Issue 23 Preview: An Approximate Hourly Record of Thoughts and Feelings During a Time of Intense Sleep Deprivation, by Lucas Mann
The following essay is included in Barrelhouse 23.
1. My daughter has a sound machine for when she sleeps. It offers many bells and whistles — tinkling lullaby options, pulsing color change through a pediatrician-approved scroll of soft reds and blues — but we don’t use those. We just use the sound in an otherwise pitch-black room, a drone so loud and constant that it begins to seem to have nuance. Somewhere in the code of it, there is a loop delayed long enough that each time a part of me wonders if it won’t return or if there was never a pattern at all. This isn’t active wondering, just one little knot nestled into the untangle able larger knot of fear and exhaustion and tenderness and a weird new type of yearning. Within all of that, the one loop sticks out — the only faithful approximation of running water that the machine produces, the gentle lap of a wave, followed by a lingering trickle. The sounds paired here don’t go together. They reference two totally different types of water and evoke totally different sense memories — bay beach at sunset; stream stumbled upon in bare winter woods — but before I can sort out the memories the machine has moved on.
2. It is too obvious and probably not interesting to riff about the Platonic nature of this anecdote, about reproduction replacing the original, and the electronic echo of nature becoming a four-month-old’s only frame of reference for real nature, and modern laboratory-parenting, and probably something about climate change, and and and. The obviousness is further stoked by how literally we try to keep my daughter’s room as cave-like as possible. In the cave, filtered through the night vision monitor, she’s appears as something other than a person, my wife says, and that makes it easier to wait the 5-8 minutes we’ve agreed to wait when she cries. It hurts less if she isn’t in front of us, real, but instead on a screen in the same fuzzy blue approximation of humanness featured in the sex scenes we’ve been watching on Love Island.
3. Sometimes it’s hard to parse the difference between imitation and memory, in that both always serve to replace. As though something happens, and then right away the implications for how it might live on and not be lost come crushing in, repeating, competing, until everything else is invisible but the original thing is blurry. A somewhat related thought: I’ve been arguing with students about Harry Potter lately (the books — everyone agrees upon the awfulness of their creator). I’m not against the Harry Potter books; I really love Harry Potter and always have. But I also love and have always loved bagels, yet I still can enjoy smoothies for breakfast, or egg on toast. The argument we keep having is about whether we want a story or a charac- ter or a morality to mimic the ones in Harry Potter that provide such reliable pleasure, and whether, if a story or a character or a morality fails to success- fully mimic Harry Potter, it has failed generally. This isn’t a deadpan thing where I’m trying not to be obvious that I think it’s stupid to not want to read outside Harry Potter. Increasingly, I don’t know. Or I’m less sure that I know. Really it’s a conversation about comfort, and how much of it we think we deserve, and whether we always deserve it, and whether a book can provide comfort simply by being recognizable and therefore making us feel a little more secure, a little less alone. When my daughter wakes up and I go in to turn on the light and turn off the sound machine, there’s a pause, and then into the brightness and clean, new silence, her face opens into a toothless smile. There is nothing good enough and also nothing new to say about what this feels like. Every day, the same face, one of the two or three she’s learned, and how did she learn? From my face, smiling down so much that my cheeks and gums hurt, a cocaine memory, pleading to see an imitation back at me, so that imitation might resemble reciprocation. Very fast, the mornings when she doesn’t smile begin to feel like a betrayal.
4. I’ve given a lot of poorly paid author talks where I go on about the easy comfort of narrative, and life not having a narrative, and writing that resists narrative being a more challenging and honest and (yuck) mimetic mode of expressing the experience of being human. But really I know that order is harder than disorder — a reader, or at least the kind of reader I am, will stretch to find patterns in the scattershot, while looking to poke holes in a narrative already painstakingly assembled. I read a Maggie Nelson interview in which she jabbed back at being asked about writing multiple memoirs by saying that she wasn’t interested in art that looked back on a moment, then tied it up with a bow. Rather, she believes in life-writing defined only by ongoingness, trying to keep up with that. I love this sentiment, but I never found my life hard to keep up with; that’s always been my secret. Easier to write like you’re on the edge of something, easier to cultivate breathlessness and mess, when life, the writing life, feels ordered, full of boxes and borders where risk and anxiety and pain cannot push through. To write a book is to fashion an ending that then ends the period of life spent writing it, neat by necessity, followed by a fallow spell, and then the attempt at another. Maintain order and calm through conveying the opposite; it can fool you into thinking you’ve relinquished control.
