The Correspondence Read online

  And my father mowed the field out back of our church. He helped Deacon Jack repaint the sanctuary and he helped Deacon Willy reshingle the roof. He cooked and served at the Wednesday night church suppers and was happy to do it. But he didn’t have much time for what he called churchified people.

  “I find it difficult to believe that the Creator of the universe gives a fuck if I drink a cold beer on a sunny day,” my father said. “These people can’t say sugar, they just got to say sucrose. Meanwhile they don’t have no more idea what God wants from me than the man in the moon. It’s my own dick I’m talking about, and I can jump up and down on it like a pogo stick if I want to.”

  I thought I was back in Kentucky to write a magazine story about a TV show set in Harlan County. That isn’t how things worked out. I wrote this letter instead.

  Harlan is not nowhere. What you want to do is this: You drive to nowhere, then you turn left. You keep going until page eighty-eight, the last page of the atlas and gazetteer, with its detailed topographical maps, which has apparently been paginated on the assumption that Harlan is the last place you’re going to want to go.

  In Harlan, in the morning, a woman walked across a restaurant and closed my notebook and said, “You can work all day, honey. Eat your biscuits while they’re hot.”

  And the woman at the hotel’s front desk said, “If you’re like those other people, you’re going to want a zero balance.”

  “I guess I am like other people.”

  “I know all you government men like to keep a zero balance.”

  I came out of Harlan bewildered on the Kingdom Come Parkway headed back toward Pineville, with its massive floodgates.

  The man on the radio said: “I’m going to have a multitude of nations come forth from my loins. And as part of my covenant, You are asking me to mutilate the very part of myself through which You are going to fulfill Your promise. I mean, Abraham, he didn’t have the biological insight that we have in our modern medical world, but Abraham knew well where babies come from. And here’s God—”

  I passed Daniels Mountain and Manito Hill. Out past Tin Can Hollow, I turned south on 25 East. I passed Clear Creek Baptist Bible College and John’s Tire Discount and an immense sign that said ARE YOU ADDICTED TO PAIN MEDICATION?

  I bore south through Meldrum and Middlesboro (home of the actor Lee Majors, aka Harvey Lee Yeary, aka Colonel Steve Austin, “The Six Million Dollar Man”), all the way to the corner of Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, aka the Cumberland Gap.

  Pale-pink-and-white dogwoods and purple wildflowers lined the ascent to Pinnacle Overlook. At the gap, Daniel Boone had penetrated a wall of rock and forest 600 miles long and 150 miles wide. He saw a new world, where all the old mistakes waited to be made again.

  When Boone was asked if he had gotten lost in that forest, he said: I can’t say as ever I was lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.

  Back on 25 East, heading north, I drove through crumbling hills past West Roger Hollow and through Corbin into Laurel County. I drove past Magic Vapor Shop and Tri-State Floors. I took 192 East to the Hal Rogers Parkway out past Lick Fork.

  Soon I saw a barn I remembered. I saw horses and cows, trailers up on broken cinder blocks, front yards full of table legs and coffee cans. I passed Urban Creek Holiness Church. I passed Jimbo’s 4-Lane Tobacco and the Federal Correctional Institution.

  At Burning Springs I turned on 472 to head toward Fogertown, where barns had been reclaimed by the land, overgrown with tall trees poking through holes in their roofs. At Muncey Fork was a burnt-down house. Creeping vines were pulling down telephone poles and billboards.

  All at once and with no fanfare I passed Cornett Charolais, where I had spent many pleasant Sunday afternoons with old Joe Dale and Dale Junior and Linda and Bessie—pleasant is a pious lie—more like bored, bored, not knowing what all of this would one day mean, what I would one day want to pretend it had all meant.

  I wanted it to mean to me what it meant to my father: home and happiness with his foster family. I liked being sent to slop out the hogs after dinner, listening to the rustling in the dark along the fence line. I liked hiking in the rocky hills with my father, seeing that he was calm and pleased, seeing the shale and sandstone and limestone and schist and slate. I liked walking across fields and hearing him holler, “Sookie! Sook calf!”

  Apart from those pleasures I had been bored and sullen, reading photocopied pages of The Antichrist folded inside Sports Illustrated, waiting to escape from that army of hayseeds.

  But twenty years later my father’s foster mother is dead, as anyone but me might have foreseen, because she was a person and not a tree, and I would eat a photocopier in exchange for two more bowls of her soup beans and cornbread—one for me, and one for my father, to whom it would mean the world made young again.

  Instead I name these places. I throw my song into the mouth of death. I break his teeth. There is no death, there is no hell.

  I drove past the old Russell House Grocery, and there was what I wanted to find: the Pleasant Grove Baptist Church, established 1860.

  I have seen my father cry three times, and one of those times was in this church, at his foster father’s funeral.

  The second time I saw my father cry was while he was strangling me. He had said my friends Scott and Allen and Gary were no-good weirdos and long-haired faggots, and I was on the verge of becoming one, too, and that if I didn’t act right he was going to cut my hair himself with the lawn mower.

