To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
—WILLIAM BLAKE, “Auguries of Innocence”
At 2:05 P.M. on Thursday, December 13, 2012, I sent an email to Tom Shroder, my friend and editor. It said, in its entirety: “I wonder what happened on May 17, 1957.”
The phone rang. It was Tom. “That’s a good idea,” he said.
If it doesn’t sound like an idea to you, much less a good one, it’s because you lack context. Tom and I were forever bouncing off each other ambitious concepts for our next book. We usually trashed them, for kindness’ sake.
Between us, Tom and I had written seven books, only two of which—one apiece—had even approached commercial success. The business model for the book publishing industry resembles the business model for nineteenth-century oil-well wildcatters—that is to say, it is an economy of informed guesswork. Most books are financial failures, but the rare hit becomes a gusher and underwrites all the dry holes. This may keep the publishing industry afloat, but it wreaks hell on writers’ egos. With book ideas, friends don’t let friends get too enthusiastic.
But Tom liked this idea and understood it implicitly. Select an ordinary day at random, report it deeply, then tell it like it happened—from midnight to midnight, the most basic, irreducible unit of human experience. Ideally, the more you’d learn, the more firmly you’d establish that in life, there’s no such thing as “ordinary.” Also, that in the events of a single day—in that telltale grain of sand—you would find embedded in microcosm all of the grand themes in what hacks and academics tend to call The Human Experience.
It was a stunt, at its heart. But I like stunts, particularly if they can illuminate unexpected truths. The magazine story for which I am best known involved placing Joshua Bell, the renowned violinist, outside a Metro stop in downtown Washington, D.C., at rush hour, incognito. In jeans, a polo shirt, and a baseball cap, for three-quarters of an hour on his priceless Stradivarius, Bell played timeless music, masterpieces by Bach and Schubert and Massenet, with a violin case at his feet, open for handouts, seeded with petty change. Would anyone notice the extraordinary beauty that was happening twenty feet away?
Few did. Most people hurried by, as if the fiddler in the subway were a nuisance to be avoided. What happened that day became a story not about our taste and sophistication but about our priorities: Have we so overprogrammed our lives that it is impossible to experience unscheduled awe? How many other worthy things are we racing past?
The stunt of reporting an ordinary day would also test a journalistic conceit I embrace: That if you have the patience to find it and the skill to tell it, there’s a story behind everyone and everything—that although great matters make for strong narratives, power also can lurk in the latent and mundane.
As the Sunday features editor at The Washington Post, I once assigned five writers to each hammer a nail into the phone book and do a profile of whomever the nail stopped at. It was a wild stab, literally, and it hit a vital organ—we got five compelling stories. One Christmas I summoned four of the best writers at the Post and sent them off in different directions—one north, one south, one east, one west, with instructions to walk no farther than seven blocks and bring me back a good Christmas story. If you don’t find one, I said, you may as well not return. They all came back, and collectively they pulled off a Christmas miracle.
The most important book of my teenaged years, the one that really changed the way I thought about things, was Flatland, an obscure 1884 work of science fiction and social satire written by an unassuming English schoolmaster and theologian named Edwin Abbott Abbott. The man with the eccentric name wrote what may well be the most eccentric book of his generation, a slender, crudely illustrated novella set in a two-dimensional world inhabited by sentient geometric figures.
The narrator, a square, is visited one day by a sphere. Initially, the square sees this three-dimensional being only as a circle of rapidly changing diameter. This is because a sphere, arriving from above and descending into and through the two-dimensional plane in which the square lives, would fluctuate in circumference depending on the diameter of the portion of the sphere that happens to be intersecting the flat plane, as a circle, at any particular moment. (There will be no more math.)
The sphere is received as something of a deity. He has selected the square to be his disciple and prophet. He would show the square the existence of a third dimension, and then send him back to his land to spread the news as gospel. Thus the sphere elevates the square above Flatland into Spaceland, so he can look down and see his circumscribed, unlovely world with disturbing new clarity—a despotic, socially rigid, class-obsessed aristocracy—even further diminished by the startling knowledge of an entirely new, seemingly limitless dimension of existence.
Back in Flatland, the square’s excited vision of Spaceland seemed to others not like science but like faith, since such a thing could not be demonstrated or even adequately explained within the context of a two-dimensional world. In the end, the square was punished for his insights because they challenged accepted dogma. He was Galileo, but he did not bend. He became a martyr for truth.
