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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250105356 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Picador |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 500 KB |
About the Author
James McManus is a novelist and poet, most recently winner of the Peter Lisagor Award for sports journalism. He teaches writing and comparative literature at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, including a course on the literature and science of poker. He is the author of Positively Fifth Street.
Read an Excerpt
Going to the Sun
A Novel
By James McManus
Picador
Copyright © 1996 James McManusAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-10535-6
CHAPTER 1
PART 1
This isn't really a horror story, but for the last seven years just the thought of what happened to David, of what I did to my Saint, has burned in my blood like cold powdered glass for an hour or two every day, sometimes all day and all night. Sometimes for eight or ten nights in a row, whether or not I'm awake. I can't make myself not remember it.
The day the ferry dropped us off at our campsite, June 28, was clear, crisp, and reasonably warm, about sixty-five degrees, but thirty degrees cooler when the sun sank below the mountains. The top third of the Alseks were covered with snow, and some of the shallower inlets were frozen. Four humpback whales breached and showed us their flukes as we cruised up the bay. Miniature icebergs tilted and spun in our wake.
It was the first time I'd ever seen mountains. Our campsite, on the northeastern shore of Tarr Inlet, was surrounded by them: the Alseks behind us, rising twelve thousand feet from the water, and the Fairweather range to the west — higher, more jagged, cutting the sun off six hours before it actually set in the Pacific.
Between the two ranges were the Margerie and Grand Pacific glaciers, which came together at the northern tip of Tarr Inlet in a four-mile-long wall of ice the color of road salt. Fruzen Velva, Saint called it. When a glacier calved — as one of them did every fifteen or twenty minutes — blue bergs the size of six-flats ripped away from the wall and belly-flopped into the water. It sounded like planes taking off.
Our campsite was almost three miles from the ice, directly across the inlet from Margerie Glacier, but the intensity of the light bouncing back through the crystalline air made it seem like three blocks. Even with sunglasses on, it was painful to do more than glance at it. The way it just glowed, the blue ice looked plugged-in or somehow on fire. Our plan was to paddle our kayaks along "her" (Saint's designation) the following morning, drifting up close without getting too reckless.
We pitched our tent on a flat patch of turf twenty yards from the water in a clearing surrounded by alders and birch trees not much taller than me. The closest other campsite was three hundred yards to the south.
David took out his rod and tackle box and caught three gorgeous trout in ten minutes; he was more of a firing squad than a sportsman. I walked down the inlet and took a roll of pictures of eagles and mountains and glaciers. I didn't take any of David that afternoon; I figured it could wait till after dinner — or the morning, when he got in his kayak. I was also planning to use the timer and set up some pictures of both of us.
* * *
Sitting on our zipped-together sleeping bags, I loaded a syringe in the light from our reading lamp. (For passionate young lovers communing with unspoiled nature, we'd sure packed a lot of CD's and books and syringes.) I brushed away an especially ferocious mosquito before hitting myself up in my lower-left thigh — my first and last shot in the wilderness — then stowed the syringe in our trash bag. We'd been instructed in no uncertain terms by the rangers to "pack out" all non-biodegradable refuse. I figured this meant used syringes.
I was more concerned with staying warm, brushing my teeth, and coming up with a plan for washing my hair without going hypothermic; the idea of dunking my head into an inlet of Glacier Bay made my molars ring out sostenuto. Once the sun went below the Fairweathers, it was hard to stop shivering, though the sky was still bright overhead. I was wearing a quilted down vest, insulated hiking boots, jeans, a flannel shirt, and long underwear. Brrr! It was gorgeous and horrible, camping. I firmly decided never to do it again, changed my mind several times, never achieved any closure. But I loved being out there with Saint.
