Liam Callanan | September 2021

I became a writer because I wasn’t much good at anything else, especially science. But the more I write, the more I read, the more I find my work informed by things that I learned, or should have learned, in my science classes.

  Like gravity. I understood that the Earth possesses enough of it that it can cause an apple—or me—to fall from the tree to the ground, and that earth’s gravity keeps the moon in its orbit, and that the Moon has less gravity. A small step for an astronaut on Earth is indeed a giant leap for the astronaut on the Moon, which exerts so much less of a pull.

  What I didn’t appreciate, however, or skipped while studying for the test, is that gravity exists between all masses. The Moon exerts less of a pull than the Earth, but it still tugs the astronaut to its surface eventually. The astronaut, in turn, exerts a pull. Much smaller, but still measurable; if the astronaut were reading Newton’s Principia in space—a nice light paperback edition—and dropped it, absent any greater masses, the book will float back to her.

  In short, all bodies have a pull. And in the way the parts of space we can’t see make scientists the most curious, I’ve found that, in fiction, the bodies—the characters—we can’t see often exert the strongest pull.

  The invisible, or absent characters in two contemprary short stories, in Tania James’s “The Liberator,” and Danielle Evans’s “Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain,” help illustrate this phenomenon, but I’ll clarify at the outset that absent characters come in many forms. There are, for example, the self-effacing first-person narrators who are eclipsed by larger characters, such as Nick Carraway is by Jay Gatsby. And there are those self-effacing character-narrators who efface themselves so much that the pronoun “I” disappears and we forget we’re reading a first-person narration, as in Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy, or the sly “I” in Andrew Sean Greer’s Less. Then there are characters who’ve died before the time of the story, and thus can’t interact with the living characters, but whose past nevertheless bends the present, as does the stillborn child in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter,” or Michael Furey in James Joyce’s “The Dead.” And there is, of course, Godot, for whom Vladimir and Estragon have been waiting for sixty-eight years. There are many more branches to this taxonomy, but common across all categories is the constant pull these characters exert, the immense gravity they possess.

  Tania James’s “The Liberator” was published in Freeman’s Anthology in 2017, and later longlisted for the Sunday Times of London Short Story Prize. The prize at the heart of James’s story is a much less valuable one: a boy’s bike. The story’s inciting moment is equally small: a teenage boy, Saeed, discovers his bike has been accidentally locked to another, much more expensive, bike at a bike rack in Washington, DC.

  Saeed lives north of the neighborhood, but travels there for haircuts. And when he comes out of the barbershop and finds his bike locked to someone else’s, he does something many writers do: he invents a character based on the details that present themselves. In this case, the details of that other bike, which is a “Trek, slant-framed and sky blue, with a pink Planned Parenthood sticker over the k. Its U-lock has them both yoked to the rack.” As he picks at that same sticker, he keeps musing: “she’s probably at the juice shop across the street, buying a smoothie that tastes like gritty salad in a glass.”¹

  Saeed will become the absent character who haunts this piece, but it’s this other, initially absent character—the owner of the Trek bike—who signals what will be this story’s central conceit: we’re often interconnected to others in ways we can’t see.

  What Saeed’s doing—inventorying details, creating character—echoes not only what we do as writers, but what we’re doing as readers of James’s story. At this point, Saeed is just letters on a page, hardly even two-dimensional. To make him visible in our minds, we scan for details that will bring him to life. In the first of several clever moves in this story, James capitalizes on our creative activity, and does all she can to feed—and subvert—those desires. Take the lines just quoted, where Saeed builds up an imaginary character in his head, his idea of someone who would own such a bike: female, wealthy enough to not only own a Trek but squander money on smoothies that taste like gritty salad.

  Readers, meanwhile, construct Saeed, and since we’re in his point of view, it’s hard not to favor him: someone else has annoyingly locked her bike to his, and the evidence suggests she’s just the sort of person who would do that, a classic combination of rich and careless. Figures.

  But in the next paragraph, James tests our affinities. We learn that Saeed has an older brother, Haider, who goes by the nickname Liberator. It’s well-earned; among the things that Haider has previously liberated—or stolen—is the bike Saeed now rides. So Saeed texts him, explains what’s happened, and tells his brother to “bring cutters.”

  Whoever accidentally locked up Saeed’s bike is still in the wrong, but the contempt we once shared with Saeed may ebb here. Saeed’s riding around on a stolen bike? His brother has cutters? If he comes, will he simply free Saeed’s bike or take both?

