To live as others do should have been easier,



as easy as falling off the overhang



of a slippery cliff, with help from a log.



My tusks had been holding you up. I am sorry for it.



The most dangerous place in the world



is the world, or becomes the world



after you have to flee into it. Even the cap



of an acorn, or the wind-distributed promise



of a future accord, will do, since all families are



adoptive, or they are failed families, or they are both,



as wind chimes need the wind



to tell what they falsely believe to be “their own story”;



the echoes in that cavern must also do justice



to the last chipmunks on earth. They fell in love,



delighting the birthday party, who saw it all



last year (age median: eight and a half). We hold



their hypothetical findings at a distance



until we realize we are in there too,



in the freezing not-quite-



forever of an artificial-



butter-and-paste-scented theater, where everything rings



and nothing gets picked up, and you have to hunt



your own critters if you want critters, to get out



and then sneak back in with some help from that freaky invention



your sister called “fire.” And that’s why we never came home.

*The incident reported below took place on July 1, 2011, at 11:41 p.m. In Blue Ridge, GA. Jim Callihan has been indicted with charges of vehicular homicide, among others. His trial is set for spring 2014. Names have been redacted out of sensitivity to the family.*



1. Summer in Blue Ridge is a time of coming, not going. It is a time when all is provided. The local grocer sells produce only in weeks of drought, and the pesticides used are from spray bottles, intended for skin. Once the evening air has cooled, dinners are taken outside, where dishes are left till morning, licked clean by our nightly visitors. Backyards end at the man-made lake, which was filled years ago in the shape of a spider. This way, it was thought, everyone could live by the water.



2. On warm nights, Jim and I swim in the dark, naked and male, loving the feel so much it leaves us hollow, floating on our backs so the fish don't nip at our peckers. We look up, out of courtesy, talk girls, belch. Back on the shore, we shake our clothes of ants, or worse than Back on the shore, we shake our clothes of ants, or worse than ants, before re-dressing. The morning sun finds our backs marked by the harmless teeth of fish.



3. "Floridiots" come in droves to the town of Blue Ridge, keeping locals off the roadways after five on Fridays. These tourists trade in their beaches and Surf-N-Turf for our mountains and grits. Downtown store owners, who were once tourists themselves, lather on our accent and sell things none of us locals will touch for prices we can't afford.



4. Downtown is a five-minute walk from our side of the lake. This is a fact that realtors selling summer cabins remember, but it doesn’t stop us from driving to church on Sunday mornings. What stops us, usually, is the lack of parking spots. This Sunday, we are running late because my mother can find nothing to wear. We decide to fight it out.

Our neighbor’s truck is parked in their driveway when ours pulls out. This is the second week, but everyone understands. No one doesn’t know. Their pew will be left empty, in case they decide to show, and another family will take up the far half so that it will not seem obvious if they sit this one out. 

    The congregation, with their shined shoes and combed, gray hair, know how to deal with those who are dealing. They understand what the newspaper left out—that it has been a rough ten days for the Callihan family.

    The tendency, here, is to say: “You should see the other family.”



5. In Blue Ridge, the church is beside the courthouse, as is everything downtown, and at the back of the courthouse is the jail. This is where I go when I break for the bathroom as the preacher fields prayer requests. 

    The jail is half full. Its occupants include two DUIs, one misdemeanor for marijuana, and a man being held for the things he did to his daughter. 

    And now, I guess, my neighbor, Jim Callihan.



6. Growing up, Jim Callihan was better than me at everything that mattered. At that point, this was horses, girls, and age. He thought we stopped riding horses together because I was jealous, because he was too fast. The truth is, there came a point when I no longer wanted to wash naked in the creek with someone who had four years of puberty on me. And yes, he was fast.



7. Summers of my childhood were spent playing John Wayne in the woods behind my house. Or my neighbor, Jim, played John Wayne. I played Clint. We liked cowboys, the sweat on horseflesh, the glint



of a spur. The others—the tourists in town—liked the idea of cowboys. They wanted to be John Wayne for the weekend.