  I dared him to, more than a little frightened that he would try it. That was just the sort of thing he was always doing: kicking in a locked door, or pushing around a far-too-young panhandler with a sign that claimed he had been a VIETNAM VETERAN.

  “Step around the corner, John Henry,” my father said, “I’d like to have a word with this young man in private.” He nudged the kid with his boot. “Yes, I do mean you—you dilapidated cocksucker.”

  And afterward, in the cab of his truck, trembling, beating his fists against the steering wheel, he said, “What’s the matter with these people, Johnny? I’m a Vietnam veteran. And just look at me. I’m fine. I’m fine!”

  I dared my father to cut my hair, and he picked me up by my throat and smashed me against the wall, then threw me through the doorway into my bedroom and leapt on top of me, and he was strangling me with both hands and shaking me and cursing and shouting at me before he came to his senses and started to cry.

  “My family is falling apart,” he said, and it was true, I was destroying our family, why couldn’t I do as I was told without having impulses and desires of my own.

  That is the second time I saw my father cry. The third time is private.

  It’s not as if my friends weren’t no-good weirdos. Big Scott had come over earlier that afternoon, and my father had said, “Hey, gorilla.” Then: “Scotty, come here, boy, you’re hurt.”

  My father had glimpsed a bloody letter “s” above the collar of Scott’s T-shirt. He pulled the collar down and saw the still-bleeding word PUSSY, which Big Scott had cut into his chest with a razor blade moments before sprinting over to show me.

  “Who did this to you, boy?” my father said. “You can tell me.”

  Scott looked at my father.

  “I don’t believe that,” my father said. “No.”

  I didn’t want to write about my father, but I don’t seem to have much choice. There is no such thing as a repressed impulse: the inside and the outside are the same side.

  What serpent’s-tooth-sharp story is this to tell about the man who helped to give me life, who saved my life when I was choking on shish kebab (thereby earning, certain tribesmen might argue, the right to choke me himself), who sacrificed his body at punishing jobs in order that I might have shish kebab to choke on?

  Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you—and I hope you choke on it.

  I visit my father in the Florida Everglades and I see a nice old man. Just this week, he mailed me his sausage-gravy r
ecipe. (“Step Five: Buy helmet, put on, tongue smacking top of mouth may cause injury.”)

  I am deceived. Where has this nice old man hidden the menacing ogre of my childhood?

  His aim was to protect me from the darkness all around us, using the darkness inside himself. All that darkness had to be good for something, didn’t it? That was what the darkness was for—wasn’t it?—not only for tormenting him and, using him as its instrument, everyone he loved?

  The man on the radio said, “Four famine scenarios. How to prepare for an economic crisis of Biblical proportions. The salt plan: how to turn adversity into advantage.”

  “Whence comest thou, Deceiver?” I said. “From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it?”

  “Be a blessing to others in times of economic turndown. This book will help you get your head straight about what is happening in the world today, and it’s very personal and practical at one hundred and forty-two pages.”

  “Leave me alone,” I said to the man on the radio. “That’s just the word God, the word the conjure man uses to wring hot tears out of the wet rag of your heart. I don’t want the word God, but the Word of God.”

  The man on the radio said to me: I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.

  I said, “Ah, Lord God, I cannot speak, for I am a child.”

  But the man on the radio said: Say not, I am a child: for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak. Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth.

  I wept until I had to pull over. God had laid His burning hand on me. If you don’t turn the radio off, you can’t drive anywhere in this country.

  LETTER FROM LEVEL FOUR

  EDGAR HAD BEEN a theology student, and a bicycle messenger, and a junk-bonds trader, and now he was working on his master’s degree. His new ambition was to become a kindergarten teacher. He felt he needed to have a master’s degree in order to teach in a kindergarten.

  My neighbor wanted me to spend some time with Edgar. I reminded him of Edgar, he said. We had so much in common. For instance, I had been a janitor, and an exterminator, and a government clerk, and a night watchman, and so on. Neither of us could keep still.

  “And you both had fringe-religious childhoods,” my neighbor said. “I’d like to put you two in a room and see what happens.”

  This is what happened. Edgar and I went to a café. He was a tall, pale kid with dead eyes.

  We talked about Las Vegas: he had been there four times already that year to take photographs, whereas I had seen it glowing from far off in the desert night twenty years before and had driven miles out of my way to avoid it.

  After half an hour, Edgar said, “I’m going to tell you a secret. You can’t tell anyone. Pretend our meeting never happened. Don’t tell my wife.”

  “Sure,” I said. When I got home I wrote down every word.

  “Last year, this friend of mine dared me to apply to law school. I sent my application, a two-page paper about legal and technical issues in circumcision. I guess the board of admissions didn’t approve. They thought it was disrespectful. Their Internet people sent the dogs after me.

  “At that time, I was working on a photo project. I had made five separate sites, each ostensibly by a different photographer, each of whom had his own biography. Pseudonyms, prismatic refractions of my identity. Kind of precious.

  “Their computer men hacked it all to pieces. They took out the knives. They got in the code and changed it, and they began sending me secret messages. Imagine if you picked up The New York Times and your name was in every headline.

