Stubborn. That was the word that best described him during those years — and every year more stubborn than the year before, more locked into himself, more unwilling to budge when someone or something pushed up against him. Ferguson had grown hard — hard in his contempt for his father, hard in the abnegations he continued to impose on himself years after Artie Federman’s death, hard in his opposition to the suburban society that had held him prisoner since the beginning of his conscious life. If Ferguson hadn’t yet turned into an insufferable scold who made people flee from him the moment he walked into a room, it was because he didn’t look for fights and generally kept his thoughts to himself. Most of his fellow high school students saw him as an okay sort of guy — a bit morose at times, a bit lost in his own head, but not someone with a chip on his shoulder, and definitely not a bore, since Ferguson wasn’t against all people, only some people, and the people he wasn’t against he tended to like, and the people he liked he treated with a reserved but thoughtful affection, and the people he loved he loved in the way a dog loves, with every part of himself, never judging, never condemning, never thinking an ill thought, simply worshipping them and exulting in their presence, for he knew he was utterly dependent on the small band of people who loved him and whom he loved back and that without them he would have been lost, another Hank or Frank tumbling down the shaft of the all-devouring incinerator, a flake of ash floating across the night sky.
He was no longer the boy who had written Sole Mates as a fourteen-year-old nitwit nobody, but he still carried that boy inside him, and he sensed that the two of them would go on walking together for a long time to come. To combine the strange with the familiar: that was what Ferguson aspired to, to observe the world as closely as the most dedicated realist and yet to create a way of seeing the world through a different, slightly distorting lens, for reading books that dwelled only on the familiar inevitably taught you things you already knew, and reading books that dwelled only on the strange taught you things you didn’t need to know, and what Ferguson wanted above all else was to write stories that would make room not only for the visible world of sentient beings and inanimate things but also for the vast and mysterious unseen forces that were hidden within the seen. He wanted to disturb and disorient, to make people roar with laughter and tremble in their boots, to break hearts and damage minds and dance the loony dance of the dizzy-boys as they swung into their doppelgänger duet. Yes, Tolstoy was ever so moving, and yes, Flaubert wrote the best sentences in creation, but much as Ferguson enjoyed following the dramatic, increasingly drastic turns in the lives of Anna K. and Emma B., at that moment in his life the characters who spoke most forcefully to him were Kafka’s K., Swift’s Gulliver, Poe’s Pym, Shakespeare’s Prospero, Melville’s Bartleby, Gogol’s Kovalyov, and M. Shelley’s monster.
Early efforts from his sophomore year: a story about a man who wakes up one morning to discover he has a different face; a story about a man who loses his wallet and passport in a foreign city and sells his blood in order to eat; a story about a little girl who changes her name on the first day of every month; a story about two friends who stop being friends because of a dispute in which both of their arguments are wrong; a story about a man who accidentally kills his wife and then decides to paint every house in his neighborhood a bright shade of red; a story about a woman who loses the power of speech and finds herself growing progressively happier as the years go on; a story about a teenage boy who runs away from home and then, when he decides to return, discovers that his parents have vanished; a story about a young man writing a story about a young man writing a story about a young man writing a story about a young man …
Hemingway taught him to look at his sentences more carefully, how to measure the weight of each word and syllable that went into the building of a paragraph, but admirable as Hemingway’s writing could be when he was writing at his best, his work didn’t say much to Ferguson, all that manly bluster and tight-lipped stoicism seemed slightly ridiculous to him, so he left Hemingway behind for the deeper, more demanding Joyce, and then, when he turned sixteen, another bundle of paperbacks was given to him by Uncle Don, among them books by the heretofore unknown Isaac Babel, who quickly became Ferguson’s number one short-story writer in the world, and Heinrich von Kleist (the subject of Don’s first biography), who quickly became Ferguson’s number two short-story writer, but even more valuable to him, not to say precious and everlastingly fundamental, was the forty-five-cent Signet edition of Walden and Civil Disobedience that was wedged in among the books of fiction and poetry, for even if Thoreau wasn’t a writer of novels or short stories, he was a writer of sublime clarity and precision, a creator of such beautifully constructed sentences that Ferguson felt their beauty as one feels a blow to the chin or a fever in the brain. Perfect. Every word seemed to fall perfectly in place, and every sentence seemed to be a small work unto itself, an independent unit of breath and thought, and the thrill of reading such prose was never knowing how far Thoreau would leap from one sentence to the next — sometimes it was only a matter of inches, sometimes of several feet or yards, sometimes of whole country miles — and the destabilizing effect of those irregular distances taught Ferguson how to think about his own efforts in a new way, for what Thoreau did was to combine two opposing and mutually exclusive impulses in every paragraph he wrote, what Ferguson began to call the impulse to control and the impulse to take risks. That was the secret, he felt. All control would lead to an airless, suffocating result. All risk would lead to chaos and incomprehensibility. But put the two together, and then maybe you’d be onto something, then maybe the words singing in your head would start to sing on the page and bombs would go off and buildings would collapse and the world would begin to look like a different world.