This week, the park entered what I think of as 'peak azalea,' when the landscape is dotted with surreal clouds of pink and red and magenta. These are not your basic suburban azaleas. The effect is beautiful, intense, and disruptive. Or maybe the opposite of disruptive, given that it pulls you into a hallucinogenic state rather than breaking you out of it, like, say, an alarm clock will do. In either case, time begins to feel less linear in a park filled with banks of azaleas. It's nice to be reminded that the world can be magical, even if there's an underlying disturbance, a sense of questioning what made you want to leave one world for another.
This week, I also finished a debut novel called Brother & Sister Enter the Forest, by Richard Mirabella, which had a similar effect on me.
As the title suggests, the novel is about two siblings -- a brother and a sister -- who as adults are coming to terms (or not) with a series of traumatic events they endured in their youth. The brother is gay and had a difficult childhood. As a kid, he's something of a loner, he has trouble making friends, and -- most problematically -- he eventually gets involved with an older man, a violent, harrowing relationship that, when it ends, leaves the brother teetering on the edge of a kind of antisocial insanity that clings to him as an adult, even as he tries to interact with conventional society and to develop more stable relationships with his sister and a boyfriend.
Despite being more popular and (at least on the surface) well-adjusted than her brother, the sister is also on the verge of falling apart as she tries to navigate her relationships with her brother, her mother, her boyfriend, and ultimately herself.
The book does many amazing things as it tells these stories, but most remarkable is the seamless way time moves back and forth between the siblings' past and present. Mirabella gives us just enough context to know where we are in the lives of his characters, but without ever using dates or other easy markers. As a result, the book feels almost inexplicably dreamlike (or nightmarish) in the same way that our lives (sometimes) do. There is one present and an almost infinite pool of the past, which ebbs and flows in our awareness without any regard to the actual passage of time.
Mirabella also perfectly captures the way trauma -- particularly when unacknowledged or barely acknowledged -- has a way of seeping into the present, where it continues to poison the life of not only the person who directly suffered, but also the surrounding parties -- family, friends -- who, wittingly or not, are drawn into the chaos, so that, as time passes, the effects of the trauma, perhaps counterintuitively, are compounded.
It's a perfect book for our times, in which we seem to be living in a state of collective denial about what we have done to ourselves, and what we're going to do next.