  “I had to quit Facebook. I couldn’t use the Internet anymore—it wasn’t safe. They had their agents following my blog under false identities. You have no idea what their technology can do.

  “They tore me down and showed me to myself. Not the five false selves of my photo project, but my real self. In the worst light. Did you ever see a film called The Game?”

  “Is that the one,” I said, “where only Michael Douglas is real, and everyone else is a supporting character in an exciting drama made just for him?”

  “So you have seen The Game?”

  “No,” I said. “But I heard about it.”

  “Well, this experience was like The Game. Gradually, from hints that my friend let drop, the same friend who had dared me to apply in the first place, I understood that they were hazing me. Incubating me. Preparing me for something greater. The next phase. Teaching me. I shouldn’t say who. Winding me up like a toy car with a key. The first sign was that people around me kept talking about cars.

  “I shouldn’t be telling you any of this. One of them is a MacArthur Fellow—you know, with a genius grant. These Internet kids, they are living in a Blade Runner world. They have figured out that most people are—”

  “Replicants,” I said. “False, synthetic androids. And a lot of them don’t even know that they aren’t alive.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “When my wife got wind of this, she was pretty upset. Two months ago, she asked me to go back into the hospital, and I did, as a favor to her. I love her and I don’t want her to worry. The doctors put me back on my antipsychotic medications. And in this way the game was paused.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, and I got up and went to the bathroom. I looked in the mirror, almost always a mistake. I closed my eyes. I was tired of my face.

  It had been a long time since I’d had a cup of coffee with an insane person. I don’t remember much of my own brief stay in the hospital. I remember seeing a sign on the door to my floor that said LEVEL FOUR RISK OF AWOL and thinking, Christ, these people must be nuts.

  Two years of parking cars with Martha and Porsche and Ira and Donnie while I sweated out all the drugs I had eaten: that was what brought me back to reality. When Martha was a little girl and asked her father why she had so many freckles, he told her she had been standing behind the cow when it farted. Porsche—one syllable, porsh—had a pencil mustache and would try to jump your place in line to get the tip he saw coming to you, maybe a dollar. Ira was a small man but a big drunk, and our cramped staff washroom was perfect for him to be hung over in, since it allowed him to sit on the can while he dangled his tiny head in the sink, retching. Donnie had an exit wound high on his back, between his shoulder blades and just to the right of his spine, where his ex-wife had shot him. Years of my life are in this paragraph: reading the book of Deuteronomy behind a cash register in a parking garage, drinking a six-pack and eating an onion sandwich in my studio apartment. And all of this, they told me, was reality. There are no other worlds than this one. There isn’t even this one.

  Another man was with me in the bathroom of the café. He was tying his shoe. He had propped his foot, the foot with the lace he was tying, up on the urinal. One end of his untied shoelace hung in the urinal water. I walked out of the bathroom, through the café, straight out the door. I had other things I wanted to do.

  I made my way down to the river. The wind wrinkled the water and the sunlight glinted and flickered. Starlings clacked in the grass. Insects hissed and sawed. Whole geese briefly became three-quarters geese as they ducked their heads underwater. Mallards kicked and fidgeted.

  “How did it go at the café last week?” my neighbor said.

  “Keep that guy away from me,” I said.

  “I thought he might interest you. Him and his potato phobia.”

  “We didn’t get that far.”

  My neighbor lit a cigarette. “I found a decapitated rabbit on my porch this morning.”

  “It’s probably a cat.”

  “It’s definitely a rabbit. I haven’t seen Edgar for days. Where’s his wife? Is he just watching television by himself in there? Do you think I should be worried about him?”

  “You should be worried about him whether you see him or not.”

  My girlfriend ran into Edgar at the café later that week. He wanted to sit with her. “Do I know you?” she said.

  “
It’s me. Edgar. We met at your neighbor’s party.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Can I sit down?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m expecting friends.”

  “Maybe just until they come—”

  She reached out with her foot under the table and pulled the chair he was touching closer to her. “No,” she said.

  “Extreme but effective,” I said when she told me her story. It was nice that she had anything to say at all. My relationship with my girlfriend was in one of its off-again phases. Her stock of conversational topics was dwindling. She said the same three or four things over and over again. Was she working something out, was she holding a problem at arm’s length? It had happened before. She would take the train to New York to stay with a friend. After a while she would come back, or else one day she wouldn’t.

  My neighbor had recently rented an office. All he wanted was a place to park his many trucks, but he’d had to take the entire property in order to get control over the lot out back. He hired a man to jackhammer it up and dig it down fresh. He was going to repave it and repaint the spaces.

  “I’ve just about got the front fixed,” he said, “and these people won’t leave me alone. This is my proposal. The front has a new sign, ferns in the window, and a false wall a quarter of the way back. Behind that, it’s pots and pans. In front, it’s a desk, and a lamp, and you, looking busy all day. For at least the first eight weeks. To make an impression.” He named a price, and I accepted his offer.

  My neighbor was not the first person who had paid me to sit around looking the way I did with my blank face, half man and half furniture. As I mentioned, I used to be a night watchman, smoking and listening to the radio.