Stranger Will (27 page)

Acknowledgments

Thanks first to Amy Sage Webb for showing me what story can do. Thanks to the entire Write Club family, especially the 2006 spin-off staring Mlaz Corbier, Jason Kane, Christopher Dwyer, Jason Heim, and Simon West-Bulford for enduring drafts of this novel that I would destroy today if you hadn’t already. Thanks to The Velvet for the binding warmth, especially to Nik Korpon, Richard Thomas, Jesse Lawrence, Gordon Highland, Logan Rapp, Pela, Stephen Graham Jones, and Paul Tremblay. Thanks to Alex Martin and Bohren und der Club of Gore, the former for introducing me to the music of the latter. Thanks to Phil Jourdan for being the best gatekeeper a friend could ask for.

And thanks to you, the reader, the god-as-congregation, for lending your eyes and mind to these words. Without you this novel would be just a glorified diary, an ego-stroke at best. But you give reason for the caffeinated nights, the cigar-infused days, and the abused keyboards in between.

One last favor before you reach for the next book in your to-read stack: please, if you have a few moments, continue your active role in the literary community by submitting a quick review/opinion of Stranger Will online, anywhere— Amazon.com, Powells.com, BN.com, Goodreads.com, Twitter, Facebook, your personal blog, or any online forum. Pretty please.

Finally, please send me direct feedback or even just general thoughts. I love conversation. Find me at www.calebjross.com.

Caleb

About the Author

Caleb J. Ross has a BA in English Literature and creative writing from Emporia State University. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared widely, both online and in print. He is the author of
Charactered Pieces: stories
,
Stranger Will: a novel
,
I Didn’t Mean to Be Kevin: a novel
,
Murmurs: Gathered Stories Vol. One
, and
As a Machine and Parts
.

Visit Caleb all over:

Homepage – www.calebjross.com

Twitter – calebjross.com/twitter

YouTube – calebjross.com/youtube

Facebook – calebjross.com/facebook

Google+ – calebjross.com/google

Appendix

“Can I Still Defend
Stranger Will
?”

A question was posed some years ago at
Thunderdome Magazine
, regarding
Stranger Will
: “Why would a healthy, perfectly normal and nice man, a happily married and loving father, write with this much gusto about apathy and abortion?” (Ignore that at the time I wrote
Stranger Will
I did not yet have a child). The question is valid, one I routinely answer with a quick, dismissive—and ultimately hollow—“I like reading gross stuff, so I like writing gross stuff.” Aesthetics. It’s a response we all accept, because we don’t want our own unique aesthetic leanings called into question. But aesthetics can’t be the entire answer.

I’m writing this as my wife sits in the living room pregnant with our second child. Nobody but my wife and I know about this pregnancy. Not our parents. Not our doctor. Not our first child, 3-year-old Jameson. Just me, her, and you, the reader. Our decision to withhold the information for now has everything to do with a fear of miscarriage—and the likely resulting wave of sympathy—and nothing to do with shame, embarrassment, or any other such comparative triviality. Miscarriage, though it hardly ever seems the fault of the parents—or perhaps because fault is so elusive much of the time—maintains a powerful position near the top of death’s org chart. A child’s death, it seems, never belongs to the child.

Communal misery as a coping mechanism has long interested me, and with it its converse—self-reflective bravery in the face of misery. These two concepts, though equally respected in most traditions, stand in contrast to one another. Sharing grief with a crowd—public tears, funerals, remembrance reunions—are celebrated as a source of power, of benefit for all involved.

Likewise, we often think of “staying strong” in the wake of hardship as a responsibility an individual must endure for the sake of communal strength (“stay strong for the kids,” “show the world you can keep on keepin’ on”). Polar reactions have never— and even more-so post-
Stranger Will
—satisfied me as the only valid reactions to death. We cannot be only sad or only brave (let’s remove, for the purposes of this essay, any open happiness associated with the fall of a national tyrant, as that happiness often comes as the result of previous deaths). Why can’t we be indifferent? And perhaps more specific to the themes of
Stranger Will
, why can’t we openly oppose the root of all death: birth? Or at least, why can’t this opposition be one of the many accepted and respected opinions on the subject of childhood and parenting. Even non-parents should be allowed to contribute to the larger discussion, right? But too often, at least empirically speaking, the child-less aren’t allowed a voice.

