Episode 21 The Strangers

Transcript

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This is episode 21 of Ed Falco on the air, and in this episode I'll be reading a poem and a short story by Jeremy Griffin. The short story is titled, At the Bottom of Everything. It was first published in the literary journal Shenandoah and subsequently reprinted in Oceanography, Jeremy's second collection of short stories, winner of the 2018 Orison Fiction Prize selected by Lance Samantha Chang and published by Orison Books. Before I get to the short story though, I want to start with the poem, which is titled, Why Are You Hitting Yourself? And it was published in issue 19 of the Saranac Review. Why Are You Hitting Yourself? By Jeremy Griffin. On the projector screen, two boys stalk through a high school cafeteria, sidestepping overturned chairs and abandoned book bags, brandishing semi autos with the insensate authority of scepter wielding tyrants. They fire into the backs of the kids, scurrying toward the exits. Easy as blockbuster heroes dropping henchmen. And I'm certain this is how they see themselves. A force vital to maintaining the planet's proper tilt. It's not until the video is over that the brawny officer manning the projector reveals it is simulated security cam footage. This is what could happen, he warns, if you're not prepared, and how pleased he appears to have duped us, this sheepish troupe of teachers, bespectacled and arthritic, who have never had to face down an assailant with anything more than the modest armor afforded by language. I want to tell him, That everyone knows what it means to be pummeled with their own fists by those who believe strength is in the holding, not the letting go. If only I could show him how, in the icy quiet before I begin a lesson, when the students are slumping into the room like line up suspects behind a two way mirror, I'll inevitably imagine a gun leveled at my skull, the slugs tearing through tissue and bone, heedless as arena bound bulls. If only he could understand, this man in his combat boots and tactical polo, that there is nothing left to learn about death. Instead, I turn my attention to the voices drifting in from the quiet outside. The young people greeting each other like finches warbling amidst the branches of saplings, high enough off the ground that no one can reach them. That was Why Are You Hitting Yourself by Jeremy Griffin, and I selected it for this episode because I want to go back to a question I talked about in last week's episode. As I said then, the most common question writers hear is, where do you get your ideas? And I imagined what the questioners really wanted to know is how they can do it. How they can find the material they need to write their own stories, or poems, or plays, or songs, whatever the genre they're working in. The question is asked in the hope that an accomplished writer might give them some insight into the process of writing. I talked in episode 20 about the relationship between the act of writing and the development of ideas. But I'd like to talk just a bit here about the deeper sources of serious writing. A few days ago, I saw the Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown. And there's a moment in the movie when a troubled Dylan complains that everyone wants to know where he gets the ideas for his songs. But he thinks that what they're really asking is, why can't I get those ideas? Why didn't I write those songs? Dylan is troubled and angry at this point in the film, and his response to the common question echoes his frustration at hearing it again and again. And perhaps he, or rather the character in the movie, is really expressing a deeper frustration. Because no one can tell another writer where to get his or her ideas. Because the ideas and the act of writing are intermingled. One starts to create. And ideas evolve in the creative act. Still, those ideas or themes are rooted and anchored in deeper sources that are very much unique to the writer. And it's the real work of the writer to explore them. To complicate things a little, it's not at all uncommon for writers themselves to be unaware of the deeper sources powering their writing. Who knows what made Edgar Allan Poe tell the same story over and over again in dozens of variations. In every Poe story, someone is buried alive and comes back from the dead. Whether literally buried alive, as in the cask of a Montellano, or figuratively, in the maelstrom, it's all the same thing. But whatever that obsession, it powered a lot of great writing. In the case of Jeremy's poem, however, I know the source that powered the writing, which is why I selected the poem and his story for today's episode. Jeremy Griffin was a student at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007, when a shooter massacred 32 students and professors in what was then the largest mass shooting in U. S. history. Everyone who was on campus at that time Everyone who was part of that college community was scarred by the event, and many of the writers in that community, like