  James then drops into the bike owner’s point of view. Her name turns out to be Lori Piotrowski, and we learn that Saeed’s take is dead-on: she’s white, female, a gentrifier, very much the type to spend money on gritty smoothies. We also learn she’s a subpar first-year medical resident: “Nearly every patient she meets is appalled by her ignorance, her youth, her surname.”

  Since the story has trained us to look at looking in this story—to pay attention to what characters can and can’t see, and the decisions they make as a result—we lean forward when we see Lori see Saeed. Here’s her interior monologue: “There’s a guy messing with the lock on her bike. Right out in the open! Nervy as city squirrels, these thieves, darting into and out of condo garages. That’s how her last bike got stolen. She waits for him to produce a pair of cutters; that’s when she’ll pounce.”

  James is masterful here on the sentence level—moving our sympathies back and forth, mercilessly and messily. First, Lori sees Saeed as an animal; that’s abominable. Then we learn Lori has had a previous bike stolen. That doesn’t excuse comparing Saeed to an animal, but it does start to explain why she’s so angry about her bike now. Then she decides he’s about to produce a pair of cutters, doubling down on her hyperbolic misreading. But we know that Saeed himself is, or was, indeed waiting for a pair of cutters. And the last verb in this sentence is perfect: “that’s when she’ll pounce.” Who’s the animal now?

  It would almost be funny if the moral here weren’t so urgent: don’t be racist, don’t judge a book by its cover. But it turns out we also shouldn’t judge a ten-page story if we’re only three pages into it, for what happens next is that James finally has these two characters, each previously invisible to the other, reveal themselves. Tragedy results.

  Saeed, having given up on the bike, crosses the street to the subway entrance. Lori, meanwhile, has seen her error—her many errors, which only start with her carelessly locking their bikes together—and calls out to Saeed: “Hey, wait!” Whereupon Saeed stops in the crosswalk and sees her for the first time.

  And then a speeding Chevrolet Camaro slams into him.

  Saeed falls face down into the asphalt. The car roars away.

  But if we’ve learned anything in this story, it’s that we always need to look twice, and so it’s perhaps only a small surprise that when Lori races to Saeed’s side, she discovers that he is not, in fact, dead: bending “close to his mouth [she]…feels his breath wisping against her cheek.” They are strangers no longer; a terribly wrought intimacy has been achieved, and the mysteries between the two are quickly resolved: Saeed gives her his name, address, high school, and the make of his bike, so that she can get it back to him. In return, she not only provides him her own name and number; she writes it on the back of his hand. She puts her nascent medical expertise to use examining him; a crowd forms and sweeps him up from the street and onto the sidewalk. An ambulance comes. He disappears.

  And here is where Saeed’s life as an absent character begins: Lori never sees Saeed again. She calls him later to return the bike, but his voice mail is full. She tries again, still no luck. She goes online. She finds his Instagram account, finds a picture of their two bikes locked together—and then finds hundreds upon hundreds of comments tailing after it. Saeed has died.

  At this point, nearly half the story is left, and Saeed haunts every page. Invisibly haunts. James doesn’t bring him back via flashbacks; she doesn’t have to. In death, the boy’s body possesses a gravity it never had in life. Lori can’t resist its pull.

  Lori, for example, feels an obligation to return Saeed’s bike to his family. She books a carshare to haul it to his house. She cancels. She books the car again. She still doesn’t go. Finally, when the pull, the pain—what she thinks of as pain—is too much, she takes the bike to Saeed’s house. It’s late at night; she’s trying to avoid the family. But maybe we shouldn’t hate her completely; the story observes that Lori has written a note and attached it to the bike. In the note, she explains who she is. That she’d accidentally locked the two bikes together. That she tended to Saeed in the street.

  She does not, however, explain that, as a medical professional-in-training, she knew better than to allow the crowd to move Saeed from the spot where he’d fallen; they should have waited for the paramedics, a backboard, a cervical collar, measures that might have enabled his survival. But she hadn’t had the courage.

  And now, late at night, she doesn’t have the courage to face the family. She rolls the bike into his family’s yard, leaves the note, and then “hurries away, noiseless as a thief.”

  James isn’t done yet, however—and nor is Saeed, whose absence drives the story’s harrowing coda. The next morning, Saeed’s older brother, Haider, until now absent from the story but for the fact that his nickname, Liberator, is the story’s title, goes out to the porch to check the mail and discovers his brother’s bike. He forgets all that’s happened—in a fog of grief, of course he forgets—and “so smiled for a few seconds.” And then he remembers and “then his hand went to the mailbox and it took all his will to remain standing.”

