1.
I was ten, school was out, and my father had an amazing idea. He was going to rebuild our house – a sloping three-bedroom with gray Masonite siding – entirely out of brick. And not just any brick, but a very special, hard-to-find brick that went by the melodious nineteenth-century name of its maker: Silas Lucas. In my father’s telling (offered serially as we drove through town, the way an actor might workshop a soliloquy), Silas Lucas was an itinerant American genius who had risen to run a brick foundry in our part of Eastern North Carolina, only to end up stalled out and beaten down and passed over and underappreciated and subsequently forgotten by everyone. Everyone, that is, save my father. By the time he’d moved on to his Silas Lucas fixation from whatever had come before, Dad had already amassed a small stash, which he carried around salesman-style in the back of his car.
I remember him pulling into a driveway and popping the trunk to put one in my hand. I was surprised by the heft of it. Perhaps, too, by its actuality. For years, I’d known my dad to be on difficult terms with the truth. But this brick was beautiful, or became so the longer he talked. It was rough, distinct, handmade – primarily pink, but mottled with a range of colors from white to lichen to ochre. When I turned it over, dust clung to my fingers. ‘You see that?’ Dad said. ‘The softness? That’s what we’re after.’ And instead of climbing back into the car, he turned toward the shattered factory we’d parked alongside and set off walking, craning his neck from side to side, peering into the waist-high grass.
This was the summer of 1989, and these gorgeous-ass bricks were lying around for the taking. The Silas Lucas constructions that had once dotted the landscape – the chimneys and house steps, the ovens and garden walls – were all crumbling, the mortar giving way. The owners would sell you the bricks for pennies, happy just to have them carted off, or if you knew where to look, you could walk with a small trove for free. Which wasn’t theft, exactly, I don’t think. Rather, the bricks offered a classic instance of an ‘arbitrage opportunity’, wherein a wide and fertile delta opens between a thing’s cost in situ and its yield when transported to some other, more notional realm.
Now, there were a number of reasons why this zone of shifting values might have appealed to my father. One was simply the thrill of the hunt, the search for the overlooked treasure. He proposed, for example, to rebuild our house not in its present location (though that wouldn’t have been out of character) but on a wooded lot five miles out in the country, adjacent to a hypothetical golfing community that remains, as of this writing, just a dozen or so McMansions plopped down in some fields. Here’s our chance to get in on the ground floor of something, he told my mom. (And sorry, have I mentioned yet that our current house, the one we were living in, was scarcely three years old? It was when he rolled out the blueprints for the new one – our seventh home in less than a decade – that I noticed the floorplans were virtually identical.)
Another allure of the diamond in the rough, for my father, would have been that we didn’t have much actual money. At forty-two, he was a frustrated novelist teaching English to the not-particularly-invested undergraduates at the local land-grant college. The advance from his first book was gone. There was a film option, or so he said – Michelle Pfeiffer was interested, Matthew Broderick attached – but then why had he begun skipping payments on his silver Nissan Maxima with its aftermarket spoiler? In order to fund the groundbreaking for a new house, we’d have to sell the current one.
Still, the most significant cause of my father’s endless speculations was probably just psychic fragility. To defer his disappointment in the actually existing world, he needed the dream of some bonanza just over the horizon – the perfect house, the perfect car, the perfect pawnshop electric guitar. The implication, rarely spoken aloud, was that if he were ever to give up on his fantasy life, something terrible would happen.
But against all that, I can say that his obsessions also bespoke an ethos, a power. The payoff he was chasing had little to do with profit. It was denominated in whatever unit you use to measure nobility or meaning or pointless beauty. And damn if, in the real world where those values remained rare, he didn’t keep things interesting. Knowing what I know now, I believe he may even have been trying to teach me something about this, driving around the back country of the Pamlico-Tar basin that summer, peering through the alluvial lushness for the telltale pink of the brick. A way of seeing the world, or of seeing through it. A way of seeing his life’s work through.
2.
