A grand tour of the edges of our lives, where glory and significance riot against the logic of living and the pall of tragedy.
The Making Sense of Things is a collection of twelve stories that pulse with memory, magic, and myth—all our favorite ways of trying to make sense of things.
Readers are treated to vivid and unforgettable characters. A fiercely independent woman puts the man who loves her to unconscionable tests, never guessing that arson, suicide, and canine obesity will yield a magical kind of happiness. A honeymooner in Venice, addled by fever and second thoughts, commits by dumb error a double murder. A brisk lawyer founders when a car wreck claims his son and ex-wife, then discovers that the desperation of grief is a kind of hope.
A grand tour of the edges of our lives, where glory and significance riot against the logic of living and the pall of tragedy.
The Making Sense of Things is a collection of twelve stories that pulse with memory, magic, and myth—all our favorite ways of trying to make sense of things.
Readers are treated to vivid and unforgettable characters. A fiercely independent woman puts the man who loves her to unconscionable tests, never guessing that arson, suicide, and canine obesity will yield a magical kind of happiness. A honeymooner in Venice, addled by fever and second thoughts, commits by dumb error a double murder. A brisk lawyer founders when a car wreck claims his son and ex-wife, then discovers that the desperation of grief is a kind of hope.
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Overview
A grand tour of the edges of our lives, where glory and significance riot against the logic of living and the pall of tragedy.
The Making Sense of Things is a collection of twelve stories that pulse with memory, magic, and myth—all our favorite ways of trying to make sense of things.
Readers are treated to vivid and unforgettable characters. A fiercely independent woman puts the man who loves her to unconscionable tests, never guessing that arson, suicide, and canine obesity will yield a magical kind of happiness. A honeymooner in Venice, addled by fever and second thoughts, commits by dumb error a double murder. A brisk lawyer founders when a car wreck claims his son and ex-wife, then discovers that the desperation of grief is a kind of hope.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781573668767 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 03/06/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 184 |
| File size: | 820 KB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
TROTH
IT WAS A WORLD EXACTLY LIKE OURS, WITH THREE DIFFERENCES.
First, short went first. When two people crossed paths, the taller gave the right of way. Same if they reached a door at the same time. Or bumped into each other.
The rule was simple. Even children learned "sky hangs, earth moves" and fumbled past each other in reverse height order. The rule was logical. A taller person could better view and anticipate a crossing situation, then make up lost time with longer strides. With time the rule became custom. It reigned in all cultures, including those where in this world ladies go first, and where the reverse is true, and where age bestows priority, and where strangers' shoulder caps are things for sudden nuzzling because no convention adheres.
The time saved in any given encounter was small. Multiplied across the other world's bus stops and vestibules and elevators, it saved days and months. It happens that nine lurching dances of uncertainty in a hallway contain enough moments for a breakthrough in the arts or sciences.
The other world was globalizing as relentlessly as ours. The rule accomplished there what the jagged heap of customs in our world cannot. Take for instance the Walloon, the Yemenite, and the Aleutian Islander who converge on the same entrance to the duty-free shop in Charles de Gaulle's Terminal 2A — the narrow entrance, the one to the side. In our world they are destined each to lose three seconds picking at the floor with sheepish feet and blinking. Four, if a mixed-gender assortment. In the other world they moved around each other like breezes in a courtyard.
There was another benefit. Persons equipped to navigate physical encounters with ease and poise, even without common language, could not help but feel better about almost everything. There was nourishment in repeatedly confronting a problem, one so fleshy and immediate, and solving it instantly. A steady drip of these small but sure successes made people think of their souls as places where good things happened, rather than sticks that chafed against life's corners.
The other world, in sum, was more accomplished, more fulfilled. It was a better world.
He shows up late. The groom strolls over and thanks him for arriving before the couple's first child. They join the other groomsmen.
At the front a priest speaks instructions to the church's ceiling.
Across the nave stand the bridesmaids. They loom around the bride. She is a tiny woman with nervous looks and perfume that wears like a shriek. Except when speaking, she offers her friends only the sides of her head.