  What is it like to lose a brother and blame yourself? Because if you had only agreed to grab your cutters, head over and liberate his bike, Saeed would still be here today.

  What is it like to lose your brother and then, for a wonderful, terrible, moment think Saeed was still alive today?

  And what is it like if the phone rings and it’s your now absent-forever brother alive and on the line?

  This last question is not for Haider to know but for Lori to experience. Because in the story’s final paragraphs, Haider drunkenly takes Saeed’s cell phone and calls the number that Lori has left in her carefully, cowardly penned letter. When Lori sees the caller ID, she’s alarmed, but she can’t not answer, and Haider, for a ghastly moment or two, lets her believe it’s Saeed.

  “There was an obituary,” she stammers, and Haider, acting as Saeed, replies, “yeah, I was in this coma thing, and just when they were about to pull the plug, I woke up.”

  She’s trembling now, horrified; she doesn’t know what to say. It sounds like Saeed, if huskier, grainier, so maybe he lived, maybe she had been able to help him—and so she can’t keep herself from asking: is it really you?

  And Haider says no.

  And Lori says, “‘What the fuck…is the matter with you?’”

  To which the Liberator replies, “Well, now you know how I felt this morning. Now you know how it feels.”

  And now we do, too. It’s no mistake that a story that’s relied so much on seeing, on telling us not to trust what we see, on showing us what happens when characters look and don’t see, ends with two characters on a voice call, unable to see each other. Each has, instead, created a character. Haider, like his late little brother, has created for himself the character of a woman he doesn’t see. Lori, meanwhile, believes she sees, or hears, Saeed—because his voice and her desperate conscience want this to be so. But it’s not.

  This story is so much more powerful for rendering Saeed invisible in these final moments. It would have been so easy, even obvious, to draft this scene with Lori visiting the family in broad daylight, in a living room, pictures large and small of Saeed all around. But by making the risky decision to keep the story’s most admirable character offscreen during its most critical scene, James asks us to consider not only what Lori saw, what Saeed saw, what Haider sees, but what we see. Consider that James even makes the unusual decision to tell the story in present tense, a tense in which the future always lies just out of sight.

  The title of Danielle Evans’s story, “Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain,” seems inscrutable until you look more closely and realize that it is a mnemonic for ROYGBIV, or the order of colors in the spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. First published in American Short Fiction, and later collected in both the Best American Short Stories of 2017 and Evans’s own celebrated collection, The Office of Historical Corrections, Evans’s story centers around a wedding and a runaway fiancé.

  But as the story opens, no one knows that running is on the horizon. Rather, the horizon is full of rainbows, or so it seems to the story’s main point of view character, Rena, a hardened photojournalist who “is not a bridesmaid but has been dragged along for the festivities thanks to the aggressive hospitality of the bridal party.”² That poor bridal party, meanwhile, has been mandated to dress in either red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, or violet, one color per person. The rainbow theme is chosen for the oddest of reasons: the bride, Dori, a preschool teacher and pastor’s daughter, has chosen as a central theme for her wedding weekend the story of Noah’s Ark.

  Between Rena and Dori stands JT, the putative groom. We never learn what his two initials stand for, which is altogether fitting for a character who will soon disappear.

  What’s ironic is that JT was once very visible—his face took up the entire cover of the Times Magazine five years back, thanks to Rena. It turns out the two of them met under strange circumstances in Africa. She was headed home from an assignment, he from a Peace Corps posting. A mysterious bioweapon threat forced their plane to land in Ghana, where the two of them were sequestered in a hotel for days while the authorities sorted things out. Though no weapon was ever found, Rena’s photo of JT wearing a paper face mask wound up illustrating a larger article about such threats. It was not her best work, Rena concedes, but she knows why the editors chose it: JT is “handsome, tanned, and blond, [which] was what the public wanted as a symbol of the boy-next-door on the other side of the world. Boy-next-door, Rena knew, always meant white boy next door.” Rena, meanwhile, who is “black and Polish and Lebanese,” is “present in the photo, [too,] right at the edge, a shimmery and distorted sliver of herself in the mirror.” She’s all but invisible; “most people didn’t notice her at all.”

  But JT’s longtime girlfriend Dori did notice, then and now. Dori was curious, to put it mildly, that JT was trapped in a hotel in Africa with a female photojournalist, and Dori is equally concerned that, years later, JT has invited Rena, still single, to their wedding. “Dori,” the story tells us, has “negotiated her anxiety with perfect composure, but Dori has not womaned up and simply said to Rena did you ever fuck my fiancé, in which case Rena would have told her no.” Because, indeed, they never did.

