Debris

Johnny Huscher
Nov 6 · 18 min read

I was ten years old the first time I saw my father preach on a street corner. We were living in Budapest, Hungary at the time. My parents were sent out as missionaries from a small, non-denominational church in Nebraska shortly after the Soviet bloc countries relaxed their border policies on westerners with Bibles. They were devout, sincere Evangelicals — my father having famously proposed to my mother by saying “I believe God is calling me to marry you.” In a way, it made sense that we would uproot and move to Eastern Europe. It made sense because we had Jesus and they didn’t.

There were a number of strategy meetings in our Budapest living room before the first trip to Skála. Dad’s sermon was reduced to ten minutes, because using a translator meant that everything would take twice as long. Our translator, Péter Szabados, was a short bald man who learned English while in the military. His name back then was Péter Orosz, but he had filed the paperwork to change it in 1989, two years before our arrival. Péter’s former family name, which literally meant “Russian,” had made him virtually unemployable in the months after the Soviet tanks rolled east back toward Moscow. The fantastic thing about watching Péter translate was in how perfectly he emulated my father’s pitch and tone. Sometimes, perhaps without even knowing it, he even mirrored my father’s physical gestures.

At those same meetings, my father, Péter, and the small team of missionaries they worked with talked about how to get as many people to hear the Word as possible. “A crowd,” Dad told us, “will draw a crowd.” He decided to have the group dispersed over a small area, and then, as he and Péter began, we were to quickly come stand and listen as if we were interested. My brother and I were included in the plan. The group practiced in the yard, creating a crowd of 8 around Dad and Péter that would allow more interested folks to walk in between us, closer to the front.

Dad preached at the Skála for several years. On Saturdays, the three of us (him, my brother, and me) took the 114 bus from XIII. utca to Kosztolányi Dezső tér. We met up with Péter and the rest of the group before my brother and I were dispatched to take up our post near a flower vendor. There were a few times that we became so distracted by the trying to remember the names of the blooming irises and dahlias, idly running our fingers along the rough edges of leaves, and sticking our noses into the bunches of yellow and orange roses that we missed his sermon altogether. Usually we didn’t. Usually we heard the familiar boom of his voice and feigned curiosity, moving through the crowded market toward a man yelling in English about redemption.

* * *

Bruno Schulz wrote two novels, or maybe three, though the last one lurks only in letters, journals, and rumors. The other two, Street of Crocodiles (as it’s called in English), and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, are both full of his father. Or a father figure of some kind. He appears as a fox and a condor and a knight and a scorpion, dying and reincarnating over and over. In the last chapter of Sanatorium, he’s in the wallpaper somehow, and when you read it you think to yourself, Yes. Yes of course he’s in the wallpaper. Because isn’t that what it’s like to watch someone lie in the same bed in the same room for so many years? Didn’t you have to say good-bye to him so many times before he died, and wasn’t it like letting him die every time? You remember your uncle Louis and his long piano-key fingers. Wasn’t there something of Louis in the uncomfortable couch? The rough fiber against your cheek while you tried to nap after lunch. He was propped in the recliner, oxygen tubes extending up from the green and silver tank, pillow under his back, and you watched his chest rise and fall, expecting it to stop at any minute. He was so fragile you couldn’t sleep a wink.

Closing the cover to see the author’s name crawling down the spine, it will not occur to you as a possibility that Schulz’ father was still alive when he wrote the book, or that Schulz did not spend some portion of his formative years watching his father die. It would last for almost a full decade. Of course that’s how it happened, you will tell yourself. He couldn’t have written it otherwise.

* * *

Ankur has only ever had one complaint about my writing. It’s the names, he says. He gets too distracted trying to turn “Joanne” back into Amy or “Gabriel” back into Michael. Last time he saw me read, he asked me if I had really ripped the spark plug cable off of “Kayla’s” P200.

I could have. She certainly deserved it, showing up like that after sending me court papers. The P200 would have been towed to a shop and she would have dropped a couple hundred bucks to a lucky mechanic for 30 seconds of work. It would have proved a point about where she belonged, but only would have changed things for her. The damage was done on my end. That was the night I stopped wishing she’d come back. I might as well have set the thing on fire. It wouldn’t have made any difference at all.

