Us Read online

  Praise for Us

  “Michael Kimball never ceases to astonish. He is a hero of contemporary fiction.”

  — Sam Lipsyte

  “A deep love between an ageing husband and wife is given a heartbreaking voice … tender and poignant”

  — Time Out London

  “Be warned: this book has the power to make even the most hard-hearted of readers shed a tear. … Kimball has broken into new territory: Us is one of the most graphic depictions of illness and loss I have ever read.”

  — The Glasgow Herald

  “Haunting and awesome … beautiful and intense … This is a novel from a great talent.”

  — El País (Spain)

  “Powerful and moving … breathless”

  — Observer

  “A monument to love”

  — El Placer de la Lectura (Spain)

  “Bathed in tenderness … touching and breathtaking … one of the most moving, heartbreaking, and sad novels of contemporary American fiction. It is essential.”

  — El Razón (México)

  “This is the saddest book I have ever read and one of the most beautiful and unusual. … One can’t help being aware of his grief and the great love he feels for his dying wife. It will make you cry and break your heart but this is one book you must read.”

  — Telegraph and Argus

  “First, Camus showed us the human condition. Now Kimball has … with a fluid style and a dizzying empathy. Kimball is a great writer.”

  — El Mercurio (Chile)

  “Kimball has created something rare and brave … [It is a] beautifully tuned, near perfect account of a very ordinary death.”

  — Metro London

  “There are two books I can remember that ever made me physically cry. There were the rape scenes in Saramago’s Blindness, and there was nearly every chapter of Michael Kimball’s [Us]. While the first hurt because it was so brutal, Kimball’s was a softer kind of invocation—as I read it in a bathtub, I could not shake the feeling of being held, as if somehow the words had interlaced my skin. This is the essence of the magic Michael Kimball holds—his sentences come on so taut, so right there, and yet somehow so calming, it’s as if you are being visited by some lighted presence.”

  — Blake Butler

  Praise for Michael Kimball’s Other Novels

  “Occasionally a novel by a new writer will cause critics to choke with excitement. This is one. … Kimball resembles a skinhead at a cocktail party—no quarter given to poxy commercialism. For that reason alone, his achievement is admirable.”

  — The Scotsman

  “[Michael Kimball] has taken it [American literature] somewhere very dark and unsettling.”

  — The Times

  Michael Kimball “has already delivered the future of the novel … [He is] one of the authentic innovators in contemporary fiction.”

  — Letras Libres (Mexico)

  “Kimball creates a sort of curatorial masterpiece, finding the perfect spot for everything that a life comprises.”

  — The Believer

  “There is a whole life contained in this slim novel, a life as funny and warm and sad and heartbreaking as any other, rendered with honest complexity and freshness by Kimball’s sharp writing.”

  — Los Angeles Times

  “I don’t always say this, so I hope you will indulge me: Read Dear Everybody. It is a work of literary inventiveness and great compassion.”

  — WETA’s The Book Studio

  [Dear Everybody is] “one of the hottest, most innovative books of the year”

  — Htmlgiant

  “Dear Everybody has the page-turning urgency of a mystery and the thrilling formal inventiveness of the great epistolary novels. Jonathon Bender’s magical letters to the world that never wrote to him are at once whimsical, anguished, funny, utterly engaging and, finally, unforgettable.”

  — Maud Casey

  “Kimball should be commended”

  — Village Voice

  “Elegantly and eloquently written … It’s an unforgettable book”

  — The Star-Democrat

  Dear Everybody confirms Kimball’s reputation as one of our most supremely gifted and virtuosic renderers of the human predicament. It’s as moving a novel as I have read in years.”

  — Gary Lutz

  “In addition to writing stunning prose, Kimball evocatively hints at entire physical and emotional worlds lying just behind his story’s surface.”

  — Time Out New York

  [Dear Everybody is] “inventive and often extremely funny, but it will also break your heart. Michael Kimball is one of the most talented and original writers in America today. You should read his books.”

  — Greenpoint Gazette

  “Compelling”

  — Booklist

  “Relentless”

  — Library Journal

  Tyrant Books

  676A 9th Ave. # 153, New York 10036

  isbn# 978-0-615-43046-1

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First Tyrant Books Edition, 2011

  First published in Great Britain in 2005 by

  Fourth Estate

  Copyright © 2005, 2011 by Michael Kimball

  The author would like to thank the editors of New York Tyrant, Prairie Schooner, Open City, Unsaid, LitRag, Sleeping Fish, Avatar Review, Mud Luscious, Necessary Fiction, Whiskey Island, and The Collagist where excepts of the novel first appeared, often in a different form.

  A different version of this book was previously published in other countries under the title How Much of Us There Was.

  Designed by Ryan P Kirby

  Cover art by Shelton Walsmith and

  The Flying Chabowskis

  Author photo: Rachel Bradley

  www.nytyrantbooks.com www.michael-kimball.com

  Us

  Michael Kimball

  TYRANT BOOKS

  For my grandparents,

  Kenneth and Gertrude Oliver.

