inspecting a bottle of Cabernet. Beside him is my father, busting Bobby’s balls. “Does she tuck you in at night, too, asshole?”

I am two and my mother asks me if I want to sing. We pick “Frosty the Snowman,” but I can’t remember all the words, so we switch to “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” Uncle Chuck makes me stop when I start again unprovoked a few minutes later. “No singing at the table,” he says.

Dinner conversation is entirely normal, everyone expecting perfectly well to be exactly where they are. On the tape, my mother is preoccupied with how much I’m eating and when I’ve eaten enough to be excused. My father and grandfather talk about wine.

“Did you know they’re making more wine in California than anywhere in the world?” my grandfather says. He is trying to impress my father. He thinks my father has connections to the mob, or at least knows people with connections to the mob. He assumes that men with connections to the mob know about wine. My father responds politely, says, “Oh yeah? No kidding, Doc.” He knows about wine, but pretends my grandfather knows more. It is a move of deference, an acknowledgment of the thin ice beneath my father’s presence at the table. His voice treads lightly.

At two, I have recently learned a valuable skill. I shove a final spoonful of peas into my mouth, and my mother releases me from the table so that I can show everyone my amazing discovery. “Jump?” I say to my family.

“Jump, Aunt Kerri?”

I circle the chairs. My grandfather, whose sternness occasionally breaks with his affinity for me, says, “Her mind is always at work.”

“Her mouth is always at work,” my great-grandmother says.

“Jump, Uncle Chuck?”

“Jump, Daddy?”

My father laughs, but not at me. “Yeah, right, let me just break my hip,” he says to the rest of the adults. He knows they are watching him. He was away for a while, and now my mother has let him come back.

When I listen to this tape with my mother and my husband two and a half decades later, each of us clutching a glass of wine, I recognize everyone but that tiny voice, my voice. I don’t know how I discovered jumping, or how I really felt about peas, but I’ve heard my grandfather talk about wine my entire life, and I know the sound of that silver on that Corelle ware, that collective, civil laughter periodically breaking up the silence of our eating. I know my uncle’s chiding and my mother’s assessing of my plate. But like my own, my father’s voice startles me, like somebody spliced the tape with a recording from someone else’s house.

“Jump, Grammy?”

My grandmother takes the bait, as she always does. We move into the background and begin our game. “Ready? One, two, three. Jump!” she says.

There are a few indications of the year. The California wine, my father and Uncle Bobby discussing Hill Street Blues. Someone asks my mother what she got for Christmas and I hear her fork clatter onto her plate.

“I got a microwave!” she says, and I picture her arms shooting into the air, her face scrunched with happiness. It’s a gift from my father, something to help around the house, and it’s expensive for 1984, my father writing out his love in a check. I do not mean this cynically. This is how he makes us happy. It is the only way he knows.

I thank my grandmother for jumping with me by making her an imaginary cup of coffee on my imaginary stove. The women prepare Jesus’ birthday cake—a large sheet of ice cream and cookie layers from Pat Mitchell’s. They light the candles and we sing “Happy Birthday” to Jesus. As the only grandchild, I get to blow out the candles.

While we eat, my father tells a story about Christmas Eve. “So, we’re coming back from church last night,” he says. “Kathy and I are horsing around up in front, teasing, you know. Well, Amy’s in the back, and I don’t know, maybe she’s tired. Anyway, she thinks we’re fighting and gets all upset. We’re up there laughing, and she’s back there going, ‘Mommy, it’s okay, Mommy, don’t cry.’”

Everyone laughs. My mother laughs.

Nobody is rude enough to point out the obvious—that I have barely seen my parents together and can’t recognize the subtle difference between my mother laughing and crying. That this is my first and only Christmas with my father in the house, and I have been told it’s only a trial.

I finish my first piece of Jesus’ cake and ask for a second. “More?” I say. There is a pause while my plate is inspected. “Christ, Amy,” my father says, “are you even chewing?” Everyone laughs again.

The tape is an hour and a half long, and this is as much as my father speaks to me, using me for a little levity around his in-laws, a little lightness to dispel whatever skepticism lingers around the table. Why does my mother record this Christmas and no others? Does she know my father will be gone again before the next? Does she know Aunt Kerri is about to discover that Uncle Bobby fools around? Does she know Alzheimer’s is wending its way down the pathways of my great-grandmother’s brain? What prompts my mother to borrow her friend’s cassette recorder and bring it to Christmas dinner this year?

“I don’t know,” my mother says when we listen to the tape. “I guess I just thought it would be neat to have someday.”

I listen to myself eating a second piece of cake, my mother complaining about the chocolate ice cream dripping down my chin and into the neck of my knitted pink sweater. No matter. I grip my spoon in a fist and shovel. It’s like the cake won’t be there if I look away for even a second.

“Jesus, Amy,” my father says. “What, are you going to jail tomorrow?”

The other day I attempted to write an essay about the human brain and its extraordinary knack for pattern recognition. Brains are capable of identifying complex and subtle relationships between external stimuli that would confuse even the world’s most powerful computer. Our brains are also capable of accessing ancient memories almost instantly, though not with anything like the precision of a computer and its digitally-stored data.

However, I soon gave up on the idea of an entire post about the marvels of the human brain because I realized I was too lazy to research the subject again. I’m loathe to make generalized statements where actual facts are needed, and though I’ve read quite a lot about the workings of the human brain, I would have to go back and do the same research again because of this problem of how our minds don’t make bit-perfect recordings of incoming stimuli.

Even so, I remain fascinated by the subject. For instance, Facebook’s “People You May Know” feature selects for me individuals from two primary audiences: Wichita Falls High School acquaintances and people associated with The Nervous Breakdown. Usually I don’t actually know these suggested folks, because I only lived in Wichita Falls for a couple of years and because the TNB universe extends well beyond my core group of friends here. In almost every case, however, I can look at the 96-pixel-wide image and guess to which of the two groups the individual belongs. The clues at my disposal are the names of the individuals, the context and style of the photography, and maybe clothing choice and hairstyle. I can barely make out any actual detail in an image so small, and yet still I am able to make a ridiculously well-informed assumption about the person’s connection to me.

Pattern recognition comes to humans so easily that we often take it for granted. But anyone who writes software for a living can grasp the complexity of teaching a machine even the simplest task. A computer can’t do anything unless you tell it exactly what you want and how to do it. We have made strides in certain areas, like software that can modify and optimize its own code, and other programs that “learn” by observing trends in user input data, but we’re still pretty far away from creating a machine that can think like a human brain.

Even so, the brain’s weaknesses are unfortunate considering the amount of processing power available to it. For instance, because we’re so good at identifying patterns, we often see patterns where they don’t exist. Like constellations, for example–even a child could draw a better bull than the stars associated with Taurus. The brain can also be intentionally fooled into seeing patterns, which can be demonstrated by using the constellations again and their associated astrological signs. Read the typical newspaper horoscope and you’ll find the sort of generalized life experiences with which almost anyone can vaguely identify. And don’t get me started on how inaccurate our memories can be. If you’ve ever been locked in an argument with your spouse over what she just said five minutes ago, you know what I’m talking about. And further imperfections arise over time as we allow emotions to color our recollections of past life experiences.

Recently I considered compiling a list of everyday behaviors of other people that I find annoying, but most of them had to do with driving and that’s not very original. Still, it’s interesting to wonder why people behave in certain ways that have nothing to do with the logic of the situation. One of my favorites is when people drift into a turn lane and then absently activate their blinker, completely forgetting that a signal is meant to convey intent. What these folks are doing is essentially the same as punching someone in the face and then angrily notifying the offender that if he doesn’t stop insulting your mother, you’re going to hit him. Another favorite is when a driver on a very wide residential road approaches a stop sign and feels compelled to right-justify her vehicle when she plans to turn left. Why doesn’t the driver, when there is plenty of room for it, imagine a left turn lane? Thereby allowing someone behind her to freely turn right?

Decoding repetitive human behavior can be interesting to the layperson, but provides little direct benefit. It’s not as if I can approach every driver on the road and have this conversation with them. And even if I could, maybe that person wouldn’t bother to stop the illogical behavior. Maybe that person is in fact programmed to be illogical. Maybe the reason human brains ignore information easily available to them is because they aren’t making decisions at all. Maybe the universe is completely deterministic and nothing is left to chance or probability. Or perhaps everyone around you is a bit player in a computer simulation in which you’re the main character.

In September, as many of you already know, I published a novel called Thomas World. The primary question of this story is whether or not the protagonist is living in the real world or some artificial reality. And if his world isn’t real, what’s the point of the simulation in the first place? I chose to write about this idea because the existential implications fascinate me. If the world is fake, if the creator of it is some kid playing a more sophisticated version of The Sims, it would explain why horrifying tragedies occur in a world that many believe was built by a benevolent deity. My beliefs since my mid teens have wavered somewhere between atheism and agnosticism, and this is the first possible explanation for the world that ever caused me to rethink those beliefs. Already I’ve received feedback from readers who claim Thomas World has caused them to look at the world in a different way. But maybe it really didn’t. Maybe they’re only playing their roles.

