A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise Read online

  I paused, having read this tale about my grandfather and the haircut. I wondered whether he’d really done that—made a barber shave his son’s head so he’d look silly and then laughed at him. I wondered, too, about this girl Bob so loved who’d happened to show up precisely at this humiliating moment.

  Perhaps the story was a delusion.

  Perhaps it was a lie.

  Or perhaps Bob had some kind of agenda. For example, I imagined, perhaps he was upset with his dad and had therefore written this unflattering story to get revenge. (If that was the case, I didn’t at all like that he was trying to get me involved.)

  Not that I knew much about Bob’s relationship with his dad.

  I figured Bob relied on my grandfather and his second wife, my step grandmother, Agnes, financially—many in my mom’s family did, to some extent. I recalled hearing that they owned the house where Bob lived.

  :::::

  I read a few more pages of the manuscript, to where he described Lake L’Homme Dieu in Minnesota, where he had spent his summers growing up. I’d heard lots about Lake L’Homme Dieu. People on that side of the family—my mother’s mother’s side—loved to talk about L’Homme Dieu. Whenever they got together, they’d end up telling stories about those good times back then. They’d laugh and laugh until they wiped tears from their eyes. (L’Homme Dieu roughly translates as “man of God” in French, but nobody pronounced it right; they all said “La Hamma Doo.”)

  I read a few pages further, to where he wrote about being a white student at a newly integrating junior high. I frowned at his descriptions of his black peers. A few pages further and he was at Berkeley High. A slur cut across the page like razor wire. I’d had no idea that Bob, or anyone in my family, was so explicitly racist.

  I let myself stop reading.

  The manuscript stared back at me.

  It was hideous to look at, even from a distance.

  Its pages literally reeked.

  I wanted to ignore it. I wanted to ignore it the way you ignore a urine-soaked pile of coats on a sidewalk or a man on a park bench screaming obscenities.

  I slid the papers back into their sheath and set the envelope into a seldom-opened drawer.

  I told myself I was busy, which wasn’t a lie.

  :::::

  When he called soon after, I didn’t answer. He left a message, asking if I’d read his book. I didn’t call back. I felt bad but didn’t know what to say. Even if I’d wanted to, and then I did not, I couldn’t have simply corrected his spelling and added paragraph breaks and replaced the colons with periods and commas and sent Bob’s story off to the presses.

  The little of his manuscript that I’d read was partly comprehensible to me, but I had the advantage of being familiar with many of the places and people about which he’d written. Not to mention that I was somewhat accustomed to Bob, to the way he used language, and to his sense of humor.

  He left other messages that fall. If he was mad at me for not responding, or hurt, he didn’t let on. He always seemed in good spirits, like he was stoked to have just tried me.

  I did tell my mom that her brother had sent me something he’d written. She said that sounded “creepy” and that I could throw it out.

  :::::

  I probably would have, but what he’d sent appeared to be an original.

  I imagined it had taken him a long time, maybe a really long time, to type it. And given that he called himself a hermit, it seemed unlikely he’d gone to a copy shop and made duplicates. Besides, if he’d done that, wouldn’t he have sent me the photocopy and kept the original?

  So I held on to it and tried unsuccessfully to forget it was there.

  A couple times I randomly decided to show it to friends. I removed it from its envelope and said, “Check this out.” They marveled or gawked and tenaciously looked at a page or two. They asked why he sent it to me. “Are you close?” they wondered.

  “Not at all,” I said. I explained my guess, which was that he wanted help with his writing and I happened to be the only writer he knew.

  Sometimes when I passed the drawer, I’d feel a faint curiosity, like a whiff of cherry smoke lingering on a forest trail.

  :::::

  One day a large box arrived for me in my apartment building’s lobby.

  I lugged it upstairs.

  Inside were assorted jams and jellies in little glass jars. It seemed he’d ordered them, maybe from a catalog or QVC. I could not recall Bob ever giving me a gift. I doubted he had much money. I had already felt bad about not reading all of what he’d mailed me, and now I was overcome.

  I opened the drawer and set the envelope on my kitchen table. The least I could do, I told myself, was give his manuscript one good read.

  I prepared tea and toast with boysenberry preserves, and I read, for the first time, the whole story of my uncle’s life.

  I tried to, anyway.

  One way to think of what’s happened since is I have never stopped reading it.

  :::::

  Not long after I read Bob’s manuscript that first time, I was back home in the Bay Area. He again called and this time I answered. I happened to be walking through his hometown, actually, right near UC Berkeley, on my way to plug a meter. I told him so, and he cracked up. Then he got right to it: “Did you read my book?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I don’t know many people who’ve had a life like that.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, trying to choose my words carefully.

  “Pretty crazy, hey,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  There was a lot then that I didn’t know how to feel about the story Bob had sent me and his apparent wish that I help him figure out how to get other people to read it.

  I knew there was a lot in those pages that gave me great pause. There was the overt racism, and his other bigoted views—anti-Semitism, homophobia, crude words about kids with disabilities he’d known in a halfway home and also sometimes himself. Many of his descriptions of women did not thrill me.

