Everything is fleeting and ephemeral, on a course to die out and be extinguished. The exterminator and his bugs, the Yale students and their consultant careers, even Marina Keegan and some day, her Celiac disease, too. And yet. In that yet is the works of Shakespeare and Beethoven’s symphonies, a mother’s love, the memories of a beat up hand-me-down Toyota Camry, and a young, aspiring writer and activist. In that yet is hope. It’s us. The maddening creatures who break hearts, disappoint mothers, care more about beached pilot whales than starving Ethiopian children, but also creatures who inspire, motivate, and move others, who change the world for the better. We are something to hang on to, however long it lasts against the dying of the light. These juxtaposing thoughts — dreaming of the past, aching within an uncertain present, and yearning for a future still to come — is where we find Marina Keegan’s fiction and nonfiction works, teeming with such promising voice and vigor, grappling with the smallness, and bigness, of us. Her words, including where she envisions her death, where she can finally enjoy all the gluten foods she’s been unable to eat since birth, take on a tinge of the prophetic and further profundity due to her untimely, tragic death shortly after graduating from Yale University in 2012 at the age of 22. So young, so “still-to-come,” so ephemeral, and yet. In the 2014 book, The Opposite of Loneliness, Keegan achieved what she sought in her whimsical, earnest final message in the final nonfiction story, “Song for the Special,” to say, “Hello,” and it echo down through the ages.
The Opposite of Loneliness is a posthumous curation of Keegan’s fiction and nonfiction by her family, friends, and teachers. There are nine fiction stories and eight nonfiction stories, with two lovely snippets of poetry introducing both sections, such as the following:
Do you wanna leave soon?
No, I want enough time to be in love with everything …
And I cry because everything is so beautiful and so short.
Marina Keegan, from the poem, “Bygones.”
Everything is so beautiful and so short, but Keegan’s role as a writer, a person working on mastering the “art of observation,” is to capture the beauty as it zips by, turn it into some form of permanence in an impermanent world. She does that lovingly across fiction and nonfiction, literary and genre fiction, essays and journalistic articles. In her essay that went viral, the namesake of the book, interestingly, Keegan relents on the weightiness of ephemeral and embraces the seemingly long road ahead. “We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time.” The italics are Keegan’s and I interpret it not so much as bombast, but a reverent whisper against our own insecurities, doubts, imposter’s syndrome, and comparative jealousy. She did have so much time. She did.
Her fiction is replete with the concept of “dreaming of the past,” regret, and longing.
“Cold Pastoral,” is about a girl, Claire, who has a rather intentionally ambiguous relationship with a boy, Brian, who then dies after suffering an aneurysm. However, upon going to his house and funeral, Claire learns someone else was much closer to him. Brian preferred Lauren Cleaver in every way, which, excuse the pun, cleaves through Claire. After the funeral and an unexpected invitation to deliver a eulogy, Claire is at a party where she meets a man, who invites her back to his apartment. She said she never wanted anything more. “But as I watched him smile back at me and zip his coat, I saw everything in the world build up and then everything in the world fall down again.” A penetrating observation, indeed, about the ups and downs of romantic, often fleeting love.
“Winter Break” is a melancholic ode to an unsatisfied mother thinking of ending things with her husband, who is on the verge of full-blown alcoholism. As she witnesses her mom walking the family dog, the main character has this poignant observation, “… and something about the stillness or my state of mind reminded me of the world’s remarkable capacity to carry on in every place at once.” She’s doing her thing, her younger brother is playing video games, and there her mom is, just trudging along, more fragile than the main character remembers, but dutifully walking the dog, nonetheless.
“Reading Aloud” is where Keegan pontificates on the sorrowfulness of “dreaming backward.” Indeed, the older you get, the more prone you are to it. Anna is a 60-something woman, aloof in the world since her ballerina career ended at 28, and even more marooned on an island of loneliness since her husband returned to work after a short retirement. So, to find “purpose and routine,” she assists at the library reading to a blind 20-something-year-old man. The very not normal part of Anna’s routine, though, is to undress as she reads to the blind man until she’s naked. Her penchant to do so, though, is rendered moot when her husband suffers a heart attack and dies. The most melancholy line of the short story is this one, “She understood silence the way he understood darkness—running from neither as the sun set and the words ran out.” Anna is also just trying to outrun the dying of the light in her own peculiar way.
“The Ingenue” was a darkly comic story about a girl with a theater actor boyfriend who insists he invented the phenomenon of saying “cha-cha-cha” after each phrase of the Happy Birthday song. She starts getting jealous — violent in her thoughts kind of jealous — when she repeatedly watches his performance where he kisses and gently caresses his counterpart actress. She thinks there must be more going on. It’s confirmed, to her, later in the story when they’re all playing Yahtzee and he cheats to win. Still, she goes on to marry him. As one does.
“The Emerald City” is an interesting departure from most of the other short stories in the collection, fiction or nonfiction, both in form and substance. In form, it’s told through a series of emails from William Madar, a Coalition Provisional Authority officer in the midst of the Iraq War. He’s an architect. We don’t ever see the email responses from Laura Kenzie, but they seem terse and sparse comparatively. William and a translator he befriends get hoodwinked by Al Qaeda operatives into letting them into the Green Zone (the safe area). Much death ensues, including William’s fellow CPA colleague. William and the interpreter decide to make a run for Syria instead of going back home and facing jail time. I thought “The Emerald City” showed Keegan’s versatility and range: the Iraq War setting and William character were wholly believable, as were the emails, as he got more and more into the war and desperate. I was impressed!
