Living Strange, a novel By Allison Giese Hyde Park, New York

296 Pages·2017·1.17 MB·English

by  Allison Giese

Living Strange, a novel
By Allison Giese
Hyde Park, New York

A Thesis Presented to the Honors Program of the State University of New York, New Paltz in
Candidacy for Graduation with Honors

English: Creative Writing/Theatre Arts

th
April 18 , 2018

__________________________Larry Carr___________________________________________

__________________________Jan Zlotnik Schmidt___________________________________
Abstract: Living Strange is about a young webcomic artist, Aaron Bateson, as he survives a
suicide attempt and must begin the arduous process of recovery. However, a muddled and
strained family situation, along with the fact that he’s begun to see his dead ex-boyfriend’s ghost,
is making it even harder. Living Strange is a story about healing and reclamation. Structurally
speaking, it’s a coming-of-age story, filled with phantoms of the past. Mental illness,
specifically chronic depression and anxiety, feature prominently in the story and how they color
the voice of the protagonist. Additionally, persona narration and free indirect style are used to
show how Aaron’s mental illnesses affect his consciousness and how he tells his stor yP.arallels
are drawn between the protagonist and the late Dmitri through specific and controlled
encounters, as Dmitri was never able to seek help for his depression. At its heart, this novel is a
character study about how we heal when things go wrong, and when we’re at our rawest and
most vulnerable.

Keywords: English, creative writing, young adult, depression, anxiety, LGBT, magical realism,
ghosts, artists, art

Living Strange by Allison Giese 1
PROLOGUE
July
It’s hot. The AC at Dmitri’s house is broken. He paces, back and forth, over the well-worn
carpet. It’s dark. The blackout curtains are drawn. He can’t hear it, but he can tell there’s yelling
going on in the house—he saw it when he peeked down the stairs at his parents in the kitchen.
Time’s run out. He knew it would, eventually. He’d just hoped that he’d have a little
more warning. He locks the bedroom door and is tempted to pull his dresser in front of it. Would
his mother escalate to actual violence? If the vein throbbing in her forehead is anything to go by,
he can’t be sure.
He picks up his worn black backpack. At the corner of his closet, where the walls meet,
he peels back the carpet, jimmies the floorboard to the side, and finds his stash of cash. It’s not
much. It’d barely afford a bus ticket out of the state and a room in a cheap motel. But it’s what
he has. He shunts the money into his pocket, and while he’s at it, the pills he used to sell. A
change or two of clothes. He wishes he’d thought to grab his toothbrush, but that would mean
leaving the room. He rolls his tongue over his teeth. This would have to do for now.
His laptop, the charger, his leather-bound journal and a few pens. His passport. He didn’t
know where he would be going, but it would be best to leave his options open. Dmitri knew he
should probably grab a jacket, but again, he’d have to leave the room.
There’s a photo on his desk. This morning it was dug out of his bag by his unwitting
mother, who meant to wash it. She discovered that it depicted two boys kissing, and one of the
boys was her son. And that was that.
Dmitri touches the photo, touches the other boy’s face. He knows where to go.

