Well Read online

  PRAISE FOR Well

  “Matthew McIntosh is the real thing—a tremendously gifted and supple prose hand, recounting all manner of human distress and extremity in an assured and generous voice, balancing, as all honest practitioners of the fictional art must, the delicately pitched forces of fate, remorse and grace.

  The interlocking vignettes that make up Well … revolve around how Federal Way’s forgotten citizens strain to carve out intelligible destinies for themselves against a built environment that, down to its most basic details, denies any quarter to such outmoded fantasy.

  [His] characters are not, as are so many of their counterparts in postmodern fiction, appointed to feel bad in pat and ambient exercises of self-disarming humiliation. They are, rather, tugging insistently at questions that stretch far beyond the horizons of Federal Way, and indeed of their lives at large. It’s heartening that an author as young as McIntosh would be wise enough to grant his creations such vulnerability and spiritual dignity. [Well] is an astonishingly sharp and satisfying debut.” Christopher Lehmann, THE WASHINGTON POST]

  “The twenty-six-year-old has burst onto the national literary scene with a dazzling debut, where low-rent voices and dispirited lives capture the ennui of these troubling times with stark, unadorned prose. These are students at backwater colleges, workers in taverns, print shops, warehouses, construction sites, accounts departments doing data entry. These are people struggling to just exist and get by as best they can, but McIntosh manages to convey their inner lives without condescension or irony. This is a novel in which a young writer of unflinching honesty and uncommon maturity is examining important questions about life, death and meaning. Well is an indelible debut portrait of disaffection and disillusion by a writer of great promise.” John Marshall, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER]

  “Well is pitch-perfect… a grim painful world filled with the mystery of life, both in its randomness, chaos and order, and in its preciousness, its vulnerable existence. Together, McIntosh’s compassion for his characters and his relentless reportage of their failings test both our capacity to care and our tolerance. [He] has a rare talent for showing us how to read in a new way…. I’m thankful for Matthew McIntosh. He makes no apologies.” Michael V. Smith, GLOBE AND MAIL]

  “[A] bruising novel of existential despair. In a series of vignettes and clipped bios, he renders the facts that brought them there with an acute ear for each character’s voice and the tragic sense of the ineffable.” THE VILLAGE VOICE]

  “[An] unusual, dark debut novel with an ensemble cast. The sustained glide from voice to voice is virtuosic, and the writing is dogged… it digs through the clichés and the usual inarticulateness of the stories people tell in bars and grocery store lines; and it stumbles on diamonds in the rough everywhere. McIntosh is only twenty-six, but he is already an artful registrar of the heart’s lower frequencies.” PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (starred review)]

  “McIntosh’s bold confection of literary styles … prove him a gifted new chronicler of quiet desperation.” NERVE.COM]

  “Daringly structured … McIntosh shows a remarkable facility for capturing different voices, the way people speak and think in their most private moments.” THE BALTIMORE SUN]

  “This really is fiction of the highest order. Parts of it are so vivid that in later life, you might remember bits and think that you lived them.” BIG ISSUE IN THE NORTH]

  “Individual lives are suddenly caught in the light, burn brightly and are gone again. A remarkable first novel.” METRO LONDON]

  “[This] panoramic, sweeping, vastly ambitious debut novel… presents a long cycle of chapters, some two pages long, some a dozen, scores of narrators cutting in and out, speaking as little as a few lines and then vanishing forever. Reading this book is like walking through a crowd, catching snippets of conversation, glimpses into other lives. This astonishing book is about: compassion and love, suffering and redemption. And by the end, you’re wrung out and bewildered, having been dragged through something huge, something miraculous, punch drunk on all the love and squalor.” UNCUT]

  “The humanity of the people sings off the page. They are not characters in a book, but rather living beings with all the hopes, dreams, fears, loves, hates, illusions and rationalizations that are part of the human dilemma. This book is a real joy to experience… and it is an experience, a wonderfully human experience. A book that still resonates in my heart.” Hubert Selby, Jr., author of LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN]

  www.wellbook.com]

  WELL

  Matthew McIntosh

  Copyright © 2003 by Matthew McIntosh

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  “Fishboy” previously appeared in an altered form in Playboy.

  “Chicken” first appeared in Ploughshares.

  “Looking Out For Your Own” first appeared in Puerto del Sol.

  “Grace (So long! Part II)” first appeared as “grace” in a hand-set letterpressed edition of nine copies (state 1) and thirty (state 2), published by Well Known Press.

  The phrase “Though occasionally glaring or violent, modern color is on the whole eminently somber” is borrowed wholly out of context from John Ruskin’s Modern PaintersIII (1856). Spellings have been Americanized.

  The affirmations on pages 31–32 were taken from a now-defunct Web site, which did not name the original sources. Other current sites use similar and often identical affirmations, and likewise don’t name sources. I assume they are part of the public domain.

  Lyrics on page 32 (“Perhaps love is like a resting place…”) are from “Perhaps Love” by John Denver. Copyright © 1980 Cherry Lane Music.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST GROVE PRESS PAPERBACK EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McIntosh, Matthew.

