The Cheese Plate

Keep your $21.99. The ending to my first book goes something like this:

Our main dude, Garrett, is on a boat a few miles off the coast in southeastern Alaska. The boat belongs to the father of his estranged dad’s girlfriend. His dad is recently dead. His dad used to work on the same boat. Garrett’s on the boat because, back on land, he may or may not be in some deep shit for punching an Army recruiter. He was on speed. Months of it while working sixteen-hour shifts in a salmon processing plant and now at sea he’s finally coming down. The sea is acting as a kind of salve or maybe a call to the void. He’s not sure, so we can’t be either. Regardless, he’s coming down and thinking about stuff, the way people in books do. He’s feeling sad but not manic or crazy and he’s taking an animal type of comfort in his own sane sadness. A perennial dumbass, he’s edging his first encounter with self-knowledge now that the drugs are draining out him and significant family secrets have been revealed, etc. It's a coming-of-age story. I think most stories are.

It's a bluebird day, windless and glassy. The kind of day on the water where the sun comes at you from all angles and at night, in your berth, you notice that even the underside of your nose is sunburned. It’s convenient that there are no other boats on the horizon and in that convenience, Garrett sees something strange and white and round pop over a swell on the portside. It’s not a dead halibut. It’s not a buoy. It’s not a volleyball. It’s nothing he knows and now his mind is riffing on conspiracies. Strange soliloquies come next, real Hamlet-type-stuff. He sees a human skull because the book starts with him thinking he finds a human femur.

Now, there’s golden light pouring from the eye sockets.

Now, the rest of the world feels distorted and strange, as if through a fish-eye lens.

Now, there’s a cause-of-death crack in the skull with a blinding white light knifing through.

Now, Garrett’s grabbing the long gaff and leaning hard over the portside rail to collect the skull which surely means the same patterns of magnification and delusion that gave birth to the predicaments in the novel. The skull rides the swell that’s breaking broadside on the hull, and time is distorted through language, and just before the skull is lost in the churn of the rudder, Garrett sees that the skull is in fact a single slice of American cheese centered on a Styrofoam plate.

The end.

The ending preceded the book. 

It was July of 2019 and I was standing on the back of a thirty-nine-foot salmon troller called the Steadfast. It was that exact type of day, the kind that locals to Southeast Alaska tell me are becoming alarmingly common. I’d been at the back of the boat for twelve hours and had caught about as many fish. I gaffed and hoisted each one into the boat. I tore the gills—their long, fine filaments, like eyelashes dipped in blood—and when they were bled I gutted and cleaned them, scraping the kidney line with the handle of my knife, and I dropped each one into an ice water slurry. Each salmon financially equaled about a cup of coffee to me, meaning that my boredom was flavored with economic distress.

My mind was approaching a dangerous cliff which turned out to be the limit of what I could think. I remember thinking exactly that—maybe I’d thought every thought I could think, the end of memory and imagination—when something white and round popped over a swell. I mistook it for volleyball. Then I wondered how a skull could float. Then I saw it was a plate with some cheese on it. It likely came from a charter boat. But there really were no boats nearby. They were all elsewhere. Probably where the fish were.

It wasn’t just the irony that made the cheese plate so vivid. It wasn’t just the boredom either. The cheese was so square, and so centered, and just so yellow, and the plate was so round and so white. Nothing at sea is that yellow. Or that white. Or that square. Or even that round. A marvel of commodity and geometry, the diametric of the blood and guts on my gloves. It was beautiful and funny and curious and sad. But soon the cheese plate was sucked under, leaving me with the ending to a book that was beginning to take shape in a notebook in my berth at night.

I didn’t really make the cheese plate the ending of the book, but not for lack of trying. I tried it with our dude Garrett seeing the lonely plate and reflecting on never knowing where it came from—a heavy-handed parallel to the futility of hunting down family secrets and the broader issues of food labor explored in the book.

I tried it with Garrett watching the cheese plate sink and imagining his own fingerprints washing off—too self-knowing for a character whose primary trait is madcap ambition.

I tried it where the plate just sinks. Irony, ambiguity, an image left along to do its weird magic. Maybe that’s how it should have ended. The truth is I’m still not sure.

