Sun house, p.1
Sun House, page 1
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2023 by David James Duncan
Cover design by Lucy Kim
Cover images copyright © Shutterstock
Cover copyright © 2023 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104
littlebrown.com
twitter.com/littlebrown
facebook.com/littlebrownandcompany
First ebook edition: August 2023
Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.
Excerpted lines from “Statesboro Blues” and “Cottonwoods” © Chris Dombrowski from Ragged Anthem (Detroit: Wayne State University Press 2019), all rights reserved. Excerpted lines from “Brother Tree” © Chris Dombrowski; this poem is unpublished. Excerpted lines from “Fado” © Jane Hirshfield from The Beauty (New York: Knopf 2015), used by permission of Jane Hirshfield, all rights reserved. Excerpted lines from “The Kingdom of God” © Teddy Macker from This World (White Cloud Press, 2015), used by permission of Teddy Macker, all rights reserved. Gary Snyder, excerpts from “Breasts,” “Changing Diapers,” and “True Night” from Axe Handles. Copyright © 1983 by Gary Snyder. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Counterpoint Press, counterpointpress.com. Excerpted lines from “Work Ethic” © Jessie van Eerden from The Long Weeping (Orison Books, 2017), used by permission of Jessie van Eerden, all rights reserved.
ISBN 9780316248723
LCCN 2022943306
E3-20230627-NF-DA-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Book One: Moaning Is Connected with Hope First Telling:
I. Dead Mother’s Son
II. Risa’s Immaculate Conception
III. Jamey’s Gravitationally Collapsed Mother Object
IV. Veda U
V. Theology Face-First
VI. Mormons vs. Mojo
VII. Not Getting Schooled
VIII. Radiance vs. Reef
IX. Jamey’s Six-Cent Shopping Spree
X. The Unbearable Lightness of Dave
XI. The Stumptown Shakespeare Ensemble
XII. Risa’s Vestigial Tongue
XIII. Tits vs. Gandhi
XIV. Wounded Eagle
Second Telling:
Lore, Trey, and Snyder
Third Telling:
I. How TJ Got Rich
II. Risa and Grady’s Double-Occupancy Study Carrel
III. How Jervis Got Poor
IV. Grady vs. Two Gorgeous Bald Guys
V. Being Eaten
VI. Staying Stupid
VII. Rig Veda vs. Rose
VIII. Eight on I-5
IX. People of the Purse
X. Tiny Joseph Gives Big Jesus the Speaks
Fourth Telling:
I. Jervis at Sea
II. Mr. Wrong
III. Mountains Right Now
IV. Ocean-Walking
V. Lawn King
VI. On Irony (Yeah, Right)
VII. The Nativity of Dumpster Catholicism
VIII. Thirteen Tons of Poison Sutra
IX. Heart/Mind vs. Manas
X. Jervis on World Peace
XI. The Carport Folk Festival
XII. Dungeon
XIII. The Ocean at Night
XIV. Carport Coda
XV. Trojan Horse
XVI. Barkeep
Book Two: Eastern Western Fifth Telling:
I. When East Touches West
II. Loom Eye
III. You Have Saved My Life
IV. Genesis
V. The Face of Love
VI. Dearest Walt,
VII. Grady at Elevation 8,400 Feet
VIII. Hail Debbie, Full of Grace
IX. Grady at Elevation 40 Feet
X. Murk Movie Beguinage
XI. Dear TJ
XII. Both an Angel and a Storm
XIII. Becoming Pope
XIV. Airstreamers
XV. Tarkio. Ouzel. Father. Sad. ·
XVI. Appaloosa in Hell
XVII. Skrit Lit at E City Storage
XVIII. Pope vs. Preambles
XIX. Infinite Guest
XX. Release
XXI. First Beguine Audience with a Pope
Sixth Telling:
I. The One True Seven-Hearted Holy Goat
II. Nine Cool Unlikelihoods
III. Blue Empty
IV. An Elkmoon Geographical Précis
V. The Squire and the Pope
VI. What Threads, Dreams, and Fragments Grow the Whole?
VII. Ona’s Severe Twang Phase
VIII. Cottonwoods vs. the Corporation
IX. Out of the Cleft the Waters
X. A Seeing That Didn’t Stop Where It Once Used To
XI. Risa’s No Night Stand
XII. Mahatma Gandhi’s Magic Word
XIII. Barzakh
Last Telling:
I. Notes on the Lûmi
II. Romeo Shows Jamey the Door
III. Perfect, Not Cruel
IV. Moondial
V. In the Heat of the Mother’s Palm
VI. Seeking the Below
VII. The Queendom-Come Shards
VIII. Holy Purchase the Great
IX. Cure for Staph
X. Governance by Wandering Griefs and Joys
XI. Lorilee at The Pearl
XII. Running Hand
XIII. Sky Door
Acknowledgments in Four Stories
Discover More A Sun House Bibliography
About the Author
Also by David James Duncan
Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.
Tap here to learn more.
