as the way to truth, but his challenge over the course of the novel is to understand language as a function of sense; Mickey must learn to value duration over time and sense experience over cognition.
Mickey’s journey toward embracing sensation emerges from the tension the novel presents between form and content, as in the early scene when Mickey first meets Ema and immediately imagines that a great romance has blossomed between them. He suppresses the nagging suspicion that his love is imaginary and unrequited, but reality, in the form of physical contact with Ema and detailed descriptions of other bodies, impinges on Mickey’s stories (20). As he and Ema walk through Ciudad Juárez, the corporeal materiality of Mexico’s poverty and its subordination to the United States fracture Mickey’s sense of self and narrative control. He intuits that his stories cannot create order out of this chaos, but the novel is not ready to give up on story altogether. Story shifts, over the course of the novel, from the past-tense, mental activity of Mickey “looking for clues” to his story’s ending (40), to his future-oriented, physical certainty, “in his bones,” that “something serious was going to happen” (127). By freeing Mickey from the cause-and-effect, linear patterns of scientific time, Gilb introduces the idea that causality and contingency are integral to the self, but require narrative creativity for their recounting.
The narrator’s curious grammatical choices illustrate just such creativity. While Mickey throws away the western novel he’s been reading because he is tired of its racist generic conventions (207), the narrator offers three grammatical workarounds for writing the things that cannot be written: the conditional tense, appositions, and double negatives. The conditional introduces contingency at the level of the word. In sentences such as “He’d work out with weights. He’d push himself into major shape” (2), the conditional is used to indicate the future, but in other places its meaning is less clear. With apposite phrasings the narrator gestures similarly toward Mickey’s need to appreciate shades of gray. Mickey wants to be prepared “for the better or the worse, mind and body” (2). He doubts the suitability of the YMCA for him because he “wanted anonymity, not publicity, privacy, not spectacle” (4). These appositions, this lexical bouncing back and forth, mirror the endless games of ping-pong Mickey plays at the YMCA and open an in-between space for the interstitial self to emerge: what is the ping-pong ball as it flies through the air? What is the middle ground between publicity and privacy, better or worse?
Gilb’s use of the conditional and appositional clauses highlights Mickey’s desire, implicitly subverted by our narrator, to construct a narrative world of surface. The narrator, conversely, makes consistent use of double negatives to force the point that language hides a world of meanings. Positivity lurks beneath the profusion of negative terms in double-negative constructions. For instance, the reader learns that while Mickey and his friend Butch enjoy each other’s company, they both guard their private lives closely, and “that wasn’t unlike anybody there at the Y” (55). Repeatedly using the negative to indicate the positive suggests that meaning lies in the difference between what is spoken and what is intended. Mickey reads this difference as an absence of meaning, but the narrator suggests that a deep significance lies in the novel’s linguistic slippages, a point Butch makes when he tells Mickey, “It’s not lo que dice [what you say], bro. It’s how” (52).
With Butch the novel challenges Mickey to find significance in meaning’s present absence. Mail, like meaning in Last Known Residence, is also present in its absence. Mickey waits for the mail to deliver what he describes to Fred, the YMCA desk clerk, as a “check with a bunch of zeros,” an indeterminate indicator of either a lot, or very little (89). Other YMCA residents anxiously await their mail, one character is fired on suspicion of tampering with it, and another, Charles Townsend, collects mail from the trash and organizes it into dated bundles (202). Charles is unique amidst all the narrative attention to mail’s absence in that he makes the mail visible in his attempts to organize it chronologically. The narrator suggests that Charles’s efforts are in vain, however, when Mickey discovers the bundles in Charles’s room along with a .22-caliber pistol (202). Mr. Fuller, the YMCA manager, is later shot with a .22. Charles owns the gun, but Mickey has access to it, and the reader never learns for certain the identity of the culprit. Charles’s abstract chronologies yield to the finality of the gun and death, from which no meaning can be drawn. Fuller’s story has no resolution; the identity of his murderer is less significant than the fact of his death, just as the content of the mail is less significant than that it reach its destination.
The gun and the mail matter, but they do not mean anything. Mickey cannot tell a story about them, and so ideas about free will and sense certainty take center stage here in this moment of Mickey’s narrative failure. For example, the scene of Fuller’s murder is not described in the novel, but we read of Mickey’s physical reaction to Fuller’s death before we learn he has died: “It had happened.… And he was still alive. This he was absolutely sure of. He could hear his breath and heart beating. This was true. There was a strangeness in this sensation of life, a joy that ached like sadness” (212). Fuller’s death shifts “truth” from knowing to being, from cognition to the sensual experience of the breathing, beating bodies.
Before Fuller’s death, however, Mickey agonizes over what he can and cannot know, as well as whether he or some higher power is determining his actions. Mickey’s anxiety is only heightened when Mária, who has been fired for allegedly tampering with the mail, tells him, “I didn’t touch the mail, never,” and reminds him, “Nothing is unintentional” (102). Earlier, Mária suggests that there is no intention but God’s (83), but her double negative in this instance throws a shadow of doubt over such claims: if she did not never touch the mail, then perhaps she did touch the mail. God’s intention may supersede Mária’s, yet her choice of words reveals the possibility of her own, human intention. Logical puzzles such as this question about intention throw Mickey into a tailspin of doubt. But with Fuller’s death, the human body emerges as will and vitiates Mickey’s need to know. Mickey comes to the conclusion that his knowledge and choices do not matter: there is no such thing as a truth that stands outside the self’s will to believe.
Mickey’s choice of belief over knowledge is best understood in the context of philosophical debates over the nature and existence of free will. Throughout Last Known Residence, Mickey wonders why he is doing what he is doing, whether he is writing his own story or playing a part in a story that has already happened, whether he is, in short, acting of his own free will. Philosophy offers essentially two ways to consider Mickey’s problem: his actions are predetermined or they are not; there is either order or chaos in the universe. On the side of order we have Benjamin Libet, who found that our bodies move and react to things before our brains begin processing relevant information, suggesting that the human capacity for rational thought has little bearing on what we do: our actions are predetermined through bioscience; there is no free will.14 Libet straddles this fine line, though, arguing that free will resides in our capacity to veto undesirable actions. The more robust counter to such hard determinism points to the random catalytic action between agents. The course of particles through space and time might be predetermined but there is always that unexpected swerve, that coming together of forces producing something new that Merleau-Ponty referred to as folds in the flesh of nature.15 This fold, or swerve, opens a space for human intention, like Mickey’s belief or Mária’s possibly touching the mail, and grounds the potentiality of free will.
Still the question remains: how do we exercise the will to control our actions in the moment of the fold? Can we be morally responsible actors? For Mickey this question is moot. Culpability for Fuller’s death is unresolved; Mickey embraces the swerve, embraces the chances he embodies, and the novel closes with him wandering off into indeterminate border space. That conclusion reinforces the novel’s larger argument that Mickey must learn to act on what he feels and not be incapacitated by his inability to know (just as the reader must forge on even though significant plot points are never resolved). For example, Mickey doubts Sarge’s friend Philip’s story about a local Mexican restaurant that has different menus for its Mexican and Anglo customers (67). Philip’s lack of evidence, coupled with Mickey’s inability to be precise about what evidence he would accept, prove to Mickey that the
