Magic Hours (33 page)

Before Hale could stop for the day, she had to perform one last virtuoso task: Shepard's grunts and pain noises. She was given direction for a pain noise to indicate she had been shot once, a pain noise to indicate she had been hit with a burst of energy, a pain noise to indicate she had been shot while moving, a pain noise to indicate she had been punched, a pain noise to indicate she was nearing death, and a pain noise to indicate she had died.

 

 

I decided that I couldn't leave Los Angeles without playing
Mass Effect 2
with Commander Shepard herself. Hale, after some hedging,
agreed to try and came to the house where I was staying. A screen came up asking us to select the male or female Shepard. “Are you kidding me?” Hale said, choosing the latter. A load screen came up, and Hale passed the time by excitedly tapping her feet against the hardwood floor. She looked over at me. “Is my head going to explode?”

During her interactions with other characters, I asked Hale whether she would play as the Paragon Shepard or Renegade Shepard. “I'm going to go with the middle—of—the—road Shepard,” she said. “I want to hear my middle responses, because they're the hardest to land. Filling them with energy and emotion takes a lot of focus.”

Upon hearing her first spoken words in the game—“The distress beacon is ready for launch”—Hale groaned. “Drives me nuts,” she said. “I could have made that better.” When the opening cinematic gave way to actual gameplay, Hale looked helplessly at her controller. She tried, vainly, to move Shepard forward. “Wait,” she said. “What am I missing? The right
what
moves me?”

“The right stick moves the camera,” I said. “The left stick moves you.”

She had somehow positioned the in-game camera in its least obliging position. “I'm looking at my own tush,” Hale said. Soon she had Shepard running through the hallways of her spaceship as it came under devastating attack. Hale leaned forward to turn up the volume, so as to better hear Shepard's breathing. Something in her eyes changed, and she began to nod. “This,” she said, “is actually really informative.”

We watched the eerie scene in which Shepard is sucked out of an airlock and into the soundlessness of space, the only sound her increasingly labored breathing as her frantic, thrashing limbs gradually relax into death. Hale sat back. “I remember recording this vividly. It's really fun to die specifically.”

In the game, of course, Shepard is swiftly resurrected. Soon, Hale had her first taste of combat. She struggled with learning how to take cover, shoot, move while shooting, climb over cover, reload, and find ammunition, all the while keeping the camera centered in front of her. But when the game required Hale to find a grenade launcher and dispatch a platoon of hapless robots, she did so quickly and efficiently. “Handled it!” she said, in a tight, confident voice. It was, I realized, Shepard's voice. The game soon brought Hale into contact with a character called Jacob, yet another of Shepard's potential love interests. During Shepard and Jacob's conversation, Hale mined the paraphrase system to get as much information—and hear as much of her performance—as she could. At one point in the conversation, Hale cringed. “There's a segue error there,” she said. “The energy in the transition was wrong.” I pointed out that she could hardly control that. This was true, Hale said, but “I need to have that information somewhere.”

After an hour so, she indicated that she was ready to stop playing. But I realized that the next sequence would bring Shepard into her first contact with a character known as the Illusive Man, who is played by Martin Sheen—an actor she had never met. “We should really keep going until you have your conversation with Martin Sheen,” I said.

Hale perked up. “I should
always
have my conversation with Martin Sheen. He's my favorite president.”

During the interaction with the Illusive Man, Hale pursued every available line of conversation possible, trying to hear as much of her performance as she could. When the Illusive Man, at last, dismissed Shepard, Hale put the controller down and stared at it. It seemed unlikely that she would be picking up another controller anytime soon.

“So how did that feel?” I asked.

It was helpful, she said, but beyond gaining a basic understanding of what playing games is like, she felt surprisingly unaltered. Or maybe that was not so surprising. “I'm used to living in a disassociated universe,” she said.

