Painting Beyond Walls

David Rhodes

Description

It is 2027. August Helm is thirty years old. A biochemist working in a lab at the University of Chicago, he is swept off his feet by the beautiful and entirely self-assured Amanda Clark. Animated by August’s consuming desire, their relationship quickly becomes intimate. But when he stumbles across a liaison between the director of his lab and a much younger student, his position is eliminated and his world upended.

August sets out to visit his parents in Words, an unincorporated village in the heart of Wisconsin’s Driftless Area. Here, he reconnects with several characters from his past: Ivan Bookchester, who now advocates for “new ways of living” in an age of decline; Hanh, formerly known as Jewelweed, who tends her orchard and wild ginseng, keenly attuned to new patterns of migration resulting from climate change and habitat destruction; and Lester Mortal, the aging veteran and fierce pacifist who long ago rescued her from Vietnam. Together, the old friends fall back into a familiar closeness.

But much as things initially seem unchanged in the Driftless, when August is hired to look after Tom and April Lux’s home in Forest Gate, he finds himself in the midst of an entirely different social set, made up of wealthy homeowners who are mostly resented by the poorer surrounding communities, and distanced in turn by their fear of the locals. August soon falls head over heels for April, and different versions of his self collide: one in which the past is still present in tensions and dreams, another in which he understands his desire as genetically determined and chemically induced, and then a vaguely hoped-for future with April. When Lester is diagnosed with liver cirrhosis, Ivan comes clean on a ghastly past episode, and April makes a shocking revelation, a series of events ensues that will change all involved forever.   
As approachable as it is profound in exploring the human condition and our shared need for community, this is a story for our times.

Sujets

• Science-Fiction
• Toute la Science-Fiction
• Psychological
• Midwest
• Literary
• Medio Oeste de Estados Unidos
• Ácido desoxirribonucleico
• Literature
• Impatiens
• General officer
• Midwestern United States
• Psychology
• General
• Middle West
• DNA
• Fiction
• Rhodes
• Wisconsin

Informations

• Publié par: Milkweed Editions
• Date de parution: 13 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781639550579
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

