Thoughts on The Host
My first short story for this newsletter is something that happened almost word for word, as much as you can say that most things in The Host ‘happened.’
Note: This is an essay on my short story The Host — read it first!
Last night was full of nightmares. I went to bed agitated for reasons of the adult variety, and the restlessness seeped into my dreams. In one of them, I believed I was awake (the worst kind of nightmare) in bed in my room at night, safe from the night terrors, but then I heard a rat roaming around. The people who were with me (there were people with me in the room, I guess) did not hear it, but I did. I tried to move my arms to reach the lid that covers my radiator, in order to bang it and scare the rat away, but as it is often the case in my bad dreams, my limbs were unresponsive. Eventually I succeeded in moving them, and heard my foe scurry away at the loud sound — a happy ending, albeit one that can’t ignore the fact that a rat scared off is not a rat gone for good.
Fear has been perhaps the most consistent emotion in my life, or so I have convinced myself in my pessimism. As a kid, I was afraid of many things, from the somewhat reasonable (robbers) to the normal child stuff (demonic little girls, velociraptors) and the deep German-like existential dread ("my parents will abandon me in the park because they can’t afford to feed me, Hansel and Gretel style"). Eventually I shed most of my afraid-of-the-dark inclinations, becoming, if anything, a bit reckless, but I think it’s fair to say that fear never left me, it just morphed into other, less velociraptor-y shapes. I suffered from anxiety before it was cool, even if I didn’t know to call it by that name. It manifested in obsessive thinking, unshakeable worries that often defied logic, and symptoms of diseases that I never seemed to actually have.
But not knowing what psychologists call it never prevented me from trying to cure my fear, or at least silence it, with:
Medicine I did not need and took far more than recommended (reading labels is for people who are actually sick, it doesn’t apply to us hypochondriacs);
Getting blackout drunk (or at least drinking enough to get blackout drunk; I remained painfully conscious most of the time);
Sex (which pairs very well with alcohol);
Drugs (which achieve the same effect as alcohol but don’t leave you with a hangover — at least not the ones I took);
Cigarettes (which pair very well with drugs);
Fast food, which I always had a special relationship with because I don’t gain weight easily (in Brazil they’d say I’m magro de ruim, which roughly translates as “evil skinny,” a harsh but fair assessment).
I did slowly start to shed the more intense “remedies” as I made my way through my twenties and the responsibilities of paying the bills made partying a less inviting proposition. But around the time I was graduating from the MFA program that brought me to the US, I was still very much self-medicating, trying to fill in the cracks that therapy (a healthier habit I picked up after moving here) still could not patch. And I think it’s fair to say that it doesn’t take a child who once thought his father was leaving him in the car forever just because he stepped out to an ATM (I guess at 6 years old, I didn’t realize that if my father was trying to save money by abandoning me, leaving the car behind was just bad math) to be as anxious as I was in the summer of 2017. Any poor soul who chooses to get an MFA is bound to feel queasy around graduation: we’re not exactly entering a field abundant in jobs or generous in salaries. But to add to that, my student visa left me just one year to accumulate as many credits as possible to apply for an artist visa, or to find an employer that would sponsor me. I had walked away from a successful, high-paying marketing career in Brazil to pursue my dreams, and school had been a nice buffer between that life and the harsh reality that awaited me, one that being an immigrant made all the more difficult.
In perhaps the hopes of alleviating that, my program chose a couple of us to take on a trip to Los Angeles and show us what a career in Hollywood would look like. Suffice to say the experience, for which I remain very grateful, only added more stress to the proceedings, as I hated the city (I have motion sickness, so I’m not the best match for a car-based life) and did not feel comfortable in most of the meetings we attended, always sitting behind a sort of glass wall that said “you’re not cool enough to be here yet, come back in five years” (five years I did not have; see: visa). One night during the trip, me and another classmate (one of my best friends and, at the time, also my roommate in New York) went to see one of her LA friends. I knew her friend as well, having met her the year prior, and had learned that a night with this friend meant a night of trippy partying. Exactly what I needed.
