CALEB: (to DVR) October 2nd, 2011, Skykomish, Washington. Last day of the trip. Nothing like a sober rant first thing in the morning. Two things piss me off: Cruel and unusual punishment is a tautology. Cruel, to me, is releasing a rapist-murderer into society after he “pays his debt” because that shows cruelty toward the victim. What’s cruel? Manson’s victims’ relatives having to endlessly appear at parole hearings because the law grants Manson the possibility of being set free.
Second, I think drugs, prostitution, gambling—all these so-called vices—should be legal but regulated and controlled. And if you commit crimes when using, rather than it being a mitigating factor, it should be aggravating.
DAVID: Good luck getting that one through.
CALEB: Did you put the sugar and other stuff back over here?
Oh, I see. Garbage is right there.… The thing you realize with drugs is, there’s a cost. I stopped smoking pot at nineteen. And with other drugs, after you do them, you don’t need to do them. I mean, an altered state can be fun, but drugs have a detrimental effect. Long- and short-term.
DAVID: How much acid have you done?
CALEB: Maybe a half dozen times.
DAVID: Huh. I would have thought maybe more. You’re definitely a brother from another planet.
CALEB: Did you put the milk over there?
DAVID: Over here.
CALEB: I’m no doctor, but I’ve heard that organs and tissue can regenerate when young: smokers who stop at thirty can have almost full recovery—
DAVID: That’s when Laurie stopped smoking. We hope and assume—
CALEB: At fifty the lungs get only so much back, and at seventy or eighty they will never regenerate. That’s how it works with the brain. When I took acid, I could feel this searing inside my head. Acid isn’t addictive, but it was obvious it could make you crazy.
DAVID: I love what the comedian Rick Reynolds says about the Bible: “Great story. Wish I could believe it.”
CALEB: You ever read Barabbas?
DAVID: The Marlowe play?
CALEB: The Pär Lagerkvist novel.
DAVID: It was originally a Christopher Marlowe play. Barabbas goes back to the Bible.
CALEB: Lagerkvist was familiar with the play, but Marlowe’s Barabbas is a sociopath, full of rage, an unrepentant killer. Lagerkvist’s Barabbas comes across as searching and humble.
DAVID: I’m Lagerkvist’s Barabbas. You’re more—
CALEB: Not funny.
CALEB: Let’s bring out the riding lawn mower. Time for a morning beer.
DAVID: Beer?
CALEB: Shakespeare: “Every morning just before breakfast, I don’t want no coffee or tea. / It’s just me and my good Buddy Weiser, that’s all I ever need.”
DAVID: Shakespeare?
CALEB: A lesser-known character: The Duke of Thorogood. Can’t mow without beer—you want one?
DAVID: No thanks.
They depart from Khamta’s house for a short walk in the woods before leaving.
DAVID: That was fun. I’ve never driven a lawn mower. So we hike, go back, have lunch, and maybe we can watch the Seahawks game somewhere, but I need to be back in time for Natalie’s call. I can’t miss that.
CALEB: You bet. Even though you claim Heroes is your mediocre first novel published thirty years ago and is invented “whole cloth,” it takes from your knowledge of life, which isn’t invented. Your personality controls every word. In some ways it’s more you than anything you’ve written. It says a lot about you: What sort of man are you? What is your morality? What sort of husband would you become, what sort of father? The idea that the main character would cheat and feel guilt, feel overburdened with a diabetic son, worry about being an inadequate parent—of everything you’ve written, Heroes most accurately predicts your apprehension of fatherhood, marriage, and not wanting a second child. I could argue it’s your most autobiographical book.
DAVID: And I could argue This Seething Ocean, That Damned Eagle is a brilliant title.
DAVID: Through my early thirties, against a lackadaisical defender, I could look like a genius on the basketball court, but the moment someone stronger and quicker D’d-up against me, I would completely vanish.
CALEB: It’s part mental: just get the shot off.
DAVID: But it’s also physical. It’s real. If he’s hand-checking you, you have to be able to put the ball on the ground and take it to the hoop. And I couldn’t.
Nearing the end of a road completely washed out by a flood.
CALEB: Let’s check out the washed-out bridge.
DAVID: Can we really just walk over it like this?
CALEB: Interesting, how the river veered here and swept the earth out from underneath the road.
DAVID: How could the water wash out the road? That would have to be an awfully strong current.
CALEB: Maybe heavy rains and ice pack melt, and it all came rushing down the mountain. Let me take a picture.
DAVID: Jump in the water, take a little swim.
CALEB: Freeze to death for dramatic purposes?
CALEB: Kosinski’s Steps—good stuff, no argument—but The Painted Bird provokes thought and leaves the reader alone.
DAVID: I don’t want to be left alone.
They walk down a dirt road toward a vacant monastery.
DAVID: I love in The Ambassadors when Strether says, “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had?” It’s easy for Henry James to write that toward the end of his life. He’d devoted himself entirely to art.
CALEB: Maugham said James wrote as if there were a lively cocktail party next door, but the voices were too far away to hear, and the fence was too tall to peer over.
DAVID: To Maugham, that was probably a criticism, but to me that’s what makes James great. Life feels like that to anyone who’s a serious artist.
