Woke Up Lonely A Novel

In sum: one must learn to love one’s people ardently.

They were together. As a family. Two fugitives and a child in a camper van, hurtling through the woods. Dad in the passenger seat, his wife at the wheel. His wife? Yes, his wife, driving like nuts, as their child in the back looked from one parent to the next, going: Wow. Just: Wow. How little they knew of each other. How little time they had left. She held a videotape to her chest. A gift from her dad. For after, he’d said, which turned out to mean: For after I am gone.

Bruce sat in the back with camera aloft. He’d arranged the lights and from this arrangement had developed a mood. Tender and elegiac, while the snows fell from Ohio to North Carolina. He felt, in the making of this film, like a balladeer, for theirs was the action of tragedy that’s often told in song. But only from his vantage, which was not shared. The three were happy; they were on the road. In action: a country station yodeling its best, and a child whose parents were tributary to her needs. A child whose thoughts skewed from the brake that might pitch her through the windshield—she was rooted between the front seats, had refused the belt—to the man, the dad, in the passenger seat, whose presence did not reconstruct the geometry of her universe so much as animate the triangle she’d long imagined herself a part of anyway. My dad is famous. My dad is God. My dad is right here, with me.

Bruce did not say a word for the rest of the day; he just trailed the family as it went.

The van was registered to a woman who had died a few months back; Martin set it up. There were provisions for a week, though a day was probably the most they could expect. They drove in silence but always turning to look at one another. By nighttime, all Thurlow had managed to say to Ida was that he’d missed her. He was afraid to say anything else—he did not know her at all—but he marveled at the joy dawned in his heart just to have her near. He waited for her to sleep—maybe he could talk to her in sleep—but she fought to stay awake. Her eyelids rolled back with terror every time she nodded off; she did not want to miss anything. Thurlow felt this wide-eyed girl could see right through him. Finally, she went down. Neck angled like it might snap for the weight and bounce of her head against her shoulder, but holding fast.

He was not a strong man, but he could lift his daughter and tote her to a cot in the back. The rest was in his head. Dread of letting her fall. Dread of waking her up. Dread when she groped for his arm after he swaddled her in a blanket—for swaddling was all he knew of how to care for her—and then the retreat, like the end of an endless night, of every sorrow of every year intervening, as she said, half-asleep, “Dad. Don’t go.”

He and Esme spoke in the front. The future was bleak; they left it at that.

She told him about their meeting in North Korea. The DoI employees, her plan.

He told her about the ransom tape. His demands for wife and child. To have them back, to live as old.

Esme drove on without a word, though to everyone who saw this on film later, she seemed to glow, irradiated with feelings that, for their light and color, were as an aura that repelled the gloom of every day she’d spent without him.

“But why didn’t you come six months ago?” he said. “Or six years? Why didn’t you tell me what you wanted? Everything could have been different.”

She gripped the wheel. It was fleeced and hot. She said, “I didn’t know how. Please leave it at that. We have what we have.”

They wended through the woods until the way was impassable by camper van. The roads were icy, the angles acute.

Esme pulled over. It was a Sunday dawn in the Pisgah National Forest; no one would be coming this way for hours. Only someone did come. He passed them, then stopped, because the van was not so much pulled over as whaled on the margin of a road that had no margin for this. Of the two, Thurlow was the more recognizable, so Esme took her chances. A stranger just trying to help. Were they okay? Yes, just camping. Did she know there was a turnoff just up the road? She did now, thanks, and with that, the man left without a hint of recognition; he was old and hermited to the woods, and probably did not know the cold war had ended, either.

But Esme knew better. “Quick,” she said, packing a bag and giving Thurlow one. “We don’t have much time.”

He did as told, but without vigor. Couldn’t they stay in the van? Drive around? Just be with each other? He looked back on the camper with a heavy heart. It was not as if he didn’t know where this would finish for him, all hours but one till the end of his days in a ten-by-twelve cell in the most isolating penal institution on earth. Where the government sent its evil, the evil and his beloved, who’d simply waited too long to know herself.

The astronomical center was close enough, and Ida, for having come here every summer for years, knew the way. She said, “Are we meeting Pop?” and from the lift in her voice Esme knew this was the apotheosis of joy for her child, to have parents and grandparents together at last. The right time to break the news had come and gone. Esme nudged her on.

For February, the weather was clement, and they were able to trek through the snow with ease. Flecks of light breached the canopy of leaves overhead, so it was not until they came to a clearing that the morning sun made its brilliance known. The trees were slick and pitched in tar, the ground painted new, and everywhere a glaze that refreshed the land as though no one had ever come this way before.

Thurlow looked up. A cloud drifted across the sky. “My God,” he said, squinting. “What is this place?”

