Maybe the real journey was the friends we failed along the way: "Up Here" by Tristan Hughes

One of those quotes about writing you hear everywhere but which nobody can determine the actual origin of goes something like this: there are only two plots: a man goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town. (Read one attempt to find the origin of the saying here.) In Tristan Hughes' "Up Here," we somehow get both plots squeezed into one fairly compact short story.

The unnamed narrator has had some small failures--he wrote a couple of books nobody read and he's had at least one relationship that didn't work out. But none of that seems to matter now. He's moved "up"--somewhere in the vast northern stretches of Canada, I might guess, although the setting is never named--and it agrees with him:

What a wonder it was, this magic trick of distance, that could conjure you so effortlessly into another existence. In a different far away my other life stuttered and failed, and here it meant nothing. It was no great fall, hardly a topple really (though up close it might have felt that way). I'd published a few books and not many people had read them. 

"Up here," with a naturalist girlfriend who teaches tourists about the habitat of the gigantic national park she works in, he's so happy he has to sit down in the middle of a neighborhood gathering to collect himself. That's how strong the feeling of joy is for him in his new life, far from everything.

As an outsider who loves it all, he's anxious to learn to fit in and act like the locals. He lists with pride the characteristics of life "up here," both to distinguish this life from the one before and also to set goals for himself for the kind of person he wants to be. Up here, the summers are short. Up here, even mosquitoes do what they have to do. He embarrasses his neighbors and himself gushing during a cookout about how much he respects them:

I told them I was very keen to learn these things. I told them I wanted to share in the kind of stories they told...I told them I admired and envied them for having such a practical purchase on things, for being so solidly enmeshed in the world. I think that may have been the phrase I really used. The firefighter smiled indulgently, and surreptitiously put the beer he was about to hand me back in the case. 

So he loves it here, and the neighbors mostly accept his enthusiasm, even if it's a bit over-the-top and filled with the kinds of verbal excesses that kept people from reading his books. But it's not his presence as the stranger in town that most of the story is about. It's about his journey.

He has agreed to shoot his girlfriend's dog. Why? Because the dog is old, it is in pain, and because his girlfriend knows she has to act now or she will never be able to put down the one thing that's been consistent in her life. More to the point for our narrator, putting a dog down for your girlfriend strikes him as the kind of thing you do for your lover "up here." Since he failed in his old life to do the things that were expected for one's lover, like give her "twenty-thousand dollar bills," he decides to do this for her now. It will show him that he is "getting better at being in love." That's why this city slicker writer sets off in the morning with a rifle and a tottering dog to find a place out of earshot of the girlfriend where he can put the dog down. The stakes of this journey for the narrator are that shooting the dog is necessary to prove he belongs in his new location and in his new relationship.

He really needs to come through, because even though her issues are not in the foreground the way the narrator's are, the girlfriend has some weighty problems of her own to deal with. Through breadcrumbs in the story, we can piece together some important facts: she takes anti-depressants, she was homeless for a year as a teenager. At her job, she has to wax rhapsodic about the harmony of nature while as a naturalist she is all too aware of how one small change in nature can have terrible consequences all over the food chain. Using two allusions, the narrator says she has to present "a more upbeat Ecclesiastes," but in private is aware that nature is more like Shakespeare's "wanton boy with a fly."

So losing the dog is going to hit her hard, and the boyfriend/narrator needs to get it right.

There are a number of obstacles in his way: he's not that good with a gun, he's a sucker for sad dog eyes, but the biggest obstacle, ironically for the book-writing narrator, is his inability to tell what kind of a story he's in. He's obsessed with viewing life as a story. Besides telling his neighbors he wants to be able to tell stories like they do, he also complains about it being hard to "live between different stories, ones that will not fit together." He means this about his girlfriend, who sometimes makes wild love to him and sometimes locks herself in the bathroom to cry. But his problems solving the ambiguity of life-as-a-story fits his larger reality: is he in a world where things work out, more or less, or one where randomness rules?

We ought to have some idea of which story we're in when the narrator admits that his girlfriend "tells better stories" than he does. That is, she has a better sense of what kind of story they're in. At the happiest moment in the story, she kills the mood by pulling out that old Alcoholics Anonymous cliche about not being able to run away from your problems: wherever you go, there you are. This gives us an ominous sense that the narrator wasn't just getting a new start after bad luck when he came "up here." He was--to use another Biblical allusion--more like Jonah, running from God. If he doesn't change, he's going to have the same problems here he did where he came from. Right now, that means rising up to meet the emotional needs of his girlfriend. Put the dog down right, then tend to her.

The narrator fails. He kills the dog, but doesn't bury her right, leaving her to be scavenged by birds and foxes. And while we don't learn what happened, it is clear that his failure to follow through with the dog was a sign of things to come in the relationship, which didn't last, either. It's left ambiguous whether the couple just broke up or if the girlfriend maybe is gone for good after self-harming, but in either case, he has failed, and now finds himself without new journeys he can go on, without new towns he can come to as a stranger: "How did you learn to live with a decision like that? What was it that you had to do? And what here was there where you could do it?"

He's out of options now. It's a failed narrative cycle, one in which the protagonist comes to his moment of truth, is weighed in the balance and found wanting. It's also a really powerful failed hero cycle, one that is all the more emotionally tough for its tenderness and humor along the way to the ultimate heartbreak. This story ought to satisfy the kind of old-timer who hates youngsters for their participation trophies they supposedly get all the time, because this is about how there are some moments in life where trying to do your best really just isn't enough. It's also the sort of story that sits well with cynics like me, who have a hunch what kind of story we're all in.