Fitting Ends (21 page)

Del and I had never been close. We had never been like friends, or even like brothers. Yet after that day on the elevator, I came to realize that there had been something between us. There was something that could be taken away.

He stopped talking to me altogether for a while. In the weeks and months that followed my lie, I doubt if we even looked at each other more than two or three times, though we shared the same room.

For a while, I slept on the couch. I was afraid to go up to our bedroom. I can remember those first few nights, waiting in the living room for my father to go to bed, the television hissing with laughter. The furniture, the table, the floors seemed to shudder as I touched them, as if they were just waiting for the right moment to burst apart.

I'd go outside, sometimes, though that was really no better. It was the period of late summer when thunderstorms seemed to pass over every night. The wind came up. The shivering tops of trees bent in the flashes of heat lightning.

There was no way out of the situation I'd created. I could see that. Days and weeks stretched out in front of me, more than a month before school started. By that time, I thought, maybe it would all blow over. Maybe it would melt into the whole series of bad things that had happened, another layer of paint that would eventually be covered over by a new one, forgotten.

If he really had pushed me, that was what would have happened. It would have been like the time he tried to choke me, or the time he tried to drive the car off the hill. Once those incidents were over, there was always the possibility that this was the last time. There was always the hope that everything would be better, now.

In retrospect, it wouldn't have been so hard to recant. There would have been a big scene, of course. I would have been punished, humiliated. I would have had to endure my brother's triumph, my parent's disgust. But I realize now that it wouldn't have been so bad.

I might have finally told the truth, too, if Del had reacted the way I expected. I imagined that there would be a string of confrontations in the days that followed, that he'd continue to protest with my father. I figured he wouldn't give up.

But he did. After that night, he didn't try to deny it anymore. For a while, I even thought that maybe he had begun to believe that he pushed me. He acted like a guilty person, eating his supper in silence, walking noislessly through the living room, his shoulders hunched like a traveler on a snowy road.

My parents seemed to take this as penitence. They still spoke sternly, but their tone began to be edged by gentleness, a kind of forgiveness. “Did you take out the trash?” they would ask. “Another potato?”—and they would wait for him to quickly nod. He was truly sorry, they thought. Everything was finally going to be okay. He was shaping up.

At these times, I noticed something in his eyes—a kind of sharpness, a subtle shift of the iris. He would lower his head, and the corners of his mouth would move slightly. To me, his face seemed to flicker with hidden, mysterious thoughts.

When I finally began to sleep in our room again, he pretended I wasn't there. I would come in, almost as quiet as he himself had become, to find him sitting at our desk or on his bed, peeling off a sock with such slow concentration that it might have been his skin. It was as if there were an unspoken agreement between us—I no longer existed. He wouldn't look at me, but I could watch him for as long as I wanted. I would pull the covers over myself and just lie there, observing, as he went about doing whatever he was doing as if oblivious. He listened to a tape on his headphones, flipped through a magazine, did sit-ups, sat staring out the window, turned out the light. And all that time his face remained neutral, impassive. Once, he even chuckled to himself at a book he was reading, a paperback anthology of
The Far Side
cartoons.

When I was alone in the room, I found myself looking through his things, with an interest I'd never had before. I ran my fingers over his models, the monster-wheeled trucks and B-10 bombers. I flipped through his collection of tapes. I found some literature he'd brought home from the detention center, brochures with titles like “Teens and Alcohol: What You Should Know!” and “Rap Session, Talking about Feelings.” Underneath this stuff, I found the essay he'd been working on.

He had to write an essay so that they would let him back into high school. There was a letter from the guidance counselor, explaining the school's policy, and then there were several sheets of notebook paper with his handwriting on them. He'd scratched out lots of words, sometimes whole paragraphs. In the margins, he'd written little notes to himself: “(sp.)” or “?” or “No.” He wrote in scratchy block letters.

His essay told of the Outward Bound program. “I had embarked on a sixty day rehabilitation program in the form of a wilderness survival course name of Outward Bound,” he had written.

THESIS: The wilderness has allowed for me to reach deep inside my inner self and grasp ahold of my morals and values that would set the standard and tell the story of the rest of my life.

