Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer Dies at Age 83

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The acclaimed Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer passed away yesterday at the age of 83. In 2011, Tranströmer won the Nobel Prize in Literature, with the academy noting that “through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality.” He also won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1990, among many other awards. He is widely considered one of the most important Scandinavian writers since the 1950s and his work has been translated into more than fifty languages.

A Language that Conceals: an interview with Kazuo Ishiguro, author of The Buried Giant

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Ten years after the publication of his last novel, Kazuo Ishiguro has come out with a new book, The Buried Giant. A former winner of the Man Booker Prize and considered one of the best British writers alive today, Ishiguro is a master of the understated. His works feature narrators that speak so simply and so plainly, they appear to have almost no affect at all. Still, their stories are dark and poignant, and it’s often not until the last few pages of an Ishiguro novel that we realize how deeply we’ve been moved.

In The Buried Giant, an elderly couple sets off on a journey through a mythical England populated by ogres, dragons, knights and giants. Axl and Beatrice are in search of their son, whom they can’t quite remember how they lost. This is because the inhabitants of The Buried Giant’s mythical world suffer a collective amnesia, a ‘mist’ that keeps them from holding onto certain memories, both personal and historical. As we travel with Axl and Beatrice, the novel asks us what memory (and forgetting) means to a person, to a couple, to a society. In many ways, the book is surprising (The New York Times calls it ‘a departure’), but it also showcases some of Ishiguro’s most essential qualities as a writer: subtle prose, a dreamlike atmosphere, and powerful questions about loss and memory.

I sat down with Ishiguro in Knopf’s office early on a Friday, just before it began to snow. We talked about his writing process, collective memory, Inglourious Basterds, and his new novel’s recent role in the conversation about genre.

Chang: Each of your novels is so unlike the one that came before it. The Buried Giant has surprised a lot of readers. Can we talk about what influenced you while you were working? What books were you reading, or drawing upon?

Ishiguro: Well, I did a great deal of research and read quite a lot before I wrote the book. But I don’t know that the books I read during the actual writing process necessarily have much to do with it.

I find that when you’re writing, it becomes quite a battle to keep your fictional world in tact. In fact, as I write, I almost deliberately avoid anything in the realm of what I’m working on. For instance, I hadn’t seen a single episode of Game of Thrones. That whole thing happened when I was quite deep into the writing, and I thought, ‘If I watch something like that, it might influence the way I visualize a scene or tamper with the world that I’ve set up.’

Chang: It sounds like the planning stage and the writing stage were two very separate parts of your process.

Ishiguro: Yes, it’s really when I’m planning the project that I actively look for ideas and read very widely. I spend a lot of time planning. I’m quite a deliberate writer in that way. A lot of writers I know just work with kind of a blank canvas. They feel it out and improvise on it and then they look to see what kind of material they’ve got.

I’ve never been able to do that. Even at the start of my career, when maybe I would have been a little more reckless. I’ve always needed to know quite a lot about the story before I start to write the actual prose. I’ve always needed a solid idea before getting started.

Chang: How do you know when you have a solid idea?

Ishiguro: It’s got to be something that I’m able to articulate to myself in about two to three sentences. And those sentences have to be compelling, much more than the sum of their parts. I should be able to feel the tension and emotion arising from that little summary I’ve created, and then I know I’ve got a project to work on. With The Buried Giant, for example, the starting point was something like: ‘There’s a whole society where people are suffering some sort of collective, and strangely selective, amnesia.’

Chang: And that was the summary you had in mind before you sat down to the page?

Ishiguro: Yes, but that’s not quite enough for an idea. That’s more of a concept. I guess if I had to write the next line of the summary, it would be, ‘There’s a couple who fears that without their shared memory, their love will vanish.’ And then the third line would be that the nation around them is in some kind of strange tense peace.

Alright, so I didn’t literally write those sentences down, but that’s how I start a project. I start with something quite abstract like that, and then I start to plan and do my research.

I tend to read quite a lot of non-fiction around the themes I want to explore.

Chang: Are you fairly careful about curating what you do read or think about while you plan a novel?

Ishiguro: Not necessarily. For this book in particular, I read a very good Canadian book called Long Shadows by Erna Paris, It was written in the early 2000s and documents her travels, looking at the various kinds of brewing or buried trouble. There was also Postwar by Tony Judt, and Peter Novich’s The Holocaust in American Life.

Now, those nonfiction books went into it the research part, but I find that almost anything around that point can be influential. Around that stage is when I’m most sensitive, or most open to influence. Almost every movie I see, every book I’m reading, I’m thinking: ‘Is there something here that might nudge me toward an image, or an idea, or even a technique?’

I remember I happened to be watching Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds at a formative point. There’s a long scene where the American guys are in a German bar, pretending to be German soldiers, and they’re playing this game and speaking in bad German, and it goes on for this incredible amount of time. You know it’s going to end in some terrible violence, but it goes on and on.

That seems to have nothing to do with my book. No one would detect Tarantino as an influence while reading The Buried Giant, but I thought it was such a great way to deal with an explosion of violence. You actually don’t have to spend a lot of energy on the violence itself. It’s the lead up, the tension. So, yes, I’m quite open to reading or hearing or seeing anything at that point in the process.

Chang: What was behind the decision in setting The Buried Giant in a mythical, medieval England? Did you know this would surprise people the way it has?

Ishiguro: Often the setting comes quite late in the process. I usually have the whole story, the whole idea, and then I hunt for the location, for a place where I can set it down.

It’s sort of like I’ve wandered into people’s countries without knowing where I’ve landed.

So I’m a little bit naïve, maybe, about what the finished thing will look like in terms of genre. It’s sort of like I’ve wandered into people’s countries without knowing where I’ve landed. And after I’ve been there for quite some time, someone says ‘you realize you’re in Poland now.’ And I say, ‘Oh really? I just followed this trail of stuff I needed.’

I didn’t wonder how people would define or categorize The Buried Giant until it was done. And then as publication approached, I started to see it from the outside. I’d been so absorbed with trying to get the thing to work from the inside.

I did think about setting it in a very real contemporary, tense situation. I considered Bosnia in the 1990s as a setting, and well, I thought about Rwanda but didn’t consider it for too long, because I feel unqualified to write about Africa. I know so little about African politics, African culture. The disintegration of Yugoslavia I felt closer to, because I live in Europe. These massacres were occurring right on our doorstep. I wanted to look at a situation in which a generation (or two) has been living uneasily in peace, where different ethnic groups have been coexisting peaceably and then something happens that reawakens a tribal or societal memory.

Chang: What made you ultimately decide on this more distant reality?

Ishiguro: Well, if I had done that you’d be asking me why I was suddenly interested in Yugoslavia, and if I have relatives that used to go there, and what do I think about what Milosevic did or said on this or that day. It becomes a completely different kind of book. Some people write those kinds of books brilliantly. It’s almost like reportage. They’re very powerful and very urgent books.

Maybe in the future I’ll feel compelled to write that kind of specific and current book, but right now I feel that my strength as a fiction writer is my ability to take a step back. I prefer to create a more metaphorical story that people can apply to a variety of situations, personal and political.

Setting the book in an other, magical world allows me to do that. Every society, every person even, has some buried memories of violence or destruction. The Buried Giant asks whether awakening these buried things might lead to another terrible cycle of violence. And whether it’s better to do this at the risk of cataclysm, or whether it’s better to keep these memories buried and forgotten.

The same question applies at the personal level, say, in a marriage. When is it better to just leave certain things unsaid for the sake of getting on together? Is there something phony about a relationship if you don’t face everything that’s happened? Maybe it makes your love less real.

Chang: Do you feel that the conversation about genre boundaries, which has been a major focus of the book’s reviews and press, has taken away from these questions the book is asking?

It’s a much broader conversation, isn’t it? What do we call fantasy?

Ishiguro: I didn’t actually anticipate that there would be so much attention paid to the genre of the book. I read Neil Gaiman’s review in the NYTBR which opens with the words, “Fantasy is a tool of the storyteller.” It’s a very interesting piece that, in a way, is much bigger than my book. It’s a much broader conversation, isn’t it? What do we call fantasy? What do we call sci-fi? I guess the subtext is that mainstream fiction and literary fiction look down on fantasy tropes but, as Gaiman argues, those tropes can be very powerful, and they’re part of an ancient tradition. There were a couple of other pieces that appeared like that. And of course, there was a bit of a spat with Ursula K LeGuin. Although, she’s since retracted what she said on her blog, which was gracious of her. I think it’s a much larger dialogue she’s been involved with in the past with authors like Margaret Atwood, for example.

I think the positive side of all of this is that it is quite an exciting time at the moment in fiction. I do sense the boundaries are breaking down, for readers and for writers. Younger readers move very freely between genres and between what used to be fairly strict categories of ‘popular’ and ‘literary’ fiction. My daughter and her generation, for example. They were quite literally the same age as Harry and Hermione when the first Harry Potter book was published. In a way, they kind of followed that whole storyline in real time, year by year.

For that generation, one of the coolest, most exciting things to happen in their young lives was reading books. Of course, now they read widely just like any person interested in literature, but their foundation, their love of books is based on Harry Potter, Philip Pullman — that whole explosion of very intelligent children’s literature that they grew up with. It’s very exciting, I think — this shift in what constitutes ‘serious’ fiction.

Chang: Even though The Buried Giant has arguably nothing to do with Japan, I love the way there’s still something Japanese that comes across in its style and tone. Are you very conscious of language and tone when you are writing or does that come more naturally?

Ishiguro: At the beginning of my career it was quite deliberate. A Pale View of Hills was set in Japan. My characters were Japanese, so of course they had to speak in a Japanese kind of English. And in An Artist of the Floating World, the characters were not only Japanese but they were meant to be speaking in Japanese even though it was written in English, so I spent a great deal of energy there finding an English that suggested there was Japanese being spoken or translated through. Maybe some of that effort has stayed with me. I use a formal, careful kind of English, but to some extent that may just be my natural or preferred way of using the language.

For example, the butler in Remains of the Day is English, but he often sounds quite Japanese. And I thought that was fine, because he is a bit Japanese.

