The Object is Always Magic: Narrative as Collection
by Gregory Howard
Some years ago I found myself in the British Museum. My family was on vacation for my father's seventieth birthday. We were on our way to Ireland, where my father would get to golf and the rest of us would get to be tourists. I was, in a sense, just passing through. After wandering the galleries for several hours, and just before I was to meet up with my mother and sister, I came upon a small exhibit entitled Medicine Man: The Forgotten Museum of Henry Wellcome. Having long been interested in medical histories, especially failed knowledge and deliberate quackery, and having long been a lover of museums for their transmission of the pleasurable sense of encountering the arcane, I was immediately drawn in. It's safe to say I had no idea what I was about to see. In the room—small by the standards of the museum gallery—all manner of strange and divergent objects were on display. Here there was a male chastity belt, artificial noses made of gold, silver, and ivory, glass eyes in rows and real eyes in jars, artificial hands made of metal and other artificial hands made of ivory, a variety of artificial legs, various anatomical dolls, and phrenological heads; there were advertisements for treatments and medicines, public health posters warning of a variety of diseases, painted depictions of medical techniques and surgeries, and coterie of shamanistic amulets, votive candles, and death masks. I walked through the exhibit with a sense of awe, delight, and a little bit of confusion.
It wasn't my first encounter with this kind of thing. Years earlier I bought five Victorian glass eyeballs at an antique sale outside of Harvard Square in Boston. The antique dealer told me each eyeball had been made specifically for a client, a perfect match to correspond to the client's real eye. They were hazel and blue and green and light brown and some of them had artfully constructed red veins in the sclera in order to enhance the realism of the eye. A hundred of them had been found in an old optometrist's shop that had burned down. The eyeballs were one of the only things to survive the fire. As the dealer told me this, I held various eyeballs in my hand, felt their particular weight, admired their beauty, and thought about the people for whom they were intended. Why did they never pick up their eye? Did something tragic happen to them before they were able? Did they fall out of window? Were they shot by a jealous lover? A jealous spouse? A jealous mailman? Did they lose all their money before it was time to pay for the eyeball? What does a fake eye say about a person anyway? What story can it tell?
In his novel Immortality, Milan Kundera creates an entire book out of a gesture the narrator, a writer named Milan Kundera, witnesses at the pool of his health club. A middle-aged woman, having finished a difficult swimming lesson, turns back smiles and waves. The gesture, the narrator tells us, belongs to that of a young girl. The narrator is fascinated by this discrepancy. Who is this woman? he wants to know. "The essence of her charm," he states, "independent of time, revealed itself to me for a second in that gesture and dazzled me. I was strangely moved. And then the word Agnes entered my mind. Agnes. I had never known a woman by that name."
The lesson here is this: stories come from fragment and from ellipsis.
At the same time I got the glass eyeballs I was collecting junk. Mostly what I collected was rusted scrap metal I found on the street, small bits, big chunks, anything that caught my eye. I would pick it up and bring it back to my room and put it in piles. All over my room there were piles. I imagined I would learn how to solder and create something wonderful from the culture's detritus, the bits sloughed off in our delirious and impatient constant rebirthing. I put the metal in piles and put the piles in boxes. I took them with me everywhere I went for years, boxes upon boxes. I never learned how to solder and didn't create anything, yet still I collected this scrap metal, kept it, and cherished it. Maybe it seems useless but I don't think what I was doing was useless. What I was doing was learning how to be a writer.
(cont.)
