When Arthur Louis Pullman was in his twenties, he was in love with a man just one year older than him (Jeffrey Kopek). This was during the Vietnam War, when many Americans were feeling scared and upset at how the government was sending so many US boys abroad. Arthur organized protest movements in rebellion (under the organization “Greater Purpose”), one of which was the anti-Vietnam war protest in Kent, Ohio on May 4th, 1970 (which turned into the Kent State Massacre). Jeffrey was one of the victims (the “5th” victim, even though in actuality, only 4 people died). Arthur was so scarred from this that he blocked out Jeffrey from his memory. He eventually wrote a best-selling book, married a lady, named his son “Arthur II”, who then named his son “Arthur III” (the main character of the story).
“Do you know what trauma is? … It’s the way that we respond emotionally to the bad things that happen to us… The most common effect that trauma has is a sort of… intentional forgetting. Our brains want to protect us, so they mask the bad experiences by remembering them as different, normal ones. That’s how people forget war, death, childhood abuse, anything that scars them -- they remember it as something else” (385).
“Alzheimer’s breaks down brain functions one by one -- short-term memory, then language, then decision-making, then mood control -- but long-term memory is the furthest back, so it stays buried. Then when an Alzheimer’s patient starts struggling to understand their senses and what’s really going on around them, the long-term memories start to become their reality. Like, Jewish nursing homes in the last fifteen years started noticing Alzheimer’s patients hiding food and ducking nurses, because in their heads, they were back in concentration camps, reliving the Holocaust. It’s called episode reliving. At the end of their lives, people with Alzheimer’s basically live inside their strongest memories” (164-165).
One week before Aurthur’s grandpa died, he took a solo cross-country trip (without telling anybody, and despite the fact that none of his kids thought he ever left California before), and his body was found in Kent, Ohio.
5 years later, Arthur III’s life is falling apart. He loses his UCLA tennis scholarship after he breaks his hand by punching a wall (which he did due to his anger that his girlfriend was cheating on him with 3 other guys, including his best friend). So he attempted suicide by turning on the gas from his Camaro in the garage and letting the fumes get to him. His father rescued him, and even though Arthur III is older than 18, he gets placed on suicide watch.
Arthur goes to his aunt’s and uncle’s farm. But when he finds an old poem that his grandpa wrote with a clue of his whereabouts that final week, he takes a chance and tries to pursue the truth.
Along the way, he tries to get recruited by the new Greater Purpose leader (Jack), but the group has devolved into an evil anti-American group. Arthur III refuses to join, so he has both the police and Jack out to track him down. Eventually, Arthur III gets caught by the police (sent out by his dad) and undergoes a psychiatric evaluation (where he learns that all his dreams about him driving his Camaro into the sea is really him misremembering his suicide attempt in the garage). He gets released via bail from his grandpa’s friend, and he completes the journey to where that friend had driven his grandpa during that final week (to the Kent State bell memorial).
The fact that Arthur took this journey mirrors a story that his grandpa used to tell him, about taking a chance.
“The old Native American story or something he used to tell me, about this village that was in a drought, and they needed to get to this weird, magical river to keep them alive….// So there was a young man in the village, the son of the chief, and they had kind of decided he was the only one strong enough to make the journey. But because he was so vital, they weren’t sure if they wanted to send him out to die, because if he died, then the village was done for, for sure. // So I guess they decided to wait for a sign from God -- or the divine, whatever they called it -- to let them know whether or not they should send him into the woods, because that’s the kind of people they were. And they waited and waited, and nothing happened. And the young man started to get sick, because he didn’t have enough water, but they didn’t want to send him, because they trusted the divine to tell them when. // Then one day, the boy’s father, the chief, came running into the village, shouting about how he’d just seen a cardinal, which, according to their superstitions, was a sign of good fortune. So they prayed, or whatever it is you do, and they sent the boy into the woods to get water. // But after the boy left, the chief confessed -- it wasn’t a cardinal. It was a tanager. Which isn’t lucky at all, evidently it was common in that area. And the father knew that, and still he lied, to his own son, just for the sake of trying to save his village” (393).
“I didn’t know if I was being brave or being stupid… But to tell you the truth, the more I’ve lived, the less I’ve understood the difference” (394).