5. I think adulthood comes when there’s only room to challenge your own tastes with so many things. Very few people are convincing when they claim otherwise, as though they have the unique bandwidth to embrace omnivorous-yet-discerning cultural consumption. Maggie Nelson is one. Susan Sontag? Hilton Als? I’m sure there are more, but the point is mostly everyone else is a liar. It’s important to me that I like “good” books and mov- ies, but the moment I graduated college it felt like a license to listen to a lot of music that I already knew the words to, or that sounded like the songs I already knew the words to, which really means music that reminded me of me. I was holding my daughter at a bar last week, and the two men I was talking with began going on about The Beatles, and how their whole lives, even when they were just sullen children, they knew enough to know that The Beatles were bad, or at least uninteresting, despite the proselytizing of the people around them, who were also, they’d sensed right away, uninter- esting. This conversation made me want to scream at them, but my daughter was sleeping so I said nothing. Of course, right underneath the intense urge to defend The Beatles was the need to defend myself. The Beatles meant something to me, so to write them off was to write off the place where I chose to find meaning. My brother taught me about The Beatles, and my brother is dead — there’s a Beatles lyric on his tombstone and still, nearly twenty years on, when I hear Golden Slumbers, I have this sensation that everyone in the room is looking at me to see how I might react to all the meaning happening. All the elements are rote now, the echoing plunk of a single chord struck slowly on a piano, the knowledge that after A-minor must come C and F and G at some point. When I pick up a guitar, my fingers hold an A-minor on instinct, and I strum, and convince myself that it sounds significant, not just familiar — the perfect chord, revelatory each time. Sometimes I think I never liked music that much, even though, or maybe because, it makes me feel so easily, so often, so much.
6. There was a whole little dustup in the literary corner of the internet a few days or weeks or month ago over someone saying you should never fuck an adult who loves Bukowski. Many people agreed and said lol, but others cried elitism and said that those turning their noses up at Bukowski were merely those afforded the luxury of reading in an ivory tower somewhere about the problematic and limited legacy of Bukowski. Then still others were like, don’t you dare use claims of elitism as a way to support the con- tinued cult status of a rampant misogynist and one of the many posterboys for self-involved male mediocrity being held up as genius. It was the perfect Twitter triptych — poorly thought out statement; anger; anger at the anger. A day or two, max. At the end: lingering, pointless unease. Repeating it here, writing its movements, seems only stupid, yet clearly it’s still nagging at me so I might as well embrace that I’m the stupidest one in the whole equation. I was never a Bukowski guy, but I reflexively get sad at the notion of a Bukowski guy being made to feel as though what Bukowski made him feel, still makes him feel, is illegitimate. This shouldn’t be important to me, maybe it isn’t important to me, but that’s the reflex. Also, this: every time I see a man alone at a bar, I feel sad in a good way. I used to like going to bars by myself, sitting as that alone man, and assuming that others would look at me that same way. When I romanticize a before time now, a who- I-was-then, I think of myself in bars alone far more than I ever was, and the way I thought people saw me, shoulders curled in, elbows on sticky wood, hand swirling brown liquor slowly like there was too much to say to say any- thing. I had a good friend who gave me Post Office as a birthday present, but I never read it because I’d already heard enough people talk about the kind of man who loves Bukowski. I didn’t tell the friend that. We were both writers but I was getting an MFA and he worked at the liquor store I went to a lot. I got a book contract shortly after and he was the first friend I told. We were drinking whiskey in the kind of bar that had a self-conscious juke box. He said cheers, and then he said, You’re a real writer and I’m a guy who works at the liquor store, and that’s just who we are. I felt ashamed, and also a little jeal- ous of the depth he seemed to have to him then, a depth that felt masculine in that it was expressed in only a sentence, and existed mostly in beautiful, silent regret, so much to say and do that wouldn’t be said and done, a trag- edy that would always be more interesting than me doing and saying things that could, at best, be effortful, at worst entirely disappointing. I’ve been missing him, missing myself in association with him. These days, I’ve never felt more effortful or more disappointing, still romanticizing something I never really wanted. Part of me thinks I should read Post Office, but I won’t.
7. Once in grad school, I took a PhD class in cultural studies, an idea I should have realized was too ambitious the moment I was told MFAs were allowed to take PhD classes pass/fail. We watched videos of drag performances, first famous queens, then some kings. In our discussion, without really thinking, I said something about how much more outwardly impressive I found the drag queen performances to be, both in costuming and affect, the plethora of small observations they managed to ape into caricature. In comparison, I thought, the kings were just a collection of eyeliner goatees with some well-positioned zucchini bulge. There was instant scowling around me; the narrowness and lack of imagination in my comment was jumped on, the idea that if I thought there was no real compelling imitation happening what I was really saying was that I thought masculinity was innate, that there was no performance to study or absorb or reflect or mock. Which was me saying that I didn’t think I was a walking performance, a set of tics that were never even my own, when so obviously I was. That particular flush of shame, a sense memory that lingers and lingers; invest your whole identity in being the type of guy aware of all the problems inherent and obvious in your identity and then, in a flash of clarity to you, if no one else, you reveal that you’re not. Once, in college, a friend saw me walking toward him from across the quad and changed the gait of his own walk as we got closer. He held his chest out, hips open, shoulders stretched so broad they almost curved backward. Basically, a strut, either muscle-man or fat-and-gregar- ious-uncle, depending on the generosity with which you chose to look at it. I asked him why he was walking like that, and as soon as I said it, before he answered, I knew, and I was even more embarrassed because I hadn’t recog- nized until right then how easy I was to caricature.