I don’t know what happened, and I have given up trying to find a narrative that will explain it to me neatly. It might have been the amount of stress I was under, the specific strand of happiness aids we partook in, or the Santa Ana winds. All I know is that one moment we were laughing maniacally at a funny story, and the next I was no longer in the room. My thoughts were getting away from me, racing incredibly fast to the scariest of places. I was no longer in control of them nor could I give them any cohesive shape. I was no longer myself, for myself is an idea of who I am, and I had no ideas — at least not ones that would remain in my brain for longer than a second. My roommate and her friend talked in the background and I was aware they were there, but not with me; we were in different universes, and it made me feel terribly afraid and alone. They eventually noticed and tried to help, but couldn’t, either from inexperience or because of their own inebriated state. Eventually I just lay on my bed, and tried to sleep to no avail, finding only the vaguest of comforts in realizing that sometimes I came back to the same thoughts, and the repetition gave me hope that eventually I’d be myself again, and this nightmare that had made its way to my conscious brain would return to the world of shadows.
The next morning, as I would often for the year that followed that incident, I feigned being over it and all right. But I knew I wasn’t back. I wasn’t in that breakfast, eating those eggs and saying I would miss the hotel’s food when we were back in New York. I wasn’t on the plane back home trash talking our colleagues and using the free wi-fi. I wasn’t in most of the social gatherings that followed with former classmates, or the festivals my scripts got me into, or the trips back home to see my family. I was faking it and not quite making it, still lost in the horrifying vastness of the universe, seized up by the fear that the very idea of myself had been a lie and I would eventually wake up, like Neo, floating in amniotic fluid to find out that the comfort of being firmly in the present was an illusion invented by evil overlords to keep us pliant, and the universe is in fact run by Lovecraftian forces that we stand no chance against.
I remember my first therapy session after the incident, months later (my doctor was part of my former school, so seeing him after graduation, and actually paying for a session, took some convincing myself). I was in the room but not in the room, trying to make my peace with the fact that I might at that very moment be dreaming, in my bed and/or in amniotic fluid. He asked me if I wanted him to tell me that I wasn’t crazy. I said that it would make no difference; his words couldn’t reassure me because if this was all an illusion, the illusion of course would try to validate itself. It wasn’t just therapy — none of my usual remedies worked. Any bit of inebriation or escapism would soon send me back to what Jordan Peele so terrifyingly painted in Get Out: a sunken place, a vast galaxy that it’s just as trapping in its vastness as a padded cell in an asylum, a place where your body just floats around for all eternity, not heavy enough to crash and end it, not light enough to lift up to salvation. In a particularly harrowing, not possession-related passage of The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty describes it just as well: “gasping, dissolving, slipping off into the void, thinking over and over I will die, I won't be, and forever and ever...” The German existential dread, as it might have been apparent, came back into my life in full force.
But just like Gretel in her very not-for-kids tale (seriously, why would someone ever read that story to children), there was a part of me that refused to believe there wasn’t a way out of that dark forest. Stupefiants may have been my bread crumbs, eaten up by the crows of my conscience, but there had to be some stones laying around somewhere, hard truths that I could use to find my way back to safety. Something deep inside me called to the other emotion that has been constant in my life: Faith. Of the supernatural variety, yes, but of the natural as well — hope. That things can be all right. During the many panic attacks that accosted me during that time (and continue to, every once in a while), hope was never to be seen. Everything was bad and if poked at revealed itself to be worse, nothing was ever comforting. Not God, not family, not friends. No one would stay, no one would understand, no one would care, I was not deserving of anything other than to be forever alone. So how could I bring hope back into my life?
One of the things that I’ve learned recently is that things are usually as simple as they seem to be; complicating them is our way of not giving up what we want to get what we need. And so a simple commandment I learned way back when — “Love God with all your heart, and thy neighbor as thyself” — gave me the rocks I had been looking for. I decided to:
Reconnect with my religion (in spite of remaining an active Catholic all my life, I was guilty, as most of us are, of practicing without understanding);
Committing to a social circle of friends that could count on me and I on them (the first part was the one I had so far struggled with the most, the result of a rocky relationship with society as a child that left me deeply suspicious and mistrustful);
Giving back (which I had always planned to do when I became rich — but I decided to frontload by volunteering my time instead of the money I did not yet possess).
You don’t have to tell me that this sounds like a pamphlet that a smiling person with dead eyes would hand you on a subway station; I know it does. But I was willing to try anything — short of medication, which I had (perhaps understandably, due to my experience with chemicals) become very weary of. And for some reason, these steps based on being a “good person,” or in a less cliché way, doing stuff for others instead of myself, felt right. A lot of the choices that brought me to that breakdown were based on self gratification and being numb to the bad things around me. I wasn’t myself anyway — there was no me to gratify anymore. And the bad things had become impossible to ignore.
