Blue Walls Falling Down

An Excerpt from Blue Walls Falling Down: A Novel

Stella Tęsknota was ready to marry Blake Yourrick, the troubled if earnest protagonist of Infinite Regress. In this stand-alone novel (and loose sequel), set after Blake abruptly—and inexplicably—breaks off their engagement, Stella throws herself into a tough South Chicago teaching assignment. There she meets Peter Clavier (P.C.), a psychologist-activist whose uncle—a pastor—has long prophesied for Peter a future of otherworldly greatness. As Stella draws out Peter’s past, the novel follows P.C.’s trajectory from a Cabrini-Green childhood to surreal stardom in the orbit of underwritten radical politics.

When his boss offers Peter a marquee microphone and he moves to D.C., Stella returns home to Milwaukee in search of steady ground. She finds her self-sacrificing father hosting basement meetings that mix nostalgia and conspiracy. In the confluence of comfort and catastrophe, Stella is invited to wager on faith.

Written with a style and sensibility that have been compared to David Foster Wallace and Dostoevsky, James Joyce and Saul Bellow, Blue Walls Falling Down chronicles the eternal questions that agitate our subterranean frequencies and demand more than the human spirit can give or answer alone. 

In the excerpt below, Stella and Peter converse during their first date.

Stella wiped clean her lip and jutted her chin at him, signaling the sweet tea flecks of sugar that had stuck there like a crust of ocean salt left on the shore at low tide. 

Peter said, “Well, let’s move from one forbidden topic—religion—to another, just to test the temperature of the waters between the two shining seas. Now I’m of two minds. George Washington makes me uneasy. Owned slaves but freed them in his will. Emancipate but only after the ease needed to be a great man carried him on its back like a mule. Oh yes, he enjoyed the moral nuances of heartache at the awful thought of selling slaves separately so that families would be chopped and parted like butcher’s meat. That luxury of pain in a delicate but slack conscience. But—and so when I use his face to purchase a few rounds of a black man’s music—alright, okay, so Miles had a white pianist, but, forgive me, you get where I’m going? When I use his face to make that music play, should I be disgraced by the use of such presidential power or relieved that I’ve rid us of these dizzying faces—one, two theefourfivesixseven, Oh man! Infinite Washingtons. How should I square that sum?”

“I can’t tell,” she said, “if you’re joking. The way you say it’s meant for laughter but what you say is vexed and serious.”

“Who are you?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean there’re certain things we’re not supposed to say. But you don’t seem confined by those boundaries.”

“They, I, they hound me like crazy, but somehow I can’t—settle—for safety that comes in the form of a straitjacket.”

“Shit! You are my kind of woman.” She pressed her sternum and felt with her pinky the blouse seam. Forty felt close to losing fertility. Sometimes she was sure she was past her time but then the blood would come again. “Now tell me,” he started in earnest, then stopped. “Wait, one second”—he rose, his long legs radiating energy as he ducked under the low ceiling that housed the bronzed potbelly jukebox. Closing his eyes, he dropped the coins in the slot that split the gargoyle mouth, beneath the snout of the ironwork stove, and pressed a code that seemed perfectly familiar, which set the speakers above them crackling, then the ivory keys unfurled like tiptoes trying the waters before they ran down the ascending pier and dove into the frigid liquid and swam, frenzied, as much to keep warm as to get to the other side, where they entered a lighthouse with a wood-crackling fireplace which she snuggled up close to as he came back and asked, “Are you? I mean, who—”

As the syncopation propelled the saxophone, she spoke louder than she liked to in order to be heard over the bluesy croon that massaged her back. For the first time in months she went slack, but the relaxation made her feel nervous. She sipped water, sipped more, and smiled into his full moon eyes, which, when lidded, matched the crescent of her mouth. She told him her life had been extraordinarily ordinary, how before she’d worked as a florist for ten years she took five years to finish two university degrees—she’d double-majored in math and ancient literature—with two theses, on Euclid and Greek tragedy. The exposition was a neat outline, a suddenly nervous and uptight narration over a first course of sweet tea that she sipped in pretense because sugar made her sick—and he saw this and asked the waitress for a bitter cup, to the sound of Stella’s “Coming right up!” She spoke longer than intended of Nonna—who, you just had to meet her, and spelled, poorly, with apologies, with what Nonna’s best friend Mary called “palaver,” a dumbed-down rendering of the damned debacle with Blake, volunteering unconvincing upswings at the ends of parts irredeemably sad.

