I thought for a moment. On most subjects, Mum was utterly fearless. You could try her with any thought and she would listen. Curiosity almost always conquered any natural anxiety or reticence she might have felt. So it was important to give her the same attention, to consider carefully just what she was saying. ‘Do you mean,’ I said after a minute, ‘in a real estate sense? Or in a sort of spiritual sense? Like a haunting?’
She gave me a withering look. ‘Real estate. The house might be difficult to sell if two people have died in it.’
I knew what she meant. I knew the people in the lane were aware she was dying; their kindness, and their quiet voices as they walked past the house, were testament to that. But I also knew that none of them had been here fifteen years ago, when Cath had died, and that perhaps none of them would be when Dad wanted to sell the house. Neighbourhoods were not what they had been. Houses that we still referred to as the Wilsons’ or the Browns’ had had three, four, five families come and go since we’d lived at home. I knew nobody would be thinking of Mum’s house as the house of dead ladies.
* * *
It was dark. I can’t seem to stress this enough. And around two or three in the morning I began to feel sick. Not just a bit dizzy, but wavering, wobbling, and with a thick feeling in my throat as though I was going to throw up. Oh god, I thought, I’ve got some sort of gastro. I’m going to be sick, I’m going to be sick. I had to get up and leave the bedside. I went into Mum and Dad’s room and lay down in the dark, my eyes so accustomed to it that the furniture stood out like bones in a crypt. I was flat on my back. My sister came to lie beside me and I said, ‘You can’t lie here. I have to be alone.’
If I could go back and change one thing about the way I managed my mother’s dying, it would be my tone. Not just the tone I used to my brother and sister and father, but the tone of my whole self. Early on I had decided that I would be the best at this. I was convinced I was the best. I would be the most capable. I would be the one who did not give way to tears when our mother was in distress. I kept to this tone throughout, and that night was the first night I began to notice that it was more than a tone. It was a thing, a clenching thing, an instrument. An instrument I used against myself. I was my own iron maiden, closing, driving the spikes of myself into myself. My friend Gabrielle Carey, whose mother had died some years before, looked searchingly at me one day and said, ‘Make sure you take some time to rest. Do something for yourself.’ That’s what I am doing, I thought, closing harder.
I lay next to my sister with the iron maiden closed over me, and my brother came into the room. ‘Are you okay?’ he said.
‘I’m sick,’ I said and made myself reach a few inches across the mattress to hold my sister’s hand. ‘I think I’ve got gastro or something.’
From the real sick room, the breaths, long, racking breaths. From the gallery, the long hum of the oxygen compressor.
‘You’re not sick. You’re tired. You’ve overdone it,’ said my brother.
He made me stand up, and led me down the gallery to the kitchen, where the lights were switched on. He took a little container of Valium out of his pocket and unscrewed its lid.
‘I don’t need that,’ I said. ‘I can’t afford to be sleepy.’
‘Have half,’ he said, and expertly snapped one in two. He handed it to me, ran me a glass of water. I put the pill in my mouth, drank the water. I stood looking at him, and he at me. Quite suddenly, I didn’t feel sick anymore.
‘Back we go,’ he said.
* * *
Mum was little, and now littler than ever, her body like a stick under the covers. She was yellow, her eyes sunk deep into her face, the sockets dark as though someone had used charcoal to colour them in. Her mouth was permanently half open, the lips stretched dryly across it. We kept applying pawpaw cream, but her lips had no softness or malleability. They were like the rubber seal of an old pickling jar. Her head was jerked sideways, at an angle that looked painful. Once in the previous days, I’d slid a hand under her neck and tried to straighten it to an angle that looked less uncomfortable, and she’d made a noise somewhere between a squawk and a shriek. I left it alone after that.
We sat in a half-circle around her bed, listening to her breath crackling and gargling and growling. She did not seem closer to death, or further away from it.
