The Opposite of Fate (27 page)

Russell and Robert wanted to dash down and take photos. But I begged them not to. I said I had the distinct sense that we had trespassed into a forbidden realm and that something terrible had happened in the very spot where we were standing. Words had an inhibiting effect. I emphasized the unknown consequences of trespassing. I reminded them of a news story we had read recently: A couple of tourists had been killed by bandits in a
remote area of China. We turned back and twenty minutes later arrived at Bei Sa Po, just as it began to rain. When our car rumbled down the dirt road heading for Guilin, schoolchildren gathered along the side of the road and cried out to us in English: “Hello, good-bye! One-two-three, A-B-C!”

On the drive to Guilin, I was thinking that I had to use this setting in my next book. And a year or so later, when it did indeed surface as the fictional village in
The Hundred Secret Senses
, I further borrowed from the events of that day by casting the narrator as half Chinese, like the actor Russell Wong, and a photographer, like my friend Robert.

Sometime later, I was enjoying a fine meal with family at a Hakka restaurant in San Francisco, and I decided aloud that the fictional villagers should be of Hakka ethnicity so I could, of course, deduct the meal as research. But then my sister Lijun said from across the table: “Hakka people do not live in that part of China.” She had lived in Guilin for ten years, and so she knew for a fact that no Hakka people lived inland. They were fishermen, not farmers. (Remember this detail: No Hakka people live inland, and certainly not in the remote mountains south of Guilin.)

I put aside this clash between fact and fiction and went heli-skiing for a week on glaciers in Canada. On the last of the seven days, and in the last hour, I did an impressive three-revolution forward cartwheel without intending to. My skis never released, but the top of my tibia did. It broke off and lodged under my kneecap, severing my nerves at the same time, so that mercifully I suffered little pain and did not even know I had sustained a serious fracture. The helicopter flew me back to the lodge in the
wink of an eye, and because ninety-nine percent of all heli-skiers seem to be sports medicine physicians and other jock docs on holiday, I found myself surrounded by a retinue of the medical profession’s finest.

One of these was Eric, an anesthesiologist, who routinely logged a million vertical feet of heli-skiing every year. My husband and I became friends with him; over the next three months Lou and I saw him at Squaw Valley and in southern California, and we often swapped horror stories of skiing accidents and avalanches. Eric had witnessed a mountain helicopter crash for whose victims he performed triage; four of them died. He had seen avalanches, and he described the sound, the stiff crack as the thick layer of congealed ice and snow separates from its upper half, the train rumble as the slab begins its descent, and then the crash as it achieves the speed of an ice-skating rink tilted sideways into freefall.

I had often imagined what an avalanche might be like, I told Eric. A close friend of ours, Steve, had been in one during an outing to which we had been invited but had been unable to go. Eric was like Steve in many ways. Steve was nicknamed “Jock Doc” because he was a sportsman first and a physician second. He was the ultimate risk-taker, a guy who scuba-dived among sharks and windsurfed in the crushing waves of Maui. And while he often tended to victims of horrendous accidents, curiously, he was afraid of death. One warm spring day, while cross-country skiing in an out-of-bounds area with his wife of nine months watching from above, he triggered an avalanche. A beacon for being located in case of such disaster was in his backpack. It was not turned on.

Steve had done everything right, another friend told me. He tried to swim through the avalanche, pushing himself up in the leaden ice floe with a butterfly stroke to gain his way to the top. When he was tumbled down, he managed to cup his hands in front of his face and push the snow away from his nose, doing this within the second before the snow congealed into the consistency of concrete, trapping him.

The medics who arrived at the scene knew Jock Doc personally. He was a friend, and they knew he had the aerobic fitness of a marathon runner. He had made the air pocket—this they knew because they found him with his hands clasped as if in prayer before his face. Most people, they said, would have lasted ten or fifteen minutes tops. Jock Doc, they guessed, had lasted at least forty-five.

I told Eric that all these years Steve had been gone, I could not stop wondering what he had been hoping, praying, believing during those forty-five minutes.