I would go into our room when my brother was out and take the essay out of the drawer where he'd hidden it. He was working on it, off and on, all that month; I'd flip it open to discover new additions or deletions—whole paragraphs appearing as if overnight. I never saw him doing it.

The majority of the essay was a narrative, describing their trip. They had hiked almost two hundred miles, he said. “Up by sun and down by moon,” he wrote. There were obstacles they had to cross. Once, they had to climb down a hundred-foot cliff. “The repelling was very exciting but also scarey,” he'd written.

This was meant to teach us trust and confidence in ourselves as well as our teammates, they said. Well as I reached the peak of my climb I saw to my despair that the smallest fellow in the group was guiding my safety rope. Now he was no more than one hundred and ten pounds and I was tipping the scales at about two twenty five needless to say I was reluctant.

But they made it. I remember reading this passage several times; it seemed very vivid in my mind. In my imagination, I was in the place of the little guy holding the safety rope. I saw my brother hopping lightly, bit by bit, down the sheer face of the cliff to the ground below, as if he could fly, as if there were no gravity anymore.

“My experience with the Outward Bound program opened my eyes to such values as friendship, trust, responsibility and sharing,” Del wrote in his conclusion. “Without the understanding of these I would not exist as I do now but would probably instead be another statistic. With these values I will purely succeed. Without I would surely fail.”

Next to this he'd written “Sounds like bullshit (?)”

I don't know that I recognized that distinct ache that I felt on reading this, or understood why his sudden distance, the silent, moody aura he trailed after him in those weeks should have affected me in such a way. Years later, I would recall that feeling—standing over my son's crib, a dark shape leaning over him as he stirred with dreams—waiting at the window for the headlights of my wife's car to turn into our driveway. That sad, trembly feeling was a species of love—or at least a symptom of it.

I thought of this a long time after the fact. I loved my brother, I thought. Briefly.

None of this lasted. By the time he died, a year later, he'd worked his way back to his normal self, or a slightly modified, moodier version. Just like before, money had begun to disappear from my mother's purse; my parents searched his room for drugs. He and my father had argued that morning about the friends he was hanging around with, about his wanting to take the car every night. Del claimed that he was dating a girl, said he only wanted to see a movie in town. He'd used that one before, often lying ridiculously when he was asked the next day about the plot of the film. I remember him telling my mother that the war film
Apocalypse Now
was set in the future, which I knew was not true from an article I'd read in the paper. I remember making some comment in reference to this as he was getting ready to go out, and he looked at me in that careful, hooded way, reminscent of the time when he was pretending I didn't exist. “Eat shit and die, Stewart,” he murmured, without heat. Unfortunately, I believe that this was the last thing he ever said to me.

Afterwards, his friends said that he had seemed like he was in a good mood. They had all been in his car, my father's car, driving up and down the main street in Scottsbluff. They poured a little rum into their cans of Coke, cruising from one end of town to the other, calling out the window at a carful of passing teenage girls, revving the engine at the stoplights. He wasn't that drunk, they said.

I used to imagine that there was a specific moment when he realized that he was going to die. I don't believe he knew it when he left our house, or even at the beginning of his car ride with his friends. If that were true, I have to assume that there would have been a sign, some gesture or expression, something one of us would have noticed. If it was planned, then why on that particular, insignificant day?

Yet I wondered. I used to think of him, in his friend Sully's car, listening to his buddies laughing, making dumb jokes, running red lights. It might have been sometime around then, I thought. Time seemed to slow down. He would sense a long, billowing delay in the spaces between words; the laughing faces of the girls in a passing car would seem to pull by forever, their expressions frozen.

Or I thought about his driving home. I could see the heavy, foglike darkness of those country roads, the shadows of weeds springing up when the headlights touched them, I could imagine the halt and sputter of the old pickup as the gas ran out, that moment when you can feel the power lift up out of the machine like a spirit. It's vivid enough in my mind that it's almost as if I were with him as the pickup rolled lifelessly on—slowing, then stopping at last on the shoulder where it would be found the next day, the emergency lights still blinking dimly. He and I stepped out into the thick night air, seeing the shape of the elevator in the distance, above the tall sunflowers and pigweed. And though we knew we were outdoors, it felt like we were inside something. The sky seemed to close down on us like the lid of a box.

