Character Portrait: Sylver
Part one of the character portrait series
Sylver is the young protagonist of a fantasy story I’ve worked on for the past ten years. The project is called The Antarctic Dream. Sylver is the son of a young couple in Chicago, living on the eve of the second world war in a cozy orange house on the edge of a large church cemetery.
The story?
Sylver’s father, Davy, gets drafted to fight the Nazis in Europe and goes missing after a bloody D-Day battle off the beaches of Normandy.
For years, Sylver has made a game of running through the graveyard near his house in order to get to school, always at the heels of his imaginary friend, a polar bear of unnatural size called Big Bear.
Strangely, months after Davy’s disappearance and assumed death, a circus comes to Chicago sporting a mysterious creature from the depths of Antarctica: a twelve-foot-tall polar bear. Of course, polar bears come from the Arctic, not the Southern Butte, lending a mystical air to the circus’ main event.
Sylver gets wind of the bear and meets its head on after it breaks free from the circus and lumbers all the way beneath his window. Sylver, inexplicably, begins to follow it during a snowstorm with city cops all over trying to locate the beast. Where does the bear take Sylver? Straight to the graveyard, like old times, but the terrain is nothing like Sylver remembers. This is a world of icebergs, pirates, and lost fathers.
I’ve been laboring on various versions of this story for almost a third of my life, which feels bizarre, but am hoping its current iteration finds a home somewhere. Young Sylver is adventurous, creative, though melancholy-prone young man, mourning the loss of his father, hoping that somehow, he learns for certain whether Davy is alive or dead. Maybe this mythical circus bear can give him some answers.
*Excerpt from The Antarctic Dream*
Dear Dad,
Thank you for your last letter. Yes, things are all right here. I’ve been doing okay in school. I hate math. George isn’t good at it either, so we have stuff to talk about. No, I haven’t walked Cathy to school yet. She goes the long way around the cemetery for some reason, and I still go right on through. What am I supposed to do? She’s the cutest gal in junior high and I don’t know what to say to her! That’s why I have to make the football team, you know. Then she’ll be all about it. Don’t you think?
Mom misses you an awful lot, of course, even though she doesn’t show it around me. But she’s doing all right. You asked me to tell you honestly, and I really think she’s all right. But nothing seems all the way all right. Not anymore.
George is having a birthday party tomorrow. He is a year older than me and asked for this amazing model plane. I hope he gets it. We’ll sail it off the top of his roof if he gets it. I saw somebody fly it once. It went so far and had such a smooth ride. It landed in someone’s chimney, and the chimney was smoking, and some man came out shouting. I don’t think they ever got the plane back.
Well, Mom is calling for dinner. Please write back soon, Dad.
Love,
Sylver
Dear Sylver,
Hey, take your time, sport. Math doesn’t come easy, and neither does talking to beautiful women. Believe me. You should’ve seen me back in college, son. Your Uncle Joe will tell you. I just mentioned it to him now, in fact, and he laughed. Imagine that! Anyway, back then, when I met your mother, I could barely breathe within a hundred yards’ distance of her. Moonstruck. I met her in an English class. We were talking about King Lear. You’ll probably read it one of these days. One of Uncle Joe’s favorites in fact, probably because it’s one of the saddest pieces of literature that we ever got, but that’s beside the point. It’s a good play. You’ll read it someday.
But see, I had the idea that what really impresses a woman is poetry recitation. So, one day after class I got up the gumption to go up to your mother and go, “Say, Phoebe, do you know I can quote Shakespeare by heart?”
And she said, “That’s really something. Which Shakespeare?”
“Sonnets,” I said.
“Sonnets?”
“Yes, sonnets. I’ve practiced sonnets since I was nine years old.”
“Wow, that’s pretty…extraordinary.”
But you know, I really did know a couple of sonnets. I’d been sweating over a couple doozies in the dorm room. Joe was trying to study in one corner, and I was standing in the other corner, sonnet in hand with a dramatic posture. Joe said it was all hopeless. He was probably right. But I talked a sonnet or two to Phoebe and it got me a passage to lunch with her, and then I forgot all about the sonnets and trying to impress her and just started paying attention to her. That made all the difference. See, sometimes you can get so caught up in worrying about how you’ll come across her that she ends up getting the raw end of the stick. What you want to do is look Cathy right in the eyes and say, “How are YOU?” and really mean it, and not worry about the fluttering in your stomach. True wonder and true attention amount to true love, Sylver.
I miss your mother, too. Tell her so, will you? I tell her so in my letters. I miss you too, son. I miss seeing you and being seen by you. Your Uncle Joe agrees. It’s nighttime here and I can see the stars. They’re the same stars, more or less, that you’ll be looking at here in a few hours. Something else. It’s a broad, dark, luminous universe, and here we are scrambling over nations. Don’t touch the tombstone like we have, Sylver. It’ll turn you into one, sooner or later. Keep on running through them.
Love,
Dad