Nothing That Counts
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Excerpt
Claire is at the refreshments table, skimming the picked-over strawberries and the ignored grapes and the square vat of what’s probably hummus with an expression of polite optimism.
A minute later, she’s nowhere at all.
She’s not over by the wine table, nor halfway across the room engulfed in small talk with some dreaded colleague, nor seated among any of the clusters of conversation here and there throughout the pews, nor is she standing anywhere near where the student is standing, over in the back by the carpeted staircase, arms crossed, staring. Frank keeps his eyes moving in their steady rotation, fixing his face in an empty and unsuggestive smile. Whenever he sees the student now he feels a kind of mental tilt, a shiver of precarity, and he has to shake it off like a dream.
Claire is not up near the podium, talking kindly to the guest lecturer, as she often will when the presentation has been particularly dry and she knows no other compliments are waiting in the wings. She might have left the room to take a phone call, though Frank doesn’t know who would be calling at this hour on a Friday night. Unless it’s their son, in some kind of trouble? He checks his phone, but there are no texts from Cory, no notifications at all in fact, and Frank makes his way back to the pew where he and Claire had been sitting, as if he might still find her there.
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Devon Halliday
Devon Halliday is a Pushcart Prize winner, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Graduate Fellow, and a 2024 Anthony Veasna So Scholar. Her short stories have appeared and are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Idaho Review, West Branch, Indiana Review, and Ninth Letter, among others. She holds a Fiction MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Brown University.
Patrick Ryan on “Nothing That Counts”
Transient Global Amnesia. Ever heard of it? I hadn’t either until I read Devon Halliday’s “Nothing That Counts.” Turns out TGA (as it’s known in acronym) is a real, frightening, and fascinating thing. Our new issue tethers us to a character named Frank, who is witnessing what he fears is the unraveling of his marriage, until something begins to happen to his wife, Claire, that causes a different kind of unraveling. As one emergency turns into another, Frank is forced to shift his concern from himself to Claire, and in doing so, confronts an opportunity that might be too good to pass up.
One of the things that draws me to “Nothing That Counts” is that it feels, at the onset, like a very familiar story…but it doesn’t stay that way for long. And as the narrative departs into strange waters, it doesn’t just take us along but puts us in a vessel piloted by a character of dubious intentions. As such, the story functions on multiple levels of concern—both for Frank and the reader.
When I asked the author what it was like, writing from the perspective of someone like Frank, her answer reminded me that writers do well not to write about their characters from a point of judgment. “I had to believe Frank,” Devon said. “It’s a sort of contract you enter into with a character: you can’t move forward with their voice unless, at some level, you take them at their word.”
In our Q&A, she also told me two things that surprised me: 1) She’s usually very happy with her first drafts and doesn’t do anything to them until she gets feedback from others; and 2) the first draft of this story was from the perspective of Claire(!).
One Story is delighted to present to you Devon Halliday’s “Nothing That Counts.” When you finish this story, you might find yourself closer to the edge of your seat than when you started—and you’ll be left with the kind of questions that breathe life into fiction.
Q&A by Patrick Ryan
- PR: Were you aware of Transient Global Amnesia before you started writing this story? Or did you decide to incorporate that element after you had the basic story in mind?
- DH: I knew nothing about TGA until one of my relatives experienced two episodes, about six months apart. I wasn’t present for either episode but heard them described, and what captured my imagination was the unnerving gap between my relative’s experience of the event and the experience of the witness. A person experiencing TGA is disoriented but can’t form memories for long enough to get proportionately upset about the situation; when you’re in that state, you never quite have enough context for fear to take hold. Meanwhile the witness has full cognitive access to fear and worst-case scenarios, and takes the brunt of the panic, not to mention all decision-making responsibility. “Nothing That Counts” grew out of these two roles and the imbalance between witness and victim, both of whom are sharing this burden, but feeling the weight of it differently, on entirely different timelines.
- PR: How long did it take you to finish a draft you were happy with?
- DH: My dark secret as a writer is that I’m always happy with my drafts! It takes feedback from trusted readers and editors like yourself to nudge me toward greater clarity, intentionality, and sincerity. I’m happy with a draft as soon as I can tell that it houses some inarticulable feeling, or the nuance of some particular dilemma, or some particular haunting gesture. That’s where the bar is for me to feel good about a story. Then of course the next step is to discover whether this inarticulable feeling/dilemma/gesture is actually reaching the reader—because if it’s not, however pleased I might be with the raw material of a draft, I still have to work to make the story communicative to anyone besides myself.