A year later, my faith in God had been rekindled, for good and bad — fear of God is part of the package, after all. But religion became a source of hope and peace, God being someone at whose feet I could place all that wasn’t up to me or under my control, a reminder that I’m not at the center of the universe — which we can all agree is a good thing because I’m not, strictly speaking, the best. My friend group expanded (reasonably) and solidified, my friendships becoming less about only having fun and more about helping each other carry our particular forms of pain. And I became a regular at some volunteer programs in the city, usually based around education and immigration, two big topics for me. Not gonna lie: it never “recharged” me or made me “happy.” I never woke up dying to go help some kids on the days I took off work. But I always left those moments humbled and hopeful that I had made a difference in someone’s life. Rocks, all, that I could grab onto in the moments when my mind threatened to slip into darkness.
I never came back to myself, truly, or if I did it was never for long periods of time. I always joke about it with one of my friends who’s also a fan of the Matrix analogy — once you wake up, there’s no going back. No blue pill. But I did become less afraid of the Sunken Place, and learned to avoid it by trying to escape reality less and, most importantly, not arguing with the void. You can’t win, just sink. So I stopped. Things are sometimes that simple, even if that doesn’t mean easy or immediate. I began to feel better, and happier about my role in the world.
Enter the tweakers.
* * *
Most of the fiction I write, be it for the stage, the screen, or the plain old page, tends to require a dictionary of Francisco references and life experiences to be ever traced back to me. Not that I’m one of those writers who writes about others just for the sake of living different lives, because however foreign my characters’ circumstances may be to me (and they often are), I will only engage with the story if it feels like I can have emotional stakes in it, usually via some shared experience with its protagonists. But experience doesn’t necessarily mean facts. I often write about times or places I never lived in/during, but I share particular forms of happiness or (because of the German existential dread habit I can’t kick) pain with the characters. Autobiographical stories are not my go-to when creating a project. But emotional truths applied to a galaxy far far away? Now we’re talking.
Which makes it very unusual that my first short story for this newsletter is something that happened almost word for word (give or take some chronological reordering for clarity’s sake). It happened, of course, as much as you can say that most things in The Host “happened,” since a considerable percentage of what’s there are paranoid worst-case scenarios imagined by the protagonist. It’s the reason I consider it to be a fiction story; my brain started spinning narratives the moment I received that booking request.
I can’t add much to the experience that’s not already in the story, other than what I imagined I would answer in the adjoining interview that would be published when The Host debuted in The New Yorker, with Cat Person-levels of virality augmented by our quarantined 2020 lives. “Why did you write about this particular experience?” Deborah Treisman would ask (you know what, fuck it, this is my fantasy; it would actually be Vinson Cunningham, who happened to read it because he got copied on an email by mistake and liked it so much that he made a case that, since I’m a playwright as well, the theater critic should just this once do the fiction interview). And I would say “I think at the end of the day, Vinson, any story about one of my Airbnb guests would expose my control issues or my innate use of personal domain as a defense barrier. But only this one put two fundamental aspects of my personality at war with each other. Was I a horrible person for not allowing them to stay longer? Is it enough to ‘give back’ and engage with the problems of this world in the time and way I chose to? Am I entitled to not volunteer my house to those in need? I think it all comes back to that fundamental question — what do we owe each other?”
I wrote the story a day or two after they left, in a haze, as I often do when writing from the heart, in an uninterrupted session that would not let me go until I was done, leaving me cramped and exhausted. At the time, it seemed important to put it all down for posterity, terrifying as it still was. The guests tried to come back that Sunday, saying they had gotten another coupon from AirBnb, but I lied and said I don’t usually host couples and had not noticed they were one when I accepted the original reservation (which is true, but not the reason I was turning them away). The specter of the experience chased me, and as I often do with anxious thoughts, putting it down on paper was a way of making it less powerful. But it was in doing it so that the experience revealed its depth — the soul searching I did (which I talk about in the final scenes) that my survival instincts tried to shut down. For a while, I tried to find evidence that my suspicions had been correct (which I sort of did; even though I didn’t leave a review on their profile, others have by now), until I realized it didn’t matter. Them being meth users was not an automatic reason for me not to help them. I had run a risk assessment in my brain and decided against it, and my heart had not balanced that out. Sending the story to a friend, she expressed frustration without being able to say why, and poking at it I realized she wanted to criticize the protagonist without criticizing me, which I gave her carte blanche to do. “It felt like you judged them from this position of superiority,” she said, “when in fact you needed them, to pay your rent.” I agreed.