Chang: Right, that’s one of the brilliant parts of his character.

Ishiguro: In The Buried Giant, I wasn’t thinking consciously about Japan or Japanese, but the priorities of the language, I suppose, are still the same. I quite like language that suppresses meaning rather than language that goes groping after something that’s slightly beyond the words. I’m interested in speech that kind of conceals and covers up. I’m not necessarily saying that’s Japanese. But I suppose it goes with a certain kind Japanese aesthetic; a minimalism and simplicity of design that occurs over and over again in Japanese things, you know. I do like a flat, plain surface where the meaning is subtly pushed between the lines rather than overtly expressed. But I don’t know if that’s Japanese, or if that’s just me.

Author photo by Jeff Cottenden, courtesy of Knopf

Media Frankenstein #8: Florida

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The Sisters of Mercy

THE HEAD: The Sisters of Mercy’s A Slight Case of Overbombing: Greatest Hits, Volume 1 (1993)

I wasn’t raised in Florida. San Diego saw me through my childhood and adolescence until I moved to the East Coast for college. Currently, I live in New Orleans, which is nothing, of course, like San Diego. San Diego has boardwalks and neon and flautas; New Orleans has gators and crime and parades. Both have palm trees, lots of palm trees, some of them native, but most of them not. And so it stands to reason that Florida, or anyway the idea of Florida — in some ways an amalgam of Southern California and Southern Louisiana — is a place I’ve been circling all my life, though I have only sort of been there. As a boy, I went to West Palm Beach, say, a dozen-times-plus to kibitz with grandmother. Walking its streets is an experience I can only describe (cribbing roughly from my father) as “touring the site where a neutron bomb hit, wiping out everyone except for the old people.” Not that West Palm Beach is shabby. It has a cauterized pristineness; planter boxes, blasted granite. And yet I sensed beyond the palms and the ocean’s susurrus a tingle of something — something weird and unknowable, almost uncanny, beneath the veil of what was seen. I would come to recognize this feeling later in the bland, politicized way educated adults recognize most everything that evades them as children: Florida is a complex place. Its crossfade of cultures, its flora and fauna, its palatial golf courses and acres of swamp, and all too often in the news its seismic wealth gap and its prejudiced laws, its environmental ignorance and failed prison system. Even on a surface level, the state is bizarre in its very overtness — Miami’s beachfronts and the spires of Walt Disney, Lake Worth’s esplanades and the tracks of Daytona. No place can look like this, you think, and not have something else behind it. Ergo, as a child, that sensation I had that what I was seeing was not what I saw. What better band, then, to embody this feeling than what I was listening to at sixteen: the British Goth-rock outfit The Sisters of Mercy — specifically, 1993’s greatest hits volume A Slight Case of Overbombing, sprawling in running time, sinister-kitschy, with an almost Wagnerian over-production. Since I was a hot-weather Goth I can tell you: combat-boots appear black, even blacker, in sunshine. Emerging originally out of the mid-to-late 80s with Andrew Eldritch (born Andrew William Harvey Taylor) on vocals and (personified drum-machine) Doktor Avalanche on beats, Sisters of Mercy epitomize a subcultural moment so glittering and distinct that you need shades to see it: the 1980s’ death-rock scene. And even though A Slight Case of Overbombing contains only one direct reference to Florida in the locomotive of sleaze that is 1990’s “Doctor Jeep” (from the album Vision Thing) — “Everybody shouts on I Love Lucy/Pee Wee reads the evening news/A pre-owned song or a second-hand Uzi/Everybody got a job to lose/Here come the golden oldies/Here come the Hizbollah/Businessmen from South Miami/Humming AOR” — the record conjures up the state with every sax solo and dance-lick of bass. There is an artificiality to greatest hits albums that perfectly mirrors the Florida crux: packaged pleasure on the outside, incomprehension underneath. What’s more the band isn’t even American; they come from Leeds, England, an ocean away. And yet the album Vision Thing is a limey critique of Bush I’s presidency, whose family dynasty, years later, would come to have controlling stakes in Florida’s government via Jeb Jr. (Not to mention 2000’s election charade where Florida was the battleground, those “hanging chads” ushering W. to office.) Andrew Eldritch’s voice is a crooning lost soul among the drums and keyboard mists. The soaring female choruses on “This Corrosion” and “Dominion/Mother Russia” could score the revelation of a sunset over the Gulf of Mexico, arterial red and tangerine. If there is a better city-at-night driving song than “Lucretia, My Reflection” then I haven’t heard one, better still if it’s through Miami, Daytona Beach, Tampa, Orlando or any one of many of Florida’s cities, lit up garish and strange in the tarns of their bays. As Eldritch sings on “Detonation Boulevard,” another of the album’s standout tracks: “Through the angel rain/ Through the dust and the gasoline/ Through the cruelty of strangers/ To the neon dream… Long distance information/ Disconnect me if you can…” Under Florida’s wraparound shades there is gloom, but Sisters of Mercy don’t glare it away. They feed it to the drum-machine as the skirt of the hurricane blows into harbor.

The Isle of Youth

THE TORSO: The Isle of Youth by Laura Van Den Berg (2013)

Laura Van Den Berg’s second collection of short stories endeavors a similar chipping-away of Florida’s sparkling exterior, the main difference being that several of the stories actually feature Florida. Van Den Berg, an Orlando native, has always written with a very specific kind of disquieting beauty about her home-state; she is not unlike Flannery O’Connor was to Georgia, for example, or Shirley Jackson to Massachusetts. The stories in The Isle of Youth serve up their noir with a bitter aftertaste of existential terror and uncertainty. In conversation with Jeff VanderMeer (The Southern Reach Trilogy, 2014), another Floridian, Van Den Berg had this to say on her provenance as a writer: “The storms, rapid growth and decay, the rotting heat: Florida is an extreme climate in many ways and it has imbedded in me a love for extreme landscapes, in addition to places that are weird and ungraspable. The harder it is for me to ‘sum up’ a place, the more it interests me, and I know that’s the Floridian talking.” In “Opa-Locka” (an actual Florida enclave “ten miles north of Miami” whose name “came from the Indian name Opatishawokalocka, which meant ‘the high land north of the little river on which there is a camping place,’” in Van Den Berg’s words), a pair of sister private eyes hired to tail a shady husband shack up in an apartment on the strip, “a Glock 22” on the “bedside table.” “It was a rough neighborhood,” Van Den Berg writes. “…I had tried to talk my sister into moving, citing crime statistics and reasonable rents in other neighborhoods, but she loved the two-story stucco building with the concrete balcony and the drained swimming pool half-filled with bottles and empty cigarette packs.” While in the title story “The Isle of Youth,” a pair of identical twins — one of them a party-girl, the other a librarian — meet in Miami to triage an “emergency” in the party-girl’s life that grows ever more vague as her present unravels. The agreement: the librarian-sister will pose as her twin so the party-girl sister can get out of town. Librarian-sister takes twin-sister’s pills, dons twin-sister’s makeup, haunts twin-sister’s haunts. Van Den Berg writes of a club on Miami Beach that the narrator visits, posing as her sister: “A stainless steel bar stretched down one side of the room; on the other, a staircase spiraled into the darkness upstairs. In the back, DJs stood on a stage and people danced beneath streams of flashing light. The lights made the dancing bodies look fragmented and strange.” Estrangement is common in Van Den Berg’s fiction. The characters know not why they do, only that they must recklessly follow their actions. They are as disconnected from themselves and each other as the ebbing and placeless landscape that contains them: its refuse-filled pools and its bass-thumping beachfronts. The only thing darker than life’s shadow-side is finding that life has no meaning at all, that the self is flagrant and garish façade. As the “The Isle of Youth[’s]” narrator reflects at the end of the story: “It was startling to see how many people I mistook for my sister…; it was even more startling to realize that to mistake someone for Sylvia was to mistake them for myself, that there were so many women who, in the dark, could pass for me.”

Monster

THE LEGS: Monster dir. Patty Jenkins (2003)

Where A Slight Case of Overbombing embodies Florida’s shadow-side and where The Isle of Youth pursues that shadow into Floridians’ hearts, Patty Jenkins’ film Monster, about serial killer Eileen Wuornos, chases it back to the place where it lives. Wuornos, who killed seven men while working as a prostitute between 1989 and 1990 in Florida, has a tragic life story of rape and abuse and homelessness and mental illness. Yet the film based on her life is disarmingly tender. The first scene has Wuornos (Charlize Theron) sitting in pouring rain beneath a freeway overpass, holding a loaded pistol. Later on, we learn that she was contemplating suicide. She goes to get a beer instead. In the bar she meets Selby (Christina Ricci), a woman hoping to pick her up, and even though Wuornos insists she is not gay, they become fast and ill-defined friends (Wuornos’ real partner was named Tyria Moore.) The rest of the film parallels Eileen’s descent into bloodthirsty madness alongside her relationship with Selby. Wuornos attempts to keep totally separate her love for her “girl” and her hate for mankind, and the way that the tension plays out in her psyche, which we can hear in voiceover, makes the film darkly funny but also heart-wrenching; we recognize Wuornos’ plight. To earn the money that supports them, Selby thinks Eileen is hooking, when in reality Wuornos is killing her johns and ransacking their cars and clothes. “I’ve done everything in the whole wide world hoping that you’d never have to know,” she says to Selby midway through the movie. “So you could go on thinking that people are good, and kind, and that shit makes sense, you know.” Charlize Theron is transcendently good in a performance that would later earn her the Best Actress Oscar in 2003. Much was made of her physical transformation for the role from red-carpet dame to itinerant hooker, and yet it is the little things that Charlize Theron really nails: Wuornos’ smile and her sharp, side-mouthed laugh, her swagger and her violent strength, the gleam in her eye for the woman she loves, her crackling demeanor before doing murder. As Wuornos is led out of the courthouse after her first conviction, having been sentenced to death (an execution that the State of Florida carried out in 2002), she clings to her love for Selby against eternity, which might seem tone deaf did it not work so well. Have you ever seen Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)? Well, anyway, it’s a little like that. Wuornos narrates: “Love conquers all. Every cloud has its silver lining. Faith can move mountains. Love will always find a way. Everything happens for a reason. Where there’s life there’s hope. Hope — they got to tell you something.” The awkwardness of the emotional dynamics in this sequence is striking — oh beloved serial killer, true romantic to the end! — and while the viewer grapples with them, a grotesque poignancy starts to worm its way in. Wuornos could’ve done something else with her life but when life betrayed her she learned to do this. And in some ways, perhaps, Jenkins’ film could be viewed as the story of a woman who discovers her calling and with it true love, just with really bad timing. Florida is vital to the film for several reasons — not least of all its mis-en-scene of tract houses in grassy lots, of truck stops bathed in eerie blue, of the Florida sunset as red as a knife-wound. Van Den Berg’s protagonists are strangers to themselves, a quality reflected in the character of Florida, though never once in Jenkins’ film does Wuornos not know who she is. While Van Den Berg’s characters spiral away from themselves and the thing they are actively seeking, Wuornos grows comfortably into herself — her status as a person on the margins of life and her prodigious talent for murdering dirtbags. Misandry, it starts to seem, was waiting for her all her days. Monster returns Florida to itself: a fucked-up realm of biker bars and fleabag motels where you pay by the day and fast cars on the interstate with spoilers in the shape of sharks, some of them sub-woofing Sisters of Mercy as they speed toward the neon ramparts of the city. Wuornos’ weapon of choice is a gun: some of the men she shoots dead in their cars, while others she lures to their deaths through the forest. The scene in which she kills a man for no other reason than that he has seen her is anxious, nauseating stuff. When he mentions his family in hopes it will save him, she yells in agony and fires. In her off-hours, she and Selby visit somewhere called Fun World. Wuornos rides the bumper cars. She waves at Selby from the track with her stringy blonde hair and her soiled trucker cap and the night-palms of Florida harbor this gesture, recalling an innocence already lost.

