The Lights
this is a genuine barnacle book
A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books
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Copyright © 2017 by Brian McGreevy
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A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 453 South Spring Street, Suite 302, Los Angeles, CA 90013.
Set in Minion Pro
epub isbn: 9781945572333
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Names: McGreevy, Brian, 1983-, author.
Title: The Lights : a novel / by Brian McGreevy.
Description: First Trade Paperback Original Edition | A Barnacle Book | New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2017.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781945572128
Subjects: LCSH Dating—Fiction. | Family—Fiction. | Man-woman relationships—Fiction. | Mothers and daughters—Fiction. | Austin (Tex.)—Fiction. | BISAC FICTION/General.
Classification: LCC PS3613.C497245 L54 2017 | DDC 813.6—dc23
For Jim Magnuson
Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.
—Alejandro Jodorowsky
Contents
hogwarts
two encounters
the mythic dimension
truth
the plight of the plus one
wings
interlude: changeling
the click
gardens
oh, the places you’ll go
funny you should ask that, Terry
goodbye
hogwarts
Dear You,
The spring of the dead birds, the one after the death of my mother, I knew a broken angel was going to come into my life. And not a moment too soon! For a while after the funeral people didn’t know what to say to me, and my presence made them uneasy, like a vaguely defective appliance they were afraid of breaking. People don’t like thinking about these things, and yet won’t believe you if you tell them that quite literally nothing they can say has any impact on the situation so it would be preferable all around for them to treat you normally without thinking about it all. Which is not to suggest normalcy is any kind of prize. I was working as an editorial assistant at a monthly culture magazine of some repute—working for the such and such, sufficiently inflating you in the eyes of others to divert you from the feeling of, on your better days, the triviality of your position and, on the average ones, an obscure but inexorable sense of doom. This, however, is why bars were invented: the carrot incentivizing you to lunch, and then happy hour, and, after the vice in your chest has finally relaxed, you’re just sitting there like everyone else, dumber and drunker and waiting for something new to happen. Then the season turned and the birds came back, and the third or fourth time I found one fallen on my stoop to or from work, head askew and legs sticking up like a stem with all the grapes picked off, I got the point: it was in the wind, everything was about to change.
I didn’t tell Mark. We were living together in a small walk-up on 126th Street and he was working at a corporate video-editing job worse than mine—at least I worked for the such and such—and he hated disruptions of the status quo. Like, for instance, a conversation about what had happened to his ambition to be a filmmaker, or how his fatalism had grown to the level that I would come home to find him miserable in a sweltering centrally heated apartment because he couldn’t summon the will to get up and open a window. Or how often I was falling asleep before ten, fully clothed, with wine-stained teeth. Or how long it had been since it had occurred to me to be anything but fully clothed around him. So there was no point in upsetting him until there was, or until he noticed I was hiding something. Which he wouldn’t.
I’m being FEARLESS, this is the point of this whole exercise. It is the first step in abandoning someone I loved. Or someone who loved me. Separating the two has never been my strong suit.
But you already know that.
Bear with me, baby. I am using my own words. The benevolent cult of which I am now a member encourages this approach, employing TACT and COMMON SENSE over its own potentially alienating jargon: one day at a time, Higher Power, hitting your knees. (Though I suspect you would have no objection to the last one, you autistic pervert.)
Then I got the letter informing me of my acceptance to Hogwarts. This was the very elite, prestigious, etc. graduate program in writing to which I’d applied. This had been an ambivalent decision. For starters, I could hardly think of four dumber words in the English language than “graduate program in writing.” In this life some people have a destiny and some don’t. It is as cruel and true as the inequality of love. And people with a destiny are not supposed to go to the Pharisees to learn it; the academy was not the sort of environment where the axe to break the frozen sea within us would be found. I believed as much as I believed anything that it was my destiny to be that axe. To the chagrin of copy editors, unfailingly spelling “axe” with an “e” was merely one proof of my literary seriousness!
But there were other considerations. The impossibility of things going on as they were, the impossibility of overcoming my fear of changing them by myself. There is a particular satisfaction THE REAL WORLD takes in reducing your formerly incandescent potential to a small set of numbingly proscribed paths. This process is a spectator sport in the rust belt city of which I am a native, and a familiar one to the recovering Catholic school pathological overachiever who could not repress the instinct to prove her worth, arm fluttering desperately with the RIGHT ANSWER, despite seeing in the sisters’ faces how keenly they awaited her comeuppance.
So while the acceptance to Hogwarts (as I had taken to referring to the program during the application process, its reduction to adolescent fantasy a preemptive strike against my own fear of rejection) was to my thinking nothing more than a mirage that led in any direction but here, it was no less imperative to follow. It is a received part of the Galvan family oral tradition that I was born with one foot in this world and one in the next, and a chorus of dead birds is nothing to sneeze at.