It wasn’t just me who was soul searching at the time. The pandemic had a lot of people asking themselves what was their role in society. Another friend, an outspoken liberal, found herself dreaming that homeless people came through her balcony, saying “we have to shelter in place somewhere, lady.” Yet another, a proud Queens native who had taken part on many a BLM protest during the summer, sent me an article from the Times about a neighborhood in Minneapolis who, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, had vowed not to call 911 on the homeless people camping in a nearby park, only to find themselves questioning (and in some cases regretting) the decision. My friend felt conflicted by some of the situations the article narrated, wondering what he would do if someone pointed a gun at him and took his car. A particular section of the piece struck me: “The influx of outsiders has kept Ms. Albers [one of the residents who vowed to not call 911] awake at night. Though it is unlikely to happen, she has had visions of people from the tent camp forcing their way into her home. She imagines using a baseball bat to defend herself.” The parallels gave me chills.
What do we owe each other? I don’t know. I mean I do, I said it earlier — to love one another as we love ourselves. But what does it mean to love one another? Jesus answered this very question with a parable, one in which a good samaritan (which is were the expression comes from — He was talking about someone from the region of Samaria, which He chose because His followers did not particularly like Samaritans) finds a stranger who’s been robbed and beaten and bandages his wounds, leaving him at an inn with enough money to pay for his recovery. I’ve talked about this with the same friend who sent me the Times article; we both tend to engage in work that has a direct result on a specific person (such as my volunteering or donating to institutions I’m engaged with), and less on broader forms of philanthropy or activism that are good for “the cause” (not dissing on causes here, I just feel the quotations make clear what I mean). I tend to be the samaritan to a specific wounded person, because I can be sure that my efforts made a difference, as I see them with my own eyes. So why couldn’t I be the samaritan to these two people whom I could see from a few feet away, whom I could hear through the walls of my bedroom? One could argue it wasn’t in my power to actually give them the help they truly needed. But I didn’t give them any kind of help. Why? My guess would be fear, my old companion.
Not too long after writing the story, I found myself smoking on my fire escape while a fine rain fell before me. “God is in the rain,” says Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta (you’ll get plenty of Alan Moore in the next story, so I’m warming you up). I thought of that line as I saw it fall. The rain, like God, is completely beyond our control. We can understand it better, but we can’t make it do anything, we can only adapt to its will. Which is upsetting a lot of the time. I found myself getting bitter about how much my relationship with God is based on fear and not love. I have a tremendous awareness of His power (the fear of God I mentioned) but I yearn to love more, in a personal capacity. Then I got bitter about being afraid so much in general. I hate fear. I hate that it’s always there, making me sick, keeping me awake, taking charge of my thoughts.
And then it struck me that fear is, perhaps, the very tool God chose to give me in order to lead a better life. It can be used against us, of course, like the pufferfish that blows up and scares its predators away, when they could’ve had a fine meal if they didn’t flee. But it can keep us alive, like the fear I felt sitting in a safari jeep many years ago while a lioness stared directly into my eyes and I had to confirm with the guide that, indeed, staying put was the best course. Had I not been around trained professionals and inside a car designed for this very purpose, the fear I felt would’ve been not only correct, but necessary. I should be afraid. If I didn’t have fear, I might focus on the lioness’ beauty, or the way she pranced, and try to pet her. And I would’ve lost my life.
If I didn’t have fear, I wouldn’t have nightmares or somatic symptoms, but maybe I’d be lying in a pool of vomit dying from alcohol poisoning, or killed in some random hotel room by a hookup gone wrong. Fear might be my bane, but it might also have been a major ingredient in leading me to have a life I can be happy in, even proud of.
Learning to tell the difference between the fear of the pufferfish and the fear of the lion, though, between when I should bandage wounds and when I should run for my life, is still something I struggle with, and may struggle with for the rest of my days. I still don't know if I made the right call that Saturday telling my guests to go. But I still don't feel like I would've done it differently.
Illustration by Deepti Sunder, revision by Lilly Camp.
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