Alternative Cuts:

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937); The Supremes’ Diana Ross and the Supremes: Greatest Hits (1967); The Paperboy dir. Lee Daniels (2012)

Mega-Python vs. Gatoroid dir. Mary Lambert (2011); The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanDermeer (2014); Deicide’s The Best of Deicide (2003)

Bully dir. Larry Clark (2001); Citrus Country by John Brandon (2010) and/or Swamplandia! by Karen Russell (2011); Lynyrd Skynyrd’s All Time Greatest Hits (2000)

Fun, Fantasy, and Fine Art: The Fine Art of Fucking Up by Cate Dicharry

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“I am sitting behind my desk watching the downpour when I catch the scent of bacon,” begins Cate Dicharry’s The Fine Art of Fucking Up from Unnamed Press, “Dunbar is in the building again, despite the restraining order.” Thus we are introduced to a quirky, kooky cast of educators, the odd pairing of artists with academia. Dicharry’s novel is a dark and funny mix of slapstick, observational humor and institutional satire. Ultimately, this is a caper, and Dicharry’s ability to write humor into tragedy, into her main character’s unspooling, makes for an entertaining read.

Full disclosure: Dicharry and I were both students at the UCR Palm Desert MFA several years apart. We have many mutual friends, but do not know each other well.

The Fine Art begins with its main character, Nina Lanning, administrative coordinator of the School of Visual Arts, in crisis. Her boss, Ramona, who should be running the school, has lost herself in a fantasy world of romance novel obsession — so much so that she ignores all human interaction. The professors of her school, each a talented and self-obsessed artist, only come running to her when it serves their personal needs. One of the professors, Don Dunbar, has been sneaking back into the building in violation of his restraining order, frying up bacon in protest. At home, Nina’s husband, Ethan, decides he wants a baby, now. As a “test”, he brings home an international student that they can care for and use for practice. He tells Nina:

“He showed up in class this afternoon, distraught, I mean literally in tears. He’s just figured out they’re closing his dorm for the summer. He hadn’t been able to understand the email notifications or fliers. He had no idea. Nobody told him. Can you believe that? Nobody checked that he had made arrangements. He can’t go home because his visa is for one entry per year, so if he leaves he won’t be able to get back in time for the fall semester. He has nowhere to go.”

Nina doesn’t want a baby and she certainly doesn’t want an undergrad. That’s only the beginning. One of the joys of Dicharry’s tale is how many crises are happening at once. All of them, dire. Nina Lanning is juggling one bad thing after another, and seeing her drop the ball is funny. Dicharry understands timing and writes with wit.

Nina’s biggest problem — more than squabbling professors and procreating husbands — is an impending flood, poised to fill the architectural wonder of an arts building with sludge from the river, destroying the archives and a priceless Jackson Pollock painting. With Ramona indisposed, it’s up to Nina to coordinate the evacuation.

It occurs to me this will not be possible. We will be unable to evacuate everything in time for the river cresting. Things will be lost. Equipment. Furniture. Art. We’ll have to prioritize, decide what to save and what to sacrifice, designations over which there will no doubt be disagreement. Panic sets in, and I feel my chest constrict.

The scrutiny on Nina makes for great comedy, and Dicharry knows when to release the pressure valve for laughs. What makes this more than a light romp, though, is the way Dicharry underscores her main character’s frustrations with real dilemmas. Her marriage — which seems happy and genial from the outside — is in crisis precisely because she and her husband are not talking about it. Her reluctance to have a baby is rooted in an earlier decision to have an abortion. She wonders about what happened to her identity as an artist after becoming an administrator. Dicharry defines Nina’s rich inner life, and thus gives weight to her struggles rather than using them for cheap laughs.

But laughs are plenty and often priceless. Dicharry writes Nina with keen awareness about just how funny this tragedy is, even as it’s happening. During a spirited break-in to save the Pollock painting, she falls out of a canoe and into the rising floodwaters.

Never could I have imagined such circumstance: the building underwater, Ramona trapped inside, the Pollock in peril, Suzanne and James in love in a kayak, Ethan at home playacting fatherhood with an international exchange student, and me, wanted by campus police staggering around in sewage, a chipmunk carcass thumping against my breastbone as I try to keep myself from throwing up.

“I note, with all possible connotation and entirely of my own doing,” Nina tells us, “that I am immersed to the chin in shit.” In fact, Nina gets into so much of it that readers will revel in trying to figure out how she gets herself out. When it seems that no more terrible things can happen, Dicharry pushes harder.

The Fine Art of Fucking Up is a remarkable debut novel. Dicharry creates a complex cast of characters that are each so driven by ego that they’re unable to play well with others. Nina, the book’s “vaudevillian straight man”, remains calm while her life crumbles around her. When she inevitably takes hold of the reins, she ends up creating even more of a mess. Dicharry uses Nina’s plight to highlight the absurdities and absurd personalities that anyone who has worked in a school will recognize. The Fine Art of Fucking Up is a strong debut, a light but literary course in bureaucratic nonsense.

To purchase Cate Dicharry’s The Fine Art of Fucking Up, click here to visit the Unnamed Press site.

Us Against the End: an interview with Porochista Khakpour, author of The Last Illusion

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I don’t remember how I first heard of Porochista Khakpour or her second novel, The Last Illusion, which was released in paperback this month, but I’m fairly confident it was social media’s fault. Usually how this sort of thing happens to me these days is I see a friend post something and a book cover catches my eye. Then I look into the book and if it sounds like I’ll enjoy it, I put it on my ever-growing wish list of books.

For Christmas my wife bought me a signed hardback of The Last Illusion, having seen it on my wish list, and I consumed the book in a way I hadn’t consumed a book in years: I savored it. I read it slowly, trying desperately to draw it out. I haven’t been so excited about a book in a long long time and it inspired me to want to do something else I haven’t done in too long: interview someone.

I reached out to Porochista through Twitter, where she has become one of the few people whose tweets I actually try not to miss, and she was kind enough to indulge my questions via email.

Ryan W. Bradley: The Last Illusion has a beautiful balance between the nostalgia of storytelling and a very modern plot and setting. It is easier to screw up trying to meld such disparate worlds of story than it is to nail it because consistency becomes so important in the voice of the narrative. Were there ever moments where you had to cut things out of the story purely because they worked against that balance?

Porochista Khakpour: I originally imagined something like The Wild Palms, one of the first Faulkner novels I fell in love with. I imagined two separate stories in alternating chapters. I imagined their call and response as subtle. But then as I got deeper into the draft I realized the two stories were very much the same one, that they needed each other, that their friction would create something interesting. It was a problem-solving challenge at that point. By the next few drafts, the relationship between Zal and Silber, man and bird, Y2K and 9/11, ancient Persia and modern-day NYC — it was all there, the connections. A mash-up is only successful if it’s a little bit surprising to the creator too, I think — that can be contagious to those on the other end. But it can’t just be a trick either — I don’t think either story could stand on its own, not the way I wanted it. The satiric, the surreal, the stylized — these were important to me not just ambiently but thematically. I wanted to create something altogether new mainly because the story made a move like that necessary.

RWB: You talk about friction between stories and that propels much of the plot, but the friction I found most interesting throughout was that within Zal. There’s the man and bird dichotomy, but I think it goes a lot deeper than that. You have mentioned in other interviews how you tend to write male characters, and in at least one from after your first book came out you mentioned trying to write more female characters. Zal takes a much more complex role than a male or female, he is an outsider to gender, and even humanity in a way. He has been told what he is supposed to be in his life, first by his mother, then by Hendricks and his therapist. But as he strikes out on his own he starts to find some ownership of manhood, it becomes a sort of discovery. He goes through layers of identification. It’s really intriguing. How do you see Zal’s flexibility in this process in the context of how he is or isn’t able to relate to the other characters, and do you think the complexity of his gender blank slate and self-discovery has changed the way you approach writing male or female characters?