8. Every night, we read my daughter Goodnight, Moon before bed, even though she’s too young to care. When it’s my wife’s turn, I hear them through the door — my daughter’s impatient breathing; my wife’s voice lowering and softening into a rasp, lingering on the best line, by which I mean the sort of throw away literary line: “Goodnight, Nobody.” I know people who swear their baby only gets excited when he hears Kendrick, which I think is such a transparent projection of the people they want to be onto a small, blank semi-human that hasn’t yet had the chance to become lame like them, but also I’m a little jealous, and a little anxious at how fast I’ve become the kind of parent who sings the least controversial Bob Marley songs to his baby, like we’re trapped in the lobby of a Sandals. I tell myself that the melody soothes her, meaning it soothes me. My mother says that when I was a baby the music I liked the best was black gospel, which makes me think that I’m no different from her, just another generation of liberal white people both in love with and ambivalent about their own procreation, piping in the sounds of foreign suffering turned into something reassuring — sleep baby, and tomorrow our burden, such as it is, might be lifted. Who was she pretending to be then, and who am I pretending to be now? The same blurry idea of a kind of person who might impart something soul- deep about faith, though we’ve never had it, though we’ve never been tested enough to know if we have it.
9. Every day, the gulf between the person that I want to believe that I am and the person I am widens. This could also be described as another version of my definition of adulthood. The baby is not soothed when we hold her, or not that much anyway. We tell each other this is a blessing because there’s no crutch, no risk of her only sleeping in our arms since it wouldn’t occur to her (do things occur to her?) to do that. But every morning, while my wife takes her turn getting ready for the day, I hold the baby to my chest and wait to feel something soften in her. For a few seconds, she’s still and warm, her heart beats adjacent to, similar to, mine, and I waste those seconds fumbling my phone screen open with one hand, trying to catch her in the act of what would appear to be what I’ve been led believe a baby looks like pressed to a present, loving father. I’m always too late; her body stiffens, then writhes against me. She makes a sound that’s less of a cry, more of a gasp against a strangle that doesn’t exist, my least favorite noise of hers, one that I sometimes convince myself I hear in the fuzzy loop of the sound machine, even when she’s silent. In these moments, I’m pretty sure I have the sense that she’s being unfair to me, and though I can register minutes later that it’s a preposterous feeling to have, I have it again, instantly, the next time she makes that noise. It is beyond my control, which means that in those moments, holding something, someone, that small, that powerless, I am literally out of control. It’s a feeling long shelved, forever teenaged, standing close to a subway track as the train arrives, the rippling of the air, the sensation that there’s no way to feel completely safe inside myself, only this time, two decades later, I’m not alone and not supposed to be fragile.
10. I’ve always admired people who believe differently or have different tastes than the way they were raised. My atheism, my liberalism, they don’t feel like a decision. I don’t believe that I’m right — well, I do, but that just means that I believe I was raised right, then I copied. When a friend describes how it feels to miss the community of the mega-church she was raised in, but regrets that she ever felt any closeness to the doctrine, I am amazed, far less so by the generosity of her beliefs than the fact that she evolved into them. What I’m saying is if I was raised by racists, I’m pretty sure I’d be a racist. It’s hard for me to think that my models could be wrong, even now; why, then, would they have ever been my models? My father raised me on Woody Allen movies, and when I was old enough to pretend to make up my own mind, I raised myself on Louis C.K., a slight evolution, I thought, if not a departure. Each one a model for how, if you say you hate yourself enough it might supplant the ways you show contempt for anyone else. Or not even contempt, just total disregard. You cannot make them feel worse than you make yourself feel, and embedded in that certainty is a self-defined fairness. And if that’s true, what can’t you say? What can’t you do? For most of my life, I thought this was what sensitivity meant.
