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After and Before

Much of my work explores survivorship. Surviving—be it a terrorist attack or an abusive relationship or, as in “Epcot Center, August ’88,” a lethal disease that can ravage even those bodies it doesn’t infect—has, at times, struck me as a crueler fate.

To “survive” isn’t simply to live but to outlive, which is the definition of its Late Latin cognate supervivere. Relativity carries with it an additional weight, more brutal than the initial catastrophe—an enduring affliction that has been voiced by survivors of historical calamites like the Holocaust and Hiroshima, as well as those who faced more ubiquitous tragedies like AIDS. When the survivor asks Why me? the existential crisis is two-fold—they are both condemning fate for the cosmic injustice they endured and self-recriminating their endurance, which defied the outcome of so many. The liminal universe extant in these inner conflicts, and their manifestation, fascinates me.

There isn’t much in the way of bells and whistles in my story (and by “bells and whistles,” I mean plot). The tension that drew me to write the piece is the very inner conflict I described, complicated by the element of familial estrangement. The child never rejects the parent first, a psychologist friend once told me. It’s a sentiment I kept near as I worked on the story, trying to illuminate the history of the protagonist and his son without bogging down the reader with unnecessary interiority. The protagonist endeavors to narrow the gap between himself and his late son by gleaning their lost years from his son’s girlfriend, as well as amplifying his own sense of paternity by harping on the lessons he bestowed, of which his son thought highly enough to repeat.

My hope was the modular, minimalist approach would allow me to bring into relief the protagonist’s growing cloak of survivorship—the failed parent already cursed to survive his child, now grappling with his culpability over his son’s actions that led to the death of a girl who, in another life, may have been the mother of his grandchildren. Thus I could portray survival as a portal we enter through—as much a temporal disturbance as a cataclysmic event—and from which there is no exit.