Brock Clarke - Exley

“Are you going to help me look for my dad?” I asked Dr. ______, but it didn’t seem like he was listening to me. He was peering through the snow at someone walking toward us across Washington Street. “Oh my lord,” he said when the person got a little closer.

“What?” I said, but by then I could see who it was, too: it was Mother. This was Thursday, and she was wearing her Thursday clothes: a long black skirt and a black blazer and a black overcoat. My dad always told Mother on Thursdays that she looked like she was going to a funeral. When I remembered that, my throat felt all of a sudden full, like when you eat something too quickly and aren’t able to swallow every bit of it. To make the feeling go away, I started talking really fast: about how the guy inside the VA hospital was dead, but that it was OK, because she was right, he wasn’t my dad, I had lied about that, I had made that up, just like I had made up those letters, just like I had made up everything until now. “I know my dad has done some bad things,” I told her. “I know he’s hurt you, like I’ve hurt you. I know he’s lied to you, like I’ve lied to you. But at least he isn’t dead. At least he didn’t go out and die on us. I don’t want him to. I don’t want him to be like the guy in the VA hospital. I don’t want him to die somewhere far away from home without us. I know you don’t love him the way I love him. But he’s my only dad. He’s the only one I want. Please let me and Dr. ______ try to find him. Please let him come home.”

My mom listened to me talk like a deaf person would: she watched my mouth, not my eyes. When I was done talking, she hugged me. “Oh, Miller, I can’t believe you finally lost a tooth,” my mom said to my shoulder. “On your birthday, too.”

“I know,” I said. I didn’t want to mention that Harold had knocked it out, because I didn’t want her to stop hugging me. For the first time, I felt like I needed her, the way I’d always needed my dad. But she did stop hugging me finally. She stood up and smiled weakly at Dr. ______, who smiled weakly back. It was like they hadn’t expected to run into each other here and were sad about that.

“What are you doing here anyway?” I asked.

“The VA hospital called me, Miller,” she said. She tried to hug me again, but I wouldn’t let her.

“They shouldn’t have,” I said. “Like I said, you were right. That guy wasn’t my dad. I lied about that. I don’t even know who the guy was.”

“You do know,” my mom said. “And you were right about your dad. He did go to Iraq.”

“No, he didn’t,” I said. “Stop it.”

“And he didn’t go to Iraq because you read Exley’s book, either,” she said. She was looking at Dr. ______ now. I wanted him to stop her, to say, Better not tell him . Except he couldn’t say that, because only Dr. Pahnee said that, and Dr. ______ was Dr. ______, not Dr. Pahnee. Anyway, Dr. ______ didn’t say, Better not tell him , or anything else. He just nodded, Go on , then looked up into the falling snow. “He went to Iraq because he wanted us to be proud of him.”

“But I already was,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “But I wasn’t, and he thought I would be if he went. And that’s the other reason. He went to Iraq because of K. But K. wasn’t one of his students.”

“Stop it,” I said. “What are you doing ?”

“I’m telling you the truth,” she said, but softly, and not like she wanted to be congratulated for telling it.

“Please don’t do that,” I said. I thought that if my mom stopped talking right then, then everything might still be OK: that I would persuade Dr. ______ to pretend to be Exley again, because I thought my dad would like that, and Exley and I would go find my dad and bring him home and that would end up being our truth, and not the truth my mom was trying to tell me. In one truth, I could see my dad, my mom, Exley, and me. But in the other truth, I could see nothing. I don’t mean that it was empty. I mean that it was full of everything I couldn’t stand to see: my mom, and me, and everyone like us, and all the people, places, and things we couldn’t live with or without. “Please don’t say anything else,” I told my mom. But she did.

I wouldn’t have written this book if I hadn’t first read and loved Frederick Exley’s great “fictional memoir” A Fan’s Notes and been convinced that everyone else should read and love it, too; and I couldn’t have written this book without the help of Jonathan Yardley’s invaluable biography of Exley, Misfit: The Strange Life of Frederick Exley . There is a character named Yardley in Exley who sometimes speaks in direct quotations from Misfit; there is also a character named Exley in Exley who (along with other characters) sometimes speaks in direct quotations from A Fan’s Notes . When this happens, I’ve punctuated their dialogue like so —“ ‘. ’ ” — so that there should be no question about the original source. Likewise, when my two first-person narrators quote or paraphrase lines from A Fan’s Notes , I’ve labored to make sure that the source is clear, either from the context or by direct reference to the book.

So, thanks to Mr. Yardley, and thanks beyond thanks to the late Mr. Exley and his sisters Fran and Connie; his niece Helen; his nephews Chris, Ed, and Kurt; and all their families, and also to his fellow Watertownians, who were such good hosts to me.

Thanks also to Michael Griffith, Keith Morris, and Trent Stewart; Mark Blask and Liz Bell Young; my colleagues at Bowdoin College and the University of Cincinnati; the National Endowment for the Arts and the Taft Foundation for their invaluable financial support; the good people in charge of the Exley Archives and Special Collections at the University of Rochester’s Rush Rhees Library; Ben George and David Gessner, who published a section of this novel — in somewhat different form — as the short story “Our Pointy Boots” in Ecotone , and Bill Henderson, who reprinted the story in his Pushcart Prize anthology; Michael Fauver and Russell Valentino, who published a section of this novel — also in somewhat different form — as the short story “Knock Knock” in The Iowa Review; Heidi Julavits for publishing an essay of mine about Exley in The Believer; everyone at Algonquin, especially my terrific, and terrifically patient, editor, Chuck Adams; my excellent agents Elizabeth Sheinkman, Felicity Blunt, and Betsy Robbins; and as always, my family, especially Lane.

I first read Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes in the summer of 1993. I was at my parents’ house in upstate New York. I say “my parents’ house” and not “my house” because I was of an age where I should have had my own house, but I didn’t. I also was of an age where I was too old to think of the entire summer as “my summer vacation,” but I did. Perhaps it doesn’t need saying that I was in college, again, still. I was underemployed and overeducated. A loser, in other words.

Being a loser will make you feel insane. I felt insane, a little, and had enough residual inherited Protestant work ethic left in me to know that I might feel better if I did something productive. So I decided to read a book (you know you’re insane, and a loser, when you think of reading a book as doing something productive), and the book I decided to read was A Fan’s Notes . I don’t remember how I came to own the book. It wasn’t my parents’ book, but I don’t remember buying it, or someone giving it to me. It just sort of dropped into my life, the way books do when you need them the most.