11. My wife is back at work and I’m not, which means that multiple people have used the horrific phrase daddy daycare when describing my days. I like our pediatrician because she doesn’t suffer from or encourage any additional anxiety, but the last time I brought my daughter in alone she fought pretty hard during the undressing portion, and was flailing and grabbing at that useless paper that stretches across the examination table, so when the doctor came in it looked like we’d been opening presents in there, and her response was, Oh you just have the perfect helpless dad look about you right now. She said it in a nice way — does that matter? I must have looked at her harshly or bruised, so she said, It’s just a type, that’s all. I half-filled with rage and a fan- tasy to say something about her type, which would have reflected far more poorly on me than her, but I also wanted to say, yes I am helpless, so helpless, can you help me please? The doctor said everything was normal, even the baby’s skin taking on that blueish tint sometimes. She put her stethoscope on my daughter’s chest; my daughter’s body shivered from the cold metal, a very human little reaction, and she made a sound that made me think of her mother stepping into a cold lake somewhere sometime, and I spent the rest of the appointment trying not to cry, unclear whether the tears I was fight- ing were from joy or regret. On the ride home, I played the Bradley Cooper solo song from A Star is Born. A few days before my wife went into labor, the last thing I did by myself was take a bunch of old edibles and go to a noon showing of A Star is Born at the mall. I was the only person in the theater. I was very moved. I’d gone in determined to be; that was the whole idea. He was just sad, sad, sad all the way through. Doomed and gifted and sad. I play the song on guitar for my daughter a lot. When I sing, I try to sound like him, the way he was trying to sound like Kris Kristofferson, the way Kris Kristofferson was trying to sound like a cowboy who could let you in on the secrets of the universe just by mumbling in tune. When we are alone and I sing, she is still, maybe happy, and I wish the doctor could see that, wish anyone was around to find beauty in us.
12. There’s a guy who frequents three of the same coffee shops that I frequent (used to frequent) who looks like a pained figure at the center of a tangle of bodies in a Renaissance painting. When I see him I text my wife, Pained Renaissance guy is here! He looks so pained! A Google of the term “Pained face + Renaissance painting” reveals an Art History 101 primer explaining to freshmen why Renaissance figures appear so expressionless, so I may be getting my era wrong. There is a specific painting I have in mind, or a composite of many paintings that I saw in a particular room in a museum once. The experience of being in that room remains indelible because I remember thinking that the images seemed to reflect the first captured grimace. The figures in oil looked so sad, more than a human face could ever look in the wild, since there are always other concerns and impulses to interrupt any one feeling. I like to think of early artists spending decades trying to zero in on a single expression, make it the fullest, truest version of itself. This coffee shop guy looks more unified in a particular emotion than I think of an actual person being, so he becomes more profound through consistency; that’s what I mean. He looks like he’s been posing for hours, and someone has given him the prompt, Every day we stray further from God’s light. I’ll never talk to him because it would only be a disappointment. How’s the latte today? In a voice as flat and bored and chipper as anyone’s: Fine, fine; I get it with oat milk.
13. Maybe it’s a cop out, but when I think of ever trying to make art of any kind again, it feels simultaneously overwhelming and boring to do any- thing but focus on a single feeling, one note out of however many human notes there are, and just hit that note over and over. Maximalism, by any definition, upsets me in a way that I’m almost positive is more than simple jealousy. I was reading Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, and loving it, and then the perspective changed and I got so personally offended that I gave up on the book. I stopped reading Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, which I was also loving, because someone warned me, though they meant it as a compliment, of an impending shift into an almost entirely distinct book. Virtuosity is impressive, but often I think impressiveness is the opposite of beauty. I went to a museum in Iceland running an exhibit of their preemi- nent modern artist, Ragnar Kjartansson. The work was cool but sort of all over the place, and I remember nothing except a video installation where he filmed The National playing their song “Sorrow” on a loop for six hours. The singer’s voice grew hoarse ; sometimes the tempo changed a little, nearly impossible to notice if you weren’t trying to. The crowd cheered each time the band started again, but the cheers became increasingly lackluster as they grew tired along with the band. The song itself is a drone, three minutes of repetition stretch out into six hours; to watch it didn’t feel repet- itive, it felt like a lens focusing until the image becomes so crystalline that it blurs, then deepens. When there’s nothing else to expect, the thing in front of you expands to fill the space you need it to fill.
14. Can you imitate a feeling? Can you imitate something that can’t be seen? There was a conversation five or six weeks into her life in which we both said that we didn’t love her. What we were saying, I think now, is that to love her felt like an imitation, and we needed to admit that. To call a new- born beautiful or perfect feels both rote and hopeful, but not accurate. Very soon, it seemed impossible to have ever not felt love for her, but when did the change happen? I don’t remember changing my mind — nobody ever remembers changing their mind — so I find it hard to trust that I didn’t just do the impression of how I should have felt until it stuck. I love you I love you I love you — not as an expression of truth but an attempt at manifesting. I like to think I can discern when my daughter is in real pain from when she’s repeating and honing a performance of how pain should look and sound, but I can’t and that’s the worst thing. It seems necessary to try to create a hierarchy of how bad she might be feeling, terrifying that she might always, in her body or in her mind or both, be feeling everything her face suggests. Immunizations — this was real, obvious pain, from the moment the needle punctured her thigh fat. Her face skin moved like pinched dough; there was silence and then an explosion of sound. Maybe this is giving her too much credit, or not enough compassion, but it seemed like the first time she found the feeling she’d been performing whenever she was bored or confused, or edging up to the beginning of hunger. We’ve been telling everybody about the way the pain looked on her, unlike, we try to emphasize, any pain ever felt or expressed. Or really, more like pain than any depiction you’ve ever seen — pure pain, isolated, with nothing else to feel. It’s tempting to find relief in what is so excruciating for her because there is no question, there is nothing muddled or frustratingly conscious about what she’s feeling and what she wants: pain and someone to hold her until the pain stops. And it’s easy to be the person to do that, at least, until the pain abides and there is quiet, and a face that once again is trying to figure out what to express.