PK: Very interesting question. This comes at the end of a hard day, when I’m trying to do everything I can not to cry and give up, but let me take a stab at it. I’ve always been interested in coming of age — Karen Russell and I were speaking about this at the Lannan talk we just gave and she was paraphrasing Antonya Nelson in part and saying that she loves coming of age as a subject because we never stop coming of age. For adults, this quest is still very real — to inhabit that idea of a whole person in us. I wanted coming of age, coming of human, coming of manhood, all to be here in different and similar ways. Is masculinity a metaphor? I want to snort a bit at my own question, but in a way it has been for me — maybe virility, or what the Chinese might call “yang energy.” I do find the worst parts of the stereotypically male — some archetypal straight white male for example — to be very interesting — partially because it’s rather easy to trace all the problems in this world to it, wars, genocides, homicides, you name it. Male energy, hate it or hate it, it has been historically a dynamic force in the world. Is it simply the hormone testosterone? Is it the idea of manhood? Is it the physical body of the male, what it implies, the negative space it requires? And yet aren’t men the ultimate underdogs in the end? We even outlive them, always have! On another level though, I was a bit of a tomboy and very inspired by my father and brother, and men I was friends with — again inspired is a strange word for me, because their shortcomings and mishaps were in their own way inspiring. Look at all that foolishness, and yet they survive! I think my first novel deals with men much more directly. Here I wanted to look more closely at the asexual and the pansexual, and so, yes, in a way it made me challenge what I thought of as male or female. But everything in this book is stylized, satiric, a bit animated in my mind. So it’s never quite that simple. This book can’t quite change what I think of anything — can any book really? maybe — because its universe is its universe. It’s not ours. The book is a retelling, on several tracks.

RWB: Whoever convinced us that we ever stop coming of age did humanity a disservice.

Survival is another strong thread in the book, and not just with Zal and his journey from bird to man. Hendricks is clinging to Zal in an effort to survive the loss of his wife, Silber is clinging to his reputation, Asiya is clinging to anything she can to survive the tempest of her visions and emotions. Human survival is at the forefront of my interests as a writer, and I loved seeing this swirl of frailty throughout your book. Ultimately the book blooms into a sort of 9/11 fable, which provides a wide lens on the same topic. What drives you, personally, to explore particular themes and do you think there’s something to be learned about ourselves or humanity at large by plumbing aspects of primal nature like survival?

PK: Your questions are so beautifully worded and intelligently thought out, I feel like a bit like an idiot before them. There are two ways to approach this question for me. One is a sort of autobiographical cheat: many of my friends and lovers have commented on how I am often preoccupied with life on a very basic survival level. I guess I know what they mean. I am a pretty good person in emergencies — maybe my best self then — it’s like all my life I wait for those moments to be truly me! I become calm, rational, a good leader when usually I’m a distracted goofy follower at best. Anyway I do think of life in terms of food-clothes-shelter and I wonder how much of that is New York, a place nobody can quite survive in and yet we somehow do. I also think it might have had to do with so many heavy survival challenges as a child — first memories all war and revolution, the uprooting, the looking for a new home, the setting in the US and then struggling to survive without a grasp on the language and then being forced to rapidly master it — the playground was such a daunting place for this little immigrant. And then so many awful life events, like 9/11. I think everything we do goes back to basic survival and I get made fun of at times for always saying things like, well, is it going to kill you? No? Then do it? Or what’s the worst that can happen, you die? And really that is all there is. Us against that, our end, the thing that we can’t survive.

I have a more theoretical answer but perhaps that’s the most honest. Writing is a performance and sometimes we answer as critics but you are a much better reader than I am — the best thing I can do is tell you where my impulse was, I suppose. But what a day to talk about survival — the city is all ice and I’ve taken three bad falls and I’m all bruises and cuts, and I keep thinking how crazy that this can kill you, or that choking on a sandwich like the great Mama Cass, how radical our fragility is indeed…

RWB: I’m just trying to do justice to you and the book!

I love when someone finds the best of themselves in difficult situations. There’s something truly amazing when everything goes wrong and you feel suddenly slowed down, calm, and think to yourself, “I’ve got this.”

You mention death, and like you said, it seems like it’s always the smallest things that hit us, make us think “so this is how I’m going to go.” My nearest-death experience was choking on a bagel and that was exactly what I thought to myself.

People often call death the great motivator. But it seems you and I are alike in our view of death, that it’s the worst that can happen, and eventually it will. For everyone. Do you think death motivates you? And how do you see it playing a role in your writing, because as a reader I didn’t once find myself thinking about death in The Last Illusion, everything to me seemed like it was focused on perseverance?

PK: Okay! Death! I made it through a cancer scare yesterday — had some bad news from a doctor that turned into good news — so I’m feeling bold. I am obsessed with death — it’s a big part of my everything. Was it Dali who speaks of Lorca practicing his “death face?” The Spanish obsession with death is not unlike the Persian one. I am so hooked on the great Sadegh Hedayat of Iran and his 1937 surrealist masterpiece The Blind Owl, which I got to write the intro to in 2011 (Grove put out a new edition of the English translation) — so much of my feelings about death and creation are tied into the nightmares of that book. But I am most obsessed with death because I am most obsessed with staying alive — and that is in the psyche of all the characters of The Last Illusion too. The end is coming — a sort of end is coming anyway — and what can we do but try desperately to live? The book is very anti-nature in some sense, very much pro-civilization. The City is everything, it IS the cosmos. The rural, or the village of the first chapter, is almost to me a paradise lost — I meant those sections to seem a bit unreal — the rural and the ethnic-specific there where everything went wrong, where everything could have gone to death, where myth meets a sort of nightmare of invisibility. But The City is where everything is laid bare, where all of life’s theater plays out. It’s shorthand for the world, of course — even all our nicknames for New York, “the Greatest City” all of that. The horrors of symbolism made literal — it’s all over the 9/11 narrative, the hijackers very intentionally created that. Symbolism and spectacle, so many of the seductions and tools of the artist now turned material, literal, organic — how horrifying it can be. What is metaphor and what is not, in our manmade world, all the déjà vu, the Baader-Meinhof phenomena, the cult of social media and its own superstitions and mysticism like the recent popularity of mercury retrograde, for example — well, I became obsessed with the magical thinking of our contemporary world as I wrote this, starting from the numerological delirium of Y2K. But we do these things, I think, out of a great fear of dying. With religion too, we fashion the god that we’d most want: forgiving, benevolent, a stern caretaker but caretaker nonetheless. But we fear its power and therefore want its power. Even the suicide bomber martyr I think is some ways marries himself to death, because it can’t live with death making the first move — that’s a sort of laughable way to put it perhaps, but I think of the power-hungriness of suicide, the need to take control. It’s maddening to not understand our ends, to not even experience them consciously in the end — how are we not tempted daily to just submit to it, to stop the horrible waiting? I realize I am a particular kind of dark bird, so many probably won’t relate to this, but this is where my mind goes, all the time. The basis of optimism is sheer terror, goes the famous Oscar Wilde saying, and I think that’s there in my book, in everything I do and write. We make the best of things, but we wouldn’t have to do if we were deep in truly the best. I learned we died older than most — I thought death by natural causes was impossible and you just kept getting old (let’s face it, some old people look several centuries old!) — and so maybe I am just trapped in that late realization. It makes people a bit nervous when I speak about it, so I try not to, but I think this “problem” is there, here, all the time. It shouldn’t paralyze us, of course, but I’d also say, what a miracle that it doesn’t!

RWB: I’m so glad you got good news! I had one of those scares a few years ago. It’s so otherworldly, the experience of waiting for the results. And even when you get good ones, there’s this weird internal emptiness, almost like crying it out, where you’ve spent so much energy preparing for the worst that you’ve emotionally bankrupted yourself.

In my research for this interview, I actually came upon the edition of The Blind Owl you wrote the intro for and instantly put it on my Amazon wish list (a great way to keep track of all the books, movies, and music I want to buy when (if) I have money).

I want to focus on the ideas of optimism and fear. I find your learning about natural death later in life interesting, because I don’t remember when I first became aware of death. On any level. I remember people in the family dying, but I was old enough by that point that surely I was aware of it beforehand.

For a lot of people death is the ultimate elephant in the room, especially for artists. So, if optimism and fear go hand in hand, how do they show themselves in your writing? What fears do you have that get translated into your writing, whether concretely becoming themes, or just in how you approach your work, being a writer, working on novels, etc.?

PK: Okay, where were we? So much has happened. Feb 12 was the one-year anniversary of the death of my friend Maggie Estep — which I’d been dreading for weeks — and then suddenly David Carr died that evening (I didn’t know him well, but I had hung out with him at events and parties and such). He was also an idol of mine though. I loved his memoir, and I love his work and just his presence around town. So gutting. And the Chapel Hill shooting, my god, the discussion around that. And many of my friends are seriously ill plus it looks like I may be having a sort of Lyme relapse (as I seem to do every winter). Oh, and I have an ex who has tried to take over months of my life with all sorts of messes. And the snow won’t stop. Last winter seemed to be The Worst Winter Ever in NYC, and now it has a rival. It’s Valentine’s Day and I’m neck-deep in deadlines, student neuroses, a bored dog, a house that is so unlivable that I basically can’t stop thinking thoughts like, what if I just threw away all the dishes and lived on paper plates and plastic utensils ’til this period blows over? This period! I don’t know if every late winter was as bad as these past two, but I’m now becoming phobic of winter, my second favorite season (autumn of course is first). Have I always been this unhappy? I have to remind myself that I have been much unhappier.

Death! Oh god, where were we? I am terrified I will die in a few days in my plane flight for my Australian book tour, I am terrified I will die of late stage Lyme, terrified I will die of the cigarettes I have brought back into my life — I’m terrified. Of a lot! The one saving grace of my mind is that I burn out on all terror — the energy short-circuits and I fall into a weird black zen state and then I feel a sort of very genuine primal fearlessness that lets me do things. Thank goodness for that. Otherwise, on the day-to-day, I am finding life impossible these days, and yet I badly want to live!

So maybe this is a way the good and bad work together. Sometimes good has be there — something has to fill the space. Occasionally, the odds fall with good.