* * *
At three or four am, ten or at the most fifteen minutes after we called him, the doctor arrived, looking weary. He stood next to Mum. He held her arm, ran his thumb along it, looked her up and down. Then he reached over Mum’s face, slipped a sure hand behind her head, unhooked the tubing from around her ears, and took the oxygen prongs out of her nose.
We stared.
‘She doesn’t need it anymore,’ he said.
We had not seen Mum’s face without oxygen gear attached to it for more than a year. It looked – clean. The doctor stepped out into the gallery and switched the oxygen machine off.
Silence. The silence of a landscape over which a goods train has passed, dragging a line of carriages that it seemed would never end. Silence that carried the imprint of a sound so long heard it was as though you were still hearing it. Silence, except for the sound of Mum taking her dying breaths.
Nothing changed. We sat a long time, saying nothing, upright in our chairs but half sleeping, while the night solidified around us.
* * *
The first hint of light. I had been holding Mum’s hand with my eyes closed, and I thought I was asleep, but a sudden pulse shot through me, and I was speaking before I was looking, saying, ‘She’s dead.’
As I was standing up, leaning over her, I saw something leap up, a little light like a flame, from Mum’s face, perhaps from her mouth. Later I would think of the ignis fatuus, the little spurt of phosphorus from a marsh, gas that spontaneously combusts in air, once mistaken by travellers for a ghost. Then, although I have no religious belief, I thought of it as the last sign of Mum, escaping, disappearing. And suddenly everyone was crying except the doctor, who stood by her, looking into her dead face, the lips finally slack, the head dropped back, glancing at his watch, and smoothing the hair back from her head.
In a short time we composed ourselves, and it was getting light, and the doctor was writing the death certificate. As he left, he said to us, ‘I’ve seen a lot of deaths, and this is in the top five per cent.’ We were all grateful; we knew he was right, even though it had been so terrible. And later, we amused ourselves or lightened things when talking of Mum and her dying by giving each other the thumbs-up. ‘Top five per cent!’
There is more to tell: the dressing of Mum, the arrival of the gentle people from the mortuary with their fold-up trolley and the body bag, and me hiding in the bathroom so I didn’t have to see her being packed up. I drove home later that day. It was a great comfort to see my children and my husband. I didn’t yet know how hard it would be to force my iron maiden open, how much trouble lay in front of me. I went to bed early, exhausted.
* * *
Another important part of the exchange between Vikki and me is labour stories. She has three, I have two, and we have each had a miscarriage. We tell them over like beads, each hour carefully recalled.
I remember my friend Kate, whose first child was born six months before mine, looking me in the eye after her labour and saying, ‘Tigs, it’s terrible’ – a truth that was to be of great help to me.
After Mum died, I wanted to say the same thing to Vikki: ‘Vix, it’s terrible.’ But this was the only time I couldn’t tell her the details. Her mother, Brenda, having had the most painful and degrading treatment for her cancer, was becoming worse, not better. What to say to Vikki about those last weeks and days? I could only give advice. Get some sleep. Make sure to eat. One detail we did share in Brenda’s final week, both finding relief in laughter: each family had had an attack of nits on the deathbed. Both of us had alternated hand-holding and brow-wiping with nit-combing.
* * *
The day after Mum
died, I was woken at five am by the sensation of rising on water, as though I had been lying in the bed of an empty dam and it had suddenly filled. What was filling, I realised as I awoke, were my eyes, with tears; they brimmed over even before I knew where I was.
My husband woke too and turned his body to face mine. He laid his arm alongside me and pulled me over until I was lying across it, against his body. And in this way I told him every detail of that last night, pausing only to wipe away the tide of tears that kept rising and rising. It took an hour or more, while the children were still sleeping. I told him all that had happened, and he listened carefully. It was the single kindest thing anyone has ever done for me.
The worst that could happen
Three days shy of her fifteenth birthday, Alison Pope paused at the top of the stairs.
