Kirmizi_ada

I’ve been working on this novel—called Tending—for a while. The prose scampers out of my imagination without much protest. The characters do the things they do in other novels—lift things, apply things, wait for things. It’s all been pretty hum-drum and lovely thus far.

Just this morning, I had to notice that I was neglecting the premise of the thing, the reason I set out to write it. This negligence roughly corresponded to a much broader, holistic negligence of mine, as far as memory is concerned. I had decided to write this particular novel as a kind of mnemonic device about the 2000s—this decade distinguished by the fact that it has, even after eight years, no name, and that you can stare at “the 2000s” on paper, know what it means, but be fully unable to pronounce it aloud. What other word in current usage has that property? I wondered if, early on, there had been a tacit agreement not to name it since, by 2003, we were already hoping this wayward shuffle of years would quickly find the door.

Sitting down to write, and expecting the history of this decade to present itself to me like so many bottles of acrylic paint, I was stunned to realize that it would not do so. That I could not remember in what year and in what season I first heard the names Lindy Ingram, Natalie Maines, John Walker Lindh, Benazir Butto, and Frank Luntz—these unredeemed captives of a KKK frat party gone planetary. Like a stoic teenager, I could only remember the most recent impact; the shame of the one that struck four or five episodes prior no longer registered. I stopped remembering to ask why this all was happening.

When the word came of the Nazis defeat on the Eastern front, neighbors of the philologist Viktor Klemperer began talking to one another differently—trying on tones, syntax, and lines of articulation that had been kept under the floorboards for ten years. Going through the brackish ritual of remembering, they traced how they had become subsistence subjects—cyclical, timid, robbed even of their hunger. I hope the characters in this novel can do the same for me, to tell me what condition of body and mind I was living in from age 24 to 32.

Maybe they will also be able to figure out how to pronounce “the 2000s,” and let me know.