I’m stalling, I think…

Magical Thinking and its cousin Conspiracy Theory are big fears of mine — not unrelated to death! — that are all over The Last Illusion. Asiya becomes the embodiment of all that — in a sense I almost felt her anxiety was bringing on the inevitable 9/11 of the ending, so much that I began to dread writing her with all my heart. But they are also understandable. It makes the world smaller, a culture of superstition. There is something so human about thinking things might not be what they appear. After all: death! Afterlife! What the hell is all that? Dreams even! Babies coming from sex, growing inside and ejecting themselves from human bodies! Shitting! Breathing! (At one point in my Lyme Disease journey I was losing the ability to swallow food and so I would for hours a day read online about swallowing. It’s incredible how it works — how many systems have to operate perfectly for swallowing to happen.)

So much about our lives seem psychedelic to me.

And I tend to be overly empathic and I think that might have to do with trying to infuse meaning into the things I fear. Being on a playground, immigrant kid, not speaking English and having to read people’s faces and gestures for what they thought. I feel like I am always searching, always taking people perhaps too seriously. So when confronted with Magical Thinking and Conspiracy Theory, with all their damages, I have to remind myself this is what happens to good strong minds who feel they can no longer understand the experiment at hand. They create ghosts, they reinterpret reality, they try to bring a sort of rationality and reason to the table. The intention is often a good one and the problem solving here is seductive, but who can live that way? Apparently many but I’m not sure they are living.

RWB: The older I get the more it truly seems that life is a never-ending cycle of the world going to shit, people dying, being killed, horrible, disgraceful treatment of humans by other humans, not to mention the way humans treat other creatures and the environment. When you really get down to it, it’s hard not to think, well maybe Morrissey isn’t so melodramatic after all, or about that comic stereotype of a character in a French film taking a drag of a cigarette and saying “life is shit.” And yet, there are such wonderful, beautiful things woven in, that in spite of it all we keep living, keep striving to live.

Asiya fascinated me, dealing with my own struggles with mental illness I tend to feel discomfited when I can recognize myself in a character, even if it’s just a small piece. In a way she is a ghost herself, she is disappearing into her prophetic hysteria. And while it seems that Zal is attracted to her because she is the first person who gets to know him first as Zal rather than Zal the Bird Boy, Asiya is attracted to him because of his own chaos. She only knows chaos, from her family, to her mental state, to her sense of artistic identity. How did her character evolve? What informed her development?

PK: Asiya: you described her set-up so perfectly that not sure what I can add! I love “In a way she is a ghost herself, she is disappearing into her prophetic hysteria. And it seems that Zal is attracted to her because she is the first person who gets to know him first as Zal rather than Zal the Bird Boy, whereas she is attracted to him because of his own chaos. She only knows chaos, from her family, to her mental state, to her sense of artistic identity.”

Though I’d guess that the chaos is from being parentless. Like Hendricks. Like Zal. Like pretty much everyone in this book.

Asiya, as I said, was the character I least enjoyed writing. For one thing, I have no interest in writing about women with eating disorders. At a certain point when I was very young I suffered from something resembling one, but to be honest, it’s hard to say if I was just very poor and therefore starving or very crazed and starving. Probably both. I know when I was young control was very important to me — much more than it is now (I relish losing control so much these days, more than ever, maybe because of all my years very sick with chronic illness). It was also a way to create shape in my days, to give meaning to my life, to create goals I could achieve. Once I abandoned perfectionism, I no longer had the urge to go there.

It’s my own fault but I don’t love depictions of them in literature usually because so often they fall into the trap of presenting the disease as sexy. Which it is not at all. I know there are many things I can read that surpass this, but I haven’t had the time to look at much of it — but perhaps I will.

But I went there. And as I said, I did not enjoy writing her. But the story made me do it — I had no other choice. I finally have a sense of “inhabiting a story” and “let the characters show you the way” etc, all the old clichés of creative writing workshops that are decent advice!

She seemed black and white to me in so many ways. I was scared of her. I never trusted her and resented her for what she did with Zal.

It’s crazy how real these characters feel to me and yet in so many ways they are symbolic to me. I hadn’t really let symbolism dictate character and plot ever before — and I think it’s actually unadvisable and for good reason! But I wanted the challenge and it so happened that I had a story that wanted that treatment.

As I may have said earlier, the challenge here was to take archetypes and even stereotypes and inflate them into very real life.

RWB: I think you did an amazing job conveying that in the book. And honestly I think there are enough things that I loved about The Last Illusion that I could ask enough questions to fill a book, but I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me a bit. I’m really looking forward to getting a chance to read your first book, Sons and Other Flammable Objects as well as everything you do going forward!

PK: Thank you for your questions. The dream of any writer — this writer at least, and definitely some I know — is to have someone read their work this carefully and really care to engage them on its ideas. I don’t really make a penny from anything I’ve written but this sort of interaction makes me feel richer than anyone. Thank you. It’s a real gift and I can’t wait to read your work.

Ferguson Librarian Scott Bonner to receive ALA’s Lemony Snicket prize

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by Elizabeth Vogt

The American Library Association has announced the winner of its second-annual Lemony Snicket Prize for Noble Librarians Faced with Adversity, and it couldn’t be a more worthy recipient. Scott Bonner, the director of the Ferguson Public Library in Missouri, was described in the announcement as a “quiet hero” for keeping the library’s doors open despite the protests and crises that erupted in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting this past August. With schools closed, the library served up to 200 students per day, providing educational resources and a safe place for the community. Once the story of Bonner and the Ferguson Library reached social media, over 13,000 people across the country raised over $175,000 in donations, which Bonner used to create a collection of books focused on diversity and civic engagement. While Bonner was the only full-time librarian on staff at the time of the incident, he has consistently refused any sort of special praise, saying instead that any other librarian would have done the same.

The award, a $10,00 cash prize, will be presented by Daniel Handler aka Lemony Snicket and recent National Book Award-winning author Jacqueline Woodson at the ALA Annual Conference & Exhibition in San Francisco on June 28th.

Steven Spielberg to Direct Ready Player One Film

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According to Deadline, Steven Spielberg has signed on to direct the adaptation of Ernest Cline’s dystopian cult hit Ready Player One. The 2011 novel, as the name might suggest, largely takes place in a futuristic video game world called OASIS. As such, the question of how to film it has been tricky. (The film rights were sold before the book was published.) Deadline:

With this news, a question arises about how they will bring a key element of the book’s virtual world to life for the big screen. After all, it seems imperative for the audience to feel like they were dropped into the middle of a video game.

That kind of technology is just becoming available, and if these guys implement that, this could change the face of cinema. The studio has been on the cutting edge of this kind of thing before, pushing the envelope with technology and visual effects with such films as The Lego Movie, Inception and The Matrix — all with great results. If anyone can pull it off again, it will be these guys.

No release date has been set, and Spielberg is set to direct The BFG first, so don’t expect the film anytime soon.

The Covers for Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman Are Pretty Nice!

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If you’ve paid any attention to literary news this year, you’ve heard about Harper Lee’s semi-sequel to her acclaimed To Kill a Mockingbird. The supposedly lost manuscript was found a few months ago and is being published this summer. There has been a storm of controversy around the novel’s publication with charges of shady lawyers and elder abuse (an investigation into the latter found no grounds for a case). But another controversy over the sequel, Go Set a Watchman, was this ugly cover that floated around the internet:

Watchman

Yikes! It’s not clear where this cover came from — it’s still currently the cover on Goodreads and other sites — but it won’t be the cover on the US or UK editions. The actual covers are actually pretty nice! Here’s the especially nice US cover from Harper (the publisher):

Harper Lee watchmen

And here is the UK cover from William Heinemann:

Ukwatchmen

As for the insides of the book, well, we won’t know about that till July.

Midweek Links: Literary Links from Around the Web (March 25th)

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Looking for some interesting reading to get you through hump day? Here are some literary links from around the web to check out:

Racial Balance

The Asian American Writers Workshop has an interesting essay on “the limits of diversity” and the problems with #WeNeedDiverseBooks

Margaret Atwood on her love of Game of Thrones (which is officially going to spoil the book ending)

How Harlequin became a titan of romance

Some great writing advice from Padgett Powell

Buzzfeed has a list of great books with strong female protagonists

Stephen King is demanding an apology from Maine’s governor

James Hannaham explains how he became a “Southern writer”

Vice interviews legendary filmmaker Jodorowsky about his new novel

Apparently some people want to make C.K. Chesterton a saint (can we recommend Flannery O’Connor instead?)

Hero Absorbs Major Damage

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by Charles Yu

I could definitely use a whole chicken right now. Or just a chicken leg. But I keep it to myself. I don’t want to alarm anyone in the group. They’re all busy fighting demon dogs. These guys are literally killing themselves for what? Fifty points a dog is what. It just breaks my heart. When I think of everything the group has been through together, the early days grinding it out in the coin farms, to where we are now, I get a little blue in the aura, I really do.

I can still remember the morning I found Fjoork in that wooded area near the Portal of Start. He was just a teenager then, nothing on his back but a thin piece of leather armor, just standing there like he’d been waiting since time immemorial. Like if I hadn’t come along, he might have been waiting there forever.

I’ll never forget what he said to me. The two of us standing at the place where the road splits off into three paths.

One leading into the forest.

A second path across a creek and into a valley.

And the third toward the north, up into the foothills and over the mountain pass, on the other side of which, as told in legend, lies the Eternal Coast of Pause.

And then Fjoork, all of three foot six, turns to me like he’s known me all my life and says, without a hint of emotion

Select Your Path.
I Shall Follow You.

The shall is what got me. I still love it when Fjoork goes all shall on me. To have someone believe in me like that, even as a kid. Or perhaps especially because I was just a kid. I was what, twenty-two? And here was this weird little guy saying I Shall Follow You all serious like that, as if I were someone, as if he knew I was destined for something good. Maybe even something great.

And now to see him like this, it just kills me, just makes me wish I’d made better choices. I just want to take Fjoork to get an ice cream and wash off all of that blood.

Trin and Byr are out in front of him, casting Small Area Fire over and over again. They aren’t going to be able to keep that up for long. They’ll drain everything they have trying. But that’s how we are. Like a family, after what we’ve been through. We’ve stuck together this long. Stuck together when everyone said we were all wrong for this quest, that we were a team built for flat-ground battles, that we’d never make it out here.

