“I’m crying!”
“Yes.”
“I wish Cinnabar didn’t die!”
“I know. I wish she didn’t die, too.”
“I wish she didn’t die!”
“I know.”
Sobbing, head bent close over the body across her lap, red-gold hair brushing Cinnabar’s red-gold fur. “But I love her so much!”
And there it is, the understory, source of horror and romance and suspense and mystery and science fiction and fantasy, the reason we keep writing and reading about death: I love her so much! I wish she didn’t die! But she dies anyway.
After a while, when the time seems right, I say, “I’m going to take Cinnabar’s body back outside now, honey. You need to say good-bye to her.”
Without hesitation, joining herself fully with this story, she keens, “Good-bye, Cinnabar! Goodbye!” and lets the body go.
Later she will take me aside and confide, “Baba! I really, really, really understand ‘die’!”
When I relate this story to someone who wasn’t there, someone who doesn’t know this child, I’m compelled to add the ironic comment, “If that’s so, she’s a better woman than I am.” But I know what she means. Or, what she means when she says “I understand” intersects somewhere with what I mean when I say, “I understand,” and together we have a story.
Stories are masks of God.
That’s a story, too, of course. I made it up, in collaboration with Joseph Campbell and Scheherazade, Jesus and the Buddha and the Brothers Grimm.
Stories show us how to bear the unbearable, approach the unapproachable, conceive the inconceivable. Stories provide meaning, texture, layers and layers of truth.
Stories can also trivialize. Offered indelicately, taken too literally, stories become reductionist tools, rendering things neat and therefore false. Even as we must revere and cherish the masks we variously create, Campbell reminds us, we must not mistake the masks of God for God.
So it seems to me that one of the most vital things we can teach our children is how to be storytellers. How to tell stories that are rigorously, insistently, beautifully true. And how to believe them.
Chapter 7
Telling Tales
When I was a boy I had no way to tell my stories, or at least no audience I judged as safe. But I told them anyway. I lied. I learned to make stuff up. I had always been a storyteller with an audience of one, telling myself tales as far back as I could remember. I used them to explain myself to myself. I used them to find my way through a world I could not even begin to understand. I used them to describe the mysteries around me. I used them to create a future for myself, when I did not really believe I had a future.
Having children someday did not figure into any of these tales. Here my much-vaunted imagination met its match. I could not imagine myself in any real relationship, much less a relationship with children. I’d have been thrilled to foresee that one day I would use Story to explain the world to my own children, but it was not an idea I could entertain at the time.
Instead I made up stories about why I was who I did not want to be:
Hideout
Above the garden was a place that scared me. It was wild, like a set piece out of one of those Tarzan movies where natives were pulled off the path by things that lived underneath. I wasn’t supposed to go there. “You stay outta there, boy, you hear me?” My father would be furious. Sometimes I wondered if this choked, overgrown place was my father’s hideout, and what I ought to be afraid of was stumbling on him hiding out there. I was twelve, too old to be afraid of such things and too young not to be.
And so, of course, I couldn’t for the life of me stay away. I raced my bike past the overgrown lot, feeling—though I didn’t know the old story then—like the boy Gautama passing the dark wood. Nothing jumped out at me with sticky claws, and my father didn’t find out, though our house as usual felt on the verge of bursting into flame.
The next day I stopped on the road and waited. I held my breath, let it out in a whistle, hummed that stupid country tune that was on the radio all the time and I couldn’t get out of my head. To give the impression I couldn’t care less, I busied myself with a low front tire, a loose shoelace. But whatever was in the woods was better at this couldn’t-care-less business than I would ever be. It wasn’t going to come out. I would have to go in.
I didn’t know what to do about my bike. Left along the side of the road, it might be a clue for a search party if I disappeared, which was a good thing. But it would also tip off my father. For four days I rode past, hoping a plan would occur to me, hoping the woods themselves or whatever was hiding in them would decide for me. Finally, I walked the bike a little way off the road, laid it down, camouflaged it with branches and brush, and, feeling mournful and guilty, left it there while I went on in.
There was something exciting and disturbing about the fact that it wasn’t really a woods but a town lot allowed to run wild. The pale, ringed cuts of the upended trees were human-made, smooth ones by a person with a chainsaw, jagged ones by a person with an axe. The brush hadn’t piled up like that by itself, had been purposely cleared and collected. I found no actual footprints, but a sort of path that had to have been made by feet that must have been human.
I followed the path. The light in here was gray-green. On the road behind me cars went by, not enough to be called traffic but reminding me both that I wasn’t alone and that I hadn’t escaped. An airplane buzzed overhead and from habit I looked up, though the tree canopy and the cloud cover meant I had no hope of seeing either the plane or its trail. Something that could have been either a bird or a squirrel chittered. Vines snaked around my ankles, reminding me to keep an eye out for snakes, but I didn’t see any. Off to my right was a bush with red berries that might be poisonous. Off to my left was a hut, mounded with kudzu that had been cut back for a window and a door. Inside the hut was a boy about my own age, sitting cross-legged on the dirt floor.
