A novel of literary fiction.
Armchair historian Ivan is forty, unemployed, and fearful that he is no longer interesting to his attorney wife Karen.
Regardless, he doesn’t know how to say no when Hugo, his best high-school friend, former punk comrade-in-arms, and object of Karen’s complete derision, arrives unannounced in the middle of the night—on the run from the FBI.
When Hugo’s stop-over turns into a prolonged occupation, threatening his already crumbling marriage, Ivan is forced to lurch from his armchair into action as the FBI and Hugo’s mysterious, unstable girlfriend circle in.
A novel of literary fiction.
Armchair historian Ivan is forty, unemployed, and fearful that he is no longer interesting to his attorney wife Karen.
Regardless, he doesn’t know how to say no when Hugo, his best high-school friend, former punk comrade-in-arms, and object of Karen’s complete derision, arrives unannounced in the middle of the night—on the run from the FBI.
When Hugo’s stop-over turns into a prolonged occupation, threatening his already crumbling marriage, Ivan is forced to lurch from his armchair into action as the FBI and Hugo’s mysterious, unstable girlfriend circle in.
They say your life flashes before your eyes at the moment of death, but, in my case, it happened regularly, no moment of death required. Only, the life that flashed before me was not my own. It was the life of an obscure Russian revolutionary named Aleksandr Anosov who had, as far as anyone knew, died in an uprising against the Bolsheviks in 1922.
As before, it happened one morning in August while I was edging my front lawn in a hurry before the afternoon heat would make the job impossible. I trimmed the left side of the walkway up to my porch, and the facts of Anosov’s life reeled past me like film footage. It felt wrong that these were not the facts of my own life. It felt wrong to me that lawn-edging was my life. Anosov’s biography rolled through my mind in a newsreel tone slightly more vibrant than sepia, and that old data, buried deep within in me since childhood, was more real to me than the drying brown grass that my humming blade spat across the concrete.
I had inhaled Anosov’s story since the age of twelve, reading one of my mother’s old college history course texts, and had exhaled them since: Anosov’s mother thrusting him into the midwife’s arms, peering up over her distended belly, her breath dying on her lips, as she glimpsed her son for the first and last time. Anosov growing hard under the rule of his widowed father, an illiterate ex-monk, who believed scholarship and labor secondary to obeisance to God’s will—and his own. Anosov struggling against his father’s wish to place him into a monastery, his escape, his flight across Russia to the tutoring position in Petrograd and the arms of Lyudmila, the woman who would introduce him to Trotsky. That fatal handshake! The lectures to the tradesmen! The encounter with Rasputin! The midnight ride to Moscow to retrieve Lyudmila from prison. The Revolution … His disenchantment with the Bolsheviks … The uprising in Tambov province, and his final, fruitless attempt to escape. Abandoned by Lyudmila, forgotten by everyone … The cell in the dark reaches of the building that would become Lubyanka Prison under Stalin, and the firing squad.
I saw it all, and I remembered how Anosov’s story had so affected me in my youth. We were connected, I liked to think, our histories intertwined through the past forty years of my life. It all came flooding back: youth, misery, deception, history, listlessness, friendship, love, ambition, desolation. That was the sum of it. The sum of me. And Anosov. But there was nothing that could be said about me that wasn’t better framed in terms of the life of Aleksandr Anosov.
There was no mistaking me for a Russian revolutionary. Unemployed for nearly three years, I edged and mowed and raked the lawn or heaved snow from untraveled sidewalks and kept the house as dust-free as human habitation could allow while Karen, my wife, managed the expenses from her more-than-full-time gig with one of the larger law firms in Detroit. I no longer had any idea where the battlefield lay. Anosov’s example had not encouraged me to any martial action in quite a long time.
For reasons unknown, this knowledge chafed in my pocket like a walnut shell that morning.
It could have been the heat. The humidity of August in the historical swampland of southeastern Michigan often sank me in muddy minefields of thought.
When I was finished with the lawn, that day, my forehead beading, on my way indoors for the balance of the day, I squeaked open the mailbox beside the front door to check for the previous day’s mail. Or the previous week’s, who could say? I slipped my hand inside and plucked out a single postcard that I presumed, upon first contact, to be a dentist’s advertisement or one of the regularly hand-delivered realtor pleas for a quick phone-call to discuss the rising value of our oversized home that received from local realtors from time to time.
Instead, it was a lurid picture postcard sporting, on one side, a color photo of a mouth-wide-open, shouting punk rocker guy in leather motorcycle jacket, red flannel shirt tied around his waist, and twenty-four inch green mohawk haircut aiming a British flip-off—two fingers up—at the camera. Red block letters overlaying the photo read, “If Punk’s Dead, Then Why Am I Still Alive?” The other side of the card was blank: no message, no return address.
Funny that a postcard would echo the very thought I’d only just entertained I the throes of lawn maintenance.
Of course, it was from Hugo, my oldest friend, who would, wherever he was, not fail to divine that, on a certain August morning, I would require a good slap in the face. No return address or signature was necessary.
A message would have been nice, though.
