13thWR

HEART OF A STRANGER / by Charles Rammelkamp


"Try to put yourself in somebody else's shoes when you write these dramatic monologues, okay?" Castleman had driven to school through a mumble of February rain. There'd been a six-inch snowstorm only a few days earlier, paralyzing the city and snarling traffic, closing down schools and sending panic shoppers to the grocery stores in droves, but now it had warmed up well above freezing and the rain had washed away most of the snow. Thankfully, it had cleaned all the salt grime from the windows of his car, too. Routine as this creative writing exercise was, Castleman found getting inside somebody else's skin a bit beside the point just now. Tiresome. He felt so much trapped in his own skin, the circumstances at home, the writing class was a sandbox. Castleman's father-in-law was dying; not only was he dying but his wife of fifty-six years wanted a divorce. This left it up to Castleman's wife Jodie to take care of her dying father. Trouble was, he lived in a remote part of Montana, kept falling over - weak but not brittle-boned -- and his wife had just picked up and moved to Los Angeles. Jodie could take liberal leave from her job at the university, but how long would she have to be away? The children were upset. "Can we write it in the stream-of-consciousness style?" Jason Rutz slouched in his chair, baseball cap on backwards.

Always wary of such questions, Castleman equivocated. "Well, of course it's the stream of the speaker's consciousness as translated into speech. So yes, but no, if you mean some unintelligible free association gibberish. I mean, the speaker is speaking, after all, communicating with a listener. What exactly do you mean, Jason?"

"Well, I don't know. I guess not so much making a speech as - "

"Well, yes, it's conversation, and you can take a conversational tone," Castleman interrupted, "or did you mean -"

"Does there have to be a point?" Rita Dugan interjected. "I think that's what Jason meant. Is there some sort of point to the speech?"

"Depends on what you mean by a point." Again Castleman's instinct was to equivocate, cover himself. "Basically you're revealing the speaker's character by his speech - "

"Can't you do that in a stream-of-consciousness sort of way?" Jason asked.

"I guess I don't know what you mean by 'stream of consciousness,'" Castleman said. "Why don't you just go ahead and write your dramatic monologue and read it to us and we'll see what you've got? We're starting to debate the meaning of technical terms, so just go ahead and write and we'll see what you've got. How does that sound?"

"I just want to be sure I'm not going about this the wrong way."Castleman didn't say anything. Right and wrong were such vague categories. In one sense there was only one right way and all the millions of other options were wrong, or on the other hand you could say that all ways were right ways, at least in some way. "So it's somebody speaking to somebody else about a dramatic situation that somehow reveals what his character's all about?" Miriam Lowenberg asked.

"The classic definition. But sometimes it's just like a soliloquy, when the speaker just speaks to himself. Like Hamlet. 'To be or not to be.' Like that."

"Then it can be stream of consciousness!" Jason said triumphantly, looking around for support.

"Well," Castleman said hastily, about to begin another equivocation, but then he just gave in. "Sure, yeah, stream of consciousness. Whatever you want to call it. Just show us what you've got."

"I think what Mister Castleman means," Shelley MacArthur said, and for once Castleman was grateful she was coming to his aid, "is you don't want to free-associate your ideas all over the place and confuse the reader with meanings that are so private nobody gets them. Isn't that it, Mister Castleman?" Shelley was the ass-kisser in the class, the apple polisher. But Castleman was off in a memory of his children.

"Why does Mommy have to go and take care of Grandpa?" Carol whined.

"Doesn't take a brain scientist to figure that out," Lily said. Lily was ten and had just learned the phrase. She liked to challenge her older sister, rile her up. She knew just which buttons to push, too.

"That's 'brain surgeon,'" Castleman said before Carol could react. "They always say 'rocket scientist' and 'brain surgeon' when they talk about smart people." He thought. "But 'brain scientist' works too, I guess," he conceded.

He remembered smelling the sour odor of his daughter's morning breath and reflecting the bad morning breath of a child was so much more potent than that of an adult.

He became aware of the silence in the room, that a question had just been asked of him. What had they been talking about? Dramatic monologues. Stream of consciousness. "I don't know. What do you think?" he said, using the device of asking a question to cover his inattention. Apparently it was the wrong question. He wasn't sure who he was supposed to be talking to, either. Shelley? Jason? "But anyway, you know, the main thing is to get into somebody else's shoes," he said, talking fast now to cover his slip. "The idea is to create a character. We'll be getting into fiction next, writing stories, so the idea is to find somebody else's voice. What does it say in the Bible? God's talking to the Hebrews; they're in the desert, they've just gotten the Ten Commandments, and He's teaching them about righteousness, and one of the things he tells them is not to oppress strangers, because you have known the heart of a stranger, he says, having been strangers yourselves in the Land of Egypt. Sure, it's a moral instruction, but you can see the artistic application, can't you? Be that person. Know that person. Speak in the voice of that person." His remarks were met with skeptical silence. Or silence, at least, that he interpreted as skeptical. They must see through him, he thought. Even Shelley.

