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YOUARE

NOTASTRANGER

HERE

This book has been optimized for viewing

at a monitor setting of 1024 x 768 pixels.

NANA.TALESE

DOUBLEDAY

NEWYORKLONDONTORONTOSYDNEYAU
CKLAND

YOUARE

NOTASTRANGER

HERE

PUBLISHED BY NAN A. TALESE

an imprint of Doubleday

a division of Random House, Inc.

1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036

DOUBLEDAY is a trademark of Doubleday

a division of Random House, Inc.

Some of the stories in this book have appeared, in different form, in the fol
owing publications: “Notes to My Biographer”

i n Zoetrope All-Story, “Devotion” in The Yale Review,

“War’s End” in BOMB magazine, “The Beginnings of Grief”

in The James White Review, and “Reunion” in The Alembic.

The quote that appears on pages 184-185 is from the novel Affliction by
Russel Banks.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations,

places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Book design by Gretchen Achilles
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Haslett, Adam. You are
not a stranger here / Adam Haslett. p.

cm.

I. Title.

PS3608.A85 Y68 2002

813’.6—dc21

2001054839

eISBN 0-385-50962-6

Copyright (c) 2002 by Adam Haslett

Al Rights Reserved

v1.0

TOMYFAMILY

AND

TOJENNIFERCHANDLER-WARD,LOVEALWAYS

CONTENTS

NOTESTOMYBIOGRAPHER

THEGOODDOCTOR

24

THEBEGINNINGSOFGRIEF

48
DEVOTION

65

WA R ‘ S E N D

89

REUNION

118

D I V I N AT I O N

138

M Y FAT H E R ‘ S B U S I N E S S

165

THEVOLUNTEER

194

YOUARE

NOTASTRANGER

HERE

NOTESTO

MYBIOGRAPHER

T W O T H I N G S T O get straight from the beginning: I hate doctors and

have never joined a support group in my life. At seventy-three, I’m not about
to change. The mental health establishment can go screw itself on a barren hil
top in the rain before I touch their snake oil or listen to the visionless chatter
of men half my age. I have shot Germans in the fields of Normandy, filed
twenty-six patents, married three women, 1

survived them al , and am currently the subject of an investigation by the IRS,

which has about as much chance of col ecting from me as Shylock did of
getting his pound of flesh. Bureaucracies have trouble thinking clearly. I, on
the other hand, am perfectly lucid.

Note, for instance, how I obtained the SAAB I’m presently driving into the
Los Angeles basin: a niece in Scottsdale lent it to me. Do you think she’l ever
see it again? Unlikely. Of course when I borrowed it from her I had every
intention of returning it and in a few days or weeks I may feel that way again,
but for now forget her and her husband and three children who looked at me
over the kitchen table like I was a museum piece sent to bore them. I could
run circles around those kids. They’re spoon-fed Ritalin and private schools
and have eyes that say give me things I don’t have. I wanted to read them a
book on the history of the world, its migrations, plagues, and wars, but the
shelves of their outsized condominium were ful of ceramics and biographies
of the stars. The whole thing depressed the hel out of me and I’m glad to be
gone.

A week ago I left Baltimore with the idea of seeing my son, Graham. I’ve
been thinking about him a lot recently, days we spent together in the barn at
the old house, how with him as my audience ideas came quickly; I don’t
know when I’l get to see him again. I thought I might as wel catch up with
some of the other relatives along the way and planned to start at my daughter,
Linda’s, in Atlanta but when I arrived it turned out she’d moved. I cal ed
Graham and when he got over the shock of hearing my voice, he said Linda
didn’t want 2

to see me. By the time my younger brother, Ernie, refused to do anything

more than have lunch with me after I’d taken a bus al the way to Houston, I
began to get the idea this episodic reunion thing might be more trouble than it
was worth. Scottsdale did nothing to alter my opinion. These people seem to
think they’l have another chance, that I’l be coming around again. The fact is
I’ve completed my wil , made bequests of my patent rights, and am now just
composing a few notes to my biographer, who, in a few decades, when the
true influence of my work becomes apparent, may need them to clarify certain
issues.

Franklin Caldwel Singer, b. 1924, Baltimore, Maryland.

Child of a German machinist and a banker’s daughter.

*

My psych discharge fol owing “desertion” in Paris was trumped up by an

army intern resentful of my superior knowledge of the diagnostic manual. The
nude dancing incident at the Louvre in a room ful of Rubenses had occurred
weeks earlier and was of a piece with other celebrations at the time.

