Wide Blue Yonder (43 page)

More laughter and cheering. Rosa hid her face. Frank and Elaine looked at each other, then glanced into the bedroom, the neatly made-up bed and its plain chenille spread, where Harvey and Rosa slept as man and wife.

Frank said, “Do you wonder …”

“I don’t think we’ll ever know.”

R
osa wanted them to go to Mexico. She wanted him to see it with his new eyes. She showed him on the television when the map came on. She said: See? See? Mexico was brown, like Rosa. The map floated just above the screen. His eyes still didn’t work quite right. Things weren’t always where they should be. Sometimes smears of rainbow dazzle crept into the corner of his vision, and at night the darkness was fuzzy. But other times it was like a window opening up.

He was trying to learn Rosa-talk. ‘Sky’ was see yellow, ‘blue’ was a zoo. He wanted to talk to her about Mexico. How did you get there, and what did you do once you arrived? Was Mexico a place that had good or bad weather? You never heard that much about it, like it was too far down on the screen for anyone to see.

Rosa-talk was like a different channel on the television. You didn’t always get good reception. A lot of the time it was Ya ya ya. Other times it almost came together. He had to let his ears slip down into a different place. Then watch Rosa’s face and how she moved around the room. She said: She was old now, but Mexico was where she had been young. If he came with her, he could imagine her when she was a little girl, a young bride, pretty, she hadn’t always been such a dried husk. What use was an old woman? All you could hope for was to keep yourself clean and pray for mercy. But her heart was still red and Mexico was her heart.

He said: Rosarosarose … I’ve never been anywhere. How do you start?

The girl said they should do it. “It would be like a honeymoon. You could ride on an airplane, would you like that? Oh don’t worry, everything will be right here when you get back. What do you think, you could fly through a cloud. In the real sky, not the one on the dumb TV.”

Off we go, into the wide blue yonder

“Now where did that come from? Did you hear it on a commercial? But it’s
wild
blue, Harvey, it’s the Air Force song.”

Off we go, into the wide blue yonder
Flying high, into the sun

“All right, have it your way. Wide.”

Da da da, dumpity dumdum dumdum

“You have kind of a nice singing voice, did anyone ever tell you? I bet my mom would help you buy the tickets if we asked her.”

It would be his first and last trip. Would he see the ocean? Did the Air Force sell the tickets? Did the sky want you up there? Did Rosa know which direction? What did the map look like from that high up?

He was excited, thinking about it. You Are Here was going Someplace Else. He ran up and down the back porch stairs just to let off steam. Some of Rosa’s friends would go with them. He liked her friends. They had names like hurricanes: Alberto, Carla, Eduardo, Juana. They took him and Rosa for rides in their car sometimes.

It would be his first trip because he had never taken one before, and it would be his last because you didn’t live forever and forever was right around the corner. He could tell. The window opening in his eyes seemed to look inside as well. Some mornings he didn’t feel like he’d woken all the way up. Some nights his sleep was thin and foggy. Different parts of his body announced themselves like clocks, like the new one in the kitchen that said robin oriole song sparrow meadowlark. Except his clock said knees neck heart breath. Then, sooner or later, the clock stopped. Off we go!

Oh don’t be scairt. Nothing can stop the U.S. Air Force. It beat the army hands down. He flew loop the loops in the wide blue yonder. The air was as clear as water. At night when he couldn’t sleep, he reached out his hand to Rosa. Rosa was like a map you could touch. She stirred and spoke to him from her dreams, in a kindly cross voice: Ya, go to sleep, baby, baby, let Mamma sleep. Love was a more, a more, a more. When he stretched his hand over the Weather screen, it covered everyone: Rosa and Fat Cat and the girl and Yoo Hoo and Frank Junior and Football Ed and Lorena and Ramon and Juana and all the names ever invented. Everyone he loved was underneath the same sky.

