A Preparation for Death

by Greg Baxter

  There were readings in the afternoons, by participants, and in the evenings, by faculty. We attended a few afternoon readings, often because someone from our parallel conference was reading, and we went to all the faculty readings (I was alone in my willing-ness to skip them). Afterwards, drinks and barefaced networking stretched late into the night. Big salivating circles formed around agents and editors. One woman who was publishing a collection of sweet, unremarkable stories – stories for the broken-hearted girl in all of us – had taped a sign to her back that read: Blurb my book! Lots of people wrote promissory signatures on her sign. She would get down on all fours so the guys could scribble legibly, and they would make humping noises. (One member of the faculty, we knew, moved aspiring female authors through his bedroom with promises of recommendations and introductions.) When I tried to make conversation, people looked right through me; only when it was discovered that I worked for the Southern Review did I gain a little respect. Suddenly people wanted to know things about me. Suddenly my bad habits seemed romantic. Our group of dissidents swelled. We probably had enough for a softball team.

  I should have realized, during those ten days in Tennessee, that my failure as a writer was inevitable. Dave Smith had stressed the importance of an awareness of purpose, an acknowledgement of audience. He believed, like his spiritual mentor, Robert Penn Warren, that to write was to commit a moral act, that a poem was a vote. I tried to apply this. I asked of all my stories, Is this moral? I had no idea. Who was I voting for? What were the issues?

  I liked Dave. A lot of people in Baton Rouge didn’t. He was caustic and impatient, and when he spoke about art, his voice acquired the gravity of a black hole. If you were young and impressionable, and especially if he liked you, you could not escape its pull. At LSU, the position of Dave’s protégé was a position of difference, since everyone else in the programme was a protégé of Andrei Codrescu, who was as much rock star as writer, and a strong believer in the principle that more of anything was better, especially writing. Dave would have preferred a world in which ten people wrote. I was seduced by the idea that I might be one of them.

  At LSU I had seen Dave as a renegade; now I saw him in his element, among the high priests of a deep-voiced, wrinkled, belligerent tradition. I had duped myself into believing that an apprenticeship could lead to individuality; now I felt less like a protégé and more like a factotum. Two years later I would write the novel only I could write, and he hated it: he told me to begin a new book immediately. I had failed him – as I was always going to, if I was to become myself. He feared that I had grown too insulated, that I was writing for an audience of zero. But what was the alternative? Taping stickers to my back? Fellating editors and agents? Writing books that suited people?

  Brent was disgusted with the scene as well, but it didn’t ruin him. He simply ignored it. He would go on to achieve all that is expected of decent men – have kids, build a business, never stray from his promises, never desire to inflict harm on the weak or insipid or boring or arrogant, or the generous. His books, which have been modest successes, would reveal, through his characters, a humanity in him that I lacked utterly.

  ∗

  Seven years later, I am in my dining room in a northern suburb of Dublin, writing. My marriage ended a few months ago. The dining room and living room are at the top of the house, with a little square terrace full of dead plants. One whole side of that top floor is glass, so I can see all of the sky to the south. It’s a warm, overcast night, and the light is dwindling out of the clouds. It is also the morning, before work, clear and cool, and the light of the sun, which cleared the horizon only a little while ago, is gathering on the rooftops of my hygienic little estate. It is always something: the weather, morning, night, evening, a weekend. There’s nothing to explain. I am writing for nobody. It is only an unbreakable habit.

  A week ago I read through some of my old stories, which I wrote around the time I took the trip to Tennessee. Full of desire, of wanting, of an urge to be published, of ambition, there is within them all an explosive quaintness. They scored picayune truths. They deferred to bad influence. This is the effect of inclination: it obliterates difference.

  I’ve stopped eating, for the most part. My liver is a brick. I sleep in my clothes. I shave twice a week. I have painful cavities. Maybe I’ll be dead in a year. What is the difference? When Priam came for the body of Hector, he told Achilles: Such is the way the gods spun life for unfortunate mortals, that we live in unhappiness.

  I go to work. I teach writing classes. I drink on my own. I drink with my students after class, because I have exactly one friend left in Ireland, Henrik, and he has a life. I come home and write for nobody, for an audience of zero. I am incompatible with the concept of the future. How do I explain to anyone that such a life, however unsustainable, is my ideal?

  A few days ago, coming home from the bar after class, sometime around midnight, I drove my Vespa to the docks in Ringsend, which is dramatically out of my way, and parked for a while beside my first apartment in Dublin. I used to jog there in the mornings, in the cold and sometimes rain, before the sun came up and the streets filled with traffic, past the toll bridge, beside the sleeping cottages, and I observed the blue mooing of cargo ships, the high clanks of crane activity, the idling of empty trucks. I saw no people. From time to time, through a frosty cottage window, I would be spied by a cat or dog. I ran for thirty minutes, up and down the street, without hope or desire, infinitely nobody.

  Each writer at Sewanee got a twenty-minute one-on-one session with a faculty member of his or her choice, and on the third-to-last day of the conference I sat down with Barry. It was about ten in the morning. I was up early that morning with nerves. What did I have to say to him? I was aware that Barry had much more in common with Brent than with me – the humanity and wonder. This didn’t unsettle me. I didn’t want to be an acolyte, one of the so-called Sons of Barry. I was happy just to hang with the man who wrote Ray, Airships, etc.