When they finished the steam-shrouded jambalaya and ate two packs of oyster crackers, cracking them open as if one could house a pearl, after three rounds of bitter and sweet drinks and a detour to the bathrooms, he asked if she needed to be leaving, and she said “I thought we were only now starting, darling”—and the dare was insane but she made it anyway and couldn’t press delete, and the tea seemed liquored but was possessed of no poison.

He raised his hand—more a fist, tilted back with two fingers up, nothing like the peace sign he had mocked earlier—and asked the waitress for a comfortable table that could be conveniently occupied for a couple of hours. The waitress obliged. Soon they were sitting, on the same side, all alone at an unused zinc counter that stretched in front of the defunct juke box in cushioned bar chairs with backs that let customers tip back and be caught, spun the same as carnival fun.

“So, you’re slumming it?” he smiled. His voice was sharp, like the question was a test more than a curious line of inquiry.

“Pretty fancy lighting for a slum. Apartment’s got heat and running water. Relative.”

She bent her right elbow at an awkward angle and pulled at the long chandelier earring that threw back the room’s blue illumination like a single working headlight in a downpour. The room was too dark. She leaned against the wall and adjusted the bulbs, feeding the currents all their watts could take. When the room’s faces found her tampering there without an explanation, she pretended to be searching for something on the floor.

He joined her, generously, pointing at nothing—which she promptly picked up. Reversing the dial of the dimmer switch, she restored the reassuring darkness, strangely calmed, herself, by its return. Too many conversations came back out of tune, rising and converging in polite competition to remain private and yet be heard. Stella laughed.

“I mean,” he pursued, elevating his thickened eyebrows in playful arcs, “unless you plan to take up residence here permanently. How many teachers I’ve seen flee after the first year. Not that I—I mean, it’s hard, practically happy dumb mule-like, to keep coming back after you see how little you can really do in spite of spending yourself so . . . Meaning I’m sympathetic, but it also makes for a problem that’s systemic. You think the merry-go-round of teachers helps these kids whose nights and days are devoid of anything looking like stability?”

“I know the drill. I’m not cut out. I’m points and lines and Antigone and Creon—a tragedy waiting to happen to my kids. This’ll be my last year, actually.” Actually she had not decided until now.

“Wait—where you going?”

“I’ll let you know.”

Go, she told herself. Leave now, and she repeated this command as he continued his critiques. But she could not put one foot in front of the other.

“My admiration for you just grew. Must be hard to let go of that image you had of yourself when you entered the classroom.” A bottle popped behind the counter. Glass crashed across the floor. She missed what he said except “the work we need is maybe not so much be the change you want to see but figure out who you are, first. I hate to cite Gandhi, too much a cliché, but if I recall the man took his time in deep self-scrutiny before he decided he was fit for the work he set out to do. My Uncle Cedric was fond of saying the same in another way, a better, more beautiful: ‘And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple. For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him, Saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish.’” 

Before his compliment her headache had flashed back, the headache that had peaked as the children shouted and ran at recess. As she pictured those little bodies—launching a half-flattened kickball over the fence to a chorus of cheers and shrieks, bulletproof glass circling the perimeter, disrupting the illusion of openness and ease given by the chain-link fence—a blood rush drowned out the migraine’s flicker. She found his eyes and fixed hers there.

He winced for a breath, his furrow assuming the angular bent her headaches gave her eyebrows, startled by the boldness of a glare she gave to him unknowingly. After she nodded to his “You okay?” he resorted, now, to memorized statistics spouted like precious verses that could crack open the meaning of life, cited the names of peer-reviewed articles she should really—no, she needed—to read.

“Four thousand homicides in my city of Chicago. Any hypotheses on how many of that number have a darker skin color? Vast majority not motivated by money. Mayor’s nonsense about poverty. Take the spirit of oppression out of the equation. The soul of it.”

“The psyche, in the ancient sense,” she dared.

“I do declare you are my kind of woman! The shtick of how all of this is talked about makes me sick. Ain’t gonna work: wrestlings with the history we’ve shared are either dismissed as resentment politics or cheap blame for crimes committed centuries past. It’s not—I could lend you a book, what’s its name?—all about white indentured servants, human cargo. But if oppression isn’t essentially bound to color, we can’t—c’mon—act colorblind either . . . ”

Her father had used some of the same questions and figures he cited during their last hard conversation.

“You’re not a child,” Dad had said. “Stella.”

“I’m not a child. Maybe you missed that because I got stuck in stasis for over a decade. I’m more than halfway to a natural death. Do you happen to know who I am, I wonder.”

