Requiem, Mass.

by John Dufresne

  I arrived at the Garden City’s airport sometime after midnight, after a stop in Great Falls, to where a former Requiem County man, David Brown, had moved a year earlier, changed his name to Nathaniel Bar-Jonah, butchered a ten-year-old boy, and fed him to the neighbors. A few months later when I read of Bar-Jonah’s arrest, I recall that night I stared out the airplane window at Great Falls, thinking this is where the Corps of Discovery faced eighteen miles of mosquitoes, gnats, and rattlesnakes on their portage over cactus-covered land and where Captain Lewis was attacked by a grizzly, a cat “of the tiger kind,” and a “buffaloe.” Lewis wrote in his journal, “It now seemed to me that all the beasts of the neighbourhood had made a league to distroy me…” Bar-Jonah wrote in his journal, Lunch is served on the patio with roasted child.

  I waited for the hotel shuttle and talked with a fellow traveler on his way to Polson. He told me we were standing in the banana belt of Montana. When I touched the door of the shuttle, I got a shock of static electricity. I checked in at the Edgewater Motel on the Clark Fork River, on the site, I was told, of what had been a famous poet’s house.

  THE DEAN of the College of Arts and Sciences tells me that his wife is from Requiem, the Kevin Bacon of cities, but he can’t tell me much of anything about salary (it’s negotiable), health insurance (a couple of your big firms), or tenure and promotion (it’s up to the department), which makes me wonder why I’m even talking to him. He tells me I’ll get a handbook that explains everything. He tells me his wife’s maiden name, but it’s not one I recognize from Requiem. I try to imagine his wife, and I see a university logo sweatshirt with a white lace collar sewn onto the neck. I see swollen knees and white sneakers. I see a floral print skort. The dean seems neither carefree nor careful. He seems pacific. He tugs at his knit tie. He runs his fingers along the edges of my file. He leans over the file and breathes as if the file is a pot of steeping tea and he’s trying to inhale the steam of its meaning. When I summon his diminished attention and ask about the benefits package, his eyes glair over like he’s developed nictitating membranes, and, in fact, he does look a little froggy. Squat, slick, smooth, and plushy. He looks sedated by the light slanting through the window. All in the handbook, he says.

  He smiles like he might have enjoyed being more helpful this morning, but I don’t have to tell you what that can lead to—more and more questions and answers, a chuckle or two, and then a cordial lunch at Front Street Pasta and Wraps, an eventual, inevitable friendship, invitations to dinner, an exchange of holiday cards, family trips to Glacier. Life gets terribly roiled and scrambled very quickly. The dean shifts in his chair, leans back, folds his arms, glances at his watch, gazes at his telephone, asks if I have any further questions. I say, How do you like Montana? He twists his class ring, says, It’s not for everyone.

  HILLARY AND I order more Bob Evans coffee. I tell her how I thought the reading and the fiction workshop with the students at her alma mater went quite well. After the workshop I walked the Hellgate Canyon Trail and then went to the UC for a bagel and a Diet Dr Pepper at Soups and Such. I bought lip balm, eye drops, saline nasal spray, throat lozenges, and hand lotion at the bookstore and then walked to the English Department. The man at the next Bob Evans table tells whomever it is he’s talking to on his cell that he’s on his way to the La-Z-Boy Gallery right now. Almost there. Need to hang up before I wreck.

  The English chair can barely speak. I lean forward, turn my good ear to his voice. Mostly he nods at everything I say. Apparently, yes, there is an adjunct slot for Annick in the theater department and, yes, the local public schools are exemplary, and, yes, the salary is competitive and is commensurate with experience and publication. Apparently, anything is possible in Grizzlyville. The English chair is more forthcoming than the dean, but he is not a bundle of information, and he is without enthusiasm. He’s pleasant enough, if not effusive. But he seems dazed, like a bear who’s stirred too early from hibernation. I wonder if this is some Zen-like, unitive, null state that he has achieved, the altogether everywhere, or if it’s emotional collapse and cognitive resignation. Either way it resembles senility. He keeps the lights off and the blinds shut in his office. He pats the pocket of his fleece vest, takes out a memo pad, flips to a blank page, clicks the push button on his ballpoint pen with his thumb, and writes himself a note. I squint to make it out. The office is so hot and dry it hurts to swallow. He closes the memo pad, clicks the pen. I feel like my intercellular substance is drying up, the walls of my cells are puckering, my body’s shutting down. I’m losing my will. Crust is building up on my nasal septum. The thing is I want to like this man who’s retying his thin and scraggly gray hair into a ponytail with a maroon scrunchy. He adores Blake, after all. (“Energy is eternal delight.”) He has presented a paper on the violation of boundaries in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. He likes Blake and Wordsworth and Yeats. To what then do I attribute his languor? Maybe there’s trouble at home. He finds it difficult to concentrate. Maybe his wolfhound, Albion, is having seizures due to an astrocytoma on his frontal lobe. Surgery’s out of the question, I’m afraid. And what with his arthritis, the sweet old dog can barely walk.

