Brain surgery. Assault weapons in the bed of a pickup truck. Sophia Loren at the Oscars. Rilke, Rodin, and the craters of the moon. Recovery and disintegration. Monkeys stealing an egg outside a temple in Kathmandu. Brushing teeth bloody on long car rides under blue skies. Pain, ours and what we bring to others. Wildfires in southern California. Rats in Texas. Childhood abuse. Dreams of tigers and blackout nights. The sweetness of mangoes. A son born into a shadowy hospital room. Love. Joy.
In Feverland, Alex Lemon has created a fragmented exploration of what it means to be a man in the tumult of twenty-first-century America—and a harrowing, associative memoir about how we live with the beauties and horrors of our pasts. How to move forward, Lemon asks, when trapped between the demons of one’s history and the angels of one’s better nature? How to live in kindness—to become a caring partner and parent—when one can muster very little such tenderness for oneself? How to be here, now? How to be here, good?
Immersed in darkness but shot through with light, Feverland is a thrillingly experimental memoir from one of our most heartfelt and inventive writers.
Brain surgery. Assault weapons in the bed of a pickup truck. Sophia Loren at the Oscars. Rilke, Rodin, and the craters of the moon. Recovery and disintegration. Monkeys stealing an egg outside a temple in Kathmandu. Brushing teeth bloody on long car rides under blue skies. Pain, ours and what we bring to others. Wildfires in southern California. Rats in Texas. Childhood abuse. Dreams of tigers and blackout nights. The sweetness of mangoes. A son born into a shadowy hospital room. Love. Joy.
In Feverland, Alex Lemon has created a fragmented exploration of what it means to be a man in the tumult of twenty-first-century America—and a harrowing, associative memoir about how we live with the beauties and horrors of our pasts. How to move forward, Lemon asks, when trapped between the demons of one’s history and the angels of one’s better nature? How to live in kindness—to become a caring partner and parent—when one can muster very little such tenderness for oneself? How to be here, now? How to be here, good?
Immersed in darkness but shot through with light, Feverland is a thrillingly experimental memoir from one of our most heartfelt and inventive writers.
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Overview
Brain surgery. Assault weapons in the bed of a pickup truck. Sophia Loren at the Oscars. Rilke, Rodin, and the craters of the moon. Recovery and disintegration. Monkeys stealing an egg outside a temple in Kathmandu. Brushing teeth bloody on long car rides under blue skies. Pain, ours and what we bring to others. Wildfires in southern California. Rats in Texas. Childhood abuse. Dreams of tigers and blackout nights. The sweetness of mangoes. A son born into a shadowy hospital room. Love. Joy.
In Feverland, Alex Lemon has created a fragmented exploration of what it means to be a man in the tumult of twenty-first-century America—and a harrowing, associative memoir about how we live with the beauties and horrors of our pasts. How to move forward, Lemon asks, when trapped between the demons of one’s history and the angels of one’s better nature? How to live in kindness—to become a caring partner and parent—when one can muster very little such tenderness for oneself? How to be here, now? How to be here, good?
Immersed in darkness but shot through with light, Feverland is a thrillingly experimental memoir from one of our most heartfelt and inventive writers.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781571313362 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Milkweed Editions |
| Publication date: | 09/19/2017 |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
KISSING GOD
You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.