Say the staircase was marble. Say she descended and all heads turned. Where was {special one}? Approaching now, bowing slightly, he exclaimed, How can so much grace be contained in one small package? Oops. Had he said small package? And just stood there? Broad princelike face totally bland of expression? Poor thing! Sorry, no way, down he went, he was definitely not {special one}.
These are the first lines of the first story in George Saunders’ Tenth of December. In this story, ‘Victory Lap’, Alison Pope continues her descent of the stairs, talking to herself, and opens the back door to a man in a meter reader’s vest, a man who is a rapist and murderer, and who is there to rape and murder her.
George Saunders, the bestselling author of four collections of short stories, a novella, a novel, a children’s book and a collection of essays, began his professional life as a geophysicist, working for the Radian Corporation while he completed an MFA in creative writing at Syracuse University. His teachers included Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff. Saunders now teaches at Syracuse.
In the documentary Bad Writing (2011), made by an ex-creative-writing student in search of insight into his own execrable poetry and fiction, Saunders accuses himself of having a ‘big Hemingway boner’ when he began his degree. In another interview, he says he spent a year writing a ‘serious novel’ with all the skills he had learned at college, and those he had picked up from Hemingway, Jack Kerouac and Thomas Wolfe. When he had finished, he reread it and hated it. It was ‘horrible, incoherent’. One day at work, during a conference call, he began ‘neurotically scribbling out these Dr. Seuss-like poems, and when I got to the end, there was more energy in that than anything I’d written in the last three years. That was my breakthrough.’ He describes it as not so much a shift in genre as in ‘tonality’.
I first read Saunders’ work in 2000, when a teaching colleague gave me a copy of his second book of short stories, Pastoralia. I had just begun an uncertain apprenticeship in the short story – through teaching it. There is no question that Pastoralia turned this apprenticeship into a full-time job, a life’s work. It felt as though every short story I had read previously was a kind of nothing, a dribbling away of narrative, a useless entrainment of pretty words. Truman Capote tells us to ask of the short story: ‘After reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right.’ Saunders’ stories appeared to me as though I had never seen an orange, or only a poorly imagined one, a pale one, a painted one. Suddenly I knew what an orange was.
* * *
The classic Saunders story, like a classic Dr. Seuss, is most easily distinguished by the author’s use of language, where he is brilliantly at work on several levels. Saunders has what Thomas Pynchon described as ‘an astoundingly tuned voice’. His characters, for the most part struggling, under-educated people dreaming of better things, speak to themselves as clearly as they can, but their language is either mangled or colonised by another language: of the corporation, of advertising, of the self-help manual. More often than not they use polysyllabic words, incorrectly. No-one understands so well as Saunders that clarity of speech means clarity of thought, and that these things together mean power. Saunders’ characters are powerless but always hoping, incoherently, that this might change.
Alison Pope is a middle-class girl in a comfortable house, but like all teenagers she is trying, through a kind of self-narration, to arrange reality into something less banal, less awkward. Something kinder. Alone in the house, she is telling herself a story that will carry her right down the stairs. But because she is not completely in charge of her own language she has to keep pulling up, correcting herself. That wasn’t {special one} the first time, with the business about the small package – the story got out of control. So she begins again:
What about this guy, behind Mr. Small Package, standing near the home entertainment center? With a thick neck of farmer integrity yet tender ample lips, who, placing one hand on the small of her back, whispered Dreadfully sorry you had to endure that bit about the small package just now. Let us go stand on the moon. Or, uh, in the moon. In the moonlight.
This clearly isn’t {special one} either, and Alison has to keep returning and correcting, returning and correcting until she reaches the door, where a truly unkind reality awaits – one that she is absolutely unable to organise into something better. And here we switch to the point of view of Kyle, her teenage neighbour, whose mental space is colonised by the voices of his panic-stricken, control-freak parents. Kyle sees Alison in trouble, but he knows that to help will be to violate his parents’ countless ‘directives’, which preclude running in the yard, leaving the yard barefoot, and entering the Secondary Area – beyond the yard – without permission.