  But perhaps it’s not domestic distress at all. Perhaps the English chair is feeling sorry for me and embarrassed for himself because he is privy to what I will soon find out, and he knows he should never have agreed to dragging me 2,340 miles across the country for this dog-and-pony show. There are—I’m told by another candidate, just so I know what’s going on—five candidates for the job. Three are in-house. One is the sister of the director of the creative writing program. (And another dated a girl from Requiem when he was in prep school in Connecticut.)

  IN THE corridor, the candidate who spilled the beans, lifted a corner of the veil, unmasked the harlequins, introduces me to Hokey Mokey, the Ginsu poet. (He’s a knife that needs no sharpening.) I shake his hand. Hokey Mokey, I think. Where have I heard that name before? Hokey Mokey’s handshake is limp and thumbless, his fingers folding like a contessa’s. He ogles my unruly hair when he says he is so looking forward to the faculty interview at five. I tell him I have to hurry to meet Realtor Sharri for the real estate tour. Where do you live? I ask him. Manhattan. When you’re in town, I mean.

  The man on his way to the La-Z-Boy Gallery orders sausage pinwheels with his poached eggs. I ask the waitress for the time. Nine-ish. Hillary says Hokey Mokey must be new. Sharri drives down Stephens, and I see that the comic-book store is having a Halloween Day Price Massacre. And the French bistro on Higgins, For Crepes Sakes, will be hosting a Miss Ooh La La Contest. The whole idea of the real estate tour seems cynical and fraudulent. I tell Sharri I’m not likely to get the job, but I would like to see the town if she wouldn’t mind. She scolds me. Not with that attitude, you won’t get the job. I tell her they’ll likely hire a local, and she’ll be out a commission. Sharri says she can’t live her life thinking negatively.

  She wants to get an idea of where to look and asks what size house I own now. I tell her I rent a house. I’ve never owned one. I have failure written all over me; I can feel it. She explains to me how I am being fiscally foolish, but the car is so hot that I’m falling asleep. We drive up the Rattlesnake, down Pattee Canyon, through Linda Vista. I want to confess all of my incompetence. I don’t know what to do in case of emergency, Sharri. I can’t solve for x. I have no savings account, no 401(k), no investments, no IRA. I can’t hit a curve, and I can’t operate the DVD player. When I point out a house I like, a Craftsman bungalow not far from the university, Sharri is forthright enough to suggest that this particular school district may not be what I’m looking for. I have no kids, Sharri. The Hmong, she says. The Belarus. What about them? I say. Refugees.

  WE ASK the man eating his sausage pinwheels for the time. He wipes yolk from his chin with his fingers, holds his wrist toward us. Nine twenty-five. Hillary says we should pay the bill and leave for school. She asks me how the faculty interview went, and I tell her how the couple of dozen profe
ssors—all, with a single Asian exception, white—sat at the seminar tables arranged along the walls of the classroom, somberly attired in that starched and creased but casual manner, all inexplicably well coiffed, thanks to some secret cowboy mousse, while I slumped in my chair with my crappy flyaway hair and my itchy, bloodshot eyes and my cracked and bleeding lips, breathing through my mouth, and my new interview shirt (on sale at Marshalls) made me look bloated and pale, dangerous and dyspeptic, and a bearded critical theorist said, So tell us why you want this job, and I told him, I’m not sure I do. (And this was where an adverb could have come in handy. “I’m not sure I do, actually,” would have made all the difference.) I’m here to find out, I said. Well, that set off a flurry of scribbles. Fair enough, he said.