Book One:
Moaning Is Connected
with Hope
First Telling:
Magic Words
Magic words are the most difficult to get hold of, but they are also the strongest…Magic words or magic prayers are fragments of old songs or apparently meaningless sentences heard in the days when animals could talk, and remembered ever since by being passed from one generation to the next. In the very earliest time…when all spoke the same language, words were potent and the mind had mysterious powers. A word might suddenly come alive, and what people needed to happen would happen. Nobody could explain it. That’s just the way it was.
—Nalungiaq (nineteenth-century Iglulik elder)
I. Dead Mother’s Son
(Portland, Oregon, 1958 to 1968)
Assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
—Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
EXTREMELY IMPLAUSIBLE ACCIDENTS do not feel innocent. When, for instance, an inch-long steel bolt shook loose and fell from an AeroMexico DC-8 cruising at 38,000 feet, drifted seven miles to Earth, and embedded itself in the skull of an eight-year-old girl hoeing weeds with her widower father in a Mexican cornfield, killing her almost instantly, the term “freak accident” did not begin to appease. The minds of everyone who loved the girl groped for explanations. A thunderhead shook things loose…An airline skimped on maintenance inspections…A skilled maintenance man, distracted by a coworker’s tale of a secret affair, failed to torque down the bolt despite the thousands he had faithfully inspected…But no rational explanation, not even a “correct” one, purges the preposterousness from the event. An inch-long bolt. Seven miles. The perfect timing. The tiny target. Chance veered so far out of its way to kill this child that some sort of premeditated attack seemed to have been committed.
The question then became: By whom? Who was the unseen attacker? Destiny? Fate? God? One wants to know. And one doesn’t want to know. Because say it is God. Suppose that not a sparrow or human-made meteor falls without His knowledge. Suppose the winds are His breath, and His exhalations oh-so-carefully steered the steel throughout its drifting, twisting, high-speed fall. Now say you’re the girl’s father. Suppose you call out to your daughter when she drops in the dirt, wondering what crazy game she’s playing, smiling at her histrionics as she briefly writhes, then lies perfectly still. Suppose that, as the game grows protracted, you grow irritated, stroll over to her—and find the small, blood-filled cavity amid the raven hair you braided that morning. Suppose you look skyward as you shatter and glimpse, miles above, not even the departing jet but only a fast-va
Now start trying to love that all-knowing, oh-so-careful God.
Suppose you’re the Jesuit novice from El Norte, summoned in the old padre’s absence to console the mourners at her grave. Suppose that, after heartsick consideration, you fall back on your Jesuit training, draw a troubled breath, but try to sound confident as, in your stiff foreign Spanish, you tell the girl’s father and handful of ragged friends, “Yours is a terrible loss. I’m more sorry than I can say. But God loves those He takes as well as those He leaves behind. His purposes are beyond us. We must trust, even so, that all things are meant to bring us to holiness.”
Suppose the father grows wild-eyed, leaps forward, and smashes your face repeatedly till you fall to the ground. Say he then sobs, “You must trust that my fists have brought you to holiness!”
How can you answer? Some human beings are singled out to suffer agonies of the heart. We don’t know why. All we know is that any even slightly confident explanation or consolation we offer in Spanish, English, or any mortal tongue sounds glib in the face of every such event, and so merely insults the hearts in agony.
THE PORTLAND ACTOR and playwright James Lee Van Zandt once suffered a highly implausible blow: Jamey was born on January 30th, 1958, at Providence Hospital in Portland, Oregon. On January 30th, 1963—five years later to the day—his mother, Debbie Van Zandt, died of leukemia in the very same hospital.
When any conceivable Divine Being or Random Fate deletes your mother in the very place she gave birth to you, and on your birthday, the extreme odds against it suggest that a premeditated attack has been committed. The five-year-old Jamey struggled for months to grasp that his mother was never coming back. He struggled for years to accept that she’d been ripped away like a sweetly offered, viciously retracted birthday gift. His acceptance of these two facts, after all that struggle, led him to conclude that Fate, God, or whatever Power rules earthly life is so farcically cold and cruel that only a fool would place faith in “It” or “Him.” He then began losing faith in other things the ruling Power was said to bestow upon humans—things as basic as the reality of his own feelings and experience; reality of his face in the mirror; reality of his very world and life.
This early wound began weathering Jamey’s identity the way winter storms and summer thunderheads weather granite peaks. Psychologically, his wound sensitized him to farcical situations, disingenuous behavior, and cruel illusions of all kinds. Philosophically, the wound bequeathed him a seething hatred of any and every formulaic, theological, New Age, or piety-ridden consolation. Socially, the wound turned him into a sometimes hilarious, sometimes self-destructive iconoclast so unemployable that he had no choice but to employ himself, becoming a playwright, actor, and theatrical director. The wound also bequeathed his comedy a ruthlessness that at times delighted and at other times appalled his audiences.
But before any of these influences were clearly recognized by Jamey, his early wound and fierce rebellion against it nearly killed him several times over.