“ . . . ”

“Hello?”

“I thought you hung up.”

“You ought to hang your head, Dad.” She had never dared to be so bold and regretted what she said for days before she sent him a short letter that said I’m sorry. I meant what I said but I said it badly.

Dad had been calling nearly daily to be sure she was alive, was weekly mailing her printouts of jobs for which she’d be suited, highlighting the salaries with a dry green marker (and yes they easily surpassed her current wages), Love you Stella underlined and signed in his illegible, gentle hand.

When P.C. fell into his arguments he set off a tingle in her spine—she saw him bent like the linebackers who ran perpetually across the TV screen of her childhood Sundays and holidays—and again she was scared and excited by such intensity: “What Wretched taught me was exploitation—the rationalized excuse to harm a fellow human is not essentially a matter of race. Follow me. It can be, has been, fixed on color in a way that makes a people so subject that they can’t shake the dominance for centuries. But any number of nameless nobodies can become the source of leisure for their rulers. Sub-minimum wage plus the spirit of oppression.” She wanted him to define that spirit but followed, running behind, his arguments, which shattered, again and again, her known lines. When any of the statistics he could conjure were not without good-faith counterpoints—his mind was a switchback dialectic that made him argue aloud with himself—she took it all in like the gravy cooked down with a patient simmer that filled and spilled over her mashed potatoes. She yearned to learn all he had to tell, to know him long enough to test the ideas. She felt bad for him when he started to sound lifeless—long day, I’d better end it—and groped for talking points dragged up from up polls. But once he finished the statistics, she saw, it was as if he was cleansed like the mythical Roman who visited his vomitorium daily and left feeling shipshape. He sat up straight and made, with his fingers, the timeout symbol and then stayed silent, rubbing his cheeks with a cramped fist. “Since I first heard it said, ‘History’s what hurts,’ made an indelible impression on me. But now that line seems overdetermined. “History’s not a nightmare nor a sweet dream. There’s another choice: the insomniac who’s never caught off guard at the midnight hour.”

“We could claim we’re so different we’re past all but sympathies. But on a low level, where the caricatures don’t obscure—you and me are the same. Don’t get me wrong.” She certainly had. She steeled her nerves and then let her shoulders down. “More, we’re the same as everybody like us. Indistinguishable one from another, if you look at the pattern from far enough away (which, God, both clarifies and obscures). Not happy with that state of things. This state. Not happy staying unknown.” No. Ridiculous: her hermit soul. But the gesture was sweet and even cute in its clumsy grasping after common ground. “A gnawing need to be looked at by many—a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand? For me it was . . . millions. Millions. Look at that greed in my soul. You think I’m just a victim, think again.”

Her eyes, finding his, narrowed, as if his admission dwarfed their significance.

If she stared at him long enough she could surprise him, sate his appetite with one pair of eyes. Would he see her, then? And could she cease to care if, in fact, he failed to see her, then? And if he helped her make a child—what then? That mind, bringing whatever was worth it from her mind. The music of his voice. That mouth’s curves. His. His mind. Not reasons, really? Not things she could say, aloud, to explain to Mom and Dad. Not a reason, right, but she loved the angle of repose that went from his mouth edge to the tip of his nose. The perfect line. Madness. The haste of her thoughts made her blush.

“Now I, I’m the first to confess that I was the worst of all. Never underestimate the human being's capacity for pandering to celebrity, even of the small-pond variety. Cleaving to a Name’s aura. But, mind you, behind that Name! A tangle of pettiness, pomposity, self-importance. I’ve met others along the way who got this crazy, inimitable knack at tilting a half-truth this way or that to approximate a pleasing yes or eke, just barely, a frightened no, while also saying—without saying—f-off. While also signaling, with a flat, amused smile, ‘Man, I got thoughts that would give you a heart attack, but I recognize that reality, for you, is drip-fed in meted-out increments that will never accrue or increase in frequency to the point of insomnia, let alone indigestion.’”

Stella stopped, bowed, and gave him her best flat and amused smile.

“Isn’t that just manners? I mean, without them, without some measure of—”

“Dissimulation—”

“Consideration that all can’t be said at once—we’re not God, we can neither say it nor take it.”

Peter pulled out a piece of gum and, gnashing the white strip between his teeth, awkwardly turned to her and offered her one of the thin aluminum columns. It felt warm in her fingers and she pocketed the silver just as it reflected a condescending gleam, an inanimate wink. She waited for him to speak, but he censored himself with an agitated stubbornness. Streetlights wore short golden skirts, sharp angles that tried to hide the rounded wombs she could see swelling. She wanted the light to reach down farther. To cover the whole long pole legs. She who was ready to follow him through the doorsill of his bedroom. She was not her Nonna’s child anymore.