  I had meant to be honest, but I know I sounded arrogant and flip. Still, the English professors smiled collegially and maintained their polite demeanor except for Mr. Hokey Mokey, who squirmed in his seat and folded his hands each time he spoke. He repeated everything I said and then asked me if I really meant it: You contend that a plot is necessary in a short story. Did you really mean that? Why else would I have said it? Did you really mean to imply that fiction is at least as well written as poetry? Not that it is, but that it ought to be. And I didn’t imply it, I said it. And you honestly mean it? That’s why I said it. That’s ludicrous. With all due respect, Professor Hokey Mokey, fiction has to do everything poetry does, plus tell a story. Hokey Mokey brushed a lash from his eye, yawned, and smiled. I watched to see if he put the lash on the back of his hand.

  I HAVE three shots of vodka at the Ox with the candidate who let the cat out of the bag before I go to dinner at Shadows Keep (nouvelle American—no kab yob [pronounced kai-yaw], no draniki) with the Director Whose Sister, etc., and with Hokey Mokey and his betrothed, and with a Deconstructionist and his wife. Before I even get to taste my first pan-fried oyster (in Montana! what was I thinking?), Hokey Mokey drops his pococurante pose, points his knife at me, and demands to know why he was not hired two years ago for the poetry position at my university.

  Oh, you’re that Hokey Mokey, I say. Always nice to put a face to a name. Hokey Mokey’s intended cradles her teacup in both hands and stares into her white Darjeeling. Sometimes she wishes her honeybunch would temper his badgerly ways. But isn’t that why she loves him, after all? The Deconstructionist rests his fork, prongs down, on the edge of his plate. His wife sips her blush. The Director Whose Sister, etc., pats her mouth with her napkin, and suddenly I hear John Denver singing “Country Roads,” and I think maybe we’re experiencing a divine intervention here, or it’s a short circuit in my tinnitus, but then I realize it’s the unobtrusive Shadows Keep sound system.

  All eyes are on me, and I wish there were no here here, wish I were on the watery planet Urizen in the pinwheel galaxy Los, where poems are written in foam and the people have a word for feeling like you’ve been strapped to the knife-thrower’s wheel of death. I really want to know, the impalement artist says. Did you find someone who wrote crime poetry? Well, Hokey Mokey, we didn’t like your lugubrious and self-regarding poems of po-mo disconnection and ponderous desolation, didn’t like your ironic skepticism and fashionable obscurantism, but still we were willing to overlook all that, so we gave you the telephone interview and asked you what you thought of Kentucky, and you laughed and called your students hicks, and the interview was over. Two of my colleagues walked out of the room, one (the one from Kentucky) holding his fingers over his nose. We found you pompous and, frankly, more than a little creepy. Dickhead was, I believe, the popular assignation.

  That’s what I wanted to say. What I did say: The truth is, Hokey Mokey, that we were under some unstated, but quite apparent, administrative pressure to diversify the faculty, if you catch my drift, and we had an in-house candidate who seemed to fit the bill, and we didn’t think it fair to ask you, a white man, to fly to Miami to jump through hoops and then send you home with false hopes. And with that I ordered another Ketel One martini. I smiled collegially, raised my glass. Here’s to Grizzlyville! I said. Here’s to the sunless city!

  THAT NIGHT at the Edgewater I dreamed that I lost my real job in Florida, where Diane DiPietro used to teach, because I’d applied for this bogus job in Montana, Montana, the Glory of the West!, and so I started the Famous Writers School, Inc. in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where my intense, brilliant, and acerbic friend James grew up and which is 477 miles southeast of Flin Flon.

  “If you can write this sentence—‘It is universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’—then you might have what it takes to become a famous, respected, and handsomely remunerated writer. Act now! Send for the Famous Writers Aptitude Test. If you test well, or show other evidence of writing proficiency, you may enroll. Write in your spare time in the comfort of your home! Writing today offers a life of financial reward, personal recognition, and the freedom to live as you please!” Among those who took the aptitude test was one Mr. H. Mokey, and I wrote back to him explaining the difference between articulation and accomplishment and suggesting that the only way he’d ever be famous would be to slaughter a colony of Montana Hutterites. And that’s when I woke up.

  The Hmong believe that we are born with three souls. When we die, one goes to the land of the ancestors, one is reincarnated, and one stays in the grave. The one that goes to the land of the ancestors collects its placenta, climbs the heavenly stairs in thirteen days, and crosses a salty river and a bitter spring. The journey home is a lonely one. Forty thousand Hmong died fighting for the United States in the Vietnam conflict. When the U.S. lost the war, the Hmong lost their homeland. One hundred and thirty thousand of them fled to the United States, three hundred or so to western Montana. Their journey to America across the great salty river to the Bitterroot was a lonely one.