“Hey. You’re trespassing.”
“Says who?”
“Says me. This is our property.”
“Oh, yeah? So?”
“So where do you come from?”
There was no answer. To fill the silence, I pointed toward the farms back over the hill where I’d explored despite Dad’s inexplicable rules. The boy just grinned.
“You new around here? I’ve never seen you in school.” To be honest, I didn’t pay much attention to any of the kids in school. If I didn’t look at them, maybe they wouldn’t look at me.
The boy didn’t confirm or deny anything. Over the next week or so, we didn’t tell each other our names, but we played Tarzan and Jungle Jim and Robinson Crusoe—the boy was darker than any other kid in town and volunteered for the “native” parts, once the story had been explained to him, particularly the reason his name was “Friday.”
Mostly we played Pirates. The boy claimed to be a “Chinee” Pirate, which was pretty exotic. “Hey, we could be professional pirates when we grow up.”
“How would we do that?”
“If you stay a pirate until you’re an adult, that automatically makes you a professional.”
“Huh?”
“Well, maybe I can’t do that. But I bet you could.”
“I don’t know about that,” the other boy protested, but with a dreamy smile.
Almost right away, I started feeling sorry for the boy in the hut. He was always there, waiting, as if he didn’t have any place else to go. He was always wearing the same torn and dirty blue-and-yellow-striped shirt and brown shorts and holey sneakers with no socks. Maybe his parents didn’t care about him or maybe they just weren’t strict, or maybe he didn’t have parents, which would be a great mystery.
“Don’t let my dad find you.”
“Why not?”
“He hates Jews. He had this officer in the Navy.”
“Yeah? So?”
“That’s all he’s ever said about the war. Oh, and one time his ship was hit by a kamikaze
and afterwards he found his friend’s arm all bloody and with the watch still attached.”
“Wow.” After a momentary silence to appreciate this horror in the edgy prurient way of twelve-year-old boys, he demanded, “What makes you think I’m a Jew?”
I said, not entirely to the point, “He doesn’t know what to make of negroes.”
“Make?”
“No telling what he’d do with a Chinee pirate. Probably call the sheriff. Maybe I could vouch for you.”
“What’s ‘vouch’?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, maybe you could.”
I started sneaking food to the boy in the hut; there was always plenty of leftover fried chicken in the refrigerator.
Clothes would have been too obvious; my mother would have noticed when she did the wash. Besides, I had the feeling if I pushed too hard the boy would leave and maybe not come back. I so much didn’t want that to happen.
But one day it happened anyway, of course. On my way to school I stopped to give the boy in the hut one of the Karo-syrup-on-white-bread sandwiches our mother put in our lunches that nobody would trade for, and the hut was so empty it almost wasn’t a hut anymore, except for a couple of the boy’s comic books I would hide away in secret places in my various rooms for years. They would somehow vanish, and I would forget their titles. For the rest of my life I would sorely wish I still had them.
My parents’ stories about their own lives were fragmentary, plots truncated, motivations unclear. Melanie describes much the same experience with the stories her own parents allowed her about their lives.
Both our mothers had many suitors. My father once rode a motorcycle into a relative’s living room. When another boyfriend tried to talk my mother out of marrying my father, her defense was that the wedding invitations had already been printed. My father spent their wedding night drinking; my mother spent it weeping.
“So why did you do that?” I’d ask. “Then what happened?” They’d just shake their heads, or tell me they didn’t know, or ignore the question altogether.
Melanie says she didn’t ask about motivation or what came next. She just took everything in and, when she got past the need to spurn it all, she filled in the gaps.
So we were both invited—compelled—to make stuff up out of our own imaginations and our observations of the world. This, of course, is where the act of creation happens, at this juncture of experience and imagination; it may be where reality happens, too. Many of the bits we invented seemed highly unlikely, but the details were nice:
Melanie’s mother frequented a candy store on the corner. At various times her favorite candies were licorice, peppermints, and nonpareils.
My mother once had a hat of rose-colored silk. When sunshine filtered through it in a certain way, her face glowed.
Melanie’s father once wrote a long poem about God, with precise if occasionally strained rhyme and rhythm. He worked on it for months. When it was finished, it pleased him. He shredded it and scattered the pieces like ashes into the Monongahela River.
My father had a hideout back in a hollow, a green and private place with trees. He stopped going there at about the same time he started drinking, when he was much too young.
Now I’m at an age when I wonder what my kids and grandkids will remember about me. What stories will they come away with after I’ve thrown all this material at them?
“He sang silly songs in the car.”
“He put on a maroon velvet wizard’s cap and he had something he called a magic wand and he exorcised the monsters from under my bed.”
“When he was a kid he had an imaginary friend who lived in a hut in the woods. I don’t know why he did that. I don’t know what happened next. Did he ever tell you what happened next?”
We each have our own stories to tell. My children’s stories—even their stories about me—are not my stories, and my stories—even about them—are not theirs. I try to remember that when, despite or because of all the love we have for each other, our lives begin to separate.
