This is The New Yorker’s Fiction Podcast. I’m Deborah Treisman, fiction editor. Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine’s archives to read and discuss. This month, Edgar Bloom, whose fiction has appeared in the magazine since 1986, has chosen ‘A.C.A.,’ by his son, Simon. The story was published in the magazine in 2008.

‘And she’s right, or not, depending on whom you talk to. She thinks there are three kinds of truth: your truth, their truth, and what really happened.’

He joins us from Blue Haven, in New South Wales. Hi, Edgar.

Hi, Deborah.

Edgar, your son wrote two story collections in total. ‘A.C.A.’ was added to his second collection, Newcomers, in the latest reprint. When did you first read Simon’s work?

Not for a while. He often sent it to me. I wanted to read it. What can you say? It’s… embarrassing.

His writing, or your failing to read it?

I was trying to protect him. He seemed obsessed with our past, as if it were a key to a lock. He didn’t get it. You never find your past, just a series of reflections. You think we’re going to give that up? The way we saw things?

Don’t you owe it to him?

As a child, I watched my father through his study window, his back hunched over, and the tick of the typewriter keys. I grew to love the back of his head. Years later I wrote my own stories, thinking just like dad.

He burned his writing long before he died: letters, stories, even old family photos. I stood on the back step, watching smoke fill the backyard until he’d disappeared, a shadow dissolving in the grey. I laughed. He’d been devoured by his work.

You’re avoiding the question.

Which was —

Your son’s truth. Did you owe him at least some sense of closure?

I don’t know that I owed him that. The truth shifts. Look back in time, and you think you have it pinned. But talk to someone else, someone who was there. They might remember something you’d never even considered. Maybe they’ll have forgotten, or were barely there in the first place.

Are you talking about the divorce?

(Pause). No. Why would I be talking about that?

Do you think it affected him? I think there were other factors at play.

Why did you choose this story?

I always thought Simon showed more potential than his early work suggested. Quite explicit, those first few stories.

Still, he wrote, though I rarely saw the results. He stopped showing me his work for a time, until finally he drove up specifically, gave me an early draft of ‘A.C.A..’ I told him it was probably for the scrapheap.

How did he react?

He said very little. After he left I found the manuscript in the bin, a thick black line drawn diagonally through every page. He’s never been one for constructive criticism.

What do you think of the finished version?

Not that it matters now, but it’s much better. It’s a shame that he never brought it back. I would have been impressed. It would have been hard to read of course, but then, maybe that’s the point.

‘A.C.A.’ takes place in Brisbane, Australia. What’s the connection?

Simon stayed there for a few months in 2007. He headed up the coast afterward. He would call me late at night: not to talk about anything specific really, just to chat.

And then?

He called one last time. He asked how I do it, carrying on in the face of so much heartache. I said it takes patience: that he needed to trust that things would get better. He asked if I was proud of him. I said, ‘You know I am. Have I never told you that?’

He said, ‘No, you’ve never told me.’

He needed to get away, but told me not to worry. I said, ‘Wait,’ but he hung up. I called back, but he’d switched off his phone. We haven’t spoken since.

‘A.C.A.’ is about a man who thinks he’s met his soul mate, but instead finds a woman still struggling with her own parental legacy. Is there anything else listeners should know?

Simon was in a strange place when he wrote this. He’d started to pray, group conscience, he said, with people just like him. Quite spiritual, apparently. Like reaching out to a higher self, but it always sounded more like confession. He worked out some things. Or he knew them all along… by then we knew them too.

I’d like to see him. Tell him I’m better. That I got help.

Now here’s Edgar Bloom, reading ‘A.C.A.’

____________________________________________________________________

Amy curls her hair, applying eyeliner with soft strokes. She zips up knee-high boots, fishnets crisscrossing up her legs and under denim cut-offs. Amy’s my girlfriend. Sometimes, I love her.

Always, I love her. You would, too. Such a pretty, fucked-up little thing.

Hey, she says.

Hey. You look nice.

Are you taking the piss?

No, really, you look nice.

She flashes an embarrassed smile and for a second, I think we’re going to be all right.

Let’s stay in.

I can’t.

You know –

No one asked you to come.

And she’s right, or not, depending on whom you’re talking to. She thinks there are three kinds of truth: your truth, their truth, and what really happened.

Amy bites her nails to the skin. She bonds with ‘drinkers’, all of whom, she says, are much more fun than me. I tell her it’s easy to be fun, and harder to be sober.

She rolls her eyes and then necks a Breezer, drinking half the bottle in a single gulp. Chokes. Swallows. Drowns.

She could have been a dancer. One night pulled up late to a park, deserted, with swings rattling in the wind. Music, missing, her, so close, hand lost under her hair and cradling the back of her neck, with her breath warming my chest, eyes closed, feet shifting, forward, back, and she’s crying but happy, and maybe we can just keep dancing.

I’m going.

Go.

Do I get a goodbye kiss?

Are you coming back?

Amy sulks, not for the first time this week, or today, or in the last five minutes. She’s about to leave when her phone buzzes. She swears under her breath.

It’s Dad, she says. They’ve moved him to an earlier flight.

By nine they’re both pleasantly drunk, sliding coasters back and forth across the table. Amy’s father drinks Shiraz from a cask he calls ‘Chateau de Cardboard’, refilling Amy’s glass when it’s still half-full.

He mentions Sri Nisargadatta Mahara’s I Am That as we sit around the kitchen table, and I want to read the book. I hope I’m not that, visiting my daughter once a year, slurring words like a drunken Speak & Spell.

Chin chin!

I don’t drink.