B.A., Ph.D., engineering, Johns Hopkins University.

1952. First and last electroshock treatment for which I wil never, never, never
forgive my parents.

1954-1965. Researcher, Eastman Kodak Laborato3

ries. As with so many institutions in this country, talent was resented. I was
fired as soon as I began to point out flaws in the management structure. Two
years later I filed a patent on a shutter mechanism that Kodak eventual y
broke down and purchased

(then-vice president for product development Arch Vendel ini W A S having

an affair with his daughter’s best friend, contrary to what he wil tel you.
Notice the way his left shoulder twitches when he’s lying).

Al subsequent diagnoses—and let me tel you, there have been a number—are

the result of two forces, both in their way pernicious: (1) the attempt by the
psychiatric establishment over the last century to redefine eccentricity as il
ness, and (2) the desire of members of my various families to render me
docile and if possible immobile.

The electric bread slicer concept was stolen from me by a man in a diner in
Chevy Chase dressed as a reindeer who I could not possibly have known was
an employee of Westinghouse.
*

That I have no memories of the years 1988-1990 and believed until very
recently that Ed Meese was stil the attorney general is not owing to my
purported paranoid blackout but on the contrary to the fact my third wife took
it upon herself to lace my coffee with tranquilizers. Believe nothing you hear
about the divorce settlement. 4

When I ring the buzzer at Graham’s place in Venice, a Jew in his late twenties
with some fancy-looking musculature answers the door. He appears nervous
and says, “We weren’t expecting you til tomorrow,” and I ask him who we
are and he says, “Me and Graham,” adding hurriedly, “We’re friends, you
know, only friends. I don’t live here, I’m just over to use the computer.”

Al I can think is I hope this guy isn’t out here trying to get acting jobs,
because it’s obvious to me right away that my son is gay and is screwing this
character with the expensive-looking glasses. There was a lot of that in the
military and I learned early on that it comes in al shapes and sizes, not just the
fairy types everyone expects. Nonetheless, I am briefly shocked by the idea
that my twenty-nine-year-old boy has never seen fit to share with me the fact
that he is a fruitcake—no malice intended—and I resolve right away to talk to
him about it when I see him. Marlon Brando overcomes his stupor and lifting
my suitcase from the car leads me through the back garden past a lemon tree
in bloom to a one-room cottage with a sink and plenty of light to which I take
an instant liking.

“This wil do nicely,” I say and then I ask him, “How long have you been
sleeping with my son?” It’s obvious he thinks I’m some brand of geriatric
homophobe getting ready to come on in a religiously heavy manner and
seeing that deercaught-in-the-headlights look in his eye I take pity and
disabuse him.

I’ve seen women run down by tanks. I’m not about to get worked up about
the prospect of fewer grandchildren. When I start explaining to him that social
prejudice of al stripes runs counter to my Enlightenment ideals—ideals 5

tainted by centuries of partial application—it becomes clear to me that

Graham has given him the family line. His face grows patient and his smile
begins to leak the sympathy of the ignorant: poor old guy suffering from
mental troubles his whole life, up one month, down the next, spewing
grandiose notions that slip like sand through his fingers, to which I always
say, you just look up Frank Singer at the U.S. Patent Office. In any case, this
turkey probably thinks the Enlightenment is a marketing scheme for General
Electric; I spare him the seminar I could easily conduct and say, “Look, if the
two of you share a bed, it’s fine with me.”

“That drive must have worn you out,” he says hopeful y.

“Do you want to lie down for a bit?”

I tel him I could hook a chain to my niece’s SAAB and drag it through a
marathon. This leaves him nonplussed. We walk back across the yard together
into the kitchen of the bungalow. I ask him for pen, paper, and a calculator
and begin sketching an idea that came to me just a moment ago

I can feel the presence of Graham already—for a bicycle capable of storing

the energy generated on the downward slope in a smal battery and releasing it
through a handlebar control when needed on the uphil —a potential gold mine
when you consider the aging population and the increase in leisure time
created by early retirement. I have four pages of specs and the estimated cost
of a prototype done by the time Graham arrives two hours later. He walks into
the kitchen wearing a blue linen suit, a briefcase held to his chest, and seeing
me at the table goes stiff as a board. I haven’t seen him in five years and the
first thing I notice is that he’s got bags under his eyes. 6

When I open my arms to embrace him he takes a step backward.

