(on rewriting part 1) (Patreon)

It's been a bit of a rough month! I finished a draft of This House is Ours, and now, I think it needs rewriting. It is difficult to share edits publicly. But that is what's happening, and so that is what I will do. This will be a relatively long post.

Let's start with the opening scene of the novel, as it appeared in the first draft.

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1.

I don't want to believe in ghosts. 

I used to. 

I mean, I used to want to. My father was dying, and I didn't want him to die. Every day we stood around in that hospital room and told him. I don't want you to die. 

Saying "I don't want you to die" doesn't help, though. You can't convince cancer. 

I don't want you to die. I don't want you to die. 

So, I made a plan. 

I collected the ingredients. The memories. Recordings of his voice. His love. His fear. The spooky echoing laughter at his own dumb jokes. My little brother Simon and I, we collected every bit of him that we could, and we tried our best to trap a ghost.

I wanted to hold onto my father even after the cancer took him. I wanted there to be rituals or magic to keep him alive. To catch his voice in a bottle. But there wasn't any magic. In the end it was just a collection of recordings. I love to listen to them. Simon loves to listen to them. But there is no ghost there. Just the memory of a joke about chickens.  

I was disappointed at first. But the more I think about it, the more it scares me, what we tried to do. What if we had caught his ghost? I imagine him sitting somewhere in the dark, by himself. What if he was still dying in the afterlife? What if they were still bruising his arms with needles? Freezing his blood with poison? What if the angels had been doing their jobs so long they turned cruel? What if their empathy was a colorful pin on a uniform they had worn until it was faded and cold.

I think about that a lot. What we almost did to our father. 

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That was the first draft. I wanted something that reintroduced Sunday, touched on the novel Malagash, and her reflection on the events.  And it is short and punchy, which is what I wanted. A strong image of angels as indifferent nurses, driving cold needles into his arms in the afterlife. That's a sad final line.

The problem is that the more I looked at this, the less I could see. There are echoes of her from the first book "I don't want you to die." And that's good. I don't think it is enough, but it isn't bad. But collecting the recordings isn't explained properly. How that might be a ghost. It makes the worries about an afterlife seem beside the point.

There's an argument to be made that this is just a teaser. Like a cold open. Whets the appetite. But I don't think so. I think it fails at what it is attempting. I think the best thing that can be said of it is that it is short enough to move past without giving up on the book.

So, I sat down to rewrite it. I had two things in mind. One, I would give relationships the space they need, even if it went against my tendency to go for punchy writing. And two, this first section would not be about malagash. It would be about how Sunday's father dying affected her. 

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1.

A weight lifted.

My father died, and a weight lifted just the way he said it would.

Lying in his hospital bed, rolling crushed ice around in a plastic cup. "A weight will lift," he said. His face was serious. His face was always serious when he teased me. "A weight will lift, my darling daughter. A leaf will fall. Fresh white snow will blanket this whole sleepy town."

I have it all on my phone. The sound of ice. The dry 'sleepy town.'

'Darling daughter.' Teasing me, but meaning it, too.

"Sunday, you are my daughter," he says on the recording. I can still feel his hand in mine. "You are my daughter, and it breaks my heart that the day has finally come for you to learn this hard and simple truth."

I recorded him. I recorded him for weeks. The cancer was everywhere, the doctors said. But on the bed, in that flimsy hospital gown, it was still my father. It was still him, even though so many physical parts of him were missing. Whole organs were gone now. Some parts of his body weren't his own any more.

"The truth is that we, each and every one of us, lie down in the winter of our lives," He cleared his throat on the recording. The sound of crushed ice again. "to make way for the baby skunks and the excitable little porcupines that are born in the spring."

His wonderful teasing deadpan voice.

It was still him, and I was so confused. I was scared to lose him, but I was confused too, about how it could still be him. His stupid jokes were still his stupid jokes, even after the doctors took so much out of him. Even after he shrank and shrank and shrank. They were still his jokes. It was still him.

It made me want to believe in ghosts. Fear and confusion made me want to believe in ghosts. Desperation and so many other things that I thought were love. I thought if I could record his jokes. If I could catch the weird way his mind worked, maybe he didn't have to die.

I am telling this story all wrong. My father is dead now. He was dying then, and he's dead now. A weight lifted.

He didn't have to suffer anymore. No pain. No cold needles and callous nurses. No fear. All gone. No laughs either though. No jokes. No hugs or kisses. No steak. No Jimmy Stewart. But that's not - we didn't have to watch his suffering anymore. We didn't have to feel like he was staying alive just for us.

A weight lifted.

Fear and Desperation are part of love. Every day was the same. He was dying, and I didn't want him to die. Every day I stood in that hospital room and I told him. I don't want you to die. I don't want you to die.

But saying "I don't want you to die," can't convince cancer.

I don't want you to die. I don't want you to die.

So, I made a plan. A ghost.

I collected the ingredients. The memories. Recordings of his voice. His love. His fear. His quiet hellos. The way he said my name.

The spooky echoing laughter at his own dumb jokes.

Ghosts can pass through walls. Strangers can hear ghosts late at night. I had so many ideas. Desperation has so many ideas. I spent hours at my computer, trying to program something that could rattle chains on a stranger's computer, half a world away. Something that traveled the internet and left cold spots right here. Can you feel that? Put your hand right here.

Soon, my little brother Simon started to help. We were on our own in that small town. Every day started with a visit with our father, and then it was just the two of us in all of Malagash, left to our own devices. Long winding roads of clay red asphalt to map. The crashing Atlantic ocean to walk beside. Fields and vineyards and dirtbikes. A broken down dried old house, the roof caved in like an exhausted spine. Malagash, Nova Scotia.

A memorial to an old salt mine. Tunnels hundreds of feet beneath us, some collapsed, some open and filled with the sound of pick axes on salt. Coughing. Chains rattling. Can you feel that? Put your hand right here.

In the daylight we wandered. Simon and I. Out of place. Not talking. Just being there. And at night? At night I taught Simon how to use a database. How to help archive the recordings in my computer. How to tag the entries.

He caught on quicker than I expected. He's sharp.

I hadn't noticed that about him, before. But if I am being honest, there was a lot about Simon I never noticed until our father started dying.

We spent our days wandering. We spent our nights huddled. Simon found ways of indexing the recordings that surprised me. I surprised him right back. I showed him recordings that I made in secret. Our mother and father, talking in private. My phone hidden on a shelf. Parts of our father we never got to hear. They needed to be saved too.

"So you're killing yourself. You're giving up," my mother's voice.

"I'm going to die either way," he said. "At least this way-"

Recorded. Indexed. Tagged.

Soon my brother and I were a team. Two strangers working together for a common goal. We collected every bit of our father that we could, and we tried our best to build a ghost. Or to keep the bits alive somehow. Floating in a jar of formaldehyde. Or some strange glowing radioactive juice. I don't know what we were doing. We were injecting nanobots. We were placing stones over his heart, in the casket. There were pieces of a meteor that glowed and promised everlasting life.

Desperate stupid fantasy.

In the mornings, my father and I could be alone. Even when you are waiting to die, there are too many hours in a day. They need to be filled. My mother and Simon went on walks. My father and I read the obituaries. He read me the obituaries every day. Laughed about them. Got angry with them.

"Sunday, I am counting on you to not let anyone say I died surrounded by nameless loved ones. Or that I lost my courageous battle with cancer."

"I'll tell them you won."

He laughed. I loved his laugh.

"Exactly! You tell them that. The cancer is dead. I did what needed to be done. I'm a hero."

And he did. He did what needed to be done. The cancer is dead. My father is a hero.

And when he died, I kept my promise. I wrote his obituary. I sat down with Simon. We dressed up for the occasion. I don't know why. Button up shirts. Dress pants, just to sit on the floor in front of my laptop. And we wrote my father's memorial paragraph together. The few dozen words that would remember him to history. To a world of strangers.

Simon understood.

We used our recordings. We used our memories and our own voices. We wrote an obituary FOR our father, not about him. It was a love letter. It was a get well soon card. Wish you were here. Just got out of bed, wish you weren't dead.

This was our obituary:

"He was right. A weight has lifted. The leaves all fell. Fresh white porcupines have blanketed this whole stupid town. His cancer is dead. He doesn't have to drag his coffin around behind him everywhere he goes anymore. We don't have to drag his coffin behind us everywhere we go anymore. Our father succeeded where you failed. He did what none of you cowards had the guts to do. He threw himself on the grenade. He WAS the grenade. He did what had to be done. He cured cancer. There will be a Nobel Prize, but it will not have your name on it. Our father had a heart like napalm. He had a beautiful laugh. He was a sight for sore eyes. He is survived by everyone."