     Jim wanted it for life.

     *For life*, I should mention, is not a term we hope gets thrown around a lot. It is something we in Blue Ridge do not wish on Jim Callihan.



8. With a television, toilet, and twin bed all on twenty-four square feet of concrete, the jail cells in Blue Ridge leave little to the imagination. It is not the place I want to be on a Sunday morning, but I decide to play it light.

    “This is a good look for you, Mr. Wayne,” I tell my friend, keeping my eyes on anything but the patchwork of stitching across his nose. I slide open the cell door and sit beside him on the bed. “Two good

Christian boys on a Sabbath morn.”



9. Friendships of a certain length are bound to run through phases. The best was my childhood friend’s cowboy phase, which he did not grow out of but rather increasingly into, eventually leaving me behind. The worst was his faggot phase, which followed shortly after I was no longer included in his cowboy tales of cigars and tits. The brunt of this phase was directed at me, the child faggot, though I’m sure there were others—at school, in locker rooms, surrounded by cowboys.

    These phases you forget when your friends are in need. When your sister’s first boyfriend, for example, who had a year or two of puberty on you, gives you a black eye in the McDonald’s parking lot because you didn’t like the way he was talking to her, you forget that, afterward, she asked *him* if he was alright. 

    And when your childhood best friend is in jail for killing one person and paralyzing another, you forget the time he pinned you to the ground in his backyard because one of his new friends called the game “Smear the Queer.”



10. My mother was upset when she heard the news—what had happened to the neighbor’s son. My father was practical. “Give it a couple days,” he said, folding the newspaper and dropping it on the table. “All this will blow over.” 

    “And when it does,” said my mother, “that family is in for a long vacation.”

    I picked up the newspaper and gave the story a read. “On second thought,” I said, “don’t forget what happened to the last family who said that.”



11. The people of downtown Blue Ridge are not kind to the Callihan family. After what happened, they are cold, petty. They quiet for even the Callihan’s acquaintances. 

    I do not care for these people. They do not make me feel guilty. The most pressing concern they seem to have about Jim Callihan ramming his truck into an Orlando license plate is the effect it could have on souvenir sales.



12. Families vacation in Blue Ridge expecting to show their children some semblance of a culture different from their own: to let them experience a life less complex and a people less sophisticated. They come hoping to uncover the history of the first southern settlers, a history borne in gold-rush towns, tucked under lines of mountains, in bootlegging, butter, and incest.

    In other words, these people* come* for the lawlessness.

    “What the hell did they expect?” asked Jim Callihan, having sobered up for a couple of hours in jail.



13. The wreck was the biggest news all year, and the offender was the doctor’s son. It made sense, then, that the better of the two town lawyers took the case, free of charge.

    “We sure showed them,” said the lawyer to the family. Then, recanting, said, “I’m going to hell for that one, aren’t I, Doc?”

    Laughing: “Aren’t I going to hell for that one?”



14. When the newspaper reported the car accident in Blue Ridge, it told how the children affected were ages three and five, and how it was the five year old who was dealt death upon impact; the three-year-old, immobility.

    We learned the rest through gossip.

    We learned, for example, that the person responsible for the crash was a teenager seen drinking at a bonfire that evening—a bonfire from which I, too, drove home. We heard that he was driving 30 above the speed limit, and that he ran a red light a few miles back, a red light where a police car was stationed. The officer, it was suggested, must have seen who it was in the red truck and decided not to bother turning a siren, because the driver was a good kid from a good family, and because all boys deserve a little fun now and then.



15. In a town where so much of our identity depends on us vs. them, public opinion is easy to gauge. In the case of the fatal car crash involving a local teen, the most important evidence for many in the town was the other car’s license plate. After being un-crumpled and spread flat across the D.A.’s table, the town on the license plate was a town not *here*.

    The Orlando family involved in the wreck requests the trial be moved elsewhere. They refuse to return to this town.

    The lawyer representing the local teen will not allow it. He says, “Jury of your* peers*.”



16. Old teachers bring food to the Callihan house as though it were a funeral. Mrs. Callihan, with a rubber band wrapped around the waistline of her skirt, listens as these women explain how her role is crucial. What a shame, they say, how tragedy can tear apart a perfect family.

    “We are all mothers,” they say.

    They talk with Mrs. Callihan about the good times—how they knew her son. If they had asked me, if Mrs. Callihan needed my stories as she did theirs, what would I have said?

    Perhaps I would have told about feeding fireflies to a found bullfrog, about watching its belly pulse light and dark, light and dark, beneath the cover of my hands, before her son appeared with the three-pronged gig. Or about the time he stood behind me on the bank of the rock quarry and promised, “You jump, I jump”—the day I tasted the lime of the water, turned red, as he ran to the road for help.



17. Jim Callihan rode his horse hard, with spurs. When he had the choice to ride Dollar at full gallop, or wait behind for me and Ranger, he chose to gallop. I could tell what he was thinking by his speed around the trail. 

    I once rode upon Jim washing blood from a gash in his leg. All he said, the water separating at his knee and rolling downstream, was, “Dollar finally grew a pair.”

    Dollar was taking water beside him on the bank, mud splattered along her underside, more his equal in that moment than I would ever be.



18. “John Wayne never stayed in jail,” said my friend, Jim, the third time I visited.

    He had been in jail for two weeks, was growing impatient.

    “John Wayne killed Indians,” I said, checking for remorse in his glare.



19. In the weeks following the accident, the defendant’s family received photographs of the two children, the victims of the crash. The boy, now paralyzed below the neck, is pictured swinging from monkey bars. The girl, now dead, is with her mother, kneeling in a bed of flowers.

    The defendant’s mother had been reading self-help books that instructed her to save reminders like these, to place them conspicuously. This way, the books explained, their family can come to terms with reality.

    It makes me wonder what the people who write these books have been through. What have their sons done?



20. I have heard that people behind bars often ask why their friends haven’t visited. My friend, Jim, asks what people are saying. It’s the first real conversation I’ve had with him since the accident that got him here. I expect him to open up, to confide in me the feelings he had been suppressing—the guilt, the sadness of it all.

    “It could have been me,” he says instead. “I could have* died* in that crash.”

    He asks what I thought, when I first heard the news. I tell him that I was worried, that we all were. What I don’t tell him is that the first thought that crossed my mind was: Good. Now he’s the fuck-up.



21. Autumn in Blue Ridge is for apple festivals. For final bonfires burned over raked leaves, for people in flannel shirts, whose truck windows remain closed. 

    It’s for the forgiveness of summer’s transgressions.

    Or forgetting.

    Even now, I can’t remember. Those nights of early summer, the nights spent in lake water, did the fish bite because they were hungry, or because we were where we shouldn’t have been? Were their intentions as harmless as we thought, or were their teeth marks evidence of our intrusion?



22. The town doctor is the father of a friend. He tells me a story about a woman he treats. This woman has been bitten three times by brown recluse spiders. After the second bite, she brought over friends to search the house. These friends opened her crawl space to find it laden with pearl-shaped eggs. There were so many spiders, said the friends, it looked as though the wooden beams were moving.

    This woman called for an exterminator. When the poison had settled and she was allowed to move back in, she again checked her crawl space. What she found was not what she expected. Three hundred dollars worth of extermination had killed every* other *bug in the house, leaving carcasses scattered across the floor of the crawl space, dragged home by the spiders. She had provided them a feast.



23. The Associated Press picked up the story: the first time Blue Ridge has ever made the news. The story of Jim Callihan ran in hundreds of newspapers across the nation. In each article, pictures of the town were included—of the lake, the mountain foliage.

    This fall has been the busiest the town has ever seen.

    This is that story.

I. Destruction and Silence



 



*The accounts of individual eyewitnesses, therefore, are of only qualified value, and need to be supplemented by what a synoptic and artificial view reveals.*



 



In a series of lectures delivered in Zurich in 1997 (and later published in essay form as “Air War and Literature”), the late German novelist W.G. Sebald decries the “curious blindness” to, and willed ignorance of, the truths of destruction that by any logical reckoning should have come to define life in the fractured wasteland of postwar Germany.



