ON THE LAST DAY OF CREATION AT THE BLUE MOUNTAIN CENTER

“Which of these characters is you?” That’s what a critic or a reader—anyone who is likely not a writer him or herself—might ask the author of a piece of fiction. On occasion, one character is the writer’s voice. But my guess is that most fiction writers who are not writing veiled autobiography would answer like me: they all are.

I think about Hannah Tinti, finishing up her writing at Blue Mountain, up in the New York Adirondacks. The last night of the last day. Putting down her pen. In a zone. The story or book has reached a conclusion. An ending, if not the final end. In some ways, it’s as intended. In others, the characters have surprised her, taken on lives of their own. Said things she hadn’t expected. Refused to mumble other lines she’d turned over in her mind like jewels.

Cajoling characters isn’t as impossible as herding cats. But it’s not a military operation where everyone follows orders. Characters who come to life, who become palpable, can have wills, if not absolutely free. Like defiant children. Like all God’s children. Straying from that perfectly planned garden: its weedless beds, its mulched mounds, its cultivated rows. They climb trees, pick and hurl fruit, break down fences. They snap off the tulip tops and threaten to whip their friends with rose stems. They leave, they have sex, they fall in love, they commit atrocities, they die.

So, like a goddess—for what are writers, creators, but the gods of the page, the worlds they create. Omnipotent! At least at the start, and ceding power as their worlds gain traction and rotate. So, like a goddess, Hannah Tinti puts down her pen, be it a TUL or a Univision or a Bic. She finds her way along a path through the old growth forest. She crosses a stream--beckoned ahead by Eminem--and reaches a gathering where all the other supposed recluse writers, hermited painters and shy poets will dance. Lo, they do not rest on the final night of creation. They have been static all week, only exercising their minds. They turn up the music. They kick off their shoes. After creating worlds, they dance and they dance and they dance.

So, which of these people is holy, is God-like? The priest? The monk? The taxi driver? The prostitute? Any honest deity would have to welcome us all, without demanding an admission ticket. No repentance, no sacrifice, no good deeds, no tithing. As surely as Huck’s father belongs to Twain or Raskolnikov to Fyodor, we belong to whatever force set this wet ball in motion with a word and a kick, as surely as we writers string together, out of our own unnamed urges and curiosity, words of good and evil, words of holy and unholy intent.

GRIEVING

Kathy has told me this story before. This time, we are in a car, driving into Charleston, South Carolina. The five old college roommates, leaving Kiawah Island at the end of a long weekend. Squeezing every last minute of intimacy out of the trip.

She leans forward from the back seat so Julie, who is driving, can hear. Julie is no stranger to tragedy, awaiting her pre-teen daughter’s heart surgery, crossing her fingers the doctor will cure, not kill her. Linda, sitting beside me, has a temporary reprieve. Her ovarian cancer won’t return for four months. Caren, riding shotgun, is healthy. It’s her marriage that’s fallen apart.

Two of us are missing, too. One dead; one in a cult and only dead to the world. But we’re not thinking about them now. We’re on vacation from personal disaster while Kathy tells her tale.

It was years ago, when Kathy and her husband Gregg were camping in Alaska, in Denali National Park. One day, while hiking, other campers stopped them on the trail. Had they seen a moose? Or a bear? Kathy and Gregg hadn’t seen the moose, but kept a lookout. And then, they stumbled across the bear. He was lurking around the edges of the cul de sac where they were camped, blood staining the fur around his mouth.

They weren’t sure what had happened. Had someone said that the moose had a baby? Babies? Or was about to give birth? But what had they said about the bear?

While they debated, the moose lumbered up, bigger and more imposing than they expected. Her earth-pounding steps sent Kathy jumping into the trailer, and Gregg scurrying up the ladder to its roof. As the moose swung around her head, it seemed clear—she was on the hunt for her babes.

So began a dance, for hours. Drawn by some invisible force—the smell of blood? Anguished cries?—the moose ran at the woods, then around the circle at the end of the cul de sac. She’d head toward the grizzly’s lair, then retreat to the campsite, ears pricked up and listening, fur on her back at attention, watching and waiting, and waiting and watching.

But the rangers knew she wouldn’t find her babies alive; the bear had eaten them.

The rangers caucused, decided it was a dangerous situation. Elevated from orange to red, like a homeland security alert. Bears aren’t the only aggressive beasts, Kathy explains. Moose charge, too. Campers could get hurt.

The rangers reached into their cab for weapons. They cocked their guns, as wary of the moose as scared of the bear. The men trekked into the woods on a mission to subdue the grizzly while the moose was at the campsite. All the while, the mother moose kept her anxious vigil: scooting toward the trees, then back to the center of the clearing, eyes and ears alert, hair a-prickle.

