The expressway thinned to a two-lane highway, which soon gave way to a dirt road, and at last unspooled into a rutted path that ribboned through an anonymous patch of forest. Looking out the window, I understood that proximity to pavement was the Alaskan metric for wealth: modern, aluminum-sided houses lined the freeway; the dusted windows of log cabins stared vacantly out at the cracked highway; sheds and shacks slouched along the dirt road. And in the slow, hiccupping movement down that rutted path I looked out at the corpse of a school bus, its roof staved in, looking remarkably similar to the place where Christopher McCandless died, but in a far less romantic setting. Next to the bus was a rusting travel-trailer, forsaken on cinder blocks, and the mess of clothes left out front suggested current or at least recent habitation. My liberal guilt jabbed at me. I thought of the impoverished people who lived this lonesome way, powerless and without water in a moldering camper at the edge of the world. I wondered about the aspirant McCandless who might be living there now, the sort of hale and hirsute man who could bear such an existence.
And then, as if my imagination had summoned him, my Alaskan stereotype came waddling from the birch forest: a silver-bearded man, as round as tall, carrying a construction worker’s stop sign on a pole, which he drove into the soft earth of the path. STOP, his sign commanded, and so we stopped for a long, blinking moment. From the road’s opposite side, his stooped, feminine equivalent caned her way from the forest, a scroll of paper rolled under her arm. The dashboard clock read 4am. From the dusky forest came the sounds of men screaming.
. . . . . . . . . . .
I went to the woods, like a type-A Thoreau, because I wished to work deliberately. Over the previous spring and summer in New York, I had sprinted through the first draft of a novel. Ablaze with productivity, I had powered through paragraphs at speeds clockable by radar gun. And yet, when I finally read those pages, I found little to care about, and I immediately consigned the whole thing to my graveyard of literary projects, a memory stick I keep in the top of my closet. For the following weeks, bookless and aimless, I focused on ways to make my days feel purposeful – over pricey Brooklyn microbrews, I made a boozy para-career out of complaining to other writers about the difficulty of the writing I was no longer doing. Each morning, I’d wake to palpate a liver-shaped ache and spend a morose few minutes regretting the ways I had saddened my already depressed savings account. From my bed, I could almost hear the whistle of the deep absence on my computer’s hard drive.
Eliminate my distractions, I decided, and I would have no choice but to produce pages. I lived in New York City, but I was going to a theater camp in Fairbanks to become more productive. Writers play all sorts of tricks on themselves.
. . . . . . . . . . .
The shouting grew louder, a cacophony that resolved into what sounded, to my ears, like rebel yells, blood-rich screams. The shouters were drawing closer, fleshy movement flitting between the dusky birch trees. I turned to Anne, who was hysterical, but I couldn’t tell if she was weeping or laughing. Such was my panic that I had forgotten Ma and Pa Cerberus, the gatekeepers to our passage. But the hunched woman waved at me and unfurled the sign under her arm. On the paper, someone had drawn a crude rendition of a duck-crossing road sign, and – beneath it – painted the word WELCOME. No, not a Rebel Yell – it was something equally avid but sillier, men quacking as ducks. And, at last, the quackers were upon us. Five bearded men, doing their best duck-waddle in a row, naked but for their dirt and bruises.
What the fuck? I said.
This, Anne choked through tears, is the welcome committee.
We’re – what? There?
Welcome to camp!
I surveyed the mess of rust-trimmed trailers and sheds in the distance. Nothing looked like it could survive a hard rain.
But, wait. Wait. Where are the cabins?
I think they picked that one out for you, Anne said, gesturing at the trailer I had just pitied.
. . . . . . . . . . .
After nine hours of travel, my frayed thoughts could focus only on a vision of a cool pillow against my face. Already, I had begun to worry about how my exhaustion would ruin the next day of writing. As I mounted a musty futon, grateful for the powerless camper’s dim light that forbade a good look at the stains on the sheets, I told myself, 1000 words tomorrow, no matter what.