"I think I am going to write mine in the voice of a 10-year old girl who gets a tapeworm from kissing her dog," Jason said. "She's in denial, ashamed, keeping it to herself, even as she experiences diarrhea, itching in the perianal area and abdominal discomfort. Finally, she has a CAT scan and MRIs when she develops lesions on her internal organs, and they reveal a six-foot tapeworm."

"Her dialogue comes at the moment of discovery of the tapeworm? The diagnostic results?" He'd evidently done his homework, Castleman thought. Diarrhea, perianal area, abdominal discomfort, CAT scans, MRIs, lesions.
Impressive technical terms.

"The thing is, she's learned to keep secrets from years of having kept the shameful secret that her father is a drunk who beats up her mother. She's long envied her friends their 'normal' families, but the worm of doubt has always been there as to whether her friends, too, have shameful secrets
about their parents."

"So the tapeworm's supposed to be some kind of symbol?" Rita asked, but nobody responded to the comment.

"You may have something there, Jason. And what about schadenfreude, the thrill you get from seeing your friends fail? This has got to figure in with how she regards her friends, a kind of morbid wish fulfillment."
Castleman could not believe he was taking this conversation seriously, but he was. There was time to fill up, for one thing, and he surreptitiously glanced at his wristwatch to see how much was left. "Let her tell it. Stream of consciousness or not. Maybe she's talking with her doctor, who's just brought her the results."

"How about something in the voice of one of those TV weathermen forecasting another crippling blizzard?" Miriam asked. "That super-seriousness."

"They've done research on the news, the marketing guys, and it shows there's an interest in the weather more than any other subject; it's why people feel impelled to watch the news. Ratings go up and advertising
revenues with them. You do the math. So they hype this 'Storm of the Century' stuff to the hilt, like some sort of B-rated Hollywood sensation flick."

"Can I do it, then? A dramatic monologue in the voice of a weatherman?"

"Well...let's see what you get. It might sound more comic than dramatic, more tongue-in-cheek. But it could be ironic and very funny."

"How about this?" Andrea Mercer asked, and she read, "Gerald was one of those people who talk like a term paper. 'Thus,' and 'Indeed,' figured into everything he said. Moreover, 'moreover' did too. But it could be worse, Joyce thought, it could be the voice of a book reviewer outsmarting everybody under the sun, explaining them to themselves. 'He's a revisionist,' they say, slapping a label onto somebody, neatly categorizing his thoughts. '"He's a hopeless romantic.'" "Sounds like descriptive prose, but keep it. Hang onto it. You
could turn it into a dramatic monologue, though, I suppose."

"She wrote me a 'Dear John' letter from Beverly Hills," Foster Colson sobbed. "The bitch! She says it's because I don't love her but it's just that she refuses to take care of me in my illness! That bitch! That dirty rotten bitch!"

"Oh, Dad, I'm sure she didn't mean it. How could she live with you more than half a century and just forget about you? Be reasonable!" "Reasonable! You tell your mother to be 'reasonable.' Oh that - that harridan! The God damn harridan!"

". . . the heart of a stranger?" Shelley asked. Castleman frowned, as if he needed to reflect on her question, consider the implications, but he started to panic, knowing he hadn't the vaguest idea what she was talking about. He was moving through a tricky minefield. What could Shelley possibly be talking about? Should he ask her to repeat what she said? It might be the safest strategy. But then he heard himself talking, as if a ventriloquist had taken over, or as if he'd suddenly started speaking in tongues.

"My mother-in-law left her husband a few weeks ago after fifty-some years of marriage. These people are around eighty years old; they live in Montana, and my father-in-law is essentially housebound, can't take care of
himself. Winter can be really severe out there, and it's not going to be over for a while. I try to get inside the hearts of both of these people and I just draw a blank. It's like something you read in 'Dear Abby' that you think somebody made up and sent in. Now my wife is going to have to go out there and take care of the old guy and maybe cajole my mother-in-law into returning.

"I don't know. The heart of a stranger. Seems like they're so familiar with one another by now, and yet you'd think there'd be more empathy, let alone for a stranger, a creature of your imagination. " There was a nervous silence for a moment, and Castleman was afraid he'd spoken too personally. What were they to make of it, after all? What could they say?

After a minute, Shelley spoke up. "Actually, all I wanted to know was where that reference can be
found? The heart of the stranger."

"Exodus, chapter 23, verse 8 or 10 or something," Castleman said. He thought there should be laughter, but the room remained silent, and he knew he'd lost them for good now, the tenuous trust between teacher and students gone. He'd become a crackpot in their eyes. Better cut his losses. Next week he'd show a different face - a different heart - and they'd all forget. "Why don't we call it a day? Bring your dramatic monologues to read to the class. And why not? Make it a stream-of-consciousness if you want."