“What’s the matter?” I ask. Here is my child wary of me in a strange kitchen

in California, his mother’s ashes spread long ago over the Potomac, the
objects of our lives together stored in boxes or sold.

“You actual y came,” he says.

“I’ve invented a new bicycle,” I say but this seems to reach him like news of
some fresh death. Eric hugs Graham there in front of me. I watch my son rest
his head against this fel ow’s shoulder like a tired soldier on a train. “It’s
going to have a self-charging battery,” I say, sitting again at the table to
review my sketches.

W I T H G R A H A M H E R E my idea is picking up speed and while he’s

in the shower I unpack my bags, rearrange the furniture in the cottage, and
tack my specs to the wal .

Returning to the house, I ask Eric if I can use the phone and he says that’s
fine and then he tel s me, “Graham hasn’t been sleeping so great lately, but I
know he real y does want to see you.”

“Sure, no hard feelings, fine.”

“He’s been dealing with a lot recently. Maybe some things you could talk to
him about … and I think you might—”

“Sure, sure, no hard feelings,” and then I cal my lawyer, my engineer, my

model builder, three advertising firms whose numbers I find in the yel ow
pages, the American Association of Retired Persons—that market wil be key
—

an old col ege friend who I remember once told me he’d competed in the 7

Tour de France, figuring he’l know the bicycle industry angle, my bank
manager to discuss financing, the patent office, the Cal Tech physics lab, the
woman I took to dinner the week before I left Baltimore, and three local
liquor stores before I find one that wil deliver a case of Dom Perignon.

“That’l be for me!” I cal out to Graham as he emerges from the bedroom to
answer the door what seems only minutes later. He moves slowly and seems
sapped of life.

“What’s this?”

“We’re celebrating! There’s a new project in the pipeline!”

Graham stares at the bil as though he’s having trouble reading it. Final y, he
says, “This is twelve hundred dol ars.

We’re not buying it.”

I tel him Schwinn wil drop that on doughnuts for the sales reps when I’m
done with this bike, that Oprah Winfrey’s going to ride it through the halftime
show at the Super Bowl.

“There’s been a mistake,” he says to the delivery guy. I end up having to go

outside and pay for it through the window of the truck with a credit card the
man is naive enough to accept and I carry it back to the house myself.

“What am I going to do?” I hear Graham whisper. I round the corner into the
kitchen and they fal silent. The two of them make a handsome couple
standing there in the gauzy, expiring light of evening. When I was born you
could have arrested them for kissing. There ensues an argument that I only
half bother to participate in concerning the champagne and my enthusiasm, a
recording he learned from his mother; he presses play and the fraction of his
ancestry that suffered 8

from conventionalism speaks through his mouth like a ventriloquist: Your-

idea-is-fantasy-calm-down-it-wil -be-the-ruin-ofyou-medication-medication-
medication. He has a good mind, my son, always has, and somewhere the
temerity to use it, to spear mediocrity in the eye, but in a world that
encourages nothing of the sort, the curious boy becomes the anxious man. He
must suffer his people’s regard for appearances. Sad. I begin to articulate this
with diamond-like precision, which seems only to exacerbate the situation.

“Why don’t we have some champagne?” Eric interjects.

“You two can talk this over at dinner.”

An admirable suggestion. I take three glasses from the cupboard, remove a

bottle from the case, pop the cork, fil the glasses, and propose a toast to their
health.

My niece’s SAAB does eighty-five without a shudder on the way to dinner.

With the roof down, smog blowing through my hair, I barely hear Graham
who’s shouting something from the passenger’s seat. He’s probably worried
about a ticket, which for the high of this ride I’d pay twice over and tip the
officer to boot. Sailing down the freeway I envision a lane of bicycles quietly
recycling efficiencies once lost to the simple act of pedaling. We’l have to get
the environmentalists involved which could mean government money for
research and a lobbying arm to navigate any legislative interference.

Test marketing in L.A. wil increase the chance of celebrity endorsements and
I’l probably need to do a book on the germination of the idea for release with
the first wave of product. I’m thinking early next year. The advertising tag
line hits me as we glide beneath an overpass: Make Every Revolution Count. 9

There’s a line at the restaurant and when I try to slip the maitre d’ a twenty,
Graham holds me back.

“Dad,” he says, “you can’t do that.”

“Remember the time I took you to the Ritz and you told me the chicken in
your sandwich was tough and I spoke to the manager and we got the meal for
free? And you drew a diagram of the tree fort you wanted and it gave me an
idea for storage containers.”

