A Disembodied Piece
[A scene cut from The Night Country]
The tree, the tree. We're always here, nailed to it like saints,
like the wreath Kyle's mom put up, making every car that passes
think of us. Those kids last year, right, that was Halloween.
It's fucked; people should have to know our names to feel
sorry for us.
It's beginning to sprinkle, drops rustling the dry leaves.
The road's shiny, a thin film of oil building up under the
tires, and we're on a curve. It's easy to see how it
happened.
(Except it wasn't raining, Danielle says.
Thank you, Toe says.
What? she says, innocent. It wasn't.)
No one stops. There's just a glance behind a wiper, a flash
of a stranger's face under glass, a stab of thought that connects
us. This is where it happened. They don't go beyond
that, don't try to peek behind the dumb curtain of tragedy.
Because there's no Romeo and Juliet reason: this is just the
kind of shit that happens around here. If it wasn't us, it
would have been some other losers. Maybe not this tree, this
road, but maybe so. It's almost random, like Friday the 13th—kids
die. So it's not really Toe's fault, even if it is.
(Is not.
Shut UP.)
Some drivers don't make the jump, too lost in their own thoughts,
hypnotized by the road and the radio, the wreath floating
past like a plastic bag caught on barbed wire, just garbage,
a sign emptied of meaning. It's the middle of the day, landscaping
trucks taking the shortcut through the woods, scuzzy dudes
in back looking up and holding out their hands to test the
rain, hoping they'll get the rest of the day off. We want
to follow them, or the FedEx guy with his corny uniform, see
what's inside the packages in the back of his van, but we
can't. There's another car, a silver Lexus, and inside it
is a tennis friend of Danielle's mom on her way to get her
hair colored in Farmington. It's like Poltergeist: we're he-ere.
Stewart O'Nan explains:
So, yeah, that little self-contained segment got cut from
The Night Country, mostly in an attempt, between
my finished draft and the galleys, to generate more speed,
or at least streamline the middle section of the book. It's
the lull during the day, and while I thought it was a nice
way to show that limbo-like feeling the ghost-narrators have
of being stuck, my editor thought it repeated too much information
the reader already had.
I wanted to keep it, since I felt it helped with the feeling
of simultaneity (the ghosts are yanked out of the scene before
this by the memories of people driving by the tree, and then
yanked out of this segment by yet another person's memories
of them across town), the narrator's teenage hatred of the
mindless sympathy that goes out to victims ("people should
have to know our names . . .") and just what goes on
in this quiet, aflluent suburb in the middle of the day (the
landscapers, the FedEx truck, the friend of Danielle's mother
going to get her hair colored).
It also establishes the rain dramatically (the rustling in
the leaves, sheen of oil), which is crucial later on, and
furthers the circular argument over whose fault the accident
was. And there's the cute conceit of jamming Romeo and
Juliet into Friday the 13th, both stagey teen
tragedies like the ones the ghosts are trying to refute by
telling their own story (aware that they're failing because
the audience is too stupid to understand correctly).
So the segment, though it's only a double-spaced page, hit
on a lot of themes, established important dramatic elements,
and had some lines in it that I really loved: "a stranger's
face under glass," "a stab of thought that connects
us," "kids die," "a sign emptied of meaning."
While I thought it was worth keeping, I also wanted the book
to be faster, shorter. A very wise friend said the book wanted
to be a poem, and I agreed with that assessment; if that meant
cutting a lyrical segment to create a more lyrical whole,
then so be it. I knew I was losing good stuff, but all in
the service of a larger cause.