  Well / Matthew McIntosh.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9945-4

  1. Working class—Fiction. 2. Seattle (Wash.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3613.C539W45 2003

  813′.6—dc21 2002044687

  Design by Erin Kincaid and Matthew McIntosh

  Set in Adobe Trump Medieval and Gill Sans

  Grove Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  for Erin

  CONTENTS

  IT’S TAKING SO DAMN LONG TO GET HERE (I)

  Maybe not always, but a lot of the time. It doesn’t matter where I actually am, it’s all the same. For instance, I could be walking to the mailbox or driving in to work and I will get this thing—not a picture but a sort of perception, this sort of sense, in the same way you imagine the shapes of the walls and the furniture when you’re walking through a familiar dark room, that’s how it is…

  BURLESQUE

  IT’S TAKING SO DAMN LONG TO GET HERE (II)

  We had this thing where I’d be Russia and she’d be the States and she’d put on her blue bathing suit top and her red bottoms—and I’d put on this red cape and this pair of yellow boxers—we’d both be really loaded by this point—we’d be mixing our chemicals let’s just say…

  MODERN COLOR / MODERN LOVE

  IT’S TAKING SO DAMN LONG TO GET HERE (III)

  Somebody passed me a gas mask and I put it on. I te
nd to get claustrophobic so I wasn’t really into wearing shit like that on my face, but I put it on anyway and someone put a joint up to the part where the filter would go—they’d unscrewed it. I think they have better ones nowadays, this one these people got at a junk store. But somebody puts a joint up to that part and I start breathing in…

  CHICKEN

  IT’S TAKING SO DAMN LONG TO GET HERE (IV)

  I struck up a conversation with one of the older guys, a contractor—I’d seen his truck outside, a huge white beast with his name and face painted on the side. We drank and laughed and got to know each other a little. For some reason I asked him if he’d been in the War, Vietnam, and he said, No, I had a high number. I didn’t have to worry about that shit, he said. I stayed here and took care of all the pussy…

  VITALITY:

  SPAREMAN

  DAMAGE

  ACHE

  EVERYONE IN THE WORLD

  MODERN COLOR NO. 20

  THEY ALL WAIT FOR YOU (SO LONG, PART I)

  INTRODUCING…

  You didn’t know what to say to something like that. But I wasn’t surprised. I’d known him since we were kids. I just moved on to the next thing. He was living then in Sea-Tac and wanted to get together sometime—he wanted to start a band—and when it was his stop, he rang the bell and stood up…

  ONE MORE

  GUNMAN

  IT’S TAKING SO DAMN LONG TO GET HERE (V)

  Then there was nothing. A dial tone. I’d hung up on her. The first time I called back it went to her voice mail. So I hung up. Then I called right back and it started ringing but then nothing—I thought she answered it but just wasn’t going to say anything—you know, the silent treatment. I said, I can hear you. I know you’re there. But I couldn’t and I didn’t…

  IT’S TAKING SO DAMN LONG TO GET HERE (VI)

  I’m walking out the door and I turn around and I wave bye for some reason, and I don’t even know who I’m waving to, I mean I don’t know now, and I probably didn’t know then, and one thing I notice as I’m walking away is the lawn could really use some watering because all that’s left is practically dirt, and when I walk down the walk, dust and dirt go swirling up in the air around where the grass should be, which is another weird thing…

  FISHBOY

  GRACE (SO LONG! PART II)

  IT’S TAKING SO DAMN LONG TO GET HERE (VII)

  If I had to try and make some sense out of it I guess I would have to say that I worry I’m going to be waiting so long I’ll forget what I’m waiting for. Does that makes sense? You worry you’ll forget what you’re waiting for and then you worry one day you’ll forget that you are waiting for anything at all. Maybe you’ll get up one day and go to work, and after work you’ll come home and sit down in front of the TV, for instance. Or the radio or whatever. And you turn the volume down because all of a sudden you have the sense that something’s slipped your mind…

  LOOKING OUT FOR YOUR OWN

  THOUGH OCCASIONALLY GLARING OR VIOLENT, MODERN COLOR IS ON THE WHOLE EMINENTLY SOMBER: THE BORDER

  ALL IS WELL

  And surely I am with you always,

  to the very end of the age.

  MATTHEW 28:20

  IT’S TAKING SO DAMN LONG TO GET HERE (I)

  Maybe not always, but a lot of the time. It doesn’t matter where I actually am, it’s all the same. For instance, I could be walking to the mailbox or driving in to work and I will get this thing—not a picture but a sort of perception, this sort of sense, in the same way you imagine the shapes of the walls and the furniture when you’re walking through a familiar dark room, that’s how it is—and I am always struck with the perception that I’m there, at the bottom of a well. And I’ve never even seen a well that I can remember, except for on TV and in movies, but I’ve always felt this way. Meaning, I’ve felt this way about the well since childhood. Or maybe it didn’t happen until adolescence, but there I am. I feel that way right now, I really do. I mean, I’m looking into your face right now, but somewhere deeper, somewhere behind it all, I could swear that I’m at the bottom of the well. That sounds crazy, doesn’t it? My husband tells me I have a constant look of near-absolute abandonment on my face. He says I wear that expression all the time.