He nods his head.

“Come on, where’s your smile?”

I walk up to the maitre d’ but when I hand him the twenty he gives me a
funny look and I tel him he’s a lousy shit for pretending he’s above that sort
of thing. “You want a hundred?” I ask and am about to give him an even
larger piece of my mind when Graham turns me around and says,

“Please don’t.”

“What kind of work are you doing?” I ask him.

“Dad,” he says, “just settle down.” His voice is so quiet, so meek.

“I asked you what kind of work you do.”

“I work at a brokerage.”

A brokerage! What didn’t I teach this kid? “What do you do for them?”

“Stocks. Listen, Dad, we need—”

“Stocks!” I say. “Christ! Your mother would turn in her grave if she had one.”

“Thanks,” he says under his breath.

“What was that?” I ask.

“Forget it.”

10

At this point, I notice everyone in the foyer is staring at us.

They al look like they were in television twenty years ago, the men wearing
Robert Wagner turtlenecks and blazers. A woman in mauve hot pants with a
shoulder bag the size of her torso appears particularly disapproving and self-
satisfied and I feel like asking her what it is she does to better the lot of
humanity. “You’l be riding my bicycle in three years,” I tel her. She draws
back as though I had thrown a rat on the carpet. Once we’re seated it takes ten
minutes to get bread and water on the table and sensing a bout of poor service
I begin to jot on a napkin the time of each of our requests and the hour of its
arrival. Also, as it occurs to me:

Hol ow-core chrome frame with battery mounted over rear tire, wired to rear
wheel engine housing, wired to handlebar control/thumb-activated
accelerator. Warning to cyclist concerning increased speed of crankshaft
during application of stored revolutions. Power brake?

Biographer file: Graham as my muse, mystery thereof; see storage container,

pancake press, tricycle engine, flying teddy bear, renovations of barn for him
to play in, power bike.

Graham disagrees with me when I try to send back a second bottle of wine,
apparently under the impression that one ought to accept spoiled goods in
order not to hurt anybody’s feelings. This strikes me as maudlin but I let it go
for the sake 11

of harmony. Something has changed in him. Appetizers take a startling

nineteen minutes to appear.

“You should start thinking about quitting your job,” I say.

“I’ve decided I’m not going to stay on the sidelines with this one. The power
bike’s a flagship product, the kind of thing that could support a whole
company. We stand to make a fortune, Graham, and I can do it with you.”
One of the Robert Wagners cranes his neck to look at me from a neighboring
booth.

“Yeah, I bet you want a piece of the action, buddy,” I say, which sends him
back to his endive salad in a hurry. Graham listens as I elaborate the business
plan: there’s start-up financing, for which we’l easily attract venture capital,
the choice of location for the manufacturing plant—you have to be careful
about state regulations—executives to hire, designers to work under me, a
sales team, accountants, benefits, desks, telephones, workshops, paychecks,
taxes, computers, copiers, decor, watercoolers, doormats, parking spaces,
electric bil s. Maybe a humidifier. A lot to consider.

As I speak, I notice that others in the restaurant are turning to listen as wel .
It’s usual y out of the corner of my eye that I see it, and the people disguise it
wel , returning to their conversations in what they probably think is
convincing pantomime. The Westinghouse reindeer pops to mind. How
ingenious they were to plant him there in the diner I ate at each Friday
morning, knowing my affection for the Christmas myth, determined to steal
my intel ectual property.

Re: Chevy Chase incident. Look also into whether or not I might have
invented autoreverse tape decks and 12

also therefore did Sony or GE own property adjacent to my Baltimore

residence—noise, distraction tactics, phony road construction, etc., and also
Schwinn, Raleigh, etc., presence during Los Angeles visit.

“Could we talk about something else?” Graham asks.

“Whatever you like,” I say and then inform the waiter our entrees were
twenty-six minutes in transit. Turns out my fish is tough as leather. The
waiter’s barely left when I have to begin snapping my fingers for his return.

“Stop that!” Graham says. I’ve reached the end of my tether with his passivity
and freely ignore him. He’s leaning over the table about to swat my arm down
when the fel ow returns.

“Is there a problem?”

“My halibut’s dry as sand.”

The goateed young man eyes my dish suspiciously as though I might have
replaced the original plate with some duplicate entree pul ed from a bag
beneath the table.

“I’l need a new one.”

“No he won’t,” Graham says at once.