Existential concerns don’t have much to do with everyday reality, though. You still have to get up and go to work every day regardless of whether or not the world is real. However, the difference between humans and current day computers is we are afforded the luxury to entertain ourselves with these concerns. We’re able to appreciate music, whereas computers are mainly limited to identifying a piece of music when you let your iPhone listen to a few seconds of it. The technology of music identification is a type of pattern recognition, and it is impressive, but it’s nothing like the abstract and complex relationships the human brain makes when listening to a beautiful passage of, say, Mozart.

My girlfriend was sitting next to me last night, and when I looked at her I wondered briefly if she was real. The reason I wondered this is she seems to be the physical manifestation of a set of attributes I’ve often wished could be found in a single person. And because I am a writer, and since I do enjoy contemplating existence and its possible meanings, it occurred to me that my life might be a video game for which I wrote the script. When I mentioned this to her, she smiled and even blushed a little. And then the moment passed, and I let go of the idea, because whether or not she is real or something other than real, she is nevertheless a part of my life, and rather than wonder how that came to pass, I decided instead to simply enjoy it.

I was living in a group home in Pacific Palisades.  He was a friend of my brother’s and had accidentally fallen in love with me. I remember a night when we lay side by side in the dark, he talking about his mother’s death and me, the loss of my wild crazy mother.  Both of us talking, tears secretly rolling down our cheeks.   At midnight I said, “It’s my birthday.  This is my first birthday without my mom.”  Then, in the pouring rain, he drove me to go buy tampons.  I sat in his 1976 Volare.  He ran up to the 7-11 window, tapped on the glass, and held up two different tampon boxes.  He was big and Puerto Rican and overly pierced and his laugh was awkward but something told me that with all of his giant features and doofiness he really did love me.

He had sent me a letter, telling me so.  As a teenager I was constantly in fear of being forgotten.  Out of sight, out of mind.   Living in a group home was like being grounded for my entire adolescence.  By that point I had lived in several group homes.  My mother had lost custody of me for being abusive.  She was completely out of her tree. I was moved constantly around because it was hard to find a match with a foster family. I didn’t drive.  I wasn’t allowed due to licensing restrictions in foster care.  And besides, where would I get the money for a car?

And this friend, he wrote me a letter telling me that he thought of me often, and that I was loved.  He made a special effort to go to my high school, on the other side of town, and tag his name on the administration building. I remember walking into the building one morning and seeing the black drippy spray paint.  His nickname on the brick facade.  It was a secret nod to let me know he was thinking about me.  I kept his letter folded in my wallet for a long time, until it wore thin and ripped in the creases, little flakes of white rolling off.

Eventually, though, we lost touch. He got into drugs.  Speed was his favorite.  I went on to college.  He came to visit me once because he had a coupon:  dinner for two at Chili’s.  We sat in the booth and laughed at our fajitas, laughed at the fact that we were so grown up, and so broke.  After dinner, he dropped me off and drove home.  He couldn’t stay the night at my place because I had a down comforter and he was allergic.  He would wheeze around cats or feather stuffed comforters.  He was in a constant state of wheezing.

I kept his letter in my wallet.

I only saw him once or twice after that.  Usually around the holidays.  And if I didn’t see him, I would hear about him through friends. He rode around town on a special concoction he had made, two bike frames welded together.  He went by the name ‘Captain Welfare.’

The last time I remember seeing the letter I had just moved to New York.  This was years ago.  I was feeling completely alone and pulled it out of my wallet and read it to make myself feel better. The letter instructed me to always hold on to it, so that I could know, no matter where I was, that I was loved.  I remember he also told me that I was beautiful. And he recounted the first time we met.

And sometime after that, I lost the letter.  I don’t know how.  I don’t know where.

***

I remember the day the phone rang.  I picked up.  And heard the terrible news.  The news that my friend had died, and that nobody really knew why. I assumed it had something to do with drugs, or maybe it was his asthma, or maybe both.

I think of him now, and I remember us when we were young, just kids, lying in the grass in my friend’s backyard, looking out at the hills, smoking pot.  This was before the group homes. I pointed out at the hills.  “You ever want to go up there and just roll down?” I said.

He laughed. We were high.

“No, seriously,” I said.  “I want to go up to those mountains and lie on my side and roll down.”

We turned and looked at one another.  Teeth chattering.  It was cold outside. He had a hoodie on and was rocking back and forth. He told me I was crazy.  I asked him if he would go with me.  I had a blanket wrapped around me.  He wrapped it tighter.

And told me yes.

The hard things happened at night, sometimes in the dark, sometimes lit by a yellowish bed lamp, or the light from another room.

But right now she’s telling me about blue light, because one time the light seemed bluish, but how could that have been? Light isn’t actually bluish, is it? she says, It’s yellow, really. Maybe she’s thinking blue because she remembers blue flames.

So probably it wasn’t blue light, but more an infusion of blueness, a perception, from the blue flames she could see in the space heater, which she can see into because she’s on the floor in the kitchen, she’s sure of that, well pretty sure, at least the blue flames imply that’s where it was, because that’s where the space heater is. Or was. Is, who knows anymore?

I’m kinda losing it, she says to me, I mean, um, time. I don’t know when it is right now, I mean, when I am, but it’s blue then, it’s blue and it hurts, you know, they’re hurting me. One’s sitting over me like you just did, ah, you didn’t mean anything and how could I know this was gonna happen? But you did and now.

This. Blue. Shit.

She looks at me in the room, not my kitchen but my bedroom, we’re on the bed, and I know she wants to give me her blue light, so it can become mine. So I can feel it with her, or see it. So I can be on that kitchen floor, if that’s what it was, or when.

So I can go there. Me, the guy who semester after semester tells innocent freshman, The spectacular evolutionary advance of even an early language is that it permits shared consciousness. You can invite me into what you know and take me places I’ve never been. And show me what’s there.

Ah but now we’re not talking flint, chert, obsidian, chokecherries, blueberries, hackberries, carrion, fresh-kill, glacial light, mesa light, storm light. We’re talking blue light.

I know she’s going to take me, the me who’s sitting on the bed looking at her, she’s taking me back where the blue flames were, no, are, were, it doesn’t even matter, and I see in her eyes I’m no longer the me I know, but some other me she knows or doesn’t know for sure.

She’s transformed me into that person, too, and for a moment I think, Well allright, maybe this can help her work it out, yes, maybe symbol of, or standing in for so she can get ontop of it, but then I think if she takes me there, if I go along, how will she tell it? Through whose eyes will I witness it? Please, hers. Not the guy’s.

Tell me what you see.

It’s dim, but when I turn my head I see blue. One is my father  (she never says Daddy, Dad, Pa, Pop, only My father, only he, his, him, not before this night, and will not after it) but I can’t see the other one, too close, I couldn’t move my head, he’s sitting on my chest, he broke my collarbone, I don’t know who it is.

Only pain, his knee, choking, blue.

It would pain us, years ago, not to touch one another. In Key West, maybe a couple months after we met, Louisa and I celebrated an early-love sort of holiday—you know, the eight-week anniversary of the first French kiss, or something blissful like that—with a dinner at the now-defunct Cafe des Artistes on Duval St. Atypical for me, I remember little about the actual food, though snapshots of warm foie gras, port wine reductions, diver scallops and saffron decorate the memory, accurate or not. More than anything, I remember the size of the table, a massive dark wooden number, way too big for a two-top, Louisa and I perched at opposite ends. It took our full wingspans to reach one another across that expanse, surely dodging fresh flower, the vase that held it, and burning candle. All for a mere brushing of the fingertips, an actual, if chemical, recharging of our batteries, our blind feet searching in vain in the gulf beneath the white linen tablecloth.

It was a window table, and I remember looking through it at her standing in streetlight on the sidewalk, enjoying her mid-meal cigarette, her blonde hair glowing orange in the night. Somehow, even though it was Key West, and probably at least 70-degrees, I impose, in memory, snowfall on this scene—some dramatic anomaly, some fictional meteorological introspection, the kind of nostalgia that, for a Midwestern boy, can only reside in light ice falling beneath the orange pool of a streetlamp, smoke pouring from the lips of an early lover in the dark, through a restaurant window, at a too-big table pushing flutes of hazel champagne into the air.

Often, it’s still like this—how we’re driven by the need to touch, how our memories are inflamed sometimes by this lack, the distance we must breach. Here, on the other side of the Zócalo tracks, there is no distance at all to breach; we are wallpaper-glued together and we cling to one another not out of need, but incidentally. Actually, we cling to a whole bunch of people, the streets jammed with the chaos of familiarity—the kind that represents a close-knit neighborhood. Really close—like someone’s-knee-in-another’s-tailbone close. I think of my ancestors in the Jewish ghettoes of Poland, the wild social structures and hierarchies within. Here, in Mexico, land of living ghosts, I commune with them. Some apparitional great-aunt with ham-hock arms juggles pierogies, catching them in her mouth before they fall. Her smile bears the sheen of sour cream, bridging Poland and Mexico with a single ingredient. I want to wrap my arm around this burly ghost, sway, gather the streets into a frenzied We Are the World.