Eric said that he himself was afraid not so much of the pain of death’s sword as of life’s ledger. In his mind, the sum total of his experiences had not changed the world one iota. He was an anesthesiologist who worked for plastic surgeons, on elective-surgery cases where the money came from those who had the discretionary income to buy a better face. He was about to turn forty, and he saw himself as one more rubber raft floating in the doldrums; when he was gone, there would be another rubber raft to take his place. I asked him what it would take to prove that his life meant something—a medical discovery, charitable work, children? It’s not too late, I said. You can still choose to do things differently. Eric underscored the false simplicity of my words: “It’s not that simple,” he said.

I thought about Eric’s spiritual malaise, a common unease that plagues many from time to time, the longing to be special, the fear that one is not. I’ve had the sense that what I do is ultimately meaningless in the larger context of humanity and its pain and suffering. And because I often include in my writing what I feel at the moment, I decided to give my story’s narrator, Olivia, the same unease. Further into the story, I wrote a scene in which an avalanche kills Olivia’s imagined nemesis, a character on whom I bestowed the last name of my friend Steve. As to how I chose this character’s first name, that is another story, another detour.

Summer arrived, and in July, I tottered off with my surgically repaired leg to Yaddo, a writers’ retreat in upstate New York. Two weeks into my retreat, I took a weekend off to visit my editor, Faith Sale, at her country house in Cold Spring, a few counties away. Poking about her shelves, I spotted her Cornell yearbook, and decided to search for the face of Nabokov, one of my favorite writers. Faith had told me that he had taught at Cornell when she was a student. I plopped open the book on the kitchen table, where Faith sat doing the Sunday
Times
crossword puzzle. As I scanned the photos of young men and women with their 1950s hairdos, one image stopped my heart. It was that of a young woman whose steady gaze made her appear both defiant and frightened.

“My God, this one looks haunted,” I said, “as if she’s seen all the tragedies of the world.”

“Who?” Faith asked.

I read the name aloud, and Faith gasped. “Ilse was my dearest, best friend in college.” That afternoon I learned she had been brilliant and intense, both comic and serious. Ilse was born
in Poland, and when she was five, her father threw her into the arms of friends before a train took the rest of the family away to Auschwitz. Ilse went to live with a Catholic family. She had to hide the fact that she spoke Yiddish as she prayed to Jesus on a cross. After the war, she was sent to the United States. Shortly after she graduated from Cornell in 1958, she checked into a hotel, signed the register claiming that she lived on a street named Tod—German for “death”—then killed herself.

I was so taken with Ilse’s story that I told Faith I was going to revise the chapter I was working on. I wanted to add this back story. By coincidence, I had named my character Elza, which sounds close to Ilse. I proposed to change it to Ilse.

“Keep it,” my editor said. Elza was Ilse’s name in Poland, before she changed it to something she thought sounded less Jewish.

When I returned to Yaddo, everything seemed awash with references to the Holocaust. The CD music that a novelist lent me turned out to be a symphony written by a Polish Jew, who had dedicated it to the survivors of Auschwitz. One day I received a care package of dried fruit from a Jewish friend who said she was on her way to Poland to visit the village where many of her family’s relatives had been slaughtered. Two nights later, I met a composer who was writing an opera about the San Francisco gay activist Harvey Milk, and he told me how the libretto was progressing. “The producers,” he said, “think the librettist and I are placing too much emphasis on Harvey’s upbringing as the child of Holocaust survivors.”

When I returned home from Yaddo, I joined some friends for dinner at a poet’s house. I learned that she also taught Holocaust
literature, and that she, like my editor and Elza/Ilse, had graduated from the same university, Cornell, and in the same year.

Details like these, and many others, turned up with the persistence of a polished public-relations campaign directed by Jewish ghosts. With that kind of pressure, how could I not cast a few imaginary parts in the novel for my new imaginary friends?

I found these links between fluke and fiction to be meaningful, both a code and a carrot on a stick to make me go forward. It occurred to me that I should include tributes to other people, living and dead, as a way to thank them for being part of my life. I got so carried away that I even put in the names of my first pets, turtles named Slowpoke and Fastpoke. They died at the hands of my three-year-old little brother, who wanted to see what turtles looked like with their jackets off.