Did I pull the spark plug cable off of Kayla’s P200? No. I drank beer and sulked in the bar like a chicken shit and couldn’t come up with anything to say or do that would have made that night interesting at all until two years later when I sat down to write a story about the thing that happened inside my head.

* * *

The mirror was the shop’s only amenity, and I watched both of us through its dusty face. I watched my body become not my body while Ed pushed the needled tip of the gun over my pale skin, pausing intermittently to wipe the blood and ink with a Brawny paper towel. It was my first tattoo. On the mirror a small sticker with a crucifix and large block lettering read

BODY PIERCING SAVED MY LIFE.

In the graphic next to the text, a railroad spike-sized nail protruded from an open palm. Tomato-red blood gushed out. Ed and I didn’t talk about Jesus, but I suppose we could have.

I looked at the sticker and the reflection while Ed wrote the word “Truth” in an old English font onto my shoulder. I was 19. It was the sort of tattoo one gets at 19, which is to say it’s the reason people tell you not to get ink. My parents didn’t know about it until I was 21.

“I’ve had it for two years” I told them.

“Doesn’t it seem strange that you would lie about that? About a tattoo of that word?”

* * *

There was something very 1950s about us. We went on walks. She held my hand while we aimlessly wandered the sidewalks of her neighborhood. Usually at night. There were specific houses we knew would probably have the picture window curtains drawn back. We never stood on the sidewalk to stare in, but of course we would glance up into the houses to see shadows on couches or at the dinner table, often illuminated by the flickering blue of television. I told her once that it wouldn’t be so strange to just see people watching sitcoms, but sometimes we could see people watching commercials. Or just see a TV playing in an empty room.

The first postcard I sent her was from Africa. It was before we started dating. She kept it on her nightstand under a novel by a Polish writer that she could never seem to finish. The edges of a Cape Town coastline poked out from under the book. I mailed her others, even when we lived on opposite ends of the same town. Usually they were just photos I had taken and printed onto cardstock paper. The postcards never said anything really. She never wrote back. It was never about that side of the card. That wasn’t how it worked.

At night she used to sleep on me, with her cheek against my chest, and ask me to write postcards for her. I swept my fingertips lightly over her naked back, drawing the shapes of cursive letters. I studied the shape of the light fixture above her bed. She dropped off into a heavy sleep before I could. The swirls of the letters were impossible to decipher. She never knew what I was writing — sometimes things like

I love you so bad I think I might set myself on fire.

Sometimes I wrote

I’m afraid to leave you, so I’m waiting for you to go.

But when I wrote things like that, the cursive had so much more calligraphy.

* * *

A reduction of anxiety between thumb and index. I spin the ring slowly. Push it against my knuckle. The tiny grooves which, at the end of my finger, become my fingerprint are made smooth under it. The silver ring is how I survive small rooms, elevators, and crowded vehicles. It pushes the walls out. The ceiling into the sky until I can find oxygen.

My brother bought it for his high school girlfriend maybe 9 or 10 years ago. When she left for college in a different state, the ring stayed behind. He was destroyed. Called an ambulance for himself 2 months later, having realized how terrible it would be for his roommates to have to clean up his blood from the bathroom floor.

He gave me the ring one Thanksgiving when we were both at my parent’s house. He said he wanted it to mean something else. It was a rare moment for us. Getting along like that and being able to talk about horrible stuff. I used to beat the shit out of him when we were growing up. Really awful. I feel worse about the way I treated him than I do anything else. I almost admire him for hating me. We don’t talk anymore, but I still wear the ring.

* * *

The film The Raven (with John Cusack as Edgar Allan Poe) was filmed in Budapest, but made to look like 19th century Baltimore. I can’t imagine that the art directors had to do much more than make sure there weren’t any cars parked on the street. The industrial plants in the Eastern districts have painted the walls of Budapest in gray soot. It is a city of hard surfaces — the modern concrete and pavement folding into the centuries old cut limestone and castle walls. Wrought iron window bars. Tall ceilings and small rooms. The city belongs to every time but this one.

