Everything Is Over Before It's Begun

Thoughts on coming home and Sergio De La Pava’s "Every Arc Bends Its Radian"

It was the longest night of the year. I saw a horse roll over into a drift of snow and then I couldn’t see beyond the car’s headlights. No one could.

We passed a semi-trailer parked on the highway’s shoulder, hazards flashing in the dark. Next, I saw tire tracks going from the road to the ditch to a field, no car though, as if the tracks belonged to the car of a ghost. I had to guess where the car ended up and thought I saw tail lights glowing red under the snow. Minutes later I saw an ambulance go by. The fog disappeared when we entered Saskatoon’s city limits. 

I had just read Sergio De La Pava’s Every Arc Bends Its Radian.¹ It involves a kind of homecoming, too. The main character Riv Del Rio visits family in Cali, Colombia after his life in New York City takes an unexpected turn. He feels like a tourist in Colombia despite being of Colombian descent. He sees actual tourists and feels a bit lost. He drinks to blackout with his cousins. It’s deathly hot. 

No personal tragedy for me. In fact, winter’s harsh conditions let up during my time in Saskatoon. I was glad because I prefer the milder weather, although somehow the higher temperatures would only make things worse later on, I was told. Despite growing up there, it’s hard not feeling like a tourist after all this time—a tourist not really on vacation. I’ve realized recently that even though I left when I was 25, I was still practically a child.

Def chucked a few of these

Riv either tells his family he’s a private detective or they already know. He’s also a poet. A family friend hires him to find her daughter, a computer science grad who’s been missing despite the Cali police department’s best efforts, which is no effort at all, and actually it’s entirely possible they’re in on it. Riv senses evil, which isn’t a surprise with all the semi-automatic weapons hanging around everyone’s necks. In Every Arc Bends Its Radian, being paranoid in Colombia is normal. 

Again, I experienced the opposite. While surrounded by family and friends, many of whom I hadn’t seen in a long time, there was nothing to be paranoid about outside of a possible flight cancellation, true evil didn’t lurk behind the scenes of the Christmas dinners I attended, and no one was strapped with a machine gun. Life isn’t a noir. And while Every Arc Bends Its Radian makes use of some of my favourite genre elements—suspense and paranoia—the best part of De La Pava’s works are his characters’ lengthy digressions on things like humanity, good and evil, and faith. After Riv reluctantly begins his investigation, he sits down at what is barely a restaurant, a woman’s house with a few plastic chairs and tables in the yard and an oven inside:

I feel good sitting there. What are we, what am I, that I can feel this way at this instant? 

Well, I don’t know about you, but I know what I am. I am a child. Not like a child, just a child. 

Stella wants to know if I need anything else. Little does she know how much. There’s a sense in which what I most need right now is to sit right there in perpetuity. To never again enter that claustrophobic NYC rectangle with all the charged detritus Jane left behind. Normally, the thought of being perfectly alone produces anxiety but now all I can see in it is the freedom. What happens to me doesn’t matter beyond me. Which means that when I act I’m not weighted down by the responsibility to others or even self-preservation, should I ever choose to act again.

Riv briefly fixates on the woman, who has rare, orange-coloured eyes, and then continues:

[…] anyway, if I’m a child it’s only because I’m a child of God. And if that’s not an option anymore, then I’m still a child of the universe. Universe being one of those charged words that can never be discovered to lack an actual tangible referent. Referring as it does to merely everything that exists. So there has to be a universe. 

And just now it seems lacking in sense to wonder if God is one of those things that exists. It feels more revelatory instead to discover God is neither superior to nor encompassed by universe but that it’s two ways of saying the same thing. Odd also that this insight is spurred not by something like sitting in the desert under some influence while staring at the pointillist sky, but rather by this.

Because this is miraculous, but only in the way of our shared everyday miracle. That this courtyard I sit in is more than thirteen billion years in the making. All that time, all those elements create this unexpected oasis of peace as prelude to what feels like imminent mayhem.”

