Alone in the garage with all these books. There’s no room on the shelves anymore. Now they live in piles. Technically, I’m a part-time resident of the apartment upstairs, but I spend many hours down here in what I call, without enough irony, my office. Our ex-neighbors used to film amateur porn in this space. When they moved away, they left behind powerful overhead lights (if I leave them on overnight, the place will burn down), and I sit here, awash in brightness, gazing at these stacks of books that will squash me when the big one comes, and I think: Earthquake or no earthquake, I’ll be dead before I read a quarter of the books down here. I know this for certain and I wonder if repeating it out loud will make me believe it. I’ll be dead before I read even a quarter of the books down here. That leaves at least three-quarters of these books unread. But to measure a life in unread books seems about right to me. All the experiences we will never have, places we will never go, people we will never meet. Even so, just to hedge my bets, I’ve asked my family to bury me with a decent library.
Down here, in addition to books, unused film supplies, boxes of condoms, unopened jars of coconut oil (intriguing), and velvet pillows, there are also snow tires for a car that no longer exists. There’s a cracked bike helmet. Whose? Why hold on to a cracked helmet? And yet I don’t toss it. I don’t toss anything. I consider any and all objects fodder for some as yet untold story. Basically, I’m a hoarder with a highbrow rationale. This crap is for my art. There are suitcases (always good for a story), squash racquets, shovels, a single Rollerblade (size 13), a stained mattress, a cradle, and eight or nine cans of yellow paint. I’d once planned to repaint the kitchen. There’s a large iron bell too heavy to move. Also, a saddle. Why a saddle? How long has this saddle been down here? Through how many decades of tenants? An English saddle, I can hear my father say. See? There’s an elegance to a saddle like this. It’s got no horn, see? Horns are for slobs. Here and there the gnawing mice peep out of their little holes in the walls. They’re not afraid anymore. The cat that used to sleep on the couch died a month ago. I found her lying in her spot. She would always flee when I yanked up the garage door, leaving her indentation in the cushion for me to smooth my hand over. That’s how I knew. When she didn’t move when I opened the door. She’d been so thin for so long. I buried her—I never knew her name—in a patch of dirt behind our building. Now the mice come out and say hello. I say hello back. I say, Hey, I’m reading a great book by So-and-so. They shrug and retreat to their wood chips and rusty dust.
I’ve always been suspicious of introductions, prefaces, prologues, forewords, etc., as so often they seem a last-ditch effort to influence the way a book is read. Here’s why the following book is worthy of your attention. The writer in question, in particular, is the last person in position to judge. It’s like being your own lawyer. It only makes you look guiltier. And since I usually skip these myself, I wouldn’t blame you for doing so, too, since I am now about to attempt what I’ve condemned others for trying to pull. Am I any less a hypocrite for confessing? But here’s an attempt at self-explanation: In the year or so after my father died, I found, for the first time in as long as I could remember, I couldn’t write fiction. My father and I were never especially close, and not nearly as close as he’d wanted us to be. For years he used to call me. Three, four, five times a day, he’d call and he’d call. I’d never pick up. But somehow this not being close, at least as far as I was concerned, was a form of being close. It helped define my precarious existence. There was always this gap between us. Within the gap: a kind of love. Now there’s no gap, nothing. It never occurred to me that there wouldn’t be a time when he wouldn’t be puttering around the house I grew up in, winding the grandfather clock in the front hall or flossing his teeth in his blue bathroom. His sudden nonexistence left me with a blank I had no idea how to fill. Since it is my job to obliterate blankness with words, I felt adrift. My inability to do my day job—and fiction writing is my day-in, day-out job no matter how little it so often pays—may have had to do with the fact that in many ways my father had always been a fictional character in my life. Without him I lost my weirdest creation. My father’s funeral in Skokie, Illinois, wasn’t fictional. And I didn’t invent the rabbi who’d never met the man he was eulogizing. It was early April and snowing. Light flecks of snow melted on my face like false tears. We dropped an urn filled with soot into a small, square hole and walked back to our cars.
Grief weighs heavy, regret even more, and I found that without a certain lightness I couldn’t imagine my way into other people’s lives. It was during those befuddled months that something occurred to me. Don’t laugh. All these years of reading and trying to write, hours beyond hours of reading and trying to write, and one afternoon in a garage it hits me: the whole time I’ve actually been alive. How long did I think this dress rehearsal was going to last?