No one in my family ever used the word
suicide
. When we referred to Del's death, if we referred to it, we spoke of “the accident.” To the best of our knowledge, that's what it was.

There was a time, right before I left for college, when I woke from a dream to the low wail of a passing train. I could see it when I sat up in bed; through the branches of trees outside my window I could see the boxcars shuffling through flashes of heat lightning, trailing past the elevator and into the distance, rattling, rattling.

And there was another time, my senior year in college, when I saw a kid who looked like Del coming out of a bar, a boy melting into the crowded, carnival atmosphere of this particular strip of saloons and dance clubs where all the students went on a Saturday night. I followed this person a few blocks before I lost sight of him. All those cheerful, drunken faces seemed to loom as I passed by them, blurring together like an expressionist painting. I leaned against a wall, breathing.

And there was that night when we came to Pyramid with my infant son, the night my father and I stayed up talking. I sat there in the dark, long after he'd gone to bed, finishing another beer. I remember looking up to see my mother moving through the kitchen; at first only clearly seeing the billowy whiteness of her nightgown hovering in the dark, a shape floating slowly through the kitchen toward me. I had a moment of fear before I realized it was her. She did not know I was there. She walked slowly, delicately, thinking herself alone in this room at night. I would have had to touch her to let her know that I was there, and that would probably have startled her badly. So I didn't move. I watched as she lit a cigarette and sat down at the kitchen table, her head turned toward the window, where the snow was still falling. She watched it drift down. I heard her breathe smoke, exhaling in a long, thoughtful sigh. She was remembering something, I thought.

It was at these moments that everything seemed clear to me. I felt that I could take all the loose ends of my life and fit them together perfectly, as easily as a writer could write a spooky story, where all the details add up and you know the end even before the last sentence. This would make a good ending, you think at such moments. You'll go on living, of course. But at the same time you recognize, in that brief flash of clarity and closure, you realize that everything is summed up. It's not really worth becoming what there is left for you to become.

Fitting Ends

DAN CHAON

A Reader's Guide

Q:
Fitting
Ends
was first published in 1996 by a small press, and
is now being reissued by Ballantine in a revised edition. Was it
strange to return to these stories, and to re-edit the book after
all this time?

A: It
was
strange, but not in a bad way. I suppose like everybody, I've always fantasized about being able to go back in time and alter things a little, and so there was an almost illicit thrill to it. It felt a little like cheating, since, of course, most times you get only one chance—once a book is published, usually that's it.

It was also odd to go over these stories once again. Many of them I hadn't read for years, and in some cases it was almost like they'd been written by a different person. The stories in
Fitting
Ends
were written when I was in my twenties (the earliest one, “Accidents,” was written when I was a senior in college). Looking back at myself from a very different point in my writing career was instructive, sometimes awkward, but mostly fun. I felt a little like the narrator watching the videotape in the story “My Sister's Honeymoon.” It was like being a ghost hanging over my younger self.

Ultimately, I found that I didn't really change many things. There were some embarrassing lines and a few personal tics that I noticed more now, which I took out, and a few additions and streamlining here and there, but mostly I left them alone, even when, in some cases, I might have made different choices in plot and so on, now that I am older. Flannery O'Connor rewrote one of her earliest stories, “The Geranium,” toward the end of her life, and a radically changed version became one of her last stories, “Revelation.” Maybe I'll eventually do that with some of these.

But in the case of this particular reissue, the biggest changes had to do with reorganization. Working with my Ballantine editor, Dan Smetanka, I rearranged the order of the stories in the collection. We took out two pieces from the first edition, and added two—“Thirteen Windows” and “Presentiment,” both of which were written in-between the time that I finished
Fitting Ends
and before I started working on my next collection,
Among the
Missing.
I wrote the two stories a bit too late for them to make the final cut of the first edition of
Fitting Ends
, but I've always felt that they belonged in that collection.