PAINTING BEYOND WALLS
a novel
DAVID RHODES
MILKWEED    EDITIONS
ALSO BY DAVID RHODES
Jewelweed (2013)
Driftless (2008)
Rock Island Line (1975)
The Easter House (1974)
The Last Fair Deal Going Down (1972)
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
© 2022, Text by David Rhodes
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.
[phone]
milkweed .org
Published 2022 by Milkweed Editions
Printed in Canada
Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker
Cover art by John Edwards (“Various Tulips,” 1791)
and Julie de Graag (“Studies of wasps”)
Author photo by Anna Weggel
22 23 24 25 26   5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
978-1-57131-141-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rhodes, David, 1946- author.
Title: Painting beyond walls : a novel / David Rhodes.
Description: First paperback edition. | Minneapolis, Minnesota : Milkweed Editions, [2022] | Summary: “As approachable as it is profound in exploring the human condition and our shared need for community, this is a story for our times”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022017325 (print) | LCCN 2022017326 (ebook) | ISBN 9781571311412 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781639550579 (epub)
Classification: LCC PS3568.H55 P35 2022 (print) | LCC PS3568.H55 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn .loc .gov/2022017325
LC ebook record available at https://lccn .loc .gov/2022017326
Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Painting Beyond Walls was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Friesens Corporation.
To E DNA ,
my wife
companion
friend
critic
lover
muse
advocate
helpmeet
financier
caregiver
manager
guide
coconspirator
enemy
bodyguard
advisor
nurse
counselor
strategist
secretary
priest
chef
scrubwoman
confessor
chauffeur
alter ego
ambassador
scheduler
paramour
architect
litigator
hero
therapist
consultant
banker
competition
druggist
gamekeeper
jailer
liberator
and the other
CONTENTS A Miniature Cage Pale, Polished Wood A Grief Unlike Any Other Red Rooster Cafe Determined Fidelities Jet Lag Saws Working Wood The Glass Eye The Home Place The Fish Room Eating Snakes The Flat Worm Dogs Play Shampoo Insects Whittling Carjacking Player Piano Divine Madness Visitors Violated Hot Biscuits Femicide Snow Links and Linkage Living’s Bookends The Service Gene Circling We Grew Up Together Climax Epilogue Acknowledgments
Without familiar patterns, how will we ever know we’re lost? Seek beauty, but no—not over there. Evolution depends on the misfit who fits.
— JAMES NOLAND
A MINIATURE CAGE
SEPTEMBER 2027, CHICAGO
E ARLY FOR AUTUMN , yet a few trees had already turned color, surprising the old brick-and-mortar neighborhood with splendid, if unwelcome, harbingers of winter. It seemed too soon for summer to be over, too warm for daylight hours to shorten. But there could be no mistake about the signs. One especially extravagant hard maple paraded in front of August Helm’s apartment on Fifty-Eighth Street, its red-orange flora shamelessly monopolizing the window view from his second-floor kitchen. On sunlit mornings, broad avenues of light slanted in from the horizon, and the glowing leaves resembled the innermost chamber in desire’s furnace.
Five blocks away, August Helm worked in a biochemical laboratory at the University of Chicago, the same facility he’d been in for four years—almost as long as he’d lived in the Hyde Park apartment. Along with the fifteen other members of the research team, he experimented with adaptive immunization engineering—studies primarily designed by Dr. Peter Grafton and funded through grants from privately owned pharm-conglomerates and the National Institute of Health.
It was a relatively unremarkable time in August’s life. He was thirty years old, an inch shy of six feet, and he weighed roughly 150 pounds; his daily routine had a nearly predictable rhythm, and his health remained excellent. He enjoyed cycling whenever he could carve out the time, and on one day rode his Swedish-made bicycle eighty-six miles—a personal record; yet the high odometer reading had less to do with his own ambitions, and more to do with the man and woman he was riding with. Both were older than August, well respected within the scientific community for their grant writing, and wore their fitness like merit badges. Though August generally went out of his way to avoid overt physical competition of all kinds, on that day it seemed important to keep up with them. Two weeks later, when he was asked to ride with them again, he begged off.
Most of the stumbling blocks along August’s career path had been overcome, and he anticipated a decade of working in temporarily funded labs before seeking salaried employment with an established pharmacological or biomedical company. Currently, his monthly student loan payments were being waived, yet his income never quite stretched far enough to cover all his expenses—like a twin sheet fitted over a full-size bed. And he accepted this as normal. Nearly everyone he knew under the age of forty lived beyond paychecks, settling old obligations by incurring new ones. Due to a steady trickle of people and businesses from the East Coast, where retreating shorelines seemed increasingly inhospitable, and an even steadier stream of immigration from the drought-plagued Southwest, the costs of living in Chicago had risen.
August’s parents had been calling and texting a lot lately, urging him to come home for a visit. His mother had become unusually strident, and recently threatened to take a bus to Chicago by herself if August’s father continued to refuse to drive into the city because of the traffic. She complained that if August stayed away from home much longer, they might become strangers to each other.
But August kept putting them off. The tiny village of Words, Wisconsin, where his parents continued to live in the same house August had grown up in, had come to seem to him like a foreign land, nearly irrelevant to the life he’d become accustomed to. Whenever he considered returning home, other activities and schedules always seemed more pressing. He could never find the time.
This dismissive attitude toward the place of his childhood would have seemed quite unfathomable to August seven or eight years earlier, when the urge to flee back to the benign familiarity of home had tormented him unmercifully. For months after leaving Wisconsin, his heart had nearly broken from dislocation. And he’d often dreamt—even during daylight hours—of returning home, coming upon his mother pulling weeds in her garden or reading in her favorite chair, and his father working on gasoline and diesel engines until after dark, smelling of perspiration and oil. Any remembered scenes from home, it seemed, could be effectively mythologized by his loneliness into visions of domestic rapture.
But since then, the unfamiliar had become familiar, and like many other young people who are selected by test scores, sorted by application forms, separated by scholarships, and relocated out of voiceless rural backwaters into urban centers of higher education and technical training, new activities and thoughts gradually consumed him, and for several years now, he seldom thought about his origins.
First, there had been the dormitories, cafeterias, offices, and classrooms to contend with, and many of those mammoth buildings had exuded a grand respectability of age and old-world craftsmanship, with polished granite floors, thick, beveled glass, and hand-carved woodwork. All of them seemed formidable, bursting with people from every corner of the world—many of whom looked and sounded very important. Growing up in a lower working-class family in an extended rural community of other families of similar circumstances had not prepared him for the diversity he discovered at the university. On that first day, in front of the dorms, arriving students had pulled suitcases and boxes out of vehicles that August had never seen before excepting in magazines and movies; but he also saw people who looked like they hadn’t changed clothes, slept, eaten, showered or entertained a benign thought in many days. Everywhere he looked, something challenging looked back.
August’s assigned roommate—an ultrapolite young black man from Puducherry—spoke in a distinct British accent. He called himself Ishmael, though the name listed on the student registration form clearly read Eugene, and he wore a bright white turban carefully wrapped around his head. His baritone voice conveyed infinite self-confidence, and even his normal mode of speaking gave the impression of making announcements. His smile seemed friendly and upbeat, and at first reminded August of blinking his headlights at the driver of an oncoming car, only to learn his low beams had already been engaged.
When they met, Ishmael assumed the responsibility of explaining to August that Puducherry lay along the southeastern coast of India; and until 1954, Puducherry had been a province of France, previously founded as a trading colony by the French East India Company as early as 1674. Ishmael’s family had at one time been spice merchants, or, as Ishmael explained with a short, friendly laugh followed by a blinding smile, “One of Europe’s many flavor vendors.”
Before August cou