BASS 2022: Leslie Blanco, “A Ravishing Sun” from New Letters, 87.1/2

The Tower Tarot card represents chaos and destruction. It is the Major Arcana card of sudden upheaval and unexpected change. This change usually is scary, life changing and often unavoidable. A negative Tower event can be akin to a bomb going off in your life. You don’t know how you will survive but somehow you will and later you will realise that while it was a tremendously difficult thing to go through and you wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy, it has made you into the person you are. One positive aspect of The Tower is that the destruction it brings is usually directed at something that was built on a false beliefs and foundations or unrealistic goals and dreams. Also on the bright side, the destruction The Tower brings is always followed by renewal and creation.

The Tower Tarot card, online at TheTarotGuide.com

I resisted this story. I immersed myself in the neuroscience: epigenetics, PTSD, somatic memory. I played blame-the-protagonist. I played blame-the-writer, resented the flagrant style abuse – I love me some sentence fragments and weird sentence constructions, but come on – and the everything-but-the kitchen-sink content. I focused on minute details: how did the guy’s brains end up going through the windshield if his helmet was still on? I put it aside for a few days and came back to it. Because what it really was, was too close.

The opening values style over information:

I look for the motorcycle, for the body. I look everywhere except at my feet.
At my feet.
By then, people are milling, afraid to go near him.
Not me.
I touch him.
I speak to him.
I see his spirit leave. I see it. Like an S rising up, swishing its tail like a fish, wishing, longing. Then a whoosh – not a sound, a feeling in the silence – so fast in every direction, touching every tree, every molecule, every drop of sky.
Exhilarating.
Until I understand what I am seeing. And then the swarm of dark flies, the stink of carrion, the weight – a boulder – that falls and pins me to that asphalt, to that story. For years.

It’s oddly beautiful – that S shape of the spirit, the image of being pinned – but what’s going on? Persistence is a necessary virtue. This paragraph makes a lot more sense when read after finishing the story. A million Creative Writing 101 teachers will tell you not to start a story by confusing the reader, but sometimes it works, it draws one into the story, arouses curiosity: what’s literal, what’s figurative?  As the opening lines of an anthology, I wonder if it’s a wise choice. Would I have persisted if I hadn’t committed myself to yet another annual BASS read?

The story follows Lucy through her recovery from trauma, a journey that includes a lot of side trips through privilege, the psychosociology of the immigrant, cultural norms, and medical treatments that range from ineffective to quackery.

While the motorcycle accident is the inciting incident in the story, the inciting incident in Lucy’s life is elsewhere. We find out that at the time of the accident, she’s left her husband and her career as a doctor to return to grad school and study Cuban history. She blames medical school for the failure of her marriage: “The world drained slowly of wonder, of beauty, until all that was left was illness…. I want to be outside, with the living.”

It’s not clear exactly clear why this discovery, this decision to change everything about her life, happened at the moment it did, but that is the ultimate inciting incident. The question is muted but hangs over the story: had she not been in the middle of such a massive life change, would the accident have been as traumatic? She sees herself as being punished by karma, Santeria, genetics, the Universe; but what if she’s doing the punishing herself?

 Xavier has been a nice feature of living, though it took her a while to get to the point where she took their relationship seriously. And then a motorcycle crashed into them on a blind curve. Aside from a few lacerations, she and Xavier were not injured, but the motorcyclist died. And this is where her symptoms started. Fear. Lack of motivation. Inability to work. Flashbacks of Xavier’s bleeding face, of the dead man’s brains on his shirt, of the dead man’s soul leaving, coming back to her, over and over.

Her father waits a few days before bringing out the tough love:

Consider this your wake-up call, Lucy, he says, the universe is telling you to get your life in order.
What the hell are you saying? I ask him.
But I know what he’s saying. He wants me to regress. To my husband. To my career. To socially condoned misery.
Scholar? my father’s said. What does that mean, scholar? Are you changing it to historian now? What does historian mean? What will they pay you for, exactly? He acts like he’s never heard of a university. Like he’s never read a history book. Seeing a documentary. Do you have any idea how much I paid for your medical school? You’re a doctor. Do you hear me? A doctor. And every time he’s greeted Xavier – not a doctor – he’s looked him up and down with a scowl, as if Xavier was an intruder, a hitchhiking vagrant I picked up at the side of the road.
This is your wake up call.
Wearily, with no anger or amusement, my sister’s words echo in my head. If you’re going to rebel, couldn’t you have picked something more exciting than Cuban history, for God’s sake? Couldn’t you have become a fucking stripper? My sister. Also a doctor. Married to – what else – a doctor.

That thing about “what does a historian do anyway?” reminded me of my own father. He once told us some news about a cousin: “He teaches a class at some university, and he wrote a book about cults, but I don’t know what he does for a living.” Sociologist, like historian, is not on the scorecard for some people.

The thing is, we learn that Lucy’s father, who emigrated from Cuba, knows something about trauma. About being held at gunpoint by government agents. About secret police. About his father’s torture for insufficient fealty to Communism. Lucy doesn’t know these details for a long time, but she knew her father:

I know which by the way my father holds his body, by the way his papers have to be arranged just so, by the way he cleaves so tightly to the notion of progress, of never looking back. You can’t slow down, he said to me so many times. You’ve got to keep moving. You’ve got to go forward. You’ve got to succeed. And at night, he surfs the news channels with a look on his face of intense vigilance. As if reading facial expressions for code. For deception. For apocalypse.
…For a child, from a parent, panic is heritable by touch, by proximity. Calamitous thinking, too. Threatening, traumatized, dysfunctional patterns. Threaded into the DNA.
All it takes, then, is a confluence of traumatic events in a short period of time – a divorce, a career change, a family feud, actual, physical violence – and your brain connects a zillion dots of personal and ancestral suffering.