Q: How do you decide that a group of short stories “belong
together,” that they represent a “book”? How do you go about
putting a collection together?

A: I hope that this doesn't sound too “un-literary,” but I've always thought that a collection of short stories should have the cohesion of a great record album (I mean, um, CD. I'm showing my age). Do you know what I mean? Some albums are just collections of singles, while others seem like the songs really belong together, in a particular order, so that they move through themes and motifs and moods in a way that creates a coherent, resonant soundscape for the listener. I feel like that's what I want a collection of stories to do. Even if the characters aren't all connected, I want the experience of reading the book of short stories to have a sense of wholeness that is not unlike the experience of reading a novel. For me, it's not just a bunch of different stories tossed together.

Of course, I know that a lot of readers will approach a short-story collection like a box of chocolates. They'll sample here and there—and maybe even take a bite out of one and then put it back. But for me, ideally, a book of stories is read from beginning to end just like a novel, and I spend a lot of time trying to make the stories work together and bounce off one another in interesting ways.

Q: What made you decide to become a writer? What were
some of your influences?

A: I guess my becoming a writer was an accident. I grew up in a very tiny rural community in western Nebraska, and my background wasn't literary at all. Instead, it was, I guess, what you would call working class—my father was a construction worker and my mom was a housewife, neither one had graduated high school. Growing up, I didn't know any adults who read books for pleasure.

On the other hand, I was not discouraged from becoming an avid reader myself, though I think it was considered a little strange. Actually, I think that I
was
a fairly strange child—I was a sleepwalker, I talked to myself, I spent a lot of time involved in elaborate imaginary games that were more than occasionally mortifying to my parents (such as the time when I pretended for several days to be blind). In short, if my parents had been more well-to-do, I would have spent a lot of my childhood in therapy.

I wonder what a therapist would have done with me, because the truth is that I spent my childhood with a fairly tenuous sense of reality. My earliest memory is of being about two years old, in a department store with my mother during the Christmas season, and climbing into the center of a circular rack of shirts. I believed that I was lost—it seemed to me that there wasn't just one layer of shirts around me, but a whole forest of them that went on endlessly, and I didn't know how to get out. I don't remember hearing anyone calling for me—only that when I was finally found, my mother was very angry, and the store itself was empty and closed. The strange thing about this memory is that I remember being discovered by my mother and a man who was dressed in a bright red jacket with gold buttons, wearing a tall black hat, like a Nut-cracker soldier. I know that there couldn't have been such a man, though I remember him vividly. My mother claimed that this event didn't happen at all—I never got lost in a store, she said. It occurs to me now that there simply
weren't
department stores like the one in my memory anywhere near the rural area where I grew up. Ultimately, I have no idea whether this very specific remembrance has any basis whatsoever.

I was extremely lucky, though, in that as I was in the process of turning from a strange child into an even stranger adolescent, I encountered a really wonderful teacher, my seventh-grade teacher, Mr. Christy. We were given creative-writing assignments in his class, and we could read any book we wanted for extra credit. I began to write a lot, and then another important thing happened. In the middle of the school year, Mr. Christy gave an assignment for us to write letters to our favorite author. Mine was Ray Bradbury, and once I'd written the letter I went a little further than the other kids and actually found his address in a directory and sent it off to him, along with some stories I had written, which were pretty slavish imitations of Bradbury's own work. The amazing thing was that Bradbury actually wrote back to me, praising the stories and offering a critique. Bradbury was full of kindness and hyperbole, and told me that he thought I would soon be published. I was around thirteen, and this is when I decided that I was going to be a writer. I began sending stories out to magazines, being basically too ignorant to know any better, and not quite realizing that the rejection slips I was getting were form letters. By the time I went away to college (at Northwestern University), writing was a habit that I'd gotten into, and I was encouraged by my teachers there as well—including one of my lifelong mentors, Reginald Gibbons, who published the first edition of
Fitting Ends and Other Stories
, at Northwestern University Press.