  We discussed my story for a while. We smoked a lot of cigarettes. We talked a bit about William Goyen, whose work I liked very much at the time. He told me to ask him for help, when I got a book together, because he was going to get my ass published, but I think he said that to a lot of people. Inexplicably we got on to the subject of SUVs. He loved them. He said he admired our red Cherokee – which was preposterous but true. He had a green Cherokee of his own and he said he felt like the captain of an aircraft carrier, driving it.

  Then he said, I feel like a cheeseburger.

  I said, That sounds nice.

  He said, You feel like a cheeseburger?

  I could eat.

  Or do you want to catch the next reading?

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him I didn’t know which reading he meant.

  We drove around fairly aimlessly for about an hour, and I got the sense he hadn’t really wanted a cheeseburger after all. He just wanted to get away. We stopped at a gas station for cigarettes, and we loitered there a long time, since he said he liked to spend time in strange gas stations. He was not the man I had seen once before, at LSU, trim and handsome, with a full head of hair. He was swollen from his therapy, and his skin was pink and raw. His eyes, which were once little black marbles, bulged like eggs. Yet he retained his presence. He started to get worried that I needed a cheeseburger, so he asked some locals if they knew a place – not a drive-through but a diner. It was the experience of a cheeseburger he sought. They gave us complex directions, so he bought me some beef jerky and himself a fountain coke, but he couldn’t drink it.

  You want to go back? he asked.

  Not really, I said.

  All right, he said – and he had a way of drawing this out, All right, which implied that we were going in search of some trouble.

  We went to the Army/Navy store, a pilgrimage he made every summer in Sewanee. It was about twenty minutes’ drive from the gas station.

  I love Army/Navys, he said. I’m fascinated with World War Tw
o. I was born into it, and I feel like I fought it myself.

  Yes, I said, though he had told me the exact same thing on two previous occasions.

  The way out to the Army/Navy took us down a winding road, and he grew quiet. His smile disappeared. Instead of talking, we watched the landscape roll by. Woods and farms. Patches of traffic in the opposite direction. The day was hazy and warm and bright – even with sunglasses I had my hand above my eyes.

  The Army/Navy was all by itself in a gravel parking lot. A few cars were parked in it, but not in rows. You just pulled in and stopped wherever you liked. He killed the engine, but rather than getting out, he sat with his eyes closed and breathed laboriously through his nose. I didn’t want to insult him by asking if he was okay. After a few minutes he shook off the nausea and stepped out.

  The store might have said Army/Navy, but really it was a white survivalist shop. Knives, firearms, shovels, ammunition, and thousands of Confederate flags. There were some serious rednecks talking to the clerk, and they all looked me up and down – white T-shirt, cargo shorts, flip-flops, fancy chrome sunglasses. I might as well have been black. I got myself a souvenir – a grey NAVY T-shirt. When I went to pay, I found Barry talking to the rednecks. The rednecks were pontificating about the importance of the Confederate battle flag, about the history of the Civil War, the aggression of Federalism. If only they knew who they were talking to – the greatest Southern storyteller since Flannery O’Connor. Barry bought a Confederate flag bandana out of affection for irony.

  One redneck said, They’re trying to take away our right to fly that. But they can’t take our history.

  I waited. I wondered if Barry might say to them something like, You are going to waste your life believing in something that owns you; or, Say something wise for once in your life; or, Look what we did, are doing, to this place we pretend to worship; or, Perfect! We knew you’d be like that. These are the things his characters might say. Instead he looked angrily at the man, pointed his finger at the man’s bushy moustache (Barry has famous antipathy for the moustache – one always appears on characters he dislikes), and said, You’re goddamned right.

  The redneck took a step back. Barry is five foot nothing, and with cancer very much an old man, but this large Tennessean got out of his way.

  We got back in his Cherokee and he closed his eyes again. He asked if I minded driving, because he was not up to it. I couldn’t tell him I needed my glasses. I was totally blind to road signs, to distant traffic, to lanes. But I had to drive or we were never leaving. I couldn’t figure out how to move the seat back, and he was starting to fade out of consciousness, so I drove in his seat the way he had it. My knees were up around the steering wheel. I kept my elbows very high to avoid my knees, and my face was nearly at the window. I just tried to keep us on the road. When you have bad eyesight, often you don’t realize you’re blind until you need badly to see something.

  After about twenty minutes, Barry woke up and smoked a cigarette. He looked at me with curiosity but said nothing. We spoke a little bit about Europe. He said he liked Paris. I told him I was probably going to leave the US one day, and for good.

  Yes, he said. I can understand that.

  At the beginning of our drive, he had said something about the daughter of a friend who was shot in a bank during a robbery. She lived, but she would never walk again. I wasn’t sure how to respond. Had he known the girl? How close was the friend? We were going through a little spot of earth with a few stores and gas stations – these places are not towns. I said, trying to conjure a little profundity: We are all at the whim of randomness.

