A Lite Too Bright Page 2

  I didn’t feel obligated to anyone, least of all God.

  “No matter how hard it gets, we’re so glad to be alive. And to share that gift with each other.” He shot an eyes-closed glance in my direction. “Thank you for this food, and for our health, and for the law, which protects us, and most of all, for the gift of being alive. Amen.”

  We ate in silence. Occasionally, my auntie would volunteer some information about the eBay collection habits of Southern widows, or Tim would tell a riveting water installation story, but my dad looked even less interested than I was. We’d almost made it through the meal before he casually dropped a bomb.

  “Tim, I forgot to tell you.” He spoke through a mouthful of Jell-O. “We’ve been talking to Dad’s agent, Mr. Volpe, if you remember him, and—I think we’re going to do a preferred text edition of A World Away.”

  The room was silent.

  I looked up from my plate. “You’re going to do what?”

  “I think it’s time.” My father addressed me like I was an active land mine. “To do an author’s preferred text version. A rerelease, for all the die-hard fans.”

  All the adults at the table nodded in unison like bobbleheads, as if it made perfect sense. A World Away was my grandfather’s only novel, and it was a classic. It had won every award a book can win: a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, been a New York Times bestseller, and more. It was mandatory reading for almost every high school junior in America. One time, Tom Hanks said in an interview that it was his favorite book. Tom Fucking Hanks.

  “The account is pretty dry, even after this year’s royalties, and . . . and Richard managed to recapture the copyright, so he says we’d get good money for it, in advance. It’d be enough to take care of us for a long time, maybe even life. He says publishers’ll be lining up left and right, especially after all the press and the rumors and everything when Dad . . . left.”

  I swallowed my response. That was how we spoke of my grandfather’s disappearance and death now: abstract generalities, whatever would end the conversation the fastest. My dad avoided it, maybe because he felt guilty about not looking for him, or maybe he didn’t care anymore. The confusion had burned in a small corner of my stomach for five years, but not in my dad’s. He seemed content to bury his with my grandfather.

  “Does he have any preferred text?” Tim asked, excited for the opportunity to stroke his mustache. “I didn’t think any of us had ever seen him write anything.”

  My father was cavalier and careful to avoid my stare. “Ah, I’m sure he’s got some notes or something sitting around.”

  “Please,” Karen mumbled. “He didn’t even write his own grocery lists.”

  I squeezed my ring under the table. I hated it when they talked about him like this, even though I knew they were probably right. I’d never seen him write anything either, despite how often people outside our family wanted me to tell them that I had. I remembered all of us sitting around the television once, watching a PBS special on my grandfather’s life. They interviewed expert after so-called expert, each one more certain than the last that Arthur Louis Pullman was in the process of finishing his literary masterpiece, while behind me, he was finishing a masterpiece that he called “a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.”

  I wanted them to be right. But I knew they weren’t.

  “Well, then we’ll make some up,” my father said, shrugging again. “It’s an anniversary edition. People are gonna buy it either way.”

  My stomach turned over.

  It would make money. My grandfather’s agent was right; Americans had a fetish for gossip and controversy, especially when the stories involved people going crazy, and people dying. The rumors around his death would probably drive the asking price way, way up.

  But I also knew my grandfather, and he would be clawing at the top of his casket if he heard they were going to republish an “author’s preferred text” version. It wasn’t the first time it had been discussed, and each time, he’d shot it down. It was about his honor. He didn’t want to pretend an old thing was a new thing just so he could make more money. He didn’t want corporate influences to bastardize his art for profit. And I understood that, even if my dad didn’t.

  “He’d hate that,” I said.

  My father’s fork stalled midair. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were appointed to represent my father’s interests.”

  “I just remember last time when you tried to do this, and he called it ‘corporate bullshit.’ He said he’d rather die than republish the same book just so people will buy it again.”

  “Well, he is dead now. So.”

