There are a thousand kinds of thirteen, more than there are kinds of fifty, or eighty. There is Oddly Childlike Thirteen, and Worried and Obsessive, and Alarmingly Manly, and Girlish, and Gothic Horror, and Scapegoat, and Something Happened to Him as a Child, and Beatific and Despised, and Lonely, and Just Plain Stubborn. There is Manic and there is Depressed, still leading separate lives. There is Loves Adults and there is Steals Dad’s Antique Pornography. There is Steals Everything, Period. There is Already Smokes and Already Drinks and Already Screws. There is Weeps Alone. And Misses Childhood. And Hates the World. He was none of these; he was less than these. He was the kind of boy who had been a prodigy at six and faded by seven, the kind who would be handsome by twenty and show his old yearbook photos to girl-friends, unable to feel joy when they’d exclaim how hopeless he used to be. Somewhere in between those points was where he lay, and somehow – and this was the hopelessly sad part – he knew it. If you asked him, on a test sheet, to name his own type of thirteen, he would write in his seismographic hand: ‘Waits for Time to Pass’.
Pictures, also, reveal very little. There is one of him at that age, in 1984, standing by the fireplace in a navy blazer and gray slacks his father had helped him pick out, clearly dressed for some acquaintance’s bar mitzvah, his hair parted and set with a wet comb, dried into long lines like grass when it’s been raked of leaves – possibly also sprayed with a canister of his father’s Commander, it’s that solid. It’s a shame that photos, like children, remember only rare moments and never the everyday, for he has never looked like this in his life. A look of guilt, of surprise. Eyes a deep blue, the blue of a baby’s eyes that will eventually turn to brown, wide open. Eyebrows raised, perhaps in his first failed try at posing, at elegance. Or perhaps he has set his face this way as he waits. For his father to adjust the lens; for the sweat to trickle into the pits of his new shirt; for the terrible moment when they have to go. A dismembered hand floating in the ink of navy. One gold button, the only proud thing in the room.
The photo has captured nothing. Not the glow from the flowers on the mantel behind him, a present, which in this picture might as well be fake, or the evaporating droplets on the windowpane. Not this boy’s beautiful, desperate love, tamped-down inside him like brown sugar in a measuring cup, which should fill every corner of the frame. Which should make that sad house plant beside him burst into flower. You would never guess that he is not looking out of a picture at all but is standing in a room looking at a grown man, at his own father, and what he thinks of that man we, looking at the picture, will never know. His is not the first photo not to capture these things, but for the viewer they might as well never have existed.
Contributors
DANIEL CLOWES was born in Chicago in 1961 and now lives in Oakland, California, with his wife, Erika, their son, Charles, and their beagle, Ella. His books include Ghost World, David Boring, Caricature and Ice Haven.
EDWIDGE DANTICAT was born in Haiti and moved to the United States of America when she was twelve years old. She is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, Krik? Krak!, The Farming of Bones, The Dew Breaker and, most recently, Brother, I’m Dying, a memoir.
DAVE EGGERS is the editor of McSweeney’s and the author of four books, including What Is the What. He is the co-founder of 826 Valencia.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER was born in 1977. He is the author of Everything Is Illuminated, which won the National Jewish Book Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. He is also the editor of A Convergence of Birds, a tribute to the work of the American assemblage artist Joseph Cornell. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
ANDREW SEAN GREER is the author of three works of fiction, most recently The Confessions of Max Tivoli, a national bestseller. He is the recipient of the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, the NY Public Library Young Lions Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in San Francisco.
ALEKSANDAR HEMON was born in Sarajevo, and moved to Chicago in 1992. Upon his arrival in the US of A, he had all kinds of lousy jobs, including, but not limited to, canvassing for Greenpeace and teaching English as a Second Language to the people who suddenly found their First Language nearly perfectly useless. He acquired an MA degree in English from Northwestern and dropped the pursuit of a PhD the moment he sold his book The Question of Bruno. Then he wrote Nowhere Man. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Esquire, The Paris Review and in the Best American Short Stories, among others. He writes a column in Bosnian, under the unfortunate title Hemonwood, for the Sarajevo magazine Dani. He is a Guggenheim, MacArthur and decent fellow. When he lives, he lives in Chicago.
A. M. HOMES is the author of the acclaimed memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter and the novels, This Book Will Save Your Life, Music For Torching, The End of Alice, In A Country of Mothers, and Jack, as well as the short-story collections, Things You Should Know and The Safety of Objects, the travel book, Los Angeles: People, Places and The Castle on the Hill, and the artist’s book Appendix A:.
NICK HORNBY was born in 1957. He is the author of four novels: High Fidelity, About A Boy, How To Be Good and A Long Way Down, and two other woks of non-fiction: Fever Pitch and The Complete Polysyllabic Spree. In 1999 he was awarded the E. M. Forster Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives and works in Highbury, north London.
HEIDI JULAVITS is the author of three novels, most recently The Uses of Enchantment. She is a founding editor of The Believer magazine and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in New York and Maine.
MIRANDA JULY is a filmmaker, performing artist and writer. Her collection of short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, was published earlier this year. She lives in Los Angeles.
A. L. KENNEDY has written four collections of short fiction and four novels, along with two books of non-fiction – many of these have won awards. Her latest novel is Day. She produces a variety of journalism and also writes for the stage, radio, film and TV and performs stand-up comedy. In 1993 and 2003 she was listed among Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.