The package arrived in my departmental mailbox some time before Christmas break, but I didn’t see it until several weeks later, well after New Year’s Day of 2011—a rather unfortunate circumstance, since its arrival during Advent would have boosted my flagging affinities for the miraculous. Now I am revising this preface one last time, just over a year later, in spring of 2012, my mundane life having been permanently jolted by the parcel’s marvelous contents.
The package contained, in short, and to paraphrase Prince Hamlet, “words, words, words”—the luminous sort of words upon which we have built our civilization. Or, as my former student Jack Springs described the gift in his last letter to me, it was “a box full of nothing but words.” There may have been madness in the box—but as I eventually learned, method as well.
As that last reference might suggest, I am, and have been for the majority of my life, an English teacher, a mid-to-late career professor here at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, steady and politic, a woodworker and fisherman in my spare time, nearing the end of a long and (some would say) productive career. For reasons that evade me, and that in fact do give me some regret, I’ve never married, nor have I ever come close to approaching that foreign land of husband or father.
Some may argue that in fact I have fathered a certain kind of offspring, at least insofar as I have fostered a faith of sorts: the religion of great literature, the solemn belief in the ennobling power of words. On my best days, I’ve provoked in young minds a passion for the written word, the compositions of our great artists. But perhaps “midwife” would be more appropriate. Either way, it all sounds rather grand, I suppose. The reality of my days is much less romantic: I teach my classes, some brilliant, others desultory. I search for signs of life among pages and pages of student writing, from freshmen to doctoral candidates, pages often defaced by coffee stains, colas, tobacco, or the eccentricities of faulty, bargain-priced printers. It is often most exciting, and also most horrifying, during the humdrum act of grading freshman papers, performed ostensibly in the study of the most majestic expressions ever penned by human hands. Because it is among the youngest that we are occasionally rewarded with the briefest glimmers of promise and, every so often, even genius. And so in due course, I assign grades—and attend meetings about various departmental and administrative issues, hold office hours, advise English majors and listen to the unexceptional details of their everyday lives, and try to carry on some of my own research and writing. Almost all of these tasks involve the free market commerce of the mother tongue; I’m a purveyor of what are sometimes called the English language arts, including both the ridiculous and the sublime. My life is disciplined and predictable, some might even say boring, but I’ve grown comfortable with it.
And so it was on that frosty morning in January, a little over a year ago, that I found myself returning, after a long absence, to my campus office on the fourth floor of Ballantine Hall. There was quite literally not a single other person around. Classes were a week away, and most of my colleagues were either still out of town in warmer climes, at home enjoying a second cup of coffee, or safe between the blankets, sleeping an extra hour or two. At least eight inches of snow covered the ground, but I forged through it, intent on a day at the office, as is my habit, knowing that a huge amount of holiday mail would be waiting for me. I was drawn to campus by the promise of the mailbox.
It has long been my habit to work in the mornings. I am fond of the ambient drone of a computer or a mini-refrigerator, the stillness of letterhead, paper clips, and file folders, and I certainly relish the fact that almost no other professors (and absolutely no students) haunt the hallways before 9:00 or 10:00 a.m. I savor the monastic tone of an academic environment—the shelves of volumes, the piles of unread manuscripts and publishers’ catalogues, the odor of slow deterioration, the decay of acidic paper and day-old coffee. And I relish the romance of a stack of unopened mail. I wonder—what secrets might be hidden between the worthless leaflets, the random advertisements from sellers of casebooks and curricula, the slick fliers for overpriced documentary films on authors of marginal accomplishment? Often nothing of value emerges, but until one works his way through it all, slowly and patiently, at least a sliver of possibility remains that some buried treasure will emerge.
Having been in upstate New York visiting my aging mother, I had not been to the office in over three weeks. And as it turned out, a major discovery was to be unearthed from among that early morning’s rather large stack of mail, all of it stored neatly in my mailbox on that early Monday morning after Twelfth Night. As the first human visitor of the year, I was like one of the mysterious magi from the east, and the departmental office was shadowy, its doors locked and its confines silent as the stars on that far-off winter’s night. I used my master key to unlock the windowless door and collect the ample plunder of mail hidden within, a booty that included dozens of letters and memos, several boxes of books, and various issues of periodicals and journals. From there, I carried it all to the frigid end of a long corridor, where stood my office.
