Introducing Character

I am working on a story, a story that I have been working on for nearly a year now. It started out, essentially as a character sketch; a few months later it developed into a story with a clear plot, but no definite ending; and, now, finally, I see where the story will go. But, this requires the addition of a new character, and a strapping young male character at that. It is incredibly difficult to write about tall dark and handsome or blonde-coiffed blue-eyed dreamy without using those cliches and sounding incredibly sentimental or romance-novelly. I start to imagine my beloved story turning into a scene out of a Nicholas Sparks novel where a muscle bound dude with a perfectly chiseled jaw arrives to to save the day by carrying the female protagonist's bike or two bales of high on her farm. Just like in real life, that man can't save anyone by lifting heavy objects, and he certainly won't save my story by swooping in to ease the female protagonist's plight. Ultimately, what saves a story is writing characters that seem real and that seem to have real connections with your other characters, and, to paraphrase the great Eudora Welty, this often means writing characters that are "more real" than reality because we get to know them more than we ever get to know another real life human being. The trick, of course, is not making it seem obviously over the top or exaggerated. The trick is creating a great character subtly.

So, to figure out how to do this, I decided to go to a writer who could write sex, love, and romance without sounding sentimental: D.H. Lawrence. I believe he does this by focusing on symbols, gestures, etc. that represent the psychological aspects of love, hate, and other impassioned human emotions (see: the rocking horse winner). Particularly, I recall Lawrence's book, The Fox. In this novella, two unmarried women, March and Banford, live on a farm together in England during World War I. They are without laborers and male counterparts, and, during the war, they struggle to maintain life on the farm. A fox is a particular difficulty for them because March, the more stereotypically "male" of the two women who performs acts that require strength such as hunting, attempts to shoot the fox who has ravaged their farm, but he always eludes her. Below is Lawrence's description of March, with gun in hand,  coming face to face with the fox:

"She lowered her eyes and suddenly saw the fox. He was looking up at her. His chin was pressed down, and his eyes were looking up at her. They met her eyes. And he knew her. She was spellbound-she knew he knew her. So he looked into her eyes, and her soul failed her. He knew her, he was not daunted."

This description ends, of course, with March being shaken from her spellbound state and realizing that the fox had eluded her once again as she sees him leap off, leaving her with only the image of his "white buttocks" retreating in the distance. Shortly after this occurrence, a man, Henry, arrives on the farm. And it is clear, through the reaction of March to both of these characters, that Henry and the fox are connected in some way. It would be easy for Lawrence to have simply made the man appear, but he is creating back story and symbolism with the fox, allowing us to see the psychology of March through a seemingly straightforward description of a fox and a man. Below is Lawrence's description of March and Banford's first meeting with Henry, which certainly has clear comparison to that description of her meeting with the fox:

"He had a ruddy, roundish face, with fairish hair, rather long, flattened to his forehead with sweat. His eyes were blue, and very bright and sharp. On his cheeks, on the fresh ruddy skin, were fine hairs like a down but sharper. It gave him a slightly glistening look...He stooped, thrusting his head forward...He stared brightly, very keenly from girl to girl, particularly at March, who stood pale, with great dilated eyes. She still had the gun in her hand. Behind her, Banford, clinging to the sofa arm, was shrinking away with half-averted head."

There is so much depth in this introduction of Henry. Clearly, Lawrence's language is layered with sexual innuendo, both in his description of the fox, "And he knew her," and of Henry, "He stooped, thrusting his head forward;" but, superficially, Henry is depicted rather innocently. The description starts with alliteration, words to describe Henry's physical description with repeated "f" or "r" sounds: "ruddy and roundish," "face with fairish hair," "flattened to his forehead," etc. The use of these "softer consonants," a voiceless fricative (f) and an alveolar approximant (r), as a opposed to voiced or plosive consonants (for example, a "v" or a "p") has an interesting effect on accelerating the reader's perception of Henry's appearance. The "f" and "v" sounds create a soft and liquidy atmosphere in which we meet Henry. This seems to fit well, generally, with how Lawrence wants the reader to perceive this newcomer - soft, liquidy, and mysterious, like an angel or a ghost (we're not sure). Lawrence also uses words that act like approximants (not a stop or a fricative, but somewhere in the middle), words that establish that Henry is almost certain things but not quite those things: "roundish face," "fairish hair," "rather long," etc. His entrance is cloudy, veiled in mystery. Why, indeed, is he there?