There were growing pains, for sure. We had to learn one another’s styles, everyone’s strengths and weaknesses, had to learn to stop getting in the way of one another’s semicircles of damage. More than once I got thwacked to the tune of 2d6 by someone’s +1 Staff. There were days when it just seemed like the world was nothing but fields and fields of blue demon dogs, each one needing three stabs before it would go down. We learned and improved, and there was a point, not long ago, when it felt like we’d been through just about everything there was to go through.

And then we learned about the uncharted land to the west. An entirely new continent had just opened up.

And that’s when things started to get bad.

Fjoork said We Shall Push On! It Is Our Destiny!

Trin and Byr suggested marshaling resources. Seeing if, perhaps, there were any alternatives.

Rostejn, being Rostejn, said to follow the action.

That made it two against two.

And I said, what are you all looking at?

Then my POV shifted.

And that’s when I realized everyone was looking right at me.

As in: We Shall Follow You.

You. As in, me.

Me. As in, The Hero.

It all made sense after that. The odd sense I’d always had, some kind of fixed radius around me. If I moved left, the group moved left. Hell, when I moved left, the whole battlefield moved left. I always seemed to find myself in the middle of everything, the center of the action.

Because the center of the action was defined as: wherever I was.

So yeah, I led them in here.

I led a thief (Fjoork), two mages (Trin and Byr), and a swordsman (Rostejn) into a devastated wasteland: brutal terrain, limitless bad guys, and, as far as I can tell, pretty much no chicken.

Fjoork is still getting hammered on. Trin and Byr have run out of magic for at least two rounds and now each of them is just randomly stabbing with Ordinary Dagger.

Rostejn and I are the only ones who are doing any kind of real damage, but neither of us is feeling exactly Thor-like at the moment.

I’m not going to die or anything, feeling about thirty-five, maybe forty percent health. If I had to guess, Rostejn is a little worse off than that right now.

We’re finishing off a cluster of these hellhounds, hoping against hope we’re close to a resting point, when a fresh wave of murderous dogs comes rushing in from the north. The worst part isn’t even their teeth. It’s their breath.
Rostejn’s a couple of feet in front of me, and when the new batch shows up, I see his shoulders slump. He slashes a demon dog in the throat and cuts another one’s legs off in two clean and efficient motions, then turns to look at me as if to say, chicken sure would be good right now.

I grunt in agreement.

Then it’s just there. I don’t know if it’s the prayers to the deity worked or we just lucked out, but there it is. A whole delicious chicken, cooked and on a platter, just sitting there under a tree. None of the demon dogs is interested. They’re undead and don’t get to eat anything except for human souls.

Go for it, Rostejn says.

No you, I say.

You eat it, he says.

This is what it’s all about. These guys, they all freaking love each other. And by guys, I am including Trin and Byr, who are like sisters, but also guys, but also, I might be slightly in love with Trin, like slightly and maybe also totally in love, like maybe ever since that double full moon in Oondar, when we spent a night flank-to-flank for warmth, but other than that, we are all like brothers, like chicken-sharing brothers.

Eat it, Rosti, I finally say, with authority. I tell him you feel great, only half lying. He needs it more, but even if he didn’t, this is what a hero does, right? Right?

No really, right? I am really asking. I wish there were someone who could answer.

The group sets up camp for the night. Everyone is demoralized. Turns out that chicken Rostejn and I kept offering each other wasn’t a chicken after all, just one of those smooth, chicken-looking-kind-of-rock mounds that stick out of the ground around these parts, so when Rostejn got nipped on the arm by one of those canine hell spawn, it took him down to twenty percent life bar and I’m sitting not so pretty myself at thirty-two, I just said to hell with it and used the Power Move I’d been saving for the last nine rounds. Lucky for everyone, it worked. But just barely. We all scrambled to this saving place, a little clearing near a cave. A place to hide out and heal our wounds, before setting out again in the morning.

The troops take stock of their equipment before dinner. A lot of it’s pretty banged up. Byr has the whole mess laid out in front of her and Fjoork is reading off the scroll of items.

Shield of the righteous.

Check.

+1 short sword.

Check.

+1 long sword.

Check.

+1 medium sword.

Check.

+1 medium long sword.

Check.

“Jesus,” someone mumbles.

“No wonder my back hurts,” Trin says.

Our problem isn’t really not having enough equipment. More like the opposite. No one wants to get rid of anything.

“Do we really need Blade of Slashing and Blade of Slicing?” Fjoork asks. Everyone knows it’s directed at Rostejn.

Darts of Severe Pain.

Check.

Darts of Moderate Pain.

Check.

Dagger of Nothing in Particular.

Check.

Chain mail’s one thing, and everyone knows you can never really have enough Heal Wounds, or Elixir of Potency, but this is sort of ridiculous.

Fjoork and Rostejn cook a meal together without saying a word to each other. Afterward, we all pass around a wineskin and look up at the night sky.

Byr says, “Have you ever wondered what you’d be if you hadn’t been what you are?”

“Probably a bard, I guess. I’m told I have a good singing voice.”

“No,” Byr says. “Not a different class. What if there were no classes? What if there were something else, other than ranger or thief, paladin or mage? What if you could be anything? What if you couldn’t be those things, but you had to be something else?”

“I’d be a hill giant,” Rostejn says. “Without having to wear a girdle of hill giant strength. Or maybe a frost giant. Those are stronger, right? Frost giant, I think.”

Byr rolls her eyes at Trin and the group drifts off to sleep.

I watch them all snoring, Trin the loudest. She’s a single mother. Who is taking care of her kid at home? I don’t even know. I am in love with her, and I don’t even know who takes care of her kid.

Byr wakes up and catches me staring at Trin.

“She loves you, you know.”

I ask Byr if Trin actually told her that.

“Yeah,” Byr says, throwing a stick into the fire. “But she thinks you’d be a shitty dad.”

Eventually, I drift off into a restless sleep of my own. I dream the ancient dream, the immense dream of the ancients, I am looking out across the gray timeless expanse of Evermoor, having the greatest of all dreams, until Rostejn wakes me up in the middle of the night relieving himself in the wooded area.

In the morning we set out for Argoq. Fjoork, who always seems to have a sense of these things, says he knows a guy who knows an elf who says to take the long way around, steering clear of the Lake of Sensual Pleasures. The group sort of grumbles, but everyone knows they have to stay focused on the mission, relentlessly scrolling toward the right.

We stop into a shop run by an old druid friend of Trin’s. Trin greets him with a peck on the cheek. Seeing her kiss him burns me up inside and I feel like I need to make a small saving throw just to avoid getting dizzy.

The druid shows off his new wares. Boots of speed, harp of discord, harp of merry diversion. The usual clatter thrown off by the steady flow of questers along the Silvan Route.

“How much,” asks Trin, “for that Ring of Regeneration?”

“Fifty,” the shopkeeper says, “but actually it’s a Ring of Warning.”

I fish coins out of my pouch and drop them in the keeper’s hand. He gives me the ring, which I nonchalantly pass over to Trin, trying to be cool about it.

Byr raises her eyebrows at Fjoork, as in, hey, get a load of Grenner the Romantic over here.

Trin refuses it. “You need this a lot more than I do,” she says. It’s true. I’m an 11 Dexterity, the lowest in the group. But really what it’s about is that Trin, being what she is, has an innate sense of being pursued.

I take it back and notice that Byr is suppressing a smile. OMG: how have I never realized this before? Byr is in love with Trin. She can barely contain herself.

I’m staring at Byr who is staring at Trin who is trying to pretend that this triangle of unrequited staring is not happening. Lucky for me, Rostejn breaks up the tension with his usual nonsense.

“Check this out,” he says, holding up a vial of something yellow and bubbly.

“Oil of Craziness,” the shopkeeper says.

“We’ll take two,” Rostejn says, flinging the coins onto the counter. I shoot him a look.

“What?” he says. “You never know when this might come in handy. You just never know.”

It is a half moon later when Krugnor joins our group. We’d spent several days slashing through wave after wave of dumb meat, orcs and ogres, churning and grinding. Toward the end, we were barely talking to one another, just carving up bodies, leaving them in piles. Green flesh hacked up everywhere.

Krugnor isn’t any of the classic types. Krugnor is special, and everyone can see it right away.
It used to be there were only four kinds of people in the world: fighters, mages, clerics, and thieves. What someone did for a living said something about who they were, what they thought of themselves, how they approached the world: strength, intelligence, wisdom, or charisma.

Krugnor, however, is one of these newfangled classes. A hybrid, part of the generation that refuses to be pinned down.

A warrior-mystic. Or at least that’s how he introduces himself, when we find him by a babbling brook, doing yoga.
I try to roll my eyes at Trin, but she’s not having it. She likes him. I can tell right away. I look over at Byr, to see if she’s noticing this, but even she seems to be in some kind of trance.

Even my own disciple seems smitten. “We need that guy,” Fjoork says.

So I put it to a vote.

Trin votes yes, tries to not look excited.

“He will help with hit points,” Byr says. “We could take on a thousand-ogre wave, if we had to. Brute-force our way through the battles and rest up. Just plain outslug the monsters.”

Rostejn votes yes, too, although I get the sense that he just wants to get at some of the awesome hardware Krugnor has in his equipment sack.

And Fjoork looks head-over-heels for the new guy already.

No need for me to even weigh in.

Krugnor joins the group.

“Shall we make it official?” he asks.

I say, uh, sure, what does he have in mind?

“Stare into one another’s souls, of course,” he says. “Isn’t that how you guys do it?”

I say yeah, sure, okay.

Krugnor goes to Trin first, big surprise, and takes her head in his large, callused hands. They lock eyes and she seems to melt.

“So that’s what a hero looks like,” Byr says.

I tell Byr to shut up.

Each member of the group gets their own turn. When it comes to me, I take a pass.

“If we are going to be brothers-in-arms,” he says, “we will need to touch souls.”

I say I’m getting over a cold and don’t want him to catch it.

“It was really a nasty bug. For your own good.”

