Excessive Candour
Things Exactly As They Are

The man on the ceiling laughs at me as he remains always just out of the reach of my understanding, floating above me on his layered wings, telling me about how, someday, Melanie and my children and everyone I love is going to die and how, after I die, no one is going to remember me no matter how much I write, how much I shamelessly reveal, brushing his sharp fingers against the wallpaper and leaving deep gouges in the walls ... , heading for the open door of one of my children's rooms.

The man on the ceiling opens his mouth and begins eating the wall by the staircase.

We are near the beginning of Melanie Tem and Steve Rasnic Tem's The Man on the Ceiling, a novel or confession or mutual biography or position paper on the maintenance of family life in a dangerous world, a book which, however we wish to describe it, the authors insist is a book that tells the truth: "Everything we're telling you here is true." An edifice of words—a nest of interlocking stories—which can be deciphered in terms of a catechism as raw as that must (we figure) be exceedingly simple-minded: or not.

We choose to think that The Man on the Ceiling is not a simple-minded book.The first thing to do, then, is to try to understand the man on the ceiling who haunts the book like Poe's raven.

At one point or another it seems that he must be a demon (a hungry demon that eats flesh from the inside out, like cancer); or that he is an angel (whose wings are composted from the heart-rending family bricolage deposited by Melanie and Steve and their children into the seams and cellar cavities of one house); or that he is a trad psychopomp-like "image out of Spiritus Mundi" (William Butler Yeats' great image-dense poem of Aftermath, "The Second Coming" [1921], is referred to several times, and is quoted from, not quite accurately, at least once); or that he is the Arrow of Time (which, for Steve in particular, seems to be a way of defining Fear Itself); or that he is a divinely obscene/obscenely divine scarecrow woven out of Story (certainly it is in order to try to understand him that the authors of The Man on the Ceiling attempt to tell us the large number of absolutely true stories [Story is sometimes capitalized] which comprise the book); or that he is the _genius loci_ of every place that any of the various Tems have lived; or that he is entropy; or that he is death; or that he serves; or that he does not choose to serve. In the end, of course, we assume that he is all of the above, and also that he is also—this the Tems tell us outright is the case—a mask of god.

But he is also something else. Perhaps the central fact about the man on the ceiling is that he does not fall. As far as it is possible to understand the primal understory of this singularly eloquent, dumbly repetitive, cleverly resonant, bare-naked book, the persistence against gravity of the daimon who haunts its pages almost exactly represents the persistence against time and gravity of the small Family here called Tem, as its two narrators, speaking antiphonally, depict themselves and their five adopted children living it, somewhere near the heart of Denver.

So. What do these folk do in Denver? Even if we decline to understand every confessional moment woven into the braid of the book as being meant literally, the Tems, one must admit, are an odd family—though maybe no odder than most. The portrait of "Steve Tem" given us mostly by Steve Rasnic Tem—it is sometimes hard to know who seems to be writing what passage, though the two authors' voices are sometimes pretty distinct—is of a man physically clumsy, almost indolent, a dreamer prone to extremely frequent anxiety attacks of the utmost severity, a solitary who cannot remain alone, a writer who wrestles very nakedly with his demons and who writes to display/allay them. The vision of "Melanie Tem" that Melanie Tem (mostly) gives us is of a person less transfixed by extremities, someone who exists more in clear than her beloved husband, who may find it easier than he does to write more stories less marbled with terror, less conspicuously caught in the headlights of Time. These two portraits seem plausible, as far as we can know writers from reading their work.

Marriage is mutual

The Tems' marriage is devoutly mutual—they seem to have spent most of their lives together without experiencing much of anything (certainly as far as this this cunning, seemingly ingenuous text goes) that cannot best be described in terms of that marriage. They are nothing if not marital. Even the house they have lived in for decades somehow only becomes real when it shares in the sharing:

An uninhabited house offends the natural order. The whole point of a house, its reason for being, is to provide shelter to human beings, who can't live without it. A vacant house begs to be filled, with new owners, with squatters, with ghosts, with fictional characters (maybe even a man on the ceiling) who can be whatever the house needs them to be.

This is, of course, blather; but one of the genuine strengths of the Tems' nakedness of avowal—in this case a poshlosty avowal of their naked need to have lived in a house that admittedly partakes of their story—is that knowing them as far as we know the Steve and Melanie Masks they've carved with such confessional care, is to know that every now and again they do talk blather, and to forgive it.

The central axis of the naked marriage of the Tems is the intercourse of the two partners; but the central topic of that marriage is not the two partners but their five adopted children, one of whom has hanged himself at an age (9) when it is hard to argue that he could have known what he was doing. The other four, all grown men and women by the time the book begins to be written in the early 21st century, are described in passages simultaneously loving and devastating. It is perhaps in order to understand them—all adopted children are in a sense stories made up by their adopters—and to pass on to them the dangerous gift of family lore that The Man on the Ceiling takes on the air of a vade mecum. The fantasy and horror tales that make up much of its bulk are lessons in living, lessons in how to disobey gravity until the last moment. Story itself is that lesson, the Tems seem to be saying. "I'll make something up," warns one of them; perhaps the warning is meant for their victim/beneficiary children as well as for us. "It may not be factual. It will be honest and true." It will keep us on the ceiling.

Everything is under threat, as in any life, as with any family. "The man on the ceiling is out there, on the ceiling of the world, ... just waiting for the right moment to squash himself against Steve's windshield and make him drive off the road or into oncoming traffic, into the path of cars carrying everyone he's ever loved." For the reader unused to the fantastic, this gravity-defying eidolon of Story must work solely as a metaphor; for any reader familiar with the fantastic—someone who has probably read Yeats with due attention, and maybe the Tems as well—the man on the ceiling means exactly what the Tems mean him to mean, at each single moment of the unfolding text. He is on call to Story: which is a shorthand description of how as a whole the fantastic works. The tropes and devices of the fantastic are answerable to our needs in a world we can no longer begin to describe in clear, at a time when the surviving mundane literatures of the fallen West still cling like barnacles to the measurable: every tic and apercu of The Man on the Ceiling slaps mundanity in the face, because everything in the book speaks to us in every voice it is possible for us to hear. The man on the ceiling, as in any dream that any of us dream in the darkness of our lives, is everything we need to go on with.

The Man on the Ceiling may deposit long moments of unearned sweetness, but it is, in the end, pure fantastic. It is as pure in its slightly nagging way as the work of an American poet who seems to me rather closer to the Tems than Yeats. The Tems are saying, maybe, what the man on the ceiling in Wallace Stevens' great poem, "The Man With the Blue Guitar," says: that "Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar." But this is not good enough for his auditors, his readers, his children, or the Tems, who tell him in the end that he must play instead, for all our sakes,

A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.