CALEB: That’s not really life.
DAVID: I remember once, toward the end of high school, I performed some chore incompetently—vacuum my room, I forget what—and when I romanticized my incompetence, my mother said, “Just because you’re a ‘writer’ doesn’t mean you have to be a schlemiel.” Laurie and I met at an artists’ colony outside Chicago called Ragdale, where her job was to fix stuff and make dinners. And now sometimes, when she’s a little drunk, she’ll say, “You just married me so I’d take care of you.”
Caleb laughs.
DAVID: You wanted to become an artist, but you overcommitted to life. I wanted to become a human being, but I overcommitted … Oh my god …
CALEB: The crematorium.
DAVID: It’s not Tibetan, is it?
CALEB: Chinese characters. 
mountain temple.
DAVID: Only the chimney remains.
CALEB: A few years ago people used these grounds. The monastery must have been lovely. The deck doesn’t seem so solid. We could fall through.
DAVID: That would be totally schlemiel.
CALEB: Still life: David Shields in pond.
DAVID: Wonder if they’ll ever rebuild.
CALEB: I stayed at a monastery in the backwaters of Thailand. You want to contemplate eternity and suffering and the ten Buddhist precepts—hang out at a monastery.
DAVID: Are you and Terry equally competent?
CALEB: She seems to think she’s more competent, and I agree. I’m the schlemiel.
DAVID: You’re still the artist figure, even though you take care of the kids?
CALEB: We’ve got a good balance. I don’t know about opposites. There’s no such thing. The opposite of “artsy” isn’t practical or businesslike or mathematical.
DAVID: There is a yin and a yang. I do think that Laurie and I are more different than some couples are. Some people marry others who are quite similar to themselves, and I always thought I would, and to my surprise and delight, I didn’t.
CALEB: There’s almost more friction between artists. What if your wife wrote ultra-conventional novels?
David laughs.
CALEB: I had a musician friend who dated a singer. She had all this musical equipment, microphone, sound systems, but she had no talent. My friend said he couldn’t go forward in a relationship with someone who was so blind to her own faults.
Even two artists who love the same form might clash. One could be a messy night owl, the other tidy and an early bird. One’s vegetarian and one isn’t. One drinks too much; the other hates drinking.
DAVID: To be very honest, in previous relationships with either writers or visual artists, they would look to me to take care of them. I was supposed to be the strong, silent, competent, sane one. My reaction was always, You’re not serious—you want me to be the rational one? No, I get to be the overanxious artist. A composer named David Del Tredici once said to me, “One Jesus child per family.”
They walk down another forest service road.
CALEB: I’m going to get them to take a picture of us.
DAVID: Do you know them?
CALEB: No. (to a couple on their front lawn) How you doin’?
WOMAN: Great.
CALEB: Could you do us a favor?
WOMAN: Sure.
CALEB: Take three or four. Click here.
WOMAN: Do you want a close-up or far away?
CALEB: Where we are will be fine. Great. Thanks.
MAN: Where you guys off to?
CALEB: Just taking a walk. I’m a journalist, and this guy I’m with is from out of state. Witness protection. His memoir is coming out—under a pseudonym, of course.
David laughs quietly.
CALEB: Seriously.
WOMAN: Can we read about it?
CALEB: Seattle Times will have a piece out in about six months, timed to coincide with the book’s release.
CALEB: Okay, let’s talk about your past in the mob.
DAVID: Bugsy Malone and I were like this.
CALEB: Sunglasses, the black jacket, bald head. You kept silent, didn’t give anything away with your high-pitched voice.
DAVID: I don’t think they bought it.
CALEB: Probably not.
DAVID: What do you think they’re doing—just cleaning up their yard?
CALEB: Kill two birds: clear out yard, stack firewood for the winter. I should have thought of a nickname for you.
DAVID: If I were really in witness protection, you wouldn’t have said that.
CALEB: True.
DAVID: Did you make all of that up on the spot?
CALEB: Not very good improv.
DAVID: Not bad.
CALEB: Skykomish Witch Project.
DAVID: I don’t think that’s our title, but I can see it being a line in the book. It’s really turned out interesting, hasn’t it? When we left, on Thursday evening, I was thinking it’s perfectly possible we would come up empty.
CALEB: I thought, Who knows? Maybe it’ll be more of a writers’ retreat than any big conversation. We’d get time to read and relax, but we didn’t—
DAVID: Don’t you think we got what we wanted?
CALEB: We’ve covered most of my concerns. My beefs are not so much with you as with artists in general. Writers today don’t concern themselves with powerful and important topics. And I got to find out about you, see you in a different way.
DAVID: How so?
CALEB: Warmer. More friendly. Earlier you said there isn’t a pretentious bone in your body, and now I see what you mean.
DAVID: That’s a nice thing to say. Thanks.
CALEB: This is where you say something good about me.
DAVID: I knew you were smart, but I had no idea you were this smart.
CALEB: Some things, unfortunately or not, have to stay out of the final draft.
DAVID: We pushed limits.
CALEB: We can’t betray everyone.
DAVID: We can’t?
CALEB: We went as far as we could.
