I provided my classmates this explanation of my story and my style. It's kind of haughty, but at the same time it touches on some points that really do piss me right off when they aren't treated with the considerable concern they deserve. It's actually an addendum (as you'll soon see) because I really quick wrote down a letter of intent right before class, because it was required along with the story. This one's better than that one. You don't need to see that one.
Letter of Intention: Addendum
I’ve had a chance to reread my own story a handful of times now, and first let me just apologize for the typos. Second, let me apologize for adding an addendum to my initial letter. The first one came too soon after the completion of the story, and I hadn’t had time to really think about what it was my story was trying to wring out of me. Now here goes.
When I approach any sort of task involving creativity, I find I accomplish it best when I am able to forget the medium I am using and just focus on [insert Unknowable All-Encompassing Truth here]. Let me give you a few examples: when I play Guitar Hero, I do great, but start to mess up if I think too hard about what my fingers are doing or whether or not I should strum down and/or up; when create visual art, I truly stand out when I use a pencil and paper, whereas my creations suffer greatly under less familiar media like watercolor, pastel, torn-paper, or other sadistic things art teachers demand; finally—and this is the relevant part—when I write, I feel my ideas come out most cleanly when I can just forget about the pages themselves. Liken a keyboard to buttons on a Guitar Hero controller. Liken writing styles to artistic media.
I’ve taken a stab at lots of styles—I mean I’ve gone neck-deep into full on poeticism fairly recently, and I spent half my nerdy upbringing trying to write in High Style English—and now, for the first time in a long time, I seem to have come to a plateau of sorts. I don’t mean that in a quantitative way, but more just that I feel really comfortable with where I’m at, stylistically. If I had tried to write this story in my self-conscious Joycian style, (e.g. “… ‘I’ll be king and you’ll be queen,’ she sang, her blonde hair a mess with backyard sharkleaf weeds; we are alone in the world and eight years old,”) then I think I would have lost both the subtlety and, in video game terms, the replay value that are more in place with “How He Got Home” as it is. I’ll say it again because it never stops hurting: I seem to be stuck in Raymond Carver dialect.
I think it’s popular in much the same way drawing with pencils is popular. BUT there are artists who dominate the realm of the imagination via pencil, and there are artists who simply prefer to get their art homework done faster by using pencil. Carver didn’t just introduce his minimalism, he justified it. I keep working with pencil because my heart is in it, not because pencils are easy to come by. Of course, I am not anything but a hopeful student at this point, and I adamantly apologize for constantly relating myself to Carver. See, look at how ugly that sentence is.
Shakespeare had to write about every inner pondering he could think of. He wouldn’t just say that an important character tugged his old shirt down from under a pile of sweaters and pillowcases, no, he would ruminate on the symbolism of that gesture. He would go into iambic pentameter on behalf of each sweater, on the drool stains of each pillowcase as they related to the themes of death and despondence prevalent in the tale. Proust probably would have, too, and might have even taken the opportunity to make a novel about closets. Borges… not as likely. My theory is that, ever since Shakespeare made literature more than just storytelling, the literary world has gradually gained popularity with a readership that, back in his day, was in the vast minority: the imaginative. You can feel Shakespeare trying to reach out to the common man with his writing, his all-too-familiar desperation to inspire. But these days, imagination and creativity are taught in Kindergarten, (with mixed degrees of success, but then you don’t often hear the Engineering-type students discussing philosophy, anyway). These days, movies literally ‘cue dramatic music’ to let you (and Engineering-types) know when you are being inspired. Carvery—that is, Carver’s writing style—would have been another fork in the road for literary progress back in Shakespeare’s day. Now, it’s an important retaliation, a compensation of sorts for modern man’s lowered responsibility, a deliberate removal of dramatic music cues. The result is something ponderous. The result is, ideally, that the reader will take the time to ponder—whether while reading or, later, when a passage idly returns to mind—why and how and where the author chose to mention the sweaters and the pillowcases amidst a tale of death and despondence. Shakespeare would have done all the thinking for you across fifty lines so that you wouldn’t have to do it yourself, later. Today’s readers are practiced imaginers, because Spielberg and Howard and Kubrick have given us hours and hours of rehearsal time. Once upon a time, dramatic music was actually dramatic.