Entering, I paused to savor the sunlight beginning to emerge through my south-facing window. The trees were bare that bitter morning, with the exception of a few stingy old oaks, which were about as forlorn as trees are ever likely to be. As I stood looking out into the glade below, the office seemed to yawn, as if waking from a long winter’s nap.
I settled the mail on a side table, stuck my gloves in my coat pockets, and shrugged off my coat, hanging it, along with my hat and scarf, on the hook behind my door. Next I flipped on the small space heater hidden beneath my desk—which was, technically, against university rules— and grabbed my carafe, headed back down the hallway to fill it with tap water, then returned to plug in the coffee maker in preparation for a long morning of work.
My empty stomach, by and by, began to pronounce its primal warblings, so I pulled out my brown bag egg sandwich, settled into the easy chair in the corner, and began sorting through my mound of mail. Halfway through, I discovered my prize (“some have greatness thrust upon them”): a mid-sized cardboard box, easy to overlook, the kind commonly used by publishers to send out manuscripts or examination copies of textbooks. In the upper left hand corner was the only outward clue: “Jack Springs,” the name of a favorite former student scrawled in black. It immediately struck me as odd that it had been sent from Kessler Boulevard in Indianapolis, instead of from Washington state, where Jack had been teaching for over a decade, and where, I would learn later, he composed its contents.
Inside I discovered several items: each with a large yellow Post-it note affixed to the front. On top was what appeared to be a book wrapped in brown paper and tied with a string; its note read, “Open me first.” Beneath it was a business-sized envelope with “Professor Martin Dean” written on it along with a note reading, “Open me second”; and then came a medium-sized package wrapped in the same brown paper, also tied with string, and sporting a note instructing me to “Open me third.” I also found another, smaller box, gift-wrapped in Christmas paper, its dimensions suggestive of a wallet or keychain. Taped to it was the final note, demanding “Open me last, after reading the story.”
Now duty bound by the domineering tone of a Post-it note, I unwrapped the first package and was pleasantly surprised to discover what turned out to be a worn copy of The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. Opening the cover, I was stunned to discover that it was not only a first edition, but was inscribed with a personal message:
Dear Eloise,
I send my warmest greetings
(unlike the last time!).
Yours Always,
Ernest Hemingway, October 7, 1952
Signed and dated by the great author, Papa himself! This was a marvelous gift for anyone, but unlike some of the other things Jack had sent in recent years, this one was really worth a lot of money—possibly thousands of dollars at auction.
I settled the tattered novel, the package with Jack’s manuscript, and the smaller, gift-wrapped box on my worktable beside me, then opened the letter envelope, and pulled out the note, which read:
December 13, 2010
Danforth Springs
1247 Kessler Boulevard
Indianapolis, Indiana
Dear Professor Dean:
It is with the utmost regret that I write to you today on behalf of my son Jack. As you are undoubtedly aware, Jack has been suffering this past year with an aggressive and largely untreatable form of cancer. It has only been in the past few months that the disease has made it impossible for him to carry on with his work at the university. He came home to Indianapolis in late September of this year to be with his family for what little time might remain for him. His mother Hannah and I, and his sister Susan, have had the privilege of spending these final weeks in the company of a young man who, as you know, had a rare gift for language and storytelling, a jovial gift of humor, and a kind of grace under pressure that we usually reserve for heroes in fairy tales. Only in Jack’s case, the grace was real.
With great sadness, I must now tell you that Jack passed away, on the early morning of Dec. 7 to be precise. I am just now trying to deal with the kinds of things that no parent should ever face. Among those matters is the delivery of Jack’s letter to you, along with the three other items enclosed here. Jack was extremely insistent about my sending these things to you as soon after his death as I might be able to do so. I recognize the value of the rare Hemingway volume, which Jack showed me with pride, but I have no idea as to the contents of the other two enclosures, nor of his letter to you, which is, of course, a matter of privacy. Jack wanted it that way, and whether you should ever choose to reveal any of the contents to me or his mother is completely up to you.