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Hospice handclasps
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Further
Gregory Howard website
'Hospice' reviewed @ Kirkus
'Hospice' @ goodreads
'Hospice' @ Project MUSE
'Hospice' excerpt @ HARP & ALTAR
'Hospice' excerpt @ The Collagist
'The Dog', by Gregory Howard
'The Mark', by Gregory Howard
'Aversions', by Gregory Howard
Gregory Howard @ Twitter
Gregory Howard @ Facebook
Buy Hospice
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Hospice floor plans
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Dead Bodies
by Gregory Howard
When the woman was still a girl, and before the disappearance, she and her brother would play dead bodies. Dead bodies meant lying next to each other, silent and immobile, in the parents’ bed. Almost touching, but not touching. It was always afternoon when they did this and their parent’s bedroom was dim and empty. When you are dead, her brother said, it’s dark, but not too dark. At first they still wore clothes, but slowly they took them off until they were naked. Degrees of death, her brother said. The desire to touch him consumed her. Like there was an animal under his skin that needed petting. But touching was forbidden. What do you think about when you’re dead? she asked. Death means not thinking, he said. But sometimes ants and worms come to eat. And yesterday a crow pecked out my eyes. Much to her awe he could be dead for hours. But all she could think was the word “dead”. Dead, dead, dead, she thought, in hopes of making it work.
*
The problem was looking. Even though it was against the rules, she stole glances. This looking was a kind of touch. He would lie on his back in the middle of his bed, his eyes wide open, his lips bright. In the dim light his body was pale and delicate. She hoped that she was as beautiful dead as he was. He was perfect. Later she would lock herself in her room and remember him. In the memory he had no genitals. His arms were crossed gently upon his chest. His skin was the color of white dinner plates. Behind the memory was her hand, hovering and waiting for its chance.
*
But there is also this: she has a photo of the beach where her brother disappeared. In it she and her brother stand in front of their parents. They wear multicolor swimsuits and determined smiles. Behind them the ocean looks grey. The photograph was taken by a passer-by. He was a pudgy, sunburned man in a floppy hat and large sunglasses. What did this have to do with her brother? She remembers her mother running around kitchen table and throwing things. Things in this case mean dinner plates, pots, glasses. The floor was covered with shards and dust. But this is this only thing she can remember. If she had a picture of the beach without the family, or at least without her brother, she thinks she might remember differently. She might remember what her father did. She might remember where her brother went. Although she does remember that she had been collecting small rocks, which she later kept in a jar in the back of her closet. Occasionally talked to them as if they were her brother.
*
He came back four months later but it was not really him. He told her parents that someone had taken him and told him religious truths and that he had, for a time, believed them. This explanation satisfied her parents, but parents are easily satisfied. They merely wanted to look at him. Just look at you, they said. Let’s take a picture. When she held the two pictures next to each other the difference was obvious. Something about the hair and the eyes and the mouth. At night she would sneak into his room to watch him sleep. The way someone dies is like a fingerprint or a snowflake. His body splayed differently. Who are you? she whispered to him while he slept.
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Book
Fiction Collective 2
'When Lucy is little something happens to her brother. He disappears for months and when he returns he’s not the same. He’s not her brother. At least this is what Lucy believes. But what actually happened?
'Comic, melancholy, haunted, and endlessly inventive, Gregory Howard’s debut novel Hospice follows Lucy later in life as she drifts from job to job caring for dogs, children, and older women—all the while trying to escape the questions of her past only to find herself confronting them again and again.
'In the odd and lovely but also frightening life of Lucy, everyday neighborhoods become wonderlands where ordinary houses reveal strange inmates living together in monastic seclusion, wayward children resort to blackmail to get what they want, and hospitals seem to appear and disappear to avoid being found.
'Replete with the sense that something strange is about to happen at any moment, Hospice blurs the borders between the mundane and miraculous, evoking the intensity of the secret world of childhood and distressing and absurd search for a place to call home.'-- FC2
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Excerpt
At the Chateau, Mrs. Taylor still wasn’t talking or taking her pills. This did not seem to be much of a problem for anyone. When she filled out her forms and handed them to the head nurse, the nurse would scan them, make a clicking sound with her tongue, and then return to whatever it was that she was doing.
After a while she grew bored with her duties and began to wander the hospital. She checked in on other patients. Surely, she thought, there must be better patients, patients who would respond to her prompts and advances. But the patients at the hospital were mostly the same. There was a woman who complained loudly about her gout and a woman who kept asking people if they wouldn’t mind giving back her arm. There was also a woman who limped around the hospital calling after a kitty. Here Isabel, the woman called. Here sweet pea. Mommy wants to repay you for what you did. These were the kinds of women there were. The ones that talk, she decided, were worse than the ones that didn’t. Eventually she came back to the small woman and her pills and the window. Together they sat in silence until it was time to go.