Language is metaphors. It is a constant attempt to shorten and further shorten the short-cuts between one meaning and another. The phrase “justice is universal” would have required immense amounts of explanation once upon a time. Today, we understand it and even find it a little boring, by itself, if not somewhat controversial. Cliches aren’t the death of a symbol, just like dying is not the total erasure of a person from existence. The longer language has been around, the higher and higher the ideas it implies have escalated, the more great ideas become clichés or, that is, understood. Shakespeare’s work was like the introduction of electricity to language, the beginning of an industrial revolution in the field of literature. He gave life to things we never would have thought possible. But that’s old hat now. Electricity is old hat. Now we have touch-screen iPhones—now you can find out your wife’s water has broken and download bestial child porn all with one device that fits in your pocket. Amazing! It’s easy to say we’ve lost our way, but it’s only that beauty is ever changing and ever climbing. Elegance, like language, never looks the same from one generation to the next. Carver is no less brilliant than any of his predecessors. Read “A Small Good Thing” and tell me you didn’t cry harder than when you read Romeo and Juliet. It’s just that our tastes of changed. And yes, thanks for not asking, that IS a cliché.
The reason I’m creating this addendum, as I said, is because I wrote my first letter too soon after finishing “How He Got Home.” While I’m the first to admit I’m stuck in a rut, stylistically, I also have an overwhelming urge to explain that I created this rut, myself, and its Carvery is not just the result of idol worship, but of the many many many times I’ve caught myself humming ‘dramatic music’ during my own personal moments of eureka and stopped myself. I am Anti-Hollywood at a spiritual level.
I wrote this story because one time I went out on a job and had to clean up an apartment where an old man, a recently retired trucker, had died a couple of days before. Everything was just how he’d left it. There were quarters laid out and counted on a piece of paper in his kitchen. There was a pile of dirty whitey-tighties in the bathroom, some pairs with massive amounts of stainage. There was the chair that he had died in that had to be wrapped up and taken out, and it smelled like HELL. But none of this got to me. None of it. The one thing I remember most is his calendar, how I went up to it and looked at the next month and read the dates he’d written down for the upcoming weeks. He hadn’t planned on dying when he did. He died of old age, sure, but he had meant to be there, come July. The money we count and the underwear we stain and the chairs we fall asleep in, all of these things play a part in our death, but it is the death itself, the verb, that haunts us from our future graves. All of those other things are just adverbs. Fuck adverbs. The only way the job could have been any worse that day was if it had been my mess that we were cleaning up. So I wrote that story down and gave it to you guys.
Tremendously yours,
<3 Dana <3
HOW HE GOT HOME.
Kris called up Tom and asked for his old summer job back. Tom’s voice was exactly as it had always been. Yeah, he could have his job back. After hanging up, Kris tried to think about how his own voice had sounded. Some moments later he found his keys and left for the neighborhood across the interstate.
He parked at a chain link fence down a hill from the highway and smoked bowl after bowl until there was nothing left in his crinkled baggie.Then he unbuckled his seat belt, bent around into the backseat, and grabbed his CD binder from the floor. He unzipped it in his lap, flipped through its plastic pages unhurriedly, and listened to each CD in his mind’s ear. He fed one into his CD player. Then he zipped up the binder and set it on the floor behind the passenger’s seat. When the first track was over some minutes later, he rolled down his windows to let the smell out and the breeze in.
Highway litter was strewn about the weedy hillside beyond his window. Dusty plastic bottles with caramelized soda in them, a rain stained purple sock adorned with orange jack-o-lanterns, a complex constellation of scrapped paper and plastic and aluminum half-buried in the dry mud or else entangled in the overgrowth, and, up at the peak of the slope, a bright white sack from McDonald’s. Mixed in with the waste were the sanctuary sounds of vehicles coming, vehicles going by, and vehicles having passed. The sun drifted beyond the horizon, lighting up like neon the underbellies of a couple passing clouds.