As for the items enclosed with this letter— he wanted you to have them on condition of his death only, and not a moment before. Even on the morning of the day he died, he repeated these instructions to me, though he was fitful, and in what seemed to be unendurable pain. Evidently these were materials of some great importance— at least in his fevered imagination. In the future, should you decide to share with us the nature of those contents, we will of course be your willing and eager listeners. But for now, I am honoring my son’s dying request that they be delivered to you unopened and unexamined.
Professor Dean, I think you should know that he spoke of you with the utmost respect and admiration. You had a profound and lasting impact on his life, and he admired you greatly, though you may not have realized it at the time.
I apologize for my brevity here, but we are daily—and indeed even hourly—struggling to deal with this horrific set of events, especially my wife, who is simply overwhelmed. The funeral was just two days ago, and it is an unspeakable day in the life of any parent.
If I can ever be of further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Sincerely,
Danforth Springs
And so it was with this letter that I learned on that snowy morning back in January of 2011, that Jack Springs was prematurely dead at the age of 44. Like his father and mother, I felt the horror of parental grief sweep over me— the horror that there is something unnatural, even unjust, about losing a child as admirable and as brilliant as I knew Jack to be. The elders consider it to be their rightful honor to precede the young into death, that undiscovered country, to pioneer as it were, but sadly, this is not always our privilege. And perhaps, as many believe, it is life’s greatest tragedy.
Two items remained: the neatly wrapped manuscript, dimpled and rustic-looking, and on top of it the mysterious box, wrapped in cheap holiday paper, red with white stripes, like candy canes. This prize bore a cheerful, royal blue ribbon on top—red, white, and blue—very American, I thought. Again I glanced at its imperial Post-it note, where Jack commanded me again from the land of the dead: “Open me last, after reading the story.”
I seemed to intuit, and would learn soon enough, that for me, an aging academic getting too set in his old ways, stodgy and unsurprising in my lonely life among books, the joyfully wrapped box contained a key that could magically unlock a mysterious doorway in my life, an entrance into a new world, like the wardrobe leading into Narnia, the rabbit hole into Wonderland. But like Jack’s distraught father, I complied with the simple instructions and left it unopened—for the moment.
Instead, Jack’s holy parchment beckoned me, and it now gathered my fullest attention. Slowly, I worked the string that held the manuscript together. Finding it knotted in such a way that I was unable to untie it, I reached for the pocketknife that I keep handy on my desk, for just such tasks, and I severed the cord. The paper fell away, and I held in my hands a neat manuscript, printed out in the gentle, fourteen-point font that my old eyes prefer. On top, a single sheet was stapled to yet another business envelope, with a few pages inside. Its message was scribbled unevenly, all in upper case lettering, with a bold, black pen:
READ MY LETTER,
THEN THE MANUSCRIPT,
BEFORE OPENING THE SMALL BOX.
ejs
One must be struck by the sheer insistence of Jack’s repetitive instructions; it was a carefully conceived scheme, and he had it all planned out, as the unfolding of the tale will elaborate. And so I did everything in the precise order he prescribed, and I’ll ask my readers to do the same, as I present the materials exactly as I received them myself. First came his poignant letter to me, appended below. Ornery editor that I am, I have silently corrected stylistic blunders and several minor typographical errors within the letter, as I have done throughout the full manuscript. Otherwise, it read precisely as follows:
This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,—
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.
Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!
Emily Dickinson
Dear Marty,
It’s the day after Labor Day, 2010, up here in the Pacific Northwest, and like a labor of love, or maybe the labor pains of childbirth, this story is finally being delivered. A box full of nothing but words. But these words are not just for you; they are to be made public, eventually. This is my letter to the world, wrote Sister Emily. And, as Mabel Loomis Todd did for sweet Emily, I’d like to ask you to do me a favor: in the near future, please prepare my manuscript for the world to read, as my editor, or literary executor, if you prefer. Don’t worry, there’s something in it for you. A labourer is worthy of his hire (KJV).