—Cormac McCarthy, The Road
I
My son is born into a Caravaggio painting. At 3:34 in the morning, my wife labors in the doom light of a hospital room in Fort Worth, Texas. There are pools of blood and hushed murmurings. Sideways voices curl through the darkness. It is the middle of January 2012. In less than two weeks I will turn thirty-three and most days I am amazed to be alive. My boy—who does not yet have a name, who will not be anything but baby boy for the next seven hours, who is simply my son, my grime-slicked boy, my wailing and blood-roped son, my boy, blinking, teary, how much pain you look like you’re in, my son, my son, my crumple-fleshed son—the head of my son appears in the muggy space between his mother’s knees. I swear to you: there was nothing there and then, suddenly, there was. Blinding shine of the silver bowl and I move to stand at Ariane’s head, her black hair frizzed with humidity. My knucklebones grind as she crushes my hand in hers. Slick skin and the darkening light of ecstasy and oil paints. My field of vision narrows into a tight circle around my wife’s pelvis. The nurse and doctor and doula hunched at Ariane’s feet, urging her on, all vanish into the shadows. Everything slows, and the room gets even darker, darker, darker, slowed way down, so slow that the weak feeling in my knees is already gone, has turned into Maybe. I’m. Not. Feeling. Anything. At. All? Maybe. I’m. Feeling. Too. Much. And then everything ratchets back up, it gets louder and louder. It’s palpable, all of the life in this room; it teems with noise. Grimacing, smiling, hurting, my wife stares as a wrinkly boy appears, some trick of birthing-room light, smoke and mirrors, a movie’s special effect—I swear to you: there was nothing there, and then, howlingly, there was. A person, much too large to fit inside another person, to have lived and grown inside my wife for months. A whole human being—can you hear me over the crying? over my screaming son?—like pulling a bonfire out of your mouth, a white tiger out of your hip pocket, a magic trick, and, in the keening air, a baby boy materializes in a red-soaked towel.
[sb]
And then less than a year later, it is spring and beautiful and I’m blowing through stop signs to get to the same hospital. I’m staring big-eyed around the ER’s waiting room. I lean against the receptionist’s desk and the wall of Plexiglas she’s sitting behind. My chest feels like it’s being jigsawed apart. I have a wife and a baby boy at home. I am going to die. I put my ear to the circle in the Plexiglas to hear her next question. I press the flat of my hand to my heart to show her where the pain is, run a hand down my left arm, fluttering the fingers when I describe the way it hurts. I fold the readout of the EKG performed at Emergency Care two hours before and pass it to the receptionist. It shows that I’m having an irregular heartbeat—peaks and valleys and lines—something about one of the ventricles, something that’s not beating correctly, the nurse had said, before adding that I needed to go to the ER immediately for more thorough medical procedures, to be sure, to make myself right. I’d driven straight home from Emergency Care, slowly, with both hands on the wheel. In the driveway, I tried to figure out what I was going to say to Ariane, but then, trying not to cry, flatly told her that my heart was fucked up. I kissed her shocked face as Felix clambered up my lap and grappled around my neck.
“What’s going on? What is it?” Ariane had asked. “You need to bring your MRI.” I wouldn’t have thought of it myself so I tried to smile at her. I sat down, said, “Sure thing, thanks,” and stared at our reflection in the kitchen window. Felix laughed, and then leaned toward my cheek with his mouth open and kissed me wetly.
Before I left, crying, I kissed them both again.
In the ER waiting room, I don’t look directly at the receptionist because my nystagmus—the uncontrollable bouncing of my eyes—has gotten more severe. I have diplopia, double vision, too. I can’t focus on anything; it looks like I have eight fingers, a blur of digits on each hand. I raise my arms and say that earlier in the day, there was a limb of pain branching down the entire left side of my body. Right to my fingertips. Both of my hands are numb, my face too.
“Or,” I tell her, trying too hard to suggest it’s no big deal, “it might also be my brain.”
She looks up, nonplussed, from the chart she’s filling out.
“My brain.” I notice—starting to blush—how loud I am. I’m making big arm motions at her. I drop the hand I’d been pointing at my ear. “My brain stem,” I say. “I had a bunch of brain bleeds, brain surgery over ten years ago.”
I run my finger down the scar on the back of my head, then lift the MRI films I’ve carried in with me.
“When I was twenty-one. I have my MRI films here. I just got one a week ago. Haven’t even gotten the results yet.”
II
“I think gold would be good,” the dentist says. He’s just a voice emanating from the blinding light above me. His rubbered fingers push in my mouth and over and against my teeth and lips. It feels like a cuttlefish, a squid, is trying to get inside me. I have sea creatures on the brain.
