Clouds and Apparitions

PAINTINGS BY SASCHA BRAUNIG

Lynne Tillman is an author, essayist, art critic, and the fiction editor of Fence magazine. Many well-read individuals recognize Lynne’s 2006 novel American Genius, a Comedy as part of a cautiously guarded canon that includes Gravity’s Rainbow, Infinite Jest, The Dead Father, White Noise, etc. It will teach you lots of things about Zulu, the Manson family, chair design, and what life’s like for an extremely intelligent middle-aged woman stuck in an asylum. Hence we are extremely proud to present an exclusive extract from Lynne’s novel-in-progress, which will tentatively share the title of this sneak preview. We’ve coupled the story with paintings by Sascha Braunig whose portrayals of hypnotic, iridescent beings were met with acclaim at her first solo exhibition at Foxy Production in New York last spring. Her work, like Lynne’s, makes our brains feel weird in very good ways.

The end doesn’t depend on the beginning. The end may be the beginning of other possible endings.

There’s a story in my family about Great-Uncle Ezekiel, who didn’t know, until he was 18 and married to Margaret, that women went to the bathroom. It’s always told with this euphemism. My father, whose uncle Ezekiel was, told it to my older brother, Hart, when he was 13, then me at 13—a father-son rite of passage—and his two brothers told their sons, and then their daughters, when the fathers loosened up about girls.

My kid sister, Clover, baby of the family, was named after a minor-league 19th-century figure on my mother’s side, a great-great-great-ancestor. Historical Clover had a tragic end, but Mother liked the woman, the name, and gave it to her baby girl. Also Mother felt attached to her family in a mystical way, she said. I thought it was creepy, given the provenance, but you can’t argue with mysticism; you just need to know your enemy. For a long time, I stayed out of all that, or tried to be objective. That was when I had hope for objectivity. But the mind is weaker than the flesh. Just kidding. My father didn’t know that much about his genealogy. They came from different parts of the old country, his mother, German-Scottish-Irish, father, Russian Jewish and Austrian, all from the mid- to late 1800s. The usual immigrant deal: Fourth and fifth generations not only don’t refer to the old country but also never think about it; brothers became professionals, sisters married well. My father’s an agnostic and a lawyer, or maybe the same deal, Damned with Doubt.

My mother thinks she is America. Her family arrived on the Mayflower—with the criminals, Mother; the religious crackpots, Mother. Man, she gets pissed. We were poets, feminists, abolitionists, politicians, she says. Her Boston people hung with the Henry James crowd; but when she came of age, she let family privilege go, which was part of her privilege. Image was a personal issue for my mother; the way I’d put it, it was in the family as ancestor worship, and she knew herself as an image from birth, distanced or not. Her family’s house was decorated with ancestral portraits by respectable English and American painters, and later on 19th-century photographers. Mother was our only family photographer, until I was eight and she gave me a cool camera. She owned a Zeiss Ikon, and my father bought the first Polaroid camera in 1962. In 1982 Kodak launched disc photography, the easy-to-use, “decision-free” cameras built around a rotating disc of film. Mom bought me that. It was cool, unfussy. Primitive now. I loved it, but I was more interested in bugs and rockets then. Then, at about 12, I went crazy for photography. You could say it became everything to me.

I was a boy who didn’t kill insects or torture small creatures, except my sister; she believes adamantly that I tortured her. Tormented, that’s more like it. When I was six, I found ecstasy in our backyard. A praying mantis appeared. I didn’t know what it was, but it rocked my world. I watched its little head turning on its neck—the only insect on earth that turns its head, like a person. They’re dinosaur humans. PMs have a face and look you in the eyes. Theirs are in the middle of their tiny heads, and they see the way we do. So cool. The PM noticed me, looked right at me. I thought I was face-to-face with a god or an alien, E.T. is a PM. The PM really took me in, with sympathy and intelligence. I wanted him for a pet, a friend, and named him Mr. Petey. (My parents wouldn’t let me bring him indoors.) I could talk to him—it could have been female—he listened better than my parents, and pretty much every day I went into the backyard to find him. Mr. Petey usually showed up. I never touched him. You can’t kill a PM, my mother said, huffily, they’re a protected species, and if you kill one, we’ll have to pay the government a lot of money. I wasn’t ever going to kill Petey, she was crazy, but learning about the existence of a protected species thrilled my kid-brain. Still does. I wondered if I was one, a special boy with special powers because I knew Mr. Petey. I reveled in talking with Mr. Petey. You can’t find a PM stuffed animal, so I made drawings, and my mother sewed me one. I still have it, Petey’s head flops down after all these years. Mr. Petey has seen it all—Mr. Petey, plural. I didn’t know then that he/she lives only one year. A PM’s short life span fundamentally defies the value of human longevity, its evolutionary merit. The flaws therein.