But all we can do is succumb to the rhythm, decide not to fight the current. My great-aunt’s ghost fades into the multitude. In these streets, the Cafe des Artistes two-top would be ground to sand. The undertow carries us into Tamale Alley, literally an entire street lined with outdoor food-stalls, each of them peddling their unique takes on the corn-husked delight, not a single one stuffed with huitlacoche. When we ask for it, utter those four corn-smutty syllables, we are, each time without fail, greeted with wrinkled foreheads and dismissive waves. We are obviously absurd foreigners, belted with occasional bursts of tamale steam as the vendors lift the tin lids of their water baths. Crowds of mid-day eaters huddle six-deep, eating together in front of the stand from which they bought their food, pulling bits of golden cornmeal stuffed with mole negro chicken, carnitas in salsa verde, whitefish in mole amarillo, from the corn husks wrapped in greasy crinkling waxpaper, laughing, arguing, working things out. One portion of the alley prepares only mole negro, another the amarillo, another the verde. Tamale Alley has cliques, cornmeal turf wars.

Cars, bikes, mopeds, garbage trucks, skinny shirtless guys hauling cardboard boxes on dollies cascade around the standing diners, swinging wide to avoid them, snaking sidewalk and street, wherever there’s a breathe-hole, a crack of space through which to push. No table gulfs here. No place to put your elbows except against your ribcage, your wrists doing the all the work, fingers pulling strings of meat from the husk, dripping with psychedelic sauces. The smells of garlic and diesel commingle overhead.

Commingling beneath, Louisa and I push to the front of a tamale stand, dare not ask for huitlacoche. Deep in her handbag, our stone knife is surely twitching, longing to halve some brave foodstuff. From a fat old woman we purchase two mole negro tamales. An old sinewy man in a dirty Chicago Cubs baseball cap begs two pesos from us for a tamale of his own. And we dine together silently, the three of us wrapped in crowd on the street. Louisa croons. The old man smacks his lips. I save my energy for the unwrapping of the corn husk, wet with a tawny grease that runs along my wrists as I lift the pillow of cornmeal to my mouth. It gives easily to my teeth, bursts with an outer earthiness—the smells of the Midwest, drives along the farm roads of Central Illinois, Indiana, the sun reflecting from armies of silos. But inside, it’s all Mexico, the molasses sap of the mole negro, penetrating as fresh oil, tar, all sweet burn and toast, the threads of chicken soaked with the charred sauce, lingering flavors of grassy chile, sesame, almond, raisin, cinnamon, chocolate. This is a tamale to span the length of all meals—it is amuse bouche and appetizer and entree and dessert. It is a four-hour meal at a giant table, and your lover pulling the last drag from her last cigarette beneath some final moon. In this tamale, the swings of Buffalo Grove’s Tartan Park regress, go squeakless again, and the tornado slide cleans itself of the old purple of all childhood blood. In this firecracker mole negro parents live forever.

With one hand, I snake Louisa’s thigh. With the other, I raise the tamale to my mouth for a second bite, wondering what this one will evoke. Louisa, nearly finished already, throws her head backward and knocks the old man’s Cubs hat to the asphalt.

29 December 2010. “Tell me the story about the animal family,” my daughter says. She curls her body on top of my lap and puts her head against me. Her hair tickles my nose and I can feel the thinness of her body as it grows. She wants to be a princess and a soldier and a cheetah. She is five years old. I am thirty two. In The Animal Family, a hunter lives by the shore. His father built the house but his father is dead. A mermaid comes to live with him and a wild bear cub and a boy after that. Then things are different. They are all so different from one another and none of it makes any sense. But it is a beautiful story. The hunter misses his father. The mermaid takes care of the bear cub. It makes sense when you read it in the story.

When I take my daughter to bed, she says her prayers. “I want to say the prayers for your dad,” she says. We say the Requiem Aeternum and she asks me if it makes my father happy. I tell her that I don’t know; you don’t know how other people’s lives end. She doesn’t like that; she’s going to be a soldier and a princess. She asks me if we’ll read about the animal family again tomorrow. “No,” I say, “I have to work on daddy’s story.” She likes that I’m making a story. She wants it to be like The Animal Family. “It is a little like that,” I tell her, “and it has pirates.” She wants to know if the pirates are real. “Yes,” I say, “these ones are real.”

The boy, the hunter, the strange neighbors, the house by the shore, the pirates and the constant possibility of bloodshed. It’s all there, and yet when I look at what I’ve written, I know that I’ve hidden it all; I know that I’m almost ashamed to recover the story, to tell the story beyond saying that it was an interesting case study of everyday life in the eighteenth-century British Empire: John Fontaine, born in 1693, the first English son of a Huguenot refugee, the Rev. James Fontaine of Vaux and Royan, who fled France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. A grain speculator, merchant, manufacturer, fisherman, and sometimes minister, James moved to Ireland with his wife and six children on Christmas Eve, 1694, and by the beginning of the War of Spanish Succession, he had established himself at Bearhaven, where he earned the favor of the Crown and the hatred of his Jacobite neighbors by interrupting the regular activities of smugglers and foreign privateers along the coast.

When John came of age, his father bought him a commission in an infantry regiment headed for Spain. He spent his tour near Barcelona, saw little action, and by 1714, “John, the officer, was without employment, and so it was determined that he should make a voyage to America” aboard the Dove out of Cork, that  he should “travel through every part” of the colonies “where the climate was temperate, and purchase a plantation.” By 1716, John was speculating on land in Virginia. That same year, he accompanied Governor Spotswood on an expedition to scout real estate. They went as far as the Shenandoah country accompanied by fourteen rangers, four Meherrin tribesmen, sixty-three attendants, seventy-four horse, several dogs, and ten Tidewater gentlemen. John kept the records. When they returned, Spotswood presented each officer with a gold, jewel encrusted stickpin in the shape of a horseshoe, so that his companions became known in later years as the “Knights of the Golden Horseshoe.” And inscribed on each: Sic Juvat Transcendere Montes, or Thus He Swears to Cross the Mountains.

But in 1719, John returned, landless, to Dublin, even as his siblings began to trickle, one by one, to the Virginia he had left behind. In 1722, his father, James, began to write his Memorial for the benefit of his children. It described his family’s history at Rochelle, their service in the causes of French kings and the Reformed faith, his own flight, his sufferings, and his triumphs. He appended it to it his son John’s Journal, a decade’s worth of writing that recounted by fits and starts his military service in Spain, his tempestuous journeys home and abroad and back again, as well as the sum of his experiences in colonial Virginia. It is a communal document; both voices, the father and the son, expand the limits of what the other one’s experiences can speak to. It is enough material to construct a history from, or rather a series of histories that divide the “living history” into what Fernand Braudel calls the “various planes” of historical narrative, “or, to put it another way, to divide historical time into geographical time, social time, and individual time.” James’ life, or John’s: “individual time,” but nested in the conflicting traditions and expectations of others around them, the “social time” that plays out long, gradual currents of change through short bursts of tangible violence. So that -

1 June, 1704. While the world warred for a vacant throne in Spain, he lived in the little stone house at the end of the world where his father had brought him. Where there was land beneath him, it heaped to the low, sandstone peaks of the An Ceachach until it broke like jagged tides against the midmorning. Everywhere, it seemed, the stubborn, broken ground resisted its possessors, any possessors, erupting wherever you stepped or settled or rested your eyes with the fraught and dreamlike litter of history: wild saint’s graves, forgotten megaliths, nameless stone cottages left unthatched and tenantless, the mossy ruined outline of the Caislean Dhun Baoi where the long-dead Gaelic lords bore their foreign arms against Elizabeth, and the old market square at Castletownbere, where the victors hanged them dead.

But through the window now, the boy, John, could see only the craggy rim of “the little cove” where the longboats hove in the sand. It sunk beyond in the vast, clear surface of the Cuan Baoi to a depth of nineteen fathoms at high tide; there it lay littered like the inland peaks themselves with the violent rubble of men: whitewood currachs with pierced hides, smugglers’ craft, French and Spanish six-pounders, the salted bones of the drowned. Conger and dogfish swam above them like flocks of gulls where they fled from nets, but today there were no nets.  No boats but one.

A French privateer: ten guns, mounted, and a crew of eighty. Aboard were four of the boy’s “Irish neighbors, who acted as guides,” leading the swift ship “toward the mouth of the creek” until it came around, broadside, directly “opposite one corner of the house.” There it stopped and it “cast anchor about a long musket-shot distant” from the window where John watched, “floating,” ever so slightly, “toward … [the] house in a perfect calm.” To the boy, how could it not have seemed like the trompe l’oeil backdrop to some stage play, one from behind which the men in the longboats issued to play their scene against the shore with muskets and knives before retiring? They played for a rapt audience. For “during the whole time,” John’s father later recalled, “there were two or three hundred Irishmen collected on a neighboring height, watching the conflict, rejoicing in the anticipation of our defeat, and waiting for the moment when they might come down and participate in the plunder.”