But then one day Mrs. Taylor spoke.
This isn’t my first time in the hospital, she said. Her voice was soft and hoarse. No, she said. Not at all. When I was younger, I used to make it a habit of visiting my sick friends in hospitals. I liked visiting these friends. It made me feel alive, she said, quickened, as they say, like I was touching something electric, but in the good way. Like when you touch something you can’t stop touching. In fact, Mrs. Taylor continued, after a moment, I liked it so much that, for a while it’s all I did! I would go from one hospital to the next with my daisies and my chocolates and I would just sit in those rooms, those wonderful sterile rooms, and listen to whichever friend it was ramble on about their health and their dreams and their fears until it was time to go to the next visit, where I would do the same thing. This would go on all day and into the night. And when there weren’t any friends in the hospital, a tragic but not unusual affair to be sure, I would just go to one, any old random hospital, and make a friend, just so I could visit. It wasn’t easy, let me tell you. The business of visiting sick friends in hospitals, it’s a serious one. You have to have patience, physical stamina, emotional fortitude. You have to have a willing ear. And if you’re visiting people you don’t yet know, well, then you have to be prepared. Often I would stand outside and listen in on other people’s conversations. I’d stand outside and smoke like I was a patient or a worker and try to piece together names, so then I could go in for a visit. Or, I’d borrow a friend’s dog and walk right in and tell them the therapy dog had arrived. This was more difficult, obviously. Because you have to find a place to put the dog while you visit the patients. A dog will only get in the way of a visit, you see. The whole thing becomes about the dog. Look at the dog. What’s his name? Isn’t he a good little doggy? These are the things people say when there’s a dog present. You don’t get anything of significance from the patient. You don’t feel wanted with a dog in the room. So, the important thing was to find a room to stash the dog while you visited. It wasn’t easy, like I said, but I had my ways. I had my ways.
Mrs. Taylor stopped for a moment to remember her ways. She looked out the window like she was peering into the porthole of a mysterious yacht. She chuckled.
Anyway, she began again, all of this was mine. The hospitals, the patients, the exhilaration of the taking of life’s fading pulse. It was a grand time to be young. But then one day it all changed. One day, I visited this particular sick friend. He was a young man—we were all young then of course—who but the young live in this way—but this sick friend seemed to me particularly young and he had been in the hospital for so long that it seemed he had been there all his life. But even though he had been in the hospital, in and out of the hospital, you see, for so long, even though this was true, I had not yet visited him. He had called me several times to come visit, pleading to come visit, but I had ignored him. It was a busy time. I was visiting other friends, friends with diseases much more serious than his. I didn’t tell him this, of course. You can’t be cruel. Plus you never know when a mildly sick friend is going to blossom into a truly sick friend. You have to keep your options open. And sure enough, eventually my patience was rewarded and this young man, call him Frank, finally took a turn for the worse. So I borrowed an automobile and drove all the way out to the hospital where he was staying so we might, at last—what do you call it?—commune. The hospital was a mean two-story building located at the apex of a cul-de-sac, a kind of irregular, oblong cul-de-sac, an ill designed cul-de-sac to be sure, that itself was at the end of a long industrial road, with rigorously spaced trash cans on either side. The intention of the trashcans and their spacing were unclear to me, but it seemed like, as a patient you were intended to dispose of everything, strip away everything as you went, your jackets, your shoes, your hats, your caps, the soda cans in the car, the coffee cups and old newspapers, your overnight bags, even that, in order to arrive at the hospital in a state of pure anticipation. This, at least, is what I imagined. So when I walked in through the front doors of the hospital I imagined what it must feel like to have left everything behind, to come in ready. This should have been my first clue that things were about to change. This should have been my first clue to turn right around and find a usual hospital. But I was intent, you see. I was blind with desire, and I kept right on going, right through those hospital doors. Inside, the hospital felt—how can I describe it?