Mark was predictably rattled. It meant moving across the country, and to central Texas, which as anyone from the Northeast knows is not a real place. But nothing else would be required of him than to be there and contain whatever would happen if I was left alone too long. Both of us should have been more worried about his commitment to this role. At social gatherings during our last couple of weeks in the city he would say, “She’s the lightning and I’m the bottle.” There was pride in his voice when he said this.
We arrived in Texas in August. South of Waco we stopped at a rest area with sweat puddles in dark stains on the backs of our legs even with the air conditioning on high. We looked out at flats of grass as yellow a shade of green it seemed like a living thing could be and still be a living thing. I said the heat was like a theological argument. Mark said it was too hot to be clever. We moved into a bungalow in east Austin. At the time the east side was in the early phase of serious gentrification, consisting of a mix of poor black or Mexican families and grad students and young musicians whose dart landed here on the map instead of Portland or Brooklyn. There were hipster coffeehouses with year-round Christmas lights and competing piñata stores and the cicadas were a wall of sound that seemed like it would close in at any minute. It seemed like every old man came out of the same mold: comically skinny posterior, beer belly that tapered to a point. I bought boots from a store where the sales staff wore deputy b
adges as name tags, the smell of leather reminding me of trying on shoes from my mother’s closet as a young girl.
My first weeks were spent mostly alone. Mark had found a nearly identical job and though he could have deferred starting he said he wanted to dive into routine. Both of us knew this wasn’t the case: the trip down had occurred without emotional eruption from me and he didn’t want to test his luck. It had been so long since I’d had time to myself that I was at a loss over what to do with it. Of course, drinking, but like the ticking of a clock this was hardly separable from the passage of time itself. When I did not have time for my own work, I desired nothing more, and now that I had it, I spent it on dysmorphia. I started running five- and seven-mile loops on the trail around the river in the heavy, wet heat. By the end my clothes were soaked through as though I’d been caught in a rainstorm and my eyes stung from the salt. My heritage is substantially Sicilian peasant stock, so my frame is small and my hips are broad and muscle packed easily on my thighs. I would make Mark encircle them with his hands and flex proudly like men do with their biceps when they come back from the gym. One day on the trail I was caught in an actual rainstorm. I had never experienced anything like a storm in central Texas. Its advent was sudden and without warning and all around me water pounded the earth with a force that bordered on the erotic. I made my way to a portable toilet off the trail and waited inside. The sound of the rain on the plastic walls rattled my shinbones. Then, just as suddenly, it was over, and by the time I got home there was no black in the sky and the heat had sucked all the wetness off the pavement and there was no reasonable argument to be made that it had rained in the first place. I noticed an urgent fluttering of white, tissue-like paper in my path, though there was no breeze. I crouched. It was two butterflies on the sidewalk in a state as biblical as the storm. I was breathless at the defiant fragility of this coupling, which I could not believe any boot or atomic weapon could bring harm to. It was then that I realized the truth, that East Coast elitism had nothing to do with it: Texas was not a real place—like the heart it could be located in space and time, but its most essential coordinates could not. Living here was as like living inside a beautiful and melancholy and possibly fictitious memory as it was actually happening.
Then the term started and stillness gave way to a blur of orientations and receptions and introductions, introductions, introductions. Though I would have sooner swallowed hot coals than say so, I had been terrified of meeting the other students at Hogwarts. Its exceptional funding ensured its exclusivity, and on paper everyone was outrageously accomplished: Harvard and Yale grads, former Stegners and Fulbrights, a poet or two I had actually seen in respectable literary magazines. I imagined them looking at my BA from the not-quite-Ivy arts college that wore its mind-blowing pretentiousness and self-satisfaction to mask its secret shame as a safety school, and my position at the such and such, which they would be with it enough to understand the actual loserdom of, and my ears boiled. But reality disappointed, and everyone was nice enough.
What a moronic fraudulence. Everyone was certainly not NICE ENOUGH; this is the worst Pollyanna lie to evade the pulpy heartbreaking screaming person-ness of everyone around you at any moment, but all of this was a thousand years ago now when we were made of the ideas we had about ourselves and not the choices yet to be made and it is the simple and unbelievably lonely truth that almost all of the people around you at any moment are background actors. This isn’t about them. It’s about us, baby, and we are no more relevant to them, unimaginably.