I recognize now that I was extremely fortunate. I had parents who, however puzzled they were by my weirdness, were tolerant, and loving; I stumbled upon encouraging teachers at just the right time in my youth and college years; and, finally, I happened upon a particularly generous spirit in Ray Bradbury, whose kindness put me on a track I might not have had the confidence to pursue otherwise.

Q:
Fitting
Ends
was your first book, and you followed it, a few
years later, with another book of short stories,
Among
the
Miss
ing.
What particularly attracts you to the short story as a form?

A: Well, for one thing, I grew up thinking about storytelling in ways that are more suited to short stories than to other forms. The things that caught my attention were the anecdotes, bits of gossip, jokes, the times when someone would come in and say, “The weirdest thing just happened to me!”

I guess one of the things that interests me the most is the small pieces of the world; the small pieces of our lives that are significant yet mysterious and unexplainable. I've never been particularly comfortable with the Big Picture, the idea that you can summarize and encapsulate someone's life, the idea that we're all living a larger narrative. I don't even really believe that we are basically the same person our whole lives. It seems to me that there are moments throughout our lives when the Big Picture collapses. We come to these little crossroads all the time, and we make one choice or another, and each crossroads changes us a little bit, so that we are always in the process of becoming a different person. I'm most interested in those little crossroads, the decisions we don't even necessarily mean to make, that we haven't planned for, but that still nudge us gently yet permanently through the membrane of one self and into the next one. Those small choices can end up being huge, and that's the stuff that I like to write about the most.

Q: The story “Fitting Ends” appeared in
Best
American
Short
Stories,
1996
, and in the appendix to that volume you wrote a
short description of how the story came to be written:

Writing stories, for me, is something like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. I write hundreds of pages of fragments every year and put them in folders together,
hoping they will mate. But in general, it's a long process,
and this story was no exception. I had a folder, three
inches thick, full of jottings on the quarreling brothers
Del and Stewart, which I thought might be a novel. In
another folder I had descriptions of “Pyramid,” a dream
version of the village I grew up in. . . . In yet another, I
had a junked-up ghost story, a mock of the
True
Ghost
Sto
ries
I loved as a child. During my first year of teaching
composition, a student wrote an essay about the Outward Bound program, which moved me, and which helped me
to understand the character of Del in a way I hadn't before.

Is this your usual method of writing?

A: For better or worse, this tends to be my main way of working. I begin with fragments: anecdotes that friends or family tell me, a bit of gossip, or something in the local news, something seen from a passing car, an image. Often the beginnings of a story will come to me like a dream. I will picture some image, or my mind will give me a glimpse of some scene. These will take hold of me, and I will begin to figure out where the image or scene is leading me. Who are the characters? What is happening to them in their lives? A small window opens for me, and I am able to imagine a scene, or a memory of the character's past.

Eventually I'll try to fit those pieces and fragments together in various configurations, trying to find the “real story” that exists in the littler parts. For me, putting a story together is sort of like stitching together a quilt of different elements, trying different pieces to see how they work, revising and rethinking and revising again. Sometimes an idea that seems like a whole story will eventually get reduced to a few paragraphs once a story is finished. For example, in
Fitting Ends
, a small subplot has to do with the relationship of the narrator to his deaf mother. Once upon a time, I thought that was a completely separate story, and I wrote almost an entire story just on that subject before it got folded into “Fitting Ends.” Sometimes, looking back at the stories, I feel like I am a very wasteful writer—dozens of pages of a first draft often end up getting reduced to a paragraph, and my closet is stuffed with grocery bags full of these fragmented beginnings of stories that I've never been able to use. I'm working toward a point where every single word that comes out of me will be brilliant and useful, but I haven't quite gotten there yet.

Q: As a writer, how do you know when a story has reached its
conclusion? Do you have a specific ending in mind from the
beginning?

A: It's very rare for me to know what the ending of a story is going to be when I start out writing, though sometimes I have an image in mind. For example, the story “Going Out” started with the image of the kid at the edge of the pasture's fence, kneeling in front of the lowing cattle, and I knew that that was where the story ended—though I had no idea how to get there! A lot of the time, I'm sort of like my characters, groping blindly forward. I guess I'm looking for the place where the character has reached a certain hot zone, where their life has to inevitably change.