Really?

You ever seen Amy when she’s drunk?

We’ve been drunk together. Is that the same thing?

No.

What’s it like?

Forget it.

Come on. Humour me.

She blanks out, but by the end of the night she’s back, and she’s a little bit worse the next time, and the time after.

She loves you. You think?

She told me. Still, she says all kinds of things… especially when she’s drunk.

The two of them carry on, committed to finishing the cask. I go to bed around ten, and leave them to reminisce, laughter loud, and echoing up the hallway. I’m woken after one by the sound of breaking glass.

I walk into the kitchen. Amy stands in a tiny tee and pyjama bottoms, leans down and rises up, tossing back a sea of curls. Smiles when she sees me.

Dance with me.

Amy.

Don’t Amy me. You, fine sir, are my boyfriend. She raises her hand. May I have this

dance?

Where’s your Dad?

Ssh. Dance with me. She’d never danced with anyone before me; door slammed shut growing up, towel under the door to block in the sound, always, motion, mostly fast, sometimes slower, cradling love, missing brother, mother, sister, knowing one day, someday, she would have to stop. Only now that she has, she’s dizzy, scared, shaking, and it’s all she can do just to be here with me.

We sway, forward, back, slow and slower. She shushes me over and over. I’m silent, but still she shushes. We hold each other up in a Kedron kitchen, dancing in and out of the light.

I walk into the kitchen. Amy stands in a tiny tee and pyjama bottoms, leans down and rises up, tossing back a sea of curls. Smiles when she sees me.

She’s playing a game. It’s about trust, and if I can’t dance with her, past one on a weeknight, why should she trust me? I’m killing her buzz standing still, so she asks me to dance. I’m stiff, rigid. She shushes me over and over, because she knows. She understands, and there’s no point being partners if you can’t be mutually vulnerable. She wants me real: for me, for once, to be honest, frightened, strong, weak, gentle and alive.

I walk into the kitchen. Amy stands in tee and pyjama bottoms, leans down, and rises up, tossing back a sea of curls. Smiles when she sees me, burps, and smiles again.

She holds out her hand, wavers, and steadies herself. Licks her top lip but her tongue stays out a little too long, as if she’s wiping off dust. We dance, kind of sweet, kind of sad, and she trips on her shoe. I want to let her fall, thinking maybe she’ll wake up, recall, or regret, but instead I catch her as she dips.

I want to kiss her, but I know she’ll taste sour, her lips too wet, grasping for me. I’m half-holding, half-supporting her as she drinks me in, pull her up, hold me, please, don’t go, stay, promise, promise. I’m tired, and it’s late, and I have to work tomorrow, and she starts to cry; she’s sorry, so inconsolably sorry, and she’s never going to drink again.

I wake up next to Amy. Her mouth’s half-open, breath drifting in and out, with a light whistle on each inhale. I watch for a moment and stroke a stray strand behind her ear. My fingers linger a second too long. She brushes my hand away, settles, and then starts to snore, both hands gripping at the sheet.

I walk to the living room. A wine bladder lies out of its box, inflated next to two glasses, the bulbs smudged with fingerprints. The screen door’s open, a nearby painting tilted almost diagonally, and a fat, sleeping man splayed over the couch, his pants around his ankles.

Amy calls from the bedroom. I walk back to the doorway, waiting; she opens and closes her eyes, as if adjusting to life.

What happened?

You don’t remember?

She shakes her head.

We danced.

Was I good?

You were great.

Are you taking the piss?

No, really. You were great.

Oh, she says, holding her heart with a sheet clad hand. Come to bed, she says. Just for a bit.

And she’s never there, clouding my mind, on my breath, or wedged deep down in my stomach. And yes, we have our moments, meals, take-out containers piled up in the kitchen bin, and maybe today she’ll come back, but probably not, and it’s growing, this gap, and I don’t know how to close it.

Take a photo and her face will blur. Miss her call, the machine, just voices in the background, thinking is that her? Does she even know that she dialled our number?

Come to bed.

I close my eyes, breathe, slow steps, and she’s close, I can tell. Feel her face, hear her voice, breaking with emotion, and it’s as if she’s with me, breathing, feeling, frightened, weak, gentle and alive.

____________________________________________________________________

That was Edgar Bloom, reading ‘A.C.A.,’ by his son Simon. Edgar, there’s a sense of resignation throughout this story. Knowing something’s changed. Wishing he could help her. But she’s gone.

Still he tried. It’s a bit sad.

He chose to be there.

True, but it’s an old pattern. He didn’t choose his childhood.

It was a long time ago.

Frame it how you like, Deborah. It still hurts.

Do you think Amy was real?

As real as any piece of fiction. Did Simon do her justice? That I can’t say.

To know her well, I guess you’d have to love her, kiss her, hands held past eleven on a weeknight; writing words of faith and devotion on butcher paper. Believe for a second that you’re meant to be there: that you’re making a difference, and she wants to get better… leaving when you have to. Never look back, or if you do, know there’s nothing there, not anymore.

What can we take from ‘A.C.A.,’ given it was Simon’s last published work? Do you know where he is now?

I get the odd call, strangers mostly. Say they saw him at a hostel, headphones on and an open notebook up the back of a bus.

He’s working through it, I guess. Doesn’t drink. Why would you? Knowing what he knows?

What do you mean?

It’s one day at a time. Hoping. Praying. Not to God, necessarily ’cause only God knows if he’s listening.

You have to believe… but it’s hard. That’s what I mean.

And yet –

This is a story, Deborah. But what if it wasn’t? What if this were your son? Or your father? What if it were you? What would you do?