Exposed Nerve
Somewhere out there, you've got an ex-lover speaking very ill of you. The mention of your name brings out the worst in them. Maybe you were abusive. Maybe you cheated on this person or lied to them, or both. Maybe you never recapped the toothpaste or you hogged the blankets. But somewhere, in someone else's eyes, you are the Antichrist. Chances are they're spewing vitriol on your name as you read this.
Yes, I'm talking to you.
You know this is true because you have someone of whom you speak the same way. Stories of your relationship sound as though you'd coupled with Beelzebub and your friends wonder, what did you ever see in them? Sometimes, it's our selective hindsight talking. Other times we look back and wonder, what was I thinking?
That's why it's called obsession.
Mountain climbers endure frostbite; ex-addicts chain smoke or turn religious with a vengeance; collector fanatics amass coins, stamps, butterflies, baseball cards, ceramic kittens and Third Reich children's books. Our obsessions aren't always good for us but they do define us--in ways we don't always like to think about. When we try to exorcise one obsession, we make room for a new one.
The Seven Deadly Sins, what Dante defined as the most ruinous traits in man, weren't specifically actions or thoughts, but obsessions. Kafka's hunger artist, perhaps the personification of Sloth, was so much bone and withered flesh when he finally admitted that his circus act was just his inability to find anything he liked to eat. It wasn't good for him, but it's what made him tick.
As for the rest of us, we're still grinding our teeth, biting our nails and clipping magazine articles about people who are larger than our own lives. We still see Elvis; we still get letters from someone whom we've never seen, but who's obsessed with us. And some of us write those letters.
Too much obsession is considered a disorder by modern medicine. And medicine now has drugs that can cure obsession, or at least its symptoms. These drugs are themselves products of obsessions-obsessions with profit margins, knowledge and scientific progress. These obsessions have exposed the very source of obsession in the human brain. Science has pinpointed the nerve center of obsession.
Will Christopher Baer found it on his own. As a self-confessed binger of everything- relationships, writing, everything- Chris understands that what's good for us and what makes us tick aren't always the same thing; he knows that what's bad for us and what makes us tick are all too often exactly the same thing.
Take his narrator Phineas Poe, waking in a bathtub full of ice and sporting a row of staples where a certain vital organ used to be, thanks to Chris's femme-fatale/field surgeon, Jude. Most sane people would be screaming for justice, not to mention abstaining from cocktails with gym-nazi prostitutes sporting black medical bags in seedy bars. But Phineas Poe doesn't do the sane thing. Phineas falls in love with Jude while working up the nerve to kill her. A latter-day Hunger Artist, Phineas Poe is obsession personified. And over the course of Chris's three novel obsession with Phineas and Jude, our mono-kidneyed antihero loses even more to his anti-lover, including his sanity and a chunks of his memory too large for the padlocked ice chest holding the aforementioned organ.
I understand Phineas Poe. He has my deepest empathy because I know Jude, Chris's Promethean vulture in human form. I've met her more than once, though she had a different name each time I awoke chained to a rock as punishment for the light and warmth she brought me, my insides ripped out at every sunrise. Jude is my obsession, too.
The person who's done enough damage, metaphorically, to damn near kill you, literally, is the one person you're best off without but whom you don't want to forget. Jude is every mixed emotion rolled into one, the woman who graces Poe's lips with a tender, lingering kiss before cutting him open and ripping out his insides.
We've all kissed Jude. He or she is that ex-lover we never want to see again but refuse to forget. But remember, we've all been someone else's Jude, both kissing and cutting our lover while they slept.
I learned, over a long period of writing, to get off my soap box and write stories, not "truths." I learned to quit teaching and preaching, and learned instead to be as candid and naked as possible in my work, to expose my very flesh and bone. In so doing, I learned I could touch the hidden nerve in a reader. I then learned a bit about why people pay someone else to beat them or why someone won't leave the person who does.
People like Chris don't write the kinds of things that make for good holiday dinner conversation, and anyone who does so for fame, glory and money is sorely misguided. Nobody exposes that much flesh and bone under normal circumstances. No, you only connect with someone through a story by exposing as much of yourself as you can, and no sane person would do that willingly. You have to be obsessed.
Will Christopher Baer can touch those hidden nerves of yours, because Chris slaps his own nervous system onto the chopping block with each page, and he does so for one reason and one reason only: Chris Baer is obsessed. And I, for one, am grateful.
-Craig Clevenger
June 2004