Where do novelists get their ideas? Along with a corollary, ‘how much of this story is true?’, it’s a question with which anyone who’s ever attended a bookstore Q&A will be intimately familiar. And though I can think of colleagues who condescend to these matters in weary tones, they seem to me to undergird most higher-order interview questions, so maybe they’re not commonplaces at all. Maybe they start to get at the deep human mystery of fiction-writing itself.
How to explain the feeling? You’re walking around, minding your own business, and all of a sudden you find yourself picturing three men in formalwear wrestling a fourth onto a boat at night (that’s E.L. Doctorow, on the germ of Billy Bathgate). Or it occurs to you that Homer’s Odyssey might usefully be redone as a mock-epic of Dublin, starring a guy who once dragged you from a gutter (James Joyce, Ulysses). Or you notice the front page of an old New York Times split 50/50 between the Giants winning the pennant and the Soviets testing their first atom bomb (Don DeLillo, Underworld).
You know you’ve got a story on your hands, but how? In my experience, it’s almost a precondition for the novelist’s ‘private excitement of the mind’ (Doctorow again) that the dynamic elements implied by the word ‘story’ be missing or occluded at the outset, often along with character and language and the whole dimension of time. What arrives instead is something singular, fused, intractable. And at the center, aquiver with potential, some kind of gap or incongruity. On the border between two previously non-communicating domains, a mix-up has occurred, opening up a channel. A tuxedo where there should be coveralls. A hero where there should be a scoundrel. A brick lying orphaned in the unmown grass. The telling of the story, then, amounts to a redrawing of the borders so that the problem might be integrated into a continuous and sense-making whole.
This is close to the account of creativity Lewis Hyde gives in his wonderful book Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. In tracing the figure of the artist-as-trickster through thousands of years of folklore, Hyde finds inspiration arising not ex nihilo, but here at the crossroads, where Coyote, Monkey, Hermes (or whoever) makes meaning through acts of mixing and switching and stealing. There is nothing new under the sun – all was present at the creation – but if you’re willing to transgress against the static arrangements that constitute reality at any given moment, a change, which is to say a story, can break through.
To put it another way, we like to imagine fiction-making in procreative terms (the heroic novelist bringing forth something out of nothing), but really it is more of an abduction. Trickster has taken hold of something half-formed and now has to smuggle it across a boundary to the place where its value can be recognized. And then has to execute the same move in reverse, so that the longed-for resolution can become part of the real.
My father was in this sense a trickster nonpareil. His problem, as a man and as a writer, was that he lost track of which realm he meant to end up in. Rather than moving through fiction as fluidly as if it were the world (finishing another book, say) he moved through the world as if it were his own fiction, leaping from private excitement to private excitement, oblivious to whatever real-life damage his fantasias might cause. And by the time our family disintegrated under the pressure, less than a year after we’d moved to that new house in the country, I had vowed to take no part in this fiction-making business. Not that I could ever unsee what he’d shown me, but I refused (I thought) to drag it into anything so messy as a narrative. Rather than chase ideas back and forth across the border of unreality, I’d make peace with the world as it was, and no one, least of all me, would get hurt.
3.
It was somewhere near the end of the brick-acquisition process that Dad announced a family trip: he had a line on a fresh supply of Silas Lucas, which we’d all go as a group to explore. This was a Saturday morning, so I’d planned to spend the day at my friend Jimmy Armstrong’s, but Dad had that glint in his eye that meant he was going to be unbudgeable. I suggested we could bring Jimmy along with us, knowing his parents wouldn’t care. They worked sixty-hour weeks, and come the weekend liked to retreat to the bedroom and watch movies and nap, particularly Jimmy’s stepdad. He’d married Jimmy’s mom just before they’d moved to town; until a couple years later, when the formal adoption papers came through, Jimmy had had a different last name. Perhaps not unrelated to these complications, he was a total handful.
So with Jimmy keeping up his patter, we rode out into the wilderness beyond town. In the deep shadows of porches, old ladies in housedresses sat twitching their fans and rocking, while in the fields behind them, the crops went a vivid, almost alarming green. I don’t know which direction we actually headed – east, I guess, toward Black Jack or Calico – but eventually the fields dwindled and the pine forests neared the road and we came to a long brick wall cutting through. The wall ran on for maybe thirty yards, too tall to climb, before a driveway punctured it. My dad got out to unhook the chain hanging across.