DAVID: Some of our secrets need to stay secret.
CALEB: You agree?
DAVID: I guess.
Back at the house, preparing to leave.
DAVID: Obviously, I’m a sugar fiend. This is probably going to sound kind of weird, but one of the issues between us is control vs. loss of control: Apollonian vs. Dionysian. I’m a very moderate drinker. Only in the last couple of years have I even started to drink at all, although I now dearly love my bottle of Pike Kilt Lifter Ruby Ale every night. “Let the healing begin.” I don’t know how to judge drinking, is what I’m trying to say. And I don’t know how much you drank this morning. But I’m not totally comfortable with you driving us home.
CALEB: Ah.
DAVID: So I thought I would drive. But also, I wonder—do you not have any drinking issues? Am I totally misreading that? I’m such a nondrinker, but I thought if you drink heavily before lunch, isn’t that supposedly a sign? Tell me if I’m totally off base.
CALEB: Terry notices.
DAVID: You seem like a great guy, but you’ve had three or four beers before lunch, and perhaps the weekend is, for you, a wonderful time to unwind or whatever. I’m just raising it as a boring Safety Patrol thing: Do you want me to drive? Secondarily, friend to friend, do you think you have your drinking under control, or is it a slight issue? A nonissue? Tell me your thoughts.
CALEB: If this were coming from Terry I’d say—
DAVID: “Fuck you?”
CALEB: Well, no, I’d try to put on a legitimate defense. I woke up at seven thirty and had a beer when I mowed the lawn. I put a beer in the cup holder and took off. And then I had a couple more as we cleaned up. One more after the hike. And I always tell Terry that a beer an hour—
DAVID: Is a fun buzz.
CALEB: She told me once, “I’ll always remember our honeymoon in Belize. It was the first time I counted beers, and one day I counted twelve.” Sometimes, if we barbecue into evening and I’ve had eight beers, she’ll say, “Caleb, you’ve had eight beers.” And I’ll say, “It’s been eight hours.” I think I’m fine to drive.
DAVID: Okay, but your speech has gotten—
CALEB: Am I slurring?
DAVID: A lot.
CALEB: Okay.
DAVID: Again, Laurie makes fun of me, because if anyone drinks much at all, I always think they’re roaring alcoholics.
CALEB: And with my past …
DAVID: Transvestites, car accidents, last night, the night before …
CALEB: I’ve never had a DUI, never had an arrest or problem.
DAVID: How is it in your life in general?
CALEB: Terry says don’t drink before five p.m.
DAVID: Right.
CALEB: Sometimes, you know, I’ll have a beer before that, but I feel you.
DAVID: I love how they say that in The Wire: “I feel you.” I’m not in any way judging it.
CALEB: You should judge.
DAVID: I’m not.
CALEB: You’re raising it.
DAVID: I’m just saying, practically, do you want me to drive?
For instance, if you want to drink during lunch, cool. I’ll drive.
CALEB: I see why you wanted to drive to the Cascadia last night.
DAVID: The irony being you’re probably a better driver drunk than I am sober.
CALEB: I was freaking!
DAVID: I was driving super slow.
CALEB: Whenever a car came the other way, your right tire went well over the white line and onto the shoulder.
DAVID: But there wasn’t any harm over there, was there?
CALEB: No.
DAVID: I’m definitely a cautious driver. A granny driver. I just thought I’d bring it up.
CALEB: I’m not an angry drunk. A foolish one, perhaps. On vacation in Mexico I’m able to maintain a buzz. You drink two beers quickly, you have a buzz, and then, for me, if I drink too much it becomes unpleasant.
DAVID: Don’t you need food in your system?
CALEB: That matters. If I’m going too far, I drink a seltzer.
DAVID: You do moderate it.
CALEB: I brought a case of seltzer for this weekend. When we go to my in-laws’, I’ll alternate seltzers or colas with beer, and by the end of the night I drive home. Terry wouldn’t let me drive if she didn’t trust me, and she doesn’t have as many opportunities to drink, so I’m usually the designated driver. However, I’m not sure why a buzz is pleasant, if it really is, or if I’m just escaping something.
DAVID: You maintain.
CALEB: It’s the end of our four-day vacation.
DAVID: It could be a weekend thing, for you. Obviously, I’m doing this partly to get a “moment.” It’d be a great ending.
CALEB: An “I know you but not as well as I thought I did” moment.
DAVID: Right. I can say, “You’re an alcoholic.” You can say, “Oh my god, what a pain-in-the-assperger.”
CALEB: How about Laurie with drink?
DAVID: She has two or, at the most, three glasses of wine a night. She’s a moderate drinker. She has it nicely under control. During the week do you drink?
CALEB: We drink less.
DAVID: What difference does it make?
CALEB: When I cut down on drinking, I lose weight. I’ve tried to gauge whether I’m a better writer when I drink. Is it conducive to thought?
DAVID: Uh—
CALEB: Alcoholics like to push their limits, but I don’t like drinking beyond a certain point. Not that I’m in complete control.
