The Red Arrow

Last year, on vacation, I read a book called The Red Arrow by William Brewer. It’s about a man ghost-writing the autobiography of a famous Italian physicist while struggling with suicidal depression. He takes an experimental psychedelic treatment, and it has a profound effect on him.

Looking forward to reading it, I brought the book with me to the beach, but by the time I got there, almost no chairs were available. Luckily, after wandering around for a while, I found one next to the pool, right beside a public shower people used to rinse the sand off themselves before heading back into the hotel. It wasn’t a great spot; the view was terrible; but it would do the trick. I sat down and picked up where I’d left off: page 64.

As a wave of depression sets in, the unnamed narrator flees to the washroom to be alone, and turns on the shower. He writes:

Thinking back to that moment, I can’t help but laugh now, realizing for the first time that I’d fled into the bathroom only to fill it with steam, a kind of mist, because I didn’t know how to feel frustrated or sad without it.

To give you some context, he’d always referred to his depression as “The Mist,” which is why this moment means so much to him.

As I read those words, a group of people began using the shower, when suddenly, a warm breeze came through the beach, rustling the leaves of the palm trees. When it passed through the shower, it created a light mist, which blew towards me, and dampened the very page of the book I had open. I could even feel the tiny droplets of water hitting my face.

Interesting, I thought. Here I was, surrounded by mist, reading about a man who is, himself, surrounded by mist.

What’s even more interesting is that, later on in the book, the writer describes having a very similar experience as I did, while he was on vacation in Rome, reading a book at the San Calisto bar.

He writes:

But then, moments later, the following sentences made me start in my plastic seat: “In the evenings we limped to… our local bar, the San Calisto, where Fabrizio, the barman, had elevated surliness to the level of a comprehensive world view. With an unrelenting scowl, he abused everything he touched, yanking the lids off the gelato, gouging out the gelato, dumping it in glasses, thumping the glasses on the counter.” I’d read this description of Fabrizio as Fabrizio himself, the very barman who’d just sold me a Peroni, was behind me performing the very actions Dyer described, in perfect synchronicity…

What was The Red Arrow pointing to? I began to formulate an idea of what this might be when I read the scene on page 186, where the narrator describes something that happened to his wife, Annie, while she lounged on a beach chair - very much like I was - and a gust of wind blew her way:

… an immense gust of wind blew into the cove and lifted the top half of our umbrella off its anchored bottom pole, the half’s pole then spearing the top of Annie’s lounger. […] Had she been sitting up, it would have gone right between her eyes, almost certainly killing her.

A few days later, when I got home from my trip, I was scrolling through Goodreads, reading reviews, when something jumped out at me. It was the first line from the blurb of a book that had just been released. It said:

A random bolt from a DC-8 falls from the sky, killing a child and throwing the faith of a young Jesuit into crisis.

A random bolt falls from the sky.

Immediately, I thought about the umbrella pole, flying through the air, almost impaling Annie. It was as if The Red Arrow had pointed, among other things, to my next book: Sun House by David James Duncan.

I tracked it down, convinced - if it’s not yet obvious - that it was pointing to someone’s death.

Part of me almost wanted it to happen, because then it would prove I’d stumbled on to a true prophecy; but another part of me was sickened at the idea, and thought the whole thing was ridiculous. Nonetheless, that’s what was on my mind as I began flipping through this almost 800-page monster of a book.

Early on in Sun House, Jamie’s mother, Debbie, dies of leukemia on her son’s birthday. Now Debbie’s mother, and Jamie’s grandmother, is referred to as “Gramma Nan.”

Right away, Eminem - whose mother is, famously, Debbie, and whose grandmother is Gramma Nan - came to mind. Not to mention, the book was called Sun House - and Eminem was the son of Debbie. Was the red arrow - the red arrow of death - pointing to Eminem? Eminem, of course, had long been my all-time favourite artist.

When Jamie thinks about his mother, one year after her death, we encounter a familiar metaphor:

He vaguely glimpsed a blue-eyed, pretty face. But before he could study that face, memorize it, convey his love to it, it broke up and melted into mist.

Which brings us back to “The Mist.”

Which brings us back to The Red Arrow.

The more I read, the more obsessed I became with the possibility this was a prophecy of Eminem’s death. My mind raced even further, for example, when after I made the Debbie-Gramma-Nan connection, I later saw the words ’em and rap - on the same page of Sun House. It was page 114.

The first sentence was:

“I’m pretty sure you’ll like ’em.”

And the second was:

Lorilee was in bed reading Snyder’s Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems.

And even though the word was not actually rap, but riprap - i.e., stones laid down to stabilize trails or riverbanks - it is, I think, important to remember that Eminem is the rapper who rips other rappers…

But I digress.

Now the day after I made all these connections, Eminem’s mother, Debbie Mathers, died.