Dripping in eye drops was an intense relief. Kris blinked repeatedly, wiping his cheeks on his wrist. He looked at his wet eyes in the closeness of the mirror. Then he drove home, ate dinner with his mother and father, and went up to his room where he fell asleep early. On the desk across the carpet, the digital numbers of a stereo alarm clock blinked thirty-seven times per minute, turning his room green, and then black, and then green again.
-=-
The next morning, he tugged his old work shirt down from under a pile of sweaters and pillowcases in his closet. The shirt was orange and smelled like nothing. After pulling it on, Kris reconsidered its awkward enormity in the bathroom mirror, how it swallowed his elbows and billowed out from where he had tucked it in. He took it off, folded it up, and then returned it to the closet. He got out a plain shirt that he knew he would sweat in.
The low yellow angle of the early morning cast his driveway into leafy shadows that he hadn’t seen since high school. He backed slowly through speckles of light, rolling down the windows as if to let them in.
At the edge of his neighborhood Kris joined the rhythmic log-jam of morning commuters, and when in wafted the sharp smell of exhaust, he put his windows back up. He arrived early for work and, after all the how-the-hell-are-yous and the paperwork, told Tom he wasn’t able to find his shirt from last year. Tom looked at him for a second before saying alright. Kris’ new shirt fit him. And this year it was green.
The entire day was unexceptional, which was a good thing, a forgettable day. A purple house’s basement was re-carpeted, all the weight-lifting equipment relocated to the laundry room. An empty dental office, which had been sanitized last Thursday, still smelled and needed a second steam-cleaning, so Kris did that, dragging the heavy chrome wand and its orange accordion tube from room to room, bringing noise to the painted walls and the stillness. Just before the end of the day, another job was called in, but Tom said not to worry about it.
“Fuck. You go on home.” And he went alone to the site.
-=-
There were no jobs for a couple days. So Tom walked Kris over to the stacks of boxes in one corner of the warehouse, each with the name Riemann scrawled across the side, and told him to take them down, one by one, and scrub all the contents clean with a toothbrush.
“Then dry them off, ozone them, and put them in new boxes. I don’t care what size box you use.” He went to the nearby folding table, turned off the radio, and grabbed Kris a toothbrush with brown bristles. Kris thumbed the bristles with his gloved hand as Jeff filled a plastic tub with hot water and a dollop of industrial cleaner.
Kris asked what happened. A few of the boxes were marked Toys. Tom told him, “Kid and his mom went out of town for a soccer meet. Come back after the weekend, and see Dad made a fucking mess of himself in the bedroom. In the kid’s bedroom. Body sat in there over the whole weekend while they were gone.”
Kris said damn and asked how he did it.
Just then the clamorous shriek of a train whistle filled the garage, sending a jolt through Kris’ skull. Tom spit and shook his head, then went away, leaving him alone with the boxes and the ruckus of the train. Tom’s spittle looked like molasses on the concrete floor. After the train had passed and left the quiet of the shop ringing, Kris said fuck.
-=-
Tom called later that night and asked Kris if he could come down to the shop. Kris was playing a video game, but he said no.
“Really,” said Tom. “Damn it. Alright.” And then Tom hung up.
A couple minutes later Kris turned off his game, sat for a moment, and then called Tom and told him he was on his way. He pulled his work shirt out of the dryer and put on his work jeans, which still had his car keys in the pocket. The intersection at the entrance to his neighborhood blinked yellow as he turned onto the major road. The sky was all cloud, illuminated by the city a dull orange mauve. In an empty parking lot, near where the railroad cut through the yard, stood Tom’s shop, an unremarkable concrete box with a square orange light on its garage-door side that shone against a nearby huddle of trees.
The door was locked, the front office, dark, and Kris could barely see past his reflection through the Plexiglas. He went around to the side, his shadow purple beneath the orange light, and tugged at the garage door. It was locked, but there was light seeping out between the boards and at its base. The radio inside was playing the alt-rock station that it always did.