Henry claims that his arrival at the farm is based on the fact that his grandfather once lived there. The truth of this is unclear. But beyond the mystery, we see a bright blue-eyed man with fair hair and red cheeks, and all signs of character types point to innocence, much like the external appearance of a fluffy brown fox. Of course, Lawrence does not stop with the external appearance of Henry. We see how other characters react to his arrival, which gives us information about Henry as well as the other characters in one fell swoop.

March reacts to Henry much the way as she reacts to the fox. She stands, frozen, but with a gun in her hand, conflicted between being mesmerized and penetrated by the stare of the other (a metaphor for her feelings about sex, fertility, the male gaze in general?). With Henry and with the fox, she didn't move to shoot, but she also didn't drop the gun. She stood in a liminal space between fear and fascination. And, through March's lens, the reader becomes fascinated by March, the fox, and Henry as well; all while the frail Banford is cowering in the corner.

In these two descriptions we learn about March psychologically through the physical description of staring from the eyes of a fox and a man. The conflict that boils throughout the story is also given its first flame here in these brief moments of introductory character description. It takes a powerful hand to create so much meaning in a few sentences, but that is what writing is all about. Each word, every sound has power to portray something (plot, character, etc.) to the reader, and, if you are writing smartly, each sentence will do a multiplicity of those things. So, hopefully, I can listen to my own advice and finish this damn story that his been boiling in my brain and on my computer for nearly a year now. I guess I've always been a slow simmerer. ;)

La-Z-Boy

The La-Z-Boy rocked back and forth, back and forth, from his quick exit. He walked with vacant, bulbous eyes focused on only one thing, that bottle of amber liquid he always had waiting in the kitchen. He poured a shot into his Old Fashioned Glass, but left out the ice. Instead, he tipped the bottle again and made it a double. Shaking, he carried the glass in his venous, wrinkled hands back to his weathered recliner still rocking back and forth, back and forth.

Sitting, shaking, staring, his black, beady eyes gazed into the swirling oblivion of his glass, the amber liquid that would obliterate everything he didn’t want to think about: his dad, his parents’ divorce, his latest break up, his many many failures. The La-Z-Boy had become accustomed to his touch, just like the women in his life. The cushions were indented, sunken in to accommodate his head, butt, and legs. The recliner was always waiting for him to fill in the gaps he had created.

The women were the same, until they realized he could not fill in all the gaps that he left behind. They would become sad or angry, and he would send them away, not knowing how to make them happy, not knowing that it was his own unwillingness to accommodate his soul to another that would make him unhappy and his partner unhappy time and time again.

The La-Z-Boy expected his touch nightly and expected nothing else. The chair could not tell time or become paranoid when he didn’t enter to fill in the gaps. If only he had realized that people aren’t recliners; they’re trees that must grow and bend but still stand proud and tall alone. But he was a toxic weed that consumed other life from the roots.

The tan, red, and brown lines of the recliner had faded after many years with him. His pressure on the fabric, causing the cushion to compress even in his absence, was the only relic to prove that the man was living at all. That, and the ever-dwindling bottle of amber liquid. A chair, a bottle, and a man alone.

***

When he was sixteen, his daddy bought him a fancy new BMW. Shortly after, he had his first girlfriend (no more masturbating with bags of mushed up bananas). But, it wasn’t about money or cars or even sex really with this girl; it was about finding someone who would hang on his every word, like it was the most unique and insightful statement ever uttered. He had never felt important before, only when he was making jokes like a hired monkey brought in to entertain his parents’ friends, but that first girl was different from everyone else in his life. That first girl listened to his feelings.

After they broke up, he convinced himself that he was an asshole. He let the guilt eat his convictions. He convinced himself that self-destruction was the only way to live his life. In his late twenties, he went out to the bar night after night with people who knew him only superficially. This was comfortable for him. He avoided questions by making jokes or witty remarks. He never really wanted to let anyone in again.

When people saw him more and more at bars, restaurants, his usual haunts, they began to see a deep pain in him that he carried around everywhere. He tried to explain it away – his dad, his job, his current girlfriend, anything except turning the lens around. But the poison started to leak from his heart and into his veins. It was becoming harder and harder to hide. Dark circles formed under his ever-blackening eyes. His fingers and toes blued with each passing day. His ears and nose, too, blued and blackened, giving him the look of a half cleaned chimneysweeper. He looked for cures and answers in the bottoms of bottles, in between the legs of women, through a glassy eyed stare from the La-Z-Boy and into the TV.  

