If It Bleeds

“‘What about you, Craig?’ Dad murmured. ‘Want a last look, or are you good?’

I wanted more than that, but I couldn’t tell him. The same way I couldn’t tell him how bad I felt. It had come home to me now. It didn’t happen while I was reading the scripture, as I’d read so many other things for him, but while I was sitting and looking at his nose sticking up. Realizing that his coffin was a ship, and it was going to take him on his final voyage. One that went down into the dark. I wanted to cry, and I did cry, but later, in private. I sure didn’t want to do it here, among strangers.

‘Yes, but I want to be at the end of the line. I want to be last.’”

At Mr. Harrigan’s funeral, Craig realizes the intimacy of his friendship with the old tycoon. His reluctance to share how he really feels with his father foreshadows his later decision to share Kenny Yanko’s bullying with Mr. Harrigan, but not with his father and the other adults around him.

“Children believe their entire worlds revolve around them. That sense of being at the center of everything usually starts to fade by the time you’re twenty or so, but you’re a long way from that.”

In this passage, Ms. Hargensen delivers a crucial insight that resonates with the narrative frame around the novella. Because the story is being narrated by an adult Craig looking back on his childhood, the inclusion of this observation points to Craig’s understanding of his limited perspective as a child. This implies that as an adult narrator, Craig has grown out of the perspective that Ms. Hargensen describes.

“When I powered up the phone, I saw I had a text message from pirateking1. I tapped with a trembling finger to open it and read this: C C C sT

[…]

I knew what that message meant: Craig stop.

Because I was hurting him, or because I was hurting myself?

I decided that in the end it didn’t matter.”

In this passage, which depicts the emotional climax of the novella, Craig tries to interpret the meaning of Mr. Harrigan’s final incoherent message to him. Key to this moment is the subtext of Craig’s grief, which has driven him to assign meaning to the late tycoon’s messages, even when they make little sense. Craig now realizes that his futile speculations are a final manifestation of his grief, which he needs to let go of to move forward with his life.

“I don’t know for sure if everyone is addicted to those high-tech Del Monte cans, but I know that I am, and I know Mr. Harrigan was. It’s why I slipped it into his pocket that day. In the twenty-first century, I think our phones are how we are wedded to the world. If so, it’s probably a bad marriage.

Or maybe not. After what happened to Yanko and Whitmore, and after that last text message from pirateking1, there are a great many things I’m not sure of. Reality itself, for a start. I do know two things, however, and they are as solid as New England rock. I don’t want to be cremated when I go, and I want to be buried with empty pockets.”

The novella ends with the assessment that modern society’s engagement with smartphone technology has been to its detriment. When Craig suggests that he wants to be buried with “empty pockets,” he is stressing his detachment from personal devices. He doesn’t want to become so attached to his phone that someone thinks to bury him with it.

“‘I’ll bet many of those folks think the multiple disasters we’re facing have a single cause rooted in what we have done to the earth’s environment. It’s not so. I would be the first to admit that we have treated our mother—yes, she’s the mother of us all—very badly, certainly molested her if not outright raped her, but we’re puny compared to the great clock of the universe. Puny. No, whatever is happening is much larger than environmental degradation.’

‘Maybe it’s Chuck Krantz’s fault,’ Marty said.”

In this passage, King hints at the true nature of the apocalyptic scenes that feature heavily in the novella’s first chapter. Yarbrough suggests that the crisis that threatens their existence is beyond human control. Marty quips that the crisis has to do with Chuck Krantz, unaware that he is right since the endangered world is a representation of Chuck’s dying inner life.

“‘The human brain is finite—no more than a sponge of tissue inside a cage of bone—but the mind within the brain is infinite. Its storage capacity is colossal, its imaginative reach beyond our ability to comprehend. I think when a man or woman dies, a whole world falls to ruin—the world that person knew and believed in. Think of that, kiddo—billions of people on earth, and each one of those billions with a world inside. The earth their minds have conceived.’

‘And now my dad’s world is dying.’

‘But not ours,’ Doug says, and gives his nephew another squeeze. ‘Ours will go on a little while longer.’”

In this passage, Doug raises the novella’s central philosophical question. Death puts an abrupt end to the richness that every person contains within them. The novella tries to explore how life can still have any meaning in the shadow of death. Additionally, when Doug indicates that the world will go on without Chuck, he unwittingly draws a comparison between Brian’s experience and Chuck’s, since Chuck’s story begins with the death of his entire family, causing his world to go on without them.

