One of the weirdest things about reading
is you start wanting to--
I start want to changing it.
I'm like, well, maybe I could ad lib a little bit.
And sometimes you can ad lib and you do all right,
and then sometimes it just falls apart.
And tonight, I don't feel like I'm as sharp as I am.
I'm never that sharp, but I'm not
feeling extra sharp tonight.
And so I refrained, but any pause or mess-up you saw
was because I was wanting to just make shit up.
[LAUGHTER]
But that's just what I do, I guess.
So this section is--
I was really interested in the idea of brain injuries,
because I think they're so horrific.
Everything I've read about brain injuries
is your mind kind of lives in a--
unable to contain its thoughts.
Your mood swings get worse, and you never
end up in happier places.
It always seems darker places.
There's a really interesting book
about it called Thank You for Your Service-- the David Finkel
book that I think is really interesting-- about soldiers
coming home with brain injuries.
So I thought, if your life was so rattled by that
and you were stuck with that, but maybe one night you woke up
and you saw how rattled you were, that's the big dream,
right?
Like if you're really falling apart,
maybe you'd have one night of clarity
where you could see where you really were and maybe get
yourself out of it somehow.
So this guy wakes up and realizes
that his life has been 10 years in a group home
in a suburb of Spokane.
And he realizes like, "Well, Jesus, I just
want to get out of here."
And so the guy tries to kill himself,
but he doesn't do a good job at it, and he survives.
And so he wakes up and he goes, "Well, what I'll do now, then,
is just disappear into a story.
I'll disappear into a dream."
Personally, that's the way I always live my life.
When I was a kid and things got bad,
I just made up something that wasn't bad.
And it's a bad--
it's kind of a lazy way to live, and maybe not
the most beneficial to a person's well-being,
to live inside a fake world.
But that's what I did, and that's
what Leroy does in this story.
He wants to go and disappear on a boat with his girlfriend
up the Pacific coast, up through Canada,
because that's what his girlfriend always wanted to do.
And by the time we meet him now, reality and his story
are kind of coming together.
And his girlfriend's come back because he's
dying in the hospital bed.
And so this is just a little section from it.
So this is kind of like that idea of-- it's a dream world.
But it's like when you're having a dream,
but it's also things are happening
outside that change your dream.
So if that makes any sense, I did good.
And if not, then that's OK, because I don't know if it made
sense.
"In the middle of the night, she woke to Leroy's arm
over her, pulling her into him.
'Well, how are you feeling?' she whispered.
'I'm better,' he said, 'but I keep seeing things that are
so horrible.'
'Well, the things you've been seeing,
I've seen them too,' Jeanette said,
'and they're the worst things I've ever seen.
So are you sure you're OK?'
'I think so.'
'You know, I was just having a dream,' Jeanette said,
'that I graduated from college, and you and I were living
in a one bedroom house we bought together.
You should have seen this place.
The plumbing didn't work, the wood floors
were splattered with paint, and everything
was covered in grease.
I don't know why there was so much grease on everything,
but there was.
Anyway, we fixed it up until it was a really nice house,
and the yard that had once been all weeds and trash
became a real yard.
You poured a concrete pad and built an awning,
so we could sit in the shade during the summer and barbecue.
And we planted trees.
In my dream you had just come home from work
and you were bleeding.
You'd cut yourself from a job site.
The cut was on your forearm.
I tried to wash it out in the sink,
but it wouldn't stop bleeding.
We decided to go to the emergency room.
In the dream, we didn't drive.
It was like all of a sudden, I was in a waiting room,
and you were gone.
But you weren't gone in the doctor's office,
you'd vanished.
You were in the National Guard; you were deployed in Iraq.
In the dream, I panicked.
And when I panic, everything changed.
All the walls turned gray, and suddenly, I
was in an empty building that I couldn't get out of.
I was alone and I couldn't find you.
And I knew, then, I'd be stuck in there forever.'
'But that's not real,' he said gently and kissed her neck.
'Maybe it is.' 'I don't think so.'
'In our house, there were pictures of us all over.
One photo had your uncle in it.
He has long, black hair, and he's wearing a corduroy coat.
Your mother was short, she had brown hair and freckles,
and she's hugging your uncle and they look very happy.
They're surrounded by snow and there's someone behind them
that I can't quite make out.
The image is blurry.'
'Well, I have that picture framed,' Leroy said.
'When I was 13, my mom rented a cabin in the mountains,
and we spent the weekend there for my birthday.
I'm the person behind her that you can't really see.
My uncle took the picture on a timer,
but I moved in the last moment.
That's why it's so blurry.'
'Well, how would I know that picture?'
'I don't know,' he said.
'You're going to join the army and get killed,' she whispered.
'That's what the dream says.'
'It doesn't.' She moved her hands up and down his arms
and stopped over a long scar.
She turned on the bedside light and looked at it.
'See!' she exclaimed, 'You have a scar,
and before you didn't have a scar.'
'No, I've had this scar for years.'
'You haven't.
I know, I feel your arms every night.'
'Well, I swear,' he said.
'Well, how did you get it?'
'I cut it on a job,' he said, 'like your dream said.'
'I just don't understand any of this,' she said,
'I don't understand what's real and what isn't real.'
He kissed her neck again.
'In my dream, I could see the couch
we bought at Salvation Army, and the table
and chairs we bought from a garage sale.
I can remember us painting the walls,
and you wiring the basement so we could
put in a washer and dryer.
I remember buying towels and sheets,
and inviting your mom over for dinner.
We had movie posters on our bedroom walls and a framed
picture of Amália Rodrigues on our dresser.
We had a bathtub and a fireplace,
and we used to make love in every room
because you convinced me it was good luck to do so.
We had everything you could ever want.
Why would I know all these things that aren't real?
Why would I be dreaming about things like this if they
weren't true?'
It was early in the morning, and the woman
who sat holding Leroy's arm couldn't stop weeping.
Her name was Jeanette, and her thin fingers
moved over a long scar on his arm while she spoke.
'A couple of weeks ago, I was going to the store.
And in the parking lot, I saw an old red Ford Fiesta,
like the one I had, like the one you always had to work on.
I just stood there and looked at it, and I couldn't stop crying.
I kept thinking about all the places we went in that car,
of all the times you tried to fix it
when we went camping in it, when we went
to the beach, or the movies.
I just stood there staring at the car,
and I couldn't leave.'" So that's just three little
sections of The Free to give you a taste of what it's like.
I'm not going to read any more, because when I go to readings,
I hate listening to a guy read from a book.
I always like to see what weird shit he's going to say,
if he's got anything to say at all.
So if you have any questions, I'm
more than happy to answer them, because maybe I'll
say something so idiotic that it'll make you laugh.
Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
Or not.
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks.
Thanks for clapping.
[LAUGHTER]