  “That doesn’t mean you get to just trample all over his grave—”

  “For God’s sake, Arthur, would you quit pretending like he actually had some attachment to that book? I lived with him my whole life, and I don’t think he remembered what he wrote it about! Have you even read it?”

  I grimaced. “Not all the way, but—”

  “Well, let me fill you in. It’s a story of forbidden love, and adventure, and tragedy. And all the Arthur Louis Pullman I knew ever did was watch baseball and read the Bible.”

  “Not when he was younger—”

  “Yes, when he was younger! Do you know what he did when he was younger? He worked on a railroad, and he drank. Never even left California—he was writing out of his ass!”

  “So?”

  “So stop acting like there’s some pretend integrity at stake here! We’re his family, we own the copyright now, we’ll do with it what we want. God knows we earned it—”

  “Earned it? How did you earn it? It was his book.”

  “Living with him! Caring for him! My whole life, I had to sit there and watch him lose his mind, then cater to his insanity! Do you have any idea what it’s like to have to take care of someone that crazy—”

  “Arthur.” Auntie Karen was glaring at him, not me.

  He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Arty. . . . I love my father. I just . . . I love you guys more. I want to take care of you. Of us. And with the account getting low, and this therapy stuff, your legal fees . . .”

  “Yeah, right.” I twisted the ring on my hand. “You didn’t even go look for him when he ran away.”

  My dad sighed. “That’s not true, and you know it. We looked everywhere he could possibly have been. Everywhere he’d ever been. We couldn’t predict he’d turn up in Ohio.”

  “Except he did.”

  “Yes.” I could tell my dad was measuring his temper, trying to give me teaspoons. “Yes, he did.”

  “Didn’t you ever wonder why he went there? Or how? Or something?”

  He shook his head. “I never tried to figure out what was going on in that man’s head. I never cared to know.”

  “He was your father—”

  “No. No, not those last years. That man was not my father.”

  We went back to eating in silence, my dad and I both staring at our plates in disgust.

  “It’ll be good, Arty,” Uncle Tim said, ignoring the tension. “All the new attention on the book . . . might be able to use it to get laid.”

  The adults at the table groaned.

  “I’m serious! I mean, your mother was an English teacher when she met—”

  My father laughed and flung a napkin in his direction, and it was the end of the conversation.

  5.

  MY FATHER LEFT almost immediately after dinner. He tried to apologize. He told me he was trying his best, and that he still wasn’t sure how to be a parent sometimes, and I told him it was okay, because I didn’t care anymore.

  As soon as he was out the door, my uncle led me to a ladder in the far corner of the room, up to the loft attic. “Here’s where you’re setting up camp. We’ve just taken to calling it ‘the Arthur Room.’ You know the family’s had this cabin since the—”

  “Gold rush, yeah, I know.”

  “Well, they used to tell us your grandfather was born up here. That’s why it was his favorite spot,
back when he owned the place. Then your father used to stay up there all the time when he’d come visit, and now you’re receiving the torch. Next in a long line of Arthurs.”

  I examined the room at the top of the ladder. It didn’t take long—it was about the size of my bedroom at home, but the slanted roof meant most of the ceiling was too low even for walking. Cut out of the slanted roof was a large, circular window that looked west over the lake. The remaining light from the sun was painting the water purple as it set behind us.

  “Best view of Donner you’ll find in any of these cabins,” he told me. “We’d know. We’ve checked.”

  The only furniture was a nightstand next to the bed and a desk underneath the window, facing out. There was a single book in the room, on the nightstand: Birds of Tahoe. Next to it, a pamphlet for weekly church activities.

  “Sorry,” Tim said. “Your auntie is, well, you know.”

  I dropped it into the trash bin next to the desk and scanned the photos: mostly my aunt and uncle at various spots around Truckee, skiing, boating, drinking wine. On the far end was a small, rectangular frame. As soon as I picked it up, I felt a lump in my throat.

  Uncle Tim saw it in my hands. “It’s, uh . . . that’s the last picture we got of him, actually.”