I am twenty-seven and life is good, only getting better. After my dental appointment I’m going to walk out into the California sunshine and breathe deep the flowery air and get fish tacos at the restaurant that’s a few storefronts down in this strip mall.
“Gold, gold, gold,” the dentist mutters to himself, like I’m not there at all. The room is thick with his honeyrot cologne. My head snaps each time he jabs my teeth with the tiny metal hook. The dazzle off his diamond and gold bracelets, his heavy gold chain, makes me squint. He stops scraping my gum line and stares out the window at the shine of the Lexus-packed parking lot. “Good value. Good keeping.”
Like someone trying to catch a snowflake on their tongue, I nod, open-mouthed, ask, “Really?” but it comes out “Aaaaaaaaaaeeeeeeee?!?”
[sb]
As a little boy I dreamed of tigers. I’d be sitting right behind the animal’s colossal, mawing furnace of a head, controlling its loping by tugging its ears, urging it forward, faster—or to slow down, or stop—with the fragile bones of my ankles. Two bluffs cradled the part of Red Wing I lived in. The Mississippi River snaked by on the other side of Barn Bluff. Wisconsin was just a bridge away. It was all very Huck Finn and I was already one hundred years old. I rode my bike to the craggy mouths of caves charred black by old fires, that were littered with the starlight of Bud Light cans; empty soup cans and shattered liquor bottles littered the deer paths I hiked. I scrabbled up the slopes of loose rock to the brittle grass on top of the bluffs.
For whole days, I hung my legs over edges, hundreds of feet straight down. I lay stomach-down on hot flat stones, my head lolling over sandstone lips.
From Barn Bluff, like some tiny impotent god, I watched all of Red Wing buzz and weave below. I felt burnished with the sensation that I almost, just almost, could control what I saw down there. The cars and people just toys for me to move—four steps forward, four steps back—around the board game that was my days.
[sb]
I can’t figure California out—the beautiful tedium that bleaches the day of sorrow while growing a gnarled pit of sadness inside you—but I think some part of me loves it, this gorgeous shitshow. A perfect day—the cloudless, bluest sky above Thousand Oaks, 72 degrees and a breeze shuffling the pomegranate trees—will be followed by weeks of calamity. Midnight earthquakes. Rain, rain, rain, rain, and then mudslides. Then the world will go inferno. For a month, ash will darken the air, a gloomy gift from one of the dozens of uncontrolled wildfires spreading through Southern California. Hundreds of thousands of dead fish will wash ashore and the beaches will shut down. Two days later, the same sand will be foaming with raw sewage that leaked from a water treatment plant in one of the cities along the coast.
[sb]
Each day from high above Red Wing I counted the houses on my block. The neighbor lady in the wheelchair, with whom I talked and for whom I ran errands. The bullies’ big house on the corner. Colvill, my elementary school, and the blacktop field where we played kickball. The lot that froze into a skating rink each winter after the fire department hosed it down. I let my arms marionette in the wind, watching hawks that lazily hooped through the air. Brown-gold swoops in the blue sky above the Mississippi, above the small Minnesota town.
[sb]
Yesterday was one of SoCal’s flawless days: sun-soaked, dozens of radiant oranges in the light-pearled tree. And today started even better, but an hour after breakfast it started to shred apart. The kombucha smells off, a puckering vinegary sweetness, and these new pills my doctor prescribed are giving me what Ariane calls the “yawn.” The kefir I’m making in the kitchen has started expanding exponentially. The first forty-ounce batch was perfect with a splash of mango juice, but the quantity of finished kefir doubled the next time, and that doubled the next—again and again—until now two levels of the fridge are packed with forty-ounce jars of curdling milk. My wife doesn’t like kefir and Sam, the only friend I have here, lives an hour away in Ventura. I’m not sure he trusts my batches of homemade fermentation anyway. In a couple of days the kefir will be a rot-chunked soup. I will not let it go to waste, I will drink it all if I have to.