‘Bill, what are you doing?’ my mother asked.
‘What?’ he said. ‘This is the place.’
Inside the wall, the pine trees were thicker, above a sandy floor dappled with wires of light. The wind and the birdsong had gone silent, but my dad seemed unperturbed, even chipper. And sure enough, after a kink in the dirt road, bits of junk began to appear between the trees: a mildewy pulpit, an ancient washtub, a cairn of hubcaps, a rusted iron chair with a missing leg.
We rolled to a stop in front of a one-story house. Whoever lived there was keeping the blinds drawn, even at midday. My dad killed the engine. Went to undo his seatbelt. My mother touched his arm. And all at once a huge dog was at her window, baying and snapping and scrabbling at the metal frame as it tried to force its head through. ‘Bill!’ she said. He turned the key again, restoring power. But now the dog was around to his side. Something had short-circuited in either him or the car; he couldn’t get the windows to work.
Then the dog was being pulled back toward the shade, and in its place loomed a stubbly man, late middle age, holding the animal’s collar without visible strain. The shotgun I’m remembering may have been on the porch, but seemed to tremble in his hand.
‘Can’t you people read?’ he said. ‘No trespassing.’
‘I was told you have brick?’ my dad managed. ‘Silas Lucas brick?’
The guy stooped to peer into the backseat. I could see the comb-lines in his too-long hair. He looked from me to Jimmy to my sister, his nostrils faintly whistling. Stood back up. ‘I’m giving you all thirty seconds to get off my property.’
The dog growled.
‘Bill . . .’
And for one brief moment, my dad was subject to the same reality as the rest of us. He threw the car into reverse and backed down the road at engine-whining speed, not braking for the curve, or even for traffic when we reached the blacktop. I don’t remember anyone saying a word as we high-tailed it back toward town.
For the next several days, I wouldn’t see Jimmy Armstrong. I knocked on his door, but was told by the cleaning lady that he’d gone to stay with his grandmother, one county over. By that point, though, I’d become such a part of his parents’ Jimmy-management strategy that they couldn’t really keep me at bay. Anyway, it was my dad they were mad at, Jimmy told me upon his return.
One day not long after that, when I’d gone inside his house to get a drink and cool off, his mom called me over to the kitchen table. She was barely out of her twenties, and would often sit with me this way, feeding me bits and pieces of her and Jimmy’s let’s-say-colorful past.
‘Look,’ she began. ‘It’s not like anybody meant for anything to happen out there in the country. But that was dangerous for Jimmy that day.’
It was dangerous for everybody, I pointed out, my dad included.
She seemed not to hear. ‘I’m not saying your folks could have known – how could anyone have known? – but that man who ran you off . . . that was Jimmy’s grandfather.’
The sheer absurdity of the coincidence caught me off guard, even as I saw how she’d put together the details volunteered by Jimmy – the drive, the wall, the dog.
She went on: That compound out in the country was the family place of Jimmy’s father – the one with whom he’d once shared a name. For a while after the divorce, the father had been living out there with his own parents. Might have been living there still, for all she knew. ‘And if any of them had realized who that was in the backseat, they’d have tried to take him again.’ What she was driving at, she explained, was that long ago, when he was too young to remember, my friend Jimmy Armstrong had been kidnapped.
The story she then unfolded went something like this. Not long after she’d been granted sole custody, she’d taken him grocery shopping. Somewhere near the checkout, she realized she’d forgotten something in the aisles and ducked back to retrieve it, leaving Jimmy alone in the cart. She can’t have been gone more than thirty seconds, but when she returned, he was missing. She knew instantly who it was that had taken him – the custody battle had been awful – but now her ex had disappeared, gone to ground. Or more likely (though her former in-laws denied it over the phone), had barricaded himself and Jimmy inside the walls of that compound, with the gun and the dog and the chain across the drive.