DAVID: That’s a good sign, that—
CALEB: The hangover should be avoided. All things being equal, alcohol tires you out and doesn’t prolong life. The writer who lives longer and lives better produces more. I guess that’s a reason to stop. I’m going to have to confront this sooner or later. So, last night, you drove into town.
DAVID: I wasn’t comfortable with you driving.
CALEB: All right.
DAVID: Anyway …
CALEB: You’re not off base.
DAVID: Milton Berle was at a Catholic charity event, had a glass of sherry, and they asked him, “Don’t you want a second glass?” Everyone else was getting drunk. Berle said, “Jews don’t drink. It interferes with our suffering.”
Caleb laughs.
DAVID: That is to me the great Jewish joke. How does the other one go? The Catholic is thirsty and thinks he needs a drink, the Protestant is thirsty and thinks he needs a drink, the Jew is thirsty and thinks he’s getting diabetes.… Umm …
CALEB: Needs a little work.
CALEB: Terry called to tell me about how Ava had a birthday party yesterday but neither of us—namely me—remembered to RSVP.
DAVID: Why couldn’t she wait?
CALEB: She does this a lot.
DAVID: She’s trying to make you feel guilty.
CALEB: If I leave in the morning and the refrigerator door hasn’t been shut, she’ll call me. “Caleb, you forgot to close the refrigerator door. Don’t worry—I closed it—but I just wanted you to know.” Or, “Why didn’t you bring the dirty laundry downstairs?”
DAVID: It’s an endless game of Tag—You’re It or You Fucked Up. If I break a glass, it’s a major tragedy. If Laurie does it, it’s “Whoops.”
CALEB: It’s the bliss … ters of domestic life.
DAVID: Ouch. Not again.
CALEB: Let’s see, would Khamta want me to leave the hot tub on or off? He probably told me and I forgot.
DAVID: Why would it matter?
CALEB: Waste energy or not? That’s the question. I’ll give him a call.
CALEB: (leaving message on Khamta’s voice mail) … anyway, Khamta, give me a call.
DAVID: What are you going to do?
CALEB: I guess I’ll turn the hot tub off.
DAVID: The thing I liked best about Peter’s novel [A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism]—what he was trying to get to (I think it’s his big theme, actually, given that his father was a big muckamuck at the IMF)—is that if you view life as a chess game, you’re going to miss it. Life, that is.
CALEB: Look at Bobby “Dear Mr. Osama” Fischer: the penultimate moronic genius.
DAVID: “Penultimate” means “next to ultimate,” not “ultimate.”
Caleb raises his eyebrows.
DAVID: Sorry. Chess game!
CALEB: Four Jews in the desert: three rabbis and one dissident rabbi. Or let’s make it Caleb and his two friends versus David.
DAVID: Okay.
CALEB: Four Jews in the desert arguing over the Torah, and David Shields says to Caleb, “My interpretation of the Torah is right, and to prove it, I will ask for a sign.” The blue sky clouds over, there’s thunder, a few lightning bolts, and the skies part. David Shields says, “See, I’m right.”
Caleb says, “That could have just been a coincidence, not a sign from God.”
David says, “God, a little more help, please.” Black clouds roll in, there’s lightning all around, nearby trees are destroyed, a brief rainstorm, then the sky clears and there are a few puddles. David says, “Okay, admit it. I’m right.”
Caleb consults with his friends; they come to a consensus: Caleb says, “That still could be a coincidence. Today could be one of those strange weather days.”
David Shields gets on his knees and shouts, “God, I implore you!”
Clouds roll, part in the middle, a golden light floods the desert, and a deep voice booms, “David is riiiiiiightttt!!!!!”
David says, “What more proof do you need?”
Caleb and his two friends gather once again, and Caleb finally emerges and says, “Now it’s three against two.”
DAVID: Perfect. “I think you’re totally wrong.”
CALEB: A few words on post-childbirth belly: That belly is the home of our babies and that belly’s beautiful.
DAVID: See, that’s the thing: I couldn’t say that without blushing if my life depended on it.
Pulled over on the side of the road outside Index, Caleb clicks off his phone.
CALEB: Well, I guess I was supposed to leave the hot tub on. I’ll turn around. We’re not going to be able to get you home in time for Natalie and Skype.
DAVID: Hmmm.
CALEB: Call Laurie, say that I fucked up.
DAVID: It wasn’t any big mistake. You did what you thought you should. Unfortunately, Khamta called back.
CALEB: Fortunately. I mean, what if he called later? If I don’t turn on the jets, the water will, little by little, turn green and nasty. The water needs to filter. He was cool about it.
DAVID: We’ll get back around five?
CALEB: There’ll be a little bit of weekend traffic around Sultan through Monroe. You might be late.
CALEB: We die, but I want to die old. I mean, if you die and you’re forty-five and you have religion, you die thinking you will go to heaven and reunite with your loved ones. But I can’t believe in something that I don’t see as possible—that the afterlife is conditional on faith, that beyond being a good person you have to have “belief and swear allegiance to God,” whatever that means, in order to enter heaven.
DAVID: There’s always a rock in the garden. That rock is mortality or evil or both, but I really do love my life with Laurie and Natalie, my writing and teaching life. I have a blessed life and I hope it continues for another forty years.
CALEB: Then you won’t outlive your father.