Stalked By God
One night when he was ten years old, he saw God. Worse, God saw him.
Over the course of a single week when he was ten years old, he saw God.
Since he was ten years old and saw a face in the clouds—silver hair, flowing beard, eyes so full of rage he thought he might burst into flame; your basic Old Testament God, because that’s all he knew—since then, he has seen faces in everything.
The moon in southwest Virginia is sometimes as big as ten houses and ripe enough to fall. This night, when he was ten years old, complicated black clouds hung in front of the moon, letting light out in slivers and crescents. The face they revealed was dark and brooding and angry, unquestionably God’s face. A faint breeze animated the face just enough to show him it was real.
When he couldn’t take it anymore, he went inside and hid in his bed. Bad enough that the face of God had been there and he’d been the only one able to see it—far worse that God had noticed him.
The next morning, passing by the neighbors’ house as he did every day, he saw a face in the screen door. He stared at it, realized it must be some sort of shadow cast by someone standing a foot or so back, politely said, “Hello.”
No response. He walked closer and saw that it was a pattern in the screen, as if someone had stood there looking out for so many years the oils in his skin had discolored the mesh in a pattern to match his face. The thing seemed pretty improbable but it also felt scientific, so he decided to go with it.
Later that day, around sunset, he was looking at a tree in the side yard when suddenly, with a shock, he was seeing thousands of small faces etched into the bark. They all had reddish eyes and pink halos around jaws and cheeks. The tree crawled with their anger. Suddenly he knew all these little faces were about to start singing, and if he heard their song he would never be able to get it out of his head. He got away from there as fast as he could.
That night as he was washing up for bed, he saw faces in the translucent patterned marbling on the pale green bathroom tile. Hundreds and hundreds of faces.
In the mirror the next morning he found faces in his own face, dozens of faces in the creases of his skin, surrounding the moles, tucked up onto his eyelids.
This went on for days. He found faces in the wallpaper, in the grain of the wood floors, in the rugs, in the soap scum near one corner of the sink, woven into every bedspread in the house.
He became convinced that the only possible explanation for all these faces was an answer to his other major question of the time: what happens to us when we die? The world couldn’t just forget all about us, could it? It had to have a way of making a physical remembrance, a memorial, so it must have a way of taking pictures, but maybe they were more than pictures, maybe the images were ever so slightly alive. Maybe they were aware.
He worked out this cosmology in some detail. The faces shrank and the awareness diminished as time wore on. So the face in the screen was someone who had died very recently, and the tiny faces in the tree were ancient, the spark beginning to leave them, and maybe that was why they became so angry when they saw him.
And the faces in the tile had been gone so long they probably had no spark left. To see them was like looking at skeletons.
“You’re getting to be such a big boy. Too big now to sleep in the same bed with your brothers.”
“Why?”
“You sleep in here now.”
“In the guest room?”
“You sleep in here. But you keep all your toys and clothes and things in your brothers’ room, okay?”
“Why?”
“Because this is the guest room.”
“But we never have guests.”
“Never can tell. You sleep in here now but it’s not your room. It’s the guest room. You’re getting to be such a big boy.”
Always afraid of the dark, even on the hottest summer nights needing protective strata of sheet and blanket and quilt, now he st
ayed awake all night trying to interpret the familiar and alien noises that filtered through from both outside and inside. In his blood, in the air moving through his body, were voices and almost voices, no words, a beautiful abstract vocal music immobilizing him with anxiety. Maybe these were the voices of the dead. Maybe that’s where you went after you died, into other people’s blood, other people’s lungs. And that’s where you lived until everything everywhere ended. Hands over ears, he listened to the voices in his blood, until he couldn’t stand it anymore and pulled his hands away, which meant that now he had to listen to the wind’s monologue and the trees’ conversation and the dark man at his window scratching and mumbling and scratching again.
Finally, in the middle of the night, he began screaming. His parents came. From the way they looked at him and asked questions, it was obvious he scared them a little. They thought he was screaming because of the wind and the branches against the window, and because there was something broken in him.
But he was screaming because he’d understood how alone he really was, and however much they might love him, it would never be enough.
However much he would one day love his children—and he would love them immeasurably—it would never be enough, either. That’s another of the dilemmas inherent in parenthood: we are required to love our children in every conceivable and not-quite-conceivable way, without measure or limitation, and still it will never be enough.
Toward the end of my second short stay in a mental hospital—
Do you trust me enough now to believe what I have to say? Or has my credibility with you been destroyed by this disclosure that as a young man I took a break from college for a far more specialized education in one of the east coast’s finest asylums?
Writers worry about credibility. But at this stage in my life I have other things to worry about.
Toward the end of my second incredibly brief stop in a rest home for weary mental travelers, my doctor told me I played the walk-on role of mental patient better than most. I think it was his way of saying it had been a useful part for a time, but now I needed to move on.
The Man on the Ceiling Page 10