by Robert Atwan
Wonder Question: “What is the sound of everything happening at once?”
“When a gun goes off,” The Book of Knowledge says, “the flash and the report of the gun occur in the same moment.” If we stand at a distance, the flash appears first, as a silent flare in the darkness, and the muffled blow of the sound arrives later, in an echo of the flash. So if you stand at a safe distance half a mile away when the gun is fired, “you will not hear the sound for nearly half a minute.
“And yet,” The Book of Knowledge adds, because it is also fond of “and yet,” “if we are very near the gun, we see the flash and hear the noise at the same time.” At that range, you miss nothing. If you hold the gun to your body, you feel everything happening at once, and it reverberates until the trembling stops somewhere at the edge of nothing.
Turning the self into a nothing is a moral conundrum too difficult for The Book of Knowledge to crack. A literal self-contradiction, the answer even eluded Jesus. The Catholic poet Dante may have planted the suicides with other violent sinners in a deep ring of Hell and tormented the poor souls with winged harpies, but the golden rule is about doing unto others, not doing the self in, and on suicide Jesus is silent. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that Immanuel Kant, whom some consider the wisest European philosopher, explained the immorality of suicide with his “categorical imperative.” When faced with a moral dilemma, Kant argued, you should act so that your action becomes universal law. When you lift a gun to your temple to pull the trigger, you must imagine that the hands of all the people in the world are required by your version of the moral law to lift a gun to their temples too. No one escapes the bullet in this game of Russian roulette. “Do you like this vision of the world?” Kant asks.
I give it a try and see my mother in the hall of mirrors within her moral imagination, every hand in the world holding a .44 lifted at her command, and she pulls the . . . but no, that is not right.
Suicide is about the survivors.
Suicide is two boys and a father hurtled into darkness at the speed of a locomotive. The boys, sitting on the plush pile seat of a railroad car headed away from their home in Deerfield, Illinois, will never see their mother again, rarely speak of her again, rarely think about her again. Their father—a big man, bulging out of his suit—sits down on his haunches in front of them. Facing into the darkness ahead, he has been through hell and has been given one more impossible task, but he is a man who believes in taking charge and wants to fix things even when he can’t, so he will do his job. The boys are headed backward into the night, the lights outside the window floating away from them, and I don’t know if they are afraid or in shock or just tired. Who knows what the younger one remembers? He is eight years old and has penetrating blue eyes. The older one remembers his dad looking down, but only for a moment, and then, as he always did when he spoke to people, looking directly into his sons’ eyes and saying the impossible. I remember him speaking, his voice a mesmerizing low rasp conveying confidentiality this time as well as command, and I remember him reaching out with his arms to kind of hem us in as he spoke, his large arms coming out of the sleeves of his suit a bit as he extended them. I remember—or I think I do—the maroon plush of the seats in the Pullman and the windows black as we rode into the open fields of Illinois at night.
But I have no idea what he said.
Someone took pictures at my mother’s funeral. I found them in a wicker basket with other photos and memorabilia. Several show the graveside service conducted on the open prairie of Kansas, the land that my mother wrote of “going back to” in her memory while living in New York. The photographs are mixed in with a nearly identical set of pictures from my grandfather’s funeral, which came three weeks after hers, including a particularly sad one of my mother’s and grandfather’s graves side by side, her blossoms windblown and slightly wilted beside his new batch of greenery and white.
But the hardest pictures for me show my mother’s open casket surrounded by a shower of flowers, a mound of red and white carnations, daisies, and pink mums. The coffin is draped in a spray of red roses, and my mother’s body lies in a bed of satin, the opening of the casket draped in a transparent mesh. The picture of her face is very small, but I can see that her hair is pulled back from her forehead in tight curls. She wears a suit with a silk scarf at the neck, exposing the base of her throat. I find a magnifying glass that I keep with my dictionary and examine the picture up close. The cotton and plaster of Paris that the morticians used to reconstruct the face make her cheeks look puffy, and the dermal wax and restorative cosmetics hide her wounds and bruises under a shiny pastiness betraying the illusion of life. There is something wrong with the mouth, which has been stretched wide into a smile after the mortician pulled together the scalp, and the eyebrows are heartbreaking, dark and perfectly arched like wings, as if, after all, death took her by surprise, and maybe—who knows?—it did.
My gaze settles at last on her eyes. Leaning forward into the lens to see more clearly, I tilt the page this way and that for a better look before slumping back into my chair.
Faces in photos don’t follow us if their eyes are closed.
Until I read her letters, those closed eyes were my mother’s story, an image that I carried until I became a sixty-year-old man. And yet—because there is always this “and yet”—there is more, much more, and it is in the letters, not the photographs.
