Lorrie Moore, "People Like That Are the Only People Here"

the torment of breakthroughs & the relief of darkness

“Among the three of them here, there is a long silence, as if it were suddenly the middle of the night.”

Every writer is granted, or maybe cursed with, a period during which the act of writing becomes gloriously frictionless. The period may last only a day, or a couple of hours — long enough to write (transcribe might capture the experience more accurately) a single short story or a few pages of a novel. Forever after the writer will live with the disorienting, gloomy knowledge that another way is possible, that this daily struggle — this limbless wriggle across a field of volcanic rock — is, in some sense, unnecessary.

In the introduction to his collected stories William Maxwell writes about his own frictionless period: “I thought — mistakenly — that I had had a breakthrough, and stories would be easier to write from that moment on; all I needed to do was say it.” This is always the sense — that the fluency came about not because the writer flexed some heretofore undetected muscle but because he relaxed some complex of muscles that he had not even known were tense. Achieving frictionlessness feels as if it should be easy.

But it isn’t. It can, so far as I know, be accessed in only two ways: (a) by accident (a Tuesday afternoon on which the neurons happen briefly to align) and (b) as the byproduct of personal disaster. I recommend method A, but should method B impose itself on you, you’ll find no better model for your writing than Lorrie Moore’s “People Like That Are the Only People Here.” Moore wrote the story after her infant son was diagnosed with cancer (he survived: this is not so much a spoiler as a promise that the story will not destroy you). You can feel, reading it, the surrender of Moore’s self-consciousness, of her need to create a piece of capital-L Literature. It’s a forty-page dispatch from the vivid, ingenious, fertile place where dreams and melodies percolate. 

“A start: the Mother finds a blood clot in the Baby’s diaper. What is the story? Who put this here? It is big and bright, with a broken khaki-colored vein in it. Over the weekend, the Baby had looked listless and spacey, clayey and grim. But today he looks fine — so what is this thing, startling against the white diaper, like a tiny mouse heart packed in snow?”

This is the story’s music: speedy, casual, with the characteristic pressure upon the page — urgent but free — of a private journal.

Early on, the Mother (Moore refers to everyone by their role — Mother, Baby, Father — giving the story the funny, awful sense of being the world’s longest and most insoluble SAT word problem) takes the Baby to the hospital for a scan. The Surgeon calls her into an examining room to deliver the diagnosis — the Mother, and the Reader, stare with breath-held terror. 

But the Baby, being a baby, wants to play with the lights. 

“He’s big on lights these days,” explains the Mother.

“That’s okay,” says the Surgeon, nodding toward the light switch. “Let him play with it.” 

And so this hellish conversation (“‘What we have here is a Wilms’ tumor,’”) is punctuated by sudden stretches of utter blackness.

“The room is quickly on fire again with light, then wiped dark again. Among the three of them here, there is a long silence, as if it were suddenly the middle of the night.”  

With this gesture with the lights, Moore does the impossible: she makes a pre-verbal baby a lively and even willful character in a story. Most literary babies, like most stage babies, are essentially Cabbage Patch Dolls — props to be passed, bundles to be patted. But that light-switch functions for the Baby as a pen and paper do for someone who has lost her voice. Even now, the Baby says through the language of the lights, the world is a wonder, and there is no hilarity greater than imposing a reality of my choosing on these adults.

And the business with the lights does another piece of literary lifting — it places the conversation in time. Words, darkness, words, light. This is one of the hardest and most important things to do in a scene carried by dialogue, to remind the reader that the physical world continues to unfold even as these characters ascend to the plane of signs and symbols. The car’s turn signal clacking after the husband has given some dire piece of news to his wife; the garbage disposal’s interrupting the conversation in which a woman tells her elderly mother that she should no longer drive — these are the poles that hold up the tent of a scene, making it a thing you can walk around in.

And then there is the darkness itself. Among the three of them here, there is a long silence, as if it were suddenly the middle of the night. What a strange relief that darkness is! The light reveals all that is real and irrefutable and excruciating about the moment — the Surgeon’s “crisp, frowning” face; the “small framed watercolors of the local lake.” The darkness grants us an instant of peace — a taste of the deep and literally mindless sleep that is the backing for even the most unbearable of our experiences.

And notice how Moore slows us down (the not-quite-necessary word here followed by a not-quite-necessary comma) so that the interlude of silence feels real to us too. I find it hard, arriving at the sentence’s end, not to just sit there and blink for a second, as if listening to peepers around a pitch black pond.

And the strange thing, the miraculous thing, is that Moore — in her agony-channeling clarity, her disaster-fueled fluency — almost certainly didn’t give any of this a second thought. She just wrote the sentence (or the sentence just wrote itself) and then she moved on to the next one. Such is the fecundity of the frictionless mind. Such are the compensations, paltry but undeniable, for living in a world in which pediatric oncology — the phrase, the specialty, the hospital department — need even exist.