  Hillary’s brother fought in Vietnam with Charlie Company, Eleventh Brigade, Americal Division. He was killed on the Ides of March, 1968, and his death may have precipitated the slaughter of 350 unarmed civilians—the size of five Hutterite colonies—at My Lai the next day. Praying children were shot in the backs of their heads by American fighting men. Women were gang-raped before they were executed. Elderly peasants were hacked to death with bayonets. (My Lai is 8,389 miles west-southwest or east-southeast of Requiem, Mass., where M16s were manufactured at Harrington & Richardson Arms Company.) I fell back to sleep and to dreams where I was once again the dean of the Famous Writers School, and we were off on our Semester at Sea, aboard the good ship Jane Austen somewhere off the coast of Winnipeg, and in my welcoming address to those students who doubt that stories need plots I quoted the Hutterites (who conscientiously object to war): You are either on the ark or off the ark.

  IF PLANCK length is the smallest measurement that has any meaning, then we have to say that the universe came into existence when it was already 10-43 seconds old, and we can never know what happened before (in this sense a meaningless adverb) that moment or understand in what sense the universe came to be 10-43 seconds old. How could that have happened outside of time? The universe is the effect; there is no knowable cause. Is there then a purpose to existence? We’ll never know. Are space and time independent of their contents? In what matrix do space and time exist? Why precisely three spatial dimensions? Why did the Big Bang happen? What is the fate of the universe? When does the present become the past? How many stars in the sky? Why do we wonder? Why do we sing? Why do we laugh? Why do we need to die?

  WHY DO we feel the need for sausage pinwheels? Why do we eat them? The opposite of Planck length would seem to be the time it takes for the phlegmatic Grizzlyville University English Department to tell me I didn’t get the job. I didn’t get the job, of course. You knew that already. I’d give the job to my sister, too. But I didn’t hear the news from them. Not a grunt. Not a peep. Not an official letter of regret on the insouciant dean’s own linen stationery. Not an e-mail from the complaisant English chair. Chalk it up to that legendary Old
West reticence from the last good place, I suppose. Less is more, they figured, so then nothing is everything. The opposite of Planck length is never. And I never got the handbook that explains it all.

  IN CLASS at the Methodist university, the students sweetly, shyly confess that they don’t quite get my story. It doesn’t seem to have a plot, they say. They suggest an honest-to-God knife for starters, instead of a chimera. They specifically suggest a twelve-inch coffin-handled Bowie knife with a clip blade. They suggest gushing blood and oozing gray matter and a woman who will not die. They suggest a puddle of lungs on the kitchen floor. When they want to know about irony, I tell them about my friend Shane Ferrie who got drafted during the Vietnam War and made up his mind to flee to Canada rather than kill another human being, rather than go to jail. But his fiancée, Margaret Mary Foley, told him that she could not marry a coward, and so Shane found himself in the Army in Phu Loi, a bit north of Saigon. While he was in-country, Margaret Mary took up with an antiwar activist named Bliss, became involved with the movement, and eventually married Mr. Bliss.

  WHAT HAPPENED to Shane? These days he works on a surveying crew when he does work, and keeps a journal of every beer he drinks, every calorie he ingests, every woman he romances. In this way, he tells me, he maintains control of his life. Margaret Mary and her activist are now Republicans. He’s the governor’s press secretary. What if, back then, Shane and Margaret Mary had moved to Manitoba? To Tolstoi, Manitoba, let’s say. Tolstoi for the beauty of the tall-grass prairie. Tolstoi because they were treated so kindly by the couple at the Chinese restaurant where they had stopped for lunch. Tolstoi because it was so much more affordable than Winnipeg. If Shane had moved to Manitoba back then, I’d be visiting him today instead of avoiding him. We’d bundle up and take a walk after supper out to the Ukrainian cemetery, and there among the Antonychuks, the Biallys, and the Dutkas, he’d confess to me that now that his kids had moved away, he understood the shame of the older generation in town, the shame of being unable to build a community that your children would not leave. A way of life is dying here, he’d tell me, but this is my home, he’d say, and I feel blessed.