Parts of the story have been hibernating in a file on my hard drive for a very long time now. Some of it describes the quiet lives we lead as English professors—lives like yours and mine. But my mundane life suddenly got all mixed up with some adventures in the Far East, all recorded herein. My story includes fond reminiscences of Sensei and meandering visions of Mika, two characters you’ll get to know in due course.
Sensei. Mika. Sometimes I just speak those names out loud, into thin air.
Even now, those two magical names ramify deeply, being as they are the hazy yin and yang of my first serious enchantments overseas. Their precious names hover and whir about me like bright, insistent hummingbirds, along with other recurring images:
– Starched robes cinched with deep purple sashes
– Steaming mugs of green tea, trays of rice crackers wrapped in seaweed
– Late night sounds of trains, swooshing in and out, clack-clack, clack-clack
– Antique wood-block prints: bawdy geisha, cone-shaped mountains, red torii
– “Great Wave off Kanagawa”
– Prussian blue and white fingers, dagger-like, plunging into tiny boats,
– Old hillside temples, jutting into wind, anchored on thousand-year-old timbers
– Bald monks in wooden shoes, sweeping wide porches, incense painted on air
– Fresh crab brains, gooey as toothpaste
– Orange day lilies and white chrysanthemums, dozing in earthen jars
Remembering has never been hard, often in haiku-like form—mere images, as above. But not always pleasant images—sometimes I would awaken in the dead of night, sweaty, startled, remembering what I wanted to bury. No, it was getting it all down on paper, preparing to send it out to the world that’s been the hardest part. But I always knew the story needed telling, and given the circumstances of recent months, I’ve finally found the guts to wrench it out, for you, my friend, and for all the world to see.
In fact, there are confessions to make. I’ve suffered my own fair share of guilt, maybe even trauma, admittedly an overused word these days. Michael Herr puts it this way: “The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all; it just stayed stored there in your eyes.” What a line: stored in your eyes!
The mixed feelings are hard to explain, and harder to justify. I was paralyzed by remorse for days and weeks at a time, followed by a month of remorseless ease and comfort, unmoved by the events recorded here. Maybe I’m just kichigai— crazy, out of my gourd, cowering at flashing red lights, sirens rotating around in my brain. Over and over I’ve heard the familiar screams: Taskette! Taskette! (Help! Help!) And I’ve had the repeated nightmares, and the clammy, sudden awakenings. Meanwhile, I’ve kept my silence, biding my time.
Only in the past half dozen years did I begin to take some action, searching for answers, doing what any good researcher would do. I devoured countless books about the effects of trauma on its survivors. Academic volumes, clinical data, mostly about the survivors of the deaths of loved ones. Earthquakes became a particular focus. I studied the grisly accounts of massive temblors all over the world: in Iran, for example (December 2003, over 26,000 dead), or Pakistan (October 2005, over 73,000 dead), or China (May 2008, over 87,000 dead). Haiti, earlier this year: over 315,000 dead! Strangely, I ordered books on Amazon filled with frightening photographs. The literary trope also captivated me: the biblical symbolism of earthquakes, the threshing floor of God’s wrath, the shorthand of apocalypse. And I developed a fascination with the pragmatics of earthquakes, how mundane human lives are so easily and abruptly shaken to their core, how normal people respond to the daily tremors of their existence, and how unpredictable concussions reveal the hidden fault lines of our characters. I felt like my own world had been rocked, and underneath were all these deep, secret chasms and fissures.
As one expert put it, “Trauma seems to be much more than a pathology, or the simple illness of a wounded psyche: it is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available.” The story of a wound. I like that. Or, in some cases, hundreds, or thousands, of wounds.