It would have been a fine resolution, if in the Fairbanks Shakespeare Camp in the month of July there were such a thing as today or tomorrow.
I closed my eyes. With the swift efficiency of a toilet’s flush, my mind swirled toward sleep, when the bearded men came back. They pounded at the door and did not wait for a reply to enter the crouched, tin space of my camper, where two of them informed me, with a little offense, that I was missing the welcome party they had just begun for me.
Welcome party? But it’s five in the morning!
Hey, bub, it’s summertime! one of the beards told me, his crisp thespian’s voice incongruous, coming from the hole in the red nest of his face. No day, no night, no bedtime!
I sat up, gravity twice its normal pull.
So when do you sleep?
Whenever you drop!
I think I’m dropping.
No, you’re not, the other beard said. You, my friend, are drinking.
I followed my hosts down the gravel path that led to the center of camp: a shed that housed a jury-rigged kitchen, a scattering of shacks and outhouses, and the fire pit, where a stack of wood from an old theater set burned. Scraps of old sets and props were everywhere. The plywood Verona of a long-ago production of Romeo and Juliet had been refashioned into a cabin. The main outhouse was a converted two-floor gallows, the wood painted the festive colors of Elizabethan England. One of the men wore a Falstaff’s velvet cap.
500 words, I thought. That will be a good enough start.
A man cannot make him laugh, the feral-bearded Falstaff said, lobbing a can of Red Dog Lager in my direction. But that’s no marvel; he drinks no wine.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Was it that I welcomed these new distractions as I had the old ones in New York? Or did I just want to be an accommodating guest? With the unburdening of six or seven tall boys and a few tokes of a greasy medicine pipe, I stopped counting words and hours.
Those days (nights? afternoons? mornings?) are hazy. I remember participating in a tomahawk-throwing contest, digging up a suitcase of cheese the men had buried in the permafrost, helping to assemble a makeshift stage for the local band that had decided to put on an impromptu show. Is it possible that the hundreds of dreadlocked, hemp-sacked Alaskans that I remember actually came? That is how I remember it. The grease of our cooking rose into my unshaven face, already thickening my stubble into a grimy short beard.
. . . . . . . . . . .
The Fairbanks Shakespeare Theater’s main stage was a few miles away, but the real show, I saw from my boozy vantage, was here. It was a camp, but it was also a living set that the crew and actors continuously constructed and demolished, the set of an impromptu campfire cabaret. Just as day became night without any distinction, audience became performer became audience, a booze- and hallucinogen-generated theater of improvisation.
Some of these performances were camp classics: One of the beards would pick up a guitar and serenade us with wandering Dylan tunes, or worry us with tales of the people who had gone missing in the forest that was all around us. And yet, just as often, the performances were delightfully bizarre. We heated the fire poker and singed portraits of one another into the trees. Another beard, a set designer, showed us how he had recently used the same poker to brand primitive designs into his forearm. Anne and her fellow cast members recited Shakespeare’s soliloquies over the fire like incantations. A guest of the camp, a comely and diffident-seeming young woman, told me she was a performance artist, and later gave us a demonstration of her work, lancing needle-tipped feathers into her skin, hanging herself from meat hooks through the nape of her neck, and swinging from the rafters
. At all hours, a pack of Alaskan sled dogs penned next door bayed and whined.
Eventually, of course, my Fairbanks bedtime came, and when I woke, I woke with a hangover beyond all reckoning. My laptop still slept in my backpack. The wan light in my trailer was like my aching sobriety, grimly lighting an alternate and far less generous view of the place: My cabin, once again, was just a broken-down trailer in a squalid camp. I counted off bitter diagnoses: alcoholism, poverty, aimlessness. When I opened my computer at the table in the kitchen shed, I saw a still blank Word document and a date that was nearly a week after my arrival. I had come here to escape distractions, but I began plotting an escape from my escape.
While I was on hold with my airline, one of the beards came into the kitchen, dug through a cooler and tossed me another can of Red Dog. Finish up whatever you’re doing, he told me, we’re gonna go see the play.
