One, two, three, shoot

This one took a while, but it was worth it.

(Click on the title below to play the song.)

I Woke Up in Utica

By Drew Bunting and Brian Francis Slattery

Utica is a small city in upstate New York that too many people, including myself, have used as the butt end of a joke, the kind you tell because it’s either that or you cry. Upstate New York’s cities can all seem like lost causes, places that saw their best days already. There’s the wreckage of industry at least a generation gone, and the relics of that past all around, in the gorgeous masonry on churches, public buildings, even small apartment buildings, places that nobody has the money to maintain now. I drove around Binghamton and Johnson City, south of Utica, just a little while ago, and went past miles of empty storefronts, windows of plywood. Nobody on the streets. How can these places ever come back? You visit them and can’t help but think that maybe they should do as Youngstown, Ohio is doing, and remake themselves as much smaller places, to do the very brave thing of giving up what they had and working with what they have.

But then you look closer and see the life. In Utica, the same conditions that made so many people leave the place—in the 1990s, Utica lost its three major industrial employers in the space of five years—have also made it a sanctuary for people who come here with nothing, as Utica has opened its doors to wave after wave of refugees. They come from former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Burma, Vietnam, Laos—thirty-one countries, they say now—and many of them are remaking parts of the city that had been given up on. It seems weird at first glance, this roiling diversity in an upstate New York town, until you remember that immigrants—Irish, Italians, Poles—built Utica in the first place. It’s not a seamless process, and there’s still the ruins of its past to contend with. But there’s hope in the idea that people are coming to Utica to start again, as they have before, even if I can’t articulate it very well.

For this title, Drew and I decided to work together more closely than usual. So first I wrote a story that explicitly followed the structure of a song: it had three verses and a bridge. I figured I’d leave the chorus to Drew. Drew liked the story and said he’d get back to me. It took a while, but when he did, I discovered that he’d managed to cram pretty much everything I’d written into his lyrics. I didn’t have anything to add; the story is in the song.

But then there was the question of how to record it, as it was about an accordion player (and an accordion), and neither of us played accordion. Luckily, we knew a phenomenal player, Christina Crowder, who, bless her, was totally game to involve herself with this ridiculous project. But by the time we got to that point, Clifftop—a ten-day music festival in West Virginia—was only a month away, and since we were all going, we had the idea that maybe we could record it there, live, into one mike. And also assemble a roughly twenty-piece band to play and sing it with us. Which we did. And in so doing, made one of the most exciting musical moments I’ve had the privilege to be a part of all year. Thanks to everyone who took part in recording it, from the dear friends to the strangers we pulled in at the last minute to swell the choir. I hope you like it.

—Brian

P.S. Drew here: I want to double up on Brian’s thanks to everyone who pitched in, especially the mighty Joe Bass for his minimalist engineering (“put the mic there”). We know some fantastic musicians, the kind of fantastic where you play them the song once, tell them where to stand, and press record. This is the first take.

P.P.S. from Brian and Drew. For the record: Drew sang lead and played guitar. Christina Crowder played accordion. Ken Bloom played clarinet. Joe Bass and Bryan Thomas both played bass; Bryan used a bow and also hit a tambourine with his foot. Brian played violin, sang in the choir, and clapped his hands. Maggie Neatherlin played violin and sang. Harry Bolick played violin and sang, in his words, “like a tree shredder.” Dan Ruckdeschel, Ben Stowe, Sarah Stowe, Mark Piro, Ian Piro, and Evan Piro all sang and clapped their hands, too, along with Annie, Donald, Steve, Eric, Bill, Breitan, and Kim, whose last names we cannot recall, which we are sorry for, because you all sound beautiful. If you find this, tell us who you are.

The title “Hyenas Are Born Fighting,” from an acquaintance of Drew’s, was irresistible, and apparently, something about the title resulted in both of us getting as verbose as we’re probably going to get in this project. The idea of listening to the song, reading the story at the same time, and comprehending anything is pretty laughable. Drew was also of the opinion that the song and the story diverged thematically more than the last ones did. I’m not so sure—certainly the song and story seem to have the same energy level, and there’s something to be said for that. What do you think?

After this blaze of words and notes, Drew and I have decided to try one—from the title “I Woke Up in Utica”—where we both calm down a lot. We’ve also decided to work together much more in the early stages of writing both the song and the story, perhaps even structuring the story so that it’s clear that specific parts of the story correspond to specific parts of the song (which Drew has pretty much already written). Are we maturing? No. We don’t mature; we just gather dirt. But we think we might be figuring out a couple things.

—Brian

(Click on the title below to play the song.)