15. It’s hard to think about badness being an imitation of bad influences, because that means that goodness, too, is just an imitation of someone else’s version of goodness. I was reading the apology of a poet today, who thirty years ago was the frontman of a skinhead punk group. Another pang of sympathy for this stranger whose work, both the early evil and the later respected versions, I had never interacted with. I read an article in which he said that, at the time he was a skinhead, he was a young man without models, for whom self-expression was only ever introduced through this vessel of rage and cruelty. He has learned. He has found a community with new models for what it means to make art, and he followed those instead. The subtext is that he cannot be blamed for what he didn’t know, that the contrite, decent-seeming person he found his way to being should erase the person that he was when was lost, and he’s sorry. To write or think that sentence, it seems unimpeachable — I’ve always been such a sucker for the vulnerability of even a half-decent apology — but then it’s impossible not to wonder how can a person not know better than to be the worst kind of per- son. Or how an apology can be anything but an imitation of other apologies.
16. Before the baby was born, my father asked me what I was afraid of, and I said anger, and he said that’s what he figured because of him and the speed and the force with which he got angry. I don’t mean to suggest that he was that angry — I was never hit by anyone, or if I was, it was such a weird occasion that it has become a joke in memory. I never faced anything within even the newly expanded definition of abuse. But I remember his anger prominently, as silly as it feels to say, given the scope of angers in the world that his didn’t live up to. He is smaller and older now, a more reflec- tive version of the good man he’s always been, and when he’s angry it fizzles into mournfulness. We were visiting my grandmother — very near death, porcelain. She was so fragile, and he was getting there, and it seemed so impossible there in the nursing home for anyone to be anything other than quiet and brittle and guiltless, and I felt myself looming, still capable, we were agreeing, of causing harm. The first time I heard my own anger at my daughter, she was maybe a week old, howling as we tried to bathe her. I said shh in a way that moved from an attempt at calming her into an attempt at drowning her out. She screamed louder. You should have to pick between saying something happened on instinct or that something happened because of the ways you’ve seen and internalized how to be in the world. Both make a similar claim to helplessness, which is a kind of inevitability, and that was the claim I made, even though I didn’t believe it. I left — was banished — to sit on the stairs under the window. It was black night out, nothing to see in the window but the reflection of the light inside, my body big and hunched, monstrous. When my wife brought the baby back over, she was wrapped in a towel, like something rescued from the side of the road, a million internet videos of a hand squeezing milk from a washcloth into the pink mouths of stray kittens — how hard should it be to love that the right way?
17. This can’t be true, but from what I can remember I’ve only read one version of fatherhood that felt worth emulating: Reverend John Ames in Gilead. An old man, written by a woman, a man of quiet, patient faith, though I’ve never been quiet or patient and I’ve never had faith. There’s a passage early on, where he describes honeysuckle, the act of smelling it, then biting and tasting it, with his son, and that sense memory spans his whole life, the sweetness and stillness of it, and the enormity of everything he’d ever wanted and had and lost and still regretted. The child in Gilead is vague, mostly just an audience for his father’s monologue, the only image to remain blurry in a novel whose whole bit is to render every detail so fully that it begins to feel like a miracle. Ames’s love is vivid because he’s writing his own elegy. Love seeps in through regret — not the love of being with his child, but the love of anticipating what he’ll miss. Gilead is the best kind of first-person novel, in that it wouldn’t be good, it wouldn’t be anything, if retold in third. What Ames thinks and feels is so much more compelling than what he does, which is nothing, really. Too old to have a good catch with the boy, he thinks but does not say, and I reread and am moved by what he wishes for, so much more resonant than anything he could have done. If the novel was in third, or from someone else’s point of view, he would be stiff and silent; there would be no evidence (and this is the most painful thing to think about) that he cared at all.