The state of Kyle’s household, with its directives and Traffic Logs and Work Points, is an example of Saunders’ magical ability to dream up little societies or near-future situations and furnish them with products and sets of rules that instantly cohere into a logical world. Nothing takes place in space, or during the Middle Ages, or on an earth transformed by climate change, but he is a world-builder par excellence, one of the most truly speculative writers of fiction at work today. When Saunders writes the future, he creates situations that feel a terrifying hair’s-breadth from our own. He seems not to be predicting so much as anticipating: a subtle difference.
Saunders’ biggest, widest target is capitalism, and at his best he makes you notice, as though you had only just noticed, how money and the art of selling things (and the helpless way we go on buying things) have come to govern everything we do. All of his characters are victims of capitalism in some way – from the teenage boy in ‘Jon’, from In Persuasion Nation (2006), who has a device fitted to the back of his neck that runs advertisements continuously through his brain and is given a constant supply of mood-altering drugs to help him ‘evaluate’ them, to the character in ‘Sea Oak’, from Pastoralia (2000), who is fired from his job as a waiter and stripper but shouts desperately, ‘It’s been a pleasure!’ as he leaves, because there is so little work available and he is ‘trying not to burn any bridges’. Endless satisfaction and instruction are to be received from Saunders’ lists of invented product and place names, television shows and theme parks. I like KnyghtLyfe™, a drug that enables its user to speak in the language of chivalry (necessary if you have a Medicated Role at a medieval theme park), and the television shows How My Child Died Violently and The Worst That Could Happen. This is the anticipatory impulse in Saunders’ writing – it is scarily easy for us to imagine drugs or television shows like these. He is always reminding us of what could be: in effect, the worst that could happen.
Saunders’ first published book, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996), received a lot of attention for the aforementioned elements – its interest in capitalism, alternative worlds and, most of all, theme parks – but also for its darkness. The words ‘dark’ and ‘bleak’ are used again and again in reviews of this collection, and indeed Saunders is unsparing when it comes to laying out grim futures, or non-futures, for his characters. It is very much a first book, in which we can se
e the author testing his skills, trying out his tricks. On the first page we hear about ‘Burn ’n’ Learn’, a company that arranges for you to tan in a fully stocked library where high school girls on rollerskates fetch books for you. Ideas proliferate in this collection, but the body count feels unnecessarily high and the endings are grisly and a little unwieldy, the author putting a gun to his characters’ heads out of what feels a bit like uncertainty.
Pastoralia contains some of Saunders’ best stories – most significantly ‘Sea Oak’ and the title story, in which a man has a job as a live-in caveman in an ancient-history theme park. The theme park (like all Saunders’ theme parks) is failing, the man’s child is sick, and his wife is sending him increasingly frantic faxes through the machine hidden in the back of the cave. Furthermore, his cavewoman colleague, Janet, is refusing to stay in character, because she too is having family and financial problems, and is too weary to keep up the charade. The caveman is also being asked to evaluate her performance, every day, by fax – in other words, to betray her. He tells us he is Thinking Positive and Staying Positive, but it is a struggle, and it is a struggle not resolved. We last see him still playing out his caveman role – ‘All afternoon we pretend to catch and eat small bugs’ – on the off-chance that a visitor will come by. Nobody does.
‘Pastoralia’ is nearly seventy pages long, allowing Saunders to expand his cast of characters. We get to meet Bradley, Janet’s hideous son, who turns up to threaten her with his future, swearing that he will begin ‘inadvertently misusing substances’ again if she doesn’t lend him money. We meet, by fax, Greg Nordstrom, who is under pressure to begin the Staff Remixing, and who needs our caveman to betray Janet. We also meet Marty and Jeannine, who have been Remixed out of their jobs running the Employees Only shop.
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