Elton John
I stopped thinking about my sister Vicky after the first couple months or so. Lots of people died around the time she died, including famous jazz drummers and painters and the elderly mother of a dear friend. It wasn’t unusual to know someone who had died, or to be a person trying to go on without someone who had died, and I did a pretty terrible job of focusing on Vicky after her sudden decline. Recently I had dinner with some friends, a rare occasion where Tia called a couple of us and we met at a place near where two of us live, on a weeknight. It was so nice. During the meal, we talked about our travels and the follies of the upper echelons of the administration at the various places we worked or used to work. Over the dirty plates, we talked about death and dying. The daughter of one of the foolish administrators we had maligned earlier had recently died in a traffic accident. Her car had flipped the barrier and headed the wrong way on an interior highway, one of those heavily traveled commuter paths that are the most dangerous stretches of road. It was unclear whether she had lost consciousness before losing control of the car—it could have been epilepsy or a drug overdose that led to the crash. The toxicology report would take months, and in the meantime, this administrator had been prevented from claiming his daughter’s body.
Strangely, this same administrator’s assistant had almost died, and was either recovering slowly or gradually coming to terms with the fact that she wouldn’t make it. She was on extended medical leave. One of our friends had visited her in the hospital. She was so weak, our friend said, that she couldn’t pull the covers up over herself on the bed. She lay there shivering, unable to lift her hand and push the call button for the nurse. Speaking slowly, she explained that she was simply very tired, our friend told us.
Long before my sister died, she’d written a book of poems. That is, for a period of about two months, Vicky had written a poem or two every day, and after her death our eldest sister Althea had collected them into a spiral-bound booklet. We may have read a poem or two, years ago, at the time Vicky was writing them. Doubtless we said, oh great, nice job, or something completely noncommittal. It wouldn’t be like either of us to praise something that was in fact just the sketchiest observation made into a poem by line breaks. Rain. The wind. Althea and I were the kind of people who would be politely uninterested in poems that made as if to record the passage of a cat across a rug, Althea because she’s a scientist, and me because I’m an artist. Most of Vicky’s poems read like slightly sad greeting cards, with exceedingly commonplace sentiments. It’s no surprise to find that in one of them, she describes the moon as
like an
ancient
silver coin
the effect being more like a version of something she’d read than any acute observation or the capturing of a moment of personal intensity.
While I taught myself slowly and not too well to play the piano, Vicky said that she would like to be a genius, like Elton John. Elton John, she told me, had sat down at the piano as a child and was immediately able to play anything he heard. Not like me, she meant. My older sister simultaneously disdained my efforts and aspired to an almost magical ability with the instrument for herself. She just hadn’t sat down yet, to find out if she had Elton John’s talent. One day we would know. I continued to fumble through my simple Bach and Haydn, while also continuing to feel discouraged by Vicky’s remark.
It was just as easy to wound her, a perpetual outcast. I didn’t refrain from it at any point, adulthood failing to call a truce on childhood’s bitter battle. Vicky seems to have died from the same illness that attacked the assistant of the administrator at my friend’s workplace. Vicky lost the ability to move, and finally to breathe, through no known cause. Her illness was given a name that meant “it’s not all these other things it could be, all the similar diseases that immediately spring to mind when you hear of someone without the strength to lift even a piece of toast.”
Vicky hadn’t dealt with her mysteriously progressing condition at all, until one day she called 9-1-1. The ambulance took her away while her neighbor was at work. This neighbor later said that she had knocked at Vicky’s door every day, and wondered if she should call the police. Maybe Vicky had gone on vacation, but she thought Vicky would have told her she was leaving. It was only after months had passed, when Althea and I came to clear the apartment, that this neighbor learned what had happened.
“She used to knock at my door in a particular way,” the neighbor told us, imitating the rhythm on the coffee table. Vicky often came by and sat in a chair in this neighbor’s living room, as long as this neighbor didn’t have her mother with her. One time recently, she had heard the knock. “Oh, Vicky’s back,” the neighbor said to herself. But when she opened the door, the outer hallway was empty. She was absolutely sure it had been Vicky’s distinctive rapping. The neighbor tried to remember the date this happened. Could it have been the morning that Vicky died?
