Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Hugh Sheehy writes about Design Flaw from Acre Books.
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I learned I was a nonbeliever at age six or seven. I think the experience must be common: one observes a certain lack of feeling. It was summer, dull bright morning, my sisters and I hanging on a mossy tree. I told them what had passed through my mind. One carried the message to my father, who summoned me to the family vehicle, then a sea green Buick Regal, and commenced driving me around the East Side, presumably in search of a solution. We were Catholics, you see. He was furious, speechless, racing down crumbling roads. Only when we reached Nabisco’s concrete silos by the Maumee and halted at a red light did he say, What’s this shit about not believing in God? I had no answer, and neither did he. He turned down another grim street and took me home.
In college a guy kept a black macaw in an enormous steel cage. Whether from love of animal or drive to self-distinction, I never knew. And maybe both came to pass in time. People tried to teach the bird words, primarily obscenities.
My own history with animals is unremarkable for a born Midwesterner. I have loved and adored many cats and dogs, rabbits, fish, crustaceans, reptiles, amphibians, and bugs. It troubles me to think they are dead, except, probably, some of the turtles. I could have been a better keeper. I was never deliberately cruel, but I made mistakes, like the time I caught a dozen or more anoles in a Florida courtyard and stuffed them into an empty gallon jug. I vented it, never guessing the sun would cook the poor creatures while we played at the beach. I was ten or so. The smell, when I found them, was appalling.
From 1997 to 2006, I gave about a year to long drives in the Midwest and Southeast. I saw many strange things destined to go unrecorded, like the early-00s winter when Western Kentucky’s snowpack so crowded the interstates that the spring melt revealed a shocking number of traffic-mangled deer. I often stopped at rest areas and thought nothing of sleeping in my car. One night, traveling to Tuscaloosa from Atlanta, I pulled off inside the Alabama border. A storm had blown branches and leaves across the lot, and the fully illuminated comfort station appeared empty. On the winding downhill exit ramp, I passed a tractor trailer on the shoulder. The driver stepped out of the bushes ahead. He was naked, striding into my little car’s headlights. I drove offroad to avoid him, never braking. I prefer walkable places.
I doubt there’s a single childhood cruelty behind “Amontillado.” There were so many. I was a nerdy kid, despite and also because of my efforts to make people think I was cool. One boy had to choose each game, or else he’d retreat to his room in furious tears, abandoning me to the apologies of his gentle mother. We went to the same college, where he became active in the Young Republicans. I grew up close to Lake Erie but rarely thought of it. I read a lot of horror fiction.
In middle school, I squandered a small fortune in paper route money on Nintendo’s help line. It was one way to cope with comprehensive social failure. I thought the guys who answered and bantered with me were so cool. Now I suppose I know a little better. This was in Ohio, a state famous for producing serial killers. I have worked many jobs over the years.
When our beloved wirehaired pointing griffon died in 2019, we had her cremated. We keep her remains in the living room. This is in the Hudson Valley, a place of spectacular darkness and light. It has long been a region where people fleeing New York City reinvent themselves, and its strange and varied landscapes suggest the ghosts I imagine enchanted Washington Irving two hundred years ago.
For a while, sneakers plugged with disembodied feet kept washing ashore in the Pacific Northwest. My hometown has become foreign to me. A lot of confirmed Catholics have switched to megachurch evangelicalism. The sex scandals are a tempting but ultimately unsatisfying explanation, given the lag-time between the John Jay Report and the broader migration. Toledo’s nightly news programs have preserved their old tone, casual and insomniac. Maybe, in the TV studio, 1992 is still alive, tied to a chair and gagged. I have what I think is an active dream life, though it’s hard to be sure.
One summer I moved to Roanoke Island and to guard lives, I guess, on Cape Hatteras. Really I wanted to get over my fear of the sea. A weaker swimmer than my peers, most of whom were college athletes, I landed a chair on a quiet beach with relatively gentle surf. I didn’t perform a single rescue. Then, on my day off, a guy shot himself in the dunes, and a woman went into labor about two hundred feet from where my coworkers discovered the body. For some reason, another lifeguard rode in her ambulance to the hospital. The Outer Banks are wild. A National Parks Service ranger told about his interest sex parties (Love me, he said, a good gang bang). One morning, on Pea Island, I saw a whale.
After BP Horizon, a photographer in an affected fishing village added me on Facebook, along with hundreds or even thousands of others, in an attempt to broadcast his community’s stories. I’d never heard of him, but I was drawn to his photographs and frequent emotional posts. He seemed angry, understandably, if unable to settle on a coherent narrative. Sometimes Big Oil was the enemy (understandably), sometimes the government (also understandably), and sometimes (probably inevitably) readers like me. The connection didn’t last, him dumping me as abruptly and inexplicably as he’d friended me (probably along with a huge swath of other strangers). For a mercifully brief but nonetheless troubling time, my wife’s former employer stationed her in a town in central Louisiana. White supremacists ran the show; the public high school held a segregated prom. The year was 2005.
Years ago, a woman told me a story about going to New York with some anti-abortion group when she was in high school. The group had a baby doll of such hyperrealistic appearance and heft strangers on the subway thought she was a young mother. She and her friends made it a game; she laughed, proud of fooling those city-slickers, though she also seemed nostalgic for the teenage mom-fantasy. I was living in Atlanta, still in my twenties. One evening a man just released from prison approached a friend and me outside a bar. Naturally, the carceral experience weighed on him. He said he regretted killing a boy, though he must have been a child himself when he’d done it, and that he was trying to figure out what to do with all this new life. He seemed profoundly damaged, terrified, if also hopeful. Little else happened—I think we gave him a few bucks before he continued on his way—but he has stayed with me.
My mother was a child’s librarian, and for years the Toledo Public Library was where I went when my parents couldn’t get a sitter. It was and remains a special place, one of the last relics of the city’s former civic ambitions.
After Brooklyn, before Dutchess County, we lived in Weehawken, New Jersey, a narrow and geographically challenging municipal strip situated on a cliff and stretch of coastal plain across the Hudson from Manhattan. For a small fee and the trouble of completing paperwork, residents could use the exercise room at Stevens Institute of Technology, just down the road in Hoboken. There, my fellow Weehawkenites and I stood out clumsily among the fresh-faced undergraduates not so subtly checking each other out, and in the half year I exercised in that place, several men who’d come to campus as I had told me things about their inner lives I did not wish to know.
I wasn’t looking when apocalypse stories became comfort food. I have often been subjected to fluorescent lighting. I am not extremely online; I’m nonetheless too much there. I have lived in Florida on multiple occasions. I have a dread of tick-borne illness. I am not a utopian and understand human life will always be marked by a struggle with our worst impulses. Iris Murdoch writes, “We are not isolated free choosers, monarchs of all we survey, but benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy.” I think that’s right. Still, I think we could do better.
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Hugh Sheehy is the author of The Invisibles, winner of the 2014 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. His writing has appeared in Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, Cincinnati Review, Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, Rain Taxi, and Post Road. Sheehy teaches at Ramapo College of New Jersey and serves as a mentor in Miami University’s Low Residency MFA Program.