"Double Visions: David Means and Jennifer Egan on Life's Final Moments" by Brady Huggett
Sometime in early April, maybe a month into New York City’s full shutdown meant to fight soaring SARS-CoV2 infection rates, my wife and I noticed a middle-aged man and a stooped older woman regularly sleeping in the enclosed ATM foyer of our local Citibank. They each had a suitcase, and she wore a long coat, still had jewelry on her fingers. They were not mentally ill, as far as we could tell. They appeared to be a mother and son recently expelled from a more stable life. Walking my dog late at night, I’d see them dozing under the foyer’s bright light, their backs against the glass, her cane within reach.
So I had been thinking of David Means, who often writes about the paths to homelessness, having witnessed it up close in his own circle. That led me to re-read “The Grip,” a third-person narrative from Means’ 2000 collection ASSORTED FIRE EVENTS. The story follows a young white homeless man named Jim, who is riding the rails with his traveling partner Roy during the Great Depression. While trying to jump a train in Albuquerque, Jim gets stuck between cars “as the train opened up full throttle,” and is left standing on a thin foothold, clinging to a handle, as night falls.
His survival requires singular concentration on his grip. His mind strays just once, when he recalls his boyhood in the “backyard of the house in Galva,” where his mother was hanging “large double sheets on the line as they bloomed and folded with wind like spinnakers.” She died not long after that moment, and Jim’s childhood from then on was, the story tells us, “short-lived and brutal.”
The memory ends, and the night deepens. In his agony, Jim nears surrender, and prepares for the “long snaking oblivion of the night” to have its way with him. Yet, in this moment, above the railroad car, his mother’s face appears:
So sure was he that this wasn’t an aberration, that this was in no way a mirage, that he called out her name several times. Mom. Mom. Mom. She reached down to him, her arms long and thin and frail-looking in the darkness; she reached down to him and put her fingers around his fingers and held them tightly there—grip holding forearm; grip holding forearm—until twilight began to merge with the dark and spread above the train.
The machine stops in full daylight, and Jim stumbles out from between the cars. He finds Roy and tells him what has happened. Jim is exhausted, but before he lies down he begs Roy to remind him of what has occurred after he awakes. “Promise me you’ll tell me,” he says. “I forget everything in my sleep.”
The last two paragraphs of the story relay that Jim does in fact forget the vision of his mother until a moment decades later, when—on his deathbed in an Ohio hospital, his adult son at his side—the memory of that terrifying train ride floats back to him. He tells his son that his mother’s fingers “wrapped around mine and together we worked our way out of the night and into the next morning when, like a song of mercy, the clacks slowed and the train came off the long grade and stopped to take on water.”
The story concludes with Jim recalling how he made Roy promise to “repeat the tale” back to him so he wouldn’t forget it, and how he then fell face first into the brambles for “the deepest sleep of his life.”
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I mulled this ending for a day or two, and then went back to my bookshelf. Something about The Grip had me thinking of Jennifer Egan’s celebrated 2010 novel-in-stories, A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD.
Flipping through it I found what I was looking for: a chapter (and standalone story) called Out of Body, which is written in second person—a shrewd choice by Egan, which helps to clarify her main character’s mindset. The piece opens in March 1997. A cast of NYU college sophomores is hanging around an apartment: Lizzie, Bix, Drew, Sasha and ex-high school football player Robert Freeman Jr., though we learn that “Rob” is not currently enrolled. He recently tried to kill himself by slashing his wrists with a box cutter. His scars still “twang in the cold.”
Sasha and Drew are dating, but in backstory Egan tells us that during freshman year, Rob sometimes slept in the empty bed in Sasha’s dorm room, and when she cried out in her sleep he climbed between her covers and held her until she calmed. They shared their deepest secrets: while in high school, Rob once spent an hour in a car fooling around with a boy named James; Sasha regularly traded sex for money while living in Italy, where she was also a thief.
We also learn that it was Sasha who found Rob after his suicide attempt. She came to the hospital to visit him and, in an echo of her dorm room bed, Sasha climbed in with him. These two damaged young people lay face to face. “We’re the survivors,” she told him. “Not everyone is. But we are.”
On the night of the day the story takes place, Sasha, Drew, and Rob venture out to hear some live music. Though Rob loves Sasha, he also feels something for Drew, a “woodsy” type who grew up swimming in Wisconsin’s lakes, and who still takes to the water when he wants to burn off tension. Drew once boasted of building a cabin with his brothers, and in a way Rob wants Drew to be the brother he never had, but he also thinks that if he “could see Drew naked, even just once, it would ease a deep, awful pressure” inside himself.
At the concert, Drew and Rob take drugs, and as dawn approaches the two young men walk together alongside the East River. In this exhausted, druggy state, the city bleached by weak morning light, Rob tells Drew, “I wish we could live in that cabin. You and me.”
“I would miss Sasha,” Drew says, warily. “Wouldn’t you?”
Rob says, “She was a hooker. A hooker and a thief—that’s how she survived in Naples.”
Drew walks off. Rob follows, hoping to contain his mistake. When Drew reaches a tiny bit of sand that extends into the East River between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, he undresses and dives into the water. Rob undresses, too, and jumps in after him.