My uncle Frank took the obituary from us and said nothing. Sitting at the kitchen table with his husband Jonah and our grandmother, working out funeral details. I don't think they expected us to contribute. But our father asked me.

"He asked me," I told Frank. "He wanted me to write it."

And then, after Simon and I went to bed, they rewrote it anyway.

They took our goodbye and replaced it with every other goodbye in every other obituary in the world. When I looked on the hospital website later, Simon wasn't in those words. I wasn't in those words. Our father wasn't there.

Now everyone thinks he fought a long and courageous battle. He passed peacefully, surrounded by nameless loved ones.

I don't think my mother even saw our version. She was locked in her room now. She is a different part of this story. I thought I knew her. I thought she and I were the same. But my father died and she fell to the floor and she did not get up. She locked herself in her room and she is there, still.

Before my father died he was "dying." He was very clearly dying. It was a process. I don't know if that's true of our mother. Can I be honest? I don't know much of anything. Our mother is going to die. She has made a choice. She has let us know. But she's not dead yet, and I don't know if that means she's dying or not.

I don't feel a weight.

Simon and I kept working on our "ghost."

But there is no ghost. There is no magic.

In the end what Simon and I created was just a collection of recordings. Our father's voice. We're little dogs at a gramophone.

I love to listen to them. Simon loves to listen to them.

But there is no ghost there. No Frankenstein's Monster built of voice.

After our father died, we worked hard on that computer virus. And in the end, I told Simon it worked. We sat together in front of the computer and entered the command to activate the virus. To send my father's ghost out into the world, so that his laughter would echo inside a million computers. So he would haunt a million darkened offices, and hide underneath movies and video games. And live. And live forever.

But I lied. Nothing happened. There was no virus. Just fantasy.

We had spent weeks making those recordings, trying to hold onto our father, and somewhere in those weeks, things changed. It feels like they changed in an instant, but it must have been more gradual than that.

When we arrived in Malagash, Simon was just my little brother, helping me transcribe recordings into my laptop, someone I had to keep busy so he wasn't always underfoot. A family pet I had to protect from the crows. A responsibility. The waif.

It felt like I could never get away from him. Look after your brother. Take Simon with you.

At night, sometimes I would stay up late, long after everyone had gone to sleep, and I'd climb down the ladder of our bunk beds. I would sit in the dark and listen to our father's voice on a loop. It calmed me down. It made me feel safe and created this little world where nothing would ever change.

And then one night, I woke up and there was Simon, down on the floor with the headphones on, his face barely visible in the laptop light. I sat there and watched him. He'd taken my one private place.

But I watched. I watched his face flicker with the smallest expressions. Confusion. Fear. And then he smiled. He smiled and I felt suddenly sick with shame. How self absorbed do you have to be to not see? To not recognize that your brother is a person too?

Another night, my own thoughts and worries drifted away to the sound of Simon crying in the bunk below mine. Or trying his best not to cry. In the morning, while we were getting dressed, I reached out and I pulled him into a hug. I kissed his head, and I squeezed him, and yes I was ashamed that it had taken me so long to finally see him. To see he was afraid of our father dying, too. Afraid of being alone. To see that he was afraid of me, of being in my way, of being a person in front of me.

But I was happy, too. I wasn't alone anymore.

We couldn't make a ghost out of our father. At best we were making a scrapbook. Memories. And that wasn't a bad thing. We were paying more attention than we ever had. We were getting to know him better. And no, that wouldn't make him live forever. Nothing would make him live forever.

We spent so much time clinging to him, holding every moment like it was ours to keep. Because it was ours, we thought. He was dying, and we only had these last few moments to see him. To know him. And so we took them. We took them and we took them.

But I didn't show him how scared I was. I never told him we were trying to catch his ghost. He never saw that I was the kind of idiot who thought you could program a ghost into a computer. The kind of idiot who couldn't see her own brother was a person too.

The kind of idiot who hid her feelings from her dying father because she thought it was the strong thing to do, like Simon trying not to cry in his own bed at night.

We only had these last few moments with him, but he only had these last few moments at all. He only had these last few moments, and he was beautiful and open and he was our father. And I was scared and hiding. I was making jokes.

I love Simon. He is my brother, and I've always loved him. But I stumbled on his hiding places.  And now I can see him. Or I can see more of him. I don't know if my father ever got to. I don't know if he ever got to see me.

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