Book Excerpt: Irreplaceable by Stephen Lovely

Apr 2, 2010 by A Book Excerpt Author

A P R I L 2 0 0 5/Prologue

Isabel crouched low on the bike, hands in the drops, legs cranking. Her cycling jersey, damp with sweat in the upper back, clung to her skin. Sweat crept down her forehead and temples, trickling into her eyes. She wiped her brow with the back of a glove. She touched three fingers to her carotid artery and felt thuds in her neck.

When she’d left town an hour before, the sky had been mildly overcast, but now the wind had come up and the clouds were on the move. The sky was inky. The air was fragrant with moisture and manure. Red- winged blackbirds were restless on the phone wires. She guessed she had five or ten minutes to reach town before the downpour.

The wind tossed and shoved. She relaxed her grip on the handlebars to let the bike absorb the blows. She resisted the more forceful assaults by leaning into them, achieving a precarious balance until the trickster wind stepped back and she had to quickly shift weight again to avoid careening onto the shoulder.

She felt exposed and vulnerable. This was Iowa, and though she didn’t hear the tornado siren, she kept her eye out for a funnel cloud on the horizon. She needed to get home. She wanted to see her husband, Alex. She wanted to pet her dog, drink a glass of orange juice, get to the basement—if there was a tornado warning. If not, take a hot shower.

At the same time she was excited. Exhilarated, even. To be struggling against this wind, this impending storm. To be brushing up against danger.

She plummeted down a steep hill, a chute of rushing air, body and bike melded into a hurtling projectile, achieving a sensation of incredible speed, freefall, release from all surrounding matter.

She sped across a long, flat straightaway past fields covered with the stubble of last year’s corn, a farm house, distant pastures, configurations of cows, a stand of oaks.

She pedaled hard through the approach to another hill, downshifted, and surged into her climb. She bent sharply forward at the waist, gripping the handlebars palms- down, nose practically touching her forearms. She shifted her weight back and mashed her legs through their strokes, holding her cadence, fighting her way up. For the first twenty yards she felt like an engine—a sleek, powerful, perfectly calibrated device clipped onto the bike to crank its pedals. Then she ran out of gas. This was a long, steep hill, and she wasn’t yet in shape. It was only her third ride of the season. Her lungs felt singed, her thighs heavy as iron. The bike wobbled beneath her.

She looked up and saw the crest of the hill approaching, not ten yards distant. A field of soybeans dipping toward a farm. Goats huddled in a barn doorway.

She struggled to the top, where the wind lunged and bullied, its sound sharpening to a whistle at the peaks of the gusts.

The roar of an engine lunged out of the ground behind her, and she felt a jolt of panic: in the fraction of a second before impact she realized she was too far out into the road.


A P R I L 2 0 0 6/One

Alex Voormann slouches in a folding chair in a basement room of U.S. Exam’s corporate campus wishing he could call his wife. He’d like to vent, perform a little comedy routine called “My Shitty Day.” You wouldn’t believe the inanity we’ve got going over here, Iz. He used to enjoy calling Isabel at the lab and luring laughter to her serious surface. She’d giggle and protest. Alex, I am so busy. Still, she’d be tickled, and glad he called.

Alex would like to call Isabel, but Isabel’s dead. She’s been dead now nearly a year.

Diane Topor, director of U.S. Exam’s SCAT Project (Secondary Composition Advancement Testing), appears at Alex’s side dressed in one of her citrus- colored power suits. She inserts a piece of paper into his field of vision. “Remember this essay? You gave it a zero. The Quality Control Panel gave it a unanimous score of three. Can you account for the discrepancy?”

Alex is used to Diane bringing his work back to him, querying his scores, defending inept young essayists. He leans back in his chair for a better view of the essay, wanting Diane to notice his wrinkled, untucked polo shirt, his faded jeans with the fringy tear in the knee. He rakes his fingers through unkempt hair and tries to remember the essay and author. Of course. Tina Criswell. Age thirteen, of Fort Collins, Colorado. In response to the essay question—What do you think is America’s biggest problem? What can be done to fix it? Use details and examples to make your writing vivid to the reader—Tina wrote, Teen pregnancy.  Abstain until marriage. Her script is neat, tight, curlicued. Beneath her words she drew a winking smiley face. The smiley face is provocative and impossible to interpret. What does it mean? Sex will be hot when you finally have it? Abstinence is a joke?

