In “Keuka Lake,” your story in this week’s issue, Nadia is struggling to reconcile herself to the loss of her husband, Drew. In her grief, she imagines that there was something shady about his death, which happened after his car was hit head on by a pickup truck. What got you thinking about this premise, and how does Nadia benefit from thinking conspiratorially about Drew’s end?
Nadia’s predicament—the premature loss of one’s spouse—is one that I’ve witnessed several friends endure, and the bereavement does seem to involve episodes of disinhibition. The disinhibited behavior, in Nadia’s case, gives voice to a suspicion that we all carry within us: there’s something off about death. One minute you’re here and existent, the next minute you’re nowhere and nonexistent. It doesn’t make sense. Someone should look into it.
Six months after Drew’s death, Nadia drives to Montreal to visit her sister, who’s dating a very attractive man—a “mimbo”—who seems almost too good for her. Nadia thinks the relationship doesn’t add up—why does she think that?
It’s fair to say that not much adds up for Nadia at this point in her life. Everything feels absurd and animated by obscure cosmic forces. What Nadia doesn’t know is that in Montreal, as in certain parts of Brooklyn, conventional looking-good responsibilities are often reversed: it’s not unusual for the arm-candy member of a couple to be the man and the schlubby one to be the woman.
Twice in this story, Nadia describes her desire to become an assassin—not a killer for hire but someone who kills bad guys pro bono. A deliverer of justice, basically. What’s behind this impulse, and is it one that you see in yourself, too?
Killing bad guys is not necessarily a matter of delivering justice—of privately imposing a supposedly merited death penalty that the legal system cannot or will not impose. It can also, or separately, be a question of killing a bad guy to prevent prospective harm of a political nature—the destruction of the planet, say. Would I, personally, use the power of invisibility to kill bad people in the latter sense? I would certainly hope so, if I felt it was the right thing to do. That’s a big if, needless to say.
The story ends in the village of Hammondsport, where Drew was killed, with a kind of incantation of the cycle of life on Keuka Lake. What made this feel like the appropriate way to end this story?
First, let me say that I’ve never been to Hammondsport. I wrote about it only because I wanted the words “Finger Lakes” to appear in the story. Once I had decided on the Finger Lakes, I opted for Lake Keuka because it is near the road to Rochester, where Drew was bound. Subconsciously, it now occurs to me, I may have chosen it because it puts me in mind of Lake Kafka. The decision to end the story with a kind of prose poem about the life of the lake was both intuitive and technical. I don’t want to demystify it more than that! ♦
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