They watched as below the French “lieutenant landed with twenty men, and made haste” across the open ground toward the house. From behind a “barricade of mattresses and large books,” John watched, too, counting their paces, ranging them in the iron sights of his father’s musket as his older sister and his three brothers, posted “all at different windows,” did the same. His mother passed behind them “here, and there, and everywhere, carrying ammunition, and giving encouragement to all, as well by what she said, as by her own calm deportment.” She was “perfectly fearless,” her husband remembered: “I wanted a needle to broach the [jammed] muskets, which she went to fetch for me from a place where the balls were coming in at the window like hail, and she did not think of stooping to avoid them until I called out to her to do so.” For his part, John’s father, James, posted himself “in one of the towers over the door,” where he could hear the slates above him “shiver” under fire. He was alone; he felt the “tremors of fear” in his solitude; his sons could not see. Perhaps it mattered. Quickly, he recounts, though, he “humbled” himself, “committed” himself “both soul and body” to his God, and “suffered from fear no more.”

While James Fontaine struggled with his soul and his God, the young “lieutenant” outside (some cousin or nephew, himself, to the “pirate” captain) was “advancing with every appearance of confidence in his mien” across the open ground. Then he was almost at the door. He could see the outline of John’s father above him in the window, moving the shadows and assuming a sudden firing position. John, if, in fact, he saw what was to happen at all, would have known from his vantage point nothing of what caught the lieutenant’s eye; could have seen nothing reflected in that eye of the blunderbuss “loaded with large shot” that his father held out from behind his poor concealment and aimed center-mass at the Frenchman. Somewhere above him, the flint on his father’s weapon was striking the frizzen; it shrouded the shadowy figure behind the flared muzzle in balls of smoke and flashes of fire so completely that for the subaltern below, and no less for the sanguinary audience of some “two or three hundred” that waited with bated breath on the nearby ridge, John’s father played the part of some prodigious magician in a masque, or a little devil from Faust making its entrance at the appointed scene.

For the boy, there would have been only the sudden report of the shot, the ground for two or three feet around the lieutenant churning with dust, the leaden shot rending the earth in groups, and the sudden arresting of the figure in motion, its face and its belly hidden by little mists of blood. Fontaine had shot wide but the shot spread; it tore open the lieutenant’s “neck above the shoulder-blade;” it settled in “his side.” It happened quickly. Even as he fired, Fontaine later wrote, the subaltern “was taking aim at me as he fell,” which, fortunately for John’s father, “made the fire go too high” and strike the stone face of the tower as harmlessly as rain. Immediately, Fontaine “ran for another loaded piece which was in the next room,” and by the time he returned, the lieutenant’s men had taken “him up, crossed the ditch, and carried him back to the vessel.” The boy would have seen that much.

When their assailants returned, they brought with them a new officer and “twenty more men and two small cannon” which they manned “under cover of the rocks and hedges.” For the next several hours, they “cannonaded the north side of the house, while the guns of the vessel bore up on the south-east.” Then stopped. Then the new officer was gone and the cannons and the men who manned them were gone, and “in a short time” the harried family “had the satisfaction of seeing the vessel draw up her anchor and sail away.” They went down to the shore where the longboats had been. They “inspected the stations” that the privateer’s crew “had occupied on shore.” Under the “rocks and the hedges,” they “found a quantity of blood” which the assailants “had evidently tried to hide by treading earth and leaves into it.” Later some of the “Irishmen who were on board” told them “the loss sustained by the enemy.” Three killed, seven wounded. The lieutenant, and perhaps two others, had bled to death among the rocks.

29 December 2010. The ship sulking in the bay. The “satisfaction of seeing” her “draw up her anchor and sail away.” The blood in the crook and furrows of the rocks. The curiosity, perhaps even the “satisfaction of seeing” the blood and the groove in the sand where the smugglers had dragged their dead. It is hard for me, even at this remove, to stop thinking about it and in the thinking, perhaps, risk doing my own violence to the scene, to the little family whose members are all too easily masked behind the language of the time, behind their own names scrawled onto pension petitions to Queen Anne, military commissions, prayer books.

The dramatic story of the family guarding their stone house against the crew, the pathos of the beautiful, stately Mrs. Fontaine reloading the muskets, the eerie presence of Irish audience – none of this would have come about in the first place if deeper cultural dynamics at play in eighteenth-century Europe had not created, magnified, or sustained the animosities of the French, Irish, and English players. But they did not encounter one another as one encounters religions, cultures, economies, or states. They encountered each other individually in an evolving present, and in James Fontaine’s case, the present was a dramatic encounter through bloodshed that resolved in what he later remembered as his “glorious victory.” That is the record we have. Being the only account, it is also the best record of what cultural dynamics looked like on one given day at one extremity of the British Empire. And if James’ antagonists had left their versions, they would have remembered it differently; it would all have the hues of embarrassment and defeat. Surely for the privateer captain, who swore he would “roast” James and “salt” him alive, any narrative of that day would have been first a narrative of violation and retribution. The dead lieutenant’s body, that was his brother’s or his sister’s son. The blood on the rocks: that was his blood, too.

The more we try to respect the integrity of first-hand or contemporary accounts, or try to see history as its initial narrators saw it, the more we risk becoming fiction writers. The questions raised by a first encounter with the individual lives we encounter in the past, and thus our entry point into broader questions about the reach and meaning of social structure, have a great deal to do with how imagine intent behind the actions narrated by contemporary writers. Why, for example, did James’ Gaelic neighbors hate him with such fervor? Or did they even really hate him in the way that James imagines? Did they, laughing at their smuggler cousins aboard the French ships, suppose that the whole affair would end bloodlessly? That the Fontaines would simply surrender to the French officers and the French officers would laugh and leer a little at Mrs. Fontaine and send the little family off with a good scare back to the Lord Lieutenant in Dublin?

To ascribe motives to them, even the motives James assumes them to have had, involves a slippery shift into the modes of fiction. We cannot know what they thought. We cannot even, with absolute certainty, know what James, himself, thought. We can know only how he reflected on his state of mind at a remove of almost two decades. At a distance of over three hundred years, what can I say about it all? I want to zero in on the day. I try to adduce as much as I can from the records available: James’ Memorial, the geography of the place, contemporary descriptions of fisheries, trade patterns, family lore, baptismal records. I could go further. The problem, though is this: the closer I get to that day, the more I feel the nearness of the “kind of men” who “held the world” or lost it there; the more I feel this closeness, the easier it becomes to imagine how it must have felt, what they must have felt. And when I write that into my account as what they did feel, I am no longer writing history. I am writing a novel. A historical romance.

Time refracts when you read history, the way it seems to refract when you enter the fictive time of novels. Your life refracts into the lives of others. The father, James: he seems so much like my own at times, and perhaps I am a little more like John than suits my conceit of myself. Salyer, Fontaine: Huguenot names. My father’s people came out the south, Toulouse, and moved like James through England and Ireland within a generation until they came to New York. In the Revolution, they served the King – he had preserved them – and after defeat fled south and west until they came to the Appalachians, where they settled, stayed, remembering that that once they had been Hugeonots and had written it Sallier. They feared their God, fought; they stayed and flourished on hard land. It is hard not to see my own father crouched, his big scarred face clenched against its own unexpected gentleness, in “one of the towers over the door.”

And Bearhaven: go north, not far. Follow the coast. When you come to Cahersiveen, stop. Find the moor. My mother knows the name for it in Gaelic. My grandfather, who learned his hard, gutteral English in Willimantic, Connecticut, never knew a different name for it. Those are my people, more so than my father’s distant people are to me. Those are the ones who raised me, here, Waterbury, in the shamble of a New England factory city, as an Irish kid with a strange, foriegn name. It is hard to read the story of James Fontaine and not remember that I am Irish, I am Catholic, and I am accustomed to violence. As a scholar, I can tell you a great number of facts with a suitable rhetoric of detachment:  the depth of the Bantry, the names of Spanish ships that sank in its depth a half century before James settled his family there, the shot spread of his blunderbuss or the number and general characteristics of the Huguenots who found their way into the service of the British Crown on the years after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. But none of that is who I am. I am Irish, or Irish enough; I am Catholic; and as much as I see my father in James Fontaine or myself in John, the proximity I get to the events of 1704 through a more critically informed reading of the historical record refracts me again: I would, no doubt have stood on the opposite ridge with some “two or three hundred” others. I would have waited to see my cousins and my neighbors – Irish, Catholic, partisan – kill the decent man who reminds me so much of my father and the boy who may have been a little like me. I may have even held my breath and hoped for it to happen. The foreign father, the foreign son; my own father, myself. I could have hated them both so much.

Because James’ story is not my own, retelling it implicates me; it reveals me as the living, interested, and fundamentally limited speaker that I am; sometimes I am the advocate of my subjects; sometimes, even in ways that I cannot even fully understand, I suspect that I am their enemy. Without such a confession, there is no honest way to begin writing this or any other story about the past, for everything, as Fernand Braudel argues, everything “must be recaptured and relocated within the general framework of history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we may respect the unity of history which is also the unity of life.” And to recapture and relocate everything within the “general framework of history,” the historian must also recapture his or her own speaking identity from the rhetorical ethos of objectivity; it, too, must be “relocated” within the text as one voice among many.

What, after all, is Braudel’s inclusive “unity of life” if it is not time considered as a whole? This is ultimately a metaphysical argument; it seeks to “recapture” all manner of human and inhuman events within a “general framework;” it seeks to reconcile all possible combinations of “difficulties … and contradictions” together into a temporal fullness which, Braudel concludes, “we must respect.” Must. It becomes an imperative; it cannot be questioned in Braudel’s model because the “unity of life” presupposes that you can see the end of things, that what Frank Kermode calls the “humble genesis” and “feeble apocalypse” of tick and tock in our daily lives points toward an absolute and resounding tock, “an end [that] will bestow upon the whole [of time] duration and meaning.” If we stood outside of time, we could see its delineated beginning and its end; we could see, interpreting backward through the end, the tock, all the ways in which the duration of events and their proximity to one another contained and produced meanings.