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It’s not a long walk, from his house to Aaron’s, not on paper. By car it took five minutes.
Aaron’s dad took him that way a lot. But it’s all surface roads with no shoulder, and he has to
find an alternate. By the time he gets there he’s winded, he’s sweated through his old Genesis
shirt, and it’s past dark. All the lights in the house are off, aside from one or two bedrooms.
Dmitri finds the key in its hiding place in the gutter (bunch of amateurs) and unlocks the garage
door. Theoretically, there’s a security system, but he knows from experience that nobody ever
thinks to arm it.
He climbs the stairs slowly, so as not to wake up Aaron’s father, the only hearing person
in the house. It smells like it always does—dishwasher detergent, stale tea, and remnants of
whatever weird dish Aaron decided to cook for dinner. It’s hot in here too. There must have been
a brownout, because normally Aaron has the house feeling hermetically sealed.
He pushes his hand through the crack in the door. Flickers the light. “You shouldn’t have
left that spare key lying around,” he signed.
Aaron looks startled. He’s perched over by his drawing desk, kneading some clay. “Did
you walk all the way here?”
“Left an hour ago.”
Aaron’s wide gray eyes take in his bedraggled appearance. “…For the night?”
“I did what you wanted. I came out.” He doesn’t have to know that’s not precisely true. “I
was already done with them anyway.”
He presses a hand against his brow. “So they kicked you out?”
Why is this so hard for him to understand? “I didn’t stick around long enough to find
out.” How would there be any other solution?
Aaron turns even paler. He wipes his hands on a towel. “You have to go back.”
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Of course he said that. “No back to go to.”
“Dmitri, you can’t—”
Dmitri came expecting comfort. A hot anger boils in his stomach. “Can’t what? Abandon
them? Why not? You don’t know. You couldn’t understand. Your dad accepted you. You saw
what happened to Charlie. It’s easier if I just leave.”
His brows scrunch together in the way they do when he’s anxious, which Dmitri knows is
all the time. “Where will you go?”
Suddenly it makes sense to him. “Out west,” he signed. “I have a cousin in New Mexico.
They’re the only other family I have. I can’t stay with Ann. Everyone else said no. My own
friends won’t give me a place to stay.” He’s asked them all before, in the past. It’s not the first
time he’s come close; just the first time he’s followed through.
For a long, torturous moment, Aaron doesn’t say anything. He shakes his head. Dmitri
sees his shoulders moving, how fast he’s breathing.
He needs to keep talking. “Come with me, Aaron. We can go together. Start over. Drive
across the country, do what we want.” It would be so nice to be free together. They never had the
chance.
A thin patch of color stains his face. “You’re still only seventeen,” he points out.
The irritation thickens. “So?”
“We have no money.”
He’s trying to keep himself restrained. “Your point?”
“I can’t leave my sister.” His hands, long fingered and graceful, seem small as he makes
the signs.
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Hopelessness begins to blot out the anger. “So leave for a few weeks and come back. I
don’t want to go alone.”
It takes Aaron a while to talk. “I can’t. I just can’t.”
“This is because of what Cora said, isn’t it?” He crossed his arms. “She didn’t mean it.
You know that.”
Aaron’s eyes turn sharp. “Then why did you agree?”
How is he not getting this? That argument was so stupid—Cora thought she was helping
Dmitri by chewing Aaron out, but she made a bigger mess. She wanted to help him stay closeted
until he went off to school, but then, of course, he failed out and it all fell apart—“Because I love
you and I don’t want you getting hurt. People like us—we don’t get to be safe. The last thing you
need is for the people in your community to turn against you.”
“I can’t believe that. Maybe I’m not who you thought I was.”
For fuck’s sake. A bubble of hysterical laughter leaves him. “Maybe not, Aaron. But who
are you, then?”
More silence. He bites his lip.
“Come with me,” he signed again. “Please.”
Aaron covers his mouth. He looks pained.
Dmitri’s heart sinks. “I’m going, Aaron,” he signed.
“There’s nothing else you can do?”
“You’re my only option.” It takes a lot of air to admit that.
“I can’t rip another hole in my family.”
“Right.” He knows this. Maybe he always knew it. Aaron would never be able to choose
him. “So that’s it, then?”
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He looks up at Dmitri fully for the first time. “Will you text me? Tell me you’re safe?”
He thought about the irony of this statement. “Maybe. Maybe not, who knows. I have to
start new.”
“Dmitri—”
He kisses Aaron. He always feels and smells so familiar, so warm. It hurt to leave but
staying hurts even more. “Goodbye.”