My image of him in Alaska: sitting cross-legged on top of the boulder in front of our sleek yellow tent, reading the booklet of liner notes to a Mingus CD while swatting bugs from his face. Incipient dark-brown goatee, black plastic sunglasses with green prescription lenses for his weak gray-blue eyes, brown hair swept back behind his ears, pushed down across the top by the headphones. Behind him the Alseks are dull gold and black, backlit with sapphire sky and gray cotton clouds tipped with pink. But above all his face. Just his face.
When I experimented with my kayak, practicing for our trip to the glacier, it wasn't as unwieldy or prone to flip over as I'd thought it would be. It went more or less where I aimed it. I made two wobbly arcs out and away from Saint's boulder, then rested my paddle across the bow and mock-flexed my biceps to show him how pumped I was feeling. I knew he was anxious about whether the pancreatically challenged were up to this level of roughing it. So. I was showing him.
He grinned and flexed back at me. Now that I'd stopped paddling, I could hear "Fables of Faubus" leaking out the sides of his headphones.
"Any no-see-ums out there?" he called, much too loud.
I shook my head no and kept flexing.
Less loudly, he asked, "There are but you just can't see um?"
When I pretended to grab one from out of the air and squish it by clapping my hands, he applauded in time to the music.
* * *
We scoured the campsite, then got into the tent a little after eleven. It had already been a long day, and it was two in the morning Chicago (and my body clock's) time. Ah Um was playing on the little foam Discman headphones, which were down by the ends of our sleeping bags. Even with the volume on ten, it was distant and comically tinny. Outside the tent the bay rippled gently, incessantly, lapping the pebbles beneath our beached kayaks. I felt horny and cold and sequestered, alone in the wild with my Saint.
He pulled off his sweatshirt, cursing and swatting mosquitos. I leaned back on the egg-crate foam mattress and watched him. He was pretty in daylight with clothes on; he was pretty in moonlight soaking through yellow Gore-Tex. Bugs whined behind and between us as I rolled back and shimmied from my jeans. It felt like I was sitting on soft little mountains — as though my thighs had expanded to vast, continental proportions. Saint stroked the inside of one, then the other, using the back of his hand, one too-brief, unhasty stroke each. I couldn't stop shivering, but I didn't feel cold anymore. From the short streak of gray on his chin, I could tell that he'd just brushed his teeth.
He pulled off his boots and socks. His legs were tanned from the middle of his thighs to his toes except for the lines from the straps of his sandals, which glowed in the dark at the other end of the tent, a million and a half miles away.
"Ghosts," I said, pointing them out.
He squinted. "Iridescent puppies," he said, wiggling his long, bony toes. The white wishbone lines bent and shimmered.
"Like the fruzen velva glaciers," I said.
"Oh, I don't wanna lick them," he sang. "I just wanna be their victim."
"Lick who?"
He kissed me. The cathedral vault of the tent was brushing our hair and the sides of our faces. We knelt there and kissed for a while. It was only our fifth night together, and sometimes I don't even count it.
Eventually David pulled back his knees and slid off his shorts. In the moonlight his olive-drab boxers looked black against his pale skin. I could see his erection slanting up toward the waistband. I was trying to decide whether to make a friendly remark about that when he put his hand on the side of my neck and kissed me again. No tongues in play, just lips lightly brushing. I tasted a soupçon of baking soda as I ran my hand over his chest.
We knelt on the mountainous foam and fondled each other as the mosquitoes and no-see-ums attacked. I ran my nails over his nipples. I knew David liked that; I loved when he did it to me. We nibbled on each other's lips. I hoped that my breath wasn't horrible. Gently, our lips barely touching, then with sudden ferocity, we kissed. We were starting to get pretty good at it.
But the mosquitoes were still a huge nuisance, even inside the zipped tent. We'd been careful all day to keep the mesh doorway zipped, but there were still five or ten of them buzzing us. I'd read in a guidebook that only the females would sting you for blood — but so what did the males do for nourishment? Rely on their wives or their girlfriends? Whatever their gender, the ones in our tent were half an inch long and persistent.