But we cannot. We do not have an eternal perspective. For the human subject, acting as though the end, wherein we see this “unity of life,” is certain and inevitable is an act of faith. It requires accepting history as a kind of revelation, just as we accept that events that unfold in novels will be made whole by the last page. Historical consciousness, then, is ultimately an act of piety for Braudel; if we must, now, in time, respect the end of time, it is only because we allow ourselves to be convinced that “however remote tock may be, all that happens happens as if tock were certainly following.” This is simple enough for the human who looks at history from the outside, but such a figure is ultimately an abstraction and not a living person at all. For actual historical subjects, this historical piety remains one of Braudel’s “fundamental paradoxes” of experience, as much so as any measurable change in customs, commonwealths, and geographies over time.

Like Keats’ description of powerful aesthetic experiences, living and reflecting as if the tock is coming means that the historical subject acquiesces to a kind of “negative capability” whereby he or she becomes “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts.” For Keats, all “irritable reaching after fact and reason” distances the reader from the totality, the aesthetic tock of “Beauty” that “overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.” But to tell time, one reaches “after fact” in a special way. As Braudel suggests, the periplum into the domain of facts, relics, texts, geological records, and human traces of all kinds, produces a greater sense of the whole: the underlying “unity of life.” At the same time, the variety and scope of experience means that the exact nature of how the tock comes and what it will mean – what it will make facts mean – remains shrouded in “uncertainties, Mysteries, [and] doubts.” History itself – and by history we distinguish a special relationship with time which we believe is moving to an end but which has not yet ended – history, in this sense, “overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.” But we cannot, living in the middle of it, see how.

How, then, can we accept the one for one exchange between Braudel’s “unity of life” which we experience piecemeal, and the “unity of history” which we encounter as a formal unity manufactured and repeated and transmitted whole through texts? Begin with what Paul Ricoeur calls our impulse to safeguard the “fundamental bifurcation between fictional and historical narrative.” This Aristotelian distinction helps us to distinguish between real and imaginary referents; we align the mode of fiction with the unreal and the historical with the actual, but if the equation is between the “unity of life” and the “unity of history,” the problem of finding a form for representation needs to be restated: how should we produce historical texts that align with the experience of history? Can we claim authority as narrators and witnesses in texts when we would not claim similar authority with respect to actual experiences? On the other hand, what becomes of the “unity of history” – not to mention the unity of texts – when our stories about the past foreground our own limited understanding, our biases, our predisposition to see events passing in their courses as the preludes to some unrealized tock?

I do not know. At the same time, I believe it is important to try to know in practice, just as I believe that it is important for you to hear just who I believe myself to be at the present time, and for much the same reason: namely that I -both as living man and narrator, functor – may be wrong. Both are elements in an experiment with narrative and yet I am claiming – even by asserting the right to curtail it – an authority to tell stories that are not really my own. By insisting, moreover, on telling social history as a narrative, while at the same time refusing to believe in my own disinterestedness, I risk doing ethical violence to the past, to the lives of others, now dead, who can no longer speak for themselves. They can, however, render me answerable to other voices within texts, just as I may, in turn, as narrator and rhetorical I, question their own judgments about their experiences, their world, their declared selves.

This dialogic relationship, present in complex, multivocal narratives, illuminates what Alasdair MacIntyre argues when he writes that “narrative form is neither disguise nor decoration.” Voices answer to one another within texts, just as narratives that claim a special explanatory relationship with reality are held accountable to what Braudel calls the the totalizing “unity of life.” And this experience – this formal mandate – of answerability,# both within texts and without, opens the very real possibility of a mimetic correspondence between the organization of texts and way that time structures actual experience. Jean-Francois Lyotard has argued – and with great reverberance – that narrative form is “losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal … [it is] being dispersed in clouds of narrative language functions – narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on.” But this is true only where there is a poor mimetic correspondence between the kind of omniscient, disinterested, narrative voices we suspend our disbelief to accept in texts and the finite, endlessly conflicted, and answerable selves that we know ourselves to be in real life. In Braudel’s terms, narrative fails where the “unity of history” fails to approach the “unity of life.” However, because the narrative form of history forces us to encounter other voices that would elsewhere remain effaced, servile, or else monologic and unanswerable, it forces us to recognize the scope and boundaries of our own moral agency in the historical forms of the world around us. It allows us to imagine answers to the question of “‘What am I to do?’” MacIntyre observes, because we can first “answer the prior question, ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”

20 August 2011. “Tell me the story again,” my daughter says, “the one about the animal family.” The one about the whole wide world. She curls her body on top of my lap and puts her head against my chest. Her hair tickles my nose and I can feel the thinness of her body as it grows. She wants to be a princess and a soldier and a cheetah. Her left ear comes to a point like my father’s did, and when she sleeps, she sleeps like him. When he died, he looked like he was sleeping. She is five years old and I am thirty two. She doesn’t know why her ear does that or what my father looked like when he died. I haven’t told her that story. In The Animal Family, a hunter lives by the shore. His father built the house but his father is dead. A mermaid comes to live with him and a wild bear cub and a boy after that. Then things are different. They are all so different from one another and none of it makes any sense. But it is a beautiful story. The hunter misses his father. The mermaid takes care of the bear cub. It makes sense when you read it in the story. There are stranger stories for children to get lost in. Real ones. There are always bad neighbors, frightened fathers, empires, ends of the earth, animal families.

And there are always strangers on the shore. Real ones.

“If a man have espoused a damsel that is a virgin, and some one find her in the city, and lie with her, Thou shalt bring them both out to the gate of that city, and they shall be stoned: the damsel, because she cried not out, being in the city: the man, because he hath humbled his neighbour’s wife. And thou shalt take away the evil from the midst of thee. But if a man find a damsel that is betrothed, in the field, and taking hold of her, lie with her, he alone shall die: The damsel shall suffer nothing, neither is she guilty of death: for as a robber riseth against his brother, and taketh away his life, so also did the damsel suffer: She was alone in the field: she cried, and there was no man to help her.”     - Deuteronomy 22:23-8

A lot of people say your films are pure shock value and that you’re taking the piss out of the audience. What are you actually trying to say with this new film? “It’s all about trying to establish that the main character’s own life was not totally meaningless. And it’s also about the experience of one small mammal among millions of mammals. Very frequently what a life boils down to is a single, very traumatizing experience.”     - Gaspar Noe

“F[ace]B[ook] is dead as ever. Now time for me to entertain someone or at least try.”

- Francisco Cruz, aka “Cisco Ninjaa,” 15 July 2010 at 05:45

I tried so hard to kill someone at the foot at that cross but I never could. It just seemed too fantastic to write; it seemed gratuitous. When you come up in a place like Waterbury, you learn to say it Whuudd-rbry by the time you leave. If you leave. Someone asks you where you live (not where  ya from? but where do you live?) and you picture them living, not belonging but living the way they mean it, with stone counters and classic kit cars and highboned bird women safe in one of the white clapboard houses where the long, spindling, oldentime candles show in the front windows. And you: Whuudd-rbry, meaning your neighborhood or Brick City or Dirty Water, The Dirty, meaning milltown, nowhere,  ghosttown, ghetto. It sounds like you’re puking when you say it, Whuudd-rbry, and they say nothing or just ohh, brows arched, ohhh, or else where in Wahhter berry there are still some nice parts of town  there but that isn’t what they mean. What they mean is I’m very sorry about your loss. It’s a condolence. A condolence because you’ve come up in the world belonging to a place that signifies to the living all the awkward, immoderate burden of a bad and embarrassing death: dirty, brick, bare-assed Whuudd-rbry. You: because you’ve appeared in its place signifying death. And in the silence, the undesired condolences, the nice parts of town there, you begin to feel the callouses on the inside of your hands, a scar from a bottle, a burn from where you removed a tattoo, or you recall a broken crown hidden painlessly deep in your jaw and you feel suddenly ashamed: you are gratuitous; you are obscene; you are bare-assed; more than likely, you never knew it.

And thou shalt take away the evil from the midst of thee. But the evil is in the midst of thee because it is in thee and you can no more take it out of yourself than you can take yourself out of your neighborhood, your nowhere, ghosttown, ghetto. You feel this through a kind of blood knowledge in Whuudd-rbry; you know it the way that Macbeth knew “to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow” as the “calamitous harbingers” of one fucking thing after another; the way the prophets and the saints in their old …and it came to pass times knew themselves broken by sin in their jealous covenant with God. “And surely the blood of your lives will I require,” He told them; surely, He told them, surely, dumbfucker, like they ought to have known already, known how at “that the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man’s brother will I require the life of man.” What does it matter, then, where I imagine the setting to be or what characters I place within it? What story could I invent, what plot, that does not at the hand of every man’s brother … require the life of man? I belong to The Dirty Water, to this milltown; I am its chattel, and I could no more write about Updike’s “Rabbit” Angstrom than I could light the candles in a whitewashed Litchfield house.