“We took our first drive yesterday,” my mother writes on Monday, November 20, 1950, from a brick bungalow in Monsey, New York, when she and Dad first moved away from Kansas to live in the Northeast. “The scenery around here is gorgeous. We took the Hudson River Drive on the way up.” She explains that she is sending pictures, and I find the colored postcards in my wicker box, stiff and pretty colorized photographs of West Point and the river, but her words say more than the pictures. “The river is very large, calm, and beautiful,” she writes. Having lived on the prairie all her life, she is unaccustomed to seeing large bodies of water and is filled with wonder. “Saw the ships and were quite thrilled—first large ones I’ve ever seen. We took Bear Mountain Drive home. We were sorry we didn’t get to see all of this because it got dark before we got home. It is completely dark by five here.”
My mother weathered the mental cyclone of depression much of her adult life, but there are moments in the letters when she paints, in words, another self—whole and wonder-struck—and the whirlwind stops. These moments often happen outdoors, or while looking outdoors, and record a joyous embrace of a wide and open sky that may have evoked feelings of the family farm in Kansas where she and my grandparents picnicked while she was growing up. They are sublime glimpses of grandeur, often bounded by darkness—the blackness that finally claimed her, creeping in at the edges—but they are also marked by a brilliance of light and an expansive vista that is exhilarating. The sights transported her, lifted her momentarily out of the troubles of life; they helped her to be her best self and reengage with family.
In one letter she describes a flight back from Kansas in prose reminiscent of her descriptions of seeing the Hudson River for the first time. “Had such a smooth flight from K.C. to N.Y. Slept part of the way. The plane was very crowded when we boarded so I had to sit on the inside seat of the three[-seat] row which was fine except I couldn’t see out too well but thought the view of K.C. and Chicago were gorgeous. Looked like a huge Christmas display.” She explains that she arrived early at LaGuardia and took the time to freshen up before meeting us. “When I walked out I saw Max & boys—called to them. The boys were so surprised for a second—I squatted on my knees—Ronnie said, ‘Mommy’ and gave me a big hug. I hugged Steve with my other arm. He put his arms around my neck and said ‘Hello, Mommy.’”
After my mother died, I forgot the sensation of her touch and the sound of her voice. I could not hug a shadow. I could not fill her silence with my words.
Who is suicide? She was suicide.
She became her death.
And the pic
tures, hundreds of curled shavings of the past in a basket, did not bring her back. Even when my mother gazed directly into the camera, I knew that she was looking into a future that was already over, with shadows like gun smoke folded into the glossy black-and-white. I needed a voice speaking in her present, not one whispering to posterity, a voice animated by the desire to capture the present for someone alive. That is the voice I heard in the letters. When I read them, I got to know her—for the first time, really—know her and miss her. Miss her, not some made-up idea of her. The pain, which had been nothing more than a dull throb, changed in character, becoming softer, more diffuse, and ardent like heartache.
“They each held on to my hands,” my mother wrote, describing our triumphal exit from the airport at LaGuardia. “They kept talking to me about how happy they were that I was home—and sorta beamed.”
Wonder Question: “Could we ever travel to the moon?”
“We know everything we need to know for the planning of such a trip,” The Book of Knowledge claimed optimistically in 1952. Its writers argue that the first real problem will be creating a rocket with enough thrust to allow a “space-ship” to reach “escape velocity,” the speed required to lift the ship beyond the gravity of the earth and let it float, unimpeded, toward the moon. The formula for determining this velocity is too complicated for The Book of Knowledge to make clear, so it asks that we accept on faith that by means “of a computation belonging to the realm of higher mathematics,” the velocity required for a rocket to rise into space and escape the gravitational pull of the spinning earth is “7 miles per second.” Once a rocket can attain that speed, the “earth’s gravity is powerless” to pull it down and the rocket can drift into the vast emptiness of silent space, leaving the weight of its earthly burdens behind.
Five years later, the Soviets rocketed a satellite into orbit.
At midnight on the last day of January in 1957, my mother and father woke me to watch Sputnik 2 cross the dome of the sky, and I don’t remember it happening at all. I do remember Sputnik 1. We were still living in our house on Caravella Lane in Nanuet, New York, and many from the neighborhood, including my mother and me, had lined up on the dead-end street in front of our houses to see the first satellite propelled into orbit, but the memory of the second satellite is gone.
It was an anxious time internationally, causing Americans, like my mother, to have mixed feelings about the space race. “It is a shame,” she wrote, that “the great event of launching a satellite into space has to be overshadowed with the fear that the Russians are a great deal ahead of us scientifically.” At the dawn of the nuclear age, she lamented that the Soviets had “perfected the intercontinental missile” and wondered about the ability of America to prevail. “It makes us all realize we have been complacent.” Despite these anxieties, she wrote that we were all “very excited” and that Sputnik 1 was a “spectacular sight.”
Sputnik 2 caused a stir because it carried Laika, the dog, but by this time our family had a new set of anxieties to deal with. After seven years of living in New York, we had moved out of our house in Nanuet and were living somewhere near our new house on Warrington Road in Deerfield, Illinois. Construction had been delayed and my parents had not yet moved in, but they were checking on it daily. “This is the finishing work that makes a house a home,” my mother wrote. I am sure, with the move, the delay, and the new house, that this was a busy and exhausting time for my father and mother, but I must have pestered my parents to let me see Sputnik 2, and they relented. “Steve has been so interested in the satellite that we promised him we would wake him if it did orbit.”
