Adam Haslett - You Are Not a Stranger Here

—Help me for a second, Dad.

—What?

—The pills on the bureau.

—Okay, okay. But do you hear what I’m saying? Everything could change, I could buy the old house back and that ugly pine hedge could be dug up and replaced with a Japanese maple tree like the one your mother planted, the smooth bark—

—Dad.

—Those small shiny leaves almost like the petals of a flower—

—The water glass—

—Spread like a fine carpet on the lawn, if I could just get in there with a stake—do you have paper somewhere, I have to write a letter to my bank and we can get it messengered downtown.

—Help me, please. Turn this off, here around my neck…

—Why are you wincing, Danny?

—Please.

—You must have paper somewhere.

2. Interview with Daniel Markham’s roommate, Al Turpin

—April 4th, we’ve got my roommate, Al, here. Al? Do you want to say something?

—Is this like a time capsule?

—I told you, it’s the start of the research. It’s a record, some confirmation that something’s happening.

—Right, well, I guess I feel like a lot is happening. I mean the whole idea of selling those old futons to help with the rent. I think that’s all gone really well. It’s very shrewd.

—All right, Al, but we’re doing the anecdotal sociology now, so let’s just move on. All right?

—Sure.

—Okay… we’re going to begin here with my friend Al Turpin, who’s twenty-six, an office temp, and he’s agreed to talk to us about his interest in philosophy… we’re just starting by asking people how it began.

—Well, the first thing I remember is my sister coming home from college and saying to me: “Scratch an altruist and watch a hypocrite bleed.” We were sitting out by the lake, and I felt this sudden flutter of excitement in my chest. The idea seemed so powerful, that I could know such a thing.

Now I mostly just read. Like after work, I’ll come home and pick up whatever I’m working my way through, Leibniz or Hegel or whatever, and I’ll read a few pages, take some notes, just try to understand what they’re saying. It’s kind of like reading a big, very long story, starts with Zeno and those guys and then there are all these installments, all these episodes, and you don’t read it in order, you just get this idea of the overall structure of the story, the plot I guess, and you fill in the parts you don’t have. Some of it’s really boring.

Like Spinoza. But you got to do it. I don’t know why really.

You just have to.

—Can you describe reading the books, Al, the actual experience?

—That’s hard. I’d say the main thing is the sense of order.

The sense that even if you can’t perceive the whole architecture of the argument at any given point, you know there is an architecture, that you’re in this man’s hands in a way, being carried along toward the completion of a vision, something he’s seen and is revealing to you slowly. There’s a tremendous comfort in that kind of order, even if you can’t see it… By the way, did that Dutch guy who called about a futon say when he was coming?

3. Interview with Daniel Markham’s friend, Kyle Johnson

—Yeah, just sit there, that’s fine. Okay, okay, we have Kyle here, a good friend of mine from Bradford High, and he’s going to talk to us, okay, okay, so tell us how the whole philosophy thing got started for you.

—Dan?

—Yeah?

—Are you all right?

—Me? Sure, sure. Fire away. You want some coffee? Al, get him some coffee.

—You look a little harried.

—I’m fine, really. So how did it start?

—Dan. I know it hasn’t been easy lately. I heard about your dad going back in the hospital. I remember all that stuff when we were kids. To tell you the truth I haven’t been so great myself. But I’m saying if you ever need a place to stay or anything.

—That’s very, very, very kind of you, Kyle. Now about philosophy.

—Have you been seeing your doctor?

—Whose fucking inquisition is this anyway?

—Okay, Dan, okay.

—All right, then. Philosophy.

—Well, I guess it began in the barn.

—The barn, okay, tell us about the barn.

—There was a room in the barn. A room I used to play in.

No. Wait. I have to go back. I have to tell you about the newspaper.

—Okay, the newspaper, tell us about the newspaper.

—When I was ten I started a newspaper. It was called the Hammurabi Gazette .

—After the famous legal code.

—No. My cat was named Hammurabi. The paper was devoted to coverage of his life.

—You never told me you had a cat.

—Yeah, I had one.

—Go on.

—There were feature articles about Hammurabi and his daily life. Pictures too. My brother wrote a monthly crossword made up of the nicknames we had for Hamm. There was a sports page as well. We set up a miniature Olympiad for him and photographed him knocking over little hurdles. My father photocopied the paper at his office. Relatives in Canada subscribed to it.

—So you got into philosophy from a publishing angle?

—No, wait, you have to listen.

—Okay, okay.

—In the barn there was a room. No, Al, I said I don’t take milk. The barn was old. It was rotting. My parents didn’t like me to play there, but I did. In the floor of the room there was a small trapdoor that opened onto the stables. They used to throw the hay down through it. I was angry at Billy Hallihan.

He had deflated the tires of my bicycle the day before at He had deflated the tires of my bicycle the day before at school and laughed as I pumped them up again. I asked him over to play in the barn. I knew he’d come because the barn was cool. The barn was falling apart. Before he came I opened the trapdoor. The door swung downward. I covered the square hole with paper. Old copies of the Hammurabi Gazette, stapled together. My plan was that I would stand on the far side of the room. When Billy entered I would say, “Come over here, I have something to show you.”

He would walk across the room, step onto the paper, and his leg would go through the hole. My sense was that his entire body would not go through it. That he would just be hurt and embarrassed. I put the paper over the hole and went back outside to ride my bike until he arrived. When I saw him coming across the yard, I hurried back into the barn. The paper was gone. I walked up to the hole. I looked down. In the stable below there was an old rusting sit-down lawn mower that my brother and I had taken half to pieces. I had removed the plastic knob from the gearshift. That’s where Hammurabi had landed. On the spike of that metal stick that I had uncovered, falling through the trap I had laid with my paper devoted to him. Hamm had carried a copy of the Gazette down with him, and it too was impaled.

—Jesus Christ.

—Yes. The image is not so different. He died for my sins.

—You never told me this, Kyle. So this eventually led to what?

—Kant. Rawls. Moral theory of one kind or another.

—And you studied that in college.

—Yeah.

—And now you work at the bakery, right?

—No, I left there a couple weeks ago. Somebody stole a bread slicer, they pegged it on me.

—So what are you doing?

—I work at a cemetery. I’m a groundsman, I prepare the graves.

—Get outta here! You’re a grave digger!

—They don’t call them that anymore. Just like they don’t call bank tellers bank tellers. But yeah, that’s what I am.

—Where?

—Out in Bradford, that little cemetery behind Saint Mary’s.

—You’re kidding me! Is this a temporary thing?

—I don’t know. I don’t know how I would know. The future is a mystery to me.