“Okay,” he says. “But don’t think you’re getting away so easy.”

After he’s done with all the soul-staring, Krugnor asks me for a copy of the battleplan. I say, uh, I’ll get that right to him.

It is foretold that there will be two hundred fifty-five battles in our path to destiny.

In the Final Battle, Battle 256, we will face the final boss.

Sounds pretty exciting.

And it was, for a while.

Today is Battle 253.

I think.

Hard to tell, though.

Because, to be honest, these epic battles of good and evil, after about the first two hundred, they all start to kind of blur together.

Before setting out to the battlefield, we pray to our deity again, whose name is Frëd. He’s a minor deity, but sort of an up-and-comer. At least that’s what he tells us.

We get a lot of shit from other groups for worshipping him, but he’s really Byr’s deity. Now that I think about it, she’s partly responsible for this mess we’re in. Before we all became acolytes of Frëd, we used to worship different deities. Some of us didn’t even have one. And we definitely never talked about it, it was just sort of no one else’s business who or what you worshipped or sacrificed poultry for, so long as you pulled your weight and your deity wasn’t some imp who was going to screw with everyone or make us give up gold coins for safe passage or cause us to suffer ordeals. But then Byr went away to the north over summer vacation and when she came back she had that look like someone had cast Slightly Crazy on her, and she was all Frëd this, Frëd that, she couldn’t stop talking about the guy, and we were all like, okay, cool, but you’re not going to go all druid on us are you?

“Frëd,” Byr prays, “oh Sort-Of-Omnipotent One, protect us today. Keep us safe, body and soul. Let us fight without fear, and vanquish our enemies.”

“Or at least let us not get our asses kicked like last time,” Rostejn adds.

“Goddammit, Rostejn,” Byr says.

“No, no, fair enough,” Frëd says, from wherever he is. We can’t see him but his voice booms from on high. “I have to apologize for not doing such a great job with the god-thing lately. Honestly, I’ve just been going through kind of a weird time.”

Byr reassures Frëd. “You’re fine. Seriously. You know we love you,” she says, and everyone murmurs in agreement, but it’s not the most reassuring thing to realize that the god you worship actually just wants you to believe in him.

Krugnor turns out to be an absolute beast on the battlefield. Not that anyone is surprised. He’s ripped.

“Has to be at least 16 Strength,” Rostejn says, watching him tear through some bad elves.

Byr’s like, “Nuh uh. Seventeen, man. Easy.”

Trin isn’t even fighting, she’s just standing there watching, staring at the dude’s muscles while he brandishes his +3 broadsword. I’m not even sure I could pick that thing up.

I ask if he really has to fight with this shirt off, but no one’s listening. He flexes a lot, even when it doesn’t seem necessary, and he can even do that back-and-forth flexing thing with his pecs. Ugh, look at him, just standing there in the river as it rushes by and splashes on his hardened body.

Fjoork even gets in on the love fest. Fjoork, the guy who is supposed to be following me for all eternity.

“Did you see what he did to that kobold king?” he says. “Split him clean in half, one-handed, with his short sword.”

If I didn’t know better, I’d think Krugnor had cast Infatuation on everyone. The guy is totally cheeseball beefcake brooding sulking warrior-type. Such a cliché. Although, I have to admit, I do feel safer with him out there in front.
Maybe that is what a hero looks like. A leader. The protagonist.

And for the first time since the quest began, I start to feel a little wobbly, as if my POV isn’t so stable. As if the center of things is moving.

As if the frame is unsure of who to follow, whose story it is. As if, maybe, I’m not so destined for my destiny after all.

We cross the highlands and come to a ridge, on the other side of which is the Valley of Aaaa.
“I’ve always wondered how that’s pronounced,” Rostejn says.

Byr says a prayer for to Frëd as we begin our descent into the valley. We trudge through the Bog of Uncertainty. Trin reminds everyone to be careful of what we eat or even look at. Last time we were in the bog, Rostejn fell under the sphere of influence of a powerful mage in the Abjuration school and almost got everyone turned into black pudding.

Now we’re in a dead zone for magic. Alteration prevails on one side, and Necromancy on the other. Neither one can practice in the other’s region, as they are mutually forbidden schools. We walk the tightrope in between, maneuvering carefully, taking the narrow path, as shown on our scrolling map.

Krugnor follows my lead. Everyone else does, too.

At one point we encounter some halflings. A quiet, intelligent people who live around these parts. One of their young has disappeared. The boy’s mother is sobbing. Trin goes to comfort her. The mother explains that her son had fallen asleep on what he thought was a nice soft pile of leaves.

“A shambling mound,” Byr says.

The mother looks at us, unsure.

“A creature that looks like a heap of rotting vegetation,” Byr explains. “But is actually a flesh eater.”

“Yuck,” Rostejn says. “That is nasty.”

Byr shoots Rostejn a look like real nice, idiot, and the mother starts her crying again, even harder this time, and everyone is looking at me to do something, so without a word I leap straight into the mound, diving into the creature’s body to grab the halfling-kid, and then hacking my way out with a scythe. Which is messy, to say the least, and costs me about eight hit points, but in doing so, I level up. Everyone congratulates me, and I’m feeling pretty good. Even Trin looks impressed, and for a moment it doesn’t seem so impossible that she might be in love with me after all.

The good feeling doesn’t last long, though. The next battle is Battle 254 and we just aren’t quite ready for this kind of onslaught yet, not tactically, not in terms of speed or weapons or as a team. Byr nearly dies, Rostejn nearly dies. Even my health dips down into the red zone.

I start to flicker in and out, a warning that my existence on this plane is in danger.

I know what I should do, but I can’t bring myself to do it.

Another hit, direct to my torso, and that’s it, my health is critical. My soul starts to tug itself out of my mortal coil, and my POV is floating up toward the clouds. I watch my body down there, fighting without spirit.
Frëd help us, I cry out, in a moment of desperation.

I can’t see him, but I feel Frëd’s presence next to me. “I thought you didn’t believe in me,” he says.

“That seems sort of petty.”

“Um, yeah. Duh,” Frëd says. “Do you know anything about gods?”

He’s got a point, I suppose, although really what I’m thinking is how come I’ve never noticed how high Frëd’s voice is. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but for the first time I realize there’s something off about him.

“Byr’s down there,” I say. “She prays to you all the time.”

“Yeah, but you’re the one that’s asking for help,” he says. “Get on your knees.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“For real, dude. I want you to pray to me.”

So I start. “O sort-of-great one. O exalted mediocre one, Frëd.”

“Get on your knees.”

“You’re pushing your luck.”

Frëd uses some kind of POV shift power to direct my attention back down to the earthly battlefield, where my team is getting slaughtered. “I don’t think you’re in a position to be talking about luck right now.”

I sort of get on my knees and am about to start again when I hear a woman’s voice.

“Frëëëëëëëëëëëëëëëëëd,” she yells. She sounds angry. Great, now there are two gods, one petty, one angry, and I’m still floating in the sky, getting farther from life with every passing moment. “You are in big trouble, mister.”
Wait a minute. Is she? No. She can’t be.

“Um, Frëddie?” I say. “I think your mom’s calling you.”

“Not a word,” he says. “To anyone.”

“Sure, sure. Just kill those monsters for us.”

“I, uh, I can’t do that. Sort of used up all my juice for a while. But here’s a chicken leg,” he says, and disappears. “Sorry, gotta go.”

You eat the food and gain just enough health to stop flickering and return to the plane of the living, where you see that Krugnor and Trin are in berserker rages and Rostejn has just used his Daily Power Move and the battle’s pretty much over. The mini-boss, a frost giant, is on the ground, and one more thrusting attack by Krugnor does the trick.

Trin spots you reappearing and says welcome back, nice of you to join us.

The mood at dinner is somber. No one’s much inclined to be bawdy, or even merry, not with half of the group near death. We all lie still and chew on chicken in silence.

It’s hard to understand how it got to this. I led a bunch of good fighters, good hand-to-hand fighters, into a ranged combat situation. Maybe it’s my 15 Charisma. It’s the highest of anyone in the group. Maybe a good Charisma score has been my crutch. I’ve always secretly wished people wouldn’t like me so much.

After dinner, I find Fjoork over by a stream, washing his face.

“Hey buddy,” I say.

“Hey.”

“Tell me again why you think I’m destined for greatness?”

Fjoork looks off to the north, stands there just looking for a long time before answering.

“I never said that.”

I’m brushing my teeth with a twig and do a spit-take.

“You didn’t?”

“No man. I said, I Shall Follow You.”

“Oh,” I say. “Yeah, you did. Huh.”

Fjoork wipes his face, rubs the back of his neck.

“Well,” he says. “This is awkward.”

“Don’t I feel a bit silly. All this time, I thought.”

“Yeah, I know what you thought. And that’s okay. It got us this far, didn’t it?”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Who knows,” Fjoork says. “You might rise to the occasion.”

And if not, maybe Krugnor will do it for me.

When I get back to the campfire, I see Trin and Krugnor sitting together on a fallen tree. Trin has her hands under her thighs, which she only does when she’s feeling a little red in the aura. Now she’s looking at him in a way I have never seen her look at anyone. She’s definitely never looked at me that way, not even in Oondar.

Charisma’s good for a few things. Bluff, Disguise, Handle Animals, Intimidate, Perform. But it’s not so good when things get real. It’s not so good heading into Battle 256 with a group of tired, beaten-down warriors. Right now, I’d trade half of my Charisma points for some Wisdom. I’ve always been a couple of points on the low side in that department. I think about gathering everyone around, to rally their spirits a bit. If only I could say something wise right now, or at least something wise sounding. Even that might not work. But I can’t come up with anything decent, so I keep my mouth shut. Everyone’s a little tired of me anyway, I think.

In the middle of the night, I wake up to Byr and Rostejn whispering. I listen to them in the darkness.
Krugnor knows where the map doesn’t show.

Krugnor could lead us to The End.

Krugnor this, Krugnor that.