By the time the cop arrives traffic on I-87 is already being rerouted. A truck with a huge white
trailer sits perched crookedly on the road, its hazards blinking dazedly. Traffic whizzes by at a
conservative fifty-five miles an hour. There’s an ambulance, but the lights are off. There’s
something on the side of the road covered by a white sheet. The cop sighs. Her hair keeps
coming out of her bun and she brushes it out of her eyes.
She approaches the ambulance. A middle-aged man sits trembling under a shock blanket.
“Hello sir,” the cop says. “Are you the driver of this truck?”
The man nods. He’s shaking.
The cop’s too tired for this. She hasn’t gotten a good night’s sleep in weeks, not since
they moved her off of the night shift. Her body doesn’t do well with days. “Would you be able to
tell me what happened?”
The man’s lip trembles. “I saw him walking along the shoulder,” he says. “I wanted to
shift into the next lane, but there was too much traffic. I saw him look up at me, then all of a
sudden he—” His voice breaks. “I couldn’t stop in time.”
The cop believes him. People, especially the long-distance truckers, fly by at eighty,
ninety miles an hour, perhaps more. A rig that heavy can’t exactly stop on a dime. It’s
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unfortunate, but it happens—though usually with passenger cars, not with hitchhikers. “We
might have to take you to the precinct for some questions, but this feels open and shut to me,”
she says.
The man nods. “That poor boy’s family,” he says. “I… I had no idea—”
“There’s nothing you could have done,” she says in a voice that she hopes is soothing.
“You try and get some rest. I just need to sort out a few more things.”
She approaches the EMT kneeling next to the body. The sheet has blood on it and she
tries not to look. He offers her a wallet made out of tie-dye duct tape and a battered, half-torn
passport. “He was carrying plenty of ID,” the EMT says. “The family will get some closure, at
least.”
She opens the wallet. A high school ID from New York School for the Deaf. A learner’s
permit, giving the boy’s name, stabby and Russian. Inside the wallet is a photo, folded up. The
cop unfolds it, sees the two boys kissing. Things start to make sense to her. She sighs. Open and
shut after all.

July
So I’m having this dream. In this dream time isn’t working, it’s going too fast. Dmitri’s kissing
me, kissing me gently like I’m something being worshipped. He takes off my clothes. I’m
wearing a shirt that’s not even mine, it was his, he left it behind one day. The album cover from
Selling England by the Pound. I could never figure out where his obsession with that band came
from. Every time I asked he’d just shrug, saying there needs to be some mystery left in things.
Living Strange by Allison Giese 7
He makes love to me. It’s good, maybe the best we’ve ever had. I don’t feel stuck in my
head like I sometimes get during sex, I feel like I’m in my body, and that this body is worth
having.
I get close, so dangerously close, to finishing. His weight on me is warm and reassuring. I
look up, wanting to see his face. But it’s not his face. Vines are spilling from his mouth, twisting
all over me, weighing me down, and everything smells like blood.
I wake up covered in sweat, the space between my legs uncomfortably sticky, like I’m
fourteen all over again. My heart is racing. I can still feel the blood on my skin. My breaths hurt
my chest and these weird rough uneven sobs fall out of me.
I thought if I slept more I would escape him, and escape the truth of him being gone. But
here it is again. The pain laces through me slowly, twining though my nerves, draining me dry.
Makes itself comfortable. It’s going to be here for some time.

Part 1—HIATUS
1.
December
Monday
I’m at work. My boss Helen and I pull books off the shelves in her tiny store for the weekly
markdowns. It’s an absent sort of work, the kind that uses our hands, so we don’t get to talk
much. She manages somehow. She asks me why I work so much. She doesn’t mind, so she says,
because it means she can spend more time focusing on her infant daughter. I don’t have a good
way to articulate that if I keep moving, if I keep busy, and if I keep out of the house, it keeps the
Living Strange by Allison Giese 8
house of cards that is my anxiety from collapsing in on itself. I need to keep my mind from
spinning. So, I work.
Today’s panic attack is after lunch in the backroom. It lasts 3 minutes and 43 seconds.
Tuesday
I have class at SUNY Purchase, where I elected to go when my teachers wouldn’t stop hounding
me about applying to Gallaudet. Intelligence, yadda yadda. Potential, blah blah. This was the
compromise. I’m “getting my feet wet.” End of semester one the only friend I’ve made is my
school-provided interpreter, a grad student named Louise doing her interpreting fieldwork hours.
She comes with me to American lit, where the professor yammers on about the upcoming papers
we’re supposed to do about a poet each of us as been assigned. I got William Carlos Williams.
Dmitri used to read me those poems. I haven’t gotten one word written. The paper is due in ten
days.
Today’s panic attack is in the men’s room. It lasts 4 minutes and 15 seconds.
Wednesday
Dad leaves his debit card on the kitchen table so I can buy groceries. I’ve bought all our food
since I learned that I like to cook. I learned I like to cook because my father sank into a catatonic
depression three years ago and if I didn’t learn fast my sister and I wouldn’t eat. He got better but
the habit remains the same. It’s easier, he says, because I can buy the things I like. Plus he
always ends up working late at his law firm in the city, trying to help struggling undocumented
immigrants as the government chews them up and projectile vomits them back out.
I shop. The order and the churn of the store sets my teeth on edge. I buy pork loin and try
to breathe.
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