Louis Wittig lives in Albany, New York. His fiction and essays have appeared in Rundelandia and also on Substack.
Thanks to his love of writing fiction – for hours at a time and mostly in his basement – Louis excels at creating characters that are definitely not him. That is, they may be private detectives, or space actuaries or whatever else he dreams up. What Louis definitely is, however, is a writer who is also a creative director in advertising who lives with his wife Grace and daughter Evie.
Gulag
By Louis Wittig
So maybe I wasn’t exactly sure what a “gulag” was the summer after I turned nine. But I knew who I was, and exactly how the world worked.
I knew what summer was: Being bored with friends. Being bored at the pool. Being bored as my Uncle Denis wandered into the house without knocking, made himself a sandwich, told me the latest idea he’d had for a book he’d write, then wandered out again. Being bored at the public library, looking at the covers of thick books with bright red titles that read “Gulag Archipelago.”
I didn’t know many bad words. “Gulag” sounded pretty bad. “Archipelago” sounded like a dinosaur.
I was also a bit hazy on sleepaway camp.
Mom decided I should go. It was a camp for special kids: kids with asthma. Which I think she thought was like having polio. For me it was mostly about trying to remember where I’d left the inhaler I never used.
After our Honda Civic pulled away without me in it, counselors walked me and a bunch of other strangers my age to see a box. They called it a cabin but I was pretty into Legos then so I knew about construction. No interior walls, no insulation, one lightbulb: This is what you made when someone had already used the Legos you needed. And I had to sleep in it.
At camp you couldn’t do normal stuff like wander away from everyone else, find an empty room and curl up with a Sherlock Holmes collection, which I did routinely at my own birthday parties.
It wasn’t a do-your-own-thing kind of place. But that was all I’d ever done.
There was a big plywood board full of little hooks down at the lakefront where we swam. When you went into the water you hung a nametag on the right side. When you ran out, shivering and muddy, you moved it back to the left. Except I forgot. It wasn’t until hours later, when I heard my name booming over loudspeakers and echoing off trees, that I realized they thought I was dead. I was pretty embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t drowned.
Fires were cool. No question. We did those by the lake at night. But no matter how long you looked into a fire you still wouldn’t see an episode of "The Golden Girls." You could only see "The Golden Girls" at nine o’clock on Saturday on NBC.
And right at that moment it was Saturday, and Rose Nylund was telling a story about Saint Olaf and I wasn’t watching. And, if Dorothy zings Blanche and I’m not around to hear it, do I even exist?
Past the fire, across the vast starless water to the far side of Lake George, I saw the tiny twinkling lights of normal human life. I’d always called places like that “here.” But now they were a very distant “there.”
I had no idea where I was and it was very dark.
I don’t remember exactly how, after just three nights, I ended up in the camp director’s office with someone dialing my home number.
“I think he’s pretty homesick,” the counselor said to my mom before handing the receiver to me.
I knew she’d need some convincing to come pick me up, but I couldn’t find the words.
“It’s like a gulag archipelago here Mom,” I sobbed. “I’m in a gulag archipelago.”
Years later I’d learn that Stalin’s victims were also not allowed to watch "The Golden Girls," so I wasn’t entirely wrong.
Mom laughed. She was going to make me stay.
But Uncle Denis happened to be there when the phone rang. Denis always had a lot of big ideas that people didn’t understand when he tried to explain them.
Denis got me.
And he drove me back home to the center of the Universe, just outside of Albany, New York.