Lane Kareska
Destroyer Comes Home
SR: I’m Stephanie Rowden, the fiction editor for the Progenitor Literary magazine. I am speaking with Lane Kareska about his story “Destroyer Comes Home.
What inspired you to write this story?
LK: So ten years ago or so, I heard a news piece about a young couple in Nebraska. And basically what had happened was that they left a party together and they were trying to get back to their apartment that I believe they shared. And they got lost in some farmland in the dead of winter, and they left their car, walked out into these fields and they got just hopelessly lost. They called 911 a number of times and their calls—which were recorded, you can hear them—are just very bizarre and terrifying and it sounds like they believe that they’re being chased by a cult or a group of crazed people. And they say things like ‘Oh, they’re following us, they’re taking apart cars and putting them in trees.’ Just stuff that made very little sense. Tragically, the couple was found dead not much later, they were frozen to death, and as the incident was investigated what was revealed was that they were high on crystal meth which apparently they’d ingested several days prior to this incident.
I don’t know that I have all those details correct but that’s the way the story kind of stuck with me. It always struck me as really phenomenally sad and it’s just stayed with me ever since I first heard it and I believe that story, that true incident, was absolutely the seed of Destroyer Comes Home.
SR: What was the writing process like?
For me with short fiction, what I typically find is that a draft will either come out really really quickly, like in a matter of a couple of hours or it’ll take forever, like epochs, like years. With “Destroyer Comes Home” I wrote the first draft in really just 3 sessions. Probably three 90 minute sessions or so. Really that was all it took for the first draft to be completed. But my first drafts are, as a rule, horrible, just unreadable, it took me a really long time to hack away at this story before I felt like it was whole. So the first draft was written in, I believe, 2011 and it was only recently, I think in the very beginning of 2015 that I thought it was ready to be sent out into the world.
SR: Wow that is a stretch, but it’s really cool. The story is really amazing. And in light of that, what do you want the audience to come away with from this story?
LK: I think for me the big takeaway is the final moments of the story when Ribs is sitting on the porch and he’s got the gun across his lap and his dad is behind him and he’s looking out into the woods and they hear some noise out there, it could be nothing or it could be something more ominous. It could be the sound of attackers approaching and the dad asks what’s coming and I think when that piece of dialogue came out in the writing I think I Probably recognized that that was maybe the moment to end the story. Because that question seemed to me the only question, certainly the most important question that these characters could be asking, probably that any family could be asking, and it’s probably a question that most families do at some point whether they verbalize it that way or not ask themselves.
Certainly I think that’s a question that I’m constantly subconsciously constantly asking myself. What’s coming? What’s next? What’s out there that I don’t know about that’s seeking me right now, you know, either for good or bad. And in the case of ribs and his family it’s almost certainly for bad.
SR: I thought that was a very powerful ending. It wasn’t just a typical ending because you ended it with that question. He’s in this state of preparedness but he’s also heading off into the unknown and most stories don’t end that way.
LK: I think there’s a real sort of expectation that Ribs is going to have an epiphany that he’s going to realize something new and something more deeply true about himself than he’s ever realized before. And I think he definitely does have that epiphany, he kinds graduates from one level of thinking to another in that moment but beyond that there’s also a darkness that comes with that knowledge, a kind of foreboding griminess, Even though he realizes this new information about himself and he knows his character on a more granular level: that doesn’t save him in anyway, in fact he realizes he’s now going to have to come to terms with the fact that He now knows who he is and who he is essentially a herald of destruction
SR: That’s an interesting way to put it. At the same time he’s bent on this self-destruction, he’s also at the same time very much an antihero; he’s still standing up and fighting for something. So what is your favorite part of the story?
LK: For me, my favorite part is the moment where Ribs is returning from some evil they committed against this character, Hacker, who he rightly or wrongly believes his responsible for the death of his sister. After they’re leaving the scene of their crime, Ribs realizes that he’s left his cell phone behind. It never really says when the story takes place but in my head this always took place in a kind of 2006, 2007 in the era where there are cell phones and certainly cell phones are ubiquitous but they’re also not password protected. And so the ultimate consequence of leaving your cell phone behind at the scene of a crime you committed is that you’ve revealed your identity—that’s your calling card—but you’re not revealing just yourself but you’re revealing yourself through potentially everybody in your catalogue of contacts and the reason that is my favorite moment is because I see myself reflected in that moment of foolishness and awe that ribs experiences.
There was a time more than ten years ago when my buddy and I were prolific vandals, we would just get into idiot trouble and there was a golf course near us and one night we went over there and broke in, I believe we caused some trouble on the putting green, I think we stole a flag and probably ripped up part of the green, we were jerks, we were 21, we were very young and profoundly stupid, and the next morning, I woke up head splitting in pain from a hangover, dirt in my fingernails from playing around on the putting green, just feeling like an idiot, I had this horrific moment where I believed that I had left my cell phone behind and so again, no password protection, I thought certainly they’re going to report this crime to the police and they’re going to find the cell phone, and I just imagined some cop scrolling through the phone seeing contacts like mom, brother, sister, dad, whatever, and I wondered who was going to get the first call. Luckily, I hadn’t actually left my cell phone behind it was just in another pocket or some article of clothing. That struck me as a near miss that was a moment where I dodged a bullet, really just dodged a consequence of my own idiocy. But that moment stuck with me and I had to put it in a story and I’m happy this where it showed up.
SR: That’s a very fitting because it was a very real moment for Ribs, especially when he goes back to look for it and can’t find it. And then he buckles down and he knows he’s going to have to deal with it.
LK: And that’s the thing: You can’t undo that. You’ve already committed to a course of action and there’s no undoing that moment for Ribs and more so as there’s no one doing it for his family.