Nightly, he would go to the bar ready to perform with his blue nose and his façade of jokes. The people would laugh. He told them lines, like the one about how he had gone down on Smurfette one too many times. “And your ears and fingers?” the people would ask.

“She was a wild one, that Smurfette,” he said with a smirk. Eventually, the jokes would grow stale, the laughter would die, and the people would trickle out, leave with their respective partners, family, or friends. Then, he would be alone on the barstool. As he grayed and wrinkled, and the blackening and bluing bled inward as he sat on that burgundy barstool, the employees started to take him in as an elderly family member who needed assistance. They would make sure that he stumbled home okay and that he found his way to his unmade bed, where the sheets were never changed, except for when Karen, the bartender, who was only working at the bar in Queens for the summer, noticed urine stains and stayed to wash the tan sheets that had become brown.

***

            Karen found the place unnerving. The exterior of the building was brick and somehow this old man lived on the third floor. He was leaning on her shoulder, his eyes closed, drool seeping out of his mouth, as she stood with him outside of the black metal steps leading to the green door. Karen looked up at the door and then back again at the old man. Holding him steady with her right arm, she shook his right shoulder with her left hand. “Wake up,” she said. “We’re here.” He pushed her hands off of him, grumbled, and stumbled back to stare at her with shiny beads of eyes. He hobbled up the three black steps, gripping the railing with each struggled climb as if holding tighter would salvage some shred of the dignity he had lost long ago. Karen watched him as he made it to the pinnacle, let go of the railing, and turned the knob to push open the green door. A piece of her felt that maybe she wouldn’t have to go in this time, or ever, but when the old man fell flat on his face as he opened the door and seemed to move in with it and then down away from it, she knew there was no chance of escaping the reality.

            Karen took in one deep breath through her nose and exhaled a puff out of her mouth. She jogged up the stairs to lift the old man from where he had fallen. He was frail and thin. She thought picking him up would be easy, but he was heavy with the irresolute weight of alcohol. She heaved him up, using the strength of her powerful legs to hold his venous rangy body. His head lolled into the space created between her neck and shoulder as his body leaned into hers. “Wake up,” she said to him again, and his head and eyelids lifted for a moment to show her thoughtless shiny beads. His head rolled back into her shoulder gap, and she grabbed for the railing, using its sturdiness to pull them up step by step.

            She reached the top of the first flight. She stopped to breathe four heavy pants. The old man said nothing, a lifeless sack. She looked above at the pink-carpeted staircase, the two more flights to go, the white and black and brown flecks of dirt and lint peppering the staircase. She looked to the old man on her shoulder and began to trudge forward once again, gripping the railing tighter and tighter as the load of the old man began to challenge her endurance.

            By the time they reached the top of the second flight, a time that felt infinite until it had indeed ended, the weight of his body merged with her own. They were a pair of Siamese twins united by the shared strife of life, but she was carrying all of the vital organs, all except one. She looked up at the final flight of stairs to the white-painted wooden door with the golden doorknob. Keys, she thought to herself. She leaned on the bottom of the railing and reached her other hand around the old man and into his pocket. He groaned. The pocket was warm but empty. He groaned again, and she removed her hand. As she placed her hand on the man’s shoulder, she noticed her fingertips were blue. She tried to wipe it off on his shoulder, but it wouldn’t budge. A dye residue from his navy pants, she assumed. Shifting her weight into the man and holding him by his shoulder, Karen let go of the railing and quickly reached into the man’s other pocket. She felt metal, looped the ring around her finger, and quickly pulled her hand out of the pocket to place it back on the railing. The key dangled from a loop around her bluing ring finger, and on she heaved.

"Blue" - A new story I am working on with altering points of view...

I look back on my life, sitting in this tunnel, knowing I have done little of interest, except for the one thing. But no one knows about that, except for the unborn child in my wife's belly. He is Blue, pregnant with my ideas as his mother is pregnant with him. I am still not sure if it will be born with him or if he will have to seek it out, like he will search for identity or meaning in life.

I know not if his mother is aware of what she carries; she knows I wished to call him Blue. I told her that before I left, before I went into hiding. But she knows little else. I couldn't tell a living soul about what I was doing. It would be too tempting to expose. So, I thought about it endlessly when we were making efforts to conceive Blue, and, then, when I knew he was in there, I whispered it into my wife's belly everyday until I left.

I am sure many of you (whoever you are reading this) wonder how I am so certain the message went through. I wish there was an easy answer, but the answer lies in the idea itself. The idea and all of it's complexities, which are no longer mine, which sit in the subconscious of my unborn son.

***

"Elijah!" the woman with blue hair screamed to the boy with crystalline eyes. "Elijah!" the woman screamed again, this time up the stairs, assuming the boy was hiding in his bedroom. She assumed correctly.

Elijah sat on his bed staring at the Picasso print, an old man playing a guitar, a print of form not so abstract as his most famous work. He sat, staring, as he always did when his mother called him by his middle name. He liked the name he had been given, but, she, for some reason, had grown to hate it with time. With each passing day, more and more Elijah's replaced less and less Blue's. But who was he, a boy of twelve, to tell his mother of the great struggle she was causing him? Shouldn't his mother know more than any other the name he was to be called? Elijah just didn't feel right, and each time she said it, it was like she was jamming a pipe deeper and deeper into a tiny hole. No, Elijah didn't feel right. It didn't feel enveloping and nourishing like a cocoon did, like Blue did. Elijah was suffocating him. He would have to tell her.

Plan Benny (Story in progress...)

The first time Ellen Sawyer saw him, she was ten months out of a five-year relationship. He barreled into the party, a tiny ball of nervous energy seeking a power outlet, like Napoleon preparing for battle. Ellen’s first thought when she saw him was, who the fuck does this guy think he is. Her second thought, bedroom eyes. Her third thought was interrupted by his squeaky speech, but first by the speech of his friend in the room.

“Benny! What have you been up to, buddy?” Ellen could sense the way the other men in the room fed on his nervous energy, his insecurity. He was fodder for ball busting, for making everyone laugh, for making the other men feel stronger than they actually were because, at least, they were stronger than him. Ellen felt sorry for Shakespeare’s fool, but she had to remember that this wasn’t Twelfth Night, that people are people and not character types, that just because someone acts like a fool on the outside does not mean they must carry some heavy wisdom on the interior. In the real world, the fool is often just a fool, but Ellen was still a bit enamoured with Madame Bovary ways of thinking about the world. For the moment, though, Benny quickly shook her from her literary frame of pondering the world.

“Tryna get laid, dude!’ Benny said it and then sniggered into a fit of staccato, high-pitched laughter. Ellen shifted her context of understanding this man from literary to historical. He wasn’t Shakespeare’s fool. He was Napoleon Bonaparte. And, then, the context quickly shifted to the psychological - Napoleon Complex. If there was a term to describe Benny, that was it, and it seemed his friends knew this and pressed on with inquiry of his apparent bachelor lifestyle of attempting to hook up with random chicks at ski resorts. Sex has always been an easy way to obtain power.

“Having any luck?” his friend said with a smirk.

“Not really.” Benny sniggered into laughter again. Ellen’s Madame Bovary lens flicked back on again. In her typical way, she felt sorry for him in the moment. She wanted to help him, to let him see that everyone had something to offer, that any man can reach for the apples at the top of the tree and keep one, if he really worked hard for it. And Ellen wanted to help herself out too. It was clear Benny had one thing on the mind for attaining status - women. Having sex with him would be easy. She didn’t think at the time that easy sex would not necessarily be good sex. Her only thought was that it had been too long. That ten months, twelve if you don’t count the last two of her relationship where sex amounted to hand jobs, was not a healthy amount of time to go without the touch of another human being. So, she decided to play the game, a game she had been good at because of her solid knowledge of how it worked, but bad at because of her inability to foresee how the game would toy with her sensitive emotions.

Light Blown

Let me begin by saying that I started my life knowing there was very little worth doing, that there were no rules worth following, that, regardless of my motivation or self-initiation, I would always be what I was going to be. Some might call me a fatalist, maybe even a Calvinist, although, I am hard pressed to believe that there are “chosen ones.” None of us are worth saving in the higher being’s grand scheme.

My mother was an alcoholic. That is all I ever knew her as. Apparently, when I was in my mid-thirties, she cleaned up her act and began helping others. She really needed to help my sister. She had followed mother down the same path. But, even when I knew mom was clean, I didn’t want to see her. I could only remember her as the drunken woman driving me around town to various men’s houses while dad worked long hours starting his own business to put food on the table. I could hear my mother fucking around. From the time I was three years old, I knew what sex sounded like. I knew what my mother sounded like when she had sex. I knew she would go into a room in jeans and a small white Tshirt, her hair curling around her face. She would come out of the room sweaty, hair dissheveled, the white Tshirt with a wet, circular stain that made it look gray.

