A Calling for Charlie Barnes

by Joshua Ferris

He was born a nobody and that’s how he would die.

He liked it better when he had pancreatic cancer. Not really, of course. That was absurd. But he did enjoy the clarity it gave him.

If my father was something of a joke, he was also a fucking colossus. There was no bringing him down, no killing him off. Recall the gods that dwelled upon Mount Olympus. They, too, could be easily mocked by the poets and their lives described in terms of farce, because they were immortal.

The worst thing that could have happened to Icarus was not, in fact, his fiery end but his decision at the last second to go by Greyhound, and to start a nice family in Cleveland.

Altogether, these things did not make him a man to reckon with, not a rich or powerful man, but a happy man. Now, that was unexpected.

Move in the direction of love and life gets harder. He had known that much from the time he was sixteen, when he got a job so as to buy a girl a Coke.

I bring this up only to suggest that I do not have a lock on the truth, provided there is such a thing, and that, in fact, when we consider the necessarily curated nature of any narrated life, its omissions as well as its trending hashtags, if you will, we are forced to conclude that every history, including our own first-person accounts, is a fiction of a sort.

Or, as Wallace Stevens put it much more succinctly, “The false and true are one.”

“For instance! Why not a man in his basement who has hopes and dreams, and fears and debts, and regrets, and a car in need of repair, and a whole lot of other things?

And this one, from Lowry’s three-volume history of the Spanish Civil War: “Vicious contention between uncompromising factions marked the civil war in Spain. Why should its histories be any different?”

And here is Nietzsche, in what amounts to an author’s note in the middle of Beyond Good and Evil: “What forces us at all to suppose that there is an essential opposition of ‘true’ and ‘false’?…Why couldn’t the world that concerns us—be a fiction?”

“I grieve that grief can teach me nothing,” Emerson wrote at the sudden death of his beloved son, Waldo, age five—a much harder loss, no doubt, than that of some old dad, but the remark sums up my own experience.