Either way, there were two glaring exceptions. Take an academic situation based on the mutual assumption of our elevation over the base considerations of the MARKET, while not so secretly fueled by the crass desire for validation by the same, and this is the exact kind of brittle veneer it is irresistible for a certain kind of adolescent ego to shatter. These two egos were Harry and Jason, and I hated them both immediately. Harry was the worse offender. He was prone to sweeping assertions that symbolism had no place in the short story, or that he would never write anything with an iPhone in it. In addition, he had spent a decade working in advertising, giving him a messiah complex. He believed that his soul had undergone privations in corporate America that the rest of us could not be expected to understand, as well as a practical comprehension of THE REAL WORLD that he would communicate in disgruntled sighs when conversation took a turn for the naïve or theoretical, followed by a suitably masculine and condescending lecture on how things actually worked. His writing consisted of the hardscrabble sufferings of blue collar Idahoans, although he had grown up in this region a child of what he held in greatest contempt: the classroom. Both his parents had been professors more conversant in squabbles over parking spaces in the faculty lot than scavenging a house for copper wiring. He was heavily tattooed and had one cauliflower ear and was just below average height for a woman, which he compensated for with a caricaturesque musculature and by hating women, though he attempted to disguise the latter in the form of reductive and aphoristic humor. He considered himself Faulknerian in his understanding of people’s inner workings but never came to a more nuanced evaluation of gender politics than women be shoppin’.
Jason, his familiar, suffered from the same testosterone poisoning that led to the belief that crassness was the better part of valor, but his case was less straightforward because Jason was a child. Looking back, it is unbelievable to me what a child he was. At the first couple of functions I noticed him at I didn’t notice him at all, really, assuming he was some faculty brat exploiting the free sparkling wine. And despite my skepticism of Hogwarts as an institution, my response upon discovering he was a student was one of indignation: who let this child in here! This tedious golden child. He was a long, sandy blond Texan, baby-faced and blue-eyed in a thirties matinee idol sort of way as though to bludgeon the world with his favored genetic inheritance. He dressed in blue jeans and Lucchese pointed toe boots regardless of the heat, a boy rebelling against the boyishness of shorts. I was to discover he looked so young because he was; he had come into the program straight out of undergrad and had had the gall to finish undergrad early. To be sure, I have never been any sort of advocate for the cult of LIFE EXPERIENCE, only confirmed by meetings of my benevolent cult sitting on metal folding chairs in church fellowship halls listening to men and women who have lived hard, bad lives but possess no voice to tell about them outside of the most maudlin platitudes—but the fact of this child’s existence still rankled me. The biography of an artist is of interest only to an artist judging herself in comparison, and such is the myopia of competitive anonymity that relative youth seemed like a thing worth getting bent out of shape over. When, of course, there was only one relevant question that wasn’t openly discussed but nevertheless changed the molecules of the air like a high-tension wire. And this was: which of us would MAKE IT—while knowing that, statistically, most would not, and silently sizing up, envying, cursing, and praying about who among us were God’s Favorite Children.
Not even Harry and Jason were defiant enough to talk about this out in the open, but it was no surprise to me to later discover that they did so in private, with the kind of detail and morbidity that girls use to talk about their bodies—analyzing the self-defeating flaws in other people’s work/thought/character while using terms like data point and brand management. No epithet offended them more than “writer’s writer,” believing fame to be simply a form of attainable capital. Either your goal was to become famous or you were a liar. They liberally punctuated these conversations with quotes from man movies. “Coffee is for closers. Fuck you, pay me.” These were the qualities they believed separated them from the rest of Hogwarts, but the one that probably did so the most was that being here never made them feel safe: in what was intended as a place of artistic sanctuary they always felt like the wolves were at the door. But they were the wolves, two crude alpha wannabes who mistook their basest instincts for metaphysical assumptions about
aristocracy.
A week or two into the term there was at a kickoff barbecue that was held at a small ranch house to the southwest of the city amid an expanse of hills of sage and cedar and prickly pear. I drank mint juleps and basked in the praise of professors who were on the admissions committee and happily answered questions about my “influences,” taking care to omit contemporary fiction. Though I had had misgivings about going back to school, I had always been good at it. It’s a sort of reversion to childhood when corresponding to a simple set of expectations results in being treated with the importance of a thoroughbred. My own childhood consisted of praying nightly that the cocktail of alcohol and benzos would hit my mother only after the lit cigarette had extinguished in her hand and not on the couch and carrying my asthma medication with me in my backpack so I didn’t have to fear one of her friends going through my things and stealing it—I flourished in the structure and predictability of school.
When I finally tired of Lisa Simpson–ing, I went inside the ranch house to have a moment to myself and have a snoop, two of my favorite things. I was admiring the skulls and antlers and furs (like my mother, I had an intense appreciation for the aesthetification of death) when I was joined by Harry and Jason, the disparity in their size and body type, a fire hydrant next to a parking meter, calling to mind a Depression-era pair of tramps. In fact I was not “joined,” I had been stalked. New females were objects of great interest at Hogwarts, and I had lost track at this point of the number of timid questions I had been asked about my CV or favorite This American Life episode by circling males. This was great fun, the most I’d had since having too much to drink at the magazine’s Christmas party last year—the pleasure of reminding yourself you are a sexual being without the risks of doing anything about it. These two were not so subtle in their approach.
“How old are you and how much do you weigh?” Harry asked.