18. When the baby was about a month old, we watched Eighth Grade, which I thought was remarkable — paced like a horror film, the good, old kind, before every horror was rushed in an effort to get to the next one. The scene I loved the most, though it was probably the worst one in the movie, or at least the most out of place, was the sudden, overwhelming catharsis of the single dad next to a fire in his backyard with the daughter who was so sad and frightening, so foreign to him, but in that moment he told her how much he loved her, the strength he saw in her, and she accepted that in leaned into him, and you realize watching that it’s the first time in the movie that two bodies touch in a way that isn’t furtive or tortured or cruel. It’s a release valve in a narrative that maybe isn’t supposed to have one. It makes the whole thing feel like it was never about the eighth grade girl’s loneliness, but rather the loneliness of the father seeing her alone; it’s as destructive a moment as it is generous. To be a thirteen-year-old girl remains full of unsolvable pain, but the movie lets us think of the triumph of what it feels like, even in a single moment, when a father cares the right way.
19. It’s not a coincidence that the most indelible renderings of a father come in a narrative in which the mother is gone. This goes way back to Lear, at least in my memories of a literary education. There’s Atticus Finch, there’s The Man in The Road, there’s the guy in The Curious Case of the Dog in the Nighttime. As a boy, I read Danny the Champion of the World, the only stab Roald Dahl ever took at a sympathetic adult, a father alone with his son, marooned with him and yoked to him all at once. Every other caretaker Dahl ever created was either evil or an idiot or both, but not this one father who is instead the barrier between his son and all the evil idiots. Sometimes the fathers aren’t solo, they’re one better: gone, a memory, a disembodied guide, like in Foer’s Everything is Illuminated. Either way, the father shines through in absence or because of absence. As though in a narrative full of characters alive and where they are supposed to be, he would fade.
20. For some reason, I tried to teach the Mary Gaitskill story, “The Girl on the Plane.” Written in close third person point of view, a middle-aged businessman returning to his family sits on a flight next to a young woman who, if only for her youth and his wants, makes him remember a girl he knew as a teenager. He drinks and speaks to the young woman, and slowly you start to realize that he’s confessing to a gang rape that he’s unable to identify to himself, still, as what it was. The feeling of reading the story is mounting unease, until it’s excruciating. I guess I taught it to say something about craft, that imaginary vacuum. Look how she paces the revelation to twist the knife! Didn’t you feel it twisting? The easiest way to write off the ensuing conversation is to say it was about sensitivity, but really it was about pain. If literature is supposed to make you feel, then it’s just as dumb as it is cruel to minimize the feelings it provokes. A lot of reactions to the story were, I hate it, but I think that can often be a stand-in for, It makes me feel awful — a roomful of students of whom I’d required something that made them feel awful. This class happened right around the time I stopped reading Butcher’s Crossing, a novel about buffalo slaughter, once the buffalo slaughter started. On my own time, it’s becoming harder and harder to remember the argument for reading or watching through the awfulness once you know the awfulness will happen. An examination of something is not necessarily an endorsement of it, yes. Empathy and curiosity shouldn’t be reserved for the good, yes. Art isn’t supposed to be affirmative — that’s something I know to be true, but more and more it seems like the highest compliment you can pay to a piece of art is that it affirms you, that it provides a blueprint for how to be better, or at least feel better. And I like to feel better; I want to feel better. Still, it’s hard for me not to read that as weakness, especially as a teacher — that line of thought I was taught with and lapped right up, about how steeling yourself through something is braver and more intellectually valuable than turning away. Then there’s this: the fact that I just compared the trauma of being made to read about rape with the trauma of voluntarily reading about buffalo slaughter during the gold rush — what can I possibly know of the difference between discomfort and pain? So much of the silly, nebulous claims of a culture war hinge on a refusal to ever say the phrase, I cannot understand. I know the familiar rush of shame at the idea of admit- ting that you have no frame of reference for what could be painful enough to trigger someone else — why? Some admission of lost expertise in suffering? There’s that Margaret Atwood quote about how women are afraid that men will kill them and men are afraid that women will laugh at them, which is an entirely smart quote but also makes me feel unfairly attacked, so there you go. Anyways, in the few quiet moments of paternity leave, as the baby lay soft and still, breathed evenly, I found myself replaying this interaction, which wasn’t a bad one exactly, but ended up at this predictable place of me talking about art like it was vegetables, like I was saying I understand that sugar is great but please oh please I’ve put so much thought into bringing you this broccoli you hate. How much of the way I was taught, and the way I teach, breaks down to this idea of some earned authority, and the student then going through discomfort to try to approach it? How often does that seep out into the rest of my life? How many times would it have been better for me to say, I don’t understand, and I’m sorry? When does challenge, even growth — emotional, intellectual, physical — veer into pain?