“Baggage Claim” was a short little story (one of the shortest of the collection) with a fun concept. A couple, where the guy is a bit of a curmudgeon, visit a warehouse that sells all the stuff found in lost airport baggage (after a 90-day window is given to claim the baggage, of course). I just wish it was fleshed out a bit more to see where the concept could have taken Keegan.
“Hail, Full of Grace,” is another story of a character traveling the nostalgic “what if” road, with some of that dark, acerbic wit of Keegan’s.
“Sclerotherapy,” might be the weakest of the fiction stories, if I had to rank them in such a manner, but I enjoyed the dark comedy of someone getting a Chinese character tattoo thinking it means, inner resolve and outer peace, a general levelheadedness and tranquility, and instead, it means soybean. We all like to think we possess inner resolve and outer peace, a general levelheadedness and tranquility, but we’re probably navigating life with an inner soybean (which isn’t such a terrible thing).
“Challenger Deep” is similar to “The Emerald City” in being an outlier in form and substance. A group of people are stranded in a deep sea submarine with diminishing rations and eventually, light itself — a rather horrifying notion. One character can’t take it anymore and in an effort to kill herself instead renders herself deaf. Again, a short story demonstrating Keegan’s ability to traverse different types of writing, and as a big fan of horror, I liked her playing with that here to chilling effect.
Keegan twice in her nonfiction talks about the sun dying out one day. The end of everything. She even titles one of her nonfiction stories after the study of the world ending, “Putting the ‘Fun’ Back in Eschatology.” In the interlude poem from, “Nuclear Spring,” she sets the stage for this sentiment, talking about the sense of urgency, a deadline for the end of things. She just wants to know, ” … if you’d wanna leave your shadow next to mine.” So lovely and macabre. An evocative serenity, even.
“Stability in Motion” was an oof of nostalgia. The story is about Keegan driving the aforementioned Toyota Camry hand-me-down from her grandmother and how it became a vessel of her adolescence and growth. A first car is a moment in time indeed, and Keegan offers a touching tribute to it.
“Why We Care about Whales” is where Keegan gets philosophical and muses about the way of things, the way of whales. Perhaps the best opening line of the whole collection starts this one off: “When the moon gets bored, it kills whales.” When pilot whales are beached, scores of volunteers rush to save them and comfort them. After the job is done, they go home, eyes averted from the homeless people on the street corner and the news of starving Ethiopian children. Keegan is at first befuddled by this, but arrives, I think, at that conclusion that it’s not so much that we care about beached whales more than the suffering of fellow humans, but that beached whales seem like a solvable problem, whereas “homelessness” and “world hunger” are not. True enough, I’d say!
“Against the Grain,” which is a great play on words as a title, is about Keegan’s Celiac disease and the ways in which her mother tried so hard to protect Keegan from gluten throughout her life, which only served to embarrass Keegan (and then maybe shame her for feeling embarrassed at her mother). She just wanted to fit in. To not be an exception. To not be noticed for how unlike others she was. Food is food. With age and time, I think Keegan came to appreciate her mother’s efforts, as she thinks ahead to how she would be as a mother.
“I Kill for Money” is the journalistic essay (one of two in the collection) about Tommy Hart, an exterminator. And it’s so sad! People are not just scared of bugs and rodents in their businesses and houses, they’re embarrassed by them, so by extension, they’re embarrassed by people like Tommy who eliminate the bugs and rodents. Even his wife and children are rather perplexed by him and his vocation. He hides behind bug humor and self-deprecation, but it’s a thin veneer. In some ways, he is the mouse dancing on the sticky pad until they run out of oxygen and die. I guess, in some ways, we all are.
“Even Artichokes Have Doubts” is Keegan’s second journalistic endeavor to understand why 25 percent of employed Yale graduates go into the consulting or finance industry. She sees it as such a waste, if you will, of the creativity, curiosity, and aspirations of the class of people she knows. Job security, because it’s accessible, whatever the reason, Yale graduates line up to take such positions, leaving behind, at least for now, loftier notions of changing the world, or following more creative passion pursuits. “I feel like we can do something really cool in this world. And I fear—at twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five—we might forget.” Another oof moment. Incidentally, education combined with the pressure of assimilating into the “real world,” has a way of ironing out those aforementioned loftier, more creative pursuits. By the way, again, Keegan is versatile in her writing; she would have make a great journalist.
“The Art of Observation” is perhaps a few years ahead of the curve, at the time it was written, about the odiousness of always being on, observed, and documented by others. And we can’t fault others for doing it, as we are equal opportunity offenders.
“Song for the Special” ends the collection going back to everything dying and so, what makes us special? Keegan said she searched her name on Facebook and found eight other Marina Keegans. So, when they all die, their gravestones will match. If everything is ephemeral, what makes us special when there are so many of us, as Keegan laments? But maybe we are all special in that we exist at all. This desire to be special, which engenders a sense of jealousy at worrying we aren’t special, is the other angst in Keegan’s craw. But this is where Keegan also thinks, before she dies, she’ll send out a radio wave to the universe saying, “Hello.”
For someone who didn’t want to let the universe down as we chased the dying of the light, I think it’s fair to say Keegan didn’t. She made her mark. She sent her “hello” into the stars. However long the light lasts, at least. I wish the world could have gotten more of Keegan’s writing, as she matured, grew, continued to find her voice, but what a lovely treat to have these words at the time of my own ephemeral chase against the dying of the light.
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