When it comes time to rehearse the procession, both groups filter into the nave and make their way back toward the entrance.
He first sees her when she stops. This bridesmaid has paused to let a short groomsman pass. She waits with her head at a kind tilt. She resembles someone hoping everything will turn out all right.
She first sees him when the rehearsal is over. He is waiting to use the restroom off the narthex, yawning.
Second, people had two hearts. Each. One heart took the same place in the body as yours or mine. Were one a doctor, or a fitness trainer anxious to suggest erudition, or the kind of person who has attended an auction of ancient maps, one called it the upper heart. Otherwise it was known as the high heart. Like hearts in this world, the high heart enjoyed the shelter of a rib cage. The low heart, and there will be no surprise in this, sat lower in the abdomen. It also had four chambers, but was smaller. It wore the liver like a sun hat.
A second heart was the fruit of evolution. In the state of nature, torpor is death. In the other world, too many early humans had fallen asleep after meals, their blood wicked away from brains by working stomachs. Too many had woken up bleary and confused, under trees, outside caves, aware for a weird instant that their heads had turned into agonies and these agonies had a color and this color was specific but oddly indefinite, either stabbing red or crushing black. Too many survived just short of realizing that ravaging jaws meant both.
A stray mutation changed everything. After a large meal the low heart could dedicate itself to the viscera. This freed the high heart to keep the brain alert as an indignant bird. The evolutionary advantage was significant. The two-hearted were better nourished for not having to choose between eating well and staying safe. They were less vulnerable to attack, and so lived longer, and so procreated often and saw their offspring through adolescence.
The two-hearted quickly established themselves as the dominant line. The one-hearted fought off sleep but not extinction.
Popular myth doted over the two hearts. Many believed the caged heart an animal, lurching against its bars, responsible for the passions: fury, revulsion, brutality, righteousness, elation. The low heart, on the other hand, was a jewel that needed plushness and velvetry to protect it. So it glinted quietly: pride, regret, resentment, sympathy, contentment. In certain traditions the high heart stoked new love, while out of the low one leached the serene affection of couples with grown children and a preference for sitting side by side while dining. In others the low heart discharged prudent love, the kind that revels in cheerful, circumspect, adequately insured spouses, while the high heart craved velocity and calamity and ex-convicts with darling white teeth.
It was generally accepted that the high heart, from its vantage, gazed into the future, while the low heart mired itself in the past.
People in the other world lived longer. They were more awake to life as they lived it. It was a better world.
The hotel room is warm. She likes this. Maybe it will incubate boldness in her.
She sits cross-legged, shoes off. The panty-hosed toe of the suspended foot dips like a bashful eyelash.
He sits on the end of the bed, bow tie loosened. He watches her face. She takes him in with glances.
You seem like a calm person, she says. The way she holds the wineglass exposes as much web between fingers as possible.
I am a calm person, he says.
Really? You don't let anything get to you.
Not usually.
She puts down her wine and leans over.
Let's see. She places a hand on his high heart. So slow.
I exercise.
What about this one? she says, slipping her hand down to his low heart. This one doesn't lie.
He man-giggles, chuffing twice through his nose with his mouth closed.
It lies less, he says.
I know something that doesn't lie, she says. Her hand waits a sly moment.
Yes, he thinks, but it spits when it talks. You're beautiful, he says.
Third, there was troth. There existed in every language a word that meant both, except for three things, not two. In English the term was troth. In Spanish it was trambos. In Tuvan, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.].
It was a small thing. Thrice is a triplish word. Terms like all and everything can refer to three things. Or five, or fifteen. An inessential word like troth should not have mattered.
But it did.
Perhaps it was because troth was so concrete. All and everything are abstractions. They flap out of the mouth and alight where they will. Troth grabbed with three hands:
"Still, sparkling, or tap?"
"Troth, thank you."
"Go to the last verse. Good strong voice, now."
"'I will troth lay me down in peace, and sleep, and dream: for thou, Lord, only makest me dwell in safety.'"