Saint sprayed some Jungle Juice on his fingers and painted my neck, my forehead, my cheeks, the insides of my wrists ...
"Hold still," he told me.
"It's cold, plus it tickles," I said, holding as still as I could.
He lifted my sweatshirt and rattled the can back and forth. I swallowed. Gingerly, watching me, taking his goddamn sweet time, he fingerpainted each of my nipples. All in good time, I reciprocated, daubing chevrons of invisible war paint onto his nose, cheekbones, forehead. I told him to take off his shirt.
"Yes'm," he said shiveringly, mocking me. "Whatever you s-say. A-a-absolutely."
"Turn around." I squinted, the better to see him obey me.
"Yes'm."
Still kneeling, he turned. I sprayed his shoulders and back, then used my hands to smooth it over his back, arms, and legs, memorizing (I thought) every last detail with my too-hungry fingers. I remember his eminent little buttocks when I tugged down his boxers. I smoothed and bit and kissed them, then moved up and licked the downy hairs in the small of his back, tasting the sticky martini of bug spray. It could have been gasoline, transparent blood, or curare. I loved it. I painted and tasted him, watching him shudder and listening to his suggestions, and in roughly this manner the bloodthirsty female mosquitoes became even less of an issue.
That spring we'd been in Christina Zorn's seminar on contemporary Irish poetry. Saint never said much in class, but judging by Zorn's sotto voce comments when she handed back the papers, you could tell that she thought he was brilliant. And funny. I was getting A's and A-minuses on my own papers, but Zorn never muttered "Indeed" or shuddered with mirth when she handed them back or discussed them with me.
She also never invited me to Starbucks after class. That Parnassian compliment was reserved for Mr. David St. Germaine and another guy in the class named Bill Hill. My brain popped and sizzled with the various permutations and combinations of Zorn and either or both of those guys in the sack together, not one of them founded on even the most gossamer filament of evidence. There was also a rumor that Zorn had taken up with Leona Marvin, who in those days was UIC's resident light-heavyweight critic.
As the semester wore on I became almost frantic to get to know David, or at least get my hands on one of those "deftly convincing" papers of his. I was too insecure to simply show up at Starbucks alone, or to straightforwardly introduce myself after class. The day before May Day, a Wednesday, I came up with a fairly convincing faux-impromptu explication of Eavan Boland's "Spring at the Edge of the Sonnet," eliciting at least two nods from David and a low-key mm-hmm from Frau Zorn. After class I summarily decided I'd be well within my rights to tag along to get coffee, pretending at the outset to be headed in that direction myself.
As we moved up toward Morgan Street, we configured ourselves mostly as twosomes in a series of raggedy parallelograms: first Zorn and me in front with Bill and David behind us, then me in the back with Bill Hill. I couldn't get paired off with David.
"I mean, who doesn't wanna kill Ronald Reagan and fuck Jodie Foster?" Bill Hill asked rhetorically, taking up a thread I hadn't been privy to.
David just shrugged, but Zorn burst out laughing.
"I doesn't," I blurted — to assert myself, I suppose. Own my anger, or something like that. Own Zorn's laughter, perhaps. I said it, in any event. I didn't say it confrontationally; I admitted it as a matter of fact, for the record.
"Sure, right, okay, but — you don't?" said Bill Hill, while subtly but witheringly, spiked head thrown sideways and back, Frau Zorn said, "Ah."
David, for his part, said nothing.
"Um, not particularly," I said. I was being a stick in the mud pie they were joyously baking. I don't really know what my point was.
"That's what they all say," David piped in, and not too sarcastically either. Had he come to my rescue? Sort of, I thought. I was hoping. But they?
"But that doesn't prove she's insane!" Bill Hill claimed triumphantly.