That life: Protestant, angst ridden, middleclass, unbloodied; it seems more fictive to me than the serial  adventures of John Carter of Mars or King Kull of Atlantis. But this world: Catholic, poor, sanguinary. World because I did not know until I had left it that there was anything  past the twenty-eight square miles of dead machine shops and storefront brick facade that could possibly  matter. World: where the patient, sullen people of my grandfather’s time envied and hoped and hid their fears  on the front stoops of shambling threefamilies. They left roses to run weed, choking the street lights by their long,  haughty necks. Jars of nails. Stolen gas pipe for fences. Whiskey on the low shelves. The black crucifix. Even when I was a boy, you could see the lines where they hung their laundry out to dry in the chemical air, pierced only by siren and engine whir until the mournful equinox of the churchbells rose and remembered them to the God who bled. World, His World, because He watched them busy themselves with blood and He bled among them: hands ground to nubs in the pressgears; the accidental cooking of human skin in the brass foundries; old J— Z—, the landlord with the broken nose; the tenants he hung over the back porches while his son watched, learned; Z—, the brick shithouse Albanian who locked the doors and beat a dozen men nearly to death in the old Brooklyn Cafe; M— A— (La Mano Nera, the Black Hand man), who lent my grandfather money and whispered and grinned with him and walked the little girls down to St. Lucy’s; the little girls at Our Lady’s, scrubbed, hairbrushed, fidgeting serenely in their mantillas and white gloves as the hard men put on their killing faces and led the Virgin downtown on a painted float. The hard men. The killing faces. The Virgin where she belonged. And all of them old and broken and longed for and dead enough when I came up in the world, in dead enough Whuudd-rbry. But they’d left holes in the World. You could watch the holes growing, day by day, year by year, even as that world grew older, more distant, and as you grew older in it, until your home was nothing more than an old photograph pulled too late from a fire.

And the World: that hole, the present, that is the evil from the midst of thee.

And you: but I was in the city, and being in the city is within me.

And the World: but you cried not out, being in the city.

Because -

Because you you begin to feel the callouses on the inside of your hands, a scar from a bottle, a burn, because you recall a broken crown hidden painlessly deep in your jaw and you feel ashamed; because you are gratuitous, obscene, bare-assed, and you never knew it.

But the city, you say, meaning milltown, nowhere, ghosttown, ghetto, she was like that already.

And the World: she was alone in the field: she cried, and there was no man to help her. You remember nothing, say nothing, are nothing.

I am a condolence, a wound.

You are a little wound, at best, and an old wound; you are a gap for the blood to cry out through.

The old men with the hard killing faces, the little girls my mother knew, the tumbled down skeleton of their lives left to blanch along the banks of the Naugatuck River in brick and iron. Echoes, refrains, like the murmur of my heart, the blood. It was always the blood that made me want to write about the world I came up in. What else could I write but the World? Even now, if I am completely honest, it is almost a leap of faith to admit the reality of anything that is not Catholic, urban, poor, and sanguinary, that is not my Whuudd-rbry, my Atlantis. At the same time, it was the blood that prevented me: the way that blood calls lonely out to blood, the way you hide blood – your own, your beloved’s. Sop it up, sop it up before youpeople see and scrunch up your long, right noses. Sop it up, sop it up, but keep the rag like a holy relic or an old uniform that signifies – what? – something; it is enough, in the end to signify something. It left me speechless, the blood, not because I couldn’t find the right story to tell about this nowhere, but because at every turn, the city revealed itself through a baroque figuration of hard, vibrant lives that passed and fell in their terrible courses before becoming fixed in the sanguinary memory of Whuudd-rbry. Bright, potent mosaics that writhe beyond belief.

Writing about the place imposed on me the burden of telling the truth, bearing witness to those whose marks on the world were being swallowed up whole by – what should I call it? – time, evil, forgetfulness, apostasy, modernity, the middle class. It meant shovelling what was back into the hole in the World. How else can one write? Perhaps a more pressing question is: why imagine a fiction in the World at all? Can it fill the real holes in the real World? Maybe it can’t. But it can signify where the gaps are, and with what stuff they ought to be stopped up. And you need them to be filled, for nothing other than what has been can explain the life you live or the meaning you give it.

In a sense, we live backward. Dying we; we make sense of the here and now according to our conviction that some end we have yet to encounter in the passage of time will let us at last understand both the hungry burden of the past and the disparate present. At the same time, it is our relationship to the past that determines what materials we have at hand to imagine an at last with. So in the Greek, the end of all things is apokalypsis, the lifting of the veil that covers what has already happened to reveal the hidden purposes that have so long eluded us. But we cannot stomach apocalypse, so we need fiction to show it to us. Safely, as though through a thick glass darkly. For Aristotle, this helped explain why we die; we cannot see well enough to put our origins together with our ends. But in a ghosttown, nowhere, life passes in high relief, epithetic as an Iliad or an Aenead, because the end has already happened: ohh or else where in Wahhter berry there are still some nice parts of town there. And how do you face the clean, well scrubbed faces of Litchfield County or Woodbridge, Connecticut and tell them you’re from tha Ill-yud or the Uh-nee -uudd?

You don’t. You lie. Fiction lets you lie. It lets you fix your teeth and qualify for a car payment or know what a 401k is. It means that you’ve never woken your wife and told her to take your baby and lie down flat on the ground until the Hillside Niggaz stop shooting wild outside; it means you didn’t come home to a man pissing on the side of your house and kick him in the ribs; and when he staggered to, shaken the daze off his shoulders and charged you, it means you didn’t let your rottie tear out a strand of his calf. It means you didn’t have a rottie. It means you were scared.

You always have to be scared in fiction. It makes it more believable, even if it makes your blood reel up in your chest to lie like that. More believable because its less terrifying to readers than the alternative. Perhaps the believable is the enemy of the real, or else it’s a sacrifice you make in order to bear the World a little witness. It makes the safe, confident men in the white clapboard houses confess their own proximity to it and, in exchange, you lie because they lie: there’s nothing to be scared of; it’s just a story; the world just happens. Normally. Accidentally. Quietly. You get a raise. You take a vacation. Read a novel. Things happen in the novel. A boy walks a pretty girl home and rapes her at a holy shrine that an old man built from garbage and auto salvage. It means something. It has symbolism. Maybe it’s set in Bombay (there was a film like that wasn’t there? Slumdog Millionaire? It was a wonderful movie, yes) or maybe it’s set in Afghanistan. Maybe the old man stoned the girl. I forget, now. Vintage published it. It must be trying to say something. About something. And there are questions in the back of the book, itemized for the highboned bird women to ask one another in the quiet rooms with the long white candles. The questions mean that the rape and the shrine and the slum and the old man and his shit are all part of something that reveals a beginning and an end. And it’s all right because their world of blood and signs – Bombay, Afghanistan, yeahyeahyeah, wherever – is the world of fiction. And the world of fiction is not the world.

But if it is, and if it is my World, what then? How do you bear witness to the reality of the Waterbury baroque, where everything says something, says everything? Again, you lie. You write fiction, and the deception in this instance lies not in a subtraction or manipulation of events, but in presenting what has happened and what may happen under the veil of what would never happen. Not here. Five minutes from a Super Stop and Shop. A Starbucks. A Nissan dealership with red balloons and twentysomething salesmen in chinos and North Face jackets. Ranch houses covered in beige vinyl and white trim. Office parks. Fresh, silent driveways running between banks of white gravel and red mulch to Godknowswhere behind the trees. God knows where: to the gate of that city, maybe, from which thou shalt take away the evil, and once within that city to its highest point, the rough granite face of Abrigador Hill where the stone outcroppings, graffitied and crooked, overlook the steeples of St. Anne’s and Francis Xavier’s, and below them, the flat roofs of brick bodegas and South End tenements; and at the highest point of the Abrigador God knows where to the field where it flattens out to a garden of roses where she cried at the foot of the nightlit electric cross; and there was no man to help her; to

WATERBURY —  A 19-year-old man was charged Sunday with raping and killing a 16-year-old friend whose body was found near a closed and run-down religious attraction in Waterbury. Francisco Cruz faces charges including capital felony, murder and sexual assault in the death of Chloe Ottman. Her body was found near Holy Land USA on Saturday, a day after her family reported her missing. Cruz was the last person seen with Ottman, but initially denied having anything to do with her disappearance, said Waterbury police Capt. Chris Corbett. After being questioned, he led police to the body and confessed to sexually assaulting and strangling her, Corbett said. Cruz and Ottman, both of Waterbury, had been friends for about two years and walked together to the mostly deserted Holy Land USA on Thursday evening, Corbett said. Cruz was behind bars in lieu of $5 million bond on Sunday and was expected to be presented in court on Monday. He could face the death penalty if convicted. Holy Land USA was an 18-acre religious attraction on a hillside overlooking Waterbury in western Connecticut. Closed for years, it featured a “Hollywood”-style Holy Land USA sign and replicas of Bethlehem and Jerusalem made from scrap wood, chicken wire, sheet-metal and other materials. Its 50-foot cross is still illuminated at night and serves as a city landmark. The site is owned by the Religious Teachers Filippini, and several nuns still live there. (Waterbury Republican-American 19 July 2010)