I must’ve fooled myself—actually, kids don’t fool themselves—when a new PM showed up, because their markings and colors vary. I don’t know what I thought. But a PM arrived in the spring and stayed through summer, I called him/her Mr. Petey, and then one day Mr. Petey went for a vacation, in the South. I figured that out for myself. And that was always Mr. Petey in the backyard, until I left home.

I was a dreamy kid. I’m not so dreamy now. Maybe I am still, but in a different way, and my dreaminess is more blocked to me. Or it was, until recently. Anyway, I had dreamed about being a medical doctor because of Dad’s brother Lionel. He told me people wore green uniforms in the hospital. I figured he jumped around in the halls like a big insect, the way he did in our house. But older bro Hart went into medicine, so that got taken. When Uncle Lionel was drunk, he lunged at the couch, collapsed, and slept like the dead until he was pulled off by his wife (Aunt Marnie). My father drank too, but held it better, and he was an estate lawyer.

Lionel took the big hit, a onetime muscle-destroying heart attack. My miserable father battled esophageal cancer. People mostly lose this one, and eventually he did too, not so long ago. Through his breathing tube, Dad spat out his last words to me. Nothing spiritual from an estate lawyer: Get your money out of the market. I almost forgave him for that, later.

I’m so running ahead of myself.

1) Not a good time in my life. In most ways, not.
2) Could be exciting, if it weren’t my life.
3) Studying people’s lives, beliefs, customs. A cultural anthropologist, ethnographer of images.
4) Things shifted—I became my own subject.

A soft science, Hart says. “Not putting it down, Little Bro.” He’s four years older and a forensic pathologist. Right, Big Bro, I say, and you see dead people. Actually, dead people have a lot of currency in my family.

Our family house was a large 1960s split-level ranch: four bedrooms, parents on one end, children the other, bedrooms the same size for Hart and me and baby sister Clover—but hers had more windows, a sore point—and there were walls of picture windows in the living- and dining-room areas, slate floors, an open kitchen with an island, floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace, and we were sort of in the country. Outside Boston, near Beverly. John Updike territory. Nice family place, if you didn’t know the family. Just kidding.

My parents told stories of their upbringings, to the point where they couldn’t make sense of them, or why they were telling them. Reminding them: They shouldn’t have had children. Three of us. “But we had you. We love you.” They were older parents, who waited until the best time, they said, to have the best children. With all that pimping, they underlined their gene-carriers’ supposed exceptionalism by bestowing us with “unique monikers.” I’m Ezekiel (after Dad’s uncle and also a sixth-century prophet) Hooper (maternal surname) Stark (paternal German-Jewish-English-Unitarian). In grade school, “Zeke” was yucky, “Stark” sucky, I rhymed with everything. Brother Hart Hooper Stark, same rhymey biz, but he glories in it, imagines he’s special, like Hart Crane, the writer. But he’s just a pathologist.

Our Clover (Clover Sturgis Hooper Stark) doesn’t say anything about her handle, or if she suffers because of its sad legacy (I do). She suffers from selective mutism. She can talk, but she doesn’t want to, or she chooses to be silent—and it’s debatable, maybe she doesn’t choose. She’s six years younger. Ten years younger than Hart. That’s a big spread. Clover’s a singular presence in our midst.