What Happened to Lani Garver (38 page)

Ellen and Cooper have had the privilege of saying "I told you so" when they hear me perform. They're making reference to their belief, "You've got to pay your dues to sing the blues." My playing really has taken off again, in such a greater way than back when I was learning between chemo sessions. Back then I learned to reproduce anything I heard. Now I play my own stuff, too, and very little of it is about razor blades. I'm not afraid of my feelings, even the bad ones, and it comes out when I sing. I'm wailing sometimes, screaming, too, when it's appropriate. Nothing feels over the top.

My mom keeps going to AA, which should make me happy enough. I'd like to say she returned to being the grand, steady person she was when I was a little kid, but as Erdman has pointed out, there's no going backward in life. She's not the social butterfly she once was. She ditched
Les Girls
and has not mentioned missing my former friends. But I worry about Mom. Her mood swings are not to be reckoned with. On a good day she says, "I'll find myself, Claire." She looks like she really believes herself, especially when she adds stuff like "All good things take time. It'll be good when I know who I am, apart from parties and apart from you."

I guess that covers everybody who was touched by Lani Garver's visit to Hackett Island—except Lani himself. I think about him a lot, especially at night when the fog rolls in and I'm feeling restless. Some nights, I open Andovenes' book and stare and stare at that floating angel that looks so much like him, and I ask myself a lot of questions. Like ...
Isn't it weird how so much insanity could end up improving my life?
Sometimes I get out that photo album Macy gave me, and I look at the early pictures ... then I look at the ones that were taken after Lani showed up on Hackett.

There are some newspaper clippings of Calcutta, and this one really great picture of me taken by
Philadelphia Magazine.
A photographer showed up at one of our rehearsals. Jason French was dishing out orders as usual, and some of the guys were arguing with him. It's a cute photo. I'm just standing there, a couple feet off, drumming my fingers on my guitar and waiting for them to simmer. Most of my face is hidden under that fedora Suhar got me, and I look pretty stone-faced, all slouching in my black leather pants and bloody mary T-shirt. The cutline reads, "McKenzie, a new Philly musical tour de force, would rather strum than argue."

There are snapshots of me and Ellen, a couple with Cooper. At the end, I put the photo of Lani on the beach, all dripping wet, which I ripped off out of his mom's photo album. It's in the very back. I watch him stare at me and laugh. I tried to copy something as pretty as Macy's backwards handwriting when I added the ident, "What happened to Lani Garver?"

Do I think he's an angel? It would be ever so convenient for
me,
wouldn't it? On the one hand, I tell myself, if he was out there somewhere, I probably would have gotten at least a postcard. On the other hand, I have a blank page in that photo album that I am saving for the day when one shows up. There's not much else I can do, except this one thing in honor of Lani that works out pretty well. I try to be nice to everyone—even on Hackett—even when people's childish naiveness is pissing me off royally. Nobody has ever asked me why I'm nice. It's a strange relationship, the one I have with the people around here. They called me Crazy Claire for a while. Then my mom started running around with newspaper clippings of me from big Philly papers, and it shut them up, but it didn't make them like me. They want to ogle at me more than they want to talk to me. And yet, all of a sudden, there are at least twenty black leather jackets wandering around the corridors of Coast Regional. Go figure.

People probably think it's strange that they can stare at me, and I smile and wave, and pick up dropped books for people in the hall, and visit kids with cancer when I have time. I wish someone would ask me why I'm like that.

I would love to say, "You're supposed to be kind to everyone, because you never know when you're meeting an angel." I could say that much and know I was speaking the truth.

1. How does convenient recollection serve Tony and Macy?

2. Why doesn't Lani make it clear that he is a guy when Macy asks him if he is a girl? Why does it matter which gender he is?

3. Why does Vince strike out at Lani when Claire laughs about the magazine?

4. Claire says, "Complete happiness can feel so much like complete terror that it's hard to tell them apart." What does she mean?