I meant it. I tried so hard to kill someone at the foot at that cross but I never could. It just seemed too fantastic to write; it seemed gratuitous. And yet every story that I could imagine ended there, with the old hard leather men trampling through the miniature cities like drunken giants, wheezing halfmad and out of time, suffering aneurysms along the broken Stations of the Cross, or with the little girls snagging their white gloves bloody on the chainlink and the nails, stigmatic as Faulkner’s Benji. It was an elephant’s graveyard for the old Catholic ghosts of my grandfather’s world, and to tell their story through to the end invariably meant leading little-lost-ghost them back to roost where they belong amid the replicas of Bethlehem and Jerusalem, the scrap wood and chicken wire and the sheet-metal. But it made me ashamed. I could feel the broken tooth in the back of my jaw and the hardness of my family’s accent rolling around it. I felt the blood and the blood made a coward of me. Who, after all, would believe it? A death, a killing, a dimestore Pieta nightlit in the mostly deserted Holy Land USA. Describe the “Hollywood”-style Holy Land USA sign, the replicas of Bethlehem and Jerusalem made from scrap wood, chicken wire, sheet-metal and other materials. Bring it to a climax beneath the 50-foot cross … still illuminated … a city landmark. No. It has to be a novel; it has to only seem real because otherwise it is too much. American roadside grotesque whipped to a frenzy. Hubcap romanticism and graveyard saints. Highways jammed, holy water, and broken heroes on a last chance power drive. Hide it, hide it. It never happened never happens. They’ll mock it. Protect it. Youpeople; they’ll mock it. Hide it in the blood. Hide the blood inside of you. Run your tongue along your broken tooth. No one can see it. Hide it hide it it never happened could never happen you never happened either.

You will never happen.

Condolence.

Shhh.

But it happened. It happened like things happen in a novel. A boy walks a pretty girl home and rapes her at a holy shrine that an old man built from garbage and auto salvage. And it means something. It has symbolism. And there are questions at the end … because it is real life. You could never have invented something like this, would never have let the hairbrushed girls writhe at the foot of the 50-foot cross … still illuminated, crushing the rosehips with their heels, grinding the palms of their whitecotton cloves raw against the concrete base. The antiseptic florescence of electric light overhead. Eyes of the saints broken in their plaster skulls. Had you written this, the old men, out of time, would have stopped it; they would have carried her home like Ethan Edwards in The Searchers. You wouldn’t have allowed it because they wouldn’t have. You remember them well enough to be certain of that much. You’re sure of it. You’re sure of your fiction.

But it happened. A boy walked a pretty girl home and raped her at a holy shrine that an old man built from garbage and auto salvage. And the old man is dead. And the shrine – is it dead, too? And the girl, no that is the fiction her name was Chloe she is dead, too; she was alone in the field: she cried, and there was no man to help her. No, that is only a way of speaking. She was never alone. There was the boy; he was there, a 19-year-old man … charged Sunday with raping and killing her. No. That is the fiction, the confessed to sexually assaulting and strangling her, the part you can stomach. The Vintage novel. The believable. But look at it: past the crumbling Gethsemane, a sign reads King’s Tombs; a victim lamb waits cast in concrete beneath a visitation of human rubbish: condom wrappers, Bud cans, old Nike’s, dried puke, piss, coins cast for good luck and the intercession of saints and martyrs. Jerusalem wreckage. Sexually assaulting and strangling her no that is the fiction that isn’t what he did. He came to the foot of the cross and he shoved his cock into her and he shoved his thumbs into her throat and he shoved his cock into her and she stopped breathing and he shoved his cock into her and she started breathing and he shoved his thumbs into her throat like a pair of cocks and he shoved his cock into her like a gagging thumb until he had finished. At Golgotha,

which means the place of the skull,

where God bled.

This is not a story. This is Whuudd-rbry; this is Holyland, and Holyland is apokalypsis, the lifting of the veil between the terrible bloodiness of the World and the lie that it’s all just a story, that the world just happens. Normally. Accidentally. Quietly. For Aristotle, this helped explain why we die; we cannot see well enough to put our origins together with our ends. But whatever I have left off writing, whatever I have tried and failed to explain in stories about this milltown, nowhere, ghosttown, ghetto – I have already seen how it ends. And I can write it now, all of it. No that is the fiction Waterbury wrote it for me, both better and worse than I could have ever invented it. The man and the girl at the rim of the World’s navel. And in the heart of the city, she was alone in the field: she cried, and there was no man to help her.

God knows where the man was.

When I began this column, one of my goals was to shine a flashlight on short stories, the neglected baby sister of the fiction world. But when I sent out an APB last year for under-the-radar story collections, and the writer Steve Almond recommended “Tony” Doerr’s latest, I balked.

I do not doubt that Steve, prolific scribe and TNB contributor, has good taste. But Anthony Doerr — author of four books, three-time O. Henry Award–winner, Guggenheim Fellow, winner of the Rome Prize, one of Granta‘s 21 Best Young American Novelists, and a finalist for the $20,000 Story Prize — isn’t exactly under the radar. Didn’t People magazine once report that Laura Bush read Doerr’s debut collection, The Shell Collector? I had images of Tony, in book-avatar form, canoodling with the former First Lady on Air Force One. This guy, I decided, didn’t need my flashlight (which is, come to think of it, more like a laser pointer, anyway).

Upon further reflection, I realized that no matter how many awards you string after your byline, the act of writing short stories is, by its very nature, under the radar. Unless you are Alice Munro, committing to short fiction is like announcing to your banker friends that what you really want to do is make dollhouses out of tongue depressors. To your average American, it’s not even as compelling as scrapbooking.

With that in mind, and with fond reminiscences of The Shell Collector, I decided to give Memory Wall (Scribner, 2010) a chance. After all, TSC included a vivid tale about a psychic hunter’s wife who could read the mind of a hibernating bear, and any writer who can pull that off deserves a second look.

A reviewer of science books for the Boston Globe in his spare time, Doerr is known for his moving depictions of people and their relationships to the natural world. He has a lyrical sense of place, a traveler’s avidity for detail, and he shows that talent to full advantage by setting the two novellas and four stories of Memory Wall in locales as far-flung as South Africa, Lithuania, China, Germany, and Korea. (Curiously, the least memorable story, “Procreate, Generate,” is the only one that takes place entirely within the United States.)

While some collections include so many narratives that they almost drown each other out, this is not the kind of fictional smorgasbord that makes you feel like you’re glimpsing too many stations from a speeding train. The satisfying length of the entries in Memory Wall (the first novella is 85 pages long) allows for the total immersion more characteristic of novels.

Despite Doerr’s geographical range, the real landscape here is memory. In the title novella, we’re introduced to the premise of a helmet that can archive memories on cartridges so they can be experienced again and again. This is a science-fiction trope we’ve seen before, but Doerr makes it entirely his own through careful composition: Suburban Cape Town, a setting where all is not forgotten, is the perfect place for him to braid together the narratives of an elderly white woman suffering from dementia, her deceased fossil-hunting husband, her black houseman, and a pair of memory thieves fishing the woman’s brain for information about a priceless archaeological find.

In the last novella, “Afterworld,” the narrative shuttles between World War II Europe, the present, and a purgatory populated by eleven orphans, as an elderly seizure-prone woman struggles to reconcile her survivor status with the events of the Holocaust. In “Village 113,” the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China (which forced the relocation of well over a million citizens) complicates the relationship between a rural seed-seller and her only son, a city-dwelling bureaucrat overseeing the evacuation.

The motif of faith resonates throughout the book: Doerr writes unsentimentally about very sentimental things — the marriage of memory and identity, seeing versus believing. From “Village 113″: “Don’t disbelieve what you can’t see.” From “Afterworld”: “Isn’t everything that’s real only real in our heads?” From “The River Nemunas”: “He says this means that just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean you shouldn’t believe in it. I can’t tell if he means Jesus or gravity.”

The following sentence, from “Afterworld,” could be referring to the brave scope of Doerr’s own writing: “Within the wet enclosure of a single mind a person can fly from one decade to the next, one country to another, past to present, memory to imagination.” But the author’s greatest gift lies in taking potentially melodramatic setups and infusing them with genuine emotion. In Memory Wall, he dodges a series of Hallmark landmines with empathy and elegance: Apartheid? Check. Infertility? Check. Broken marriage? Check. Orphanhood? Check. The Holocaust? Big check.

Yet it would be simplistic to look at this list of hard topics and dismiss Memory Wall as earnest or dispiriting. There is hope and beauty here too — and that’s something the scrapbookers can definitely get behind. After all, they’re archivists too.