“I hear you, just a second!”
Tom’s giant shape blotted out the shop lights through the cracks of the garage door, and he began struggling with the lock.
“Fucking thing, just a second.”
It was a coarse iron hook shoved into a rusty hoop in the wall, and Kris had never gotten it in or out on his own. Tom gave it a powerful grunt and then pulled up the door. He had already loaded up the van.
Kris asked what the job entailed. Tom went looking for something on the shelves. They were two stories tall, and on the top shelf, big boxes of what, Kris didn’t know, almost touched the roof of the warehouse. Tom carried the shop ladder over to where he was searching, set it down with a clatter that echoed across the tall walls, and then clambered up as hastily as if no one had ever had a ladder slip out from under him before. He spoke at Kris, who was still standing by the van.
“Carpet blades. I know there are some extras lying around up here. Fucking I was supposed to go out and buy some more last week. Goddamn it. There they are.” He climbed down, moved the ladder over a few yards, and then went back up. He stood on the ladder looking at the shelf for a moment, having forgotten where had just seen them. “Goddamn, there you are,” he said.
Kris said they must be going to take out some carpet. Tom told him it was nothing big, that he just needed an extra hand. He told him he’d get paid for fours even if the job took two.
“Some asshole cuts himself up in his bathroom, right, so I’m not thinking it’s going to be a big fucking deal, like some industrial cleaner and a couple nights with the air-scrubber on.” They each climbed into the van and Tom drove out into the dark before switching on the headlights. “Turns out they have carpet in there, in the bathroom. Fucking, how stupid do you get? Putting carpet in your bathroom.”
The job took all of an hour from hello to goodbye. Tom carved out the carpet, and Kris rolled it up into a blue plastic bag, tied the top of the bag in a double knot, and threw it into the back of the van. The victim’s cousin stayed in the kitchen the whole time, preparing stew. She didn’t offer any of it to them, like they sometimes do. It smelled delicious, like tomatoes and onions and steaks.
Kris sprayed the plywood bathroom floor with a sweet-smelling disinfectant, and Tom laid out the new carpet, working swiftly around the corners of the vanity and the base of the toilet with his utility knife. Kris leaned against the doorjamb, holding the disinfectant pump, and watched. When Tom spoke, where most people would put the word ‘um’ or ‘like,’ he would say ‘fucking.’ It was also his adjective.
“Never, fucking, put carpet in your bathroom.”
Kris said yeah, I won’t.
“You know who puts carpet in their bathrooms?”
Kris said morons.
“Fucking, morons is right.”
When they got back, Tom went into his office and Kris took the van behind the shop to a large open dumpster and threw away the bag. It landed heavily on a torn blue foam couch.
-=-
Toward the end of June, a job was called in with Kris’ last name and address on the file, and that morning Tom asked him if he could load up the van and do it himself, because he was going to be busy at a site from the week before, seeing about some possible mold growth. Kris told Tom his name was on the file. Tom said, “I see that. I don’t care. Go do it. I need to be in Blair by nine o’ clock.” Kris said it was his address on the file, and Tom asked if he’d loaded up the van yet.
Kris went into the office and called home but no one answered. Tom bit his cheek and told him to quit jacking off. “Get to work. You’re on Tom time.” He took the file from Kris and put it in a dark brown to-do box on the wall beside the door into the shop. After Tom left, Kris called several more times. Then he went into the shop and sat down in a metal folding chair. The radio in the back was a fuzzy symphony of shouting and sound bites and ad time. He sat for several moments before getting up to walk over to the shelves. He stood before them, looking at the equipment it had said he needed on the file. Then he loaded up the van, grabbed the file from the to-do box, and left. He stopped the van just outside the shop and got out for a moment to close the garage door behind him. He tried to lock it, but he just hurt the meat of his palms pressing against it.
When he turned at a railroad crossing, something in the back of the van fell over. It slid around every time he turned, banging into the cleaning buckets or the truck-mounted vacuum or the giant hose reel. Finally, a few blocks from his house, it stuck somewhere and was quiet.
