Chapter Text
In the fall of 1995, Michael Wheeler sits in a classroom on the fourth floor of a brick building near Union Square in Manhattan, staring uneasily at the woman at the front of the room.
She’s talking about voice and perspective, about how memory is malleable, about the ethical responsibilities of a writer, about some other things that are interesting enough; and Mike listens, he does, but it seems more like he’s learned to hear without hearing. He nods once or twice, and his eyes don’t stray from the woman’s silver hair or the chalk streaking across the blackboard, but his mind ticks and whirs with the ever churning city lying just outside the grimy little windows.
He's paying attention, but it’s syllabus week. The professor has passed out a packet that outlines the year-long class and, by extension, Mike’s fate in this master’s program, in the shape of one capstone assignment that fills a whole fifty percent of his grade, and due at the end of the third quarter. The assignment is two and a half pages long and double-sided, which Mike is used to at this point, but it still gives him one of those headaches that starts somewhere between his eyes and creeps backward into the base of his skull.
Mike reads it once during class, and then again afterward, standing out in the hallway while someone argues loudly about whether Trainspotting was overrated and another person hums something that might be Alanis Morissette.
His hair is frizzier here in New York than it was on the West coast, and he’s yet to find the specific brand of curl cream he prefers here in the city; absently, he brushes a few strands of frizzy curls from his eyes with slightly trembling fingers. He’d had three cups of coffee today, which was never a good thing for his churning mind and even worse for his anxious stomach. This building smells like floor cleaner and burnt coffee, and the fluorescent lights are always flickering, so Mike has to squint down at the paper to fully understand.
He is being asked to write a memoir.
Not a novel shaped like one, not a story with invented names and a fantastical world and just enough plausible deniability to sleep at night; A real memoir.
With a subject, with interviews, and with a tape recorder, if he wants to be sincere about it. He’s not really sure if he does.
The professor called it a dialogic form, which Mike wrote down and circled twice, mostly to stop himself from writing fuck me or this is a trap in the margin. His professor had said something about how memory mostly exists in relation to other people, and had outlined the importance of honing authentic writing voices, and narrative structures, and how memoirs foster deep self-reflection that can inform all types of writing.
Which is why, Mike learns, this class is a required credit for Creative Writing masters students. Because he's not a journalist, he's not a reporter, and neither are any of the other students in the class. But it's still a requirement. Something about the thought of self-narratives makes his skin crawl; and when he reads over the assignment again, the dread curls around his stomach once more.
The assignment requires a living subject.
This narrows things quickly.
Mike has a small handful of friends from undergrad, but they’re all back West still; Dustin is still in Georgia, Max and Lucas in Chicago.
El is not alive in any way that fits the spirit of the prompt – a thought that makes Mike’s breath stutter and his stomach pang in that empty hollowness he so often succumbs to late at night. His eyes sting, and for a long moment, Mike stares absently at the swimming, waxy floor below hum until a passing man in a tweed blazer accidentally bumps into his shoulder.
He shakes the ache out of his head, clears his throat, looks back down at the assignment in hopes that it might have changed while he wasn’t looking. It hasn't, and so he keeps thinking. Hawkins exists, of course, and the people there do, too – but that is also too far for a three-quarter-long assignment, and besides, Nancy is in Boston, and she and Holly and his parents are – he flips the page – explicitly discouraged. (“Avoid family unless absolutely necessary.”)
Mike almost laughs at that.
That rule neatly erases his cousin, wherever he is now – he grew up in rural Maine, but he thinks he may have moved to LA; Mike tells himself he’ll write soon. (He tells himself that often.)
But the list of people Mike knows is embarrassingly exhaustive, and soon he is left with the sobering realization that he doesn’t know anybody here in this city.
The streets hum with strangers outside, and yet Mike can’t name a single person whose face he would recognize if he passed them on the subway. Seven million people breathing and brushing past him, and the city has never felt so lonely, so hollowed out.
And then – like a switch flipped somewhere behind his eyes – he thinks: there is someone I know in this city.
The thought lands wrong, like he caught himself completely off-guard. Like he hasn't had that thought about ten times every day since arriving at JFK two and a half months ago. It hits his stomach first, sharp and immediate, a wave of nausea so convincing he stumbles three steps toward the bathrooms across the hall before stopping short, bending instead over the water fountain. He laps at it like an animal, cold water spilling down his chin, darkening the front of his sweater. The girl across the hall gives him an odd look, but he doesn’t care.
Because there is someone he knows here.