Alex encountered this essay just before lunch, and felt it a perfect candidate for the zero score. The student does not attempt to address the question and/or the student’s answer is illegible and/or written in a language other than English.

He looks up at Diane, hoping she’ll take his bewilderment personally. “A three?”

Diane raises her eyebrows, a direct challenge to his intelligence.

Alex rummages through his papers for the Holistic Scoring Guidelines and reads aloud from the description of a three. “ ‘Vague focus.’ I didn’t see any focus. ‘Content limited to a listing of ideas.’ Where do you see ideas? ‘Inconsistent organization.’ Organization of what? ‘Repeated weaknesses in mechanics and usage.’ What mechanics? What usage? Diane, this girl didn’t write anything. She didn’t take the question seriously.”

Diane places her hand tenderly over Tina’s words. The sleeve of her blazer slides up her wrist, revealing a stiff white cuff and a gold watch with a butterfly-shaped face. “We consider this an attempt. A minimal attempt, but an attempt nevertheless. There is focus. The focus is teen pregnancy. Two ideas are listed and organized. One, teen pregnancy is a problem, and two, a possible solution is to abstain from sexual activity until marriage. There are no weaknesses in mechanics and usage. Indeed, we have a sophisticated use of the imperative verb form.”

Alex surveys the basement room’s sulfur yellow walls, the urine-colored window overlooking the back of a shrub. Is it possible that this is all a bad dream from which he’ll eventually awake?

He scoots his chair back to face Diane more directly. “I can’t believe the panel gave this a three. Do the guidelines mean anything? Are you sure the QC people aren’t working off the guidelines for first and second graders?” He’s exaggerating his dismay; he really doesn’t care about anything except bucking against Diane and U.S. Exam and this whole dubious enterprise of branding adolescents with numerical scores. “You’re rewarding this girl for doing nothing. We know she’s smart. She used the word ‘abstain,’ and spelled it correctly. She blew this test off. She told you to take your test and shove it.”

Diane draws a long breath meant to display how much oxygen her response will cost her. “One of our concerns, Alex, is that you seem to have difficulty recognizing effort when you see it. You consistently score lower than the panel by two or three points. This is unacceptable, in the long run, but in the contemporary we’re willing to work with you.”

Alex tries to calm down. He does need the job, after all. He allows penitence into his voice. “Look, I made a judgment call. I don’t call this an attempt. Not for a seventh grader. See this space here?” He touches his hand to the exam booklet, the blank answer space. “This should be filled with words, thoughts, ideas.”

Diane nods, a perfunctory display of understanding. “Revisit this essay and see if you can’t surface its merit. That was the imperative verb form, in case you didn’t recognize it.”

“I believe you’ve committed a usage error, Diane. You don’t revisit something you’ve read. You might revisit, say, Italy, but when it’s a book or other piece of written material the correct term is re-read, I’m pretty sure.”

“Re-grade the essay,” Diane says, and slides it onto the table.

*****************

Before meeting Isabel, armed with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and a master’s in archaeology, Alex worked doing rescue excavation for the Iowa State Archaeologist. He and his team, over which he was proud to have been awarded a supervisory role, traveled to the sites of future roads and highways and dug up fields and abandoned lots, making certain, before bulldozers rolled, that there was nothing present of historical or cultural value—remnants of a prehistoric settlement, say—that might be destroyed.

Alex liked the work, the days spent in the country kneeling on dry, hard ground, brush in hand, his fanny pack stuffed with tools (soup ladle, teaspoon, dental probe), his primary concern a meter- wide square of the Earth’s surface. He liked the solitude—his square meter, his province—and the safety net of camaraderie, the other excavators close by, kneeling over their own square meters, respectful of his need to concentrate but available to chat if the occasion arose.

He would come to appreciate a similar blend of solitude and easy communicativeness with Isabel. Sitting in a room with her, reading or studying, he had the silence and space to conduct his inner life, but it wasn’t the barren, unbounded space of loneliness: Isabel was right there carrying on her inner life, which she had linked to his in what seemed to him an astonishing act of love and generosity and confidence, and when one of them sensed a need or receptivity in the other they would set out talking, populating each other’s minds with thoughts, ideas, theories, connections. They shared a spirited affection for science—Isabel was working toward a PhD in plant biology—and during their days apart, while he was kneeling over some remote patch of ground, Alex liked to think of her back in town peering through a microscope at a spore or out in a field taking pollen samples—liked to think that they were engaged in a joint venture, a collaborative investigation of the physical world.