Another expert listed the many characteristic symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and I was not at all surprised to learn that at least five of them described my own odd behaviors: 1) excessive vigilance; 2) feelings of numbness or cognitive deadness; 3) sleeplessness often featuring recurring, intrusive memories of the events; 4) compulsions to repeat certain events, including a weird fascination with similar forms of violence; and 5) a sense of isolation from others. One famous psychologist described in detail exactly how I felt a good deal of the time: “Normal life becomes permeated by the bizarre encounter with atrocity and violence from the past, so much so that this past can never be completely purged. The two worlds haunt each other; the phantoms of a violent past insist on making their eerie presence permanently felt, even as we wash the dishes, write letters, or walk the dog.” And another psychologist described the three steps for full recovery from PTSD: according to clinical research you must tell your story, you must find a reliable witness for your story (usually a close and trusted friend), and you must work to create a new story altogether.
That’s where you come in, Marty. Are you that close and trusted friend?
Until now, nobody alive knows what I’m about to tell you, though my old pal Jim Daymon probably has a strong inkling, along with a few concrete artifacts—clues that I entrusted to him many years ago. Jim used to live in a Zen monastery up in the Japan Alps, but I haven’t spoken to him in well over a decade now. More about Jim later.
The story you hold in your hands is the result of much fear and trembling this past summer and culminates many years of restless drafting and false starts, the majority of it now consigned to a digital purgatory. Most of the words came spilling out over long weekends of camping and hiking with my black and silver German shepherd, Walt, and my trusty laptop in the amazing mountains and coastlines within a day’s driving distance of eastern Washington. Unfortunately, these past few months, many Fridays and Saturdays I would wake up feeling terrible, barely able to walk to the kitchen for coffee. But I had to write out my letter to the world, and tell the story. It has, to some extent, lifted a burden and begun the process of redemption, if that’s even possible at this late stage.
By now, of course, if it’s all gone according to plan, you’ve already heard the news: the most important motivation of all this effort has been the solemn realization that I’m dying. During spring break this year, I was riding my bike out in Mt. Rainier National Park—one of my favorite places on the planet—and I experienced some sort of physical attack. It was in the Paradise section of the park, and I was marveling at the endless fields of purple and yellow wildflowers. Suddenly, I hit a very deep pothole in the road and immediately felt a sharp pain in my lower chest that took my breath away and sent me careening into a very large, and very old western hemlock tree. Besides breaking my collarbone, I lay there for quite a while, blinded by a throbbing pain beginning around my belly and through to the small of my back, until someone happened by and alerted the park rangers, who rushed me away to the nearest hospital. It wasn’t that near.
It turned out that the bicycle accident was the least of my problems, and that the stabbing chest and back pain that had buckled me over and sent me headfirst into the tree was the real source of trouble. The ER folks attended to the collarbone and urged me to contact my regular MD for further testing. CT scans indicated a mass along my spine, and additional tests confirmed that I had prostate cancer that had gone metastatic (rare for a youngish forty-something like myself, but not unheard of). Stage IV, I was calmly informed, meaning not only that would I be dying soon, but I probably only had a few months of active living to enjoy—or endure.
All this was less than five months ago. My final weeks and days, almost certainly, will find me bedridden and, in the end, largely immobile. I am telling you all of this as abruptly and humorlessly as I was told by Dr. Koyama, my earnest physician back in Spokane. There was a mocking irony to his being of Japanese heritage, I remember thinking, though of course he was third generation. His father, though, had spent time at Manzanar as a little boy, so the tragic remnants of historical abuse still lingered in Dr. Koyama’s sad smile. Or at least I imagined it lingered. As he put it that day, his palms pressed together, prayerlike, and his index fingers touching his lower lip: “Consider this summer to be your gift. What do you want to do with it?” He peered at me over the top of his reading glasses. “Or—what do you need to do?”
Physicians generally do not make good therapists, but in this case, he asked the right question. And so, learning that I probably only had a few months of serious energy left, I knew it was time to finish my story. I must now face those few dark secrets hidden away, and consider the best way to dispose of them. Honestly, I had no idea if I could do it. In fact, if my health had not changed, I’m sure I would have kept it all buried away, in some dark vault underneath the floorboards, like in a Poe story, just as I had for fifteen years. But now I had to figure out what to do about those secrets, and I didn’t have a whole lot of time to do it, if modern science had anything to say about it.
I’m hoping that writing all this down will be redemptive. But I need to warn you up front: complete redemption, in my case, is partly up to you. Yes, today I’m feeling the old remorse rising up within me. So to put things right, at least in my own mind, I need the help of a trusted friend. It will require you to undertake “a few minor tasks,” as Sensei liked to put it. You’ll get to know him soon, in a way.
I realize you are an “old dog,” but newness is good for the soul, though I’m sure the favor I’m going to ask will sound like climbing Mt. Fuji to you—and, in fact, climbing will be involved, as you will soon discover, so I suggest you order some comfortable walking shoes. There’s no one else I can trust, Marty. My dad’s too old, and his health’s lousy anyway—and my death, I’m sure, will be a tough blow making things even worse for him. And Mika? Well—I could never reveal these things to her. Finally, I want it to be someone who truly cherishes and understands the treasures involved. That leaves only you. And so I have sent you this box full of nothing but words. And a key to unlocking them.
Basically I want to enter whatever awaits me in the Great Beyond through the doorway of tranquil sleep, made possible by the knowledge, or at least the belief, that I did my best for those remaining. So please be that close and trusted friend, and help me create a new ending to this story. As Emerson once wrote:
“A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.”
Best wishes, EJS
With this letter from my old protégé, I was catapulted into spring semester of 2011. Professors always hope to hear from former students; in fact some of the greatest satisfactions of any teacher are the achievements and adventures of star pupils like Jack. And here, being described as a trusted friend, was a poignant moment to be sure. But can you feel the horror with which I now read Jack’s epistle?
He had left Bloomington in the summer of 1986, heading off for graduate work in the Ivy League. One often loses track of people, with or without the Internet, and this was certainly the case with professors and their former students back in those days—even the favorites. And so for roughly a decade, I heard nothing.
Our relationship recommenced in the waning months of the Clinton administration, just before Easter of 1997, when he wrote a lengthy letter to me, announcing with great joy, that after spending three years in Japan followed by a couple years teaching and writing in Seattle, he had finally been offered—and had accepted—a tenure-track position at Gonzaga University in Spokane. I had not even known at the time that he’d lived and worked in Japan, but of course, I was overjoyed to hear of his good successes.
Jack did not announce this news in an email, as today’s students might, and in fact, I still have the letter, tucked away in one of my prized file folders containing them all. Those letters, it goes without saying, along with our unspoken commitment to snail mail, are now revered even more in my memory. For me, his letters had become Jack. In truth, we had not even been in the same room together since he left Bloomington twenty some odd years before.
Now, I will catapult you, my dear reader, into the larger tale followed by my own account of the adventure set in motion by Jack’s elaborate plan. Yes, finally, onward to Jack’s wonderful manuscript.
The majority of the lengthy chronicle you now hold in your hands was produced not by me, but by my former protégé, Dr. Eugene Jackson Springs, a splendid student whose potential and achievements were among the best it has been my privilege to witness and encourage. I have only augmented Jack’s story occasionally, at the end of chapters, with either useful observations and/or hard factual data, all of which I’ve italicized (like this) for the sake of my readers. Jack’s story, with my minor interruptions, is then followed by a briefer report of what came afterwards. My own participation in all this, as it turned out, required more than just editorial assistance.
I can divulge up front that I now understand why he kept certain details in the strictest secrecy for so long, and why evidently his own parents were not even allowed to hear the tale—until now, when all the world can listen.
Our great authors were an eccentric bunch: often bullies, sometimes even sociopaths. All were driven by mixed motives, by their love of truth and beauty, by their tempestuous and autocratic personalities, and by the impure motivations of lust, personal gain, and notoriety. And yet they penned those marvelous words, words, words.
The lyrical inventions of the great artists can indeed set us free, but if we’re not deliberate in our careful use and stewardship of them, their narcotic effects can imprison us as well. Jack’s confession is thus a cautionary tale. It illustrates a devotion that should certainly inspire us, even as it reminds us that some kinds of devotion also contain the seeds of our own corruption, and perhaps even destruction.