The idea sits in him, half-fear and half-sickness, pulsing. But he doesn’t know where he is these days, anyway – and worse than that, Mike carries a tight nagging suspicion, deep enough to make his stomach clench, that even if he did, he wouldn’t want to see Mike.
The hallway empties slowly around him, until it’s just him and the girl from class with the butterfly clips in her hair.
Her name is Shannan, and she’s very sweet, and asks him if he knows who he’ll ask for the assignment. Mike can’t quite make himself meet her eyes; his head feels buoyant in the wrong way, like he’s half a step behind his own body, this dull dread hovering just out of reach. He tells her he’s not sure yet, and the words feel flimsy the moment they leave his mouth.
Outside, the September air bites at the bridge of his nose and stings at the apples of his cheeks. His scarf is too thin, and the wind gets through anyways, sending shivers down his arms and an odd ache in his throat. Leaves skitter along the sidewalk in soggy brown and orange spirals, their crackle swallowed by the oily breath of bus exhaust; somewhere across the street, dogs bark and cars honk, the sound distant and thin enough that they could be coming through a wall.
Mike walks home along avenues that are crowded but lonely, past faces carrying entire lives he will never intersect with. He tries to be undaunted when he imagines the intimate whir of a tape recorder set between him and someone he trusts – tries to picture the weight of it on a table, the click of the button, the shared agreement to speak, without feeling like he's going to be sick.
But he can't, and even the thought of asking someone turns his stomach over.
At his apartment, after tripping over a discarded pair of chucks and a neglected cardboard box lying unpacked by the kitchen sink, Mike pulls the handout from his bag again and spreads it across the small desk beneath the window, where the light falls crookedly on the notebook he hasn’t written in yet.
He reads the assignment slowly this time, all the way through, concentrating hard on this train of thought, trying to keep the conductor of his brain (who already controls way too many tracks), from letting everything derail at once.
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Capstone Project: Dialogic Memoir
Over the course of the semester, you will select one living subject with whom you share personal history.
This person could be anyone you've known long enough to have shared history with, however it is strongly encouraged that you avoid family unless absolutely necessary.
With this person, you will conduct a series of conversations and interviews structured around assigned prompts. Each submission will be a braided, written essay that explores both the subject’s life and your own. You may record your interviews for ease and integrity, but submission of the recordings is not required.
This is not a biography, and it is not journalism. The goal is to examine how memory is shaped through relationships, and to work on the tool of dialogic writing.
You may lie to yourself in early drafts, but you may not lie to the reader in later ones.
Guidelines:
Each piece must be grounded in specific lived experience.
Avoid fictionalization, allegory, or speculative framing.
Metaphor is permitted only after the literal truth has been articulated.
You are encouraged to notice patterns of omission.
You will submit seven essays over the semester, with a total of seven prompts to guide you. The prompts will be given every other Monday, and will increasingly escalate in emotional risk. Due to the personal nature of the assignment, the content of this capstone will not be shared with anybody besides the professor and student. However, you may share your project with others, if you so choose.
You will receive one final grade based cumulatively on the reflection component and the seven essays written.
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Mike leans back in his chair and stares out the window at the rooftops across the street; how they stagger and climb across the Manhattan skyline, stitched together with power lines, freckled with satellite dishes, crowded with people perched on plastic balcony chairs, smoking and listening to radios that bleed faint music into the air.
The sky is heavy with the promise of an afternoon rain – an ominous thing to Mike, who needs to go to the grocery store and also find somewhere that sells grout cleaner for his bathroom. He needs bedsheets too, because yes, he’s been sleeping on a bare mattress with only a blanket and a pillow for almost three months now, and he is tired of it.
Across the street, a few pigeons lift off in unison, forming a little fluttering cloud that breaks apart on someone’s laundryline. Somewhere below him, a man is selling mixtapes in a doorway, and a group of kids with high-pulled backpacks dismount a bus.
Mike drags a palm down his face and lets out a breath that doesn’t seem to empty his lungs.
He is twenty-four; He has spent most of his life translating discomfort into fiction. Now, he has to do the opposite.
He opens his notebook anyway, leaves it blank in front of him. His pen has started to leak, and ink bleeds into his fingers, which is strangely disappointing; he’s had it since graduation, and it’s one of his favorites. He exhales, drops it into the trash, and goes to get a glass of water. The first few fat drops of the sky have begun to weep onto his window, and he watches them slide like tears down the pane.
He is twenty-four, and has lived in this studio apartment for two and a half months. He has been in New York City for three.
And he has no idea what he’s doing.