The cold is jarring, and Rob treads water. There are sounds of early morning traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. There is a tugboat. The Statue of Liberty, a tiny figurine across the water. Church bells somewhere. He hears his name being called, at a distance, and with a flash of panic realizes he is caught in a current and moving fast. He begins to flail.
Two things happen then. First, Rob’s mind slips away to a remove, as it so often does, as it did when he was fooling around with that boy James in the car years ago. Here is the explanation for Egan’s choice of second-person narrative voice: Rob is so depressed, he’s often living outside his own body, merely watching his own life unfold. Now his consciousness again takes flight, through the “buildings and streets, the avenues like endless hallways,” and reaches his dorm. There, he slips “through Sasha’s open window” where she is “asleep in her narrow bed, her burned red hair dark against the sheets.” The story then concludes:
You kneel beside her, breathing the familiar smell of Sasha’s sleep, whispering into her ear some mix of I’m sorry and I believe in you and I’ll always be near you, protecting you, and I will never leave you, and I’ll be curled around your heart for the rest of your life, until the water pressing my shoulders and chest crushes me awake and I hear Sasha screaming into my face Fight! Fight! Fight!
•
Here is what “The Grip” had recalled for me in GOON SQUAD: the deathbed vision. Perhaps this is stale ground for a writer to tread, perhaps the deathbed vision is cliché. But it seems to me it’s likely these types of scenes became cliché in literature because they frequently happen in real life. The phenomenon has not been systematically studied but much of the anecdotal evidence from hospice workers and nurses tell us that deathbed visions are most often of a loved one, especially a mother, though dying people also tend to see religious figures and beloved pets. William Barrett collected stories like these in his book DEATH-BED VISIONS, which was first published in 1925 but is popular enough to still be in print.
In American fiction, the standard bearer for this sort of scene might be Ambrose Bierce’s AN OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK, published in 1890, in which Alabama civilian Peyton Farquhar is hanged by Federal soldiers during the Civil War. At the moment of his hanging, he dreams of escaping, returning home, and being met by his wife; the story snaps back to reality when the rope breaks his neck. Vladimir Nabokov used the trick, too, in DETAILS OF A SUNSET, published in 1924, in which a young man named Mark is hit by a bus and has a vision of his fiancé before he returning to his lifeless body, when the story abruptly ends. Tobias Wolf updated the concept in his 1995 short story “Bullet in the Brain,” in which the dying protagonist Anders, a literary critic, envisions not a lover or family member, but the moment in his boyhood when he heard a bit of slang and first marveled at the beauty of unpredictable language.
Means and Egan also pushed beyond convention in order to make their stories fresh. To do so, they both used what I’ll call a double vision.
In “The Grip,” Jim’s mother first appears as a specter, securing his hands until the train slows and he can safely dismount. Means then has the moment disappear from the protagonist’s memory until decades later, in the cancer ward. When Jim recalls that moment as he’s lying in the hospital it is, in effect, a second visitation by his mother—and, again, when he’s nearing death’s door. She saved him on the train, but we understand she cannot save him here.
Egan also gives us a double vision. As Rob drowns, his mind takes him to Sasha’s room, where he offers his apology and says his goodbye. The story could have ended there, I suppose, with Rob thinking of Sasha, but Egan avoids that trope with a brutal switch to first-person narration, slamming Rob back into his body and bringing Sasha to him. These two kids are face to face, as they were in his hospital bed after his suicide attempt, and she is screaming at him to fight for his own survival. Sasha in the water with Rob is the second vision, a reversal of his visitation to her.
There is plenty to elevate these stories beyond this narrative trick. Means, in particular, lays down some gorgeous prose. I’m still admiring how his train, slowing on the tracks, is “like a song of mercy.” And Egan’s story is almost perfectly built, with several plot echoes and intricately placed details. The early mention that Drew likes to swim when he’s “bummed or tense” makes it easier for the reader to believe that Drew might jump into the freezing East River after Rob wounds him. But all that great craft is lost if the work slides toward predictability. The most realistic ending in these types of stories might just be the death-bed vision, because our minds often do turn to partners, to the ones we love and our families during moments of great fear, unsettling change or even death, but we have to find ways to refresh or surprise with our art. My guess is both Means and Egan knew they were skirting tired conclusions, and they consciously sought to subvert them.
•
I am back to thinking about David Means, and the path to homelessness. I figure the man and his mother were in a shelter, and when the pandemic broke he knew she was at risk and he got her out of there. Decades ago, she used to care for him, but time has reversed the roles.
They are still in my neighborhood. Now they sleep on the bench in a bus stop shelter across the street from the bank. I walked past them in the early morning last week, my dog on his leash. The man was already awake and standing; she was still asleep, slumped on the bench. The nights are getting colder, and she had a short blanket draped across her chest. The man leaned down to pull the blanket up, under her chin. Mom, he said softly. Are you OK, Mom?
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Brady Huggett's fiction has been placed at Fredericksburg Literary & Art Review, The King's English and Cagibi. He won the Macaron Prize in fiction for 2020, with Andre Dubus III as judge, and was a finalist for the 2017 Tillie Olsen Short Story Award and Boulevard's 2019 Emerging Writers Nonfiction Award. He is also an award-nominated journalist with Nature Biotechnology.