If it feels as though De La Pava is laying it on kind of thick, and by association I am also laying it on thick, it’s because he is, and I am. I can envision some readers chalking up this kind of thinking to melodrama, but I’m interested in how vulnerable the character is. It can be hard at times to ignore the force of existence, the fact of life itself, a force that is both invigorating and depressing.

We are all children of the universe

Life’s “charged detritus” normally distracts enough to keep us from ruminating on either side of the scale too long, getting caught in the wash cycle that is invigoration and depression, but they’re always there, just under the surface. Riv realizes he’s got nothing to lose—another instance where, while in Saskatoon, I arrived at an opposing sentiment—but what better way is there to improve your chances of defeating evil? Before meeting his cousin to continue their investigation, Riv finishes the above thought:

Only I don’t think this is some kind of culmination. The whole thing will just keep spinning, merging, dividing. A perpetual motion machine without volition or deliberation. One that will grind on not only long after we’re gone, but in way that erases the fact we were ever here.

I didn’t have any epiphanies while in Saskatoon and things just sort of happened while I was there, as though I was on autopilot, waiting to go home. Of course, being there conjured up memories and feelings I hadn’t thought or felt in a long time. Everything I observed was through a lens similar to Riv’s and I couldn’t help being hyper aware of how cosmically meaningful and meaningless my being there was. I inevitably saw family and friends in a different light. I’ve grown closer to some and less close to others, without volition or deliberation. Like clockwork, everyone asked me when I would be moving back and I never had an answer. I’m still thinking. 

Every Arc Bends Its Radian presents a tough case for Riv, as he’s up against a particularly evil supervillain with artificially superintelligent ambitions. (Why’s it always the bad guys who want to live forever?) Needless to say, things go sideways as they collapse in on themselves. During the book’s dizzyingly epic climax, Riv says, “If I could live forever I would. But only because it’s the only way to keep fighting,” as the walls of the story close in around him. And it’s here, when the book is at its most surreal, that it tries to understand evil. There is a logic to it. If evil truly exists, then the same must be true of its opposite. This is the only way Riv can convince himself he’s one of the good guys. 

I remember I used to ask God for help before soccer games because I got so nervous. I wonder now why I couldn’t just be nervous. But maybe it isn’t such a big deal talking to God, though I don’t remember the last time I did. Maybe we do change. I oscillate between thinking we do and we don’t. In Saskatoon, everyone was much older than the last time I saw them but no different. More themselves really. I wonder if that urge should be resisted, if it’s a problem to become the fullest version of ourselves. No one bothers to think otherwise, as far as I can tell. Thinking isn’t living. Or maybe it is?

Sergio De La Pava writes like he is working through hard problems, constantly trying to figure out the difference between right and wrong or good and evil; and justice, or the idea of actual justice, is never far away. In Every Arc Bends Its Radian, Riv is never not aware of his own faults, and always struggling to do the right thing, even when he’s in the middle of what seems to be doing the right thing. Eternally thinking it through, and in this way, there is no hesitation in his hesitation. Thinking is living. 

My trip was brief, about 10 days, which might seem like a long time, but when your only chance to visit with someone adds up to a few hours every year or two, it’s not much at all. I saw friends who I have known since I was five or six years old, whenever we started kindergarten. I’ve known others since high school. It’s been so long. They’re practically family after all this time. We took their kids skating while snow fell in thick flakes or went sliding at a nearby hill, the snow inching its way up my feet, soaking my ankles. I held their babies in my arms which is, these days, probably what I look forward to the most. Shared everyday miracles, thirteen billion years in the making. 

The more I think about Saskatoon, the clearer its image. I’m at home now and most days I don’t think about it at all. The fog from that first day never returned. The days got longer. Every arc bends its radian. Everything is over before it’s begun.

1. I’m a big fan of Sergio De La Pava. His novel A Naked Singularity is one of the few books I’ve read more than once.