—damp. Maybe even moist. My friend, Frank, was located in a small and dull orange room on the second floor, which he shared with an old woman on a ventilator. As I mentioned this friend of mine was young and because he was young and probably for other reasons too, he held out hope that now that he was really bad off, in other words, that this thing making him sick might be killing him. But not only this! He held out further hope that the thing killing him would be singular to him. He told me all this right off the bat. He said he hoped while singular to him this thing would after it was done killing him go on to kill other people too, perhaps many people, although perhaps not in hideous ways. If he was to be honest, he said to me, he hadn’t really thought about that part. While his own dying had not yet been hideous there was no telling what lay around the corner. Things that lay around corners are usually hideous and horrible. Lurking, that’s the term for corners and their things. In any case, the point was this: the more hideous and horrible this unknown thing inside my friend, the better, he thought. Because the more hideous and horrible this thing inside him the better chance that other people, the people who would later succumb to it, and the people around those people, and the people who merely read about sick people, would speak his name with fear and reverence. That, in the end, is what he really hoped for. To be the name of a strange and perplexing disease! What do you think of that? I’ll tell you what I thought. How fantastic! That is what I thought. Just when you think you have heard everything a sick friend has to say, out comes one with something so extraordinary, he might as well have been speaking Swahili. I remember, Mrs. Taylor said, that I wanted to capture every single word of his, to savor his unique perspective. But it was hard to concentrate in that room. First there was the sound of the ventilator stuck to the old woman’s face. Whush Whush was the sound it made. Whush Whush. Plus under those horrible regulation fluorescent lights, the dull orange color took on a dream-like quality. Here he was, my friend, what’s-his-name, describing how his life’s ambition to be recognized was, with some good luck, finally coming true, and all I could think about was my own hands. But this, it turns out, may have been the point. Because it seemed that at this particular hospital there were different color rooms corresponding to the patient’s proximity to death. Orange was closer to death than pale yellow and yellow closer still than pink. This much I gathered on my own. I walked from room to room and snuck looks at the patients’ charts. I watched as patients were transferred, fairly regularly, from one color room to another. However, no one could really explain the purpose for these color-coded rooms. One orderly told me about a plan implemented some time ago by the hospital administrator. He said that idea was to correspond each disease with what the hospital administrator called its adversarial color. You see, every disease, the administrator reasoned, was thought said to have an essential color and each color an opposite and adversarial color, which, when applied to the area surrounding the disease would act as a tonic. So, if a patient came into the hospital complaining of kidney problems, he would be placed immediately into a green room because green is the opposite of yellow, which is the color of kidney disease. But if, once in the green room the patient’s condition got worse, well then that patient would transferred to a yellow room under the assumption that the problem was not the kidneys but instead the liver. Unless, of course, the problem was not the organ per se, but the disease attacking it, like let’s say kidney stones rather than kidney failure, and so the shade of the color, in which case the patient would be transferred to a room with a lighter or darker shade of yellow or green, which explained all the different colors and movements. But that, according to another orderly, was hogwash. The colors were established by a different hospital administrator, and meant as homeopathic cures, much in the manner of early treatment for madness, in which a caged red bird was placed next to a patient for a predetermined period of time in order to attract all the red sickness from the patient’s body and then, having completed its task, was decapitated so that the madness died with the bird. This, according to the orderly, was the reason for all the trashcans. After a patient was better they would strip the room and burn the paint chips in the garbage cans. Oh yeah, his friend said, then why don’t we see nothing burning? It’s done in the wee morning, the orderly said. Administrators don’t do nothing in the wee morning, his friend replied. They don’t get up before noon. Can you believe that? Burning paint? Administrators? The wee morning? What wonderful men! By this time I had lost complete track of my friend. Truthfully, the hospital had become way more interesting to me than any old sick friend. Even one who hoped to one day be a terrible disease. By the time I remembered him, he had already been discharged. Because he was better or because he was worse? I asked the discharge nurse. But she only shrugged. Who knows? is what she said. A little while later I received a note saying my sick friend had indeed died. But not of any disease, known or unknown. After he was released he threw himself under a bus or train or possibly into a lake.