“He’s a dropout from Juilliard, which he calls—with apologies to Kay Kyser—the Kollege of Musical Knowledge. He lasted three semesters, but in the end it wasn’t for him. They wanted you to think about what you were doing, and as far as Jared is concerned, the beat is your friend and thinking is the enemy. He sits in on the occasional gig, but bands don’t interest him much. Although he never says it (okay, maybe once or twice, while drunk), he thinks maybe music itself is the enemy. He rarely thinks about these issues once he’s in the groove. Once he’s in the groove, music is a ghost. Only the drums matter then. The beat.”

The novella’s second chapter faces the challenge of investing the reader in characters who are simply passing through the narrative. By digging deep into Jared’s interiority in this passage, King reinforces the idea that every person contains a rich inner life within them. He characterizes Jared as someone who has a complex, nuanced opinion of music and his experience as a drummer.

“Now his sensible Samuel Windsor Oxfords are taking him for an afternoon walk. Not very exciting, but quite pleasant. Quite pleasant is enough these days. His life is narrower than the one he once hoped for, but he’s made his peace with that. He understands that narrowing is the natural order of things. There comes a time when you realize you’re never going to be the President of the United States and settle for being president of the Jaycees instead. And there’s a bright side. He has a wife to whom he is scrupulously faithful, and an intelligent, good-humored son in middle school. He also has only nine months to live, although he doesn’t know it yet. The seeds of his end—the place where life narrows to a final point—are planted deep, where no surgeon’s knife will ever go, and they have lately begun to awaken. Soon they will bear black fruit.”

King foreshadows the third chapter of the novella by describing the narrowing of Chuck’s life, which goes against the hopes he had as a youth. He also calls back to the events of the first chapter by reminding the reader that Chuck’s time is limited by his impending death. This creates subtle yet compelling tension for the second chapter, raising the question of how its events will figure into the larger scheme of Chuck’s life.

“‘What made you stop in front of me? And what made you start moving?’

Chuck thinks that over, then shrugs. He could say it was because he was thinking about that old half-assed band, the Retros, and how he liked to dance across the stage during the instrumental breaks, showing off, swinging that mike stand between his legs, but that’s not it. And really, had he ever danced with such elan and freedom even back then, when he had been a teenager, young and limber, with no headaches and nothing to lose?”

King uses ambiguity to drive the second chapter’s contribution to Overcoming the Fear of Death as a theme. Because Chuck’s death lurks in the periphery of the narrative, Jared’s question takes on greater significance. This allows King to reach deep into Chuck’s past, using the immensity of his life to partially address Jared’s question.

“As he passes the place where Jared set up his drums, those two questions recur: why did you stop to listen, and why did you start to dance? He doesn’t know, and would answers make a good thing better?

Later he will lose the ability to walk, never mind dancing with little sister on Boylston Street. Later he will lose the ability to chew food, and his meals will come from a blender. Later he will lose his grip on the difference between waking and sleeping and enter a land of pain so great that he will wonder why God made the world. Later he will forget his wife’s name. What he will remember—occasionally—is how he stopped, and dropped his briefcase, and began to move his hips to the beat of the drums, and he will think that is why God made the world. Just that.”

The second chapter ends with a recurrence of Jared’s question, which King recontextualizes by explicitly referring to Chuck’s impending death. If the previous passage addresses the question by looking at Chuck’s past, then this passage addresses the question by looking to his future. It was good for Chuck to dance when he met Jared and Janice because, in the future, this memory will be enough to make him think that life was worthwhile.

“Of course he was also looking forward to having parents, but none of that worked out thanks to an icy patch on an I-95 overpass. Much later, in college, he would tell a girlfriend that there were all sorts of novels, movies, and TV shows where a main character’s parents died in a car crash, but he was the only person he knew who’d had that happen in real life.

The girlfriend thought this over, then rendered her verdict. ‘I’m sure it happens all the time, although partners can also be taken in housefires, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and avalanches while on ski vacations. To name only a few of the possibilities. And what makes you think you’re a main character in anything but your own mind?’”

The last chapter of the novella begins with metatextual commentary on the death of Chuck’s family. By referring to the distinction between stories and real life, as well as the girlfriend’s observation on Chuck’s apparent self-centeredness, King downplays the existential significance of the event against the personal significance it has in Chuck’s life.

“But after that, Chuck was frightened of the cupola, with its locked door at the top of a short (six steps) flight of narrow stairs lit by a single bare bulb hanging on a black cord. But fascination is fear’s twin brother, and sometimes after that night, if both of his grandparents were out, he dared himself to climb them.”

King uses nuance to characterize Chuck’s dynamic with the cupola. The cupola represents Chuck’s fear of death, making him hesitant to engage with it because it reminds him of the most traumatic experience of his early life. At the same time, Chuck cannot help but tempt the possibility of entering the cupola as a way of satisfying his curiosity and overcoming the power that death has over him.

“Very gently, she put her palms to his temples. They were cool. They felt so wonderful he had to suppress a shiver. ‘What’s in there between my hands? Just the people you know?’

‘More,’ Chuck said. He was thinking of his mother and father and the baby he never got a chance to hold. Alyssa, sounds like rain. ‘Memories.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Everything you see. Everything you know. The world, Chucky. Planes in the sky, manhole covers in the street. Every year you live, that world inside your head will get bigger and brighter, more detailed and complex.’”

In this passage, Ms. Richards expounds on the allusion to Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” by helping Chuck realize that he contains an entire world. While this explanation reinforces the clarification of the apocalyptic scenes in the first chapter, it also drives the importance of those scenes in building the novella’s central message: Every death has high stakes because an entire world is suddenly lost.

“He looked up, saw a million stars, and understood that for each one of those million, there was another million behind it.

The universe is large, he thought. It contains multitudes. It also contains me, and in this moment I am wonderful. I have a right to be wonderful.”

After the Fall Fling, Chuck experiences a life-affirming moment that reinforces the third chapter’s use of the coming-of-age genre. Rather than feel defeated by the fact of his smallness in the universe, Chuck cherishes the richness of his life. This pivotal moment addresses the philosophical question with which the first chapter ended.

“Why had he told the lie, then, if not to cast himself as the hero of a fictional story? Because the scar was important for another reason. Because it was part of a story he couldn’t tell, even though there was now an apartment building standing on the site of the Victorian house where he had done most of his growing up. The haunted Victorian house.

The scar meant more, so he had made it more. He just couldn’t make it as much more as it really was.”

In this passage, Chuck realizes that he has mythologized his own life. He withheld the true story of the scar from his wife because it would seem underwhelming without the context of his early life to frame it. The divide between the true story and the story he initially told his wife stresses the richness of Chuck’s experiences.

“The man did not fade, as ghostly apparitions did in movies; he was just gone, insisting he had never been there in the first place.

He wasn’t, Chuck thought. I will insist that he wasn’t, and I will live my life until my life runs out. I am wonderful, I deserve to be wonderful, and I contain multitudes.”

The novella ends with Chuck’s vision of his death, bringing the story full circle. The disappearance of the vision brings the reader back to the central question of the novella, asking how life can still be significant in the shadow of death. Chuck responds by returning to his affirmation the night he got his scar, reminding the reader that in spite of pain, there still exists wonder, which can never be voided.

“‘But see, here’s the deal about inside and outside evil, Holly—I don’t think there’s any difference. Do you?’

She considers everything she knows, and everything she’s been through with this young man, and Bill, and Ralph Anderson. ‘No,’ she says. ‘I don’t.’

‘I think it’s a bird,’ Jerome says. ‘A big bird, all frowsy and frosty gray. It flies here, there, and everywhere. It flew into Brady Hartsfield’s head. It flew into the head of the guy who shot all those people in Las Vegas. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, they got the bird. Hitler. Pol Pot. It flies into their heads, and when the wetwork’s done, it flies away again. I’d like to catch that bird.’ He clenches his hands and looks at her and yes, those are tears. ‘Catch it and wring its fucking neck.’”

Jerome philosophizes on the nature of evil, suggesting that monsters and killers are essentially the same. When he describes evil flying into the head of each person who goes on to do wicked things, he underscores The Banality of Evil as a theme, stressing that anyone can be driven to evil.

“Her eyes fill with tears, and when Holly sees them, she feels—in spite of all the work she’s done in therapy—a surge of resentment that’s close to hate. Maybe it is hate. She thinks of all the times she cried in her mother’s presence and was told to go to her room ‘until you get that out of your system.’ She feels an urge to throw those very words in her mother’s face now, but gives Charlotte an awkward hug instead. As she does, she feels how close the bones lie under that thin and flabby flesh, and realizes her mother is old. How can she dislike an old woman who so obviously needs her help? The answer seems to be quite easily.”