  It was my whole family, squinting into the sun, most of us half smiling at whatever stranger had been asked to take the photo. My face looked excited, although I can’t imagine I had any reason to be. We were standing on the Truckee platform where my auntie had picked me up earlier that day. Somehow lost in the middle, surrounded by the family he had built and wearing what had become his signature confused squint, was my grandfather, Arthur Louis Pullman the First.

  “When did we take this?” I asked.

  “It was the morning you all rode up here to drop him off. Five years ago, the day he . . . took off.”

  I looked closer at the photo, to the digital clock on the platform behind us. It read April 27. It was the last day I’d ever seen my grandfather.

  I ran my thumb over it. “I don’t, uh, I don’t remember taking it. I feel bad, I wish I would have—”

  “Don’t.” He cut me off. “There was no way to know.” He swallowed. “We all feel bad, but there was no way to know.”

  I didn’t say anything. It didn’t sound like he was really talking to me.

  It was strange, looking at my grandfather in the last moment of his life ever captured. He was a calm person, expressionless and almost cold. But in this photo, he was the opposite. His face was alive; he looked scared and intense. He looked like there was someone, or something, he was trying to avoid.

  “He hated most photos, but God, he loved that one,” my uncle said. “We got it developed right away, and he just stared at it. For hours, sitting right there.” He nodded to the small folding chair where I sat. “Sometimes I would think he was trying to remember who we were, then sometimes I think he knew and . . . and I guess it was just his way of spending a little more time with us.”

  I nodded. “During those last few months, I hardly . . . I mean—”

  “He wasn’t well, Arthur. You know what they call Alzheimer’s? ‘The long good-bye.’ We get to remember them how we choose.” He waited a moment while I stared at the photo. “You’ve gotta go easy on your dad, kid,” he said finally, nodding to the frame in my hands. “He’s still not right with all of this. He misses him, he does. It’s just . . . it was a complicated relationship.”

  “Yeah.” I flipped the photo over, and taped to the back was a newspaper clipping cut from the Chicago Tribune. My grandfather’s photo was enormous, a smiling black-and-white portrait from long before I was born.

  “What’s this?”

  “His obituary,” my uncle said. “The best one, at least. Fit for a king. Actually, I’m pretty sure even kings don’t get this many column inches when they die.”

  “Who was Sal Hamilton?” I asked, reading the byline.

  “Closest thing Dad had to a biographer. As in, he actually knew this guy. This’s gotta be one of the best articles anybody ever wrote about him.”

  “How’d he know him?”

  Uncle Tim shrugged. “I don’t know. I doubt Dad even remembered. One of his many mysteries.”

  6.

  A FINAL MYSTERY FROM ONE OF AMERICA’S MOST CAPTIVATING STORYTELLERS

  BY SAL HAMILTON

  CHICAGO, IL. MAY 5, 2010—Perhaps one of the most culturally heartbreaking events we’ve been forced to become familiar with in our country this century has been the passing of our literary icons. Yesterday, this routine tragedy came to us as anything but routine and claimed one of our most beloved. Arthur Louis Pullman, author of the modern classic A World Away, passed away, tragically and mysteriously, in a Kent, Ohio, hospital.

  His wife, Josephine Pullman, passed away in 2005. He is survived by his sons, Arthur Jr. and Timothy.

  The death was announced by Mr. Pullman’s longtime literary agent and friend, Richard Volpe, who’d cited a long-developing degenerative brain disease as the cause of death. “We have no reason to believe there were any extraordinary circumstances surrounding his death, other than the extraordinary manner in which he lived. [Mr. Pullman] has been battling illness for the better part of his life, and the only explanation for his passing is that he must have decided it was finally time to move on from this form and go see what else was out there for him.”

  While all evidence sides with this conclusion, Mr. Pullman still left a few unanswered questions for his family and literary communities at large surrounding the location and events leading up to his passing. A week prior to his death in Kent, Ohio, Mr. Pullman was reportedly staying for an extended period with his son Tim Pullman at his cabin in Truckee, California, 2,300 miles away. The events of that week, the manner in which he traveled those 2,300 miles, and his reasons why are all, at this point, unknown.

