Storytellersunplugged

by Brian Hodge

[Podcast edition also available here.]

I lie so that I may tell the truth.

Somebody said that about writing, but I can’t recall who. And Google’s no help. The only hit that comes up is when I used the same quote here last September.

Always had better luck with this one:

Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.

July 2007. I’m proofreading the galleys for this autumn’s new edition of my 1996 novel Prototype, about a young man trying to understand and overcome the rare new chromosomal mutation he carries, and its personal and societal implications. Nice to encounter old friends again, even if many of them are prickly and distraught.

Not Sarah, though. She’s one of the most life-affirming characters to have ever graced my pages.

Sometimes we write characters we would fall in love with if they walked through the door, even when we’re in love with someone who already has. Except Sarah’s a lesbian, so friends is all we could ever be.

A detail when we first meet her: She scuffed around on wide peasant feet, a legacy from a barefoot childhood. At twenty-nine, Sarah still distrusted shoes.

Elsewhere: She wore rumpled socks and a T-shirt that fell to mid-thigh, promoting some den called Club Cannibal, on the Ivory Coast … its tribal mask design staring…

I’d half-forgotten these traits. But I know where they came from: Oh yeah, that’s right. I gave her Doli’s feet, and one of her T-shirts.

The encounter makes me happy. Time has folded and pressed then and now together like two dots on opposite ends of a sheet of paper.

Doli still has the feet. Then I wonder whatever happened to the T-shirt. Haven’t seen it for years. Probably wore out and got recycled for dust-rags.

The realization makes me sad in ways I find hard to clarify. Maybe because, as went the T-shirt, so too will her feet turn to dust. Someday.

November 1987. About a dozen miles from my Illinois hometown, from my front door, a family named Dardeen is murdered in and around their home. Father, mother, three-year-old boy, infant daughter born during the attack.

Savage hardly even begins to cover it. The county sheriff’s department and State Police detectives say it’s the worst thing they’ve ever seen. Some are veterans of Vietnam, and say they never saw anything this bad even there. Local reports stress the enormous strength of the killer or killers.

The crime won’t be solved for more than 12 years.

For the duration, I’m haunted in that distant way you can be haunted by the fates of people you’ve never known. Imagination fills voids. There’s no face to the killer, so I’m free to imagine one. Given the horrid strength and extreme inhumanity of his deeds, and his vanishing act, it’s easy to envision something more or less than human. There’s something perversely comforting in flirting with the notion that some other realm coughed up a monstrosity that evening that did its work, left a family dead and the surrounding communities terrified, and then returned to … wherever.

I have no idea how I’ll write about this one day. Just know that I’ll have to.

Spring 1997. I’m writing a novella called “As Above, So Below.” It’s intended to be the capstone of my second story collection, Falling Idols, and some years later will also be chosen to fill the 1998 slot in the massive The Century’s Best Horror Stories anthology.

Its central character, Austin, is after many years reunited with Gabrielle, a childhood friend he grew to love in young adulthood. At the time, he’s retreated to a shack in the desert where, while he maintains a grip on reality, reality is losing its grip on him. Somebody else whose motivations make no sense at the time leaves Gabrielle’s feet on his porch for Austin to find one morning. Of course he recognizes them. Because:

What a privilege that he’d been able to see them over so many years, in so many circumstances — child-size to full-grown, wading in streams and kicking in lakes, running through grass and skipping over hot pavement, and, more languidly, tracing chills of pleasure along his legs, his chest. Her feet … Her dear feet.

I don’t make the connection until summer 2007, a few paragraphs into this essay.

It unsettles me in ways I find difficult to pin down. Because it makes me think I don’t know myself at all.

January 2000. Tommy Lynn Sells, now 35, is arrested for the rape and murder of children in Texas. He’s been drifting and killing since he was 16. Dozens of times, he estimates. Thirteen confessions are soon confirmed. Including a family in Illinois.

I once spent 3 days not knowing who kidnapped and murdered a friend for his car. Can’t imagine what 12 years of it does to someone left behind … only the staying power of life’s worst mysteries.

April 1994. Kurt Cobain has just blown his brains out with a shotgun. The news makes me sad in ways I find hard to articulate.

A few days earlier — or was it a few days later? — an area TV weatherman took his private plane up just high enough so he could perform a deliberate nosedive into the tarmac. Reports say he was distraught over an affair with a co-worker.

I should be concentrating on my newest novel. Prototype, I guess this would’ve been. Except for four consecutive mornings I get up and write a story about a recent college graduate, adrift in purpose and haunted by the fates of a TV meteorologist and Kurt Cobain, people he’s never known. He finds a strange solace in starting a freelance business writing other people’s suicide notes.

I send “Mostly Cloudy, Chance of Kurt” to a magazine editor who wants a story from me. It only seems to confuse him. I ask what sort of thing he’d rather see from me. His only touchstone: Was I familiar with the old Kolchak: The Night Stalker series?

I tell him, in essence, to take it or leave it, that that’s where my head has been lately. He takes it. But the whole exchange sort of leaves me wanting to blow out my own brains.