It had been how long now? His last visit had been sometime after my lay-off from the Troy Public Library, and he had entertained my kvetching about the ugliness of local millage votes and inadequate city services funding for exactly nine minutes before dragging me downtown to see some random band play at The Old Miami. Awful band, good night. Just what I had needed in the moment, though, as I recalled, Karen had wanted to talk me into some part-time job as a law librarian at her firm when he’d banged on the door, spoiling the conversational moment. Hugo’s presence never thrilled her.
Had it been two years, really? Yes, and where had he been?
I was no revolutionary, maybe, but Hugo was, sort of. Or an itinerant bum, I wasn’t totally clear on the distinction.
At an earlier stage, I’d been on one side of the line with him, or I at least liked to think so. As a kid, I perpetually thought of myself as a thorn in the side of somebody, even if I couldn’t always identify the body. Maybe I was some level of revolutionary in that I bothered to think about politics at all during the reign of Ronald Reagan, when Citibank and Walt Disney were busy constructing the inescapable marketing and propaganda engines that had kids captured from birth nowadays.
Probably I thought that just because I listened to punk rock and glowered a lot in the hallway at school. I spiked my hair (Hugo used industrial glue in his!) and wore Sex Pistols t-shirts and wraparound shades from the Incognito store in Royal Oak and presumed that to be a form of action. I complained a lot. About everything. All the time. Once in a while, I mouthed off to a teacher and landed myself in detention after school.
Hardly Anosov-level stuff.
The complaining that Hugo and I did over our bologna sandwiches and foil-wrapped pizza in the school cafeteria about Reagan, shitty pop music, jocks we hated, and the general state of things was revolutionary to us. At that time, little words made a big difference, and clothing really did say nearly everything that there was to say about a person in high-school. Uniforms may not have been mandatory in our school, but there were uniforms up and down the hallways of the place regardless. The football players had their jerseys; Hugo and I had our t-shirts, leather jackets and trench-coats, and boots; the kids who just wanted to get by and move on to college slinked around in neatly tucked button-down shirts and navy blue khakis.
Any real difference in the way that Hugo and I lived our lives from other teenagers of the time—watching television, eating potato chips, stealing beers from somebody or other’s parents, seeing concerts, mooning over girls, worrying about acne, swearing over bad die-rolls during games of Risk—was immaterial. To us.
These days, there were few parallels between myself at that age and myself at forty. For Hugo, it was a different story. There were easy parallels there, and I relied still on him to remind me that we had had something at that time that did draw some sort of meandering dotted line between the two of us and likes of Aleksandr Anosov. I needed Hugo for that, whether I actually saw him every two days or every two years. He was my totem, the spirit of something that I wafted past at some point without noticing.
Still, revolutions have been waged by seventeen year-olds. Anosov couldn’t have been much older than that in 1917, after all. Those upraised two fingers on Hugo’s postcard still said something, Hugo had picked out that postcard for that reason. I knew, and, wherever he was, he knew it. Times change, true, and kids age out of putting glue into their hair, but, once in a while, it was useful to be reminded that things don’t need to change quite as much as they might.
I folded the postcard into the pocket of my cargo shorts and retreated inside into the air-conditioning, in search of lemonade, which Aleksandr Anosov would surely also have enjoyed.
Can you still call yourself a punk rocker when you live in the suburbs with your wife, who is an attorney? As you fully embrace middle age can you maintain your youthful ideologies or do you have to sacrifice them to survive?
In John Hilla’s debut novel, Stay Free, he addresses the philosophical questions of idealism, realism, and existentialism with a small cast of characters. But throw in an FBI manhunt, a struggling marriage, and the realities of everyday life and you have an interesting story to lead you through the questions.
Ivan is an out-of-work professional librarian living near Detroit who is also obsessed with the historical drama of a little-known leader in the Russian Revolution. Ivan’s marriage with Karen is in danger and he seems incapable of stopping her as she drifts away. Just when it seems life cannot get worse, Ivan’s long-time friend, and the nemesis of Karen, appears back in his life. Unfortunately, the FBI also shows up.
Hugo, Ivan’s childhood friend, is still living out their punk rock ideology. He is also wanted by the FBI who interview Karen and Ivan, which only drives a deeper wedge between the couple. Ivan is pulled between his life in the past and the life he wants in the future, but he lacks the ability to make a decision. The inescapable existentialist motif of “not to choose is to choose” is embodied in Ivan, who continues to allow life to make decisions for him.
Ivan examines his own life by reflecting on Alexander Anosov, a little-known Russian revolution leader. Their stories appear to have little in common, but as we learn more about Anosov we can see where our heroes fail and where we may succeed.
Forced to finally act, Ivan refuses to give up on Hugo, housing him and his unstable girlfriend in his basement. Hugo never hesitates to remind Ivan that his life in the suburbs dependent on his lawyer wife is everything they would have hated. But as Ivan sees Hugo living out his life in the basement and on the run, he begins to question how far youthful ideology can carry someone. Forced to reexamine his own situation, even Hugo starts to wonder about his choices in life.
As the story comes to a climax, many of Ivan’s choices come together violently. In the end, Ivan knows the direction he wants to go and we hope he gets the chance to pursue it. Stay Free is a literary and philosophical story of how we address the dreams of our youth as we age.