I couldn’t forget those images of my mother. I couldn’t forget the time she fucked a man behind a curtain in a one room apartment while I played with toy trucks on the other side. When dad told me mom was clean, I told him I didn’t want to see her. He understood, even if he didn’t know the extent of what I had seen as a child. He didn’t press me. I don’t think I ever would have changed my mind about my mom, had some epiphany and realized that I really did love her and appreciate her for bringing me into this world. I don’t think that was ever meant to happen. Regardless, fate made sure it never would. On June 2, 2001, dad called to tell me that mom had died suddenly, a brain aneurysm. I couldn’t help but think that all of those years of drugs and alcohol finally caught up with her when she tried to go clean. Fate felt the same way I did in this case. Mom could never get clean. When she finally got there, she had to go. The world had no place for her anymore.

I recall not a single moment of my birth. I suppose no one does, really, but usually parents have recounted the story so many times that the details become part of a mutually-stored memory. I wasn’t there when my half sister was born, but I remember it. My dad’s telling of the story is a staple of family dinners. All of the grown children gather at my parents’ house knowing that at some point we will see dad reenact the moment she burst from the womb. She was filled with cries so loud her toothless mouth was shaped like a giant half moon. I don’t know why dad never talks about my birth.

I think there is an overwhelming desire to believe that the way one enters into the world is a mark for how one will live the rest of his life. Loud and angry, loud and proud, quiet and reserved, quiet and scared… these could describe babies’ cries and personality traits. I still don’t know what my cry said about me. I never had that story from moment one to lead me on a path of personality or a mission for my life.

I spend my evenings sprawled on this weathered off white couch with giant red and yellow flowers, a memento from the married life. When Janine left, she left the couch. I never thought of a good reason to get rid of it. Maybe that is why I’ve never thought of a good reason to move on.

I live alone now, mostly. There is this girl, Mary. She comes around after work and on the weekends when she knows I will be just sitting, lounging on the couch. She tries her best to make me feel good. She does make me feel better, but I don’t know what she sees in me. I would feel guilty giving her reason to return to me here in this pit of nothingness leading nowhere. I am not mean to her, but I am certainly not romantic or loving. I do accept what she brings me. It might be the only thing keeping me going. I convince myself that I don’t need anyone, that Mary around or not around is the same to me; I don’t know that I’ve ever really thought about it. In that deep-seeded kind of way of having someone around who isn’t family, Mary is all I’ve got.

I never had kids, and, at the ripe old age of 46, I don’t think I ever will. Mary and I have unprotected sex. At least, I don’t think she is on birth control. I never really asked. She is 32, still in prime baby-making years, but, as far as I know, she’s never had one, we’ve never made one. I have always told myself that I don’t want children, sort of like I always told myself that I never wanted to see my mom again. I decide on an idea and I stick to it, then eventually fate steps in to confirm or deny it. It is a very slow way of living life, leaving everything up to fate.

At 46, I don’t think I can have children anymore. My sperm are probably too slow. Fate has made a choice for me. Fate also brought me Mary and took away Janine. Janine wanted kids. She would have fought for those babies, thrusting her hips in the air to make sure her eggs soaked up the sperm. But I had the power that tore through her perseverance and drive, I told her I didn’t want kids. That having kids would ruin my life. I told her she couldn’t convince me. Of course, she fought for awhile. Multiple screaming matches across the living room, in the kitchen, during a drunken night on the town. Eventually, she didn’t want to fight my stubbornness anymore I guess. She up and left one day. She left most of her stuff. I still haven’t moved it. Mary doesn’t seem to mind it. That, or she doesn’t think about it. She can’t possibly think that I decorated this off white, antiquarian, museum of a house?

Mary never talks about wanting kids. It must not be a priority for her. In a way it makes her perfect for me, but in a way it makes her boring. It makes me wonder if she is burying a true desire. Maybe somewhere deep down in my soul I was hoping to find the person that would break me free of my stubbornness, fuck me so hard that a baby would appear. There would be no tears, no fear of lost love, the baby would just happen. Fate. I would have to accept it, if I became a father under those conditions.