DAVID: Another forty-four years.
CALEB: If you’re a religious moralist, you look for solutions within religion, but the secular or atheist moralist lacks absolutes. How do you tell people how to be happy when you can’t define this for yourself?
DAVID: I’m not sure that being a moralist means you want everybody happy in the same way.
CALEB: Ever heard of Robert Ingersoll? Nineteenth-century atheist, way ahead of his time, loved his wife, a good father, a humanitarian, an abolitionist, a supporter of women’s rights when these views were not in vogue. His speeches make for good reading. He said the most important question was, “How can you be happy?” And his answer was, “By making other people happy.”
DAVID: Wrong question. Wrong answer.
CALEB: Right question. Right answer. First settle the question of yourself, then those around you.
CALEB: Money Creek Campground exit: the bridge and that tunnel are easy landmarks. We turn by that school bus sign.
DAVID: I’m gonna go in the house and steal a few crackers—or should I not do that?
CALEB: Khamta’s mighty generous with his crackers. I don’t think it would be a problem.
DAVID: I’ve still got an apple, grapes, cheese; you’re welcome to any of my stuff, obviously.… What do you need to do?
CALEB: Go inside, get the key for the chain wrapped around the hot tub, open the hot tub, get the water circulating.
DAVID: Of all the things that could have gone wrong, this is obviously pretty minor.
CALEB: It’s an extra hour.
DAVID: Maybe a little more. If at all possible, I’d love to avoid missing Natalie’s call.
DAVID: You’ve traveled far more than I have, but when I’ve traveled, I pretty much find that worldwide there are seventeen types of people and you meet all seventeen types wherever you go, don’t you think? It’s not as if you arrive in Amsterdam or Seoul or Prague and suddenly realize: Oh my god, people are so different here!
CALEB: If you don’t like your boss in the United States and every girl you go out with is a bitch, then overseas you’ll hate your boss and your girlfriend will be a bitch.
DAVID: That’s not what I’m saying.
CALEB: The dynamics of prejudice change, though. Koreans don’t like the disabled or physical deformities.
DAVID: Meaning?
CALEB: There was this one teacher, American, who got fired because he was cross-eyed.
DAVID: They fired him for that?
CALEB: He couldn’t control his pupils.
DAVID: Thanks for making such good time on the turnaround. Let me see if Laurie checked in.
CALEB: If no traffic problems, we’ll be home in an hour.
DAVID: What town now?
CALEB: We’re about to hit Gold Bar.
DAVID: All these funny names: Gold Bar, Index, Startup, Baring, Climax.
CALEB: Delivery needs work.
CALEB: You ever see The Sunset Limited?
DAVID: That Cormac McCarthy play with Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones?
CALEB: Jackson saves Jones from committing suicide, and they talk it out. Jackson’s a no-luck ex-con and Jones is a professor, but no matter how Jackson tries to convince Jones that life has meaning, Jones holds on to the emptiness of life. There’s a scene where Jackson recounts a prison fight and uses “nigger.” Not “nigga,” but “nigger.” And Jones gets offended!
DAVID: Right. “Life has no meaning, I want to kill myself, but I’m going to be offended by the word ‘nigger.’ ”
CALEB: What do you think of Cormac McCarthy?
DAVID: To me, he seems to be a complex and nihilistic version of The Tao of Pooh. His writing, from what I can tell, assumes the reader has never before confronted existential matters.
DAVID: Your ESL teacher’s guide was published by a real publisher?
CALEB: Yes. We’re talking triple-digit advance, and when you add royalties, I made well into four figures.
DAVID: You have three books. Two self-published?
CALEB: Technically, my sister published Chinoku. She publishes music and game books. She paid to have it formatted and so on. It’s a puzzle book, more of a toy or game. It doesn’t count for much.
DAVID: What are the three titles?
CALEB: Chinoku, This Seething Ocean, and The World is a Class. My publisher spelled “is” with a lowercase “i.”
DAVID: What do you mean? Did you just not correct it?
CALEB: I didn’t catch the error. I read galleys. She sent me a proof. I must have seen it a dozen times. The World is a Class.
DAVID: It’s funny how your mind can fool you.
CALEB: Have enough Caleb for one weekend? Normally, friendship is marked by long periods of silences interrupted by selective extroversion, but I felt like silence wasted time and opportunity.
DAVID: I know what you mean.
CALEB: Every time I thought of something, I had to mention it. Earlier you said, “Caleb, we have to get to the point, not waste time, be succinct.” But how can we do that? Conversation is a rough draft.
DAVID: That’s where editing will come in. We’ll cut from live moment to live moment, getting rid of the dross. Argue, asterisk, argue, asterisk, argue.
We need to make sure we go at each other. Life against art. I do think we embody those two antipodes. Not that I’m not interested in life or that you’re not interested in art, but we need to ferociously defend how we have lived our lives. I have to say, “It’s okay that I’ve never changed a tire, isn’t it?” Or I say, “It’s amazing that you speak all these languages and have traveled so extensively, but at age forty-three you’re not yet the writer you want to become.” Sound good?
CALEB: No. It doesn’t sound good.
DAVID: Okay, then. If I’m being totally honest, I must admit I find it sort of depressing how much you’ve driven the conversation.
CALEB: That’s not true.
DAVID: You have more stories. You’re a better storyteller. I’m out of stories, out of new ideas. I need to change my life.
CALEB: That’s taken straight from that Rilke poem. Even your big heartfelt revelations are borrowed from books!
DAVID: It was an allusion, and you—
CALEB: Also, I don’t want to fictionalize anything.
DAVID: What?
CALEB: What we say goes. I mean, yeah, add on a thought to a conversation—fine. Or if I paraphrase a quote and when I transcribe, I look up the exact quote, that’s okay, that’s in the spirit. Or if we talk about something on the second day, but it makes sense to bump it to the first day, I’m down with that. But I don’t want to fictionalize some conversation with two bicyclists we never met. It didn’t happen. I don’t want to cross that line.
DAVID: Fine, but I can—
CALEB: If it didn’t happen, I don’t want to say it happened.
DAVID: I do.
CALEB: How often do you have life talks with Natalie? Who told her about the birds and the bees?
DAVID: In school, when she was twelve, they had to watch a movie called Boys Like Breasts. Basically, “You’re about to get your breasts, and boys like them, so don’t worry about it,” that sort of stuff. We’ve had relatively few such talks with her.
CALEB: You talk about abstinence, condoms?
DAVID: She struggles with her weight due to the insulin issue and so—
CALEB: How’s her esteem?
DAVID: That’s a good question. She’s a mixture of tremendous self-possession and deep insecurity (unlike the rest of us). The weight thing is a major problem for her. It’s heartbreaking. She’s beautiful.
CALEB: Life can be cruel. Kids can be cruel.
DAVID: Alert the media.
CALEB: Has she been asked to prom or homecoming?
DAVID: A bunch of people went together as friends. People like her, she has a lot of friends, and boys like her.
CALEB: Does she get any counseling for—
DAVID: She’s seen so many doctors and nutritionists and specialists. She’s been on so many medicines. We so hope she can break the cycle with diet, exercise, and meds. She’s having good success of late.
CALEB: Have you ever been to counseling?
DAVID: Here and there. Nothing serious.
CALEB: What made you go?
DAVID: I saw speech therapists on and off until my early thirties. When I was trying to decide whether I wanted to be a father, I saw one psychologist a few times. He was pretty bad. He just kept saying, “What else are you gonna do?” Have you ever talked to someone?
CALEB: When I had my accident. I had serious bruising in the brain—in a coma for four days. Then I had a seizure right after waking up from the coma. My mind wasn’t ready, and then they took off my cast. They set the bones wrong. I had a bulge in my wrist, so they had to rebreak it, set it with metal screws, and put it together again. I really took advantage of this and played the victim. But my head wasn’t well.
I had the accident at the end of July and stayed at St. Luke’s in Bellingham. I missed the first two weeks of senior year and was let out of the hospital in late September. My first week back, I had an episode at a football game. I had started at quarterback as a junior, and now I’m on the sideline with a back brace and a broken arm, telling everyone that I’ll be ready to play in a couple of weeks. I’ll get good real soon. The eyes of my former teammates and coaches were saying, “You’ve got a cast and shell around your chest, scars all over your face. Yeah, right.”
A couple of my friends were going to the Oak Harbor High School dance afterward, and I wanted to go; the plan had been my mom would take us, wait outside, and then drive us home. But my mom wanted to take me straight home because I was acting nuts. I really wanted to go. It’d be my first dance in months, but she said, “No way—we’re going home.”
I became enraged, punched the door, opened it while she was driving, threatened to jump. My friends calmed me down. She dropped my friends off, took me home, and I’m raving and angry, still. Then she called 911 and a policeman came to the house. Not an ambulance but a policeman. I didn’t know why. He came in and said that he just wanted to take me to the hospital for a checkup and I’d come right back, and I said, “Why? I’m fine. There’s nothing wrong with me.” The policeman explained that I had to go, I’d be examined, and if I was fine I’d come right home. So I went in the back of the police car. My mom followed. My dad stayed home with my sisters. They take me to Whidbey General, put me into a room, tell me that I’m not fine, that I’m going to have to go back to St. Luke’s for further examination.
I exploded. I screamed, “Let me out!” I punched walls until I was exhausted. They strapped me down, took me in an ambulance to Bellingham. They said I bent the metal plate in my wrist slightly. I remember going nutso toward my mom, saying stuff like “Fuck you, you bitch. You betrayed me, you bitch.”
DAVID: What meds were you on?
CALEB: Dilantin. I’d already had the one seizure in August. This time I blacked out, had another seizure, and woke up strapped to a bed in the psych ward of the hospital. They told me I’d gotten violent: they had to monitor me, and I couldn’t leave. I asked one of the nurses to take the straps off. After a little bit they did, and I just started asking questions. I was completely normal, or so I believed. As if I woke up normal, and now I was in this mental ward.
There were other patients—men and women, and they all hung out in a common area, playing games or watching TV. I played chess with a Vietnam vet, and I made a few friends, if you want to call them friends. We each had our own room. I stayed there for two weeks.
I asked one older woman why she was there. She had outbursts/breakdowns, and she was maybe fifty. She was beginning to go bald, a little overweight, had gray hair and enormous breasts, and when I asked her when she was going to go, she said, “Whenever I want. I’m a voluntary patient.”
I couldn’t believe it. She volunteered? I asked her why. She didn’t want to go into it but said that she sometimes felt like killing herself. So I went to the nurse, a guy with a beard, and asked about this. He told me I was also a voluntary patient. So I said, “I’d like to go.” I didn’t know that my parents had admitted me as a voluntary patient.
DAVID: “Guess what? You’ve been volunteered.”
CALEB: I got angry. It wasn’t a psychotic rage, though—more like I was rationally annoyed. I just tried to tell them I was fine, and this was ridiculous.
DAVID: I wonder if the meds wore off, or what caused the outburst.
CALEB: I’m not sure. I remember the hospital stay vividly. The Vietnam vet had been a Navy SEAL. He and I would play chess, and he had a very beautiful wife and daughter; the daughter was my age, too. I wanted to hear Vietnam stories, which he definitely didn’t want to talk about. I told him he seemed normal, and he said, “Not on the inside.”
The woman who was suicidal and going bald—she lost it once, just yelled and talked about killing herself, and the bearded nurse had to gorilla-hug her and calm her down. Her smock had slipped off and her breasts were showing, she was slobbering and drooling, and there were seven or eight patients watching.
My parents and friends visited, and I could take supervised walks—sometimes with this very kind nurse I had a crush on. She was maybe thirty. Very beautiful and calming. We’d take walks and converse, and I’d say how I didn’t belong there, and she’d explain how they had to make sure. By now it’s October—been over two months since the accident.
The last week or so I just played chess or card games and watched a little TV and read books, and waited, and gave up trying to argue, and that’s how they knew I was sane. They knew I was sane because I no longer struggled; I accepted the situation.
DAVID: Part of it must have been that you saw yourself surrounded by truly crazy people.
CALEB: I couldn’t make comparisons to McMurphy/Nicholson because I hadn’t yet seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but when I saw the movie I knew I’d been there—at least a slice. I’d thought about killing myself in a not completely serious way. Maybe I’m in denial, even now. I imagined it.
After they released me I had to see a counselor in Coupeville once a week, and occasionally I’d go back to St. Luke’s. My parents had to agree that I’d be kept under counseling. And I had to take all these personality tests before I could take a full course load at high school.
DAVID: What’s that famous test, the Minnesota Multiphasic?
CALEB: Could have been. These questions were all over: Have you ever had a homosexual fantasy? Have you ever thought of killing yourself? Have you ever wanted to kill your mother? Have you ever wanted to sleep with your sister? When they finished, they told me I was in denial, according to “expert” evaluation. The only denial might have been about killing myself. I debated that one. I could imagine what it might be like to murder someone, but that’s not the same as being murderous. I had a writer’s imagination before I started writing, is how I look at it.
I’d taken these same tests in early September—same answers, and the psychiatrists had let me return to school; they hadn’t seen my “denial.” After the second test, the head counselor talked to me for a grand total of fifteen minutes and said, “Oh, I’ve looked at your results.” She had practically no interaction with me and came up with this “expert” analysis. When I’d been truly insane, they let me out. When I was sane, they said I needed more counseling.
The school counselor and principal met, looked over these results from the hospital, and disregarded them. They put me back on a full course load. My parents stopped the counseling, but my depression was real. I mean, having broken bones and scars and not being able to play sports is depressing. It’s not mental disease. You lose your wife or children or parents, something much more serious than what I went through, and you’ll be depressed.
About four years after the accident I asked out a Coupeville girl, Michelle, I always thought was cute. In high school I wore heavy-metal clothes and had a mustache; she never paid attention to me. But in college I picked up a little fashion sense, and over summer vacation we were at a party on Whidbey Island, and she said something flattering about me in front of other people, so I asked her out. She accepted, we went out, she seemed awkward all night, I tried to kiss her, and she gave me a peck and left. Then I called, left a couple messages but never talked to her, and after a few days Brenda, a mutual friend, called to tell me Michelle wasn’t interested. I’m twenty. It’s not seventh grade.
I asked Brenda why, and she told me that Michelle thought I was odd. Brenda said that Michelle said, “I don’t feel comfortable; he’s weird.” Brenda said, “That’s just Caleb. Since the accident he’s changed.” And then Michelle said, “Caleb was off before the accident.”
David laughs.
Thus my interest in the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders], leading to stuff like the Rape Crisis Intervention Handbook. Doctors try to evaluate rapists based on science. The conclusion always is, “This guy’s going to rape again, and he’ll be let out someday.” I diverge. My point is I realized how important it is to appear sane. In Speedboat, Renata Adler says, “Sanity is the most profound moral option of our time.”
DAVID: Don’t I know it.
CALEB: Therefore, for the immoral, the criminal, it’s to their benefit to appear insane. Any quasi-sane sociopath just needs to read the DSM in order to work the system.
DAVID: Do you see the world through the lens of the DSM?
CALEB: So you’re familiar with the DSM?
DAVID: I practically wrote the fuckin’ thing.
CALEB: It’s riddled with uncertainty. A careful reading should make any doctor even more agnostic. I don’t understand how any psychiatrist can testify at a trial as an expert. Rape and recidivism correlate—why do we need a psychiatrist to tell a judge that this or that rapist may or may not be a risk to reoffend? “This offender has a less than fifty percent chance of reoffending, so let’s set him free.” Why should society worry about violent recidivists? If you’ve committed a violent rape, not to mention murder, you never get set free. The end.
CALEB: Sometimes Terry suggests marriage counseling.
DAVID: When you guys are going through a rough patch?
CALEB: It’s tongue-in-cheek. We watch Curb and Larry is getting counseling, and she’ll say, “Doesn’t that look like fun? Do you think marriage counseling could settle our differences?” I’ll say, “You want to pay someone $150 an hour to tell him how you wish I vacuumed more often, and if I did you’d be in the mood more often?” The sex-for-chores carrot is a turnoff. Whenever she pulls that, I tell her I’ll fuck her more often if she lets me drink more beer.
DAVID: You guys seem to get along pretty well.
CALEB: We rarely have arguments, although we disagree about everything.
DAVID: Same.
DAVID: I’m interested in how you had this brief flirtation with imbalance and how, from then on, you resolved to become a highly rational person. You decided you weren’t going to go back there anymore.
CALEB: It made me an artist.
DAVID: That’s a pretty fancy thing to say.
CALEB: My senior year, after the wreck, I was very introverted with occasional outbursts. It was when I “discovered” nature. I took walks or drives on Whidbey Island by myself, and I looked at myself, from the outside, for the first time.
There was a girl, Cathy, who I had kissed a couple days before my accident. I thought about her continually in the hospital, and she seemed glad for my recovery. We went out. My cast had been removed, I had a back brace, the bones in my right forearm bulged grotesquely; the surgery to reset hadn’t happened. I wanted her to touch the bone. My arm is an orange-and-purple-and-blue deformed mess. She’s trembling. Later I tried to kiss her. She gave me vomit face.
I get through my senior year. For the first time in my life I became contemplative. I started examining Christianity and went from drugs and alcohol to periods of abstinence followed by more periods of experimentation.
DAVID: But why do you think it turned you toward writing per se?
CALEB: Mark and Vince were the only two I could talk to about these things; each of them had a parent who had died. But some thoughts I wanted for myself, and I had these thoughts and needed to write. I started writing poems my senior year but didn’t consider myself a “poet”—just writing thoughts and notes down on a piece of paper. Writing led me to philosophy and the Bible, and literature was the next step.
DAVID: I suppose it’s pretty obvious how the stutter drove me inward as a survival mechanism. So, too, for you, this accident, though in a different way. “How did you go bankrupt?” “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” You went for suddenly. I went for gradually.
CALEB: I’m not bankrupt.
DAVID: Neither am I.
Both laugh.
CALEB: I wasn’t a typical jock: I’d missed football and part of basketball. I scored high on the SAT, I graduated third in my class, and I got this army scholar-athlete award that they give to only a thousand people in the nation.
DAVID: Did you have to be from a military family?
CALEB: No. An army officer spoke at our high school assembly, mentioned various achievements, I was zoning out, and then he announced my name. I shook the guy’s hand wearing a Judas Priest T-shirt, a mustache, and a quasi mullet. I finally realized how dumb the mustache looked and shaved it off before starting college. I met you two years later.
DAVID: I’m not sure how to articulate this exactly, but I forget that if a teacher comes along at the right time, that person can have a dramatic effect on a student’s trajectory.
CALEB: Fishing for compliments?
DAVID: Trying to get us an ending.
CALEB: Your class humbled me.
CALEB: You pooh-poohed everything I wrote.
DAVID: (laughing) I don’t remember that. Didn’t I criticize everybody’s work?
CALEB: Of course, but you gave me a 3.0.
DAVID: Was that lower than usual?
CALEB: For a writing class where all you have to do is show up and participate, yeah. It was a wakeup. When that UW reporter asked me my main impression of your class, I told her I improved as a writer directly from your influence.
DAVID: Thanks. Hearing that is one of the rewards of teaching.
CALEB: My teenage students in Argentina gave me a parting gift and wrote, “Thanks for not only teaching us English but also for becoming our friend.”
CALEB: We’re home. This is 95th.
DAVID: Right. Is this your house? Well, that was painless.
CALEB: Tracy’s car is here, too. Come on in.
DAVID: I can’t. I’m already late. I’m supposed to be skyping with Natalie.
CALEB: Five minutes. I’ll set the timer and kick you out.
DAVID: I can’t. If not for the hot tub snafu, no problem—I’d love to—but, you know, I’m really trying to be present as a father and a husband.
CALEB: Meet Tracy. Talk a little bit with Terry. I’ll try to think of something off-color to get a conversation going. C’mon, for our book.
DAVID: It’s already past five. It’ll take me another fifteen minutes to get home.
CALEB: Oh, this is excellent. This is the flip.
DAVID: Ooh, I—
CALEB: What’s it going to be? Life or art?