Jeremy, worked through their feelings in poems, stories, and essays. So, clearly, that experience is the deep source of the poem, Why Are You Hitting Yourself? It's a poem written in response to an experience. But the ideas that make the poem so powerful, I'm sure, emerged in the act of writing the poem. The speaker, in reaction to being shown a film simulating a mass shooting, thinks that everyone knows what it's like to beat themselves up out of fear, knowing themselves to be vulnerable to the violence of others. It's in the speaker's response to that feeling that the ideas for the poem emerge in the final lines. The speaker, a teacher, turns his attention to his students, to, quote, the young people, greeting each other like finches warbling. Amidst the branches of saplings, High enough off the ground, That no one can reach them. In that final image, the fragility and vulnerability of the young is made vivid and touching. The speaker compares the young to tiny, vulnerable creatures, made safe only by his imagining them out of reach of danger, as is always the case in the best poems. There is no exact prose paraphrase of its meaning, but the ideas that evolve in this poem concern the vulnerability of the young, and the tenderness and love that comes from recognizing and accepting that troubling truth. I think you'll see these very same ideas show up again in Jeremy's short story, At the Bottom of Everything. To be vulnerable, to be unsafe, to be vulnerable. To be made aware, through experience, of the fragility of life. At the bottom of everything, by Jeremy Griffin. Today is the one year anniversary of the Conway High Massacre, as it has come to be called. And we, The nineteen surviving gunshot victims have converged on the large desolate field where Travis Covington, seventeen, filmed his now infamous video diary before opening fire on a pep rally in the Conway High School gymnasium. It's midnight, and the crisp night air is rich with the aromas of earth and grass and decay. Our feet send up a chorus of inelegant, squishing sounds as we proceed into the mud, sidestepping pieces of junk deposited by neighborhood residents unwilling to make the trek to the dump across town. Broken appliances, tattered furniture, mounds of old mildew clothes, a graveyard of possibilities. With our eyes fixed on the ground in search of rusty metal scraps, we might appear to be onlookers, like a search party combing the area for a missing person. Actually, what we are looking for is the baseball diamond sized pond On the far side of the field, where Travis used to practice shooting at beer bottles. Even before the video diary was released, everyone in the area was familiar with the field, though it is large enough that finding the pond, in the dark no less, proves difficult. In fact, the diary, FedExed to WKLG News an hour before the attack, gave little indication of its location amidst the weedy, garbage strewn expanse. In the video, Travis would set the bottles to float in the center by way of a small platform constructed from plastic containers. The viewer can see the bottles pop and shatter in mists of brown glass. In the wake of the attack, the footage went viral, attracting scads of gawkers to the site, eventually forcing police to cordon off the area until traffic stopped altogether. Up until now, we have avoided the field. Partially for this reason, but mostly out of a childish fear that our presence might be met with the ghostly vengeance reserved for movie characters who have stumbled upon ancient Indian burial grounds. Classes will end at one o'clock today for what promises to be a sobering commemorative assembly in front of the school. The mayor will speak. And then a few words from Student Council President Jessica Schiff, and then Principal Moody will call for 26 seconds of silence. We will be seated in a row of folding chairs at the front, dressed in our honorary CHS letter jackets, of course, hands folded in our laps like penitents, exuding the heroic poise that has come to be expected of us. It's not so hard to understand why our classmates would like our scars to mean something, to emblemize the triumph of the human spirit. As one slick haired South Carolina senator phrased it, who doesn't want to rationalize their traumas? If only to preserve their conception of the universe as an ordered system in which righteousness and evil are easily distinguishable. It is for their sakes, then, that we have kept the truth to ourselves, that there is no meaning to be gleaned from our scars, no arcane wisdom, only a cold, sinister reminder that at best, we Everything is only temporary, even us. Maybe this is why our hands instinctively seek out our scars as we approach the pond, the calm surface sparking plaintively in moonlight. Notice, for instance, how Emily Lepisto clasps her left wrist, feeling the twin dimples from the slug that left her unable to bend her fingers more than a few degrees. Or see Adam Kravitsky remove his Clemson cap and absentmindedly trace the mottled pink ridges crisscrossing his head, making his skull look like a Phillips head screw. Although we carry 5. 