  All of this storytelling has happened with JT offstage. JT’s character is well-rounded—we get his physical description, a diagram of his relationships—but he’s static, a figure behind the scrim of two other characters’ storytelling. And again, while it must have been tempting for the author to make JT fully present, to make him interact with Dori and Rena in scene, it works better for the purpose of this story to have him be absent. Indeed, a prime driver of Dori’s angst is that he’s spent so much time out of her sight. Whereas Dori thought they’d be married in high school, JT “went to college. Then he went to grad school. Then he went to Togo.”

  What’s particularly fascinating about JT as an absent character is that it’s his static state—a flat character in someone else’s story—that makes him dynamic, and so able to exert a pull on all those around him. His absence from the story’s stage makes him liable to constant mis- and re-interpretation. His being invisible to his future fiancée Dori while he’s in Africa, for example, means she could and did make any number of assumptions as to what he was doing in that hotel with Rena.

  Similarly, his absence from the present timeline of the story, which is largely concerned with bridal party shenanigans, leaves Rena to wonder about JT, too. It’s telling that the first time his name is even mentioned in the story, he’s presented almost as a stock or fungible character. “There is a groom involved in this wedding, though Rena believes his involvement must be loose”—note how carefully Evans cloaks JT’s entrance here. Readers could be forgiven for wondering if Rena even knows the groom. Only when his name later enters the sentence does that become more clear: “There is a groom involved in this wedding, though Rena believes his involvement must be loose; she can’t imagine JT is on board with this ark business.”

  She can’t imagine, or put another way, she can only imagine, because JT isn’t in the scene to ask or examine directly. He exists, quite clearly and memorably, in her memories and the memories of his fiancée, but he’s otherwise a cipher.

  Rena is a cipher, too. While Dori’s anxiety is readily sourceable—her fiancé’s longtime and relentlessly single friend is lurking about her rainbow wedding and wearing black, no less—Rena’s angst is initially harder to chart. She’s a war correspondent, true, but even so, she seems remarkably angry and detached. And because we’re in her point of view so much, we feel as though we should know what’s going on; it comes to feel like she’s not telling us something.

  And so maybe it shouldn’t be surprised when midway through the story, Rena reveals the presence of another invisible character, one whom the story pivots around in an unexpected way.

  This happens in a paragraph that, in keeping with the story’s by now proven method of misdirection, begins with, “Sleeping in someone else’s bed doesn’t stop the nightmares,” and then talks about Rena’s life as a war correspondent—oh, so that is what’s bothering her, we think—and then pivots to weddings, which Rena has “missed a lot of…by being strategically or unavoidably out of the country”—oh, so it’s weddings that have her anxious, we think—before finally finding its way to an episode of Rena’s past, that, crucially, doesn’t involve JT. Though it does involve a wedding: “the only time [Rena] was in a wedding, she was the maid of honor,” it turns out. “It was her little sister Elizabeth’s wedding, autumn in Ohio, a small ceremony, a marriage to a man both of them had grown up with, Connor from the house around the corner. Connor who used to mow their lawn and rake their leaves and shovel their snow….Connor [who, a year after the wedding] suspected Elizabeth of cheating because he’d seen a repairman leave the house and she’d forgotten to tell him anyone was coming that day and so he put a bullet through her head.”

  It’s worse than that, actually, the story tells us. The sister lived. “Or someone lived: it was hard to match the person in the rehab facility with the person her sister had been. Rena has not been to visit Elizabeth in three years.”

  Significantly, as soon as the story makes this searing digression, the story’s other absent character, JT, suddenly appears. Rena is up and wandering the hallways of the hotel before dawn. “It is four in the morning. There is a wedding today. The groom is standing at the elevator with a duffel bag. Something has gone wrong.” And something has, but look at all this story is doing right—look how, even in the moment of appearing, JT, the absent character, disappears right into the syntax—“the groom is standing at the elevator.”

  And then he speaks. “I can’t do this.”

  It turns out this flat dialogue is more misdirection, for an extraordinary exchange is about to begin. Sticking up for the about-to-be-jilted bride, Rena tells JT he can’t just disappear—as though he hasn’t been missing all this time—and he replies that he’ll call the poor bride from the road. Rena is furious:

He does not seem or smell drunk, only sad, and that he should be sad, that he should treat this decision as a thing that is happening to him, enrages her to the point that it surprises her. She speaks to him in a fierce whisper. “When I met you, we were trapped across the world, and you told me you were calm because you’d learned not to take for granted that anything was safe. You don’t get to be scared of a woman you’ve been with since you were teenagers.”