Just a short time passed, and then the rangers lugged them out―the two dead baby moose. They threw the corpses into the back of their pickup like slabs of ruined meat while the mother moose watched. At once, her demeanor changed. Her pelt fell flat, her ears drooped. She stopped roaming and stood stock still in the center of the campsite. Motionless, for a good hour. She was frozen, expressionless.

Back in Charleston, Kathy drops her arms and rolls back her eyes, her best imitation of a stunned mother moose. We don’t laugh.

She says that’s how it went the next day, too. Kathy and Gregg woke to find the moose unmoved. In mourning. Too grief-stricken to leave the scene of the murder.

Kathy falls back in her seat. She looks around the car for a word to express the moose’s sorrow. She gives up, resorts to a phrase out of our shared past.

“Well,” she says, “that moose, she was totally bummed out.”

There are no bleak-enough words for that kind of despair.

We ride in hushed assent, staring at the maze of roadways in the distance. We can’t see the potholes and collisions that will rattle our lives in the miles ahead.

WITHOUT EVA

Just weeks ago, Eva died. I always liked her, but didn’t know her well. I learned the personal details of her life incidentally and accidentally, at neighborhood gatherings.

Four years back, when her Dalmatian Prince was still alive, she threw a birthday party in her yard for the deaf old dog, complete with paper hats and cake. She invited both people and pets, but I didn’t dare bring Porter, my black lab, for fear of him humping the hostess. I don’t remember any animals save Prince and a stray cat. It was a pet-less pleasure to relax on Eva and Albert’s lawn furniture and visit.

My son was considering college then, and she warned me off of Kalamazoo, saying it ‘ruined’ her boy. He took up with the wrong crowd, and ended up modeling in New York City. Was this her code for coming out as gay? I didn’t ask. The bunch of us moved on to stories about 9/11. She and Albert both had grown children in New York, from first marriages, who’d found their spouses via cell-phone after the towers fell. Our neighbor Susan Chiaro’s father flew into Boston just as planes were grounded. Upon landing, his cabbie was weeping: the honey-mooning couple he’d dropped off that morning had boarded a doomed flight.

The usual things changed in the ensuing years. Susan moved to Madison. Prince died. I’d spy Eva power-walking when I took Porter out. Her cropped blond locks bobbed along at a brisk pace and I’d admire her lithe limbs and upbeat mood, hoping to be like her when I reached her age. Though she was but a few years ahead of me, and I kept overtaking the ages I envied, I never closed the muscular gap between her taut shape and my own softer figure.

Sometimes we’d say hello in passing, other times exchange more words. She’d mourn the lack of “a dog to pee on my flowers” and indulge Porter’s leaping greeting. Over those years, Albert began and finished an immense project in their yard, bricking in walkways, planting borders and flowers, coaxing it into a magical showpiece of a garden. Over the winters, she said he sat staring out the window, sketching and planning. Summers, he’d dig and water and prune--such work you can do without a big dog to pee on and tear up your efforts.

I passed their house at least once a day, noting the neat lemony border of petunias below their living room window, and the white grand piano behind its filmy curtains. Summer and winter, petunias or snow, a vase full of flowers, often roses, would sit atop the piano: red punctuating ivory. I never thought to ask about the piano, who might have played, whether it was Eva or Albert, or one of their children, up and gone.

Somewhere in that interval of years, we sought each other out at a neighbor’s baby shower, though our talk soon turned grim for the occasion. Eva was recently back from Poland, where her mother had died. In the hospital, when they visited, her mother’s breasts had turned black, something she’d never heard of before, nor had I.

Time advanced. Eva walked; I walked Porter. This winter, I didn’t see Eva, but didn’t wonder. There’s not much pleasure strolling hereabouts in the subzero months.

Then, in April, I heard she was dead. Diagnosed, suddenly, with gall bladder cancer. Cramps and projectile vomiting, surgery. A quick three months from discovery to death.

It’s hard to grasp an absence when someone dies who you don’t see daily. But I’ve heard a change. These days, when Porter and I pass her window at night, we’re often startled by haunting piano melodies. It’s Albert at the keys, performing concertos as lush and lovely as his garden, with Porter, the roses and me his only audience.

I never remembered to ask Eva who played piano. I know now; the music has answered.

MARSHALL FIELD'S OTHER WINDOWS

Marshall Field’s, the Chicago department store about to lose its name to Macy’s, has long been known for its windows. Each year, the ground floor display windows fill with elaborate winter scenes: leaping nutcrackers, Santas and elves, princes, skaters and ballroom dancers. They glitter, shine and mesmerize shoppers on pilgrimages from Decatur to Indianapolis.

