conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Gate, Stairs, Best with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'A Gate at the Stairs'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A Gate at the Stairs
  My father did not lie in bed in the mornings the way my mother did, but busied himself in the fields without me. "You should rest," I said to him.
  But he said, "I can't lie there and just think. It's too scary to lie there and just think." Sometimes he spent the days just chopping wood.
  My mother covered all the mirrors in the house with pillowcases and scarves. The mirrors in the flowerbeds she covered with sheets.
  Robert's body was flown home to Chicago and from there two men drove it the five hours north to the funeral home in a Hummer, as if here in Dellacrosse even the dead might need the protection of such a vehicle, though the body did require a refrigeration unit and so perhaps this was why. The driver, on greeting my father, gave him my brother's dog tags, which my father took like they were a fistful of change, in one hand, not looking.
  The funeral, at a former Lutheran church Robert himself had never been to—one that was now Unitarian, for people who felt that God should be elected democratically and after a long campaign—seemed dominated by his friends. Chuck Buzlocki. Ken Kornblach. Cooper Dunka. They stood up, gearhead after gearhead, and you had to hand it to them: they had one boring story after another about Gunny, which moved them all to both laughter and tears. We his family sat startled and mute as if we did not know any of them, including the person they were talking about. Yet hadn't we just seen all these boys at graduation? Listening to them, I realized why Robert's grades had been so bad.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: And my dad would be silent, driving, considering. Then he would speak. "Because they insist on it. They don't want what happened to ladybugs to happen to them. These ladybugs have masculinity issues to beat the band!"
  I tried to laugh. I appreciated his trying to acknowledge me, be with me, though it had become difficult for him. Ahead of us ballooning clouds floated there absurdly, as if for a party that had yet to begin. Groups of geese crawled through the sky, their metallic honks declaring their departure south.
  We would stop somewhere to eat and do just and only that: stop and eat. We got BLTs and soup and then would continue on our way. The brilliant gold leaves and grasses, the drying roadside timothy and bluestem, all looked on a nice day like a hymn to sunlight, when in fact, if one actually thought seriously about the situation, the mechanism of their dialogue with the sun had been shed entirely. The honey locusts had gone first, raining shimmering trails of seedlings into the gutters of the streets in town. Then the yam- and ham-hued maples. A papery caramel of leaves or a trail of maize or both lined every road we were on. How like the end of love to leave a beautiful corpse. When they weren't gold against blue, like something royal, the oaks bore the flat blackish red of a blood orange, and my father and I would drive along staring out at them through the windshield, each of us thinking our own thoughts. One evening migrating songbirds, oriented toward the moon, mistook a red-lit cell phone tower for their destination and we watched as they all shredded themselves in the tower's steel supports. More disastrous love performed in symbols. As we passed, my father slowed down, then sped up again. Silence was not the worst thing, though it still contained sorrow and making-do. Here and there a rabbit scurried across our path.
  Fattening in the butt, shy, petty, carsick except in a truck, perhaps I was more suited to country life than I'd ever understood. When we got back at night, my father would slam the truck door and look at the vast and watchful sky. "That's a hell of a heaven up there," he would say. Inside he would sit before the nightly news, which had just begun a semimonthly honor roll of American servicemen, fresh-faced privates, killed in the Middle East. Their photographs were shown, a few at a time, in silence, with their names and ranks and hometowns printed beneath. They were the faces of babies, babies in hats, and on the rare occasion that there was someone older, an officer, my father would shout: "Aha! All right! They got a lieutenant colonel!" A light bird. Once a full bird—a colonel—elicited my dad's bitter whoop. Each soldier's face stared out from the glass TV screen like a sweet, accusing child in the good-bye window of a terrible, terrible nursery school. My dad began to smoke my mother's cigarettes, Camel Lights, which had never affected her health very much, but which left him hoarse and hacking, at least at night; the brandy piled up near his chair, first in shot glasses, then whiskey glasses, then coffee mugs. The night we saw my brother's picture in the honor roll we all just happened to be there together, both my parents and I, and we were stunned into motionlessness. Robert's, too, was the face of a baby with a hat jammed on. The hat was absurd, conferring nothing but a dark decoration as if to anchor the composition of the photo. His eyes were caught in the headlights of something—foreign policy? a bored remark of the cameraman? the portentous burst of the flash?—and he was not smiling. "Robert looks tired in that photo," my mother said finally.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Sacrifice the children to propitiate some ancient god. There were a lot of gods and they all wanted something.
  The gothic knell of a wedding bell, the hangman's rope grown straight out of the chest then looped like tasseling around the tables. Rat teeth raking the cake. Beauty could not love you back. People were not what they seemed and certainly not what they said. Madness was contagious. Memory served melancholy. The medieval was not so bad. Gravity was a form of nostalgia. There could be virtue in satirizing virtue. Dwight Eisenhower and Werner von Braun had the exact same mouths. No one loved a loser until he completely lost. The capital of Burma was Rangoon.
  Then he paused. "Perhaps this is too sudden of a phone call." His voice had become weary and tart. "Too out of the blue for you, maybe."
  The earth was not perfectly round but pear-shaped. And according to black hole experts, ninety percent of the universe was missing.