While Cusack walks through the frame, I wonder where he is exactly. I think Obuda in the north of the city for awhile, but the streets seem too narrow. I wonder if they’re not in the First District, near the river. There is a beautiful museum about the Hapsburgs there. A gothic cathedral which always seems to linger just out of frame. I can’t unsee the tall, stone spire. I can’t unsee the city. Cusack is Budapest. He is Lloyd Dobler and Denny LeChance and Martin Q. Blank and Rob Gordon and all of them are each other and all of them are a bastard city.

* * *

Several of my writing students got into a bit of an argument over the general procedure of cremation. One of them had written a story about a guy addicted to chopping up bodies with a fire axe, and there was a question as to whether bodies prepared for cremation would give our protagonist the sort of Tarantino-esque blood splatter he so craved. One student suggested that all of the blood was drained from the body long before it was cremated. Another suggested that the blood wouldn’t splatter at all since there was nothing pumping it through the body. “It would just sort of ooze,” he said, gesticulating a sort of gelatinous fluid with his hands.

Allen, who never does the reading, was faking his way through the conversation. He had no idea the story was about dismemberment until one of his classmates brought up the logistics of it. Then Allen wouldn’t shut up about how great the story is. I know I’m not supposed to say this sort of thing, but I hate Al.

I finally recommended that the author find out what he needed to find out about cremation, but that we, as readers, could probably think of more useful things to say that don’t have to do with logistics. The author needs to know what happens exactly, but maybe the rest of us don’t. I told them that I had once watched a series of YouTube videos of cow births to try and write a scene for a story. “But you don’t put all of that in there,” I said, “But you could if you wanted to.”

Al raised his hand and asked if cows eat the placenta, and it made me want to bounce his face off the desk in front of him.

* * *

The first stories I ever wrote were about three boys who fought battles against an evil oversized lobster. The stories were called “John Mark, Jeff, and Josh.” My two best friends in the fourth grade were named Jeff and Josh.

* * *

The question was always how and whether or not it had changed, and the truth was, it hadn’t. Not even a little bit. The language was a bit rusty and I could hear my own accent coming and going. I met Nona on my fourth day back in Budapest. She had just been robbed by gypsies and was living off of her roommates food. I did the decent thing. I bought her beers until she was piss drunk and then walked her home.

On a national holiday when neither of us had to work, there was a large political rally a few blocks from her house. In spite of my warnings, and having shown her the YouTube videos of the previous year’s rally erupting into a full-scale riot, Nona insisted that we should go.

The Nationalist Party crowd was four blocks deep. Many of them were dressed in black. Gas masks hanging from their belts. Ten-eye combat boots. Hands in white knuckled fists. Nona and I were able to walk through the crowd without being noticed. We were just another pair of bodies shouldering our way to a closer look at the central stage. A woman was at the microphone yelling angrily. Nona tugged on my jacket, but I refused to translate. I whispered to her not to say anything in English and said we should leave. We made our way to Parliament, where we stood at a safe distance and watched a small skirmish between police in riot gear and a few angry, drunk Nationalists.

* * *

Before the year was up, my brother and I carried new backpacks on our trips to Skála. Both were packed with freshly printed copies of “The Four Spiritual Laws” booklet. The popular tracts had, of course been translated into Hungarian — the familiar font on the front had to be drastically reduced in size in order to make room for the new words: Ha személyesen megismerhetnéd Istent, érdekelne-e?

Mike and I had concerns about the tract. For one the word for “four,” négy, was nowhere in the title. The new title also ended with a question mark and the whole point of the Four Spiritual Laws was, of course, that there was no question. Observing these things did not deliver us from our heavy burdens. We pulled ourselves onto the bus by gripping the guide rails on the door.

Before the bus settled into its route north along the river, I found a seat near the back of the bus where I could sit alone while my dad and brother talked and laughed in English. I slid the blue backpack under my seat and sat with my arms folded over my chest. As the diesel engine roared away from another stop, I tried to imagine being brave enough to get off without the tracts. It was impossible.