In response, Christina Zorn made several wet lip farts, which left me too startled to answer Bill Hill. The three of them were already off again on what I gradually understood to be a running debate as to the difference between actors and movie stars. Billie Whitelaw had ceased to be a legitimate actor when she cut short her stint in the London production of Happy Days to take the part of Damian's nanny in The Omen. Ronald Reagan was an actor as president and he was not an actor as an actor. Roy Scheider was an actor in Sorcerer, but in all his other films he was a movie star. Harrison Ford was a squinter, a newt, a torso with limbs, monolithically intense, a wally, and (according to David) a mook. Dustin Hoffman and Anthony Hopkins and Danny Glover were actors who happened to be movie stars. Robert De Niro was becoming a mook if he didn't watch out. Roman Polanski was a century-class director and child molester as well as a half-decent actor. Jane Fonda was an aerobics instructor and, worse, a wife. Madonna could act like a mother; no she couldn't; the fuck she couldn't; she could — if you'd seen her on Broadway in Speed-the-Plow, bud, you'd know that. When she wasn't being too tomboyishly cutesy or "lizardly," according to Bill Hill, Jodie Foster was a convincing and serious actor. They went on and on in a series of flamboyantly opinionated exchanges that startled me further when it managed a measure of closure: however sane John Hinckley might be, he was not, in Bill Hill's humble opinion, an actor.
Half a block from Starbucks, Zorn and Bill Hill simultaneously discovered that they needed to get home immediately — to their separate apartments, that is. At least that's what I thought was being communicated. They were speaking to one another with cryptic signals and pauses that I couldn't decode. They said they'd catch up with us later.
David shrugged. He was wearing a blue hooded sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed past his elbows and black rugby shorts. His limbs had looked delicious all afternoon, but I would have been willing to bet he was about to make his own excuse, or just make a run for it, using those same sightly limbs.
We stood there, everyone smoking but me. I watched the three of them carefully, trying to read the unfolding, four-part departure. David and Zorn raised their eyebrows a fifth of an inch. Bill Hill's right thumb almost, then did touch, Zorn's elbow. Nothing else happened of note. And then Zorn and Bill Hill were gone, headed in separate directions, and David and I were walking up Morgan alone.
* * *
We sat on tall stools at a little round table in Starbucks. David had paid for our coffees at the register but allowed me to hand him two dollars. We rotated our cups with our palms as though they were tiny LP's that we wanted to fit on a spindle. David was asking me questions and I was answering them; I cannot remember the subject. I do recall snapping the upper corners of the Equal packet before I tore it open, making sure no granules were stuck in the crevices, then snapping the bottom corners after I'd emptied it into my cup. David continued to talk to me.
I sipped the strong coffee. I swallowed. "So what's so funny about those papers that Zorn's always joshing you?"
"Joshing me?"
Why had I said that? It definitely wasn't a word I would use. No one would use it unless they were deranged with anxiety. "She must think they're terribly witty," I said. I couldn't have felt too much less so, myself.
"What makes you think she thinks they're so funny?"
I haltingly managed to recount my process of deduction.
David shrugged. "She never told me they were funny."
"Be that as it may. I'd still like to read one sometime."
He shrugged, said, "Okay." The way his jaw would move under his skin — I adored it; I wanted my own jaw to move that way too. Plus his eyes looked so angry and confident, while his voice was so sad. I suddenly felt very ... invaginable, if that's the right word. I think I'd become slightly delirious. I needed to get some glucose into my system. I therefore couldn't be held accountable for what I was saying, and I knew that I would be.
I imagined him saying, "I orchestrated all this, you know, with Christina and Bill."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Going to the Sun by James McManus. Copyright © 1996 James McManus. Excerpted by permission of Picador.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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What People are Saying About This
The admirably edgy energy that runs through John McManus's five previous books is a kind of signature. But in Going to the Sun there seems to be a special urgency about his writing that powerfully portrays the consciousness of his diabetic central character, Penny Culligan; it's an urgency capable of conveying not only her cross-country flight but the very spikes and plunges of sugar in her blood. It's an urgency that is finally a measure of the deep compassion in this intense novel.