"A car? With what money are you getting a car?
You crying to your mother again? Or maybe you'll sell your blood, like before. Maybe the rest of you."
"Maybe troth. Maybe go fuck yourself."
Perhaps it was because troth brought things together. The word did not simply point, like thrice. It gathered. It tied things up with a common twine, conveyed them in a single bindle of a truth. Or perhaps it was because troth seemed like pure surfeit. It forked over both choices and the compromise to boot. It promised a union more populous than even love could manage. It spoke to each who spoke the word of possibility.
Or perhaps it was the peace it gave. In this world, we feel our hearts thumping every waking moment. Even with our single hearts, we feel a double beat: bip, bup. This two-tick, this I-am iamb, is in fact the sound of life until death — the bip heedless, the bup cowed and watchful. It is the footfall of a cripple, hobbled by the knowledge that one day he will not exist.
Those in the other world, who thought more possible, who lived in threes as much as twos, did not feel the same beat. Even when the hearts worked in unison, and made the same rhythm as in our world, the result was different. Bip-bup-bip was the cadence of experience, the first and last moments vital and lancing, the middle a pale slurry. Bup-bip-bup traced the substance of experience: the wandering contemplation of what something might be like; the abrupt punch of it while you're barely looking; the trailing memory of it thinning out to randomnesses — the dumb extrovert smell of new plastic, a caved-in voice, yellows.
Troth took the sound of dying and made it the noise of living.
The other world brimmed with potential. Life was expansive, hopeful, defiant. It was a better world.
He frowns sometimes. It is the same frown people make when they crane down looking for lint on their shoulders. Their third dinner, she realizes he does this when he is trying to remember something.
She has a fascinating aspect. It is not her heterogeneous body, its panther parts and its pudding parts, or her skin's smell like suncooked windowpane. Their third time, he realizes it is that she does not know where to put her eyes.
In the other world, the short-goes-first rule had one exception. A woman carrying a child went first. Always. It did not matter how tall she was, or if she carried the child in her arms or in her womb. Conspicuously pregnant women moved about as if the planet were abandoned.
This exception was observed as assiduously as the rule. Many contended this was no exception, only rigorous compliance. Babies, whether shucked or pupating, were always shorter.
The exception did not work when child-burdened women crossed paths. These encounters reverted to short-goes-first. Women tended to allow priority not to the smaller woman, however, but to the woman with the smaller child. This started as a small mischief, warm and sisterly and subversive, but ripened into tradition. Pregnant women delighted — or pretended delight, if they were tired or in a rush — in comparing bellies.
Sometimes two persons of the same height crossed paths. For this there was no rule. A solution had to be improvised. Often one person extended a tentative or reassuring or flamboyant palm and let the other go first. Usually this worked. But sometimes the lettee resented this, suspecting the lettor believed himself taller. His resentment was not of the gesture, but of what it seemed to reflect. What, after all, might lead someone, absent visible evidence, to assume he was taller or the other shorter? An arrogance so powerful it warped his sense of his own dimension? A contemptuous judgment of some aspect of the lettee — his clothing or his carriage or his complexion, his resemblance to some miscreant — that in a subconscious instant diminished the stature the lettor believed the lettee could credibly possess? Whatever it was, the lettee was often sure he did not like it. The lettor, for his part, routinely cautioned himself not to expect thanks but found himself searching the lettee anyway for the slightest acknowledgment — an amiable jut of the lower lip, a conscientious tuck of the head, a shifting of weight toe-ward to telegraph a quickening gait — and always, always begrudged its absence.
The other solution, of course, was for one person simply to forge ahead. This approach (best taken after meeting eyes or trading grins or otherwise signaling mutually an imminent collision) was perhaps the most expedient. It also spared the nonforger the suggestion he was obviously shorter. But the nonforger sometimes took this the wrong way. He thought the forger too ready to favor himself. He bristled at the kind of conceit that could spawn such self-advantaging. These projected antipathies addled like a two-tined serving fork in the underbrain. Meanwhile the forger, outwardly all bluff efficacy, engaged inwardly in his own self-torment. He perked his ears up as he put his head down to pass, daring himself to hear the exaggerated shuff of shoes coming to an impatient stop.