This is a tale of Field’s other windows.

The ground floor of Field’s flagship State Street store is a several story high atrium, stretching above the rooms in curlicued plaster. When my father was a young college student working as a stock boy at Marshall Field and Company, his job included opening the windows. Another young man, a student like him, trained him to do it.

My father would stand on a narrow catwalk and push the windows open one by one. When he recounts this episode, he gestures outward with his arms. I can’t tell if he used bare hands or poked them out with a pole.

Then, he decided he wanted a day off. He can’t remember why. A summer day? A ball game? My father lived for baseball as a youth, his one heartache: his own father refusing to sign a farm league contract with the Cubs because my father was too young.

On that obscure day off, the day my father didn’t work, the other young man took his place—creeping along the catwalk, pushing open the windows. On that day, the day my father didn’t work, the other boy pressed the windows wide, leaned forward and fell. He plunged to his death.

Fifty-eight years later my father remembers the young man’s funeral. My father didn’t introduce himself to the parents, didn’t say it should have been him, that he should have been working that day.

He tells this story at the holiday table, on the eve of Field’s own demise. It’s a grim tale and I forget to ask if he ever did it again, ever returned to work, ever crawled along the catwalk, poking out the windows, ever whispered to his coworkers of that lost young man. For whatever he did, he did it safely enough to quadruple his years, to bring me into this world and to make me mourn and remember a nameless young man I never have met.

STANLEY ELKIN'S MAGIC

Mom and Dad and Dianne Schramm are in a car with Stanley Elkin around 71st Street on the south side of Chicago. It's a busy area back in the 1940’s. While someone is in a store, Stanley decides to try to hypnotize Dianne. He moves his finger back and forth, and she follows it with her eyes. She goes under. It's the first time he's successful with hypnosis.

Okay, he says. Now I am going to bring you out, he says.

He snaps his fingers. Nothing.

He claps his hands. Nothing. She won't come to.

He tries every trick he knows to reverse the spell. Still, nothing works. She's under.

She sleeps, does Dianne Schramm, whose picture I will find in my parents' photo album decades later. After Korea. Who will marry Morty Haberman, who will divorce him, a man now dying of esophageal cancer.

All these years later, after Dianne's trance, my parents will still know Morty. They will spend New Year's Eve 2004 with him, watch as he chugs morphine before each bite of food to kill the pain.

But she, Dianne, can't read that future, or the titles of Stanley’s future books, or his Multiple Sclerosis and death, or Morty’s doomed esophagus, or at least says nothing about them. Instead, she sleeps, oblivious to Stanley's imprecations, his attempt to bring her back to that present, before my past even begins.

She sleeps a long while, waking with a headache in her own time, says nothing about what time, what future or present she's glimpsed, and whether it's fate that's given her a headache, or Stanley and his clumsy, novice technique.

I don't know if he ever hypnotized anyone again, at least without a pen.

THE MEETING

The department secretary chews on her cheek.
The warehouse manager leans into her elbow on the table, chin resting in hand, and digs her nails into her face.
The deputy clerk squeezes his mouth with his fingers, smoothes down the hair on the back of his hand.
The purchasing director is biting her lip, touching her painted face with enameled fingertips, picking stray polish off her flesh.
The chubby lawyer rubs his ruddy face, then tugs at his beard.
The deputy director nods, smiles and blinks.
From time to time her tongue darts from her mouth, moistens her lips, and slowly retracts. It has a will of its own, triggered by dry spells or perhaps passing flies.
The law student recovering from a concussion rests his forehead in his hands.
The IT director props her chin in her palm, tenderly nipping at her nails. The outreach director pokes her pen in her mouth, then uses it to dig in and clean out her ears.
The PR assistant raises her eyebrows, plays with an earring, furrows her brow, scratches the bridge of her nose with a fist.
The elected official strokes his moustache and smirks.
The meeting concludes; the next date is set. Relief lights their faces and all rise and stretch.

DREAD

Dread. It's become ubiquitous. Although tomorrow is my birthday, it's not dread of getting older. Rather, dread of pain, of loss, of suffering, of random attack, of war.

Dread is overriding, the modern American posture. An attitude. Dread takes off, takes over, pursues from behind. Dread stalks, like the mugger waiting in the shadows, the terrorist on the train platform with a bomb in his backpack.

In our collective imaginations we are only moments from running, from racing away from the thief, the plastique, the shrapnel, the fire, the chemicals -- three hundred million variations on the young Vietnamese girl in the photograph. She is fleeing, arms flailing, mouth wide in a silent scream.

Dread is the post-millennial soundtrack; we are dancing to its tune like drunks in a bar, a bully shooting bullets at our feet.