When I began writing
Stranger Will
, I did so with multiple motivations. I was disenfranchised with the lack of political sway that I assumed was granted to me as a young, idealistic, and motivated college student (these motivations are explored further in Appendix A); I had a girlfriend (now my wife) who desperately wanted children even as I favored a life without them; and I wanted to be as viscerally affecting with my writing as possible, being at that time heavily influenced by writers like Chuck Palahniuk and Brian Evenson and an aesthetic I would later learn is called noir (a full exploration of
Stranger Will
as a genre novel in Appendix B). Now, nearly ten years after completing the original draft of
Stranger Will
, can I still defend the novel by way of its origins? I am letting it be re-published, after all. Or, has the motivation I once assumed, and insisted upon, given way to more deeply realized yet wholly more digestible motivation: a desire to simply allow a conversation about birth in which both parents and non-parents could participate.

But why
Stranger Will
specifically? Why approach the desire for conversation at such an apparently hostile and grotesque angle?

Perhaps I simply feared being a father. I didn’t know then (and barely know now) how it was done (more about my fatherless childhood in Appendices C and D). Not until my mid- twenties did I realize that I’d been subconsciously looking to every male figure in my life—both senior and peer—as a beacon of what it meant to be a capital-M Man. I picked up on car jargon via the 1990s cable sitcom Home Improvement; fell into, and out of sports, repeatedly throughout childhood; and just before my first client visit for my first job right out of college I was forced to approach one of my female co-workers for tie knotting help (which eventually lead to a second opinion via an internet how- to guide written by, I assume for the sake of what little testosterone I can still claim, a man). Meet my father, the internet. I learned to shave one tiny red square of toilet paper at a time.

So, fear perhaps drove the investigative angle of
Stranger Will
. I was free to explore themes that were never played out for me in a real-life domestic setting. The hostile and grotesque angle? I’ll have to retain the claim of simple aesthetics, perhaps with a touch of willed confrontation; a reaction was a reaction was a reaction to my early-twenties brain. Now, at thirty years old with a child and a half under my wing, I’ve molded and shaped from that simple reaction a larger desire: conversation. Everyone, I hope, will at least feel compelled to question the purpose of parenthood. Great literature forces us to ask questions. My hope is that I’ve created great literature.

Appendix A

In Defense of
Stranger Will

Originally published at The Nervous Breakdown, May 10, 2011

I understand that an introduction to a novel, especially one written for a first-edition printing by a relatively unknown author, may seem egotistical; this of course presumes a reaction to this book passionate enough to warrant such a pre-defense. I am willing to gamble my humility on this presumption.
Stranger Will
is a book that will polarize readers, and I believe setting proper context for this novel is important.

Stranger Will
started with a newspaper article about dead bodies. I was in college and for the first time in my life open to outside influence. Sudden self-sufficiency coupled with my first completed year of university study forced me to open up to new ideas. Despite my historical defiance of the status-quo (or what I thought at the time was defiance), the university liberal arts program did its job and liberated me from my somewhat
-
rigid thought structure. Where before I would have read the dead body article and walked away simply satisfied with its morbid imagery, I instead walked away with a sense of possibility. The article had potential, though I wasn’t yet sure how to leverage it. That would come months later.

My first years in college correlated with the most heated years of twenty-aughts Middle East conflict, specifically the invasion of Iraq. American citizens were just beginning to feel the wear after having been misled into combat. Protests weren’t working. More than any other point of my life, I realized that the world was much greater than me. A line from Octavio Paz’s “The Blue Bouquet” (which I altered slightly and used in
Stranger Will
), comforted me immensely:

“I thought that the universe was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket’s saw, the star ’s blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue.”