All of which leads to the admission that I was happy with the first draft of “Nothing That Counts”, written in early 2023—and that I’m much happier with the final draft, which has exactly zero lines in common with the first. - PR: One of the most interesting aspects of “Nothing That Counts” is the character of Frank. The third-person narrator is tethered to him, so it’s his perspective we get on all these events—and because of your deft handling of the information flow, we know Frank has more on his mind than just his wife’s odd, possibly concerning behavior. Were you aware as you wrote that Frank was going to be a kind of anti-hero in the story? Or perhaps I should ask, is Frank an anti-hero, to your thinking?
- DH: Frank is a slippery guy. In earlier drafts, the nature of Frank’s transgressions was left almost entirely up to speculation, and though successive drafts sketched out his wrongdoing with a little more specificity, the narration really doesn’t give us much in the way of concrete, hold-up-in-court detail. The narration is heavily filtered by what Frank believes and what he chooses to think about; the story doesn’t condemn him outright because Frank is unwilling to condemn himself. I do think he’s an anti-hero, though I absolutely didn’t write the story with that label in mind. I think that when writing an unreliable or unsavory character, you’ve got to get in the weeds with them; it doesn’t work to peer down and observe them from your high horse of moral imperviousness. In order to write the story, I had to believe Frank. It’s a sort of contract you enter into with a character: you can’t move forward with their voice unless, at some level, you take them at their word.
- PR: Do you feel like there’s redemption for Frank at the end? Or the start of redemption? Or is he just a guy who gets a lucky (and very unexpected) break, in that Claire’s condition has gotten him off a hook?
- DH: I love this question of redemption, because I think Frank’s choice at the end of the story can be seen as an act of grace, or as irredeemably selfish. Do we owe the truth to the people we love when we know the truth will hurt them? Whose responsibility is it to pay the price of our worst deeds? Frank has gotten lucky, but maybe the luck is that he’s spared making a confession that could only cause pain. Or maybe the luck is that he got to feel the full weight of his actions’ consequences, just for a moment, and then got to skip the consequences themselves. Maybe the catharsis of confession will be enough for him. Maybe the guilt of getting away with it will eat at him.
Personally, I do think Frank has an opportunity for redemption at the end of the story, and I think he’ll use it to change for the better. And I certainly don’t think he’ll fill Claire in on what she missed during the episode of TGA. I think he’ll sweep it all under the rug, and every time he crosses that proverbial rug he’ll trip a little and remember what’s under it, and maybe that’s an okay way to live, or anyway a pretty common one. - PR: How different is the story you ended up with from the story you first conceived? Were there any surprises in the writing of it?
- DH: The original draft of “Nothing That Counts” was written from Claire’s perspective. I was interested in capturing her disorientation, finding stylistic ways to mimic the temporal loops she’s caught in, re-having the same thought. This approach was revelatory as a way to get inside that headspace, but ultimately couldn’t go anywhere, because Claire herself can’t go anywhere: she isn’t forming new memories, and thus she cannot change. Frank is the one who will be permanently changed by this night, or who at least has the opportunity.
Once I moved to Frank’s perspective, I knew that his paranoia would power the first part of the story, but I was amazed at how neatly Claire’s responses ratcheted up his suspicion—a perfect crime of miscommunication. Frank is in that marriage-specific mode of reading hostility into every gesture, and Claire can’t modulate her behavior to reassure him because she can’t hold a thought long enough to notice his mood. All the tools of their dynamic, their deep familiarity, their established habits, are working against them here. I was surprised at how tragic that felt, and how relieved I was to reach the moment when Frank finally catches on. - PR: What are you working on now?
- DH: I’m working on a novel about decision-making, namely: how terrifying it is that many of the pivotal decisions of our lives are made for arbitrary, misguided, or narrowly settled reasons. Looking back, it seems obvious that Option A was the only conceivable choice, but we forget how close we came to choosing Option B, how we very nearly wholeheartedly embraced Option B, how we told our whole families and all our friends how sure we felt about Option B… This stuff fascinates me. So the novel throws a bunch of characters into the present tense and forces them to choose between Option A and Option B, without any hindsight to help make the merits of one versus the other anything close to obvious.
- PR: What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received/heard?
- DH: It’s revision advice, and it has defined the way I give feedback as well as the way I edit my own work. The advice is: “Don’t make the bed when the house is on fire.” In other words, find the biggest problems and solve those first. Solve problems in descending order of bigness. Usually, solving the big problems will end up mysteriously solving the smaller problems as well, through a benevolent ripple effect.
I confess that I’m much better at applying this logic to others’ work than to my own. “Maybe the house isn’t really on fire,” I tell myself, watching flames lick through the windows of my story. “Maybe I should go check first on the bed.”