Early in the essay he describes a live report, produced by the BBC Home Service, of an air raid conducted, in the midst of the war, on Berlin. The Lancaster bombers take off, soar in broad arcs over the North Sea; the target is reached, and the lethal cargo is dropped. The report, Sebald concludes ironically, “is rather a disappointment to anyone expecting…insight into the event from some superior viewpoint.”



The perfectly German joke, of course, is that the report, given from the vantage of an aeroplane in the sky, issues by necessity from a “superior viewpoint.” Given the purpose of the raid—to raze and reduce centuries of careful stonework, to ignite beams and plaster, to boil streets and the unfortunate traipsers upon them—there could not be a more ideal viewpoint than an aerial one, from which the extinguishing of human lives is made so morally and practically simple.



But Sebald’s real point is that the assumption that the ideal viewpoint for destruction is also the ideal viewpoint for interpretation—a belief deriving from the fallacious assertion that we will see what the aggressors saw, feel what the aggressors felt—is foolish and naïve. It is an approach that ignores the ineffable alchemy wrought by the act of observation.



For many years after the end of World War II, German writers avoided the war, and the Holocaust, as a subject. Of necessity, their moral culpability was likewise elided. As a result, Sebald asserts, they abetted the collective amnesia that had settled like a pall over the German people. Eventually, however, the pendulum swung the other way. The past was viewed with furious condemnation, and an aggressive push was made to view the facts of the war, and the Holocaust, with complete objectivity—as one would view the ground from an airplane. But for Sebald, this was merely another false step, a flight into rhetoric that, in the final analysis, was merely another facet of aesthetic exploitation of destruction.



Yet Sebald is not entirely immune to the temptation of the aerial view. Much of his fiction can be seen as an attempt to salvage it as a metaphor, as an oblique way of discussing historiography—an attempt, in other words, to determine its true applicability. Hence it’s not without reason that readers of Sebald’s fictions often report experiencing a floating sensation, as though they’re hovering above the events and stories described. The first chapter of *The Rings of Saturn* is largely taken up by an essay on the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, a 17th-century English writer that Sebald both admired and emulated. Browne, according to Sebald, “sought to look upon earthly existence, from the things that were closest to him to the spheres of the universe, with the eye of an outsider, one might even say of the creator.” To achieve these “sublime heights,” Browne employed a “parlous loftiness” in his language. Though his sentences are occasionally gummed up by his vast erudition and baroque style, when Browne “does succeed in rising higher and higher through the circles of his spiraling prose, borne aloft like a glider on warm currents of air,” Sebald writes, “even today the reader is overcome by a sense of levitation.”



For Browne, this aerial remove functions counter-intuitively: “the greater the distance, the clearer the view: one sees the tiniest of details with the utmost clarity.” When one is looking back at history—when the metaphor is horizontal—this functioning is a commonplace; historical hindsight, we believe, will eventually reveal the truth. But when one views the past aerially—when the metaphor assumes verticality—the paradox becomes clear. Sebald desires Browne’s preternatural magnification—which might constitute the “historical metaphysic” capable of “bringing remembered events back to life” that is sought after in all of his fiction—but it remains a pipe dream. The higher the viewpoint in Sebald’s fictions, the greater the sensation of nausea, of vertigo. All we see is flattened, and objects and structures are robbed of their discreteness: “Such is the dark backward and abysm of time,” Sebald writes. “Everything lies all jumbled up in it, and when you look down you feel dizzy and afraid.”



It is with this bevy of concerns that Sebald assumes the task of creating fictions, turning to the practice with a sigh of impotence. The impossibility of pure history, of the reconstitution of memory, is the dreadful and immanent nausea that suffuses his prose, that forces catalepsy upon his narrators and characters. And just as the constituents of time and history become jumbled together, so, too, do the elements of the work of fiction. In an essay on W.G. Sebald, James Wood writes that though “his deeply elegiac books are made out of the cinders of the real world, he makes facts fictive by binding them so deeply into the forms of their narratives that these facts seem never to have belonged to the actual world.” The warp of fiction is braced by the weft of fact, and the resulting tapestry is a talisman aimed at teasing, from the welter of an obliterated past, a representative view of history.