 

—2011

On a Visit with Jim Harrison

I
grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which is, essentially, a New England-sized forest with the population density of Siberia. As of this writing, the U.P. has coughed up a major league pitcher, a couple world-class coaches, and exactly no movie stars, film directors, celebrity chefs, giants of finance, reality television geeks, or (as far as I know) porno queens. Its sons and daughters, by and large, dream feasible dreams. For the U.P.'s young writers, though, it is a little different. This difference is largely due to Jim Harrison, who has been publishing fiction and poetry about the U.P for the last forty years, a good deal of which was written in a cabin up near Grand Marais, a two-hour drive from Escanaba, the U.P. ore town in which I grew up.

My father and Harrison, who is now 73, are old friends. They met through the writer Philip Caputo, with whom my father served in Vietnam. My father, like Caputo and Harrison, is a keen bird hunter, and during the autumns of my childhood the three
of them would head up to Grand Marais and hunt pheasant and grouse. A few times, while passing through Escanaba, Harrison came by our house for dinner, seeming less like a man to me than a force of nature with a Pancho Villa mustache.

“Jim Harrison is a writer with immortality in him.” Or so the
London Sunday Times
once said—a high—mileage blurb Harrison's publishers have understandably splashed across several of his books. Once I developed an interest in writing, I would sometimes stop and ponder my father's Harrison collection, which comprised almost all of the fiction and none of the poetry. (It is not actually clear that my father knows Harrison writes poetry.) I noted the paperback jackets' comparisons of Harrison to Melville, Hemingway, and Faulkner, but I was also aware of the Harrison Legend, which in the meantime has only grown: the films made from his work, the friendship with Jack Nicholson, the immense foreign readership, the incomprehensible appetite (he once ate a 37—course lunch and lived to write about it). There was also the way he wrestled with nature in his work. For Harrison, the natural world was not something to be cherished because it was pretty; rather, it was something to be howled at, gloriously, in the night.

Imagine my puzzlement. The man who occasionally sat at our dining room table wrote stories set in the U.P., and critics in New York, London, and Paris regarded these stories as literature. Until that point in my life, I had heeded the inadvertent lessons of my English classes: literature was something written by the dead for the bored. Literature was decisively
not
about the towns I knew.

One day I pulled Harrison's first novel,
Wolf,
from my father's shelf. Subtitled “A False Memoir,”
Wolf
is about a Harrison stand-in named Swanson who retreats to Upper Michigan after youthful city living in an attempt to spot a wolf in the wild. I stopped at the line where Swanson says something about “the low pelvic
mysteries of swamps.” I was fifteen years old and for the first time in my reading life I underlined a phrase not to retain its information but to acknowledge its mystery.

I followed
Wolf
with
Just Before Dark,
a collection of Harrison's nonfiction. I latched onto its first essay, which moves from an opening account of Harrison ice fishing on the bay in front of my father's house to an anecdote involving Harrison's dinner with Orson Welles. How was it possible, in life or in writing, to go from ice fishing in front of our house to dinner with Orson Welles?

The simple fact of Harrison's existence demonstrated that you could slip from one world to the other, Escanaba to Orson Welles, smuggling literature both ways. Maybe it was time to thank him.

 

 

Harrison no longer lives in Michigan. Nine years ago, he and Linda, his wife of forty-one years, sold their cabin in the Upper Peninsula and their farm in the Lower Peninsula and relocated to the environs of Livingstone, Montana, for the summer and Patagonia, Arizona, for the winter. It was the early summer, so off to Montana I went.

States do not get prettier than Montana. Driving across its landscape is like being trapped in a beer commercial wrapped in the National Anthem. The only place I have visited that rivals its rough, mountainous beauty is Kyrgyzstan. I kept this to myself. MONTANA: AMERICA'S KYRGYZSTAN was a motto unlikely to appeal to locals. I was supposed to meet Harrison and Linda at the 2nd Street Bistro, Livingston's best restaurant, at (for some reason) 6:07 p.m. I arrived at 6:00 and was promptly seated at a table that had been set with a hefty cheese and salami plate around the edge of which WELCOME HOME JIM & LINDA had been written in drizzled milk-chocolate script.

Harrison and Linda arrived at 6:07. “My son!” Harrison said in greeting. It was the first time I had seen him since 2006, at a party
in New York City. At the time he had been so afflicted with gout that he needed a cane to walk. Now Harrison's cane was gone; his gout was mostly under control, as was his diabetes. His shingles, however, were dreadful, and he moved as deliberately as a cold-slowed bumblebee. This was not easily reconciled with the humongously vigorous Harrison of my youth. I suspected that Harrison's current condition was rather more difficult for him to accept.

