Q: You still believe in something as old-fashioned as meaning-making?
A: Maybe the biggest fiction I want to create is that it all matters. It matters so much. It matters and matters.
Q: Contrary to the evidence.
A: This is the only life I have. This is the only life you have unless you’re lucky enough to die and be resurrected as the fiery angel.
Q: Why do you have the robot in the story about the suicide?
A: It was a mistake. That story needed seventy-three robots, twelve pirates, three Vikings, three zombies, seven murders in polygamist cults, two slow trains to Bangkok, three bejeweled elephants in the court of Catherine the Great, six scarlet-threaded elevators to space, fourteen backlit liquor bars in Amsterdam, five bearded men spinning plates on top of thirty-foot poles in Central Park, four mechanical rabbits, three alarm clocks, two magic tricks, twenty-four test tubes, the Brooklyn Bridge, the London Bridge, the boob doctor’s daughter. .
Q: Whatever it takes to get your attention?
A: Whatever it takes to cover all the hurt.
Q: Are there any stories you want to try again?
A: Turn the page and see.
THE SWEET LIFE
THE BOY IN THE CASKET was my wife’s nephew.
“I want to talk about biscuits,” the preacher said.
We were all of us sweating. The sanctuary doubled as a gymnasium.
The preacher took the store-bought biscuits from their wrapping. He put a piece in his mouth and ate. “Mmm, mmm,” he said. “Biscuits is one of the sweetest things in the world.”
The boy’s mother and father sat apart. Soon they would no longer be married.
“Life can be sweet,” the preacher said. “Like these buttermilk biscuits. Yes, sir.” He took another bite. He wiped his forehead with a white handkerchief.
My wife was holding my hand. My wife’s hand was shaking.
“The sweet life,” the preacher said. “Is made of bitter parts.”
Like the biscuits, he was saying. He seemed as far away as the planet Jupiter. Everything in the sanctuary gymnasium seemed out of proportion. The basketball hoops were flying saucers.
“Two cups all purpose flour,” he said. He poured from a paper bag into a Tupperware cup. He licked his finger and put it to the flour and took it to his lips and tongue. He made a sour face. “It’s bitter, flour,” he said.
A single drop of sweat rolled down my wife’s arm and landed on my hand. It felt wet on my hand. I could see the veins. They seemed so large, bulging there like an old person’s veins, like my grandmother’s. I had a vision of her, in her red housedress, sweating in her trailer, even though she could well afford to run the air conditioner.
“Baking powder,” the preacher said. “One tablespoon.” He ate and made his cartoon face.
Some people were laughing. Laughing!
“Three quarters of a teaspoon of salt.”
My wife was not crying. Maybe her mouth, like mine, was dry. If you suck on the insides of your dry cheeks you can hold the crying in.
“Baking soda. Vegetable shortening. One cup buttermilk.” He tasted the buttermilk. Some things, he said, are sweet, even in the time of bitterness.
Amen, somebody was saying. Were they saying Amen? Was it someone, the mother or the father, who had the right to say Amen? Or was it someone else, anyone else in the room — someone who did not have the right to say Amen.
The preacher poured the buttermilk into a glass bowl, and mixed it with the flour, the baking powder and the baking soda and salt and all.
I looked around to see who was saying Amen.
There was a small oven on the stage. A theater prop, not a working oven. The preacher poured the biscuit batter into a silver biscuit tray and pretended to set it baking. Then he moved from sermon to eulogy.
Somehow the smell of biscuits filled the sanctuary gymnasium.
“No one knows why these things happen, but everything happens for a reason. All things work together for good, to them that love God, to them who are called according to His righteousness.”
On the front row, the mother sat beside her mother. They were weeping. Perhaps they were finding comfort in the preacher’s words. Perhaps everyone but me and my wife were finding comfort in the preacher’s words.
“And God, in His good time. . ”
The boy was dead in the box.
On the stage, the oven timer dinged. A helper delivered a foil wrapped basket of biscuits. The biscuits were warm, brown. Done. The preacher bit into one. His testimony was that the buttermilk was baked well into the biscuit. “A message of hope I have for you,” he said. The biscuit was sweet.
The mother was crying. The father sat with his head in his hands. There were grandparents, cousins. A sister. We all of us must have wanted for hope.
The preacher promised a call to salvation. The musicians took their places on stage to play the music that would make more powerful his talk.
In the moment before the musicians started their music, there was a silence. To me the silence seemed our natural state, bitter and forever. There was a burning smell from the oven. I did not want to give it meaning, but we have been conditioned to give everything meaning. Then we began to sing.
II. “As I Fall Past, Remember Me”
THERE IS NOTHING BUT SADNESS IN NASHVILLE
1.
A NOTHER SUICIDE. Area Code 615, the caller ID says. I answer and hear my brother’s voice. He just found out, and the funeral’s tonight. It’s the girl with the red streaks in her hair, the seventeen-year-old he brought home to Florida last Thanksgiving who smoked pot on the back porch and blew my brother in the bedroom while my parents prayed over the turkey and waited for them to wake up from their naps. Unlike the last few girls, this one was shy and lovely. She could hardly make eye contact with any adult in the house. When tickled, she doubled over and got teary-eyed. She watched football without complaining. She said she would never be any good at school. I wanted to take her home and adopt her and raise her through college.
It’s 380 miles from my brick apartment in Columbus, Ohio, to the funeral home outside Nashville, Tennessee. Six hours or so. “I’ll be there in five,” I tell my brother. “Stay,” he says. I’m already in the car driving. We spend the six hours talking on cell phones. It’s a mistake to keep Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison playing softly on the in-dash, but it’s not less than fitting. “I didn’t love her,” he says. “I didn’t want to take care of her.” He told her so, and she went to the bowling alley with some lowlifes from the community college. They passed around X, and she took too much probably on purpose and it stopped her heart. The word coming down was they were close to the hospital but didn’t take her to the emergency room because they were afraid of getting arrested. So they let her die. “You know what her mother told me?” he said. “She said, ‘My daughter loved you. Swear to god you were the only man ever treated her good. Nobody ever treated me so good in my whole life is what she said. Nobody will ever treat me so good again.’
“How do you face that?” he said. “How do you walk into that funeral parlor and let people talk to you like that when what they ought to do is punch you in the face?” America flies by while he says these things. Those rusty bridges over the Ohio, and the rows and rows of tractor-trailers idling in the vast lots in Louisville, and all the waystations that conjure brief meetings past: the hitchhiker in Shepherdsville, the stripper in Elizabethtown, the gas station preacher in Cave City. We meet at a strip mall off Nashville Pike, where I leave my car, and we ride together in his pickup truck to the funeral home near her trailer park in Gallatin. The cab has gone feral. The floorboards are littered with fast-food bags and empty plastic bottles and torn candy-bar wrappers. His skin is translucent and he is too skinny. “I told the doctor I’m not taking those pills anymore,” he says. “My sleep was all screwed up and I was hearing voices. It scared the hell out of me.” We’re flying over potholes and all the side roads now are dirt.