I Think You're Totally Wrong (6 page)

DAVID:
When Wagoner taught, he required his students to present their work by reading it aloud in class. That way he wouldn't have to read their work on his own time.

CALEB:
I saw this blog once that posted a list of keys to being a writer and one was not drinking.

DAVID:
That's such an inadequate response to existence, and Wagoner's work suffers from exactly the same caution: every poem he writes is about how he took a walk in the woods and came across a snake or a dying ember, which turns out to be a symbol of something or other. I know I'm guilty at times of being overly careful about health and food, etc., but even I know the point of life can't be to die at ninety-two safe and secure in your jammies.

CALEB:
This girl, a friend from Whidbey Island, Samantha, had a fling with Harv—his name is Harvey, but we call him Harv. It's a good story and happened here in Sky when Harv was staying out here. And before I begin I'd like to say that that writing mantra “show—don't tell” is bullshit.
You don't show stories; you tell them. Too many writers “show.”

DAVID:
No kidding. I'm the one who taught you that twenty years ago.

CALEB:
Write expediently. Speak expediently. Okay, Samantha and Harv were colliding into each other. Backstory: Ten years earlier, Harv had a fling with Jen while Jen had a boyfriend. Six months later Harv bumps into Jen at a party and she's six months pregnant. Harv says, “Mine?” Jen says, “It's not yours.” A year goes by and Jen calls. “Harv, my boyfriend made me give the baby a paternity test. It's not his. Come on in.” So Harv goes in and boom, he's a dad. Ten years later Harv and Jen are together, and then Samantha comes into the picture.

DAVID:
At this time is Jefferson with Samantha?

CALEB:
No, this is years before Samantha. Like I said, it's backstory. Jefferson confronted his wife, she confesses—big blowup and breakup. Since then Jefferson learned a trade, he works, but when things get bad he turns to drugs. He's nice, quiet, introverted, and not an idiot. He once was reading
Moby-Dick
. I tried to talk to him about it. “What
do you think?” And he gave one-word answers. “Good.” Or: “Interesting.” He's fifteen years older than Samantha. Samantha's young, cute, and fun. We don't know why Samantha keeps going back to him. She wants out. It just drags on and on.

DAVID:
Have these people not heard of birth control?

CALEB:
Go figure. Samantha's sweating for a few days. It turns out the fetus is Jefferson's. Samantha dumped Jefferson and now has a four-year-old son. Jen left Harv, got a degree from the UW, and now works at Boeing. Harv's derailed but hanging on. Same with Jefferson.

DAVID:
You've got a good bad novel on your hands. I don't really have anything to say other than “There it is: real life comin' at ya.”

CALEB:
What sort of response is that?

DAVID:
There's no particular larger—

CALEB:
It's just what happened. It's not a—

DAVID:
Do you know the Danish TV show
The Killing
?

CALEB:
My sister lived in Denmark for four years. When she was here this summer, she dropped off the whole series. My parents are watching it now.

DAVID:
Twenty one-hour episodes. It's not great, but it's
good. You watch it in Danish with huge English subtitles. By the end, you've convinced yourself you know Danish. It's an endlessly elaborated investigation into the murder of a high school girl.… This song is so beautiful.

CALEB:
“Jesus Don't Want Me for a Sunbeam.”

DAVID:
That voice, the bottomless sadness of that voice.… I get bored easily by the plot, it takes a million times too long to get there, but it finally builds to something very beautiful. Brag points: I figured out who the killer is in the first episode. It—

CALEB:
Aargh. Stop. Anyone who didn't appear in episode one will be eliminated as a suspect.

DAVID:
Uh, it actually wasn't in the first episode, come to think of it. It felt like the first episode. I figured it out toward the beginning. The killer may have been anywhere in the first several episodes. Anyway, what these twenty episodes build to is this: the men are always certain, and they always get it wrong. Basically, men know nothing and women know everything, intuitively. In some sense it's a feminist parable disguised as a detective story, but it's very delicately done. The merest bass line thrumming away. When you told your story about Jen cheating on her boyfriend and then Harv cheating on Jen and then Jefferson seeing his sister die and becoming a meth head and on and on, I was only slightly interested in it. It was just a “story.” It has to flip over into something, into “X.” I need an X factor. Without that, it's just life.

CALEB:
Let's talk about that former student of yours you keep writing about—the guy who served time in prison for “shooting a dude” and whose prison credo “Do your own time” you don't like.

DAVID:
“His stoicism bores me.”

CALEB:
Why keep writing about him?

DAVID:
I'm running out of ideas. That's where you come in. You're fresh blood.

CALEB:
Ha ha.

DAVID:
I'm serious.

CALEB:
I want to know more about this guy. Did he kill or injure his victim? Was it assault? Was it murder? Manslaughter? How many years did he serve? In your books, the only question you ever ask is, “How do we deal with the fact of mortality?” In essence, “We die. What do we do about that?” That's your modus operandi, but I'm interested in why we kill.

DAVID:
Why people commit individual murders or genocide?

CALEB:
In Vollmann's
Butterfly Stories
there's a restaurant owner in Phnom Penh who survived the Khmer Rouge, watched them kill his wife and children, and did nothing because if he'd showed emotion, he, too, would have been killed. Vollmann writes a sentence or two about suffering and moves on. I wanted Vollmann to stay.

DAVID:
And what I loved is that Vollmann moved on. He knew we could fill in the blanks. That's where the art comes in.

CALEB:
I grew up around Cambodia, metaphorically. My parents went to Angkor Wat in 1956; they shot 16mm film. My
dad was in Saigon for a year, and he has a lot of books from that era. They subscribed to
National Geographic
. I remember this issue: “Kampuchea Wakens from a Nightmare.” I was maybe twelve years old. After college, Cambodia became an obsession. I became engaged to a Cambodian woman; it lasted a year. Later, I went to Cambodia. I'm now writing a Cambodian woman's biography. That's my X factor: suffering, the sociopath, the serial killer, atrocity, Pinochet, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, what motivates Ted Bundy?

DAVID:
Do you somehow think that will get you closer to anything?

CALEB:
It seems futile, but yes, I do.

DAVID:
Yeah, let's hear about another murder. You got the happy solution to murder?

CALEB:
What's frustrating is the vacuum. No one's interested in Cambodia, but we follow celebrity waistlines. Books about Cambodia and such: I read these books over and over again.

DAVID:
What kind of books—genocide porn?

CALEB:
Atrocity can become cliché, but—

DAVID:
I'm much more interested in pulling back and seeing the big picture.

CALEB:
Huh?

DAVID:
My closest friend, Michael, has been spending the last decade writing a book called
Investigation into the Death of Logan
. His father died in Vietnam in '63, almost certainly a suicide. His wife, Norma, died at forty-six of cancer. And German soldiers in World War II had to return home from the Eastern Front because the war had made them insane. Michael is convinced that he and Norma decided she didn't
need to get a biopsy—when she did—because Michael had been so obsessed with his father's death for so long that the two of them, Norma and Michael, just couldn't deal with any more incoming. What Michael loves about the German soldiers is that they couldn't handle the war. Through them, Michael—

CALEB:
There's no satisfying X factor to life: people suffer and die, and that's it, but that's what I'm interested in. Let's get to life, not this evasion of life, not “escaping reality” hunger. Maybe your friend thinks he's gotten to something, but it's personal and not universal.

DAVID:
I couldn't disagree more. You're missing the entire point of art.

CALEB:
I get what life's about.