Kris parked on the street in front of his house and walked up the driveway, then the sidewalk, to his front door. He rang the doorbell and inside his dogs began barking giddily from the front room. He heard the backdoor open and shut, and the barking transferred outside. A gangly daddy-long leg was perched motionless a few inches above the doorbell button. He couldn’t tell right at first if its tiny body was looking up toward the roof or down toward his hand. He rang the bell again and a moment later his father came to the window next to the door. He peered blankly at Kris and at the van in the street, then unlocked the door and opened it.
“You’re Tom,” he said, his voice sounding like a customer’s.
Kris said he was not Tom. He was Kris. He expressed his condolences and told his father he was there to clean up. His posture was calm and semi-professional.
“The bedroom’s upstairs,” his father told him. “There’s two doors on the left when you get up there, and it’s the door on the left. The left one on the left. I’m Red, by the way.” His dad smiled for a second and looked at him, and Kris almost thought he had made a joke. He moved out of the way to let Kris in, and then closed the door behind him, adjusting the rug on the tiled entryway floor with his foot.
Kris said he would take a look and then be in and out with some equipment. He said if there were any pets that it would be a good idea to keep an eye on them. His father said his two dogs were out in the backyard.
“They can stay out there till you’re done.” His dad turned and took a few steps toward the back of the house. Kris nodded. Through the sliding glass door in the kitchen, Kris could see his dogs looking in at him and his father, panting with their ears perked and their tails wagging in slow unison. “You know, they’ll probably bark their heads off at you when you’re out there, but if you want to go up to the fence and introduce yourself, they’ll quiet down. If you’re careful with them, you’ll see they’re sweethearts. Mosquito and Pepsi. That’s Pepsi on the right.”
His father would have kept on talking about the dogs, about how Pepsi is the smart one and Mosquito is the affectionate one, but Kris put on his gloves and respirator and made his way upstairs.
His bedroom was as he had left it that morning in the dark, except that on the floor of the closet there was a wet mess like someone had hanged himself. Kris went back outside and crossed the yard to the van. He opened the back doors and the disinfectant pump fell out onto the pavement. He picked it up and set it in the lawn, and then he started unraveling the hose into the street, letting it bundle up around his legs as he pulled it off the coil, arm over arm. The carpet wand was hooked onto the wall inside the van, and he climbed up inside to get it down. It was the old wand, the one that leaked scalding water while it steamed, and Kris grunted at it. He drew the hose out across the yard, untangling it, and then hooked up both ends, one to the truck-mount engine and the other to the carpet wand. The truck-mount was straight out of a B-grade sci-fi movie. It was a big green box, in a cage bolted to the corrugated floor of the van, scalding hot to the touch, with a flat metal face that was pocked with dials and switches and gauges and little bulbs that lit up when certain things were on or overheating. At the bottom of it was a large round hole where Kris had shoved in the half-melted plastic end of the vacuum hose. A key turned it on, and a lever opened the water valve. When this machine was emptied of its liquid contents, the entire block around Tom’s shop was near uninhabitable for the stench.
Kris found himself stalling, just standing with his back to the house and sweating inside his Tyvek suit. He put the barrel of disinfectant under his arm and lugged the carpet wand with both hands over the yard, through the front door, and upstairs to his room. His closet was small, so the cleaning took little time. The wand stuck to the floor as he dragged it across the pooled waste, leaving a clear blue stripe of carpet. He went over it all twice, and then left and put the wand back on its hooks in the van. He turned off the truck-mount engine, rolled up the hose and grabbed a blue biohazard bag and some boxes before going back inside.
Squatting down on his heels, he dragged a carpet knife across the closet doorway, waddling as he moved. Then he yanked the carpet up from the tack-strip around the base of the wall, careful not to prick his knuckles, which were scarred with reminders. When it was completely loose, he rolled it up with the padding and put it into the blue bag. He pumped the disinfectant bottle a few times and then sprayed it across the bare floor, applying a few extra coats to the big black spot in the plywood. All the clothes in his closet, including the sweaters and the pillowcases and his old work shirt, went into a couple boxes that he taped up and marked with his last name. He went to his computer and erased the porn from his internet history. He took his pipe out from underneath the incense in the top drawer of his dresser and put it with the carpet in the blue bag. Then he grabbed the bag, tied it up, and returned everything to the van two at a time.