A SIMON & SCHUSTER READING GROUP GUIDE
 

W
IDE
B
LUE
Y
ONDER

Like all my books,
Wide Blue Yonder
began with something small—the idea of a man watching the Weather Channel—and grew to fill a space. Early on I knew who Uncle Harvey would be: innocent, damaged, isolated. Once I found a language for the dialogue of his inner life, many of the specifics about him seemed to follow naturally. Of course he would live in a run-down house with a spoiled cat, of course he would grow a haphazard garden, eat ice cream straight out of the carton, and so on. When I tried to imagine who else might be involved with such an unsocial character, I naturally thought of family, and then invented a health crisis that would cause the family to intervene. Josie and her mother, Elaine, and all the secondary characters that branch off from them, derive from that basic plot necessity. Rolando Gottschalk, of course, is the wild card, a force of will, personality, and nature, that disrupts the expected course of events and, I hope, expands the book’s scope.

The wonderful thing about the Weather Channel, for Harvey and I suppose anyone else who watches it, is that you can sit alone in your own living room and feel like a participant in matters of global import. I wanted to make that connection between individual lives, even seemingly insignificant lives, and the metaphysical. Harvey constructs his own version of the afterlife, while Elaine ponders the requirements for happiness, Josie decides the purpose of living is love, and Rolando berates the universe for causing his rage and pain. What I like best about novels,
Wide Blue Yonder
or any other, is the opportunity to give such abstract ideas features and flesh, make them move and talk and surprise us.

D
ISCUSSION
P
OINTS

1. “There was always Weather. And every minute there was a new miracle,” we learn in the opening passage of
   Wide Blue Yonder
   . What does the novel have to say about changeability of natural elements and the human condition?
   

2. Harvey has an unusual relationship with the Weather Channel. What sustenance does Harvey find in its programming? What purpose does it serve in his life? How do others perceive Harvey’s interaction with the Weather Channel? Do these perceptions change at all? If so, how?
   

3. We witness characters in Wide Blue Yonder struggling with avoidance—of reality, responsibility, even mortality. What are they afraid of and how, if at all, do they come to terms with these fears over the course of the novel?
   

4. Spoken word and silence each figure prominently in
   Wide Blue Yonder
   . Which characters rely most heavily on verbal expression? Is this tactic successful for these individuals? Discuss the role that silence plays throughout the book. Who is silent, and what consequences follow from this state of being? How do the silent people communicate with others?
   

5. The novel explores the connection between communication and love, both filial and romantic. As we meet the various characters and watch their relationships evolve, how does communication function in each instance?
   

6. Examine how Thompson has structured the novel. How does its structure relate to its various themes? Consider the narrative point of view.
   

7. “You know, Frank, I don’t think of Harvey as crazy. More like he’s on this different plane where there aren’t any good or bad people, just good or bad weather,” Elaine comments. What light do the characters Harvey, Mitch, and Rolando shed on the question of morality? What other moral issues does
   Wide Blue Yonder
   address? In the world Thompson has created, what determines if someone is good or bad? Is it possible for an individual to change?
   

8. Discuss the significance of Josie’s relationship with the Abraham Lincoln statues in Springfield, Illinois. What cultural connotations does Lincoln carry for Americans? How do these ideas intersect with the themes of the novel?
   

9. Talk about the varying portraits of women (Josie, Elaine, Rosa, Teeny) in
   Wide Blue Yonder
   .
   

10. Family is an important corollary to the discussion of women. Describe the different families that we meet throughout the novel. Would you consider them emblematic of American society? How does each of the female characters influence the nature of her family and how the unit fares as part of a larger social structure?
    

11. Wide Blue Yonder
    contrasts the role of people as individuals and as members of society. On many levels power defines our society. What power hierarchies has Thompson set up within the novel? What forms does power take? Discuss the importance of race and class to the story. What significance, if any, does Elaine’s factory in India have?
    

12. How is intelligence defined and perceived in
    Wide Blue Yonder?
    Discuss the different forms it takes and how each of these forms is valued.
    

13. Discuss how
    Wide Blue Yonder
    challenges us to reexamine our assumptions about several core paradigms: sanity and insanity, happiness and discontent, love and hate.
    

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