Blue Walls Falling Down
Joshua Hren has been kind enough to make available to our readers an excerpt from his new novel Blue Walls Falling Down. For those who enjoyed his novel Infinite Regress, this one will be a must-read.
First, a summary, and then keep reading for the excerpt.
Stella Tęsknota was ready to marry Blake Yourrick, the troubled if earnest protagonist of Infinite Regress. In this stand-alone novel (and loose sequel), set after Blake abruptly—and inexplicably—breaks off their engagement, Stella throws herself into a tough South Chicago teaching assignment. In the roughness of the classroom she finds diversion from her disappointment and a test of her bleeding heart. On the rebound from Blake, she falls into an impassioned, exhilarating liaison with Peter Clavier (P.C.), a psychologist-activist whose uncle—a pastor—has long prophesied for Peter a future of otherworldly greatness. As Stella draws out Peter’s past, the novel forks paths for a time, following P.C.’s trajectory from a Cabrini-Green childhood to surreal stardom in the orbit of underwritten radical politics.
When, at nearly forty, Stella becomes pregnant, she pushes Peter to D.C., where his boss offers him a marquee microphone. She returns home to Milwaukee in search of steady ground, but instead she finds her father hosting basement meetings that mix nostalgia and conspiracy, and soon runs into her former fiancé Blake, who strains her capacity for forgiveness. Meanwhile, Peter grates against the hard realities of ideology, even as he weighs the worth of strategic violence.
In the confluence of comfort and catastrophe, the torment and contentment of caring for her baby, the sundry absurdities of contemporary America, Stella is invited to wager on faith.
Written with a style and sensibility that have been compared to David Foster Wallace and Dostoevsky, James Joyce and Saul Bellow, Blue Walls Falling Down chronicles the eternal questions that agitate our subterranean frequencies and demand more than the human spirit can give or answer alone.
And now, the excerpt. If you like it, the novel can be purchased here.
A clack of wood and the smack of her foot flesh against the floor. Awah! Awah! Huuhnn, huhhnn. Awah! Hunnhana . . . Outlandish in this too-still house, the house whose creaks could keep you up, whose basement mice could be heard running across all the house’s rafters, from the basement to the peak of the attic ceiling. A cry. A baby. Whose baby? Mine oh my God mine oh my God what time it is mine is it time isn’t mine out of mind out of mind. Up Stella’s arms shot with a quickened stiffness that made her elbows snap and she rotated her body leftward to seize the baby, whose baby, her baby, whose face had gone from burnt umber to the color of an unwatered rose. Clear snot caught the starlight and glistened in the dark. She wiped the stream of snot with her fingers, wiped her fingers on the sheet. Snot green sheets. God. Can’t. You. Do it. She shoved her hips into the mattress and bounced her left buttocks against the springs until the wheezy screams relented and Jason’s eyes reluctantly shut. She kissed the side of his wide open mouth and, all ease, felt the bed and not P.C. embrace her dead weight. The elm tree’s highest branches held the street lamp’s nuclear-orange orb and desiring an oblivion that would not end she slept she rattled awake and slept wearied beyond beyond worn beyond motion and nearly time. Again a cry. A baby. Mine “God oh my God I can’t,” she said, then again not aloud but to whoever was listening. “God my God I can, I can,’”—hopefully more than herself alone, a loyal but unreliable companion.