It’s a charming little book and considerably deeper than it seems. It anticipates relativity and quantum physics. It explores the self-protective hypocrisy of organized religion, the suppression of inconvenient thought, and the ugliness of class oppression. But to my teenaged eyes it was mostly about the possibility of heightened perception through heightened perspective—thinking outside the box.
Our ordinary understanding of the world is myopic, limited not only by our imperfect senses and flawed powers of analysis but also by the capricious nature of the news narrative we are presented with, day to day and year to year. Fame is transient and shallow, and even the more reflective storytelling of historians tends to shine arbitrary spotlights; significant events and meaningful connections go undiscovered.
Hence One Day. But it would be one day presented both microscopically and panoramically, from deep within but also high above, able to see forward and backward in time—applying the added, illuminating benefit of that fourth dimension.
WHAT REMAINED WAS selection of the day, and it had to be completely random. That is how Tom Shroder and I came to be at the Old Ebbitt Grill, a stately Washington, D.C., oyster house, at lunchtime on New Year’s Day, 2013. We brought an old green fedora.
Tom had suggested a dart thrown at a sheet of numbers, but I demurred. You can aim a dart; even blindfolded and with the best of intentions, there’d be a feel of manipulation. So we went with the hat, into which we would crumple sixty-four slips of paper in three separate drawings. First, the twelve months of the year, then the thirty-one days of the month, and last, the twenty-one years to which we’d decided to limit the field: 1969 through 1989. (We wanted a date far enough in the past to feel like “history” and have a future to explore, but not so far back that living witnesses would be hard to find.) We’d left ourselves with 7,670 possible dates.
The first draw was made by Oscar Southwell, age eleven, who was dining with his parents at a nearby table. Oscar pulled December. His sister, Willow, eight, drew the twenty-eighth. Not wishing to incite sibling squabblery for rights to the final dip, Tom and I returned to our table and asked the waitress to pick the year.
December 28, 1986, would be our day, for better or worse. A quick calendar check revealed it to have been a Sunday.
Tom and I spent the following few minutes in silence, consuming mollusks and contemplating, separately and sourly, our grotesque bad luck.
Any journalist can tell you that Sunday is the slowest news day of the week, and what little news there is often goes underreported by skeleton newsroom staffs. That’s why, particularly in the journalistically flush 1980s, the local newspaper that would on all other days thud onto your driveway like a sack of wet succotash, would, on Mondays, settle like a leaf.
Also, any journalist can tell you that the softest news week of the year is the sleepy one between Christmas and New Year’s. So we had the worst day of the week in the worst week of the year. Nineteen eighty-six didn’t ring any particular big-news bells, either.
Obviously, there could be no do-overs. Randomly is built into the DNA of the book; it is its central swagger, and a mulligan would dismantle that claim. (If, in a weak moment, either Tom or I considered timidly suggesting a secret waiver of that central principle in the face of the problematic date, neither of us has yet admitted it to the other.)
I got home to an email from Tom. “John D. MacDonald died on The Day,” he said. It was our first solid fact, a top hit when you search the date. It also provided the first strange reverberation in a project that would end up with many more. This echo was serpentine, and personal, and weird, and it reached a half century into the past. It will take some explaining.
John D. MacDonald was a prolific writer of hard-boiled detective thrillers and the creator of Travis McGee, the emotionally callused but philosophically articulate “salvage consultant” who lived on a houseboat in Florida and hired himself out to recover items that had been lost by victims of larceny, swindle, or assorted other unscrupulousnesses. These stolen things could be as concrete as a car or as abstract as a reputation. I’d read some Travis McGee and liked it.
MacDonald’s death in a Milwaukee hospital on December 28, 1986, was not eventful, as ends of lives go. He’d uttered no dramatic last words—indeed, no last words at all. Three months before, at seventy, he’d walked into that hospital on his own steam for scheduled heart bypass surgery, but afterward, things quickly went bad. His lungs filled with fluid faster than a dipso broad at an open bar. By December 1, he was in a coma, and two weeks later his brain was cheese. Death sucker-punched John D. MacDonald, sapped him from behind like the gutless punk it is.
Actually, MacDonald wrote nothing like that. His tough talk was graceful and his insights profound. In the thirty years before his death, he had almost single-handedly rescued the hard-boiled detective novel from a generation of Raymond Chandler imitators. MacDonald had taken the manhandled genre, shook off the cliché, reinstated the intelligence, and added a social conscience.
By the time of his death on December 28, 1986, his novels were widely accepted as literature, but there was a time when this hardly seemed likely. In the 1950s, he was essentially a pulp writer, cerebrally experimenting with the form, but very much a part of it.