Ida skid across a patch of ice. “Come on, Dad, I’ll show you.”

His heart near broke for the sound of it. Dad, Dad, Dad.

Esme nodded. She was right behind them.

They reached the foot of a steel lattice that sprung 120 feet in the air. A radio telescope.

Ida said, “It’s for listening to stuff from outer space. So we know who’s trying to reach us.”

Esme smiled. “That’s right, tulip. Because the world’s got ears, they’re always open. Now come on. I’ve got a surprise.”

There were landings all up the side of the scope, and stairs between each, and though Ida was scared, she didn’t look down. In ten minutes they were in the dish, which was like sitting in some giant’s breakfast bowl.

Gaps had let out the snow, so mostly it was dry. Esme opened her knapsack. She had powdered donuts and hot apple cider in a thermos.

“A picnic,” she said. “How ’bout it?”

Ida wanted to know if they were allowed to be up here.

Thurlow laughed and grabbed his daughter and held her tight until he was red and wet in the face.

They got on their backs and stared at the sky.

“Hear anything?” Esme said.

“You’re not supposed to hear them,” Ida said, though she knew her mom was kidding.

Thing was, they all heard it—faintly but not for long—sirens closing in, wailing the news. Ida could have wormed up the side of the bowl and peered over the rim, but why risk it? The hours ticked by. They got twelve. A Day in the Life of Family was what Bruce would call it later. Look at the clouds, what do you see? My favorite food is grape jelly. I like skating and candy and coconut soap. My worst fear has been that this day would come and it wouldn’t be enough, but it’s plenty. I have been shadowing you for nine years. The mistakes we made. The child we had.

The film showed on PBS and was released on DVD. It made the evening news alongside the Intelligence Commission’s report slamming the government for its failed assessment of WMDs in Iraq. After that, the pope died. News anchor Peter Jennings got lung cancer. Prince Charles and his paramour got hitched. And waiter Dave Franklin, who had just gotten off work at TGIF, had a first date with the Bakelite salesgirl of his dreams. Problem was, the date ended in the chagrin of sex. Nice girls didn’t put out so freely, at least not with Dave Franklin, whose experience of women ranged from the close-but-no-cigar to the haha, no. In bed, he was cavalier. Assumed positions he had seen only on video. But after, he was mortified about his socks, black dress, which he had forgotten to take off. He turned on the TV and stared madly at the screen and hoped she would just go away. It was 4 a.m., and here was a documentary about that cult leader and his family of three, sipping cider in a radio telescope 120 feet in the air. The mother saying she’d hired the documentarian to film the daughter every month and to send her the tapes when possible; the father saying he wanted copies, too.

Meantime, the salesgirl had wrapped a sheet around her body because she really liked Dave but had maybe been frugal in the expression of her feelings, and so, she, too, stared madly at the screen. The film rolled credits. An epilogue said that three of the Helix House hostages had gotten home safely but that one died with his parents in a plane crash off the California coast. A few government officials were headed to jail. Most were not. The salesgirl fumbled for the right words, not I like you, but maybe, Can we talk about it? And as she thought it through and the screen went black, Dave took off his socks, and grew his heart just enough to fathom her own. He reached for her hand. Didn’t let go.





Acknowledgments

Big thanks to the following people and organizations for helping me write this novel:

Bard College, the Corporation of Yaddo, Casa Libre, the MacDowell Colony, the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute, Michael Bronner, Mary Caponegro, Martha Cooley, Steven Ehrenberg, Bill Geerhart, Myla Goldberg, Claudia Gonson, Michael Hearst, Brigid Hughes, Bill Karins, Patrick Keefe, Robert Kelly, Bradford Morrow, Nelly Reifler, Helga Siegel, Lydia Wills, John Woo.

Leigh Newman and Peter Trachtenberg, both of whom saved this novel from the trash.

Stacia Decker, a tremendous reader and agent, both.

Fiona McCrae, for her incredible guidance and unflagging engagement with this novel from the moment it fell into her hands. Also: team Graywolf, which got behind me and pushed.

Jim Shepard—again and again, with boundless gratitude, Jim Shepard—who shows me how it’s done.

And finally: My family, in particular my brother (whose work on nuclear nonproliferation was invaluable to me), my stepdad, and my mom, whose response to Woke Up Lonely in draft—draft after draft after draft—spurred me on to greater extremities. I could not have written this novel without her.



FIONA MAAZEL is the author of Last Last Chance. She is winner of the Bard Prize for Fiction and a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree. She teaches at Brooklyn College, Columbia, New York University, and Princeton, and was appointed the Picador Guest Professor at the University of Leipzig, Germany. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.