The waiter pauses, considering on whose authority to proceed.

“Do you have anything to do with bicycles?” I ask him.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“Professional y.”

The young man looks across the room to the maitre d’, who offers a coded
nod.

“That’s it. We’re getting out of here,” I say, grabbing bread rol s.

13

“Sit down,” Graham insists.

But it’s too late. I know the restaurant’s lousy with mountain bike executives.
“You think I’m going to let a bunch of industry hustlers steal an idea that’s
going to change the way every American and one day every person on the
globe conceives of a bicycle? Do you realize what bicycles mean to people?
They’re like ice cream or children’s stories, they’re primal objects woven into
the fabric of our earliest memories, not to mention our most intimate
connection with the wheel itself an invention that marks the commencement
of the great ascent of human knowledge that brought us through

printing

presses,

religious

transformations,

undreamt-of speed, the moon. When you ride a bicycle you participate in an
unbroken chain of human endeavor stretching back to stone-carting Egyptian
peasants and I’m on the verge of revolutionizing that invention, making its
almost mythical power a storable quantity. You have the chance to be there
with me—like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes/He stared at the Pacific—
and al his men/Looked at each other with a wild surmise—/Silent, upon a
peak in Darien. The things we’l see!”

Because I’m standing as I say this a quorum of the restaurant feels I’m
addressing them as wel and though I’ve slipped in giving them a research lead
I can see in their awed expressions they know as I do not everyone can scale
the high white peaks of real invention. Some—such as these

—must sojourn in the lowlands where the air is thick with half measures and
dreams die of inertia. Yes! It is true.
 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
Greek influence and the settlement of Decapolis was still mainly
Greek in the Gospel period. Asoka and St. Paul are not at all the kind
of successors that Alexander would have anticipated or desired, but
his conscious desires were utilised by Providence to serve an end of
which he never dreamed. His early death before his Empire could be
consolidated in a political sense is as markedly providential as his
emergence at the precise moment of history when he appears upon
the scene.
The case is similar with Napoleon. Alexander at his death was
32 years old. Napoleon was 52. He also appears at a critical
moment, is active precisely as long as he can serve what we now
see to have been the cause of progress, and is then removed. The
great feature of the period is the growth of the sentiment of
nationality. This is the sense of membership in a people united by
common characteristics and a common purpose; it is therefore
always democratic in spirit though it need not at all necessarily be
democratic in machinery. The old European constitutions, which had
been valuable enough in their time, were becoming a barrier to its
further development; the flood of progress burst the dam in France,
and soon after there appears the supreme genius, not himself a
Frenchman, who was to carry the spirit of which France had just
become consciously possessed through the entire length and
breadth of Europe. Napoleon, like Alexander, was conscious of his
mission; he thought of himself as being the organ of the Revolution;
he is reported to have said that moral principles did not apply to
him; they applied only to persons, and he was a force. But there can
be no doubt that he was as much concerned with establishing a vast
French Empire as he was with merely carrying the principles of the
French Revolution into the other nations. He is allowed success so
long as the work of destruction is still needed; his activities first as
general and then as ruler began the unification alike of Italy and
Germany; but as soon as the spiritual work which he was to do is
fully accomplished, the political construction, which was as a great
scaffolding surrounding it, falls to pieces, and he is driven into exile
to end his days in solitude and impotence. Perhaps some day people
will look back upon the horror that now lies upon the world and not
only believe that God was active in it, but see the blessings which He
was conferring by its means.

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY

RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED,
BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E.
AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

* * * * * * * *

By the Rev. WILLIAM TEMPLE.

THE FAITH AND MODERN THOUGHT. SIX LECTURES. With an

Introduction by Professor Michael Sadler.

THE KINGDOM OF GOD. A COURSE OF FOUR LECTURES.

THE NATURE OF PERSONALITY. A COURSE OF LECTURES.

STUDIES IN THE SPIRIT AND TRUTH OF CHRISTIANITY. BEING

UNIVERSITY AND SCHOOL SERMONS.

REPTON SCHOOL SERMONS. STUDIES IN THE RELIGION OF THE

INCARNATION.

FOUNDATIONS. A STATEMENT OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF IN TERMS OF

MODERN THOUGHT. By Seven Oxford Men: B. H. STREETER, R.
BROOK, W. H. MOBERLY, R. G. PARSONS, A. E. J. RAWLINSON, N. S.
TALBOT, W. TEMPLE.

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.

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