When he stepped back inside with the air-scrubber in tow, he smelled a roast in the oven. His father wasn’t in the kitchen, so he went and looked. A small touch-pad button turned on the oven light, and Kris had to stoop a little to peer inside. In a white casserole dish sat a large blood brown hunk of meat and some golf ball sized red potatoes. There was a metal meat thermometer poking into the roast, its glass face, steamy and browned at the rim. The seasoned smell was intoxicating, and Kris decided he was hungry.
He hurried up with the air-scrubber, leaving it on the floor of the closet and closing his bedroom door when left. His father was on the computer in the basement, and he yelled down to him that he had finished. The wheels of his father’s office chair clacked as they reeled backwards over the tiles, out from under the desk, and soon his father was standing at the bottom of the stairs with a pen in his hand.
“Alright. Let’s get this paperwork out of the way,” he told his son.
Red took the clipboard from Kris’s hands and then began filling out the blue form on top of it, reading the name of each blank out loud before filling it in. Kris fiddled with his cell phone. He reread old text messages in his in-box from weeks earlier and tried not to hear his dad’s voice.
“Okay. I sign here.” His wrist twitched as his signature knotted its way onto the paper. “That it?”
Kris said yep. That’s it. Then he shook his father’s hand.
“Did you meet the dogs?”
Kris said he would introduce himself before he left. And he did.
He drove to a diner near his house where he ran into a friend from his elementary school days, the stocky one that had introduced him to Pokemon and Earthbound once. The two young men stood in line together, glancing strangely at each other’s hair or face or shirt if the other was gazing up at the menu. Kris had taken off his sweat-soaked work shirt in the parking lot and put on a spare undershirt that he kept in the front of the van, but he knew he still smelled awful, and his hair stuck salty to his forehead. He got his double cheeseburger to go and parted ways with his friend at the soda fountain. His friend was still filling up his root beer when Kris stepped back out into the sun baked parking lot.
Tom never came back from what turned out to be a long list of errands, but called Kris and told him to scrub contents until four. At four he could go home. Before Kris started working again, he turned the radio dial to the classical music station, stood listening for awhile, and then turned the music off. When one of the Riemann boxes held a wide array of Transformers, he spent the rest of his shift in silence, playing with them, and only sometimes stopping to scrub a spot off a tire or an arm. They were mostly clean, anyway.
-=-
Kris got home a little before five and his dogs greeted him at the door. His dad told him not to eat anything, there was a roast in the oven. His mom had called and she was on her way home. When she arrived, the dogs barked. The smell of her perfume followed her into the kitchen where she sat down at the table across from Kris, took off her shoes, and asked her husband for a glass of wine. Kris got up and went to the calendar on the refrigerator. He flipped up the page and looked for a moment at the illustration on the month of July, and then went up to his room.
-=-
The claws of paws clicked up the wooden staircase to the landing outside his room, and a tail whacked against the open bedroom door as Mosquito came into where Kris lay on the floor, next to his closet. The dog’s coat smelled revolting, so Kris breathed through his mouth. The dog poked his cold slick nostrils into Kris’ stubbly cheek. Kris wiped his cheek dry on his shoulder, then he scratched Mosquito behind the ears and told him to sit. The dog did sit, and he looked down at the boy’s face and waited. Eventually he lied down alongside him, scooting his paws forward and grunting as he eased his weight down to the ground. And not long after that, Pepsi came up quietly and joined them.
July was going to be a red-haired woman at the window of some pleasant-looking house, looking out over her leafy bushes and her expansive green lawn, toward a wall of tall pines. A gust of wind was making its invisible way across the blanched summer sky, and high treetops all bent to the right, away from the woman. There were some clouds, but they were forgettable.