What followed was three days of helplessness, and sleeplessness, she said. She’d been afraid to go to the compound herself, or call the cops. In the end, Jimmy had been returned to her, on the condition that she not press charges, but all her fears had returned last week with the knowledge that Jimmy had come within a few feet of a man no one had known was his flesh and blood . . .
It was, impressively, the craziest story I’d ever heard. It also fundamentally altered my relationship with Jimmy. After telling me never again to take him anywhere without permission, his mom swore me to secrecy about the attempted abduction. The whole point of moving to town had been to give Jimmy a fresh start. Still, I found it hard to look at him afterward without seeing this thing about him I knew and he didn’t. We’d be out shooting hoops or monkeying around a construction site and suddenly I’d catch myself studying him through different eyes. Seeing my finger rise to shush Jimmy in his shopping cart; seeing my arms reach down for his fat little arms reaching up; seeing us hustle out into a grocery-store parking lot so bright it could have been a mirage. That was as far as my inspiration took me, though. What I couldn’t see was what happened next, or why anyone would risk prison time – risk everything – for the equivalent of a long weekend with his child.
4.
Now flash forward a decade. My parents have divorced. I’ve changed schools, Jimmy and I have drifted apart, and my other friend, Frankie – my brother, really, since toddlerhood – has died of brain cancer, at age thirteen. And somewhere along the way I’ve developed a drug habit, one that’s persisted for most of high school. Perhaps as a result of the drugs, perhaps as a result of Frankie’s death, perhaps just through not seeing Jimmy anymore, I’ve lost sight of the whole episode of the kidnapping: the compound in the country, the gleam of Jimmy’s kitchen, the hunt for Silas Lucas and the light in my father’s eye.
It’s now the fall of 1997, and I’ve returned east from my first semester of college, newly sober (or what passes for me at eighteen as sober). Bright and early the Friday morning after Thanksgiving, I’m standing at a payphone outside a 7-Eleven in Washington D.C., waiting for a new friend to return a page, when all at once, from around the corner, I hear a voice. It’s a man not much older than I am, telling someone about his estranged daughter. She needs him, he’s saying. He has to go to her, reach her, get her back somehow – carry her away with him – and to hell with her mom, and the custody agreement.
This voice, real or imagined, has a clarity to it. Right away, I know a few things: the young man doing the talking is, like me, an addict. His grip on reality is shaky. He’s been in trouble with the law. And what happens next is a novel – the first idea for one I’ve ever had.
Of course, I’ve long since sworn off fiction-writing, which I associate with my dad at his most florid. Still, I try turning this idea of mine into prose: about a guy ready to kidnap his own daughter. First a paragraph or two on notebook paper, right there in the parking lot. Then, back at college, some cryptic little vignettes rehearsing the run-up to the kidnapping proper. And finally, by the time I graduate, full-blown scenes . . .
What occurs in the process, counterintuitively, is less a recovery of the facts than a comprehensive forgetting. For one thing, I forget that, at the moment I’d heard the young man speaking, the child obsessing him had been a daughter. Jimmy Armstrong was a boy, my own experience is as a boy, so the victim in this kidnapping must be a son. Indeed, by the time my scenes start cohering into chapters, my old fascination with Jimmy’s crazy dad has likewise faded into oblivion. The young father in the story has become simply a vessel for my feelings about my wasted youth.
Which is almost beside the point, since I can’t turn this idea into a story to save my life. In paragraphs, in chapters, I can make the same kinds of moves a poet would. I can describe, praise, phrase-make, liken, look back. But I can’t seem to get anything to happen. I am twenty-two, full of the hubris of youth; my novel should be rolling out before me like a grand narrative. Instead, I’m stuck in the world I’d once vowed never to leave, a victim of my own wish for changelessness.
5.
The next dozen years of my life would offer something of an education in the inevitability of change. I got married, for one thing. I became a dad myself, with two young sons. And eventually I did write a novel – a different one, which taught me the finer points of plot. It was accepted for publication in 2015, when I was thirty-four. The hardest thing to adjust to, though, was the death of my father. He’d been diagnosed with cancer a decade earlier, just before I started drafting the novel, City on Fire. At the close of his life, battered by chemo, he kept asking when finished copies would be ready, as if it were essential he see one. In the end, he came up a few months short.