  Mostly, I worried about how candidly he’d written about himself, sharing details about his mental health history, his illegal drug use, and his sexual relationships, including one with a sixteen-year-old when he was twenty-three and working at a gas station. He’d included what seemed like very honest opinions about many controversial topics. He’d written openly about many of our relatives, saying things I assumed they would find upsetting. I worried that he didn’t understand the implications of baring himself—and those around us—so honestly to the world.

  I was also aware that it certainly didn’t seem like Bob had asked anyone’s permission to include them in his story. It seemed likely that other people would remember things very differently than he had. I worried that if I helped him, I would jeopardize my relationships with many of the people in question. In some cases, he’d spilled secrets that weren’t his to share, some details so private it seemed that repeating them would devastate people I loved.

  I had no idea how to say any of this to him, though, that day on the phone.

  He was repeating stories from the manuscript, one about a song he’d played on a keyboard and a guitar that had been stolen and a seashell collection that had ended up in a San Francisco museum. I looked at the water and across the bay to the Golden Gate, where the sun was falling fast toward the Pacific.

  I finally asked whether he really thought pursuing this project any further was a good idea. “Because,” I said, “there are things in there you wouldn’t want everyone on earth seeing.”

  He agreed. He said he wanted two things. First, he wanted his story “out there” because it was “true.” But, he added, “I just don’t want to hurt my dad.”

  :::::

  Sometime after that, I began trying to write an essay about the manuscript Bob had mailed me—and how it contrasted with my memories of him. In that essay, I included both my own sentences as well as lines from his account. The closer I’d read his writing, the more I’d understood it, which makes sense. What surprised me was how much I liked it—his word choices and style. I was loath to do anything but let him speak for himself. So my essay, which I submitted for peer critique, was a sort of patchwork: some of me, then some of Bob in all-capital blocks, spellings and colons and all.

  None of my classmates who read that essay liked it, but nobody disliked it for the same reason. Many felt my choice to quote him faithfully was somehow problematic, perhaps condescending. Some found his writing hard to understand. Mostly I observed that few had actually read anything that Bob had written, and I’d included what I’d felt were some of his most powerful sequences. My readers seemed so thrown by the look of his words that they were unwilling to engage with his ideas. It was a feeling I understood, to some extent; my first reaction to his writing had also been to ignore it.

  One time I was messing around and I tried writing Bob’s story a different way. I had a very strong vision of him getting a knock on his bedroom door and being told to pack his bag. I wrote my version of it, referencing his account as my guide. I kept going, really studying a chunk of his story and then writing it in a way that captured its spirit as vividly as I could.

  Writing this way forced me to read his book closely, to try to understand every single phrase, no matter how seemingly unintelligible. Occasionally, I’d still decide that the way he’d put something was just too beautiful or funny or moving—or profane—to change, and so I’d leave it his way. The capitalized words and phrases served as reminders, too, that this was someone else’s story.

  I’ve never known what to call my version. Sometimes I call it a “translation,” but that’s an imperfect term. Sometimes I call it a “cover,” as in music. A good cover, I think, may affect a style, but its goal, ultimately, is to convey and affirm the power of the original. For the sake of this exercise, I assumed that all the assertions he made in his manuscript were true, and I confined myself to portraying only what he’d written there.

  Many people have asked me why I did this. Why did I choose to write about Bob? What interested me so much about his story? I’ve never had good answers to these questions. Bob, in his manuscript, described long days out on Lake L’Homme Dieu in the summers fishing. Perhaps it’s as simple as Bob was a talented fisherman and I’m the guppy he caught on his line.

  :::::

  Occasionally, I’d let people read what I was writing, and they’d express dissatisfaction with it. Many were curious about lots of things that Bob hadn’t included in his manuscript, for example, facts about medicine. Lots of readers wondered whether other people remembered events the same way he did.

  I’d argue that I wasn’t interested in what anyone else had to say, just what Bob had to say.

  Eventually, though, I relented, and began writing this project’s second element, the beginning of which you are currently reading.

  :::::

  In many ways, I’m not the best person to have taken on this task; if nothing else, these years have taught me just how true that is.

  I haven’t lived my uncle’s life, and there are ways in which our lived experiences and beliefs differ greatly. I am no expert in so many of the complicated topics at hand. As my grandfather once pointed out to me, incredulously, I think, I was born decades after most of the story occurred.

  I have tried to compensate for these deficits. I have tried to learn all I can. I have talked to everyone who’d have me. In some cases, I have changed or omitted names and details. I have made decisions, however wise, about what information belongs.

  My shelf of books that relate to this project is now taller than me. Many of the topics it spurred me to research were, I discovered, thorny brambles. Often one book on my shelf would begin shouting at another.

  A lot of the fights were about words, about what to call things. As a result, I’ve thought about how certain words may hold outsize power. How certain words walk around concealing knives that only some people can feel. I have weighed whether to include some particular words in my own version of Bob’s story, and have ultimately decided to make my portrait an honest one. Through these years, I’ve thought a lot about power, too, because that’s what these fights often seemed to actually be about.