5. Why do you think hearing the other kids' problems made it possible for Claire to eat the sundae?

6. Do you think Lani is a floating angel?

7. Claire, Tony, and Mrs. Garver all have different beliefs about what happened to Lani Garver. What do you think happened to Lani?

Question:
When did you begin writing?

Carol Plum-Ucci:
When I was a kid, I lived above a funeral home—if you had cut a hole around my bed with a hacksaw, I would've dropped down onto the face of a nonbreathing visitor. Creepy, yeah, but it inspired a writer's imagination. I used to lie awake at night wondering if we had an "overnight guest" downstairs. My mom's imagination was even more bent than my own. I'd say, "Mom, there's a ghost downstairs. I can sense it." Instead of telling me to shut up and go to bed, she'd say, "Okay, we're going to catch it." She was ghostbusters central, and I went to sleep many a night with my door strung with one of her infamous booby traps. I think maybe that's why I had insomnia so much as a kid—it was more interesting to stay awake. I eventually started to write about the things I feared and the thoughts I dreamed up to comfort myself.

I wrote my first poem when I was eight. Mom was this total neat freak and usually refused to post anything on the refrigerator. But she stuck that poem up on the fridge door. It was a lousy poem (as you can imagine, since I was only eight, though I think it actually rhymed out), but the honor encouraged me.

Q:
What is your writing process?

C. P.-U.:
Whatever works! Normally, I write like a bricklayer: The first chapter has to work before I'll move on to the second. But, occasionally, a manuscript emerges in stages: a stinky draft turns into a less stinky second draft, turns into a tolerable third draft.... It may take up to five—or more!—drafts. Books are like children: When they're born, you don't know which ones will be angels and which will require serious psychotherapy to reach maturity. I throw out probably two-thirds of what I write. Some of my most beautiful scenes will never see the light of day, as beautiful isn't enough when a passage is not working. I think the most important thing for writers is to keep an open mind and not be too hard on themselves during the creative process. It's all gold, for one essential reason or another.

Q: Do you work certain hours or days?

C. P.-U.: Before I published, I wrote whenever/wherever, which included the middle of the night, office lunch hours, in my car stopped at a red light, even in my bathroom using the toilet seat as a desk when we had too much company and no other rooms were available. Now I work mornings and again at night, skipping the middle passage of the day. If I write for more than four hours in a row, though, I fry my brains.

Q: Which books or writers have influenced you?

C. P.-U.: I have favorites for certain things. For strong teenage characters, I love Terry Trueman, who wrote
Stuck in Neutral
and
Inside Out.
He's got such great voices, you could read the lines over and over again. For the classics, I've probably read
To Kill a Mockingbird
fifty-five times. And it's one of those books I'll pick up in the middle of the night and I'll just start reading anywhere. Lolls me off, but in a very good way. The author I think I've learned the most from is Stephen King. He's tended to be ignored literarily because of his
ew
factor and horror motif, but he has one of the strongest voices and consistent literary sensibilities of any author I've read. I also love his potty humor. The scene in
The She
featuring the flatulent nun was probably largely inspired by his pie-eating contest scene in
The Body
(made into the movie
Stand By Me).
If you think I curse too much in my stories, it's King's fault.

Q:
How do you come up with story ideas?

C. P.-U.:
Usually a story starts when something happens in real life that totally burns my buns. I get on this slow simmer and suddenly my brain goes, "There's a story in this." For example, it really upsets me that very intelligent people are often dismissive of information collected by the intuition. It seems to me that modern philosophy has unwittingly crippled our ability to "know" by creating too narrow a definition for "evidence." Once, I cleared a room really fast by defending the plausibility of miracles—at a Christmas party. That and similar memories accumulated into my slow burn, and a decade later
The She
emerged.

Q:
What sparked the idea for
What Happened to Lani Garver?