Somewhere along the line, these notes began to morph into something different from what I’d originally intended. I began them in 2008, at another time of great confusion, in the aftermath of a marriage, but they were never intended to be personal. They were only morning notes to myself. Think of this as a book of unlearned meditations that stumbles into memoir. After a while, this began (to appear) to have a certain logic. Only through reading has the rest of the world, including my own small place in it, begun to make any sense whatsoever. Stories say what I can’t. A few years ago I came across the word “ekphrasis.” It took me a couple of dictionaries to track down what it means, which is essentially art that attempts to describe other art. At first the word seemed pretentious, and I’m still unsure how to pronounce it, but I’ve come to see that maybe this is what I’ve been trying to do here, make some (poorer) art of other (greater) art as a means of explaining a few things to myself. Stories, both my own and those I’ve taken to heart, make up whoever it is that I’ve become. I’m a Jewish kid from Chicago, but without Anton Chekhov, without Isaac Babel, without Eudora Welty, without Juan Rulfo, without John Edgar Wideman, without Gina Berriault, without Malamud, Gallant, and Dubus (the list goes on and on and on1), I’m not sure I’d have any clue at all who I am. Yet even with them, some days, who the hell knows? There you have it. We’ve come full circle. I’m as confused as I was when I started. See what I mean about introductions?
One thing I’m sure of, though, is that I’m drawn to certain stories because of their defiant refusal to do what I just tried to do, that is, to explain themselves. Fiction isn’t machinery, it’s alchemy. Anybody who claims to shed complete light on the mechanisms by which fiction operates is peddling snake oil. A piece of fiction can have all the so-called essential elements, setting, character, plot, tension, conflict, and still be so dead on the page that no amount of resuscitation would ever do any good. Call this an anti-manifesto. Fiction doesn’t work. There is no algorithm. No robot or supercomputer will ever write a moving story. Try and prove me wrong, Silicon Valley. Drive our cars, you’ll never make us weep, because it is as impossible to explain precisely how a made-up story works or doesn’t work as it is to explain love and not-love. Let’s say you see a face in a crowd moving toward you. This particular face reminds you of someone out of your past, someone you once loved. Explain in words that moment of recognition? Or harder, infinitely harder, that moment of unrecognition? When this face gets closer and you realize the stranger isn’t who you thought it was? When the vision in your eyes goes from lucid to foggy. Because the person you thought it was—she or he, whoever they once were to you—is gone. Long gone. Explain the moment when you apologize with your eyes because you don’t have the strength to say it out loud? I’m sorry, I thought you were—
The other day at the park my daughter said to me, “You only love books and apples.” I protested, saying that there are plenty of things I love as much as books and apples, dearly love, including, of course, her and her mother. I said being her father was by far the best thing that’s ever happened to me once I got over the shock.
“What shock?”
“You know how much you love surprises. It’s like that. You like them, you’re just not always exactly prepared when they—”
“I’m always prepared.”
“Look, bottom line is you got here, and you basically saved my life. All right? I just didn’t—”
“Saved your life from what?”
“That’s a longer story.”
“How long?”
“The park will close before I even get halfway.”
“Shorten it.”
“Don’t you want to go do the dizzy thing again?”
“Talk. Speak words.”
“Let’s just say I was on the edge.”
“Of the pool?”
“In a way.”
“Which pool? Woodacre?”
“A hypothetical pool.”
“Where’s that?”
“Montana.”
“But you can swim.”
“Sometimes people forget.”
“What happens then?”
“Well, you kind of go to sleep in the water.”
“You mean drown. Even when you can swim? Kaput?”
“That’s it. Even when you can swim. Anyway, listen, you’re better than any book. Got it? No joke. When we get home you can kaput all my books in the street.”
She squinted her big eyes at me with a lack of faith that had no place in the eyes of a five-year-old. Maybe I wasn’t all that convincing. I’d had to look up from a page to respond and, the whole time, held my place with my finger.
My dad also read. There were always piles of Dick Francis horse-racing mysteries beside his bed, but also novels by John Galsworthy. Horse racing I understood. My father had grown up riding and loved reading about the horses even more than the racing. He once said in another life he would have liked to have been a Canadian Mountie. But what drew him to Galsworthy and stories of intrigue and hypocrisy among the British upper crust? My father, from Fargo Avenue, Rogers Park, Chicago? How simple and irretrievable are the questions we never ask. What would it have taken for me to pick up the phone when he was still on the face of the earth?
JUNE 2015