Hyenas Are Born Fighting

By Drew Bunting and Brian Francis Slattery

They’ve just thrown themselves from a train in South Carolina and are almost thirty feet in the air, falling toward the water, when Sal gets the idea that maybe hanging out with Jules is bad for him. She’s right next to him, falling too, arms pinwheeling, hair fanning out around her face. As blissed out as he’s seen her yet. She loves this, he thinks. She loves every second.

It’s five days ago, outside a bar on the rough end of a dilapidated beach town in New Jersey, across a weedy street from an abandoned arcade, and Sal’s just said the wrong thing to the wrong dude. He gets the dude’s knuckles between his teeth before he has time to apologize, is wincing away from the next one when the guy’s put on the sidewalk by a baseball bat across the back of his knees. She’s already primed to swing again. Get up, she yells. Get up so I can knock you down again. The dude does not comply, decides it’s better to lie there. She takes a look at Sal, throws him a towel.

“Cover your mouth,” she says. “I’m Jules.”

Two days later she asks if he wants to get married.

“I have to think about it,” he says.

“But we would have such beautiful children,” she says. They’re lying side by side on a mattress in the attic of a rattling Victorian on the sun-drowned coast near Temperanceville, Virginia that lost its last bit of paint to a big piece of weather four months ago; soon the rain will come for the wood.

“I need a little bit more time,” he says.

“Okay. Until tomorrow then.”

There are forty-seven other people staying in the place. They sleep in piles on the living room floor, in the tall grass of the blowing fields around the house, four hundred yards from the highway. They stay up all night playing music and arguing in the kitchen. A window is broken, fixed with plastic and tape. The shower doesn’t work; someone keeps turtles in the bathtub. But five of the people in this place, Jules says, are going to do something huge.

She’s wrong: It’s six people. Three of them will become investigative reporters who unearth a corruption scandal that puts twenty-two businessmen in jail and topples a head of state in Central Asia. Another three will become oceanographers and deep-sea divers, discover a new species of fish on the ocean floor near a thermal vent. Its unusual regenerative abilities will make them think; four years later, a chemical from its glands, reproduced in a lab, turn out to treat some forms of blindness. Later, biographers will not uncover the connection among all of them and Jules and Sal, that they were all in the same house near the ocean in Temperanceville. But the six of them will all know.

The next day, on the side of the road hitchhiking through North Carolina, Sal learns that Jules should have had a twin, who died in the womb. Jules should have died, too, but didn’t; understood early that it’s all borrowed time, and she owed it to her sister to try to live both their years. In Los Angeles, she learned to play the guitarron, helped build squatters’ settlements in the San Gabriels. They haven’t kicked them out yet, she says. She worked in a television station in Florida, learned to build furniture in Nebraska. Was married once already; it lasted nine weeks. Don’t worry, baby, she says, we’ll last at least twice that long, and kisses him, long and deep, as though she’s pouring all of herself into him, all at once. She has something in her, he thinks, something big. He can feel it. One day it’ll explode and kill them, them and everyone around them. Or show them something they’ve never seen.

Three days later, they’re in South Carolina, running from the state police, skipping along the tops of buildings, tumbling into the back seats of cars waiting at stoplights and scampering out the other side. At last, they’re clinging to the side of the train, howling over a trestle bridge. Four cruisers are waiting on land, the officers with their guns out, one of them shouting into a megaphone, something Jules and Sal can’t hear over the scream of the wheels.

“You’ve been running from the cops for five days?” Sal says.

“Longer,” she says.

“What did you do?”

She shakes her head. There’s no time to explain.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want to lose you.” Then she takes his hand off the side of the train, and they jump together.

Twenty-three years from now, they’ll have different names, different accents, different-colored hair. They’ll have made two hundred seventy million dollars for themselves, almost a billion for other people, only to give it all away in one sweeping trip across the dying parts of America in a tiny green convertible, throwing thousands of dollars in cash at everyone they see. Here. Take it. Take as much as you can carry, and give it to your husbands, your wives, your children, your friends who brought you candles when the power went out. Take it and do everything you can. Why are you doing this? the local news anchors will say. Because we should, Jules will say. Because we have to, before it’s too late. Three years after that, she’ll die of an aneurysm in Wisconsin, and he’ll outlive her by another twenty-six years, never regretting a minute he spent with her, until he’s killed in a lightning storm off the coast of Oregon. They never do get to have children.

He doesn’t know any of that is coming, but he looks at her, angling toward the river below them. Feels it again, something in her, and stops thinking. Points his feet toward the water and closes his eyes. Takes a deep breath and holds it.

This title comes from an Episcopal priest in Connecticut.  If he/she wants credit for it, he/she knows where to find me.  Till then, I’ll work on the assumption that said priest doesn’t necessarily want everything she/he says to be available to 6.7 billion people.

—Drew

(Click on the title below to play the song.)