8 pounds of titanium alloy. In the form of cranial plates, bone screws, artificial kneecaps, and spinal fusion cages. So far, we have undergone a total of 71 surgeries to repair punctured lungs, perforated bowels, temporal bone fractures, cerebral contusions, pulmonary lacerations, intercranial hematomas. Arteriovenous, Fistulens, Hemothorax, Pericardial, Tamponade. Three of us has suffered neurological impairments that, while thankfully having no effect on our cognitive abilities, will prevent us from ever driving again. One of us is now blind in one eye. The most iconic clip from the video diary features Travis standing with his back to the pond, dressed in a black t shirt and cargo pants, clutching the weapon, a Bushmaster 223 semi automatic rifle, purchased online with a fake ID, to his tawny chest.'This is my manifesto, he says robotically into the tripod mounted camera. For too long, I have been ridiculed and tormented. Now the guilty must pay. The fakes and the liars. You brought this on yourselves. It is this clip alone that has allowed him in our memories to take on the impossible dimensions of a mythical figure. Half human, half speculation, a harsh contrast to the nervous, lanky, fair skinned boy we'd see skulking through the halls like a death row inmate on his way to the gas chamber. He was never very popular outside his cohort of friends. With whom he usually spent his lunch hour playing Jenga in the A. V. lab. With their bad skin and anime t shirts, they all seemed interminably trapped on the edge of adolescence in a way that made them outcasts, foreigners amongst the rest of us. Beyond this, we knew almost nothing about his personal life. Other than that he had an older sister, Tori, who had graduated before any of us had started high school, but whose promiscuity remained something of a legend among the students. She was rumored to have once taken part in a house party game to see which of five girls could fillet the most boys in a half hour, and, as a consequence, had to have her stomach pumped of semen. That no one ever was able to verify this did not stop us from trading the story time and again like gospel. His parents, we learned after the attack, had been divorced for most of his life. His mother was a paralegal in Conway, and his father had a wife and two other children, and owned a four wheeler dealership in New Orleans. But it is the seemingly innocuous memories of Travis that have taken on the most retrospective weight in our minds. Whitney Smith remembers when he chose Mein Kampf for his end of year research project in sophomore English and how annoyed Janice Arundel was when it took first prize in the annual CHS writing contest, beating out her sonnet about her family trip to Mexico. He only chose the book to get attention. She was overheard complaining to a classmate. Kevin Molinaro recalls the two straight weeks he wore sunglasses for no apparent reason and how he used to draw flames on his tennis shoes. Brian Vick remembers when, during a fetal pig dissection in his sophomore biolab, he began to dry heave into the sink and had to be escorted by Mrs. O'Dell into the hall, where he spent the remainder of the period, sobbing hysterically. Maybe these were nothing more than the hallmarks of an awkward adolescence. We were all teenagers after all, gloomy in our own way, and terrified of what the world had to offer. Nevertheless, in our minds they now seem hopelessly laden with significance, like opportunities that only reveal themselves once you've missed them. On a September morning in question, he strode into the gym with the rifle in his hands, just as the dance team was finishing up a routine. We didn't know what we were seeing, not at first, Deshaun Burgess would later comment in a CNN news feed. We all thought maybe it was, like, part of a skit or something. Coach Barnes, an Iraq war vet, the fact of which has received almost as much coverage as the shooting itself, Not to mention whispers of a made for TV movie option, was the first to realize what was happening. Leaping up from the bleachers, he yelled, Get down! And then darted across the court toward Travis, presumably with the intention of tackling him. Travis, clad in the same black paramilitary garb he'd worn in the video diary, took aim, and with an eerie calm, shot the coach through the right eye. The man's head snapped back violently, as if yanked by an invisible string, and he dropped to the floor in mid step. At least three radio talk show hosts would make comparisons to the Kennedy assassination. A chorus of terrified screams rose up from the bleachers. Students flooded the floor all at once, clamoring for the exits, tripping and trampling each other, despite the teacher's frantic attempt to corral them into the halls. The thick pops of the rifle resounded throughout the room, big as planets. While all around us it seemed bodies were collapsing, shredded by gunfire. The scorched smell of cordite, the panicked tang of sweat. For some of us, like Katie Wilkes, the blasts hit with enough scalding force to send us flying off our feet. Others didn't even realize at first that we had been hit, as in the case of Doug Castellabri, who propelled by adrenaline and fear, assumed the blood on his shirt was someone else's, until once outside the building he noticed the dime sized hole in his abdomen. Altogether, Travis Covington fired off 74 rounds in approximately 3. 