Glass #FlashFiction

There was a shard of glass on the top staircase where I used to sit and tie my shoes every morning before school. Mother had warned me that you could never clean up broken glass with a broom and dustpan. You needed a vacuum, a Hoover in her days. Now I used the Dyson she bought me last Christmas. But there was something about that shard of glass on the steps that made me not want to pick it up. Maybe I enjoyed perseverating on memories as I settled into my parents’ house, my inheritance, with a strange mix of guilt and justice. I stared at the shard for a moment longer, appreciating the rainbow colors that reflected in the odd angle cuts. Then, I walked out to the glass room, the room of all windows at the end of the house.  

I sat in the rocking chair, the rocking chair where I remembered my dad sitting last year, sitting and listening to Chicago while he told me about RGIII being the hope for the Redskins, that this was going to be their year. He had said the same thing about another rookie bringing back the Redskins the year before. Sitting in my dad’s place now, I looked at the chair where I had sat last year, turned around with my knees pushing in to the cushion. I thought about the fact that I had no one to yell at when they dug their knees into my couch cushions. I thought about the fact that I had no one to listen to my stories and eat my food. I thought about the fact that my dad had never gotten to hold a grandchild, and that I wanted nothing more in that moment than for him to see me as a mother with a beautiful baby on my hip. I wanted nothing more than for him to wrap his loving arms around both of us. But we couldn’t do those things now. I couldn’t live my life on regrets.

I was walking in the park, and I saw a boy running around with no shoelaces. The tongues of his red shoes were flapping around as he chased around no one in particular, maybe an imaginary friend. He didn’t care that he had no shoelaces. He didn’t care that he was by himself. His smile was broad, and his movements were carefree. I walked up to the boy and told him that his shoelaces were untied. He looked at me and laughed before shyly ducking his blonde head and running to his mother knitting on a park bench.

I walked on. I noticed a bottle ahead in the distance, a large one that looked like a large fat cylinder on top of a short skinny one. I imagined someone had been drinking iced tea out of it on the day before, a warm spring day. I walked up to the bottle and nudged it with my foot. I picked it up and moved to throw it in the trashcan, but then the thought of recycling popped into my head. Guilt made me hang on to the bottle. I passed another trashcan, but no recycling bin. I saw the boy with no shoelaces again, flying a kite with his mother. I kept walking and not seeing recycling bins, so I knew I was at a crossroads. Keep looking, possibly in vain, or go home where recycling bins were plentiful? I decided to walk home.

I had the bottle in my hand when I pulled open the sliding glass door to the window room. I saw you sitting in the rocking chair, seemingly alone, but, like the child, you didn’t care. Were you there with your imaginary friends? Were they walking backwards, causing mischief, and generally helping you to retreat from a world that could level us with its boredom? No, you were just staring, but then you spoke. I still had the bottle in my hands. You told me that our marriage wasn’t working for you. I asked if there was someone else. You told me no, but I could read the subtexts that had been piling up. I folded a woman’s black T-shirt from the Gap. I didn’t own any black T-shirts. I found a black, lacy G-string inside of one of your shoes. I definitely didn’t own any G-strings. I thought about all of this, but I said nothing. I lost my parents a month ago, but I had lost you long before that. I thought about the complicated pretense, the strict, anxious, and depressing life I had lived to hold everything together when it felt like my world was crumbling around me, and I would be very much alone. I thought about the simplicity of a black T-shirt and a black thong. I wanted that simplicity. I deserved it. You had taken it from me. I threw the bottle, but not at you, I threw it across the room. It was a warning signal. A sign for you to take your shit and leave.

But you didn’t get it. You got up from the rocking chair and tried to hug me; like there was something worthwhile you had to give me. All I could do was to tell you to leave. You cleaned up the broken glass, all except that one piece that you missed on the staircase. You packed your things and left, and, when you were finally gone, I let the emptiness and the loneliness flow over me. I sat in that rocking chair and wrapped the blue and gray diamond patterned blanket around my shoulders. Tears streamed down my face, but I didn’t sob. It was a cry of relief. I could hear my own thoughts again.

I looked out of one of the windows and saw a squirrel scampering from the tree to the deck and back again. I thought back to the time when I was a child and we had to raise two baby squirrels that had been abandoned by their mother. We bottle-fed them. One of the squirrels thrived. Her name was Buttercup. We released her to the wild when she was big enough. I wondered if the squirrel I saw could have been Buttercup. I thought about children who were separated from their parents at birth. I thought about the mothers who said they would always recognize their own child. I wondered if it was true. I walked up to the glass. I could see myself in it. I could see my mother in there too.