THE RICK MOODY ARGUMENT

It's the fourth of July and I'm driving Harvey's car to the movie theater to pick up Meredith and her friends Rachel and Hannah. Meredith's idea is to do a little driving before the fireworks. She's got her permit; she's fifteen. I can be a nice mom, so I tell her yes.

Then, while I'm cruising south on Dodge, I hear the word boys drift out of the radio and my internal radar starts to beep. I turn up the volume, and sure enough, some woman is reading that Rick Moody story, one of my very favorite stories, the one where boys enter the house.

It's not a long piece, and I guess that if I lift my foot off the gas and drift, maybe I can drag out the trip to ten minutes. Maybe I can hear the rest of the story. Once Meredith's in the car, she'll put up a stink, turn to an oldies station or search for a tune by Cold Play. A story? Out of the question in front of her friends.

I keep a far distance from the cars in front of me. I don't rush the yellow lights. When I pass the high school, boys are going to a wedding. When I turn onto Church Street, boys are carrying their brother home. It's a good narration, though I wonder why a woman is reading it. There's a musical background that jars me – I want each word that I've read before to peal like a bell in my head. But I get used to it and enter the story. By the time I'm going east, boys are going fishing. As I cross Ridge, and see the train trestle ahead of the cineplex, boys are carrying their father into the house. I'm choked up, and boys exit the house before the girls see me, before I park in the loading zone.

It's not until I see them in the rear view mirror that I hear the announcer. There's a new Rick Moody piece after the station break, and Moody will read it. It's from a performance taped in Chicago. A performance I wanted to attend, but that night was my writing group. I couldn't skip; they were doing my story.

So this is my second chance. That's when I decide to ask her indulgence.

I start: "I'm sorry. You have to let me." They're piling into the car and Meredith waves away my words like flies. But a few light on her ears: Bennington, friend of Amy Hempel's.

"It's okay," she says. Amy Hempel might be what does it. Amy Hempel is a beautiful and mysterious picture on a book jacket.

That's when other words start to register. Vomit, and waking my mom, and kids calling me a fag. Moody says vomit like he's tearing its page from the dictionary and wadding it up. Hannah starts to laugh. Meredith's lips are pursed like she can't quite decide: Am I humiliating her? Making a good impression?

We've got two miles to Rachel's, and Moody's progressed from vomit to girls to baseball. When we cross from Evanston to Skokie he goes from birthday presents to Long Playing records.

Do you know him? I say no, I've only spoken to him once.

Is he really gay? Hannah asks.

Is he cute? They want to know.

Yes, I say. And I tell them he plays the guitar.

We're pulling into the driveway when he mentions Smoke on the Water, and I sense reluctance as Meredith's friends slide open the van doors, as they climb out.

"Thank you," they say over Rick Moody's voice. "Thanks for the ride. Goodbye."

Then we're left, just the two of us, in an aging minivan with Rick Moody. He's riffing on rock and roll, on what it can mean, what it can say. But the cultural moment is over. Meredith's indignant. "I want to drive."

It's true; I said she could. But I want to hear Rick Moody. If she drives, I kill the radio. Those are my rules – no radio, no cell phones. Can I stretch them? Make readings an exception? Draw a line between narration and music? I flash on all the precedents I've regretted for years.

When she was three: "But Grama lets me have Fruit Loops."

At 7: "But at Sarah's, we stay up til midnight."

I foresee the next year of driving, arguing about the radio, But you let me listen to Rick Moody.

I can't bear it, the thought of the Rick Moody argument. I can already see my daughter poking at the radio, hunting for a better station, tuning out a pop song, changing CDs – and inevitably, answering her cell phone and skidding into a ditch.

But you let me listen to Rick Moody. Not defensive driving.

I unbuckle and open my door. I circle the car to the passenger side. She takes over and adjusts the mirrors, making the images overlap. She's shorter than me, so she drags the seat forward. As she shifts into drive I only hesitate a few seconds before I reach over and turn off the story.

There's no time to mope. I'm saying stop at the STOP, go at the GREEN. A soccer ball lolls in the street. "Don't kill that kid," I say and she laughs. It's a short ride home and she does a good job. Nine months til her license. She stops at the curb, is pleased with her progress.

She's singing in triumph. Smoke on the water. She turns to me as she sings it, and smiles an orthodontically-enhanced smile. When did she learn that? Maybe it's Rick Moody. Then she keeps singing. Fire in the sky. Maybe it's the fireworks – a song that gets seasonal radio play, is aired on the fourth of July. Hell, maybe it's in the water or it's genetic memory. Or maybe it's just being 15.

She still has my keys. I watch her hop up the porch steps and unlock the door. She's singing. I'm watching her enter the house.