21. She made the sound yum very clearly once, though not intentionally. She made it after I squirted treacle-sweet liquid Zantac into her cheek to try to quell her constant spit-up. Yum! We say it to each other back and forth, then down at her. Yum! She said it! Yum! Now we call her Zantac her yum. Do you want some yum? It’s time for your yum! Say it, with your lips like this, the way I’m saying it — yum! What a sweet tooth! What an excitable girl! What a way to name a feeling that’s definitely, without question, being felt! Look at her, just like a person! How many times a day now do I say yum? Hold the M until the vibration makes my lips tickle. She’s maybe six inches away from me, propped up on my legs, her heels kneading my stomach. I’ve never been watched like this before. The complexity of moving lips from open to closed. The little twitches across her face as she tries to mimic mine. In this position, I play music and she dances, which means that I make her dance. We binged that show Umbrella Academy, which I reflexively said was stupid but watched with great investment. It’s all about adults who still feel like children who resent the adults that made them that way, which I am realizing most everything is about. Super powers, yes, world saving/destroy- ing and all that, but also, always: childhood. There’s a cathartic group dance scene to Tiffany’s “I Think We’re Alone Now.” I play that song on a loop, the way I have always listened to music but do even more so now that the baby seems to demand recursivity in anything she likes, or at least recognizes. I’m looking for that glimmer of recognition, feeding it. I think she wiggles the same way every time she hears the plunky 80s electric drum pad at the beginning. I make us dance together, my fingers around her chubby wrists, pantomime running just as fast as we can. She’s happy while the song plays, so it plays again. We’re dancing, I tell her. Her eyes carry so much flickering life that it makes my breath catch. Again, dance, again. Once, when I let go, there was a reddish ring where her skin absorbed the force of my holding her — it was that easy; I was horrified, ashamed, and then her skin bounced back blank.
22. When I remember my earliest childhood, I remember fear. I remem- ber the red vacuum cleaner in my mother’s apartment, the sound it made so close to me; in the memory, there’s the red and there’s the sound and my mother isn’t there, so there’s the feeling of abandonment, though it’s very unlikely that she would’ve turned on the vacuum and then left the room. I don’t remember my father at all until I’m older. When Maurice Sendak died, I listened to and read a lot of his interviews, which I like to do whenever a beloved creative figure dies whose project was distant enough from my own that I can feel only bittersweet inspiration, not comparative failure. He’d spoken to Terry Gross about fear, and how his work resonated because of the memory of and commitment to acknowledging that the experience of childhood was only terror. Sendak never had kids; I think that was an implied foundational aspect of his legend, especially as it was retold around his death — his relationship to childhood remained pure to the experience of being a child. I refuse to lie to children, he said. That’s the role of the par- ent: lie to them, or to ourselves — either way, for comfort. As my daughter gets older, with each successive month of continuing to further resemble a human being aware of the world, I have imbued her with a personality based around fearlessness. The child that wants to put her whole hand in a dog’s mouth when it sniffs around the stroller. The child at the bar, who we can hand to a cooing stranger while we go order and who meets their gaze. I say often that I don’t know how she’s mine — I was afraid of everything, and she’s afraid of nothing, as though I can speak it into truth. The only time I’ve seen fear on her face is when I’ve made her feel afraid — that’s the truth. And I wonder how that feeling will linger, how many times it’s come back that I haven’t even noticed. And I think of that Plath poem, Daddy, and how the heart of it, the turn, is the simplest line among all the Auschwitz metaphors: I was scared of you, Daddy. Despite our commitment to giving the baby at least a bottle a day, a month before my wife went back to the office she began to refuse it. She would scream as though I was choking her, scream until she actually began to choke on the milk she was rejecting, prov- ing herself right. Sometimes, I’d hold her for an hour until finally, mostly by accident, she finished the bottle. My wife began to take walks during these moments, so that there would be no visible presence of the person who could make things better, and also because the sounds of the baby’s cries caused her such visceral pain that it became like I was torturing two people instead of one. Alone, I’d say to my daughter, I’m sorry, this has to happen, this is happening. Even if she could understand any of that, what would it tell her? That I recognized that this caused her pain for some reason, and the rec- ognition wasn’t going to stop me. It’s the same image, over and over: her eyes shut tight, then slowly opening to look up at me again, the bottle looming. And what of my face? Every inch of skin strained, eyes turned up to the ceil- ing like I could disassociate. This hurts me more than it hurts you. I’ve really thought that so many times, but there’s no way to know if it’s true. Once I set her down in the Rock’n’Play, put a pillow over my face and screamed because my wife once told me that a Mommyblog suggested this as a guilt free way to vent. I screamed until my throat hurt, but I felt no catharsis, and when I pulled the pillow away she was staring at me. I watched her face turn slowly, like a dumb movie, from blankness to terror. No no no no no, I said, and I reached to hold her, and she cried. A few days later she stopped hating the bottle, and she lay soft in my arms and blinked up at me as I fed her. I tried to make my face look like the opposite of a scream.
