Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [150]
I’d leave the office around then because I knew what was coming next. Christof would pull his chair closer. His voice would deepen and he would get them to keep looking at his face and he’d somehow take them to places inside themselves that were broken and had been left like that for far too long. Sometimes I’d stand just outside the office and listen. It was hard to hear the actual words, but the sounds were clear; Christof’s voice would be low, careful, and focused, the inmate’s resisting, often defiant, a tone that seemed to have inherent flaws in it, fissures Christof moved into until there was a pause, then a yielding, then the inmate’s voice would become higher and anguished, as if a small boy had been buried for years beneath the muscle and scarred flesh of a man who had finally turned around to see him standing there, looking up at him, waiting.
Later, I’d see a change in these people. It was subtle but the very air around them appeared cleaner and lighter, and they moved through it with a newly discovered purpose I could only call hope. Old Frances, the woman who’d shot her husband in the face, said Christof was a godly man, that God was talking through him.
I didn’t know much about God, but I was learning more about mysteries. This came largely in the form of images, those in my daily writing, and those in the waking world that for me now were rarely as clear as the ones I dreamed. But I was learning, too, that some images on the page are mirages, that you can work hard as ever to make them real, reaching for the right words which are always the truest words, and still what you’ve written is some kind of lie, though you’ve told it well; I’d want to write about a man on a job site, but an old woman on the street would show up instead. I’d barely see her at all, just feel her outside the walls of the house my character was building, and I began to learn that that’s where the story was, with that old woman I didn’t even want to write about. I began to learn that some images were simply projections of what I hoped to write, and that what I wanted was completely beside the point anyway, that these things had a destiny of their own and my job was to find them. It took a while for me to start seeing it this way, and I resisted for this meant cutting weeks or months of work; but more than that, it meant falling into the unknown.
But it’s what I’d done on my fourth day in Madison, Wisconsin. I walked to the office of the man who ran the department of Marxist social science, and I quit.
I drove straight to Austin and spent three weeks living with Kourosh in a small house he was renting not far from campus. I’d write every morning, then walk to the gym and lift weights, but it was different now. I didn’t think much anymore about having to fight anyone. Fear and rage used to help me push that iron bar off my chest, but now it was just a good way to sweep all those words and sentences out of my head. The harder I worked in the gym, the emptier my head got, and the next morning seemed to go better. Writing was becoming as ingrained a habit as workouts, a private and necessary thing I had to do, but I did not see this as my work or my purpose. I didn’t even appear to be any good at it, and whenever Kourosh asked me what I was doing with my life, I’d shrug my shoulders and say, “Man nehmiedoonam.” I do not know.
I kept thinking of Liz in Colorado, kept seeing her under the sun in that parking lot in Boston. That night I called her, told her I missed her, asked