I heard someone behind me mutter the word yankee under his breath. Dad and Mike seemed to be even more obvious now, even more American, and I pretended not to know them. Watching them like that, I think, was the first time I understood the difference between us. I wanted him, God, dad, or whoever, to leave us alone. I stared out the window and watched the city go by — the limestone facades of the embankment and a brown, flat river on one side of the road and the blur of storefronts on the other. I tried to disappear completely.

* * *

I have come to believe in the recycled living room of television. The set from All in the Family becomes the house from The Cosby Show. Front door on the right. Open staircase in the back. Archie’s chair gets replaced with Dr. Huxtable’s couch. Walk behind the couch and go left to enter the kitchen. It becomes Raymond Barone’s house a few years later. Blossom before that. Family Matters, Step by Step, Who’s the Boss, and Full House were mirror-images of that house with the front door on the left. I have faith in the house and its ability to tell one story, and to tell it in a choir of voices.

* * *

The Nazi’s established a ghetto in occupied Drohobycz to detain the 10,000 Jews living in the city. Bruno Schulz was among them. Hundreds of men and women were shot to make room for others — families coming in from as far east as Vienna. One Gestapo officer named Karl Gunther kept a diary. It recorded the deaths of two Jewish women who were forced to dig their own graves before being executed. When they grew tired from the work, Gunther offered them water, which they refused. This meant everything.

Gunther also recognized Schulz’ illustrative talent and hired him to paint murals for his son’s bedroom. Schulz spent the next several months alternating between a new novel and wall-sized paintings of the Grimm fairy tales. One day, when he was returning home with a loaf of bread, an SS soldier walked up behind Schulz and puts a bullet in the back of his head. After the war Gunther becomes an interior designer.

Decades later the unfinished wall paintings were miraculously discovered under several layers of paint. Devotees of Schulz’ fiction were elated, but the celebration was short-lived. In what felt like a plot line stolen from an elaborate heist film, the walls of Gunther’s former apartment vanished overnight. A bedroom now sprawled over its intended borders into the hallway and bathroom.

But walls are not made to be moved. It is difficult to imagine the artwork as anything other than rubble. Perhaps some large chunks of dusty plaster. A piece with its flat side painted red. A little girl’s hood or a wolf’s tongue.

* * *

The novel’s protagonist is named “JM.” I’ve never met anyone else who went by that name. Calling him that reminds me to tell the truth. I try to tell the truth, but it’s not enough. I have to dig it out of myself.

* * *

There are four books in my tent. Three of them are religious texts. The fourth is Amos Oz’ The Same Sea. I will read it three times during the month I spend in Mpumelanga, near the Mozambican border. Three years later, on the first day of Gerry Shapiro’s 20th century fiction class, I see Oz on the syllabus. I schedule a meeting with Dr. Shapiro just so I can freak out. He tells me Amos Oz will be in town for a writing seminar, and Shapiro can get me in. I shit bricks.

Shapiro introduces me to Oz a few weeks later. I shake his hand. I tell him about the tent. How I sat on a rock in the African sun, eating boiled peanuts, re-reading his book over and over, he laughs at me.

I am biting my lip about the three other books and his essays on the Israel Palestine problem. I am fumbling with the book in my hand, nervously fidgeting with the dust jacket. Shapiro, who can see me stumbling over my own tongue, suggests that I ask a question.

Panther in the Basement,” I say. “It’s about a kid who is 12 years old in 1948.” And I don’t know why I’m retelling him the plot of his own book.

“Yes.” He smiles at Dr. Shapiro because, I think, no one ever reads Panther in the Basement, and no one asks him about it.

“You were 10 years old in 1948.” I let the question ask itself.

Dr. Shapiro takes my copy of The Same Sea out of my hand, couples it with a pen, and silently passes it to Oz.

There’s a look of disappointment, which fades quickly. He tilts his head back to look at the ceiling — to find the words. I wonder if he is picturing me in a tent. He writes something in my book. He waits for a few seconds. I don’t remember if he started with “My boy,” but he might as well have. “Everything is autobiographical,” he says. “Nothing is confessional.”

* * *

The drive home turns an interrogation. It’s warranted, I suppose. Move too far too fast too many times and you have to start answering questions. Six months ago I crashed on Tim’s couch on the way to Budapest, now we’re driving home from IKEA, having picked up a few items for my California apartment. It’s the return trip he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t buy the story about my visa running out, which is too bad since it’s the best lie I’ve come up with in years.