Mrs. Taylor stopped again. This time she looked at the wall. She sighed.
The point is: I never found out the reason for the colors, she said. For some reason, without my sick friend, the hospital was difficult to negotiate and ever more difficult to find. Every day I drove to it and you would think this would make it easier to get to, in the way that daily commuters can drive long distances and not remember a single thing about the drive or the distance and yet still arrive, right as rain, at their desired destination. But the more I drove the harder it became. At intersections, I would idle, confounded by the direction to take, horns behind me honking away, but still I would just stay there and try to think of the hospital. Think, I would say. Hospital, I would say. But the only thing this conjured up was the image of a dog in the moonlight on a neighborhood street. Sometimes I drove for five minutes and ended up back at my own home. I am becoming a loon is what I thought. This may or may not have been true. What was most certainly true was that the hospital was avoiding me. Because here was the truth of the hospital: it was a living dream. The whole point of the hospital, it finally occurred to me, was to produce that strange state I had experienced on my first visit. This was the reason for the colors and the lights and the ventilators and the intermittent sounds of breath and weeping. To ease the patients’ passage into death. The closer you get to dying the more dreamlike everything becomes. You cease to be you in the way that you have always known, the you tied to structures like houses and jobs and people, and more and more dissolve into ideas, thoughts, and memories. You become pure. The hospital, it occurred to me, was designed to create this sensation early in an illness, to ensure the patient experiences their own most perfect self for as long as possible. The hospital was designed to be a long corridor to death!
Mrs. Taylor paused and looked triumphant. Then she looked weary. Finally she looked sad. She turned back to the window and looked outside.
It was this discovery that ultimately undid me, she said softly. Because this was also the reason why the hospital was avoiding me. Who doesn’t want to live inside of a dream? Who doesn’t want their mind to be the world? If word got out about such a place there is no telling what might have happened. The poor hospital would be overrun with people desperate for a somnambulant life. People like me. Of course no one believes me, the woman said. Who could? But I know it is out there. I know it is waiting. I can hear it, she said. Calling me home.
*
p.s. Hey. The blog and I are super happy to use this weekend to help declare the world bettered by the entrance of the first and superb novel by incredible writer and veteran d.l. Gregory Howard (also known as gregorywedwin around these parts). Please spend some of the next two days exploring the backstories, excerpt, etc., and then, should you join me in being utterly convinced, score the thing itself. Thanks, folks, and great thanks to Gregory for giving me some fodder to build this welcome wagon. ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you, sir. Oh, your Manoel de Oliveira post will appear here a week from today, and thank you greatly for it again. ** Thomas Moronic, Awesome, my great pleasure. Thanks for piping in about the election. Yeah, man, at the moment chances seem to be that the US will have a choice of Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton, and while Clinton is the no brainer pick of that duo, that would neither be much a choice nor a promising, inspiring, exciting, or much of anything else situation. I.e., I hear/feel you. Have the best weekend over there, buddy. ** White tiger, Hi, Math! Uh, no, weirdly, I only took about five random photos, so that trip will remain visually muted, I guess. Very exciting news on the music front, or, rather, fronts. Music by Kyte! Wowzer! And new Michael Cameron music is always very welcome. Cool, man, and here's heavily hoping that your labs come back blindingly shiny. ** Cal Graves, Hi, Cal! Yeah, more and more full length things are getting youtubed. Traveling rules. I've been in a heavy traveling mood/mode for a couple of years, and no complaints. You going to get to do any of that? Well, I'm about to travel again, but this time just across Paris because I have to move at the end of this month. Not fun traveling, and I still don't