Anti Life

by Allen Kuzara

  It’s hard to say exactly how long it took to create this book. Was it two years of writing, fifteen years of mental gestation, or—as some might philosophize—my whole life up until this moment? I can say, however, that the catalyst, the thing that made this work-in-potential manifest itself is easier to pinpoint. It all started with a child’s birth, a drunk driver on Christmas, and a fraudulent insurance agent.

  Back in 2013, things were going alright. They weren’t the best, they weren’t the worst—was that a half-hearted nod to Dickens? (How pretentious!) We’d all survived the end of the Mayan calendar the previous year and were trying to decide for ourselves if the Great Recession was really turning around or not.

  Late that spring, my wife and I found out we were having our second child. We were excited; that is until we discovered she had a rare blood disorder and would need to be under the supervision of the hospital’s high-risk unit. Weekly and biweekly appointments ensued as we nervously awaited the big day. After a week in the hospital, I’m grateful to say, she came home, and mother and child are both healthy and happy today.

  A happy ending, you say. Not so fast. Our insurance company at the time pulled a fast one. Though we’d confirmed with them multiple times that the birth would be covered, they gleefully—it seemed—found a technicality with the diagnostic coding that some doctor whom we were never able to track down placed on our chart during the delivery and suddenly—fast forward a couple months—there were $23,000 worth of medical bills coming in the mail.

  And to make it worse, a drunk driver plowed into our legally parked car on the street on Christmas Day that year (my daughter was born on Thanksgiving.) It was totaled, and the driver couldn’t find a spare dime to save her life (except to buy more beer, that is.)

  We were sunk. Gone in an instant were our savings, and it became clear to us both that our modest incomes weren’t going to put a dent into this debt, let alone replace our car and replenish our savings, anytime soon.

  I wanted to hide, to let someone else come along and fix things. I was a loser, and I had plenty of reasons to be bitter about my circumstances. How could I have anticipated this? How many other people had to do the wrong thing in what seemed like a concerted effort to put me here?

  Writing this more than four years later, I still have to fight back tears when I recall those days. It’s bad enough worrying that your infant child might die or that she will have long-term developmental problems. The additional financial woes and the chaos that surrounded us were too much.

  Strangely, I don’t remember throwing myself a pity party or procrastinating endlessly as my prior track record would have predicted. I think it was because it was so intense, so serious seeming that I found it difficult to delude myself the way I often had. This time I girded the loins, said some prayers, looked myself in the mirror and decided it was time to fight back, however I could and despite the odds.

  I called and emailed everyone I knew, trying to drum up more work. And by the summer of 2014, I had pieced together several part-time jobs (seven of them, technically) that would all culminate in working around seventy hours and driving nine-hundred miles per week for the following year.

  During that summer, right before work was about to get super hectic, I had cleaned out my desk at home. In, on, and around it was about five years of papers, many representing fool-hardy plans for how I was going to escape the rat race and start a fruit orchard or raise bees for honey or tap maple trees and sell maple syrup or, or, or…Don’t laugh. I know how childishly naive these things sound. But so does writing a book until you actually do it.

  So, during this cleansing process where I had to actively throw away dreams and reminders of why I’d gotten myself in such a bind in the first place, I came across something very old: papers I’d hand-written the summer after I graduated from high school.

  There I was, thirty-two years old, staring at scribblings of an idea for a novel that I had hoped to someday write. The papers were fifteen years old, and the realization hit me that if I couldn’t find the time to write in fifteen years, it was unlikely I ever would. For some reason, this dream, these papers, weren’t so easy to toss out.

  I was about to enter the hardest year of my life, and I knew it. Maybe I wanted something small, something secret to hang onto that would keep my soul from smothering to death. I don’t know which absurd, audacious muse spoke to me then, only that he put his hooks in deep. Deep enough that I’m writing this to you today. Deep enough that I have five more novels awaiting edits and book cover designs along with seventeen short stories on file.

  I didn’t have time to sit at a desk and write, so I used a rinky-dink RadioShack cassette recorder and made notes in the car while driving. It was crude, discombobulated, and didn’t produce the best novel ever written. (Hey, unless you’re Harper Lee or J. D. Salinger, your first book’s probably not your best work.) But it got the story down enough that I could put it on paper the next year when I had a better job with better hours (and more pay, I’m happy to say.)

  For all these reasons, Anti Life and the subsequent two books in the trilogy are deeply personal works. I now realize that the struggles, fears, and immense challenges faced by Alvarez are really just projections of what I was going through at the time I wrote the book.

  My editor asked what the theme of this book is. Maybe, it doesn’t have one, or, perhaps, it’s too simple of an idea to be called a theme. I think it’s something like this: Work the problem. You don’t get to pick your circumstances. You don’t get to pick the hand you’re dealt. And we don’t get to decide how heavy our cross is, only whether we will bear it.

  Whew! Somebody’s dramatic.

  If you’ve made it this far, I owe you a debt of gratitude. Not only have you read my story, but you listened to me wax on endlessly about poor little ole me. Anyway, thank you sincerely.

  I’d love to hear from you sometime; shoot me a line at info@allenkuzara.com and let me know what you thought about Anti Life.