  And then JT says the last words he’ll say in scene in this story:

I was scared.... You were calm. You were so fucking calm, and that was what I liked about you. For a while I thought you were so brave, and sometimes I still do, and sometimes I think it’s just that there’s nothing in your life but you, and you have no idea what it means to be scared that what you do might matter.

  JT, the story tells us, “is giving [Rena] a reason to give him a reason to stay. Rena does not stop him.” Instead, she just watches him go.

  The next morning, the day of the wedding, his absence is, of course, noted, and as Rena is the last person to have seen him, she’s relied upon for information regarding where he might now be. Dori, the jilted bridezilla, drags her into a car and says, essentially, take me to him. Such is his gravity, even in failure. Rena, all but in a trance, blurts out an address in Ohio. They embark on a road trip that’s veering toward fun until Rena finally breaks down and says that JT’s not at the address; she has no idea where he is. “‘You made it up?’ Dori says. ‘What the hell address did you give me?’” Rena explains that she gave the address of the house where her sister was shot, that it was just the first thing that came to her mind. Dori asks, “The house where your sister got shot was the first thing that came to mind when I asked if you knew where my fiancé was?” and Rena replies, “It’s always the first thing that comes to mind.”

  The story finishes beautifully. Through a series of texts, we learn that the absent, then briefly present, JT has returned to the wedding site. But Dori and Rena have traveled too far in every sense. They turn out to be the ones who will skip the wedding. They go to a water park instead, which Rena thinks “might be the least terrible idea anyone involved in his alleged wedding has had in the last 48 hours.” Dori will not marry JT. Neither will Rena. Instead they’ll bob in the wave pool, and Rena will think back to her last time at a water park, when she was still the big sister, and her only “job was to keep [her sister] Elizabeth’s swimmies on, when there was still Elizabeth’s laugh, when there were still seas to be crossed, when the whole world was in front of her. Wish you were here,” the story ends. “Wish you were here. Wish you were here.”

  It’s a remarkable moment in a story that’s full of them, and represents yet another illuminating craft decision. Evans built two powerful absent characters here, the groom, JT, and the grievously wounded sister, Elizabeth. It would have been easy to give either one of them a larger onscreen role.

  With respect to JT, Evans could have easily kept him out of the story’s present timeline entirely; the story’s architecture would have made that effortless. But if he’d been entirely offscreen, it would have, ironically, granted him too much power—he would have become a mythic character, one with whom Rena couldn’t have argued. Absent characters can tug and pull, but it’s difficult for them to be agents of change.

  Take, by contrast, Elizabeth. It would have also been easy for the story to end with Rena visiting Elizabeth—finally, after three years. But in addition to indulging a saccharine sentimentality, it would have also sapped Elizabeth of some of her power, which is very mythic. To see Rena’s sister in the rehab center, hobbled and glassy-eyed, blinkingly unknowingly at Rena, would only tell us what we already know about Elizabeth. By keeping Elizabeth invisible—hidden underneath that repeated “Wish you were here”—the stricken sister is able to exert a much stronger pull. It’s Elizabeth who broke Rena’s heart. It’s the otherwise useless JT who reminds Rena that her heart is broken: what she can’t or won’t see weighs too heavily on her.

  The first part of Rena’s journey—when she’s all but obscured in that Times Magazine cover photo (“most people didn’t notice her at all”)—is also emblematic of the broader, deeper social issue of characters who have been rendered absent or invisible not by physics but by bigotry and racism. Pulitzer finalist Tommy Orange described a character in his novel There, There during an interview with Ingrid Rojas Contreras: there is a

way people can’t look at [this character] but he knows they know what they’re not looking at. This is the way it can feel being Native. People don’t want to talk about it. They want to look away. Pretend it isn’t there. There’s an insidious presence to that kind of absence.³

  Or as the titular character of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man declares,

I am invisible…simply because people refuse to see me….it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me, they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.⁴

  It’s critical that authors work to make visible the invisible. Some already are. Not just Ellison, but Orange and Rojas Contreras—and Evans and James—and many more. All writers, but especially white writers like me, should set themselves to the work of reading, listening, seeing—of revealing what bigotry and racism conceal and ignore.

  Gravity itself is invisible, but its effects are not. Bodies in space, on earth, in literature, pull mightily and constantly. The evidence—the stories—are there, for all who refuse to refuse to see.⁵

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Liam Callanan's most recent novel, Paris by the Book, a national bestseller, was translated into multiple languages and won the 2019 Edna Ferber Prize. He has taught at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee’s PhD program in creative writing.

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Notes