by
n+1
inspo/dialogue
Sally Rooney,
Rachel Kushner,
Shirley Hazzard,
Jonathan Franzen,
Jennifer Egan,
Raymond Carver,
Nick Hornby,
Viet Thanh Nguyen,
Annie Proulx
good dialogue, with or without quotation marks
“It sounds like you’re not enjoying this process,” my Red Cross friend said. “Looking for a house together should be a journey of joy.”
For a moment I believed her and felt a slow sinking feeling. Then I remembered that she’s always insisting that I need to be more open-minded about the tech world, because Silicon Valley offers many opportunities for storytellers.
“Like what?” I asked once.
“Like Fitbit. You track the Fitbit family users. After they exercise, some guys go to the sports bar; their girlfriends go to the frozen yogurt shop. Which user consumes more calories?”
“That’s a story?”
“Let him come,” I said to my friend. “If we refuse to speak of him, we give him the power of our childhood phantasms. The enemy has revealed himself. Now we can fight.”
“You are a white girl in the park on acid,” he said. “On the border, they are building camps.”
I put my foot out sharply and stopped spinning. One looks at one’s friends and neighbors and wonders who will turn. One turns to oneself.
I do not know if we can organize from a place this disorganized. But I want to believe.
In 1994, I was 19 years old. I’d dropped out of college. I had a job parking cars at a hospital in downtown Louisville. I lived in a one-room apartment and my neighbor beat on his wife. He beat her pretty loud.
One night I called the cops. The switchboard operator said: Is he still whipping her? If he’s not whipping her when we get there, we can’t just take him in. Unless she files a complaint. And she won’t do that.
No ma’am.
That’s right. Now you wait until he’s beating her real good and you’re sure he’s going to keep on her for some ten or fifteen minutes. That way when we get there we can haul his ass to jail. Otherwise we leave him. He’s going to think she called us. And he’s going to kill her. I mean to death. And that’s on you. You understand that?
Later that week, I was trying to get some sleep. His wife was crying. The children were crying. Something, maybe a lamp, broke against the wall. I’d gotten hammered on red wine. I don’t know what I was thinking when I stumbled through the backyard and around our building to their apartment, and I didn’t have to find out: a thin man I’d never seen before was already standing there, knocking on their door with his left hand. His right hand held a gigantic revolver.
He looked at me and smiled. You’re a good boy, he said, but go on, now.
I went back to my apartment and I turned up the record player as loud as it would go. Pharoah Sanders and Roy Haynes. Pretty loud.
i love how spare this writing is