When the O bolt won't go in: "Soon the Light" by Gina Ochsner

We've had to buy a lot of crappy, assemble-it-yourself furniture over the years. That's what the budget allowed. I'm not the handiest guy to begin with, but I think most assembly guides that come with this kind of furniture are intentionally meant to confuse even competent self-assemblers. It's a sort of middle finger from the manufacturer to everyone too cheap to buy better furniture, like we deserve this hell for not being richer. 

The thing about assembling Ikea or similar is that even though I tend to assume the problem is me, it's not always me. Sometimes, the manufacturer actually didn't include everything it was supposed to in the bag. Sometimes, the pre-fab holes really don't line up in a way that allows you to get the bolt through. Because I kind of suck at understanding directions, it's usually my fault when something isn't working out right. It isn't always my fault, but because it usually is, the hell of assembling furniture is that I can never be totally sure. I end up wondering if the manufacturer knew it could gaslight me like this.

There are some movies and stories that seem to me like Ikea furniture. They've got a lot of parts that sure look like they were meant to go together to make something aesthetically pleasing and functional. Parts of it I can get together, and maybe looking at the pictures in the book, I can get a sense of what I'm supposed to do, but damned if I can get the O-bolt to go into the G-slot. And is that really an O-bolt? I assume it is, because it's the only thing that makes sense, but what's in my bag doesn't look quite like the picture...

Let's lay it all out on the floor

"Soon the Light" by Gina Ochsner is one of those stories where I can't quite get everything to fit together. I'm going to use the same strategy I would use with shit from Ikea. I'm going to dump everything out on the floor, look at the picture of the finished product, and try to work backwards from what it's supposed to look like at the end to get a better sense of what each step is trying to accomplish.

The main pieces:

Furniture assembly books start with a page that shows you all the parts you're supposed to have. There are generally big pieces--the things getting stuck together--and fasteners--the things that hold those pieces together. The fasteners are either bolts and nuts or screws. There's also usually a tool to turn the fasteners.  

In "Soon the Light," or really in any story worth thinking about after the second it's over, the main pieces, the matter that forms the backbone of the whole thing, is the plot. In the story, siblings Jaska and Kaari are double immigrants. Their parents first left Finland for the United States, then the siblings left again together when they were grown from Minnesota to Oregon. They now live in Astoria, where the Colombia River empties into the Pacific. Jaska used to fish in boats, but he's lately taken to fishing in a weir, a sort of walled fish trap that takes advantage of the tides. Kaari used to cook in a logging camp, where she once took up with a logger named Bucky who got her pregnant and then left her. The baby died a day after it was born. Kaari now works in a store. Both siblings are single and in their fifties now.

I found this photo of a weir at nautil.us. I really didn't know what one looked like. Jaska's seems a lot simpler than this and includes nets. 

They live sort of like a married couple. Kaari cleans, cooks, and gives advice. When someone makes fun of Jaska for doing "women's work" and asks how he can live with himself, he says he doesn't live with himself, he lives with his sister. It's an intentional misreading of the putdown, but it also shows that Jaska looks at his relationship with his sister as the thing that shows he has value, the way many people look to marriage and children as the thing that justifies their existence.

The siblings take in a child Jaska found abandoned to die in his weir. At first, the child seems sweet, perhaps even a blessing. Kaari and Jaska both recover their physical health when he is around, suggesting the boy is some kind of angel. But then unexplained tragedies start happening all over, and the child shows an uncanny knack for finding it all funny. As the story goes on, the possibility that the boy is more demon than angel emerges, and the couple struggles to decide what they should do about him.

The bolts

So those are the armrests, the back, the legs, and the seat of this chair we're trying to put together. The success of an assembly project, though, comes down to whether you can get it to stick together. What are the fasteners of this story, the nuts and bolts? 

One bolt is mythology. In fact, there might be two different sizes of mythological bolts here. One is the Clatsop myth that opens the story. The Clatsop are a branch of Chinook. In the myth, God made mountains from mud and bloodied his hands in the process. That's why working the harvest is so hard. The other mythological bolt type comes from Christian mythology. Jaska reads Bible stories to the boy. Since the Clatsop myth opens the story and gets much longer treatment, one would have to assume it's going to carry more weight and assume a larger role in holding the story together than the Christian stories, but both play a part. 

Another bolt is "mother." Both siblings still send and receive letters with their mother. The letters they receive include a strange mix of advice, typical motherly inquiries, humorous anecdotes, and occasionally overbearing prescience. There is something of a Psycho/Norman vibe to their relationship with mother. It wouldn't be too surprising to find that "mother" has actually been dead in Minnesota for decades and that the siblings murdered her before they left, and they've actually been answering one another's letters to "mother" ever since. Mother's letters are occasionally whimsical, wondering why the ballet dancers in Minneapolis aren't taller so they don't have to keep rising up on their toes, and occasionally dark and Calvinist, warning of an "excess of cheer" and noting that suffering is the reward for hard work. Both children often wonder how they will tell mother about things that happen to them, meaning to some extent that they have never left childhood behind.

Various images form fasteners to the meaning of the story as well. The most obvious images are the light/dark references. The narrative alters between Kaari and Jaska's perspective. Both get alone time with the boy, and both interpret him differently. Kaari's portions of the story are invariably tied to darkness. Only a few lines into her first POV section, we find, "The darkness brewed within them--that was her meat, her milk. Her music. Darkness, she wrote, made a clean heart in her." Jaska, meanwhile, seems to dwell on the light. In one letter to mother, he writes of "how at low tide sunrise pooled in the litter of clam shells glowing wet and pinks...He wrote of the freckled globes of the violet foxglove, how they held an interior light of their own." 