If you are describing Jim Harrison physically, you are pretty much forced to start with his eye. When he was seven, a young girl, her motives unknown, pushed a broken glass bottle into his face, permanently blinding his left eye. When Harrison looks at you straight on, his left eye appears almost cartoonishly miscentered, as if he had taken a blow to the head and needs another, corrective blow to fix the problem. After six decades of double work, Harrison's right eye has weakened, as evidenced by a milky blue rim around its iris. (These days, Harrison told me, he could read no more than twenty-five pages of prose before the headache became unbearable.) But it is an amazing face, an iconic face, and Harrison's goofy left eye was like the bump in Anna Akhmatova's nose: an essential, defining imperfection.

Everything else about Harrison seems big. His round, substantive head looks as though it belonged on the end of something a Viking would use to knock down a medieval Danish gate. His body is big, too, but not really fat. Rather, it seemed
full
—the body of a skinny person that had been forcibly stuffed with food. Harrison's face and hands are an identically bright blood-pressure red.

It was something of a relief when we finally took our seats. Linda, whom Harrison has described as “the least defenseless woman I've ever known,” was seated beside me. She and Harrison have known each other since they were teenagers. One day Harrison spotted her climbing stairs in her riding pants and thought, I must have her. She was fifteen, he seventeen.

When I told Linda that I had last seen her when I was twelve, she laughed, lightly, as though this were the most absurd thing she had ever heard. The Bistro's head chef, Brian, brought a basket of fries to our table. Harrison greeted him, too, with “My son!” Brian's fries were maybe the tastiest I had eaten outside of Paris, so I asked him, one Harrison boy to another, for his secret. Here it was: salt, fresh garlic, skillful frying.

Harrison was studying the wine list. “Do you like wine?” he asked me. Harrison is a wine hound of international note, so this was a bit like being asked by Popeye if you like spinach. The first bottle came and, suddenly, another. I do not recall much of the night after the second bottle's splendid arrival, and by the end of the evening I felt as though I had been beaten up by our meal. Harrison was in comparable shape. Outside, he hugged me—an act of affection nearly triggered emesis. Harrison asked if I was familiar with Chief Joseph's famous dictum of dignified defeat. I nodded. “‘I will fight no more forever,”' I said grandly. Harrison smiled and said, with identical grandiosity, “I will eat no more forever.” Somehow I doubted that.

 

 

This fall Harrison will publish
The Great Leader
, his seventeenth work of fiction, and
Songs of Unreason,
his fourteenth book of poetry. A large number of these books were written in the last fifteen years, an unusual burst of late-career fecundity. When I asked about this, Harrison explained that after a high-impact life of travel and sport and carousing, all he really did anymore was write and fish. “I'm trying to make my life smaller,” he said. “I'm tired of living a bigger life.”

Harrison was born in Grayling, Michigan, in 1937, to intensely practical but literary parents. His mother was a homemaker and his father was a government agriculturalist who worked with
local farmers. He grew up in a close, warm family in what he “was slow to learn... was poverty,” as he writes in his memoir,
Off to the Side.
After his blinding, Harrison became a “berserk waif” whom Michigan could not hold. After lying about his age, he found work as a bellhop at a series of resorts in the American West's quadrilateral mountain states. These first, wondrous travels ended when a cop spotted Harrison putting a blackjack in his boot. The sixteen-year-old was unceremoniously shuttled back to Michigan.

He was just getting started. The following year he hitchhiked to the “threadbare nirvana” of New York City, where he lost his virginity to a sex worker. In Massachusetts, at nineteen, he met one of his early literary heroes, Jack Kerouac, who was impressively tanked. Eventually Harrison returned home and completed a bachelor's degree long-delayed by hoboing at Michigan State, where his classmates included the novelists Thomas McGuane and Richard Ford. (McGuane remains Harrison's close friend: they have exchanged weekly letters for the last forty-five years.)