  The fights were also frequently about facts—facts about science, facts about history. The facts I’ve ultimately chosen to include are here because I think they help situate my uncle’s story. I include them despite the fact that, although they may seem stable now, with time these facts might prove radioactive, fall apart, and contaminate their surroundings. My hope is that however I’ve erred—and it seems inevitable that I have—I have not distracted too much from the task at hand, which is to tell Bob’s story as he told it to me.

  The more interesting question, I think, isn’t why I began writing about my uncle but why I kept going. That I can answer. My initial curiosity about Bob’s text was, if anything, artistic; I was a nonfiction writing student. When I told people about my uncle’s manuscript, I noticed some seemed to assume that a person like him would be unable to write about himself in a way that counted as nonfiction, which struck me as something worth investigating. Over time, though, because of reading Bob’s manuscript so closely, and then because of everything it prompted me to better understand, my motivations shifted. I came to agree with him that we should try to get his story out there.

  :::::

  I read once that every time you access a memory, you alter it, that the synapses themselves are changed. Our most accurate memories are theoretically the ones we most seldom recall. And, conversely, the memories we access most are the least reliable, soiled by the footsteps of recollection. I have often contemplated the irony that, were it not for my uncle having mailed me his manuscript, I never would have thought about him as much as I have. I never would have returned so many times to memories of him from when I was a kid at the lake.

  The lodge at dinnertime would be bright and cacophonous—card games paused on tables, babies screaming, dogs running underfoot. Sometimes my grandfather paid to fly out Bob’s dog, so she’d be there too. She was small and brown and always trembled. Her name was Shivers.

  After dishes had begun and the older adults had returned to bridge, Bob would go sit on the porch overlooking the lake. He’d light a pipe and strum his guitar.

  As the sun descended and the muggy day finally broke, the loons would begin to call to one another. First, you’d hear one long low note from out on the water. Then, from another direction, a reply. Soon several loons would join the chorus, their sound at once beautiful and alien and sad.

  Often when I think of Bob, I think of him that way: sitting, smoking, strumming, and singing along with the loons.

  IM ROBERT

  Bob’s first love was a girl called LYDIA TREEANTOPOLIS. They met in third grade. He loved her even though she wasn’t in his class; she was always in the other one next door. He’d see her sometimes on the playground and wonder how he might ever impress her.

  He had a lot of friends back then, friends whose first and last names he’d remember long into his life. He was always goofing around in class, trying to make them laugh. All the time he’d wind up being made to stay after school, chalk in hand, scratching “I will not talk in class” five hundred times on the vast blackboard.

  He and his friends were all traffic boys, which meant they got to direct cars before and after school. Once a year the traffic boys would also perform at a CRAZY DAY FAIR. They’d do a drill on the command of “Simon Says,” and if you messed up, you had to sit down.

  Once it got to just Bob and his friend Danny, the lieutenant. Danny won, but as Bob jogged back to his seat, he glanced out at the crowd and looked for her.

  He wondered if she was out there.

  He wondered if she saw him.

  By the time he was in sixth grade, his final year at John Muir Elementary, he was a sergeant in the traffic boys. When you were a sergeant, you got to have a whistle. He carried it around all the time, but he was supposed to blow it only before school and after. Bob would place the whistle to his lips, feel its weight and its cool, and blow. Then his troops would help the children safely cross.

  :::::

  Only once had he gotten a good opportunity to talk to her. It was on the same day, back in fourth grade, when his dad had taken him to the barber because he FIGURED IT WAS TIME TO GET A CREW CUT:

  The barber hoisted a smock over Bob’s little frame. The scissors sneered. His dad looked up from his paper. He was an important man, a professor nearby at the university. He was the one who told the barber what to do next.

  The barber plugged his shaver into the wall. Bob felt it trace the back of his neck and then the top of his head.

  “Now you’ll look just like your dad!” the barber said, his cigarette quaking.

  Ash on the floor, and his hair, so blond it was practically white. Tears were falling, too, down Bob’s cheeks.

  In the car, Bob rubbed the velvet of his newly buzzed hair and felt with horror the two wide tracks of bare skin that now rose from his forehead on either side, meant to make him look like he was balding. Their car ascended the dark and twisty streets.

  Bob lived with his dad and mom and two sisters—one older, named Heather, one younger, named Debbie—in an adobe house in the Berkeley Hills. He had his own room that looked over the stoop. Most of the other rooms in the house looked out over the entire Bay Area.

  That evening, Debbie said there was someone at the door for him, a girl.

  Bob ran to his window, and when he saw her, his insides did somersaults.

  Lydia Treeantopolis.

  Why had she come to see him?

  How had she known where he lived?

  He touched his scalp with a shudder.

  “I’m not here,” he said to Debbie. “Tell her I’m not here.”

  He watched his sister reappear at the door and say something to Lydia.