Before she knew what she was doing Jason was strapped in the portable car seat, her knuckles clacking on the dense and heavy plastic that could repel mortar shells in case of emergency, her own heart shooting out ballistic, arcing over the damned distance, down and exploding in Chicago, landing on P.C.’s front porch and melting the jambs off of his doors, summoning him awake at this ungodly hour, settling for good in his apartment, his bed, he had to be there from time to time to continue trainings in South Chicago. She would find the flame and set afire what false future she had failed to find? “Stella, baby”—in both senses, his eyes lowering from her mouth to the miniature imitation of his face who looks askance, obliviously handsome in a woolen winter cap that pops at the top with a white pom-pom, the sort she always thought fit for little babies whose purpose from a distance was little more than to be darling but not, she thought, as she saw him in the rearview, for cheerleaders tossing their toories with league support of the fully-disclosed, ticket-holding oglers whose pleased stares were somehow permitted and even, she ran the useless stop sign at the blind-alley intersection, fostered, a stadium of oglers, a soft, family-friendly gentleman’s club of different degree but not different kind than the tucked-away secret one she and P.C. stumbled into, desperate for a bathroom as they ducked down the cellar stairs of the basement of a bar where he had been endorsed by Wright—the “biggest boost my campaign’s got yet”—but when the two, feeling for a restroom, pushed through the bolted bronze doors she found not a sewage siphon but mascaraed women who wore infant pom-poms over plasticine nipples and shook them with fury in front of worshiping faces, the men waiting for their mommies to flare their technicolor milk “Give me more, more, give more, momma!” in the delicious midnight, slapping P.C. when she found him looking, not even staring but “Startled, in shock,” and that night had not been their first real fight because the slap had solicited faux fisticuffs as he laughed that infectious exhilarating shiver that she could always only mimic with a sliver, an uptight groan like a broken guffaw. Aw, baby Blue, I’m true, and he’d flicked at her earring and tickled her lobe with a little kiss, the azure earring hot from his breath, but she covered her breast with reticent hands that rubbed her own shoulder as he backed away saddened and said I’m gonna pee my pants as they made the top of the stairs in a hustle, his hand lifting her two at a time, her swelled belly nearly ready, and he spoke his mind as he always seemed to do, telling the bartender this was the last time The Underworld would have his patronage on account of the unfortunate discovery he’d made in the presence of the First Lady, and he would make known to his constituents and in fact to the whole country how the gentlemen treated their ladies, and suddenly she saw him running for president as he swore he was meant to do, proud but worried that, pregnant, she would weigh down the star she saw rising. He stared, staid, startled when she told him this. He did not immediately but eventually said “No.”
If she reached his apartment she might find another woman. She should stay, skip the Renault, return upstairs and steal some sleep.
But you, Peter, this a piece of you true with beautiful gemstones of the mineral beryl dotting the border of the small snug hat and all the cute things I used to hate are fitting, not enough, insufficient, on him only the richest dyes will do, and the ball on top dangling from his head gave her a woolen, insulating happiness against the bared and gooseflesh facts—televised cheerleaders and underworld strippers and the cold car she was about to assume, a rattling heater that coughed at random huge lungfuls of scalding air. She pressed the snaps of Jason’s hat until his fattened chin felt snug.
She swung the car seat in wide arcs like the smoothly cranked horse head of an oil well, dangling the child in constant motion to keep him quiet as her own soles squeaked against the stairs that Mom had mopped again yesterday and would again tomorrow now that she’d left a trail of faint dark mud. She wound her brown cashmere cardigan around her body as she neared the backdoor and the maw of winter let out a warning, whining breath.
Dad, ascending from the basement, saw her struggling to pull the keys off the nail and helped her raise them high enough. She promised she was going to drive around in circles, put the crabby baby to sleep, and he hesitated and says why not the country roads, “I’d come with if it’d help”—she said no. No, no, no, no she needs to figure how to do this alone, the Renault, the Alliance, is already his and he’s letting her use the car without charge she needs to figure it out, alone, how to be alone. Alone all alone without the loneliness. “Not that I’ll ever be alone again!” she shouted as she stepped outside and the screen door screeched and she saw his face, plump and buoyant like a helium balloon but ready to pop also, his mind. Some fun he was having in the basement like another life like an afterlife like a life after the one he had lived when they were the only family she knew.
Three dead pumps and the Alliance rallied and she gunned the gas and skidded on accident down the driveway with the mohawk grass. After three circles around the block, the baby screaming louder than ever, she rolled down the window and brought the wind to a pitch that pained her own ears but quieted the spitting baby who had ripped his cute hat and tilted his head come on kid it’s not a crucifixion. She found an onramp and drove to the rural roads where she and Jake had run, saw a sign that said Chicago and took the next exit without double-checking, wandering down a serpentine side road whose winds and turns were dizzying, dredging from her empty stomach bile she spat out the window what about the baby’s belly must be bad if mine’s this nauseated. She passed klieg-lit silos and fancy farmhouses and wondered what would happen here if she pulled right into someone’s driveway and dragged her feet to the front WELCOME mat, rapping and ringing until they spied her madness through the petite security peep hole. “I’m going crazy, take this baby!”
She reached for her phone, patted her pockets, rifled fingers through the tight slits and found lint and a few pennies. Insane she left the phone at home. “I’m going crazy, take this baby!” Lost, she kept driving straight, the word metaphorical for all roads wound, curling at times it seemed in coils an infinite regress she gripped the wheel, the perfect circle, and cranked it round and round to keep pace with the winding lane lit by nothing but her mild headlights. She kicked her shoes off to let her heels breathe and pressed her bare foot against the pedal, flesh on metal; she felt a cut and blood dripped down the back of her heel. Going and going out into the country until she found a lone silo, fattened as if stuffed to bursting, illuminated like the lakefront lighthouse, stretched oblong like one of those medals Nonna made her wear in the water in case she died when she fell from the diving board, the stars she still found beautiful, miraculous the horseshoe stars grotesque the heart of God stabbed she felt again for her phone and found a faded dime that bought no miracles again and then on Jason’s booties, dangling from a keychain Nonna won from friends at a game of Patience she saw the medal she must have seen it in the rearview mirror already. She swerved the car into the shoulder, pressed the brake with all her left foot (her right foot bloodied beyond use).