  And for my wife, Tita.

  We seemed to decay at night. There were little sheets of our skin in our bed every morning.

  Her Husband

  It was so late in our lives.

  His Wife

  I blacked out and fell down. I hit my head on the floor and forgot my wife and myself for a while.

  My Grandfather Oliver

  I wasn’t me anymore either.

  Michael Kimball

  Contents

  PART ONE

  How My Wife Would Not Wake Up

  How They Helped My Wife to Breathe

  How the People at the Hospital Couldn’t Find My Wife

  The Dying Woman Who Looked Smaller and Older Than My Wife

  How Much of Her Still Worked

  Why I Stayed Awake

  How I Tried to Make It More of a Morning for My Wife

  The Small Things that I Asked Her For

  How I Tried to Drive Myself Home

  Come Back to Sleep with Me

  The Things that I Brought Her from Our House

  How I Unpacked the Suitcases in Her Hospital Room

  The Other Woman Who They Put in the Other Hospital Bed

  How I Moved into Her Hospital Room

  How My Wife Started to Move Again

  How We Talked with Our Eyes and Our Hands

  The Small Ways that She Got Better

  How We Got Out of the Hospital

  PART TWO

  Some of the People I Have Known Who Have Died

  Some of the People Who Came Home from the Hospital

  PART THREE

  Her First Morning Back at Home


  How We Slowed Our Time Down

  How I Rubbed Her Wrinkles Out

  Some of the Things that She Couldn’t Do Anymore

  How Our House Had Gotten Too Old Too

  What the Doctor Said that She Needed

  How We Practiced for Her Death

  Why We Both Took Her Sleeping Pills

  Hold onto Me

  How I Tried to Get Her Back

  What Part of My Life I Was Living In

  PART FOUR

  How Much He Cared for Her

  How Love Can Accumulate Between Two People

  The Funeral Home that Had Been Somebody’s House

  PART FIVE

  How They Touched Her As If She Were Still Alive

  The Picture of Her from When She Was Still Alive

  How I Had Not Seen Her Since She Had Died

  How I Wanted to Get Inside a Casket Too

  Thank You for Looking at Me for So Long

  PART SIX

  The Viewing Room of the Funeral Home

  How His Heart Hurt

  How He Tried to Communicate with Spirits

  How I Hear Voices

  PART SEVEN

  How I Couldn’t Take Any of My Funeral Clothes Off

  How I Danced with the Floor Lamp

  How I Lay Down in the Cemetery Grass with Her

  How I Was Afraid to Wash the Smell of Her Off Her Clothes

  Thank You for the Suitcase of Clothes

  The Little Pieces of Her that Were Still Her

  How I Got Ready to Go Away with Her to Sleep

  PART ONE

  How My Wife Would Not Wake Up

  Our bed was shaking and it woke me up afraid. My wife didn’t wake up and her body seemed to keep seizing up. That stopped and her body dropped back down flat on our bed again. She let one long breath out and then stopped moving and breathing. She looked as if she were sleeping again, but she wouldn’t wake up.

  I turned the bedroom light on, but that didn’t wake her up. I tried to shake her some more, but that didn’t wake her up either. I laid her shoulders back down on our bed and her head back down on her pillow I picked her glass of water up from her bedside table and opened her mouth up and tipped a little water in, but she didn’t swallow it. I pulled her eyelids up, but her eyes didn’t look back at me, and her eyelids closed up again when I let go of them.

  I picked the telephone up to call for somebody to come to help me get my wife up. I covered my wife up with the bedcovers to keep her warm. I pulled the bedcovers up to her neck. I brushed her hair back away from her face with my hand and touched her cheek. I held my fingers under her nose and over her mouth. I couldn’t feel any breath coming out of her anymore. I held onto her nose and tried to breathe some of my breath into her mouth. There didn’t seem to be enough air inside of me to get her to breathe.

  I was afraid to leave my wife in our bed, but I was also afraid that the ambulance might not find our house. I walked out of our bedroom, down the hallway, and up into the front of our house. I turned all of the lights in all of the front rooms of our house on. I opened the front door up, stood in the doorway, and turned the light on the front porch on too. I wanted them to know that it was our house and us that needed them.

  How They Helped My Wife to Breathe

  They came inside our house to take my wife away from me and to the hospital. They banged their way through the front door and into the living room. One of them carried an oxygen tank, an oxygen mask, and a metal box that had drawers inside it that folded up and out when he opened it up. The other one of them rolled a metal gurney inside our house that had folding legs under it and a flat board tied down on top of it. He rolled it inside our house, down the hallway, and into our bedroom. They set everything that they had with them down around our bed and my wife and they checked to see if she were still alive.

