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She witnessed the aftermath of horrors. She saw what humans could do to one another. She lost friends. In Bosnia, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Iraq. One night in Kabul the body of her interpreter was found eyeless and tongueless on a sofa in his home. She grieved, and her family worried. But for Caroline these deaths, although felt, were another passing through. They and the grief in their wake were the price of life. She took them, like all the other leavings and lost friendships, in her stride.
She was not always happy. As she edged into her thirties she recognised she was becoming cursory; how depths—of time, connection—had a tendency to unnerve her. But she was comfortable. Life, she felt, was an instrument, and the trick was to find the tune you could play on it. In this respect she considered herself lucky. She'd found her tune early, and she was playing it well.
And then, one day, waking alone in a hotel room in Dubai, she'd felt differently. As if the same chain of experiences that had taught her the price of life had finally, on that morning, revealed its value, too. It was a lesson of omission. A learning from what she didn't know, not from what she did. Her aunt had died the week before and she hadn't travelled back to Australia for the funeral. Her mother had said it was fine, that everyone would understand. Caroline was never sure if it was this phone call that had been the catalyst. At the time she'd have said it wasn't. But whatever the impetus, she'd wanted it to stop, to play a different tune. She'd wanted to wake up and know, straightaway, where she was. She'd wanted to be wanted, to be missed and needed, not merely understood.
When she returned to Beirut from Dubai, Caroline applied for a transfer to the London office. London was on the other side of the world from her family in Melbourne, but she didn't want home. And she didn't want America, either. She wanted something older than both, so she opted for London. Her scattered acquaintances—cameramen, photojournalists, editors, reporters—all passed through the city at some point on their travels. And there, on London's doorstep, was the rest of Europe too, as a fallback, a safety net for when the impulse rose in her, as she knew it would, and she needed to leave and arrive again.
In contrast to Caroline's movements across the globe, all Michael's previous addresses, except for his childhood home and one apartment in Manhattan, had been in London. Having left Cornwall to study in the capital, he'd stayed on after graduation, joining the Evening Standard as an intern. Over the next five years of jobbing journalism—diary pieces, reviews, news features, and comment—Michael had steadily increased his word length and salary until, in his late twenties, fearing the ossification he'd detected in some of his older colleagues, he'd left the Standard and moved to Manhattan. He'd arrived in the city holding a journalist's visa and equipped with a list of British editors who'd agreed to use him as a stringer, feeding their publications' appetites for all things New York. Which is exactly what Michael did. But he hadn't moved to America to follow the same path he'd been cutting in Britain. The distance he'd flown from London to New York had been about attempting another journey, too: from being a journalist, which he'd called himself ever since university, towards becoming an author.
Michael's first book, BrotherHoods, was the story of Nico and Raoul, two Dominican brothers from Inwood. A close portrait of their lives and world, the book was a narrative of thwarted ambition, of failure. For Michael it was the consequence of one, too. All through his first year in America, as he'd written reports on parties, observational pieces about the Super Bowl, travel articles on the Hudson Valley painters, Michael had harboured aspirations of becoming a novelist. But fiction had continued to elude him. For reasons he never fathomed, regardless of how many hours he spent at his desk, or in how many cafés he made notes, his imagination kept falling short at the border of the invented. The prose of the writers he admired—Salter, Balzac, Fitzgerald, Atwood—remained unattainable to him. He could register their effect when he read them, he could see how their novels and stories worked, how their moving parts fitted together. But like the engineer skilled at dismantling a plane's engine, and yet unable to make it fly, Michael found his own words remained stubbornly grounded on the page.
Excerpted from I Saw a Man by Owen Sheers. Copyright © 2015 by Owen Sheers. Excerpted by permission of Nan A. Talese. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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