He’d enjoyed playing in the dirt for as long as he could remember. As a child he liked its grittiness and fragrance, the feel of soil in his hands, under his fingernails, the excitement of not knowing what he’d find if he dug down even an inch: a blue glass perfume bottle the size of a thumb, a copper bullet, an arrowhead. Twenty years later he was still just playing in the dirt, the way he saw it, only with more sophistication, more technology at his disposal, and a better sense of what he was looking at, looking for. Each layer of soil was a flypaper-thin page that might present to him—in the language of its color and texture, its stones and tiles, bones, seeds, glass, mineral deposits—glimpses of animal and plant and microbial life, of the planet’s tumultuous geophysical history. Over millions of years frost and ice had shattered exposed surfaces, rain and wind dumped mud and dust into hollows, water seeped, roots groped, bacteria and fungi fed on debris, insects dug burrows, worms inched through the soil passing millions of tons of it through their bodies. It gave Alex quite a feeling, kneeling on top of all that—all that work. He felt integrated with the onward march of centuries. He wasn’t floating in a cold, dark universe: there in the dirt was the drop of sweat just fallen from his nose.

Two years ago there were budget cuts in Des Moines, layoffs at the Office of the State Archaeologist. Alex’s attempts to find another job—with a cultural resource management firm, an environmental canvassing organization—led nowhere. He was forced to wait tables to pay rent and bills. Relocation didn’t appeal to him. He and Isabel had married by then, and Isabel was midway through her doctoral program. They had constructed a life together that seemed to depend so much on the stately limestone university and its ongoing cultural bazaar, the familiar coffee shops and bookstores, restaurants and bars, the tree- lined pedestrian mall, the quiet streets longing to be aimlessly walked—all the things that had conspired to bring them together.

When Isabel died, Alex lost the hopefulness and assurance necessary to search for serious work. A dense weight settled in his forehead. Concentration, once a talent, was impossible: filling out a form, reading a job description, his brain went white, failed to engage, as though all the neurons involved had been clipped and cauterized. He took to buying People magazine. The stars were marrying other stars, the stars were conquering cancer, the stars had never been happier. Alex spent whole days lying on his back on his living room floor, limbs sprawled, feeling nauseous and doomed.

In the evenings he walked a mile to a shopping mall and played pinball in a video arcade stuffed with teenagers. In his favorite game, Tentaclon, the player was charged with defending the planet against an invasion force of gigantic, mutant octopi. There were bells and buzzers, flashing lights—white, blue, red—chutes and tubes through which the shiny silver ball arched with incredible speed, slots that opened, panels that flipped, a pulsating display panel that proclaimed in huge orange letters OCTOPOD DESTROYED! and BONUS PROJECTILE!

The machine had so many parts and components that Alex felt, after thirty minutes at the flippers, like a much less complex organism than he was: a spineless polyp feeding on sound and light. He played for hours. There was no doubt, no ambiguity in this game about what you were supposed to do. When the ball approached the flippers, you flipped. Thwack. Again: thwack. When you lost three balls, the machine shut down, but you could resuscitate it with a pair of quarters, and—miraculously, it seemed to Alex—with a ringing of bells and a flourish of lights it would shake itself to life.

This book excerpt is from IRREPLACEABLE, HYPERION, NEW YORK, Copyright © 2009 Stephen Lovely. Irreplaceable is available at all good book stores, including Amazon.com.

Stephen Lovely was born in Dallas, Texas and spent most of his childhood in Ohio. He attended Kenyon College, where he majored in English and made his first awkward forays into fiction writing. After graduating from Kenyon he moved to Boston and spent two years working on the editorial staff of Cell. He attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop from 1990-92 and studied with Deborah Eisenberg, Margot Livesey, Ethan Canin, and Frank Conroy.

Stephen then worked for seven years as a night clerk in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. He began writing Irreplaceable during this time.

In 2005 he became the Director of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, a summer, residential creative writing program for high school students. He currently lives in Iowa City with his girlfriend and their three dogs and three cats. Learn more about Irreplaceable and Stephen at his website, http://www.stephenlovely.com.