In my imagination they both wake me, my mother nudging me quietly while shushing me so as not to wake my brother, my father standing behind her holding my coat. I rub my eyes awake and see their faces glowing in the half-light of the room, my dad waving us toward the bedroom door. Outside it is cold—this is February, north of Chicago—but it must have been clear. The three of us walk into a grassy clearing away from trees and train our eyes on the evening sky.
Dad lights a cigarette for my mother and then for himself, the glow from the match illuminating their faces against the night sky for a moment like two crescent moons. He shakes out the match and takes a long draw, letting the smoke out slowly. My mother fiddles with her cigarette before taking a quick puff, pulling her coat around her. We wait in the cold briefly, me standing between them, my mother pulling me toward her for warmth.
Suddenly it appears. “Over there,” my dad says, squinting from the smoke, and we turn to face east. The treeline forms a black horizon, and above it the Milky Way shimmers in the chilly air.
Dad kneels down, pointing up for me to see. The cigarette at the tips of his fingers traces the arc against the sky. My mother sees it too, and putting an arm on my shoulder, she leans forward to be sure that I have found it. I follow my dad’s arm to the spot among the stars and locate it at last, not the satellite itself, which is too small, but the casing, a tiny oblong of light, tumbling silently across the constellations nailed into the night sky. It flip-flops in a regular rhythm, like a heartbeat, without glittering, and, despite its size, glows with a white-bright incandescence. In her letters my mother calls this satellite “Muttnik”—a phrase in the press at the time—because of the dog inside, but it is hard to think of a dog now, or anything else, living in this slug of pure light.
I cannot imagine that night sky now without creating metaphors from the time three years later that I hid under the stairs and looked at the nails driven into the treads overhead, that coffin lid of stars that still haunts me as one of the few vivid memories of that time. Thinking of it now, the other memories come flooding back as well. Of me at the top of the stairs watching my mother crying at the kitchen table while my dad stands off to the side. Of me stepping out of my bedroom to see my mother sing “Fever” into the record console with a drink in her hand. No, those thoughts—those precious and horrible clues—don’t go away, but they also don’t erase that night, lost to memory but captured in a letter that I almost didn’t read, when my parents and I, somewhere in Illinois, stood in a darkened field together and looked into the heavens. I picture the tableau now like some illustration out of The Book of Knowledge, with me standing in my coat and flanked by my parents, my dad pointing and my mother with an arm around me, while the three of us gaze into the night sky with wonder.
“This is,” my mother wrote, “a fabulous age.”
Contributors’ Notes
MARCIA ALDRICH is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, part of the Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers Series. She has been the editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. In 2010 she was the recipient of the Distinguished Professor of the Year Award for the state of Michigan. Companion to an Untold Story won the AWP Award in creative nonfiction. She is at work on Haze, a narrative of marriage and divorce during her college years.
POE BALLANTINE is getting taller and younger. He plans to one day be a professional skater. He lives on the Howling Plains of Nowhere with his wife, Cristina, and his son, Tom. His latest book is Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere (2013). As always he wishes to thank the editors of the Sun for making him presentable.
CHARLES BAXTER is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction. His most recent collection, Gryphon: New and Selected Stories, was published in 2011. His novel First Light, from 1987, has just been reissued. He lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota.
J. D. DANIELS has written for the Paris Review, n + 1, Oxford American, Agni, and other magazines. He is the 2013 recipient of the Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize.
BRIAN DOYLE is the author of many books of essays, nonfiction (The Grail, about a year in an Oregon vineyard, and The Wet Engine, about the “muddles & musics of the heart”), “proems,” and fiction, notably the sprawling Oregon novel Mink River. His essay collections Reading in Bed, about books and writers, and The Thorny Grace of It (spiritual matters an
d conundrums) will be published in the fall of 2013, and his Big Whopping Sea Novel, The Plover, will be published in the spring of 2014. He is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, in Oregon.
DAGOBERTO GILB is the author of Before the End, After the Beginning (2011). His previous books include The Flowers, Gritos, Woodcuts of Women, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña, and The Magic of Blood. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in a range of magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, ZYZZYVA, and Texas Monthly, and are reprinted widely. Gilb makes his home in Austin. He is the executive director of CentroVictoria, a center for Mexican American literature and culture at the University of Houston, Victoria, where he is also writer in residence and the founding editor of the new literary magazine Huizache.
TOD GOLDBERG is the author of several books of fiction, including the novel Living Dead Girl, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; the story collection Other Resort Cities; and the popular Burn Notice series. His essays, journalism, and criticism have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Las Vegas CityLife, among many others, and have earned five Nevada Press Association awards for excellence. He holds an MFA in creative writing and literature from Bennington College and directs the low-residency MFA in creative writing and writing for the performing arts at the University of California, Riverside.