She tried to find a path to the silo, strapped Jason to her breast with the wrap and slipped in a mottled clay and dirt trench, a deep meridian protecting the cornfield whose husks swished whispers in the untold night, baby still screaming as she bared her breast, refusing the chewed and purpled nipples she had offered unscathed to his father under the play tent sheets her legs had held up, their breath the heat that the radiator lacked, the light casting shadows through the cloth of white that fell like a pall over Peter’s spent passion.
She prayed that some man with a gun would not come.
Stuck in the mud her heel felt cool, healed more than manacled. The man with the gun did not come. She stood on her tiptoes to see the silo, the pain in her heel residual, faint. Certain that someone was dangling from the ladder framed by the faintly yellowing horizon she gained perspective as the pain subsided and saw instead that the figure was a scarecrow not one lynched under the old Crowe world nor the ancient hanging God whose gambled clothes she would yet refuse even here, chilled by fear more than temperature, doubting anything sufficient remedy for the creeping craze—divine or insane—that drew her to mimic the solitary scarecrow whose shadow spoke of a sacrifice no human harvest, no mortal could muster. Arms out like a crossing guard on an empty road without traffic or pedestrian, play acting for the real thing. Jason’s blue-mouthed, emptied-lung fuss blew hot flashes like fire through and beyond her veins and blood and nerves and brain, and the flames of his pain seemed not an arson—at once she saw with certainty—not a random arsonist’s terror but instead a homeopathic fever, a controlled burn in an overgrown forest famed of millennia, impossible to forget, the burning started not by her but by who she knew she did not know if once she did she hardly now could, the burning laying waste inside her, her heady breaths filling her belly, expanding what once had been her womb, each of his screams a new contraction in what new labor toward what delivery, something she fed and was fed by also, was burned by but could be healed by too, a fire she had passed to her son without will, without guilt of the kind that implies intention, except insofar as she would have done it, would have thieved the fig, the fire, would have laid waste to the primordial forest anyway, were it hers to burn—even if she in fact had not she would have done whatever it was, whatever this pain was a punishment for. Shivering, she stared at the scarecrow shadow, his form ragged-edged by potato sack clothes that bore an affront against Wisconsin winters. As if watching the shadow of the clothes he wore were the same as wearing them. “I’ve gone crazy, take this baby!”
No one takes the baby whose bellows are answered by the barn-warmed cows, the querying who of a stern owl alighting like a judge keeping unbinding court from the gutter ridge of the broken down barn whose cracked wood yet kept the cattle indoors, the judge imposing his wearied eyes, casting them down upon the petty trespasser, as if scoffing as he takes regal flight in a heavy flap of well-fed feathers. The man with the gun does not come. She slinks her healed heel into the Alliance and as soon as she leans the seat horizontal she hears the baby’s scream weaken she worries he’s dying and longs for his wailing “I’ve gone crazy, take this baby!”
She wakes in a species of endangered silence. Even her parents’ place, which seemed like a monk’s cell or a pleasant coffin when she first settled in, sounded—compared to this—with constant hum of machines and fans, heaters and coolers, the undying traffic on the free highway. But here the quietude is in full harvest, a level of soundlessness that makes her nervous. She slips her shoe around the wounded foot and stumbles, stupefied, in the middle of the street, Jason still and at last asleep. Staring down the scarecrow’s eyes—big coal pieces she could steal for fire—she melds together from the mettle of her mind a prayer. “God.” What meanings you could give or get out of one word when you mouthed it more times than you could tally.
She climbs the rungs of the scarecrow’s ladder and runs her arms through his sleeves and hears a hound mewling in the distance, nearing slowly, the sound of hunger, nearing, homing after blood, a hunting dog, she could hear, like her uncles and she tries to descend the ladder but is stuck, arms fixed where the straw had stuffed, her arms also like the telephone poles that reach cruciform forever down the highway, she imagines herself holding wires, telephone cables that reach to D.C., because he isn’t back hunkering in Chicago with another woman but waiting for me. When she slows her withdrawal her hands come loose and she feels the sting of the prickling straw as she lowers her body into the first light of the morning that would take her home.