This process of epigenetic inheritance – generational transmission of trauma, not by genetic mutation, but by changes in the supporting structures that up- and down-regulate the expression of genes – is one of the hot topics in molecular biology these days.  It’s hard to tease out nature from nurture, however.

Xavier becomes an enemy of sorts: Lucy sees his optimism as the product of white privilege. I have a lot of problems with that categorization, but it gives her something to think about, this issue of memory being different for immigrants and people of color. Her Tarot card is The Tower, a warning of danger; his is The Sun, the symbol of optimism – and it just occurs to me now, as I type this, how that resonates with the title and the final line of the story. He leaves. But he comes back. Is that optimism, or is it love?

This is the part of the story where there’s supposed to be a big climax.
There’s no big climax.
One day I do the simple thing. The hard thing. I get up.
I can’t tell you why. Why that day. Why at all.
Except: for getting up is a form of revenge.
…What is history, really, but collective adrenal time? Memories that exist collectively with an altered time signature. Memories collectively stored in isolation from reality. Memories rehearsed as if for a guarantee against the future which never, no matter what historians say, repeat, not really, not to the same people, not to the same way.

When I say this story was too close, this is one of those points where it’s like reading my own biography. Several times, I’ve emotionally collapsed in a heap for months, and several times, one day I got up. I understand the mystery here. But the revenge belongs to Lucy. As are the memories, which become her profession. 

Blanco’s contributor note describes how she originally wrote this as a micro-memoir of a similar series of events in her life, events that culminated on 9/11, but put it aside to work on a novel instead, as she felt “too exposed.” She picked it up once, turned it into fiction, but it still felt exposed, so she put it aside for another novel. The pandemic gave her the chance to get it done. “It only took me twenty years to finish it.”

 *  *  *

• The story can be found online at New Letters.
• Jake Weber does a stellar analysis of the many aspects of this story barely mentioned here at Workshop Heretic.

BASS 2022: Here We Go Again

On display in this volume of The Best American Short Stories are twenty emotionally and intellectually engaged writers. I found myself drawn to the basics this year: ease of language, innovation, humor, truth, the ability to tell an interesting and important story. Often new writers are taught to explore what is at stake for their characters. This can be love or even life, a sense of self, anything really. As a reader, I want to feel that what I am reading matters, that the story knows something profound, goes somewhere worthwhile, tries something difficult or risky, something significant. Thankfully, there was no lack of good candidates.

Heidi Pitlor, Foreword

I can’t imagine the work it takes to put together these anthologies. I struggle to read two or three stories a week; how does one read dozens, choosing from among them the one hundred best to pass along to the year’s guest editor? In her Foreword, Pitlor informs us this is her sixteenth BASS. It’s my thirteenth read/blog. I obviously have the easier job.

It always takes me a moment to readjust from reading books to reading BASS, from thinking about the two or three or four hundred pages I’ve just read to focusing on eight or ten or fifteen pages. I learned to blog on BASS and Pushcart, and they’re still my comfort zone, giving each story its individual post.

As always, the first thing I do is look through the Table of Contents. I see a lot of familiar names – Elizabeth McCracken, Karen Russell – and some recent acquaintances – Claire Luchette, Bryan Washington – as well as some old friends I haven’t seen in a while – Rebecca Makkai, Alice McDermott – and, of course, several writers completely new to me. I still wish there were more Ecotone-level journals and fewer New Yorker entries, but that’s what Pushcart is for.

I noticed Lauren Groff’s story “The Wind.” One of my blogosphere interlocutors, Jonathan Duelfer, wrote a Guest Post about it when it appeared in The New Yorker; I declined to join in at the time, letting him do his thing unimpeded. Looks like it’s a story I was meant to read.

And then there’s Andrew Sean Greer, this year’s guest editor, who I keep confusing with someone else, but I’m not sure who.

We are rightfully interested in what the story is about, but equally important (and mostly unexamined) is the language in which it is told. Because being a good storyteller is more than having a good story; we all know this. It is knowing how to tell it. The right words for this story. That is what I wanted to celebrate in the authors of this collection. … How do you write about hard things? That is the question many writers ask before sitting down. They know their terrors and fears, but worry they will not get them across properly, and to fail to do that would be to betray what is most important. Many give up and tackle smaller, easier subjects. But we all know that unless you are touching on your own private fears and heartaches, your own hardest stories, then you are not (as my Montana professor William Kitteredge used to say) “even in the ballpark.”… Clever is impressive; clever gets attention; clever is satisfying. But telling a hard story is the actual job.

Andrew Sean Greer, Introduction

I’ve been looking at Greer’s breakout book, Less, every year since it was published in 2017, wondering if I should include it in my In Between Reading. I always decided to read other things instead, partly based on the cover art, which evoked both the Falling Man photo and Mad Men, a couple of sacred images to me; I didn’t want them trifled with. It won the Pulitzer, and a slate of other prizes, and I still passed it by. This week, I read Greer’s Introduction to BASS, and immediately put Less on my TBR list. I like what he pays attention to; whether or not I see the same things in those stories remains to be seen, but I appreciate his appreciation of words, language, point of view, and humor, and his insistence on telling the hard stories rather than the easy ones.

Let’s get started.