We keep on moving. We fight anything and everything: deathknells, bugbears, carrion crawlers, lesser devils. We fight a small band of ghouls, and the ghoul queen. We get attacked by a gray ooze, waking up one morning to find the creature all over us, our camp, in our hair, covering our food. We lose almost an entire day, not to mention using up several minor enchantments plus a Cure Light Wounds, just to get cleaned up. We keep moving on, to the right, slashing and stabbing, jumping and charging, dragging ourselves onward.

Then Rostejn quits.

He comes to me and says, “You’ve been good to me, this has been good, but I gotta say, where is this all going? What are we doing? I don’t know. I don’t know anymore. I used to know. I need to know what this group stood for. Now I don’t.”

“Ros,” I say. “You are killing me. You are absolutely freaking killing me here.”

How can I explain to him that I’ve been asking myself the same questions for the last ten moons? I can’t say any of that. It will make me sound weak.

Rostejn says, “Don’t think this means I’m not grateful. Don’t think this means, in any way whatsoever, that I don’t appreciate everything.”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Yeah. Yeah, man. Yeah to all of it, all of our good times. You used to be such a great leader. You led us against a gold dragon. We slew a gold freaking dragon, man! We were the toast of the Forgotten Village for twenty moons after that. Free mead and game bird until we all got fat and out of shape and our Dexterity scores started going down and we had to quit that place and move on. You gave me my first knife, my first Threnovian Sun Blade. You taught me how to bludgeon. You helped me increase the range of my barbarian’s rage. I won’t forget any of that. It’s just.”

“I know.”

“No, no, for real. There’s something else,” Rostejn says. He cracks a smile, something I haven’t seen for a long time. “I’ve got a girl now, boss. Met her right before we started this campaign. We’ve got a kid on the way. Going to ask her to marry me.”

“Wow, Rostejn,” I say. “Wow. That’s just, that’s great.”

“Yeah. I can’t believe it. Hopefully the kid’ll take after his mother and be a peaceful law-abiding villager. Be more than I am. More than a sword for hire. Maybe solve puzzles all day. A friendlier line of work than this.”

I tell him he’s going to be a great father.

“I just don’t know. I don’t know what we stand for anymore. Byr’s gone all churchy on us, Fjoork hasn’t said a word in a moon and a half.”

“That’s not fair.”

“It’s not just you. It’s all of us. Anyway, that’s not the point. I’ve given up on Immortal Hero. That’s a young man’s dream. I’m not going to get that Hero Path. I just want to get back to what I’m good at, basic stuff, level up every few years, maybe go out and pick up a few skills along the way. I’ve always wanted to get into Animal Empathy.”

“You?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Rostejn says.

We have a warriors’ embrace.

“If you’re ever in the area,” he says, “Jenny makes a mean boar pie.”

“Sounds good,” I say, sure that I’ll never see him again.

Krugnor finds me as I’m walking back to camp and pulls me aside. Here it comes. He’s taking over.

“There is something we should talk about,” he says. “Man-to-man.”

“Yeah, yeah. I know. Go for it.”

“Go for it?” he says. He looks surprised that it was so easy.

“Yeah, be my guest.”

Krugnor lunges forward and I am expecting him to knock me to the ground in some kind of alpha-male dominance, but instead he grabs the back of my head and shoves his tongue into my mouth. Way, way into my mouth.

It takes all of my strength to push him off me.

“What the hell was that, Krugnor?”

“You said go for it.”

“That’s what you thought I meant?”

“Wait, what did you mean?”

“I thought you were taking control of the group?”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Um, I dunno, because look at you? You’re this super-buff warrior-mystic who crushes evil beings and likes to aggressively eyeball all of our souls? Because the whole group thinks you are Frëd’s gift to us?”

I hear some murmuring and that’s when Krugnor and I both look over and see the whole group watching. From the looks on their faces I realize they saw the whole thing.

Trin’s mouth is wide open. Rostejn looks actually sort of hurt, like if Krugnor was going to have a thing for one of the guys, it should have been Rostejn. Fjoork appears to be rapidly and violently recalibrating his view of everything that has happened for the last several weeks. Nobody speaks.

“Don’t mind us,” Byr finally says.

Krugnor turns back to me. “This is your group,” he says. “Always has been.”

“Then what the hell was with all of that flexing and showboating and stuff?”

“I was trying to impress you,” he says. And I look over at the group, and I can see it in all of their eyes. They’re sort of impressed. They’re sort of like, really? Trying to impress him? I know I’ve let them down, but it’s not too late. If this new guy, this super-strong, super-charming new guy is willing to follow me, maybe they can find it in themselves to remember why they followed me in the first place. Maybe I can find it in myself to remember. Just maybe.

Or not.

It’s the day of the final battle, Battle 256.

The first wave is lichs, and I know immediately that we are in trouble.

Then the rocs start in from the sky. Byr is praying her ass off, but her deity seems to be doing whatever gods do when they decide to ignore us down here, because about ten minutes into the fight I hear those dreaded words.

Byr absorbs major damage.

I do my Power Move, but it’s a drop in the bucket. We’re in a sea of enemy hit points here. A fresh wave of monsters comes over the top of the hill.

Trin absorbs major damage.

Rostejn absorbs major damage.

Fjoork absorbs major damage.

This couldn’t get any worse.

Then it gets worse.

Krugnor absorbs major damage.

It isn’t long before we are all exhausted, overwhelmed by the power and the sheer number of the enemy.

Then:

Hero absorbs major damage.

It can’t be.

I am drifting off to The Place Where You Go Between Lives. I go through heaven, through hell, through an interdimensional nether-region.

In the midst of the carnage, my soul lifts out of my corpse, and toward a great expanse of light, the eternal horizon, the edge of the world, that final screen, how beautiful and peaceful it looks.

I have failed in my quest, and as surprised as I am that the story is ending this way, what is really unexpected is how okay I am with it, with all of it.

THE END

Really?
Is it really going to end like that?

I Am Here.

When I wake up in the sky, I am two hundred feet above the battlefield.

It is not pretty.

But on this side of The End, everything looks slow motion, almost like a choreographed dance, or perhaps a game, played by people that don’t quite seem real anymore. Even my lifeless body down there looks like some kind of puppet, something to be pulled along, controlled and manipulated. The fighting goes on in silence, this gorgeous ballet of carnage, and I start to wonder, did it matter? Did any of it ever matter? I tried. I gave it my best. That’s as much as anyone can say, right? So there. So that’s that. So now, I find myself floating up to my eternal reward.

Then Frëd appears, sticking his big face through the clouds. I was right: he’s a child. Hasn’t hit puberty yet. A god-child. Even gods have to grow up, I guess.

“Hey Frëd,” I say.

“Actually, no umlaut,” he says. “It’s just plain Fred.”

“Well, good to finally meet you face-to-face, Fred.”

“Things aren’t looking too good for you,” he says. “I’m sorry about all of this.”

“Why are you sorry?”

He looks at me like, you don’t know?

“What?” I say.

“This world, all of this, all of your world,” he says, trying to find the words. The tingling gooseflesh of comprehension starts to creep up my arms and the back of my neck. My mind strains for a grasp of what it is he is getting at, like trying to visualize higher dimensions. Fred either can’t say or doesn’t want to say, but I think I know what he’s getting at.

“I’m just sorry to have put you guys in this position,” he says. “And now I have to go.”

“So, that’s it? That’s all we get? No proper ending? The forces of good and evil, geography, history, destiny, when you have to go, you just pull the plug and all of this just goes away?”

“Let me ask you a question,” Fred says. “What do you believe in? Do you believe in yourself? In your team? In heroism? In good? Do you believe in anything?”

“That was more than one question,” I say. “I want to believe. I believe I am capable of believing.”

“I guess that will have to do,” Fred says, and with a wave of his hand the clouds above part and projected onto the sky are two paths, two alternate futures for me.

In one direction is The Path of Legends:

You have fought enough battles. Your record, while imperfect, is already enough to earn you a place in the Hall of Eternity. Choose this path and you can vanish from the ordinary world. Perhaps you watch over the ongoing struggle, content in the knowledge that you have played your part. Perhaps you leave your plane of existence and become a minor deity yourself.

In the other direction is Honorable Death:

On the field of the most gruesome battle in history, you shall meet your foes and do battle. You may prevail. You may be defeated. You may prevail even as you are defeated. You may end up killing your enemy and in the process, killing yourself. Rejoin your team now and find out.

“Select Your Path,” Frëd says, resuming his god voice.

Trin is bleeding from her eyes, nose, mouth, and ears.

Byr has lost an arm.

Rostejn has lost both arms.

Fjoork is in the process of being eaten by an orc.

Krugnor is looking up at the sky. He seems to have given up.

Maybe Frëd is just Fred. Maybe we have been praying to a nine-year-old whose mom keeps yelling at him to clean up his room. Maybe this is all just a game, an elaborate architecture created by some intelligent designer, out of what, boredom? Grace? Perverse curiosity? Some kind of controlled experiment or attempt to reconcile determinism and free will? What is my score? What is a health bar? Here I am, outside my own story, no longer moving to the right, or to the left. On the other side of the edge of the screen, off screen. After the end of the game, I can see it for what it was. You know what? I can know all that and still care. I can know all that and at the same time know that it matters. It has to matter. So our deity might have to leave for a while. So he may or may not have meant to make things this way. So we might be left on our own down there. So maybe he never meant for any of this to happen; this wasn’t the story at all, he wishes he could just hit the button and start all over.

That doesn’t make it any less real. That doesn’t mean we should give up down here.

“I really gotta go now,” he says. “It’s your story now.”

He looks at me like, I’m sorry, but what am I supposed to do? And he’s right. He’s a minor power at best. He can’t get us out of this. He’s a nice guy, good at what he’s good at, but this is our problem.

I can see Trin and Krugnor down there getting their asses kicked. Things will suck if I go back down there. All of my friends might get killed. And even if they live, they will be horribly maimed and probably blame me forever for this shit that I got them into. But still. No one said it would be easy, or fun, or good, or clean, or that I would have any glory or comfort or a moment of rest in all of my days. But if I have anything at all I am still the Hero. This was my story. This is my problem. I’m going back down there to fix it.