Strategic Oblivion

By Drew Bunting and Brian Francis Slattery

The cameras only show one boat, but there must be more, many more. One boat heaving on the swells of the Atlantic off the coast of Nigeria, heading toward the gigantic oil rig that a multinational oil conglomerate built and then sold; it’s been sold three times over, and is, at the time, in the process of changing hands between oil conglomerates yet again. In retrospect, it seems obvious that the occupiers must have known this. There is also a hurricane coming. This must be a lucky accident.

The First Conversation (Abridged):

New Lagos representative: This is to inform you that we have occupied your offshore oil facility in the Akpo oil field.

PetroChemiCorp representative: Who do you represent?

New Lagos: Who do I… ah, I see. You think we are interested in the oil. We do not care about the oil. We are interested in the facility.

PetroChemiCorp: You are aware, of course, that this is a criminal action.

New Lagos: That would frighten us if we were concerned about the applicability of your domestic laws.

[a long pause]

PetroChemiCorp: Don’t tell me you’re pulling another Sealand.

New Lagos: The Principality of Sealand. Ha. That’s just a little family on a tiny platform in the middle of the North Sea. Aeterna Lucia, a bunch of tax evaders. The Copeman Empire. Hutt River. The Northern Forest Archipelago. These people make the mistake of acknowledging the concept of legal jurisdiction.

[a longer pause]

PetroChemiCorp: What do you want?

New Lagos: To stop talking to you. We have work to do before the storm comes.

Satellite imagery shows the oil rig surrounded by a ring of small and large craft. It is clear that hundreds of people have moved onto the facility. At the time the photograph is taken, lines of people are conveying crates, suitcases, livestock, and bottles of water from the ships to somewhere inside the platform. Dozens of people are spreading what looks like topsoil all over the deck. All the facility’s interior cameras have been disabled. The hurricane is only two days away.

The Second Conversation (Abridged):

PetroChemiCorp: The buyer and the seller have agreed to take joint action against you to protect the asset.

New Lagos: I told you, we are uninterested in such things.

PetroChemiCorp: This isn’t legal. It’s military. A private military contractor.

New Lagos: We are ready to repel you.

PetroChemiCorp: You’re going to die for an oil rig?

New Lagos: It is an oil rig to you. It is land to us.

PetroChemiCorp: So you are Sealand.

New Lagos: No, no. You misunderstand. We do not want to work out the legal details, or prove a political point. We are not political people. We are just people who need a place to be. We wanted the land, and then to be left alone. Now we have it, it is here under our feet. It is not perfect, at all, but it is here, with us, and thus it is ours. No one is here, now, in front of us, to dispute our claim, with papers or knives or guns. So our claim is real to us as it has never been, it has survived a day and a night, and we are willing to fight to protect it. Do you understand now?

PetroChemiCorp: Where are you from?

New Lagos: Places you will never see.

[pause]

New Lagos: Please do not attack us. We just want to go.

Four hours after this conversation, a single boat arrives in Port Harcourt carrying the crew of the oil rig. A small, loud group of international reporters meets them on the pier. The former crew is very quiet, polite, deferential. Uninjured, well fed. At last, the question: “Are you glad to be off that rig?” One of the crew looks back out at the ocean. “I don’t know,” he says. “I think they would have let me stay if I’d wanted to. Maybe I should have.”

It is unclear what transpires among the oil conglomerates after this. The military contractor’s action is delayed for thirty-six hours, a small fleet of gunboats and troop carriers swaying at anchor in the harbor in Lagos. Several explanations are given for this—logistical problems, a lack of clarity regarding mission. By the time the order is given to resume operations, the hurricane is too close. It misses the mainland but engulfs the oil fields. Contact is lost with the rig.

When the hurricane passes, the contracted military forces execute their plan and speed out into the Atlantic to the site of the rig. It is not there, though there is debris in the water, pieces of broken metal, clothing. Three bodies. For two days, the rig is presumed to have been destroyed in the storm.

The Last Conversation (Abridged):

New Lagos: Hello.

PetroChemiCorp: Hello. You survived. Where are you?

New Lagos: Free. Goodbye.

PetroChemiCorp: Goodbye.

The sale of rights to the Akpo oil field proceeds; the loss of the rig is factored into the cost of the sale. The three bodies are never identified and are cremated, the ashes misplaced.

This all started because I made a joke about copyediting on Facebook. I said, “‘Bernanke Forecasts Long Period of Low Interest Rates’ is … kind of like saying ‘God Forecasts Tornadoes.’” Ha, said some. But then Amy Smith Muise said, “‘God Forecasts Tornadoes’ would be a good title in just about any genre.” And I said, without thinking all that much about it, “The song would be epic. Let’s get Drew on that pronto.”

But then I thought more about it, and realized just how right Amy Smith Muise was. So I emailed Drew and asked if he’d write a song called “God Forecasts Tornadoes,” and I’d write a story with the same title. Then, we’d put them side by side and see what it was like to listen to the song and read the story at the same time.