[sb]
My dream tigers effortlessly churned up the bluffs’ hillsides. I boldly rode them into the caves I hardly had the courage to creep into by day. As the tiger looked over the graffitied walls, the rocky contours lit up, as if its eyes were headlights. When the animal closed its eyes the world went dark and I clung to the heaving, furred body that hummed warm beneath me like a foundry. Some nights my dream tiger would sprint right off the edge of the bluff and we could fly.
[sb]
But now, each sun-drenched afternoon, I’m falling deeply and suddenly asleep. This kind of gone-forever sleep has never happened before. It’s a being-swallowed-into-the-belly-of-a-whale nothingness.
It always starts the same: beneath the orange tree, I meditate on my recovery, on my body healed of all brokenness.
There’s an ocean breeze, the peppery smell of my tomato plants.
An hour of mindfulness, sometimes two, and then blackness. From out of nowhere. I am nothing. I don’t exist. And time is an endless train of bruised boxcars.
What feels like months pass before I’m waking, bewildered, gasping—the sapphire bowl of sky above the orange tree, the aloe plant blossoming in this place, this wherever the fuck I am, this backyard—and then fiercely I am jammed back into my body.
The grass needs to be mowed. Hookworms are making wiffle balls of the tomatoes. I listen to the neighbor’s radio—the Dodgers are up by two—and at the same time a sort of shamefulness starts crawling up my chest. I’m struck with the sense of satisfaction a policeman must feel snapping the cuffs on a burglar, as if I’d caught someone doing something wrong.
[sb]
The dream tigers appeared throughout my childhood—and I loved them. Bengals, Sumatrans, Siberians, Chinas. Almost always, each new dream brought me a different tiger—a thicker, more golden coat one night; an ear that kept flopping down the next time; a huge-headed, five-hundred-pound Siberian after that—but somehow they were also all the same. In the first dreams, when I pressed my forehead against the tiger’s enormous head, the plush orange fur seemed to cave and curl around my bones like a mask or scarf or stocking cap, and in the heat I could hear my own thoughts.
I heard, in the tiger, whatever I was thinking. I was eavesdropping on myself. Climb the bluff. Hunker through the tall weeds along the stretch of swamp before the power plant. Wonder if David is home.
[sb]
Early this morning on my jog through Thousand Oaks, hours before my dentist’s appointment, a motorcycle cop pulled me over for jaywalking. After getting my lecture, I ran up into the hills on the distant edge of town.
At night coyotes sprint through this scrub. Falling asleep, we listen to their maniacal ululations as they stand in a pack over whatever frozen-eyed animal they are rending apart.
The howls are the purest bloodlust, a gnashing bacchanal.
I followed the horse trails to look down on Simi Valley. Plops of horseshit speckle the dirt. It’s lined by prickly pear and gnarled, bone-dry brush. Occasionally wildflowers, vibrant fists of color, peek up.
I don’t usually pause for whatever’s left of what the coyotes killed during the night, but today, starting to lasso back and forth down the other hillside, just a few miles from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, I stopped short—and the raptor looked up at me like what-the-fuck-are-you-doing-here, before knifing its black triangle of a head back into the blood puddle at its claws.
It hopped, hopped, hopped through the muck like it was dancing.
[sb]
When awake—my dream tigers crouching in the sleep that I would fall into that night—I loved pop-up books, Superman and the Lone Ranger. Superman emerging, chest thrust forward, from the Metropolis phone booth Clark Kent had just entered, after I tugged the paper tag of the booth’s doors. The Lone Ranger Hi-Yo, Silver! Away!-ing atop the white stallion that I whinny across the page via a wheel that fit my index finger perfectly.
With no TV in our home, books turned to confetti in my hands. I read in the bathtub. I slept with whatever books my mother brought home from the library.
But sometimes, after falling asleep, I pressed my face into the tiger’s fur and couldn’t tell what it was thinking. A blank chalkboard. The surface of a lake on a breezeless day. Into the black gap I yearned, but I couldn’t hear what was going on inside me.
Then as I got older—sometime around first grade—the dream tigers started ignoring me. Little things at first. I’d think go right around that fallen log and the animal might go left. Instead of slowing when I asked it to, the rippling beast would keep sprinting ahead. To stay balanced atop it, I’d clutch and scrabble while it zigged or bucked.