  One of them pulled the bedcovers down off her and straightened her nightgown out. He touched her neck and held onto her wrist. He listened to her chest for her heart. He pulled her eyelids up, opened her mouth up, and looked inside her mouth and into her eyes with a tiny flashlight. He put his ear down over her mouth and close to her nose to see if he could hear or feel her breathing.

  The other one got the oxygen tank out, placed the oxygen mask over her face, and turned the oxygen tank on. My wife seemed to take a deep breath in and stay alive. They rolled her over onto her one side and placed the flat board on top of our bed where her body had been. They rolled her back down onto the flat board, lifted her up, and placed the flat board and her back down on the metal gurney.

  My wife looked so light in their arms. I wanted to lift her up too.

  They pulled the gurney blanket up to her neck to cover her up, but they left her arms out. It looked as if she were holding them out to me.

  One of them moved me out of the way with his arm. They both rolled the metal gurney with my wife on top of it out of our bedroom, back down the hallway, and out the front door. They carried her down the front steps, rolled her down the front walk, and lifted her up into the back of the ambulance.

  I followed them out of our house and down the front walk, but I could not have climbed up into the back of that ambulance. They would have had to lift me up into it too.

  One of them climbed up into the back of the ambulance with my wife and the other one pushed the two back doors closed and climbed up into the front. He told me to follow them to the hospital and he drove away from me with my wife. They left me out there on the sidewalk in front of our house. They left me out there in the nighttime with their ambulance lights flashing red all around me. They didn’t turn their siren on.

  I went back inside our house and then back out through the back door to the driveway. I backed our car out of the driveway and drove away after the ambulance. I could see the red lights flashing up ahead of me and flashing high up on the sides of the buildings and the tops of the trees that lined the streets. The streetlights blinked off and on and off and on all the way to the hospital. I followed the blinking and the flashing lights after my wife. I didn’t want to lose the ambulance.

  I didn’t want to lose my wife. I wanted to see my wife lying down in a hospital bed. I wanted to see my wife breathing again. I wanted to see her get up out of bed again. I wanted to see her get up out of our bed again. I wanted my wife to come back home and live there with me again.

  How the People at the Hospital Couldn’t Find My Wife

  I parked our car next to the emergency room entrance and left the engine on. I thought that might somehow help keep my wife alive. The ambulance that had had my wife inside it was parked there too, but there weren’t any people inside it anymore. The hood of the ambulance was still warm and it made me think that my wife must still be alive.

  I went through the emergency room’s sliding glass doors to look for the two people who had carried my wife out of our house and driven her to the hospital, but I couldn’t find them or the metal gurney that had my wife on it. I asked the people at the informa tion desk where my wife was, but they couldn’t find out what bed or room she was in. The people at the admissions desk didn’t know if she had been admitted yet.

  They all looked for her by her first name and by her last name, but none of them had her name in their computers or on any of their clipboards. The admissions people said that she might be inside the hospital even though she wasn’t in the computer yet. They didn’t have anybody who had our last name.

  I went to other departments in other parts of the hospital. I asked for my wife at other desks on other floors of the hospital. I gave everybody her name and I gave them my name too. I tried to describe what she looked like, but none of them had seen a woman who looked like what I said.

  I walked along the long hallways looking for her on any metal gurney that I found. I looked through hospital rooms. I looked through open doors and opened doors that were closed. I called her name up and down the hallways and through the doorways and behind those curtains that circle hospital beds, but sh
e couldn’t hear me or couldn’t answer me and I couldn’t find her.

  The hallways and the hospital rooms were filled with people who weren’t my wife. There were people sitting down in their wheelchairs and other people walking behind them pushing them. There were people trying to walk with their IV bags even though they couldn’t really lift their feet up off the floor.

  There were people inside the hospital rooms who were propped up in their hospital beds and watching the television up on the wall. Some of them were eating food off trays and some of them had to have their food spooned into their mouths by other people who could stand up and move their arms. Some of the hospital rooms were quiet with machines and with somebody dying in the hospital bed. Some of the people didn’t move or look at me when I looked inside their hospital room at them. They were dying in different ways and at different speeds.

  There were other people who looked back at me as if they were expecting me. They looked almost hopeful when I looked inside their hospital room at them. They were mostly probably waiting for somebody to come to see them. They were probably waiting for a doctor or a nurse or maybe they were waiting for a husband or a wife.

  I wasn’t a doctor or a nurse who could help them get any better or tell them that they were ready to go home. I didn’t have any pills or needles or bandages or salve. I didn’t have any instruments to heal them. I didn’t know what the numbers or beeps or counts on any of the machines were supposed to mean. I didn’t understand their kind of medical pain. I couldn’t offer any comfort to them or say anything to them to make them feel any better. I couldn’t somehow help them. I didn’t bring them any flowers or a get well card. I didn’t bring them a bathrobe or anything else from home. I wasn’t their husband or father or brother or son or even their friend and none of them were my wife.