August 2002/Autumn 2003. When I finally see Tommy Lynn Sells on the CBS news program 48 Hours, he looks nothing as I’ve imagined. He looks … kinda runty. He has a mullet haircut. He should be playing bass in a cheesy ‘80s nostalgia band on the Holiday Inn lounge circuit.

A year later, when I research the case for an essay I’m writing for a fundraiser anthology, Sells’s interior life rekindles the dread that seeing his external self had defused. “I’ve woken up before in places where I don’t know how I got there and I got blood on myself,” he told the investigator who arrested him.

The self-preservation instincts that must have been operating on a level beneath his conscious awareness are terrifying to contemplate.

Great — a new haunting.

January 2005. As if there isn’t enough to contend with while trying to finish a novel with a tight deadline that’s due soon after the holiday season, and Doli injecting the chaos of a redecoration project that overflows its borders, my mother informs me that she no longer has any feelings for me, and doesn’t care to ever see or hear from me again.

This is rooted primarily in religion. I developed a different spiritual outlook than the one I was raised in, with a less restrictive concept of the divine, and no amount of condemnations and interventions could change that. Also, she says, my writing and I are a huge embarrassment to her in the town where I grew up.

I remember her telling me she quit reading Prototype as soon as she realized that two of its main characters were lesbians. “What about all the ones before them that were killers?” I want to ask. “You didn’t seem to have too much of a problem with them. Or with showing up at my local book-signings with your camera and a smile.”

February 2006. John Shirley, a writer whose work I’ve always known much better than the man himself, writes the Foreword to the new edition of Prototype.

An excerpt: He’s also a damned dark writer. He illuminates our own personal darknesses by showing us the darker dark. And this book, Prototype, is, as far as I know, the darkest thing he’s ever written. It is as if, after he wrote this one, he saw some light himself and never needed to go back down to this depth.

For a bit over a decade John would’ve been right. But because we’re respectful acquaintances, rather than pals who keep in touch, John has no way of knowing I’ve finished about as deep a dive a few weeks earlier, for a short novel called World of Hurt.

It involves, among other things, the corrosive potential of religious intolerance and control, and a killer who can’t be caught even if he tries, because people don’t see what’s really there.

Written in a few months. Over 18 years in the making.

June 2007. After 2½ years of ignoring periodic contacts, my mother calls to tell me that someone is dead. My aunt. Her sister-in-law. She doesn’t know how or when, other than sometime last year. She didn’t know because she’s also been estranged from her brother for several years. My uncle the lay minister. She found out only when she saw a newish tombstone near the grave of my grandfather.

I’m glad for the call, for the contact, for the sound of her voice, although one of her statements ranks among the more puzzling I’ve heard in a while: that she felt she had to choose between Jesus and me.

I guess he’s welcome to her.

Still, it perplexes me in ways I haven’t sorted out yet.

She doesn’t ask what I’m working on, and I’m not sure I’d even tell her if she did. But it’s been germinating for a long time, maybe since 2002, and two of the main characters are siblings whose mother has no affection for them, and no use either, other than whatever prestige that their obedience to expectations might bring the family.

There’s a part of me that feels grateful to have had real insights into what that’s like. The rest of me thinks, no, I’m not … but it’s just too much to waste.

Spring & Summer 2007. Our deck overlooks a plot of ground I used to call the dog park. Dogs still run there, but over the past two years neighbors have cultivated part of it, 7 of the most beautiful, bountiful little vegetable gardens you’ve ever seen. They make me happy in ways that are no mystery. Samwise Gamgee is, overall, my favorite hobbit, for his loyalty and optimism and his love for green and growing things.

Beyond the gardens, though, something malignant seems to be growing.

It’s happened annually for, what, five years now? The Colorado winter subsides and everyone leaves their windows and sliding doors open most of the time. We let the air in and part of ourselves out.

And, often, a couple across the way scream at each other. We’ve never seen them, only heard their voices carrying over the grass, past the gardens, through the trees. Nights and evenings, typically; some weekend afternoons.

Every year, the same initial reaction: I can’t believe they’re still together.

She’s a lot louder than he is. But he’s getting there. They transcend mere arguments so profoundly that I have no way of conveying the depth of hurt and loathing they broadcast. Yet if they’re still together by now, it all must be wrapped up in some grotesquely warped version of love. It seems a horrible way to live. She always shrieks that she’s sick of it. Still, they keep living this way.

But this year it’s worse. You can hear things getting thrown at walls. They’ve added early mornings to their schedule.

Mostly, though, it’s in the timbre of her voice: a level of sustained hysteria I’ve not heard before, that makes me wonder if there’s something seriously emotionally wrong with her, and if living this way has caused it. It’s like the sound of metal being twisted past stress tolerances.

Every year, the same secondary reaction: a sense that this auditory Rear Window–type situation will work itself into a story, a novel, something. Until this moment, it hasn’t.

I wonder if I’ve just been waiting for something worse to happen.

Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow. Almost everywhere you go, you have to answer the same question: “So, what do you do?”

My answer has always been straightforward. And I thought it was honest. But maybe it could be more truthful.

“I rob graves,” I could say. “Past, present, and future graves.”

Or maybe, “I’m a cannibal. Of sorts. Really — the woman I love used to have the T-shirt to prove it.”

It gives me a sense of purpose in ways that don’t always make sense until later.