Hell of a Book

The narrator types “I MISS YOU” (273) in a text message to Kelly while on a plane. He is comforted by the fact that the message will not send while his phone is on airplane mode. Suddenly he gets a text from Kelly asking if he misses her; his phone is somehow not on airplane mode anymore. They exchange text messages. The narrator knows that she is special to him. He hasn’t seen The Kid since he spoke with his murderer. The narrator refuses responsibility to fix the messed-up world. He simply wants to focus on things that concern him. At the airport in Denver, he meets his media escort, Bonnie. She is eccentric and athletic, doing various exercises in the airport and later in the car. The car swerves as she does this. When they arrive at the television studio for the first interview, they wait inside. While they wait, he helps the receptionist add more to his enormous arrangement of perfectly stacked dominos. 

On stage, the interviewer is a tall, thin white woman. At what he believes is the end of the interview, she asks him what the book is about. The narrator is confused, saying there isn’t time and they’ve already done this. The interviewer assures him that they’ve only just begun. He gets anxious, complaining that he does not want to do the interview again. She continues, stating that the novel is based on actual events. The narrator impatiently responds that it’s fiction. He feels like he is suffocating as she asks him to talk all about his writing process. He looks out into the audience and sees his mother in her hospital gown and his father. He also sees several people from earlier chapters, including Renny, Martha, and Nic Cage.

The interviewer is persistent and begins asking him in detail about his mother’s death. He gets angry and starts to cry. The narrator realizes that he always forgets his interviews because they are always about his mother because his book is about her death. One day he was headed on a trip and declined to bring his mother along when she asked. While he was away, she had a stroke. He came back to find she had aphasia and could only say the word “home.” She eventually died, leaving him feeling like he had failed her.

The interviewer invites The Kid’s mother on stage; she looks like his own mother. She laments her son’s death, saying mothers should die, not their children. He expresses that he didn’t feel anything when he heard about her son’s death, because he stopped feeling things after his mother’s death. She understands. Now the audience has vanished. He and the mother express exhaustion and sadness about the dangers that Black people keep having to face. He takes her fidgeting hands in his and tells her that her son seemed like a good kid. She says that she came to the narrator with her story because he is the voice. Suddenly, the narrator is back in reality onstage, the woman is gone and the audience is in shock. He leaves.

Soot starts taking medication that makes him feel like his body belongs to someone else. He stops feeling most emotions and doesn’t respond when Tyrone Greene starts bullying him again. The medication does not get rid of the hallucinations, except he can no longer hear the words his father says to him. He appears to him now more as a ghost. The psychiatrist assures him that the hallucinations will fade away eventually. He trusts that they will. He cannot feel his or his mother’s love anymore. When his mother’s crying wakes him in the night, he knows he should feel compassion for her, but he cannot feel anything. He stops taking the medication; he can feel again, and the hallucinations also fully return. He does not tell the psychiatrist.

The narrator is getting drunk at the airport, watching a news report of him having a meltdown during the interview. Kelly calls him on the phone. She has seen the interview and she asks him why he keeps running away from his problems. He tells her that her role is to wisely guide and fix him, as women always do in Western love stories. This angers her. He calls her a secondary character and tells her to sort him out. He ends the call. Sharon calls to tell him she won’t work with him anymore; he ends that call, too.

The Kid appears and apologizes for what happened to the narrator’s mother. As they talk more, The Kid insists that he isn’t a hallucination. The narrator doesn’t want to think about The Kid anymore. He feels bad for not taking time to care about all the people who have suffered and died. Not caring is how he survives. The Kid asks if he will tell his story; this is what he has wanted all along. The Kid reiterates that he just wants the narrator to see him, know him, and tell his story. The narrator struggles with this request because the story of Black people’s suffering is too big to tell. He feels that his own pain is heavy enough. The Kid does not ask him to carry the pain, only to stop ignoring it.

A Black boy is taking a walk alone at night. It could be in a rural area, urban, or suburban area. He has no particular destination. This boy might have been bullied for his skin color or might have watched his father’s murder. This boy may have imagined a world where his father is alive but off on some adventure or doing something else, or even a world where his father has died of cancer instead. This could be a boy who dies young, or who grows up to be a writer. He imagines worlds where he is free, unafraid, and faces no judgment. He imagines he is by the ocean instead of passing traffic.

Now this boy is Soot out on a walk. Suddenly, he is stopped by a police officer who demands he puts his hands in the air. Soot puts his hands up reflexively. He remembers when his father would dress him as a child and ask him to put his hands up. Soot asks what he did although his mind tells him to stay quiet. The officer asks him what he is doing walking at night and asks for ID. Soot has no ID to show. He feels afraid and wants to disappear. Disappearing would allow him to escape the injustice, the pain of being bullied, the present-day legacy of slavery, the long history of racism, and news of the murder of Black people. Soot closes his eyes hoping to disappear. The officer asks him what he’s doing, but he does not respond. He opens his eyes to see the officer take out his gun. The officer seems like he might be a kind man and a good, caring father. Soot feels himself going invisible, and then the officer shoots.

The first-person narrator addresses The Kid directly in the second person. The narrator says this was supposed to be a typical love story, but it isn’t. He sees why The Kid’s parents tried to protect him from racism and violence. He knows that Black skin becomes something people hate having instead of loving it because of the way they are treated. The narrator explains that it may be easy at first to see a Black person’s murder as a unique case, but as you see more, you start realize that the issue is systemic, and you try your best to protect your kids when you have them. But The Kid died anyway.

The Kid responds as the narrator addresses him. The narrator used to be called “Soot” as a child as well. Soot asks if the narrator’s father was also shot, wondering if he and the narrator are the same person. Whether or not they are the same does not matter because if his father had not been shot, someone else’s would. The narrator thinks this may actually be a love story, but it is about loving yourself in a country where you are hated. The narrator walks over to The Kid and opens his arms for a hug. The Kid is afraid and so is he. He knows that he and other Black people fear most that they are powerless to break the cycle of oppression. Still, he feels they must try. He and The Kid hug. The Kid asks if they’ll be okay, and he assures him they can at least try to be.

The final chapter is two pages of dialogue between two people written in italics. The font is large and spaced out. The quotes from one person appear on the left page, with the responses on the right page. The image of a small boy’s side profile appears on the left, and the image of a man’s side profile appears on the right. One can assume that it is a conversation between Soot and the narrator, but this is not explicitly stated.

The first speaker asks if everything is fixed now, to which the second speaker responds that “fixed” is a dangerous word. The objective is at least to help. The first speaker finds it anticlimactic that things can’t fully be fixed, and wonders what happens if talking about the injustice doesn’t even help at all. The second speaker says it is good at least to have said something. The second speaker points out that the first speaker never used their own name or “his” name (the “he” is unspecified). The first speaker says maybe they will next time, but not now because names make everything real. He isn’t sure “we” could bear it being real. The second speaker questions who this “we” is and asks what else they could do. The novel ends on this open-ended question.