Once, ignoring my pleas, it leapt straight off the edge of Barn Bluff and instead of flying us high over the Mississippi, the huge warmth beneath me vanished. The tiger was gone. And I plummeted. Choking, my stomach in my throat, as the murky water raced up at me.
[sb]
With a jerk of its head, the bird hops at me before flaring into the air. Up it flies, a barking arrow, curling the updraft. It circles and swoops above. The mess left behind looks like a real animal—something three or four times bigger than a rabbit—exploded all over the dirt. On the side of the trail, the breakable weeds are red freckled.
Flies buzz over the splay of meat and blood.
[sb]
Because I’m a little boy, what I’m completely bewildered by—what, as a thirty-three-year-old, I still can’t make sense of; what, maybe, I’ll always be writing about, what I’ll always be trying to understand—is why my teenage cousin would want to repeatedly sexually abuse his sister and me. I’m three, maybe four years old. His sister is four, too, and she is my best friend.
These memories are mercury poured into my cupped hands. My attempts to fathom the flesh and cruelty are eating fire, choking a bonfire down.
The sexual abuse happens while I’m living with my cousin’s family in Oregon.
There is a knife in the room each time he unzips his jeans.
The blade shines.
My cousin’s zipper shines.
Rain fingers down the bedroom window. Beyond the glass, the gray sky.
My cousin points the knife tip at me, threatens to murder my mother, the most important person in my world, the one who’s raising me by herself, the one I’d do anything for, before he’ll come after me. Before he’ll kill every person I love. So of course I’m not going to tell.
At the time, I’m not even sure what exactly is going on. Don’t know if what is happening to me, what I am being forced to do, is really bad.
Maybe I deserve it, like he says. Maybe a part of me likes it.
“If you tell,” he says, “I’ll kill everyone.” My cousin smiles, taking his belt off. “Then you.”
[sb]
I had shown up to the dentist’s early. I walked around the strip mall to feel the sunshine on my face and then checked in at the front desk. On one side of the waiting room, a man sat hunched toward a blaring, wall-mounted plasma TV. A game show was on. Like I wasn’t even there—a ghost, an invisible presence in his living room—he hardly looked up when I entered. I said hello and then sat on the other side of the room.
I flipped through my book’s pages, unable to focus through his laughter, the gunshots of his knee slaps. Each time the show’s audience laughed the man clapped once, percussively, which was followed by the sound of his hands rasping away from each other, like a tennis shoe tearing away from melting-hot blacktop.
For fifteen minutes I tried not to sigh as he thundered and roared.
And then, at 11:15 exactly, the man stood, flattened his track pants with hand swipes, and tucked in his bright yellow T-shirt. From the back of a chair he swooped up a doctor’s overcoat, then stepped toward me. He grinned and reached out to shake my hand, introducing himself as my dentist, and said that he was happy I was there.
III
At some point in my life I realize that I do not see the world directly as it is—that I do not see what the people around me see. That my vision is skewed and I stare at what’s not there, or what no one else is looking at.
Often I feel like I’m living inside a cage, watched in truth by no one, but paranoid that everyone is out there, staring in at me.
Always it seems that I’m waiting for the results of a procedure that will tell me how close I am to death and if I am dying again.
Around me the world is terribly alive.
Around me the world is not equally loved.
Table of Contents
ContentsEKG
I Was Already Ready When I Was Dead
Migrants in a Feverland
Kissing God
King of the Rats
Migrants in a Feverland
My Misogyny
Heartdusting
I Can Hold My Breath Forever
Things That Are: On Pleasure
Migrants in a Feverland
Like So Many Nightmares
Migrants in a Feverland
Rabbit Hole Music
Way Up High Way Down Low
Migrants in a Feverland
Becoming Animal: A History
How Long before You Go Dry
All Night the Cockroaches
Migrants in a Feverland
Fuck the Alamo, or Never Forget: A Mixtape
Notes
Acknowledgments