23. The last concert I went to before the baby was Julien Baker, at one of those perfectly-sized old theaters with a marquee outside. She played in candlelight with nobody else on stage, small and hunched in the glow. I’d first started to listen to her during the many months that my wife and I were trying and failing, and every new day was beginning to feel the same except a little sadder each time. I love Baker for a lot of reasons, but mostly I think it’s structure. There is absolute precision to the way her songs do not resolve. When she finds the note or the refrain that captures the feeling of the moment, she hits it again and again. Sometimes, when a song is swelling in a way that suggests a return to the chorus, a quiet and satisfying come- down, she ends it — not exactly a crescendo, just the feeling of being almost at the top of the rollercoaster, still afraid. Maybe my favorite song of hers is “Sour Breath,” which starts off ambient and searching, beginning to tell a story, but by the end hits a refrain like a dirge: the harder I swim, the faster I sink. Over and over and each time it changes, clarifies, like a fist closing on a feeling, finally holding it. I think the possibility of not having our baby, how slow and sad time had begun to feel, made us believe that having her would be like a fever breaking. As though the flash of hope of her existing would mean only hope moving forward. The kind of narrative that I would distrust if I read it or watched it, yet I somehow assumed we’d live it. Julien Baker was the soundtrack to the earliest mornings with my daughter, after sleepless nights, her head on my chest, the weight of her so insignificant that I feared if she started to slip off, my body wouldn’t feel it enough to react to the change. I like to think that when I sing along to something she enjoys the vibrations off my skin. I guess this is like being those parents I hate who swear their kid is a Kendrick fan; most of comparative parenting is being grossed out by the thing someone else is doing because you so clearly recognize the impulse. And also the need to believe that sometimes the thing that soothes you can be the thing that soothes them. The way Baker’s voice can command at the same time as it trembles. The way she distills fear into a little looping guitar riff. I swear the baby loves music. I swear her eyes are so alive when a voice turns to melody. Music hasn’t been this constant since I was fifteen, and every song makes me want to cry. Four minutes is very fast and very slow, and then I hit repeat. When it’s time to put her down for a nap, she fights it but we’re letting her cry it out, so I don’t comfort her. I turn the music up and watch her on the monitor — glowing eyes, body writhing against the swaddle, mouth open and it looks like she’s singing. The other day, my mother asked me if I feel any different and the real answer is in every possible way and also not at all, but I ignored the question.
24. She likes to be outside. In the house, she’s uneasy, feral, but almost always the air and the wind soothe her. We walk and walk and walk now. When I’m trying to get her to sleep, I walk her in the stroller, but I hate this because it takes her forever and the sidewalks are so uneven in our neigh- borhood that usually I’m walking in the street. The best times, she’s awake when she’s supposed to be and strapped to my chest in the carrier, facing out, her still-soft skull under my chin. We walk the same blocks, past the old Victorians and the deli, all the smudgy windows where I try to make her know her reflection, into the park with the row of trees that someone once told me were London Plane, so now I say, London plane, remember? Like from yesterday. Everything is like yesterday, sometimes beautiful. The sweat seeps from the front of my t-shirt onto the back of hers. We stick together. Sometimes she gets restless and begins to wriggle and I try to sing to her, but softly so that people walking by don’t hear — what a silly thing to be embar- rassed about, but I am. I sing softly like a plea for her to settle, not make us have to turn back home. I tell her everything is a song. The fire engine: a song. The car alarm: a song. The squirrels fighting, the birds, the wind. She loves the wind more than anything. When it hits her, I feel her body taken over with sensation, like she’s forgotten how good the same thing felt yester- day and the day before. When this happens, I think I’ve never been so purely happy, and when it comes just seconds after she’s fussy and I’m panicking it makes me doubt the feeling, and then it’s gone and I long for it again. The other day, she was stuck to me and I’d forgotten her hat, so I had my palm out over her face to block the sun. A heavy breeze kicked up. I whispered, wind song and tried to imitate it, and then I heard her voice, a screech but I like to think there was a melody in it, imitating the breeze, imitating me.
Lucas Mann was born in New York City and received his MFA from the University of Iowa, where he was the Provost’s Visiting Writer in Nonfiction.
His latest book is Captive Audience: On Love and Reality Television (Vintage, 2018). He is also the author of Lord Fear: A Memoir, which was named one of the best books of 2015 by The Miami Herald, Kirkus Reviews, Paper Magazine, Largehearted Boy, and Oprah.com, and Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere, which earned a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and was named one of the best books of 2013 by The San Francisco Chronicle.
His essays have appeared in Guernica, BuzzFeed, Slate, Barrelhouse, TriQuarterly, and The Kenyon Review, among others. He has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Artists Foundation, The Wesleyan Writers Conference, and The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, He teaches creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and lives in Providence, Rhode Island with his wife.