Oh, right, the play. In the theater of camp life, I had nearly forgotten the actual stage. Anne and a few of the others would sometimes leave for a few hours, but always they soon returned with a few fresh 30-packs, and back at camp it could seem that their stage work was just some side errand they did while going on a beer run.
But don’t worry, the beard reassured me. First, we’ll get loaded.
Jesus, I said. How do you ever get anything done?
Oh, that’s a winter worry. It’s summertime! Get in the truck.
. . . . . . . . . . .
The outdoor stage of the Fairbanks Shakespeare Theater was like the dressed-up version of camp: the same warped, secondhand wood, nailed and freshly painted. Like we campers who had put on our button-up shirts for a night at the theater, the set was passable but wouldn’t really fool anyone. This performance of The Taming of the Shrew, which starred Anne in the role of Katherina, would be the last of the season. I found a folding chair and sat.
Like a tongue to a sore tooth, my thoughts returned, as ever, to my abandoned book. What had gone wrong? Should I have known sooner that I was wasting my time? I asked myself the question I’d been asking all day, and also for the last weeks: How had I let myself go as I had, drifting so far from my work?
The old stereo system bleated sickly, a worn-out recording of a Renaissance trumpet signal. I looked up, surprised to find myself in a packed theater, every seat taken, many double-occupied with children on their parents’ laps, all craning their necks for a clear view of the Fairbanks Shakespeare Theater’s final performance. When Lucentio bounded onto stage, the audience applauded. When Anne-as-Katherina chased Bianca through the rows of seats, we yelped with laughter. When Anne smashed and licked empty plates in a hysterical display of mock-starvation, I lifted a Red Dog tall boy and toasted with the beards.
This was a Fairbanks evening at the theater: The sun was still up, the crew was drunk, the stage was crude. And, just two hours from now, we would begin the work of rendering the ersatz Renaissance villa back into firewood and outhouses. Audience, cast and crew would disperse and return to worry, work and winter.
Forward, I pray, since we have come so far: When Anne vowed her submission to Petruchio’s strange whims and notions, she spoke also of our own willing submission to this moment at the Fairbanks Shakespeare Theater, the gratitude with which, for this summery second, we could forget ourselves, our place and our worries, and believe we were continents and centuries away. Back in New York, Fairbanks would seem almost as impossible and imagined as it had before I left. As a stubborn July sun in Brooklyn burned away the haze of THC and beery toxins, my memories would seem as unlikely as daydreams. But one thing I would remember perfectly, when I stopped counting words and finally started to write, was that kind of forgetting.
When Things Make No Sense
BY PICO IYER
Pico Iyer is the author of two novels, Cuba and the Night and Abandon, and one work of nonfiction often misidentified as a novel (The Lady and the Monk). He has also published eight works of nonfiction, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Global Soul and The Open Road. The first draft of his most recent book, The Man within My Head, was entirely fictional; the last draft was pure nonfiction.
We’d met barely five minutes before, and already, insofar as I could tell, the bright-eyed young woman with whom I was walking through the leafy streets of Vedado in Havana was proposing marriage. This had nothing to do with me, I knew; I’d received several other proposals – propositions for life, in effect – already that week. Soon (I’d agreed to take this friend of a friend to a ‘dollar store,’ technically open only to foreigners) this highly eligible woman was telling me how she was going to set sail the next week for Miami; some friends of hers were about to oust Fidel – ‘You know the C.I.A.?’ – and things were going to be different, very different, soon. But I shouldn’t tell a soul.
I couldn’t, in any case, because a man was approaching us now – we were near the Malecón – and asking if I wanted to buy a turtle.