Just before and throughout my time in graduate school I worked at a bookstore. It wasn’t a local bookstore. It was a big chain, and one of the pleasures of working in a big chain bookstore (there are a few) is recognizing just how many different types of readers are out there. Sure, chains are, to a certain extent, a bit soul-sucking. Chains don’t try to promote the same sense of self-satisfaction that local bookstores tend to do. Go into a local bookstore and you are suddenly part of a self-congratulatory community of people who think they are better than everyone else because they are such avid readers they seek out specialty books.You have your elite bookstores where you find specially brewed eight dollar cappuccinos and second-hand chairs that look a whole lot more comfortable than they actually are, as well as books that cost a heck of a lot more money than if you went to a chain. In these places you pay for the experience of feeling like a smart member of a smug elite. Another type of local bookstore you may have experienced is a “second hand” bookstore. People who go to these types of bookstores are also part of a smug elite, but they are, unfortunately, poor members of that elite. People who habitually visit these kinds of bookstores claim they love books so much they don’t even care what it is they are reading. They go in and walk out with a pile of ten books, each which has looked as though it has survived some kind of fire-the pages are yellowed, the covers are torn. This seems to somehow cement the fact that the books are important, that they’ve survived so many hardships, even though half of the books people walk out with in these stores are pretty terrible-–hardware manuals, guides to pregnancy from the ‘40s, outdated medical supply guides. But people who visit these types of bookstores are less interested in content than aesthetics (even though no one will admit to that).

Linneman Street.  Glenview, Illinois.  1976.  This was the locale of an eight year old boy’s perfect year.  The boy was me.  1976 was my Golden Year.

From informal discussions with friends and acquaintances and a theory I’ve been working on in the privacy and dusty rooms of my own head, I think everyone has had a Golden Year, a year which stands out as a particularly memorable one, a year so delicious in its entirety that at times of trouble when you’re an adult, your mind travels back to that year in order to calm and reassure yourself that no matter how shitty or troubling life gets, it is possible to have a perfect year. After all, your memory and senses and quiet smiles in the car when recalling that year tells you that it is entirely possible, because you had one.

I don’t want it to sound like I compare every year to that year, but when I ruminate about the topography of my life and the different psychic, physical and mental terrains I have passed through, over and under, bumped up against and retreated from, I do know that I once was an inhabitant of Atlantis and it was located in a particular space and time, Glenview, 1976, on a particular street, Linneman, and within the confines of a house I can still draw out with accuracy to a degree that any savant might envy. But, like Atlantis, the year is now buried beneath oceans of time.

I just spent a few days with a handful of cousins, now all, like me, into their forties.  They flew into Arizona from all over the country to help their parents, my uncle and aunt, surrogate parents in my heart, celebrate their 53rd wedding anniversary.  My cousins, unlike me, now all have families of their own and lead respectable lives.  All their children, my second cousins, were here and peppered the occasion with the kind of energy that quickly brought me back to the time in my life when I, too, was carefree.

My uncle and aunt now live in Arizona after having lived in Chicago a majority of their lives.  During our little family reunion at the end of December, standard recollections of shared childhood moments arose.  I remembered some things they didn’t and they recalled incidents which seem foreign to me.  Over games of Hearts, the memories came back with a clarity that surprised me with their specificity.

In 1976, my brother and I were dumped in Illinois while my parents were getting divorced.  We were unwilling participants in the clinical dissection of our four person family unit.  After 1976, my mother would become a summer visit, a nightly reason to cry myself to sleep for many years, nine months of phonecalls every single year, a woman living only through an inner strength I cannot now imagine exists, an organ removed from me that would be two thousand miles away, her in an apartment in Maryland wallpapered with sadness, my father, brother and I in a house in Scottsdale living, my dad often said, as The Three Musketeers.  Post-1976 was a family reorganization which I never quite negotiated.

Before 1976, The Year 1976 and All The Years After 1976.  This is how I have chaptered my life, into three parts.  Without my Golden Year, I’m convinced I would have never pushed through. 1976 somehow served, serves, to kick me along.

That year, my brother and I were welcomed into a house that was remarkably normal by anyone’s standards. It was no country club existence, no exotic paradise, no moneyed affair, no year to write about, really, but it was this:

• Paper routes where I learned that sometimes work is just work and it is cold and unforgiving and rote but it is your responsibility.
• An aunt and uncle who took us in as if we were their own and cemented in me the idea that love is sometimes just letting someone into your home for an indeterminate amount of time and giving them a regular place at the dinner table.
• Not seeing Jaws because my aunt had the common sense to not let an eight-year old boy be frightened to death.  I’ve still never seen the film and have avoided it just to keep the memory of someone being concerned for my safety alive in my mind.
• Six cousins who became like siblings to my brother and I by no choice of their own and welcomed us with objections that remain, if there were any, thankfully uncommunicated.
• Summer days so hot and humid that as many kids as could, would lay out sleeping bags on the floor of the air-conditioned and coolest room in the house, my uncle’s studio, puzzling ourselves on the floor and, when having to pee in the middle of the night, stepping gingerly through a maze of arms and legs.
• A basement laundry room so dank and constantly in use, I’m surprised the house didn’t sink into the wet, linty earth underneath.
• Buttermilk and the way it left a mucousy sheen on my uncle’s glass at the breakfast table and the joy with which he glugged it down.
• A long, thin one-car wide garage, designed by someone who must have chuckled to himself when he imagined a three car family.
• Haircuts given by my uncle, the artist, that I remember being observed by a stack of children’s eyes through the vertical slit in the doors of his studio.
• Family dinners that, because of space limitations, would sometimes be regulated by repeat-elbows-on-the-table offenders being looped over the arms with a restrictive chain that would hold your elbows firmly at your sides.  I still relish even this awkward eating situation, because there I was, firmly entrenched in family.
• Olga Korbut and Nadia Komeneci and the Summer Olympics, because some of my girl cousins were little gymnasts themselves and we all watched the gymnastics exhibition with a feeling of insider knowledge.
• Learning about the word ‘literal’, when my uncle asked us, ‘How much mashed potatoes do you want?’ and, when we said, ‘A little,’ receiving on our plate a dollop the size of a sucking candy, or, when asked how many peas and saying just a few, receiving three lonely green specks on our dinner plate. This always ended in the whole table laughing the kinds of laughs that I barely recall before or since.
• Girl cousins who slathered themselves in baby oil, slipped through a window in the hallway outside the room I shared with my brother and various boy cousins, and crisped themselves to adolescent tanned perfection.
• Hours of gin rummy at the top of the stairs with a revolving cast of opponents, hours that made me think card games are the perfect way for enemies and friends alike to find neutral ground.
• Showers in bathing suits from a hose attached to the side of the house with my uncle and cousins, showers so cold I shiver thinking about them now.
• A VW bus we’d all cram into to take road trips to Ottumwa, Iowa, to visit Grandma Sonia and be properly stuffed with food so old-country and delicious it would now warrant a cholesterol alarm.
• A doorjamb littered with the changing heights of so many kids.  Every eighth-inch from three feet to six feet was hashmarked and identified by name and dated.
• One of my cousins skilled feet walking on our backs, cracking them with a kind of precision that a practitioner of natural healing techniques would envy.
• Juggling shower time with military precision or having to suffer one with hot water that was gone three kids ago.
• Always, always, having someone to confide in because in a household of eight kids, there is no way in hell you can be at battle with all of them at the same time.   In a household of two, that’s not always possible.
• Lazy days marching through Sullivan’s field behind our house, picking weeds and sticking them in our mouths like we were in a Norman Rockwell painting.
• Boyhood crushes on my three girl cousins because they all struck me, with their primping and awareness of their own boy craziness, as an absolutely foreign and fascinating quilt of behaviors. They’ve all since grown into women as beautiful and smart and amazing as you’d ask for if given a choice of family.

Not all fireworks and amusement rides, but it was a solid time.  That was my Golden Year.  If I were granted wizard powers, I’d make sure every person on earth had at least one.

When Adile and I see each other for the first time in five years, our embrace is awkward. “I forgot how tiny you were,” she says to me. There is nothing specific I can point out about Adile, immediately, that has changed. My memory of her is distant and charged with sentimentality, an echo of her voice emblazoned on my brain, a silhouette impression in the back of my eyes. Big black curls cascade down her shoulders. She isn’t wearing glasses like she did in high school so her eyes stand out even more than usual. Her black eyeliner is thick like an Egyptian goddess. “I didn’t remember you were so blonde,” she says to me, touching my hair as if I am a little doll.

This year, I turned more inward. Since my Grandfather’s death, he became a kind of martyr figure within my family and, while my brother looked like him and actually spoke some Hebrew, I felt firmly that as the more liberal and adventurous sibling, I had a bigger stake in seeking him out. I imagined myself removing all elements of my past life, just as he did when he arrived in Havana, shaving off his beard, and speaking in Spanish, rather than Hebrew.

My friendship with Adile had always been similarly dreamy. We met when we were teenagers in high school and were artsy and irresponsible misfits, drawing, painting and writing our way through adolescence. Adile wrote comic strips highlighting the absurdity of high school life, with cheeky cameos of boys we liked, and a constant plot to see Radiohead live in concert.

We had a plan. To travel a capital a day throughout the Baltics. The first day Adile and I saw each other we sat outside in a café, which overlooked the skyline of Vilnius. We laughed and talked about how we used to be such angsty teenagers when we were younger. We talked about how much we had grown up, as if we weren’t entering a new phase of life we would look back on similarly ten years later.

Adile had respect for the older cultures. She was learning Persian. She had been to Iran. She told me details. The colors of food, the manner of dress, the skyline. Everything is exotic the minute it is far away from you. Unlike Adile, I had no respect for old traditions. I only liked new things. I hated looking back.