A BOY OF five, after suffering a heart-wound, doesn’t rant and rail at the heavens. A boy of five plays the hand he’s dealt, and if it kills him, oh well, and if it doesn’t, what do ya know? The strongest suit in Jamey Van Zandt’s hand was his nature. The weakest was his luck. An example of both:
When Jamey was born, his head was seventeen inches in circumference. The opening in his mother’s pelvis was not. Debbie needed an emergency C-section to deliver him and days of rest afterward. Baby and mother were separated. In the hospital nursery, Jamey contracted staph boils, which were treated with sulfa drugs to which Jamey proved allergic. He ended up in Intensive Care. Prolonged separation delayed lactation. By the time mother and child were reunited it was impossible for Debbie to breastfeed her son. This was Jamey’s luck. He grew into a big, happy, resentment-free lug of a baby anyway. This was his nature. Jamey’s was not the sort of heart that cried out, Where are the breasts that I deserve? His was the sort that said, Bottle? Cool. Formula? Yum! From birth Jamey was blessed, despite his wretched luck, with a nature easily pleased by the world within his reach. If the kid in the backyard next door had a twenty-dollar action figure with kung-fu grip, fully articulated joints, and power-action waist, and Jamey had an old wet dishrag, Jamey set to work exploring the properties of his wet rag, inventing a personality for it, interacting and teasing and yucking it up with it till the neighbor kid would be pleading to trade his action figure for Jamey’s rag.
Another of Jamey’s strong suits: indefatigability. An invaluable asset for a lad destined for a life in the arts. An example: Jamey loved to crawl as an infant and became unusually proficient at it—so proficient that, long after other kids his age were walking, he took no particular interest in uprightness. Jamey was fifteen months old and his parents, Debbie and Jon, feared he was developmentally disabled in some way before he began to experiment with walking. But his experiments met with an odd setback: vertical toddling struck little Jamey as hilarious. Trying to convey a toy across a room by placing one tiny foot in front of the other when, on his hands and knees, he could nearly carry his mother on his back, made him laugh so hard he’d lose his balance, teeter into walls and furniture, bang his knees, hips, head, fall on his ass, laugh hysterically, stand back up, leg it into more crashes, and laugh even harder. When neighbors and relatives witnessed his hilarity-sabotaged toddling, word spread and small crowds would convene, soon laughing so hard that the future thespian experienced an early love of his ability to amuse an audience.
One morning during his Walk, Crash, and Laugh phase Jamey sat down on the floor, fell silent, and after a few minutes began to cry—a nearly unheard-of act for this ebullient little person. When Debbie tried to figure out why, the toddler could articulate nothing, but the crying grew so inconsolable that she took him to an emergency room. The problem was a hernia. Jamey underwent surgery that night. The operation left a seven-inch scar reaching from his groin’s ground zero to his right hip bone. The surgeon warned Jamey’s parents that it would be days before he tried to walk and that it would hurt like hell when he did. But this was where his indefatigability kicked in: on Jamey’s first night home from the hospital, Jon woke to an eerie sound in the bedside crib, wakened Debbie, and in the glow of the night-light they beheld their son gripping the crib rail in his chubby fist as he staggered back and forth like King Lear in his late madness, cheeks streaked with tears, belly shaking with laughter. Even in pain, two-leggèd locomotion continued to strike Jamey as a scream.
THE BIRTHDAY DEATH of a mother does not unmake such a nature. Once in a while, though, his native ebullience would vanish, leaving him so inert that he appeared physically or mentally damaged. Not surprisingly, the worst of these cripplings came, as regularly and cynically as Santa Claus, on the birthdays that were also his mother’s deathday.
On his first post-mom birthday his dad, Jon, and older sister, Judith, attempted to blow the family grief to smithereens by throwing Jamey an extra-big party. They decked the halls with synthetic jollies, hired a professional clown, amassed solid and liquid arsenals of multicolored forms of sugar, and invited an army of gift-bearing kids. The revelers buried Jamey, as planned, in hypoglycemic cheer. When the birthday boy began dashing about as gleefully and idiotically as his guests, Jon and Judith’s plan seemed to be working. During the post-cake opening of presents, however, an officious-looking neighbor girl handed Jamey a gift and—with the cool neutrality of the mathematically precocious—announced, “You’re six today, Jamey. And your mom is minus one.”
Negative numbers. What a fascinating concept for the birthday boy. The instant Jamey began to consider Debbie’s negative first deathday the gift in his hand vanished, the sounds in the room grew muted, the unopened mound of presents morphed into an emaciated body on a mechanical bed, and his mother’s hollow eyes and chemo-swollen face turned to stare into and through him. Lost, Jamey stared back. He saw the blue eyes shine with love for a moment; then the head grew naked, the face turned yellow and puffy, and he saw himself faltering in his efforts to love this frighteningly changed face in return. Her hollow eyes saw him falter. In desperation he said to the face, I love you, Momma, but felt only fear of her state, causing the pained eyes to hurt even more.