*This story was selected as a Top 25 Finalist for Glimmer Train's 2014 Very Short Fiction Contest. See the list of all finalists here: http://bit.ly/14AprVSFtop25. 

True Detective: Unity in Opposites

I had heard many people speak of the greatness of True Detective before I ever got around to watching the show. In fact, Matthew McConnaughey as a main actor was a real turn off to me. Despite his beautifully quaffed blonde hair, chiseled jaw, rippling pectorals, and bursting biceps that I would love to lick and wrap my hands around (Whoa, that fantasy just got way too real.), I am not a big fan of McConnaughey’s acting. Fool’s Gold? Failure to Launch? How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days? No thank you. For all I cared of Matthew McConnaughey’s acting, I would have preferred to see six hours of his naked bongo playing interspersed with clips of pelvic gyrations from Magic Mike over any combination of his other movies. Of course, that was all before Dallas Buyers Club. If you have read movie reviews, watched the Oscars, talked to people, or simply been alive in the past few months, you are well aware that this movie was phenomenal and that McConaughey made the performance of his career as Ronald Woodruff. (The review in the New Yorker is my favorite of those I have read. Check it out here. You need a subscription to read the full text.) So, when a career-affirming performance by McConaughey paired with my undying love for Woody Harrelson (How can you not love Kingpin?), I decided to give True Detective a fair shot.

            From the moment the first episode begins, you know this is a show that is going to make you think. The cinematography is beautiful. It pulls you in with a juxtaposition of beauty and emptiness; pastoral landscapes meet seemingly abandoned ghost towns; My Antonia meets Walking Dead. This juxtaposition becomes a theme for the show that is explored within each of the main characters and externally through their interactions as character opposites.

            At first it is easy to look at Rust (McConaughey) and Marty (Harrelson), as cliché buddy cop stereotypes, the brain (McConaughey) and the brawn (Harrelson). In many ways, they are that, but they aren’t just that. This show dives much more deeply into what it is to be a man, that there are never just brains or brawn, that every man just wants to be loved, and that every man is afraid of something that he can’t admit to. But we aren’t quite introduced to these deep, character-driven struggles in the first episode. A lot of time is spent explaining the character dichotomy that the rest of the show fleshes out quite well through actions and dialogue.

Rust is confident of mind, an intellectual, but he is intellectual almost to the point of insanity. First appearing to be a man of few words, Rust’s lengthy end-of-the-world, glass is half empty speeches quickly pull us to the side of Marty, who, we are well aware, wants to punch Rust in the face if he doesn’t shut up. While he doesn’t do that, Marty does tell Rust to shut up, that the car is quiet time from now on, and, if you are anything like me as a viewer, you are saying “yes” and pulling in a fist to yourself in victory as he does this. But, we all get over Rust’s textbook Philosophy 101, and see something deep down in Rust that we love. If nothing else, Rust knows who he is, and he isn’t afraid to be that person. He wouldn’t punch somebody in the face without a good reason.

Marty appears, at least initially, as a more simple character. He is confident of body. He is explosive. Harrelson’s crazy blue eyes and boxy face paired with his ornery smile are the perfect embodiment of a man with anger that lurks just beneath his seemingly perfect surface. He looks like a boxer. He doesn’t hold back and then make dramatic speeches; he just says what he means and does what he wants. Of course, this type of character is more loveable initially because we have nothing to fear, we know what we’re getting, but there is something burning inside of Marty. From the outside, he has it all – a beautiful wife, loving daughters, and respect at his job – but inside, he is a bit of a lost soul. Unlike Rust, he doesn’t know exactly who he is or what he wants. (Maybe this is because the option of family was taken from Rust by tragedy. Marty actually has options but seems to be making the wrong decisions.) Marty claims to want a family, but his adulterous actions prove otherwise. The opposing traits of the two main characters are played with throughout the show in a manner that makes both of the characters lovable through vulnerability and fears, and hateable through thick layers of ego and stubbornness.