Later, while working on the Elza portion of the novel, I realized I had not yet thanked my friend Eric for his contributions, that is, his descriptions of avalanches, his discussions with me about midlife malaise. I opened the computer file that held the acknowledgments page and added his name. A week later, I received a telephone call from his brother, who told me the devastating news that on the morning of March 22, while he was heading to go skiing at Mammoth, Eric’s private plane had encountered a heavy snowstorm and crashed into the side of a mountain. A few days later, as I prepared to write my contribution to his eulogy, I remembered the acknowledgments page. When had I entered Eric’s name there? I opened the computer file and saw the date: March 22. That was also the birthday of Pete, a best friend and roommate of Lou’s and mine, who was murdered in 1976, and the publication date of my first book, in
1989
. (When I related this to my writers’ group, one member said: “You know what this means, don’t you? It’s dangerous to be your friend!”)

Lest it seem that my method of writing relies entirely on the demise of friends and pets, let me confirm that I in fact do scholarly research as well. The precise method involves pulling a scholarly text from my shelf, letting it fall open, then examining the pages that face up. I used this very technique to select a period of Chinese history in which to set my character Olivia’s imagined past life. The choice came to me on a day when I was sitting gloomily at my desk. I was stuck, unable to proceed until I figured out what details to put in my fictional village, the one based on the hamlet I had stumbled upon during the filming of the movie in China. I wanted to keep the setting, but I needed a historic period and details that made sense for that region. I had to decide who these people were, what their ethnicity was, and thus, what they did, what they ate, the various minutiae and unusual but verifiable tidbits a novelist must provide for the story to come to life.

I have a number of Chinese history books on the shelf next to my desk. The one I pulled out was nice and thick,
The Search for Modern China
by Jonathan Spence. The page where my thumb inserted itself concerned the Taiping Rebellion. I read on: The Taiping Rebellion started in Thistle Mountain, just south of Guilin. Well, well, well. This was quite convenient—the same location as my fictional village.

I continued reading: The Taiping Rebellion was led by a man who believed he was the second son of God, baby brother to Jesus. Interesting—a Chinese Christian, like my father. This man,
Hong, was a Hakka who first rallied support from the Hakkas who lived in Thistle Mountain. Hakkas! Hadn’t my sister told me no Hakkas lived inland? What an amazing coincidence—the very details I wanted, that corresponded with my setting.

Now that my fictional village was confidently inhabited by Hakkas, I needed to give it a suitable name. I remembered the landscape of the third valley, the one riddled with caves. I imagined the wind whistling through these caves at night, making the sound of singing ghosts. My morbid imagination, the one gleaned from a childhood of terrors, hypothesized that the caves were the gateway to death. With this image in mind, I pulled down from my shelf a pinyin–English dictionary, the sort of book used by those illiterate in Chinese, which, sadly, I am. I had to rely on my usual point-and-look method. The first entry my finger landed on was
changmian.
I read the definition: “long sleep, eternal rest, a euphemism for death.” Above this was a separate entry for
chang,
which means “singing.” I then looked up
mian
. This can mean either “endless” or “silky.” So there, quite by coincidence, or perhaps not, I had the exact double entendre I was hoping for,
changmian
, which, depending on how you pronounce the tones, can mean “endless singing” or “death.”

Much more scholarly research came my way. At one time I was having trouble locating information on limestone formations and a physics term known as the Bernoulli effect. I found myself seated next to a stranger at an impromptu dinner party one night, and I asked him what line of work he was in. He was a geology professor, he told me, and he had written about the rubble of limestone, and he happened to know how the Bernoulli effect might apply to wind erosion.

Another day, when I needed to know more about the possibility that ancient villages were situated in caves, I received a phone call inviting me to a dinner reception, to be attended by about thirty archaeologists, in honor of the foremost archaeologist in China, the man who helped excavate Peking Man. (That dinner would later inspire scenes I wrote for
The Bonesetter’s Daughter
.)