Drew finished a draft of the song first, just him playing piano and singing. The song was good enough, though, that I realized I needed to actually write a decent story. So I tried. This is the result.

Don’t read too fast.

—Brian

(Click on the title below to play the song.)

God Forecasts Tornadoes

by Drew Bunting and Brian Francis Slattery

The three of them were on a bus flying across western Pennsylvania, two men and a woman. They were the only ones awake. The rest were sleeping or pretending to sleep, though it was midday. Outside, the farms, the curling roads, not yet freed from winter. Fields of dead stalks blanched by snow. The hills rising sharp and fast on the far side of the valley. A long gray sky.

None of the three people knew each other, but they noticed one another as soon as they got on the bus. Recognizing in the others what they saw in themselves, that they were lightning rods for calamity, bearers of bad juju, born under bad stars. The kind of people who attracted murderers and hurricanes. If there had been a sign, a secret word, they would have used it, though they did not need to. They settled into their seats, felt everyone else on the bus drift away. Each one knew that the other would not close an eye until the trip was over. It was not good, each thought, that they were all here together, but what could they do? The question of their lives.

The first man was born on the floor of an abandoned house in Detroit; it burned down on his first birthday, took his mother with it. From there, he had bounced from foster home to foster home until he bounced out. Lived on odd jobs, charity, the forage from restaurants at the end of the night. Got to the coast and onto a fishing boat. Mistook his good fortune for the end of his hardship until the vessel sank in a big storm, lost everyone but him. From then on he got it. Fell in love, had a kid, but was too smart to stay with them for long. I need to give you two a chance, he said, but don’t worry. I will always provide, I will never forget. I may go but I will never stray. He was on his way to Akron to see them now. He had been away for seven months, working by himself in an auto body shop while a howling wave of darkness roared up and passed over him. It would have taken his family, he thought, if they had been near, if he had understood less the deal he had. But he had time now, it was his turn. A brief lull to hold his wife, kiss his daughter. Tell them everything he meant to say, enough to last when he had to go again, to keep his image in their minds, as he kept theirs in his.

The woman had fled Rwanda with her family and a small city’s worth of people, followed an old set of unused train tracks a thousand miles into Congo. Had hidden with her two brothers in the trees of the rainforest when the rebels laid waste to their parents, their friends, everyone they knew. When it was over, they walked out into a field of corpses. They staggered, hitched, begged, stole, all the way to Kinshasa, where her older brother, almost twenty by then, said that he would never live like that again. She saw that he could do it, that he was not touched as she was, so she left the younger brother with him, told them both never to look for her, and vanished. Got to New York, to Brooklyn, to Harlem. Sold incense, burned CDs, cheap paperbacks about Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. Befriended people fast, left them soon. Tried to give them a year’s worth of good in a few months. She did not want to hurt them, could not explain to them how much they were in danger. But I know, I know, she said to the air. Was on her way to Chicago to stay ahead of what was following her. She would not let it catch anyone else again because of her.

The second man had grown up in Gorham, Illinois, in the stripe of the cyclone that took almost everything with it as it passed a century ago, lifted up all the houses and took them apart. As a young man, he had seen the killer jump off the train, wander through town. Heard about the murders as soon as they were discovered. Realized only later what he had witnessed. Left the town after that, did farm work, some construction. Saw two towns flood, one in New Hampshire, one in Tennessee. Comprehended then, in the rising water, his place in this world, how he should protect it, it and everyone around him, from what he was. Was on his way out to South Dakota, figured there had to be a stretch of earth for him, a place of hard land and ragged sky that could not shift, that would take his worst and be unmoved. He was headed out there now, would sign the deed, make the best friends he could with his distant neighbors, and then leave them be. It was not a bad thing, he thought, to be as he was. Just a matter of figuring out how to live with it.

Then, all at once, everyone on the planet saw everything. All that the three people on the bus had seen and everyone else like them. All the death by fire and drowning, the car bombs and factory explosions that sent shudders through the ground, the workmen in the way when the water mains collapsed. The massacres by bullets and machetes. The people who fell from the sky, who were crushed under falling ceilings. The people who starved to death, who were buried alive. And then things really opened up and they saw all that was coming, all that would happen, to them and everyone they knew, and all the strangers they would never meet. It swept over the continents in the blink of an eye and was gone, and on the bus, everyone was awake at once, sobbing into their phones, holding each other, running fingers through hair. The bus had stopped, was at an angle across the road, the driver leaning against the side window, his hand on his brow. They could see cars frozen on the highway in front and back of them, people getting out to stare into the sky. And the three of them, who had gotten on together and recognized each other, who had never tried to rest, all looked at each other and nodded. They all knew what to do.