  Presently, his family and law enforcement have chosen not to speculate on any of these questions. “His life was miraculous and his death was natural, and that’s all that matters to us,” his son Arthur Pullman Jr. said in a statement issued to the press. “We ask that, like my father asked so many times, our privacy be respected.”

  While it was not well publicized during his life, recent statements are making clear that Mr. Pullman’s later years were marred by early onset Alzheimer’s, a neurodegenerative disorder that affects over five million Americans. In his statement, Mr. Pullman’s son continued, “Throughout his longtime struggle with this disease, his brilliance and spirit never wavered, and we hope that he can be an inspiration to others out there struggling with early-onset Alzheimer’s and all forms of dementia.”

  A World Away, Mr. Pullman’s first and only published novel, was first printed in 1975, when the author was 25. Tilda Pullman, his mother, said her son wrote the novel after moving back to live with her at age 20. Commercially, it was an instant success, developing a cult following among teenagers of the post-antiwar era. It took less than two months to become a certified bestseller, and that success has been reborn with every new generation; the book still sells nearly 50,000 copies a year.

  His book, argued to be among the best of its literary generation, follows a young protagonist, Jeffery Colton, on a cross-country journey to reclaim a lost something. Literary experts, high school English classes, and strangers on bus rides have long debated the novel’s cryptic and noncommittal description of the object of the narrator’s quest—in different sections called “an empire,” a “her,” a “Him,” “the Great,” and many more. Critics have often heralded Pullman’s detailed handling of Jeffery’s psychosis, observing what it says about the human compulsion for desire, and how that compulsion evolves as we achieve those things. In the novel’s final line, Jeffery remarks, “I have become all that I want, and for that, I am the one thing I will never understand.”

  The writing style of the novel has become, in and of itself, subject for literary study. An early review written by Tomas Cornish of the New Y
orker called Pullman “the degenerate son of Kerouac, the quicker cousin of Whitman, and the only one of them that could ever tell a real story.” His usually plot-heavy and focused prose is spattered with abstract moments and poetic musing, frequently highlighted by grammatical touches such as scorning capital letters and replacing the word “and” with ampersands (&). When asked once whether he felt that the different, seemingly competing styles were indicative of some kind of split-personality writing, he remarked, “You show me an author who’s got just one trick, I’ll show you his blank piece of paper, and my thing will be more interesting.”

  After the publication of A World Away in 1975, Mr. Pullman began his lifelong hiatus from formal literary publication and the public eye. He met Josephine Webb just prior to the novel’s release and they were married three months later at a private ceremony in Northern California. Retreating to seclusion immediately, they purchased a home in Palo Alto, where he spent the remainder of his life.

  He made his scorn of public attention well-known. Mr. Volpe has confirmed that Pullman had a long-standing objection to any proposed interviews, stories, fan mail, or connection with his literary audience in general. This aversion did little to reduce the outside world’s attempts to connect with Mr. Pullman, and rather added to his mystique. It has long been believed that Mr. Pullman spent his thirty-five years in seclusion writing what would become his most representative work, or body of work. Other rumors go further still, suggesting Pullman’s connection to a collection of unpublished works from America’s greatest writers, himself included, but these theories offer very little explanation beyond the naming of the seemingly mythical collection: “the Great Library.”

  Arthur Louis Pullman was born in 1950 and raised in Truckee, California, the son of a hotel chambermaid. A child of California through and through, he wouldn’t leave the state until he was an adult. At age 14, he began working for the Pacific Railroad Company, laying tracks across the blossoming Bay Area of San Francisco. After several stints of employment, he enrolled briefly in the National Guard, but never made it past his training in the Bay Area. His transition to writing, as with the majority of his life, is not well documented. When asked about her husband by a reporter in public, Josephine Pullman said, “My husband is a private man.”