A Calling for Charlie Barnes

by Joshua Ferris

This was one of the old man’s more curious features: an antipathy toward novels as a general rule, and absolutely no taste for reading them, together with a tendency to find their shimmering starts almost everywhere in the course of ordinary life.

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.”

You can’t lose a father and not be affected in some profound and unexpected way.

What was meant to heal him was, for me, the start of his dying.

In place of the unique article was an imitation. He had not undergone some lifesaving surgery but an experimental whole-body transplant into somebody half his size. He writhed around, looked bothered by the light. He appeared to have an allergy to his own skin.

Her purse, a leather octopus,

But a son’s revolt against his father usually ends in parody,

deadfall

Narcissism, justly lamented for doing so much damage, especially within the family unit, could also work miracles, as when a fundamentally apathetic collection of illiterates gets wind that they appear as characters in a book and transforms overnight into a bunch of rabbinical scholars. First Barbara, then Marcy, then Jerry, and now Rudy. Animals in the wild were more likely to read something I’d written prior to my turn toward the biographical, but now it appeared I’d never lack for readership.

bycoket.

I had become disillusioned, which is no easier to overcome than grief. It is grief, in fact—not for the death of a loved one but for the death of a vibrant ideal. I believed that death would have something to teach me, that I would be enlightened by it rather than impoverished. “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. When Charlie died, I grew no closer to the astral plane, gleaned no hint of the beyond. The dying breathe their last and stay dead, end of story—a hard lesson to learn about the broader truth while you’re also trying to mourn a specific and immediate loss.