Fiction was impossible in Revolutionary Cuba, I quickly came to feel; even more than in Haiti, or India, or other of the tumultuous places of everyday chaos that I knew, so much was happening, so loudly, at every minute, both on the streets and in the overheated minds all around, that it stretched credulity in every direction. In part, this was a register of frustration, of course; the island had been condemned to thirty years at that point of strutting in place. In part it was a function of need: people had to have dramas, rumors and fantasies because they were not allowed much in the way of real lives. But as much as anything, it was a reflection of a passionate, theatrical, over-the-top culture where strangers on every side were sobbing and shouting and laughing in the streets, at all hours of the day and night, with operatic virtuosity, while also reminding me, under their breath, that my best friend here was probably an informer, and I should be careful of Lourdes, who would report even her sister to the neighborhood committee, and the proposal I’d just received had come from someone whose motives could not entirely be trusted.
As I began returning to the country, year after year, in the late 1980s, I realized that even a transcript of a typical day’s activities – where a friend in prison came out to greet me with a smile (he had three guaranteed meals a day here, he told me, and security and quiet, everything he couldn’t get at home); where the phone calls I was asked to make to loved ones who’d made it to the U.S. ended in static or stories of gang killings – would beggar a reader’s belief; many of my friends outside Cuba lived in Jane Austen or Henry James worlds where it was hard to credit the desperation and suspicion that would make kids shoot themselves up with the AIDS virus, as I was being told they did in Cuba.
. . . . . . . . . . .
One day I was sitting in an apartment on Calle 23, across from the university. I’ve told this story often, because it keeps going round and round in my head, and each time it gives off a different resonance. The Top 40 Countdown was coming in from some radio station in Florida, and copies of Sartre and Dostoevsky were all around us. A rooster called Reagan, in honor of its squawking, was clucking across the rooftop outside. And inside, thanks to our conversation, I might have been in an apartment in the 5th arrondissement, or one of the loftier quarters in Madrid: the students around me seemed to know far more about many aspects of the world, not least Oliver Stone’s latest acts of insurrection, than I did.
‘Where do you come from?’ one asked, inevitably.
I knew the answer; I’d been to Cuba several times before.
‘California,’ I said (though there were many other places I could have named). California was the place these kids occupied as squatters in their heads; it was everything Cuba was not, as they saw it, and many, many had sisters, uncles, even wives who’d made it there, so that one part of their lives was now situated in Gardena – or Daly City – though out of reach, it might seem, forever.
‘I have a brother in California,’ one of the worldly-wise students said, not unexpectedly. ‘He lives in this place called Tamal. You know it?’
I didn’t.
> ‘In this big house. He’s got swimming pools and tennis courts. Four or five cars, I think.’ I didn’t need to hear what came next: please, please, please could I take a letter to the brother – the postal service between the neighboring enemies seldom worked, and e-mail had not really arrived in 1989 – so that he could get the stranded prisoner now talking to me out of Havana?
I said yes, of course, though earlier trips to Havana and ten or twenty letters collected on each one had made me sad about the likely outcome: the letters came back to me unopened, or disappeared into some black hole containing Cubans who, having left Cuba, no longer wanted to think of it or were no longer alive. I had to take the letter, but I was skeptical about the value of committing it to the heavens.
I was wrong. As I was about nearly everything in Cuba. Barely a week passed and a letter was in my mailbox in Santa Barbara from this town, Tamal, I’d never heard of. He was so happy to hear from his brother, the brother in California wrote; he couldn’t tell me how he missed Cuba. But did his brother know that he was in San Quentin Prison now? On Death Row?
Could his brother in Cuba do something – anything at all – to get him out and back to the Cuba he missed so much? This was a big building, and it had all kinds of facilities, but he would rather live with nothing in Havana, free, than amidst all these locked cars and barred recreational facilities.
I conveyed the message to the brother in Havana, though the mail between the two countries was so uncertain, I couldn’t be sure my letter ever reached him; I looked for him the next time I flew down, but he, like so many, seemed to have disappeared into the ever-shifting anarchy that was daily life in Havana. Perhaps he’d even made it to America by then.
I made contact with the brother on Death Row, too, and then realized I should go no further; I was already out of my depth and any subsequent letter I sent would only excite hopes that could probably never be fulfilled. I came to think, too, how my very trips to Cuba likely did the same, which is maybe one reason why, not long thereafter, I stopped going down there.
Better Than Fiction Page 17