“Maybe. Manners. Never thought of it that way.” Then, as if recovering from local anesthesia, he recovered his former tack. “But if manners may be more than the lubrication that whets power’s wheels, they certainly are mostly used to hustle and climb. The self-made slave can’t help facing this truth from time to time, but it's easier to keep pandering than to leave into the long empty hallway that leads away from the Big Party.” He was looking straight ahead down the long empty hallway but she, following him, could not see it. “Because it took so long—so much of your life . . . at least for me, how hard it could be to walk away from the Big Party? You see?”

“Please,” she said. “I want to. Please.”

“Man I could confess to you, something there is about you. Thank you, Stella.” Flattery a flat-out impossibility. The wet globes of his eyes. Her face burned as her lips lightly parted, her tongue barely touching her teeth. Her cycle’s clock throbbing louder and louder. She wanted to. Please. I want you.

“I used to fix like a desperate homing device—dressing desperation in the fineries of confidence—on whoever, with power, showed the slightest sympathy to some cause célèbre I cared for. It’s a fact most everyone’s familiar with, at least everyone who’s climbed his way back from a future of mass, anonymous, grass-covered graves and arrived where he started ready to make a splash, bent on leaving a mark—meaning something more than that nightmare version of his future where all he is is a nameless nobody. Refusing to see that future come to be, he throws himself—abandoned—into the ambition. And with each climbed rung of the ladder he can point to his merits even though it’s the case that what makes a man is less his mind or merits or money than the second sense. ’Cause if your orbit, your wheel, has run, for a time, close to the top, you know your ascent is totally dependent on a second sense—a subtle antenna—that can identify who has the sovereignty, the exact kind of sway you need to be lifted off your pleading knees, someone who can find some common ground you can cling to, who can make your dependence feel like an alliance, who can justify a pound of self-interest with a few pennies’ worth of alms. So after all that lackeying, a decade of banal pandering and daily flattering in so many minor gestures, you forget that you’re doing what would have once shamed you, and all the humiliations you have to swallow and all the conscience pricks you have to thimble: you think you itching to leave when you wake up and find yourself the naked emperor at the center?  I been at the center of that Party—the honored guest, hands held by ladies who smiled and nodded and had no idea that my politics, then, would have them stripped of power and of wealth, have them scrubbing the basement bathroom like the maids they hire twice a week with a husband’s big checks. Standing at the center so long I forgot what it felt like to be banished to the margins. Where people not only introduce you to others with a ‘Surely you’ve heard of,’ this constant buzz of sycophantic frequencies and under it, all the while, the low-level pleasure of half the room’s on-looking eyes watching and waiting for your wit, your attention, some indulging in that strange pleasure of standing there longer the more you ignore them, never making eye contact exactly, they may even put a paw on your shoulder, but maybe they just know you see them there waiting in the periphery, waiting like little boys in the wings, desperate for the spare change of your conversation. And you can’t help being disgusted, frankly, by the temperature of their desperation. Sigh. Doing the little boys a service by leavin’ ‘em standin’ there. Shit.

“But, take it from one who knows, you stand at that center of attention for so long and you start watching what you say. Simple self-censorship, but it spreads through the bloodstream until every synapse in that widely praised brain is chained to some consciousness of how you’ll come off, and who could misinterpret or twist this claim or straightforward contention. And so—for me—it was necessary, finally, to leave that Party and walk the long hallway that leads to what feels by comparison like the faded half-lit ghost world of utter insignificance. How easy it was to have opinions formed for me, comparatively, ready-made by a servile self-censor saving me from hard-won thought. And same for the fawning ones. Took my every opinion piece for inspired opinion, sage. Shit. It’s hard for both parties to part from the Party, to walk away in opposite directions down the two long hallways that lead to loneliness.”

Joshua Hren is founder of Wiseblood Books and co-founder of the MFA at the University of St. Thomas. He regularly publishes essays and poems in such journals as The Los Angeles Review of Books and First Things, America, National Review, Public Discourse, and The Hedgehog Review. Joshua is the author of ten books, including the novel Infinite Regress; the short story collections This Our Exile and In the Wine Press; the book of poems Last Things, First Things, & Other Lost Causes; How to Read (and Write) Like a Catholic; Contemplative Realism; and (forthcoming)  More than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature.