Beemouse Laboratories

I finally got around to reading A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, by Amy Bloom. I read Come to Me last year, and loved it. I felt shocked when I read those stories, and stunned by their beauty and truth. (It’s strange– what I perceive as beauty might be the feeling I get when characters actually act with passion, instead of living like lumps, their lives indistinguishable and slowly becoming one with the earth around them.)

A Blind Man… wasn’t as good as Come To Me, but the very last story in this book, “The Story,” was cool. At some point during the telling, the role of narrator seems to dissolve away, and the voice of the “real author” takes over… it’s a strange and cool effect.

“The Story” is about a recent widow and a couple with a child who lives next door. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of the end:

Sandra, as I’ve named her, was actually a therapist but not a psychiatrist, and I disliked her so much I can’t bear to make you think, even in this story, that she had the discipline and drive and intellectual persistence to become a physician. She had nothing but appetite and brass balls, and she was the worst mother I ever saw.

I wished her harm and acted on that wish, without regret. Even now I regard her destruction as a very good thing, and that undermines the necessary fictive texture of deep ambiguity, the roiling ambivalence that might give tension to the narrator’s affection. Sandra pinched Miranda for not falling asleep quickly enough, and she gave her potato chips for breakfast and Slurpees for lunch, she cut her daughter’s hair with pinking shears and spent two hundred dollars she didn’t have on her own monthly Madison Avenue cuts. She left that child in more stores than I can remember, cut cocaine on her changing table, and blamed the poor little thing for every disappointment and heartache in her own life, until Miranda’s eyes welled up just at the sound of her mother calling her name. And if Sandra was not evil, she was worse than foolish, and sick, and more to the point, incurable. If Sandra was smooshed inside a wrecked car, splattered against the inside of a tunnel, I wouldn’t feel even so sad for her as I did for Princess Diana, for whom I felt very little indeed.

And here are some excerpts from the middle of the end:

The story I began to write would have skewered her, of course. Anyone who knew her would have read it and known it was she and thought badly of her while reading. She would have been embarrassed and angry. That really is not what I have in mind. I want her skin like a rug on my floor, warm throat slit, heart still beating behind the newly bricked-up wall. [...]

I can’t say I didn’t intend harm. I intended not only harm but death, or if not her death, which I think is a little beyond my psychological reach, then her disappearance, which is less satisfying because it’s not permanent but better because there is no body.

And here is the end:

I have made the best and happiest ending that I can in this world, made it out of the flax and netting and leftover trim of someone else’s life, I know, but made it to keep the innocent safe and the guilty punished, and I have made it as the world should be and not as I have found it.

Untitled, Yelapa, Jalisco, 2006