have a new place to live nailed down, so I'm a stress bunny. I'm up to that and to finishing Zac's and film for good and writing and stuff. The next film is pretty early on. We're developing the premise and making notes and figuring stuff out. It's about a guy who wants to explode. I mean literally explode. Cool, and I can only imagine, about the Swans show. I still haven't seen them since they reincarnated. But I saw them back in the '80s, and it was insane. Thanks for the link to the Black Metal movie! I'll watch that this weekend, cool. What are you up to this weekend? Porously, Dennis. ** Keaton, Wait, you're an Emo girl fan yourself, or you're a fan of Emo girls? I'm guessing it's the former. 'Taken 3'? Why, ha ha? I haven't seen any of them, so I don't know what I'm saying. I'm going to look up Irish Car Bombs because I don't know what that is unless you're being literal. If so, urp? ** Kier, Ha ha, denraffe. Like giraffe? You know the giraffe is my favorite animal, right? Fun: your big b'day, yes! Nice gifts. Zac has a 3DS. It's sweet. Which Ulver album? Ulver rocks. That giant newborn lamb sounds scary, but I'm imagining a really, really huge newborn for some reason. Cool photos! Everyone, check out b&w botanical nature through the eyes and lens of artist supreme Kier. My days? Let's see ... Thursday I woke up after good sleep and thought my jet lag was gone, but then I slept like shit that night and woke up lagged-out yesterday, and now I got good sleep again and am okay. I don't know what's going on. Anyway, there was a lot of trying-to-get-an-apartment stuff. Still nothing except for the one place that I really want but will only get if my guarantor agrees to give the owner his bank RIB number, and right now he's very wary to do that, and it would have to happen immediately or I'll lose the place, so I'm stressing about that. I have to start organizing my stuff for the move, which is going to be a lot of work 'cos my place is a huge, disorganized mess, so I need to start this weekend. Zac and I went to see the Bruce Nauman show at Foundation Cartier, and that was really good, and then we ate Indian food at this awesome vegetarian Indian food place by Gare de Nord, yum. I worked on notes for the new film. We delivered the last BluRay/DVD combo submission to the last category (Director's Fortnight) of the Cannes Film Festival that we're submitting 'LCTG' to yesterday. We sorted out the schedule for the final 'LCTG' sound mixing, i.e starting Tuesday morning for a week-plus. I had a coffee with visiting d.l. Cobaltfram at a cafe near the Pompidou yesterday afternoon, and that was nice. Bookforum posted a very nice review of 'Zac's Haunted House', which made me happy. It's here, if interested. Uh, is that all or at least the describable bulk? Maybe. Okay, tell me all about your weekend, okay? I'll do the same, of course, on Monday, of course. Love, me. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Thanks for the UK election knowledge and speculation. I hope you're right, all things considered. 'The Luminol Reels' is terrific, isn't it? Cool, I'm really glad you liked it too. ** Steevee, Hi, Steve. I'm curious about the Young Fathers. I admire Mountain Goats, but I don't feel passionate about their stuff, which seems strange, even to me, but I'll hear what I can hear. How is 'TGoTG'? I'm like you about him. ** Misanthrope, I don't think you can change love, G. It's too collaborative for that to work or something. Unless it's the unrequited kind or the mostly imaginative kind or something? I don't know. Oh, ha ha, I think my investigative interest in 1D was born and then died during the time period in which I made that Zayn post. I don't even know what Niall looks like. I can't even nod on and off on planes except in miraculous circumstances. I hope your gaming was fun. ** Bill, Hi, Bill. Fun with your house-guest, I gather? Yeah, whatever amazingness Berlin had doesn't exist enough to appear before my eyes, I guess. I just don't get what the big deal is about Berlin. But it may hit me next time or something. ** Hyemin kim, Hi! Nice to see you! Yes, so sorry I haven't gotten to your questions. I should be able to in the next days. It's been crazy, travel-y, and/or jet-lagged. Of course I don't mind. I'll do my best to be diligent and very present. Best to you! ** Right. Give it up and over for Gregory Howard and his very lovely, exciting novel this weekend, thank you very much! See you on Monday.