  Randomness? I withered into myself. He was silent for a few moments, and I felt very stupid. I started to wonder if he might turn back and find someone more interesting. We stopped at the light and he turned to me. He said, Greg, you can’t live your life that way. You can’t be afraid to leave your house.

  When we got back to Rebel’s Rest, there was nobody about. Everyone was eating lunch or taking a midday nap. Barry said he needed some sleep. He shook my hand and said, Thanks for our day. Two days later he would inscribe the same thing for me in a copy of one of his books.

  I took a seat on the patio and grabbed a beer – even though drinking wasn’t allowed at that hour – and smoked a lot of cigarettes on my own. Brent and Marc showed up after a while. They asked if Barry had liked my story, and I said he had, but I’d forgotten almost everything he’d said about it. In any case, I’d forgotten my story. Gradually the dissident wing trickled in. By that point in the conference, we could locate midday drinking by its scent, anywhere on campus. I have a photograph from that afternoon. A woman who had joined us took it, then mailed us copies. In it, we are all pretending not to notice the camera. The day is bright and everyone has a drink in his hand. I am perched on a railing. There are some people beside me. Some others are sitting in chairs. I can see what I am thinking – that I was finally part of something, that I could lead something large and magnificent. That I could annihilate the lukewarm vision of American letters. That by desiring I created – a book, a life, a movement. What a foolish illusion. I spent many years trying to interpret existence, when I ought to have been squandering it. What is there to learn from life, except that it ends, and for a little while you are alive? I could not even, until recently, comprehend the beauty – the unimportance – of my afternoon with Barry, who is still alive, I think, and is pausing to admire strange gas stations, searching for the experience of a cheeseburger, accidentally teaching his own life.

  3

  The City of Perpetual Night

  My grandfather, Herbert Fuchs, was a schoolteacher in Vienna before the Second World War. In July 1944 he was killed by a bomb in a small Carinthian village, a village of no importance, where he was serving as an officer in the Waffen-SS. He never received the letter sent by his wife Maria, my grandmother, with news of the birth of his second son, my father; it was returned unopened not long after Maria received, by post, the notice of his death. She used to tell this story with no emotion, though I am certain that, of her three husbands, Herbert was the only one she loved. In fact, except for Herbert’s sister, Erika, nobody has ever told the story of his death with sorrow.

  Although I know almost nothing of him, or perhaps because of that, Herbert lurks in the interstices of my life with the tormenting persistence of a sense that you have forgotten something. His death was the first and most drastic accident to turn the accidental course of the world toward my existence. Only something drastic would do. Without Herbert’s death, and Maria’s emigration to the States to remarry, my mother, who came from Splendora, Texas, would have never met my father at a bus stop in Austin.

  Over several years, Maria told me portions of her story before and after the war, in the hope that I’d write it. She did not wish to be preserved forever – she is no egoist – but I think she wanted very much to preserve her memory of Vienna, of Herbert, to fix it in an unalterable state, and leave something for the rest of us, so we would know where we had come from. It is not extraordinary, and there is no wild end to it. There is only the commonplace irony of a crippled mind at the end of a rich history: at the age of eighty-seven, she lives in a nursing home in San Antonio, Texas, as far from her own life as she could ever be, and suffers from vascular dementia. Within her day-to-day pattern, she keeps up with familiar identities and places, but anything outside it – me, for instance – is lost unless it walks right in front of her.

  Maria met Herbert in a Viennese military hospital in 1942. She worked as a volunteer nurse, mainly cleaning and re-dressing wounds and keeping soldiers company. He spent weeks there after an artillery shell struck his position: he suffered burns on one half of his body, and his ear was melted off. (When I was younger, I took great pride in a story I must have fabricated, which was that the Russians had cut his ear off to torture him.) They fell in love, I presume, married, and before he was sent back to the war she was pregnant with my father’s elder brother, Peter. He wo
uld see her once more when Peter was a baby, and when he left again she was pregnant with my father.

  It does not strike me as peculiar – never mind that people do such things all the time in war – that Maria, a woman of considerable good looks, would have wasted no time in marrying him. Herbert was handsome in a way – as with all Fuchs men before and after him, he had striking eyes, commanding eyebrows, and a nose like the keel of a boat – and he was rather dashing, especially in uniform. In the pictures I have seen he beholds everything with the aloof confidence of a man who believes he has everything he wants, or knows that by pretending so, he gets what he wants. In the photos that predate Maria, he, usually in a bathing suit, is surrounded by a handful of pretty women; he is lean, muscular, and his legs – he was also an amateur gymnast – are enormous. When he is not around women, he is usually by himself, in handsome suits, standing in the tipped-hat, hip-forward pose of a rake, usually holding a completely redundant walking stick – a fashion, I hope, of the time. With Maria, in the hospital and later, holding Peter high up in the air, he is a little wiser – more serene than aloof – but very much the same man.

  Though his nose was larger than mine – it was truly gigantic – and his chin more square, we look alike, so the thought of what he looked like in Carinthia, dead, commands my attention more and more as I outgrow the age he was. Erika says that only one bomb was dropped, a stray bomb, as though the Allies were simply getting rid of it. Perhaps this is false.