I read a lot of debut novels and, before I wrote one of my own, I never quite understood the bent among writers to tie up a story so neatly. Back when I was a high-school wrestler, I had a similar tendency. My dad called it getting tight-assed. “You got a little tight-assed at the end,” I remember him saying. “You puckered right up.” That was my problem with wrestling—I’d rather lose a close match respectably than try to win at the end and risk getting pancaked on my back, counting the lights.

But artmaking isn’t a match to be won or lost. So why do we get so tight-assed at the end of a novel, puckering into safe, respectable convention? For me, with the plate, I think it was a fear of triviality. In a novel full of environmental mania, meth, n-thousand dead salmon, the long shadow of suicide and war on the periphery, who cares so much about a slice of cheese? Up against the weight of serious issues, a cheese plate couldn’t just be a cheese plate. It was stuck—sandwiched—between image and representation.

Recently I spent an afternoon looking through debut novels, and I saw a spectrum of tight-assed endings. Endings that are overly symbolic. Endings that feel too much like a punchline. Endings that labor to cross every T or add a coda for each character. Endings that go too hard the other way and toss in a pregnancy or a suicide or an unnecessary change in setting, until, suddenly, you’re at a funeral in France. Each pucker was a response to the pressure of concluding, and a departure from the idiosyncratic genius that kept the book on my shelf in the first place.

In times of trouble, people seek comfort, which might be part of the reason debut authors edge toward safety at the end. Afterall, safety is the first craft lesson many of us are taught. In graduate school, I remember being told with a clinical seriousness that everything should either end on a meaningful image or an action. Even better if the image was repeated from earlier in the work. Better still if a few images from earlier all come together at the end, like if the cheese was actually an old photograph or a tin of salmon, and at the same time a metaphorically useful bird flew overhead. That’s how you make something “well-crafted.” But the further I get from graduate school, the more I realize that “well-crafted” isn’t the compliment I was taught to believe it is. If someone reads your book and their first thought is about its craft, one of you has a limiting concept of what a novel can or should be.

Maybe we as readers are partly to blame for our relationship with endings. Just hop on Goodreads and you’ll see what I mean. Far too many readers complain that they loved a book but not the end. To this, I ask: Which ending? 

Lately I’ve been taking solace in the belief that a book has many. Think of The Grapes of Wrath. Characters waft in and out of the narrative, disappearing down crystalline rivers or dying in the back of wagons or even appearing on the last page, starving for milk. Each member of the Joad clan gets their own conclusion, and only a couple of them coincide with the book’s last page. And besides, if you think back to your favorite novels—really, take a moment, and think—what do you remember? For me, it's rarely the ending. I see Jake Barnes introducing Lady Brett to the hot bullfighter. I see Mattie Ross in the snake pit and Beloved dripping wet on the doorstep. I see Xiangzi shivering in a smoky Beijing tea house in Lao She’s Rickshaw Boy, lamenting that it’s so cold outside that his asshole has frozen shut. Every novel can be a novel of moments, if we let it.

Whatever the reason, getting tight-assed is ultimately a consequence of pressure, and pressure has a way of sneaking up on you. When I started Slime Line, the pressure was low. It started as a short story in grad school, an exercise in voice, and later, writing on the boat, I never got tight-assed because the stakes were always lower than the mortal workaday danger of winches and boat fire and falling overboard into 55-degree water. And I didn’t know if I’d end up even finishing a book. I wrote freely, with verve and joy and what Padgett Powell calls “controlled whimsy.” But soon an agent reached out, and one after the next the horsemen of getting tight-assed—agent, editor, critic, reader—began to point their bony fingers at me. 

The funny part is neither my agent or editor or any other earlier readers suggested I change the cheese plate. It was the tiny workshop instructor in my skull. The pressure of my own internal sense of conventionality. And maybe I was right, giving the reader something a little more satisfying. I wrote a strong last scene—a cold, green cove, an earnest reflection on living with mental illness and pain, on taking solace in the sea, and on the impossibility of trying to put something like the low, monkish groaning of the ocean into words.

But who knows? There’s a thousand possibilities floating at the edge of the last page, and even now I’m avoiding committing to one.