By then, I’d already begun to suspect that my transformation into novelist was a fluke – that if I didn’t go back and finish that original story, the one about the kidnapping, I’d never write another book, thus fulfilling the family curse. I brought my laptop on book tour, trying to return to my reality-challenged protagonist. But after a dozen years away, I discovered that bits and pieces of my dad had started to mix themselves into the story – his gestures, his phrases, his impulses.
Also, not incidentally, that the novel’s point-of-view had migrated to the child, now a wounded and sardonic thirteen-year-old named Jolie. For as long as she was a boy, she’d been something of a cipher, but from the moment she regained her original gender, she became the novel’s hero. I watched her drink secretly in vacant lots and school bathrooms; watched her sneak off to a meditation center to try to escape her own body; watched her obsess over Prince’s ‘Controversy’ (Do I believe in God / do I believe in me?) and I thought, I know this girl: not the person recovering from addiction, but the person sliding toward it.
Yet the center of the novel – the kidnapping – remained as mysterious as ever. In my teens and early twenties, approaching it from the father’s side, I’d been looking for a motive, an answer to the problem of why a guy trying to piece his life back together would stake everything on a single, doomed roll of the dice. Now that the fucked-up father had started to resemble my own, the question was more the one I’d had as a kid: why had he been such a mess to begin with? That is, what could things have looked like inside him?
I can’t tell you how long I struggled to find an answer. I had drawn such a sharp distinction between the dad and his child, and now that I had taken her side, I found myself locked out of him once more, unable to imagine his side of the story. For a while, I backtracked. I sought to expunge from the character any vestiges of the earlier drafts. I would make him purely an image of my dad – so vivid a person in real life that he’d have to become one on the page. But this didn’t seem to unflatten things, either. Maybe my view of my dad had been only partial. Hell, maybe his had been, too.
One day, in the shower, I found myself talking to the character, now named Ethan. Why won’t you just open up to me? And again I heard a voice, the same one from the parking lot: a voice not so different from mine. Because I’m an addict, man. Don’t you remember? Opening up is the thing we don’t do.
It seemed utterly inconsistent with the father I’d been writing; as far as I knew, my dad had rarely even touched grass. Yet now, when I went back to the desk and tried reimagining the character as an addict again, the things I saw him doing suddenly looked consistent.
Moreover, this seemed to solve the problem of motive. I’d already granted some of my own early experiences as an addict to the daughter, Jolie. But what better reason can a father have for a crime, for abandoning all inhibition, than to keep his child from turning out as he has – from making the same mistakes?
It was as if my dad’s compulsions had been passed on to me, in form if not in content. Like his internal struggles, whatever they had been, were intimately connected to, resonant with, my own – spooky action at a distance. Which meant that the character could be both of us together, somehow, as on one level all children are their parents, and all parents their children.
It remains a borderline business, I guess, this telling of stories. I’d been novelist enough to make the first step, from sclerotic reality to imagination. But I’d found imagination alone a prison, too, or at least a labyrinth, and now I could see my way back. And it was my father, in all his pathology, who had shown me the path. Now, I’m not recommending that any parent, or for that matter writer, should surrender to his or her craziness, even for noble reasons. (After all, Jimmy Armstrong’s father had followed his obsessions, too, and the result was a missing son and a string of court cases and – I’ve just learned now, researching this – a grisly death at sixty-seven, in a shootout with the police.) But thinking back to that summer of Silas Lucas, I can see my father trying to invent for me the place where the actual and the possible meet to make something new. He may only have meant to infect me with the beauty of the brick, its mottled surface, its mingled fragility and toughness. But the fact that he was no longer keeping his yearnings in check meant that I could see him, too, in his full range of colors. Not the dad of his diminished years, content to see his work realized through me, but Dad in all his glory, in the full flower of what made him who he was, hauling us around the countryside to build the dream house he never got to live in – brick by damaged brick.
Image © Tom Wachtel