 



***



 



Memory is a human construction. The world (that is, the natural world) is destined and indeed designed to forget itself, and in the struggle against this constant ablation, as Sebald sees it, we have only the bluntest of reconstitutive tools at our disposal: a language whose inner cohesiveness and epistemological efficacy are to be doubted, and a smattering of vague and half-focused photographs that may depict, but more often seem merely to adumbrate.



It may seem strange to discuss the doubting of language with regard to an author such as Sebald, who incorporates antiquarian syntax into the elegant scaffolding of his prose, but aphasia in Sebald is reserved for very specific themes: language may dance around certain subjects, but it may not spring from them. “The construction of aesthetic or pseudo-aesthetic effects from the ruins of an annihilated world,” he writes, “is a process depriving literature of its right to exist.” As other writers and theorists have asserted, there is a moral obligation not to derive aesthetic effect from supreme destruction. As an extension of this claim, Sebald asserts as an epistemological reality that it is impossible to derive aesthetic effect from oblivion.



Despite this weakness, within Sebald’s fiction, language is still the master of appearances, of surfaces, of phenomena. It may be employed, with sufficient effect, to describe spaces, buildings, landscapes, to painstakingly limn their physical relations to one another. Hence there is little doubt embedded in the narrator’s description, in *Austerlitz*, of the Centraal Station in Antwerp; the spires and turrets and domes are presented as faits accomplis, real and ineffaceable, undoubtable. Otherwise, if uncertainty were allowed to creep into and compromise language’s simplest functions, Sebald’s magisterial descriptions of architectural oddities would collapse beneath an equally grandiose anxiety.



Sebald’s great skill in precisely delineating surfaces, and the power that the framework of his fiction grants to language in this endeavor, sometimes obscures a great, though intentional, failure of his language: It is very nearly incapable of elaboration, of developing images external to the source material or which are not, to some degree, a meditation on ineffability. The black hole of oblivion ever reigns in Sebald’s writing, drawing the fiction into itself and preventing the construction of complex aesthetic effects.



If the typical sentence of Proust—the master of elaboration—is meant to ambulate, to rise and fall in synoptic waves, flirting ever with the achievement of liftoff and gesturing, in these pendent moments, at images outside of the text, outside of language itself, the typical Sebaldian sentence is meant to incorporate and contain—it remains a self-sufficient, closed system. The uncertain tempo of a Proustian elaboration stands in stark contrast to the steady and unrelenting tempo of Sebald’s writing; Sebald’s sentences roll on, devouring details and preserving them in the process, embedding facts (real or fictive) in their elegant, multiclausal construction.



When memory seems merely a cancerous stimulation of oblivion, and language reigns supreme only in the realm of detail, then the main concern of language is clearly dictated. From *Austerlitz*:



*[T]he darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on.*



Sebald has set himself the impossible task of the metaphysical documentarian, to collect and preserve the entirety of history via the “places and objects” that bear it, and to lathe it all into some manageable form of representation.



There is a very famous sentence in *Austerlitz* that runs for nine pages and contains an unbearable amount of information about the Theresienstadt concentration camp. What’s remarkable about it is that despite its length, it remains a completely flat sentence, unfolding in segmented regimentation, like a spider testing its limbs. Without devolving into nonsense, and without becoming a mere catalogue, the sentence functions as a precise historical record containing no aesthetic elaborations. It is a beautiful record, but a record still, one that does not attempt to derive aesthetic affect from oblivion, but merely places the reagents of the past in close proximity to one another, in the hopes that, by some obscure process of relation, they will generate an image of the past. The sentence does not so much limn the past as perform the ritual necessary for its appearance (unsurprising, then, that Sebald’s prose is frequently described as “processional”). When a reader of Sebald admits to a feeling of levitation, it is not because he or she has been “borne aloft” by aspiring helices of prose. It is because Sebald has done his best to write flat sentences, which we look down upon in more ways than one, sensing patterns and signs immured within the text.