Ethnic differences heated the forkpoints to glowing. Certain populations were taller than others. Encounters between their members happened often in this other globalizing world, most without consequence. But repeated encounters between height-disparate groups planted bad seeds. Ethnic Austrians were one and a half inches taller than Turks, on average. A guest worker and serial lettee from Istanbul might wonder after a fourth tight, waiting Viennese smile whether it was the product of the gray matter perched behind it rendering him an ignorant misogynist. Three and a half inches meant that a Finn late for an appointment at Siltasaarenkatu 18 might puzzle over why he subsidized with his irretrievable time the Somalis who had failed to consult him before arriving to throng his city's sidewalks. Seven inches caused Indonesians in Amsterdam to bustle past as hastily and unobtrusively as possible, which might be viewed as smug entitlement, felt as degrading infantilization, and experienced all around as absurd and inequitable.
The biggest problem, however, was hunkering. Those in a hurry sometimes curved their backs and compressed their necks and trained their eyes on the ground. The posture shrank them, and the averted eyes let them avoid (or claim to avoid) seeing and thus having to stop and wait for other human beings. It was a double license to untrammeled movement. The trouble with hunkering, of course, was the very plague the crossing rule prevented — collisions. Hunkerers mostly got around fine, but from time to time crashed spectacularly into shorter persons who had not guessed the rule would be ignored. Sometimes they smashed into other hunkerers: a game of chicken gone gamy. A double-hunker smashup seemed like sweet justice, but in fact it fired people's imagination so powerfully that they were prepared to believe every hunker-caused crash was a double-hunker. This in turn stigmatized the undersized and innocent victims of single-hunkers as hunkers themselves. The slightest slighted.
Cross-ethnic double-hunkers between pregnant women were rare. But when they happened, there sometimes was violence.
It is a stupid thing to do. But there is a gland, perhaps part of a heart, that urges it.
They are not married, let alone thinking about a family. Yet they name their unborn children. There will be John, after the church where they met. And Sarah and Peter, after the bride and groom who brought them together.
Sarah's life is a hard one if troth are boys, he says.
If troth are boys we have bigger troubles, she says.
With you, he says, troubles are adventures.
One day he comes home and finds her in tears.
She does not make perfect sense. She explains, tries, how this love terrifies her, how suddenly they have so much to lose.
He holds her. He tells her he knows, because he has felt these things, too. He teases her — if love upsets you, devotion will kill you — and holds her closer. She makes wet noises that are laughter. He is bending down. Before he knows what he is doing, he licks the tears off her cheeks.
He'll never be able to do that again, she thinks. At least not without making light of this moment, this wonderful moment.
He holds her some more.
They don't taste like adventure, he thinks.
Usually, the two hearts beat together. But not always. Under stress, the hearts abandoned their bicardia, their unison, and scrambled into different rhythms, dicardia, each heart for itself. Someone waiting in a crowded room to give a speech, or seeing ajar a door she locked a minute ago, or kissing for the first time a friend's lips, felt her heartsbeat not only accelerate but also diverge. Dicardia intensified nearly every emotion. Imagine the core of you launching into separate tumults. We in this world feel urgency, desperation, when our insides thrum faster. Those in the other world felt these things, too, but moreover catastrophe, or rapture, when their insides split apart.
Because the high heart sat off to the left and the low to the right, a state of excitement felt like being cracked into quarters. Limbs seemed to snap off in conspiracy with these phantom dicardiac fourths, and so a person might feel helpless or out of control, rodeo-oxed from his own exploded trunk. Oddly, a person might also feel stronger. Suddenly he sensed two power plants pulsing forcefully and independently inside him. The more the heartsbeat diverged, the more he felt strong as two men. It seemed as if he had a life to spare.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Making Sense of Things"
by .
Copyright © 2018 George Choundas.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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