He presses me on it, so I admit that it’s a lie. “My visa did expire, though,” I tell him. In the Frankfurt airport, an EU border guard shook his head at me and muttered “three months Visa” in a heavy accent. He held me from my flight to New York so he could consult with a superior officer. The other travelers, now indefinitely stalled behind me, shot me a few dirty looks. When the guard returned, he pressed my passport against the glass and yelled, “Next time! Only three months visa!”

Tim laughs at the story, but he still wants to know the truth.

I am silent as the red Subaru carries us along business 80. I check over my shoulder once to look at the unassembled living room in the back seat. Stacks of cardboard boxes. “Team lift” stickers appearing several times on each one. Tim stares blankly at the downtown skyline as we cross the river. It won’t be long now.

* * *

Krakow is covered in snow, but it’s not cold. From the train station it’s a ten minute walk to the banks of the Vistula river. A wide sidewalk extends around the Kazimierz and the southern end of the castle and goes right up to several overpriced hotels with very English names. The Sheraton. The Kossak. The Radisson. There is a Best Western a bit further north. I swear to god. A fucking Best Western.

It’s a tightrope walk of sorts. I stay away from bars and restaurants where I can read the menu, but once I sit down I order Kielbasa and coffee because it’s the only way I know what I’m getting. When I meet Ewa, a cute banker who I chat up in a small coffee house, I tell her “I want to do what the locals do,” and she says, “but we don’t do anything.” I don’t believe her, so she has me over to her apartment where we eat spaghetti, drink wine, and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The Polish broadcaster can’t afford to hire voiceover actors, so it’s one man doing all of the voices. If you listen closely, you can hear the original dialogue in the background. Ewa says you get used to it. We finish the wine and I take a cab back to my hotel, alone. It’s one of the best nights of my life.

A few days later, I get up at 5 in the morning and take a bus to see Auschwitz. It’s an hour and a half away, and I am smashed between a small Japanese man and a woman who spends the entire trip digging through her backpack for books and chapstick and a bottle of water. It takes me 5 hours to walk through the camp. There are hundreds of us on the grounds and no one speaks. When someone asks me about the trip later I will say, “It’s a museum, right? But every display and exhibit is just there to say ‘This happened. This is a horrible, horrible thing and it happened. And it happened here.’”

On the bus ride back to Krakow, I feel like shit. I think seriously about asking Ewa to marry me. I’ve known her for 3 days. Of course I won’t do it, but the particular chemistry of that moment makes it seem like the best idea I’ve ever had. Love is the lie I can afford to tell myself about Ewa. I settle into it.

* * *

The novel is in pieces. It is four MS Word documents and is almost 400 double-spaced pages when I print it out. It is a four-inch thick pile in my filing cabinet as well half of a drawer under my printer. I’ve outlined the next set of revisions for myself by stacking 37 post-it notes in a specific order. Two copies have notes on them. The word “kid gloves” is written in cursive in one of them. I can picture it in my head on the left side of the page. It is underlined.

The last revision stalled when I tried to write the chapter about the first night I missed curfew. I was 12, and surprised to see my mother sitting in a chair by the front door when I came home at sometime after 3AM. She screamed at me. Asked me where I had been. I refused to answer. When I tried to go past her, she grabbed me by the throat, digging her fingernails in around the outline of my trachea. She threw me against the bathroom sink, and I bent the faucet. Two days later I took the 114 to the Skála with my dad and my brother. We never fixed the faucet. None of this is in the novel.

One thing I am sure of, having spent the last five years inside this narrative, is that the fiction and the autobiography of it will always be at war. Wanting to find, to build a space where they can coexist is the battle of each paragraph and sentence. I try to paint it with the thinnest brushes. I lose sleep over it. I should buy a paper shredder. It’s a problem I have. Believing in the sacredness of things. In the wholeness. Never thinking to look in the de

Johnny Huscher

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Johnny is a writer from Sacramento, CA. He tries not to break things. Sometimes that’s the best he can do.

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