2 minutes, before turning the gun on himself. Ballistics reports would later describe the shooting pattern as random and uncoordinated, unquote. The video diary was aired by every major news network in the country, and Travis, who hadn't had the stomach to make it through a fetal pig dissection, became one of the most popular search terms online for nearly four weeks straight. As for possible motives, people have suggested maybe video games drove him to it, or the absence of his father, or milk hormones. Or perhaps even his ADD, but who can ever know these things? That's the worst part, really. Trying to find a singular cause, while knowing at the same time that such things don't exist. Aren't we naturally predisposed to believe? Despite all reason, that tragedy serves some higher moral function. Isn't that what this afternoon's assembly is all about? But no. Tragedy has the same point of origin as everything else, and searching for it only makes you understand how little your own survival actually accomplishes. And so, this is why now, standing at the mucky edge of the pond, with the reeds swishing gently against our ankles, we begin to undress. Each of us without a word, because we have nothing left to hide, perhaps we never did in the first place. The cool air slides over our skins like strangers fingertips in a crowd, arousing the fine hairs on our arms and legs. Leaving our clothes in piles in the grass, we wade chastely into the frigid water. In the brittle moonlight, our bare bodies glow spectrally, our scars rendered practically invisible. Could this be all that healing amounts to? Outlasting whatever you thought was keeping you safe? Moving farther out into the pond, we think about the video diary. We remember the footage of Travis target practice sessions, and we imagine the bottom of the pond as a vast carpet of glass shards waiting to slice the feet of unsuspecting swimmers. Just like the childhood monsters beneath our beds, because isn't that where the danger always lives? At the bottom of everything? Hidden, but closer than anyone would like to believe. You brought this on yourselves. Now we lie back in the water and close our eyes and drift listlessly out toward the center of the pond. We are alone here, and the night is silent, save for the trilling of crickets, and the wind against the grass, and the water lapping gently at our goose rippled skins. We float like corpses, the nineteen of us, wholly exposed, limbs splayed like the points of stars. As we wait for whatever is beneath us to reveal itself. That was At the Bottom of Everything by Jeremy Griffin. I hope you can see in it the same source and similar ideas to those expressed in the poem, in the story, in the The 19 survivors of a mass shooting, made acutely aware of their own vulnerability, engage in an act of communion, bathing together in the same place where the shooter practiced killing, as if to re immerse themselves in the experience and to know that they survived, though aware, forever, of the dangers that lurk at the bottom of everything. As in the previous episode, I have attempted here to answer the question, Where do your ideas come from? My answer to the question summed up is that the ideas for a story come from the writer's deep sources and evolve in the act of writing. If you are a writer searching for ideas, Consider the possibility that starting with an idea may not be the best course of action. Maybe try starting with characters and situations or facing problems that you'd like to explore, that you'd find interesting to explore if you were in that situation. See what your characters do. Be curious about them. Pay attention to the situation. With luck, ideas will emerge and evolve as you follow the action of your story. That was episode 21. Featuring the writing of Jeremy Griffin. Jeremy is the author of the short story collection A Last Resort for Desperate People, stories from Stephen F. Austin University Press. Oceanography, winner of the 2018 Orism Book Prize. And Scream Queen, stories, winner of the Hudson Prize from Back Lawrence Press. Currently, he teaches creative writing at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa. I'm Ed Falco, and I hope you'll come back for the final four episodes of Season 1. Each dropping on Mondays, where I'll talk some more about writing, answer questions, and read stories and maybe even a poem or two before wrapping things up. If you have a question you'd like me to answer, you can email me directly at falco. ed at gmail. com. In the meantime, be well. Thanks for listening. And I hope you'll come back next Monday for episode 22.