Kyle Minor - Praying Drunk

“When you get home,” Sebastian said, “you will not remember me.”

Within six months, he would be dead. The rally at the Palace. The fires. The burning tires. The gunshots, two to the head.

That day at the Marché, he said, “It’s going to be the most beautiful suit. It’s going to be linen. It’s going to be chalk-striped, double-breasted. It’s going to have a notched lapel. I’m going to get it tailored.”

Q: Do you think you can resurrect the dead?

A: I am the fiery angel. I can run time backward. I can speed it up and dance babies back into the womb.

Q: Do our thoughts betray us?

A: Scientists are perfecting a brain scanner that can already show distorted images of your dreams. Then they’ll just stick you in an MRI machine and ask the questions you don’t want to answer, and your thoughts will betray you. Until then, other people can only guess.

Q: On the cover of this book, it says “Fiction.”

A: That’s what people write when they want to get away with telling the truth. When they want to convince you of a lie, they dress up some facts and call it “Nonfiction.” Either way, people from the past send angry emails.

Q: Did the things in this book actually happen in the unvirtual world, what the kids call meat space?

A: It’s like Kazuo Ishiguro said: “I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.”

Q: Don’t hide behind Kazuo Ishiguro.

A: I remember the bully who beat me up almost every day in junior high school. I remember the sweet odor of those red mesh equipment bags that held body armor and hung from meat hooks. I remember the puke-green walls of the locker room. I remember the special orange-brown of the rust on the edges of the lockers. I remember the shape of my own hairless testicles, how they seemed to retreat in fear when it was time to take a shower among a bunch of kids my own age or a little older who looked like full-grown men and had a foot or more of height on me. But were they as big as I remember, or was my idea of their height exaggerated because of my smallness and the smallness of my idea of myself and the bigness of my idea of them? And did they beat me up almost every day, or did they just beat me up a few times, but I responded so strongly and fearfully that in my memory it became almost every day? Why am I calling the football pads “body armor”? Had I ever seen a meat hook? Did I think of those red mesh bags as hanging from meat hooks back then, or is that something that I used later, to gild the story — or, no, to uglify the story. Because they’re conveniently dramatic words, aren’t they? Meat, and hook? They open up associations. The body as meat, the cheapness of meat, the animality of meat. The hook, which pierces and controls.

Q: Who sends the angry emails?

A: People from the Christian school. People from the churches where I was raised and where I worked as a pastor. They follow a form. The first thing the email writer does is to assure me that he or she is reaching out in love to offer correction. Correction is the price of love.

Q: Do you think that’s true?

A: If it is, then these awful stories I’m writing are also an expression of love.

Q: How?

A: Because I see them as a correction of the untruths I was told as a child about how the world works.

Q: Are you saying that the adults in your life were liars?

A: No. I think they were mostly good and decent people. I just think that it is inconvenient and possibly destructive, for some people, to closely examine your own life, or to have a reckoning with your past, your family history, your community of origin, your own choices.

Q: Unintentional liars, then?

A: I knew a woman, my teacher. A mentor in many ways. She said the most useful thing: Our job is to identify the distance between the story we’ve been telling ourselves about our lives — the received story, or the romantic story, or the wishful thinking — and replace it with the story that experience is revealing about our lives, the story that is more true.

Q: The facts are the same in both versions of the story.

A: It’s the reckoning that changes. The narrative itself is the reckoning. The choices you make about what is or isn’t significant, and what it all comes to mean.

Q: Why do you often tell the same story two or three different ways?

A: It’s not done with me yet. I forgot something important, or I hadn’t learned it yet.

Q: You still believe in something as old-fashioned as meaning-making?

A: Maybe the biggest fiction I want to create is that it all matters. It matters so much. It matters and matters.

Q: Contrary to the evidence.

A: This is the only life I have. This is the only life you have unless you’re lucky enough to die and be resurrected as the fiery angel.

Q: Why do you have the robot in the story about the suicide?

A: It was a mistake. That story needed seventy-three robots, twelve pirates, three Vikings, three zombies, seven murders in polygamist cults, two slow trains to Bangkok, three bejeweled elephants in the court of Catherine the Great, six scarlet-threaded elevators to space, fourteen backlit liquor bars in Amsterdam, five bearded men spinning plates on top of thirty-foot poles in Central Park, four mechanical rabbits, three alarm clocks, two magic tricks, twenty-four test tubes, the Brooklyn Bridge, the London Bridge, the boob doctor’s daughter. .

Q: Whatever it takes to get your attention?

A: Whatever it takes to cover all the hurt.

Q: Are there any stories you want to try again?

A: Turn the page and see.

THE BOY IN THE CASKET was my wife’s nephew.

“I want to talk about biscuits,” the preacher said.

We were all of us sweating. The sanctuary doubled as a gymnasium.

The preacher took the store-bought biscuits from their wrapping. He put a piece in his mouth and ate. “Mmm, mmm,” he said. “Biscuits is one of the sweetest things in the world.”

The boy’s mother and father sat apart. Soon they would no longer be married.

“Life can be sweet,” the preacher said. “Like these buttermilk biscuits. Yes, sir.” He took another bite. He wiped his forehead with a white handkerchief.

My wife was holding my hand. My wife’s hand was shaking.

“The sweet life,” the preacher said. “Is made of bitter parts.”

Like the biscuits, he was saying. He seemed as far away as the planet Jupiter. Everything in the sanctuary gymnasium seemed out of proportion. The basketball hoops were flying saucers.

“Two cups all purpose flour,” he said. He poured from a paper bag into a Tupperware cup. He licked his finger and put it to the flour and took it to his lips and tongue. He made a sour face. “It’s bitter, flour,” he said.

A single drop of sweat rolled down my wife’s arm and landed on my hand. It felt wet on my hand. I could see the veins. They seemed so large, bulging there like an old person’s veins, like my grandmother’s. I had a vision of her, in her red housedress, sweating in her trailer, even though she could well afford to run the air conditioner.

“Baking powder,” the preacher said. “One tablespoon.” He ate and made his cartoon face.

Some people were laughing. Laughing!

“Three quarters of a teaspoon of salt.”

My wife was not crying. Maybe her mouth, like mine, was dry. If you suck on the insides of your dry cheeks you can hold the crying in.

“Baking soda. Vegetable shortening. One cup buttermilk.” He tasted the buttermilk. Some things, he said, are sweet, even in the time of bitterness.

Amen, somebody was saying. Were they saying Amen? Was it someone, the mother or the father, who had the right to say Amen? Or was it someone else, anyone else in the room — someone who did not have the right to say Amen.