SR: Is you favorite genre to write in fiction?
LK: Yes. I wrote this piece in graduate school. My MFA is from Southern Illinois University. This is one of the final pieces that I submitted for workshop. I do write fiction. I would say that the genre of fiction I write is Dark Adventure. I don’t know that that’s a legitimate genre but that to me is the best way to describe where my tastes and prejudices in art take me. Which is to say that most of my fiction features a knife, a road trip, or someone getting punched, but also, hopefully, my fiction also includes some love, some new insight or some otherwise new sharp wrinkle in the fabric of a characters life. That’s the kind of stuff I consciously or subconsciously try to commit to paper. An example of this, something that typifies what I’m trying to describe, I have a novella called North Dark, I’ll include a link here, that I published recently. And to me, that is an example of what I think I mean when I say ‘dark adventure’. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18177132-north-dark
SR: I think that’s a good category. Because it seems that at the same time there’s this darkness, there’s also this chance for light and learning and growth, whether it’s forward or backwards.
LK: I like that. Light and learning, I think those are excellent descriptors of an adventure or what an adventure could or should be.
SR: Your story reminded me of Cormac McCarthy, a little bit of Tom Robbins, except there’s not so much violence in Tom Robbins, but it’s still that quirky kind of story.
LK: Thank you. I went through—I’m still very much in the midst of a long, protracted, sustained Cormac McCarthy phase. Hopefully one I’ll never leave.
SR: What is the significance of Rib’s nickname?
LK: I mentioned that I work shopped this story. Something a classmate of mine pointed out is that Ribs has way too many nicknames. And that’s completely accurate. He’s Ronald, he’s Ron, he’s Ribs, he’s Destroyer, he’s got other wrestling personas like ‘the coma’. I think that’s symptomatic of his psychology. He’s always trying to assume one guise and it never really fits, and so then he moves on to the next one and that one doesn’t fit any better or it fits awkwardly in some new way. He leaves that and keeps moving on. He just is not comfortable in his own skin for various reasons probably mostly because of the guilt he feels about what happened to his sister and how he believes himself to be responsible. But the name Ribs, to me, I realized this only very recently, there’s a lot of cow imagery in this story. That certainly wasn’t conscious. The story begins with these cows in this field who Tina and her boyfriend take to be attackers because they are intoxicated. Ribs several times is compared to a cow or a beast of burden. His names is Ribs and that to me evokes butchery. He uses his body more than he uses his mind. The tasks and the expectations that people place on him tend to be more physical than anything else. I think if he were to describe or were to try to contemplate the execution of his truest self it would be a physical gesture, it would be an attack or grapple. It wouldn’t be any mental feat and it wouldn’t be an emotional state. I think he thinks of himself as a physical actor. So to me Ribs was just the encapsulation of that. Also it was important to me that Ribs be a wrestler, because he’s constantly grappling, he’s grappling with his memories, the guilt that he feels, he grapples with the animosity that rightly or wrongly he’s directing at these other people in his life, most notably the character of Hacker who he decides to go after to not the best result.
SR: At the beginning of the story, is this a memory of Ribs’, is it a way that he tortures himself?
LK: The first scene that you’re referring to is kind of like a vignette, its maybe just one paragraph. It’s a really quick, confusing moment where you’re seeing it from Tina’s perspective. She’s trapped in the car, its snowy outside and she believes these attackers are coming after her. It’s a confusing way to start a story I think, but I stuck with that because that ultimately is the inciting incident, that’s what sets the forward motion of the story, sets it into gear. It’s the event that happens in Tina’s life, Ribs’ little sister, it’s the last even that happens in her life. I don’t know exactly what it is. The way it’s portrayed, it’s either the event from her perspective or its Ribs’ memory or its maybe this kind of cobbled together mythology that everyone collectively or subconsciously has agreed was the series of events that happened at the end of Tina’s life. It’s this confusing, tornadic disaster; it’s this little violent event that sets the rest of the story into motion.
SR: While Ribs is bent on avenging his sister, he’s at the same time out to punish everyone else, am I reading that right?
LK Yeah, I think so. That’s how I read it. I think he wants to avenge Tina because he’s been told that’s how he should feel. I think he wants to avenge her because if he does that, if he commits some violence against this other person, who he can blame then maybe that takes some of the pressure off of him. Maybe that takes some of the weight or guilt off of him. But ultimately, I think that’s a fools’ errand. I don’t think that there’s anyway for Ribs to alleviate that burden that he feels especially since he probably is complicit in the events leading to her death. He’s out to avenge, he’s out to punish and not just others, he’s out to punish himself. Absolutely. What happens at the end with Bee, his step-mother, I think that’s absolutely the embodiment of the ultimate punishment that he brings to bear on his family, He’s trying to out to avenge Tina but in doing so he winds up breaking what family he has left.
SR: What advice do you have for writer’s that are just starting out?
LK: Cool, thank you for asking. The advice that I would give to writers just starting out is not my advice, its advice that you can find in Stephen King’s book On Writing. It boils down to this: if you can read four hours a day and if you can write for four hours a day then pretty soon you’ll be a writer. And nobody’s got that kind of time, nobody has four hours a day to read and another four to write, but if you can be pragmatic and systematic and tenacious about it and if you want to do it, you’ll find a way to just read everything and to read ferociously, to read avidly and as a result you’ll probably want to write ferociously and prolifically. And that’s as far as I can tell the only thing that you can do, is to just keep reading and writing. And the other thing too, is that nobody is going to tell you to stop. It’s completely an independent activity that you’re the only one in charge of it. So, that’s the advice I would give is to read as much as possible and to write as much possible and to never stop.