Childhood artwork for a class assignment. Front and back covers for “The Dream.”
The Dream
Shorthand
House of Mirrors
When I was five, and there wasn’t much left, my mother took me to the Perth County Fall Fair. There was a petting zoo. For a dollar, a donkey with a slumped spine and flies in its ass carried me around its sawdust pen. A German farmer shouted “Squeeze!” and pointed at his cow’s teats. I warmed a white, hyperventilating chickadee in my hands. A dung-toothed goat licked my face. On the midway (a K-Mart parking lot), there were three rides. They had names like yard-sale paperback mysteries: The Zipper, The Octopus, The House of Mirrors. The last one was a trailer truck full of shiny warped metal that made you fat, thin, multiple, and not there at all. My mother tried to win me a stuffed giraffe by tossing rings at Coke bottles. The man inside the booth looked like Jimmy Durante and spat blue hork in place of laughing. He kept his hand out and said, “Don’t let the little fella down!” My mother’s dirt-wrinkled elbow showed through a hole in her sweater, and she kept a cigarette in her mouth as the rings were thrown, bobbled, and rejected. At the end, with the last of the money my father had stuck under the ashtray before he left, she bought me a pair of plastic binoculars. Putting them to my eyes, I looked up at the darkening limestone sky and found the moon, a blue-veined headlight.
Originally published in The Quarterly.
Author of the Month: Andrew Pyper
Tell us about yourself.
I was born in Stratford, Ontario, forty-four years ago, to parents who were recent immigrants to Canada from Northern Ireland. From as soon as I learned handwriting, I’ve been writing stories. It was never seen as a potential career, it was just something I did because I liked it, and because it afforded me a special privacy, a safe place from the bruises and shames of everyday life. Somewhere along the line, I wrote a novel which was published in a lot of places and I’ve been writing novels full-time since then. These days I live in Toronto with my family, and silently pray for things to stay as they are as much as possible.
When did you realize you had a passion for writing?
Even though I have three brothers and a sister, because I was youngest of the bunch by a number of years, I was a de facto only child growing up. They say isolation and/or illness are great motivators for writers, and I don’t know if that’s true, but having few playmates in my first years certainly forced me to entertain myself. For me, that entertainment was always storytelling. Fake radio shows, monster movies, DIY hardcovers. I was a one-kid content provider. As for the “why,” I’d say it was the simple pleasure of the thing. It’s still the reason I do it.
What pieces of writing/authors have had the greatest impact on you?
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. The Shining by Stephen King. The Progress of Love by Alice Munro. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. The Information by Martin Amis. But these are only off-the-top-of-my-head today. Ask me tomorrow and you’d get a different (though no less true) answer.
How and when do you find time to write?
I’m lucky enough to be able to write fiction full-time, so I just go up to my home office, Monday to Friday, and wrestle with sentences.
What has been some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced as a writer?
Oh, the usual. Rejection, rejection, no job security, rejection, dumb reviewers, rejection, severe income drops, rejection and, often, rejection. It’s not a great job for those who are sensitive to or over-analyze every—wait for it—rejection.
How have you changed as a writer over the years?
I’m more of a planner, an idea-tester, a concept teaser. Sentences remain a primary concern, but I feel like I’ve largely found my way when it comes to the lines and how to build them (this took a long time though!) As I go along, the book’s architecture, its concept, its “way in,” takes up more of my head space than it used to.
Golden
Tanks crawling through my city, right there, close, behind the window. I’m on the floor, face down, buried in the carpet my brother took his first steps on. It’s not only scary at twelve, it’s made clear. Don’t look up. Don’t listen to sounds outside. Recite memorized poem about Vladimir Ulyanov. All the statues of Lenin, gold-plated, will have no heads, or worse, in the morning. Dragged by ropes off the pedestal, my history, gold fillings in teeth.
Collection
When I was little I had an amusing game of cataloguing ways to die. Some were boring, run-of-the-mill suicides, like hanging, drowning, etc. Some stemmed from ancient torture practices, like being sat naked on a bamboo shoot and dead within a day because of the plant’s incredible growth rate. Ripped apart by horses, one’s arms and legs tied to four of them respectively. Or an icicle dripping on the top of one’s head until they go mad, and then piercing them through as it thaws and detaches. One of the scariest ways for me was from an article I read, not about torture or suicide, but an accident. A needle was once lost in a patient’s bloodstream. It eventually pierced his heart. I would imagine this for hours. It would always be a sewing needle my mom used to mend my socks. It would have a very small eye. A slender silver float coursing through blue rivers intricate as dreams, until it stops at the heart.
Foreign
I’ll hold my tongue. Against yours, against all odds, look: open mouth and it pours. Your tongue— stiff, unfamiliar with my language— how it moves around shapes. Little details wander into your life, spread themselves out on the table, buzzing. And this being inside of me, it roars, it cannot be appeased. Tongue turning slowly, ancient machinery, awkwardly forcing muscles into submission. Gears grinding the rust of habit away, shifts that give. All I can feel is this.