  So I was at the grocery store the other day—this is what I was supposed to be getting at—I’m sorry, I’ve never been good at getting to the point—I was in line at the grocery store and for some reason I was feeling particularly at ease with myself, and with my situation, the world on this particular day was feeling very adequate, you know, everything was good. For some reason I was looking up at the beams and through the skylight—it was one of those enormous warehouse grocery stores that are springing up all over the place—actually, I think this was the reason: I was contemplating all the ways in which the world changes; or not all the ways it changes, but more specifically, I was contemplating this one particular way that it was changing. I was focusing on the skylight and I was thinking of a time where it was an unheard of thing to have a skylight in a grocery store, not unheard of in a bad sense, just in an unheard of sense; it’s just that nobody’d thought to do it at the time. Why are grocery stores so goddamn big today? Do you know? Are we eating more? Are we all getting fatter? I mean some of these places…

  Anyway, I guess I was staring up at the skylight—I must have been doing it for a long time—and remember, I’m happy, I really am, I’m having a good day up to this point—and the little thing ringing me up, she all of a sudden stops what she’s doing, and she takes hold of my arm, and she says, “Ma’am, are you all right? Do you need me to call someone?”

  Do I need her to call someone? I didn’t know what to say. What would you say? Is there a proper way to answer a question like that? It wasn’t the question she asked that was so shocking, of course, but that I’d been so damn happy when she’d asked the question. I’d been really happy. I hadn’t been that happy in a long time. Jesus, I don’t even know what I was so damn happy about, but I was happy. I said I was fine, a little rudely, probably, and I wrote the check and left the store. I drove home and sat out front in the car for probably twenty minutes, until my daughter came out and asked me what I was doing, and how long I was going to stay in there.

  BURLESQUE

  Adda put down her nail file and lay back on the bed.

  Len, saving one last hit in the bottom of the bowl, exhaled, and put the pipe down. Quietly, he walked to the bedroom door, stood outside and listened for her. Then, hearing nothing, he left, shutting the apartment door behind him quietly, then down the hall to the fire escape, down the stairs and through the alley behind the strip club [inside of which the girls were downstairs getting dressed, the bartender was leaning across the bar joking with the DJ, the manager vacuumed the red walk-up carpet, the waitress was beating the dust out of a couch cushion with her fist, the bouncer sat on his stool rearranging his tie, waiting to hear the word and turn the sign on to say: OPEN], and across the parking lot to the market. He nodded to the old Asian man behind the counter and picked up another six-pack from the cooler. The game had just started and the Asian man was watching it on a small TV behind the counter.

  We’re not doing so well, Len said, and the Asian man said,

  No, we are not.

  We’re not like we used to be.

  No, the man said. Not like nineteen ninety-six.

  I miss Kemp.

  Yes.

  That was the team that could have won a championship. We lose tonight we won’t even make the playoffs.

  But if we do make the playoffs, the man said, I think we will do something special.

  Len agreed. In their hearts, they were optimistic people.

  They said goodbye and Len walked back towards the apartment with his beer.

  Adda was the girl that he wanted: beautiful, smart—smarter than him, though he wouldn’t admit it. The best lay he’d ever had. Adda did things to him he could never tell anyone.

  Someday he hoped to start his own m
arble and tile business and marry her and build her a nice house. Retire by forty. A couple rugrats. He wanted to treat her good. He never had much money but he always paid for everything. He paid for the weed, he bought her wine coolers, he took her out and picked up the check. It made him feel good.

  But now she’d told him she was leaving in the morning to visit her fiancé in California who wanted her back. She said she owed it to the guy to give him a week.

  She’d been with R since she was fifteen and then a few months ago he’d left Federal Way, asking her to come, but she told him she couldn’t; she was going to dental hygienist school, she said she wanted to be certified. But that wasn’t the real reason—she hated looking into people’s mouths and she quit soon after he left, got a job answering phones at a lawyer’s office in Seattle. The real reason was it was occurring to her then that she didn’t know if she really loved R.

  When she’d told Len she was leaving and why, he’d said, You don’t owe him nothing.

  You don’t know what you’re talking about.

  I don’t know what I’m talking about?

  You’ve never been with someone that long. You don’t know what it’s like.

  I don’t give a shit what it’s like.

  At first, when they’d gotten together, Len hadn’t cared that she had a fiancé or that the guy had money or that he was taller than Len and better-looking from the picture he’d seen in Adda’s wallet. What did it matter to him? What did she matter to him back then? He was just fucking some dude’s girlfriend. It turned him on. He used to imagine the guy opening the bedroom door while Adda was going down on him, he imagined himself saying something smart like: She insists on doing this after every meal. It didn’t matter then. But sometime over the past four months, Adda had turned into his girl and he’d started locking the door, not wanting to give her back.