 



II. Buildings in Time



 



*The noblest claim of modern historiography nowadays is that it is a mirror; it rejects all teleology; it no longer wishes to ‘prove’ anything. All this is to a high degree ascetic; but at the same time it is to an even higher degree nihilistic.*



 



History, perforce, is a function of time, and so it is only natural that the characters in, and narrators of, Sebald’s fictions frequently expatiate upon the nature of time. Given the force of materiality in Sebald’s fictions, and the supernatural tendencies ascribed to the agent of time, it’s unsurprising that these discursions typically aim at the wholesale reification of time—a fortiori, they are characterized by the attempt to convert time into a spatial phenomenon.



“I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all,” Austerlitz opines, “only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like.” Time is a wavering image shorn of one crucial dimension by the feeble reach of our minds; it is the projection into our reality of an ungraspable complex.



Thus Sebald’s abiding interest in architectural oddities, in structures that bear time—that manage, even, to function as time itself. Country homes and train stations and vast stone edifices (memorials, monuments, mausolea) abound in Sebald’s work. Oftentimes they are baroque and nearly illusionistic structures, full of sealed-off rooms and curlicue passages that defy our understanding. Always they have lapsed into desuetude: Windows are broken, and dust has settled in a gauzy integument on the inner districts of the home; hallways designed to channel crowds now abide in silence, bereft of the patter of crossing feet; creepers and liana crowd yards in vicious, encroaching skeins.



In a prosaic sense, as monuments, these structures are historical records, but in the Sebaldian sense, they function as structural allegories—they are physical manifestations of the abstruse calculus of time. In The Emigrants, the narrator inspects a country home designed so that “on every floor hidden passageways branched off, running behind walls in such a way that the servants…never had to cross the paths of their betters.” Like the eunomic reticulation of chambers and paths in a termite nest, these passageways go unnoticed by the average viewer. “Often,” the narrator continues, “I tried to imagine what went on inside the heads of people who led their lives knowing that, behind the walls of the rooms they were in, the shadows of the servants were perpetually flitting past.”



It is out of such “hidden passageways” and dim defiles that the past returns to us in Sebald. Conscious excavation is likely to yield no results because there is no precise point of oblivion around which to focus our work; there are no nodes or images that may be cajoled into revealing their essences. Rather, the return of the past functions by whimsy. It is like a door that swings open unexpectedly and beyond which lies a ramified series of hallways, through which images of the living and the dead flit, generating a wind that reaches outward past the threshold, and which alters our world in fey ways. Voluntary memory is incapable of revealing the past. It merely dredges up artifacts that, on their own, are speechless.



There are subtle instances of this phenomenon of whimsy to be found throughout Sebald’s work. In *The Emigrants*, the narrator reads a journal left by one of his deceased relatives that describes a journey to Jerusalem and the desolation he finds there; in *The Rings of Saturn*, the narrator describes an elaborate matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, a painstaking reconstruction of the vanished edifice. A quieter example: Austerlitz, who as an adult has studied the history of siegecraft, spies in a square “a peasant woman wearing several layers of coats, and waiting behind a makeshift stall for someone to think about buying one of the cabbages she had piled up into a mighty bulwark in front of her.”



Historical images, and those of our personal pasts, return to us, outsize or shrunken. To borrow Sebald’s description of Browne’s vision, “It is as if one were looking through a reversed opera glass and through a microscope at the same time.” It is to Sebald’s great credit that his fictions, and the sentences therein, function like architectural oddities, which, while not quite grasping the obscure infrastructure of time, manage to approximate it, and facilitate its functioning. Sebald’s sentences are themselves the blueprints of ramified hallways. Like intricate diagrams, they allow for the supernatural resonance of past and present, fact and fiction, memory and oblivion—a resonance that offers life, obliquely, to the misremembered shades of history.