C. P.-U.:
I have a friend who was born in a coal-mining town. He had to leave home when he was twelve because he was so effeminate that even his parents were getting death threats from the laborers. He lived on the streets until he was nineteen. He's fine now, a college graduate with a great job. He's so sweet and happy and not bitter that I've often wondered if he is an angel. He was my impetus for Lani Garver, though he and I both marvel at how Lani emerged distinct and unique unto himself, not sharing my friend's personality when all was said and done.

Q:
Do personal experiences or details ever end up in your books?

C. P.-U.:
Sometimes I try to make characters out of real people, but as with Lani Garver, they quickly become autonomous and end up resembling nobody but themselves. I put many personal experiences in my work as well as things I've heard from others. My belief is that fiction is a subconscious exercise in examining reality and discovering interesting things about it. Hence, the best stories are laced with an inordinate amount of what's real.

Q:
In
What Happened to Lani Garver,
Lani refers to noteworthy thinkers like Freud, Jung, and Hegel. How did you come to incorporate the philosophies of these men into Lani's character?

C. P.-U.:
I wanted to created an alleged angel with a gift of intellectual precision. The whole story entertains the theme of deconstruction—the attempt to blur harsh lines we draw in the sand that are more hurtful than helpful, such as gay/ straight, poor/rich, white/black, male/female. I was hoping to work a little deconstruction on the barrier erected between religion and science because the two, for all essential purposes, do not contradict each other in the least. Many people working in the sciences these days will agree with that.

Q:
Convenient recollection is an important theme in
What Happened to Lani Garver.
What drives your exploration of this theme?

C. P.-U.:
My initial interest in "convenient thinking," which is the mother behavior of "convenient recollection," was sparked by a statement my pastor made on a Sunday in the early nineties. He was responding to a recent act of terrorism and halted his sermon to comment, with ironic sympathy, "And, by the way, these people truly believe they're doing God a favor." It intrigued me, this concept of two people holding diametrically opposed points of view, with lives being lost in defense of each. According to the standard rules of logic, both can be wrong but only one can be right. And, therefore, in innumerable human conflicts—everything from domestic quarrels to world wars—people can become utterly convinced that folly, fiction, and even nonsense are not only entirely true, but worth killing and dying for. I've often asked myself,
How do we fall for this? And why?

The answer I explored in
Lani Garver
lies in perception, which serves as the looking glass through which we see truth. Except perhaps in cases of divine intervention, no one sees pure truth; we see truth wrapped in perception. Acting as our friend, perception is a series of messages from the subconscious that can coat, blur, distort, and even conceal truth from us, sometimes because truth is bluntly painful or, more often, because it is inconvenient.

Q:
Do you think floating angels are real?

C. P.-U.:
I think the angels outlined in the Bible and in Judeo-Christian tradition are quite real (and spiritual beings from other traditions might be real also, but I'm not familiar with them). My floating angels are probably most strongly influenced by the angels who came to save Lot from Sodom and Gomorrah—beautiful enough to attract the attention of those who lusted after beautiful boys, and yet human enough to fool people as to their superhuman identities. However, I actually made the decision to create floating angels and their prophet, Andovenes (see the word
dove
in the middle?), from scratch. I felt that to trumpet from an existing doctrinal record, such as the Bible, would have been to alienate another, such as the Koran. The message is universal.

I'm not sure I developed my thesis of floating angels to such an extent that readers would actually look for them while walking down the street, etc. I'm not sure that was my point. The point was to create an alleged heavenly being who was so real, so believable, and so likable, that a reader might reflect on God and the spiritual realm as also being so real, so believable, and so likable. We go through much of our lives pondering little but what we can see, smell, touch, taste, kiss, hug, and accumulate. The things that really matter—the pursuit of truth, love for one's neighbor, the essential awareness of our eternal nature—can get lost in the shuffle.

If I've accomplished any such pondering via
Lani Garver,
I'm deeply humbled. But as my mother used to say, "Shoot for the stars and you just might hit an airplane."

M
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