MacDonald had become an adjunct member of a small literary colony in Sarasota, Florida, mostly men like MacDonald in reverent orbit around the dean of Florida writers, the dapper master of historical novels and short stories, MacKinlay Kantor. Kantor had turned his formidable skills as a storyteller into great fame, and for a time, considerable fortune. He won a Pulitzer for his masterwork, Andersonville. Drove a big brassy yellow Lincoln. Visited his friend Hemingway in Cuba.
Kantor would become a deeply influential force in MacDonald’s life. But like many of Kantor’s protégés, the ones he really cared about, MacDonald would pay a price for the older man’s attention. Filled with himself, Kantor was disdainful of MacDonald’s hard-boiled oeuvre and would turn that screw whenever it pleased him.
I am holding in my hand a letter from John D. MacDonald to MacKinlay Kantor. It is dated Monday, December 12, 1960, the night that MacDonald decided he would take it no more. It begins:
Dear Mack—Here in a windy sobriety of midnight I foist upon you a windy letter, partly as an explanation of myself to you, and partly as a therapeutic self-analysis . . .
The letter goes on for three dense pages, at times deferential, at other times acrid and scolding. MacDonald did not yet know exactly who he was as a writer, nor precisely where he was going, but he knew he was not the unambitious hack in training that Kantor apparently saw. The letter shows the anarchy of spacing and variations in boldness typical of the old Remingtons and Smith Coronas, when you could slam or caress the keyboard according to your mood, and you’d see it on the page. On this night, clearly, the machine took a beating.
It has been your habit (over the years I have known you) to make snide remarks about the work I do which is of importance to me. They have stung. I have been unable to laugh. You speak of “that mystery stuff” with a slurring indifference . . .
Kantor had evidently poked fun at the jaundiced, misanthropic tone that is at the heart of hard-boil—tales narrated by emotionally closeted private ops who live in a seamy world of compromised morals. To this, MacDonald launches a fierce but nuanced defense of the genre not as a lesser form of literature but as a fully worthy form, a vessel into which a gifted writer can pour his heart, can seek truth, expose duplicity, skewer sanctimony, and develop characters of no less complexity than those in Kantor’s works.
I believe the appraisals I make are more severe, more uncompromising, than yours. Yet we are both, in essence, moralists. We are both prying, searching, scrabbling for The Good. I seem to see it in the human animal less often than you do, but that does not mean the quest is less pressing, nor does it mean that I bleed less when I don’t find it, or feel less glory when I do.
At forty-four, MacDonald was an angry, brilliant, insecure, largely unknown writer, and the letter crackles with amusing arrogance; he dismisses some of the most acclaimed writers of the day—James Michener, John Hersey, Leon Uris—as tiresome. John O’Hara is a diarist “of upper income fornication.” He calls his own magazine stories—written for quick money—“meretricious.” But he unequivocally defends the integrity of his books, into which, he says, he has poured everything he has.
Kantor had made his fame by writing of the past and had urged MacDonald in the same direction, because he felt historical novels confer gravitas to a writer. MacDonald explains how he would not—could not—do that and remain true to his conscience:
Damn it, I have to put my people against a current tapestry—one which I feel to be monolithic, onanistic, escapist and, in large degree, shameful. This IS a new time, unparalleled. These are the days when the world is filling up, and the significance of the individual is being muted by the hard logic of there being so many of him. We are all keeping our heads down, more than we should. And the greatest evil in the world is the sin of non-involvement . . .
This indignant letter from protégé to mentor is as eloquent a defense of any artistic genre as you are likely to encounter anywhere, delivered by a master of the form so early in his career that it is essentially a passionate mission statement. I did not find it in any book or scholarly work or in the papers of John D. MacDonald. It was given to me by Tom Shroder, who had it in a file cabinet.
MacKinlay Kantor was Tom Shroder’s grandfather.
Tom remembers MacDonald from his childhood. The novelist would come to visit Mack Kantor from time to time; the two men had remained friends, despite lingering resentments never quite resolved.
On those visits, MacDonald would bring Travis McGee–themed trinkets for the grandkids—pencils and other promotional knickknacks. The books were huge by then, and MacDonald was rolling in dough. But by then MacKinlay Kantor had begun a decline; his ornamented writing style was fast going out of fashion.