The title of the story is "Soon the Light," which seems a clue--the way the picture on the box of an Ikea chair is a clue--that light is critical to assembling the story correctly. In addition to the depictions of light and dark in nature, there is the question of light and dark in the boy himself. The boy is unquestionably light, almost unnervingly white. Jaska thinks of the prophet Jonah, bleached white from three days in the whale, when he first sees the boy. He sees the boy's whiteness as a sign the boy is from God, but Kaari, who is tied to darkness, sees it differently. 

Kaari is influenced by "Indian Jennie." Kaari looks out for Indian Jennie, even though Indian Jennie is the woman Bucky left Kaari for. Kaari can't help herself. Jennie's mental faculties have declined, and she is "so simple these days, childlike and forgetful, and it seems wrong to hate a child." Jennie still wanders around looking for Bucky, although Bucky died long ago in an accident. 

In a sense, Kaari and Jaska each has a child to take care of. Jaska's is a child of the light and Kaari's of the darkness. Jennie sees the boy and immediately thinks he is evil. "The devil is white, white," she says. This will, of course, immediately make many readers think of some strands of black nationalism that believe the "white man is the devil" or something like that. That might be what's on Jennie's mind, but I think there's more to it than that. Whiteness holds more than modern political overtones for Jennie. Whiteness is tied to light, and while Western civilization has been nearly unanimous in preferring light to darkness ("And the light shines in the darkness, and darkness has not overcome it"), Kaari and Jennie seem to mistrust light. 

One final nut to try to use to hold this all together is the image of the bear. When Kaari tells Jennie that Jaska thinks the boy is a prophet, Jennie says she has met prophets before. They always come back telling stories about bears, because Heaven is full of bears. This is an interesting observation, as nothing in the story is as reminiscent of a bear as the boy himself. The boy is irreformably wild, for one thing, refusing baths and shoes. One scene all but calls the boy a bear:

The boy, naked and dripping wet, now sat at the kitchen table stroking the shiny scales of a salmon Jaska had been keeping alive in the kitchen sink. Spellbound, they watched his hands. Flick. Flick. His long fingernails, sharp as knives, flashed. Scales flew through the air. They could not take their eyes off him, even as he boiled the fish, its body jackknifed in the water and the head sticking out of the pot. He ate it like that, one half of the fish cooked, the head still alive.

Eventually, whatever evil is plaguing the town kills Jennie as well. Kaari, convinced the boy at the very least does not belong with them, convinces Jaska to take him to drop him off at an orphanage. But the boy runs off and is playing in the water near the weir when the tide is coming in. Jaska tries to rescue the boy, who keeps dashing off. Kaari makes a decision to rescue Jaska and let the boy drown. 

This chair is still kind of wobbly

I've used up all the parts, but the chair still isn't sturdy. I must have done something wrong, or the thing is defective. This is where I go back into the box to make sure I'm not missing something. And sure enough, there's a piece that's so weird, I mistook it at the beginning for packaging, but maybe it's actually important? It's all this stuff about Bolsheviks and a strike at the cannery and hints that World War II is on the way. It seemed irrelevant at the time, like when you occasionally just get an extra bolt that doesn't go anywhere, but maybe it actually does matter. 

I think everything I ever put together from Ikea has at least one piece that's smashed from where I rage stabbed it.

Kaari and her "child," Jennie, are both tied to the past. Jennie still thinks Bucky, who died in a logging accident, is coming back. Kaari might have decided to care for Jennie because Jennie, as a sort of child herself, reminds her of the child she lost. Kaari had to move on from Bucky, but because Jennie can't move on from Bucky and keeps looking for him, Jennie allows Kaari to hold onto the past vicariously. The darkness with which Kaari allies herself is the world as it was. 

The boy and the light that comes with him represents change. It represents a world that is coming. He burns letters from mother, their link to the old world. Twice, Kaari laments that "we are changing," once in a letter to mother and another time when the boy is burning the letters. It's not a good change for her. Although the light of the new world brings some good things with it (like curing of physical ailments), it also will erase things that will never come again. Light means destruction along with creation. 

Jaska also senses that the boy means change. He dreams of the town shaking "loose from its moorings." He dreams of its canneries, houses and docks all sliding into the muddy water. For Jaska, though, the change isn't as terrifying. His particular interpretation of his Christian background allows him to assume these changes could be for good. He has something of an "If God sent it, it must have a purpose" mentality.

The title is "Soon the Light," which only raises the question, "Soon the light what?" The story doesn't say, but one can perhaps assume that the natural continuation is that "soon the light will rise" or "soon the light will shine" or something like that. The light of change is coming, and it can't be held back any more than the dawn. With it comes the end of many things. The future is never without loss. We think of the march toward a more civilized world, but the future is at least half a wild animal, eating its prey half-cooked and half-raw. 

Kaari sees what the light destroys, and this is why she choses to stay behind in the darkness with her brother for as long as they can. Is the boy, who brings with him light and the future, evil? That's an open question. The future does bring in problems not dreamed of before, but Kaari is perhaps overly enamored of the darkness of her past and therefore unable to see what good it might bring with it. It's not clear whether the boy is evil or Kaari's own attachment to the past is.

Not a chair, after all

So we've used up everything we had, and we've tried putting it together in as many ways as we can. What we have seems better than our first try, but it's still not totally solid. Maybe that's because it wasn't a chair, after all. It's more like a hammock. It's supposed to rock. This story is Gothic. It's horror. The identity of good and evil in it is supposed to be a bit unstable. What seemed its weakness might be its strength, and the ambiguity is intentional. "Soon the light what?" isn't a riddle to be solved. The open-endedness of what comes after is actually the whole point.