Althea and I consulted the calendars on our phones. We knew this neighbor would love to have received a spectral visit from our sister on her way to the other side. She had had a closeness with and fondness for Vicky that Althea and I didn’t share. Our interactions with our sister had been much more complex than hers, or perhaps poisoned by our long history.
The neighbor waited, tensely smiling, while we two strangers opened apps and swiped left and right. But clearly, Althea and I agreed, the day of the mysterious knock could not have been that day. Not the day Vicky died. The knock had happened on one of those other days, where the date reigned over its little space on the calendar’s grid, no appointments, no holiday, a day that had entered with morning and frayed into dusk but that still bore its numeral in case anyone came back to fill it with something in retrospect.
Fallujah
It’s not uncommon to meet veterans, some of whom tell you everything, some nothing. They go to massage therapy school on their full-ride veterans stipend, they smile at you from park benches, they use their vast mechanical skills to figure out why that light is signaling some internal disaster in your car. You may have been warned to let them have a seat facing the door, and not to press them too hard if you’re their personal trainer or phlebotomist or even just their cashier in the Kwik Trip. It’s good to know that men and women walk among us primed to react strongly to things others of us can’t see, as we don’t have their experiences.
I met a man called Quinn at a poetry reading where a friend was on the bill. Quinn told me about writing a short story for his class at the local community college, and later he lent me the manuscript. In the story, a man sits in a waiting room before a medical appointment and keeps seeing a little girl behind a glass door. She sort of shimmers, hidden where the glass is transparent, but her head is visible the whole time. She looks at him. The man is sure the little girl isn’t real. No one else in the waiting room reacts to her. They’re all looking down into months-old copies of Golf Digest. Then the story moves to a giant mud hole. People are dying all over this mud hole, dropped into it, climbing out of it. Tire tracks cross it, in its dusty parts. Pits of water bubble, then dry and crack. His story described the texture of the baked soil, the heat under his helmet, the view of the mud from a distance, from close up. Sounds of people shrieking. It went on for pages, these precise scraps of vision of this mud hole, this bog, this shallow grave. This place, the story explained, was called Fallujah. The soldier in the story had been stationed there, in Iraq, at one of the worst scenes of carnage in the Gulf War.
The poet had read this story aloud to his creative writing class at the community college when it was his turn for critique. His fellow students piled on him. Why had he made all that stuff up? His story was like a caricature of a war story. It was inflammatory. It was disgusting. The writer should write about his own experience, and not borrow suffering from websites to make his narrator’s experience sound dire and important. The other students’ stories had been about waiting for their step-mom to show up in a far corner of the Best Buy parking lot, and about a girl named Laura’s rough night after a break-up, and a kid who had cancer, and that kid’s brother’s feelings after the funeral, and about basketball, and a car-jacking, and an old man who hates the squirrels who raid his bird feeder. It wasn’t fair to make them, his fellow students, squirm with his second-hand pain. “Your story,” one of them said, “brings us very close to the experience of the newspaper reader, who winces in outrage, and then turns to the sports section. It’s cheap and ephemeral, this shock value from horrific eyewitness accounts, which are probably exaggerated, misunderstood, and distorted in translation. If there’s anything you learn in this writing class, it should be not to write like that.”
But I was there, Quinn told the class. I was in Fallujah. All that is basically from my diary. I was a medic in the army for two years. Now I’m training to be a nurse.
The class felt very sorry then for their assumptions that his shocking narrative was made up. Maybe because he was such an ordinary-looking small person, not particularly fit, not clean-shaven, they hadn’t thought for an instant that he’d been in Iraq. Quinn laughed about it, telling me later. But I could see why he might think poetry was safer than prose. A better bet. To keep things short, and not so explicit. His story, he said, had after all been a piece of junk. Everyone thought they should write about their war experiences. It was really better not to.
Angela Woodward
Angela Woodward is author of the novels Ink, Natural Wonders, and End of the Fire Cult, as well as two collections of short fiction.