thisnewday

When we left the house, after I'd printed out the school registration forms from online for her son and we were getting into the car for me to drive her to the store and then back to her place again, she looked at me and said,

"You look really stressed. You need to breathe."

And I couldn't say anything, for a minute, because it hit me that this was a line directly out of the book, the one I'm reading again, bit by bit, because I have to.

It's a book about the end of the world, called The Dog Stars, and the survivalist Bangley says it over and over to the protagonist Hig to get him through an attack on the trail near their compound, where Hig is out alone and Bangley has spotted the intruders, from the tower they built to protect their perimeter, but is too far away to effectively engage.

After the attack, which Hig survives due to a sort of deus ex machina provided by Bangley, Hig says,


"Bangley

Yes, Hig?

You're always telling me to breathe.

Laughter through the [portable radio] unit. Genuine relieved laughter. A draught of cold water.

Better than if you fucking don't, huh, Hig?"


The difference is, the one now telling me to breathe is the one out on the trail. Alone with her child in a city where she's afraid. Without a car. Without the one who brought her here.

The one whose mistakes, miscalculations, and outright misdeeds it seems my everlasting duty to amend, adjust, if possible fix.

She is, for want of a softer and therefore less accurate word, another castoff, another girl who has briefly passed through my son's life and then been summarily set adrift.

And so she's out there and I'm back here, inside my own safe perimeter, needing to remember, needing to breathe, needing to become my own better self. Because there are others like her, brave and at risk, who may be depending on it...

LPK
LiveJournal
9.5.2012 (a)

(The exchange between Hig and Bangley, quoted above, is from Peter Heller's book, The Dog Stars, published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2012.)

The reviewer said that he didn't need to talk that way. The broken dialogue. Doesn't add anything, the reviewer said. Idiot. I sometimes wonder if they actually read what they review. Probably not. So many books, so little time. And the day job, because nobody can live by reviewing books. I hope the other job isn't teaching lit. Idiot.

The broken dialogue is because he's mostly alone. Just him, his dog, and his misanthropic neighbor. With his thoughts and the feelings that drive them. So under the circumstances, there is no need. To say what is already complete before the words. And then the other thing. The fever which he thinks may have fried his brain. Altered some processess. Left uncertainty about perceptions of things, including self.

So that this is his voice. It is what remains of what he was. So that what he says is what he presently is. And somehow the reviewer missed, or inexplicably discounted, all of that. Idiot. You should probably quit your day job too, depending on what it is. But enough about such fools. Near the beginning, this is what the voice said. The one that survived the apocalypse:


My name is Hig, one name. Big Hig if you need another.

If I ever woke up crying in the middle of a dream, and I'm not saying I did, it's because the trout are gone every one. Brookies, rainbows, browns, cutthroats, every one.

The tiger left, the elephant, the apes, the baboon, the cheetah. The titmouse, the frigate bird, the pelican (gray), the collared dove. Sad but. Didn't cry until the last trout swam upriver looking for maybe cooler water.

Melissa, my wife, was an old hippy. Not that old. She looked good. In this story she might have been Eve, but I'm not Adam. I am more like Cain. They didn't have a brother like me.

Did you ever read the Bible? I mean sit down and read it like it was a book? Check out Lamentations. That's where we're at, pretty much. Pretty much lamenting. Pretty much pouring our hearts out like water. [The Dog Stars by Peter Heller, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2012]


Thus, on page one, the protagonist/narrator sets up the story. And does so in the broken diction of a man, a survivor, living in a broken world. Which seems to me the perfect expression his own brokenness and that of the culture and civilization in which language itself is embedded.

Meanwhile, the reviewer in question is likely not listening. He's at his day job. Don't forget the fries with that burger, dude...

LPK
LiveJournal
8.14.2012