In this passage, King deepens the dynamic between Holly and Charlotte by digging into the backstory of their relationship. When Holly was a child, Charlotte used to undermine the importance of her emotions, driving her to become repressed as an adult. Now that Charlotte is calling attention to her own emotional outbursts, Holly tries to sympathize with her because she wants to be a better person than her mother. At the same time, she can’t help but feel tension because it seems unfair for her to extend that attention to her mother, who never extended it to her.

“‘I love you, Mom,’ Holly says, and ends the call.

Is that true? Yes. It’s liking that got lost, and love without liking is like a chain with a manacle at each end. Could she break the chain? Strike off the manacle? Perhaps. She’s discussed that possibility with Allie Winters many times, especially after her mother told her—proudly—that she voted for Donald Trump (oough). Will she do it? Not now, maybe never. When Holly was growing up, Charlotte Gibney taught her—patiently, perhaps even with good intentions—that she was thoughtless, helpless, hapless, careless. That she was less. Holly believed that until she met Bill Hodges, who thought she was more. Now she has a life, and it is more often than not a happy one. If she broke with her mother, it would lessen her.

I don’t want to be less, Holly thinks.”

Holly reconciles the tension between herself and her mother by reminding herself that she aspires to be someone deserving of the respect she gets from the people she loves. This requires her to love her mother despite her flaws, which is the truest sign that her love is real. By loving her mother, she can convince herself that she is a good person.

“He said his grandfather thought it was basically harmless. A kind of exotic chameleon, and if not the last of its species, then one of the last. It lives off grief and pain, maybe not a nice thing, but not so different from maggots living off decaying flesh or buzzards and vultures living off roadkill.

‘Coyotes and hyenas live that way, too,’ Brad said. ‘They’re the janitors of the animal kingdom. And are we really any better? Don’t people slow down for a good long look at an accident on the turnpike?’”

Brad Bell draws a comparison between Chad Ondowsky and symbiotic predators, suggesting that his presence was natural to the environment in which he operated. This observation ends up reflecting a larger critique of the news media industry, which thrives on reportage on suffering and tragedy.

“It would be easy—much too easy—to think this childhood room has been waiting for her, like a monster in a horror story. She’s slept here several times in the sane (relatively sane) years of her adulthood, and it has never eaten her. Her mother has never eaten her, either. There is a monster, but it’s not in this room or in this house. Holly knows she would do well to remember that, and to remember who she is. Not the child who nibbled Mr. Rabbit Trick’s ears. Not the adolescent who threw up her breakfast most days before school. She is the woman who, along with Bill and Jerome, saved those children at the Midwest Culture and Arts Complex. She is the woman who survived Brady Hartsfield. The one who faced another monster in a Texas cave. The girl who hid in this room and never wanted to come out is gone.”

Holly contrasts the difficulty of her childhood against the challenges she’s faced as an adult. She realizes her maturity when she acknowledges that her childhood fears no longer feel as monstrous as the antagonists she’s faced, from Brady Hartsfield to Chad Ondowsky. In this context, Holly understands that her mother isn’t a monster to fear, which makes her easier to love.

“‘I have the tools,’ he said at last. ‘And I have the talent. So it might be good. It might even be commercial, if I understand the meaning of that word when it comes to fiction. Good matters to me, but that isn’t the main thing. Not the big thing.’ He turned to her, took her hands, and put his forehead against hers. ‘I need to finish. That’s all. That’s the whole deal. After that I can either do it again, and with a lot less sturm und drang, or let go. Either would be fine with me.’

‘Closure, in other words.’

‘No.’ He had used the word with Al, but only because it was a word Al could understand and would accept. ‘It’s something different. Something almost physical.’”

In this passage, Drew declares his motivations for pursuing his new novel writing project. He indicates that his desire to finish a novel is something innate, resonating with his core motivations for living. This establishes the stakes for the novella, allowing the reader to wonder what obstacles Drew will face while writing his novel and what he is willing to do to achieve his objective.

“‘For most of my adult life, I’ve been trying to write a novel. Do I know why? No. I only know it’s the missing piece in my life. I need to do this, and I am doing it. It’s very, very important. You’re asking me to risk that.’

‘Is it as important as me and the kids?’

‘Of course not, but does it have to be a choice?’

‘I think it is a choice, and you just made it.’”

When Lucy urges Drew to come home, King recalls Drew’s motivations for pursuing his objective. In this passage, Lucy reframes Drew’s motivations as a choice between writing or family. Drew chooses his writing project over the safety of his family, foreshadowing his later decision to name Al Stamper as the sacrifice that guarantees the completion of his novel.