But Kantor couldn’t give up his perception of himself as a famous writer, one who could mint money on the onionskin paper he fed through his typewriter. In his view, shortages were always temporary, so he continued his grand style of picking up checks at fancy restaurants and booking first-class cabins on cruises to Europe, eventually mortgaging his house on ten acres of beachfront so he could keep up the show. Then his body, abused by drink, began to give way. His publishers stopped returning calls. MacDonald helped him out with some cash and tried, unsuccessfully, to get him writing gigs.
When MacKinlay Kantor died on October 11, 1977, he was deeply in debt and largely forgotten. When John D. MacDonald died on December 28, 1986, his obit was atop the network news.
What does it mean that a man who died on The Day knew the child who would become the man who would help pick the day? Nothing but coincidence, obviously, except in the way it speaks to degrees of separation, and our common suspicion that the deeper you drill into anything, the more eerily intertwined things become. We are more connected—to one another, and perhaps even to any single point in time—than we know.
In the course of reporting this book, I spoke to one man—the son of the drummer of the Grateful Dead—about Jerry Garcia, whose experience on the day was significant. When we were done with the interview, we compared times and places and realized that he and his dad and Garcia, when they were in Washington, D.C., had often stayed in the house of a friend of theirs, and that it happened to be the man from whom, years later, I bought my house. Same house. I looked around in awe. Jerry slept here.
FOR THIS BOOK, not much has gone as easily as I’d hoped. Some people I needed to talk to are dead. Some who are alive expressed no wish to relive the things that happened to them on December 28, 1986. Some promising newspaper stories from The Day have proven, upon further review, to have been 97 percent wrong.
At the perigee of my reporting, in desperation for reliable detail, however humble, I reached three of the people featured in a 60 Minutes report about HSAM, or Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory. They are said to have in their minds virtual blueprints of their entire lives, day to day, hour to hour, available for instant upload; their feats of memory, on camera, were eye-popping. On the phone with me, about December 28, 1986, all three basically drew a blank.
There have been good developments, too, and some extraordinary surprises.
Researching The Day, I have so far seen and done things I never could have imagined. I exchanged emails with a famous man, not knowing he was in the hospital, neither of us suspecting he would be dead within days. I watched a man in a mask hold in his hands a beating human heart. I watched as a man with one eye, no hands, and a face that has terrified children in the streets—a man who almost died on The Day at the age of one—somehow type thirty-five words a minute with his stumps. One story line that was to be about hatred and savagery became, with deeper research, an epic narrative about love and forgiveness.
There were unexpected gifts of reporting, large and small.
In inner-city Washington, D.C., less than a mile from the U.S. Capitol, there is a barbershop called Brice’s. On the window glass is painted, with great flourish if dubious grammar, It Pays to Look Well. Brice’s Barber Shop is where I get my hair cut because I like the prices and I like the ambiance—Bibles and free condoms in the waiting room—and because I like the barber, whose name is Sheila Knox.
Sheila wears her own hair in a crew cut, under a baseball cap. She has more opinions than anyone else in the room and she is generous in sharing them, which works out well because her opinions are righteous and mighty. She is not big on homeschooling, or male Geminis, who are “needy and clingy.” She disdains husbands who take for granted doormat wives. (“If you come home late, you should have ate.”) She’s got no patience for handsome but indolent men. (“I’ll get me a good baby, then send him on his way.”) She is deeply suspicious of authority, convinced the Illuminati run the world, along with the Bushes and the Rockefellers.
She talks like she was brought up hard, but you sense an underlying tenderness. And she’s simply great with hair. At Brice’s there are two barbers, sometimes three, but even with empty chairs, customers often wait for Sheila. I do.
Brice’s oozes funk. The chairs are fifties-era green metal with orange leather seats. On the wall is Dogs Playing Poker, and a gauzy velvet American eagle shedding a tear over 9/11, and yellowed, sepia pictures of amusingly vintage hairstyles. Think Angela Davis, circa 1968.
One day I mentioned the book I was working on, and when I told Sheila the exact date, she stilled her scissors for a moment, squinted into a mirror. and said triumphantly, “I know exactly where I was that day.”
Where?
“In prison.”
Ah.
Sheila asked if the twenty-eighth was a Sunday, and when I confirmed it was, she smiled and said she also knew what had happened to her on that day because it had, in a small but important way, changed her attitude toward life.
On that day she’d just passed her twenty-second birthday as an inmate at the women’s correctional facility at Jessup, Maryland. She was serving five to fifteen after having been caught with some extremely unsavory individuals in a stolen rental car with guns in the trunk. The takedown came in the parking lot of a suburban shopping mall, outside a Hecht’s: weapons drawn, orders shouted, handcuffed facedown on the asphalt. Sheila might have avoided jail time—they got her only on conspiracy because she was just a ride-along—but she skipped her court date and fled to Atlanta. That added a fugitive warrant, and also pissed off The Man, and that meant time.
From the age of pigtails, Sheila Knox had been in hot water, a smart little girl who did well in school but thirsted for mischief. At eight, she broke into a locked room and stole money from a church. At eleven she stole her mama’s car. At twelve she got a juvie record when, at his wit’s end, her dad turned her in for breaking into houses, stealing guns, and selling them.
On December 28, 1986, at Jessup, she was in solitary for giving lip to the guards. (“Pick that up, Sheila.” “Do I hear a please?”) At noon, they told her she had visitors. In the visiting room were her mother and her father’s father and her mother’s mother, all part of a loving support matrix for her son, Willie, who was five. Willie was there, too. (The little boy had been the result of a one-time thing with the friend of a friend. Even in romance, Sheila was reckless.)
Prison conversations with family in an antiseptic common room tend to have a familiar flavor and structure. It was no different with the Knoxes. On days like these, someone would ask Sheila whether she was ready to turn her life around, and Sheila would dish the most earnest I’ve-come-to-Jesus bullshit she could, and Mom would nod and Grandpa would roll his eyes, and sometimes there were silences when no one seemed to have anything to say.
On this Sunday, one of those silences got filled when Sheila’s mom, Shirley, mentioned the peculiar thing that had happened on Christmas: A stranger had stopped by the house and dropped off two presents for Willie—a nice sweater and a toy racecar set.
Grandpa didn’t like hearing this at all. He was a proud man, and he grumbled that the family doesn’t need or want charity. But Sheila shushed him. She asked her mother to repeat what happened, because it was inconsistent with any reading of the world as Sheila Knox, twenty-two, understood it.
Yes, strangers at the door. Gifts for Willie.
Sheila remembered the two women who had come to the prison around Thanksgiving, saying they were a charity organization that arranged for kids to get Christmas presents. Sheila figured they had an angle—every stranger in her life had an angle, and most were acute—but she couldn’t figure this one out, so she ponied up her son’s name and her mother’s address. That’s when the ladies asked her something that made Sheila sure they were phonies. They asked if she had a favorite clothing designer—like they’re gonna go shopping for a black woman in prison. “Ralph Lauren Polo,” she said, with affected sophistication.
In the barbershop, Sheila laughs at the memory.
“I remember thinking, ‘Yeah, whatever,’ and forgetting about it right away. Nobody gonna do something for somebody for nothing.”
But someone had. The organization turned out to be Angel Tree, a church-based prison ministry. They had gone shopping. And the sweater for Willie was, indeed, Ralph Lauren.
Sheila Knox remembers December 28, 1986, as the first day in her young, reprobate, passionately cynical life that she understood that even among strangers, and even through institutions, there can be such a thing as unconditional kindness.
It wasn’t seismic; it was one of those “huh!” moments. They happen and you move on, maybe with a slight adjustment of attitude. When Sheila finally walked out of Jessup three and a half years later, she’d lost none of her iconoclasm, but her adolescent war on authority was over. She played mostly by the rules, which took her, by and by, to Brice’s, where she remains the barber for whom men wait.
And Willie now volunteers for Angel Tree.
THE ONLY DEITY I believe in is the one I have always called the God of Journalism, to whom I attribute unanticipated gifts in reportage. You know He has shown up when facts align in unlikely ways to make a good story better or a great story perfect, or when you casually mention something to the lady cutting your hair, and a splendid little tale spools out (and then checks out).
The God of Journalism is just. He rewards effort. Time and again in my life He comes through for me, but only after I decide to conduct that last interview, the one I don’t really think I need, or badger someone more than I’m entirely comfortable with, or stay at a scene longer than I’d planned, just to see what happens.
On this book I’ve encountered my god many times. But I have also known days and weeks of wretched, forlorn biblical doubt. I have had many disappointments, but I have also found funny things and poignant things and dramatic things, all of which originated in or culminated in or knifed through one particular 360-degree rotation of the third planet from a run-of-the-mill star.
Overall, it’s been an oddly disorienting experience. In the writing, I have at times felt like that hapless Flatlander square, given knowledge but struggling to convey the almost inexplicable. In my case, it’s about the concept of a day, the soul of it, something that is more feeling than fact. If I have succeeded half as well as Edwin Abbott Abbott, I’ll be satisfied.