When I was watching the first episode, all I could think about was ego, specifically male ego, as in, this show had way too much of it. Early on, the female characters are a bit of a wash – stereotypes of wives, mothers, and whores. Marty has no respect for his wife, and she doesn’t stand up to him when he acts like a generally shitty and neglectful human being. Early on, the only female character that gets a say and gets to stick it to Marty’s ego is the woman in charge of the Bunny Ranch in the second episode. She sees the insecurity that lurks beneath his brawny façade. Marty threatens to shut her down because she has an underage girl working there, but the woman in charge calls his bullshit: “You don’t like it because it means you don’t control it like you thought you did.” This is so true, and Marty proves it true by handing the girl money and telling her to do something else. He wants to take control from the Bunny Ranch manager and give it to himself, but no one wants to give the young girl control of herself. It becomes that societal cycle of abuse, where young women are abused by men and older women. The older women, once finally in a position to make a change for the younger women, for their collective gender, have been so bogged down by the abuse from men that they see it as a right of passage for the young women to be victims of it too. This is why so many feminist groups advocate for the idea that there must be male feminists in order for any real change to occur. And, Rust, in a way, seems to take on this role, but only after having made huge mistakes of machismo emotion burying in his past. When Marty and Rust are back in the car after leaving the Bunny Ranch, Rust says, “What is that? A down payment?” He sees right through Marty’s attempt to portray himself as the hero, the family man with a picture perfect life.

So, as is often the case with characters that seem, at first, to be stereotypes, Marty and Rust both require some time for the audience to warm up to them. We can’t decide if they are both deeply troubled or deeply enlightened. Maybe, in truth, they are each a mix of both. The relationship the two characters build with one another is what helps the audience to fall in love with both of them as they fall in a complicated friendship with one another.

The first episode uses a framing setup to flashback to the situation that is the true meat of the story. Marty and Rust are being interviewed, separately, about the Dora Lang case, and, as they speak in these interviews, it provides the perfect narrative break to go back in time to how Marty and Rust began their partnership with the Dora Lang case. We sense there is a tension, a complication, during these interviews. Both Marty and Rust seem overly nonchalant, so nonchalant, in fact, that they seem to be hiding something. As Marty leans back in his chair making one liners and Rust demands a 6-pack of Schlitz to continue the interview, the audience is made to realize that the questions Marty and Rust are being asked are not really about the Dora Lang case at all. They are about Rust, who, seems to be teetering on the edge of philosophical enlightenment and psychological breakdown (or maybe he just wants to appear that way).

The use of framing and flashback allows us to look at the characters now and then, how they have grown and changed as individuals and as partners. This provides a fascinating opportunity for exploring characters internally without the use of first person perspective. We also get to see beyond the characters’ current attitudes and static personality traits; we get to learn their individual narratives, their personal struggles, and their endearing strengths. Most importantly, in the first episode, we learn how Marty and Rust first became partnered together. As Marty puts it, “You can’t pick your parents, and you can’t pick your partners.” As the show develops, we get to see how their relationship develops, and we slowly fall in love with both of them, like our hot new best friends. Personally, by the third episode, I was hooked, and I just wanted to give Marty and Rust a hug and tell them that everything was going to be alright, but, if I did that, and they were completely stable, they probably wouldn’t get the job done, and we really wouldn’t have a show at all. The thing that turned me off to the show, the flat female characters, is reconciled by the end. This isn’t a show about a women. It is a show that explores male obsessions and male companionship in all of its complicated glory.

Marty and Rust will never write long letters of gratitude to one another like Emily Dickinson wrote to her dear friends who read her poetry. They will never like each others’ statuses and post words of encouragement on each other’s Facebook walls. But, we know that their bond is unshakeable, that they respect one another in that quiet, unspoken way. Marty respects Rust’s intelligence, his dedication to the job. We know this from the first scene when Rust sees through the Dora Lang case and makes detailed sketches in his notebook. Rust is less transparent, of course. He has a bit of a chip on his shoulder, but Marty offers him something very important – stability. Marty knows how to work the system. He knows how to create the appearance needed to keep something going in a public system, such as police work. He holds Rust up while Rust thinks, ponders, and does all of the leg work. And, eventually, as the season progresses, they teach each other a thing or two about how to be in the world. They end up as one another’s only companions. There is no better moment than when Marty wheels Rust out of the hospital in a wheelchair. They are looking at the stars. Rust recounts, openly, about nearing death, about feeling what it would have been like to die and be with his daughter in a warm, light, and glowing place. It is clear he wants nothing more than to be there, but he can’t. He is pulled back to earth where the Dora Lang case is the only thing on his mind, and Marty is the only thing saving him from being completely alone. Similarly, as the two tragically sit alone eating TV dinners, we learn just how important their friendship truly is. They are connected in their loneliness, in their inability to let love in, in their inability to appreciate what they have, what they could have had. The show is a perfect mélange of light and dark, of love and hate, of beauty and ugliness; an exploration of opposites and how they must and do co-exist in this world both with harmony and with strife.