Despite the negative context of the story, I felt this non- control to be an optimistic and consoling outlook. Paz’s line would become my mantra for dealing with a world that I truly could neither control nor understand. Apathy, for all its faults, at least relieves stress.

As a result of this realization, I decided to write what I eventually came to understand as a self-help novel for the war
-
torn. In
Stranger Will
the main character slowly learns that in order to be mentally and emotionally free he must accept being controlled. I am sure this sentiment would please ruling powers, from the upper manager to the throned king. However, my intention is not to feed those powers, but instead to warm the subverted.

That dead body article ultimately became the basis for my protagonist’s job. William Lowson cleans crime scenes. Such a macabre position forces William to come to terms with control the way I’d had to during the Middle East situation. Fellow writers may already sense the inherent difficultly with promoting Apathism. How can one express passion around a topic that is passionless by definition?

I met this challenge on two fronts: genre and sentence style. Noir literature was born and popularized of the years preceding and during the great depression. Not surprisingly, noir literature deals with emotionally- and physically-damaged morally- ambiguous protagonists made so by a similarly physically- damaged and morally-ambiguous environment. People were living bleak in the 1930s, so they wrote and read bleak. Pairing noir conventions with
Stranger Will
‘s oft-subdued and minimal- istic language came naturally, yet nonetheless uncomfortably.

Perhaps my own personal interest in the behind-the-scenes miscellanea of a writer, even an obscure one, does enough to justify this defense. It is my name on the cover, after all. But I hope the need goes further than my own interests. Even if that need stays confined to my family. My kid may read this one day. I plan to be senile by that time, so justifying this book won’t be possible. So, for you Jameson, know that I love you (I finished the book before you were born. At the time of publication you will be just over two years old).

Appendix B

“Six Personal Investigations of the Act of Reading: Caleb J. Ross’

Stranger Will
” by Pablo D’Stair

Originally published at Sunday Observer, July 17, 2011

One of my favorite responses to any question ever belongs to Prince Hamlet—Polonius inquires what he is reading and he says “Words, words, words.” It strikes me as pure and beautiful, the way a book should be encountered and experienced—in my most abstract, philosophical ideal a book would exist as a white cover, title in black, author name in grey, then the pages with the words-nothing of exterior, a priori influence to the interaction.

I can count on one hand the pieces of literature (and add in even the non-literary works) I have had the pleasure of experi- encing in such a vacuum, usually there are some half dozen influences I encounter well before the first word, usually even more peripheral influence during the read. Certainly such is the case with Caleb J. Ross’
Stranger Will
.

“Noir ” is one of those wonderful genres in that it so ethereally avoids exact definition, it’s broken into sub-genre, it’s fervently believed to be composed of X by this party of Y by this of Z by some other. Indeed, it is a genre name I use to mean something very particular that seldom matches up with anyone else I encounter—it’s a genre I sometimes write in, as well, so my own artistic tendencies (what I do, not even what I observe in others) creep in to inform my encounter with anything labeled (or labeling itself ) with the word.

Stranger Will
does this. And so from the outset, I “knew what it was I was reading”—or, better put, “knew what the book was telling me it was”. Always a curiosity about genre, the idea of which party sets the tag to a piece-originator or audience-and whether it is something fluid or something interchangeable...

But this is not so much what was on my mind when I started the novel.

Genre

What was on my mind, as often is when I read noir, was Roman Polanksi’s film Chinatown—because this film epitomizes how I define the genre, and moreso it (better or worse for whatever new material I am encountering) sets the pitch as to whether something is going to be “good noir ” or “bad noir ” and only after I make this determination do I, personally, get my head unstuck enough to consider my direct reaction to a piece, outside of its arguable connection to a label.

Ross’ novel is, to my way of thinking, about the hermetically sealed atmosphere of an individual—there is a conscious sense about it of “being a novel”, this cannot be denied, an artful stacking of conflict, representational parties, events which have a sense of inertia to them built more of progressing a series of prompt/responses than of suggesting a tangibility in a world “outside of the pages”, but these elements don’t overwhelm the humanity right out of the thing.